Two events in 2008 brought about substantial changes in the international system: the Russian invasion of Georgia and the international financial crisis, both of which highlighted the powerlessness of international institutions to deal with such events. The war in Georgia made it clear that unilateral US measures, including an American deployment in traditionally Russian zones of influence, revitalized the country's relations with the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in order to propose a regional vision on international security issues. On the other hand, the financial crisis originating in the United States has had repercussions on the world economy, causing, among other things, the volatility of international commodity prices and the retraction of investments in emerging economies. Governments are trying to apply corrective measures ad intra while seeking, externally, to create conditions to stabilize the financial situation from a cooperative perspective. In this context, American hegemony without the multilateralist complement, which means having international legitimacy, is an invitation to generate strategic counterweights. From the perspective of critical realism of geostrategic unilateralism, such as that of the Iraq war, could argue that if the world is to be governed, multilateralism is the way to go.
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Strategic communications is a key means of gaining acceptance of one's ideas, policies or courses of action. As such it plays a critical role in helping the United States to reinforce understanding of its values and culture — including support for its ideas, policies and courses of action — both within its war-fighting establishment and by the rest of the world. This article examines the historical actions of military chaplains to shed light on a critical aspect of their work; their ministries as strategic communications platforms from which they carry out a pastoral role while offering, as valued members of the military inner circle, religious, moral, spiritual and ethical advice to leadership, both at the strategic and tactical levels. It examines the role of the American military chaplaincy as a strategic communications phenomenon that predates the concept itself. A buzzword emanating from the 1990s that gained even greater currency in the September 11, 2001 global "war of ideas" — "strategic communications" might appear to be a new concept. Yet for centuries military chaplains have labored as strategic communicators in an effort to win support within the armed forces for their countries' national policy and doctrine.
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This essay analyzes the relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Colombia in the strategic context of the region. It begins with an analysis of why growing relations between China and the region are a key security and defense issue, despite the mainly economic nature of the relationship. It continues with an analysis of China's strategic interests in Colombia within the framework of general interests in the region, which include access to primary products, access to markets, isolating Taiwan, and fostering a secure environment for China's rise in the world. He concludes that relations between Colombia and the People's Republic of China in recent years have been primarily commercial in nature, with multiple strategic implications for Colombia, including the evolution of its trade structure, the increase in human trafficking, and the indirect empowerment of irregular forces and external threats in its neighborhood, and that China-Colombia-US relations should be understood as a triangle in which the development of one party impacts the others, but with opportunities to collaborate, including defense and criminality issues that involve the entire region.
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In this paper, we examine whether the 1990s neoliberal reforms, commonly known as the Washington Consensus, which many Latin American nations implemented, ultimately impacted US national security. Given the rise of leftist regimes in Argentina and Venezuela coupled with the distancing of former allies in Brazil and Chile, we ask whether these reforms, meant to strengthen US national security, harmed it instead. We briefly review the literature on the causes of the Latin American economic crises, which led to the Washington Consensus and explore the various methods of reform implementation in four countries of strategic interest to the United States: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. Examining whether the reforms, in general, were successful, we consider competing theories on the success (or the failure) of the reforms in these countries. Reviewing evidence on the reforms' impact on these nations, we discuss whether or not the reforms should be abandoned. We find that while stakeholders held competing objectives and divergent opinions existed on the scope, type, and speed of the reforms, the reforms appear to have improved economic growth and reduced poverty. We argue that, despite associating neoliberal reforms with increasing anti-American sentiment, Latin American support for free trade and other aspects of the neoliberal reforms remains strong. For this reason, we argue that the United States should reinvigorate support for these reforms.
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This paper analyzes the process of integration designed by the Presidents of the Republic of Cuba and Venezuela, based on the doctrinaire socialist ideology of the two leaders, through the Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement, aimed at promoting and fomenting the progress of their respective economies and obtaining reciprocal advantages, and of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which agreement expands on and modifies the Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement. It constitutes an alliance whose purpose is to establish Latin American-Caribbean leadership through international cooperation in various sectors, and to change the correlation of international forces, establishing a multipolar world and creating a new international political order in which the interest of the people prevails. With this purpose in mind, the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean and their position as a swing vote in international decision-making, which will make them sovereign in their decisions and masters of their own fate, is being sought. In addition, substituting products from the region for products from outside countries, and the use of petroleum as a negotiating tool, is proposed.
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This presentation addresses the subject of the war against terrorism and the implication that the Armed Forces in it is a topic that is itself polemic. However, it is possible to argue in favor of a moderate and contained insertion from a theoretical basis that, departing from M. Creveld and M. Kaldor in terms of the new types of armed violence, suggests that the concept of war can be applied post- September 11 to a series of conflicts that were being profiled from before that event, linked to large-scale political violence. It is a subject of defense entities inasmuch as it influences or disrupts security, but it has fewer armed implications under conditions of institutional stability if the action concentrates on the nature of the economic action that supports terrorist and criminal activities. The author postulates that weak states can define a supranational strategy that will coordinate and produce a strangulation of illegal funding sources, given that the illegal financing circuits are the same for terrorism as for transnational organized crime, which are not certainly the same thing, but represent threats of new nature for the region's states.
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The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the policy of Ad Hoc alliances or "coalitions of the willing" in the Bush administration in connection with the war on terrorism. The emergence of such represents an international-level policy designed to effectively combat the threats that disturb the global scenario as a whole, but that also generate divisions within the international community at the time that they are defined and, therefore, create dissension when it comes time to consider the best way to combat them. This paper concludes that Latin America should move toward participating and extending its participation in coalitions of the willing, due to the fact that permanent regional multilateral efforts are difficult to achieve, because of the wide scope of the existing threats and because of the increasing polarization existing in the region regarding the US
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The essay examines the impact of military assistance on the levels of state violence against civilians during civil wars. Azam and Hoeffler argue that outside funding raises the levels of counterinsurgent brutality. This essay claims that this may be true for development assistance, but not for military aid. Using data from Peru and El Salvador, it is suggested that military aid may sometimes be inversely related to the levels of violence against civilians. This is explained by two factors. First, development aid only increases the funding of brutal regimes, whereas military assistance can also induce them to abandon brutality. Second, while traditional military aid programmes have been driven mostly by strategic concerns, those implemented in Peru and El Salvador also incorporated human rights considerations.
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The attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 changed dramatically the dynamic and nature of North American relations, igniting interest in closer cooperation among the three countries, especially on issues relating to security, border patrol and immigration. This renewed interest in strengthening collaboration in North America has crystallized into a call for the establishment of a "North American Security Perimeter." The three North American countries have taken several significant steps to strengthen collaboration on security matters. In effect, security cooperation within the continent has never been as strong, and it has in fact been institutionalized between Mexico and the US on some levels. Nonetheless, despite this new level of continental security cooperation, this article advances the argument that we are still far from the establishment of an international regime that would resemble anything close to a security perimeter. Instead, it is argued that what we are witnessing is the emergence of an informal North American security system that has unfolded along the two traditional axes that have historically characterized North American relations: the US-Canada relationship and the US-Mexico relationship.
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