WPR Blog Archive

I mentioned last week, in the aftermath of the announcement that William Burns would be attending Saturday’s Iran nuclear discussions, that the move seemed calculated to appeal to the court of public perception as much as it did to the Iranians. After all, while Burns’ presence represented a symbollic shift, his message didn’t. And it’s a message that the Iranians have consistently rejected over the years. Now that it looks like the meeting between the EU’s Javier Solana and Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili didn’t produce any breakthroughs (which isn’t so very surprising), the onus does indeed seem to be very […]

The buzz over the weekend was about a Der Spiegel interview with Nouri Maliki in which the Iraqi PM essentially embraced the 16-month timeline for withdrawal articulated by Barack Obama. While Iraqi government spokesmen have since backpedaled on the remarks, there’s little room for doubt when you actually read them. It’s a testament to how opaque and unpredictable the political context of the Iraq War now is that President Bush, Maliki and Obama are all converging on the need for some sort of “timeframe” for withdrawal, even if everyone is hedging their bets by using murky language or tying it […]

The New York Times has an interesting article on Barack Obama’s 300(!) foreign policy advisers. Examining the ideas of advisers in order to gain insight into the candidates’ true beliefs is a perennial campaign season past-time. Leaving aside that more obvious angle, however, what really struck me about this NYT piece is what it might say about the candidates’ management skills. I would never argue that core beliefs and ideas aren’t important, but history tells us that, perhaps especially in the realm of foreign policy, the positions of candidates often bear little relation to the policies they adopt once in […]

The Army War College just released this year’s Key Strategic Issues List (.pdf) which, as a call for academic research on key strategic questions, offers a peak into what problems the Army is looking to solve. It’s 171 pages of research topics, more than a few of which reappear from last year’s version. Here are a few (either new or that I didn’t flag last year) that caught my eye: – Recognizing progress in counterinsurgency operations, and reinforcing it– What proportion of U.S. land power should be focused on counterinsurgency operations and how should it be organized, trained, equipped, and […]

Late last month, a Jewish teenager wearing a yarmulke was brutally beaten in Paris’s 19th arrondissement by a gang of what the French media has widely-described as “youngsters”: jeunes. As discussed in my earlier WPR report “‘Gang Wars’ or Anti-Semitic Attacks?,” while the Paris District Attorney’s office has identified anti-Semitism as an “aggravating” factor in the attack, both the District Attorney’s office and the French media have strongly relativized the charge of anti-Semitism by presenting the incident as the outcome of a series of “clashes” between rival “youth gangs”: a black and/or Arab gang, on the one hand, and a […]

It looks like William Burns has pulled double duty, because according to this report from The Times of India, he’s stopping over in Vienna for today’s IAEA briefing on the U.S.-India nuclear deal before continuing on to Geneva for tomorrow’s talks on the Iranian nuclear program. Meanwhile, The Hindu reports that one of India’s opposition parties has demanded that PM Manmohan Singh promise to withdraw the safeguard agreement from the IAEA should his government lose next week’s confidence vote. The demand comes in the wake of rumors that Singh plans to forge ahead with the deal even if next week’s […]

I almost flagged a story in the Turkish press the other day about Iranian FM Manouchehr Mottaki heading to Ankara for talks with his Turkish counterpart, Ali Babacan, mainly because talking to Turkey seems to be synonymous with backchannel negotiations of late. I held off, because it seemed like a stretch. But as Laura Rozen reports in Mother Jones, the story takes on some added significance when Stephen Hadley turns up in Ankara the day before Mottaki: One wonders, is Turkey hosting some sort of pre pre-negotiations now between the US and Iran? The Turkish press certainly seems to think […]

Steve Clemons argues that Barack Obama’s making a blunder by skipping Brussels on his upcoming European trip, and while the thought hadn’t even occurred to me before he brought it up, I’ve got to agree with him: He’s hitting France, Germany, the UK — and all of that is good. But Brussels is the capital of Europe. It is the promise of what Europe is struggling to become that makes Brussels a vital stopover point. Obama is visiting some of the key, strategic nodes that give Europe some of its legs — but the trip looks like an “Old Europe” […]

This is about the sharpest take I’ve seen on the Union for the Mediterranean (UFM), from Nouri, aka The Moor Next Door: The Union for the Mediterranean is not in itself the construction of a new pole; it instead is an attempt to fortify the EU pole, and, inside of that, to strengthen France’s position. It seeks to put France in a headman position, so that it occupies a place of primary leadership within its region that is comparable to Brazil’s within Mercosur, South Africa’s within the SADC, and China’s within the SCO. Concerns over immigration agriculture aside, France seeks […]

So just how big a deal is the Bush administration’s decision to send third-ranking State Dept. diplomat William Burns to Geneva to sit in on EU-Iran talks on Iran’s nuclear program? In two pieces worth reading (one at Mother Jones, one for the Guardian), Laura Rozen talks to some well-informed folks and concludes that the move is a very strong symbolic signal, but unlikely to be decisive unless it’s followed by flexibility in the American position. To begin with, that means getting the actual negotiation phase started. Here’s a WaPo piece Laura linked to: The administration has also supported Solana’s […]

I’ve made a point of not bringing the subject up for a while, because it’s never good to get fixated on an idea and see everything through that lens for too long. But believe me, it hasn’t been easy. So if none other than Robert Gates himself up and goes there (via U.S. Diplomacy), then I think I’m entitled to cut myself a little slack: Overall, even outside Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has become more involved in a range of activities that in the past were perceived to be the exclusive province of civilian agencies and organizations. This […]

It’s reassuring to see that a COIN pro like Charlie over at Abu Muqawama has got some concerns about the McCain campaign’s Afghanistan “surge”: Charlie would love to know which specific “strategy” has been nominated for export….and whether it was based on any assessment of, you know, Afghanistan. There are some basic COIN best practices that might improve the situation in Afg (one word: sanctuary), but the broader population centric approach would require significant changes to be successfully applied there. And if McCain’s crew think they can blindly transfer “lessons” from the Anbar Awakening to the assorted tribes in Afg […]

Last night, Iran’s less than satisfying response to the P5+1’s latest offer on the nuclear standoff was leaked to the press by a European source. Today, the Bush administration leaked the news to both the Times and the AP that William J. Burns, the third ranking State Dept. official, will attend this weekend’s meeting between the EU’s Javier Solana and Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. It’s the highest-level contact between the two countries, but there are a number of caveats: The officials emphasized that Mr. Burns’s participation was a one-time decision, that he would not meet one-on-one with Mr. Jalili […]

Hugh White from The Interpreter sketches out in greater detail his argument that in order for Asia’s new order to emerge as a stable one, Japan will have to become a nuclear power. The crux of it is Japan’s concern that as China’s regional influence grows, America’s need to accomodate Peking will begin to take precedence over its strategic guarantees to Japan: So Japan faces a really tough dilemma. As long as it relies on the US for its security, Japan will understandably feel threatened if the US accords more weight to China. But if the US does not do […]

Via Nouvel Obs’ Vincent Jauvert (via Reuters, via TPM) comes this .pdf link to a facsimile of Iran’s formal response to the P5+1’s last offer for negotiating a settlement to the nuclear standoff, delivered in Brussels on the 4th of July. (Who said the Iranians had no sense of irony?) Reuters is highlighting the introductory passages which are basically a diatribe against “. . .the duplicitous behavior of certain big powers. . .who interpret and apply human rights laws and rules on the basis of their self-serving interests. . .” Hmmm. I wonder who that might be. . . A […]

To follow up on Petra’s post, the Syria-Iran relationship is based on interests, not values. In many ways, it’s against nature for both regimes. Given a secure border with Israel and lucrative commercial ties with the EU, Syria might feel less of a need for the Iran-Hezbollah insurance policy, or at least, as Petra says, more of a need to try to ratchet down their destabilizing influence. Those are the two angles Sarkozy is working. Is it a long shot? Sure. Is it easy to dismiss his efforts? Like shooting fish in a barrel, which is one reason he’s been […]

Kevin Drum cites a Juan Cole post questioning the emerging conventional wisdom of refocusing our military commitment from Iraq to Afghanistan, and thinks out loud a bit: The main argument for beefing up our presence in Afghanistan is obvious: It’s the home of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and these are the groups we really ought to be fighting. But what’s left of al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and Cole argues that this is largely where the remnants of the Taliban are too. . . So if we’re not going to invade Pakistan (and we’re not). . .then what are we doing […]