East Asia won't choose sides in any Sino-American rift
Barnett
¦"Bush Shifts Focus Back to China: Beijing's Rising Power Again Makes It a Foreign-Policy Priority for U.S.," by Greg Jaffe and Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 3 June 2005, p. A4.
¦"Rumsfeld Issues A Sharp Rebuke To China On Arms: Sees A Broad Risk To Asia; In Singapore Speech, He Urges More Trade and Political Freedoms," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 4 June 2005, p. A1.
¦"East Asia Fears Superpower Squeeze: China's Neighbors Are Wary of Washington-Beijing Rift, As U.S. Criticizes Mainland," by Jay Solomon and Barry Wain, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2005, p. A9.
Donald Rumsfeld carries some Dick Cheney water to Singapore, sounding yet another Bush administration warning about "rising China."
He notes China's rising defense spending and asks, Who threatens China?
Well, the chief Chinese delegate asked the same thing about America.
If Rummy were to answer, "International terrorism!" Couldn't China do the same?
China wants to be big in Asian security, so give it a venue to express that bigness, say I. Give them an East Asian NATO-and fast.
As I warned in Esquire in February: the price will only go up.
Energy requirements ARE the new Indian foreign policy
¦"Hunger for Energy Transforms How India Operates: A growing need for power influences foreign policy," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 5 June 2005, p. A3.
I remember sitting down with an Exxon exec who told me Bangladesh was going to float away on a sea of natural gas before those stubborn people would ever let in Western investment. And, of course, it would never sell that gas to natural enemy India.
Just like India could never think to lay a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan . . .
Well, things change. So India wants to plus up its nuclear energy industry big time, and doesn't want any hassles from the U.S. on that score. And yeah, we've given them the business before. When I was in India in 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the front page of all the papers, basically calling India a rogue state for its pursuit of nuclear power and it's intemperate relationships with like-minded states.
Well, things change for us too. Now we are willing to sell such technology to India, and when India signs a huge gas and oil deal with Iran, likewise demanding its international rights to develop nukes for "peaceful means," we better not expect the Indians to lean on Tehran or rein in that investment strategy.
Energy relations will remake South Asia and Central Asia in very profound ways in coming years, and those networked ties will extend into the Persian Gulf via Iran first and foremost. There is no preventing this, or Iran's growing role as a Gulf pillar. There is only coopting-or making sure you get what you want out of the process.
Don't expect India to piss in the wind on any of this, nor choose America over China. China-India energy cooperation will happen. It's not just some dream. As one Indian advocate points out, the EU started with just cooperation on coal between France and Germany.
So get used to it. India already has. "Mutual dependencies" is the new diplomatic buzzword in South Asia, where India rules and Iran is viewed as a little brother.
Again, get used to it.
The military/market division of labor in shrinking the Gap: a bad thing or a good thing?
¦"U.S. Challenged to Increase Aid to Africa," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 5 June 2005, p. A8.
¦"AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls," by Sharon LaFraniere, New York Times, 3 June 2005, p. A1.
The article describes a "powerful consensus" that is emerging among the world's heavyweight donors to buy into Jeffrey Sachs quest to dramatically ramp up (basically double, in most cases) their amount of official developmental aid to Africa as part of the UN's big push to reduce poverty there by half in coming years.
The EU's 25 members seem on board, as does Japan, which has already taken the pledge. The Bush Administration is seen as the lone hold-out, and I don't necessarily disagree with their stance. Having interacted with people from State, USAID, and the Millennium Challenge Account on the subject, their doubts are the doubts of development experts everywhere regarding Sachs's latest version of "shock therapy": too much too fast with most of it likely to be wasted by governments in Africa yet unable to manage those flows and too often beset with internal strife. The U.S. is basically ready to ramp up, but not at the same pace.
Me, I am concerned that in all this aid talk, there's little talk about the huge amount of civil strife and generalized violence and associated corruption that is afflicting big chunks of Africa. Money alone can't solve these problems, and I worry that what ends up happening in a lot of triage that helps people, especially refugees, simply get by under such dire, violent circumstances, without any real associated push to deal with those violent circumstances.
In short, I see the market linkages (many of which start if very basic stuff like healthcare and education), but not the military ones (as recent reports have indicated, so many of the premature deaths in Africa result from conflict-driven migrations).
What's also interesting on the article is a share-percentage breakdown of U.S.-versus-EU-versus-Other donors of ODA (official developmental aid) over the past 45 years. Not surprising, in the early 60s, the U.S. alone provided roughly half, as Europe was just emerging from the shadow of WWII. Since the mid-1960s, coincidentally when the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, the U.S. share has slowly decline while the EU share has slowly increased, as has the other. Now the U.S. provides around 25%, the EU around 50% and the Others (led by Japan) providing the remaining 25%.
To me, there is a certain symmetry in these numbers, for you could say that the U.S. provides roughly 75% of the security aid (aid, training, crisis responses, major military interventions, and follow-on stabilization and reconstruction ops-aka nation-building) to the Gap, while the rest of the Old Core (EU + Japan + others) supplies around a quarter (reasonable ballpark guess). So if that's the rough breakdown in military aid, then it shouldn't surprise if the ratios are reversed in the market aid.
Wrong or right, fair or unfair, that's the way it has naturally emerged-this division of labor within the Old Core.
So if America weighs in primarily with the Leviathan and the rest of the Old Core primarily with the ODA, then what is the New Core logically good for? Methinks a certain specialization in the SysAdmin.
I had my eyes opened on that score by The New Map Game and the strategies of the China team, treating, as they did, the SysAdmin role as a potential Gap-market-conquering strategy.
So must we fret if the Chinese "infiltrate" too much of sub-Saharan Africa and turn these backward societies toward something better?
Read the frightening and very depressing story on AIDS orphans in Africa and tell me America should ever be in the business of worrying about some New Core power payting "too much" attention to that continent.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 02:12 AM Evoked? Provoked? Ask Tom
Russia welcomes FDI and oil output rises; Russia scares off FDI and oil output stagnates
¦"Russia Oil Output Is Showing Signs Of Leveling Off: Investment Decline Augurs Stagnating Production, Upward Pressure on Prices," by Bhushan Bahree and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 3 June 2005, p. A9.
Russia let in the foreign investors and oil companies in the early 1990s and production ramped up dramatically, absorbing in recent years almost half of the global oil demand spike led by India and China.
Then Putin goes after Yukos, and investors take the chill. Production stagnates and looks to settle into a long decline.
No, no, this is not some deterministic Hubbert's Curve effect. There is a lot of Russia still not well explored or well exploited.
This is the dead hand of the statist approach to economic development scary off much-needed investors, and this trend will prove-in spades-Putin's ultimately limited ability to lead beyond reestablishing the authority of the center after too much had been lost. He's gone too far, and the big question is will Russia realize it by the 2008 election and choose a better path.
The upshot? Give the silovki (or power-types) enough time as rulers of Russia, and they will move it past the dreaded "oil curse" far faster than otherwise, forcing the society to develop, or perhaps just realize, their human capital potential sooner.
Paging Dr. Pink!
Will someone tell my wife our kids don't need to be good at math?
¦"A Race to the Top: The 35-hour work week vs. the 35-hour day," op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 3 June 2005, p. A27.
¦"Pomp and Circumspect: 'Do what you love' is now practical career advice," op-ed by Daniel H. Pink, New York Times, 4 June 2005, p. A29.
Friedman's off the Grenocon shtick, or whatever that bit was about throwing loads of investment at non-oil alternatives to transportation, and now he's singularly pushing his book's main theme, which I-as a blogger-respect . . . in other bloggers, but really, he might use his NYT op-ed column with a bit more reach. I mean, there's no way Esquirew would let me go "Core-Gap, Core-Gap" in every piece I wrote for them.
Still, it's a neat club, and Friedman wields it well, beating the French and their 35-hour-work-week mentality.
But his upshot misses target, in many ways, just like his geo-green stuff. We won't go hydrogen on our own, but because Asia will forge the pathway out of sheer desperation for both its skyrocketing oil dependency and its nasty air pollution. Left to our own devices, we'd be fine on oil for quite a few decades. We'll change because we'll not want to be left behind technologically, and Asia's rising giants will pave that path.
On the "World is Flat" storyline, Friedman's selling a serious self-critique of the U.S. educational system, and while it's true that we aren't producing the same great generations of engineers and scientists that we once were, Friedman never seems to ask the question of whether or not that's the automatic bad thing he assumes it is. If America of the 20th century was so very different in its dominant skill sets from that of 19th century America, then why should 21st century America not similarly "move on"?
This is why I find Daniel Pink's notions of shifting from a left-brain (the number-crunching side) to a right-brain (the imaginative, storytelling side) so interesting. It's not just the follow-your-bliss notion that attracts, but something that speaks very directly to my own life: so long as I tried to be like every other military analyst and do the operations research-sort of thing, I never stood out. When I moved into the serious storytelling of grand strategy, I attained a global reach I never thought possible.
And that's not just a story of the Michael Jordan-phenomenon sort. Storytelling and personal care and designing and styling are about product differentiation in a world where the standard things can be automated and mass produced elsewhere at far lower costs. Do we race China and India down that path, or do we move beyond?
My kids are all inveterate storytellers, acting out each movie we watch (often, quite annoyingly in the theater like Jerry waving his light saber yesterday at Star Wars), singing songs like every meal is their personal caberet, and writing down their stories and mangas and comics and books and plays and every thought that pops into their heads like there's no tomorrow. My eldest Emily is designing elaborate manga-style comics with hugely intricate drawings and wonderfully fast-paced action. Her latest project is a full-blown parody of the movie "Moulin Rouge" using characters from her favorite Japanese vampire-hunter manga series. And yes, if you know the characters as I do after listening to her rambling on about them for hours at a time, it's awfully good.
Meanwhile, my wife worries incessantly about their science and math skills, which are just fine, but not at the tippy top of the class like their verbal/music/singing/storytelling/all-around-showboating skills, and it bugs her to no end. Me, I'm convinced none of these kids will ever go hungry, or without a lot of career opportunities. Vonne wants to have them read science and tech magazines, whereas I favor Variety and comic books.
We shall see which view holds more promise in the end, but I'm betting on Pink's optimism over Friedman's fretting.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett "
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