International

After negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika finally came to an end last August, the gaze of the world drifted away from Athens.

One country on the forefront of the battle against the Islamic State is Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, which has over the past year successfully crushed militant cells.

With atrocities taking place in Iraq and Syria, the international community must stop the oppression against certain groups. Indeed, the lesson of Rwanda has been almost entirely ignored in 2015.

By choosing the European route instead of the bilateral one to negotiate its trading relationship with Beijing the UK maximizes its leverage with both its European partners and China, which is useful for a medium-sized ex-colonial power.

In the face of perceived threats from Beijing, Vietnam has embarked on its greatest military build-up in decades, albeit starting from a low base following economic problems after the Vietnam War.

As the 21st Conference of Parties begins this week in Paris, for the first time in years, the prospect for serious, substantive international progress on climate issues is not bleak.

Should Beijing refuse to honor a potential ruling against their claims of sovereignty, we can expect China to again attempt to assert its economic muscle to persuade other regional nations to settle the disputes bilaterally.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently spoke at the UN General Assembly meeting on behalf of the Jewish state.

Last Monday, in a ceremony at Bangui airport, about 1,800 additional peacekeepers and police joined a mission under U.N. control in the battle-torn Central African Republic CAR), along with the previous contingent of 4,800 African troops and 1,000 international police. The new reinforcements have come from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Morocco and Bangladesh, joining others […]

  It is a volcano jumping between dormant and active stages and last month, it erupted again, spitting a litany of condemning editorials across global opinion pages that set ablaze United Nations’ inexcusable, uncompromising policy in Haiti, where the cholera epidemic, now entering its fourth year, killed more than 8,300 people and sickened another 650,000. […]

In a recent communication (see below) from the French Foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, announced a possible new reform of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Such announce is not surprising as France has been for quite some time been in favor of an enlargement of the U.N. Security Council, when declaring “France is in favour of […]

As the rebellion in Syria languishes on with little attention from the international community, a confidential report authored by the U.N. Security Council’s Group of Experts was leaked to Reuters. This is not the first time such a “leak” has occurred, which implicates the credibility of the Group of Experts or the U.N. itself. The […]

As historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” U.S. history has featured recurring waves of conspiracy theories. Sometimes they have become prominent; sometimes they abide below the surface. Nineteenth-century versions saw threats that were vague and ill-defined (Illuminati, Masons, Papists, Monarchists); more recent ones have depicted […]

Kofi Annan, on August 2, resigned as joint special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League for Syria, effective as of the end of the month. He had been assigned the difficult task — a “mission impossible,” as he himself put it — of negotiating a peaceful solution to the current crisis in […]

Per Obama’s proclamation last week, yesterday was United Nations Day.  So I’ll take the opportunity to respond to fellow blogger, Ben Moscovitch, of FPA’s Israel blog, who wrote: “does that moniker then also make it anti-Israel day”?  Moscovitch, like many others, misreads the nature of the UN’s bias. Moscovitch criticizes the UN because it “considers […]