Diplomacy & Crisis News

&#8220A moral imperative and a legal obligation,&#8221 protecting children should never be jeopardized by national interests, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, deploring that 2014 was one of the worst years in recent memory for children in countries affected by conflict.

The head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has appealed “in the name of humanity and common decency” for a halt to the worsening violence against children in South Sudan that has seen boys reportedly castrated and left to bleed to death and girls as young as eight who have been gang raped and murdered.

The cholera outbreak in Tanzania continues to spread among the populations in the country’s western Kigoma region amid an influx of refugees from neighbouring Burundi, the United Nations health agency warned today as it detailed its ongoing response aimed at stemming the epidemic.

Six million people in Yemen are slipping towards severe hunger and now need emergency food and life-saving assistance, “a sharp increase” from the last quarter of 2014, according to a new joint study by two United Nations organizations.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today welcomed the release of Pope Francis’ Papal Encyclical in which the leader of the Catholic Church deplored climate change as one of the principal challenges facing humanity and called for a ‘new dialogue’ about shaping the future of our planet.

En Syrie, en Irak, la progression des djihadistes de l’EI continue de mettre à nu la vacuité des choix de la coalition internationale. Longtemps en poste à Damas, Peter Harling, de l'International Crisis group, analyse ce fiasco comme une absence de stratégie, non pas militaire, mais de reconstruction du pays. « On ne se pose pas le problème du jour d’après », estime le chercheur.

The international community is experiencing a dramatic shift in the situation facing the world’s refugees as a global surge in war, conflict and persecution has caused a record number of people to flee their homes in search of safety, the United Nations refugee agency reported today.

Noting that economic, political and social marginalization of Roma communities remains a major issue, a United Nations human rights expert urged thinking outside the “poverty paradigm” and adopting an integrated approach to address their plight.

The Security Council has emphasized the urgency for Libyan stakeholders to reach a political solution to the country’s crisis amid ongoing United Nations-facilitated talks.

The Obama administration is ready to drop a long-standing demand that Tehran open up about its secret missile research, provided Iran agrees to tough inspections going forward.

"Young people will not only be able to visit exhibits, but also drive and fly on military equipment, shoot military weapons, and do parachute jumps."

A U.S. drone strike killed Nasir al-Wuhayshi. But the real threat is AQAP’s elusive master bomb-maker.

The video depicts a towheaded correspondent turning a blind eye to violence and abuse in Gaza.

A new oil field near Venezuela could be the miracle Maduro was waiting for. There's just one problem — it's in territory claimed by Guyana.

In a country that brooks no dissent, Nasrin Sotoudeh's remarkable solo protest keeps finding unlikely allies.

If the IMF wants to keep Beijing in the tent, it's time to reward China's progress on making its currency more free market-friendly.

China isn’t ready to supply the rest of the world with RMB. So why does it matter if the currency gets the IMF's stamp of approval?

Obama's massive Asia trade deal lives to see another day. But its ultimate fate is still a mystery.

South Africa just let the dictator of Sudan fly home — that's bad news for the International Criminal Court.

The majority of the estimated 250,000 people displaced by the Houthi conflict scattered across the vast landscape of north Yemen, seeking shelter and food among the local rural populations.
Photo: Hugh Macleod / IRIN / 201003170737560353

U.S. policymakers face many difficult choices in pursuing rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran. There is little chance that Iran and the Arab monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia, can countenance each another’s respective aspirations. The U.S. is trying to make a deal with Iran while still tying itself to the demands of its other security partners in the region.

Iran’s ambitions are not new or “revolutionary”: Before the overthrow of the last Shah, a number of modern Iranian leaders had hegemonic aspirations in the Gulf, expressed in terms of past imperial grandeurs. The revolution in 1979 unleashed a torrent of anti-Americanism, but it did not diminish Iranian leaders’ aspirations. Instead, it emboldened them, as they were now animated by true revolutionary zeal, and not the reactionary imaginations of some “pan-Iranists” who called for a “Greater Iran.”

Today, such naked ethnic supremacism holds little stock among even the most hardline Iranian policymakers. While Supreme Leader Khomeini expressed himself in religious terms, he and his colleagues still yearned for national greatness beyond Iran’s borders, to export their model of governance so that would be surrounded by far friendlier regimes. Now they must balance this desire with the realization that their rule cannot survive without better international relations and a lessening of economic sanctions.

Iranian leaders still fear that offensive action might topple them from power — they know full well Western powers could stoke discontent against the ruling class — but they also want be feared and treated as equals. Iranian influence is seen in much of the Arab world as Shia, Persian chauvinism – an unsurprising view given the way Tehran carries itself. But that chauvinism is only exceeded in pretensions by the chauvinism of the Gulf States arrayed against the so-called Shia Crescent.

These Arab powers have many of the same underlying fears of their own citizenry that Iranian leaders do, though there are several notable differences. For one, the Arab states are not under the same sanctions as Iran and need to fear the socioeconomic impact of decades-long censure. Yet the underlying economic and political contracts they have with their subjects are under strain, because of the simple fact that people cannot be bought off forever, especially those who seek to overthrow the state, remove all “undesirables,” and institute a new Islamist order. Yet even with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) at the House of Saud’s doorstep, the Gulf States collectively seem to fear dissidents who may look to the Islamic Republic even more – and do too little to quell the extremist messaging emanating from their own religious establishments that has empowered ISIS and AQAP.

This shortsightedness is why the outcome of the current Gulf-led intervention in Yemen will prove decisive. Saudi leadership has sought to build up a consensus on Yemen among other predominantly Sunni nations. In drawing in as many of these countries as possible, including apparent outliers such as Sudan, Malaysia and Senegal, they wish to obscure that any political solution Riyadh finds acceptable will be unacceptable to many Yemenis.

Iran, for its part, seems content to let the coalition bleed itself. The previous beneficiary of Saudi (and American) largesse, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was tossed aside in 2011 not because he suddenly discovered reform or sided with the Houthis (as he did after losing power), but because he had so badly bungled things that domestic unrest threatened to embolden al Qaeda – which, we now learn, may have deeply infiltrated his security services. Riyadh fails to realize that its actions could deepen the quagmire that Saleh dug himself into with U.S. military assistance.

For now, the U.S. is content to distance itself from the Saudi campaign over Yemen while pursuing a grand bargain with Tehran. The coming months will tell if this remains doable, or if Washington will have to truly set down the rationale for its courting of Tehran while still upholding sanctions and arming the Gulf Arab and Israeli militaries.

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