Briefing Archive

Five years ago, on a hazy summer afternoon in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, a security guard at the presidential palace led me around its mosque, which had been the site of a 2011 assassination attempt against then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh during the height of the Arab Spring protests. The shoes of the men who were killed in the bombing—a who’s who of Yemen’s ruling party—were still piled outside the mosque’s entrance. Saleh was very lucky that day. He had been standing near the mosque’s doorway, away from the center of the room that had taken the brunt of the explosion, the […]

Little is expected from the World Trade Organization’s 11th ministerial conference next week in Argentina. U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility to multilateral agreements is a serious impediment, and American trade officials engaged in preliminary talks in Geneva have said they do not expect, nor want, any negotiated agreements to come out of the meeting in Buenos Aires. This is despite the fact that several items on the WTO’s agenda, including e-commerce, constraints on trade-distorting agricultural policies and constraints on fishing subsidies, have been U.S. priorities in the past. By contrast, China has signaled throughout this year that it supports open […]

Argentines watched in shock last month as former Vice President Amado Boudou was arrested and put in pre-trial detention on corruption charges. It was the latest in a string of arrests of former officials from ex-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration, causing many to question whether the former president, who faces indictments in several criminal cases, could be next. But although a section of Argentina’s population was elated at the media spectacle of the disheveled, barefoot vice president in handcuffs, the arrest caused journalists and politicians from across the political spectrum to question whether the judiciary is starting to abuse […]

BERLIN—Two months after Germany’s federal elections, the country is on the brink of an unexpected political crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats, or CDU, and their sister party, the Christian Socialists, or CSU, ran first in the vote, but they finished without an outright majority. Since election night, they have been casting about for coalition partners—a process that has proven surprisingly more difficult than political pundits anticipated. The alternatives, if Merkel can’t form a coalition, are either for the CDU/CSU alliance to rule as a fragile minority government or, more likely, for new elections to take place. The latter […]

The candidate of Somaliland’s ruling party, Musa Bihi Abdi, was finally declared the new president of this semi-autonomous region of northwestern Somalia late last month, after eight days of counting, recounting and closed-door negotiations between him, his main rival and the National Electoral Commission. Now Bihi faces the task of dealing with Somaliland’s many challenges, most of all turning a nascent democracy and East African success story into a fully functioning and independent state recognized by the world. The election was declared peaceful and free by both local and international observers, who despite concerns claimed to have “observed a poll […]