Is Obama using the UN to launch a coup in Canada?

by | Sep 30, 2010 | Conflict and security, North America, Off topic

Don’t Barack Obama and Canadian opposition chief Michael Ignatieff look like a natural pair of left-leaning, book-writing fans of global governance?  The Winnipeg Free Press scents a plot against Canadian Conservative PM Stephen Harper:

The Obama administration is heaping praise on some old Liberal ideas about Canada’s role on the world stage — policies the Harper Conservatives have been accused of dumping.

Esther Brimmer, the U.S. State Department’s assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs, lauded ex-Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy and his signature “human security” agenda during an exclusive interview with The Canadian Press.  Brimmer also said her government strongly supports a key tenet of Axworthy’s old agenda — the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine that the United Nations endorsed five years ago in an attempt to prevent genocide and protect innocent civilians from abuse by their own political leaders.

Canada struck an international commission a decade ago to write the doctrine and the panel included current Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in his academic life before he entered politics.  “Canada and other countries were leaders in thinking about what does human security mean,” Brimmer said in an interview this week on the margins of an international aviation summit in Montreal.

Brimmer’s remarks are timely because she is watching the race for the two temporary seats on the United Nations Security Council — a contest between Canada, Germany and Portugal that will be decided by a secret ballot at the UN on Oct. 12.

Since winning power in 2006, many observers say the Harper government has all but abandoned the R2P agenda at the UN.

Brimmer attended the General Assembly in New York last week when Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the assembly’s 190 countries that Canada has a stellar track record and is ready to serve a two-year term on the Security Council.  Brimmer declined comment on Harper’s speech, saying it is U.S. policy not to publicly endorse candidate countries vying for the Security Council.

We’re not fooled!

Afghanistan: the Michigan State University option

by | Sep 30, 2010 | Conflict and security, East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, North America

Have we tried everything possible to save Afghanistan? No! We have not turned over the entire state-building exercise there to scholars from Michigan State University.

Does this seem like an unlikely option to you? Then you weren’t in Nam. Rufus Phillips, who has a new piece in the World Affairs Journal, was:

Despite warnings [of a South Vietnamese insurgency] at the time, Pentagon planners judged the principal security threat to be an overt North Vietnamese invasion across the 17th parallel. Hence the Vietnamese army was taken out of its territorial security role and converted into a conventional army of corps, divisions, regiments, and battalions to act as a blocking force long enough for the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to come to the rescue.

A newly created South Vietnamese constabulary, the Civil Guard, was supposed to replace the army in its rural security role. However, our economic aid mission gave the training and mentoring job to Michigan State University, which used traditional policing as a model and hired former American state and local police as trainers and advisers…

Phillips goes on to argue that the U.S. and UN are actually repeating a lot of Michigan State’s Vietnam errors in Afghanistan. His piece is worth a read. If you want to learn about how Michigan’s finest flopped in Vietnam, check out James Carter’s Inventing Vietnam.  It’s a great cautionary tale for any academic or analyst who thinks that they could do a better job in Afghanistan than the guys on the ground…

When’s the next oil price spike?

by | Sep 28, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity

Back in 2008, just as the oil price started to plummet after hitting its all-time high of $147 a barrel, I did a post pondering whether the drop was “the start of a long decline, or just a brief pause to draw breath before a resumption of the relentless upward march of recent years”. I argued that oil prices would stay low as long as the credit crunch lasted, but that

once we’re through the crunch, we may be back to a game of cat and mouse between oil supply and economic growth. Demand falls, oil price falls; demand picks up, oil price goes back up too – but never for long enough to give investors a clear signal to pump cash into new oil supply infrastructure

Over at the Energy Bulletin, Dave Cohen’s just published a post thinking about the same question – and wondering when the next oil spike is due. His take is that the next crunch will likely be in 2013, give or take a year, as his graph below illustrates:

As Dave notes, this graph is not a forecast on oil prices, but rather a schematic illustrating that a) demand surges cause oil price shocks [i.e. the peaks on his graph]; b) oil price shocks cause recesssions and force reductions in demand [the troughs]; and c) the average price of oil goes up over time [the straight line]. Informally, he notes, “we can say there’s been an oil price shock when the real (inflation-adjusted) price goes over $100 per barrel and stays there for at least 2 months”.

His whole post is worth reading (n.b. especially his emphasis on the key variable in all this, namely prospects for Chinese growth) – and leaves the reader wondering: how do we break out of the cycle?

As I argued back in 08, one answer could be massive new investment in oil production – remember the IEA’s consistent warnings throughout the downturn about how under-investment in new oil production is setting the stage for a new supply crunch. But there are two problems with that option. One: we’re into diminishing returns territory. With the age of easy oil over, production increases from now depend on unpalatable options like tar sands, oil shales and, ahem, a lot more deepwater drilling (which is projected to account for 40% of global oil demand by 2020). Two: this approach does nothing to solve climate change.

So, I concluded 2 years ago, “it looks like the only way through is for policymakers to agree a global climate policy framework that’s both global in scope and sufficiently long term to provide investors with an unequivocal signal of where to put their cash: this is the only way of squaring energy security with climate change”.

I still think that’s right – but obviously, prospects for that have dimmed considerably since Copenhagen. So where does that leave us? That leaves us, alas, stuck in the yo-yo world depicted in Dave’s graph (which looks a lot like the Multilateral Zombie climate policy scenario that David and I described in our 2009 report for the UK government on global climate architecture – see page 7 onwards).

Oh – and it also leaves us on track for 3 degrees plus of global warming.