by Alex Evans | Jan 26, 2008 | North America
Yesterday, in the context of writing about the government’s new Counter Terrorism Bill, I was discussing why MCarthyism had never made real inroads in the UK during the 1950s. Today, what should drop into my inbox but an NY Times review of a new book aiming to rehabilitate Senator Joseph R McCarthy. David Oshinsky – himself a previous biographer of McCarthy – writes:
A full-throated defense of the senator is now in the bookstores. Written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative journalist whose roots stretch back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, it carries a title, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” (Crown Forum, $29.95), that well explains its thesis. But “Blacklisted by History” is drawing significant attention on the political right, where the reviews have ranged from gushing (The Weekly Standard) to scathing (National Review). If nothing else, Evans has forced his movement friends to look again at McCarthy. For conservatives, the crazy uncle has finally left the attic.
So what can we expect to read about if we buy the book?:
Evans buys into the heart of the McCarthy conspiracy — the belief that leftist elements in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a foreign policy to advance the spread of world Communism.
How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? “Who lost China?” propelled McCarthy to the national stage. Along the way, he described General George C. Marshall, the nation’s most respected military commander, as a Communist dupe; urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; purposely confused the names of the convicted perjurer and likely Soviet spy Alger Hiss and the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (“Alger — I mean Adlai”); and called Harry Truman a “son of a bitch” who made his key decisions in the midnight darkness while drunk on bourbon.
McCarthy blamed the fall of China on “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Evans not only endorses this conspiracy but actually expands it to include “the Eastern, internationalist faction” of the Republican Party, “with ties to Wall Street, large corporations, big Eastern media outlets and Ivy League establishment.” To Evans, the conspiracy passed from president to president — from Roosevelt and Truman to Eisenhower and even Nixon, a former McCarthyite, who “would fall off the teeter-totter, landing with Henry Kissinger in Red China, thereafter pushing on into the mists of détente with Moscow.”
Okaay…
by Charlie Edwards | Jan 23, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Alex has blogged before about black swans and the human assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations. Nassim Taleb argues they can’t. But that hasn’t deterred Oxford Analytica, the consulting firm that draws on a network of over 1,000 senior faculty members at Oxford. The company has developed an Early Warning system to meet exactly these needs, catchily named the ‘Global Stress Points Matrix’. According to OA:
The Global Stress Points Matrix provides a means of identifying and monitoring potential political and economic surprises and threats. These may appear unlikely but would have severe consequences should they occur. It is a disciplined approach for ‘stepping outside conventional wisdom’ and uses Oxford Analytica’s global network of experts to ‘ask the right questions’ and the Oxford Analytica Daily Brief process to monitor developments.
There’s a cool matrix too:
Some of the stress points:
1 CHINA/TAIWAN: Armed hostilities
2 US/IRAN: US strike on Iran
3 INTERNATIONAL: Human avian flu pandemic
4 UNITED STATES: Deep recession
5 INTERNATIONAL: Oil price shock
6 PAKISTAN: State collapse
7 INTERNATIONAL: Return to protectionism
13 SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY: Increasing climate regulation
14 RUSSIA: Return to regional ascendancy
18 NORTH KOREA: Military conflict
19 NIGERIA: Large-scale disorder in the Delta
21 CENTRAL ASIA: Risk of major disorder
22 BALKANS: Return to serious
If any of this does actually happen don’t say we didn’t warn you….
by Alex Evans | Jan 23, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, South Asia, UK
Interesting to see this little nugget included in the UK / Indian communique resulting from Gordon Brown’s talks with Manmohan Singh:
Long-term convergence of per capita emission rates is an important and equitable principle that should be seriously considered in the context of international climate change negotiations.
Manmohan Singh’s getting pretty good at this – as readers will recall, he had a similar conversation with Angela Merkel after the Heiligendamm G8, which resulted in her pushing per capita convergence steadily through the second half of last year (as for instance in her speech at the UN High Level Event on climate at the end of September last year).
I’ve been arguing since then that European leaders need to get behind Merkel’s position – because espousing convergence as the means of sharing out a safe global emissions budget is Europe’s best shot at securing developing country buy-in to a globally agreed ceiling on greenhouse gas levels in the air, an absolute prerequisite for limiting warming to two degrees C (as Europe says it wants to).
India is the obvious partner in this enterprise. Its per capita emissions (a little over a tonne of CO2 per person) are way below the global average of 4.18 t/CO2 – so any system based on convergence will be plenty profitable for India. (I set out a fuller analysis of this argument in the speech I did for the Institute of Environmental Security after Bali.)
What’s ironic in all of this is that India was widely criticised for being ‘awkward’ at Bali – whilst China was lauded for being willing to talk about ‘commitments’ (even if not binding targets). Manmohan Singh looks, in other words, to be pushing a much more progressive position than his own negotiators. Maybe this is a subtle two track negotiating strategy, maybe it’s just incoherence in the Indian government – the balance of opinion in the climate debate would probably say the latter, but who knows.
Either way, Europe and India have a real chance here to grab the political momentum in climate talks between now and the G8 in Japan, if they can pull together a robust joint strategy.
by Alex Evans | Jan 21, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, UK
Adam Boulton at Sky News, travelling with the PM in India, gives us a heads-up of another speech on multilateral reform:
The Prime Minister believes that the world has changed so much since then that we need to rewrite the rules. He is particularly interested in the growing might of the so-called BRICs – Brazil, Russia, India and China – the last two of which he is visiting on this tour. Mr Brown cheered his hosts by repeating Britain’s longstanding view that India should join Britain, France, the US, Russia and China with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. But in return he wants India to do more in the global conflict against fundamentalist terrorism. The Prime Minister also wants the UN to establish a standing rapid response team of judges, police, and civilian experts who can be deployed immediately to stabilize countries immediately following violent conflicts.
He seems to have the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the knock on collapse of Northern Rock on his mind in his ideas for the IMF. Mr Brown says it shoud become the “early warning system for financial turbulence”, with the powers to intervene as soon as potential financial crisis are identified. He wants the World Bank to focust on the environment as well as it’s existing mission of poverty reduction. He wants to set up a global climate change fund (Britain has already earmarked $1.6 billion for a similar project). This would be the carrot for poor countries to do something about their carbon emissions complementing the stick of rich nation threats.
Hang on, you say, isn’t there a slight sense of deja vu here? Why yes: it’s the same as his last speech on multilateral reform – and as I observed at the time, that speech in turn read like a re-run of the 2004 UN High Level Panel on threats, challenges and change. To be fair, it’s hard to find fault with the content. But it would be welcome to hear more about how the PM plans to achieve all this, given the snail’s pace of multilateral reform discussions over the last few years.
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, UK
Benedict Brogan is off to China with the Prime Ministerial travelling circus, plus various business bigwigs including Richard Branson. But as a sequence of posts on Benedict’s blog yesterday record, all did not appear to be going smoothly as the trip got underway. At 12.27pm , the first indications that all might not be well began to emerge:
Oh dear. Bad enough that Sir Richard Branson has to fly to China on a BA plane, but he’s also fallen out with BAA and Ruth Kelly. There’s been an almighty cock up involving the Dept of Transport’s security guys here at Heathrow, and as a result it’s chaos at the Royal Suite. The business bigwigs were kept sitting in a coach outside the gates for 55 mins. Branson was so cross he called the head of BAA to complain. Mr Brown isn’t here yet, but he may want to have a word with Ruth. This may take quite a lot of in-flight champagne to fix.
But things were about to get worse. 1.13pm, and Brogan is showing that irresistible Daily Mail sangfroid:
It’s not for me to say this trip is cursed, but from where I sit on the PM’s BA charter (fabulous bacon sarnies, do hope Sir Richard likes them) I can see a BA airbus that has just come off the runway due to a lack of undercarriage. It doesn’t look too serious even if it is sitting at an odd angle, but rumour is all flights are grounded. So we are delayed until BAA gets the mess cleared. This is turning into a busy day for Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former spokesman, and now head of comms for BAA.
More drama was still to come. 1.35pm:
This gets weirder. The PM’s motorcade was coming up the A4 as the plane approached and at one point his detectives grew alarmed. The suggestion is the stricken Airbus misjudged its approach and nearly took out the PM. I can’t vouch for this, but this trip is getting more eventful by the minute and we’re only now taking off.
Now, fortunately, the intrepid crew are safely ensconced in Beijing, where there’s only one small snag:
For the past three days the Chinese have asked No10 staff to ensure we don’t ask about democracy. It was explained to them that this might not be possible, and sure enough Mr Wen got asked by both Nick Robinson and Tom Bradby why it was taking so long to democratise. I suspect it may take some time: we’ve been issued with a detailed list of what is expected of us, including ” please stand up and applaud when the two PMs enter the venue”. We didn’t, but that may just be because we are fast asleep.
We’ll be watching riveted over the next few days…
