by David Steven | Jul 7, 2007 | East Asia and Pacific, Global system
These days, the American right – sinking ever-deeper into a paranoid, unreasoning funk – is mostly obsessed with Islam abroad and immigrants at home. But there are still some old-style commie-fighting cold warriors out there, and they have China in their sights.
Larry Kudlow – National Review’s economics editor and a CNBC presenter – is in the vanguard. Thanks to him, we can now see what the dastardly reds are now up to. They’re trying to kill our children.
Is China trying to poison us, our kids, and our pets? Are Beijing’s communist hardliners waging some clever, clandestine, economic/military war against U.S. citizens? Now, before flatly dismissing the idea, consider that China freely admits a lengthy record of safety woes.
Check out yesterday’s Wall Street Journal for Pete’s sake. According to China’s own findings, almost 20 percent of Chinese goods fail to meet quality standards. 20 percent…
Could this be a calculated Communist strategy? Is China trying to poison our pets and our kids? Maybe the folks suspicious of China are right after all?
by David Steven | Jun 25, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Interesting differences of opinion about how serious a problem we’re facing…
Potted Bert Metz: To avoid dangerous climate change (a 2 degree increase in mean global temperature), we need to stabilise emissions by 2015 and get them back to current levels by 2040. Even if this is achieved, we’re still going to see very costly damage.
Potted Matthew Hulbert: Don’t expect a ‘seminal moment’ where climate change is definitively linked to conflict, but security is undoubtedly going to get worse. Climate change is an undoubted ‘threat multiplier’. Africa is most vulnerable, where the climate is already challenging, many people live close to the edge, and resilience is in short supply.
Potted Brahma Chellaney: Yeah it’s going to be bad, but the doomsayers are painting too black a picture. “Scaremongering makes it harder to come up with a realistic response.” The green bandwagon is already leading us down some dead ends. Biofuels, for instance, are a sop for the farm lobby, but will push food prices higher and harm the poor. Innovation and ingenuity are the answer. (more…)
by Jules Evans | May 17, 2007 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks
Last week, the Kremlin signed a deal with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan that apparently stymies the mooted Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, which the EU was hoping would free up some Turkmen gas from the bear hug of the Kremlin. Instead, it looks like for the time being, all Turkmen gas will be exported via Gazprom.
There was a brief window of opportunity for the EU to try and woo the new president of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, after president Turkmenbashi died suddenly earlier this year.
But did the EU ever really have any hope of winning over the new president? The Kremlin would have had top politicians on the plane immediately to Ashgabat, with promises of major new investments and major personal financial incentives for all concerned. The EU would have sent some minor bureaucrat several months later, to discuss the possibility of a wide-ranging partnership including strengthening the country’s judiciary and possibly supporting some sort of theatrical festival.
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by Elizabeth Sellwood | May 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.
Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.
Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. (more…)
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
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