Global Archive

According to Le Monde, at a seminar on EU-NATO relations, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced some “ambitious” goal for EU defense to reach over the next decade. They include the ability to conduct concurrently: – Two stabilization and reconstruction missions of up to 10,000 men, for up to at least two years; – Two rapid reaction operations of limited duration; – One emergency evacuation operation invovling European citizens; – One surveillance/interdiction operation using air or naval forces; – One civil-military humanitarian assistance operation of up to 90 days; – Up to ten civil security missions (light armed police/gendarmerie) of […]

Le Monde reports that Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has accepted his invitaiton to the Union for the Mediterranean launch summit, set for next Sunday in Paris. Turkey, too, has apparently agreed to send an as yet undetermined representative, as will Libya, despite Muammar Khaddafi’s opposition to the project. That’s a promising start for a project high on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s agenda, although with all the questions and challenges that remain to be addressed, it might be something of a Pyrrhic victory.

In noting the retirement of Australia’s Chief of Army Peter Leahy, Sam Roggeveen at The Interpreter points out that the gathering consensus among Western militaries emphasizing counterinsurgency-based force structures (of which Leahy was a proponent) is not necessarily well-suited to Asia’s potentially volatile realignment of power that is taking place between nation-states. Sam’s point is well-taken, and illustrates the dangers of pack thinking. I just got back from interviewing a French general who’s a vocal advocate of adapting the French force structure for “wars of proximity,” and it’s striking how rapidly and how widely COIN doctrine is winning acceptance, even […]

“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom — their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean — the practical acknowledgment of […]

For a good rundown of what’s at stake in the mounting political crisis between Turkey’s Islamist AKP party on the one hand and the secular army and judiciary on the other, click through to this Howard Eissenstat piece over at Foreign Policy Watch. The takeaway is that given the ease with which Turkey’s Islamist parties have successfully reinvented themselves in the past, there’s a real risk that the army will pursue a more muscular approach to eradicate the AKP once and for all this time around. That, in turn, risks alienating the AKP’s religious base from the principles of democratic […]

I’ve become something of a Turkey booster recently, so I might not be the most objective observer. But it seems obvious, as this item over at FP Passport points out, that you don’t organize a coup d’état against a government that’s racked up a string of successes, both domestically and abroad, and dramatically improved your country’s influence and image. It should be mentioned that the coup in question was planned in 2004, and the recent arrests (most notably of four former generals) are part of an ongoing investigation into an alleged Turkish “deep state” of ultranationalists in the military, business […]

Nikolas Gvosdev describes an unease (among participants at a Carnegie Council panel on the Rise of the Rest) with the concessions and limited leverage that result from globalized interdependence. The new environment is definitely less conducive to a “with us or against us” approach, which I think is a historical feature of American foreign policy, even if it has been exagerrated by (and therefore associated with) the Bush administration. Gvosdev is mainly referring to the American dependence on emerging countries as sources of capital and energy. But it extends beyond that as our strategic partners increasingly find their interests interwoven […]

Michael’s point regarding “resignations of honor” is well taken. The political culture of Europe is still very much based on personal responsibility and reputation. That said, the unsolicited resignation yesterday of the French’s army chief of staff, Gen. Bruno Cuche, was as much a question of “le doigt d’honneur” (literally “the finger of honor,” situated between the index and ring finger) as a resignation of honor. According to Jean-Dominique Merchet at Secret Défense, Cuche felt that Nicolas Sarkozy had personally insulted him and the army in general while visiting the scene of the accidental shooting incident in Carcassonne: Pointing at […]