I have a piece on the ongoing North Korean political transition at African Scene, a new-ish group blog started by my friend John Stupart. Check it out – and the rest of the site too.

Count me among those who think that the Nobel Committee has made a mockery of itself by awarding the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. I say this, incidentally, as someone who supports many of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives. However, even in those cases where Obama’s policies are both well-intentioned and well-conceived (for example, pushing for [...]

On paper, the prospects for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis seem pretty good right now. In the past, Iranian foreign policy has often appeared wild and unpredictable: Iran has lied about its nuclear facilities and provocatively test-fired missiles, all the while issuing bellicose rhetoric on the evils of Israel and America. Last [...]

Muammar Gaddafi often comes across as a nutjob, travelling around with his amazon bodyguard and having himself crowned “king of kings”. And his long, rambling, intemperate speech at the UN Security Council yesterday certainly contained its fair share of crazy. However, I’ve suggested before that Gaddafi has more tactical acumen than the media gives him [...]

Khaya Dlanga touches on something that has annoyed me about the Brandon Huntley controversy: the extent to which South Africans have engaged in gratuitous Canada-bashing: A lot of people seem to have missed the point. It was not the Canadian government that gave the famed and now much vilified Huntley refugee status. It was not [...]

Eusebius McKaiser and Sasha Polakaw-Suranksky try to make sense of Barack Obama’s Africa policy: Obama’s Africa policy is essentially premised on the promotion of — insistence on, even — good governance. This policy is touted not just as an intrinsic good for Africa but also, as Hillary Clinton said at the Eighth African Growth and [...]

Marc Lynch’s Foreign Policy article on rap feuds as a metaphor for international relations is well worth reading. A sample: Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He’s #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable [...]

I’ll be on CNBC tomorrow at 6:30am, discussing Libyan foreign policy.

During Thabo Mbeki’s presidency, I argued on several occasions that South Africa’s confrontational foreign policy towards the United States did not advance our national interests, to which the then-Department of Foreign Affairs essentially responded by saying that this was a lie, and that their US policy was not confrontational at all. Thus I was intrigued [...]

by Mayibuye Magwaza So, the new Madagascan president has gone to the EU, asking them to keep the aid money flowing. South Africa (and the African Union in general) is backing the current talks, after Zuma rejected any notion of using force. Meanwhile, the Mail and Guardian reports that Ravalomanana has been talking to strange [...]

See, this is example of why Robert Kaplan is so awesome. I’ve read plenty of interesting commentary on the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, but almost all of it focuses on local issues: how did the government’s counterinsurgency campaign work?; how has the Tamil civilian population been affected?; etc. By contrast, Kaplan [...]

Michael Trapido has a very strange post on Zimbabwe, arguing that the United States should lift its sanctions on Zimbabwe because to do otherwise would be inconsistent with Obama’s policy on Iran: As Africans living in the SADC, a healthy Zimbabwe would be of benefit to the region as a whole. Moreover if Ahmadinejad is [...]

As a fan of contrarian political analysis, I’ve enjoyed reading reading Daniel Larison’s take on the Iranian elections. (See here, here and here, for example.) A sample: We pick sides like this all the time, and when we do it is almost always arbitrary, ill-informed and mistaken. For various reasons, one side in a contest [...]

Noah Millman has a very good post on the Iranian election and what it means for US foreign policy, which is well worth reading in its entirety. I was particularly intrigued by this observation: What will happen next? I would assume that much depends, as it did in China in 1989, on what the military [...]

Iran has exploded into mass protest and violence, in the wake of a rigged election that once again installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The situation on the ground is currently changing too rapidly to keep up with, but I’ve been trying to follow developments on several blogs, including Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole. In brief, [...]

The president of Niger is behaving like, well, a tin-pot dictator: It appears that Niger has now become the fifth African country to suffer a coup in the past year. It is a disturbing development, undermining the trend towards democracy in the continent as a whole, and it should be of particular concern to Canada, [...]

Reflecting on the demise of the Tamil Tigers, Christopher Hitchens writes the following: Deciding to fight as a conventional army that belonged to a separate state, the LTTE has now been defeated as a conventional army, and its state has ceased to exist. Not since the British defeated the Malayan Communists, who were too much [...]

While the Obama Administration has been focussed mainly on the so-called “AfPak” problem, the violence in Somalia has escalated to the point where it now ranks as one of the world’s most dangerous crises. The conflict became even worse this weekend, with the radical group al-Shabab carrying out an Iraq-style suicide bomb attack in Mogadishu. [...]

A related question is whether realism is actually part of the Republican Party’s intellectual DNA. Philip Zelikow says no, not really: As a historian, I think one of the more remarkable things about the Nixon-Kissinger approach to great power relations and détente is actually how anomalous it was in comparison to the record of America’s [...]

There’s an interesting discussion right now on Foreign Policy about the future of realism and the Republican Party. Daniel Drezner kicks things off with this post, to which Will Inboden responds: [T]he debates within Republican circles that I recall from inside and that I have found most interesting outside tend to be fairly pragmatic — [...]