WPR Blog Archive

For some reason, this paragraph from Hussein Agha and Robert Malley’s NYT oped jumped out at me: The United States has cut itself off from the region on the dubious assumption that it can somehow maximize pressure on its foes by withholding contact, choosing to flaunt its might in the most primitive and costly of ways. It has pushed its local allies toward civil wars — arming Fatah against Hamas; financing some Lebanese forces against Hezbollah — they could not and did not win. And it has failed to understand that its partners could achieve more in alliance than in […]

Hampton makes some really good points here. I’d quibble with the claim that globalization is about economic liberty, so much as economic deregulation. I’d also make a distinction between “Brussels” the idea, as opposed to Brussels the reality. How accurately the anti-democratic, technocratic image of the former matches the reality of the latter is subject to debate. But there’s enough truth to it to make it resonate strongly in public opinion, and resentment of it certainly drove opposition to the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, and is doing so with the Treaty of Lisbon today. I failed to make it clear in […]

I always feel a sense of satisfaction when the mainstream press catches up to a story that WPR has been out ahead of, like the scaling back of AFRICOM (here from a few weeks back in the CSM, and here from today in the WaPo and over at Phil Carter’s Intel Dump). It’s a fascinating story that combines a novel vision of an interagency military command with some highminded operational objectives, and throws them headlong into the wall of Africa’s political realities, both historical and contemporary. There’s a lot going on here, and while AFRICOM is being downgraded to a […]

The LA Times article Judah cites in his previous post frames opposition to the Lisbon Treaty inIreland and elsewhere as largely a matter of a backlash against globalization.I obviously haven’t done any polling, but at first glance this smells to me like the spin of EU constitution proponents, and seems to seriously underestimate the role some of theconstitution’s more undemocratic provisions play in opposition to thedocument. And the process by which Europe’s political elites have tried toget around the inconvenient fact that voters often tend to reject giving away their political prerogatives to the Brussels bureaucracy only reinforcesthe often justified […]

Reforming multilateral institutions to better reflect the new global balance of power is one way to encourage emerging powers to buy into the mulitlateral governance system. So if someone’s going to block India’s permanent Security Council seat, it’s better that it be China than us. What’s interesting is the way that increasing commercial contacts between the two regional rivals have yet to signfiicantly alter their military/strategic postures, as the Global Press article points out. It’s also a reminder that globalization doesn’t only redirect trade routes to facilitate commerce between “peripheral” countries. It also redirects the potential for conflict as ambitious […]

The EU has a lot riding on passage of the Treaty of Lisbon by all its member states. The future of Europe as a strategic actor on the global stage depends on coming up with some sort of solution to the EU’s institutional crisis, and its unlikely that the consensus that Lisbon represents will be reproduced anytime soon. The problem, as with the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, is that in at least several countries, elite opinion on the matter is out ahead of popular resentment towards “Brussels” (the idea, more than the place). Twenty-six of Europe’s member nations have gotten around […]

According to this Le Figaro account of Bernard Kouchner’s surprise weekend visit to Iraq, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has begun referring to the current economic, political and security conditions as a “Baghdad spring.” There’s still some background signal noise, as well as both uncertain and contradictory data points, but as Andrew Sullivan rightly points out here, conditions on the ground have changed the political calculus in Washington. Kouchner’s visit and Le Monde’s claim that France will use its EU presidency to push for increased European involvement in Iraq suggest a line that should begin to get more attention, namely the […]