Radical Movements Archive

Although far removed from Australia’s traditional areas of interest in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, the Middle East continues to be a focus of Australian foreign policy and military strategy. But its own security interests in the region have nearly always been defined in terms of its security relationship with the United States. One of only four countries to have participated in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Australia was more recently among the first countries to follow Washington’s lead in offering renewed military assistance to Iraq after the fall of Mosul to the self-proclaimed Islamic State in June […]

During the early decades of the nuclear age, a debate developed on the general utility of force. In the new and dramatically altered conditions of that period, in which a third world war could have meant the obliteration of great cities and civilization, it was hard to see what political purposes could possibly be achieved by launching an aggressive war. But by the same token there were also horrendous risks in a defensive war if that required resort to the most destructive weapons available. The dominant response, at least when it came to war among the great powers, was to […]

Hailed at the time as the start of an “African Spring,” the October 2014 revolution that ousted President Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso was called into question last month when an elite army unit staged a brief coup. But even before soldiers under the command of Gen. Gilbert Diendere derailed the transition, the process was in many ways already disappointing. Now the coup’s failure has opened another window of opportunity for real democratic progress, but serious questions over the likelihood of true reform remain. Many of Burkina Faso’s contemporary challenges are deep-rooted. Some of the country’s most important political figures […]

The sight of Syrian rebels blowing up Russian-made Syrian army tanks with advanced American missiles, captured in videos uploaded last week to YouTube, has brought a nominally covert CIA program into the spotlight. For all the attention on the Pentagon suspending its failed program to train and equip a Syrian rebel force to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the CIA’s two-year-old program to supply a handful of vetted rebel groups with TOW missiles, with Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s help, has been a surprising success, blunting a recent joint offensive by the Syrian army and newly arrived Russian forces near Hama […]