Global Archive

I had the pleasure of participating in France 24’s week-in-review panel discussion program, The World This Week, last Friday. The other guests were the IHT’s Matthew Saltmarsh, Newsweek’s Chrostopher Dickey and France 24’s Annette Young. We discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the “end of combat operations” in Iraq, Tony Blair’s autobiography, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to expel illegal Roma immigrants from France. Part one can be found here. Part two can be found here. I managed to leave the studio and make it home without having compiled a long “I should have said . . . ” list, […]

America has entered a new phase in its Iraq operations, one that represents the end of the “lost war” to many, the non-combat continuation of nation-building to others, and a vague sense of a never-ending global security commitment to just about everyone. Americans, who crave clear definitions of success or failure, aren’t sure what to make of this turning point, especially since for many, their attention has already shifted to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Meanwhile, some pundits sound the alarm with cries of “permanent war,” even though we haven’t officially declared war on anybody since 1943. As for the rest of […]

Addressing the possibility that the U.S. and Europe will shy away from military interventions post-Iraq/post-Afghanistan, Richard Gowan suggests that emerging countries — Brazil, China and India, in particular — could very well step in to fill the gap in the context of U.N. state-building operations. It tracks well with what Matt Armstrong wrote in his WPR feature article, U.N. Peacekeeping as Public Diplomacy. (Gowan’s article in that issue, The Tragedy of 21st Century U.N. Peacekeeping, makes for good reading, too, as a cautionary note.) In this case, emerging countries’ interest in burnishing their global bona fides would overlap with U.S. […]