WPR Blog Archive

“The CTBT is in big, big trouble,” said Stephen Rademaker at an East West Institute roundtable on the ever-stalled Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last Friday. The remark represented a rare area of consensus on what is otherwise a highly divisive issue. The EWI discussion of the CTBT and its likelihood of ratification by Congress came as a complement to a recently published report by the institute on the subject. With Rademaker, former U.S. assistant secretary of state (2002-2006) and currently senior counsel for BGR Group’s Government Affairs division, and Ambassador Robert T. Grey, Jr., director of the Bipartisan Security […]

The French sale of a Mistral-class amphibious attack vessel to Russia has gotten all sorts of attention Stateside over the past few weeks, culminating in Defense Secretary Robert Gates visiting Paris in part to energetically convey the U.S. administration’s disapproval of the deal. Curiously, the deal has gotten far less coverage in the French press, even following the announcement by a French Defense Ministry official that the sale had been approved, with a Russian request for three more also under consideration. The issue warrants attention, because it gets to the heart of the odd configuration that currently characterizes U.S.-Europe-Russia relations. […]

This NY Times article on the Hatoyama government’s determination to fully expose various “secret” Cold War-era U.S.-Japan security accords seems like a timely complement to the current turbulence in U.S.-EU counterterrorism cooperation. Like the U.S.-Japan agreements, many of the U.S.-EU agreements that followed 9/11 operated either entirely covertly (black site detention centers) or else under the radar (data sharing programs), for the simple reason that they would not have withstood popular scrutiny. That kind of pragmatic trade-off, though, comes with costly deferred maintenance, as demonstrated by the Japan article. When these agreements are fully exposed and recognized, even after they’ve […]

I wrote recently about the fundamental disconnect between the “privacy versus security” trade-off that Americans are willing to make compared to Europeans when it comes to airport security. The matter at hand at the time was full-body scanners, but what I was trying to illustrate was the cultural divide between American and European perceptions of the urgency of airport security in particular and counterterrorism in general. And I think this video from an Italian journalist at L’Espresso, hosted at Le Figaro’s Web site, does a good job of backing that up. According to the article accompanying the video, the reporter […]

The NY Times has two interesting articles on a subject I’ve written about before: film and literature inspired by the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Like me, they note the lack of novels, as compared to memoirs, although this is to be expected given the lag-time before good fiction usually appears. Interestingly, they also discuss something that I’d ignored, namely the lack of political criticism in both the literature and cinema that has come out of the wars to date. In some ways, that was implied in my previous remarks, given the nature of the great post-War and Vietnam-era film and […]

In another UNCLOS-related story, the NY Times reports that Vietnam is increasingly trying to multilateralize its territorial disputes with China over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Instead of negotiating bilaterally, Hanoi is pushing a collective negotiation between all the parties — Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei — that have conflicting claims. In the “Integrate but CYA” formula I’ve used to refer to Asia, this would be the “Integrate to CYA” correlary. There’s nothing terribly novel about a collection of weaker states banding together to counterbalance the influence of a more powerful one, and China is […]

After “lawfare,” it’s time to add “thawfare” to the lexicon of how to pursue politics by other means (especially since a quick Google scan indicates that I have indeed coined this neologism): Russia will invest some 1.5 billion rubles ($49.7 million) indefining the extent of its continental shelf in the Arctic in 2010, inorder to prove its right to more of the Arctic floor, the country’sNatural Resources Ministry has said. “These funds will be spent on additional hydrographic andgeophysical research in the Arctic Ocean,” the ministry said in astatement. For more background on what’s at stake in the Arctic as […]

The whole question of reintegrating the Taliban bears some attention, since it’s now become the new buzzword with regard to creating the political conditions necessary to ending the insurgency. Yesterday, Craig Davis’ WPR Briefing examined some of the cultural challenges reintegration will present. Today, Joshua Partlow examines some of the political challenges it raises in terms of negotiating with the Taliban leadership, and Martine van Bijlert recently examined some of the potential pitfalls of implementation in terms of ground-level foot soldiers. Clearly, there are a lot of circles to square, and it seems obvious that any power-sharing arrangement will be […]

France 24 just posted last Friday’s panel discussion program, The World This Week, which I took part in along with John Vinocur from the IHT, Pierre Rousselin from Le Figaro and Gerry Feehily from Presseurop.eu. . Part one is here, part two is here. I developed the thought behind the first point I made, on Tony Blair’s justification for the Iraq War, in a blog post here. As I mention in the post, the idea occurred to me pretty spontaneously, and I’m not sure I articulated it very clearly on the program. Besides that, we discussed the London conference on […]

No sooner did I click the “Publish” button on this post than I ran across the following, from Financial Times: Britain is calling for enhanced military co-operation between the UK and France, saying greater defence collaboration with the European Union may be essential if the nation’s armed forces are to operate on a reduced budget. Ina green paper to be published today that sets out the terms on whichBritain will conduct its forthcoming Strategic Defence Review, theMinistry of Defence will reassert that no military alliance is moreimportant to the UK than the one with Washington. Butthe document, drawn up by […]

The Obama administration gave another indication on Monday of its indifference toward Europe by advising the Spanish government — as the current holders of the European Union’s rotating presidency — that President Barack Obama will be a no-show at the next E.U.-U.S. summit in Madrid this spring. Obama’s decision was “a setback for the Spanish government,” observed the newspaper El Pais, “a reversal for the European Union, and a clear message of the [Obama] administration’s international priorities.” Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was counting on the ever-popular Obama’s visit to Spain to bolster his own sagging poll numbers […]

In the “Trust but CYA” game that is Asia these days, a lot of the CYA component is taking place on the water, as well as under it. That makes sense, given the importance of shipping lanes to regional economies, the heap of maritime boundary disputes yet to be resolved, and the fact that the U.S. security guarantee to friends in the region depends to a great extent on its naval capacity. But as Nick Floyd highlights in a post on Australia’s naval posture over at the Interpreter, amphibious operations are central to strategic planning as well, given that five […]

A Vietnamese court sentenced Pham Thanh Nghien to four-and-a-half years in prison on charges of spreading propaganda on Jan. 29, the latest in a string of convictions against pro-democracy activists in the country. Human rights groups have criticized Vietnamese authorities repeatedly over the last few years for an increasingly intense crackdown on free speech — one that has seen writers, bloggers, lawyers and journalists put behind bars. “It is deeply concerning that prosecutors used Nghien’s articles as a pretext to imprison her for anti-government views. This conviction leaves Vietnamese journalists and activists vulnerable to imprisonment on the basis of published […]

A lot of observers, myself included, have criticized the way in which U.S. foreign policy has been militarized of late. One pernicious illustration of that trend is how these same observers, myself included, often spend a lot more time analyzing the military components of U.S. foreign policy than the civilian aspects. Both trends are exagerrated when it comes to Afghanistan and, before it, Iraq. Part of that is understandable, since Afghanistan is a warzone. And if foreign policy really is militarized, then to undersatnd it, you’re better off analyzing the military strategy. Nevertheless, I found it interesting that, for all […]

Whether or not he’s actually dead, Hakimullah Mehsud illustrates one of the dangers of a CT strategy based on organizational decapitation — namely, that the No. 2 guy waiting in the wings might actually prove to be more dangerous than the guy whose charred boots he filled. A similar phenomenon has been noticeable among the Basque ETA terrorist group, which has replenished its ranks with what appears to be an even more militant younger generation. (Of course, Americans need only look to their own very recent past for another useful illustration.) I have admittedly been among those who have made […]

Great NY Times piece on the growing Guatemalan immigrant population in Brooklyn. The story itself is just an update of a very familiar one, but it shows the enduring appeal — as well as the brutal reality — of the American Dream. Every time I see an image of a U.S. Army platoon outpost in Afghanistan, I shudder at the thought of what we’re asking young Americans to live through over there. I had a similar, if not identical, reaction upon reading of a 39-year-old day laborer who hasn’t seen his family in 14 years. It’s also true that this […]

So instead of facing Haitian resentment to the U.S. humanitarian intervention, U.S. troops and civil aid workers are finding the mood among Haitians to be, More, please! But reconstruction is, for now, ruled out. Obviously, all reporting out of Haiti is for now anecdotatl, and today’s warm welcome could become tomorrow’s food riot. But it will be interesting to see just how long before one of our nation-building operations generates demands, not for nationhood, but for Statehood. Thomas P.M. Barnett touched on this with regard to Mexico and Cuba. Haiti seems like a viable candidate, too.