Time's Battleland: Right where we've always wanted us

Philip Stephens of the Financial Times recently pens a rather pessimistic piece on what Libya said about "Britain's pretensions of influence." Noting that the "campaign has stretched the armed forces to their limit," he calls it a "last hurrah." Now, the underlying tone of the piece is his criticism of PM David Cameron's desire to pursue a foreign policy more independent of both the US and EU, thus reaching out to the emerging powers, but his overall use of the Libyan intervention got me thinking: isn't this what we've always wanted in terms of a balanced world?

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

US-China grand strategy agreement advertised in Foreign Affairs, new US-China Relations.net website launched

The following ad appeared in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, touting the work I performed with John Milligan-Whyte and Dai Min at the Center for America-China Partnership.

Go to the just launched US-China Relations.net website for more coverage (note that not all the videos are up and working yet).  Go there for printable versions of the PDFs.

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Must Not Close the Door on Nuclear Energy

Prior to the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, the nuclear energy industry was poised for a global expansion of unprecedented size. Proponents of nuclear energy still see a bright future in a world where electrical demand grows hand in hand with a burgeoning global middle class and everybody wants to reduce CO2 emissions. But vociferous industry opponents now claim nuclear power has been dealt a Chernobyl-like deathblow. Unsurprisingly, most pessimists are found in the advanced West -- witness Germany's decision to abandon nuclear power -- while most optimists are found in emerging economies such as China and India.

Read the entire post at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: Follow-Up on African Christian-Muslim Fault Line Post

Good book on the observation of a religious fault line between the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian/other south of Africa:

"Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam" by Eliza Griswold.

Find the book here on Amazon.

Find the NYT review here.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: Global arms exports track global economy's double dip

Couldn't afford the upkeep, so it's yours now, kid!

It's interesting to think back to the start of the global economic crisis, when there were a lot of assumptions voiced about how a rising quotient of international tension would inevitably morph into more conflicts and thus more traditionally focused defense spending – i.e., great powers hedging against one another versus, say, non-state actors or state failure. If we were on the verge of the second Great Depression, then certainly we'd find ourselves in a 1930s-like march toward significant great-power struggles, yes? With the Arab Spring providing the tinder for a great-power free-for-all?

So what have we found so far?  

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

WPR's The New Rules: The Race for Global Leadership in the Age of Anger

Ian Bremmer, the founder and head of Eurasia Group (for which I work as an analyst), has argued that we are living in a "G-Zero" world, or one in which there is no genuine great-power leadership. From the perspective of political science, it is hard to disagree, as anyone reading a newspaper these days can attest. Still, the historian in me says this situation cannot last for too long. My reasoning here has nothing to do with the global correlation of military force, since thanks to globalization's emerging middle class, "butter" will inevitably emerge as the winner over "guns." 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Chart of the Day: The Dragon Eats Corn

WSJ story.

This is, of course, big news to those of us who own farmland in the Midwest (I do by extension through my wife), because China is already buying up all the soybeans (or so it would seem), and now they're moving in corn in such a big - and I believe, a permanent - way, that a state like Indiana, where damn near everything is corn or soybeans, is feeling pretty good.

Our acreage, BTW, is in NW Ohio - basically the farm my wife grew up on (her share).

With China sucking up this corn and the rest of the world's demand rising as well, it almost strikes me as criminally stupid, in a strategic sense, to continue with the economic farce that is corn ethanol.  I've seen estimates where one-third of our crop (!) is destroyed in this manner - and I do consider it "destruction" is a world where 1B are too fat and 1B are malnutritioned (Soylent Green anyone?).

Mini rant for the day. Up to Lambeau tonight to see Pack v Cards in preseason.  Taking the Mei Mei.

Chart of the Day: Chinese students continue to flood US schools

An interesting trend amidst the general deterioration of relations (of course, officially, everything is wonderful), and reflective of a growing middle class in China able to pay for overseas education.

But it also shows that far-sighted Chinese prefer the sort of "questioning"/critical thinking education that the US offers over the more rote version offered at home.  Last time I was in China, I heard that directly from college execs: they feared they just weren't developing the students the country needed.

Of course, that sort of academia would be harder to control, so China effectively outsources the function.  That does delay the eventual impact of making so many critical thinkers happen - but that's all.

Remember how the Middle East starting pushing so many young people into college across the last decade.  Yes, it kept off the streets for a while, but when they got back on the streets, my, were their expectations then even more "unreasonable."  The Arab Spring is a direct result of that.

Mr. Dalit Comes to Class

FT story on new Bollywood film depicting "untouchables" and the discrimination they suffer. The film is already banned in three Indian states out of fear of inciting social unrest.

Ask yourself, what period of US history does this remind you of?

Fair dynamic comparison, although here the pushback comes more from dalit politicians and those in favor of their rights.  Why? Film focuses on quota system for dalits/untouchables set up at time of independence. Upper castes say film makes them look bad, but dalits say film denigrates positive impact of quota system - aka, India's version of affirmative action. 

What I remember from visiting India: it seemed like the taller you were and lighter your skin, the more likely you were more powerful and thus from a higher class.  Conversely, lower caste people seemed shorter (poorer diet) and darker.  So when I mixed with elites, I looked them in the eye, but when I moved among ordinary people, I felt like a frickin' giant. The dichotomy rather stunned me.

If you mention that observation, you tend to get a strong response from Indians who find any comparison to racism in the West to be completely offbase. I'm not sure what you call it, but it strikes me as a deep legacy of discrimination based on birth (meaning you can't change who you are no matter what, which smacks of that "one drop of blood" logic) and thus is reasonably compared to racism elsewhere in the world, despite its "sophisticated" and multivariate application.

Point of post: rising India, like rising China, is racing through a lot of history and "phases" that US went through a much more leisurely pace.  That's incredibly hard but facinating to watch.

Blurb on film only hints at controversy (from Rotten Tomatoes), but understand that Prabhakar has a special space for dalits in his school and that Kumar, who is in love with Prabhakar's daughter, is himself a dalit. This is classic Bollywood (father-daughter conflict over undesirable match) with the twist that here the father is the perceived liberal:

Aarakshan is the story of Prabhakar Anand (Amitabh Bachchan), the legendary idealistic principal of a college that he has single-handedly turned into the state's best. It is the story of his loyal disciple, Deepak Kumar (Saif Ali Khan) who will do anything for his Sir. Of Deepak's love for Prabhakar's daughter, Poorbi (Deepika Padukone), of his friendship with Sushant (Prateik). It is the story of their love, their lively friendship, their zest for life, and of their dreams for the future. Centered on one of the most controversial issues of recent years, with the Supreme Court's order on reservation, the story suddenly becomes a rollercoaster ride of high drama, conflict, and rebellion, which tests their love and friendship for one another, and their loyalty to Prabhakar Anand.

Film is already in US, probably because Bachchan is the Cary Grant of Indian cinema. Done about 300k, so art-house limited.

Be interested if anyone has seen it and can provide impressions.

Time's Battleland: Our silent partner everywhere we intervene - China

Soon to be re-joined by their Chinese comrades!

That's how I like to describe it. Whether we like it or not - much less admit it, every time we show up somewhere in tumult, the Chinese are already there or soon to show up. They will be making the big investments (like that $3-4B on a copper mine in Afghanistan) and they will be winning the big extractive contracts (like with both the Kurdish Regional Government and Baghdad in Iraq). Paraphrasing Buckaroo Banzai, "No matter where we go, there they are." You can call it free-riding and label it clever competition, but it's more complimentary than we in the West care to admit, because after the bombs stop, somebody has to rebuild and who are more incentivized than those resource-ravenous Chinese?

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

WPR's The New Rules: Debunking the 'Russia Threat' Hype

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was completing my doctoral dissertation on Warsaw Pact-Third World relations. I immediately understood that my time in Soviet studies was done. Why? Because I knew that Russia was full of brilliant political scientists who, once free to pursue their craft free of ideological constraints, would do a better job explaining things there than outsiders could. 

The generation of Russian scholars that emerged in the post-Soviet era proved me right, and none has consistently impressed more than Dmitri Trenin, who heads up the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace . . . 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Our fiscal failure eventually achieves the global rebalancing sought

FT op-ed by former senior Chinese central bank official.

The big lesson of the past few weeks, he says, is that China must end its dependency on the dollar.

China has run a current account surplus and a capital account surplus almost uninterruptedly for more than two decades. Inevitably this has led to an accumulation of foreign reserves. It is clear, however, that running these surpluses persistently is not in China’s best interests. A developing country, with per capita income ranking below the 100th in the world, lending to the world’s richest country for decades is not reasonable. Even worse is the fact that, as one of the largest foreign direct investment-absorbing countries in the world, China essentially lends money it borrowed at a high cost back to its creditors, by buying US Treasuries, rather than importing goods and services.

Internationalizing the yuan, stimulus packages, letting it rise slowly, bundling up all those bucks in sovereign wealth funds - nothing has really stopped the preciptious accumulation because the government remains committted to keeping the yuan low, seeing in inflation an unacceptable risk.

But by staying so married to the dollar, it runs the same risk extended, as the US will inevitably inflate its way out of a certain amount of its unsustainable debt.

As Yongding puts it, "The longer it continues, the more violent and destructive the final adjustment will be."

Of course, the same holds for the US in this game of chicken.

Leading indicator of India eventually surpassing China as globalization's factory floor

Fabulous Economist story entitled, "India's Guangdong."

Short explanation from me b/c fighting ear infection:

Demographic dividend huge in India, and will stretch deep into mid-century.  China's, by comparison, had heyday from 1980-2010 and now starts slow decline.  China, for example, loses about 1/3 of labor entering workforce over next decade - decline finally set in motion by one-child policy.  India surpasses China in labor around 2030, and has 50% more by 2050.  SE Asia on similar trajectory.

All comes to say: China, as it moves up value chain (all those Foxconn robots!), exports jobs to India and SE Asia - inevitably.  Good and bad thing for China, just like it's been good and bad for US last 30 years.

As I watch this, I keep saying to myself: where is the leading indicator of how India actually gets around to seriously industrializing?

That's why this article so cool:  says Gujarat is the state to watch.  It's India's Guangdong.

So stay tuned.

Time's Battleland: Cyberwar fears: disaggregating the threat

Is that China over there, stealing everything?

My man Mark Thompson puts up a cheeky post yesterday that I most heartily approved of. In it he speaks of cyberwar worrywarts and rightly fears that, as the terror war recedes in some priority, new little piggies approach the DoD trough. And as these cyberwar advocates find such a prime target in China, I would note that their efforts merge with those of the big-war crowd that also hopes to regain ascendancy - despite the overall budget crunch.

Now, Mark gets immediately taken to task by none other the great Bruce Sterling over at Wired (HT, Craig Nordin) . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Must Get Back in Touch With Its True Exceptionalism

This month's debt-ceiling deal in Washington did little to quell the growing chorus of complaints around the world concerning America's continued inability to live within its means. As those complaints invariably translate into corporate hedging, government self-defense strategies, credit rating drops -- Standard and Poor's is already in the bag -- and market short-selling, the U.S. will most assuredly be made to feel the world's mounting angst. This is both right and good, even as it is unlikely to change our path anytime soon: Until some internal political rebalancing occurs, America will invariably stick to its current cluster of painfully outdated strategic assumptions.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Chinese labor: the only way "up"

Economist story posted today.

The reality of moving on up:

WITH more than 1m workers, Foxconn may be China’s largest private employer. The secretive electronics giant is renowned for taking designs from Western firms, such as Apple, and using cheap labour to crank them out in huge quantities. But its fantastically successful business model seems to have run its course.

At a closed retreat in late July, Terry Gou, the chief executive of the Taiwanese-owned company (which is also known as Hon Hai), unveiled a plan to hire 1m robots by 2013. In a public statement, Foxconn talked about moving its human workers “higher up the value chain” and into sexy fields such as research. But at least some will surely lose their jobs.

FT said earlier (8/2) that workers' pay is expected to rise 20-30% a year!  It rose 30-40% last year.  That makes robots look a lot better. So did the worker suicides and labor unrest that set those pay raises in motion last year.

But here's the trickier point the Economist makes:  Foxconn isn't known for handling complex technology; it's known for throwing labor efficiently at assembly tasks, so plenty of risk there too.

All this is to say, as China ages demographically and seeks to move up that value chain, it'll get magnificently harder to make sufficient numbers of jobs appear every year.

There is no "miracle" in catching up to the West.  It's been done repeatedly by Asian economies.  The miracle comes in staying on top - much less vaulting ahead.

Yes, China will have a bigger aggregrate economy than the US at some point.  With four times the people this is only natural and desirable. But China will be saddled with a massive welfare state eventually, and this story explains some of the reasons why.  

Remember that:  This is not a new form of capitalism here - nor an improved one.  It's a recognized model for catching up that doesn't really have a clue about what to do once that's achieved - the damaged environment being hidden problem #1.

The rest is hype.

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Counterterror Stance Ain't Broke, So Don't Fix It

Despite the rush right now to declare important milestones or turning points in the fight against terrorism, the best handle we can get on the situation seems to be that al-Qaida is near dead, but its franchises have quite a bit of life in them. The implied situational uncertainty is to be expected following Osama Bin Laden's assassination, as he was our familiar "handle" on the issue for more than a decade. But although it is normal that we now seek a new, widely accepted paradigm, it is also misguided: In global terms we are, for lack of a better term, in a good place right now on terrorism, meaning we don't need to unduly demote or elevate it in our collective threat priorities. Instead, we need to recognize the "sine wave" we're riding right now and seek no profound rebalancing in our security capabilities -- other than to continue protecting the "small wars" assets that we spent the last decade redeveloping.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Esquire's Politics Blog: How We Talk War When We Talk With China Now

Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a worried note in his New York Times op-ed on Tuesday on the state of Chinese-American military relations. It was a typically one-sided presentation of the situation: those spying, secretive, bullying, and increasingly well-armed Chinese versus a U.S. that's only trying to keep the regional peace... while selling arms at a record pace to every neighboring state, conducting joint naval exercises right off China's coast, and, you know, openly planning to bomb the breadth and length of the Middle Kingdom.

Details!

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

WPR's The New Rules: The New World Order-After-Next

There is no faster route to second-tier great power status than for an actual or aspiring superpower to fight a crippling conflict with another country from those same ranks. Moreover, if history is any guide, the glass ceiling that results is a permanent one: This was the fate of imperial Britain, imperial Japan and Germany -- both imperial and Nazi -- in the first half of the 20th century, and the same was true for Soviet Russia in the second half of the century, despite Moscow's conflict with the West being a cold one. The lesson is an important one for Washington, Beijing and New Delhi to keep in mind in the years ahead, given that the two most likely dyads for major war in the 21st century are America-China and China-India. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: As you approach #1, the catch-up tactics need to cease

NYT story on how the Defense Department suffered a massive loss of data during a hack last March.  Pentagon won't say which country is to blame, which makes it either China or Russia. Why tell us now?  The cleared version of the new US cyber strategy is being released, as Mark just noted.

Read more at Time's Battleland.