by Alistair Burnett | Feb 26, 2011 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Prime Minister, David Cameron’s tour of the Gulf on a trade promotion mission as the Arab world is rocked by mass protests against long-lasting authoritarian rulers has provoked a debate in Britain about whether the coalition government’s foreign policy is too focussed on trade and not enough on promoting values such as liberal democracy.
Mr Cameron’s visit was scheduled before the current unrest broke out in the region and the former PR executive in him attempted to head off potential criticism by adding a short stop in Egypt at the beginning of the tour to meet protest leaders and the provisional military government that removed Hosni Mubarak from power.
However, this has not been an entirely successful gambit.
The trip has attracted criticism, especially from liberal commentators, because several arms manufacturers are part of the trade delegation with the Prime Minister at the same time that the government had to revoke arms export licenses to Libya and Bahrain when the security forces there used violence against protesters.
The nub of the criticism is that the government is trying to persuade governments in the Arab world to buy British defence equipment at the same time as London talks about the need for those governments in the Arab world to stop repressing the demands of their people for more democracy. Some commentators argue that Mr Cameron is trying to have his cake and eat it, whereas the former Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, recently attacked the coalition’s foreign policy as ‘low-grade mercantilism’. The charge is that it is too focused on trade at the expense of promoting democratic values.
Mr Cameron has defended his approach and insisted in a speech in Kuwait and a town-hall meeting with Qatari students that you can promote trade and democracy at the same time and insisted Britain’s rules governing arms exports are among the toughest in the world.
It looks like the upheaval in the Arab world has brought Mr Cameron’s foreign policy approach, honed in opposition, into contact with the reality of government and he is learning that he has to talk about values as much as the bottom line.
Does this ring any bells?
Ironically, when Tony Blair first came to power, his Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook took the opposite approach to Mr Cameron, but ended up facing not dissimilar criticism. On assuming offce, Mr Cook announced that henceforth Britain would have an ‘ethical foreign policy’, but this soon encountered charges of hypocricy and/or naivety, because of – yes you guessed it – arms sales to authoritarian governments which didn’t square with respect for human rights and democratic values. In Labour’s case it was Indonesia’s violent attempt to suppress East Timor’s desire for independence in 1999 where British-made aircraft were used.
On The World Tonight this week we discussed the conflicting pressures on Mr Cameron, and the former British ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, argued that selling arms to foreign governments, under strict conditions that they will not be used for repressing their own people or attacking their neighbours, is not contradictory or hypocritical, it is a matter of judgement (as to whether those government’s will respect the guidelines or not).
But as Mr Cameron and Mr Blair before him have found out, the reality seems to be that once arms are licensed for export, it can become a political headache if that judgement turns out to be wrong.
by Alex Evans | Feb 25, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa
Ever heard of spare capacity theory? It’s defined by Gregor Macdonald as:
the assumption among western bankers, policy makers, economists, and stock markets that OPEC producers can lift oil production at will, and, export all of that spare production to world consumers.
(See also this recent post on Global Dashboard, and this one from back in 2008.) There’s a lot of spare capacity theory doing the rounds at the moment, given what’s happening in North Africa and the Middle East. Libya normally produces 1.6 million barrels of oil a day (a little under 2% of global production). It’s estimated that about 350,000 barrels, or 22%, of that is now offline, and depending on how things pan out, it could stay offline for some time.
Now imagine what happens if it all kicks off in Algeria (a larger exporter than Libya of oil plus oil products). Or, for that matter, in Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia – all of which are much more significant again. That’s what has traders and futures markets spooked, and everyone looking to Saudi Arabia: as a source quoted in the FT this morning puts it,
“It is fear of the unknown. The risks are all to the upside. Saudi Arabia needs to respond.”
Saudi Arabia, for its part, insists that it can and will increase production if needed:
“Right now, there are active talks in order to implement what is needed,” the Saudi official said. He stressed that the kingdom retains spare capacity of some 4m barrels a day – more than double Libya’s entire output, which totalled 1.58m b/d in January, according to the International Energy Agency.
Saudi Arabia has not yet decided whether to increase production. If it proved necessary to produce more, “then that will happen, there’s no problem at all”, the official said.
But what if that’s not true? Gregor Macdonald argues that the extent to which markets have climbed over the past week “suggests the market is justifiably concerned about events in Libya, and the risk of more unrest to come in oil producing regions”. His conclusion:
Given the potential magnitude of this situation, I actually think its good that we can still rely on price as a means to ration supply.
True though that may be, a new oil price spike is exactly what we didn’t need on global food prices at this point. Back at the start of the year, the fact that we weren’t in the middle of an oil spike was one of the factors I drew comfort from on the food outlook. Not now…
by Alex Evans | Feb 22, 2011 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa, UK
Presumably like many of my fellow countrymen, I am writhing with embarrassment about my Prime Minister’s ugly little junket to the Middle East this week.
It is a thing of wonder that, even as the PM is accompanied by the heads of BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Thales UK, Number 10’s press briefings should insist that the primary purpose of Cameron’s trip is about “encouraging political reform”. Or that Cameron’s defence, when challenged about arms sales, is to argue that
The idea that we should expect small and democratic countries like Kuwait to be able to manufacture all their means of defence seems to me completely at odds with reality.
Right – small and democratic countries like:
- Bahrain. Last year, exports approved by the UK government included assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and submachine guns – oh yes, and tear gas and crowd control ammunition. (OK, Bahrain may not be exactly democratic. But it’s small, right?)
- Libya. Q3 2010 goods approved for export included “wall and door breaching projectile launchers, crowd control ammunition, small arms ammunition, tear gas/irritant ammunition, training tear gas/irritant ammunition … ammunition comprised £3.2m of the £4.7m million of military items licensed”
- Egypt. 2010 approved exports included “components for all-wheel drive vehicles with ballistic protection; military communications equipment; optical target surveillance equipment; components for armoured personnel carriers; components for semi-automatic pistols; and components for submachine guns”
- Saudi Arabia. 2010 exports included “armoured personnel carriers, ground vehicle military communications equipment, sniper rifles; small arms ammunition; weapon sights”; 2009 included “CS hand grenades, tear gas/irritant ammunition and tear gas/riot control agents”
These details are courtesy of Campaign Against the Arms Trade; but in fact, as the Guardian’s Datablog shows, there’s practically no country in the region that we don’t flog arms to.
You could – if you were feeling very charitable – take the view that lots of governments were selling lots of arms to countries in the Middle East, and that no-one anticipated the wave of repression now underway. That would seem to be the underlying implication of the government’s defensive line that it has now revoked export licenses to Bahrain and Libya – as if to say, ‘Ugly business, old chap; but who could possibly have known that these regimes were so ghastly?’
But for David Cameron cheerfully to head over to the Middle East even as the shooting’s underway in countries all around him, on an arms sales junket – wow. That truly puts Britain in a class of its own.
Update: This from a press release out today from Saferworld, the conflict prevention NGO:
…in 2010, the LibDex arms fair in Tripoli saw a large proportion of the exhibition hall taken up by UK companies. Yet throughout this period there were serious questions about Libya’s status as a responsible arms importer. Libya repeatedly attempted to source orders that far outstripped its defence needs and a 2008 UN report showed that Libya sent weapons originally sold to it by Spain, Belgium and Bulgaria on to Darfur in clear breach of the UN arms embargo on the region.
And also this:
Although the UK is to be credited for revoking export licences to Bahrain and Libya, and the EU yesterday announced that it was suspending all arms trade with Libya, the fact is that many of these licences should never have been issued in the first place and, in the face of recent events, this is somewhat a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. Although the problem is not confined to Libya alone, the way exports to the country have been approached is a clear illustration of the serious flaws in how EU members’ put their own rules into practice.
by Alex Evans | Feb 22, 2011 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 22, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Middle East and North Africa
Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic (who still have yet to send me a copy of their magazine two months after the subscription was paid for…).
Update: Searching through the full archive of Rumsfeld papers (online here), I find this gem from May 2003, in a memo from Rumsfeld to the President:
Mr President, we were concerned that going to war in Iraq could alienate our allies in the Gulf – today, our relationships there are stronger than ever. There was concern about the US acting unilaterally. Instead, you formed a 65-nation coalition and in the process strengthened the bonds of friendship with Britain and many other nations in Europe, both old and new.
A glass half full kind of guy, then.
Update 2: Donald shows how to do interagency cooperation in a 2002 memo to Paul Wolfowitz:
Call Condi Rice. She said to me that we have got to get the detainee mess sorted out, that nobody is able to get answers. I think she is getting this from the UK. Call her and find out what she is talking about. She always comes in with these cryptic messages as though the Pentagon is messed up, and I don’t have any idea what she is talking about.
