An article former SAIS student James Mina and I wrote on ‘Circumventing Hormuz’ appears in the February–March 2014 issue of Survival. The International Institute for Strategic Studies today published this related post:
Tag: China
Things are not going well
Things are not going well in many parts of the world:
- The Syrian peace talks ended at an impasse over the agenda. The regime wants to talk terrorism. The opposition wants to talk transition. The US is looking for options.
- Ukraine’s peaceful protests are ending in an explosion of violence. Russia is financing and encouraging the government. The US is ineffectually urging restraint.
- The UN has documented crimes against humanity in North Korea. No one has the foggiest notion what to do about a regime that has now starved, tortured and murdered its citizens for more than six decades.
- Egypt is heading back to military rule. The popular General Sisi is jailing both his Muslim Brotherhood and secularist oppositions. Terrorism is on an upswing.
- Libya’s parliament has decided to overstay its mandate. A new constitution-writing assembly will be chosen in elections tomorrow, but in the meanwhile violence is on the increase and oil production down.
- Yemen’s president has short-circuited the constitutional process altogether. He announced a Federal structure that divides the South, whose secessionists reject the idea.
- Afghanistan’s President Karzai is putting at risk relations with the US, because he is trying despite the odds to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban.
- Nationalism is heating up in Japan, South Korea and China. Decades of peace in Asia are at risk as various countries spar over ocean expanse and the resources thought to lie underneath.
- Nuclear talks with Iran are facing an uphill slog. The interim agreement is being implemented, but prospects for a comprehensive and permanent solution are dim.
- Israel/Palestine negotiations on a framework agreement seem to be going nowhere. Israel is expanding settlements and increasing its demands. Palestine is still divided (between Gaza and the West Bank) and unable to deliver even if an agreement can be reached.
For the benefit of my Balkans readers, I’ll add: Read more
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Tags : Afghanistan, China, Democracy and Rule of Law, Egypt, Gulf states, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Japan, Jordan, Libya, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United Nations, Yemen
Peace Picks February 18 – 21
1.Urbanization and Insecurity: Crowding, Conflict, and Gender
Tuesday, February 18 | 12:00 – 2:00pm
5th Floor, Woodrow Wilson Center; 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Recent comparative studies of rapidly growing cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have identified a variety of threats to women’s personal security and an equally varied set of government and community responses. This seminar features presentations of the results of large-scale comparative studies as well as ethnographic studies that highlight the role of gender in urban violence.
SPEAKERS
Alison Brysk
Fellow
Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance, Professor, University of California Santa Barbara
Richard Cincotta
Global Fellow
Demographer in Residence, The Stimson Center
Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
Visiting Senior Researcher, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Alfred Omenya
Principal Researcher & Architect, Eco-Build Africa, Nairobi Read more
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Tags : Afghanistan, Africa, China, Gulf states, Iran
Resting on your laurels crushes them
Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose stopped by last week for a public chat with SAIS professor Eliot Cohen, who was once upon a time his youthful professor at Harvard. Their theme was US foreign policy and the future of the global liberal order. Underlying the good-natured joshing between old friends and colleagues was a sharp disjunction in their views of the world and what the proper role of the United States should be.
Rose played the full-throated optimist. Think how much better an average American life is than Napoleon’s: what did he use for toilet paper? Would you want to go to his dentist? Life expectancy and physical body size are increasing. Poverty is down. Economic, social and political development go together and are all on the upswing. There is a general recognition that peace is better than war, cooperation is good, and capitalism works, even if unchecked markets are problematic. The global liberal order, a hybrid “good enough” system, was in place by the 1940s under US hegemony, which provides vital global public goods. The end of the Cold War brought an almost effortless expansion eastwards.
The primary role of US foreign policy in Rose’s view is to sustain, maintain and deepen this system. Washington should first of all do nothing that damages the global liberal world order. It should prevent or avoid great power wars, in particular involving China. It should protect the global commons (high seas, atmosphere, outer space, cyberspace). It should maintain and deepen free trade. Everything else is gravy.
Eliot agreed on the material progress that the world has made but challenged Gideon on two fronts:
- There are real risks to the liberal order originating from the darker forces of human nature. Competitive models present challenges that should not be ignored.
- World history is replete with big disjunctions that depend on individual choices, like the decision of the Archduke Ferdinand not to retire to his hotel on June 28, 1914 after the first assassination attempt in Sarajevo.
Agency cannot be ignored in favor of structure. The triumph of the liberal world order is not inevitable but needs to be nourished and maintained against forces that would happily destroy it.
On the issue of global governance, Gideon recommended Stewart Patrick’s “Global Governance Is Getting Messier. Here’s How to Thrive” in the latest Foreign Affairs, which underlines the jury-rigged but still more or less effective system we are living with. He added that it is important the US tend its role as hegemon by making sure it behaves well and correctly so that it is accepted widely as a legitimate authority.
While agreeing with Gideon in this last respect, I confess to grave doubts about his conception of the US role in the world. It is not sufficient to sustain, maintain and deepen the system, managing the rise of China but little more. There are two reasons:
- The global liberal order is based on concepts that are universal, in particular human rights. If you believe “all men are created equal,” their treatment in autocratic societies (including China) and the treatment of women in many countries is not something you can write off to historical circumstance, cultural differences or your own powerlessness.
- The global liberal order–like its trading arm–needs growth. It cannot sit self-contented and wait for a Berlin Wall to fall. It certainly didn’t do that during the Cold War and there is much less reason to do it now.
Gravy is in the eye of the beholder. But any worldview that relegates the fundamentals of the liberal order to “gravy” can’t have it quite right. Resting on your laurels crushes them.
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The Cory Remsburg metaphor
The President’s State of the Union speech last night broke little new ground on foreign policy. He is pleased to be finishing two wars and will resist getting the United States involved in other open-ended conflicts. He may leave a few troops in Afghanistan to train Afghans and attack terrorists. Al Qaeda central is largely defeated but its franchises are spreading in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Mali. He will limit the use of drones, reform surveillance policies and get us off a permanent war footing. He wants to close Guantanamo, as always, and fix immigration, as always.
He will use diplomacy, especially in trying to block Iran verifiably from obtaining a nuclear weapons and in resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, but also in destroying Syria’s chemical weapons capability. He will support the moderate Syrian opposition. He will veto new Iran sanctions in order to give diplomacy a chance to work, maintain the alliance with Europe, support democracy in Ukraine, development in Africa, and trade and investment across the Pacific. America is exceptional both because of what it does and because of its ideals.
The President didn’t mention Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia or Japan. He skipped North Korea too. His mother must have taught him that when you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all. Those countries might merit mention, but all have in one way or another been doing things that we prefer they not do. He mentioned China, but only as an economic rival, not a military one. He skipped the pivot to Asia as well as Latin America. For my Balkans readers: you are not even on his screen. Read more
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Tags : Afghanistan, Africa, Al Qaeda, Asia, China, Egypt, European Union, Gulf states, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Japan, Latin America, Mali, NATO, North Korea, Nuclear weapons, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, Yemen
Diversifying Hormuz protection
While my career in recent years has focused on politics, especially in the Balkans and Middle East, I have a long history with energy issues. They were already big in 1972, when I was on the secretariat for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment. Even then global warming was on the agenda. I worked in the mid-1970s at the National Center for Analysis of Energy Systems at Brookhaven National Laboratory and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, handled energy issues as Science Counselor of the US Embassies in Rome and Brasilia.
In 1984 I became director of ‘energy consuming country affairs’ at the State Department, a role that included representing the United States at the International Energy Agency’s Standing Committee on Emergency Questions.
It was while oil prices were low in the mid-1980s that we convinced our IEA partners to put in place the ‘coordinated early stock draw’ procedures that are today an important part of the global response to an oil supply disruption.
But proud as I am of that achievement, I’ve come to believe that we missed opportunities to go much further in building up civilian responses to the problem James Mina and I discuss in my Survival article, ‘Circumventing Hormuz’. Over-reliance on military instruments has been costly and counter-productive. We should long ago have pressed non-IEA oil importers (especially China and India) to increase stocks (and coordinate their drawdown) and oil exporters to ensure supply by building pipelines and using them to their maximum capacity.
The current increase in US oil and gas production, while it does not insulate us from the economic harm due to an oil-supply disruption and the resulting price spike, provides an opportunity to beef up these civilian responses, redistribute burdens and lower American military costs. It also provides an opportunity to make protection of oil flow through Hormuz a multinational responsibility, with contributions from major Asian oil importers. This would relieve some of the burden on the US Navy and make it less likely Iran will ever disrupt Gulf oil supplies.
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Tags : China, Gulf states, India, United States
How to stay out of trouble
It would be easy to be pessimistic about 2014. But as Adam Gopnik cleverly illustrates it is really impossible to know whether we are on the Titanic, destined for disaster, or its twin the Olympic, which plied the seas for two more decades without faltering.
The question is what will keep America out of trouble? How do we avoid the icebergs of contemporary international relations? Gopnik suggests avoiding challenges to honor and face and worrying little about credibility or position. This seems to me wise. The question of reputation in international affairs is fraught, but anyone of the Vietnam generation will want to be skeptical about claims the United States needs to intervene in the world to prevent its reputation from being sullied or to prove its primacy.
Hubris is the bigger danger. I, along with many others, don’t like the Obama Administration’s aloof stance towards Syria. But the least good reason for intervention there is to meet the Russian challenge, reassert primacy in the Arab world or prevent others from thinking America weak. We are not weak. We are strong, arguably far stronger than we would have been had we intervened in Syria a year ago and gotten stuck with enhanced responsibilities there. The reasons for intervention in Syria are more substantial: the threat of a terror-exporting Sunni extremist regime either in Damascus or in some portion of a partitioned Syria as well as the risk to neighboring states (Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Israel) from Syrian collapse. Read more
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Tags : Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, China, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, North Korea, Nuclear weapons, Syria, Turkey, United States
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