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Less than three weeks ago, Colombians saw a familiar face splashed across every news platform. The man known by his nom de guerre “Timochenko,” the leader of what used to be Colombia’s largest guerilla group, which fought government forces for more than half a century, was formally launching his campaign for the presidency. As the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC by its Spanish acronym, Rodrigo Londono had commanded thousands of men and women in a campaign for a radical Marxist revolution. But Londono also guided the militia to a peace deal in 2016, vowing […]

Much was made in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency of “Trump’s generals,” the retired and active flag officers who made up his Cabinet and White House staff. Retired generals James Mattis and John Kelly, acting as defense secretary and then-homeland security chief respectively, and active-duty Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, were seen as experienced national security hands who would, it was hoped, create a buffer between America’s vital interests and a new president who wasn’t just inexperienced but often reckless and incendiary. From the outset, there were misgivings about such an outsized role for military […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. On Jan. 18, authorities in Sri Lanka destroyed $108 million worth of cocaine seized from a single shipment in the port of Colombo, which is a growing hub for international drug trafficking. While Sri Lanka does not appear to be a final destination for many of the drugs transiting the country, drug abuse has spiked in recent years, prompting the government to launch ambitious measures aimed at mitigating, and possibly eliminating, drug use by 2020. In an email interview, Sunimalee […]

In January 2017, under pressure from other West African leaders and much of his own population, Gambia’s longtime dictator, Yahya Jammeh, flew into exile in Equatorial Guinea. His successor, Adama Barrow—the winner of an election whose results Jammeh at first respected, and then disavowed—promised to pursue accountability for crimes committed during Jammeh’s more than 22-year tenure. So far, Barrow’s administration has had little luck concerning Jammeh himself, whose hosts in Equatorial Guinea are refusing to extradite him. Nevertheless, authorities recently arrested several of Jammeh’s top former associates, holding out the possibility of some justice. But at the same time, some […]

Last month, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono traveled to Sri Lanka, where he announced Tokyo’s plans to invest in several infrastructure projects, including a natural gas terminal. It was the first visit to Sri Lanka by a Japanese foreign minister in 15 years. Following similar Japanese investment projects in India and elsewhere in the region, the Sri Lanka trip appeared to be the latest sign of a growing strategy aimed at countering China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, also known as One Belt, One Road. In an email interview, Shihoko Goto, the senior Northeast Asia associate at the Wilson Center’s […]

HELSINKI, Finland—Tucked away in an unassuming office building near Helsinki’s waterfront, a group of around 10 academics and government officials—most of them Finns—spend long days and nights tracking disinformation and influence operations emanating from neighboring Russia. They make up a newly formed research and strategy unit tasked with lifting the veil on a range of security threats that blend conventional and unconventional tactics. The European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, known as the Hybrid CoE, was founded last year in Helsinki by a dozen member states of the European Union and NATO. It defines hybrid threats as the […]

Today in Ukraine, both inside the government and out, it isn’t uncommon to hear that President Petro Poroshenko is no less corrupt than Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-connected leader who was ousted in the 2014 Maidan revolution. The main difference between Poroshenko and Yanukovych, according to many Ukrainians, is that the Poroshenko administration is simply far more duplicitous at presenting a polished image to Western donors. That was the view from more than 100 interviews with Ukrainian public officials, activists, lawyers and businesspeople that I conducted as a visiting Fulbright scholar at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy throughout 2016 and […]

The U.S. foreign policy community tosses the word “failure” around a lot: intelligence failures, policy failures, failures of imagination. Each American president is assigned his share of failures, sometimes based on reflections of those who participated in hard policy decisions, but more often based on judgments made by others who were not directly involved. It’s perfectly fair to assess whether the outcome of a particular policy succeeded or failed to achieve its stated goal. Yet over time, some misleading “truths” become established that need to be checked and revisited. Take the increasingly common framing of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as […]

Last week, negotiators from the European Union and Latin America’s Mercosur trading bloc, which includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, concluded another round of unsuccessful talks in Brussels aimed at securing a free trade agreement. Negotiations between the two sides have been ongoing periodically for over two decades, and the most recent round again failed to provide a breakthrough, although talks will reconvene in Paraguay on Feb. 19. In an email interview, Sebastian Dullien, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international economics at the applied sciences university HTW Berlin, discusses the […]

BERLIN—Germany is getting another grand coalition. At least, that’s what the country’s political leaders hope is about to happen. After a bruising round of negotiations that went days over deadline, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, or CDU, struck a deal last week with the center-left Social Democrats, the SPD, to extend the coalition that has governed Germany for the past four years. SPD members could still scuttle the deal, though. The 443,000 members have final say over whether the party will enter the agreement, with the results of their vote by mail set to be released in early March. The […]

Analyzing the United Nations is rather like being a nervous seismologist in California. Geological experts are accustomed to tremors and small quakes along the San Andreas Fault, which bisects America’s most heavily populated state. But they are on alert for a much more powerful earthquake that could wreck some of the country’s most prosperous cities. Some say this will come soon. U.N. experts are likewise hardened to the regular crises that shake the organization but do not upend it. From Mali to Syria, the U.N. is struggling to make or keep peace. But despite occasional bouts of diplomatic frustration, the […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the production and trade of arms around the world. In late January, Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, unveiled a plan to make his country one of the world’s top 10 arms exporters. Currently, Australia exports about $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion in defense equipment annually, a figure that Turnbull said his government is seeking to increase significantly in the coming decade. In an email interview, Greg Colton, a research fellow in the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, explains what is behind the government’s strategy and […]

Costa Ricans headed to the polls last Sunday amid an unusually heated campaign that few had foreseen and even fewer dared to predict. Following the Feb. 4 vote, Fabricio Alvarado of the conservative National Restoration Party and Carlos Alvarado of the leftist Citizens’ Action Party, or PAC, which has been in power since 2014, are headed to a second round on April 1. No presidential candidate came close to securing the 40 percent share of the vote required to avoid a runoff, underscoring the increasingly fragmented political environment in what has been Central America’s most stable democracy. The two Alvarados […]

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has reportedly been mulling a limited, preventive military strike against North Korea, what has been called the “bloody nose” strategy. Pushed hardest by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, it is based on the belief that if North Korea has the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, Washington would be deterred from intervening on the Korean Peninsula, thus allowing Pyongyang to step up its aggression against South Korea and other nearby nations. The only way to prevent this scenario, the thinking goes, is a military […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss three international crises faced by the Trump administration that are now coming to a head. In Syria, North Korea and Venezuela, the administration will soon have to take decisions and actions with important consequences. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get some of our uncompromising analysis delivered twice a week straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free and timely […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The drama surrounding South Africa’s leadership transition has dragged out long enough to acquire its own snappy name: Zexit. That’s according to the BBC, which noted this week that the early departure of President Jacob Zuma, who has already been replaced as head of the ruling African National Congress by his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, is now being discussed as though it’s inevitable. This week, that meant a series of canceled meetings and other engagements as Zuma and Ramaphosa negotiated […]

Late last month, Japan and Malaysia concluded a weeklong joint coast guard exercise focused on combating piracy in Southeast Asia. Despite a recent decline, piracy is still a threat across the region and cooperation between states—including some, like Japan, that are outside the region—is seen as an important mechanism for mitigating it. In an email interview, Lucio Blanco Pitlo III, a foreign affairs and security analyst on Asia-Pacific issues and a former lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, discusses the state of piracy in Southeast Asia and what kinds of multilateral […]