by Richard Gowan | Jun 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, Off topic
Here’s a really very moving campaign ad for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, or “Big John”. It’s almost enough to make me forgive Clooney’s “Waging Peace” video, but not quite.
As I got this from Gawker (“Insane Political Ad Must Be a Joke”) and Gawker pointed out that it was already available from Wonkette and lots of other places, U.S. readers may well have seen it already. But I suspect that, in spite the world-size-reducing powers of the web, readers further afield may have missed it. Enjoy!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vcB7uCqdFk]
by Alex Evans | Jun 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
Exciting news: the DC-based Young Professionals in Foreign Policy network is organising a silent auction for charity, in which you can buy yourself a hot foreign policy lunch date.
Some of the names are pretty good. I’d be up for soup and a sandwich with Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, or with Washington Note blogger Steven Clemons. And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to grab a salad with former White House chief of staff John Podesta? I’d even – at a pinch – consider bidding for the chance to hang out with former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, if only to ask him about the opening paragraph of his biog:
“During his first four years as Secretary, America achieved the lowest vehicle fatality rate ever recorded… The Secretary has [also] overseen the safest three-year period in aviation history.”
Er, and 9/11 fits in where to this rosy account?
But all of this is before we get to the main course. For the most notable thing about YPFP’s 14 strong list is the preponderance of neo-cons. They’re all here! You can head out for dim sum with Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise Institute’s VP for foreign policy. You can have pasta with Paul Wolfowitz. You could grill Richard Perle over a rib-eye.
Or – perhaps most attractively of all – you could sign up for lunch with former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the Honourable Douglas J Feith.
I know, I know – I’m thinking it too. And so, dear readers, a proposal. In the red corner: the man General Tommy Franks called “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet”. In the blue corner, if he’s willing to accept this demanding mission: GD’s acerbic defence guru Richard Gowan – tooled up with a tape recorder, a notebook, and enough cash for to keep the zinfandel flowing for as long as it takes.
I will chip in a crisp tenner to a Global Dashboard fighting fund to bring this exquisite vision one step closer to reality. Who’s with me? The auction’s tomorrow, so we need to be a bit quicker than the average multi-donor pledging conference if we’re to succeed…
by Alex Evans | Jun 19, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system
Not much respite in prospect on food export restrictions, if today’s FT is anything to go by. Vietnam, the world’s second largest exporter of rice, has imposed a minimum price of $800 a tonne on rice exports (the price last year was $300 – ouch). Meanwhile, Argentina has just passed a tariff bill which “is not likely to lead to an immediate resumption of grain exports in the world’s third-biggest soy producer, sixth-biggest wheat producer and second-biggest corn exporter, analysts say”.
These problems underline a bigger challenge lurking in the background: that while the world may have a rules-based global trading system built around the WTO, that system is built for totally different trading conditions to the ones that obtain today.
In essence, the WTO and its dispute resolution architecture are designed to help countries to work through squabbles about market access and dumping – the sort of scuffles you expect in a buyer’s market. Fine – except that today, we’re in a seller’s market, on food and energy alike, where the concerns that are really furrowing brows are over security of supply, not market access.
And as a range of current examples show, the one thing policymakers can’t do is just sit back and ‘leave it to the market’. On energy, there’s already increasing friction over strategic oil supplies in Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the South China Sea. On food, meanwhile, export restrictions have left many countries in serious difficulties – like the Philippines, which is trying to go self-sufficient in rice within three years (from being the world’s no. 1 importer today – good luck). Meanwhile, China, Saudi Arabia and other importers are engaged in a quiet but determined hunt for land to buy in third countries.
Over the long term, these pressures may increase dramatically. Demand for energy and food is forecast to grow by 50 per cent each by 2030, according to the IEA and the World Bank respectively. If supply growth fails to keep pace – as seems entirely possible, especially given that food and energy prices are increasingly interlinked (through fuel costs, fertiliser costs, and the arbitrage relationship created by biofuels) – then situations like these will in retrospect seem like no more than trailers for the main feature.
In that context, it would be helpful if our rules-based trading system had something – anything – to say on the subject of security of supply. Do major exporters of key strategic resources have responsibilities as well as rights in the international system? Or is it no more than the legitimate exercise of sovereignty if they suspend or restrict exports at a moment’s notice?
Big questions – but not ones that are the subject of searching debate among trade negotiators. Like Britain’s artillery guns in Singapore during World War Two, the world trade system’s defences are pointing the wrong way.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 18, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia
While the national football team’s loss to Italy last night heralded the end of an era for French football and possibly Raymond Domenech tenure as coach, a new era in French national security and defence policy was being ushered in by President Sarkozy.
In a sentence: The new French white paper is a radical departure from traditional French defence policy and recommends a plethora of new policies that seek to transform internal structures of government regarding intelligence and crisis management while simultaneously articulating a shift in approach to international affairs.
It’s good, far better than the US National security’s strategy and better in some areas than the recent UK strategy. Terrorism ranks as France’s primary threat (pourquoi?).
The two key takeaways are the wholesale transformation of France’s crisis management structures and the five strategic functions of national security strategy.
The strategy offers a well worn narrative beginning with the end of the post-Cold War world and the effects of globalisation. There are some clear parallels with work done in the UK, US, Singapore and elsewhere but some notable differences. Like the UK NSS the French white paper takes an all-hazards approach, dealing with active, deliberate threats but also with the security implications of major disasters and catastrophes of a non-intentional nature.
Unlike the UK NSS which was primarily the creation of a small group of policy makers inside the Cabinet Office the French Government have put a huge amount of effort into their new strategy. The composition of the Commission included government agencies, the armed forces, parliamentarians, academia, think-tanks, independent experts and industry. And in a striking similarity with the Conservative Party’s approach, the Commission took evidence from individuals from 14 countries on 5 continents with televised and on-line hearings. Furthermore there were more than twenty in-depth field visits in defence and national security units and facilities.
For a more indepth analysis…
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jun 18, 2008 | Influence and networks
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pucdJHjZaqs]
If you do nothing else this week, watch this – JK Rowling’s superb commencement address to Harvard’s class of 2008, made a couple of weeks ago. Some excerpts, culled from the speech by Kevin Kelly:
The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….
I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….
