Hal Brands, Bloomberg
Journalistic accounts, analytical reports and even memoirs of U.S. officials have catalogued the depressing reality of the Afghan security situation for over a decade. When U.S. President Barack Obama surged tens of thousands of additional American troops in 2009, he was candid about the grim reality they would confront. “Huge challenges remain,” he said. “The Taliban has gained momentum,” al-Qaida was resurgent, Afghan security forces remained unimpressive. And both... Читать дальше...
Pres. Sebastián Piñera Echenique, New York Times
The government is committed to fight inequality in response to social unrest. The country cannot go on without social justice.
Economist
To form a stable government, he needs stability in Spain’s most restive region
Aleks Eror, World Politics Review
Michael Noonan, FPRI
Last week Royal Saudi Air Force 2LT Mohammed Alshamrani killed three people and wounded eight others in a terrorist attack at Pensacola Naval Air Station. He was killed by a sheriff’s deputy in response. The gun he used was legally purchased using a hunting license. The FBI had previously warned about this loophole for foreign nationals. He had been in the United States since 2017, receiving both English language and flight and weapons training, with brief returns to the Saudi Arabia for leave. Читать дальше...
Peter Hartcher, Syd. Morning Herald
They're not laughing at him now. The right-wing populists are indeed winning. They are reshaping the Anglo-American world in their own image. They're not sick with their own success. But they are developing a taste for it.
Alex Shepard, New Republic
Paul Staniland, War on the Rocks
A crisis and a crackdown have defined India’s security policy in 2019. In February, the Indian Air Force launched an airstrike into Pakistan following a suicide bombing in Kashmir. This then led to a crisis, dogfights, and missile threats. In August, the government in New Delhi surged security forces into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and revoked its special status, beginning months of detentions, restrictions, and claims about the beginning of a radically new politics in Kashmir. Читать дальше...
Kamran Bokhari, The Navigator
Last week Royal Saudi Air Force 2LT Mohammed Alshamrani killed three people and wounded eight others in a terrorist attack at Pensacola Naval Air Station. He was killed by a sheriff’s deputy in response. The gun he used was legally purchased using a hunting license. The FBI had previously warned about this loophole for foreign nationals. He had been in the United States since 2017, receiving both English language and flight and weapons training, with brief returns to the Saudi Arabia for leave. Читать дальше...
Andrés Cañizález, Global Americans
That 2019 will end with Maduro still in power uncovers the failure of a set of strategies that were unable to come to fruition, neither inside nor outside Venezuela. As the former President of Spain, Felipe González, points out, the moment calls for a self-criticism exercise of both Venezuela’s democratic leadership—with Juan Guaidó at the helm—and of the international community.
Ilan Berman, National Interest
Diane Francis, The American Interest
Fabiana Sofia Perera, Americas Quarterly
The transformation of the armed forces has direct implications for the country's crisisâ?"?and a possible transition.
Dexter Filkins, New Yorker
The street protests now sweeping India appear to be validating one of the oldest and most trusted maxims of politics: sooner or later, authoritarians will go too far. The authoritarian in this case is Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister. Since his reëlection victory, last May, Modi has mounted an aggressive campaign targeting the country’s Muslim minority, which numbers two hundred million.
Matt Seaton, NY Review of Books
The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’ point of.
