Atlantic Sentinel

Category: Top Story

  • German Ideological Revival Polarizes Western Politics

    “Now Europe speaks German,” declared Volker Kauder, a member of Germany’s ruling conservative party, in late 2011. Despite the scolding he earned for his remarks, he was only slightly off. Not only Europe, indeed the world speaks increasingly with a German voice. Not literally, of course, but philosophically. German ideas are emerging as powerful forces all around the globe, ringing the bell for the end of the Anglo-Saxon moment in history.

    Critics and defenders of contemporary capitalism in the United States both speak the language of German history. Those who seek to emulate the European welfare state regularly invoke the German model while those who condemn these leftist ideas emphasize the necessity of self-reliance and labor as the fundamental glue of society and the indispensable source of individual dignity.

    The irony of this debate is that while the former claim to be ideological descendants of Karl Marx, it is the latter who use his arguments in the truest sense. For Marx, labor was the essence of human existence. Men could only be men through work which enabled him to interact with nature and create a world according to his imagination. (more…)

  • For France, Gaddafi’s Demise Worth Mali’s

    After the beginning of the War on Terror and the practical annihilation of Al Qaeda assets in Afghanistan, few expected militant Salafism to rise again. But simple ideas are the most resilient and Obama bin Laden’s legacy resurged in Yemen and the Maghreb. The locales are indicative of the most peripheral rural populations being the most vulnerable to extreme militancy.

    With this in mind, the Americans devised the concept of “ungoverned spaces” and financed the Pan Sahel Initiative in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks aimed at training local regimes and their armed forces as well as installing surveillance mechanisms for the region. The aim was to prevent groups such as Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) from being allowed unchecked use of the Sahara and Sahel regions for sanctuary. This initiative was first and foremost prescient — the GSPC shifting into Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb in 2007 — but for the most part successful as no regime was ever subverted or threatened in a meaningful way by extremists. On the other hand, by no means was this initiative ambitious enough to eradicate the same groups.

    The United States have seen its prerogatives being facilitated by essentially Morocco and Tunisia.

    France, in its turn, exercises considerable influence in Burkina-Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Morocco and wields significant regional power through a network of interests inherited from the French colonial empire designated as Françafrique. (more…)

  • United States Should Pivot on Shia-Sunni Divide

    Anwar Sadat Cyrus Vance
    Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is received by American secretary of state Cyrus Vance at Andrews Air Force Base, January 1, 1980 (DoD)

    The balance of power between Shia and Sunni has shifted since the 2003 Iraq War. A bold new strategy of isolating Iran while simultaneously reaching out to and cutting a nuclear deal with it could reset the balance in the region and allow the United States to recalibrate their Middle East as well as global strategy.

    Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the United States have had a Sunni-centric approach to the Middle East that has hobbled their diplomatic flexibility. It is time for this to stop.

    The proxy war between Shiites and Sunnis has been ongoing since 2003 but after Iraq finally shifted closer to Iran, a new battleground was certain to emerge. It now seems obvious that battleground is Syria. While much of what transpires there is clearly complex, it is also apparent that Iran is backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad and Saudi Arabia is supporting the rebels. A resurgent Turkey is also shifting to an outwardly hostile position toward the Assad regime.

    This represents an opportunity for the United States that is being squandered. (more…)

  • Foreign Policy is Rarely a Zero-Sum Game

    It is perfectly possible for one country to argue with another over a controversial issue at the same time as cooperating with them on several others — as long as they both get their priorities right and are diplomatic in explaining their differences publicly.

    Unfortunately, both Britain and the United States have failed to do this with regard to Russia: they have given more attention to Syria, where they disagree with the latter, than to the many more important issues on which they share common interests. The way British and American officials have explained their differences with their Russian counterparts has also been appallingly undiplomatic and, unsurprisingly, counterproductive. (more…)

  • Nicolas Sarkozy’s Foreign Policy Should Be Vindicated

    George W. Bush and his acolytes are these days fond of claiming that history will eventually judge the administration of the former American president kindly. This is supposedly especially true of their foreign policy legacy: the “freedom agenda.” They went as far as to claim the “Arab Spring” as vindication.

    Bush and the neoconservatives are unlikely to ever find their swan song adequately praised in history manuals but by no means is foreign policy out of fashion as far as swan songs go.

    Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency for one was controversial enough but unlike Bush’s, his track record may yet be vindicated. (more…)

  • Beyond the Reset: Reverse “Nixon Goes to China”

    When President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, opened up relations with China in the 1970s, it was done in the context of needing a new lever in the Cold War, especially when the United States was still mired in Vietnam. The goal was for the United States to be closer to both China and the Soviet Union than either was to each other and to be able to swing back and forth between the two powers as needed depending on what the exigencies of the balance of power dictated.

    At that time, China was clearly the lesser power and required bolstering. The time for the United States to consider an inversion of that policy may soon become ripe.

    The strategic environment today is vastly different than when Nixon met Mao. The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is no more and China is rapidly ascending to the position of a global superpower. Under these conditions, the United States are struggling to manage a multiplicity of strategic interests in every major region of the world. Paramount among those are relations with China. (more…)

  • The Problem with “Zero Problem Neighborhood”

    While changes began in the foreign policy domain right from the onset of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, it was only in his second term, and after the nomination of Ahmet Davutoğlu, that Turkey’s foreign policy acquired a more “independent” flavor. Davutoğlu has been lauded for his “zero problem neighborhood” vision, but, as things stand today, there seems to be little merit for that praise.

    Foreign affairs is one of those portfolios with peculiar pros and cons: there can be plenty of popularity gains for a foreign minister, who gets to socialize with international leaders and opinionmakers, but there is also the inherent uncertainty of securing results as diplomacy depends on at least two interlocutors and the government he belongs to is but one of them.

    That said, it is one thing for a particular diplomatic initiative to founder into political oblivion; it is another altogether to turn a would-be close ally into a soon to be mortal enemy, as was the case recently in Turkish-Syrian relations. (more…)

  • Libya: French Soft Power in Retrospect

    If a state possesses sufficient “soft power,” it has acquired the ability to frame and shame events and actors in international relations. The ability to frame enables the protagonist to package a debate in terms that are conducive to its own interests. The power to shame refers to the possibility of trapping other countries rhetorically and changing their behaviour.

    The French role in last year’s intervention in Libya was a perfect example. (more…)

  • After Libya, Europe’s New Order in the Making

    For all his blunders, George W. Bush may forever be remembered for vindicating the notion of the “coalition of the willing.” Until the world wars, all military alliances were in fact ad hoc and it was only the messianic Western prejudices that followed the defeat of absolutism in World War I, fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War, that temporarily deluded the Western masses into thinking that an “alliance” should have a noble, morally righteous connotation.

    The campaign to oust Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya started as a simple ad hoc coalition led by Paris and London. Only later did it become embroiled in international politics with the likes of Rome and Berlin seeking to exercise some moderation by forcing the British and the French to accept NATO leadership and a subsequent bureaucratization of the intervention into inefficacy. (more…)

  • The Ants and the Grasshoppers

    The advent of new governments in many countries around the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century brought with it strategic indefinition. The reason is found in small systemic revolutions that some of these newcomers represented in terms of geopolitics. In such countries as Brazil, Japan and Turkey, the newcomers had been away from power for decades. Thus the elections that swept them into office were practically regime changes.

    The priority given to the worn out promise of “change” made foreign policy departments a prime target. Whereas during the Cold War ideological alternatives were available for different political factions, nowadays the primacy of the free-market model and of the Washington Consensus make alternative governance difficult. As a result, the perception of policy making is largely dependent on symbolism instead of substance. Hence, social conservatism and liberalism are being used as a political platform rather than economic policy. (more…)