WPR Blog Archive

Nikolas Gvosdev flags Russia’s efforts at making inroads into the South American energy infrastructure market. I’m as struck by France’s inroads into the Brazilian weapons procurement market (via Jean-Dominique Merchet at Secret Défense): According to Brazil’s official news agency Agencia Brasil, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are scheduled to sign a strategic cooperation agreement Monday during the Brazil-European Union summit in Rio de Janeiro. . . . The agreement would include the transfer of technology that would allow Brazil to assemble 50 EC-725 Cougar helicopters, four conventional submarines and one submarine with nuclear […]

Whoever’s version you believe about the wave of arrests of government officials in Baghdad, the news is troubling, if not surprising. Either we’re propping up an Iraqi government that faces even more security threats than we realized, or else one that is guilty of ruthless tactics of political suppression. My first reaction to the news that these guys were plotting a coup was that it takes a serious pair to seize power by force in a country where 130,000 American troops are deployed in defense of the currently constituted government. Either that or a nod of approval from the Green […]

One of the major criticisms leveled by skeptics in the COIN vs. Conventional debate has been that the focus on COIN training needed for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan has already degraded the Army’s readiness for conventional combat operations. So this item from the Army Times caught my eye: After seven years of war in a counterinsurgency environment, theArmy will resume training next summer on major combat operations byusing simulators in scenarios against a hypothetical uniformed force. But the brigade-level exercise won’t look anything like exercises did before Sept. 11, 2001. For the first time, commanders will incorporate stability operations […]

WPR’s World Citizen, Frida Ghitis, called my attention to this AP report on recent polling in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, after a recent surge, has lost quite a bit of ground, and while still ahead of Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, only leads by what amounts to four Knesset seats. It seems to me that a weak Netanyahu victory would probably be the worse possible scenario, since as Frida pointed out in her column last week, he had been making a pitch towards the moderate center. A bare margin victory would increase the leverage of the far-right parties he’d need to […]

As you might have noticed, WPR has undergone a bit of a cosmetic makeover, so you might want to do a control-F5 or whatever it is you need to do to clear out your browser’s cache for the site. We’ll be smoothing out any rough edges that we notice over the next few days, but your help would be invaluable in that process. A quick heads up via email for any glitches you encounter would be greatly appreciated. In addition to the new look, the changes on the front page are meant to organize the content in a more effective […]

One of the major priorities of the French EU presidency was to advanceEuropean defense in a number of particular areas. With regard to goalssuch as the 60,000-strong European expeditionary capacity, that hasamounted to renewed verbal commitments to already formulated positionswithout any strict deadlines or formal commitments. On others, such asthe creation of an EU operational headquarters, and the role of EUdefense in general, it has resulted in the stated removal of politicalroadblocks from Great Britain. Both of those are significant, if forthe time being symbolic, accomplishments. But this report from the EU Observerabout the first decisive steps towards a unified […]

It’s become pretty common over the past five years to hear appeasement and the Munich Agreement rolled out as a historical parallel to contemporary events, in particular with regard to Iraq, Iran, and Russia. But I couldn’t help but think, in reading this Economist article describing just how bad the Russian economy is looking these days, how much the fixation on Munich ignores some of the structural determinants that made an aggressive, German military nationalism not only possible, but very likely in the period leading up to Munich. The parallel between post-WWI Germany and post-crisis Russia is far from exact. […]

According to Jean-Dominique Merchet at the Secret Défense blog, France is likely to send several hundred additional troops to Afghanistan. While the actual increase is modest, the reasoning behind it has wider implications and aims to shore up one of the weak links in the NATO effort there: chain of command. If Merchet’s information is correct, and he’s pretty plugged in, the additional troops will allow the French forces in Afghanistan to regroup into a unified brigade in the east of the country where they are already deployed. French forces now stationed in Kabul would also be integrated into the […]

I think I’d prefer the Obama administration taking office without any clue than to it inheriting the Bush administration’s contingency plans. This also seems to put an inordinate amount of power in the hands of bad actors to effectively extend the Bush presidency, although doing so would represent a major setback in the battle for global hearts and minds.

Via today’s WPR Media Roundup, I noticed this ME Times item about the UAE agreeing to buy into a U.S. missile shield network in the Gulf. It’s an interesting deal, not least because it comes fast on the heels of the completion of negotiations on the U.S.-UAE nuclear energy deal a few days back (which I mistakenly said had been signed). But it also allows the Emirates to operate the system themselves, which is a significant transfer of training and know-how. So there’s a lot of quid here, but also a lot quo, and it’s hard to tell who got […]

Matthew Yglesias wonders why “this business of a bomb being planted in a French department store by ‘a previously unknown group demanding the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan’ isn’t getting more play.” To begin with, the story is definitely getting play here in France, but that’s to be expected. No one likes bombs, and Paris is sadly no stranger to them. But in answer to Yglesias’ question, the wording of the warning note left with AFP as well as the methods used have created a good deal of skepticism regarding the group’s origins and stated demands. Just from the […]

One of the reasons I stopped covering French domestic politics following Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential election victory in 2006 is that the Socialist Party was left in such disarray that it was like the old saw about the French intellectual’s complaint turned on its head: Sure it doesn’t work in practice, but does it not work in theory either? The other was because I realized that Art Goldhammer can do a better job of it from over in Cambridge than I can from here in Paris. So consider his TNR article on what the GOP can learn from the French Socialists […]

Cutting through all the chatter regarding the symbollism of the shoe in Iraqi culture and the Arab world at large, Kal over at the Moor Next Door gets my vote for insight of the day: Is there a culture in which throwing a shoe at someoneis not highly offensive? The consensus would seem to be that in mostcultures, throwing a shoe at someone at very least signals greathostility. If this incident becomes an iconic one, and I have a suspicion it will, it will be in large part because of the way it took everyone, including the Secret Service, by […]

I held off on mentioning the historic commercial passenger flight between China and Taiwan yesterday, because I had trouble finding the right image for what I wanted to say. This morning I found it, in part thanks to this clip of the CFR’s Richard Haass on the Colbert Reportexplaining in terms even the Colbert character can understand why the U.S. and China have a mutual interestin maintaining the stability of the global order, and in part thanks tothis post by Malcolm Cook over at the Interpreter: Like John Howard, I thought the Bush Administration had got the balancebetween engaging with […]

The first freelance article I wrote for WPR back in February of this year was on Nicolas Sarkozy’s zeal, upon taking office, in pursuing nuclear energy agreements with the Arab world. While the deals were commercially lucrative and made for some awkward moments (i.e. Muammar Qaddafi’s pitching his Bedouin tents in Paris), the strategic logic was compelling: Sarkozy’s decision . . . reflects astrategic calculation designed to counter Iranian claims that the Westis unwilling to share civil nuclear energy with the Arab world. Asa French official who agreed to speak with World Politics Review oncondition of anonymity put it, “It’s […]

Reuters is reporting that Iran has allowed its banks to issue debt instruments in foreign currencies. While the report describes the move as a way of attracting foreign investment capital to make up for reduced oil revenue, it also portrays the Iranian central bank’s attitude as pretty nonchalant about the whole matter. The emerging consensus on Iran, Russia and Venezuela is that falling oil prices are going to limit their ability to realize their ambitious troublemaking agendas in their respective parts of the world. That’s very likely. And to the extent that Ahmadinejad and Chavez used their oil revenue to […]

It looks like when it comes to extending the Afghanistan War into Pakistan, the Taliban have beaten us to the punch. The problem of safe havens has now metastasized into a problem of securing supply lines. Of course, that’s when military planners start getting nervous. Here’s hoping the Obama administration balances what’s right and what’s necessary with what’s possible.