Briefing Archive

With the 10th anniversary of the Global Financial Crisis just around the corner, the media will spend much of the rest of 2018 rehashing the story of the 2008 economic meltdown and its implications for the world today. There will be a surge of opinion pieces pegged to the demise of Lehman Brothers, the pivotal moment in the crisis, in the middle of September. Analysts will chart the near collapse of the global economy and speculate about how this paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit and a grab-bag of other global ills. Fewer pundits will emphasize […]

After seven years of war in Syria, the endgame is here. All major frontlines have been frozen by foreign intervention, and military action now hinges on externally brokered political deals. The result could be a de facto division of the country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed forces spent the past two years taking out isolated rebel strongholds, like Eastern Aleppo and Ghouta. Recently, they recaptured the area along the border with Jordan and territory near the Golan Heights—but at that point, they ran out of low-hanging fruit. The sight of Russian diplomats shuttling between Israelis, Syrians, Iranians and Americans to […]

Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party now utterly dominate Cambodia, after the CPP won control of the entire lower house of parliament in elections late last month. The regime had, of course, ensured in advance that the CPP would sweep the vote, the culmination of Hun Sen’s increasingly brazen repression. There were few if any impartial observers on election day. With Cambodia’s political regression all but complete, what is left for the remnants of the opposition? How will key international donors and foreign countries respond, and what’s next for Hun Sen himself? The Cambodia National Rescue Party, […]

After it was ratified by the Knesset on July 19, Israel’s so-called nation-state bill, designed to define the state more exclusively on ethnically Jewish lines, joined the short list of Basic Laws that make up the country’s ersatz constitution. A photo of grinning Knesset members from the right-wing Likud party, commemorating the occasion by gathering for a selfie around a smirking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly went viral. It took a few days for the smiles to fade, as leading members of Netanyahu’s coalition began to experience buyer’s remorse. Much to their surprise, Israel’s ethnic minorities—specifically, the Druze community, renowned […]

“Over whatever number of years we have put about $80 billion into Egypt. Most of the time, this is the kind of government they had—almost all of the time. And the reality is, no matter how much I wish it was different, it ain’t going to be different tomorrow.” These words, spoken by former Secretary of State John Kerry to The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick, are unfortunately all too accurate. Egypt is in the depths of a resurgent authoritarianism that has thoroughly crushed any possibility for political opening or reform, no matter how incremental. Kerry was correct in his […]

While the Trump administration follows through with reimposing sanctions on Tehran after it withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear agreement, the rhetoric over American sanctions on Russia is seriously overheating. Debate centers on the Treasury Department’s potential removal of the Russian aluminum firm Rusal from its blacklist of sanctioned Russian entities. This dispute risks obscuring how a desire to hit back against Russia over its election interference, rather than punish Rusal’s oligarch founder, Oleg Deripaska, invites severe unintended consequences. While the political value of keeping Rusal on the Treasury blacklist may seem high, it comes with wider economic costs […]

Judging from the political priorities in Berlin, Rome or any other European capital these days, you’d think that migration control and border management are the only important issues facing policymakers. Everywhere you look, more and more policy tools are being used to “fight” or solve problems related to migration, with some repurposed for the task. The same has been true for the European Union in recent years. In Brussels, this trend can be traced back to the summer of 2016, when the EU published its updated doctrine for defense and security policy, called the European Union Global Strategy. The doctrine […]

Immediately after the left-wing Syriza party swept to power in Greece in 2015, officials from the European Union, NATO and the United States all worried about the possibility that the newly minted Greek government was too close with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It wasn’t just the leftists in government in Athens who might have harbored pro-Russian sentiments. Greece and Russia share religious and historical ties, and a significant chunk of the Greek population views Putin favorably. The person who most worried NATO officials at the time was Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, whose past writings and connections with communist organizations marked him […]

After the storm, the calm? A month after Romania’s most powerful man was convicted of abuse of power and sentenced to three and a half years in prison, some Romanians expected a political earthquake. Instead, much of the country is heading to their summer holiday on the beaches of the Black Sea. But the political drama in Bucharest isn’t over. Liviu Dragnea, the head of the ruling Social Democratic Party, or PSD, is appealing his late June conviction, while continuing his bellicose rhetoric about a “deep state” that is out to get him, picking up a line from U.S. President […]

One of the highest-profile cases in Senegalese President Macky Sall’s anti-corruption drive has turned into a stain on his record. And the events of recent weeks suggest the story won’t be going away anytime soon. In March of last year, authorities arrested Khalifa Sall, the mayor of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, on suspicion of fraud and misuse of public funds. A year later, a court convicted Khalifa Sall, who is not related to the president, and sentenced him to five years in prison. But long before the judgment against Khalifa Sall was handed down, the legitimacy of the case had been […]

A few years after Iran’s 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini disregarded an aide who was worried about inflation by declaring that “this revolution was not about the price of watermelons.” His successors may not have the luxury of assuming that the Islamic Republic’s religious essence is more important to most Iranians than their economic situation. Indeed, the proverbial price of watermelons has now plunged Iran into a potentially explosive economic crisis, with waves of public protests. The situation has been exacerbated by U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision in May to violate the terms of the nuclear deal with Iran and […]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a surprise visit to Israel last week for talks about Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria. The negotiations came amid heightened tensions along Syria’s southern border with Israel, where the Assad regime’s recent offensive to retake lost territory from rebels renewed conflict in an area that had been protected by a 2017 cease-fire agreement guaranteed by Russia, Jordan and the United States. The fighting raises concerns about the proximity of Iranian-backed forces, including Hezbollah, to northern Israel. In response to this threat, Israel launched a series of attacks on Iranian targets within Syria, including the […]