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The United States shapes, monitors and reacts to events around the world every day—developments that require minor, and sometimes major, military and foreign policy actions to implement the established U.S. strategy. But some developments call for more than just decisions to implement the current strategy. They require an adjustment to a new strategy. The current trajectory of military-technological change is one such development making a strategic adjustment necessary. Proponents of all of the major strategic alternatives for the United States agree that events that happen elsewhere can affect our security and prosperity at home. The key question they disagree on […]

Is Francois Hollande the most underrated statesman of his generation? The question might at first glance seem like a mean jibe. The French president is almost a forgotten man these days. His domestic approval ratings were so dire that he chose not to run for a second term. French voters will start the two-round process of selecting his successor next weekend. The outcome is disturbingly unclear, and the nationalist Marine Le Pen could be the ultimate victor. Even if France picks a more palatable president, Hollande’s exit marks a greater loss for global diplomacy than most analysts recognize. France has […]

On Sunday, April 2, Ecuadoreans returned to the polls to elect their president in a second round of voting after a highly contentious campaign season. During the first-round ballot, former Vice President Lenin Moreno won 39.2 percent of the vote, just shy of the 40 percent required to avoid a runoff. His challenger in the second round was banker Guillermo Lasso, who won approximately 28 percent of the first-round vote. The campaign for the second round was divisive and at times became a referendum on controversial outgoing president, Rafael Correa. Voters struggled to muster excitement for either candidate. In fact, […]

Last month, former resistance fighter Francisco Guterres won an election to become East Timor’s next president. The vote was the third since factional fighting within the military triggered widespread violence in 2006, leading to a military intervention headed by Australia. In an email interview, Damien Kingsbury, professor of international politics at Deakin University in Australia, discusses how the vote unfolded and what the results mean for legislative elections planned for July. WPR: How did the substance of this campaign compare to past campaigns, and what does that say about how the country is evolving more than a decade after the […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about education policy in various countries around the world. Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, has made education reform a central component of her strategy to combat inequality. But her approach has been a frequent source of controversy, and with a presidential election later this year, it is likely to become a central issue in the campaign. In an email interview, Kirsten Sehnbruch, director of the Institute of Public Policy at the Universidad Diego Portales, research associate of the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion and affiliated lecturer at the University […]

On Thursday, Palestinian security forces entered the Ain el-Hilweh camp for Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon, putting an end to a week of clashes involving Sunni Islamist militants that killed an estimated seven and injured dozens. The violence broke out last Friday, when a Palestinian security force met resistance from fighters affiliated with Bilal Badr—a radical Islamist with a strong foothold in Ain el-Hilweh—while attempting to deploy throughout the camp. In response, Fatah, the party that has controlled the Palestinian Authority since 1993, launched an offensive targeting Badr’s positions. Jihadi groups aren’t a new phenomenon in Palestinian camps in Lebanon, […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and associate editor Robbie Corey-Boulet discuss Rex Tillerson’s sit-down with Vladimir Putin and the loaded protocol of high-level diplomatic meetings. For the Report, Alev Scott talks with Peter Dörrie about how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed a war on terror into a crackdown on all dissent and what’s at stake in this weekend’s constitutional referendum. If you’d like to support our free podcast through patron pledges, Patreon is an online service that will allow you to do so. To find out about the benefits you can get through pledging […]

Stories abound in the U.S. press about the hollowing out of the State Department. Employees at Foggy Bottom have relocated from work desks to cafeteria tables to spend their newfound free time over paperbacks and coffee. But there is one table that U.S. diplomats could find themselves absent from this fall—the negotiating table at the next international climate meeting in Bonn in May. U.S. President Donald Trump’s skepticism of climate change guarantees that his administration will cede leadership on the issue. “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Budget and Management, said […]

Without admitting it, U.S. President Donald Trump largely continued his predecessor’s military policy in the Middle East during the opening months of his administration. Like Barack Obama, Trump relied on American airpower and special operations forces to strike directly at the self-styled Islamic State, while deploying other U.S. military units to support local forces battling the extremists. But after a grotesque chemical attack on a Syrian village by the military of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Trump ordered a retaliatory cruise missile strike against the air base from which the chemical attack was launched. Suddenly a policy that once seemed so […]

It is perhaps apt that the man who brought a desperately needed reprieve to Latin America’s left is named Lenin. Lenin Moreno, the winner of the April 2 presidential election in Ecuador, now has the daunting task of not only moving his country forward, but salvaging the once-promising but now crumbling project of the left in South America. Moreno, to be sure, is no Bolshevik, but his victory is being hailed by anxious socialists in the region as the start of a comeback. The outgoing Ecuadorean president, Rafael Correa, declared that his protégé’s win marked an “end to that change,” […]

Have the events of the past few weeks in South Africa provided the long-awaited tipping point for President Jacob Zuma’s dysfunctional presidency? His reckless sacking late last month of respected Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan was driven not by any economic logic, but by narrow political and financial ambition. It has helped unite previously disparate forces against Zuma and brought closer the prospect—though not the guarantee—of his removal. This emerging opposition goes well beyond the official opposition parties and now embraces a large section of the ruling African National Congress itself. Last year over 100 ANC veterans called for Zuma’s resignation, […]

A year ago, Jamaican voters, tired of years of severe austerity measures, unexpectedly ushered in a new government. The left-leaning People’s National Party (PNP), which had held power for much of the past 25 years, was widely predicted to win. Instead, the conservative Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) won by a slim margin, buoyed by a campaign platform of “prosperity for all,” in part through a promised tax break for a large swath of lower-income workers. The biggest concern at the time was that the JLP would derail Jamaica’s hard-won gains in repaying debts to the International Monetary Fund for short-term […]

Last Friday, thousands of Senegalese turned out for a protest at Dakar’s central Obelisk Square to vent their anger with President Macky Sall, who is widely hailed abroad as an effective democratic reformer. The protesters, many of them dressed in black, were responding to a call from a collective of rappers and journalists known as “Y’en a marre”—meaning “Fed Up” in French—that in 2011 orchestrated massive demonstrations against the bid by then-President Abdoulaye Wade to run for a third term. The group’s ability to mobilize Senegalese youth helped Sall defeat Wade in an election the following year, but on Friday […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. In the debate over defense spending by NATO members, Germany has been singled out by U.S. President Donald Trump for alleged freeriding. Just days after Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the White House last month, Trump took to Twitter to accuse Germany of owing “vast sums of money to NATO & the United States.” In an email interview, Tobias Bunde, head of policy and analysis at the Munich Security Conference and a researcher at the Hertie School of Governance, describes […]

In late March, lawmakers in Ethiopia voted unanimously to extend the country’s state of emergency for four more months. The emergency was first imposed last October as violence escalated following more than a year of anti-government protests. The protests have largely occurred in the Oromia and Amhara regions, the homelands of the country’s two biggest ethnic groups who complain of being marginalized by the central government. In an email interview, William Davison, an Addis Ababa-based freelance journalist and WPR contributor, gives an update on the crisis and the government’s response. WPR: How has the crisis in Ethiopia evolved since last […]

It is not very often that a candidate country admonishes the organization it wants to join. Yet that is the story in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone on a series of tirades against the Netherlands, Germany and the European Union at large ahead of a referendum this weekend on constitutional changes that would grant Erdogan more powers and transform Turkey’s government from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Turkey has been stuck in accession talks with the EU for over a decade. Erdogan’s anti-EU streak began with attacks early last month against the Netherlands, which he called […]

As world leaders gather this Sunday in Dakar, Senegal, for the 2019 Summit for Global Cooperation, U.S. President Donald Trump will be spending the weekend alone at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Though Trump proclaimed on Twitter that he’d rather be golfing than listening to “windbags” deliver “meaningless speeches,” according to numerous reports he was not even invited to the gathering. Two years ago, Trump took office promising to upend the world order, famously putting “America First” to make the country “great again.” Given how irrelevant he has since become on the global stage, it’s hard to recall the degree to which […]