WPR Blog Archive

Even given the charged history of U.S. interventions in Latin and South America, I admit to having been a bit perplexed by how widespread and concerted the regional opposition to the U.S.-Colombia base agreements has been. The deal involves U.S. forces using parts of Colombian bases, not constructing new ones. And the idea that U.S. forces would be involved in a cross-border aggression in South America seems a bit outdated, more the stuff of wild, anti-Yankee propaganda than a realistic forecast of what the bases will be used for. So when I received an e-mail from the Venezuelan Embassy with […]

I personally identified with Stephen Walt’s mea culpa post regarding his own and America’s strategic ethnocentricism regarding what’s called “Africa’s World War.” As a result of reviewing submissions here at WPR, my own understanding of the various interwoven conflicts in Central Africa has risen slightly from total to simply near-total ignorance. But for probably many of the reasons Walt lists, although I periodically register the enormity of the human tragedy there, it’s not something I spend a great deal of time thinking about or studying. And when you’re dealing with over 5 million deaths in a decade, that kind of […]

A little bit more on the deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets announced by Brazilian President Lula da Silva alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy, only to be semi-retracted pending final assessment of the competing tenders. Jean-Dominique Merchet passes on a Les Echos article (sub. req.) that sheds light on some of the backroom wrangling that went on. And it turns out U.S. President Barack Obama really went to the mat to get the Boeing F-16 offer back in the running. Merchet’s post, coming as it does from the French perspective, is titled, How Obama Tried to Shoot Down the […]

By participating in the Yadana gas pipeline project in Burma, Western oil giants Total and Chevron are financing the country’s brutal military junta, Earth Rights International charges in two new reports on the pipeline. That in turn allows the junta to continue its ongoing campaign of repression and siphon off billions of dollars in income, the group maintains. “Total and Chevron have essentially provided the military regime with its single largest lifeline, that being the revenue generated from the project,” Matthew Smith, coordinator of ERI’s Burma project told the BBC. ERI’s reports allege that the two companies have ignored abuses […]

Just a few followup items I thought I’d get into the habit of posting: – With regard to my observation about the lack of Iraq or Afghanistan War literature or cinema, Jonathan Bernstein makes the obvious point, which I myself had noticed on reading the post afterwards, that all the novels and films I mentioned with regard to WWII and Vietnam were published or released well after the end of those wars. He also makes a less obvious, but just as astute, observation about the relation between a war’s popularity and the kind of works of art (propaganda vs. critical) […]

Naval rivalries have been a recurrent theme of recent Asia coverage, with China, India and the U.S. maneuvering for position and influence in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. But everyone, it seems, has overlooked another global force, quietly engaged in its own naval buildup (via Barry Ritholz).

Inevitably, Republican South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson’s heckling of President Obama on Wednesday, and other shouted remarks reported by (among others) Dana Milbank in the Washington Post drew comparisons with the habitual rowdiness that British prime ministers face in the House of Commons. To many commentators it recalled the political theater of a Tony Blair or — for those with longer memories — a Margaret Thatcher deftly handling members’ questions despite the barrage of catcalls and shouted remarks. The session takes its toll. This correspondent, who once worked briefly for Prime Minister Thatcher, can report that after the cut and […]

Beset by reports of a sex scandal, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi accused the press of falsehood. The charge is unfair: Nobody could make this stuff up. At a joint press conference with visiting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday, Berlusconi was as defiant as ever in fielding questions from a Spanish journalist. The subject, of course, was hardly Italian-Spanish relations. Berlusconi was asked about an Italian businessman’s claim that he had sent or accompanied to the prime minister’s residence about 30 young women — some of whom had said they were willing to have sex, and […]

Reading about Margaret Thatcher conveying security assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev two months before the Berlin Wall fell, I couldn’t help but think that the Cold War, from start to finish, was a mindboggling achievement of Western statesmanship. On the fly and with the survival of humankind hanging in the balance, a generation of political leadership crafted a stable security architecture largely from scratch. Thatcher and George H.W. Bush’s instinctive management of the Soviet Union’s death throes in what Andrew Sullivan calls “brutally realist fashion” was the culmination of that remarkable effort. But it’s important to remember, too, that there were […]

I’m going to go way out on a speculative limb on this one. But that UAE cargo plane carrying weapons to China that was detained while refueling in India suddenly seems like more than just a simple case of bad timing. The plane was detained while the Indian internal security minister was visiting Washington for talks on security (and counterterrorism) cooperation. It’s now emerging that there were some suspicions that the weapons on the plane included U.S.-manufactured Harpoon missiles sold to the UAE. And all this goes down at the same time a UAE crown prince is “making the rounds” […]

James Joyner tackles one of the more irritating refrains used to argue for the need to succeed in Afghanistan — namely, the claim that NATO’s credibility will not survive failure there. I’d add that to the extent that NATO tried to reinvent itself as an alliance that would project force in out-of-theater operations, there’s a kernel of truth to the claim that Afghanistan has damaged its credibility. But it’s not so much success or failure in Afghanistan that are to blame, but rather NATO’s dismal failure to create a unified chain of command with uniform rules of engagement of the […]

It looks like the deal for Brazil to buy 36 French Rafale fighter jets might not be as final as Brazilian President Lula da Silva made it out to be. To begin with, there’s the little technicality, raised by the miffed Air Force command, that its final analysis of the three competing craft (Boeing’s F-18 and Saab’s Gripen, in addition to the Dassault Rafale) isn’t due until late-October. Deviating from that schedule, says Jean-Dominique Merchet, could open the door to legal challenges by the competition. It also risked stepping on some toes in the Brazilian legislature by bypassing the defense […]

Two news items from Afghanistan made quite an impact yesterday, offering a moment of clarity in what had become a largely theoretical debate over both tactics and strategy. The first is the increasing certainty that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s election victory will not withstand the taint of widespread voting fraud. The second is a riveting account from Jonathan Landay of an extended firefight between Afghan Army troops supported by embedded U.S. Marine trainers and Taliban insurgents. With regards to the election, while fraud is almost inevitable in such a context, the problem arises both from what turnout revealed about popular […]

One circle I’ve yet to see squared is why Pakistan would share its nuclear technology — both uranium enrichment and weaponization — with Iran, when that technology is widely believed to have been financed, in part, by the Saudis? Indeed, rumors of an already done Pakistan-Saudi deal for the purchase of warheads in the event Iran achieves nuclear weapon status are so widespread that the Pakistani capacity is often referred to as the “Saudi bomb.” Pakistan’s claims that AQ Khan was a solo rogue operator were greeted with huge skepticism. And Khan — who, as a scapegoat with an axe […]

My response to Sam Roggeveen yesterday was a bit tongue-in-cheek. So to clear up any misunderstanding, Roggeveen is suggesting that France is an exception to the “Roggeveen Rule,” in that it is a civilian democracy that also exhibits a passion for “Red Square-style” military parades. And I was suggesting that the civilian leadership is indeed firmly in control here, as far as I can tell, but that French political culture has been deeply marked by at least two generals: The modern French state is essentially the product of Napolean Bonaparte, and the Fifth Republic the product of Charles de Gaulle. […]

Roggeveen calls this “Grunstein bait.” Okay, I’ll bite. But what’s really Grunstein bait is the fighter jet flyovers for the Bastille Day parade that got me scurrying down to the Seine for an unobstructed view. I was going to write that besides the sweet and low-flying formations of Rafales and Mirages, the parade itself usually doesn’t feature heavy arms, just armored personnel carriers and some cannons and the like. But then I found a photo of a formation of Leclerc tanks from the 2007 parade. (Couldn’t tell if they were camouflaged or just covered in rust and duct tape.) There […]

Kenneth Payne flags something I’ve noted before as well: No significant works of art have yet emerged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If that seems like a trivial observation, consider the impact of “All Quiet on the Western Front” or WWII-era literature (Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut) on American society and culture, or Vietnam-era cinema (Deer Hunter, The Boys of Company C, Apocalypse Now, even Platoon) and TV (MASH). Part of this has to do with structural changes in the media. Publishing is now overwhelmingly dominated by memoirs and non-fiction, both of which we’ve seen with regard to these wars. […]