Conflict Prevention

Susanna Kalaris an intern in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. As Americans flocked to polling stations on November 8, United Nations peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were hit by a grenade blast that killed one and injured thirty-two others. Since 1999, the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), and its successor, MONUSCO, have deployed peacekeepers to implement a ceasefire, disarm combatants, and protect civilians following an international war that killed an estimated 5.4 million people between 1996 and 2003 and plunged the country into economic and political chaos. Yet despite more than seventeen years, twelve billion dollars spent, and twenty-thousand personnel dispatched across the country, the peacekeeping missions have left an unfulfilled mandate and a local government that recognizes and profits from its failures. President Joseph Kabila and his government are emboldened to maintain the political status quo; while peacekeeping troops struggle to contain violence, the government violates democratic processes and civil rights with impunity, knowing MONUSCO will not stop it anytime soon. Like some other notorious UN peacekeeping missions, MONUSCO has failed to intervene as rebel forces attacked civilians and outraged those they are meant to protect. In November 2012, as the M23 insurgent group invaded the city of Goma, fleeing civilians were passed by trucks full of peacekeepers themselves escaping the rebels. M23 troops went on to take Goma without resistance from the better-equipped and more numerous MONUSCO forces. The peacekeepers drew both international and local criticism: France called their actions “absurd,” and young Congolese deemed them “useless” and “dismissed.” During a rebel attack in June 2014, at least thirty civilians were killed in the two days it took for MONUSCO forces to respond to calls for help in South Kivu. In August of this year, rebel fighters massacred at least fifty civilians with impunity, prompting over two thousand protestors to decry the lack of action from MONUSCO. These instances of inaction have powerful consequences not only for the victims of attacks, but for the future of the DRC. Since succeeding his father in 2001, President Kabila has presided over a government plagued by corruption, instability, and civil rights violations. Between June 2014 and May 2015, the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office reported numerous violations of the rights to free speech and assembly, including suspending opposition radio and television programs and blocking citizens’ access to text messaging and internet services. The government has also used force against opponents, as in January 2015 when national security forces killed at least twenty unarmed protestors. The arrests and deaths of demonstrators and opposition leaders across the DRC foreshadowed Kabila’s latest exploit, postponing presidential elections until 2018 and violating presidential term limits. Political violence has since escalated throughout the country—clashes between police and civilians protesting Kabila’s postponement left seventeen people dead in September. Critics have explained Kabila’s violation of the constitution and civil rights solely as an attempt to cling onto power, but it can also be considered a result of the inefficacy of MONUSCO forces. MONUSCO’s mistakes set an example of weakness that allows the political climate in the DRC to endure and even worsen, as it has in the past months. The failures of MONUSCO troops to protect the civilian population demonstrate to Kabila and his government that an international force has little power to affect change within his country. Consequently, Kabila is empowered to repress speech, arrest opposition voices, and use deadly force with impunity. As long as peacekeeping troops fail to create positive change in the DRC, the government can continue the current climate of violence and repression can continue without accountability. While many scholars advocate for better-equipped troops, more specific mandates, or flexible forces in the DRC, what is missing is accountability. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon regularly condemns rebel attacks on civilians, though there is neither criticism nor rebuke for the inaction of peacekeepers and their commanders. A UN Office of Internal Oversight Services report acknowledges several reasons why peacekeepers fail to protect civilian populations, but its few recommendations—like publishing “self-contained guidance” and increasing reporting of failures—lack teeth. Only by holding forces and their commanders accountable with tangible consequences will troops fully commit to their mandates and the populations they are asked to protect. If the UN truly held MONUSCO forces in the DRC responsible, and if peacekeepers fulfilled their mandate, President Kabila and his government would find their impunity greatly curbed and the opportunities to repress democracy interrupted. No longer would their rule be immune to the civil rights and democratic processes that are essential to a lasting peace.

I have a new column today on Foreign Policy—“Trump Is Less Hawkish Than Hillary. Who Cares?”—which summarizes my evaluation of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s foreign-policy positions. I have published a number of pieces focusing on both candidates, from Clinton’s call for a no-fly zone in Syria, to Trump’s convenient amnesia about strongly endorsing a U.S. ground intervention in Libya in February 2011. This campaign has been marked more by perceptions of the candidates’ behavior, temperaments, and familial or professional connections than actual policies. However, based upon the limited and skewed available information about their likely foreign policies, Donald Trump would be a far more dangerous and destabilizing Commander in Chief. He has not demonstrated any improved understanding of the basic principles, laws, and behaviors that govern the foreign policymaking process, nor the manner in which states routinely interact with each other. Far worse is his unwillingness to acknowledge when he has changed his mind, or learned from others. Instead, he has consistently lied about his past positions, and, when asked who he listens to on foreign policy, stated “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.” My new column details five consequential foreign policy issues on which Trump has demonstrated his misinformed and dangerous opinions. To take just one example: Trump either has no understanding of U.S. conventional military power, or is being intentionally misleading about the capabilities of the armed forces. He inaccurately defames the most globally committed and powerful military in world history as being “very weak” and “seriously depleted,” and led by generals who “have been reduced to rubble to a point where it’s embarrassing to our country.” Other than repeating the Reagan “peace through strength” mantra with zero context, Trump has given little indication what sorts of military missions he would support. He opposes using U.S. ground troops for “nation-building,” but has repeatedly endorsed using them in Iraq (and in Libya in 2011) to coercively extract the country’s oil and natural gas. This is an illegal act of aggression fit for King Leopold II of Belgium, not a U.S. president. For more on my final analysis on this campaign, read here.

I spoke with Dara Kay Cohen, assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, about her book, Rape During Civil War. To better understand this underexamined wartime atrocity, Dara built an original dataset and conducted extensive interviews in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, and El Salvador, including with perpetrators and victims. We discuss Dara’s research and her counterintuitive findings, which indicate that rape is often used as a tactic by some groups in civil wars to bond militants. We also talk about the role of academic research in informing policy, and Dara gives advice to young scholars considering a career in academia. A fascinating conversation with a thoughtful and brilliant scholar.

During yesterday’s third and (mercifully) final presidential debate, Republican candidate Donald Trump stated explicitly what he has hinted at for months: he will not agree ahead of time to accept the results of the election on November 8. When asked directly by moderator Chris Wallace, Trump only promised: “I will look at it at the time.” Wallace pressed further by explaining the American tradition of a peaceful transition of power, and inquiring, “Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?” The candidate, trailing Hillary Clinton by 6.4 percent in averaged national polls and forecasted a 12.7 percent likelihood of winning, replied: “What I’m saying is I’ll tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” It cannot be overstated how serious and potentially harmful Trump’s comments are. Hillary Clinton responded accurately: “That’s horrifying.” It is possible that he flip-flops on this position, as he has on many over the past fourteen months. During the first debate on September 26 when moderator Lester Holt asked if he would accept the results of the election, Trump eventually admitted: “The answer is, if she wins, I will absolutely support her.” However, the candidate’s assertion last night must be taken more seriously, as it his final statement on the matter before a national audience, and it echoes what he and his campaign surrogates have been increasingly proclaiming over the past month. Trump alone has pledged to “get a special prosecutor” to look into Clinton’s background, adding “you’d be in jail.” He has encouraged his followers to monitor polling places exclusively in inner cities—“Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago”—a transparent call for intimidation of minority voters. He has pre-alleged fraud in the voting process and in the counting of votes. Most disturbingly, Trump has transitioned from making a general case for his presidency, to warning that the election is the “last chance” to save the United States. As he yelled on Tuesday in Colorado, “This is our final shot. Either we win this election or we lose our country. I mean that. I really believe that this is the last time. This is it folks. This is it.” Trump almost certainly does not realize how closely this echoes revolutionary movements, like the Khmer Rouge, or apocalyptic leaders, like the People’s Temple prophet Jim Jones. However, the pivot from mere ideology to “last chance” eschatology may heighten the stakes for his ardent and true believers. If they actually think the United States “ends” in some way if Hillary Clinton is sworn in as president, even some small percentage could reject the outcome and instigate politically-motivated vandalism or violence. In almost any other country in the world, this escalating rhetoric by a candidate to be leader of state would be early warning indicators of potential electoral violence and political instability. The peaceful transition of power is among the core principles of the U.S. Constitution and of functioning democracies. The United States by most relative objective measures is not the deeply corrupted and nondemocratic country that the Trump campaign seems to believe. It receives a ten, or “full democracy” rating, in the Polity data series and got the highest score for political rights and civil liberties in the latest Freedom House rankings. Today, on Good Morning America Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway conceded that the candidate respected the principles of democracy, but added: “Unless the results are actually known, certified and verified, he’s not going to concede the election.” According to the National Archives and Record Administration, there are five deadlines for states to certify the election outcomes, and submit them to the Congress. It is only on January 6, 2017, that Congress will meet in a joint session to count the electoral votes. If no candidate receives 270, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution allows the House to decide the Presidency. This means that Trump could enjoy fifty-nine days of media mentions and vitriolic tweeting before deciding how to concede his likely defeat. During this timeframe, he may manufacture a constitutional crisis to further compel his supporters to react angrily, or simply to sustain public attention for the launch of a media empire. Should Trump overwhelmingly lose on November 8, hopefully he takes the responsible and dignified step of graciously accepting defeat that same evening. Sadly, given his recent statements and outlandish comment last night, we cannot assume that this will be the case. We could be in for nearly two more months of a denigration of American constitutional principles and questioning of the foundations of democratic governance.

In last night’s presidential debate, it took little time for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to bring up the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Responding to moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about a leaked recording of Trump bragging about groping women, Trump promised that he would “knock the hell out of ISIS.” For the amount of time spent by both candidates talking about defeating terrorists, viewers might think that they pose the greatest threat to the United States. Terrorism may pose a significant threat to U.S. national interests, but the time, attention, and resources spent on countering it may also be distracting policymakers from other, more serious, sources of instability in the world. To successfully address threats, U.S. policymakers must first understand which potential contingencies they should focus their time and resources on most directly. After election day, the new administration and the 115th Congress will have little time to decide how they will craft policies to address the sources of instability and conflict that could affect the United States. To assist policymakers in anticipating and planning for international crises that threaten U.S. national interests, we at the Center for Preventive Action are again conducting our ninth Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS). The annual PPS evaluates ongoing and potential violent conflicts and sources of instability based on the impact they would have on U.S. interests as well as their likelihood of occurring in the coming year. See, and evaluate, the results for 2016 for yourself. What threats and conflicts are you worried will emerge or escalate in 2017? Please tell us your suggestions in this survey. Keep your responses short and to the point, but feel free to explain why the contingency is important. Compelling suggestions will be included in this year’s survey, which will be published in December. Take our three-minute survey here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/PPS2017.

Niall Henderson is an Interdepartmental Program Assistant at the Council on Foreign Relations. On September 14, Ukraine initiated arbitration against the Russian Federation for violations of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, with specific reference to access of energy resources off the coast of Ukraine and Russian-annexed Crimea. This development follows the Russian seizure of Crimean oil rigs in the Black Sea in late 2015, and the installation of rigs bearing Russian flags in the area more recently. Regardless of the outcome of the litigation, the escalation of Russian-Ukrainian tensions has serious consequences for European energy security. Ukraine lies at a critical juncture between Europe and Russia, and therefore its ability to resist Russian energy securitization has widespread implications for the European Union (EU) as well as for U.S. strategic options in the region. In September 2016, the EU imported 53 percent of its total energy, with natural gas imports from Gazprom (the energy titan whose majority ownership is the Russian government) increasing by 20 billion cubic meters from 2010 to 2015. In sum, over a third of the EU’s oil and gas are imported from Russia. Forty percent of this passes through Ukraine, leading to the precarious vulnerability that the EU is now struggling to surmount. Using energy as a political weapon, Russia has cut off gas to Ukraine multiple times in so-called “gas wars” in 2006 and 2009. The resulting disruptions resulted in severe fallout for the EU overall—the 2009 shutdown, for example, resulted in a complete cutoff of all Russian gas to Europe for two weeks in the middle of January. European governments were forced to scramble for alternative fuels, close factories, and declare national states of emergency. In the city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, alone, seventy thousand apartments were completely without heat in below freezing temperatures. The role of Russian energy manipulation vis-à-vis Ukraine increased significantly after the annexation of Crimea. Following the invasion, Russia seized a natural gas terminal in the Ukrainian town of Strelkovoye (less than five miles from the Crimean border), later manipulating its gas outflows. The 2015 “Black Energy” cyber attacks on Ukrainian power distribution centers in the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk left over 230,000 without power. With sufficient reason to blame Russia, as well as strong findings from Ukrainian intelligence services indicating Russian responsibility, the attacks demonstrate the continued efforts by Russia to convey and maintain control of energy supplies. More overtly, Gazprom’s current Nord Stream II proposal constitutes a Russian attempt to diversify its control and ability to manipulate energy. The pipeline would go directly from Russia to Germany, notably bypassing Ukraine amidst the country’s efforts to increase domestic production and sourcing from Europe. However, the existing Nord Stream I pipeline is only operating at 50 percent capacity, rendering the actual transportation value of Nord Stream II useless, and revealing its underlying political drivers. To combat its energy insecurity the EU has taken steps towards reducing the region’s vulnerability to Russian energy control and manipulation. Of particular note is the 2014 Energy Union, intended to synchronize EU distribution networks and diversify energy sources as well as the October 2014 stress tests to check the EU’s ability to handle a cutoff of Russian gas transported through Ukraine. However, these efforts are not sufficient. Earlier this year, the EU commissioner for climate action and energy, Miguel Arias Cañete, highlighted how much is left to be done. He claimed: “We are still far too vulnerable [to disruption of gas supplies]. With political tensions on our borders still on a knife edge, this is a sharp reminder that this problem is not just going to go away.” EU coordination ills and differing priorities on Energy Union goals plague the EU’s ability to truly ensure its energy security in the face of Russian incursions. Furthermore, the regulatory body in charge of enforcing Energy Union policy, the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, was originally only able to offer “opinions” and “recommendations” with no coercive power. Though it has since adopted such power, it has only issued three binding decisions. Since the 2009 formation of the joint U.S.-EU Energy Council, transatlantic energy security has been a stated objective of the United States. The most recent statement from the body, released in May, highlights the importance of Ukraine as a transit hub and calls for improvement of EU energy security. As the United States increases its exports of natural gas (estimates indicate the United States could match Russian exports to Europe within ten years) as well as oil, thanks to the lifting of a forty-year ban, the stage is set for the United States to change the balance of EU-Russian energy transactions. However, this all comes in the face of the United States’ own concerns over its energy dependency on the Middle East. Additionally, as tensions with Russia escalate over collapsed negotiations on Syria, the United States will have to clarify just how far it is willing to go in reference to Special Envoy for International Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein’s statement that “energy security and economic security in Europe is directly linked to our concern for [U.S.] national security, and we are committed to that.”

Dan Alles is an intern in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. At the 2016 Warsaw Summit last month, leaders from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced that they will deploy four multinational battalions to Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. This decision sends an important and reassuring message to the world at a time when some, like Donald Trump, are questioning the reliability and sustainability of the alliance altogether. Although Trump’s comments about burden-sharing have some merit, his judgements are misguided; weakening the current deterrence posture or abandoning the alliance would be disastrous for U.S. and global security. NATO is not only a collective deterrent against Russian aggression, but also a political and military organization that has adapted to meet twenty-first century challenges. Through these developments, NATO has become an indispensable part of U.S. security, and despite some limitations, it should not be abandoned. Although it was founded on the basis of collective defense, NATO broadened the scope of its missions over the past twenty-five years. Today, NATO is a leader in global crisis management and undertakes a wide variety of direct military operations to support this mission. These operations span the globe, from the alliance’s train and equip programs in Afghanistan, to its post-9/11 maritime surveillance programs in the Mediterranean Sea. This fall, NATO will also finalize plans to restart training and capacity building inside Iraq. NATO’s previous operation there, the NATO Training Mission-Iraq, concluded in 2011, but the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has pushed the alliance to return. NATO is able to take action to prevent conflicts in support of a United Nations mandate or at the invitation of a sovereign government. In accordance, NATO also maintains a peace-support presence of about 4,500 troops in Kosovo and continues to support the African Union in its peacekeeping and counter-piracy operations. NATO’s evolution since the fall of the Soviet Union resulted in an immensely integrated military alliance system with a global presence. As such, the benefits of NATO now transcend its direct military footprint and incorporate a variety of tactical advantages as well. These advantages include:           A ready-made multilateral coalition prepared to respond to crisis. A world without NATO would be one where, if the United States wanted to avoid acting unilaterally, it would have to construct a novel coalition for every conflict that arises. Not only would this take more time and cost more money, but it would also be less effective, as the alliance has already worked out its policies and procedures and shared its best practices.             Joint training and deterrence exercises. Conducting training exercises allows NATO to maintain a force readiness and deter potential antagonists. Moreover, joint exercises offer zero-consequence trial runs to test and validate new concepts in demanding crisis situations. This in turn improves the interoperability of both military and civilian organizations.             Consultation and sharing of assessments, military plans and intelligence. NATO is an effective vehicle for intelligence and information sharing among member states. Its mechanisms for intelligence sharing improves coherence among partners, including other international organizations like the United Nations and European Union.             Sharing of military resources and infrastructure. During the Gulf War, NATO did not take a direct role in combat operations, but cooperated to provide logistical support to member forces in region, including organizing transportation, landing rights, port use, air traffic control, and medical support. Similarly, though NATO is not involved in the current coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, member states contribute resources and facilities to the fight. Turkey’s Incirlik air base, where coalition troops fly sortie missions over Syria and Iraq, is just one example. According to U.S. Air Force data, there was a thirty percent increase in bombs dropped after missions from Incirlik began in 2015.   The overwhelming evidence for NATO’s strategic importance to the United States demonstrates that Trump’s comments about NATO were misguided. Moreover, approaching the alliance with threats to withdraw does not increase U.S. leverage in negotiations. Instead, it merely downplays U.S. leadership and emboldens Russia. In light of Russian action in Georgia and Crimea, and the extension of the Eurasian Economic Union—a trading bloc comprising Russia and former Soviet satellites—the United States should maintain its leadership role in NATO and encourage members to meet spending goals. Today, experts believe a Russian invasion of the Baltic Republics would be successful in a mere sixty hours, leaving NATO with limited bloody options to respond. The agreements at the Warsaw Summit were steps to increasing NATO’s defense posture, but more could be done to ensure that its tactical strengths are matched with an equally strong foundation for deterrence.

This blog post was coauthored with my research associate, Jennifer Wilson. Hillary Clinton has reportedly made reassessing U.S. strategy in Syria one of her first agenda items as president. With a history of generally backing interventions and statements of support for no-fly zones and safe zones on the record, an expanded intervention in Syria is likely should Clinton win. Plenty has been written over the past five years on the the risks and potential benefits of intervening in Syria. Consider how similarly invasive, dramatic, and potentially harmful decisions are made outside of foreign policy: an (admittedly unorthodox) analogy can be drawn between a president’s decision to intervene militarily and a surgeon’s decision to operate on a patient. Much as government officials can agree on strategic goals but disagree on policies, the decision to operate varies substantially from surgeon to surgeon—even when the same diagnosis is presented to them. To better understand why surgeons decide to recommend surgery, researchers led by Dr. Greg D. Sacks at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine surveyed doctors on their perceptions of risks and benefits of both operative and non-operative management. In one study, the authors presented 767 surgeons with four clinical vignettes in which the best course of action was not clear. They asked the doctors to judge the risks and benefits of operating and not operating and to decide whether they would recommend surgery. For example, the surgeons were asked to rate how likely an otherwise healthy 19-year-old woman is to face serious complications from an appendectomy, how likely she would be to recover fully, and the prospects of both complications and recovery if she did not go under the knife. As one might expect, surgeons were more likely to recommend an operation when the benefits of surgery outweighed the risks. However, across the four cases the doctors did not agree on whether to operate or not. In the case of the young woman’s appendix, they were split nearly down the middle, with 49 percent recommending surgery. Their decisions were informed by perceptions of risk, and those perceptions varied considerably—as much as 0 to 100 percent. Of course, defining and quantifying risks is difficult. To attempt to overcome this challenge, the authors conducted another study that exposed 395 surgeons to a “risk calculator,” which uses national data to estimate the likelihood of postoperative complications, then asked them and a control group of 384 to judge risks and decide whether to recommend surgery. The authors hypothesized that, once they saw the data, surgeons’ risk assessments would more closely match the results of the risk calculator, and these assessments would in turn inform their decision to operate. The study confirmed the first hypothesis, but interestingly, on average the surgeons did not differ in their reported likelihood of recommending an operation. In other words, the risk calculator did not influence doctors’ recommendations. Perhaps unconsciously, they altered their judgments of risk and benefits to conform to decisions they had already made upon reading the clinical vignettes—decisions made by intuition rather than by risk-benefits analysis. The results of these studies provide interesting insights for understanding decision-making. The fact that surgeons, who receive training that is far more homogenous and standardized than that of civilian government officials, can vary so much in their perceptions of risks should serve as a reminder that decision-making is an inherently complicated, contested process. These findings also raise questions for those interested in decision-making processes outside of the operating room. How do policymakers and pundits diagnose the nature of the conflict in Syria? Would attaching numbers to the likely outcome of certain military missions result in a more agreed-upon course of action? Would individuals’ perceptions, informed by a multitude of factors and experiences accumulated over the course of his or her life, continue to drive decisions? Would an alternative assessment of the risks involved sway a president who has already made up his or her mind? Surgeons receive comparable training and experiences when assessing the outcomes of operative surgery; unsurprisingly, those from dissimilar backgrounds and often no exposure to military operations would come to such different conclusions about whether and how to intervene in Syria or elsewhere.

Jared Wright is an intern in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. President Barack Obama’s recent announcement that 8,400 U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at the end of his administration, nearly 3,000 more troops than his previous timeline, reflects the tenuous stability that Afghanistan has achieved after nearly fifteen years of U.S. involvement. A resurgent Taliban and the appearance of self-proclaimed Islamic State forces have tested the ability of the increasingly fragile central government to provide security and political stability and demonstrated the limits of U.S. training and support. Meanwhile, economic and political frustrations across all levels of Afghan society have gone largely unaddressed by the National Unity Government (NUG). The security situation in Afghanistan could worsen, which would threaten U.S. interests in the region. A new Contingency Planning Memorandum released by the Center for Preventive Action, “Strategic Reversal in Afghanistan,” assesses the growing risks of strategic reversals in Afghanistan. Author Seth G. Jones, Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND, recommends steps the United States can take to mitigate or prevent such risks. The report highlights the shortcomings of the NUG and the challenges that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police—which both face rising attrition rates, low morale, and a climbing death toll—are forced to confront in providing for Afghanistan’s security. Jones identifies two principle contingencies to watch over the next twelve to eighteen months: the collapse of the NUG—which is plagued by widespread corruption, deteriorating economic conditions, and competition among Afghan elites—and major gains in urban areas by the Taliban, who now control more territory than at any other point since December 2001. Both outcomes are not mutually exclusive, as one contingency would ultimately magnify the potential for the other. U.S. interests would be harmed if either contingency happens. U.S. objectives in Afghanistan are clear: to target al-Qaeda and other extremist elements in order to prevent future attacks against the United States, and to enable Afghan forces to provide security for the country. A government collapse or the seizure of one or more major cities by the Taliban would severely diminish the likelihood of achieving either objective, while simultaneously rolling back gains made over the last decade. These contingencies could also lead to an increase in extremist groups operating in Afghanistan; introduce regional instability involving India, Pakistan, Iran, and Russia; and possibly signal to other countries that the United States is not a reliable ally, further complicating regional power dynamics. To prevent these contingencies from occurring, Jones recommends the United States leverage its relationship with Afghanistan, focusing on building greater political consensus, encouraging regional powers to support Kabul, pursuing reconciliation with the Taliban, and strengthening Afghan security forces so that they can manage internal security challenges with limited outside involvement. To achieve those aims, the U.S. should:                           Focus diplomatic efforts on resolving acute political challenges, prioritizing electoral reforms and building consensus between the Afghan government and political elites. Address economic grievances that could undermine the political legitimacy of the government. Sustain the current number and type of U.S. military forces through the end of the Obama administration. Decrease constraints on U.S. forces in Afghanistan and grant the military authority to strike the Taliban and Haqqani network. Sustain U.S. support for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.   For a more in-depth analysis on how the situation in Afghanistan might result in a strategic reversal and what the United States can do to prevent that from happening or mitigate the consequences, read “Strategic Reversal in Afghanistan.”

Helia Ighani is the assistant director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a majority of the votes after a landslide election in November 2015, becoming the first fully civilian-led government in Myanmar’s history. Once in power in April 2016, the NLD government released nearly two hundred political prisoners detained by the former military junta government, demonstrating Suu Kyi’s commitment to democratizing the country. However, the new NLD government has not yet attempted to reconcile animosity among Myanmar’s various ethnic groups—in particular, its Rohingya population. Up to 1.1 million Rohingya live in Myanmar, facing serious human rights violations, and thousands have been displaced due to violence with Buddhist nationalists (see CFR’s Global Conflict Tracker for an overview of the sectarian violence in Myanmar). Many have criticized Suu Kyi for refusing to touch the Rohingya issue, including the Dalai Lama. A new Center for Preventive Action (CPA) report, Securing a Democratic Future for Myanmar, highlights this concerns and the importance of U.S. involvement in the country’s transition to democracy. Priscilla A. Clapp, the former chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar and senior advisor to the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Asia Society, argues that reforms over the past five years have transformed Myanmar “from a country of little strategic interest to the United States into one that promises substantial benefit to core U.S. interests in Southeast Asia and beyond.” Yet, as the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Myanmar Derek Mitchell expressed at a recent CPA event, the “deep reservoir of mistrust in the country must be overcome,” regarding the reconciliation of the recognized 135 ethnic minorities in Myanmar and the “very delicate issue” of the Rohingya minority. Washington has already begun to change its tone on Myanmar. The new U.S. ambassador to Myanmar Scot Marciel said he will continue to use “Rohingya”—considered a controversial term by many hardline Buddhists who refer to the unrecognized population as “Bengali”—when referring to the large Muslim community in Myanmar, despite being asked by the government to not bring up the issue. While Washington hinted that it is considering reversing its sanctions policy toward Myanmar, it is counting on the new government to improve human rights conditions. The Obama administration will decide on whether to continue the sanctions when the underlying legal basis for the program expires next week. Clapp details policy options for facilitating a democratic transition with the NLD government, including U.S. policy recommendations relating to human rights conditions and sanctions on Myanmar. Over the coming year, she recommends that the United States should: • Assist with the establishment of a reconciliation government. • Provide assistance for economic development and conflict mediation in Rakhine State and encourage the new government to give legal status to the Rohingya minority. • Revise the legal structure of remaining sanctions and begin to sunset sanctions specific to Myanmar. • In consultation with the NLD, develop a strategy to expand dialogue with Myanmar’s military.   In the long term, she encourages the United States to: • Expand the purview of U.S. assistance to include capacity-building for government institutions. • Help rebuild the justice system. • Promote economic development at the state level to consolidate peace with ethnic minorities. • Lead a regional effort to find a humane solution to Rohingya statelessness and legal status in neighboring countries. • Promote Myanmar’s political and economic integration into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).   Read Securing a Democratic Future for Myanmar to get Clapp’s full analysis and learn more about Myanmar’s transition to democracy.