by Charlie Edwards | Mar 17, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa
The Israeli secret service has launched a blog written by four of its agents. According to the BBC the agents discuss how they were recruited, and what sort of work they perform; they also answer questions sent in by members of the public. The blog is part of a recruitment drive with one agent claiming that the service ‘offered her a better work-life balance than her previous job in the private sector.’
Sadly for wannabe spies the agents also debunk a myriad of myths. They don’t work in a basement or spend the day wearing earpieces and don’t get to have flashing blue lights for their cars but have to sit in traffic jams like everyone else.
Not very exciting is it?
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
As you watch the ongoing tailspin in the dollar’s value and ponder to yourself whether Ben Bernanke is really going to reduce interest rates by a whole percentage point tomorrow, spare a thought for those poor countries – like Ukraine, China and Saudi Arabia – whose currencies are pegged to the dollar. Inflation in all of them is going through the roof as it is, thanks to food, energy and other commodities.
Here’s Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research:
In emerging economies, core inflation for most people is mostly determined by the prices of food and energy. In these countries, central bankers (who aren’t as politically independent as their counterparts in advanced economies) are reluctant to tighten monetary policy too aggressively to fight inflation because this might trigger a recession, which could be politically destabilising.
So they are increasingly letting their currencies appreciate as their primary anti-inflation policy. This means they are increasingly less willing to prop up the dollar, which then pushes up the key commodity prices that are causing their inflation problem.
David Bowers of Absolute Strategy Research puts it like this: “By failing to recognise the external dimension to the credit crunch, the Fed could introduce a new source of instability.”
by Charlie Edwards | Mar 17, 2008 | Conflict and security, UK
This Wednesday the British Government will publish the UK’s first ever National Security Strategy. This is a big moment for Gordon Brown and comes with great expectations. Don’t be surprised if there is no Minister on the Today Programme discussing the strategy’s pros and cons on Wednesday morning – this will be Gordon Brown’s opportunity to kill lots of birds with one mighty strategic stone (so lets hope he does wait and announce it in Parliament).
Dignity and gravitas will ooze from every pore of the front bench as Brown steps up to the dispatch box and announces the strategy. MPs from all sides of the House will nod and mouth their agreement. In the gallery sketch writers will pen columns for Thursday’s newspapers about how important Parliament is. For a brief moment the Government will look in complete control of its destiny – polls will even show the Labour party jump ahead of the Conservatives.
Some British newspapers are already trailing the announcement. The Telegraph suggests that ‘a national security council will be created, staffed by senior politicians including, potentially, individuals from other parties, intelligence and military chiefs, and scientific experts.. and that Paddy Ashdown has been suggested as a possible leading opposition figure with the experience to be invited to serve alongside senior Government ministers’. The Guardian points to the fact that ‘officials were divided about how broad they should paint the security threats facing Britain, and whether they should include such issues as social cohesion, for example,’ while The Times believes that a ‘group of veteran specialists will advise Gordon Brown on all aspects of national security, ranging from terrorist strikes to pandemics’. Finally the Financial Times writes that Sir Paul McCartney has been ordered to pay his estranged wife Heather Mills £24.3m.
Below are some thoughts ahead of the publication of the UK NSS.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
When I was the IPPR’s energy research fellow, I always loved working with Dieter Helm – a total iconoclaust who’d infuriate the green establishment by poking holes in their shaky claims about how cheap it would be to sort out climate change. He could always get away with it for the simple reason that he knew energy policy better than they did. He was at it again last week in the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. and Europe refuse to acknowledge that halting the relentless rise in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will take a significant slice out of economic growth. It will probably mean living standards will have to be cut if our consumption is going to be environmentally sustainable. We are simply living beyond our — and the planet’s — means.
This is not a welcome message for politicians to give to their voters. But it happens to be what is required to tackle this global crisis. Not since the late 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, has such a massive restructuring of major economies been required. Nobody told the British or American people then that the challenge of creating a wartime economy was going to be cheap. They should stop pretending that the enormous challenge of decarbonizing the major economies can be done on the cheap, either.
Thank goodness for straight talkers. Absolutely. I’d be a rich man if I had a pound for every enthusiastic green who told me that the bad news is that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are just round the corner and will be here in a few minutes, but that the good news is all I need do is remember not to leave my phone charger plugged in. People ain’t stupid. When the gap between the problem narrative and the solution narrative is that wide, they assume one of two things: that it’s already too late to solve the problem, or that the scale of the problem is being exaggerated in the first place.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, South Asia
While China is blocking websites in the hope of preventing news of security force brutality from seeping out, Xinhua is busy denouncing the Dalai Lama as a “master terror maker”. In fact,
The Dalai Lama and his clique have never for a day refrained from violence and terror. His childhood teacher, an Austrian, was a Nazi…
You have to be kidding. Hard to see how China’s going to make a success of the Olympics if this is the best they can come up with on media relations. Moises Naim looks pretty prescient in the light of his observation last November that when the world’s entire activist contingent descends on Beijing,
…the government will inevitably attempt to control and repress the activists. And that will be a new and frustrating experience for a centralized government that is not used to containing well-organized, media-savvy foreigners who work through highly decentralized, international, nongovernmental organizations that know how to mobilize public opinion to advance their causes.
Charlie Beckett, who runs the Public Media Forum at the London School of Economics, reports that the Chinese have been seeking his advice on managing the media better – though it’s not clear how they’d manage to effect such a sea change in so little time, even assuming they were inclined to.
It’s tempting to feel a sense of schadenfreude as China trips itself up over and over again while carrying the Olympic torch, given its appalling human rights record. But on the other hand, remember David Miliband’s observation when he spoke in China last month:
We will only resolve [shared threats like climate change and fragile states] through a new bargain between major states in the international community, embedded in our bilateral relationships, multilateral institutions, and not least the partnership between China, the world’s fastest growing economy, and Europe, the world largest single market. Isolation would be a disaster for that process and there is too much at stake. That is why my message to British people back home is simple. Do not boycott the Olympics, celebrate them instead.
The risk is that if China manages to cock up the Olympics as royally as she seems poised to, then at best it will make it harder to engage her on issues like climate change where there can’t be any solution without her. The world needs China to feel safe to come out of her shell – and this is the best prospect for long term progress on human rights record too (look at Burma, after all – hard to see many signs there of isolation being an effective driver of change).
At worst, of course, the Olympics could go bad at the same time as other chickens (like food inflation or a sharp economic slowdown) come home to roost too – and then all bets would really be off. As Naim commented last year,
It’s fair to say that the Chinese government probably had no idea what it was getting into when it applied to host the Olympics in 2000.
Update: some good reporting here from ITN.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbTsNu08Xqs]
But as Blake Hounshell notes, the LA Times reckons that China’s media strategy is working well for its intended audience – at home:
One key factor is a media strategy that, while still blunt and heavily reliant on censorship and propaganda, shows more nuance than usual for the lumbering Communist Party.
This last week the government has used something it traditionally viewed as a big negative, any suggestion that it’s not in total control, to its advantage by going large with print, still and video coverage of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and destroying their property.
Not only does this rather ironically paint the Chinese state and its massive police force as something of a victim, analysts said, but it also stirs up feelings of fear and anger among many Han, the nation’s majority population, that add a personal dimension to the riots.
