China schools attacks

Per the FT (Hille):

When a man with a cleaver walked into a kindergarten in China's Shaanxi province on Wednesday and hacked seven children and their teacher to death, shock was not the first public reaction.

After six such attacks in as many weeks, the mood among parents is approaching panic.

As one woman pleaded:  "We cannot feel safe any more.  How come they can't stop this?"

How come? Cause the government is too damn busy reading all your text messages.

This latest attacker, according to Oster in the WSJ (5/13) , showed no signs of mental illness, was well-off by local standards and was a member of the village government.  Naturally, the Party comes under fire: 

"These cases pose a challenge to the government because it's being criticized for its weak social administration," said Ma Ai, a leading sociologist at the China University of Politics, Science and Law. "The government may be blamed if it can't protect its citizens—especially vulnerable children. I think these attacks are more and more like terrorism."

Sign of the times:  popular children's write pens a song called, "I want to come home alive."

Dear uncles and aunts
I am in the school
If you are dissatisified
Please petition the government
I want to go home alive!

Nice.

Wen (premier) feels compelled to address the issue (Wong, NYT):

In a brief television interview, Mr. Wen told Phoenix Television, based in Hong Kong, that the government attached “great importance” to investigating the assaults, in which 17 people have been killed and nearly 100 wounded. All the assailants have been middle-aged men armed with knives or tools and acting alone.

Apart from taking powerful security measures, we also need to solve the deeper reasons behind this issue, including resolving social tensions, reconciling disputes and enhancing mediation at the grass-roots level,” he said. “We are sparing no effort in all of the above works.

In discussing the attacks, however, Mr. Wen did not address the possibility that some of the attackers might have been mentally ill.

Under orders from China’s central propaganda department, most of the main Chinese news organizations have declined to run follow-up stories on Wednesday’s attack, which took place in Linchang Village, in Shaanxi Province. China Daily, an English-language newspaper aimed at foreigners, was an exception — it ran a front-page headline on Friday that said "School Security Beefed" and carried Mr. Wen’s comments. Chinese officials say reports about the attacks could incite more copycat assaults, and in any case the propaganda department is often quick to order a blackout on news that points to deep social disturbances in China.

Two of the attackers in the first four episodes were diagnosed with a mental ilness, a topic that the Chinese often avoid discussing. Interviews conducted by The Associated Press in Linchang indicate that the killer there, Wu Huanming, 48, was an unbalanced person . . .

So event though such attacks are rare in China, the combination of middle class parents, precious only-children and media coverage is creating a lot of public pressure on the government to do something.

Another sign of social stress:  higher rates for suicide among Chinese factory workers.

Telling Kenya how its constitution should handle abortion

Doves released at a pro-new-constitution rally in Kenya

The gist from a NYT story:

The push to pass a new constitution in Kenya, a cornerstone of the effort to correct longstanding imbalances of power and prevent the kind of upheaval that followed deeply flawed elections here, has attracted some unexpected interference — from more than 7,000 miles away.

Before Kenyan lawmakers had even finished drafting the proposed constitution, American Christians organized petition drives in Kenya against it, objecting to a provision recognizing Islamic courts.

Now that the draft is done, three Republican members of Congress contend that it significantly expands abortion rights, and are accusing the United States Embassy in Kenya of openly supporting it in violation of federal rules.

It is the latest battle in the American culture wars playing out in Africa. Last year, American Christians helped stoke antigay sentiments in Uganda; later, Ugandan politicians proposed the execution of some gay people. That debate is still raging, though it looks as if the Ugandan government is backing down and will not pass the antigay bill after all.

Old theme of mine:  we hamstring ourselves diplomatically and security-wise when we let our strategic choices be unduly influenced by internal social debates like abortion.  Especially sad:  by and large, it's easy to get an abortion across the Core but much harder throughout most of the Gap, where women's rights lag.

I am profoundly pro-choice.  Until you give women control of their bodies, economic takeoff is far harder to achieve.  Development is mostly about liberating women, not men.

Meanwhile, a NYT editorial notes that Core spending for AIDS relief/prevention across the Gap is wavering after the big plus-ups of the Bush era.  Everybody cites the economy.

Chart of the day: Brazil's PAC-2 infrastructure program

Earlier this spring Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Sivla, outgoing president of Brazil, announces the second phase of the government accelerate growth program (PAC2).  First phase (2007-2010) was for half a trillion.  Didn't meet all its targets, but met plenty and was significant factor in Brazil's growth.  With PAC2, investment as a percentage of GDP rises from just under 17% to above 21%.

The key bottlenecks are electricity and roads.  Of the 1.6km of highways, only 12% are paved.  Moving stuff on unpaved roads costs, on average, one-third more.  At 8.5m square km, Brazil is close to the size of the US and China (both roughly 9.5m square km).

Our "tough" new sanctions on Iran--read the fine print

AP photo, WAPO story.

Clinton shrugs off the surprise Turkey-Brazil-Iran deal of yesterday, and says this new round of sanctions is about as tough as it can get.

All very nice as a headline, but get down to the bottom of the WAPO piece:

European and U.S. officials have made clear that a new U.N. resolution would be the weakest of three steps toward "crippling sanctions." The other two steps are a European Union resolution and tough unilateral sanctions by individual countries.

But nothing can happen before the imprimatur of a new U.N. resolution, since some European countries will not act on sanctions without U.N. approval. Diplomats said that some of the proposed language in the current resolution was added with the full knowledge that it would be removed by the Russians and Chinese -- but then could be revived in the European resolution. The individual country sanctions would come after the European Union has acted and would be led by the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other like-minded nations, diplomats said.

Turkey and Brazil, which currently hold rotating seats on the Security Council, have expressed opposition to new U.N. sanctions on Iran.

Lebanon also has indicated it would not support a sanctions resolution against Iran, which has provided military and political support to an influential faction in the government, Hezbollah. Lebanon holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month, which may complicate efforts to bring the matter for a vote before June.

So tell me what's changed.  It's still the West promising tougher sanctions, the UN as the gridlock, and the non-West talking a big game but acting in their own interests.

Both India and China hailed the Turkey-Brazil-Iran proposal. That tells you all you need to know about how universal these "tough" new sanctions are going to be. Strip away the false promises and this is still the West believing it constitutes a global quorum.

Obama: Frustrating the grand strategist in me

Warren Christopher LAT op-ed by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

Christopher makes his usual bland appeal for small steps leading to a legacy of modest, move-the-pile accomplishments.

Example:  

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised he would end our diplomatic isolation and pursue "engagement" in foreign affairs. His opponent tried to turn his proposal against him by saying it would be reckless and naive. Obama regarded his election as a mandate for engagement, and no campaign promise has been more faithfully carried out by his administration . . .

Beyond Mitchell's efforts, Obama has been using engagement in pursuit of his foreign policy goals. One of the president's chief goals, as he said on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, is "to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them." His personal intervention in talks with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia was instrumental in finalizing a replacement agreement for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired in December. The signing in Prague last month was a tribute to their mutual engagement, producing major reductions in both nation's nuclear arsenals as well as advancing U.S.-Russian ties in general.

The priority that Obama is giving to engagement has also been apparent in recent exchanges with China. The president, unhappy when the Chinese sent lower-level diplomats to meet with him at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, announced an arms sale package for Taiwan. The Chinese objected stridently.

To prevent the exchanges from spinning out of control, the president sent Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg to Beijing to reassure the Chinese ... The Chinese responded by announcing that President Hu Jintao would come to Washington for a nuclear summit ...

Improvement in human rights has been the policy goal of recent engagement with the repressive nation of Myanmar . . .

Policy goals, of course, sometimes remain elusive despite efforts at engagement. Iran, while initially intrigued by the idea of shipping uranium abroad for enrichment under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision, has now descended into a sea of political invective in the wake of controversial election results and an emerging internal opposition. Nevertheless, the president is working to build a coalition to impose a stricter set of sanctions . . .

Obama has judiciously used engagement in pursuit of our foreign policy goals. The measure of his success in using this tool will be judged by the effectiveness of our foreign policy in the hardest cases, like Iran and North Korea.

It's a decent capture and a decent defense, and it expresses the root of my frustration with the seeming lack of any big think in this administration:  SECSTATE has her lists and checks them off dutifully, Jones keeps the trains running at NSC, Gates runs his own kingdom--and well--but keeps his nose out of foreign policy, our special envoys are quite special and almost completely devoid of any accomplishments, the drawdowns proceed in Iraq and will proceed soon enough in Afghanistan and all balls are kept juggled.

What is the Obama vision?  Oh yeah, the world without nukes--the Nobel made good.  Like a Miss America contest focusing her answer down to world peace, there is an earnestness there, but likewise a distinct lack of imagination.  Obama gets to run the US at this point in history, and all we get is a world without nukes?

Moses, my man, don't go promising the land of milk and honey at year one of the 40-year wandering.

I will admit it:  I feel stale on the man.  I wrote the 12-step recovery program for a superpower in Great Powers and Obama checked them all off in the first year--just like I hoped he would because it all seemed so obvious and logical to me (go overboard, well . . . then you apologize and make it better--not exactly rocket science).  And the world (or just Norway--which is a decent approximation of the world's conscience) was just so happy in return ("A superpower that apologizes!") that it gave him the Nobel for Peace, even though he hadn't done anything concrete--just indicated that he would be far more polite and reasonable and consensual than his abrasive predecessor.

And then I waited for something to emerge after the first, realigning year.  

And I'm still waiting.  The nukes thing, I will admit, doesn't do anything for me.  I think it's goofy and meaningless and naive and a colossal waste of time. I know the man is busy with the economy and a rancorous Congress and he wants primarily to focus on domestic issues, but I think that window is going to close fast--as in, November.  

Eventually, this administration will have to show more vision than simply treading water and keeping its head up at all times. Eventually, when there's not much else that can be done in the domestic sphere, Obama will turn, as all presidents do, to foreign policy.

And he's going to need something beyond a world without nukes and everybody getting along.  Nothing that wrong with either notion, in the abstract, but in aggregate they do not constitute leadership. I see a world where China, India, Turkey, Brazil and others are all moving faster than the current, but we are not.

And the Obama administration does not seem to realize this. They seem very proud and happy just to keep the balls all moving and in the air.  

And that makes me very ambivalent, in a professional sense, about whether this guy is one-&-done or gets to stroke the back nine.

China's car market: The global race to the middle

Beijing Auto Show photo found here

WSJ story on how, up to now, the foreign car companies operating inside China have focused on the upscale end of the market while the domestic firms have focused on the lower-end market.  As China's middle class emerges, a new middle-ground battlespace opens up, with both sides--foreign and domestic--increasingly bumping into one another, chasing the same customers.

This is intense competition.  Just like in politics, where the first vote in college tends to stamp the voter for life in terms of Dem versus GOP, when it comes to car buying, the first choice usually leads to a lifetime of brand devotion.  Good example:  I've bought 9 Hondas over the last two decades.  Started with a VW Fox and hated it, and then went to a Honda Civic and loved it.  One Audi GT Coupe in there, provided by my mother-in-law, but once I settled on Honda, it's been Hondas ever since in terms of purchases.

Well, imagine all those first-time buyers in China.

So look for the foreign companies to move aggressively downmarket and the domestics to move aggressively upmarket, which is why a Geely buys Volvo--for example.

Brazil and the bomb

Der Spiegel op-ed by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

The question asked by Hans Ruhle:  Is Brazil maneuvering itself toward an acceptable pursuit of a nuclear weapon capacity?

Brazil had three nuclear weapons programs going in the 1980s--one for each military service.  After the Cold War ended, Brazil moved toward ending all that and declaring itself only for peaceful uses.

But now Brazil is building nuclear submarines.  Why?  America's got 'em, and if that's what great powers have, then Brazil must have some too.

So we have a country that's already mastered the enrichment cycle building nuclear submarines and all of a sudden--in historical terms--it's awfully close-mouthed about its enrichment cycle and doesn't care to have the IAEA snooping around.

Oh, and it's also brokering international deals WRT Iran's controversial enrichment program--alongside another rising great power (Turkey) that logically harbors nuclear ambitions as well.

For now, Brazil's constitution says no to nukes, but as everybody knows, Latin American constitutions are very changeable documents.  And with regional rival Venezuela (yes, they're rivals, no matter how much Lula sweet talks Hugo) cooperating with Iran, you just know the Brazilian military is thinking, "Why should we be the only BRIC without nukes?"

This is why, quite frankly, Obama's push for a "world without nuclear weapons" is about as wrongly timed as it gets:  we've got all these rising great powers, all looking for respect, and everything we do to prevent that path just screams at them, "get nukes and you're in!"  I mean, just look at the way we treat India on this score (as we should), in addition to Pakistan (as we shouldn't).  

We keep looking at this dynamic in Cold War terms, when we need to understand it in globalization terms. In addition to all that frontier integration, largely conducted by rising New Core pillars, we've got this crew of great powers looking for admittance into the "made men" club.  None of them can really hope to generate a conventional balance to the U.S. military, but the shortcut? 

Man, that's just too good to pass up. Honestly, we are reduced to preaching abstinence to a bunch of very horny young men.  It will not work.

We can spend all our time and energy trying to stop that dynamic, or we can focus our attention on processing their applications.

But they will all be great powers, one way or the other.

You may think it's all about America + NATO holding the line, but I think that world is dead and buried.

And I've been saying that for close to a decade in public and in print since 2004.

We can choose to have allies who cower behind their bombs to cover their declining capabilities--and age, or we can choose to work this world with allies who have plenty of babies, rising defense budgets, and growing nuclear arsenals.

Which option do you will work and which will be left behind by history as globalization continues to expand and consolidate?

Lenin (and all those BS neo-Marxists) turned upside down

Ah, but we know that capitalism and free markets are thoroughly discredited now that our global quarter-century boom came to an end.  If it could not last forever, it all had to be revealed as false--right?

And, of course, the crisis revealed that the have/have-not gap was globalization's greatest legacy, despite the unprecedented rise of a global middle class that occupies the middle 60%.  

So what is the way forward, besides all of us living under "superior" Chinese rule?

Well, it seems that the only way forward for globalization's Old Core West is to get better at selling to the bottom of the pyramid.

CANYOUBELIEVETHAT?  The ONLY way the Old Core can stay rich is by shrinking the Gap!

So it turns out Lenin and all the neo-Marxists had it right--just completely backwards once the American model of globalization truly surpassed the colonial legacies and Cold War divisions.

Whew!  What a relief!  

Here I thought my whole vision was just a regurgitation of the 1970s neo-Marxists, when it turns out to be their complete ideological opposite!

Thank God I finally saw the light.

This rant was inspired by a Samuelson column in Newsweek--a very good one.  He quotes Arvind Subramanian (a current favorite, for good reason) on the need to cross the "Hobbesian threshold."

In Pentagon's New Map, I said much the same back in 2004:  the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance ideological journey was from Hobbes to Locke to Kant--as in, security to good laws to peace-enhancing connectivity.

He's a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land

I pretty much tune Fouad Ajami out when he talks anything having to do with Obama, because on that score, he's about as reliable as Karl Rove in his one-sidedness.

But when he writes directly about what's wrong with the Middle East and Arab culture, he's often quite powerful in his observations--to wit, the subtitle of this WSJ op-ed:  "Millions like Faisal Shahzad are unsettled by a modern world they can neither master nor reject."

That is a microcosm of the Arab world in general:  globalization has embraced it--thinly, and it is both amazed and repulsed by the possibility/inevitability of deeper integration.

But it is an especially good capture of expats who never quite connect in their adopted Western countries--hence the susceptibility to the chimera of dropping out and tuning in to jihad. It is the perfect, Calgon-take-me-away Deus ex machina. You hit the rough patch and booyah! You've got this noble out that suddenly makes your life historic and genuine and not such a failure. We're talking the ultimate Plan B--a concept most of us known well after the last tough year and a half.

More:

The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, army, America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal Shahzad.

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

We can succumb to the tempting notion that it's all about "empire," hence it's always we who are the ultimate target, followed by the Brits in a residual sense. But that's our version of escapism. The globalization we began has escaped our grasp. This dynamic won't end by our quitting the contest.

We will be killing the un-redeemables and the irrationals until they stop being born.  Globalization, in the form of that massive (as in, now close to 60% of the world's population) global middle class, will simply keep paying somebody to make them go away. Might be us, for as long as we want it to be, but it will definitely be somebody with a gun.

US-Afghanistan: trying to hold the US-Afghan endgame together

WAPO, FT and Economist stories.

As in Iraq, I don't see the Obama administration doing much of anything to regionalize what comes next.  This remains completely a US/NATO show, as improved as it may be.  And so we are reduced to emphasizing publicly to the world how strong our bond is with the Karzai government--a sure sign that it is weak.

Karzai remains committed to a personality-based rule, because it's what he knows and he knows it's more popular than the Americans.  The Americans remain committed to building up institutions, because it's what we know works best, and yet, as in Iraq, there is this sense of having our eye on the door.

And so we are left with our great faith in the Kandahar campaign and the notion that, as one American general put it, the Afghans will "shura their way to success."

I personally would put more faith in a regionalization scheme that engaged the Iranians, Turks, Russians, Indians and Chinese far more explicitly and deeply.  Instead, we seem intent on relying on the kindness of the Pakistanis going forward--or maybe it's backward.

The requirement to "fight through" a cyberattack = reasonable planning

Keith Alexander is confirmed as the first head of U.S. Cyber Command, a sub-unified command under Strategic Command.

What caught my eye was his previous sensible testimony (see the other WAPO story) on the subject of war during conditions of cyber attack:

In his written responses, Alexander said that clandestine, offensive actions in cyberspace -- such as dismantling a Web site used by jihadists overseas -- are "traditional military activities" and should not be considered covert operations.

In the event of a cyber attack, the military must still be able to carry out conventional operations.

"Even with the clear understanding that we could experience damage to our infrastructure, we must be prepared to 'fight through' in the worst case scenario," he said.

I know, I know.  The right virus and everything goes back to the Dark Ages and we're all completely helpless.

But indulging in nightmare scenarios isn't planning, it's escapism. As always, the military has to plan on functioning even as comms are degraded.  There's nothing new in that.

Economic isolation is no choice, says Taiwan's Ma

NYT and WAPO, plus the Japan Times via WPR's Media Roundup.

Taiwan's President Ma is pushing hard for the FTA framework agreement with China, his culminating dream of deep economic integration with China.  

Per the NYT story:

“We can handle diplomatic isolation,” Mr. Ma said last month, “but economic isolation is fatal.”

The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, the Ma administration says, would be a prelude to similar deals with Malaysia, Singapore and, eventually, Japan or the United States. “Once E.C.F.A. is signed, we want to sign other free trade agreements and try to use mainland China to link with international markets,” a trade official involved in the negotiations, Hsu Chun-fang, said.

In recent years, Taiwan has watched as rivals like South Korea have signed free-trade deals throughout Asia, becoming more competitive in industries like machinery making and pushing their per capita gross domestic product ahead of the island’s.

Taiwan has been hampered in negotiating similar agreements because Beijing views the island as a part of China and objects to other countries’ signing formal treaties that could strengthen Taiwan’s claims to independence. The island has trade deals only with five Latin American countries, which buy a tiny slice of its exports.

The economies of Taiwan and China are already connected. Taiwan has invested $150 billion in China since the early 1990s, according to a Taiwan government estimate. About 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports already go to China, where they face average tariffs of 9 percent. Half of those exports are semifinished goods that are shipped to factories for assembly and other value-added services and then re-exported, according to Mr. Ma.

Yet many of the details remain vague, and that has fueled economic as well as political worries.

For example, Taiwanese business leaders fear a lot of small manufacturing industries, like the show industry, will get wiped out by Chinese competition.

Given his low approval ratings (20s-30s), Ma has felt the need to engage in televised political debate with his primary opponent, as if he were still running for president, according to the Japan Times story.  A lot of experts predict he may be a one-term president whose primary achievement is all his economic accords with China (12 in total) , with the framework agreement hanging in the balance.

My sense:  Ma's fears are well-grounded.  The Asian economic integration process is well underway and only gaining steam. Taiwan can either get in early or be left behind.

What happens to any Obama energy policy after the Gulf blowout/spill?

The Economist worries less about Obama's political standing post-disaster (hard to see how minds will be changed about him) than that of any prospective energy policy.  Before the disaster, "America was inching fitfully towards a coherent energy policy." Obama was in a giving mood: renewable energy subsidies, offshore drilling and more nukes. Now everything sees at risk or certainly on hold, and with the elections getting closer, the window for serious efforts may be gone in a matter of weeks.  

Now, Obama's energy policy seems boiled down to reforming the oil regulatory structure within the USG.  The big innovation? Splitting it in two so the guys who collect government royalties aren't the same guys enforcing safety.

In the end, the Deepwater Horizon may serve as a similar turning point as Katrina did for Bush--the divider between when Bush seemed to get his way on most things and when all that stopped suddenly.

Of course, the resulting hypocrisy on this will be magnificent: people will complain about waging wars in the Gulf (Persian, that is) because we're "addicted to oil" (a truly goofy description, if ever there was one) but likewise condemn any offshore drilling. But that's only par for the course.

Six of the world's 10 largest oil discoveries in the last couple of years have been in deep water, so the challenge isn't going away. Deepwater accounts for half our offshore production and one-quarter of our total oil production.

We will either pursue it or not, but others certainly will.

Chart of the day: drawing down in Iraq

A trio of stories (WAPO, NYT, WSJ--the last providing the chart) exploring the feasibility of the drawdown trajectory, all projecting the usual fears (meddling neighbors, political gridlock in Baghdad, stubborn insurgent activity, fears of an Arab-Kurd conflagration).

Bases will shrink and disappear, as will vast amounts of gear.  What gets left behind is primarily small units for training and support to the Iraqi army.  Besides the usual counterinsurgency stuff, the big focus is on controlling Iraq's long borders--especially with Iran.  U.S. troops will likewise be stationed along the line separating the Kurdish Regional Gov provinces and the rest of Iraq.

Naturally, backfilling with contractors will occur, and by the end of the summer, they should outnumber the troops by 50% (75k to 50k).

The footprint of the Special Ops forces will remain basically unchanged across the coming months--the focus on killing the worst insurgents.  I wouldn't be surprised if "zero" is never reached but never acknowledged either. The SOF guys aren't usually counted.

I would comment on the administration's strategy here, except I can't really see any--other than leaving. Iraq-the-outcome seems no more regionalized now than it ever was under Bush-Cheney.  I feel like we're pushing the foster kid out the door on his 18th birthday no matter what.

And yeah, the neighborhood is making plans.

WPR's The New Rules: Keeping Disasters in Perspective

Between Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano and the oil slick in the Gulf, everybody seems to have disasters on the brain lately. Some of it stems from the nonstop global media coverage, while a good portion relates to our growing awareness of climate change. But a lot of this heightened anxiety is simply misplaced. We don’t live in an increasingly dangerous world, whether you’re talking wars, terrorism, disasters -- or just the weather.  In fact, we live in the safest times yet known to humanity. We just choose not to see it that way for a variety of reasons.

Read the rest of my column at World Politics Review.

New Core Turkey, Brazil engineer nuclear fuel enrichment deal with Iran

This is both quite impressive in terms of non-superpower nuclear diplomacy but likewise self-serving--especially to Turkey.

What New Core powers like Turkey and Brazil say with this deal:  We ourselves can and will decide, under what circumstances we'll collectively self-engineer ourselves--and other rising regional powers like us--into nuclear status.

In other words, the Old Core, old-boy nuclear powers club no longer decides.

Bold, slick moves by both Lula and Erdogan that will provide Ahmadinejad just enough cover to claim victory--and keep us guessing--while effectively killing any movement toward tougher sanctions.  The Chinese have to like it, as will Moscow--I imagine.

Have to give it up to Iran on this one, as well as Turkey and Brazil.  This deal constitutes a real rule-set reset when it comes to issues of proliferation--both real and stealthy.  The West simply no longer dictates on this issue.

End of the world to some, but just another aspect of rising great powers incorporating themselves into the venues of international power and influence instead of waiting for the established powers to invite them in--on the West's preferred terms.

Whether or not Iran will truly be satisfied with a Japan-like outcome (obviously capable and close to weaponization but not taking the final step) is yet to be seen, but this deal is an effective short-term defusing of any logic of attack.  Now, Israel is pre-approved to be widely condemned for any kinetics by the bulk of the world's rising great powers.

Assuming it holds, it looks like the latest "check" to me, meaning a move that keeps Tehran close to its endgame win and essentially determining our next, checkmate-avoiding move.  Iran's declaration that it will continue to enrich some fuel on its own?  That's just an in-your-face reminder.

Will it be enough for the West?  Absolutely not.  But it gives China and India the out they need.

The big point:  Iran keeps coming up with these clever ways to buy time, and in doing so, it's attracting a lot of implicit support from rising New Core powers who aren't exactly in favor of Iran's nuclear status but will defend its right to do so--however quietly and cleverly.

Cybersecurity: Be afraid! But how much afraid?

Evgeny Morozov piece in the weekend WSJ a bit back, and recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek story on Richard Clarke's latest tome.  Morozov rails against the "cyber warmongers," in whose ranks one must definitely include Clarke, for reasoning both valid and hyperbolic.

I like Morozov in general:  he is snarky in a good way, solid in his reasoning, and he likes to poke holes in the usual conventional wisdom.  Here, let's say, Morozov is less than impressed with the usual "wargames" that prove, as they are designed to, that the US is COMPLETELY naked and unprepared for an electronic Pearl Harbor.  

It's one of those inescapable predictions that must inevitably someday be right--right?  The question is, How bad will it be? Will it constitute a whole new monster or just another degree of failure/collapse that's marginally bigger than the usual stuff we inflict upon ourselves with great regularity due to accidents, poor practices and bad design?

Morozov targets Clarke right off, who claims in his new book that "the cyberwar has already begun."  That's a prediction you have to love, because no matter what happens, the man has got to be proven right by events, because, what the hell!  By his logic, there's no such thing as a cyberpeace.  So McConnell (former NSA head) says we'll automatically lose any cyberwar that happens (Really?  Then who automatically wins?  Oh, THEY do, of course.) and Panetta (CIA) goes bravely on the record to say that the next Pearl Harbor will be a cyber Pearl Harbor (of course it will, because we said so and we get to determine these things in advance--just like 9/11!).

Morozov says spending on cybersecurity is higher than ever ($55B between now and 2015), but so is our angst.  He wonders out loud if the biggest scare-mongers on the subject tend to benefit from it, by selling books, and winning cybersecurity contracts from the USG (like McConnell's new employer, Booz Allen, or Clarke's new firm, Good Harbor Consulting).  

This is why I don't make enough money consulting, let me tell you.  I really need to focus on scaring people more.

Clarke defends his record by saying that the U.S. has created a very large and very expensive cybersecurity command, so that proves it's a huge problem that the government is trying to take seriously.  Both his firm and Booz denies any connections between what their poster boys say and what the company earns, but you know the visibility and the connections and the message and the product all go together.

As Morozov says, we don't want "to hold our policy-making hostage to the rhetorical ploys of better-informed government contractors."

Best-bit award goes to Obama's current cybersec czar, Howard Schmidt, who said that "there is no cyberwar," and that the term is "a terrible metaphor" and a "terrible concept."  I think he's right, but I think those can easily become words to regret.  

The web, Morozov points out, is a wild place still--a real frontier will few lawmen. We've democratized the connectivity and so too the criminality and malicious behavior--big surprise.  

Here's where Morozov gets to the logic I usually employ in Q&A when I get this question:  "Why don't you emphasize cyberwar more in your brief?":

Why have such tactics—known in military parlance as "computer network attacks"—not been used more widely? As revolutionary as it is, the Internet does not make centuries-old laws of war obsolete or irrelevant. Military conventions, for example, require that attacks distinguish between civilian and military targets. In decentralized and interconnected cyberspace, this requirement is not so easy to satisfy: A cyberattack on a cellphone tower used by the adversary may affect civilian targets along with military ones. When in 2008 the U.S. military decided to dismantle a Saudi Internet forum—initially set up by the CIA to glean intelligence but increasingly used by the jihadists to plan on attacks in Iraq—it inadvertently caused disruption to more than 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas. A weapon of surgical precision the Internet certainly isn't, and damage to civilians is hard to avoid. Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

I also tend to add: even if you, the weaker guy, shut down my nets for a bit and get some surprise attack accomplished, at the end of the day, I will still be there with my superior conventional military force, and I am likely to be able to make clear my unhappiness regarding whatever trick you just pulled.  Fait accompli or no, you will now have me as a more committed enemy, and when I decide to strike back, the cybertricks won't be enough to protect you.

So Morozov says, quite sensibly:  "We probably want very strong protection against cyberterror, moderate protection against cybercrime, and little to no protection against juvenile cyber-hooliganism."  

Why?  Perfect security would come with huge social, political and economic costs--all of which, I would add, would eventually translate to military weakness.

Best point:  "Recasting basic government problems in terms of a global cyber struggle won't make us any more secure."

So no, Mr. President, please don't turn cyberattacks into "weapons of mass disruption" because you'll be "diverting national attention from more burning problems while promoting extremely costly solutions."

Better to focus on promoting Internet freedom, Morozov says.  He has a book coming out on the Internet and democracy, so he's hawking too, but in a non-hypeish way I instinctively admire.

And yet, Clarke's four big fixes aren't so bad either:

1. Get serious about industrial espionage
2. Create information quarantines (if it's super-secret, keep it totally disconnected from the Web!)
3. Build, don't buy, security (if your security needs are unique, so too should be your solutions) and 
4. get started on cyber-arms control treaties (like one on nobody attacks each other's banks).

Pretty decent, actually.

My take remains the same: nets always race ahead of security, and since we're still--despite the Great Global Recession!--in a period of globalization's stunningly rapid expansion (what else do you call Asian investment everywhere across the Gap while the West's money pours into Asia?), it'll be that way for a long time to come. So, expect a lot of cyber stuff to happen.  Get used to it.  It'll be a natural part of our world.

But yeah, we'll get smarter and more resilient over time.  Just because the criminals and baddies are able to exploit these new techs and nets faster and better than the rest of us right now doesn't signal their supremacy for all time--nor their omnipotence now.  Frontiers get settled, rules catch up, life goes on.

So cybersecurity is real and important and we need to spend on it.  It just ain't the sum total of our existence or even of the fights and conflicts that define our age.  It's like the Web, part of damn near everything but hardly the hard core of anything--except pornography.

Roubini: the crash was a "white swan"

Roubini has become quite the brand name, thanks to his great 2006 prediction of a global recession.  His web site goes way beyond the usual blog and book-hawking to providing "a uniquely tailored look at the logic of the global economy, applying the methodology of its renowned founder, NYU economist Nouriel Roubini"--replete with all sorts of analytical pieces by his employees.

What drew me to this interview:

What have we learned from these crises of capitalism?

The first lesson is that crises are not "black swan" events, using the terminology of my friend Nassim Taleb. They're not just random outcomes. They are the result of a buildup of financial and policy vulnerability and mistakes—excessive risk-taking, leverage, debt, and so on. The first chapter of my book is called "The White Swan" because these events are predictable. But generation after generation, we seem to forget the past. When there's a bubble, there's euphoria. There's irrational exuberance. Consumers can use their homes like ATM machines. Governments and policymakers are happy because they get reelected. Wall Street makes billions of dollars of profits. Everybody's delusional.

It was an old staple of mine in the NewRuleSets.Project brief to talk about rule-set resets happening every 7-10 years on Wall Street, primarily because it was a young man's game and once you got some distance from the last crash, all the new people, being somewhat ignorant of the causes, began to imagine they had invented some new way of perfecting their gaming of the market.  Over time, in their mounting hubris, they unwittingly or wittingly broke old taboos, saying it was different this time.  As those abuses accumulated and the self-delusion grew, the crash was inevitably triggered, and many--but not all--of the "new" rules were found not to have surpassed the old ones, even as the old ones now needed to be updated to account for the new behaviors engendered in the latest round of going just a bit too far.

I got this entire logic from my people at Cantor Fitzgerald.  They said it was as regular as a clock.

So, 2008, about 7-8 past the last financial meltdown known as the dot.com crash, was a pretty decent bet or prediction to make.  Don't be surprised when another one happens sometime in the middle of this decade.

Then again, it's different now, because now we have more than just the NYC-London financial axis in play. Now we've a number of significant markets, all of whom are going through their own learning-curve cycles with predictable crashes and reboots--or rule-set rests, as I call them.

So yeah, more white swan than black.

The NIEO is a' coming!

Samuelson in WAPO by way of David Emery.

NIEO refers to the notion, championed by the South in the early 1970s, of a more equitable global economy (New International Economic Order).

Well, guess who made it happen?  Not the Sovs, and not the South, but the New Deal for the World-cum-post WWII order-cum-the West-cum- the global economy-cum-globalization, dreamt up by the United States (TR), launched by the US (FDR), defended and expanded by a series of presidents (Nixon getting the most credit, in my mind, because he opens up China and caps the Sov threat), and finally now rebalanced by our own success--and excess--in that quest.

The two biggest players in triggering this latest rapid expansion of globalization:  China and India, with Brazil, Turkey, South Africa moving up fast.

According to Subramanian (often in FT) by way of Samuelson, another take on the journey from the Gap to the Core: 

This is classic economic catch-up, as poor countries adopt the products and technologies of rich countries. It's a two-step process, says economist Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute. "First, countries have to cross the Hobbesian threshold" -- that's after philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who declared that life without strong government is "nasty, brutish, and short." Governments must provide basic security and sanitation, create some rule of law and establish protections for property, says Subramanian. Otherwise, the stability doesn't exist to pursue Step Two: allowing markets to work; practicing standard economic virtues (taming inflation, disciplining government budgets).

Parts of Africa and Latin America still haven't crossed the Hobbesian threshold, says Subramanian. But elsewhere, many countries have reaped the rewards of moving to Step Two. China and India are the most spectacular cases. Only in recent decades have they relaxed pervasive state regulation and ownership and trade restrictions for more market-based policies.

Now Samuelson's judgment on what must come next: 

So is rebalancing going according to script? Well, not necessarily. It's true that the massive trade imbalances have dropped sharply. The U.S. trade deficit fell from $760 billion in 2006 to $379 billion in 2009; China's trade surplus also dropped. But these changes mostly reflect the Great Recession. The worsening slump caused people and companies to stop spending. Global trade contracted sharply -- and with it the size of imbalances. But as the recovery has strengthened, trade and imbalances are growing again. American imports are increasing faster than exports; this surge could be temporary, suggests economist Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley, as companies replenish depleted inventories.

Still, what's missing is a sizable revaluation of China's currency, the renminbi. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute thinks the renminbi may be 40 percent undervalued against the dollar. This gives China's exports a huge advantage and underpins its trade surpluses. Other Asian countries fear altering their currencies if China doesn't change first. "They'll lose ground to China," notes Hensley. The European Union, Brazil and India all feel threatened by the renminbi. President Obama wants U.S. exports to double in five years. That's probably unrealistic, but it's impossible if the renminbi isn't revalued.

The next best problem to have, no doubt, and I agree with those that say "paid in renminbi" will be the slow route by which China converts its currency (letting more and more of its importers use the yuan, swapped out by China via currency trades).  But as this process matures, it will represent a brave new world for the Chinese as much--or more--than for the US and its dollar.

In short, the catch-up strategy stuff ends and the competition gets a whole lot more real.

The sub-divisioning of AFRICOM proceeds logically according to regional economic schemes

Harkening back to my "The Americans Have Landed" piece for Esquire in 2007, this piece (via WPR's Media RoundUp) revisits the five geographic sub-divisions pursued by AFRICOM, a staple concept I used in the brief for a couple of years following my reporting. It was the source of my prediction in the piece that the US could one day have two dozen little forts around the vast continent like the one I visited, and reported on, along Kenya's coastline.  Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, the star of the piece, is the model for four other sub-regional units (north, south, west and central.  At the time I visited, HOA had Djibouti as the sub-regional command site, plus "contingency operating locations" in Ethiopia (3, with one just closed in connection with Ethiopia's intervention into Somalia) and Kenya (1).  That's one mini-HQ and 4 COLs for a total of 5 facilities. Replicate that four times and you've got roughly two-dozen little forts, albeit spread across a landscape roughly triple the size of the United States.  HOA's HQ was 2k, and the COLs were more like 50 a pop, so let's say 2,200 total.  Replicate that four more times and you're talking a whopping total of 10,11-000 personnel (with lots being civilian contractors).  As presence goes, this is a tiny force for such a huge continent, so it can only be about leveraging local capacity.

To compare, we sent 10k personnel to Haiti for the earthquake.  Think about that:  Haiti versus Africa!

And let's just say, we didn't exactly control Haiti on the basis of 10,000 personnel.

Anyway, here's what this piece in the Geopolitical Monitor says:

The month before AFRICOM began its one-year incubation under U.S. European Command in 2007, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry said, “Rather than three different commanders who have Africa as a third or fourth priority, there will be one commander that has it as a top priority.” [2]

The Pentagon official also revealed that Africa Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five ‘regional integration teams’ scattered around the continent” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO,” particularly France, a member of both, which was “interested in developing the Africa standby force”. [3]

The Defense Department official identified all the key components of Africa Command’s role and adumbrated what has transpired in the almost three-year interim: By subsuming nations formerly in the areas of responsibility of three Pentagon commands under a unified one, the U.S. will divide the world’s second most populous continent into five military districts, each with a multinational African Standby Force trained by military forces from the United States, NATO and the European Union.

Later the same month, the Pentagon confirmed its earlier disclosure that AFRICOM would deploy regional integration teams “to the northern, eastern, southern, central and western portions of the continent, mirroring the African Union’s five regional economic communities….”

The Defense News website detailed the geographic division described in Defense Department briefing documents issued in that month:

“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….

“A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara, according to the briefing documents.” [4]

The five areas correspond to Africa’s main Regional Economic Communities, starting in the north of the continent:

• Arab Maghreb Union: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.
• East African Community (EAC): Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
• Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
• Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS): Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe.
• Southern Africa Development Community: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

The piece, with snippets of snarky editorializing here and there ("Pentagon Builds Surrogate Armies To Control Africa Region By Region"  Oh really!  That's all it takes?  My, that was easy!), lays out a lot of references and gets the facts basically correct (although I think it misidentifies HOA as--in effect--a sixth separate effort, as it basically correction to the EAC layout + Ethiopia).  It also explores my colleague Harry Ulrich's similar networking effort in the naval realm (something I also wrote on for Esquire:  "Sea-Traffic Control").

But like I say in the post headline, a fairly natural breakdown by geography:  a local precinct effort by the US to encourage regional integration in the security realm that buttresses that which is already unfolding in the economic realm.  Every neighborhood gets its community cop (locally-derived peacekeeping units) with an attendant mentor (AFRICOM sub-regionals).

Naturally nefarious to some, but who else is making the effort?  Especially when our economic interests are marginal beyond oil, and the oil will flow no matter how many brushfires were to happen anyway.

Nonetheless, the piece ends on this note, however unsubstantiated it is by the actual text:

The U.S. is not dragging almost every nation in Africa into its military network because of altruism or concerns for the security of the continent’s people. AFRICOM’s function is that of every predatory military power: The threat and use of armed violence to gain economic and geopolitical advantages.

Yes, yes. Making Africa safe for Chinese mercantilism.  So selfish of us!

Worth reading for the facts, just understand that the editorializing is both hyperbolic and unsupported.