Briefing Archive

On Friday, just over 46 million Iranians will go to the polls to elect the president of the Islamic Republic to a four-year term. Controversial hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the candidate to beat, but he is facing a stiff challenge in an intriguing struggle that has taken shape in the last few weeks of the campaign. Reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has emerged as the main threat to the incumbent, while another reformist, Mehdi Karrubi, and another hardliner, Mohsen Rezai, are also in the race. In Iran’s unique constitutional system, severe vetting by the Islamic Republic’s political elite determines […]

Throughout the developing world, the post-Cold War era has seen the emergence of increasingly powerful and violent criminal organizations, often referred to as “third-generation gangs.” These groups have exploited the major international trends of the past 20 years — including economic and financial integration, innovations in communication technology, the prevalence of weak and failed states, and a thriving global arms trade — to seize control over a myriad of illicit commercial networks. They now use violence and corruption to undermine the governments that oppose them. Latin America has proven particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The region has porous borders and […]

On Sunday, gunmen ambushed two of Somalia’s most respected journalists, while the two men were walking in Mogadishu’s Bakara market. Muktar Mohamed Hirabe, long-time director of Shabelle Radio, was killed; his companion Ahmed Omar Hashi, a senior producer for Shabelle, was wounded in the hand and stomach. On Monday, World Politics Review spoke to Hashi by phone, from his Mogadishu hospital. He said he didn’t know who was behind the attacks, or what their motive might have been. In recent years Somalia’s media has been targeted by all of the country’s warring parties, including criminal gangs, Islamic extremists from the […]

MEXICO CITY — Federal officials used the word “historic” to describe the May 26 arrests of 28 local officials, including 10 mayors, in the western state of Michoacán. Those detained were allegedly linked to La Familia, a drug cartel known for running extortion rackets, producing methamphetamines and corrupting municipal governments. Opposition politicians and some political observers, meanwhile, expressed disquiet with the arrests and questioned their timing. The sting operation — which netted mayors from the three main parties, including a pair from President Felipe Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN) — came barely five weeks before the July 5 midterm legislative […]

LONDON — Gordon Brown has come a long way from those heady days in April when he basked in the praise of U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders attending the G-20 summit in London. He had, after all, just saved the world. Happy days. That was then. Today, Gordon Brown looks drained and desolate, his political career in shreds, his leadership comprehensively trashed. The local government elections last week and European elections over the weekend could not have come at a worse time for Brown. Already fighting for his political life, the beleaguered British prime minister was left, […]

Much remains uncertain regarding the nuclear arms control treaty currently being negotiated by the Russian and American governments. But the parties have evidently decided not to try to address “non-strategic” nuclear weapons in the agreement. When asked about the issue at an April 6 conference on nonproliferation, two U.S. and Russian officials intimately involved in the negotiations said they favored excluding the issue from the immediate START follow-on talks. The latest Russian-American negotiating session that occurred last week in Geneva appears to confirm this decision. Rose Gottemoeller, the new assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance and the chief […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Following a landmark election on Sunday, the U.S.-backed “March 14” coalition held on to its slim majority in the Lebanese parliament, defeating the opposition alliance of Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), an officially secular but mostly Christian party headed by General Michel Aoun. Analysts are scrutinizing the returns in an effort to explain how March 14 managed to pull off a decisive win, given that extensive polling over a period of months had suggested a much closer race with a greater likelihood of an opposition victory. Coming as it did on the heels of […]

A huge natural gas discovery 50 miles off the Israeli coast at Haifa could potentially meet Israel’s energy needs for 20 years once it eventually comes online. In January 2009, a consortium led by U.S. energy exploration company Noble Energy announced the discovery of three massive gas fields, with one of the group’s partners calling the find “one of the biggest in the world” that represented a “historic landmark in the economic dependence of Israel.” By February, the group announced that further flow testing analysis at the Tamar 1 field had increased the initial huge projection of 3.1 trillion cubic […]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Last January, a group of World Bank scientists withdrew from the Guarani aquifer region in South America, after almost nine years spent elaborating a detailed picture of the water table there. Located beneath the surface of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, the Guarani is not only the world’s third-largest aquifer. It is also the only uncontaminated one of those three. With a volume of almost 55,000 cubic kilometers, it could supply drinking water to the world’s entire population for 200 years. The aquifer’s four countries decided not to renew the World Bank’s investigation license, which had […]

As the World Health Organization agonizes over whether or not to declare the H1N1 flu virus an official pandemic, I can’t help but think of the American national security establishment’s continuing struggle over the definition of threat in a post-9/11 world. In both instances, we see institutions with worldwide responsibilities coming to grips with an increasingly interconnected global landscape. And although that global landscape, according to all the available data, suffers less catastrophe, it nonetheless appears to present far greater potential for such catastrophes to unfold with seemingly uncontrollable consequences. By “less catastrophe,” I mean that in a world of […]

In his comprehensively titled tome, “Diplomacy,” legendary U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger laid out the two competing schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy in its rise to power. The first was realist, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, based on power and obsessed with the zero-sum game that guides the core of international relations. The second, touted by Woodrow Wilson, was idealist, based on cooperation and unflinching in its belief in the power of ideas. To Kissinger’s consternation, though he believed that realism was the right way through which to view the world, he says that it was actually Wilson’s […]

Yesterday afternoon, the stage was set: President Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim, had traveled to Cairo to give his long-awaited speech to the Islamic world, in an effort to repair the damage done to America’s image in the region by recent U.S. foreign policy. Judging by U.S. reactions, the speech was a huge success. But will the other half of the equation, the president’s Arab and Muslim target audience, follow the White House’s carefully crafted script? Though it is still too early to say with certainty, the U.S. could be in for a disappointment. To understand more […]

GRAZ, Austria — Austria’s far right, riding high on its recent national election success, is conducting one of the most hate-filled election campaigns in recent memory in a bid for EU Parliament seats. Jews, Muslims and non-European foreigners have all been maligned, while far-right supporters have expressed their loyalty to the cause by using the outlawed Nazi salute. The Freedom Party (FP) and the splinter Alliance for the Future (AF) party unexpectedly won almost a third of votes in last September’s national election. Two weeks later, the outpouring of sympathy that followed the death of Jorg Haider — the leader […]

When Air Force One landed in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula yesterday with President Barack Obama aboard, my mind traveled back to Nov. 4, last year. On the day Obama was elected president of the United States, I was in Amman, Jordan, listening to jaded Arab men declare that nothing would change in the Middle East, no matter who lived in the White House. Fast forward exactly seven months later, and the Arab world is abuzz with excitement. President Obama has traveled to the Middle East to prove my Jordanian interlocutors wrong, and to demonstrate that the relationship between […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A polarized Lebanese electorate goes to the polls this Sunday in a hotly contested general election that will determine Lebanon’s cabinet and government for the next four years. It is a high-stakes race, with more than 15 political parties and over 700 candidates jockeying for power. As always in this country of roughly four million citizens, the internal faultlines have become a proxy to geopolitical interests and regional turf battles. The multitude of parties could easily be misconstrued as the genuine sign of democracy and freedom of speech, often lacking in the Middle East. But to a […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The outcome of this Sunday’s legislative elections in Lebanon is both a certainty and a mystery. On the one hand, the main Sunni, Shiite and Druze parties are sure to win big in their regional strongholds. But the Christian vote is very much in play. With the Sunnis and Druze firmly in the pro-Western “March 14” camp led by Sunni leader Saad Hariri, and the Shiites solidly behind the Syrian-backed “March 8” opposition bloc, the balance between them will be tilted by Maronite voters in their strongholds around Beirut and Mount Lebanon. These will be split between […]

When U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo tomorrow, they may want to focus some attention on the most enduring but unexamined component of the U.S.-Egypt relationship: military cooperation. Over the past 30 years, military cooperation has yielded great benefits for both countries. But that cooperation now shows signs of strain, and a course correction is in order. Operationally, the U.S. enjoys privileged access to Egypt’s air space and waterways. That meant expedited permission for more than 35,000 over-flights and 850 naval transits from 2001 to 2005. Strategically, Egypt has largely supported — or else […]