Developing detente in the ME

ARTICLE: Iran and Israel Already at (Cold) War, By Frida Ghitis, World Politics Review, 21 Jan 2010

Nice overview of the Cold War-ish tit-for-tatting going on between Israel and Iran. The dynamic fits very nicely with my projected trajectory of seeing the region's nuclear powers (eventually Iran plus Turkey plus Saudi Arabia joining Israel) head toward a detente-like strategic talks agenda.

After some learning curve incidents sure to spook us plenty.

Polish missile defense redux

ARTICLE: Poland to Deploy U.S. Missiles Near Russia, By JUDY DEMPSEY, New York Times, January 21, 2010

While I understand this as part of Obama's slimmed-down missile defense plan, this announcement does come off as oddly backward looking: Why should putting missiles in Poland be a national security priority at this point in history?

Then there's the queer underlying logic: We expect either Iran or Russia to threaten Poland with missiles in coming years? The Iran argument is just weird (Over what exactly?), and with Russia, it's hard to see that any pressure would come in that manner, given all the other tools at hand.

So, in the end, this just comes off as a PR show sure to trigger an equally doofus reply from the Russians ("Look at our ships in your neighborhood! Are you not afraid?"), replete with Biden's gushy declarations of America's willingness to do whatever it takes to keep Poland safe--as if that's a big global concern right now ("2010: the year Poland's fate hung in the balance!").

When history judges this administration's course and comes up with the criticism of "incoherent," this will certainly seem to qualify as an example ("Team Obama made a bold move in early 2010 when it stuck defensive interceptor missiles in Poland, erasing what had been a growing global fear of missile wars in Eastern Europe.")

Saudis learning the hard way on COIN

WORLD NEWS: "Saudis Struggle in Battle With Rebels," by Mohammed Aly Sergie, Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2010.

Yemen pursues an offensive against al-Qaeda within its borders, while the Saudis press "a surprisingly costly battle of its own against rebels along Yemen's northern border."

When the Saudis launched their attacks two months ago, experts expected the military's superior firepower would make short work of the rebels. But we see the usual difficulties of operating in mountainous regions against an agile and determined foe.

The rebels are Shia Houthis, which the Yemeni government says works with AQAP (al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula) and likewise gets aid from Iran (believable, given the Iranians' profound hatred of the House of Saud).

Why such resistance from the Houthis? Word is the Saudi attacks disrupted their lucrative drug and people smuggling ops.

Seems like the usual cross-cutting mix, ja?

Race to the chocolate bottom

ARTICLE: Approval expected for Kraft-Cadbury deal, By Karla Adam, Washington Post, January 20, 2010

Kraft appears to win the Indian sweepstakes in the form of beating Hershey's offer on Cadbury, whose primary attraction lies in its demonstrated ability to sell at the bottom of the pyramid--to Indians in particular.

Expect to see similar such M&A (mergers and acquisitions) activity in coming years. The fight to brand the emerging global middle class is just beginning.

Shocking capitalism! It actually helps after disasters!

WEEKEND JOURNAL: "Rising From The Ruins: Natural disasters have been engines of development and economic growth through history," by Kevin Rosario, Wall Street Journal, 16-17 January 2010.

OPINION: "Don't Let Haiti Return to the Status Quo," by Stephen Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 16-17 January 2010.

First piece is a history of cities that have revitalized themselves tremendously post-disaster, with quakes being the number one theme.

Upshot?

Disasters, it seemed, were good for business in a dynamic, expansive, capitalist economy.

Especially because investors thought it true and thus pushed money in the direction of affected cities/regions, looking for high returns.

Then Katrina came along, and apparently told us something about the nature of the capitalist economy there.

By definition, Haiti's in for a bad time, because it's capitalism was stunted (especially in its rule sets) and highly criminalized and informal prior to the disaster--hence a city not built to anybody's code and thus the profound destruction at merely a 7.0 quake level (bad, but not off anybody's charts).

But since there seems to be equal camps on the question of "is capitalism/globalization the answer" or "the culprit," there's unlikely to be any renaissance in Haiti, as it'll remain the sole, exclusive property of the NGO/PVO crowd.

Normally, you hear that there are 45,000 Americans in a small island nation of 9m and you'd think there was an economy there worth rebuilding.

But then the question arises, How many of those Americans are ex-pat Haitians? Because, when you want to talk revitalization, the prime conduit is never Western NGOs and PVOs or official development aid, it's the ex-pats and their money. I mean, the Bahamas are close by, have no natural resources, and yet make $30k per capita a year (Johnson piece). They get no serious aid that I can see. Meanwhile, last year the U.S. sent $290m in aid to Haiti (says Johnson). Overall, aid accounts for 30-40% of total government revenue--always a bad sign (about 15% is the good limit, otherwise you're into the aid "curse" of an unresponsive government).

Meanwhile, according to the CIA Factbook, "Remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling nearly a quarter of GDP and more than twice the earnings from exports."

GDP is about $11B, measured in Purchasing Power Parity.

So yeah, bring on the ex-pats. They have to be able to buy the world a more stable and sustainable Haiti than our aid has.

I mean, they certainly do any worse, could they?

Indeed, if I compare "shock capitalism" to "shock aid," it's clear the former wins every time.

Q&A: Immigration and culture

A reader wrote:

Dear Thomas,

With regard to the increase of productivity for immigrants to the US, it might be true in raw numbers, however let us not forget that in a culture where trade (I do this for you and you do that for me, or I give you something I have for something you have) or favors are a common occurance, crunching numbers will ultimately not account for that.

How productive is a secluded tribe in the amazon jungle? The answer in raw numbers seems all too obvious. Yet, it would not be an outlandish statement to suggest that these people live in a closer community, have a lower rate of dapression (if any), see more meaning in their lives and are happier than the average American.

The difference is that Haiti is in the economic and social situation that it is in today because of the machinations of a culture that is purely geared toward economic development and consumption and productivity and not social connectedness and community life.

So when a person from a culture that is more geared towards social connectedness enters a culture geared more towards making and spending money, it is no wonder that he will become more productive.

Yet he will have a high price to pay for his increase productivity in terms of the lack of social connectedness, loss of community and all the comforts that come with being part of a close knit community becoming an all but rare occurance.

The things that you characterize as useless in the eyes of productivity may just have a value that can not simply be measured in raw numbers.

I would be very interested to know what your perspecive is on this point, so I am looking forward to a reply.

Tom replied:

I think you underestimate social connectedness in the U.S. versus a poor country. I don't see the average American as less connected socially, just a far wider geographic scope--thus more efficiency is networking with people in comparative advantage versus being trapped with the people who happen to live nearby.

I grew up in a very tiny rural community, so I know from where I speak.

Our reader replied:

I will have to get home and do some research, however I am confident that members of tribal societies that are isolated and largely unaffected by globalization and have no meaningful productivity to speak of are on average no less (if not more) satisfied and happy with their lives than the average American or Austrian (where I am from). Would you not agree with that?

Tom concluded:

No. I would take that statement as a cultural bias with an Occidentalist bent (assuming wealth/cities/modernity corrupts and makes unhappy while relative poverty/rural settings/tradition is more pure and thus makes people more happy). Very James Cameron, but historically inaccurate.

What we find globally is this (and these polls have been done the world over for many years): more money raises happiness until you hit about $20k per year per capita. After that point is reached, happiness does not measurably increase.

Comparing the US to the world is always tricky, because we're a nation of ambitious types who left the homeland and tradition and lack of freedom/security/etc to come here. What makes Americans happy is staying busy, being ambitious and moving around a lot (including switching religions at an unprecedented rate). As more A type personalities (in aggregate), we also like more stimulus in virtually all forms. We are not, as a rule, stay on the farm types. That's why we crowd in cities and along the coasts.

So when you compare Americans to those who chose to stay behind, it will always be misleading.

The point of the post and generally my work: the world is more and more becoming similar to America in terms of connectivity, mobility, disposable income, etc., and thus the skills that make us great are being increasingly universalized. You may see that as bad. I like seeing people lifted from poverty and shortened lifespans, because in life, I believe more is better--as in longer, more varied, more busy, more mobile, more free.

And if I was wrong, then globalization, in the form we pioneered here in these States and subsequently spread across the world since WWII, would not have succeeded so dramatically in creating global networks and lifting hundreds of millions--even billions--from lives that would have otherwise been impoverished and--by all polling on this subject--less happy.

The United States is based on the pursuit of happiness, as is the globalization we've spawned.

But I still liked Avatar.

To live and die in the Gap

ARTICLE: In Haiti, relief agencies rush to meet desperate need for water, By Rob Stein, Washington Post, January 16, 2010

The key line here comes from a Pan-American Health Organization worker, when speaking of Haiti's water-supply system:

"They don't have a good system in place. It has a lot of problems in the normal situation," said Luiz Galvao, PAHO's manager of sustainable development and environmental health. "Now it will be worse -- much worse."

True to our giving spirit, we come into the catastrophe and want to deliver clean water in sufficient volume to everybody who needs it. The sad truth is that, in the past, most people there did not receive truly clean water and are highly unlikely to get access to it once we leave.

This dynamic typically accounts for that lingering sense of being ripped off by the world that victims of these disasters inside the Gap ultimately harbor: they get a taste (pun intended) of a better life only amidst the recovery, then to lose it in the non-revitalization to come.

Can we hold (and extend) Afghanistan's center?

ARTICLE: U.S. ambassador puts brakes on plan to utilize Afghan militias against Taliban, By Greg Jaffe and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, January 22, 2010

Hard to think that employing local militias to defend themselves against the Taliban is a "a bold and potentially risky initiative." The argument from Eikenberry? We need central government buy-in first, otherwise we risk the country losing coherence--as if it ever had any.

So the essential policy dispute seems to be one-tribe-at-a-time (the growing inside-the-military support of the Jim Gant argument) versus extending the center's control (which seems implausible and historically elicits a troubling response from Pakistan).

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

The "unified disaster coordinator"

CATASTROPHE IN HAITI: "U.S. Response: Officials hail USAID administrator's crisis management skills," by Philip Rucker, Washington Post, 15 January 2010.

Of course, all the "officials" are Team Obama members pre-emptively deflecting criticism of an uncoordinated response.

Is this guy good? Seems like he should be, but remember, he's running an amazingly dysfunctional organization that is yet to assert serious leadership in anything this fast-moving or large.

I've watched some coverage and read plenty more, and frankly, this is the only serious mention of Rajiv Shahj that I've come across. Absent this article, I'd have no idea he was even prominent in the effort, much less that there is a "unified disaster coordinator."

Am I just out of it here? Does anybody recognize this guy as the "face" or "buck stops here" guy?

Haiti's cultural poverty

POST: Tough Love the Only Long-Term Cure for Haiti, by Jonah Goldberg, Townhall.com, January 20, 2010

Goldberg, unlike my sadly inconsistent self, truly is a conservative. Here, in a piece cited by The Atlantic Wire along with my recent post, he offers what I consider to be some very compelling logic that totally dovetails with my focus on rules and the benefits of connectivity (As in, where are Japan and Switzerland without globalization's connectivity? And yes, there's plenty of residual xenophobia--e.g., see the recent mosque building ban by the Swiss, to go around, so it's not like they've completely forgotten who they are.):

The sad truth about Haiti isn't simply that it is poor, but that it has a poverty culture. Yes, it has had awful luck. Absolutely, it has been exploited, abused, and betrayed ever since its days as a slave colony. So, if it alleviates Western guilt to say that Haiti's poverty stems entirely from a legacy of racism and colonialism, fine. But Haiti has been independent and the poorest country in the hemisphere for a long time.

Even if blame lies everywhere except among the victims themselves, it doesn't change the fact that Haiti will never get out of grinding poverty until it abandons much of its culture.

When Haitians leave Haiti for the U.S. they get richer almost overnight. This isn't simply because wages are higher here or welfare payments more generous. Coming to America is a cultural leap of faith, physically and psychologically. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz note in their phenomenal new book, From Poverty to Prosperity, that low-skilled Mexican laborers become 10 to 20 times more productive simply by crossing the border into the United States. William Lewis, former director of the McKinsey Global Institute, found that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican agricultural laborers in the U.S. were four times more productive than the same sorts of laborers in Brazil.

Why? Because American culture not only expects hard work, but teaches the unskilled how to work hard.

It's true that Haiti has few natural resources, but neither does Japan or Switzerland. What those countries do have are what Kling and Schulz call valuable "intangible assets" -- the skills, rules, laws, education, knowledge, customs, expectations, etc. that drive a prosperous society to generate prosperity. That is where the real wealth of nations is to be found -- not in factories, oil deposits, and gold mines, but in our heads and in the habits of our hearts.

And if your take is that globalization crushes local cultures (and it sure does when they have nothing useful to offer, but then again, check out the Japanese as slick mega-exporters of an isolated culture and wonder why they succeed where others fail), then be prepared to keep on paying while the glory that is Haitian stay-at-home culture (as opposed to that which comes along with immigrants to America and adds to our mixing bowl) is given free reign to prove its disutility yet again after this disaster.

Only one sensible option on Iran

OP-ED: The Soft Power Solution in Iran, By JAMES K. GLASSMAN AND MICHAEL DORAN, Wall Street Journal, JANUARY 21, 2010

Good piece except for the usual reach for sanctions. The key thing is that it gets the strategic choice correctly: the soft-kill is the only sensible option likely to succeed.

Syndicated, yes, but not more powerful

ARTICLE: Gates: Al-Qaeda has assembled a 'syndicate' of terror groups, By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, January 20, 2010

Gates looking to suitably socialize the problem-set called Afghanistan.

"Syndicate" sounds suitably scary enough and it's a reasonable label. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's a more powerful iteration of al-Qaeda's structure. It's just a looser one resulting from the persistent pressure we've applied. Neither great nor especially frightening, it's just what happens next once you engage.

Who ya gonna call?

ARTICLE: U.S. Troops Patrol Haiti, Filling a Void, By MARC LACEY, New York Times, January 19, 2010

The essence of the SysAdmin's call: "Concerns about a foreign military presence are outweighed by need."

Remember American generosity

ARTICLE: For 45,000 Americans in Haiti, the Quake Was 'a Nightmare That's Not Ending', By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. and CATHARINE SKIPP, New York Times, January 17, 2010

Details on that stunning number of Americans (45,000) living and working in Haiti when the quake struck.

Americans are an incredibly generous lot. Don't ever forget that.

Ungoverned, lawless Haiti

ARTICLE: Haitian President Préval largely absent in quake's aftermath, By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, January 18, 2010

ARTICLE: Security fears mount in lawless post-earthquake Haiti, By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Mary Beth Sheridan and Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post, January 18, 2010

A "largely invisible" national government says it all.

So the immediate result is hardly surprising: "lawless" Haiti essentially turns on itself.

Chile's billion-dollar choice

ARTICLE: Chile race reflects Latin America's growing preference for free-market centrists, By Juan Forero, Washington Post, January 17, 2010

OP-ED: Piñera won. Will he uphold Chile's post-Pinochet moral legacy?, By Alexander W. Wilde, Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 2010

ARTICLE: A Sign of Latin America's Fading Polarization, By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO, New York Times, January 19, 2010

But . . . but . . . I thought the global financial crisis strengthened the hands of anti-globalization types the world over!

Whether a billionaire businessman or a former president wins Chile's presidential election Sunday, the outcome will reflect a broader trend in Latin America -- the rise of the pragmatic centrist.

After years of victories by leftist candidates, market-friendly moderates are gaining ground in the region.

But then it turns out that the exact opposite is occurring--sigh!

Ah, but certainly this is yet another sign of the looming deglobalization we are constantly warned about . . ..

Barrionuevo hits it on the head: "The election of a billionaire from a right-wing party as Chile's president on Sunday appears to be less a signal of a regional move to the right than that of a pragmatic convergence of left and right agendas."

A lesson for us in that.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

Simmer down on water wars

ARTICLE: India Spars with Pakistan, China over Water, by Siddharth Srivastava, Asia Sentinel, 19 January 2010

ARTICLE: Possible Futures for Transboundary Water Resources, By Aaron Wolf, World Politics Review, 20 Jan 2010

Key word here is "spars," because it's awfully hard to impose a permanent and defensible military solution on such a shared resource as water. That's why true "water wars" are, in historical terms, stunningly rare.

From Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist, page 156:

Professor Aaron Wolf has gone through the entire crisis dataset, and of the 412 crises in the period 1918-94, only seven had water as even a partial cause. In three of these, not a single shot was fired, and none was violent enough to qualify as an actual war. Wolf concluded: "As we see, the actual history of armed water conflict is somewhat less dramatic than the water wars literature would lead one to believe . . . As near as we can find, there has never been a single war fought over water. The lack of actual water war examples should be compared to the more than 3,600 treaties concerning international water resources that were registered in the centuries between 805 CE and 1984. With the last hundred years alone, more than 149 treaties have been signed.

Cooler bit on the next page:

As an Israeli Defense Forces analyst pointed out: "Why go to war over water? For the price of one week's fighting, you could build five desalination plants. No loss of life, no international pressure, and a reliable supply you don't have to defend in hostile territory.

But yes, expect more near-hysterical salesmanship from the resource-war crowd in coming years.

Speaking of Aaron Wolf, he has a great piece out at WPR on the current and future state of water stress scenarios and responses to them. He remains a sensible source of balanced thinking on the subject.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

Seams within seams within the global economy

GLOBAL INVESTING: "Exploring the Frontier: Stocks from countries such as China and India are big holdings in most emerging-market funds. But some funds venture even further, into 'pre-emerging' markets," by Anna Prior, Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2009.

Japan as developed, China and India and Indonesia and Singapore as emerging, Pakistan and Vietnam and Sri Lanka as frontier, and the rest of Asia awaiting connectivity.

Point being, and I hammered this one in Blueprint: the spread of globalization is surprisingly contiguous in focus, so not such a flat world.

Bigger point from Great Powers: the latest in, the next begin. So yesterday's seam is tomorrow's frontier integrator. As natural as can be.

Right-sizing America's Leviathan duties

POWER/FOREIGN POLICY: "The Post-Imperial Presidency: Even as Obama Increases Troop Levels, He is Scaling Back American Foreign Policy," by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, 14 December 2009.

Nice piece by Zakaria: "It is now clear that Obama is attempting something quite ambitious--to reorient American foreign policy toward something less extravagant and adversarial."

If I hadn't already written that book, I would be tempted to do so now, because it is awfully ambitious, this simultaneous series of realignments that Obama is pursuing.

I don't know if you want to advertise that sort of feedback, Newsweek

LETTERS: "How Great Powers Fall," Newsweek, 14 December 2009.

I tried to read Niall Ferguson's "How Great Powers Fall," but found it such a familiar rehash that I quit after two paras.

Next week Newsweek, oddly enough, confirms my judgment with a readers poll that says 73% found the article neutral (aka, boring), 18% were critical and 9% were positive.

Weird to advertise that three out of four readers found your front cover piece a bore.