Military Archive

The tenor of NATO’s summit in Warsaw late last week focused overwhelmingly on deterring Russia’s military adventurism. While it was a positive turn for members of the alliance’s eastern flank, such as Poland and the Baltic states, longstanding NATO aspirants like Georgia are unlikely to see any genuine relief from their extended membership limbo. This is largely a consequence of NATO’s increasingly fraught internal politics, but Tbilisi itself cannot escape some blame. NATO’s shift from retrenchment and reassurance to deterrence in response to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe was evident in its plans, announced in Warsaw, to deploy four multinational […]

Can anyone save South Sudan? The country, which collapsed into civil war in 2013, is stumbling into a new cycle of violence. Clashes in the capital, Juba, have claimed hundreds of lives in recent days. The United Nations Security Council has called for calm, and the U.S., which played a leading role in ushering in South Sudan’s independence five years ago, has condemned the violence. Yet the outbreak of fighting poses an especially serious dilemma for another power with significant economic and political interests at stake: China. Beijing is playing an increasing military and diplomatic role across Africa, as I […]

With Brexit taking up most of the oxygen in Brussels these days, it was easy to miss the release last week of the Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy. Federica Mogherini—the EU’s foreign policy chief and a vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch—was tasked with developing the new strategy last June. It was drafted after extensive consultations with the commission, the European Parliament, EU member states and think tanks. Officially titled “Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe,” the strategy outlines the foreign policy objectives of the EU and asserts the bloc’s […]

World powers and Middle East regional players continue to strain without success to find a formula for winding down the war in Syria and contain its expanding terrorist spillover. But political leaders in one corner of the country are moving ahead with state-building plans of their own, undeterred by the skepticism and resistance of their critics. Syria’s Kurds are sharply focused and achieving measurable success on a two-track campaign. On one track, their military forces, working in conjunction with the U.S. and other local minorities, are pushing hard against the self-declared Islamic State, making territorial gains and now pressuring the […]

There has been a resurgence of violence in the chronically unstable and impoverished Central African Republic (CAR), as regional and international efforts to push back against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) continue to fall short, and ongoing tensions between Muslim and Christian militia groups rage. CAR has experienced episodic violence for decades, but instability deepened in March 2013, when a predominantly Muslim rebel coalition known as the Seleka seized power, overthrowing former President Francois Bozize. That precipitated a bloody war between Seleka fighters and the mainly Christian “anti-balaka” militias, fought along religious and intercommunal lines. Since then, approximately 6,000 people […]

Perhaps more than they have with regard to any other region of the world, pundits, political scientists and foreign ministries have latched on with an astounding vigor to the notion that the Arctic is an entirely peaceful region, ruled by laws and largely immune to geopolitical shocks. The United States’ 2013 Arctic Strategy is prefaced with the assertion that “the Arctic region is peaceful, stable, and free of conflict.” Indeed, the very possibility of conflict there is so beyond the pale that the Arctic Council—the primary organ of governance in the region—is precluded by its mandate from addressing military security. […]

Among his many mangled yet astute observations, the legendary New York Yankees baseball catcher Yogi Berra once noted, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This is a dilemma that the architects of American security policy often face. Prediction is hard. But the time it takes to develop new military concepts, organizations and technology, added to the potentially catastrophic consequences of being unprepared, makes it imperative nonetheless. Exploring ways to identify possible futures demands creativity, but that is often rare in large, bureaucratic organizations, particularly inherently conservative ones like the military. To get around this, the Department of […]