Like many, I woke up in shock at the massive earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. The earthquake, centered in Gaziantep, has killed 3,000 as of Monday afternoon devastated southeast Turkey and northern Syria. In addition to Gaziantep, other affected Turkish cities...
Jarrod talks with Lisel Hintz of Johns Hopkins University and Sibel Oktay of the University of Illinois, Springfield and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs about the complex history of Turkey in...
US President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to a "Make America Great Again" campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 1, 2019. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL...
We open each of my undergrad classes with a discussion of current events. In the past four years, there have been several times that students have wondered whether a war may be about to break out:...
Syria’s civil-proxy war is on the cusp of turning into an all-out regional war, with negative repercussions for all involved in the conflict. The humanitarian disaster is at its most acute to date, with Russian forces systematically attacking the Syrian opposition and on the verge of a rout of Aleppo—and now Turkish ground forces engaging Kurdish forces across its border. With the U.S.-Russian ceasefire accord appearing unlikely to alter much on the ground, the time has come for the U.S., Europe, and the Saudi-led Gulf countries to make a decisive move to take the initiative back from...
This was another busy week in global politics and I'm going to highlight some of the best tweets in my Twitter feed. Before starting, however, I will acknowledge that this post is late. I believe my excuse is pretty good as it involves lots of late night baseball. I grew up in Kansas rooting for the local team -- and the Kansas City Royals are in the playoffs for the first time since winning the World Series in 1985. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, the Royals won three consecutive extra inning games. All ended after 1 am Eastern Time. I then had to read for 30 to 45 minutes after the long and...
It's the weekend, so it's time for the third edition of “Tweets of the Week.” My twitter feed was again filled with some interesting micro-blogging. By the way, I apologize for the way last week's home page post looked. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong with the images, though it seems to be fine once the reader clicks the link to Continue Reading. I hope readers can see the image at the top of this page. This week, the bombing campaign against ISIS/ISIL was ramped up thanks to new air strikes in Syria. I believe that most people in my feed are unenthusiastic about the entire enterprise...
So this post is a bleg to those of you who know more about alliances than me. I am considering writing this up for an article, so I thought I would ‘crowd-source’ early comments on the basic argument. I also wonder if someone elsewhere has already suggested this idea in the vast alliance literature. So please let me know. The motivation is inductive – the deepening tension between Japan and Korea has suggested the addendum to alliance theory I am proposing here. But I wonder if others have said this before. Put briefly, I don’t think entrapment or abandonment captures the US position between...
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Last December, I was in Doha to attend the UN's Alliance of Civilizations conference. While fighting off jet lag in my apartment--the 13 hour flight is a killer--I saw a commercial for 'Hareem al Sultan' (the Arabic version of the...
This is a guest post from Idean Salehyan, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas and the author of Rebels Without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Cornell Univ. Press, 2009).Reports have emerged that Turkey is supporting a group of military defectors from Syria, which have organized under the name, the ‘Free Syrian Army’ or FSA. Led by Riyad al-Asad, a former Colonel in Bashar Assad’s army, this group claims to have inflicted a series of impressive attacks against regime forces. Although the extent of Turkish involvement is still...
Although it received comparatively little attention in the US, the State Department's attempt to push for Turkish-Armenian normalization was one of the great foreign-policy follies of the early Obama Administration. There was little chance that the Turkish public would accept normalization absent some kind of Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) settlement; the political viability of normalization in Armenia wasn't much greater, particularly given hostility among the Armenian Diaspora to normalization sans recognition of the "Armenian Genocide." To make matters more fun, successful normalization would have...
James Traub reminds the Atlantic Community not to freak out over Turkey's "Neo-Ottoman foreign policy."It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter...