Atlantic Sentinel

Author: Ryan Bohl

  • The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Made Super

    And here we go again.

    Especially in the United States, Palestinian-Israeli violence always sucks up the headlines, siphoning valuable media and filling it with tried-and-true journalistic narratives that play to the myriad of biases that always come to the fore when discussing the Holy Land.

    Evangelical Christians get their dose of Biblical chaos, hoping beyond hope that this time, the Rapture will follow this latest spasm of violence. Conservatives and neoconservatives find yet more ammunition against Islam, Islamism or, to the brute racists lurking among them, merely Arabs in general to fill the Facebook comments of every article that covers the attacks. Liberals dredge up well-worn tirades against colonization, colonialism, Western power and Israeli abuse.

    Rather than sit this one out, I’ve decided to delve into the very basics of the conflict at risk, of course, of revealing my own bias (spoiler: I don’t care).

    So let’s make this very popular-to-recycle conflict super. (more…)

  • No Good Options: Why America Dithers in Syria

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Barack Obama
    Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Barack Obama of the United States meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, December 7, 2009 (White House/Samantha Appleton)

    Haters do hate and many of President Barack Obama’s greatest haters despise what he’s done about Syria; or, more accurately, what he hasn’t done. Some of that criticism is fair but much of it is not, for Syria is not worth the blood, treasure or time of the United States when there are much bigger, nuclear-armed fish to fry elsewhere.

    Here’s why. (more…)

  • Why They Come: The Balkans’ Desperation

    Belgrade Serbia
    Skyline of Belgrade, Serbia, August 22, 2011 (Serzhile)

    Much of the world’s attention is fixed on the refugee crisis emanating from the warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It’s a simple enough narrative for journalists: fleeing the bombs and bullets of the Islamic State or the Taliban, refugees swarm peaceful Europe, hoping for humanitarian salvation.

    But that narrative overlooks a key failure of European migration policy. This wave of migration is hardly new. On the continent itself are states that have long propelled their citizens to jump the borders for greener pastures in Western Europe.

    Three of Germany’s top five asylum-seeking countries of origin are not in the wartorn Middle East but rather the overlooked Balkans: Albania, Kosovo and Serbia. Macedonia, another Balkan state, ranks seventh.

    What’s happening here? Why are fellow Europeans from peaceful states fleeing to Germany? (more…)

  • What the Hell Is Putin Doing in Syria?

    Vladimir Putin
    Russian president Vladimir Putin listens during a meeting in Voronezh, August 5, 2014 (Kremlin)

    And more importantly, what does he want?

    It’s important to remember how swears like that will net the sort of Google-searching folks I very much want here: the sort who want to understand, but who don’t need the gross, and largely unimportant, blow by blows.

    In two years, Vladimir Putin has taken Russia to war in not one but two countries; he’s conquered the strategically vital Crimea, froze a conflict in Ukraine and now has turned his war machine upon Syria’s conflict. The hapless United States under Barack Obama seems paralyzed with handwringing indecision and the Google searches for “World War III” are skyrocketing.

    Yes, we all ought to be worried and we all should try to understand why powerful places choose to seek war in faraway lands.

    So why is Russia now at war in Syria? What the hell happened, and, most importantly, what can happen?

    Let’s get super. (more…)

  • The Next Great Geopolitical Crisis: Venezuela

    South America gets a lot less attention that it deserves from foreign policy chats and geopolitical blogs. Much of that is because the continent is largely stable: not since the 1930s have there been any interstate wars and now that Colombia’s FARC revolutionary army is on the back foot, it appears failed states have also receded over the horizon. South America’s stability is taken for granted by both the hemispheric superpower and much of the rest of the world.

    But within Venezuela, all kinds of chaos is breaking loose.

    Last week, the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, threatened to invade and annex half his neighbor, English-speaking Guyana. Before that, he deployed forces to the border with Colombia. Meanwhile, at home, he’s been arresting enemies and presiding over a state that feels very much like it’s collapsing.

    Should Venezuela’s state behave as irresponsibly as its past suggests it will, the next great geopolitical crisis will not be in well-trodden battlefields in the Middle East, Asia or Europe but in the United States’ own backyard. (more…)

  • Why Japan Is Readying for War Again

    American Japanese ships
    American and Japanese ships conduct a joint naval exercise in the Sea of Japan, June 1, 2017 (USN/Z.A. Landers)

    Ironically, the final vote was accompanied by a fist fight but it’s official: Japan may go to war again. The third largest economy on Earth entering the geopolitical sphere as a military power is absolutely huge. For Beijing, it’s a disaster. For DC, it’s the geopolitical coup of the decade. And for Japan, it’s increasingly necessary.

    But why, and how? Let’s get super. (more…)

  • Russia’s Smart-Dumb Move into Syria’s Civil War

    As we are wont to do these days, we cry out, “The Russians are coming!” But their next move is not further into Eastern Europe where too many eyes are trained and a slowly gathering NATO grande armee is being assembled.

    It is into another, older civil war that Russian power is now deployed: Syria.

    And the best way to view such a move is through Newspeak, for this one is, geopolitically speaking, quite the smart-dumb move.

    Here’s why. (more…)

  • Saudi Arabia’s No Good, Very Bad War in Yemen

    Caveats! “Bad” on this website is rarely used for moral condemnation. So there’s that.

    “Bad” here refers to the fact that Saudi Arabia cannot win its war in Yemen. Best-case scenario is they escape with their tails between their legs. Worst case? The cracking of the Saudi state and chaos beyond imagining.

    But let’s do some wayback and remember how we got here in the first place. (more…)

  • Arab Gulf States Will Have to Let in Syrian Refugees

    Dubai United Arab Emirates
    Dubai at night (Unsplash/Piotr Chrobot)

    As the European migrant crisis is giving way to unprecedented humanitarian efforts from first Germany and now the Vatican, more than a few analysts have noted that for all Europe’s generosity, only a few Arab states have opened their doors to the masses fleeing war in Iraq and Syria.

    That’s curious when one considers that the ultra-rich Gulf Cooperation Council states are far closer than Europe and the journey there involves no dangerous seafaring. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all have considerable oil and gas reserves and their citizens are much richer than those of other Arab states. Yet GCC governments have stayed mum even as the #ArabConscience has begun trending regionally. Why? (more…)

  • The Geopolitical Argument Against Gun Ownership

    It’s often dodgy to wade into the morass of America’s culture wars. For non-Americans, the back and forth of American pundits (and Facebook commentators) seems asinine at the best of times. It’s easy to view the whole exercise as pointless when you realize much of our culture wars revolve around what people like to do for fun, whether it’s shotgun blasting a rusty pick-up truck in the desert or having unprotected sex with people we would never marry.

    That being said, there’s still an important discussion to be had here. Last week, a disgruntled (and possibly a bit racist) ex-employee of a local news network killed a journalist and her cameraman on live TV. That came on the heels a recent mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist killed nine people in a traditionally black church.

    Each time a mass shooting occurs in the United States, a cycle asserts itself: Democrats and liberals point to gun ownership and, occasionally, racism, as the proximate causes, while Republicans and conservatives counter that a better-armed society would be more likely to prevent such tragedies. Few minds change; many arguments are peddled; eventually, everyone forgets until the next dramatic shooting.

    Within the comments of many a Facebook article lie arguments for gun ownership that are disconnected from geopolitical reality. It was a brief exchange with one such commenter that inspired this article.

    I won’t go into the criminology side of gun ownership which is better detailed by more authoritative sources. Rather, I’ll focus on guns in America from a geopolitical perspective.

    So please, when you’re writing hate mail about how would I like it if some thugs broke in and raped my whole family as a direct result of being an unarmed society, do remember I’m not even remotely talking about that. I’m focusing, rather, on gun ownership as it affects the geopolitical power of the United States. (more…)

  • Imagining the End Game: How North Korea May Collapse

    There are few things that touch off more firestorms than speculation. Speculation is easy; any drunk hanging out in front of a local Dunkin Donuts can do it.

    But that shouldn’t automatically invalidate all speculation. You can, for instance, look at the clouds in the evening and guess you’ll need an umbrella in the morning. That’s not the mad-cap rantings of a person ideologically committed to morning umbrellas but the rational thought process of someone who’d rather not get wet on the way to work.

    You can apply such rationality to geopolitical speculation as well. It’s important not to get too specific — assigning timelines and trying to foretell specific events is invariably doomed to failure. Just as you might guess the next morning will have rain based on the clouds in the evening, you also probably know better than to go bandying about how rain will arrive at 7:13 AM. You know a general forecast; that’s good enough to make a rational decision. (more…)