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Something odd happened at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week: The Democratic Party seemingly became the party of the United States military. Speaker after speaker at the convention extolled the party’s support for the military and U.S. veterans, and lauded the foreign policy acumen and leadership of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, particularly in her support for the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. But perhaps the high point came on the third night of the convention when John Allen—a retired four-star general, former commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan, and former special presidential envoy to […]

Last month, as an attempted military putsch was put down in Turkey, posters lining streets across Pakistan beckoned the country’s popular army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, to take over in a coup. The posters have since been taken down, and the man responsible for them arrested. But the question still remains: Is the Pakistani military poised to take over? The last time Pakistan experienced a coup, in October 1999, the context was markedly different from today. At the time, Pakistan was reeling economically, in part due to U.S. sanctions over the country’s May 1998 nuclear tests. Civil-military relations had gone […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on countries’ risk exposure, contribution and response to climate change. Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview that imposing a “strong” price on carbon is an “essential element” of his government’s climate change policy. In an email interview, Amin Asadollahi, the lead for climate change mitigation at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, discusses Canada’s response to climate change. WPR: How big of an issue is climate change domestically, and what role has Canada played in regional and global efforts to address climate change? Amin […]

A bloody summer, with attacks from Orlando to Nice to Bangladesh, has left many wondering what compels an individual, whether a low-level criminal with a history of domestic violence or a student at an elite private school, to massacre civilians in the name of the so-called Islamic State or another extremist group. Even more confounding is how to stop them. That question isn’t new, or unique to the rise of the Islamic State. For years, governments, analysts and observers have worked to understand the drivers of radicalization and how best to block the road to extremism, particularly among youth. In […]

It has become a bit of a surreal experience to fly into Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. Visitors are greeted by a modern terminal, opened in 2015 and capable of servicing 1 million passengers a year. The fresh tarmac of a 10-lane highway that glides commuters into the city center is lined with solar-powered streetlights and stops for a new public transit system. Clearly Kinshasa is trying its best return to its former glory, when it was admiringly called “la belle.” On the surface, a lot has changed since the last presidential election in […]

Climate-driven migration will likely affect millions of people in the coming decades, adding to the displacement of millions from war and instability. States and international organizations will need to dedicate additional resources to climate migrants, but they can already begin by integrating support into essential resilience and adaptation responses currently underway. Climate change policies are beginning to confront the complex dynamics of populations living in areas that are no longer habitable due to sea-level rise, desertification or other effects. Politics and policy choices are starting to play out at various levels. And the migrants themselves are grappling with decisions at […]

In the early hours of June 27, four suicide bombers detonated their explosive belts in the sleepy Lebanese town of al-Qaa, which lies just a few kilometers from the Syrian frontier. Another four attackers would strike later in the evening, with the two attacks killing five and wounding scores more. In the context of spillover from the Syrian civil war, the violence itself was not an anomaly. Lebanon has been on high alert for retaliatory terrorist activity ever since 2013, when Hezbollah leader Sayed Hasan Nasrallah publicly announced the party’s fighters were active in Syria alongside longtime ally President Bashar […]

The United Nations is constantly embroiled in brutal conflicts, but some do it vastly more political harm than others. The organization has never fully recovered from its failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre in the 1990s. Now it faces simultaneous crises in South Sudan and Syria that may do it equally severe damage. In South Sudan, peacekeepers have been thrown off balance by an outburst of violence for the second time in three years. The U.N. mission (UNMISS) there was unable to stop the country collapsing into civil war in 2013, but managed to protect tens of […]

U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice visited China last month, where she held talks with Chinese officials about the threat of terrorism and prospects for improving counterterrorism cooperation. In an email interview, Jeffrey Payne, the Manager of Academic Affairs at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, discusses the state of counterterrorism cooperation between the U.S. and China. (The views expressed in this article are his alone and do not represent the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.) WPR: How extensive is counterterrorism cooperation between the U.S. […]

Shock waves from Venezuela’s precipitous economic collapse have finally reached Cuba. They are forcing drastic cuts in energy consumption, slashing economic growth from 4 percent last year to just 1 percent in 2016, and raising fears of another “Special Period”—the catastrophic economic decline in the 1990s that followed the collapse of Cuba’s previous patron, the Soviet Union. Cuba’s predicament was foreshadowed by the plunging price of oil on the world market and Venezuela’s declining production, down 12 percent in the past year alone. Nevertheless, for several years Venezuela continued to meet its obligation to ship some 80,000 to 90,000 barrels […]