by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, UK
Further to my rant against the legion of poltroons who have made comments on Kosovo on the Guardian website, Martin Kettle has restored my faith that there’s still some room for nuance on the British Left:
Surely British liberals have room for more than one idea in their heads at a time. How can a sense of shame over Iraq really justify getting into an anti-Kosovan menage a trois with Vladimir Putin – the Slav Ahmadinajad – and with the Islamophobic states of the southern Balkans? How can liberals from a country that was forced to concede the independence of Ireland, our very own Kosovo, less than a century ago – a move which their predecessors championed – now become ideological fellow travellers of Putin and Hu Jintao?
Britain was right to play its part in the Kosovo intervention. We have to stick with the consequences. And we have to uphold the difficult principle of humanitarian intervention now and in the future, as circumstances arise – as they well might under President Obama. Don’t throw the interventionist baby out with the post-Bush bathwater. The world is a difficult place – but we don’t make it any easier by pulling up the drawbridge, hoping it will all go away and then wringing our hands when the next call for justice goes unheeded.
by Alex Evans | Feb 21, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Yeah, yeah, it touched the $100 mark on January 2, but that was just a trader paying over the odds and making a loss in the process so that he had “the right to tell his grandchildren he was the one who did it”. Yesterday, though, the West Texas Intermediate price hit $101.32 – having been as low as $86.24 just a couple of weeks ago.
This is interesting, as a lot of hedge fund folk were betting heavily that with the US moving into downturn land, the oil price would ease too. The International Energy Agency had also cut its demand forecast for the year. So what’s the deal? Chris Flood in the FT cites four factors:
– First, demand in emerging economies is proving to be the real engine here: as Paul Horsnell of Barclays Capital puts it, “Shorting oil on account of a negative view on the US economy is always very dangerous and likely to backfire, because global oil demand growth is centered on emerging markets”.
– Second, there are ongoing supply disruptions in places like Nigeria and the North Sea; the supply outlook remains very tight.
– Third, a lot of investor inflows are arriving in the oil sector, seeking fairer climes than are currently available in credit and equity markets.
– And finally, there’s the OPEC factor. At its January meeting, it left production levels unchanged, ignoring calls to increase supplies, including from President Bush himself. Now, there’s speculation that OPEC supply might even be cut.
Various commentaries are wondering whether OPEC’s now actively planning to keep the price above $80. I’m wondering whether OPEC simply doesn’t have any more production capacity to give…
by Richard Gowan | Feb 20, 2008 | North America, Off topic
Readers of this blog will, almost by definition, be well aware of the thoughts of Mr. Alex Evans on global risks, resilience, the new dynamics of international cooperation and so on and so forth. So they’ll be pretty used to this sort of stuff:
I think we face three challenges currently: The disappearance of the nation-state; the rise of India and China; and, thirdly, the emergence of problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power, such as energy and the environment. We do not have the luxury to focus on one problem; we have to deal with all three of them or we won’t succeed with any of them.
Yeah, yeah, give us a break. Except those sentiments don’t come from Alex but from, er, Henry Kissinger in a remarkable new interview with Der Spiegel Online (the best English-language news source on the web that nobody knows about).
Old Mr. Realpolitik hasn’t exactly turned that cuddly. He has wise things to say about how the Bush administration gives European governments an easy excuse for avoiding hard questions on foreign policy – and weird ones on Bush himself:
SPIEGEL: Isn’t German and European opposition to a greater military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq also a result of deep distrust of American power?
Kissinger: By this time next year, we will see the beginning of a new administration. We will then discover to what extent the Bush administration was the cause or the alibi for European-American disagreements. Right now, many Europeans hide behind the unpopularity of President Bush. And this administration made several mistakes in the beginning.
SPIEGEL: What do you see as the biggest mistakes?
Kissinger: To go into Iraq with insufficient troops, to disband the Iraqi army, the handling of the relations with allies at the beginning even though not every ally distinguished himself by loyalty. But I do believe that George W. Bush has correctly understood the global challenge we are facing, the threat of radical Islam, and that he has fought that battle with great fortitude. He will be appreciated for that later.
SPIEGEL: In 50 years, historians will treat his legacy more kindly?
Kissinger: That will happen much earlier.
But back to the whole “problems and challenges that cannot be solved by a single power” malarkey. I’ve just returned from a week in the UK talking about Managing Global Insecurity, and although there were a lot of interesting conversations involved, I was struck by the deeply-embdedded European assumption that U.S. policy-makers just don’t get the twenty-first century risk agenda or concepts like human security. Well, piffle. As I noted late last year in a short piece for the Stanley Foundation, the whole presidential campaign has been shot through with this sort of thing:
One of the most prominent foreign policy themes of pre-presidential debates has been the need to get UN troops to Darfur. Hillary Clinton has “an aggressive plan to support public schools in developing countries” while Mitt Romney’s anti-jihad strategy centers on a “Special Partnership Force” that will win over foreign communities and leaders through “humanitarian and development assistance and rule of law capacity building.”
Such proposals leave outside observers scratching their heads. Ask the average anti-American to name the pillars of US international policy, and they’ll pick two: military power and unbridled capitalism. But the country’s leaders-in-waiting are promoting social democratic goods like public schooling and development aid. Is the US turning into a gigantic Sweden?
As I said at the time, no, not really. But think back to Super Tuesday. Here’s the key foreign policy paragraph from Obama’s speech that night:
And when I am President, we will put an end to a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, and start seeing it as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the twenty-first century: terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease.
And here’s the equivalent from Clinton’s speech the same night:
I see an America respected around the world again, that reaches out to our allies and confronts our shared challenges – from global terrorism to global warming to global epidemics.
And now the McCain-supporting Kissinger is in on the act. I’m off to go and watch the primary results roll in from Wisconsin – but if these guys are even semi-serious, the Europeans may find they’re behind the ideological curve in 2009.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 18, 2008 | Influence and networks, North America
I’ve spent some of my President’s Day holiday hammering out a review of Surrender is Not an Option, John Bolton’s scaborous memoir of his tenure at the UN. This will eventually come out in the International Journal, based in Canada, but as (i) the wheels of academic publishing move slowly and (ii) the IJ doesn’t put its reviews online, I thought I’d extract a few paragraphs here. These deal with what strikes me as the most interesting and least discussed element of the (generally badly reviewed) book: Bolton’s obsession with the political uses of jokes…
Mr. Bolton states that his audience is to be found in Middle America. He is concerned that many of his fellow nationals are too easily beguiled by the UN. For them, “the United Nations to this day remains the UN of UNICEF trick-or-treating on Halloween, and of famine-relief efforts in natural disasters, or combating diseases in developing countries.” Bolton now sets out to disillusion “those who still think glowingly of the UN as they had imagined it on Halloweens long ago.” His volume may be a first in international relations literature: a book explicitly intended to sour childhood memories.
To achieve this he hauls us through some highly involved descriptions of diplomatic negotiations enlivened by the breaking of confidences, ad hominem attacks on most other participants, and a lot of jokes. Curiously, the most interesting element of the entire project may be the jokes. We already know quite a lot about the humor of the Bush administration – Bob Woodward has revealed, for example, that the president finds flatulence funny. Mr. Bolton is more interested in verbal repartee, and from time to time he is genuinely witty. Describing a visit by George Clooney to New York to discuss Darfur before the Security Council, he notes that the actor was swarmed by female staffers, “providing humility lessons, and therefore character-building, for the rest of us.” However, he is best at skewering those he dislikes with harsh humor, and he knows it, often returning to the same victims (such as his British and Swedish counterparts at the UN) again and again.
This fascination with comedy is clearly essential to his understanding of how diplomacy works. Mr. Bolton has often been presented as a devotee of power politics, seeing little beyond interest, influence and advantage. This book does not dispel that view. But humor seems to act as a guide to how these forces work. He explains how he gained advantage over a senior German official in a meeting on Iran by noting that he inspired “general merriment”, while his adversary only “joked lamely” and then responded “dourly” to Bolton’s comedic success.
Contrary to his stated intentions, Mr. Bolton has not produced a book that will appeal to those suffering belated qualms about whether their trick-or-treating was misguided – it would be utterly ludicrous to believe that anyone without a sad obsession with multilateral diplomacy is going to care one iota whether Mr. Bolton bested largely unheard-of diplomatic rivals in the humor stakes. But for those of us who are burdened with that unfortunate obsession, this is a treasure-trove.
And if that doesn’t make you want to buy it, what will?
by Alex Evans | Feb 18, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
Javier Blas at the FT has the details:
Prices for top-quality spring wheat have jumped by 90 per cent in the past month and a half, boosted by a scramble by corporate consumers to secure scarce grain and speculative buying by investors. A surge on Friday in prices for wheat used in bread to an all-time high of $19.88 a bushel – the highest yet paid for any wheat contract and a three-fold increase from a year ago – prompted the US baking industry to call for wheat exports to be curtailed.
The American Bakers Association stopped short of asking for an export moratorium but pressed for curbs on foreign sales. Lee Sanders, ABA vice-president for government relations, said there was usually a surplus in the US wheat market equivalent to three months of US consumption. “It is currently at a very low one-month level, which is extremely concerning,” she said…
The US is the world’s largest wheat exporter. Faced with strong overseas demand after extreme weather damaged other countries’ crops, its wheat stocks are set to fall to a 60-year low this year. The shortage of top-quality spring wheat is forcing US millers to consider buying Canadian supplies… William Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a Nebraska-based food consultancy, said that one of the key themes of this year conference would be the realisation that the price surge was not a temporary hump but rather a structural change. “We are not facing a short-term price blip…but a sustained move to a new and higher plateau for prices,” he added.
Meanwhile, Gillian Tett is seeing the other side of the equation:
A WFP official, for example, recently showed me the red plastic cup that is used to dole out daily rations to starving Africans – and then explained, in graphically moving terms, that this vessel is typically now only being filled by two-thirds each day, because food prices are rising faster than the WFP budget.
