Journal of International Studies

With Iran being among the major stakeholders in Syria, debates continue over the country's potential role in the settlement of the Syrian crisis. U.S.-Iran rapprochement opens new political opportunities for the Islamic Republic. Source: AP  On Monday, Oct. 7, the spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department suggested that the United States might accept Iran's participation in the long-awaited Geneva-II conference that is expected to establish Syria's transitional government. The U.N.-backed Geneva conference is an attempt by the United States and Russia to bring stakeholders to the table in order to reach a consensus on how to settle the civil war in Syria. The participants are looking to implement the Geneva Communiqué that was issued at the Geneva-I conference in June 2012. The communiqué establishes a framework for diplomatic resolution of the crisis and seeks to create a transitional government formed on the basis of mutual consent of the government and the oppos...

Why the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are increasingly at odds. BY COLUM LYNCH   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 When Saudi Arabia  rejected  its U.N. Security Council seat on Friday, the move caught nearly everyone off-guard. In retrospect, it shouldn't have. In recent months, the United States has increasingly pursued a foreign policy at odds with its Persian Gulf ally, scaling back assistance to the Saudi-backed Egyptian military, abruptly dropping its plans to attack Syria despite Saudi support, and entering into a new round of nuclear talks with the kingdom's  regional rival, Iran. According to U.N. diplomats and officials, the Security Council move merely reflected the Saudis' deeper anxiety over the course of American diplomacy in the Middle East, exposing a deepening rift in one of America's most important and longstanding alliances in the region. In short, Saudi Arabia's U.N. snub was a sign of the monarchy's mounting panic over the possible demise of its ...

Chinese citizens don't think their government should have a monopoly on rumors. BY DAVID WERTIME   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 "Official rumors" is more than just an oxymoron. The phrase -- pronounced  guanyao  -- has become a useful weapon in Chinese Internet users' linguistic guerrilla warfare against government censorship. That battle has intensified during a government-led  crackdown  on "online rumor-mongering," which has sought to rein in China's rambunctious social media, partly through the arrest  or  detention  of several high-profile online opinion leaders. Making things worse for China's Internet users is a new judicial interpretation, issued on Sept. 9 by China's highest legal authorities, stating  that posting defamatory messages read more than 5,000 times or shared more than 500 times can lead to up to three years in jail. In the face of these assaults on their right to speak out, grassroots Chinese are trying to t...

Or why the Pentagon needs to think big and look to the past in order to prepare for the chaotic technowars of the future. BY P.W. SINGER   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 There's a famous (though, as with all great quotes, perhaps apocryphal) line attributed to Mark Twain that is often quoted as a guide to world leaders: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." With that quote in mind, for the last year I've been taking an informal poll of the joint chiefs who lead the U.S. military, asking each of them what period in history they think provides the most apt parallel to today. Interestingly, every single one of them has answered the same: the early 1990s, when the United States sharply pared back its military spending and   drew down the personnel size of its armed forces   following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These experiences were both painful for the military of that time (side note: most of the joint chiefs were midcareer officers at that...

A new report details the civilian costs of U.S. drone strikes -- and failures to compensate the families of victims.  BY LETTA TAYLER   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 On a sultry evening in August 2012, five men gathered under a cluster of date palms near the local mosque in Khashamir, a village of stone and mud houses in southeastern Yemen. Two of the men were locals and well known in their community. The other three were strangers. Moments later, U.S. drones tore across the sky and launched four Hellfire missiles at the men. The first three missiles killed four of the men instantly, blasting their body parts across the grounds of the mosque. The final strike took out the fifth man as he tried to crawl to safety. Yemen's Defense Ministry described the three strangers as members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group that the United States calls al Qaeda's most active branch. The men were killed, ministry officials said, while "meeting their fellows....