Mexico’s kidnapping business (AlJazeera)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt6wG1xfxQ[/youtube]
Après l’Empire…
Last month, I wrote a brief piece over on the ECFR website about France’s lack of leverage in the Ivorian crisis between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara:
France – the former colonial power – has been active in diplomacy in New York. But officials with long memories recall how the French used to behave in Côte d’Ivoire. In 2004, after Ivorian planes attacked French peacekeepers, France destroyed the country’s (small) airforce.
Today, there are still French troops in Côte d’Ivoire, but in smaller numbers than 2004. There have been concerns that a tough line from Paris would lead to violence against French civilians, especially after the Gbagbo camp called Ouattara a French stooge.
The EU had sent monitors to cover the polls, although their operations were marred by death threats. This week, the EU agreed targeted sanctions against Gbagbo’s henchmen and called on him to step down – but the AU, ECOWAS and US are leading on the crisis.
While the Ivorian crisis rumbles on, French diplomats have been struggling to keep up with another crisis in a former colony – Tunisia.
President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has left the country amid growing chaos in the streets, French diplomats say, and the prime minister went on state television Friday night to say he is in charge.
A French Foreign Ministry official said authorities did not know where the president had gone, and representatives of the president were not immediately available to confirm the report.
If the French are telling the truth, this is a shameful moment. You can’t just lose a president… What would the men who built the Empire say?
American Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty
Article by David Steven published in World Politics Review on current American foreign policy and what the QDDR could mean. Available from World Politics Review here (subscription required) or download below (January 2011)
The World in 2020 – Geopolitical and Trends Analysis
Presentation and report by David Steven created initially for the British Council on the world in 2020, asking how organisations can prosper in what will be a turbulent period for world order. (July 2010)
Blunt speaking from David Miliband on Afghanistan
Some very plain speaking on Afghanistan from David Miliband in the Telegraph yesterday, in a piece written to coincide with the commemoration of Richard Holbrooke’s life in DC.
While international forces are “suppressing” the insurgency, he notes reports that “unpublished UN security assessments [show] a marked deterioration in security. That, he continues, “tallies with extremely worrying reports of the insurgency spreading into the far north of the country”. He suggests the need for a twin-track approach:
Track one is an internal political settlement. Western influence is currently limited to ineffective and unspecified “pressure” on President Karzai. We need to be far more up front about our end game: a decentralised series of political settlements in the villages and valleys of Afghanistan, with security forces limited to holding the ring and keeping al-Qaeda out.
But this track will never get going unless track two – the track of regional political engagement – has real legs. This means agreements which recognise the divergent interests of the different neighbouring countries, from Pakistan to Iran. At the moment, it is a free-for-all – a recipe for the slide to ethnic enmity that Yvette Cooper, the shadow foreign secretary, has highlighted, and even renewed civil war that would be the most awful epitaph to Western engagement.