Q & A Archive

North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party held its Eighth Party Congress earlier this month, followed by a big military parade—the second one since October. According to Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, the series of well-publicized events were meant to project resilience at a time when North Korea is reeling from a “triple whammy” of economic sanctions, natural disasters and COVID-19. Kim joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss the big takeaways from the party congress. Listen to the full interview with Duyeon […]

North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party has had a busy start to the year. Earlier this month, the Eighth Party Congress was held in the capital, Pyongyang: Eight days of meetings, including a 9-hour work report read out by leader Kim Jong Un himself. Just a couple days after those sessions wrapped up, Kim oversaw a celebratory military parade, the second one since October, featuring a new missile described by state media as the “world’s most powerful weapon.” New analysis of satellite imagery by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute suggests Pyongyang could be preparing for […]

After security forces beat back the pro-Trump extremists that had occupied the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, shaken lawmakers returned to continue the work they had started that afternoon: certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, proclaimed triumphantly. But the would-be insurrectionists “don’t look at this as a failure,” says Colin Clarke, an expert on domestic and transnational terrorism at the Soufan Group. “They look at this as an overwhelming and resounding success … a rallying cry for the far right.” Earlier this […]

The storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., by pro-Trump insurrectionists earlier this month was both shocking and utterly unsurprising. After all, for anyone paying attention to the rioters’ social media posts in the days and weeks leading up to the event, they made their intentions clear. A subset of the participants appeared to have technical training, and had laid meticulous plans well in advance of Jan. 6. The attack on the Capitol, then, was a culmination—not just of the insurrectionists’ efforts to train and arm themselves for a violent revolt, but also of years of recruitment and radicalization by […]

Saudi Arabia and three of its Gulf allies have agreed to end a three-and-a-half-year travel and trade blockade on neighboring Qatar. The deal was announced last week at a summit of the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC. But the embargo has done lasting damage to the bloc, says Sanam Vakil, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, and “there’s a lot of work to be done” to address persistent divisions within the GCC countries. Vakil joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to talk about how the Gulf states can move forward after years of […]

Flights between Saudi Arabia and Qatar are resuming this week and the land border has reopened between the two countries—signs of a thaw in relations after three and half years of acrimony. Last week, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt agreed to end a travel and trade blockade they had imposed on Qatar in 2017. Those four countries, calling themselves the “anti-terror quartet,” had accused Qatar of supporting radical Islamist groups, among other charges. The crisis had divided the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, and the United States had lobbied extensively for an end to the […]

The trans-Atlantic relationship has suffered during the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, largely due to Trump’s hostility toward the European Union, which he saw as a trade competitor, and toward the NATO alliance, which he saw as a costly liability. The tensions that have arisen under Trump have made the debate in Brussels and across the EU over European strategic autonomy all the more urgent, especially in the past year. With the arrival in the White House of President-elect Joe Biden, many observers expect the return of smoother relations between the U.S. and its European allies. But what will […]

More than 340 schoolboys were abducted from their boarding school in northwestern Nigeria last month, apparently by armed criminal gangs affiliated with the extremist group Boko Haram. Though the boys were freed and reunited with their families a week later, the incident was a worrying sign that Boko Haram is expanding beyond its traditional base in northeastern Nigeria. According to Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Boko Haram’s resurgence suggests the need for a more holistic, transnational approach to countering […]