ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (R) speaks in Buenos Aires as Economy Minister Axel Kicillof looks on Feb. 12.(DANIEL GARCIA/AFP/Getty Images) Summary Argentina took one step closer to normalizing its financial relationship with the outside world May 29, when the government announced a deal that would settle outstanding debts with the Paris Club, a group of 19 public creditors including mostly European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia and Russia. After 13 years of default, Argentina has promised to pay back a total of $9.7 billion over the next five years, with the first payment of $1.15 billion to be paid in two installments in July 2014 and May 2015. Resuming payments will open the door for these public creditors to once again lend money to Argentina. Thus, the deal is an important phase in the process of Argentina's regaining access to international credit markets, which Buenos Aires will need if it hopes to avoid an economic crisis. Argentina i...

Participants attend the two-day Ministerial Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement on May 28 in Algiers, Algeria.FAROUK BATICHE/AFP/Getty Images Summary Foreign ministers from around the world gathered in Algiers on May 28-29 for the 17th Ministerial Conference of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. With representatives from Africa, the Middle East and Asia present, the outcomes of the meetings barely made international headlines. The Non-Aligned Movement, formed in Belgrade in 1961, was the brainchild of several national leaders who, like India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indonesia's Sukarno, were part of a new generation of political leadership brought to power as colonial regimes crumbled in the 1960s. Designed as an alternative to the competing U.S. and Soviet-led alliance structures of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement has struggled to define itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The bloc has found new life in recent year...

A CORE police special forces officer searches for fugitives in Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemao favela on May 13, 2014.(Mario Tama/Getty Images) Analysis Editor's Note: This essay is drawn from the personal notes and recollections of Stratfor's Renato Whitaker, who currently lives and studies in Rio de Janeiro. The boisterous man from one of the leased rooms in the house where I live bellowed for all to hear, "There's a shootout in State Hill!" OK, I thought, another shootout somewhere around here, but where? "They shut down Plaza Shopping!" Ah, well then, I know exactly where that is. Here's a quick breakdown of some terminology: The term "periphery" is used here in Brazil as a sort of social-geographic buzzword. It sometimes denotes the disenfranchised people who live "in the periphery" of society. Often it is used as a synonym for favelas -- or slums -- and the people who live in them. These favelas can sometimes literal...

By George Friedman I arrived in Bucharest, Romania, the day after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be here in a few weeks. The talk in Bucharest, not only among the leadership but also among the public, is about Ukraine. Concerns are palpable, and they are not only about the Russians. They are also about NATO, the European Union, the United States and whether they will all support Romania if it resists Russia. The other side of the equation, of course, is whether Romania will do the things it must do in order to make outside support effective. Biden left Romania with a sense that the United States is in the game. But this is not a region that trusts easily. The first step was easy. The rest become harder. If this little Cold War becomes significant, there are two European countries that matter the most: Poland and Romania. Poland, which I visit next, stands between Germany and Russia on the long, flat North European plain. Its population is abou...

Russian President Vladimir Putin (back C) attends a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council at the Kremlin in Moscow on Dec. 24, 2013ALEXEI NIKOLSKY/AFP/Getty Images Summary Russia , Belarus and Kazakhstan will sign the foundation treaty of the Eurasian Economic Union on May 29, with the bloc set to formally debut on Jan. 1, 2015. The Eurasian Economic Union is about much more than economics; it is a bloc meant to rival the European Union and the United States in its influence in Russia's near abroad. The crisis in Ukraine has aggravated long-standing tensions between Russia and the West, and the Eurasian Economic Union will serve as a primary platform for Moscow to challenge EU and U.S. influence in the former Soviet periphery in coming years. Analysis The very name of the Eurasian Economic Union implies that it is something other than European. This is not merely a geographic distinction; it is a political distinction showing that to be part of this grouping means not...

Argentina's former secretary of domestic trade wears a lapel badge of national energy firm YPF.(YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/GettyImages) Summary A burgeoning fight over hydrocarbons between Argentina's national and provincial governments is beginning to take center stage in Buenos Aires. Governors from 10 oil-producing provinces will meet with Argentine Planning Minister Julio de Vido on June 3 and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on June 9. The ostensible reason for the meetings is to discuss the standardization of provincial taxes on state-owned energy company YPF. The national government is pushing for provincial taxes of no more than a 3 percent on the company's gross income. The real question is whether the firm can force provincial governments to offer better, more consistent terms. The implications of this political struggle go far beyond YPF and will help set the stage for a more favorable investment climate for foreign companies. Analysis Click to Enlarge The mee...

U.S. President Barack Obama took the opportunity Wednesday to outline the United States' foreign policy in a commencement speech to West Point graduates. From our point of view, the president was more confirmatory than revelatory in his core message: The United States, as the undeniable global hegemon, is getting back on its feet and it does not intend to manage the world's problems alone. In our 2014 Annual Forecast , we said that this would be the year that the United States finally catches its breath after spending a decade stumbling through intractable conflicts in the Islamic world. Obama underlined that prognosis Tuesday when he announced that a residual force of 9,800 troops would be left in Afghanistan through the year, dropping to just the security contingent for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul by the end of 2016. As he conveyed in his Wednesday speech, the militant headaches expected to persist in Afghanistan will be put in the same basket as those in Mali or Yemen. In othe...

Click to Enlarge The State Grid Corp. of China announced May 14 that official approval is imminent for a controversial plan to build 12 cross-country ultra high-voltage power transmission lines . The proposed power lines would link resource-rich western provinces to China's major central and coastal consumer bases. If granted, the approval will be a breakthrough for State Grid -- the larger of China's two government-owned power grid operators -- and for the Chinese power sector as a whole. It will signal that China's leaders are committed to building a nationally integrated power grid. The long-term undertaking would entail not only enormous government expenditures, but also the reorganization of much of the physical and industrial structure of China's power generation and transmission sectors, the relationship between the sectors' constituent parts, and perhaps most critically, the relationship between China's energy-producing and energy-consuming regions. M...