by Richard Gowan | Apr 2, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Global system, South Asia
Eighteen months ago, I wrote a post for GD asking whether India was about to pull its troops out of UN missions. This was inspired by two very good Indian blogs: Nitin Pai’s Acorn and the anonymously-authored Pragmatic Euphony. Both have been arguing for India to cut back its UN commitments to near zero, on the grounds that (i) there is no clear strategic logic for these deployments; (ii) India has urgent military priorities closer to home, like Afghanistan; and (iii) Indian UN contigents have been hit by a series of accusations of misbehavior.
Back in mid-2008, this seemed like an interesting but theoretical argument. India’s commitment to UN operations looked solid. But after the 2008 Congo crisis – when Indian units were criticized for avoiding combat – New Delhi made clear diplomatic warnings that its patience with UN ops was limited. Western diplomats in New York treat Indian sensitivities with extreme care, lest Delhi pull its forces out of blue helmet missions. If that happened, the UN would be faced with a massive shortfall of infantry, helicopters, etc.
This is one of the big political stories around peacekeeping (perhaps the biggest) now. But readers of reports on UN ops would hardly know about it, as it gets very little coverage. By contrast, there’s lots of analysis of China’s role in peacekeeping, as I note in a new article out this week:
Are Chinese peacekeepers more interesting than Indian ones? Many Western security analysts seem to think so. China has just over 2,000 soldiers and police serving in United Nations operations. India has nearly 9,000. Yet while there is a steady flow of American and European think-tank reports with titles like China’s Expanding Role in Peacekeeping—mostly praising it—little is written about India’s far larger contribution.
New Delhi’s policy-makers should pause to ask why. Over the last decade, Indian forces have been on the frontline in many of the UN’s hardest missions, from Sierra Leone to the Congo. In the same period, China has gone from hardly engaging in peacekeeping at all to deploying engineers, medics and policemen—a useful but still limited offering.
Having spent a happy hour under the protection of Chinese policemen in Haiti, this author has no complaints—but it’s clear that China is getting a lot of kudos at little cost.
I should emphasize that I’m not against analyzing Chinese peacekeeping, let alone Chinese peacekeepers (and I thoroughly recommend these papers by ICG and SIPRI on the topic). But I think that Western and Indian strategists alike need to devote more time and energy to thinking through India’s role:
India should take a leaf from China’s great power playbook. It should not service UN missions for their own sake. Nor should it tie its involvement to limited rewards like senior posts in UN missions—such things are nice to have, but aren’t the currency of great power politics. Instead, India should use its investment in the UN as the basis to stake its leadership as a driver of new thinking about peacekeeping in a multipolar world.
Check out the full article for my arguments about how India can take this role – and how it might be an important step towards deploying a robust UN force in Afghanistan to replace NATO, as and when the Alliance finally gives up there.
Observant readers will note that the piece appears in Pragati, a journal on Indian strategic affairs edited by Nitin Pai, who has no problem platforming authors he cordially disagrees with. I hope that he’ll blog an equally cordial riposte to my argument, and that we can then have a knock-down, drag-out online debate about it – and that Pragmatic Euphony (who recently emphasized the need to release Indian helicopters from UN missions as priority) will join in too. For while we disagree rather fundamentally on this question, we agree that it’s an important issue for India and UN alike.
by Michael Harvey | Apr 1, 2010 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
– With Moscow still smouldering in the wake of the metro bombings, Sam Greene assesses how the Kremlin might respond, suggesting that recourse to further authoritarianism is unlikely to prove productive. The Economist, meanwhile, highlights the need for greater awareness across Russia of the fragile situation in the north Caucasus and notes the lack of a measured political discourse in response to the attacks.
– Francis Fukuyama talks to former US Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, about China’s approach to the financial crisis. Daniel Drezner, meanwhile, reports on the discontent of leading G20 countries at Beijing’s apparent insouciance over implementing agreed economic reforms. Elsewhere, Patrick Messerlin charts the actions of the emerging G20 powers across economics, trade, and climate – suggesting that while much progress has been made, they still require leadership from OECD countries. Oxfam’s From Poverty to Power blog, meanwhile, offers a progress update on the financial transaction tax.
– Elsewhere, Der Spiegel interviews the man that headed Obama’s transition team, John Podesta, who offers his thoughts on the healthcare debate, the Washington political process, and Obama’s engagement with the rest of the world. The FT’s Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, meanwhile, assess the centralised nature of foreign policy decision-making in the Obama White House – highlighting the emphasis placed on improving the inter-agency process compared with the Bush years, but also the lack of a grand strategic thinker to which the President can regularly turn (à la Kissinger).
– Finally, Prospect Magazine has an interesting article on “seasteading” – described as involving “a future in which the high seas will be increasingly commandeered for unconventional purposes” (such as medical tourism, gambling, sanctuaries for minority groups etc.) – and the opportunity it may present for the creation of “micronations” populated by libertarian-minded groups.
by David Steven | Apr 1, 2010 | Global system
Opening Remarks at a Seminar on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization – Risk, Resilience and International Order (pdf of paper), Brookings Institution, 29 March 2010
The forerunner of this paper was commissioned by the UK Prime Minister in Spring 2008 and was presented at the Progressive Governance Summit in Watford on 5 April of that year.
At the table were a dozen or so heads of state, plus the heads of the WTO and IMF, and a few wildcards, most visibly Bill Clinton, who spent much of the summit in a rage about a mysterious figure he would only identify as ‘my wife’s opponent.’
Our section of the agenda was on building an international system that could withstand global risks, but its start was much delayed. Leaders wanted to get stuck into the nitty gritty of the most recent and pressing crisis – an economic one. Bear Stearns had just been bailed out and heads were clearly shocked by what this had revealed about global economic systems.
That day, the general view was that the acute phase of the crisis was now over. While the world had experienced unprecedented market turbulence, the situation was now under control and the focus should switch to rebuilding. As it turned out, of course, the tsunami of financial destruction was still building – with the worst impact months later, after Lehman’s was allowed to collapse in the Autumn.
Governments were forced to admit that they had little idea of how global economic systems worked – and still have only provisional thoughts about how to fix them. If the financial crisis has changed anything, it’s that it’s now acceptable to admit that too often, today, policymakers simply don’t know what to do. Our presentation to leaders was written from the belief that this crisis of confidence was not just confined to the economic sphere.
We have lived through an unexpectedly turbulent opening decade of the 21st century. The financial crisis shattered all assumptions about how economic risk is controlled, especially as it crosses the borders between organizations, countries, and categories (from the risk itself, to instruments derived from that risk).
We also witnessed 9/11 and the ill-considered and poorly-executed invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that followed it – an event that took governments by surprise, and a reaction that was marred by moral, strategic and intelligence failures. 9/11 has, and will continue to have, far-reaching implications for the way the US and its allies think about security, while also significantly limiting their scope for action when confronted by new threats.
Finally (and least commented upon), we experienced a pronounced oil and food price spike – a harbinger of how difficult it will prove to cope with the world’s interrelated demographic, economic, and resources constraints. Again, it is clear that we lack understanding of the complex interplay between demand (driven by population numbers, wealth and, on occasion, speculation) and supply (driven by natural limits, investment patterns, and regulation) across a range of resources, each with interlinked patterns of usage and pricing.
Looking at these three events, we see a number of common threads which taken together define what we term the long crisis of globalization. These include:
- Scarcity, limits to the sustainable consumption of highly strategic commodities such as energy, land, water, food and ‘atmospheric space’ for emissions.
- Instability, the tendency for complex systems to experience unpredictable and unsettling shifts.
- And finally, the potential for the deliberate disruption of fragile global systems – whether by terrorists, rogue states, or the inventors of that other potent weapon, the CDO or collateralized debt obligation.
(more…)
by David Steven | Apr 1, 2010 | Articles and Publications, Conflict and security, Global system, Speeches
Introductory remarks by David Steven at a Brookings Institution seminar on risk and resilience in the global system (March 2010)
Download Speech
by Richard Gowan | Apr 1, 2010 | Economics and development, Off topic, UK
The BBC has published a story entitled “Business Leaders Back Conservative Tax Pledge” (which may rank with “Dog Would Like to Bite Man, But Chases Tail For Fun Instead” as a headline). It was initially illustrated with a montage of Connery, Dalton and Moore as Bond the CEOs of M&S, Sainsbury’s and EasyJet:*
Don’t today’s leaders (or the BBC) know that black tie is to be worn undone?
* This picture has since been replaced with a video of David Cameron – a man with a well-known expertise in formal attire from his student days, after all – discussing taxes.
