WPR Blog Archive

The Obama administration’s outreach efforts — Russia here, Syria here, Iran in the works — are certainly a welcome corrective to the Bush administration’s insistence on isolation and conditioned negotiations. That doesn’t mean they’ll work any better. The problem in all three cases is that being a spoiler offers more leverage and influence than being part of the solution. So long as a stable and peaceful Middle East is a high priority for Washington, then Syrian President Bashar al-Assad can say things like, “If you want to talk about peace, you can’t advance without Syria.” But outside of a stable […]

Even before the global financial crisis, I’d been pointing out the various possibilities for a globalization backlash. It seemed pretty likely that opposition to the enormous transfer of wealth from developed to developing countries would eventually be couched in regulatory concerns, whether social or environmental. The global downturn is likely to accelerate that process, and spread it to emerging-emerging commerce as well. As an illustration, India just relaxed a recent outright ban on Chinese toys, limiting it instead to products not covered by global certification agencies. That provides the necessary cover for now. But while all economists are voters, not […]

If all you read was the NY Times, you’d probably have the idea that the EU is on the verge of an East-West schism. Wishful thinking, perhaps. As Art Goldhammer points out, the (French-language) view from Europe is a bit more nuanced. According to this version, the EU’s refusal to float an “Eastern European” bailout is based on a broader sense of solidarity that rejects the idea of internal boundaries, whether East-West or North-South. There’s also the fact, as Angela Merkel made clear, that no monolithic bailout could respond to the distinct needs of the various countries. But here’s the […]

Two reports from the Eastern Congo illustrate the difficulty of covering events in that part of the world, or perhaps just the difficulty of doing some fact checking before going into print. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman, who either has a death wish or is vying for the crown of how many ‘worst’ places he can visit in the shortest amount of time, reports that in the wake of the Rwandan incursion over the last few months peace has finally returned. Over at the BBC, however, U.N. spokespersons are claiming that Hutu rebel groups have been moving back […]

I had some vague thoughts swirling around the cranium, and a French word I ran across in some weekend reading helped crystallize them: s’immerger, which means to immerse oneself, but also to submerge oneself. The word corresponds to the English immerge, which I hadn’t realized existed. (That rumbling sound you hear is my Shakespearian-scholar and Greek- and Latin-speaking grandfather rolling over in his grave.) It immediately made me think of President Obama’s Camp Lejeune speech, which put the withdrawal from Iraq in the context of a regional diplomatic fabric. The same approach informs the regional approach to the Afghanistan War, […]

For those of you who enter the site through the blog, I want to call your attention to the latest WPR feature issue, The Blue Planet: Water and Geopolitics, which just went live today. It’s a look at the way freshwater and maritime resources are likely to impact international relations. Here’s a hint: scarcity can drive cooperation as much as conflict, and competition is very likely to take place in the context of multilateral treaties and conventions. Here’s Aaron Wolf, from “Troubled Waters: Conflict and Cooperation Over Shared Rivers“: Water is a vital resource for which there is no substitute, […]

Recently Andrew Exum (a.k.a. Abu Muqawama) noted that Tom Ricks’ book, The Gamble, had neglected to examine the role of New Media in the Surge’s success. That led Dave Dilegge of Small Wars Journal to send out a call for comments. I was very flattered to be invited to contribute my thoughts, then humbled by the company: Dave Kilcullen, Janine Davidson, Tom Barnett, Exum, Spencer Ackerman, Michael Yon, and more. The entire document can be found here (.pdf), and Dave is also compiling an updated list of responses from around the web in this SWJ blog post. (Josh Foust’s comments […]