Atlantic Council

The Benghazi controversy’s return to Washington’s raging partisan wars continues to portray our political culture at its worst.

Algeria may be teetering on the brink of a crisis, with the three pillars of the regime’s stability—its powerful military, abundant revenues from hydrocarbons, and the façade of a democratic political system—beginning to crumble. Despite the lack of attention in Western media, Algeria is undergoing what could be viewed as a pre-revolt stage, as the state faces simultaneous security, social, and political challenges.

“It is my responsibility as a leader of a founder member of the European Union...to pull Europe out of this torpor that has gripped it, and to reduce people’s disenchantment with it.  If Europe stays in the state it is in now, it could be the end of the project.”  Europe owes French President Francois Hollande a deep debt of gratitude.

As preparations continue for an international conference aimed at jump-starting intra-Syrian negotiations to be held in Geneva in mid-June, the prospective value of the initiative is increasingly in doubt. Bashar al-Assad is making it clear to the news media that he intends to stay on and run for president in 2014, something that cannot happen if the June 2012 Geneva formula is implemented faithfully and accurately by Syrian negotiators.

All of we Brits of a certain age remember the film.  Richard Todd  coolly leading his elite squadron of Lancaster bombers into attack the Mohne, Eder, and Sorpe dams.  British stiff-upper lip and brilliant “bouncing bomb” technology combining against the backdrop of a stirring but peculiarly 1950s soundtrack to deal the Nazis a crippling blow

As part of a larger (but, unfortunately, gated) story on how the terrific new Global Data on Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) might help social scientists forecast violent conflicts, the New Scientist recently posted some graphics using GDELT to chart the ongoing civil war in Syria. Among those graphics was this time-series plot of violent events per day in Syria since the start of 2011

Kenneth Waltz, the most important Realist theorist of the last half-century, died Monday, a few weeks before his 89th birthday.

Early this week, the world looked to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a response to the bombings in Reyhanli that killed 47 people and left more than 100 wounded. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Turkey since the 2003 Istanbul bombings, shocking the nation and fueling anxiety over the war in neighboring Syria.

As expected, the National Front (BN) coalition won Malaysia’s May 5 election, but not without widespread allegations of electoral fraud, including the use of Bangladeshi migrants as illegal voters and other gerrymandering tactics. The opposition People’s Pact (PR) coalition leader Anwar Ibrahim refused to concede defeat and held a protest rally on May 8, attended by about 100,000.

Here at a conference on Professional Military Education, attention is being focused on one small sliver of the largest challenge facing militaries in general and Western forces in particular: People.