Diplomacy & Politics Archive

When the United Nations sends peacekeepers to war zones, there are often excessive expectations about what they can achieve. By contrast, pessimism surrounds the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS), which is supposed to oversee a ceasefire and create space for talks between the government of President Bashar al-Assad and its opponents. U.S. officials, having fought hard in the Security Council to maximize the mission’s autonomy and authority, have warned that it is too weak to succeed. While only a handful of the planned total of 300 hundred monitors are on the ground so far, the Norwegian general in charge […]

A few weeks ago, I met a friend from Damascus for coffee. He had just arrived from Syria a few weeks earlier, and I was curious to hear how he was adjusting to life in the United States. We had been talking for about half an hour when our conversation turned back to what my friend had left behind in Syria. And as my neighbors walked by our local coffeeshop en route home from work on a lovely spring day in Washington, my friend related to me in graphic detail how, last summer, he had been arrested, detained and repeatedly […]

As two Chinese warships dock in Hong Kong for a short visit, the deputy chief of staff of China’s South Sea Fleet says the recent U.S.-Philippine military drill did not target any particular country. World News Videos by NewsLook

New developments in a wide range of fields and regions have reshaped the global energy landscape. Whether due to newfound techniques or newfound reserves, regional politics or national policy, global energy seems to have entered an era in which limitless opportunities coexist with long-standing problems. This World Politics Review special report examines the emerging global energy picture. Below are links to each article in this special report, which subscribers can read in full. Not a subscriber? Purchase this document for Kindle or as a PDF from Scribd. Or, learn more about how you can try our subscription service free for […]

The Gulf Cooperation Council’s Joint Peninsula Shield regional security alliance held a joint naval exercise Sunday and Monday in the Persian Gulf, amid heightened tensions over the recent visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Abu Masa, one of three disputed islands in the Gulf claimed by both Iran and the United Arab Emirates. In an email interview, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a research fellow at the London School of Economics, discussed the naval capabilities of the GCC countries. WPR: What are the relative naval capabilities, in terms of fleet makeup, training and preparedness, of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries? Kristian […]

News reports indicate that the United States and Russia are close to reaching an agreement that would expand a secure communications channel originally established to avert misunderstandings that might lead to nuclear war to the domain of cyberconflicts. Such confidence-building measures are useful tools given all the uncertainties regarding cyberconflicts as well as the poor prospects of negotiating cybersecurity treaties such as those that already exist for nuclear, biological, chemical and conventional weapons. The Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, created in 1988, has already been extended to exchange information in support of more than a dozen bilateral and multilateral treaties, some […]

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama asserted that the most immediate and extreme threat to national security was that posed by a terrorist organization acquiring a nuclear weapon. As president, he pledged to mitigate that potentiality by securing all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. Simultaneously, Obama pursued a high-profile nonproliferation and arms control strategy that, despite an intensive investment of political capital, has enjoyed only halting progress. Nuclear reduction negotiations with Russia have stalled. Prospects for multilateral treaties governing nuclear tests and the production of nuclear bomb fuel are distant possibilities at best. Meanwhile, Iran and […]