WPR Blog Archive

When it comes to humble pie, there’s enough to go around for everyone these days. This time it’s Venezuela’s turn. Notice how, with Venezuelan largesse drying up, Brazil and Argentina look east to China, but the smaller, more vulnerable countries still look north to Washington. The devil you know beats one you don’t? The big winner here is Brazil, though, which once again demonstrates the superiority of the Latin American progressive left, as opposed to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s inflammatory brand of populist left. Notice that Brazilian President Lula da Silva definitively ruled out a third term, meaning that Brazil’s […]

My post on Iran’s nuclear deterrent bothered Sam Roggeveen, which usually indicates one of two things. Either, a) I need to clarify my argument; or b) I was wrong. I’ll go with option “a,” and see if that helps. The hard-line Israeli argument against an Iranian civilian nuclear program goes something like this: If Iran is allowed to master civilian nuclear technology — in particular the fuel enrichment cycle — it will eventually use that technology to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Those weapons will at worst pose an existential threat to Israel, and at best transform the strategic balance […]

Something about this NY Times piece on Oman’s smugglers touched a sympathetic chord in me. I’m pretty tolerant towards the idea of smugglers and the black market, in general, especially for things like refrigerators and TV sets. To begin with, smugglers fill a crucial subversive role that keeps even the most legitimate of governments honest. But in this case, the Omani smugglers aren’t just contravening Western sanctions against Iran. They’re also contravening Iranian law. So whatever harm they’re doing to efforts to isolate Iran are, to my mind, balanced by the harm they’re doing to the Iranian regime’s credibility. That […]

According to the EU Observer, Gazprom’s fourth-quarter profits in 2008 dropped 84 percent, to €811 million. That means a decline of €4.2 billion. Ouch. What’s more, Gazprom is limping into the lean years carrying a whopping €30 billion in debt. I imagine all the windfalls from the fat years went straight into Russia’s reserve fund, but Moscow has been burning through that to prop up the ruble and finance its budget deficit. According to Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin (via Robert Amsterdam), the fund will be “practically exhausted” in 2010. In mid-April, Kudrin suggested that Russia might turn to foreign […]

Just when Pakistan was beginning to get serious about its counterinsurgency efforts against the domestic Taliban in Swat and FATA, the German national security council put the kibosh on a previously approved Pakistani purchase of three German submarines. The Germans cited concerns about the stability of the Pakistani government, while ignoring the submarines’ central role in fighting off the Taliban threat. . . . Oh, wait. Maybe the subs weren’t meant for the Taliban, after all. Hmmm. I wonder who they were meant for? Seriously, Pakistani strategic calculations have not changed, and quite frankly, it’s hard to argue with them. […]

Rob over at Arabic Media Shack has made this point a few times recently, and it’s one worth repeating. When people — like me — say, “Al-Qaida is in Pakistan,” just what do we mean? We need numbers. Like how many people? After all,wouldn’tknowing the exact number offighters tell us something about thestrategic significance of the threat? 50 would obviouslybe lesssignificant than 400; 2,000 would definitely be moreworryingthan500. But how come we never hear this question being asked?There is one exception that I noticed recently. John Mueller, writing in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs, putsthe number of people in […]

Monday’s meeting between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the Iranian nuclear program in the spotlight. As one of the participants in the France 24 program I was on the other day put it, for Israel, “Iran and atom can’t exist.” The heart of the debate these days is how to keep that from happening,with this Patrick Barry post at Democracy Arsenal a good example of thecompeting views between whether coercion or engagement will work best.Barry discusses everything that’s changed since 2003 to diminish theU.S. ability to coerce Iran into foregoing a nuclear capacity. But amore […]

Big-time international aid researchers like Bill Easterly, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier expend a lot of effort looking for case-studies to bolster their respective opinions about the efficacy of foreign aid. I recently came across this study (.pdf) from the York University Centre for Refugee Studies, which raises some questions about the international community’s effect on one of its clients — in this case the capital of the autonomous region of South Sudan, Juba: There is an enormous presence of the UN officials and NGO staff in Juba. Since the signing of the CPA, the Juba area has experienced an […]

Time constraints this week force me to actually blog, instead of posting my usual long-form essays to the blog page. So quickly, a few thoughts on the Celeste Ward op-ed in the WaPo over the weekend, which Andrew Exum flagged. The question of the Surge narrative is central to Ward’s piece, which amounts to a critical corrective to the COIN “fad.” But I found this the more interesting thread: It still isn’t clear to me that what we faced in Iraq was aninsurgency. There were many different conflicts raging simultaneously:anti-occupation movements, struggles among and between ethno-sectariangroups, the presence of foreign […]

In case you haven’t noticed, the latest WPR Feature Issue just went live. It’s a multifaceted look at, Germany, the great power that somehow isn’t. I’ve got a hunch this is going to be one of those timely features, not necessarily in media cycle as measured by days or months, but in historical cycles as measured in years and decades. For a variety of historical and political reasons, many of them clear and others less obvious, Germany has carved out a unique place for itself in the international arena, emphasizing non-militarism and multilateralism. But with the very multilateral order on […]

Summer is the tourist season on the southern Italian coastline, but these days its also high season for the illegal immigrants who set off in thousands from Libya. The governments of Italy and neighboring Malta — 60 miles from Italy — have recently been bickering over which of these two EU countries should assume responsibility for receiving the boat people who often arrive bedraggled and near starvation, in leaking boats that barely survive the crossing. Last year, 35,000 illegal immigrants managed to reach the island of Lampedusa, the first point of contact with Italy — a 75 percent increase over […]

World Politics Review managing editor, Judah Grunstein, appeared yesterday on France 24’s French-language panel discussion program, Le Débat, to discuss the meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Part one can be seen here. Part two can be seen here.

A random thought I had in connection to the torture memos and the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 in general: The real danger of terrorism isn’t so much that it might succeed in terrorizing a country’s citizens. After all, people face all sorts of known — yet unpredictable — risks in many aspects of daily life. Prevalent violent crime, for instance, can have the same random effect on people’s lives as terrorist strikes, thereby leaving them with the same sentiment of lingering dread and uncertainty. The real danger of terrorism is if it succeeds in terrorizing a country’s leaders. That’s […]

To be a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest — that yearly competition which undermines any notion of European cultural superiority — requires either a complete lack of aesthetic judgment or a strong sense of fun and irony. Just as Europeans can sneer at Super Bowl half-time shows and Las Vegas vaudeville acts, Americans can look on in wonder at sado-masochistic dance routines set to bouncy polka music, with enough smoke and flashing lights to give Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” a run for its money. Nevertheless, you have to hand it to Norway, which walked away with this year’s […]

Today’s selection comes from a band, Maná, that I first heard while in Ecuador, back in 1996. During the same trip, training manuals from the Army’s School of the Americas — the elite U.S. military academy for Latin American officers — made headlines for seeming to condone torture. Ironically, the manuals had been pulled from use in 1991 by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney for violating U.S. policy. This song comes off of the album, Sueños Liquidos, that came out just after I got back from that trip, and I remember the impact it had on me at the time. […]

I couldn’t help but think, after reading this Today’s Zaman write-up of an interview with KRG President Massoud Barzani, that we’ll be leaving behind a lot of broken promises by the time we eventually pull out of Iraq. That’s not something you want to do in a country you invaded in the hopes of changing the strategic balance in the region.

Steven Erlanger flags a real paradox for EU enthusiasts and a boon for its detractors: The EU parliament actually wields more power than people generally realize, but for a variety of reasons that Erlanger explains well, it generates very little interest among potential voters. That reinforces the perception of an anti-democratic EU technocracy based in Brussels, and undermines the potential for popular democratic involvement that currently exists in Strasbourg. Meanwhile, this EU Observer piece on the European Space Agency’s launch yesterday of the world’s biggest space telescope illustrates the ways in which some areas where Europe has excelled simply don’t […]