WPR Blog Archive

A flurry of posts on COIN happen to form a coherent discussion of the strengths, weaknesses and future of counterinsurgency in the post-Afghanistan era: Michael Cohen here, David Ucko here, Spencer Ackerman (responding to Cohen) here and Andrew Exum responding to Ucko here. This last one by David Steven, unrelated to the rest, neatly wraps some context around them all. As for me, I think the U.S. military will leave Afghanistan having integrated the full-spectrum, whole-of-government approach to warfare, that it will not reapply its newly gained expertise in any major conflict for the decade that Stevens floats, but that […]

I can’t remember the last time I read something as cogently argued about the current strategic landscape in the Middle East as this Washington Quarterly article (.pdf) by Alistair Crooke. Avoiding the typical hysteria and alarmism often on display in such analyses, Crooke sketches out the tectonic shifts that are inexorably driving the emergence of Turkey, Iran and to a lesser extent Syria as the new arc of influence in the region — what Crooke calls the “Northern Tier.” As Ben Katcher observes, the article overlaps quite a bit with Stephen Kinzer’s thesis, as well. The obvious temptation is to […]

When it comes to military doctrine and strategic thinking, the high-profile debate getting all the attention these days is COIN vs. conventional. But if you want to get a head start on the next big brouhaha, start paying attention to the conversation currently picking up steam around the strategic implications of anti-access and area denial (A2AD) capabilities. Simply put, they refer to conventional and/or asymmetric tactics meant to prevent or deter a superior force from deploying into a theater of operations. The “usual suspects” are Iran in the Persian Gulf, with its swarming naval tactics, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, with […]

Having supposedly turned its back definitively on Israel, the EU, and the West in general, it turns out Turkey engaged in talks with . . . Israel and the EU. Go figure. I’m not going to belabor this point. Neither am I going to minimize the wild-card factor represented by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s temperamental reactiveness and his unrealistic conditions for Turkey-Israel reconciliation. And it’s useless to deny the fundamental shifts emerging in Ankara’s strategic calculus, both regionally and further abroad. But those shifts are based on a pretty clear-eyed and smart assessment both of Turkey’s upside potential […]