Defense News has the grim rundown: ten percent cuts in Italy on top of already planned reductions, $1.2 billion slashed annually in Germany, and reports (undenied by the Defense Ministry) of up to $6 billion over the next three years in France. According to the German defense minister, the cuts there will not be cosmetic, but will result in real reductions in capabilities and operations. Clearly this is bad news for an Atlantic Alliance that is already struggling to meet its current obligations. And it adds yet another challenge to those already identified by Nikolas Gvosdev in his WPR column [...]
Children’s rights advocates across the globe came together May 25 to call for universal endorsement and implementation by 2012 of two United Nations protocols aimed at protecting children against exploitation during armed conflicts or at the hands of human traffickers. “In too many places, children are seen as commodities. In too many instances they are treated as criminals instead of being protected as victims. And there are too many conflicts where children are used as soldiers, spies or human shields,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, according to the U.N. News Center. The Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed [...]
It looks like Turkey and Brazil might be making the same mistake that France made in 2003, which still serves as the textbook example of an old friend of mine’s admonition regarding marital disputes: Being right is overrated. Clearly subsequent events vindicated France’s position on the Iraq invasion. But anyone who thinks that France did not pay a price for actively lobbying to shoot down the U.N. resolution authorizing it — including then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s ill-advised tour of African capitals — is mistaken. The move demonstrated France’s ability to build consensus among a strategically weightless constituency, but led [...]
