Human Security Centre Human Rights and International Security Research

Last year’s rout of the Iraqi Army in the northern city of Mosul by ISIS represented the nadir of the post-2003 Iraqi state. But if the country’s long-term prospects have brightened noticeably since the dark summer of 2014, its path to that future is still filled with uncertainty.

All the money, good governance and reforms in the world will come to little if Ukraine is dismembered by Russia and its allies in the east of the country.

Last month saw the Pentagon announce that it was moving away from its controversial Air-Sea Battle (ASB) programme, declaring instead that it would be absorbed into a new – and somewhat amorphous sounding – model, to be known as the “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons” (JAM-GC).

We will witness a battle between a Congress that desires to restore a proactive approach to US foreign affairs and an administration that seeks to continue to limp down the path to the finish line of the next presidential inauguration. It could be a long two years.

Decades of national economic mismanagement have combined with a lingering mistrust of the military by both the public and political class to leave the Argentine Armed Forces underfunded, underequipped and unready for war. It seems likely the country’s military will have to come to terms with the fact that their fall from grace is a permanent arrangement.

The commencement of air strikes against the assets of ISIS in Syria last month marked the opening of the US-led coalition’s second front against the extremist group. But behind the immediate campaign to counter the terror organisation, the question regarding what to do about the Assad regime – a government responsible for far more deaths than the toll inflicted by ISIS – looms large.

Whilst both Vietnam and the US suffered a massive trauma as a result of the conflict between the two countries, the status the war occupies today in these nations is more as a set of personal tragedies, rather than a cultural and institutional monolith that defines the relationship between them. If handled correctly, enhanced collaboration could offer the prospect of massive and almost cost-free foreign policy benefits for both countries.

Whatever Russia’s ultimate intentions in Ukraine are following their annexation of Crimea, NATO – an organisation that was facing what some saw as existential questions post-Afghanistan – is now required to once again turn its attention to the defence of its member states.

July saw the deployment of a pair of British Army reconnaissance platoons to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to provide additional support to the EU-led peacekeeping force in the run-up to the October 2014 general election. This latest move marks a continuation of British military involvement in the country that has (with a few gaps) so far lasted twenty-two years.

When the history of the current Coalition Government is written, probably their single gravest set of errors will be able to be summed up in four letters: SDSR. The October 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review, thrown together in just five months, will go down in history as a textbook example of what happens when short-term financial and political considerations are allowed to undermine sound defence thinking.