by Richard Gowan | Oct 11, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system
The UN and NATO have signed a – not very radical – declaration about their cooperation in places like Afghanistan and Darfur, and the Russians are peeved:
Moscow on Thursday accused NATO and the United Nations of secretly forging an agreement that tightens their cooperation without informing Russia, a U.N. Security Council member whose relations with NATO are badly strained.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia was aware an agreement was in the works and assumed it would be shown to member states for review. “This did not happen, and the agreement between the secretariats was signed in a secretive way,” Lavrov said.
Russia’s anger reflected its wariness that closer relations could give NATO more clout at the United Nations, where Moscow holds veto power as a permanent Security Council member. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko suggested that top U.N. officials went back on their word. “We were assured at the highest level of the U.N. secretariat that no such document would be signed without informing us in advance,” he said.
It was silly of the UN to let this come out the same week that the Security Council agreed to extend the UN monitoring mission in Georgia. But this agreement has been in the works for ages. I recall seeing a draft in 2006, although this was covered in scribbled deletions from the French, who didn’t want it to overshadow cooperation between the UN and EU. For a time, it looked like the deal was dead, but there’s been a lot of interest in it at the very top of both NATO and the UN.
I don’t think the Russians should worry too much: this is a piece of paper that summarizes a vast amount of UN-NATO cooperation that is already happening.
But signing it was a mistake for the UN. As a report overseen by Lakhdar Brahimi implied earlier this year, UN staff are seen as legitimate targets for terrorists and malcontents worldwide because it is associated with U.S. and Western interests. The challenge in an Afghanistan is for the UN to maintain some political autonomy. Even a low-profile declaration like this makes it just a little harder to do that.
And this minor diplomatic incident points to a growing conceptual problem for fans of multilateral security cooperation. This is a naive belief that all international security institutions have, or could have, shared goals and that we simply need to link them up better to meet those goals. This is a hangover from the happy days of the 1990s, when the West still had a grip on pretty much every organization from the UN to Boy Scouts, but it’s not sustainable in a more competitive world.
NATO and the UN have fundamentally different roles: the first is still, in the final analysis, a framework for Western security while the latter is a place to do deals between disunited states. The two can cooperate case-by-case, but this deep political difference remains. And it should remain – our best hope for resolving threats in a competitive world is to keep our range of political options open.
I think the only really interesting question in security cooperation at present is how we maintain and nurture sufficient institutional pluralism in the international system. “Diverse institutional responses to diverse threats” is my new slogan.
Acute readers will note that this is rather different to what Alex and David have been saying about climate change, commodity prices, etc. – i.e. we need shared awareness and shared platforms to tackle new challenges – not to mention the swirling demands for an international response to the financial crisis.
I’ll freely admit that I’m skeptical about the idea of truly shared understanding in ANY political realm (isn’t it just an old Enlightenment fallacy back to disturb the system?) but I do share the analysis that on an issue like climate change, international convergence on a (probably rather minimal) shared awareness of the threats involved and mechanisms to respond is necessary and just possible. Maybe. Climate change now is probably in the same category as nuclear proliferation during the Cold War: everyone can be scared into signing a big deal to tackle it, which is how we got the NPT, a pretty amazing treaty in retrospect.
But even as Russia and the U.S. were moving towards the NPT, they were on alert in Europe and Asia. It is possible to converge on global problems while competing on diverse localized security issues. So I’ll leave the search for common platforms to my colleagues, and argue for uncommon platforms down below.
by David Steven | Oct 10, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
I’m just back from RUSI, where I spoke about the future of resilience. Full text is below the jump, or you can download the PDF.
The talk complements one from April, at RUSI’s Critical National Infrastructure conference. Alex and I also have a paper on the subject in a future edition of Renewal.
Brief pitch: in turbulent times, we need to build on the work done by emergency planners, and take a broader look at how to make global, national and local systems more resilient to risk. (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Oct 4, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America
In his debate with Sarah Palin on Thursday (which failed to meet the Dan Quayle test), Joe Biden talked about the “Bosniaks” not “Bosnians”. Republican commentators jumped on this, arguing that it was a gaffe comparable to, er… well, George Bush’s grasp of foreign terminology springs to mind, but whatever.
Except “Bosniak” is the correct name for the majority population in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This non-gaffe fizzled out in the blogosphere extremely quickly.
The New York Times was not, however, up-to-speed. Today, it published an otherwise positive opinion piece on Biden by Charles M. Blow that said that his use of “Bosniac” (sic) was “hysterical”. I was about to expose this foolishness, but find that the sentence has been cut from the online version, and this added:
An earlier version of this column misspelled an ethnic term for Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and incorrectly claimed that Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. had made a mistake in using it. The correct spelling is Bosniak, not Bosniac, and Mr. Biden’s usage was correct.
Oh well, that’s that fixed. No mention of Mr. Blow’s hysteria though. I’m reminded of the old joke about liberals agonizing during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. “We need to do something for the Bosnians,” one cries. “Forget the Bosnians,” a superior moralist replies. “We’re not even talking about the Herzogs.”
by Alex Evans | Oct 1, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Global system
Oh, so you thought that the torrent of criticism directed at US Congressmen for voting ‘no’ on the bail-out meant that Senators would be more likely to vote yes tonight, and that this would finally bring some reprieve?
Well, Javier Blas at the FT has news for you: the world’s super-rich don’t share your optimism.
Investors in gold are demanding “unprecedented” amounts of bullion bars and coins and moving them into their own vaults as fears about the health of the global financial system deepen. Industry executives and bankers at the London Bullion Market Association annual meeting said the extent of the move into physical gold was unseen and driven by the very rich.
“There is an enormous pick-up in investment demand. I have never seen a market like this in my 33-year career,” said Jeremy Charles, chairman of the LBMA. “The gold refineries cannot produce enough bars.” The move comes as fears grow among investors over the losses at investment vehicles previously considered almost risk-free, such as money funds. Philip Clewes-Garner, associate director of precious metals at HSBC, added that investors were not flying into gold simply because they saw it as a haven amid Wall Street’s woes. “It is a flight into gold because it is a physical asset,” he said.
Well, that’s a vote of confidence, eh readers? They’ve probably been perusing Nouriel Roubini, who reckons (bailout prospects notwithstanding) that “we are now back to the risk of a total systemic financial meltdown”:
The next step of this panic could become the mother of all bank runs, i.e. a run on the trillion dollar plus of the cross border short-term interbank liabilities of the US banking and financial system as foreign banks as starting to worry about the safety of their liquid exposures to US financial institutions; such a silent cross border bank run has already started as foreign banks are worried about the solvency of US banks and are starting to reduce their exposure. And if this run accelerates – as it may now – a total meltdown of the US financial system could occur.
We are thus now in a generalized panic mode and back to the risk of a systemic meltdown of the entire financial system. And US and foreign policy authorities seem to be clueless about what needs to be done next. Maybe they should today start with a coordinated 100 bps reduction in policy rates in all the major economies in the world to show that they are starting to seriously recognize and address this rapidly worsening financial crisis.
Doom, gloom. Still, readers may also like to be aware that in noting the ongoing travails of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Nouriel suggests that “the only institution sound enough to swallow Goldman may be HSBC”. Another reason – as though one were needed! – why those of us who bank with HSBC’s lovely First Direct can shake our heads in bewilderment at those of you who choose not to.
Now, if they only offered safe deposit boxes…
by Alex Evans | Sep 23, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
Listening to Gordon Brown’s speech today, Philip Stephens notes that “Mr Brown kept his audience in its comfort zone”:
Though he set out the challenges Britain faces in a period of tumultuous global upheaval, Mr Brown did little to challenge his audience’s preconception that the present mess was all the fault of greedy capitalists.
Reading that brought to mind another Labour Conference speech in times of global upheaval: Tony Blair’s back in 2001. Remember this?
This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.
I re-read the whole thing this afternoon, and was struck by a) its brilliance, b) its insight, c) how it soars compared to Brown’s speech today and d) the extent to which – in retrospect, with all that’s happened since – it shines with an eerie messianic fervour. It’s well worth another look: full text below the jump.
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