Assad Keepin’ It Real

Love him or hate him, Syrian President Bashar Assad sure holds up his end in this tough, adversarial Der Spiegel interview: SPIEGEL: No Western politician wants to sit at the same table with Hamas. Assad: That’s not true at all. Many European officials have sought a dialogue with Hamas, especially recently. SPIEGEL: With your mediation? Assad: The Europeans have learned from experience. That’s why they are nowtalking to the Hamas leadership here in Damascus — not publicly, ofcourse. I don’t want to mention any names. But I do think it’s tellingthat they include people who are especially critical of Hamas […]

Turkey’s Diplomatic Stumbles

I’m on record as being a big fan of Turkey’s diplomacy of late, which makes the posture of Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan during the Gaza War a bit of a puzzle. Turkey is a democracy, so the fact that Turkish public opinion was overwhelmingly outraged by the Israeli attacks probably played a part. Erdogan might also just have been unable to separate his personal reactions to the violence from his governmental function. And there’s always the possibility that there was a double communication going on, with his public declarations mitigated by direct exchanges with Israeli leaders. But I can’t help […]

Iran-South Africa Trade Talks

It’s always advisable to take Iranian claims of potential commercial agreements in its energy sector with a gran of salt. But the recent South Africa-Iran trade talks do seem to point to what Nikolas Gvosdev identified as the weak link in the whole League of Democracies concept floated during the U.S. presidential election. Namely, that the South-South perspective in particular, and emerging powers’ interests more broadly, don’t necessarily correspond with the American agenda to isolate “rogue” nations. Not surprisingly, sovereignty and non-interventionism are pretty important issues to countries that identify as much with the intervenees as with the interveners.

Turkey’s Nuclear Tender That Wasn’t

I’m still puzzling through this one, which I hadn’t seen yet. But apparently a Russian-Turkish consortium was the only bidder back in September in a tender for Turkey’s first civilian nuclear power plants. (They are now revising that bid.) According to this FT piece from September, the other usual suspects (Westinghouse and Areva) backed out of the tender due to Turkey’s insistence that the first plant come online by 2015: “In nuclear terms, 2015 is tomorrow,” one expert on the sector said. “When suppliers ask you for more time, you listen.” The Turkish cabinet will make the final decision on […]

Sifting Through the Rubble of Gaza

To the extent that my posting on Gaza over the past few weeks has focused on political and strategic analysis, it might have come across as callous to the human suffering taking place there. For the record, debates about whether a war is causing a humanitarian crisis always strike me as a waste of time. War, by its definition, is a humanitarian crisis, and the way in which this one was prosecuted, along with the nature of Gaza — which amounts to an open-air prison from which the civilian population can not flee — exacerbated that sad fact. That’s why […]

Blog Feature: Music Diplomacy

Public diplomacy has become something of a buzzword in foreign policy circles. But to lighten things up at the end of the week, I’m launching a new blog feature called Music Diplomacy. Each week I’ll post a song that has something to do with foreign affairs or foreign policy. Sometimes, like this week’s rollout, it will be a pretty strong connection. But other times, it might just be a song I like that happens to make passing reference to a foreign country or city. Other criteria will include availability, sound quality, relevance, and general funkiness, not necessarily in that order. […]

Pre-After Action Report on Gaza

Daniel Levy has a pre-after action report on the political calculus behind what seems like an imminent ceasefire agreement in Gaza, and the political fallout that the Obama administration will be left to navigate. Assuming the ceasefire goes through, his analysis seems to track pretty closely with my own rambling reflections on the conflict over the past few weeks, which is reassuring considering how plugged in Levy is. He, too, argues that a significant push towards a real final status agreement is needed to mitigate the blowback from the war. In essence, the illogic of Israel’s operation is that from […]

ISRAEL MIGHT FIGHT FIRST, VOTE LATER — Even with the faint prospect of a ceasefire in the offing, there is talk of postponing Israel’s Feb. 10 national elections. For one thing, none of the parties has been campaigning; the public has been distracted (though not unduly dismayed: a recent poll showed only 10 percent of Israelis are against the Gaza incursion, and 82 percent believe Israel has not “gone too far”); and then there is the rather pious argument that a postponement would prevent resolution of the conflict from becoming a political issue. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is flying […]

Hamas and Armed Palestinian Resistance

I’ve written quite a bit about Israel’s strategic objectives in the Gaza War. By way of Rob at Arabic Media Shack comes this Alistair Crooke piece in the National which tries to explain why Hamas basically chose to provoke what it knew would be a devastating Israeli response by marking the end of the ceasfire last month with a volley of rockets into southern Israel. Short version: Hamas was already dying a slow but quiet death that was failing to mobilize any international urgency to loosen Israel’s grip on Gaza. Going out with a bang would speed up the process, […]

WPR on France 24

World Politics Review’s managing editor, Judah Grunstein, appeared on France 24’s panel discussion, Politics, yesterday evening, alongside French Parliament Deputy Jacques Myard, European Parliament Deputy Alain Lipietz, and Middle East specialist Barah Mikaïl. Topics of discussion were the impact of the Israel-Hamas War on France, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mediation efforts in the conflict. Part one of the program can be found here. Part two can be found here.

The war between Israel and Hamas has sparked much hand-wringing, disagreement, and controversy. One aspect of the conflict, however, now appears beyond dispute: After almost three weeks of fighting in the Gaza Strip, Hamas militias have proven astonishingly unimpressive on the battleground. For Hamas’ allies and backers in places like Tehran and Damascus, and among like-minded militants such as Hezbollah, it’s difficult to imagine anything but disappointment at the performance of the Palestinian Islamist force that had so thoroughly routed Fatah, its Palestinian rivals, only 18 months ago. There was never any reasonable expectation that Hamas would defeat the much […]

Explaining is not Endorsing

It causes me no small amount of regret to pen what follows, but I think Matthew Yglesias is being unfair to Tom Friedman here. By my reading, Friedman isn’t endorsing the use of collective punishment as a deterrent, he’s just saying that that’s the logic behind Israel’s operation in Gaza. And, as I argued last week, that is the logic behind Israel’s Gaza operation, even if it’s a logic that I don’t endorse. Yglesias says of Friedman, he is “positing a much sicker rationale for military action than its actual initiators have been willing to articulate.” But surely Yglesias would […]

Brazil Launches Uranium Enrichment Plant

The news that Brazil’s uranium enrichment facility, officially inaugurated back in 2006, will become fully operational in a month presents interesting comparisons to Iran’s program. After all, although it isn’t necessarily hostile to the U.S., Brazil has spearheaded efforts to defend and promote emerging nations’ interests vis à vis the West on a global level, and the U.S. on a regional level. (See Peter Kingstone’s WPR feature article for more.) In fact, if I had to choose between which of the two, Brazil or Iran, offers a credible pole around which meaningful challenges to America’s interests and influence might coalesce, […]

Optimism and its Limits in Gaza

The Gaza holding pattern continues, with the central front now definitively shifted to the negotiations in Cairo and, through Turkish shuttle diplomacy, Syria. France has also been in contact with Iran and perhaps even other “intermediaries . . . who allow us to talk to Hamas,” although French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner did not elaborate on the latter comment. Turkey’s decisive re-entry is encouraging, and the fact that itsdelegation, scheduled to return directly to Ankara from Cairo, insteadstopped in Damscus before heading back to Cairo suggests that thenegotiations might be going better in Cairo than they have been in themedia. […]

Bin Laden’s Driver Freed in Yemen

Salim Hamdam, the man known as Osama Bin Laden’s driver, was released by Yemen after serving out the rest of his sentence following his transfer from Gitmo last year. Hamdam’s case was profiled in a WPR feature article by Brian Glyn Williams, who testified as an expert witness for the defense in Hamdan’s military commission proceeding. Williams’ expertise on the 055 Brigade, al-Qaida’s paramilitary force in Afghanistan, helped convince the commission that Hamdan was a lawful combattant, entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and not a terrorist.

Playing the Clock in Gaza

Not surprisingly, at the same time that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud declared that Israel was “getting close to achieving the goals it set for itself,” it chose to signal a distinct pause in its Gaza operation. That’s because it also, coincidentally, happened to be getting close to entering Gaza, which would represent a point of no return for both sides in the conflict. Now, you can’t get water from a stone, so if there’s simply no way to get international guarantees for the ceasefire terms that both sides need to silence the guns, this conflict will expand and escalate, with […]

Israel’s attack on Hamas continued through the weekend, despite Egyptian and French efforts to broker a ceasefire. With Israeli ground forces now poised on the outskirts of Gaza City, and with an expansion of the operation into the urban battlefields that represent Hamas’ greatest tactical opportunity for exacting losses on the IDF still a possibility, it is difficult to speak decisively about the military outcome of the ongoing fighting. But according to several American experts on Arab politics, while Israel might very well succeed — at least temporarily — in depleting Hamas’ military wing, so long as Hamas is still […]

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