The Americas Archive

Today’s international system is a confusing and hybrid mix of concepts about how states interact and manage their relations. Since the end of the Cold War, the absolute and relative importance of alliances is increasingly being questioned, and new forms of ad hoc cooperation that do not assume permanent shared interests have emerged. Above all, there’s no longer one rule book to govern interstate relations. Instead states in the 21st century work across a full spectrum of approaches, from insistence on absolute state sovereignty on one end of the spectrum to regional integration on the other, with a range of […]

After 20 months of negotiations, which came down to the wire over 18 straight days in Vienna, Iran and six world powers, led by the United States, reached a deal Tuesday to curb Iran’s nuclear program for more than a decade in exchange for lifting sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. All U.S. and European Union nuclear-related sanctions will be suspended after international inspectors have verified that Iran is abiding by its commitments. According to The New York Times, “the United States preserved—and in some cases extended—the nuclear restrictions it sketched out with Iran in early April in Lausanne, […]

After almost three years of talks, Colombia’s peace negotiations with the FARC guerrilla group will end soon—with or without an agreement. Amid an uptick in violence in recent months, Humberto de la Calle, the government’s chief negotiator, said in a July 5 interview with the Colombian media, “It’s clear to me that the process is coming to its end, for good or ill. It could be because we’ve reached an accord, as we’re in the homestretch of the fundamental issues [on the negotiation agenda]. Or for ill, if—as is happening—Colombians’ patience runs out.” Two days after de la Calle’s interview, […]

Today, the phrase “Arctic energy” has become synonymous with snowy oil rigs, icy ocean exploration and Greenpeace activists. The conditional U.S. approval in May of Shell’s plans to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska has reinforced this narrow delineation of what’s included in polar energy debates. Reflecting how observers and international policymakers view the Arctic more generally, northern energy is written as an extractive narrative. From the opening of shipping routes to warnings of climate change consequences, the Arctic is frequently framed and valued by how it can help those living below the 66th parallel. But there is another […]

Several weeks ago, the U.S. Army quietly killed a program called the Human Terrain System. Created at the height of American counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the program deployed teams of social scientists to conduct highly focused cultural research and advise U.S. military commanders on how to use this knowledge to work more effectively with local populations. While saddled with many problems, particularly early on, the Human Terrain System ultimately complemented traditional intelligence and helped beleaguered U.S. military forces understand the human environment where they fought and worked. Still, the program’s cancellation created only a brief ripple among Washington […]

Both the Brazilian and U.S. governments billed President Dilma Rousseff’s late June meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington as a reset of relations between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest democracies. Revelations in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. eavesdropping on Brazilian officials, including Rousseff herself, caused her to cancel her state visit scheduled for that October, putting bilateral relations on ice for almost two years. Arguably, Brazil and the United States had already been on separate tracks for some time prior to that, given Brasilia’s more assertively independent foreign policy under the […]

George Clemenceau, who as prime minister of France presided over the final year of World War I, once famously said that war was too important to be left to the generals. If the Pentagon’s recently released National Military Strategy (NMS), penned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is any indication, the generals should be left pretty far away from strategy, too. This year’s NMS, the first since 2011, is a typical farrago of threat-inflation, strategic incoherence and “a glass half-empty” conception of 21st-century international affairs, lubricated by the oft-heard notion from inside the Pentagon that the U.S military “must provide […]

On June 30, the Pentagon issued the latest iteration of the National Military Strategy (NMS) of the United States. The new version, the first update to the strategy since 2011, depicts today’s international security environment as being more challenging for the United States due to the unprecedented reach of globalization, the diffusion of military technologies and the rise of revisionist great powers. The NMS establishes U.S. military objectives and explains how the Pentagon will achieve them. It describes the overall global security environment in which the U.S. military operates as well as the threats and opportunities that affect U.S. national […]

Last Friday, as America was focused on landmark Supreme Court rulings that made same-sex marriage legal and prevented millions of citizens from losing their health insurance, the so-called Islamic State (IS) flexed its terrorist muscles. The impact was as horrific as one might imagine. In Tunisia, a Kalashnikov-toting jihadist gunman shot and killed 39 Western tourists sunbathing on a resort beach. In Kuwait, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shiite mosque, killing 27 worshippers and wounding 227. And in France, in an attack whose motivations remain unclear but that bore all the hallmarks of IS, the head of […]

Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina announced earlier this month that he is open to running for re-election after Congress passed legislation allowing presidents to serve two consecutive terms. In an email interview, Matthew Singer, an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Connecticut, discussed domestic politics in the Dominican Republic. WPR: What is the state of democracy consolidation in the Dominican Republic, and what are the implications for it of Congress’s recent approval of consecutive presidential terms? Matthew Singer: Term limits have an interesting history in the Dominican Republic. Immediate re-election was allowed from 1966-1996, banned in 1996, […]