The two no-confidence votes tabled to topple French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne’s government were rejected on Monday (20 March), keeping her in power for the time being. Despite this, the political crisis is far from over, MPs and observers note.
What’s new? The Somali government has gained ground in its war with the Islamist insurgency Al-Shabaab, mainly in central Somalia. Most of the progress is due to Mogadishu’s leveraging of local discontent with Al-Shabaab to form alliances with clan militias.
The core lesson of the 2003 Iraq war is that ruptures in autocratic settings are inherently fraught with risk. Policymakers should approach proposed interventions in such settings with caution.
When President Barack Obama admonished his foreign policy team, “Don’t do stupid stuff” (he used an earthier phrase), there was no real question what he had in mind. In 2002, as an Illinois state senator, Obama had warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be “a dumb war … a rash war”. Six years later, this prescient opposition helped him win the Democratic presidential nomination and then the White House. By the time Obama’s pithy staff guidance became public in 2014, there was a growing Washington consensus that the Iraq invasion had been the biggest U.S. foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. It was clear what he meant.
With its stockpile of Soviet-era weapons, Bulgaria, home to a thriving arms industry, could be a key ally of Ukraine, which is trained on and equipped with such arms, in its war against invading Russian forces.
But with parliament now dissolved ahead of elections on April 2, the fifth snap poll in two years amid political uncertainty, the caretaking government is in no mood to provide lethal aid to Kyiv, appointed as it was by President Rumen Radev, who is known for his pro-Kremlin leanings.
Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine has caused a proliferation in the “privatization of force” in Russia (see EDM, February 27; February 28), with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the sponsor and founder of the notorious Wagner Group, enjoying unprecedented publicity.
China’s mediation to normalise Saudi-Iranian diplomatic ties has been widely welcomed internationally, especially in the West Asian region. A clutch of unhappy states that do not want to see China stealing a march on any front, even if it advances the cause of world peace, mutely watched.
Abstract: Italy is a crucial epicenter of insurrectionary anarchism, a transnational extremist tendency that promotes “self-organized” illegal and violent actions, even against people. In particular, over the last two decades, dozens of acts of violence, including letter bombs, homemade bombs, and shootings, have been claimed under the banner of the Informal Anarchist Federation (Federazione Anarchica Informale, FAI), a loosely connected network that has also fostered relationships with likeminded groups abroad. The Italian counterterrorism system has successfully addressed this threat with aggressive rules, measures, and practices, that, in part, derive directly or indirectly from the long fight against the Mafia. However, today Italian authorities face a new challenge, posed by the case of Alfredo Cospito, an influential exponent of the FAI network who started an indefinite hunger strike in prison in October 2022. The handling of the Cospito affair highlights the complex political, legal, and ethical dilemmas that liberal democracies have to address in combating terrorism.
A push by Arab allies of the United States to bring Syria in from the cold highlights the limits of a Chinese-mediated rapprochement between the Middle East’s archrivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The effort spearheaded by the United Arab Emirates, and supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, demonstrates that the expected restoration of diplomatic relations between the kingdom and the Islamic republic has done nothing to reduce geopolitical jockeying and rebuild trust.
There is an active recruitment in a new military-political alliance directed against Russia and China
In recent years, Southeast Asia (SEA) has begun to make Washington salivate profusely. The most tasty “pieces of the pie” the United States has looked after for itself in the form of those that have achieved certain results in the industry of India and Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries of the Asia-Pacific region are also not ignored. Why is this place on the globe, like a magnet, attracting the interests of America’s greedy business circles?
In 2020–2022, Tunisian illegal migrants traveled through Serbia to reach Western Europe, as an alternative to the hazardous, more monitored Mediterranean route. This was driven by push factors in Tunisia, including deteriorating economic conditions and government acquiescence, and pull factors in Europe, namely smuggling networks and Serbian authorities looking the other way. While the route was sealed for Tunisians in November 2022, as long as transit states can use illegal migration to secure geopolitical leverage, such actions will continue.