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July 11, 2025 |
Hello, everyone. Today at WPR, we’re covering Turkey’s response to the shifting regional order in the Middle East and U.S. President Donald Trump’s effect on the liberal international order. |
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When Israel launched its attacks on Iran last month, Turkey, like several other regional actors, swiftly condemned the strikes as a violation of international law. Ankara had ample reasons to be concerned about the consequences of escalation between Israel and Iran, yet the immediate security and economic risks of an Israel-Iran war were not the only worries. |
In Ankara’s reading, rapidly changing regional dynamics seem to be inexorably leading to three outcomes it finds undesirable: the normalization of the principle of “might makes right,” Israel’s ascent to regional domination and the apparent end of multipolarity in the Middle East. |
As Sinem Adar writes, Turkey has in response rhetorically emphasized diplomacy over military power, while ramping up its defense industry investments, strengthening cooperation with Arab states—particularly Saudi Arabia—and courting the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. |
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In the six months since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, some observers have worried that he is seeking to dismantle the postwar international order. The view is that, whether one calls that order “liberal international” or “rules-based,” Trump has little tolerance for either liberalism or rules, so he will have no inclination to support it. |
Some analysts have gone further, asserting that Trump is aligning with Russian President Vladimir Putin to take down not just Ukraine, but the U.S.-led international system. If such a dismantling were taking place, we would have expected to see some indication of it over the past month, when the G7 and NATO held their annual leaders’ summits in Alberta, Canada, and The Hague, Netherlands, respectively. |
But as columnist Paul Poast writes, on the basis of those gatherings, we can say that the international order is, to the contrary, doing just fine. Not great. Not optimal. But fine. |
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Malaysia’s foreign minister said today that the Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN does not believe elections in Myanmar should be a priority and that the country’s ruling military junta should instead prioritize reaching a peace agreement. Myanmar’s civil war began in 2021 following a military coup, although some of the fighting paused for roughly three months after a devastating earthquake in late March. |
The earthquake struck at a time when the junta was seeking legitimacy and recognition from abroad to shore up its fragile rule, after years of military losses at the hands of resistance forces. As Michael Hart wrote recently, the earthquake offered regional powers—including ASEAN, which is currently chaired by Malaysia—an opening to engage with the junta in ways that had previously been politically untenable. |
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Peru’s Congress yesterday passed a bill granting amnesty to military members and civilians prosecuted for serious human rights abuses during the country’s civil conflict from 1980 to 2000. Supporters of the bill—which has not yet been signed into law by President Dina Boluarte—come primarily from right-wing parties, including that of Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who oversaw the worst abuses during the conflict. |
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, disappeared or tortured during the conflict, which ultimately also left rural Peruvians disenfranchised and marginalized. As Jo-Marie Burt wrote in in 2023, that legacy came to head two years ago during protests against Boluarte and her government that were met with levels of violent repression reminiscent of the conflict. |
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The U.S. Department of Defense has agreed to invest $400 million into MP Materials, a U.S.-based rare earths producer that, with additional private funding, is seeking to build a major new magnet manufacturing facility. The investment is the biggest move yet from the U.S. to counter China’s dominance of the rare earths sector, which has given it significant leverage in the U.S.-China trade war. Still, as Mary Gallagher wrote last month, any new approach to reducing China’s dominance in this sector will require borrowing from Beijing’s playbook, which includes industrial policy, state support and subsidies. |
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Mali’s military junta leader, Gen. Assimi Goita, approved a law earlier this week that grants him a five-year presidential mandate, renewable “as many times as necessary” without election. The law, which leaked to the public yesterday, is the clearest sign yet that the country’s post-coup transition is anything but, with a similar dynamic seen in the neighboring junta-led Sahelian states of Burkina Faso and Niger. Read more in this edition of the Daily Review from April. |
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