Diplomacy & Politics Archive

The month of November saw a marked increase in the phenomenon known in Japan as “ghost ships”—North Korean fishing vessels that wash ashore or into Japanese waters, often empty or filled with the remains of deceased sailors. It seems like a fitting image for a visit taking place half the world away in Brussels, where U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived yesterday for a European trip that will see him continue on to Austria and France. The parallels apply on a number of levels. Tillerson himself has been considered the political equivalent of a dead man walking—rumored to be […]

After President Donald Trump reluctantly signed legislation in August imposing new U.S. sanctions on Moscow for its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia’s parliament last month drafted a bill that would try to shield Russian banks from further sanctions by obscuring their investments in the state-controlled arms industry. The United States and the European Union have imposed multiple layers of sanctions on Russia since 2014 for its actions in Ukraine. In an email interview, William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, discusses the impact of Western sanctions […]

A village in Kenya is the only one in Africa known to be receiving a monthly universal basic income, or UBI, stipend. The experiment is intended to encourage countries with high poverty levels to rethink their approach to social welfare, but not everyone is convinced the UBI trial will yield the answers researchers seek. Makanga is a village like many others in rural Kenya. Farmsteads with walls made of clay and roofs of corrugated iron sit on plots separated by bush. Dusty footpaths cross fields that bear signs of the latest drought to hit East Africa—the effects of which are […]

Argentines watched in shock last month as former Vice President Amado Boudou was arrested and put in pre-trial detention on corruption charges. It was the latest in a string of arrests of former officials from ex-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration, causing many to question whether the former president, who faces indictments in several criminal cases, could be next. But although a section of Argentina’s population was elated at the media spectacle of the disheveled, barefoot vice president in handcuffs, the arrest caused journalists and politicians from across the political spectrum to question whether the judiciary is starting to abuse […]

Progress in reducing the spread and use of weapons of mass destruction is never linear. But these days, there seem to be more steps backward than forward. From the failure to stop North Korea from becoming the world’s ninth nuclear power to the tragically incomplete diplomatic work to rid Syria of chemical weapons, the efforts to advance global norms to reduce the threats from weapons of mass destruction are falling short. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which advocated for the new nuclear disarmament treaty that 122 countries voted for at the United […]

On Nov. 26, vandals attacked a Muslim cultural center and mosque in the Polish capital of Warsaw, smashing a dozen of its windows. Far from being an isolated incident, the attack came amid growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Poland, where the government has refused to admit refugees and asylum-seekers and far-right extremism appears to be on the rise. In an email interview, Kasia Narkowicz, a researcher of Islamophobia at the University of York in the United Kingdom, discusses anti-Muslim sentiment in Poland, what is behind it and what civil society groups are doing to oppose it. WPR: What is driving anti-Muslim […]

BERLIN—Two months after Germany’s federal elections, the country is on the brink of an unexpected political crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats, or CDU, and their sister party, the Christian Socialists, or CSU, ran first in the vote, but they finished without an outright majority. Since election night, they have been casting about for coalition partners—a process that has proven surprisingly more difficult than political pundits anticipated. The alternatives, if Merkel can’t form a coalition, are either for the CDU/CSU alliance to rule as a fragile minority government or, more likely, for new elections to take place. The latter […]

Is Germany about to retreat from the world? Berlin has become an essential advocate for liberal internationalism in recent years. But it may turn inward again. Germany has long been a payer rather than a player at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. While disbursing large quantities in foreign aid, and cautiously experimenting with stabilization missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan, Berlin generally avoided taking a real leadership role in global affairs. The priority for Berlin was always Europe, and that remains the case. But as Germany has become more powerful within the European Union, it has discovered that […]

Despite many years of effort by the United States and its NATO allies to stem opium production in Afghanistan, this year saw a record crop. Drug production is an integral component of Afghanistan’s complex and seemingly intractable problems. Not only does opium directly support the Taliban, which taxes its manufacture and transportation, it also undercuts broader attempts to stem corruption and expand the legal Afghan economy. As often happens in today’s interconnected security environment, Afghanistan’s security issues are not contained within its borders. The transportation of Afghan opium funds extremists across Central Asia and threatens governments in that part of […]

On Nov. 26, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro handed over leadership of the national oil company, PDVSA, to Manuel Quevedo, a general with no experience in the energy sector. The move comes after a series of arrests of officials within PDVSA on corruption charges, including six earlier in November. In an email interview, David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and curator of the blog Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, discusses Maduro’s underlying political motivations for the moves and the military’s increasing control of Venezuela’s economy. WPR: Maduro has arrested around 50 PDVSA officials since August, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It’s been more than a year since large-scale protests, followed by a harsh government crackdown, began disrupting life in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, where the population has long complained of marginalization at the hands of the government and Francophone majority. Yet with actors on both sides embracing increasingly extremist rhetoric and tactics, there’s every reason to believe the crisis will continue—and several signs that its attendant violence will worsen. Within a span of 24 hours this week, five soldiers and […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss North Korea’s latest missile test and why it is so difficult to de-escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula. For the Report, David Ucko talks with Peter Dörrie about the troubling signs of Islamist radicalization in the multiethnic and multicultural island nation of Mauritius, and what this “rainbow nation” can do to address it. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines, as well as what you’ve seen on WPR, please think about supporting our work by subscribing. We’re […]

The candidate of Somaliland’s ruling party, Musa Bihi Abdi, was finally declared the new president of this semi-autonomous region of northwestern Somalia late last month, after eight days of counting, recounting and closed-door negotiations between him, his main rival and the National Electoral Commission. Now Bihi faces the task of dealing with Somaliland’s many challenges, most of all turning a nascent democracy and East African success story into a fully functioning and independent state recognized by the world. The election was declared peaceful and free by both local and international observers, who despite concerns claimed to have “observed a poll […]