Latest Archive

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. Since joining NATO nearly two decades ago, Hungary has taken advantage of the collective defense offered by the alliance to reduce the size of its armed forces while improving their capacity. While the country has been a reliable partner in NATO missions, the focus under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who assumed his post in 2010, has shifted toward internal security threats, especially in light of the migration crisis of recent years. In an email interview, Gen. Zoltán Szenes, former […]

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? John Kerry, at the time a decorated but unknown veteran of the Vietnam War testifying before the Senate Armed Forces Committee, famously posed this piercing question while calling for an end to the war in April 1971. The circumstances are vastly different, and my intention is not to draw a parallel between the war Kerry and so many other Americans opposed and the senseless violence we see in various parts of the world today. But I could not help think of Kerry’s question when […]

Oil markets are expecting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies to extend their supply quotas when they meet in Vienna on Thursday. The current production cuts have failed to drain bloated oil inventories due to a remarkable resurgence in U.S. shale production. Keeping production down will not be easy for the coalition of 24 oil producers, 11 of which are not in OPEC. Even if fully implemented, an extension of the deal will likely just prevent oil prices from falling, while giving more market share to U.S. shale. It seems that OPEC has lost the […]

Argentina’s president, Mauricio Macri, was in Beijing last week to attend China’s enormous One Belt, One Road summit and sign several agreements with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Nearly 30 heads of state and senior representatives of at least 20 other countries attended the summit, where Chinese officials presented their vision for building massive infrastructure projects in many parts of the globe. The agreements between Macri and Xi covered more than $30 billion of Chinese investments in Argentina on everything from energy and agriculture to transportation and mining, capped by a Chinese plan to build two nuclear power plants at […]

As U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration navigates the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan, along with ongoing tensions with North Korea, China and Russia, it is doing so with a Cabinet largely composed of active and retired military generals. While the presence of an active-duty general at the helm of the National Security Council is not unprecedented, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, isn’t the sole appointee with a military background; two recently retired Marines, James Mattis and John Kelly, are serving as secretary of defense and director of the Department of Homeland Security, respectively. That Kelly and Mattis […]

The annual Fragile States Index was released last week, and no one will be surprised by the presence of South Sudan and Somalia, which remain the most fragile states in the world. By contrast, the indicators that middle powers, and even the United States and the United Kingdom, show some troubling signs of governance weakness might raise some eyebrows. Diplomats, military officials and development economists have yet to crack the code on what to do about weak and failing states. State fragility is a chronic reality of international politics, and the responses to it have only rarely produced success stories. […]

During his visit last week to northern Mali, Emmanuel Macron, France’s new president, announced that he would attend the next meeting of the G5 Sahel, a grouping of five countries—Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad—focused on mobilizing against extremist militants in the Sahel region. The G5 Sahel was originally created in February 2014, and plans for a multinational military force were announced the following year, at a November 2015 summit meeting in Chad. Since then, however, few details have been made available on the force’s composition and how it will operate. In an email interview, Nicolas Desgrais, a researcher […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. The Balkan nation of Macedonia has been waiting for years to join NATO, yet the hurdles to this goal seem only to multiply. In addition to objections and conditions from some NATO members, including Greece, Macedonia is also facing the possibility that its ongoing internal political crisis will prevent the process from moving ahead. In an email interview, Stojan Slaveski, a professor and security expert at the European University of the Republic of Macedonia in Skopje, explains how these […]

Has Donald Trump lost faith in realpolitik? On the campaign trail, the U.S. president promised to adopt a hard-nosed approach to promoting America’s interests. He ostentatiously spurned the stock talking points about his country’s values and global mission that most presidential candidates tend to trot out. Since taking office, Trump and his advisers have sometimes repeated the case for a cold-eyed approach to foreign affairs. The president told one interviewer that the U.S. is not morally superior to Russia. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned diplomats that an excessive emphasis on advancing American values “really creates obstacles to our […]

Vietnam’s campaign against corruption notched a significant victory earlier this month with the removal of a top Politburo official for “very serious mistakes and violations” while he was chair of PetroVietnam, the state-owned oil and gas company. But analysts say that there is a more complicated story behind the rare Politburo sacking—just the fourth in Vietnam’s history and the first for corruption—that involves personal and factional maneuverings at the top levels of the ruling Communist Party. Dinh La Thang, once a rising star in Vietnam’s government, was dismissed from the 19-member Politburo, Vietnam’s top decision-making body, on May 7. Three […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, visited Africa for the first time as head of state on Friday, traveling to northern Mali, where France led an intervention to drive out Islamist extremists in 2013. Greeted by Mali’s president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in the northern city of Gao, where French troops are still stationed, Macron offered a vision largely in line with what he espoused during the campaign: tough talk on terrorism and an emphasis on the need for development so that […]

On May 11, Hubert Minnis, a physician and former health minister, was sworn in as prime minister of the Bahamas, having led his Free National Movement political party to victory in the May 10 general election. He replaces Perry Christie, who had served for two nonconsecutive terms. In an email interview, Larry Smith, a columnist for The Nassau Tribune who operates the Bahama Pundit blog, describes the issues that animated the campaign as well as the challenges Minnis faces now that he’s in office. WPR: What were the main issues of the campaign, and how did Hubert Minnis’s message compare […]

During the campaign for this month’s presidential election, Emmanuel Macron, who was elected on May 7, was labeled an “extreme centrist” for his “neither-left-nor-right” paradigm. Establishing his En Marche party in 2016, he pledged to break from the political establishment, offering a platform to simultaneously boost France’s economy and maintain its social security net while strengthening the European Union. But many were skeptical, pointing to his role as economy minister during Francois Hollande’s unpopular administration, his degrees from elite institutions and, most nefariously, his background in investment banking. So when he announced the members of his Cabinet on Wednesday, many […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the potential pitfalls of Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as U.S. president. For the Report, Andrew Green talks with Peter Dörrie about how Uganda is struggling to maintain its progressive approach to refugees as more than 2,000 South Sudanese cross into the country each day. 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 as little as $1 per […]

On Thursday, at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini announced that Europe’s first joint military command center could be launched in “a couple of days.” EU states already approved the creation of the new military training headquarters in Brussels, known in EU parlance as the Military Planning and Conduct Capability, or MPCC, back in March, but they have been hashing out the final details this week. Though the MPCC will initially only oversee joint EU military training operations in Africa, speculation has persisted that it could lay the groundwork for an […]

Four months into his administration, U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign and national security policy is still a work in progress, a shifting, improvisational blend of diverse, sometimes conflicting themes and attitudes. It has elements of the traditional American approach to the world but also much that is unorthodox. When it comes to the Trump strategy, the traditional and the nontraditional seem locked in a daily struggle for dominance. Now Trump is leaving on his first major international trip. In a best-case scenario, the results may indicate the direction he will take during the rest of his administration and demonstrate Trump’s […]

On the morning of May 5, Boko Haram militants attacked a Chadian military post in the Lake Chad region near the border with northeast Nigeria, where the extremist group is based. Nine soldiers were killed, the latest casualties suffered by Chad’s military as it responds to a crisis that, on Chadian territory alone, has left hundreds dead and displaced more than 100,000. The following day, in the capital, N’Djamena, the Chadian Convention for the Defense of Human Rights reported that Maounde Decladore, one of its activists, had been arrested. Decladore is also a spokesman for the group “It Must Change,” […]