Europe on Iran, China on North Korea, US on the sidelines
Barnett
thomaspmbarnett.com
¦"Bush to ‘think about’ Europe’s Iran strategy: Meeting with Schroder leads to ‘convergence’ on how to deal with nuclear tthreat (US president still insists Tehran must give ground)," by James Harding and Huge Williamson, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 1.
¦"China applies gentlest of flicks to Pyongyang’s reins: Beijing resists manipulating North Korea dependence on Chinese oil and food supplies," by Richard McGregor and Anna Fifield, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 7.
Europe leads on Iran, while China hosts the six-party talks. If nothing else, this signals the limits of U.S. military power right now: our inability to do the SysAdmin job in Iraq means there’s little we can do on either Iran or North Korea. Ultimately, we’ll end up living with the consequences of this strategic weakness, which is why we’d be so much better off seeking dramatically better answers in the short-term with serious leadership instead of watching from the sidelines. Iran will get the bomb, and Europe will end up making the deal. North Korea will eventually implode, and what Asia will get is a dominating China with America nowhere in sight.
These things are going to happen. Our strategy right now seems only to consist of holding them off for as long as possible. The neocons feel burned by their one attempt at a System Perturbation, which is too bad, because it’s working wonders in the Middle East, but when you basically beg off hot pursuit of the initial conditions you’ve altered, it’s like you’ve thrown the ball down to the five-yard-line in football, only to punt on the next down. You’ve got to laugh when you hear the notion that somehow the neocons are running the world right now. If anyone is, it’s China and India by sheer default: their strategic rise provokes more vision and diplomacy than anything we’re doing. We’ve set off the Big Bang in the Middle East to do what? Return back to the same myopic fears of balance-of-power dynamics that the Bush administration seemed so consumed by prior to 9/11? These are very important years for a lack of U.S. global leadership, for growing and securing the Core will always out-shadow shrinking the Gap as THE strategic task.
And you know what? Whenever America gives off that zero-sum vibe regarding the rising New Core, we accomplish exactly what we need to avoid in coming years: we convince the Core that we’re probably quite zero-sum in our efforts to shrink the Gap. That impression just moves other Core powers to focus on integration with one another while hoping that those crazy Americans will remains obsessed with security and bogged down in the Gap.
China holds real cards on North Korea, and we see fit not to exploit that connectivity whatsoever because of our larger fears about China. Kim survives on oil and food from China, all of which stream across just three rail lines and 15 roads. But if you’re China and you see the U.S. constantly working to limit its quest for security, of course your chief fear on North Korea is that those crazy Americans will start something that you’ll be left to deal with militarily. I mean, look at America’s postwar effort in Iraq!
But you gotta know that Beijing fears a nuclear North Korea greatly, but not directly. A nuclear Kim could easily drive both South Korea or—even more likely—Japan into a similar nuclear stance, something Beijing fears far more. This isn’t my analysis: it’s the analysis of Cheng Fenguin of Beijing University. As he notes, “Taiwan will also find excuses to start its own nuclear programme.”
Add it all up and tell me we can’t put together a package on Kim that Beijing could buy into. But instead, what do we do? We get Japan to join our little security package on Taiwan.
This, my friends, is what passes for strategic vision right now in DC.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:37 PM
India and China: there is no point in choosing
¦"On the move: Asia’s giants take different routes in pursuit of economic greatness," by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 23 February 2005, p. 13.
¦"A share of spoils: Beijing and New Delhi get mutual benefits from growing trade," by Edward Luce and Richard McGregor, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 13.
I love all that talk about how we’re going to use India to balance China militarily in Asia. People who push that line simply are not paying attention. China and India themselves see their dual rise as very complimentary.
Yes, there are key differences, as Martin Wolf points out in his excellent piece:
Both are the heirs of great civilizations. But China’s civilization is inseparable from its state, while India’s is inseparable from its social structure, above all the role of caste.
This difference permeates the two countries’ histories and contemporary performance. As Lord Desai of the London School of Economics has noted, “for India, the problem [is] achieving unity in diversity.” China, however, is a “unitary hard state, which can pursue a single goal with determination and mobilize maximal resources in its achievement”…
China has accept both growth and social transformation. India welcomes growth but tries to minimize social dislocation. The Chinese state sees development as both its goal and the foundation of legitimacy. Indian politicians see the representation of organized interests as their goal and the foundation of their legitimacy. Chinese politics are developmental, while India’s remain predominately clientelist.
Wolf sees both countries as having to reform their political and economic institutions greatly in order to achieve further development, but like me, he sees this as “both constraints and opportunities.”
And you know what? Both nations see each other increasingly as an opportunity. Bilateral trade is skyrocketing, and economists and planners on both sides are coming to the realization that there is a lot of complimentarity in their development paths—one focusing on manufacturing and the other on services:
India and China are even exploring ways of joining forces to find cheap sources of supply and boost their competitiveness. There is increasing awareness—especially in India—that, far from competing in a zero sum game, both countries are growing at such a speed that there is enough room for each to accommodate greater productive capacity…
“The issue is not competition between India and China—there is no way production can keep up with demand in either country,” says a senior executive at Tata [India’s biggest private-sector consortium]. “The real question is how quickly what remains of global production will move to China, India and Brazil” …
The two countries are also tentatively exploring areas of co-operation, for example as partners for joint purchases in markets such as energy and commercial aircraft. Such a prospect, which Boeing or Airbus would not welcome—is so far not much more than talk. Nevertheless, there is a determination in both capitals to considere the unmatchable economies of scale that would be available to them as joint buyers of some of the materials and technology that both countries lack.
A side story on “Strategic parity prompts a neighbourly respect” gets to the point of the military-market nexus quite clearly:
India’s economic emergence is open encouraged by the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations, which has become increasingly concerned about the growing preponderance of China. In much the same way as the US hopes India will become a geopolitical counterweight to China over the next decades. Asean hopes India will become an economic counterweight.
That may be premature. India, with its sensitivity about sovereignty, bristles at being asked to play roles on behalf of other countries. But economic ties between India and China will continue to grow and a convergence of the two giants’ broader interests at the World Trade Organization and elsewhere will help bring them closer together.
Like I say, lock in at today’s prices or pay higher ones tomorrow, but China’s rise will embed them deeply within the Core on security affairs. We can seek to lead that process or we better be prepared to get out of the way.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:36 PM
Feeling for the Gap, wanting a better system for Core action
¦"The fate of failed states is our shared responsibility: The rights of human beings are far more important than the rights of more or less dysfunctional states to do what they wish," op-ed by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 23 February 2005, p. 15.
¦"Don’t look away this time: If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped," op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 6.
Another great piece by Martin Wolf, whose book, Why Globalization Works features prominently in Vol.
First he talks about fragile and failed states and offers some good observations (by others) on the boundaries of this problem set. The UK government lists 46 countries as “fragile,” with a population of 900m (14% of world total), with Indonesia and Nigeria being the biggies. The World Bank’s more limited definition yields 11 such nations (Afghanistan, Angola, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Liberia, Burma, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe—all Gap, naturally), with an additional 16 named as Low-Income Countries Under Stress LICUS), yielding a global total of 165m.
Wolf’s main points are these:
First, we must accept the principle of qualified sovereignty . . .
Second, we must also embrace the principle of “do no harm” . . .
Third, we should invest more in prevention . . .
Fourth, we need the ability to respond swiftly and decisively to crises . . .
Finally, we need to achieve full integration of development assistance with other actions, including security interventions, in fragile and failing states.
Hard to do? Sure, as I explore in Vol. II, but as Wolf ends: “all the alternatives are far worse.”
The “far worse” is on display in Sudan right now, as Kristof likes to keep harping. Today he runs some tame photos of dead kids and a skeleton whose pants are obviously pulled down around its knees, indicating sexual assault before execution:
One wrenching photo in the archive shows the manacled hands of a teenager from the girls’ school in Suleia who was burned alive. It’s been common for the Sudanese militias to gang-rape teenage girls and then mutilate or kill them.
Another photo shows the body of a young girl, perhaps 10 years old, staring up from the ground where she was killed. Still another shows a man who was castrated and shot in the head.
Kristof cites reasonable estimates that close to a quarter-million are dead in this manner, with numbers accumulating at roughly 10,000 a month. When I argue for the A-to-Z Core-wide system for processing politically-bankrupt states, I don’t see it as some distant goal for distant problems, but a serious, short-term answer for ongoing genocide that’s occurring on our watch.
Kristof wants sanctions, a no-fly zone, freezing of government assets, killers sent off to the International Criminal Court, a “team effort” by Arab and African states to pressure Sudan (good luck with that one) and an international peacekeeping force of Africans (even less plausible), but one with financing and logistical support from the Core (now we’re getting somewhere).
What Kristof wants is what I want: a system to deal with these sorts of atrocities, and waiting on the Gap to come up with one on its own, or the UN, is simply fanciful. It’ll be a group of Core heavyweights. It’ll look like a Star Chamber and the vengeance will smack of Dirty Harry-like retribution.
And that’ll be a very good thing—not sort of good, not kind of good, but absolutely good.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:36 PM
America’s 51st state—shhhhhhh!
¦"Latin migrants gain political clout in U.S.," by Ginger Thompson, International Herald Tribune, 24 February 2005, p. 5.
Fascinating article about politicians in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, who politic and campaign as much inside the state’s expatriate population living in the US as back home. Why? In some of the bigger cities, like Valparaiso, have half their population living in the U.S. on a regular basis, sending back $100,000 a day! Or roughly what the city of Valparaiso spends all year in its public-sector budget:
The remittances sent home by migrant workers, both legal and illegal, are translating into political clout. Their communities in the United States, better organized and more vocal than before, have become social and political forces too important to ignore.
It is a phenomenon that has made Washington a principal battleground to lobby support among Salvadorans for the Central American Free Trade Agreement; New York a crucial state in elections in the Dominican Republic; and Chicago a mandatory campaign stop for Mexican politicians.
Next presidential election, 10 million Mexicans living in the U.S. will be able to vote in the context south of the border, if legislation just approved in their legislature passes as predicted. So it’s not just the rising role of Hispanics in the U.S. political system that brings us together, but the role of those same Hispanics in the domestic politics of their home countries.
Latino migrants send back $45 billion to the Caribbean and Latin America every year, outdistancing both foreign direct investment and official developmental aid (three years in a row now). Those voices, connected to that money, are getting organized politically in the U.S., and back in their home countries. Their power is getting impossible for any American politician to ignore.
As for Zacatecas the state, over half its population live in the U.S., primarily in California, Illinois and Texas—three huge electorial states in our national elections.
Do you know what the governor of Zacatecas said? Amalia Garcia, who regularly travels to the U.S., says “I consider Zacatecas as a binational state.”
The concept of growing America isn’t a choice and it sure as hell isn’t about military conquest. It’s an economic reality based on connectivity. It’s undeniable—and it’s coming in leaps and bounds.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:35 PM
Our shell-game “War on Drugs” in the Gap
¦"US seeks Colombian help on drugs," by Andy Webb-Vidal, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 6.
Scary to think we want to apply same deal to Afghanistan as we have to Colombia, home of one of the world’s longest civil wars, which should tell you plenty about the success of our War on Drugs down there. We spray drug crops in Colombia and simply drive that effort into national parks. In Afghanistan, we’re sure to achieve similar “success,” while poisoning the land and its people (you can’t tell me it’s benign).
Does anyone think we shrink the Gap in this manner? Or just keep it the way it is, while we get the drugs?
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:35 PM
Muslims finding their cinematic voice in Europe
¦"German Turks mine rich cultural seam of migrant life," by Bertrand Benoit, Financial Times, 24 February 2005, p. 3.
I like any signs that Muslims are finding either their political or artistic voices in Europe.
This article speaks to a number of rising film makers from the immigrant Muslim community who are learning to express themselves in the mass media.
And Germany better learn to get happy with this, because if Muslims can’t express themselves out in the open, they’ll continue to ghettoize themselves in “cultural cocoons” that presage a “parallel society.” Satellite TV works both ways in globalization: allowing the Gap to see what it’s missing and for Gap migrants workers and immigrants living in the Core to zone out of their daily lives with narrow media connectivity back home. Ghettos form in response to the lack of personal connectivity for immigrants living in the Core, they don’t prevent it per se (although they can certainly reinforce disconnectedness).
Media represents society. If you don’t want parallel societies, don’t let parallel media predominate. But also don’t expect immigrants not to connect up somehow to something that features descriptions of life they can recognize and see themselves within. |
