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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to India in early October was the second summit-level meeting she has had with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the span of a month. These talks have themselves been preceded by a flurry of other high-level exchanges. Both sides seem keen to dispel any notion of a lack of momentum in bilateral relations, a view that has arisen ever since Modi failed to meet Merkel in Berlin during his trip to Germany last year. Germany is eager to take advantage of Modi’s renewed push for economic growth through clean energy initiatives and manufacturing. Germany has […]

Consider three pieces of bad news from Egypt this week: low voter turnout—likely just as the government intended—in a sham election; the resignation of Egypt’s central bank governor as the currency continues to be devalued; and the arrest of a senior leader and chief financier of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Each development was a reminder of the state of Egypt under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, a strongman who has ruled unilaterally without a parliament since 2013. The hope of democratic reform seems farther away than ever. The economy, in free fall since the popular uprising that led to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster […]

A few years ago Afghanistan seemed on the path to success. The economy was doing relatively well. The Taliban were losing ground to Afghan security forces, the U.S. military and units from other partner nations. The new president, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, seemed more willing to tackle Afghanistan’s deep political problems than Hamid Karzai, his erratic predecessor. By all indications, things were looking up. Sadly this has proven to be an illusion. Ghani has not gotten a handle on Afghanistan’s crippling corruption, cronyism and ethnic strife. The country will not be able to function without massive economic assistance far into the […]

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United Kingdom this week has largely attracted the wrong kind of headlines. Reactions from experts and officials in the United States and across Europe have been scathing, ranging from the bemused to the disturbed. Many contend that Britain’s China policy, at the instigation of Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has been reduced solely to matters of commerce. Not only do strategic matters in Asia, human rights concerns, and threats to democracy in Hong Kong appear to be virtually absent from the U.K.’s considerations, the British government gives the impression of believing that […]

Students have been rallying at South Africa’s universities since Oct. 13 to oppose a planned 11.5 percent tuition hike, with public investment in education declining across the country. Protests came to a head Wednesday, when students in Cape Town marched on Parliament and clashed with police officers wielding stun grenades and tear gas, leading to numerous injuries and arrests. Protests have spread across the country, and classes have been suspended at 15 universities. The wave of protests comes amid a season of discontent among South Africa’s university students, primarily from the University of Cape Town—one of the most prominent academic […]

The latest edition of the New York Times Magazine featured a cover story that aimed to challenge the generally accepted narrative of how the U.S. found and killed Osama bin Laden. The article by Jonathan Mahler centered on an alternative version of events by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In Hersh’s telling, the story we have heard from the Obama administration and retold by a number of books and movies essentially amounts to a vast cover-up. In exploring the controversy, Mahler focuses more on the hunt for the bin Laden story than on the hunt for bin Laden—that is, on […]

On July 20, Colombia’s peace talks with the FARC guerrilla group emerged from what was hopefully their roughest patch. With daily episodes of combat between FARC militants and the Colombian army, June was the most violent month in Colombia since peace talks began in October 2012. Then, in late July, at the strong urging of foreign diplomats accompanying the talks, the FARC declared a new unilateral cease-fire, and both sides said they would dedicate themselves to making it bilateral. The three months since then have been the least violent that Colombia has experienced since 1975. The July truce and de-escalation […]

The Israel-Palestine conflict, with all its recurring violence, often seems like the broken record of international affairs. Still this latest wave of lone-wolf Palestinian terrorist attacks followed by predictably harsh Israeli reprisals—and mutual recriminations from both sides that the other is responsible—should come as no surprise. With the collapse of peace talks, the re-election of a right-wing Israeli government opposed to a two-state solution, the continued corruption and dysfunction of the Palestinian leadership and the lack of any realistic path to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the chickens have once again come home to roost in the […]

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the times of plenty and stability are over. The autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq has been hailed for most of the past decade as an emerging Dubai in Mesopotamia and the only success story of the Iraq war. But it is descending farther into civil strife, agonizing economic recession and a political stalemate that threatens to paralyze one of America’s most potent allies in the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Last Monday, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), fired four ministers of his government, all of them members of the […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the South China Sea territorial disputes and the various claimant countries’ approaches to addressing them. Last week, Vietnam protested China’s construction of two lighthouses on the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, saying the construction violates Vietnam’s sovereignty. In an email interview, Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discussed Vietnam’s claims to the South China Sea. WPR: What are Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, and with what other countries do they overlap or […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has become Europe’s moral voice during the refugee crisis that has seen over 710,000 people fleeing war, violence and poverty arrive at the European Union’s borders so far this year. In a press conference in late August, Merkel said, “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, if this close link with universal civil rights is broken, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.” In a speech last month to the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, Merkel re-emphasized her moral view of the worst refugee crisis since World War II—and Germany’s ability to meet its challenges. […]

Hailed at the time as the start of an “African Spring,” the October 2014 revolution that ousted President Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso was called into question last month when an elite army unit staged a brief coup. But even before soldiers under the command of Gen. Gilbert Diendere derailed the transition, the process was in many ways already disappointing. Now the coup’s failure has opened another window of opportunity for real democratic progress, but serious questions over the likelihood of true reform remain. Many of Burkina Faso’s contemporary challenges are deep-rooted. Some of the country’s most important political figures […]

Last week, in a bid to end a months-long political crisis, Guinea-Bissau’s president, Jose Mario Vaz, swore in a new government after initial talks collapsed with Prime Minister Carlos Correia over the formation of a Cabinet. Correia is the third prime minister to hold the post since August, as intraparty rivalries have left Guinea-Bissau without a functioning government for months, risking international aid to a country trying to recover from its latest military coup in 2012. But Guinea-Bissau is not in the clear yet, as the underlying institutional differences at the root of this standoff clearly haven’t been solved yet. […]

When you’re a global superpower with worldwide interests and responsibilities, it’s hard to come up with a very short list of priorities that will set the agenda and organize the bureaucracy. But that’s just what presidential candidates—and sometimes policymakers—have to do when trying to convince voters of the wisdom of their national security to-do lists. In recent days, we heard just such an exercise from the Democratic presidential candidates, as well as a variation of it from Secretary of State John Kerry. At last week’s debate, when asked to name “the greatest national security threat to the United States,” the […]

Last week, when Vanuatu’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, was out of the country, the speaker of Parliament pardoned himself and 13 lawmakers for allegedly accepting bribes to vote down the previous government. On Friday, 11 of the 14 pardoned parliamentarians were arrested. In an email interview, Derek Brien, the executive director of the Vanuatu-based Pacific Institute of Public Policy, discussed politics in Vanuatu. WPR: What explains Vanuatu’s historical political instability, and what impact has it had on the country’s governance and democracy? Derek Brien: The electoral system rewards personality politics and facilitates minority representation. It also complicates party dynamics, as candidates […]

Will Vladimir Putin ever be satisfied? As the Russian president has launched his small wars in Ukraine and Syria over the past two years, countless pundits have tried to guess his long-term goals. Some believe that he is a megalomaniac, intent on an open-ended campaign against the West. Others discount him as a nervous nationalist, focused on stabilizing Russia’s disorderly southern flank. Cynics dismiss him as an opportunist, seizing chances to expand his influence whenever they arise. In New York, many diplomats and analysts affiliated with the United Nations take a fourth view: Putin is a conservative with a profound […]

Russia’s combat operations in Syria, barely three weeks old, are the kind of expeditionary campaign that Moscow has not undertaken since the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This intervention is the consequence of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama both following through on the original, respective paths they chose in Syria. While the United States sought to avoid military entanglement and stay out of the conflict—doing the bare minimum to appease regional allies in their efforts to force Bashar al-Assad out of power—Russia remained consistent in its belief that the Syrian state represents the only viable and legitimate […]