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A Managed ‘Frozen Conflict’ Could Be Syria’s Best HopeBy: Richard Gowan | Column
Peace in Syria still
seems sadly remote. Yet it is possible the country could stumble into
something like a partially frozen conflict. This could create the
conditions for an increase in humanitarian aid and, in a best-case
scenario, a drive to restart political dialogue and economic activity.
Depleted Capital: The State of European Social DemocracyBy: Patrick Diamond | Feature
Over the past decade,
social democratic parties across Western Europe have been in retreat,
with many commentators insisting they are destined to wane as a
political force. This article considers the factors behind social
democracy’s slide, with an eye toward some possible ways to stem the
left’s demise.
Iran Deal Debate Highlights Think Tanks’ Role in U.S. PolicyBy: Ellen Laipson | Trend Lines
Washington is in full
gear for an intense 60-day debate over the Iran nuclear deal, and one
important feature is the contributions made by diverse civil society
organizations. Think tanks in particular are playing a prominent role,
whether to amplify, endorse or critique the Obama administration’s
position.
Nonproliferation Progress Still Possible Despite ObstaclesBy: Richard Weitz | Column
Last week, I discussed
why the Iran nuclear deal offers limited lessons for making progress on
other regional nonproliferation issues. This week, I thought it would be
valuable to assess the obstacles and opportunities that exist for
making further global nonproliferation and arms control progress.
Investigation Could End Impunity for Brazil’s Elite Police UnitBy: Christopher Looft | Briefing
The investigation of an
elite police unit in Brazil for its alleged role in the disappearance of
a Rio de Janeiro man may represent an opportunity to restore the
public’s trust in the rule of law and, perhaps, repair the reputation of
a controversial program to pacify favelas.
Italy Tries to Make Up for Lost Time in AfricaBy: The Editors | Trend Lines
Earlier this month,
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was in Kenya to discuss trade ties
and pledge support for counterterrorism operations in East Africa. In an
email interview, Mattia Toaldo, a policy fellow at the European Council
on Foreign Relations, discussed Italy’s outreach to Africa.
Kabuki Theater of Iran Deal Debate Comes With CostsBy: Michael A. Cohen | Column
Over the next few weeks,
as Congress prepares to vote on the Iran nuclear deal, the American
people are going to be bombarded with arguments both for and against it.
But here are the two dirty little secrets about the deal: Congress
isn’t going to stop it, and no one in Washington really wants to.
Rivals and Power-Sharing Tensions Hamstring Afghanistan’s GhaniBy: Colin Cookman | Briefing
Dealing with the Taliban
insurgency is not the only domestic challenge facing President Ashraf
Ghani. The unresolved tensions between the country’s formal and informal
political systems mean that there is little consensus over the rules of
power sharing, which only adds to continued instability.
Turkey Joins Fight Against Islamic State, but Targets KurdsBy: Frida Ghitis | Column
When Turkey announced it
would join the war against the so-called Islamic State, it seemed like a
major turning point in the fight against the radical Islamist group.
But Ankara’s actions strongly suggest the new policy has more to do with
pushing back against Kurdish groups than against IS.
It’s Time to Begin Thinking About the Principles of CyberwarBy: Steven Metz | Column
Military strategists have
long studied the “principles of war.” Yet while these principles apply
to conventional warfighting, today the U.S. military is grappling with a
new form of conflict: cyberwar. Instead of applying the traditional
principles to cyberwar, it’s time to develop new principles.
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Letter From the Brussels Bubble
Posted by: Ian Traynor Friday, July 31, 2015 | http://carnegieeurope.eu/
*
It is not often one gets to write this: a triumph for European
foreign policy. But the first semester of 2015 ended with just that. It
was also a major achievement for female leadership and what the veteran
British foreign policy thinker Robert Cooper calls emotional
intelligence as applied to diplomacy, perhaps best practiced by women.
The deal reached on July 14
at Vienna’s sumptuous Palais Coburg at worst applies the brakes to
Iran’s nuclear ambitions and at best stops Tehran from getting the bomb.
The agreement was crafted in large part by a quartet of women, three of
them European: Federica Mogherini,
the EU’s foreign policy coordinator; Catherine Ashton, her predecessor;
Helga Schmid, deputy secretary general of the European External Action
Service; and Wendy Sherman from the U.S. State Department.Angela Merkel in Berlin is the go-to person on Ukraine and on Russian President Vladimir Putin. President François Hollande in Paris is increasingly seen these days as a second-tier escort for the German chancellor. Prime Minister David Cameron has steered Britain into a period of introspective insularity and foreign policy withdrawal. 
The men are meek. The women are to the fore. It is an unusually
auspicious time in Europe for female diplomacy. But can the same be said
of EU foreign policy
making as a whole? Of course not. Right now, the EU is struggling to
muster 2 out of 5 for its foreign and security policy ambitions. Must
try harder.While the EU role on the Iran breakthrough should not be belittled, the agreement is essentially an attempt at U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, with Europe supplying the staffing, the patience, the mediation, and the fancy hotels. Iran represents a rare moment of hope for traditional diplomacy in an otherwise extraordinarily bleak and dystopian vista of fundamental threats and challenges to the European order, to EU values, to the European weltanschauung. Getting to grips with Europe’s time of troubles is stretching capacities and exposing frailties. Elected authoritarians on Europe’s frontiers no longer play by EU rules or accept Brussels’s modus operandi. Putin in Moscow and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara are big players dancing to a different tune. Then there are their miniclones in the Western Balkans and Hungary, already in or wanting to be in the EU but bridling at the terms of membership and preferring different models. Mediterranean migration, unrest in Libya and Syria, Islamic State militants, foreign fighters, homegrown jihadism, crisis in Ukraine, conflict with Russia, propaganda wars, trade talks with the United States—seldom has the EU’s foreign and security policy agenda been so crowded and so menacing. Seldom in the post–World War II era has there been such a mismatch between the threats to the European order and the instruments available for dealing with them. Mogherini does what she can. She is more accomplished at maneuvering inside the Brussels bubble than was her British predecessor, although Ashton was hobbled by being the first post–Lisbon Treaty high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, with the task of creating an EU diplomatic service from scratch. Ashton was also engaged in nonstop trench warfare with the Eurocrats who jealously guard their soft power foreign policy prerogatives through control of the purse strings on aid, trade, and humanitarianism. #Mogherini can only operate within the limits of the possible. Tweet ThisBut Mogherini can only operate within the limits of the possible when national interests dictate different outcomes, varying coalitions, and contradictory policies. She has been absent on Putin and Ukraine, where Merkel has done all the diplomatic heavy lifting. Merkel is playing a long game with the Russian president. That looks like the only option when the Kremlin is happy to send young Russian men to die in eastern Ukraine and the Europeans will not shed lives in support of Kiev. The Ukraine crisis shows the failings of EU soft power when confronted with old-fashioned military bludgeoning. The climax of years of negotiations on a free-trade and political association accord with Kiev was the ostensible reason for Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. The EU was integral to the outbreak of the conflict. It is not often that you see people taking to the barricades behind the blue-and-yellow flags of the EU, but such was the scene on Kiev’s Maidan, or Independence Square, in spring 2014. There have been significant European successes on Russia, the biggest being the maintenance of unity on economic sanctions despite centrifugal tendencies and Moscow’s astute playing on EU divisions. But the implications of Putin’s bold gamble are dire for Europe. He has rewritten the international rule book and called several bluffs. As a result, the lumbering bureaucratic machine that is modern-day NATO has acquired a new raison d’être, the same as the old one: facing down Russia. The #Ukraine crisis shows the failings of #EU soft power. Tweet ThisYet Europe’s security gaps are a scandal. Suddenly, it is again clear that the world’s wealthiest region won’t spend enough on its own defense and that in an emergency, Washington might need to act as Europe’s security guarantor of last resort. If Putin embodies the old-fashioned problem of brute military force under an authoritarian regime, then Libya and immigration represent the altogether more modern nightmare of state failure, uncontrollable chaos, gangsterism, transnational crime, and terrorism. All on Europe’s doorstep. EU leaders charged Mogherini with producing a Common Foreign and Security Policy concept for the Mediterranean refugee emergency. Her chief diplomat, Alain Le Roy, came up with a surprisingly robust proposal that envisaged a phased progression to military intervention—involving air, sea, and land assets, including special forces—to disrupt the trafficking and smuggling networks that cross the Mediterranean. In an attempt to secure international backing for the proposal, the British drafted the words of a resolution at the UN Security Council in New York, where the whole plan was predictably grounded by Russia’s veto threat. The intervention appeared gung-ho, perhaps in the knowledge that it would never obtain a UN mandate. Instead, the EU launched surveillance operations in the Mediterranean, while national leaders at an EU summit in June yelled at one another until 3:30 in the morning over minimal first steps toward a more equitable distribution of the refugee burden. The nation-states trumped the EU. The main thrust of policy is to close the borders, close one’s eyes, and hope that the problem goes away—the fingers-crossed school of policymaking and diplomacy. There are very serious senior people in the EU who believe it is simply a matter of time before there is a game-changing act of terrorism in Europe, more like the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States than the January 2015 shooting at the offices of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Complacency and bickering may have to give way to a rude awakening. Ian Traynor is the Guardian’s Europe editor. *** | ||||||
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Kenyan Pastoralists Fighting Climate Change Through Food Forests
Robert Kibet
Sipian Lesan bends to attend to the Vangueria infausta or African medlar
plant that he planted almost two years ago. He takes great care not to
damage the soft, velvety, acorn-shaped buds of this hardy and
drought-resistant plant. ”All over here it is dry,” says the 51-year-old
Samburu semi-nomadic ...
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U.N.’s Post-2015 Development Agenda Under Fire
Thalif Deen
The U.N.’s highly ambitious post-2015 development agenda, which is
expected to be finalised shortly, has come fire even before it could get
off the ground.
A global network of civil society organisations (CSOs), under the banner
United Nations Major Groups (UNMG), has warned that the agenda, ...
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Central America Fails to Take Advantage of Energy from Sun, Wind and Earth
Diego Arguedas Ortiz
Central America, a place of abundant wind and sunshine, is still chained
to thermal power and large-scale hydroelectricity and has failed to
include local communities in clean, environmentally-friendly and less
invasive projects.
Although the region has been trying for years to increase the ...
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One Tune, Different Hymns – Tackling Climate Change in South Africa
Munyaradzi Makoni
Anti-nuclear energy activists are up in arms, and have taken to vigils
outside South Africa’s parliament in Cape Town to protest against
President Jacob Zuma’s push for nuclear development.
The protest has been building since September 2014 when Zuma struck a
deal with Russia’s Rossatom to build ...
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Digital Era Here to Stay in Argentina’s Classrooms
Fabiana Frayssinet
The showcases in the Colegio Nacional Rafael Hernández, a public high
school in La Plata, Argentina, tell the story of the stern neoclassical
building which dates back to 1884. But the classrooms reflect the
digital era, thanks to the computers distributed to all public school
students as part of a ...
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Kenya’s Climate Change Bill Aims to Promote Low Carbon Growth
Isaiah Esipisu
Alexander Muyekhi, a construction worker from Ebubayi village in the
heart of Vihiga County in Western Kenya, and his school-going children
can now enjoy a tiny solar kit supplied by the British-based Azuri
Technologies to light their house and play their small FM radio.
This has saved the ...
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Key Constituencies Call for Inclusion in Nepal’s Draft Constitution
Post Bahadur Basnet
Ending a years-long political deadlock, Nepal’s major political parties
inked a 16-point agreement last June to pave the way for the Constituent
Assembly (CA) to write a new constitution.
It marked the first time since the end of the Maoist insurgency and
regime change in 2006 that the parties ...
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Multilingualism Opens Doors to the World
Nora Happel
On Friday, 67 student essay winners from 42 different countries convened
at the United Nations General Assembly to present their essays at the
Many Languages, One World Global Youth Forum.
The students were selected as winners of the Many Languages, One World
International Essay Contest among a ...
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Faith Leaders Issue Global “Call to Conscience” on Climate
A. D. McKenzie
“We received a garden as our home, and we must not turn it into a
wilderness for our children.”
These words by Cardinal Peter Turkson summed up the appeal launched by
dozens of religious leaders and “moral” thinkers at the Summit of
Conscience for the Climate, a one-day gathering in Paris ...
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Opinion: European Federalism and Missed Opportunities
Emma Bonino
"A serious political and social crisis will sweep through the euro
countries if they do not decide to strengthen the integration of their
economies. The euro zone crisis did not begin with the Greek crisis, but
was manifested much earlier, when a monetary union was created without
economic and ...
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Clean Water Another Victim of Syria’s War
Kanya D'Almeida
Caught in the grips of a summer heat-wave, in a season that is seeing
record-high temperatures worldwide, residents of the war-torn city of
Aleppo in northern Syria are facing off against yet another enemy:
thirst.
The conflict that began in 2011 as a popular uprising against the reign
of Bashar ...
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Reuters
A still from a video released by ISIS on April 19, which appears to
show the execution of Ethiopian Christians by members of Wilayat Barqa,
an affiliate of ISIS in eastern Libya
