Next Year's Failed State - An FP Slide Show

When South Sudan became an independent country in July 2011, many hoped that Sudan's bloody civil war -- the second iteration of which stretched from 1983 to 2005 and claimed the lives of an estimated 2 million people -- would finally be resolved. Sudan has seen decades of conflict between the Sudanese central government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), a rebel force based in the the south. The SPLA resisted rule from Khartoum, whose primarily Arab and Muslim elites sidelined the diverse inhabitants of the south as they sought to control the country's resources. The result was a war with the highest death toll since World War II, in which both armies conscripted women and children to serve as soldiers and sexual slaves.

Violence continued after a peace agreement in 2005; in July 2011, the southern part of the country became an independent state. But the fledgling South Sudan, a ward of the international community despite its oil revenues, immediately faced challenges: millions of displaced people hoping to return home, 50 years of neglected infrastructure, and massive food shortages. Add to that a severe malarial epidemic, an ongoing showdown with Khartoum, and continuing violence in nine of its 10 states, and it's no surprise South Sudan has become what many have dubbed the world's first pre-failed state. Here is a portrait the country during its difficult first year.

Above, a child belonging to the Dinka ethnic group waits for medicine to be distributed in a refugee camp near Turalei, a village located a few miles from the North Sudanese border.

Fabio Bucciarelli /LUZphoto

Abandoning Sergei Magnitsky - By Jamison Firestone

As Vladimir Putin settles into his third term as president, government corruption is running rampant. Putin is steadily cutting back on his people's most basic rights -- and Russians are finally saying "enough." As the opposition movement gets off the ground, international efforts to discourage Putin's government from squelching political dissent are critical. Unfortunately, however, a recent article by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signals that the United States may be preparing to forsake that role.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Clinton makes the case that Congress should repeal the Jackson-Vanik law, which was passed in the 1970s to hold the Soviet Union accountable for restrictions it placed on its citizens' right to emigrate. Her argument, however, intentionally misstates the nature of Congress's position on repealing the law. Jackson-Vanik "long ago achieved this historic purpose," Clinton writes. "Now it's time to set it aside." 

Suggesting that Jackson-Vanik's mission has concluded, or describing its repeal as a simple trade issue, is disingenuous spin. No one is opposed to repealing Jackson-Vanik on economic grounds. Everyone would welcome the increased trade that lifting the law could provide. Jackson-Vanick, however, is a law intended to promote respect for human rights in Russia. Congress is deeply opposed to repealing Jackson-Vanik without replacing it with effective human rights legislation that meets today's circumstances. Clinton, on the other hand, would apparently prefer that human rights issues not enter the conversation.

But the discussion of Jackson-Vanik cannot be separated from the increasingly authoritarian drift of Russia during Putin's 13 years in effective control of the country. Putin has methodically removed every force in society that could challenge his hold on power: He has taken control of the national television channels, destroyed all real opposition parties, and dominates the Duma, Russia's parliament. His party also effectively controls the judiciary and other branches of law enforcement -- it can obtain any ruling with only a phone call. It set up youth groups that draw their members from small towns within driving distance of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and indoctrinated its charges at state expense in outrageous nationalism, anti-Americanism, and pro-government dogma. When needed, it buses in crowds of duly indoctrinated youth to intimidate foreign diplomats, human rights defenders, and anti-corruption activists.

The Russian government's cynicism and corruption reached its pinnacle when former President Dmitry Medvedev asked Russians to come forward and fight corruption -- and a young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, did just that. He testified against a group of organized criminals and high Russian government officials who had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian treasury. Instead of arresting the criminals, Russia's justice system turned on the messenger: Within a month, Magnitsky was imprisoned by the officials he testified against, tortured for a year, and finally beaten to death by eight officers with rubber batons in a Russian prison.

These facts are not in dispute: They are the findings of the Russian president's own Council on Human Rights, which the Russian government then chose to ignore. It was further discovered that all of the officers who Magnitsky accused amassed millions during the time he reported the theft was undertaken. This too was ignored.

What Russia Gave Syria - By David Kenner

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has had no better friend than Vladimir Putin's Russia. Just this week, three Russian ships reportedly headed to reinforce the Syrian port of Tartus. Meanwhile, the head of Russia's arms control export company ominously declared that the Syrian regime had been supplied with an advanced-missile defense system -- "whoever is planning an attack should think about this," he said.

Amid these developments, the news that Barack Obama and Putin agreed at the G-20 summit this week to support a political solution to the Syria conflict would seem almost, well, laughable -- if the situation on the ground weren't so dire.

As the death toll rises -- the United Nations says more than 10,000 Syrians have lost their lives -- the United States and Russia remain on opposite sides of the conflict. The Obama administration has declared that Assad must step down, while the Kremlin has staunchly supported the Syrian regime -- vetoing two U.N. Security Council resolutions addressing the conflict and warning darkly about thousands of "foreign terrorists" fomenting violence in the country.

The New York Times reported on Thursday, June 21, that CIA agents are steering arms to the Syrian opposition, but this covert action pales in comparison to Russia -- which brazenly continues to supply the Syrian regime with advanced weapons that bolster the state and its violent crackdown.

The Syrian-Russian arms trade goes back more than a half-century, to at least the 1950s. At the time, the Soviet Union found a willing Cold War ally in its struggle against the United States and Israel -- when President Hafez al-Assad's regime was threatened by an Islamist-led insurgency in the 1980s, the Kremlin supplied the weaponry and trainers to put down the threat. From 1950 to 1990, the two countries' arms trade totaled at least $34 billion.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union did nothing to dent Russia's strategic alliance with Syria. Under Putin's stewardship, Russian weapons exports to the Assad regime have only increased. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Syria's arms imports increased five-fold between 2007 and 2012 -- and Moscow was the source of at least 78 percent of these weapons.

But what exactly have they supplied Assad's forces with?

We know that the Syrians have Russian bullets, shells, tanks, and attack helicopters. Numbers, of course, are hard to come by -- much of the counting relies not on an inspection of the arsenals or public records, but in glimpses of the weapons as they are used on the Syrian people. YouTube videos filmed by Syrian activists or defected soldiers have proven vital for this task.

Here's the best attempt, using reliable data, at a list of Russian weapons in Syria:

MARCO LONGARI/AFP/Getty Images

The Pharaoh's Legacy - By Steven A. Cook

Hosni Mubarak is dead, or very close to it. The Egyptian state news agency MENA reported that the former president was pronounced clinically dead after having a stroke on the evening of June 19 -- a statement that was quickly denied by a member of the ruling military junta, who clarified that Mubarak was nevertheless in critical condition.

Whatever the case, Mubarak's final moments in a military hospital in Cairo would not be what many Egyptians had in mind when they sought justice and revenge for those who suffered at his hands. No doubt, his supporters would have preferred the pomp and circumstance of a state funeral honoring a man they believe was a transitional figure who had placed Egypt on the path of prosperity and even democracy.

For better or worse, Mubarak's predecessors, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat were larger-than-life figures who accomplished big things, whether it was nationalization of the Suez Canal or negotiating peace with Israel. Once Mubarak, for all his failings, seemed larger than life himself; but he will not join their ranks. Instead, he will be remembered for the squalid politics, brutality, and repression that characterized the last decades of his long reign, and the mass demonstrations that ended it so abruptly.

Looking back over the late Mubarak period, it is hard to believe that his presidency began on October 14, 1981, with promise. Upon taking his first oath of office, it was possible to imagine Mubarak as a reformist. He struck a self-effacing tone, reached out to an opposition that had been in open revolt against Sadat, and promised to use judiciously Egypt's emergency law, which gave the government extraconstitutional powers. In another gesture at reconciliation, soon after taking office, Mubarak emptied the jails of those Sadat had imprisoned and vowed to undertake political as well as economic reforms.

Nor was the Mubarak era strictly a period of economic stagnation. The country's gross domestic product was approximately $40 billion when Mubarak entered office; on the eve of the uprising, it topped $145 billion. There were only 430,000 telephone lines in the entire country when Mubarak took power -- by 2010, it had well over 12 million. In 1981, the life expectancy of the average Egyptian was 57 years old; it is now 70. The World Bank reports that the Egyptian literacy rate was less than 50 percent 30 years ago. Today, the literacy rate stands at 66 percent, though it remains dismally low for Egyptian women. But by the later Mubarak era, Egypt's private sector was prospering, the levels of foreign direct investment were unprecedented, and the international business community began talking about Egypt as a promising "emerging market."

The statistics obscure more than they reveal, however. While the explosion of wealth and positive macro-economic indicators looked good, the working and middle class' ability to make ends meet eroded -- an ever-larger number of Egyptians were subsisting on $2 a day or less. As the wealth gap grew, popular anger at those on the top of the pyramid grew with it.

Yet the uprising that brought infamy to Mubarak was not, first and foremost, about economic grievances, but a political system that was rigged in a way to benefit Egypt's leader and those closest to him. Political change, which became a mantra of the ruling National Democratic Party during Mubarak's last decade, was a ruse.

In Search of Merbama - By Karen Leigh

BERLIN ' It was a romantic setting on the first day of the G-20 -- a man and a woman speaking closely near a beach in Los Cabos.

But the couple with their heads pressed together has a history rooted in rancor, and though it's thawed somewhat -- with their seaside conversation, touching on the eurozone crisis and Syria, a symbol of closer ties -- the relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel remains tepid.

"On a scale of one to 10, I would give this relationship a five or a six," says Heather A. Conley, Europe director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I don't think it's as positive as has been suggested publicly and in the media."

Obama is famously aloof from other world leaders. Merkel is among the few he has cited personally, albeit awkwardly, as someone who has "a lot of trust and confidence" in his leadership. At last year's state dinner in her honor, according to the New York Times, Obama served German apple strudel and James Taylor sang "You've Got a Friend" before the two leaders clinked glasses.

There have been no embarrassing backrub moments, but beyond surface gestures, the two leaders' relationship seems anything but warm. Four months from the polls, that could spell trouble for Obama. Support from the de facto chief executive of Europe will be crucial to a president struggling to right a sinking global economic ship and sell voters on his jobs agenda.

"The re-election is going to turn on the economy, and if Merkel could buy him time more time by holding off the euro crisis and sparing the economy, it could help him in the election," says Stephen Szabo, executive director of the Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund. "I think people are so pessimistic about Obama's handling of the economy [that] one more thing could send them over to Romney. And Obama absolutely shares that view."

In Mexico, said White House spokesman Jay Carney, the two leaders "agreed to work closely together' to build support for what needs to be done in Europe and the world to stabilize the situation and support growth and jobs."

The words were comforting. But Conley says they mask "a deep misunderstanding and growing frustration on both sides. Obama believes that Merkel does not fully realize what's at stake for him, and she thinks he doesn't understand what's at stake for the future of Europe and that there's more here than his re-election.

Her Work Isn't Done - By Christian Caryl

The West is celebrating Aung San Suu Kyi this week. The Burmese pro-democracy activist, the leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), has been giving speeches and receiving honors. She stopped in Oslo to pick up a belated Nobel Prize, awarded to her in absentia in 1991, when she was just beginning her long stint in house arrest. (All in all she's spent some 15 years of the past 24 in detention.) On her swing through Ireland she received prestigious awards from Amnesty International and the city of Dublin. The audience at the London School of Economics serenaded her with "Happy Birthday" on her visit there. (She has just turned 67.) On Thursday she's giving a speech to both houses of the British parliament, a privilege granted only rarely to non-Britons.

If anyone deserves such accolades, it's her. Despite years of vicious treatment meted out by Burma's generals, the Lady -- as the Burmese often refer to her -- stuck doggedly to her commitment on non-violence and pressed her demands for greater freedom for her people. The military government repeatedly urged her to go back to Britain to be with her husband and two sons there -- offers she resolutely rejected, knowing that the authorities would probably never allow her to return. She has calmly defied soldiers who leveled their guns at her and she has survived at least one overt assassination attempt. She is, without question, a brilliant moral exemplar, a member of the same family tree that includes names like Gandhi, King, Mandela, Sakharov, and Havel.

And yet there is a distinctly valedictory note to all the fanfare on this trip. Her European tour is a story of honors long and unjustly deferred. At each point along the way another circle closes, another bit of unfinished business is checked off the list. Her visit to Britain includes a long-awaited reunion in Oxford with members of her extended family. This is sure to be a bittersweet occasion.

We in the West are right to celebrate her past achievements. But in one way the rejoicing is a bit premature. The stark fact is that her native country is still a long way from achieving the democracy of which she and her colleagues have dreamed of for so many decades.

Burma has only just begun a slow and methodical transition that may or may not end up in the promised land of liberal democracy. Last year, President Thein Sein, an ex-member of the ruling junta, launched a program of tentative liberalization that has included a softening of censorship, legalization of trade unions, and freedom for hundreds of high-profile political prisoners.

That process of opening culminated on April 1 with a parliamentary by-election in which Aung San Suu Kyi and 42 of her NLD colleagues won almost all of the seats at stake. Unfortunately, that was merely a fraction of the overall seats in the national assembly, so the freshly elected NLD members are outnumbered by the government's proxies to the tune of 15 to 1. Thein Sein's reform moves can't disguise the fact that Burma is still under the control of the same old elite.

Asia's Next Tiger - By Greg Rushford

Once considered the most promising economy in Asia after Japan, the Philippines has fallen far behind Southeast Asia's nimble, export-led economies. But things are finally looking up. Tired of being scorned as "the sick man of Asia," President Benigno Aquino III asserts: The Philippines is now "open for real business."

Judging by some very visible changes, Aquino, who has been in office for two years, isn't engaging in wishful thinking. Manila's luxury hotels are crawling with Asian, American, and European investors in search of opportunity. And the city's skyline, a symbol of its past as a home to slow-moving domestic oligarchs, is now dotted with cranes. Foreign direct investment is on track to triple this year, while GDP growth is expected to rise from 3.7 percent last year to a respectable 5 percent in 2012. Karen Ward, a London-based analyst for HSBC bank, speculates that the Philippines, now the world's 43rd largest economy, could be the 16th largest by 2050.

Such optimism is hardly a consensus view. For one thing, the Philippines has yet to deliver an economic performance worthy of an Asian tiger. The IMF forecasts that, while up considerably, Philippine GDP growth will still lag behind that of the other Asian tiger wannabes -- Indonesia and Vietnam -- in 2012. And while foreign investment is rising rapidly, it's from a dismally modest base: Indonesia is expecting to attract some $27 billion this year, compared to roughly $3 billion for the Philippines.

Indeed, the standard indictment of the economy still seems daunting. For one thing, the Philippines is startlingly dependent on alms from abroad. Roughly 11 million Philippine citizens (12 percent of the population) work in a great diaspora, running from Hong Kong to New York and Kuwait, sending home about $20 billion annually to support their families. Nearly one-fifth of all Pinoys, as Filipinos call themselves, still live in deep poverty, which is defined by the World Bank as a purchasing power of less than $1.25 a day. Meanwhile, the WTO reports that "key sectors" of the Philippine economy remain "effectively controlled" by uncompetitive domestic elites.

So why am I optimistic? President Aquino -- nicknamed P-Noy -- is apparently that rare Philippines leader who is both incorruptible and competent. And his administration seems determined to change the environment of crony capitalism where who you know in government, and how much you're willing to pay for privileges, has always mattered more than what you make or how well you make it. John Forbes, a former U.S. diplomat and business consultant, whose Philippine experience goes back more than 40 years, says Aquino's anti-corruption moves are "unprecedented."

Now, the very idea that one leader or one government administration can reverse a long history of institutional sleaze makes economists and political scientists uneasy. Successful economic reform is a complex, organic process that requires support at every level of society. And the recent past is littered with economic reform plans that succumbed to cronyism -- think Yeltsin's Russia or Suharto's Indonesia or Mubarak's Egypt. But change is afoot in the Philippines, and Aquino may just be able to nudge the economy into a virtuous circle in which reform sparks economic growth, and growth, in turn, gives outsiders the clout to contest the power of the country's crony capitalists.

Aquino's immediate predecessor, Gloria Arroyo, earned her PhD in economics. By contrast, the laid-back P-Noy would never claim to be an economic savant (though he did manage to earn a B.A. in the dismal science, and one of his professors was Ms. Arroyo). President Aquino, by the way, is prosecuting Ms. Arroyo, alleging that she raked in millions of dollars in bribes. However the criminal charges are eventually resolved -- or perhaps not, considering the notoriously glacial pace of justice in Manila courts -- this much is clear: On Ms. Arroyo's watch, rampant corruption held the Philippine economy back, while in P-Noy's few years in office, honesty is producing tangible results in terms of growth.