Global Archive

Last week’s top-level session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York offered three basic lessons. The first is that the United States can still dominate the U.N. when it wants to. The second is that a clear majority of other countries’ leaders are quite relieved to follow an American lead. But the third is that the U.N. is only really still relevant in two—admittedly sensitive—regions: Africa and the Middle East. America’s ability to direct U.N. affairs was in doubt a year ago, when the annual General Assembly jamboree was overshadowed by the Syrian chemical weapons crisis. While the […]

At a conference in Slovenia last week, the International Whaling Commission voted against allowing Japan to hunt whales in the Antarctic. In an email interview, Atsushi Ishii, associate professor of international relations and sociology of science and technology at Tohoku University, discussed Japan’s whaling program. WPR: What role does whaling play in Japan, economically and culturally? Atsushi Ishii: The Japanese have been whaling since ancient times and whaling-related culture flourished in rural coastal areas. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, whale meat was almost the only protein source for the Japanese people and became part of the national cuisine. […]

Ban Ki-moon revealed a new side to his character over the past week: Action Ban. Last Thursday, the secretary-general of the United Nations, often written off as the personification of process-driven diplomacy, announced that he was tired of just talking about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. “We don’t need all this time-consuming, so-called consultation, or consensus-building,” he told the Security Council. “There is a consensus already that this is very serious and urgent.” He outlined plans for an ambitious regional mission to fight the disease. Then he hit the streets of Manhattan on Sunday, joining 310,000 marchers calling for […]

Last week’s NATO summit in Wales was a mixed bag, with the alliance marking strong progress on some fronts but proving less successful on others. Nevertheless, the fact that the summit took place under such heavy scrutiny highlights NATO’s resurgence from an alliance that many in recent years claimed had lost its relevance in meeting Europe’s security challenges. The summit’s immediate focus was on reaffirming alliance solidarity against Russian aggression. President Barack Obama’s major speech in Estonia shortly before the summit helped set the stage by making clear that the United States was committed to the defense of that country, […]

In April 2013, outside the steps of Parliament in London, a group of nongovernmental organizations launched a new campaign to ban the use of fully autonomous weapons. Political entrepreneurs calling themselves the International Committee for Robot Arms Control had been raising concern over this issue since 2004, but their calls for a killer robot ban had been virtually ignored by the advocacy community. Things changed dramatically in 2012 when the well-known NGO Human Rights Watch published a report calling for such a ban. Within a month, nine well-known human security organizations had joined the steering committee for a new campaign. […]

Despite the recent prominence given to the issue of NATO’s membership enlargement, the alliance seems destined for at least the next few years to focus on broadening and deepening its partnerships with nonmember countries and other international institutions. NATO has developed an extensive partnership program since the Cold War and now has some two dozen official national partners, while developing ties with more countries as well as international institutions. Partners contribute capabilities, money and legitimacy to NATO activities. They have provided thousands of ground troops to NATO operations in Afghanistan and the Balkans, air capabilities in Libya and support to […]