The foreign ministers of Chile and Bolivia met in La Paz last month to begin negotiations on an agenda that includes Bolivia’s request for Pacific Ocean access. In an e-mail interview, Council of the Americas Senior Director of Policy Christopher Sabatini — with historical research by COA policy associate Nina Agrawal — explains the context for the Bolivia-Chile maritime dispute. WPR: What is the origin of the dispute? Christopher Sabatini: The Bolivia-Chile maritime dispute is actually over landlocked Bolivia’s access to the Pacific Ocean. It goes back to colonial times, when viceroys had competing claims over the area — the [...]
Turkish President Abdullah Gül met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak late last month to discuss bilateral relations and the Middle East peace process. In an e-mail interview, Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, discusses Turkey-Egypt bilateral relations. WPR: How would you characterize Turkish-Egyptian relations historically? Paul Salem: For most of the 20th century, Egypt and Turkey were effectively part of different “regions.” Until recently, Turkey was generally orientated toward the West — with its inclusion in the NATO alliance — and had fairly tense relations with the countries of the Arab East. Turkey was viewed suspiciously by [...]
In his assessment on how things could have been different in Afghanistan, David Sanger in Sunday’s New York Times repeats one of the fixed assumptions about America’s longest war to date: we wouldn’t be in the current mess in Afghanistan “if only [the Bush administration] had not been distracted by Iraq, or averted [its] eyes from the Taliban’s resurgence.” That’s almost certainly the case. But it turns out that without the Iraq war, the U.S. could well have found itself fighting in Afghanistan without NATO. It was the rapid U.S. advance across Iraq, particularly the fall of Baghdad, that turned [...]
