In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s Editor-in-Chief Judah Grunstein and host Peter Dörrie discuss the major trends that shaped 2015, a year marked by the re-emergence of borders and national approaches to transnational problems. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Trend Lines is produced, edited and hosted by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focussing on security and resource politics in Africa. He can be followed on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.
International conflict management is not necessarily a rewarding occupation for people who have neat and orderly minds. Well-made plans tend to fall apart in fast-moving crises. As I noted in a chapter in a book on the Security Council published earlier this year, the recent history of United Nations peace operations is basically a story of “one damn thing after another.” U.N. forces have repeatedly been caught off-guard by upsurges in violence and entangled in intractable struggles that they can help mitigate but cannot resolve. This is not only true for the blue helmets. In the United States, analysts once […]
Looking back on the past year, it would seem from merely scanning the headlines that the world is becoming a deadlier, more violent place. The year began with a series of bloody massacres by the Nigerian terrorist/insurgent group Boko Haram, which has become the deadliest such group in the world. Next came the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris, after which the violence seemingly continued without pause. The Sanaa mosque bombing in Yemen killed 142 people; the al-Shabaab attack on a university in Kenya took another 147 lives; the massacre perpetrated by the self-declared Islamic State in Kobani, […]
The United Nations should be pleased by recent progress in three of its hardest conflict-resolution efforts. It’s not yet time for a victory lap in Yemen, Syria and Libya: All three conflicts continue to rage on the ground, and the prospect of international peacekeepers enforcing a negotiated settlement remains distant at best. But peacekeeping is always the final stage of a lengthy diplomatic process, and some deeper appreciation for the work of the U.N.’s high-level diplomats in defining a process for resolving the three conflicts, among the world’s nastiest, is warranted. In quick succession in the final weeks of the […]
Critics no longer stop at questioning or attacking the Obama administration’s strategy in dealing with the so-called Islamic State. As Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, bluntly claimed last month, “We don’t have a strategy.” Even Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Tim Kane have joined in, saying, “I don’t think the administration has done a good job of laying out a clear strategy.” Yet President Barack Obama insists that his administration has an effective strategy based on four components: airstrikes against Islamic State targets; support to Iraqi security forces and Iraqi militias fighting the […]
Everyone it seems has a strategy for defeating the self-declared Islamic State. But the ones proposed by two of the Republican candidates for president truly stand out. Sen. Ted Cruz said last week that the United States should “carpet-bomb [the Islamic State] into oblivion.” He added, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” Donald Trump has a similar plan. Though he recently replied, when asked how he would deal with the group, that he would “leave [that] to your imagination,” he has talked previously about “bombing the [crap]” out of the […]
In August, in a village called Marea, north of Aleppo, a mortar loaded with mustard gas and allegedly fired by militants from the self-declared Islamic State landed on a house. The chemical weapons badly burned three family members inside and killed an infant. Months earlier, between March and May, helicopters from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime dropped barrel bombs on the rebel-held province of Idlib. Unlike the usual rudimentary explosives favored by Assad’s forces, these barrels were loaded with toxic chemicals, most likely chlorine. At least six people were killed, including three children from the same family. The details of […]
Back at the end of September, when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene directly in the nearly five-year-old civil war in Syria, more than a few U.S. pundits and politicians bemoaned the negative impact of Russia’s intervention on U.S. interests in the region, while lauding the Russian leader’s willingness to use force to advance Moscow’s interests in the region. “A dramatic example of the diminution of . . . American influence in the region, particularly in Iraq,” said Sen. John McCain. “Putin is willing to back up his pursuit of his interests with force,” wrote Eliot Abrams, who seemed […]
A somber weariness has settled in across Western democracies in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Defeating and destroying the so-called Islamic State with military force has won broader support. But most realize that the challenge will require a complex set of policy responses, far beyond aerial bombardments to liberate territory controlled by the group in Syria and Iraq. Although there is not yet any consensus about what such a long-term strategy should look like, some new ideas are emerging. To begin with, the old debate over how to distinguish between the threat posed by al-Qaida and the newer one […]