A classic evolution: American-invented becomes globally-owned--and locally adapted

BBC News online story by way of brother Andy.

"Historic" line comes from old friend Rod Beckstrom, now head of ICANN.

To me, this is one of America's most profound success stories in spreading globalization.  

As for the Balkanization fears, that's way overblown.  The future is machine translation.

Cultures have to be able to format the web in their own languages, plain and simple.  Enough language destruction will happen anyway, but the biggies like Mandarin and Arabic will thrive, and we will all learn them all, on some level, with our big advantage being American English's uncanny willingness to absorb new words from other languages.

Mining OPEC for Africa?

Inevitable development and proper channeling of what will be substantial blowback inside Africa (maybe not on top but definitely from below) regarding Asia's (and particularly China's) ramping up of demand for the continent's mineral resources.  

It's misleading and premature to cast China's "penetration" as a colonial-style grab for power.  What is happening is the development of a huge co-dependency relationship that lack counterparty capacity (it takes two to tango fairly on any deal) on the part of African nations.  In short, China's got its state capitalism shtick in line but African nations lack a cohesive counter, creating uneven transactions (i.e., Africa can always do better) that so far generate a lot of investment and activity and jobs (all great); it's just not clear how evenly that new wealth is being distributed locally in a sustainable fashion.

Gist of piece:  time to call the companies' bluff about being able to go elsewhere if they're not treated right by the Africans.  With China's heavy entry, that bluff starts looking a lot weaker because finding such volume elsewhere is a whole lot less feasible with each passing year of "sticky" investment.

Obama: any grand vision for Asian security architecture? None yet detected.

Former Indian ambassador to Pakistan writing in WSJ (via WPR's Media Roundup).

Gist:  Obama seems eager to make any sort of relationship happen with China.  I could add:  Ditto on Pakistan.

The loser in these foci?  India, of course.

India has tried to prod the Obama administration into a more active role. New Delhi has recently had a detailed exchange of views on the Asia-Pacific region with the State Department's highest-ranking Asia official, Kurt Campbell, but much more needs to be done. While New Delhi welcomes cooperative and constructive relations between the U.S. and China, concerns in India are inevitable when the Sino-U.S. relationship is marked either by confrontation or collusion which undermines Indian interests.

Many Indians wonder if the Obama administration has any grand vision at all in shaping the emerging architecture for security and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. No one doubts that relations with the U.S. will remain a key feature of Indian foreign policy. But in the absence of mutual trust which characterized the relationship in the recent past, existing misgivings will not be put to rest merely by grand state banquets or glib talk about democracies being "natural partners."

I have advocated prioritizing China over India, but likewise India over Pakistan.  From India's perspective, Obama's performance to date must seem entirely opportunistic and reactive--the unwinding of crises with little sense of the structure to emerge.

I would not contest that characterization.

Marine Corps Gazette: The Gap as "Arc of Instability"

Story from May issue, scanned and sent to me.  Crude image, but the shape is familiar.

Not the first time the Core-Gap map was redubbed:

That's how US News & World Report did it, but there I got credit from Mark Mazetti ("Pax Americana," 6 October 2003):

Ultimately, what is envisioned is a fundamentally new role for the U.S. service member around the globe--at once soldier, diplomat, international negotiator, and guardian of economic security. The military's mission thus becomes far more nuanced and more difficult: bringing regions like the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East into what U.S. Naval War College professor and Rumsfeld adviser Thomas Barnett calls the "functioning core" of globalized nations. At the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, Admiral Cebrowski has even discarded the term "warriors" when referring to U.S. troops. He prefers instead "enforcers," with a mission nothing short of "enforcing the norms of international behavior" in the world's most dangerous places.

Readers will remember I had an entire section in Pentagon's New Map called "Why I Hate the Arc of Instability."

Chart of the day: How much shale gas is there (over here)?

WSJ has a big spread on natural gas recently.

The chart that caught my eye (besides the nice graphic on "tapping the gas--click to enlarge) is the comparison of known global reserves of conventional natural gas and the estimates of shales in North America alone.

Historically, we've not really looked for gas, instead contenting ourselves with whatever we found when looking for oil.  This "associated" gas (as in, associated with oil) is the lighter stuff that typically sits on top of the oil deposit.  When you see that image of gas being burned 24-7 at an oil field, that's just the oil company saying, I'm not interested in the gas, just the oil, so I burn off the former.

Point being, when you only view the world of natural gas in terms of associated gas, then you're left--unsurprisingly--believing that all the gas you can access is already controlled by the same states that control the remaining, easily-access oil--meaning the Middle East and Eurasia, which dominate the know gas reserves to the tune of something like 4,500 trillion cubic feet.

For comparison's sake, the world currently burns about 115-120 tcf now, but that volume is naturally expected to rise quite a bit in the future.  We use almost 25 tcf a year.

Well, when you say shale gas is accessible at a reasonable cost (to include enviro impact), then all of sudden North America has an additional reserve (710 tcf)  thats' more than twice its known conventional reserves (309 tcf).  

What level of technology and cost is required to tap more of that vast total resource endownment?  To be determined, as usual, by the market.

Jaffe's bold analysis sums up the potential for new rules:

I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.

To understand why, you have to consider that even before the shale discoveries, natural gas was destined to play a big role in our future. As environmental concerns have grown, nations have leaned more heavily on the fuel, which gives off just half the carbon dioxide of coal. But the rise of gas power seemed likely to doom the world's consumers to a repeat of OPEC, with gas producers like Russia, Iran and Venezuela coming together in a cartel and dictating terms to the rest of the world.

The advent of abundant, low-cost gas will throw all that out the window—so long as the recent drilling catastrophe doesn't curtail offshore oil and gas activity and push up the price of oil and eventually other forms of energy. Not only will the shale discoveries prevent a cartel from forming, but the petro-states will lose lots of the muscle they now have in world affairs, as customers over time cut them loose and turn to cheap fuel produced closer to home.

The shale boom also is likely to upend the economics of renewable energy. It may be a lot harder to persuade people to adopt green power that needs heavy subsidies when there's a cheap, plentiful fuel out there that's a lot cleaner than coal, even if gas isn't as politically popular as wind or solar.

But that's not the end of the story: I also believe this offers a tremendous new longer-term opportunity for alternative fuels. Since there's no longer an urgent need to make them competitive immediately through subsidies, since we can use natural gas now, we can pour that money into R&D—so renewables will be ready to compete without lots of help when shale supplies run low, decades from now.

To be sure, plenty of people (including Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and many Wall Street energy analysts) aren't convinced that shale gas has the potential to be such a game changer. Their arguments revolve around two main points: that shale-gas exploration is too expensive and that it carries environmental risks.

I'd argue they are wrong on both counts.

Definitely a story to clip. 

(click to enlarge)

A fundamental difference between Chinese and US education

Lovely bit:

Zheng Yue, a young woman from China who is teaching her native language to students in this town on the Oklahoma grasslands, was explaining a vocabulary quiz on a recent morning. Then a student interrupted.

“Sorry, I was zoning out,” said the girl, a junior wearing black eye makeup. “What are we supposed to be doing?”

Ms. Zheng seemed taken aback but patiently repeated the instructions.

“In China,” she said after class, “if you teach the students and they don’t get it, that’s their problem. Here if they don’t get it, you teach it again.”

China, we are told, wants to teach the world Mandarin, so it's sending several hundred teachers here to teach in US schools, subsidized by the Chinese government.  US school administrators visit Chinese schools in reply.

I think this is inevitable and good, strengthening bold sides and increasing understanding.  It is hard to imagine a global culture a generation hence that isn't as infiltrated by Chinese and today's is by Japanese--the exporters of cool.  Nothing quite makes a culture feel secure in its own accomplishments than to have their ways incorporated by other cultures.

Reader-requested new glossary entry: Zero-sum versus nonzero-sum

Zero-sum versus Nonzero-sum

Zero-sum refers to situations/transactions/environments where the resource in question is actually or just perceived to be fixed in size and therefore cannot be enlarged.  As a result, competition is more intense:  If I get 80% of the resource, you can only have 20%, or everything that I "win," you must "lose."  Humans tended to view economics exclusively in this manner until the Industrial--and "industrious"--Revolution began at the start of the 19th Century.  A good example is the concept of mercantilism--as in, the only "good" trade is that which generates a surplus of a precious commodity (throughout history, the focus here was on accumulating gold, a perceived fixed-sum resource because the world's supply grew irregularly).  Until the Industrial Revolution alerted humanity to the possibilities of escaping the limits of organic growth by creating new resources (i.e., the 19th century is considered the century of chemistry, resulting in all sorts of new chemicals and compounds, as well as substances and production processes made possible by them), Malthusian logic held (the notion posited by scientist and philosopher Thomas Malthus that wealth and demographic growth were inversely related--meaning, the more people a society accumulated, the poorer it became in aggregate, because there was only so much wealth to go around).  But with the Industrial Revolution, the causal relationship between population and economic wealth was broken: portions of humanity (primarily the West) got very rich and populous (exporting immigrants globally).  Now, as globalization spreads to those parts of the world previously denied deep economic connectivity, new Malthusian fears arise, creating suspicions of future zero-sum contests over resources.  But, as in the past, such fears will prove groundless:  when certain resources become "exhausted" in the sense that the cost of accessing them becomes too high (like oil), humanity will move on to new technologies that exploit resources in different and more efficient (and less pollutive) ways.  As a final note, when it comes to matters of threat, consider defense to be more zero-sum in perception (i.e., the more defense I have, the less you perceive yourself to have), while the interdependency of globalization shifts the matter from individual (or even collective) defense to that of shared security, which is truly nonzero-sum (i.e., the more security I build into my system, or into yours, the safer we both are). 

There will always be a "cause celebre"; take your pick in the Long War

From a David Sanger Week-in-Review piece in the NYT:

When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda, but just “degrade” the Taliban, reversing that movement’s momentum.

Now, after the bungled car-bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

At the time of Mr. Obama’s strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America’s skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches’ brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.

Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.

Whether it's the decision to "take our eyes off the ball" and go into Iraq and put them back and stick it hard to al-Qaeda in Af-Pak, the "cause celebre" issue will always be there, so it's damned if you do and damned if you don't on the pro-active choice.

The alternative is to stay at home and let them find you at their leisure.  That was 9/11.

There is no detaching our ownership of the Long War from our parentage of globalization.  Our enemies will admit no such distancing.

Movie of My Week: The Beat that my Heart Skipped (French)

Watched this with Vonne in the home theater.  She was psyched because the same director (Jacques Audiard) does "The Prophet," which all sorts of critics are raving about.  Will let you know when I see that one.

Plot summary (no spoilers!):

A young man is torn between loyalty for his family and the angst-driven need to express his own emotional core in order to redeem himself from a violent lifestyle...

See the entry at IMDB.

Me? I just loved the gritty presentation of Paris, and I was mesmerized by the lead, Romain Duris, a sort of young French Mick Jagger.

His past is that his mom was a concert pianist and he has tons of talent too, but he's not living that life now and wants to reconnect.  The way  this guy's passion for the piano is conveyed is really amazing.

The film has stuck with me for days after seeing it.  And the best thumbs up I can give:  I would love to talk somebody else into watching it with me again in the theater.

In the category of pretty damn cool: American troops march in Red Square

NYT piece by way of Jeff Jennings.

Basics:

Never before in history have active-duty American troops been invited to march in the Victory Day parade, according to the United States military. The occasion is the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, a date that carries an almost sacred meaning in Russia. Russian leaders have taken pains to explain that the Americans — along with contingents from Britain, France and Poland — were invited as representatives of the “anti-Hitler coalition.”

Not for nothing are they explaining. While more than half of Russians greeted the invitation with approval or enthusiasm, according to an April poll by the independent Levada Center, the sentiment was not universal. In a country that still regards NATO as its primary security threat, 20 percent of respondents said they disapproved and 8 percent were dead set against it. Communist and nationalist leaders have latched onto it as a rallying cry, organizing rallies on the theme, “No NATO boots on Red Square!”

There is ambivalence, even for those in the first category. Most Russians say they believe that the Red Army would have defeated Hitler without any assistance from Western allies, Levada’s research shows. Many say the Allies held back until it was clear which side would win.

You know the old bit:  British minds, U.S. money and Russian blood are what won WWII, so some truth in that suspicion.

Still, nice sign.

The Iranian "Blade Runner"

Gist:

While the world's film community continues to protest the detention of Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi, another helmer from Iran traveled to Italy's recent Cartoons on the Bay festival to unveil a sneak peek of the futuristic "Tehran 2121," billed as the country's first sci-fi feature, live action or animated.

Shot by locally popular animator Bahram Azimi, using a rotoscoping technique but with a "Blade Runner" aesthetic, "Tehran 2121," almost seems intended as Iran's answer to opponents of its hard-line government.

Azimi described the pic as being about "a far-away future in which, despite how much our country will have changed, the morality and the ways of Iranians will remain the same."

"Tehran 2121" producer Mohammad Abolhassani says, "The Islamic Republic is happy to use the tools of culture to spread peace and equality." He called Iran "the top animation nation of the Middle East," citing 200 companies in the country's toon sector. 

Animation is often used in Iran for government campaigns, such as the series of computer-animated adverts that Azimi shot in 2006 to spruce up the image of Iran's police force. 

Seven minutes of the big-budget "Tehran 2121" unspooled at the Italo toon fest. 

Pic revolves around a 160-year-old man, who, deeming his death to be imminent, wants his niece, to come to Tehran so he can pass on his inheritance to her, on condition that she gets married.

During her travels, she encounters three men: a taxi driver, a rock singer and the owner of a robot shop.

This I got to see.

Recent Bret Stephens column cites Bernard Lewis saying he can imagine a future where Turkey is the Islamic republic and Iran is the secular one.

Frankly, just the fact that Iranians can think like this is interesting enough.

Of course, the notion that the Revolutionary Guards will get you to this future is awfully ludicrous, but the Iranian people?  That I could see--post-revolution.

The "what if?" counterfactual on the Times Square bombing

Mohammad al-Corey Feldman, according to Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update"; a "clean skin" according to AG Eric Holder. 

The bomb-training unit that supposedly prepped Faisal Shahzad was previously targeted by CIA drones, so there's that sense of payback.

The counterfactual to consider:  What happens if a max death count ensues?  Say, maybe a couple hundred bodies?

Well, first off, Obama is mercilessly targeted by the GOP in the usual, turnabout-is-fair-play mode.

Second, the Obama administration is required to make a big show of bombing the hell out of the direct links back in Pakistan.

Third, the US puts on a big show of calling Pakistan on the carpet.

Fourth, the US announces some sort of strategic review of our approach to NW Pakistan.

Fifth, we move according to the decisions of that review, and Pakistan counters with its own charges, moves, and diplomacy--likely to involve the Chinese?

Put the death total at a lot higher (better, bigger bomb and it works) and you just turbocharge that whole process.

But when the event fails, everybody breathes a sigh of relief--especially the Chinese!

And yet, if we move into the many-and-small-attacks world, every once in a while they will be successful, and so we'll need to get used to that, and develop some sense of proportional response that doesn't unduly freak out ourselves, the host nation, or its allies.

Local resilience versus national policing

WSJ story.

Nice image from Times Square, eh?  Pay no attention to those men in the tower!

Gist of piece:

The Times Square bombing attempt has re-energized a debate between spies and domestic-security officials within the Obama administration over how to handle ideologically driven violence in the U.S.

Intelligence officials at the National Counterterrorism Center have pushed for more responsibility over countering domestic radicalization, officials said.

But Homeland Security officials say the plot has strengthened their argument for a broader approach that would train local law-enforcement and citizens to spot early warning signs of any violence.

I have to side with the Homeland people on this one--fewer "czars" and more suspicious peasants!

I'd rather have everyone be a bit more suspicious and vigilant than have more powers vested into federal authorities.

Our best deterrence is exactly an outcome like this--repeated ad nauseum.

Brief Reminder: The Two Missions

Early slide of PNM brief that described the differences between the Leviathan and the SysAdmin. 

Blast from my past: My original Excel "map" for writing the book, "The Pentagon's New Map"

I tried a thumbnail/blowup, but the only way I could get the large Excel spreadsheet on one PPT slide was to reduce the font down to 9, so you still can't read it--even in the blow up version.

So I recreate below.

First, the color scheme:  aqua blue is the name of the chapter, fuschia (like my Harvard Phd gown!) for the career story that starts the body of the chapter, yellow for the substantive portions, and green for conclusion.  The first column is numbered Roman numerals I-IX for the chapters, and I numbered all the writing assignments sequentially (1-75)

I) New Rule Sets           

1) Playing Jack Ryan
2) New rules for a new era 
3) Present at the creation
4) The goal of shrinking the Gap 
5) The myth of global chaos       

II) The Rise of the Lesser Includeds           

6) The Manthorpe Curve
7) Bad stuff that did not happen in the 1990s 
8) The fracturing of the U.S. security market
9) The downshifting of U.S. crisis responses 
10) The rise of asymmetrical threats  
11) The real asymmetry revealed by 9/11 
12) Racking and stacking the threat 
13) The dialectics of defense transformation
14) The myth of globocop and perpetual war

III) Disconnected-ness Defines Danger   

15) Learning how to think about strategic surprise
16) Our long journey to the Middle East
17) The Functioning Core 
18) The Non-Integrating Gap 
19) Where the wars are
20) Mapping globalization's seam
21) Globalization's ozone hole 
22) Different worlds, different rule sets  
23) Preempting the threat 
24) Why arms control is dead 
25) Where--not when--unilateralism makes sense 
26) Moving into the neighborhood
27) Why I hate the "arc of instability" 

IV) The Core and the Gap           

28) What I learned from Cantor Fitzgerald 
29) The "non-specific optimism" of an economic determinist
30) Why we won't all be eating Soylent Green
31) Worrying about my PSR
32) The new global demand center in energy
33) When the world moves beyond oil 
34) The money that really makes the world go 'round 
35) From the Triad to the Quad
36) Exporting security  
37) No exit from the Gap means no exit strategy
38) The myth of America's vulnerability

V) The Rise of System Perturbations           

39) Imagining the worst 
40) 9/11 as an existence proof 
41) The Bush Administration's Big Bang
42) SARS as a system perturbation
43) The stone dropped into the still pond 
44) Barnett's rules for system perturbations 
45) Who's really in charge?
46) What's actually at risk? 
47) Where are the boundaries?
48) When do we gain the upper hand?
49) How do we deal with other states?
50) Answering the "So What?" question
51) The myth of 9/11 intelligence failure 

VI) The New Ordering Principle           

52) The Emily Updates
53) The Pentagon's core conflict model
54) It's great power war, stupid!
55) Inventing the "near-peer competitor"
56) Where is this all going?
57) A problem of success, not failure
58) From the diamond to the hourglass 
59) From "lesser included" to "greater inclusive"
60) They call me "Norman Angell"

VII) The Transaction Strategy           

61) Everything but the hot dog
62) America's essential transaction with the world
63) Globalization III in balance
64) Administering the system
65) Wallet versus will
66) The myth of the American "empire"

VIII) The System Administrator           

67) Responsibility to the next generation
68) The new American way of war or: how I learned to stop worrying about the Powell Doctrine
69) Operating in the Gap
70) The constabulary force
71) Who's next?
72) The myth of the unipolar moment 

IX) A Future Worth Creating         

73) Why optimism wins
74) Hope without guarantees
75) The myth of selfish America                       

The final book version was quite similar and quite different.  Mark Warren, my editor, put all the "Myth" sections into their own chapter, for example. But  the first several chapters did stay roughly the same, just trimmed as sections collapsed into one another, so it was New Rule Sets as I, The Rise of the Lesser Includeds as II, and Disconnectedness Defines Danger as III.  Core and the Gap stays IV, but Rise of the System Perturbations gets folded into The New Ordering Principle as V, and Global Transaction Strategy comes next (now VI instead of VII).  The proposed Chapter VIII (System Administrators) got folded into the new Chapter VI.  And Chapter IX (A Future Worth Creating, which becomes the subtitle for the sequel, Blueprint for Action) becomes Chapter VIII (renamed Hope Without Guarantees).

And that's how it worked out.                                                                

We accepted the referral for the international adoption

Reviewed all the records presented, and had them analyzed by a doctor who specializes in advising adopting parents who are considering children from Africa.  Sum result was that we collectively saw nothing to prevent us from accepting, weighing all the risks for the kids themselves and our extant family of six (3 biological kids, one adopted Chinese daughter).

So we notified our agency of our acceptance of the referral of the two girls--sisters.

We anticipate an initial trip in mid-June, based on a scheduled court date in Addis Ababa, and a return trip in mid-July to pick up the girls.  

The doctor thought they were really quite beautiful.

Again, if you want to help, see the FAQ page for the listing of desired children's clothes and medical diagnostic devices you can buy online and send to us for carriage over and delivery through our agency (an unusually savvy and long-experienced bunch in-country).   For the June trip, we'd need stuff to us by the beginning of June.

We now consider ourselves a family of eight and have already initiated our plans (furniture-wise) for a reconstituted girls' room  (Mei Mei and her two younger sisters) in the biggest kids bedroom in the house--the one our oldest daughter loses when she heads off to college in August.

The transition has begun . . ..

The problem is when the ants start marching

When all the little ants are marching / Red and black antennas waving / They all do it the same / They all do it the same way ...

So says Dave Matthews.

The reference here (WSJ story) involves Chinese college graduates who call themselves the "ant tribe" because they can't find post-grad jobs but nonetheless stick around Beijing's outskirts, squeaking out a cheap life while hoping for something to come along.

Term comes from a recent popular book that surveyed such students, one that inspired "both admiration for the young people's striving and indignation at their living conditions."

Sort of sounds like a Chinese "Rent."

This year's class of 2010 hits the job market at 6.3m strong, and more than 100k are expected to take up an ant-like residency on Beijing's margins.  Imagine five guys sharing 130 square feet, or getting by encapsulated in a "capsule" apartment that measures 8 feet by 28 (!) inches.

The popular "song of the ants" is neither Jonathan Larson- or Dave Matthews-like, and yet the punch line resonates well enough:

Though we have nothing, we are tough in spirit

Though we have nothing, we are still dreaming

Though we have nothing, we still have power

I think Bill Clinton created something like 8m jobs across two terms.  The Chinese need to create a noticeably higher figure every year.  The country's total labor supply grows about 25m per year.

The usual SysAdmin shortage: no enough trainers to go around

Pic found here

Per an NYT story, the usual suspect:

The Pentagon, in an official assessment of the Afghan mission released last week and current to the end of March, said that “one of the most significant challenges to the growth and development” of the Afghan security forces was the shortage of trainers.

So the US is forced to surge an additional 850 trainers to go with the 1,500-or-so provided by allies.  This is beyond the 30,000 troops surged previously.

That's a telling stat, is it not?

Amidst movement to crown the Shiite coalition, the Kurds recalculate

The Kurdish leadership, in the person of the regional government's president, is cooperating with the formation of a new government, and yet, per an NYT story . . .

... no one has been more openly aggressive in the jockeying for position than Mr. Barzani, and he is being closely watched because the issues he seeks to influence all have stark ramifications for Iraq’s stability. In particular, his demands for a federalist approach to governing Iraq — a weakened national government and stronger regional control — have revived fears that his Iraqi Kurdistan region may eventually try to secede.

During a recent interview, Mr. Barzani said he was determined to extract upfront commitments from any prospective coalition partners in Baghdad on potentially explosive issues like the settlement of disputed internal borders, including those of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, and the sharing of oil revenues.

“It is impossible for us to participate in or back a government that will operate in the same old way,” said Mr. Barzani, speaking at his mountaintop palace overlooking the regional Kurdish capital, Erbil.

With Jalal Talibani's party fading, Barzani seems to have effectively co-opted the rising reform movement known as Gorran, once again yielding a solid Kurdish bloc.

And so Barzani is once again pushing for a plebiscite that would possibly allow the Kurds to form their own independent nation.

One of the crucial Kurdish demands will be a pledge from the next prime minister to carry out Article 140 of the Constitution, a hotly contested passage that outlines the steps toward a plebiscite on the fate of the disputed northern territories, including Kirkuk.

“If Article 140 is not implemented, then this will mean the demise of the Constitution and Iraq itself,” Mr. Barzani warned . . . 

The back and forth over Article 140 is one example of how the Americans have sought to soften the Kurds’ demands while still showing support for their relative autonomy within a larger Iraq.

Mr. Barzani noted that one of the main reason Kurds dropped their opposition to the election law in November was a promise by President Obama that the United States would “push hard” to put in effect Article 140. He said Mr. Obama first made the promise in a telephone call at the time and then reiterated it at a meeting in the Oval Office in January.

The Administration, to the extent it ever did make such promises, has quietly backed off from any appearance of supporting a vote, fearing a Balkans-like conflagration would ensue as the Kurds seek a divorce.

And so the benefits of political integration and economic interdependency are stressed.

As I often argue in the brief, whenever globalization's connectivity is allowed in situations previously denied (by authorities or through sheer difficulty of circumstances), there's always somebody who considers the divorce route, and it's typically the most ambitious and experienced in terms of self-governance.  In Iraq, that's the Kurds, although some Shiite parties have made similar noises.  It's a tricky business for outside forces, because the surest route to keeping the state together is a unitary political structure, but then that makes any ambitious minorities all the more like to agitate against feared dictatorship.  If you encourage federalism, then the alternative problem is that the same minorities will often want to go all the way--so to speak.  So you end up trying to get them to see the downstream advantages of--again--political integration and economic interdependency.

A tricky row to how, as they say.

For a nice overview, see the referenced WPR article by Liam Anderson.

Best chunk:

As it turns out, the issues of federalism and oil and gas are both amenable to compromise in a way that accommodates Kurdish demands without alienating Iraq's Arabs. On the issue of federalism, for example, the problem is not so much the degree of autonomy the constitution grants to the Kurdistan Region, but the fact that this autonomy is not exclusively limited to the Kurdistan Region. At ISCI's insistence, Article 119 allows for governorates, singly or in combination, to form regions that would then enjoy the same level of autonomy as the Kurdistan Region. ISCI's original project for a nine-governorate region in the south now appears dead and buried, but this is no guarantee against the formation of smaller-scale regions in the future. Hence, the constitution contains the potential for the emergence of multiple regions, each of which would have the power to control its own internal security and to manage its own oil and gas fields. In the view of many Iraqi Arabs, this vision of federalism, in which powerful regions are loosely held together by an emasculated central government, is a blueprint for the disintegration of the Iraqi state. 

The oil and gas problem is more complex, but similar in kind. Once again, and despite periodic friction on this issue between Baghdad and Irbil, the real problem is not the Kurds. To begin with, the oil reserves of the Kurdistan Region are dwarfed by those in southern Iraq. And although the constitution allows regions to manage their oil and gas sectors, it requires them to distribute the revenues among the Iraqi people on a proportionate basis. The more serious problem is the possible future emergence of other regions, particularly one centered on Basra. Removing the management of Basra's oil from centralized control would leave almost no role for the federal government in the administration of the oil and gas sector.

Fortunately, the issues of federalism and oil and gas can be addressed as a package. The optimum vehicle for this is a separate autonomy agreement for the Kurds. The problem with Iraq's constitution is that it fails to treat the Kurdistan Region as sui generis.

Sounds fixable, allright.

What history predicts regarding a revalued yuan

"Economics focus" column from The Economist.

Story is an old one:  US in the 1920s, West Germany in the late 1960s, Japan in the early 1970s, Asian tigers in late 1990s, and China today.

The description:

A big export-oriented economy is booming but its trading partners are livid. Year after year, they point out, it runs large current-account surpluses. The country regards itself as an export powerhouse whose goods are prized abroad. Others castigate it for mercantilism. Some argue that it subsidises its exports unfairly by giving exporters credit at cheap rates and by keeping its currency artificially undervalued. Pressure builds on the country to revalue its currency and boost domestic consumption, which makes up an unusually small share of its GDP.

Nor is the size of China's surplus unprecedented:  both Germany and Japan owned one-fifth of the world's export surplus in their day, just like China now.

All ended up revaluing their currencies, and as the charts show, China has little to fear by doing so:

The contribution of net exports to GDP will fall slightly, but growth not impacted much at all--in either direction.  The slack was picked up by private consumption and investment.

The fly in the ointment:  better to have pursued a monetary stimulus than just revaluing the currency.  If you only do the latter, then every 10% in appreciation takes a GDP growth point off.  When Taiwan and South Korea did the same, they proceeded to liberalize their financial markets--meaning China should continue to do the same now.

Classic example of connectivity driving code: you connect to globalization to enrich yourself, and you end up having to conform your internal rules to those of the global economy--or you get burned.