by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific
Interesting to read the argument made today that China’s overseas diplomacy has in some cases – like Sudan – been “hijacked” by state-owned companies like PetroChina, that are alleged to have become “very powerful interest groups” in their own right.
Very interesting to see who’s making it: scholars at “leading Chinese think-tanks and universities in Beijing“, speaking in multiple interviews. As Richard McGregor comments, “China’s foreign ministry has not been critical of CNPC but the comments by senior academics in Beijing suggest substantial disquiet in official circles about overseas investments.”
by Jules Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia
Lord Bell, PR guru and Tory peer, has plied his dark arts for some fairly controversial characters in the past – Augusto Pinochet, Boris Berezovsky, Michael Chernoi, even Margaret Thatcher – but even he might have his hands full with his latest project: spinning Aleksander Lukashenko, the iron man of Belarus and the ‘last dictator of Europe’.
Last week, Bell met with Lukashenko in Minsk, where the moustachioed strong-man asked Lord Bell how he could improve his image in the West.
Bell told the Moscow Times:
He would like his country to be better understood, and his successes to be better grasped. He has raised pensions and wages and would understandably like to shift the focus to these areas. Lukashenko doesn’t see why Belarus can’t be a friend to the West and a friend to Russia at the same time.
The fact is, Lukashenko is increasingly neither a friend of Russia’s, nor the West. Western countries dislike him for his iron rule of the country, his use of the KGB to crush the opposition and free press, and his provocative and belligerent treatment of Western diplomats in the past.
Russia, meanwhile, dislikes him for his obstreperousness towards the Kremlin (yes, he’s no more gracious with Russia), his embarrassing outbursts on the international stage, and above all his unwillingness to give them control of the transit pipelines through which Gazprom exports around 20% of its EU deliveries.
Russia is fed up with subsidizing Belarus’ state-owned economy with cheap gas. They started putting up the gas price in 2006, and now it looks like Lukashenko is feeling the heat.
Don’t write him off just yet, however. He’s still pretty popular with Belarus’ elderly population and farm-workers in State-owned communes, who for the last decade have staved off the harsh reality of a post-Soviet world by drowning themselves in cheap gas and state-produced vodka.
by Alex Evans | Mar 17, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Ian Katz’s Observer interview with Jonathan Powell – chief of staff to Tony Blair throughout his time at Downing Street – was definitely worth a read, if for no other reason than that this was, incredibly, Powell’s first media interview since 1997. You get the impression that if Powell gave more such interviews, it might be quite fun:
“He would say the most outrageous things in meetings,” recalls one former member of the Blair inner circle. Powell does not contest the charge: “Sometimes I say things which are extremely plonkerish at just the wrong moment… which is one of the reasons they kept me away from the press. It would’ve been a complete disaster if I’d have talked to the papers.”)
You might think he’s just being modest. But try this delicious gem:
When Siobhan O’Hanlon, Gerry Adams’s late assistant, asks for a meeting with Blair during the Good Friday talks, Powell tells her his boss is in a meeting with Bertie Ahern, but “we could get rid of him”. O’Hanlon replies that there is no need and Powell, whose sense of humour frequently falls on the dusty side of dry, chips in that he did not mean “get rid of him in her usual sense”.
(more…)
by Richard Gowan | Mar 16, 2008 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
David Steven has recently reminded us of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, but an earnest story from DoD reveals that the U.S. is now running hearts and minds operations inside its “detention facilities” in Iraq.
New ways of dealing with detainees in coalition-run facilities in Iraq are paying off through less violence, more actionable intelligence for warfighters, and a better separation of extremists from more moderate detainees, a senior leader told military analysts today.
Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, deputy commander for Multinational Force Iraq’s detainee operations, said efforts to tamp down on insurgent activity “inside the wire” is paying off in protecting both inside and outside the facilities.
Stone described the “Stone principles” he implemented toward that end: establishing an alliance with moderate Iraqis; empowering moderates to marginalize violent extremists; providing momentum to the reconciliation process; and promoting stability by releasing those who demonstrate characteristics that can help Iraq succeed.
Rather than being “warehoused,” as in the past, detainees now are assessed individually to identify extremists and separate them from the rest of the detainee population, Stone explained. “Then we begin to work with both sides of that population — extremists and the more moderate — to defeat any insurgency that was going on inside the theater detention facility,” he said.
Which is obviously all good news… until you are suddenly moved to think, exactly how bad were matters “inside the wire” before Stone rolled onto the scene?
(Unexpected GWoT fact of the day: as well as a meteoric military career, General Stone is an entrepreneur in the PC-based fax software field).
by David Steven | Mar 15, 2008 | Conflict and security
In a recent post on Global Dashboard, I wrote about resilience, drawing on thinking that Alex and I have been developing together for a new project we hope to launch later this year.
The post was triggered by David Miliband’s argument that one of the defining features of the era we live in is a shift in the balance of responsibilities between state and citizen. It was a mistake to assume this would lead to greater stability, I argued. The key question is whether, when faced with a distributed threat, our systems become more resilient or less so.
Lloyd Anderson, head of science at the British Council and an ecologist, pointed out to me that it is helpful to think about three levels of influence on a system: trends, stresses and shocks.
Trends are gradual shifts in a system’s composition and context. Shocks are immediate and catastrophic. Stresses sit somewhere in the middle, and tend to affect a complex system in a particular way. Under pressure, the system ‘resists’ change up to an unpredictable point. It then shifts rapidly – and usually irreversibly – to another equilibrium.
We pay plenty of attention to shocks and trends. The former sell newspapers, while the latter keep social scientists in work. But stresses are deadly, both because they fly beneath the radar, and because they have the potential to lead to deep-seated changes that undermine the basis of our way of life.
Take two examples: the 2003 heat wave in Europe and the slow-burn insurgency in the Niger delta. (more…)
