Latest Archive

Pakistan’s worst flooding in almost a century may well be remembered as much for the magnitude of the disaster as for the fact that it constituted a major setback in the government’s efforts — backed by its Western and Muslim allies — to defeat Islamist militants allied with al-Qaida and the Taliban. There is a long list of natural and man-made disasters in Islamic countries in which militant Islamists have garnered popularity by quickly and effectively responding with relief and emergency aid, in stark contrast to governments that were slow to react and unable to provide services to victims. By […]

Ecuador recently had its name removed from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) “black list” of countries failing to effectively combat money laundering. For now, at least, this brings to an end a spat between the FATF and the government of Rafael Correa, ongoing since the Andean country was relegated to the organization’s lowest rung of noncompliance — occupied by the likes of Angola, Iran, North Korea, and Turkmenistan — in February. Correa struck a defiant tone during the episode, declaring: “This is imperialism in its most base form. . . . This has nothing to do with the struggle […]

In the 1980s, NATO ground troops in Europe faced a Warsaw Pact force of overwhelming size. To prepare to blunt a Soviet-led attack and overcome the Warsaw Pact’s numerical superiority, NATO adopted a revolutionary new idea. The so-called “AirLand Battle” concept, which originated in the U.S. Army’s training command, posited that forward-deployed NATO tanks and missile-armed infantry, supported by jet fighters carrying smart munitions, could beat a larger Warsaw Pact army. In Europe, the AirLand Battle concept never had a chance to prove itself. But its tenets shaped the U.S. approach to ground warfare in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 […]

One reason why President Obama and other very senior U.S. officials personally met with a select group of leading columnists and opinion writers at the White House last week was to highlight the often overlooked progress his administration has achieved in securing comprehensive European support for the U.S. policy toward Iran. Although it is too early to judge the effects of the new sanctions adopted by the EU and the United States independently and collectively through the United Nations, we can begin to assess the administration’s multilateral diplomacy. At least in the case of Europe, that diplomacy seems to be […]

Syrian forces detained 400 people last month in connection with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Meanwhile Syria, Turkey and Iran have seemingly stepped up their coordinated response to the militant group. In an e-mail interview, Aliza Marcus, a writer based in Washington, and the author of “Blood and Belief,” a book on the PKK, explains Syria’s,Turkey’s, and Iran’s fight against the militant group. WPR: Historically, what has been the level of cooperation between Turkey, Syria and Iran in fighting Iraq-based PKK and PJAK militants? Aliza Marcus: Turkey, Iran and Syria historically have been at odds when it comes to […]

Few pages in the American political playbook have proven more resilient over the last decade than blaming China’s undervalued currency, the yuan, when the U.S. economy sags. When Beijing announced last month that it was unpegging its currency from the dollar and implementing a more flexible exchange rate system, it came after more than a year’s worth of constant but unsuccessful pestering from Congress and the Obama administration. Now, with more than a month of this new “flexible” regime in the books, American politicians are unimpressed with the yuan’s paltry appreciation against the dollar, and are once again calling for […]

In the post-Cold War world, the rapid social, political and economic transformations associated with globalization have coincided with the continuing spread of HIV/AIDS. In fact, it’s possible to argue that AIDS is both a product and a cause of globalization, understood here as the whole gamut of economic, social, political and epistemological ways in which more and more of the world is brought within similar systems of governance, consumption and imagination. Up to an estimated 14,000 people a day are infected with HIV, and in most parts of the world, infections are increasing more rapidly than are effective responses. In […]

Sex trafficking is an exceedingly grotesque, highly profitable component of contemporary slavery. In fact, no form of slavery is nearly as profitable, and it can be argued that none is as barbarically exploitive. In the course of 10 years of research across 18 countries, I have directly interviewed more than 500 slaves of all kinds, and some of the most heartbreaking tales I heard were those narrated by women and children who suffered years of sexual enslavement at the hands of traffickers and pimps. Though much has improved as a result of anti-trafficking activism, policy, law, and media coverage since […]

While the traditional approach to national security would suggest that there is no linkage between the security of women and the security of states, there is an interesting new wave of research, informed by the life sciences, that is increasingly undermining that assumption. The organization of male-female relations within a society is one of its strongest and most influential characteristics. Where those relations are based on dominance and inequity, that template will affect the state and its security. Perhaps most interesting is that while the social sciences have been slow to pick up on this, these findings have enjoyed resonance […]

In voting overwhelmingly to support a new constitution, Kenyans sent a clear message on Aug. 4 about the need for reform in a country brought nearly to its knees by corruption and bad governance. And in going to the polls peacefully and en masse, capping a campaign season that included a bomb attack in the early days and persistent rumors of preparations for rancor around the country, the more than 70 percent of eligible voters who cast their ballots spoke volumes about the need to obviate the memory of previous elections: the last of which left more than 1,000 dead […]

The foreign ministers of Chile and Bolivia met in La Paz last month to begin negotiations on an agenda that includes Bolivia’s request for Pacific Ocean access. In an e-mail interview, Council of the Americas Senior Director of Policy Christopher Sabatini — with historical research by COA policy associate Nina Agrawal — explains the context for the Bolivia-Chile maritime dispute. WPR: What is the origin of the dispute? Christopher Sabatini: The Bolivia-Chile maritime dispute is actually over landlocked Bolivia’s access to the Pacific Ocean. It goes back to colonial times, when viceroys had competing claims over the area — the […]

Leaders from Mexico’s National Action Party (PAN) and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) recently announced their intention to run on a joint ticket in the 2011 race for the governorship of the state of Guerrero, and have begun talks to collaborate in an additional four state races. The announcement follows July’s defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at the hands of the PAN-PRD alliance in gubernatorial races held in three PRI strongholds — Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa — and signals the increasing collaboration between Mexico’s main center-right (PAN) and center-left (PRD) parties as the 2012 presidential contest nears. The […]

In late-July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gently put China on notice regarding its increasingly aggressive claims over the near-entirety of the South China Sea by proposing a formal international legal process to resolve territorial disputes there. Naturally, the Chinese were not pleased, but the proposal was a great move by the Obama administration. Every step that China takes to build up its military power naturally triggers a strong balancing desire throughout the rest of Asia. But with none of those far-smaller economies looking to anger “rising China,” somebody needs to give voice to those fears and create vehicles for […]

Over the past six months, you’ve probably noticed a reduced blog output on my part. Part of that has had to do with the need to prioritize my time to make sure the front page and feature issues are the best they can be. But part of it has been due to the need to take care of personal matters, and in particular my son. For the past year, his mother has been battling an advanced-stage lung cancer. It’s a battle that she carried out with courage and dignity. It’s a battle that ended this past Saturday. I’ve tried for […]

This week, President Barack Obama reaffirmed U.S. plans to end its combat mission in Iraq at the end of August, and to pull out the 50,000 troops that will remain past that date in a supporting, advisory role by the end of 2011. The president emphatically stated that “we will maintain a transitional force until we remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of next year.” It’s not unreasonable to think of Iraq as the new Lebanon — a fractious and not-so-united nation-state unable to form and sustain coherent governments, and still tottering near the precipice of a […]

Unless you have been living under a rock, the news that China has become the world’s top energy consumer should not have been surprising. For some years now, China has been steadily marching up the global energy consumer rankings, an ascension that was expedited by the severity of the recession’s impact in the U.S. The International Energy Agency (IEA), whose data confirmed the dubious milestone, called it a “new age in the history of energy.” Even if it is not entirely surprising, the news does beg further analysis because of its implications for global energy markets and international affairs. It […]

BEIJING — Over the past decade and more, China has capitalized on critical transformations in the global landscape to forge new patterns of political and economic influence and significantly further its national interests. But in so doing, it has also become exposed to a growing matrix of risks to its capacity for continued international expansion. While this exposure has rendered China more vulnerable to external actors and threats, the greatest obstacles facing the country’s future trajectory ultimately come from structural deficiencies in the domestic political economy. In the international arena, although China’s most recent gains have been impressive, much of […]