Section: Foreign Policy (USA)
Nigeria’s Election: Brought To You By These Hired Guns
For the militants of Boko Haram, 2015 began like most any year: with death and chaos. Three days into the New Year, the Nigeria-based Islamist terrorist group attacked Baga, a Nigerian town on the banks of the Lake Chad, shared by Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. It was one of Boko Haram’s most devastating attacks ever, leaving up to...
Central Asia’s Chess Master: How Islam Karimov’s Wily Diplomacy Has Cemented His Power
Uzbekistan heads to the polls on Sunday for presidential elections, but the results are a foregone conclusion: President Islam Karimov will be re-elected. Uzbekistan’s ruler since its days as a Soviet republic, Karimov has spent the last 24 years consolidating his power in the most brutal of ways: boiling dissidents, carrying out violent...
Reid’s Likely Successors Are Big Players on Foreign Policy
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has publicly backed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to succeed him as Senate minority leader when he retires at the end of 2016, possibly giving the main pro-Israel lobby a powerful new ally in the upper chamber. In an interview with the Washington Post, Reid predicted that Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin...
FP’s Situation Report: Paris won’t wait forever for Israeli-Palestinian peace push; U.S. straddles the fence in the Middle East; White House says Tikrit isn’t about Iran; and much more from around the world.
By David Francis with Sabine Muscat Paris to push Israeli-Palestinian peace at the U.N. Washington is considering moving the peace process to Turtle Bay. But France says it won’t wait forever for President Barack Obama to press for a measure calling for an end to Israeli settlements and laying a framework for future talks. FP’s Colum...
Yemen Strife Reminds Oil Markets That Mayhem Matters
Oil markets got a brusque reminder that geopolitical risk is alive and well Thursday when crude prices spiked in response to military actions by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to contain the violence in civil-war wracked Yemen. Prices in New York and London leaped as much as 6 percent in the morning on concerns about the potential spread of...
Ukraine Doesn’t Have a Warlord Problem
One analyst claims that “Eastern Ukraine is awash with weapons and armed militia groups on both sides.” Another speaks darkly of “independently operating warlords and armed groups.” A third writes of “independent and semi-independent battalions, some of which descend from Ukrainian nationalist groups, extreme elements of the Maidan self-defense...
Decoder: The Plague
The first victim of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa was almost certainly a 2-year-old boy in the small village of Meliandou in southeastern Guinea. Since his death in December 2013, the disease—whose previous outbreaks killed at most hundreds of people, and generally in rural areas—has infected thousands of people across West Africa, as well as...
Washington and Ankara Need Couples Therapy
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Barack Obama once described as a “close friend,” no longer appears to enjoy that status. Under President Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey, one of the most prominent and long-standing members of NATO, is running out of friends in the West. The Center for American...
FP’s Situation Report: U.S. slows troop withdrawal from Afghanistan; Congress says ‘So what?’ to Israeli spying; Secret Service scandal grows; and much more from around the world.
By David Francis with Sabine Muscat It’s official: More U.S. troops are staying in Afghanistan through the end of the year. President Barack Obama confirmed what’s been rumored for weeks: 9,800 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan, an adjustment from the planned drawdown to 5,500 by the end of 2015. But he promised they’ll be...
Is Russian Literature Dead?
Speaking at an event in January to launch the “Year of Literature,” a series of public events and projects extolling the virtues of Russian letters, President Vladimir Putin laid out his mission to raise the “prestige and influence in the world” of his country’s writers. Generations of American readers weaned on Leo Tolstoy and Boris...
