One of the most dangerous places in the Western Hemisphere is the city of Warnes, Bolivia, which lies a few kilometers outside the country’s industrial capital of Santa Cruz. There, set back in an open field off a bustling highway, is the new regional defense school of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas, or ALBA—the eight-member economic and geopolitical bloc founded by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro nearly a decade ago.
Since taking office in 2009, the Obama administration has made cybersecurity a major area of policy focus. The past year in particular has seen a dramatic expansion of governmental awareness of cyberspace as a new domain of conflict. In practice, however, this attention is still uneven. To date, it has focused largely on network protection and resiliency (particularly in the military arena) and on the threat potential of countries such as China and Russia. Awareness of what is perhaps the most urgent cybermenace to the U.S. homeland has lagged behind the times.
Amid signs that Armenia and Azerbaijan may once more be edging towards armed conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Wayne Merry argues that the West needs to act fast, rather than allow an old and fruitless mediation process to meander on.
After a two-year manhunt, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency last week arrested Colombian drug kingpin Javier Antonio Calle Serna, a senior leader of Los Rastrojos, one of the country’s most formidable drug-trafficking organizations. After being indicted last summer by the Eastern District of New York, Serna reportedly felt so squeezed by the agency and rival drug dealers that he began negotiating for his surrender.
Have we well and truly entered the “post-al-Qaeda era”? A year after Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. commandos, some experts and commentators are taking to the idea that the threat which preoccupied U.S. foreign policy for the past decade is now all but ancient history.