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Though largely overlooked amid the coverage of Mexico’s deteriorating security situation over the past six years, outgoing President Felipe Calderón made noteworthy gains in Mexican foreign policy during his tenure. With the victory in Sunday’s presidential election of Enrique Peña Nieto marking the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after 12 years, some might expect a shift in the country’s foreign policy agenda. In considering what Mexico and the world might expect from the incoming Peña Nieto administration, however, it helps to look first at the important developments under Calderón. Calderón’s first foreign policy challenge was repairing […]

In the past few decades, Latin America has emerged as the world’s unlikely laboratory for democracy. No other region has produced the sheer diversity of democratic configurations and permutations, including some that at times appear to undermine the very essence of democratic principles. The region that for so many years made news due to violence and authoritarianism is now an active workshop, tinkering with and sometimes transforming the shape of democracy. Latin America became the stage for the rise of iconic figures such as former Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to name just […]

Japan passed a law in June allowing the development of military space programs. In an email interview, Saadia M. Pekkanen, Job and Gertrud Tamaki professor at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, discussed the strategic trajectory of Japan’s space program.* WPR: What is the current scope of Japan’s space program, and what are its priority programs, both short-term and long-term? Saadia M. Pekkanen: Japan has sophisticated rocket and satellite capabilities that allow it to continue up the ladder in space technologies. It has advanced liquid and solid-fuel rockets, as well as multiple satellite programs. These […]

Last week, I noted one of the ironies of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan since 2009: From the perspective of civil-military relations, the process worked. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and despite the high degree to which the U.S. government and its allies have struggled to implement that strategy, the division of labor between civilian officials and military officers in formulating the strategy itself functioned more or less according to design. In light of the reaction the column generated, I’d like to examine civil-military relations in the United States more broadly. Today, I will […]

Ichiro Ozawa, who helped bring the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power three years ago, resigned from the party Monday over a proposed tax increase. In doing so, Ozawa and the 49 other members who followed him in the exodus weakened the parliamentary majority of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who was trying to push through a bill that would double the national sales tax to 10 percent by 2015. Ian Neary, a professor of Japanese politics and director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at Oxford University, told Trend Lines that the cost of this latest round […]

The Middle East Institute’s Center for Turkish Studies in collaboration with the Institute for Turkish Studies held their third annual conference on Turkey last Wednesday. Several themes emerged at the event that deserve to be highlighted. Turkey has clearly become a country of intense fascination for Washington players. Some 700 people registered to attend the conference, and it is easy to understand why: During the past decade, under the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey has become a much more prominent global actor backstopped by a dynamic diplomacy and one of the world’s most powerful economies, in a region […]

More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with most of the world’s attention having shifted to the threat of international terrorism, the Philippines and Peru are still struggling to pacify their countries’ communist insurgencies. Rather than fading into history, the Philippines’ New People’s Army (NPA) and Peru’s Shining Path have updated their rhetoric to reflect contemporary concerns in an effort to make their ideologies relevant to the “masses” in the post-Cold War era. The NPA and Shining Path, which were founded in 1969 and 1982, respectively, have not abandoned their discourse on Marxism and land reform, […]

In Colombia and Nicaragua, officials are considering building transport links between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that are being framed as alternatives to the Panama Canal. In an email interview, Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor in the department of global studies and geography at Hofstra University, discussed the viability of alternatives to the Panama Canal. WPR: What are the feasible alternatives to the Panama Canal, and how do they compare in terms of cost to build and transit advantages? Jean-Paul Rodrigue: First, it is important to underline that there are no complete alternatives to the Panama Canal — that is, none […]

When the U.S. approached eight countries with the idea to expand the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), it did not invite its North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) partners, Canada and Mexico, along. The exclusion of the two countries from what is being touted as potentially the most important economic bloc in the Pacific Rim was deliberate. The TPP seeks to liberalize trade by completely removing tariffs and other trade barriers, while also strengthening measures to protect intellectual property, two moves that Canada particularly had resisted within NAFTA. However, when the U.S., Australia, Malaysia, Peru and Vietnam join founding members Brunei, Chile, […]

On June 16, students at the University of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, began protesting against austerity measures enacted by the government of President Omar al-Bashir. Now staging near-daily protests, the students, along with their fellow demonstrators, are calling for the fall of Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup, and his National Congress Party (NCP). Sudanese security forces have responded forcefully to the protests, drawing international concern. Observers inside and outside Sudan, meanwhile, wonder whether the protests might force Bashir to step down. Whether or not Bashir endures these protests, their intensity demonstrates the unsustainability of the political […]

Indonesian state oil company Pertamina signed an agreement in June with Timor Gas E Petroleo, the national oil company of Timor-Leste, to develop Timorese oil and gas. In an email interview, Cillian Nolan, a Southeast Asia analyst at the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group, discussed relations between Indonesia and Timor-Leste. WPR: How have relations between Indonesia and Timor-Leste evolved since Timor-Leste’s independence? Cillian Nolan: Good relations with Indonesia were a priority from the beginning for Timor-Leste’s current leaders, but the relationship really began to grow following the establishment of the Commission on Truth and Friendship (CTF) in 2005. […]

Having done all the right things at last week’s European Union summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel found herself blamed, even attacked, in Germany for the summit’s outcome. Merkel helped prevent Spain — and, further down the line, Italy — from going bankrupt, thereby protecting German industries from the potential consequences. Yet, she faced an outcry back home that she had effectively allowed Germany to be blackmailed at the summit by a hostile alliance of French President François Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. This gap between what might be the first step toward a […]

A suicide attack outside Kandahar University kills seven a day after an Afghan policemen opened fire, killing three British soldiers. World News Videos by NewsLook