Briefing Archive

With the warring parties in Yemen locked in a stalemate on the ground, the battle for the Arab world’s poorest country is moving to a new front: the economy. The government-in-exile of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi is planning to shut down the Central Bank of Yemen in the capital, Sanaa—a city that Houthi rebels have controlled for two years—and establish a new bank in the southern port city of Aden. Hadi hopes to cut off financing to the alliance of Houthi rebels and military units loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which control Yemen’s northwestern highlands and western […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series inviting authors to identify the biggest priority—whether a threat, risk, opportunity or challenge—facing the international order and U.S. foreign policy today. The most urgent priority in international affairs today is to avoid a war between the United States and China. The consequences of such a war, military as well as economic, would be so vast as to dwarf all the other serious perils the world faces. Of course, a war is far from inevitable, but the risk is real, and much greater than most observers seem to realize, especially […]

On Sept. 7, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced the resignation of Finance Minister Luis Videgaray and appointed Jose Antonio Meade, a reputable technocrat, as his replacement. Since Videgaray had been instrumental in organizing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s controversial visit to Mexico City late last month, most coverage framed his exit as the fallout. But Videgaray’s resignation had more to do with a longer track record of failing to deliver on ambitious economic and structural reforms. It was the latest upheaval in Pena Nieto’s Cabinet at a time when the Mexican economy faces mediocre growth, mounting debt and a […]

Last week, the United Kingdom announced plans to begin building a barricade at the French port of Calais, dubbed by some media the “Great Wall of Calais.” The U.K. will foot the bill, and the barrier will complement a fence that already protects the port and is guarded by heavily armed French police. The move followed massive protests held by French truck drivers and farmers, who threatened to block the port until Calais’ large migrant camp, known as the “Jungle,” is dismantled. Protesters argue that the camp, which, according to some estimates, is home to 9,000 migrants, has led to […]

Most observers, myself included, expected Gabon’s incumbent president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, to win his country’s election late last month. Few, however—again including me—anticipated the degree of violence and apparent fraud that would accompany the process. Bongo is now reconsolidating power in the aftermath of an intensely contested election. If his victory stands, it will demonstrate that Gabon’s opposition has few tools with which to challenge the results, and that the international community has little will to sanction Bongo and his inner circle. When elections were held on Aug. 27, Bongo barely won. Gabon’s electoral framework stipulated that the winner needed […]

In late August, the European Union ordered Ireland to collect more than $14 billion in unpaid taxes from Apple. The move followed an investigation by the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, which found that Apple’s effective corporate tax rate on its European profits had fallen from 1 percent in 2003 to just 0.005 percent by 2014. At a press conference announcing the move, the EU commissioner responsible for competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said that “member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules.” EU member states are allowed to set […]

On Aug. 24, Ukraine celebrated 25 years of independence from the Soviet Union with a military parade in the capital, Kiev. President Petro Poroshenko, elected in the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising, proudly recounted the country’s progress to the crowd: “Independence already gave us democracy and liberty, sense of human dignity and national unity; taught us to defend ourselves and opened the European perspective. The middle class has been formed as well as the civil society. The first post-Soviet generation with a new European world outlook has grown up.” Less than two weeks later, a mob of far-right protesters […]

On Tuesday, Francois Hollande became the first French president in 12 years to visit Vietnam, a former French colony. Despite their troubled past marked by a nearly decade-long war that ended with France’s military defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, relations between Paris and Hanoi have warmed during Hollande’s presidency, part of France’s deepening interest in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific more broadly. By a number of measures, the visit was a productive one. Vietnam Airlines purchased 40 jets from France’s Airbus, totaling $6.5 billion in sales; low-cost private airline VietJet purchased 20 planes, totaling $2.39 billion; a regional […]

Islam Karimov, who ruled Uzbekistan for 27 years, is dead. Rumors began circulating on Aug. 26 that the 78-year-old dictator had been hospitalized with a stroke. Official recognition came two days later. On Sept. 2, following endless speculation, Uzbek officials announced the death of the country’s long-serving strongman, which leaves a great deal of uncertainty. Almost half of Uzbekistan’s 32 million people have not known life without Karimov as president. Karimov, who grew up in an orphanage in Samarkand, became first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan in 1989 and declared the republic’s independence on Sept. 1, 1991. He […]

Uganda is pulling out of the hunt for Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), taking with it the best hopes of eliminating the militia once regarded as one of the world’s most brutal. The withdrawal of the roughly 2,500 Ugandan troops from an African Union military mission, which is set to be completed by the end of the year, comes with a recognition of the LRA’s diminished stature after years of being on the run in Central Africa. But the move has also raised fears that the group could rebuild some of its strength and take advantage of […]

The international headlines generated recently by the Philippines combative new president, Rodrigo Duterte—over extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers in the country and a slur directed at U.S. President Barack Obama this week—have overshadowed his efforts to seek peace with communist rebels to end one of Asia’s longest-running insurgencies. Just over two months after being inaugurated, Duterte opened a first round of official talks in Norway in late August. Although early overtures suggest a level of promise not seen for decades, it remains to be seen whether the government and rebels can succeed where past talks have failed and translate […]

Over the past week, Myanmar held its eagerly awaited national peace conference in Naypyidaw, with hundreds of the country’s ethnic armed groups gathering in the capital alongside the government, parliament, the powerful military and political parties. The conference was a centerpiece of the agenda of the new administration led by the once-opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). It was designed to be a kind of sequel to the Panglong Conference held in Myanmar in 1947, when NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, independence hero Aung San, presided over the last meeting that brought together the country’s numerous factions and […]

This is it. As of Aug. 24, after 52 years of fighting and four years of negotiating, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have a peace accord. The FARC will cease to be one of the hemisphere’s largest generators of violence and will transition into a peaceful political movement. Already, the past 13 months have been the least violent period in Colombia since the conflict with the FARC began in 1964. And at midnight on Aug. 29, the government and the leftist guerrillas made it permanent, calling a definitive halt to all hostilities. The […]

Last week, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May reiterated that “Brexit means Brexit,” her formula for insisting that she will respect the outcome of the referendum in favor of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Her comments came as the Cabinet met to discuss Brexit strategy and the need to find a “unique” deal for the U.K. as it negotiates its EU exit, a proposition that is proving to be easier said than done. The outcome of the June referendum, in which 52 percent of Britons voted in favor of leaving the EU, prompted fears that the U.K.’s economy would collapse, […]

As if there were any doubt, it is increasingly clear that Venezuela’s profound political and economic crisis is not confined to its borders. The repercussions of the country’s humanitarian disaster and creeping authoritarianism are spreading throughout Latin America, posing tough choices for its neighbors and straining hemispheric relations. How best to deal with the Venezuela question is also making it even more difficult to set common policies to address the region’s economic stagnation. Nowhere is this problem clearer than in Mercosur, the Common Market of the South, an integration mechanism founded in 1991 by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, which […]

During a visit to Washington in April, Qubad Talabani, the deputy prime minister of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, declared that “the real existential threat facing Kurdistan today is the state of [its] economy.” The KRG’s monthly deficit had risen above $100 million, adding more strains on an already-teetering economy. Four months later, the KRG continues to face a financial crisis as oil production slows amid attacks from the Islamic State, refineries fall offline, and export quality drops. Kurdish leaders consider their region’s oil fields to be the foundation for an envisaged state. But falling oil revenue leaves […]