Briefing Archive

Since February, Burkina Faso has been shaken by major protests led by students, merchants and members of the country’s security forces. President Blaise Compaoré has responded with a combination of government reshuffles, outreach to aggrieved factions and repression. Yet unrest has increased, with a large crowd gathering in the capital Ouagadougou on Saturday to demand Compaoré’s departure. The protests reflect both economic and political frustration. Burkina Faso, a landlocked nation whose economy relies on cotton and gold exports, is one of the poorest countries in West Africa, with an average life expectancy of less than 54 years and a per […]

Not surprisingly, people in the Taliban-controlled areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have turned out — some of their own volition, many under duress — to mourn Osama bin Laden’s death and to threaten the United States and its allies. Yet, as a Pew survey documented, the idolization once lavished upon bin Laden seems to have waned in recent years among Muslim polities. The sociopolitical change now being sought by Middle Eastern masses protesting their countries’ secular and religious autocracies is a far cry from the caliphate that bin Laden envisioned. Islamist militant groups like Hamas in Gaza have condemned the […]

While the death of Osama bin Laden represents the long overdue demise of one man, its impact on the long-term trajectory of American foreign policy is likely to be more profound: Along with bin Laden, so too dies the “global war on terrorism.” This does not mean that there are no longer any terrorists who want to kill Americans and other Westerners. Neither does it mean that al-Qaida will simply disappear overnight. And another major attack could return the U.S. and its allies to a war footing. But bin Laden’s death does mean that the exaggerated role that terrorism has […]

Exactly one year after explaining that a future Conservative government would be “highly active and activist in European affairs,” William Hague, now the British foreign secretary, signaled quite the contrary when he appeared before the U.K.’s House of Commons Defense Select Committee on March 9. His comments in Parliament showed a worrying misunderstanding of the capacities of the two key European institutions of which the U.K. is a member — the European Union and NATO. In response to questions on international alliances and the U.K.’s perspective toward them, Hague argued that NATO is singularly designed for national security whereas the […]