A bad week for Cameron

British PM David Cameron has had a bad week. After the State Opening of Parliament the Queen’s speech quickly unraveled and then another rebellion took place by his own backbenchers with 50 voting against the government bill to allow gay marriage.

After the Queen’s Speech “116 Tory backbenchers voted for an amendment which criticised the Queen’s Speech for its lack of a government Bill paving the way for the promised “in/out” referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU”. Reports note that “Downing Street said the Prime Minister is “relaxed” about allowing senior Tories to register their criticism of the Government’s entire legislative agenda by voting alongside EU rebels in the Commons. Mr Cameron’s latest attempt to placate Conservative Right-wingers came as Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said the UK should be ‘ready to walk away’ from the EU. And in a further sign of growing pressure on Mr Cameron over the issue, Lord Lamont, the former Chancellor, became the latest Tory grandee to call for Britain to withdraw from the EU if its membership cannot be renegotiated to put it on a purely commercial basis”.

The piece adds “The rebel amendment states that the House ‘respectfully regrets that an EU referendum bill was not included in the Queen’s Speech’. The vote, which would be largely symbolic, is expected next week if the amendment is called for debate by John Bercow, the Commons Speaker. Mr Cameron is not expected to vote as he will be out of the country next week. However, following next week’s debate, backbenchers intend to table a private members’ bill on the issue of an EU referendum. Downing Street sources indicated yesterday that MPs and ministers may be allowed to vote for that bill as well, raising the prospect of the Commons voting over laws to provide a referendum in the next Parliament. The Prime Minister’s apparent willingness to allow MPs and ministers to join rebels will be seen as further evidence of the growing unease in the Tory Party over the threat from the UK Independence Party”.

However, in reality Cameron had little choice but to allow his MPs to back the move, albeit, in the knowledge that it would probably be defeated. If he did not allow it he would have had an even bigger problem on his hands, therefore allowing his MPs to rebel was the least worst option.

Then things got worse when the government was trying to pass a bill allowing gay marriage. Reports note that “The Coalition avoided embarrassment after a last-minute deal with Labour to save the bill. Some 56 Conservative backbenchers – half the number predicted – backed a backbencher’s amendment the Government warned could fatally delay the reform. Eight Labour MPs, three Liberal Democrats and three SDLP members joined the Tory critics in the voting lobbies. But the move to extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples was easily defeated in a free vote by a large majority of 370. David Cameron was given a lifeline yesterday after Ed Miliband decided to save the bill by tabling an amendment which would mean an immediate consultation on extending civil partnerships to heterosexual couples.”

The piece adds “Tim Loughton, a former Tory minister, accused ministers of doing a “grubby deal” with Labour to see off his amendment and said the battle would continue in the upper chamber. The Conservative leadership remains under fire from many senior party members vehemently opposed to the measure. One councillor last night accused ministers of showing ‘clear contempt for the deeply-held views of Conservative supporters’ and fuelling an exodus to the UK Independence Party. Culture Secretary Maria Miller defended the Government’s tactics insisting there was “overwhelming support” for the change, including among significant numbers in her own party. Mrs Miller had argued that extending civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples – supported in principle by many backers of gay marriage – would cause significant delays and costs”.

Another article mentions “Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats back the idea of civil partnerships for all. However, they have agreed to vote with Mr Cameron’s Conservative leadership to make sure the laws to legalise gay marriage are not hijacked or stalled. In return for the other parties’ rejection of the “wrecking” amendment, Mr Cameron looks set to support a Labour plan for an immediate consultation on extending civil partnerships. Previously the Government had only committed to examining this option after five years”.

All of this comes just days after an article was published on Saturday [18th May] where it was reported that a unnamed figure close to Cameron, with a hint that he went to Eton, called the grassroots of the party, “swivel eyed loons”. In an obvious effort to calm tensions Cameron sent a letter to party grassroots. An article notes “he Prime Minister tonight sent a ‘personal message’ to thousands of party volunteers, insisting that despite their differences over Europe and gay marriage, the leadership and the party had ‘a deep and lasting friendship’. Mr Cameron’s email was his first comment since The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers disclosed on Saturday that a member of his inner circle had described Conservative association members as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’.The Prime Minister did not refer explicitly to the remark, but insisted that he admired and respected his party’s activists.

These scandals will pass, yet the issue as many see as the problem is not the problem at all. The United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, has campaigned for decades to leave the EU. The local elections that took place recently also gave the party its best showing ever, has lent the party and air of prominence it does not normally have.

Some have said that the end of the unity on the Right has gone forever, “Suddenly, a significant chunk of conservative opinion is rejecting this historically successful approach. It is nothing like a majority, but it is a large proportion and it is starting to feel as though the split may be irrevocable. In part, this is Mr Cameron’s fault. He was so determined to attract new supporters – a noble and necessary aim – that he became careless about the feelings of his party’s existing voters. The Prime Minister’s casual decision to pick a fight on gay marriage with so many Tory members reinforced the idea that he does not like or respect the traditional wing. On the back of it, Ukip membership is rising (next stop 30,000) and Conservative membership looks likely to dip below 100,000. Describing those left in the Tory fold as “swivel-eyed lunatics” can only speed up the process. Worse, Mr Cameron has made these mistakes at just the moment when public contempt for existing institutions and professional politicians has boiled over. This has given the populist Mr Farage the most tremendous opportunity. Last night his party surged to 22 per cent in the latest poll, just two points behind the Tories”.

Yet this would be to misread the situation. The Tories lost seats in the local elections due to a bad economy and dissatisfaction with the state of British politics generally. The surge in UKIP support therefore was little more than a protest vote by the disaffected Right, and the generally disaffected. It should not be read as anything other than a temporary passing, largely due to the unfair situation of the UK having a two party voting system but more than two parties. This will ensure UKIP remain an outlier for years to come.

Israel fires on Syria

“Israeli troops shot at a target across the Syrian frontier on Tuesday in response to gunfire that struck its forces in the Golan Heights, the Israeli military said. A statement said a military vehicle was damaged by shots fired from Syria but that there were no injuries. It said that soldiers “returned precise fire”. Gunfire incidents across the frontier from Syria have recurred in past months during an escalating a civil war there in which rebels have sought to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Israel’s Army Radio said Tuesday’s was the third consecutive cross-border shooting this week”.

Chinese military VI

In the final article in the series on the state of the Chinese military, that has dealt with the general state of the PLA, its corruption, its equipment, the response from the rest of Asia, its red tape and now its cyber capabilities.

It has already been noted that China has been actively attacking America, with a private sector report issued recently, further attacks on America and South Korea, countermeasures taken by the US Government, and then a public denunciation from the administration itself.

The article opens “As the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress, released last week, makes abundantly clear, China is on something of a long march in cyberspace. While most attention is being drawn to the report’s assertions about Chinese snooping into sensitive classified areas and theft of intellectual property from leading American firms — and others around the world — there is some intriguing analysis of Beijing’s broader aims as well. Indeed, the Pentagon sees a clear progression in Chinese strategic thought that, viewed as a whole, begins to elaborate what might be seen as an emerging military doctrine enabled by advanced information technologies”.

He writes “The Pentagon report describes this as a three-phase process. First, there is a ‘focus on exfiltrating data’ so as to gain vital information needed about military command and control systems as well as the points in our critical infrastructure that are vulnerable to disruption by means of cyberattack. It is believed that the Chinese have been engaging in this sort of intelligence gathering for many years — intrusions that Washington first openly acknowledged 10 years ago, giving them the code name ‘Titan Rain.’ It has been raining steadily for the past decade. With all these data in hand, the second step — per the Pentagon report — is to use the same intrusive means that mapped our defense information systems to disrupt them with worms, viruses, and an assortment of other attack tools. The goal at this point is to slow the U.S. military’s ability to respond to a burgeoning crisis or an ongoing conflict. Think of what might happen, say, on the Korean Peninsula, if our small contingent there — a little over 25,000 troops — were to lose its connectivity at the outset of a North Korean invasion by its million-man army. Without the ability to operate more nimbly than the attacker, these forces would be hard-pressed from the outset”.

He then describes the third phase which he says is where China has the most to gain, “This is the point at which the information advantage — that is, the ability to coordinate one’s own field operations while the adversary’s have been completely disrupted — is translated into material results in battle. The Pentagon describes cyberattack at this point as amounting to a major “force multiplier.” Gaining such advantage means winning campaigns and battles with fewer casualties relative to those inflicted upon the enemy. In this respect, computer-driven “bitskrieg” could, it is thought, generate results like those attained by mechanized blitzkriegs — which also aimed at disrupting communications”.

He ends the piece “To succeed at cyberwar, it will be necessary both to scale down large units into small ones and “scale them out” across the battlespace rather than mass them together. In this fashion — spread out but completely linked and able to act as one — the sweeping maneuvers of blitzkrieg will be supplanted by the swarming attacks of bitskrieg, characterized by the ability to mount simultaneous strikes from many directions. The guiding organizational concept for this new approach flows closely from technologist David Weinberger’s thoughtful description of online networks: “small pieces, loosely joined.” Thus should the Pentagon annual report to Congress be delved into more deeply — for the document reflects a clear awareness of, and takes a subtle, layered approach to thinking about, the Chinese cyber threat. One can only hope that the U.S. military analysis of Beijing’s looming capacity for bitskrieg is mirrored by introspective views and similarly nuanced considerations of American capacities for waging cyberwar”.

Blame the Zionists

“The Venezuelan opposition on Monday released a recording of what it says is a conversation between Mario Silva, a prominent Venezuelan television host and a favorite of the late Hugo Chávez, and a Cuban intelligence officer, in which Silva details a feud within the government between Chávez loyalists and Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly. In the conversation with Aramis Palacios, a lieutenant colonel in the G2, the Cuban intelligence agency, Silva, the host of the state television program “La Hojilla,” describes a government deeply divided against itself, with rival factions competing for power amid rampant corruption. The conversation was allegedly recorded for the benefit of Cuban President Raúl Castro, but its authenticity has not been independently verified. Writing on Twitter, Silva dismissed the recording as a Zionist plot”.

A test of Pakistani democracy

Following the Pakistani general election and the election of Nawaz Sharif, as prime minister, have led some to comment that Pakistani democracy took a massive step in the right direction after decades of military (mis) rule.  Interestingly it was reported that the head of the army, General “Ashfaq Kayani, who heads Pakistan’s powerful army and holds significant sway over civilian affairs, visited the incoming prime minister Saturday in what the military described as a show of support for stronger democracy and greater stability as the nation struggles with an economic meltdown and continued insurgent attacks. Kayani met for more than three hours with Nawaz Sharif, the ­center-right conservative poised to take over as prime minister for an unprecedented third stint after securing a heavy mandate in May 11 parliamentary elections”. It was Kayani that met secretary of State Kerry and Hamid Karzai for a conference recently, rather than the outgoing PM, or president. The meeting between Kayani and Sharif was hailed as a positive step forward for relations between the powerful military and civilian leaders. In addition to this the head of the notorious ISI has also requested a meeting.

The author starts the piece “Sixty percent of registered voters took part in the elections, the highest number since 1970. These voters — including Pakistan’s traditionally apathetic urban elite — did so despite the very real threat of violence by the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the country’s most powerful terrorist group. Pre-election violence, which took over 100 lives, and terrorist attacks on the day of the polls in Karachi, Peshawar, and elsewhere, did little to deter voters. The high turnout, including unusually large numbers of women and young people, was not only a testament to Pakistani resilience, but also a slap in the face of TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud, whose group tried to intimidate voters and delegitimise democracy by claiming that it is antithetical to Islam”.

He adds importantly that the “polls were not without their flaws. There were blatant attempts to obstruct voting or rig elections in multiple constituencies in Karachi and elsewhere in the country. On Sunday, Altaf Hussain, the self-exiled London-based leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the political party that dominates Karachi, issued a not-so-veiled threat of violence against peaceful protesters demanding a revote in one of the city’s constituencies. In insurgency-wracked Balochistan, voting irregularities suggested that the military was tinkering with the ballots. At the same time, separatists in the province also waged a terrorist campaign to intimidate candidates”, but he mentions that “Whatever else Pakistanis may disagree on, there appears to be a consensus, at least for now, that democracy is the way forward. The country’s major power brokers — its two largest parties, the army, judiciary, and private media — have been at odds with one another over the past five years, but the chaos has been controlled and all these actors exercised some restraint during the election so as to not derail the democratic process. With the high turnout on election day and enthusiasm that preceded the polls, the public appears to be buying in to the democratic system as well”.

However the most obvious danger is that the Sharif government is unwilling or unable to take on the army/ISI and corrupt vested interests and stalemate ensues. The results of this, while not a certainty would likely point to the possibility of another coup.

As he argues, “the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), which has led the country’s ruling coalition for the past five years, must be given credit for helping instill a culture of consensus-building among Pakistan’s political elite. This traditionally adversarial lot managed to pass three major constitutional amendments that not only involved a significant amount of give and take, but also instituted the electoral reforms that made Saturday’s great turnout possible. On the other hand, the PPP largely failed at managing the country’s economy. While its Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) — which provided cash transfers to low-income families — succeeded at limiting the damage of the economic slowdown on the country’s poor, it did little to boost economic growth”.

The next NSA

Reports mention that apparently, “U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has become the heir apparent to National Security Advisor Tom Donilon — a post at the epicenter of foreign-policy decision making and arguably more influential than secretary of state, a job for which she withdrew her candidacy last fall amid severe political pressure. ‘It’s definitely happening,’ a source who recently spoke with Rice told The Cable. ‘She is sure she is coming and so too her husband and closest friends.’ ‘Susan is a very likely candidate to replace him whenever he would choose to leave,’ agreed Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to President Obama and counselor at the Washington Institute. ‘She is close to the president, has the credentials, and has a breadth of experience.’ Both sources said the timing of succession was uncertain. ‘I don’t believe Tom Donilon is about to leave but would be surprised if he were to remain for the whole second term,’ Ross said. ‘But in answer to your question, [Rice's appointment] is very logical.’”

Chinese military V

In the latest of a series on the Chinese military, an article notes the red tape that hinders Chinese fighter pilots.

John Garnaut writes “Pilots are neither trusted nor properly trained. Drills are regimented, centrally controlled, and divorced from realistic combat conditions. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has nearly 2,000 thousand planes, compared with a little over 3,000 for the U.S. Armed Forces, but only a fraction of the peace-time accident rate, suggesting pilots are not spending sufficient time in the air or training under pressure. While Chinese military enthusiasts saw the Shandong crash as an embarrassing setback, professionals saw it as a small sign that the PLA Air Force might be beginning to take the risks required to develop human “software” to match its expensive hardware and compete with their American, Taiwanese, or Japanese counterparts”.

Garnaut contrasts the highly regimented Chinese air force as exemplified in a Top Gun style film against the US and other Western counterparts, “American and Australian commanders are required to delegate responsibility as far down the chain as possible, and pilots are trained to be trusted to make their own decisions, according to veterans of those systems. They work through endless emergency procedure simulators to internalize key parameters and make instant decisions without need for radio contact. Nothing is hammered into a pilot’s head more deeply than the decision to eject at a set altitude when out of control”.

He goes onto write that “Captain Yue, on the other hand, dutifully obeys the myriad petty orders and then ignores the only one that counts.  ”I believe the plane has a soul,” he tells the military tribunal, explaining why he refused to eject as ordered. Not only does he keep his wings, but he receives a standing ovation. The film, a production by the PLA’s August First Film Studio, in collaboration with the Political Department of the PLA Air Force and the Propaganda Department of the Beijing Municipal Government, is not real life. But many of the PLA’s organizational weaknesses depicted in Skyfighters strongly resonate with what professionals observe. The PLA’s highest-profile challenge is to operate its newly revamped Ukrainian aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, with indigenously produced planes fitted with reverse-engineered Soviet technology, and fulfill China’s ambitions to project military power offshore. Last week, the Liaoning‘s captain, Zhang Zheng, and Rear Admiral Song Xue briefed defense attachés in Beijing and confirmed an ambition to build bigger carriers with greater capabilities. They also admitted to having only 12 trained pilots for the J-15 fighters they plan to deploy, according to sources who were present, suggesting it may be decades before Chinese carriers are operating effectively at sea”.

Garnaut ends the piece “The U.S. Navy lost a staggering 13,000 aircraft and 9,000 air crew in the four decades after World War II, mostly due to accidents, not enemy fire, as its pilots adjusted to the lethal combination of jet engines and aircraft carriers. Rubel says that much of those losses were due to a U.S. Navy culture where ship captains were naturally conditioned to survive on their wits at sea, and the early navy aviators threw caution to the wind because the chance of death was so high. Both the U.S. Air Force and the Navy established safety centers and procedures. The accident rate plummeted in the Air Force, with its centralized structure and standardized practices, but kept rising in the Navy. It didn’t fully settle down until 1983, when Top Gun was made. China’s learning curve may be even steeper. The challenge of operating battle groups and jet-powered air wings at sea, which took four decades to overcome in the U.S. Navy, is multiplied in a Chinese political system where politics explicitly trumps professionalism in all facets of organized life and there is no transparency or independent institutions to monitor and regulate the game”.

“Give Washington time”

“In a nod to how common debt-limit battles have become in recent years, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Congress Friday he was prepared to deploy the ‘standard set of extraordinary measures.’ On Friday, the Treasury stopped issuing State and Local Government Series securities (SLGS). State and local governments buy the securities as they work to refund municipal bond deals. Issuing those securities takes up space under the debt limit. The Treasury also has the power to halt new investments in federal employee retirement funds, which would be reimbursed once the limit is hiked. It also can stop reinvesting in its Exchange Stabilization Fund used to buy and sell foreign currencies. All these moves can free up billions of dollars the government can use to meet critical bills, and give Washington time to strike a debt-limit compromise. Lew informed Congress that the debt limit would again be in an issue in a letter sent Friday. He told congressional leaders that the Treasury is preparing to employ its extraordinary measures to free up room to maneuver under the cap, and gave a hint as to how long Congress could haggle over raising it before a damaging default

Chinese military IV

As part of the series studying the Chinese military, and article has been published last month noting that these Chinese military is not as powerful as many would imagine.

The piece begins noting that “as of 2012, military expenditures in East and Southeast Asia are at the lowest they’ve been in 25 years — and very likely the lowest they’ve been in 50 years (although data before 1988 is questionable). While it’s too early to factor in recent tensions, as China’s rise has reshaped the region over the past two decades, East and Southeast Asian states don’t seem to have reacted by building up their own militaries. If there’s an arms race in the region, it’s a contest with just one participant: China. Military expenditures reflect states’ threat perceptions, and reveal how they are planning for both immediate and long-term contingencies. In times of external threat, military priorities take precedence over domestic ones, like social and economic services; in times of relative peace, countries devote a greater share of their economy to domestic priorities. The best way to measure military expenditures is as a percentage of total GDP, because this reflects how much a country could potentially spend. In 1988, as the Cold War was winding down, the six major Southeast Asian states spent an average of almost 3.5 percent of GDP on military expenditures”.

Kang re-enforces the point noting, “only North Korea and Taiwan fear for their survival — almost every other state is more stable and prosperous than it has ever been. (Taiwan’s military spending dropped from 5.3 of GDP in 1988 to 2.3 percent in 2012; there are no good statistics on North Korean military spending.) Even in 1995, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and before the Asian Financial Crisis, average military spending was 2.5 percent of GDP. The drop is not a worldwide phenomenon: Military expenditures in Latin America, for example, hovered around 2 percent of GDP over the last two decades”.

The only exception to this he argues is China, “Beijing’s defense expenditures, measured in 2011 dollars, grew from $18 billion in 1989 to $157 billion by 2012, an increase of over 750 percent. Surprisingly, no East or Southeast Asian countries responded with similar increases in spending. Japanese defense expenditures, constrained by a pacifist constitution, rose from $46 billion in 1988 to $59 billion in 2012, an increase of just 29 percent. South Korea went from $14.4 billion in 1988 to $31 billion in 2012, a relatively small increase of 118 percent, or 4.7 percent a year”.

It is a mistake to assume that just because the rest of Asia is lowering its defence expenditure that they do not fear China, rather a far more plausible explanation is that as a result of Chinese aggression that know that should anything happen, America will step in and act as the purveyor of global order.

However he argues that this is not the case, “Are some states spending so little because they shelter under a U.S. military umbrella? Unlikely. In 2012, countries with a U.S. alliance spent 1.73 percent on defense, almost exactly the same as non-ally countries. And if renewed U.S. security commitments provided a relief to those East Asian countries, military expenditures should have increased in U.S. allies during the years leading up to the pivot, and then decreased afterwards; instead, expenditures fell below two percent in 2000, and stayed there. All states in the region have ample evidence of China’s rising power and ambition, and could easily have begun counterbalancing. China’s wealth, military, and diplomatic influence have grown dramatically since the introduction of reforms in 1978. While the extent of China’s power may have been unclear in the 1980s or 1990s, today China is unquestionably the second most powerful country in the world. If states were going to balance, wouldn’t they have begun by now? Maritime disputes are becoming increasingly acute, and China appears to be growing increasingly aggressive. If East Asian countries start spending more on defense, that will be evidence of their concern. If they don’t, it suggests they are not all that worried”.

Modern day nepotism

In a highly controversial move, Pope Francis has appointed the rector of the  Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, Fr.Victor Manuel Fernández, 50 as Titular Archbishop of Tiburnia. No previous rector has been appointed a bishop while still serving in office. Archbishop Fernadez will remain in his post as rector of the university.

Clinton’s legacy at State

An article examines the legacy of Hillary Clinton as secretary of State.

The article opens noting that President Obama said that Clinton was “‘one of the finest secretaries of state we’ve had.’”, the piece goes onto note that Obama’s “Lincolnesque effort to create a team of rivals had paid off, thanks largely to Clinton’s own efforts at reconciliation. During her four years in office, Clinton, displaying impressive humility and self-discipline for an ambitious politician, managed to put one of the fiercest presidential primary battles in U.S. history behind her”.

The author by contrast argues that “By any standard measure of diplomacy, Clinton will be remembered as a highly competent secretary of state, but not a great one. Despite her considerable star power around the world, her popularity at home, and her reputation for being on the right side of most issues, she left office without a signature doctrine, strategy, or diplomatic triumph. It is a stretch to include Clinton in the company of John Quincy Adams, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger”.

He acknowledges her new record set by traveling to 112 countries but adds that an administration that wanted to emphasis soft power, at least in public, she did well.  He argues that “her most lasting legacy will likely be the way that she thrust soft diplomacy to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. By speaking out about Internet freedom, women’s rights, public health, and economic issues everywhere she went, Clinton sought to transcend traditional government-to-government contacts. She set out to create — or at least dramatically expand in scope — a new kind of people-to-people diplomacy, one designed to extend Washington’s influence in an Internet-driven world in which popular uprisings”. One such memorable occasion was when she gave a highly publicised speech supporting gay rights.

He rightly contrasts this by noting that she “often played the realist hawk in an administration that started with overconfidence about its president’s transformational powers. In 2009, she allied with Defense Secretary Robert Gates to press for a 30,000-troop surge to address the chaos in Afghanistan, even though the president’s instincts were for a far smaller escalation. Later that year, when Obama had nothing to show for offering an outstretched hand to Tehran (a policy that Clinton had encouraged), she prodded the president into imposing unprecedentedly severe sanctions on Iran. In 2011, she corralled a troupe of advisers, including Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to convince Obama to support a NATO-led intervention in Libya. And it was Clinton’s State Department that was mainly responsible for the administration’s attempt at a strategic “pivot” to Asia, designed largely to counter China’s growing influence”.

He also writes that it was Clinton who “led the way with a historic trip that brought long-isolated Myanmar (also called Burma) into the fold of American partners”.

Her legacy, at least in terms of soft power is as he says, uncertain, “The outcome of the Arab Spring appears to be increasingly Islamist and anti-American, and among the legacies Clinton bequeathed to her successor, John Kerry, is a resurgent jihadist movement in the Arab world”. He credits her for helping US image, especially in Europe but the dangers of this have been warned of here before.

He again praised her for, stressing “that diplomacy and economic development must go hand in hand. She preached that helping partner countries achieve social stability — built on progress on health, food security, and women’s rights — would create stronger alliances and new paths to solving traditional foreign policy problems”.

Interestingly he writes that “A test case for whether the Clinton model of diplomacy can work going forward may be the current turmoil in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak’s successor, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, appears to be wavering in his commitment to democracy. Although Washington deals mainly with Morsi’s government and the Egyptian military, the State Department has fostered ties between nongovernmental organisations in the United States and Egypt that focus on education and development”.

He chastises her noting “although Clinton excelled at soft diplomacy, she shied away from the kind of hard diplomacy that traditionalists identify with foreign policy greatness. One thinks of Adams’ authorship of the Monroe Doctrine and the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, Acheson’s aggressive championing of containment, Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy between the Arabs and the Israelis and his clever exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split. Some critics have interpreted Clinton’s more modest agenda as stemming from political caution. In a recent assessment, the journalist David Rohde quoted a State Department official who suggested that Clinton’s hesitation to get personally involved in conflicts was related to her future presidential ambitions”.

This is perhaps unfair. It oversimplifies Monroe, Acheson and Kissinger and simplifies Clinton. Secondly, these men were living in simpler times, ie the Cold War, and as a result of the (reasonably) obvious bipolarity in the world there was clarity in the world. Regrettably this is not the case currently.

However, his specific point that Clinton, “happily agreed to leave key negotiations in crisis spots to special envoys, charging George Mitchell with overseeing the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio and relying on Richard Holbrooke to bring about a political settlement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She rarely stepped in as each of them failed to make much headway”.

He then discusses the notion that “Zbigniew Brzezinski, the dean of the Democratic national security establishment, criticized the administration’s foreign policy for being ‘improvisational.’ To be fair, the improvisation was sometimes effective. In one case, Obama and Clinton barged into a meeting at the 2009 global climate change talks in Copenhagen and forced the Chinese president to agree to a nonbinding pact under which rich and poor countries alike pledged to curb their carbon emissions. And last year, Clinton displayed cleverness and agility in negotiating the release of the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng”, but he adds fairly that “The administration failed to anticipate the increasingly Islamist bent of the countries whose regimes were ousted in the Arab Spring, and it has been slow in formulating a coordinated response to the abuses against democracy by Morsi and other Islamist leaders. Instead, Obama appears to be approaching Morsi in much the same realpolitik way he once dealt with Mubarak”.

He mentions the personal distance between the two, “Her distance from Obama, by most accounts, was a source of frustration and disappointment for Clinton, especially at the beginning of her tenure. She likely felt shortchanged by the difference between her original job description and the reality that emerged. In the fall of 2008, when Obama surprised Clinton by asking her to take the job, he told her that he had his hands full with the collapsing economy and needed someone of her global stature to take care of foreign policy. The implication was that Clinton would be the dominant figure. But that never happened. Early in Obama’s first term, a senior aide to Clinton told me that “the biggest issue still unresolved in the Obama administration is, can there be more than one star?” The answer, it soon became clear, was no; the only star was going to be Obama himself”. He adds that things were not helped by Vice-President Biden who served for decades as a senator and for many years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

He ends the piece “Slow and steady progress is not necessarily the stuff of greatness. But it is valuable nonetheless, and it may be what, in the end, the world will remember most about Clinton’s tenure as the country’s top diplomat”.

Russia’s muscle flexing

The Wall Street Journal reports “Russia has sent a dozen or more warships to patrol waters near its naval base in Syria, a buildup that U.S. and European officials see as a newly aggressive stance meant partly to warn the West and Israel not to intervene in Syria’s bloody civil war. Russia’s expanded presence in the eastern Mediterranean, which began attracting U.S. officials’ notice three months ago, represents one of its largest sustained naval deployments since the Cold War. While Western officials say they don’t fear an impending conflict with Russia’s aged fleet, the presence adds a new source of potential danger for miscalculation in an increasingly combustible region. ‘It is a show of force. It’s muscle flexing,’ a senior U.S. defense official said of the Russian deployments. ‘It is about demonstrating their commitment to their interests.’ The buildup is seen as Moscow’s way of trying to strengthen its hand in any talks over Syria’s future and buttress its influence in the Middle East. It also provides options for evacuating tens of thousands of Russians still in Syria”.

Sino-American war?

An article has been published dealing with the possibility of a Chinese-American war. Theorically this is already highly possible as has been elobrated elsewhere.

The article asks, “Are we on the brink of a new Cold War? The question isn’t as outlandish as it seemed only a few years ago. The United States is still the sole reigning superpower, but it is being challenged by the rising power of China”.

It goes on to mention “Or are we entering a new period of diversified global economic cooperation in which the very idea of old-fashioned imperial power politics has become obsolete? Should we see the United States and China as more like France and Germany after World War II, adversaries wise enough to draw together in an increasingly close circle of cooperation that subsumes neighbors and substitutes economic exchange for geopolitical confrontation? This is the central global question of our as-yet-unnamed historical moment. What will happen now that America’s post-Cold War engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan have run their courses and U.S. attention has pivoted to Asia? Can the United States continue to engage China while somehow hedging against the strategic threat it poses? Can China go on seeing the United States as both an object of emulation and a barrier to its rightful place on the world stage? The answer to these questions is a paradox: the paradox of Cool War”.

He defies it thus “The term Cool War aims to capture two different, contradictory historical developments that are taking place simultaneously: A classic struggle for power between two countries is unfolding at the same time that economic cooperation between them is becoming deeper and more fundamental”.

He then adds, “A powerful argument can be made that despite its economic rise, China will not try to challenge the position of the United States as the preeminent global leader because of the profound economic interdependence between the two countries. This is the essence of the official, though dated, Chinese slogan of ‘peaceful rise.’ Trade accounts for half of China’s GDP, with exports significantly out­stripping imports. The United States alone accounts for roughly 25 percent of Chinese sales. Total trade between the countries amounts to a stunning $500 billion a year. The Chinese government holds some $1.2 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt, or 8 percent of the outstanding total. Only the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Social Security trust fund hold more; all American households combined hold less”.

He writes that this tentative peace relies on one thing, “The argument that the United States and China will not find themselves in a struggle for global power depends on one historical fact: Never before has the dominant world power been so economically interdependent with the rising challenger it must confront. Under these conditions, trade and debt provide overwhelming economic incentives to avoid conflict that would be costly to all. Over time, the two countries’ mutual interests will outweigh any tensions that arise between them”.

The problem with this argument is not that China is strong in relation to America but rather the opposite. As a result of Chinese buying US debt, America is in a far stronger position than ever before. Add this economic power to cultural, military, and America looks far stronger than China does at its strongest.

General Assembly condemns

“The U.N. General Assembly is set to vote on Wednesday on a draft resolution that condemns Syrian authorities and accepts the opposition Syrian National Coalition as party to a potential political transition. Russia, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is opposed to the resolution, which was drafted by Qatar and other Arab nations and circulated among the 193 U.N. member states. Some Western diplomats said it was unlikely to win as many votes as a resolution that passed last year with 133 in favour”.

Chinese military III

Following on from the previous post about China’s military and article from May 2012 opens noting that “In its annual appraisal of the Chinese military published last week, the U.S. Department of Defense seems to be describing an object it finds both familiar and mysterious. The report certainly answers many of the important issues concerning China’s military, including its attempts to develop an anti-ship ballistic missile and its continuing fixation on Taiwan. Yet for many crucial aspects of China’s strategy, the Pentagon seems like it’s just guessing”.

The first thing the author writes is what China’s long term defence plans are, “Although China’s official 2012 defense budget is $106 billion, an 11 percent increase over last year and a fourfold increase from a decade ago, the Pentagon places China’s total military spending at somewhere between $120 and $180 billion. ‘Estimating actual PLA military expenditures is difficult because of poor accounting transparency and China’s still incomplete transition from a command economy,’ the report notes, referring to the People’s Liberation Army. There have been no credible estimates of Beijing’s long-term defense spending plans. On its current trajectory, China could overtake the United States as the world’s biggest military spender in the 2020s or 2030s — but there are too many unknown variables to accurately predict if this will happen”.

The second item that the Chinese have not made clear is their nuclear plan “Pentagon concludes that “China’s nuclear arsenal currently consists of about 50-75 silo-based, liquid-fueled and road-mobile, solid-fueled ICBMs.” The Pentagon doesn’t attempt to estimate the total number of nuclear weapons that China possesses, although it’s generally assumed to have a much smaller nuclear arsenal than the U.S. cache of over 5,000 nukes. Nonetheless, theories that Beijing possesses or plans to develop a much bigger nuclear weapons stockpile just won’t die down. Speculation last year that China may have as many as 3,500 nuclear warheads — predicated on rumors of a sprawling network of underground tunnels — has been reliably trashed, but some still argue that Beijing sees a strategic opportunity in building a nuclear arsenal that could match or even exceed that of the United States in the coming decades”. He ends the section noting ominously, “Two submarines aren’t much of a strategic deterrent for an aspiring superpower, but the true scope of the SSBN fleet that China plans to build remains unknown”.

The third item he mentions that China has told no-one about is the plan for its navy, “American analysts often use the term “string of pearls” to describe Beijing’s supposed strategy of establishing a network of foreign naval bases, especially in the Indian Ocean, but the Chinese don’t. The latest Pentagon report does not discuss whether China plans to create a U.S.-style network of permanent forward bases for the PLA Navy. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of speculation that China will eventually deploy military forces to port facilities it has constructed in places like Burma, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The Seychelles has invited China to use its ports as resupply points for Chinese ships, but Beijing has insisted that this is not the establishment of a first foreign base, unconvincingly calling it a “re-supply port.” The “places or bases” debate has already been running for some years, and it will continue to rumble on while Beijing remains tight-lipped about its long-range ambitions”.

The PLA-N has already been active since the ASEAN dispute, provoking most of the rest of Asia to push back against it and toward America, although there is no certainty of its true potential.

He ends the piece raising questions about China’s designs on space technology and lastly, questions “There are many other imponderables in China’s military. Chinese cyber-espionage has been effective in obtaining foreign military secrets, but it’s unclear how much of this know-how has been successfully and usefully absorbed into China’s own military programs and doctrines. The overhaul of the Chinese defense industry has revolutionized the country’s indigenous capabilities, but how close has China really got to ironing out the kinks in its military-industrial structures and processes?”

What is evident is that China is as closed and secretive as ever about its military capabilities, with little sign that it is about to assuage people’s fears any time soon.

“To strengthen elements”

“The US is working with Britain to strengthen elements of the Syrian opposition, Barack Obama has told a White House press conference with David Cameron, where the two leaders sought to project a united front in seeking a political solution on Syria. The British prime minister said in a US radio interview that Britain had not ruled out taking tougher action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but later told reporters that his government has not made a decision to arm the Syrian opposition. He announced, however, that Britain would double its non-lethal aid to the opposition over the next year and that it was looking at ways to provide more technical assistance to the rebels”.

Chinese military II

As part of the series on the Chinese military, an article, “Rotting from Within” from the Foreign Policy, argues the scale of the corruption of the Chinese military will doom any hope it has of fighting America, and winning.

Garnaut opens the piece, “the world underestimated how quickly a four-fold jump in Chinese military spending in the past decade would deliver an array of new weaponry to prevent the United States from interfering in a regional military conflict. Top American generals have worried publicly about ‘carrier-killer’ ballistic missiles designed to destroy U.S. battle groups as far afield as the Philippines, Japan, and beyond. Last year, China tested a prototype stealth fighter and launched its maiden aircraft carrier, to augment new destroyers and nuclear submarines. What is unknown, however, is whether the Chinese military, an intensely secretive organisation only nominally accountable to civilian leaders, can develop the human software to effectively operate and integrate its new hardware. Judging from a recent series of scathing speeches by one of the PLA’s top generals, details of which were obtained by Foreign Policy, it can’t: The institution is riddled with corruption and professional decay, compromised by ties of patronage, and asphyxiated by the ever-greater effort required to impose political control”.

He goes on to mention a speech given by Gen. Liu Yuan, the son of a former president of China. Garnaut writes that “Liu is the political commissar and the most powerful official of the PLA’s General Logistics Department, which handles enormous contracts in land, housing, food, finance, and services for China’s 2.3 million-strong military. ‘No country can defeat China,’ Liu told about 600 officers in his department in unscripted comments to an enlarged party meeting on the afternoon of Dec. 29, according to sources who have verified notes of his speech. ‘Only our own corruption can destroy us and cause our armed forces to be defeated without fighting.’ This searing indictment of the state of China’s armed forces, coming from an acting full three-star general inside the PLA, has no known modern precedent”.

He adds that “Some Chinese and diplomatic PLA watchers believe Liu, the highest born of all the princelings now climbing into power, is on his way to the very top of China’s military as a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) after the current leadership retires following this year’s 18th Party Congress, the first large-scale transfer of power in a decade. It helps that he is a close friend of the” current president, Xi Jinping.

Indeed some of the problems facing China’s military are positively 18th Century. Garnaut notes that “The practice of buying promotions inside the military is now so widespread, Liu noted, that even outgoing President Hu Jintao, who also leads the military from his position atop the CMC, had vented his frustration. ‘When Chairman Hu severely criticised ‘buying and selling official posts,’ can we sit idle?’ Liu’s revelations are not necessarily good news for China’s would-be foes. Foreign government strategists are starting to worry that corruption and byzantine internal politics may amplify the known difficulties in communicating with the PLA and adroitly managing crisis situations”.

The British, and other European armies used to have an officer class that simply bought their promotions and from that came incompetence, bad leadership and military defeats. Therefore, to say that a similar patterns are occuring in China now would dent any claim they have to military prowess or tactical ability against advanced armies like America or indeed, any other forces that learnt their lessons centuries ago and promote officers on merit.

Garnaut writes that “Michael Swaine, a China security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes that the ‘fragmented and stove-piped structure’ of the Chinese system means it has great trouble communicating even with itself, especially in crisis situations. He, like most other analysts, does not study corruption in the PLA because of the difficulty in measuring it”. He adds that although corruption is not measured, it is plain to see, “Outsiders can glimpse the enormous flow of military bribes and favours in luxury cars with military license plates on Changan Avenue, Beijing’s main east-west thoroughfare, and parked around upmarket night clubs near the Workers’ Stadium. Business people gravitate toward PLA officers because of the access and protection they bring. PLA veterans told me they are organising “rights protection” movements to protest their inadequate pensions, which they contrast with the luxury lifestyles they observe among serving officers. Retired officers have told me that promotions have become so valuable that it has become routine to pay the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to even be considered for many senior positions”.

He goes onto mention that “Liu’s Dec. 29 “life-and-death” speech heralded what could become the biggest expose of PLA corruption since former president Jiang Zemin opened an investigation into the Yuanhua Group in 1999. In that scandal, widely covered in official media, Yuanhua used military connections to evade a staggering $6.3 billion in taxes by smuggling everything from cigarettes and luxury cars to fully laden oil tankers. The case brought down hundreds of provincial and military officials, including the head of a major PLA intelligence division. It also enabled Jiang to consolidate his grip on the military. The outside world caught another limited glimpse of military corruption in December 2005, when the deputy commander of the navy, Adm. Wang Shouye, was detained for unspecified “economic crimes.” Official reports said he was brought down by a mistress, while Hong Kong’s Asia Weekly said he kept five mistresses and stole almost 20 million dollars. At the time, the PLA Daily, the military’s official newspaper of the PLA, said the PLA’s two historic tasks were fighting wars and eradicating corruption, but no one took visible action on corruption for a further six years”.

Garnaut goes on to mention the case of “the deputy director of his Logistics Department, Gu Junshan, after a protracted internal struggle. Gu was the first military official of such a high rank to be toppled since Admiral Wang in 2005. A source with direct knowledge of the case described General Gu extorting county officials with threats of violence and buying his way up through the PLA hierarchy. The source, whose allegations could not be independently confirmed, said that Gu, together with friends, relatives, and patrons in and beyond the military, profited immensely from a property development in Shanghai, distributed hundreds of PLA-built villas in Beijing as gifts to his friends and allies, and generally ran his construction and infrastructure division like a mafia fiefdom. He lists a bewildering array of personal assets, beginning with Gu’s own villa, which stands outside the usual military compounds behind a high wall next to Beijing’s East Fourth Ring Road, called the General’s Mansion”.

Worryingly he stokes already prominent fears, “the 1989 bloodshed left a vacuum of purpose and integrity within the PLA, which money has rushed to fill. ‘The problem has really got out of hand in the last 20 years,’ he said. ‘After the June 4 movement, when ‘opposing corruption’ was the protestors’ slogan, some of the officers no longer cared about anything. They just made money and broke all the rules.’ A second princeling who has recently retired from a ministerial-level position told me discipline and unity in the PLA has deteriorated in the past decade. He said an unprecedented leadership vacuum has opened up at the top of the military because President Hu never consolidated his grip, even after more than nine years at the helm of the Communist Party and seven years chairing the Central Military Commission”. Amazingly he goes on to write “The official with direct knowledge of the Gu Junshan case told me that Liu succeeded in taking Gu down only after Liu had appealed personally to President Hu, who had three times issued instructions to handle it. The source said the first two orders had been blocked by Gu’s key patron high in the hierarchy, whom the source did not name. ‘It was as if President Hu was making a show of his impotence,’ said the official”.

He ends the piece “Behind the PLA’s shiny exterior is a world where information is not trusted, major decisions require cumbersome bureaucratic consensus, and leaders fear their subordinates will evade responsibility or ignore directions. This entails a different array of risks than the ones that have troubled China’s neighbours and the United States. And Liu, like several other active princelings, is not sure whether the PLA is capable of self-surgery in the age beyond ideals and strong leaders. ‘We are falling like a landslide!’ Liu said in one of his speeches. ‘If there really was a war,’ he asked his subordinates, ‘who would listen to your commands or risk their life for you?’”

Drone from a carrier

“History was made this morning when the U.S. Navy’s stealthy X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator (UCAS-D) drone became the first unmanned stealth jet to take off from an aircraft carrier’s catapults. The jet launched off the USS George H.W. Bush in the Atlantic Ocean at 11:18 this morning and landed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland at 12:24 p.m”.

Chinese military I

Aspects of the Chinese military have already been discussed here before such as the new aircraft carrier, the questionable loyalty of the forces, the weakness of the PLA itself. However, despite all the noise coming from Beijing, some have questioned whether China is trained to the same standard as other forces, either regionally or globally. In this, the first of six posts, dealing with China’s military rise and how it affects the United States and world security generally, a piece in the Economist examines the increasing power of the Chinese Armed Forces, the People’s Liberation Army.

The piece begins noting “That China is rapidly modernising its armed forces is not in doubt, though there is disagreement about what the true spending figure is. China’s defence budget has almost certainly experienced double digit growth for two decades. According to SIPRI, a research institute, annual defence spending rose from over $30 billion in 2000 to almost $120 billion in 2010. SIPRI usually adds about 50% to the official figure that China gives for its defence spending, because even basic military items such as research and development are kept off budget. Including those items would imply total military spending in 2012, based on the latest announcement from Beijing, will be around $160 billion. America still spends four-and-a-half times as much on defence, but on present trends China’s defence spending could overtake America’s after 2035″.

While this cannot be denied there are some complications to what the Economist has said. Firstly, China’s spending will not be sustainable. Demographics will force it to spend less on the military and more on caring for its greying population. Secondly, while China is spending vast sums on defence there is little real indication of what it is for. America’s defence budget is among the world’s most open. Naturally, some items are subsumed within others, or hidden altogether, but for the most part the world is aware what America is spending its money on an why. This cannot be said for China. Thirdly, there is a misunderstanding that just becuase China is spending money on defence it will therefore surpass the American military. This is not the case. Technologically America is so far ahead, not just of China but all European countries that it would not be enough for these nations to spend more. America would essentially have to stop spending money on defence altogether for decades for them to catch up.

The article goes on to say “All that money is changing what the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can do. Twenty years ago, China’s military might lay primarily in the enormous numbers of people under arms; their main task was to fight an enemy face-to-face or occupy territory. The PLA is still the largest army in the world, with an active force of 2.3m. But China’s real military strength increasingly lies elsewhere. The Pentagon’s planners think China is intent on acquiring what is called in the jargon A2/AD, or “anti-access/area denial” capabilities. The idea is to use pinpoint ground attack and anti-ship missiles, a growing fleet of modern submarines and cyber and anti-satellite weapons to destroy or disable another nation’s military assets from afar”. Its cyber capabilities have been seen in action, and openly condemned by the United States.

It goes on to mention that “China’s military build-up is ringing alarm bells in Asia and has already caused a pivot in America’s defence policy. The new ‘strategic guidance’ issued in January [2012] by Barack Obama and his defence secretary, Leon Panetta, confirmed what everyone in Washington already knew: that a switch in priorities towards Asia was overdue and under way. The document says that ‘While the US military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance towards the Asia-Pacific region.’ America is planning roughly $500 billion of cuts in planned defence spending over the next ten years. But, says the document, ‘to credibly deter potential adversaries and to prevent them from achieving their objectives, the United States must maintain its ability to project power in areas in which our access and freedom to operate are challenged.’”

The article adds, “In the past 18 months, there have been clashes between Chinese vessels and ships from Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines over territorial rights in the resource-rich waters. A pugnacious editorial in the state-run Global Times last October gave warning: “If these countries don’t want to change their ways with China, they will need to prepare for the sounds of cannons. We need to be ready for that, as it may be the only way for the disputes in the sea to be resolved.” This was not a government pronouncement, but it seems the censors permit plenty of press freedom when it comes to blowing off nationalistic steam”.

China is unique among great powers in that the PLA is not formally part of the state. It is responsible to the Communist Party, and is run by the party’s Central Military Commission, not the ministry of defence. Although party and government are obviously very close in China, the party is even more opaque, which complicates outsiders’ understanding of where the PLA’s loyalties and priorities lie”.

Interestingly the piece does note that, “General Chen describes the period up to 2010 as “laying the foundations of modernised forces”. The next decade should see the roll-out of what is called mechanisation (the deployment of advanced military platforms) and informatisation (bringing them together as a network). The two processes should be completed in terms of equipment, integration and training by 2020. But General Chen reckons China will not achieve full informatisation until well after that. “A major difficulty”, he says, “is that we are still only partially mechanised. We do not always know how to make our investments when technology is both overlapping and leapfrogging.” Whereas the West was able to accomplish its military transformation by taking the two processes in sequence, China is trying to do both together”.

Author notes that “They are, for the most part, ‘asymmetric’, that is, designed not to match American military power in the western Pacific directly but rather to exploit its vulnerabilities”. It goes on to mention that “If Taiwan policy has been the immediate focus of China’s military planning, the sheer breadth of capabilities the country is acquiring gives it other options—and temptations. In 2004 Hu Jintao, China’s president, said the PLA should be able to undertake ‘new historic missions’. Some of these involve UN peacekeeping. In recent years China has been the biggest contributor of peacekeeping troops among the permanent five members of the Security Council. But the responsibility for most of these new missions has fallen on the navy. In addition to its primary job of denying China’s enemies access to sea lanes, it is increasingly being asked to project power in the neighbourhood and farther afield”.

The piece ends, “It is hardly surprising that China’s neighbours and the West in general should worry about these developments. The range of forces marshalled against Taiwan plus China’s “A2/AD” potential to push the forces of other countries over the horizon have already eroded the confidence of America’s Asian allies that the guarantor of their security will always be there for them. Mr Obama’s rebalancing towards Asia may go some way towards easing those doubts. America’s allies are also going to have to do more for themselves, including developing their own A2/AD capabilities. But the longer-term trends in defence spending are in China’s favour. China can focus entirely on Asia, whereas America will continue to have global responsibilities. Asian concerns about the dragon will not disappear”.

It then attempts to reassure readers of China’s aims, “First, unlike the former Soviet Union, China has a vital national interest in the stability of the global economic system. Its military leaders constantly stress that the development of what is still only a middle-income country with a lot of very poor people takes precedence over military ambition”. Yet this is not what the rest of Asia has seen of late, to say nothing of India. The second part of the argument the author notes is “Second, as some pragmatic American policymakers concede, it is not a matter for surprise or shock that a country of China’s importance and history should have a sense of its place in the world and want armed forces which reflect that”. He then goes on to discuss the mismatch between what the West wants and what the West says. The West wants a stable China that does not bully its neighbours for gain and works with the system rather than against it. There is little evidence that China is working with America on any substantial issues.

Lastly  and by far the most ressauring point about the PLA is “Third, the PLA may not be quite as formidable as it seems on paper. China’s military technology has suffered from the Western arms embargo imposed after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. It struggles to produce high-performance jet engines, for example. Western defence firms believe that is why they are often on the receiving end of cyber-attacks that appear to come from China. China’s defence industry may be improving but it remains scattered, inefficient and over-dependent on high-tech imports from Russia, which is happy to sell the same stuff to China’s local rivals, India and Vietnam. The PLA also has little recent combat experience”.

Trusted more than the GOP

“A new poll finds Hillary Clinton more trusted than congressional Republicans over the Benghazi, Libya, controversy, as GOP lawmakers continue to probe the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate. Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found that 49 percent of respondents trust former Secretary of State Clinton, while 39 percent trust congressional Republicans more on the issue”.

Another ally?

With the end of a violent election in Pakistan, reports mention that “Nawaz Sharif, who twice served as Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s, has decisively garnered enough seats in Parliament to give him an unprecedented third term in the post, analysts said Sunday, as election results continued to pile up in favor of the industrialist’s center-right party”. The article adds “He is expected to seek friendly relations with the United States, which for decades has been Pakistan’s principal financial patron but which remains suspicious of Pakistani motives in Afghanistan”.

A different piece, in Foreign Policy argues that Sharif will continue to double deal America just like the countless Pakistani politicians before him.

She writes “Like the last two times he won the premiership, Sharif appears to have ridden to power on the back of strong support from his Punjabi heartland, a province that is home to much of the Pakistani elite, but also a patchwork of violent sectarian and Islamic groups.  Nobody has ever accused Sharif, himself, of being an extremist, but like anywhere else, success in Pakistani politics requires playing to the base. Take Sharif’s push in 1998, during his second stint as prime minister, to pass a constitutional amendment that would have imposed sharia law across the country. ‘He doesn’t believe in sharia,’ said William Milam, the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan at the time”.

She argues that the relationship between Pakistan and America will not change fundamentally, but she writes “Sharif’s track record of ambivalence towards extremists could prove troubling in more nuanced ways. Sharif’s senior advisers insist he would be committed to working in close collaboration with the United States, including on security issues, the fact that PML-N governments have, as Millam put it, ‘played footsie,’ with extremist groups in the past represents exactly the sort of mixed message many in Pakistan worry the violence-wracked country simply cannot afford”.

The article goes on to add that “Pakistan has faced a growing threat from the domestic insurgent group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, composed of Islamic fundamentalists intent on overthrowing the state. What once was a movement largely confined to the country’s remote tribal areas now has a growing presence in major urban hubs, most worryingly Karachi, Pakistan largest city and its economic heartbeat. In a bid to disrupt the elections, they’ve launched terrorist attacks that have left more than 100 people dead in recent months. Gone are the days when Pakistan’s powerful military could take on foes — both its own and Americas — with impunity and not face popular pushback”.

Worryingly she goes on to describe that “Former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Maleeha Lodhi put it more directly. What Pakistan needs, she said, is a strong government that will tell its people, ‘we need to confront this threat, here’s how we’re going to do it, we need your support.’ In the last few years, she lamented, ‘I have not…seen anybody stand up and make that kind of a speech.’ In the waning days of this year’s campaign, Sharif began to speak out publicly — including to Western media — against what he has characterized as a flawed U.S. ‘war on terror.’ But Sharif’s senior advisors have also taken pains to highlight the party’s longstanding partnership with the United States, including their boss’s close relationship with former President Bill Clinton”.

As has been said here and elsewhere countless times, unless Pakistan comes to terms with Islamic extremism and stops supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan for its own ends then the country will descend inexorably further and further into chaos and disorder. The consequences of this are many but the most dangerous is naturally nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. Either they misunderstand the war on terror, which is possible, or Sharif does understand it but seems happy with the status quo which he feels he can control and use to his political advantage.

She has argued that fundamentalist parties have allied with Sharif in the elections, “When it comes to terrorism, Sharif and his fellow party members ‘believe that there is no room for extremism in Islam or in Pakistani society,’ Iqbal insisted. But word and deed are two different things. Many in Pakistan have not forgotten the image, a few years back, of Punjab’s law minister and high ranking PML-N official Rana Sanaullah appearing in a motorcade with Maulana Ahmed Ludhianvi, the onetime leader of the Punjabi-based Sunni sectarian group Sipah-e-Sahaba, which is banned in Pakistan as a terrorist group. Other militant groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba — the group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks — also call the province of Punjab home. Sipah-e-Sahaba has since morphed into the Islamist political party Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, and according to multiple reports in the Pakistani media, it reached an agreement with the PML-N to jointly support candidates for roughly a dozen parliamentary seats”.

Business as usual in Pakistan.

“Cap the number”

“Afghan president Hamid Karzai wants to cap the number of American bases in Afghanistan after the U.S. military withdraws from the country in 2014, setting the stage for a final postwar troop presence. Under the terms proposed by Karzai on Thursday, U.S. commanders will be able to retain major military bases in Kabul, Bagram and Kandahar according to Agence France-Presse. Other American bases in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, Gardez and Jalalabad in the east, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and Shindand and Herat in the west would also remain after the 2014 withdrawal, according to Karzai”.

“Crippled its ability to adapt”

An article argues that Gazprom’s and Russia’s power to exploit its natural resources for geopolitical gain is coming to an end.

Petersen writes “pressure from Russia’s neighbours led to a 15 percent decline in the company’s profits last year, eating into the state budget. Moscow’s single-minded focus on gas exports in an effort to become, in the words of President Vladimir Putin, an ‘energy superpower’ has crippled its ability to adapt to profound changes in the global energy landscape”.

He goes on to note “Building on the legacy of Soviet gas exports to the Eastern Bloc and parts of Western Europe, Putin and his cohorts in the Kremlin have, for years, used Gazprom as a cudgel in Moscow’s relations with European Union member states. Over the past decade, well over a third of EU gas imports have come from Russia, with a number of Eastern European states almost completely dependent on Gazprom. Bulgaria, for example, receives more than 95 percent of the natural gas it consumes from the company. Millions of European consumers shivered through the winters of 2006, 2008, and 2009 when Gazprom cut off supplies in order to squeeze middlemen in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Moldova who had had the temerity to buck Moscow’s policies”.

He then mentions that “Gazprom routinely bought cheap natural gas from producers in the Caspian region and sold it for as much as four times the price in Central Europe. To maintain the racket, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller and Putin himself actively traveled across Eurasia threatening and cajoling European and post-Soviet leaders to quash alternative pipeline networks put forth by Western companies”.

Even worse for Russia, Petersen adds that “Low energy prices across the globe are allowing consumers to use Russia’s “reverse dependence” on European markets against Gazprom. Russia’s export options outside Europe are increasingly limited, allowing European consumer to demand better terms. Meanwhile, Central Asia is no longer Moscow’s vassal, but has finally emerged as competition for cheap energy, with producers such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan not only willing to give consumers (still largely in East and South Asia) a better deal, but without treating them as former colonies to be manipulated. Gazprom’s once-intimidated customers are growing increasingly bold. Last year, seemingly hapless Bulgaria was able to negotiate a 20 percent decrease in the price that it will pay Gazprom for the next 10 years. While it was still a long-term, so-called take-or-pay contract — meaning that Bulgaria agrees to pay for a fixed amount of gas for a certain amount of time, regardless of how much gas its consumers actually require — Sofia was able to add in a renegotiation clause, should circumstances change drastically. This would have been unthinkable in previous years”.

To make things worse for Gazprom he writes that new pipelines are being constructed, ” the long-stalled efforts to connect European consumers directly to Caspian producers are finally paying off. Building on the experience of the U.S.-backed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which since 2005 has brought oil from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean”.

He ends the piece “Gazprom’s response to these setbacks has long been to tout its potential export gas eastward to China and the strong economies of the Asia-Pacific, but it has not invested in the pipeline infrastructure required for this geographical shift. Although it made record profits in the previous decade’s boom times, very little of those funds were reinvested, whether to repair the company’s ailing infrastructure or to realize new export options. Meanwhile, CNPC built its network to Central Asian producers just south of Russia, with plans for connections to Iran and the Persian Gulf states. After years of difficult negotiations, Gazprom finally signed a preliminary export agreement with CNPC in March, but the nature of the deal revealed Gazprom’s faltering clout. Neither a timeline nor volumes have been agreed upon”.

14-4

“The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday adopted a substitute amendment to immigration reform legislation with a strong bipartisan margin, signaling which Republicans are most likely to support the bill. Only four Republicans voted against the substitute amendment, which expands the legislation to 867 pages and increases funding for implementation of reform by $900 billion. It passed by a margin of 14-4″.

A curial spat

In a very public disagreement between Joao Cardinal Braz de Aviz, prefect of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and the Societies of Apostolic Life and Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over the Leadership Conference of Women Religious has come out into the open.

At the start of the month it was noted that “‘Serious misunderstandings’ exist between Vatican officials and Catholic sisters, the head of the U.S. sisters’ group that was ordered to place itself under the review of bishops told some 800 of her global peers”. The article adds that “Franciscan Sr. Florence Deacon, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), addressed the sisters during the plenary assembly of the International Union of Superiors General, a group of nearly 2,000 leaders of women religious throughout the world. Deacon’s remarks constituted LCWR’s most public narrative of their relations with the Vatican. Citing a need to continue dialog with church prelates, the group has kept a tight lip on their discussions”.

In a related report Cardinal Braz de Aviz, who according to reports, “During the interregnum, the Religious chief – said to have been despondent over the loss of his last deputy, especially given the prevailing wind at the time – saw his regard among the cardinals spike after his reported takedown of Benedict’s embattled Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in the General Congregations scored an ovation from the floor. In a new pontificate, however, all things are new, and the Vatican footage of Braz’s latest meeting with the Pope relayed images of the cardinal looking almost giddy, acting familiar and even a tad playful with Francis on entering the Papal Apartment in the Apostolic Palace”.

Reports mention that the “decision last year to place the main representative group of U.S. Catholic sisters under the control of bishops was made without consultation or knowledge of the Vatican office that normally deals with matters of religious life”. The article goes on to mention the “lack of discussion over whether to criticize the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), said Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, caused him ‘much pain.’ ‘We have to change this way of doing things,’ said Braz de Aviz, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious. ‘We have to improve these relationships,’ he continued, referring to the April 2012 order regarding LCWR from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — approved by Pope Benedict XVI — that ordered the U.S. sisters’ group to revise”.

Interestingly the piece then mentions that Cardinal Braz de Aviz “spoke openly, referring several times to tensions between sisters and bishops on church authority, questions of obedience, and the future of religious life. At one point the cardinal even called for wide-ranging review of structures of church power. ‘We are in a moment of needing to review and revision some things,’ Braz de Aviz said. ‘Obedience and authority must be renewed, re-visioned.’”

The piece adds “He said that his office — which is tasked with overseeing the work an estimated 1.5 million sisters, brothers, and priests around the world in religious orders — first learned of the move against the U.S. sisters’ group in a meeting with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith after the formal report on the matter had been completed. At that meeting, Braz de Aviz said, he told Cardinal William Levada, an American who has since retired as head of the doctrinal congregation, that the matter should have been discussed between the Vatican offices. ‘We will obey what the Holy Father wants and what will be decided through you,’ Braz de Aviz told the sisters he had said to Levada. ‘But we must say that this material which should be discussed together has not been discussed together.’

Crucially the article mentions that Pope Francis has re-affirmed the Doctrinal Assessment on the LCWR that was written before his election to the papacy.This alone should tell the LCWR that Francis is not going to support them in what they want. The narrative may not change, merely the presentation. However, more seriously there is only two reasons why the CDF did not alert Cardinal Braz de Aviz, either they were incompetent and meant to. Alternatively, the officials at the CDF did not trust him and therefore saw the need to proceed quickly without him. Yet, this is as much about turf wars as trust. The CDF, nicknamed la Suprema for its all encompassing role in the Curia, had its prefect appointed by Pope Benedict who also named Braz de Aviz.

The piece ends noting “Braz de Aviz also revealed how Pope Francis had chosen the new second-in-command for his Vatican congregation, Franciscan Fr. Jose Rodriguez Carballo“.

Laughably the Vatican statement issued after his speech notes “Recent media commentary on remarks made on Sunday May the 5th during the General Assembly of the International Union of Superiors General by Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life, has suggested a divergence between the CDF and the Congregation for Religious in their approach to the renewal of Religious Life. Such an interpretation of the Cardinal’s remarks is not justified”.

Starting the succession

Prince Charles, Prince of Wales attended the State Opening of Parliament for only the second time in his life on 8 May.

The model to follow

An article in the Economist published some time ago notes the that the Nordic model has become, rightly followed. It opens “The Nordics cluster at the top of league tables of everything from economic competitiveness to social health to happiness. They have avoided both southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality. Development theorists have taken to calling successful modernisation ‘getting to Denmark’”.

The article goes on to note that some of this attention is simply a matter of timing, “our special report this week explains, some of this is down to lucky timing: the Nordics cleverly managed to have their debt crisis in the 1990s. But the second reason why the Nordic model is in vogue is more interesting. To politicians around the world—especially in the debt-ridden West—they offer a blueprint of how to reform the public sector, making the state far more efficient and responsive”.

Yet, while it should not be forgotten that while the Scandinavian countries are a model to follow in terms of poverty, equality, good governance and a host of other examples, they are also exceptionally business friendly. Therefore they have low (business) taxes, flexible labour laws, and increasingly weak trade unions. However, the reason that this model works is that the societies are incredibly cohesive, partly as a result of their small size, and partly due to the beneficial hangover of

The article mentions, “The idea of lean Nordic government will come as a shock both to French leftists who dream of socialist Scandinavia and to American conservatives who fear that Barack Obama is bent on “Swedenisation”. They are out of date. In the 1970s and 1980s the Nordics were indeed tax-and-spend countries. Sweden’s public spending reached 67% of GDP in 1993. Astrid Lindgren, the inventor of Pippi Longstocking, was forced to pay more than 100% of her income in taxes. But tax-and-spend did not work: Sweden fell from being the fourth-richest country in the world in 1970 to the 14th in 1993″.

It then adds, “Since then the Nordics have changed course—mainly to the right. Government’s share of GDP in Sweden, which has dropped by around 18 percentage points, is lower than France’s and could soon be lower than Britain’s. Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower than America’s. The Nordics have focused on balancing the books. While Mr Obama and Congress dither over entitlement reform, Sweden has reformed its pension system (see Free exchange). Its budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%. On public services the Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up. When it comes to choice, Milton Friedman would be more at home in Stockholm than in Washington, DC”.

However, to balance against this (regulated) neoliberalism they have taken the best the left has to offer, “the Nordics also offer something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of 15%. They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects. Denmark, for instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks”.

The article bemoans the fact that public spending as a percent of GDP is too high and the level of taxes are “encourage entrepreneurs to move abroad” but whatever about the first point the second should be disregarded. As part of the social contract the only way that these societies have kept such high levels of state legitimacy, unlike some, and at the same time been flexible and market friendly is through high taxes. The fact that some young people move abroad to more neoliberal countries cannot be helped but it would be interesting to see how many return to their home countries when they begin their working lives in earnest.

The piece ends “The main lesson to learn from the Nordics is not ideological but practical. The state is popular not because it is big but because it works. A Swede pays tax more willingly than a Californian because he gets decent schools and free health care. The Nordics have pushed far-reaching reforms past unions and business lobbies. The proof is there. You can inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations. But you need to be willing to root out corruption and vested interests. And you must be ready to abandon tired orthodoxies of the left and right and forage for good ideas across the political spectrum. The world will be studying the Nordic model for years to come”.

 

More election violence in Pakistan

“A pair of bombs targeting the offices of candidates running in this weekend’s election killed three people on Friday in northwest Pakistan, the latest attacks in what has been a bloody campaign. At least 130 people have been killed in attacks on candidates and party workers since the beginning of April. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for most of the attacks, saying the country’s democracy runs counter to Islam. The Taliban are suspected in the abduction of former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s son on Thursday, although there has been no claim of responsibility. Gilani said he has asked Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency to help find his 25-year-old son, Ali Haider Gilani, who was taken as he was leaving an election event in the central Pakistani city of Multan”.

Keeping the House

AB Stoddard has written a piece on the 2014 midterms predicting that they will be a re-run of the 2010 midterms. She opens noting that “If the mere idea of ObamaCare fueled an historic GOP victory in 2010, just wait until reality sets in next year. That year, Democrats in swing districts were swept from office, so those who kept their jobs are running as fast and as far from the reform law as they can this year. Not only did Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who helped write the bill, recently call it a ‘train wreck,’ but Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who lost Tuesday’s special election in South Carolina to former Gov. Mark Sanford, called the law ‘extremely problematic,’ blaming it for cutting Medicare benefits and causing companies to lay off employees in anticipation of the program’s high costs”.

She goes on to argue that “a new tax on health insurance plans will cost small businesses an estimated $8 billion in 2014 and then $14.3 billion in 2018. According to a study by the National Federation of Independent Business, 262,000 jobs could be lost as a result. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) noted on the Senate floor Tuesday that the city of Long Beach, Calif., is keeping most of its 1,600 employees limited to 27 hours per week or less in order to avoid an estimated $2 million increase in healthcare costs that would cut jobs.  Not only are there economic consequences, but the guarantee of coverage is also at risk. Unless young, healthy people join new exchanges, costs will inevitably rise for the rest of the population. In addition, several governors are refusing to expand Medicaid, leaving millions uninsured or putting more pressure on exchanges where workers whose employers do not insure them will be seeking government-subsidized coverage”.

If governors and people are not upholding the law then the government must enforce the relevant penalties to force them to comply. It should take governors to court on the grounds that it is depriving the Federal Government of revenue and it should fine individual citizens who are not joining the new exchanges. The Affordable Care Act needs young people who are healthy to lower the cost for those who are older thus making it more appealing for the insurance companies overall. 

She goes on to make the valid point that “a good 2014 doesn’t mean a good 2016 for the GOP. Republican dreams of recapturing the White House could easily remain fantasy at the rate the party continues to divide and deteriorate. The midterm electorate will be white and old and far more conservative that the national coalition that elected President Obama in 2008 and 2012. Republicans will be handily reelected to their safe, bright red, Republican districts. A likely failure by Democrats to win the 17 seats required to flip the House will be perceived by Republicans as a resounding national rejection of Obama’s policies, who with the help of the Tea Party, will fool themselves into thinking they have turned the tide”.

Therefore the traditional patten of the incumbent administration losing the House, or even in this case seats, means that little will change in Washington with little the parties agree on. However, this is not a problem for President Obama who like most presidents on their final two years will focus on foreign policy.

Iran’s new drone

“Defence Minister General Ahmad Vahidi was quoted as saying the Epic, which can fly at high altitudes, is a ‘stealth aircraft that cannot be detected by enemies’. On April 18, Iran made public three other models, The Throne, also a stealth model, has a long range and is equipped with air-to-air missiles, said General Amir-Farzad Esmaili, commander of anti-aircraft operations. Esmaili said Iran had already produced and used dozens of them. The Hazem-3 (Solid) and Mohajer-B (Migrator) are “tactical and combat” models and also capable of reconnaissance, the general said”.

Xi’s dream

An article in this week’s Economist magazine notes that “China’s global influence is expanding and within a decade its economy is expected to overtake America’s. In his first weeks in power, the new head of the ruling Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has evoked that rise with a new slogan which he is using, as belief in Marxism dies, to unite an increasingly diverse nation. He calls his new doctrine the ‘Chinese dream’ evoking its American equivalent. Such slogans matter enormously in China (see article). News bulletins are full of his dream”.

The author goes on to write “Xi talks of reform; he has launched a campaign against official extravagance. Even short of detail, his dream is different from anything that has come before. Compared with his predecessors’ stodgy ideologies, it unashamedly appeals to the emotions. Under Mao, the party assaulted anything old and erased the imperial past, now Mr Xi’s emphasis on national greatness has made party leaders heirs to the dynasts of the 18th century, when Qing emperors demanded that Western envoys kowtow (Macartney refused). But there is also plainly practical politics at work. With growth slowing, Mr Xi’s patriotic doctrine looks as if it is designed chiefly to serve as a new source of legitimacy for the Communist Party. It is no coincidence that Mr Xi’s first mention of his dream of ‘the great revival of the Chinese nation’ came in November in a speech at the national museum in Tiananmen Square, where an exhibition called ‘Road to Revival’ lays out China’s suffering at the hands of colonial powers and its rescue by the Communist Party”.

It is indeed ironic that the CCP has distanced itself from its imperial past as many of the current top officials both in the army but also within the CCP itself are princelings - descendents are former high ranking officials themselves.  The article’s mention of Xi’s attempt to fan the flames of nationalism has already been noted here before has potentially dangerous consequences if it gets out of hand.  This crutch that has been continually used for decades by the CCP to legitimise their rule, will one day fail, it is just a matter of when rather than if.

The article notes two major problems with this dream proffered by Xi. The first he writes is that, “of nationalism. A long-standing sense of historical victimhood means that the rhetoric of a resurgent nation could all too easily turn nasty. As skirmishes and provocations increase in the neighbouring seas (see Banyan), patriotic microbloggers need no encouragement to demand that the Japanese are taught a humiliating lesson. Mr Xi is already playing to the armed forces. In December, on an inspection tour of the navy in southern China, he spoke of a ‘strong-army dream’. The armed forces are delighted by such talk. Even if Mr Xi’s main aim in pandering to hawks is just to keep them on side, the fear is that it presages a more belligerent stance in East Asia. Nobody should mind a confident China at ease with itself, but a country transformed from a colonial victim to a bully itching to settle scores with Japan would bring great harm to the region—including to China itself”.

The second problem that the magzine sees is that “The other risk is that the Chinese dream ends up handing more power to the party than to the people. In November Mr Xi echoed the American dream, declaring that ‘To meet [our people’s] desire for a happy life is our mission.’ Ordinary Chinese citizens are no less ambitious than Americans to own a home (see article), send a child to university or just have fun (see article). But Mr Xi’s main focus seems to be on strengthening the party’s absolute claim on power. The ‘spirit of a strong army’, he told the navy, lay in resolutely obeying the party’s orders. Even if the Chinese dream avoids Communist rhetoric, Mr Xi has made it clear that he believes the Soviet Union collapsed because the Communist Party there strayed from ideological orthodoxy and rigid discipline. ‘The Chinese dream’, he has said, ‘is an ideal. Communists should have a higher ideal, and that is Communism.’”

Of course such simplistic readings of history will come back to haunt Xi and his associates. The USSR collapsed not just because of glasnost and perestroika, neither of which are likely in China, but because people had had enough of being told what to do. China’s myriad problems have been discussed here at length but to double down on CCP rule and assume that because the economy is growing and that therefore China will avoid the fate of the USSR is laughable.

Keeping Assad

“Even as Washington debates whether suspected chemical weapons use in Syria should provoke direct intervention, Secretary of State John Kerry stepped back from the Obama administration’s longstanding position that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad needs to leave power“.

“Institutional logjam”

An article has been written on Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood that is becoming more and more Islamist. He writes “The real debate within the group is whether they’ve veered far enough. With Egypt as polarised as ever, the country’s largest Islamist movement has effectively given up on reaching out to liberals and leftists, focusing instead on closing ranks and rallying its base. During the presidential race, Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s original candidate, chose a Salafi-leaning council of scholars for his first campaign event, where he affirmed that the application of sharia law was his ultimate goal and that he would form a committee of scholars to help parliament achieve that goal. After Shater’s disqualification, Mohammed Morsy — a weaker, less convincing candidate — doubled down on Shater’s back-to-basics message. ‘Needless to say,’ Morsy said, ‘[I am] currently the only contender who offers a clearly Islamic project.’ After winning the presidency, Morsi took a brief stab at rising above his partisan origins. But the tragic events of Dec. 4, when anti-Brotherhood protesters and government supporters clashed outside the presidential palace, rendered such efforts moot”.

He goes on to note that Morsi has done very little that could be considered Islamist, yet, and that his main aim is to survive at the next elections. However, while this would a be concern for most normal politicians, given the powers Morsi has, as well as previous precedent, the indications of free and fair elections are not good.

He make a fundamental point that ” The Brotherhood and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), do not act like your traditional ruling party. Conditioned by more than 80 years in opposition, they still see themselves as fighting an array of enemies — but this time, they are fighting them from the top of the state rather than the bottom”. Indeed the results of this were seen in his paranoia but also in the split within the Brotherhood itself – something that does not bode well for the already shaky governance in the country.

The article goes on to argue that decision making has slowed to a crawl with “More problematically, the court’s dissolution of the legislative branch created an institutional logjam at the top of the state. In the absence of parliament, legislative powers were passed on to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, then to President Morsy, and then, finally, to an upper house of parliament that was never supposed to have that authority in the first place. Without a legitimate legislative authority, the passing of laws slowed to a trickle”.

The problem is made worse in that “this narrative of protracted institutional warfare serves the Brotherhood well, allowing it to deflect criticisms for its manifest failures in government. It also allows Islamists to portray themselves as the true democrats, who won power legitimately but find themselves prevented from wielding it. But that it is convenient does not make it entirely false: Egypt does, in fact, suffer from a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy, one replete with Mubarak-era deputy ministers and undersecretaries who feel threatened by new governing elites. While those outside the Islamist fold argue that Morsi has overreached in power, Muslim Brotherhood officials often make the opposite argument — that the president has been too deferential to the state”.

Truce and withdrawal

“Kurdish rebel fighters have begun leaving south-eastern Turkey for their safe havens in Iraq under a ceasefire, Kurdish sources say. ‘We know that they have started moving,’ Selahattin Demirtas, a pro-Kurdish politician involved in the peace process, told AFP news agency. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced last month a phased withdrawal to start early in May. More than 40,000 people have died in their 30-year fight against Turkey. There was no immediate official confirmation of the move from Turkey but an unnamed security source told Reuters news agency: ‘We have observed movement among [PKK] group members, but have not been able to establish whether this is regrouping or preparation for a withdrawal.’

Explaining the incursion

After the recent Chinese incursion into Indian territory some have tried to explain the recent actions of the PLA.

The article notes that on 5 May “several dozen soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) pulled down their tents and withdrew from disputed territory claimed and administered by India”.

He begins to attempt to tease out the reasons why Chinese troops might have knowingly crossed the border where there are already disputes. He then notes the odd timing of the event, “Chinese forces might have wanted to stall the development of roads on India’s side of the Line of Actual Control, as the de facto border is known. India’s 2008 reactivation of a remote military airfield near Depsang — less than 70 miles from the crucial highway connecting western China’s vast, unstable regions of Xinjiang and Tibet — may also have been viewed as threatening. Some Indian commentators claimed that the PLA’s advancement was a “sincere” move resulting from different understandings of where the border lies. But that view found little sympathy in New Delhi, as images of Chinese soldiers holding banners emblazoned with “You’ve crossed the border, please go back” flashed across Indian television screens. The timing is even more puzzling. China-India relations have been growing warmer; Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held his first meeting with China’s new president, Xi Jinping, in March, and Li Keqiang was preparing to make India the destination for his first international trip as China’s premier, later in May. The diplomatic setback also followed a year of deteriorating relations between Beijing and other Asian countries, including a sharp downturn in Sino-Japanese ties, the embarrassing release of a new Chinese passport that outraged several Asian states”.

Crucially he writes that “The incursion will undoubtedly provoke greater skepticism in India about China’s peaceful intentions. In recent years, an aggressive China has had a poor record of managing its disputed borders. Unlike Japan or the many Southeast Asian countries, India has been reluctant to identify itself as a U.S. partner in any attempt to hedge against China’s rise. Yet repeated Chinese provocations, as well as concerns about India’s ability to compete economically and militarily with China, might force India’s policymakers to cooperate more closely with other states that share its concerns. Moreover, India’s accelerating defense modernization might produce additional confrontational Chinese responses, perpetuating a classic security dilemma.

Thus, China’s ham-fisted “diplomacy” has yet again won it few friends. In fact all the Chinese have done is draw India and most of the rest of Asia  even further into the US orbit. Some have tried to explain that these Chinese actions are an attempt to bolster Xi Jinping’s power domestically but one must wonder at what cost.

He ends the piece “China cannot expect other governments to muzzle their media as it does. For example, a recent editorial in the Chinese newspaper Global Times about the incursion blamed the Indian government for ‘indulg[ing] Indian media habits,’ fomenting ‘border hysteria,’ and writing ‘nonsense.’ Instead of blaming the foreign press, it would benefit Beijing to become better attuned to public sentiment in countries like India”.

Papers like the Global Times and other “publications” should be more careful, the Chinese public are highly nationalistic and apart from attempting to bolster the legitimacy of the Party, it could move beyond their control and spill over into more sensitive topics like Tawian and Japan. They are as ever, playing with fire.

“China and Pakistan”

“China and Pakistan reached a formal agreement last month to construct a third nuclear reactor at Chashma that the Obama administration says will violate Beijing’s promises under an international anti-nuclear weapons accord. According to U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials, the secret agreement for the Chashma 3 reactor was signed in Beijing during the visit by a delegation from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission from Feb. 15 to 18. The agreement calls for the state-run China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) to construct a 1,000-megawatt power plant at Chashma, located in the northern province of Punjab where two earlier Chinese reactors were built. China’s government last month issued an internal notice to officials within its nuclear establishment and to regional political leaders urging care to avoid any leaks of information about the nuclear sale that Beijing expects will be controversial, said officials who spoke on condition of anonymity”.

Blaming China

In a development that should have happen many months, if not years ago, America has formally blamed China for cyber terrorism. China has long been known as the culprit but various administrations have not layed the cause at China’s door.

An article in the New York Times notes “The Obama administration on Monday explicitly accused China’s military of mounting attacks on American government computer systems and defense contractors, saying one motive could be to map ‘military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.’ While some recent estimates have more than 90 percent of cyberespionage in the United States originating in China, the accusations relayed in the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military capabilities were remarkable in their directness. Until now the administration avoided directly accusing both the Chinese government and the People’s Liberation Army of using cyberweapons against the United States in a deliberate, government-developed strategy to steal intellectual property and gain strategic advantage”.

The piece quotes the Pentagon report “‘In 2012, numerous computer systems around the world, including those owned by the U.S. government, continued to be targeted for intrusions, some of which appear to be attributable directly to the Chinese government and military,’ the nearly 100-page report said. The report, released Monday, described China’s primary goal as stealing industrial technology, but said many intrusions also seemed aimed at obtaining insights into American policy makers’ thinking. It warned that the same information-gathering could easily be used for ‘building a picture of U.S. network defense networks, logistics, and related military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.’ It was unclear why the administration chose the Pentagon report to make assertions that it has long declined to make at the White House. A White House official declined to say at what level the report was cleared”.

It adds, “Missing from the Pentagon report was any acknowledgment of the similar abilities being developed in the United States, where billions of dollars are spent each year on cyberdefense and constructing increasingly sophisticated cyberweapons. Recently the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, who is also commander of the military’s fast-growing Cyber Command, told Congress that he was creating more than a dozen offensive cyberunits, designed to mount attacks, when necessary, at foreign computer networks”.  Yet, it would be foolish for America not to take protective measures, be they defensive or offensive, to protect its interests.  Indeed, the governmnet would be sorely lacking if it did not attend to its primary duty, to defend and protect US citizens, and be extentsion the rest of the world.

The article then mentions “the Pentagon report describes something far more sophisticated: A China that has now leapt into the first ranks of offensive cybertechnologies. It is investing in electronic warfare capabilities in an effort to blind American satellites and other space assets, and hopes to use electronic and traditional weapons systems to gradually push the United States military presence into the mid-Pacific nearly 2,000 miles from China’s coast”.

Interestingly, it notes “Until Monday, the strongest critique of China had come from Thomas E. Donilon, the president’s national security adviser, who said in a speech at the Asia Society in March  that American companies were increasingly concerned about ‘cyberintrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,’ and that ‘the international community cannot tolerate such activity from any country.’ He stopped short of blaming the Chinese government for the espionage”.

The piece ends noting that the report estimates Chinese military spending to be

“Free Syrian Army will prevail”

“The U.S. Army’s top officer said that force readiness is “degrading significantly” enough that if President Barack Obama decides to put boots on the ground in Syria, soldiers may not be fully prepared for the job if they don’t move out by the end of this summer. Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, said he believes the Free Syrian Army will prevail because the rebels have been able to win and hold territory. “I kind of believe its not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” Odierno said of the FSA’s chances to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. From a military perspective, Odierno did not offer advice to the rebels, which the U.S. support officially and with non-lethal aid, but said he was encouraged by what they’ve been able to accomplish against Syria’s forces.

If not for Syria?

An article has appeared arguing that Syria has “ruined” the Arab revolutions. In fact Syria is just the latest in a long line of revolutions that had little or no promise to begin with.

Marc Lynch opens “Washington today is consumed by another round of its endless debate about whether to intervene in Syria, this time in response to the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons. I have little to add to the thousands of essays already published on this, beyond what I’ve already argued. I might add that defending American “credibility” is always a bad reason to go to war”.

He argues that “The most obvious way in which Syria has eaten the Arab Spring is the ongoing violence. Egypt and Tunisia may not have been quite as peaceful as many like to believe — many protesters died in clashes with the police — but it mattered that the militaries opted not to open fire on their people. The NATO intervention began in Libya barely a month after the first days of the uprising, before Muammar al-Qaddafi’s violent backlash gained full strength. But Syria’s almost incomprehensible scale of death and devastation has ground on for two long years, with only worse horrors on the horizon. The Assad regime’s decision to deploy all means at its disposal in order to hold on to power drove what began as a peaceful uprising into an unstoppable spiral of militarization. And those atrocities have been profoundly visible, documented in endless YouTube videos. The Libya intervention and early Arab diplomatic mobilization over Syria held the possibility of the formation of a new regional norm against leaders killing their own people. Those hopes are now long gone”.

Yet the problem with this argument is that it ignores most of what has happened since the revolutions in Libya and Egypt and Tunisia. He mentions how the violence in Syria has disrupted the revolutions yet with press freedoms being curbed in Egypt and mass of weapons that flooded into Libya during the revolution, and thence to Mali must surely lead one to question his assertion. This is to say nothing of what Mubarak did to try to remain in power, attacking protesters in Tahrir Square. Similarly, his assertion that the army did not fire on the protestors in Egypt was now revealed to be a largely due to a deal struck between the Brotherhood and SCAF.

He adds “Syria also helped to dispel the intoxicating sense of an Arab public coming together to confront its despotic leaders. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were unifying moments, not only in those countries but across the region. Almost everywhere outside the palaces of worried leaders, Arabs joined in the moment of enthusiasm for political change. Such unity would of course fade in the coming months, as polarization between Islamists and their opponents tore apart the Egyptian and Tunisian political consensus. But in those early days it was surprisingly strong”.

His point about the revolutions could have been claimed to be true initially but that has changed long before the events in Syria. Morsi’s Egypt is no better example of how they divided Egypt and let it be divided. Morsi refused to attend the enthronement of the Coptic Orthodox Pope,  which did little to reassure the large Coptic Christian minority in Egypt of his intentions. This symbolic move coupled with his power grab, his ramming through the new constitution – despite low support - and his spat with the judiciary have all done little to make the revolution in Egypt truly representative or even appease those with real concern.

Daniel Drezner argues cogently  that Syria did not ruin the revoutions, that it was already “ruined”. In addition to Morsi’s Egpyt he adds, “Syria was hardly the only Middle Eastern country to experience a violent blowback to the uprisings. Iran cracked down almost immediately after the first protest broke out in early 2011 — indeed, it cracked down so effectively that after that January the country disappeared from the Arab Spring narrative. Now, one could argue that Iran is not an Arab country, so what happens in Persia stays in Persia and doesn’t taint the Arab Spring. Bahrain certainly is Arab, however, and there was a pretty brutal crackdown there as well. It was far less bloody than in Syria, but it was a crackdown nonetheless and a significant part of the counter-revolutionary trend that Lynch highlights. And what happened in Bahrain was merely the most egregious example of repressive acts that occurred across the Persian Gulf”.

The revolutions are becoming less representative and more Islamist as was noted here before with dangerous consequences for the US

How many wars?

“The answer might seem obvious: one, at least since the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and UCLA’s Michael Intriligator argue that it’s at least four”.

Who runs the PLA?

Following on from an earlier article arguing that Chinese regional aggression is in fact a diversionary tactic for the populace, a different article has argued that the forces that Xi Jinping is playing with could lead to terrible mistakes.

Garnaut opens noting that Pacific Command’s Intelligence meetings, lead by Captain James Fanell means “the group never takes long before zeroing in on the country driving the United States’ military and diplomatic “pivot” to Asia. ‘Every day it’s about China; it’s about a China who’s at the center of virtually every activity and dispute in the maritime domain in the East Asian region,’ said Fanell, reading from prepared remarks at a U.S. Naval Institute conference in San Diego on Jan. 31″.

Garnaut then adds “Fanell, in comments that went largely unnoticed outside the small circle of China military specialists, spelled out in rare detail the reasons the United States is shifting 60 percent of its naval assets — including its most advanced capabilities — to the Pacific. He was blunt: The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy is focused on war, and it is expanding into the “blue waters” explicitly to counter the U.S. Pacific Fleet. ‘I can tell you, as the fleet intelligence officer, the PLA Navy is going to sea to learn how to do naval warfare,’ he said”. Garnaut poses the question asking how loyal is the People’s Liberation Army to the CCP and ultimately to Xi himself.

The fundamental dilemma that Garnaut argues is that “Xi may be able to build a military that is either modern and capable or loyal and political. But many in China now believe he can’t have both”. He then adds that “Politics have always played a key role, and the PLA retains a Soviet-style dual command structure. A powerful political department sits at the center of the organisation, while political minders shadow commanders at every level of the enormous hierarchy”. The natural outcome of this is that there is little trust between the two branches.

Worse than that he notes that “More than three decades of peace, a booming economy, and an opaque administrative system have taken their toll as well, not to mention that the PLA is one of the world’s largest bureaucracies — and behaves accordingly. ‘Each unit has a committee with a commander, political commissar, and deputies, to the point they have a meeting now for everything,’ says Nan Li, associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. Li told me that PLA military universities have even been reduced to printing textbooks that instruct commanders how to transcend the tyranny of committee-style decision-making”.

Garnaut then adds another layer of complication to the PLA problems, “Liu Yuan, the senior general who sent shock waves through the party and military establishment after warning in an internal speech that mafia-like knots of patronage and corruption were crippling the PLA, did so only after getting a nod from Xi”.

Worryingly he writes “U.S. intelligence analysts and generals have admitted to being caught out by the 2011 flight-testing of China’s new J-20 stealth fighter. They were dumbfounded by China’s subsequent deployment of the East Wind 21D, the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile, dubbed the “assassin’s mace” in China and’”the carrier killer’ in the West. And now China is on track to nearly triple its fleet of maritime strike aircraft by 2020, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. Its naval weapons — and capabilities — are proceeding even faster. China is simultaneously developing and producing seven types of submarine and surface warships. That’s after a decade in which it quadrupled its number of modern submarines, including nuclear submarines designed to carry nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. It has massively expanded production of corvettes, frigates, amphibious ships, and destroyers. In September, China launched its first aircraft carrier, which it has flagged as a training platform for others to come.

He ends the piece noting “At the same time, another top-level document emerged: a speech delivered in December by Xi himself, in which he gave thundering confirmation that the PLA’s primary function is to defend the regime, not China. This was the lesson learned from the Soviet Union’s collapse, he said. ‘In the Soviet Union, where the military was depoliticised, separated from the party, and nationalised, the party was disarmed,’ Xi warned, according to an extract of his speech that was published by journalist Gao Yu and broadly corroborated by other sources. ‘A few people tried to save the Soviet Union; they seized Gorbachev, but within days it was turned around again because they didn’t have the instruments to exert power.’ Nobody in the vast Soviet Communist Party, Xi averred, ‘was man enough to stand up and resist.’ Xi, then, has ultimately chosen to defend the Communist Party against internal political threats rather than prepare it to face external military threats.

“Second in three days”

“The Syrian government publicly condemned Israel for a powerful air assault on military targets near Damascus early Sunday, saying it ‘opened the door to all possibilities,’ as fear spread throughout the region that the country’s civil war could expand beyond its borders. The attack, which sent brightly lighted columns of smoke and ash high into the night sky above the Syrian capital, struck several critical military facilities in some of the country’s most tightly secured and strategic areas, killing dozens of elite troops stationed near the presidential palace, a high-ranking Syrian military official said in an interview. Israel refused to confirm the attacks, the second in three days”.

A job for the UN

An article has discussed the spread of drone technology throughout the world. As has been noted here before France as well as a host of other countries are beginning to use drones.

The piece opens noting that a drone flown by Hezbollah against the Dimona nuclear reactor was destroyed by the IDF. She goes on to write that “The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types”.

She eventually gets to the point of the article, “what makes this case rare, and dangerous, is the powerful combination of efficiency and lethality spreading in an environment lacking internationally accepted guidelines on legitimate use. This technology is snowballing through a global arena where the main precedent for its application is the one set by the United States; it’s a precedent Washington does not want anyone following. America, the world’s leading democracy and a country built on a legal and moral framework unlike any other, has adopted a war-making process that too often bypasses its traditional, regimented, and rigorously overseen military in favor of a secret program never publicly discussed, based on legal advice never properly vetted. The Obama administration has used its executive power to refuse or outright ignore requests by congressional overseers, and it has resisted monitoring by federal courts”.

Firstly her contention that drones are used secretly is wholly justified, it would make little tactical sense for every drone operation to be public. Similarly, she claims the drone programme to be secret but at the same time complains that it is not properly vetted – a contradiction if ever there was one.

Secondly, it is true and cannot be denied that the proliferation of drone technology by nations other than the United States means that the technology once solely in the hands of the benevolent power is now coming into the hands of countries that are seen as anything but benevolent. Therefore only “international law” can make up the shortfall. Despite its obvious flaws and largely pointless nature there should be some general norms, drafted by the UN, as to how drones should be used by other countries.

She then writes “This still-expanding counterterrorism use of drones to kill people, including its own citizens, outside of traditionally defined battlefields and established protocols for warfare, has given friends and foes a green light to employ these aircraft in extraterritorial operations that could not only affect relations between the nation-states involved but also destabilize entire regions and potentially upset geopolitical order”.

Her point about the lack of a clearly defined battlefield while well intentioned misses the point about the war that America is fighting where the battlefield is Boston, New York, Sacramento, London, Cairo, Bombay, Karachi and Perth. This has given rise to the predictable claim of a permanent war which has been discussed elsewhere.

She adds fairly, “what goes undiscussed is Washington’s deliberate failure to establish clear and demonstrable rules for itself that would at minimum create a globally relevant standard for delineating between legitimate and rogue uses of one of the most awesome military robotics capabilities of this generation”. She then goes on to note the interesting point that “it would be foolish to dismiss the notion that potential U.S. adversaries aspire to attain that type of war-from-afar, pinpoint-strike capability, they have neither the income nor the perceived need to do so. That’s true, at least today. It’s also irrelevant. Others who employ drones are likely to carry a different agenda, one more concerned with employing a relatively inexpensive and ruthlessly efficient tool to dispatch an enemy close at hand”.

Again she understandably argues that those being targeted are too low down the food chain, “the majority of the 3,500-plus people killed by U.S. drones worldwide were not leaders of al-Qaida or the Taliban; they were low- or mid-level foot soldiers. Most were not plotting attacks against the United States. In Yemen and North Africa, the Obama administration is deploying weaponised drones to take out targets who are more of a threat to local governments than to Washington, according to defense and regional security experts who closely track unrest in those areas. In some cases, Washington appears to be in the business of using its drone capabilities mostly to assist other countries, not to deter strikes against the United States”.

However the problem with this argument is her refusal to see an expansive national interest. In a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected the problems of Mali and Niger can very quickly become the problems of the president of the United States, however he is. To narrow the efficiency of drone strikes onto high level operatives is to miss the point of the technology and not use it to its full potential.

US action in Syria?

The Washington Post reports that President Obama “he would consider U.S. military action against Syria if ‘hard, effective evidence’ is found to bolster intelligence that chemical weapons have been used in the 2-year-old civil war. Among the potential options being readied for him: weapons and ammunition for the Syrian rebels. Despite such planning, Obama appealed for patience during a White House news conference, saying he needed more conclusive evidence about how and when chemical weapons detected by U.S. intelligence agencies were used and who deployed them. If those questions can be answered, Obama said he would consider actions the Pentagon and intelligence community have prepared for him in the event Syria has crossed his chemical weapons ‘red line.’  Other reports note that “The White House is once again considering supplying weapons to Syria’s armed opposition, senior officials said Tuesday. Such a decision would be a policy shift for the Obama administration, which has stepped up its nonlethal aid but stopped short of lethal weaponry and has expressed reluctance about greater military entanglements in the Syrian civil war”.

Decline of Europe

Mark Leonard has written an article on the future of Europe that borders on hope rather than fact.

He opens the piece arguing that “With its anemic growth, ongoing eurocrisis, and the complexity of its decision-making, Europe is admittedly a fat target right now. And the stunning rise of countries like Brazil and China in recent years has led many to believe that the Old World is destined for the proverbial ash heap. But the declinists would do well to remember a few stubborn facts. Not only does the European Union remain the largest single economy in the world, but it also has the world’s second-highest defense budget after the United States, with more than 66,000 troops deployed around the world and some 57,000 diplomats (India has roughly 600). The EU’s GDP per capita in purchasing-power terms is still nearly four times that of China, three times Brazil’s, and nearly nine times India’s. If this is decline, it sure beats living in a rising power”.

His first point about the EU having the largest economy in the world is accurate but like much of the article it assumes that the EU is a single unit, which it patently is not.  Even the stars of the “EU economy” like Holland and Germany have, or will face huge problems. His second point about it having “the world’s second-highest defence budget” makes a similar error. While France and the UK have co-operated in certain limited events like Libya and Mali (with US “assistance”) Germany did not participate in any meaningful way in either of these events due to the fact that it was dangerous.  Besides what good is the second biggest defence budget it there is no unified command structure and no clear overarching mission to which all countries must subscribe. What Leonard is actually describing is NATO which faces its own problems.

He then mentions “The EU is an entirely unprecedented phenomenon in world affairs: a project of political, economic, and above all legal integration among 27 countries with a long history of fighting each other. What has emerged is neither an intergovernmental organization nor a superstate, but a new model that pools resources and sovereignty with a continent-sized market and common legislation and budgets to address transnational threats from organized crime to climate change. Most importantly, the EU has revolutionized the way its members think about security, replacing the old traditions of balance-of-power politics and noninterference in internal affairs with a new model under which security for all is guaranteed by working together. This experiment is now at a pivotal moment, and it faces serious, complex challenges — some related to its unique character and some that other major powers, particularly Japan and the United States, also face. But the EU’s problems are not quite the stuff of doomsday scenarios”.

As has been said here before the euro is a political project with no mandate from the people of Europe. His supposed “new model that pools resources” has been an abysmal failure. Even on the point that it is supposed to share resources it is barely doing that thanks to Merkel and an EU agenda dictated by local German politics with the federal elections in September. If there was to be a true sharing of resources there would be eurobonds overnight and from that an EU finance ministry controlling taxing and spending of all member-states. The Germans do not what the first part the rest rest of the eurozone does not want the second part, even though it is necessary to save the half baked currency. Similarly, his point about balance of power politics being replaced is naive, at best. The only reason the euro exists is because France was terrified of German re-unification and hoped that a common currency would tie Germany down – what could be more geopolitical than that?

He then goes on in ever more vain attempts to attempt to make the EU look democratic and powerful and admired. The problem that the continent has tried to run away from but like Oedipus, keeps coming back to, is that of nationalism, which will be its ruin.

Israel hits Syria

“Israeli jets devastated Syrian targets near Damascus on Sunday in a heavy overnight air raid that Western and Israeli officials called a new strike on Iranian missiles bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.  As Syria’s two-year-old civil war veered into the potentially atomic arena of Iran’s confrontation with Israel and the West over its nuclear program, people were woken in the Syrian capital by explosions that shook the ground like an earthquake and sent pillars of flame high into the night sky”.

India vs China

With Pakistani-India relations poor, at best, now China, not content with picking fights with its neighbours around the South China Sea now China is attempting to push India around.

An article by Ely Ratner and Alexander Sullivan notes “The night before Beijing released its biennial defense white paper in mid-April, avowing that it would not ‘engage in military expansion,’ roughly 30 Chinese troops marched 12 miles into Indian-controlled territory. For at least the last five years, the Chinese military has routinely made forays across the disputed 2,400-mile-long Line of Actual Control that divides the two countries. The Indian government counted 400 similar incursions last year, and already 100 in 2013. But for the first time since 1986, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops refused to return home after being detected. They instead pitched three tents. New Delhi quickly summoned the Chinese ambassador, and Indian military officials protested to their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese soldiers responded by pitching two more tents, and erecting a sign, in English, that said ‘You are in Chinese side.’ Three rounds of unsuccessful negotiations broke off May 1, with Beijing demanding that New Delhi unilaterally withdrawal from its own territory before it would consider removing its encampment. Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman denied that PLA troops had even penetrated the boundary”.

Not surprisingly India took action with regards to the Chinese incursion into what is sovereign Indian territory. The act, technically an act of war,  was met with a muted, though understandable Indian response. The fact that India showed calmness by holding talks with the very country that crossed its border should be lauded.

They go on to write “It is a strange time for China to pick this fight. With potential instability on the Korean Peninsula and sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas, it belies strategic logic for Beijing to open a new front of territorial revisionism. And it seems India agrees: One Indian general called the move ‘an inexplicable provocation.’”

The authors then write that “Perhaps it was a case of a PLA officer going rogue. Perhaps China wanted to send a message of strength in advance of high-level visits in May, when foreign minister Khurshid goes to Beijing and Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang visits Delhi on his first official trip abroad since taking office in March. Or perhaps, as many in the Indian media are speculating, Beijing is signaling it will no longer tolerate India’s stepped-up patrols and infrastructure development along the border. While China’s motivations remain unclear, the potential implications are massive. The Sino-Indian dynamic is often seen as a sideshow to Beijing’s more immediate rivalries with the United States and Japan. But more intense strategic competition between India and China would reverberate throughout the continent, exacerbating tensions in Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Disruptions to the Asian engine of economic growth caused by these tensions could debilitate the global economy”.

They then trace the history of the border dispute between the two countries but then write that “Mutual antagonism persisted for decades amid periodic border skirmishes. Only in this century have the two sides begun to improve relations, with bilateral trade growing from less than $3 billion in 2000 to over $70 billion in 2011. And leaders are sticking to a $100 billion target for 2015, despite a roughly 12 percent contraction in 2012. But as China’s rocky relationship with its second largest trading partner Japan shows, economic interdependence is no guarantee of friendly relations, and severe trade imbalances in China’s favor have been an ongoing source of tension in India. Numerous other friction points persist between the two nuclear powers. China frequently complains that India’s offering of refuge to both the Dalai Lama and the headquarters of the exiled Tibetan government constitutes tacit support for China’s territorial disintegration. And India is dismayed by Chinese plans to build a series of dams on the Brahmaputra River, which originates in Tibet but flows into India. Tens of millions depend on the river, and water competition between the two countries will likely continue to grow”.

They cite a 2012 poll that shows that only 23% of both Indians and Chinese view each other in a positive, or favourable, light. They end the piece noting “Nevertheless, if the two sides cannot reach a lasting political solution soon, competition could overwhelm the positive tenor that has defined Sino-Indian relations in recent years. There are few worse things that could happen to Asia than its two biggest giants backsliding into rivalry”. There is no guarantee of a Chinese victory if there was to be hostilities between the two powers with China’s PLA weak and its navy untested.

US bases in Africa

“A quick look at exercises and other activities conducted by U.S. Africa Command this spring alone reveals a U.S. military presence in more than a dozen countries — from Cape Verde in the West to the Seychelles in the East and Morocco in the North. These exercises have shared medical techniques with the Nigerian military, provided intelligence training in Congo, trained special operators in Cameroon, and even included an East African Special Operations Conference in Zanzibar”.

Congress ignored?

An article notes that in the second term of President Obama there was a significant drop in those appointed tokey posts in the administration.

It begins “has all but skipped over Congress in choosing the inner circle to guide his  second term. Counting Vice President Biden, only three congressional  veterans have secured Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions going forward this year — down from seven in Obama’s first term — and all three served in the Senate but  never in the House”.

It goes on to add “Lawmakers in both parties have long criticized Obama for what they contend has  been a failure to reach out to Congress on the biggest issues of the day, and  some of those voices lobbied hard this year for the president to tap more  Capitol Hill veterans — particularly in the House — for high-level  administration positions. Obama’s Monday nomination of Anthony Foxx to  head the Transportation Department (DOT), however, was just the latest instance  of the president looking far outside Washington for his top lieutenants. While the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) had urged Obama to consider  one of its veterans for the DOT job, and Minnesota Democrats had pushed one of  their own, Obama decided instead on the 42-year-old mayor of Charlotte, N.C.  The choice could soften the criticisms that Obama’s second-term cabinet  is wanting for women and minorities, as Foxx is an up-and-coming black  politician. But it won’t do much to silence the charges that the administration  isn’t interested in what Congress thinks”.

The post then notes “Of Obama’s cabinet picks this year, only two came with congressional experience:  former Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), now secretary of state, and former Sen. Chuck  Hagel (R-Neb.), who heads the Pentagon. With Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood  and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis — two former House members — on their way out  the door, Biden, Kerry and Hagel will be the last members of Obama’s team with  experience in Congress. In Obama’s first term, those numbers were higher.  Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) left the Senate to serve as secretary of state; former  Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) was pulled to lead the Interior Department; former  Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Calif.) was tapped as defense secretary; Solis (D-Calif.)  quit the House to head the Labor Department; and LaHood (R-Ill.) did the same to  lead the Transportation Department”.

The ultimate point is that the president should feel constrained to pick people who should represent one group or sector or another. Ultimately, they should be appointed or dismissed at the wish of the president and should not be subject to partisan attacks in confirmation hearings. Finally they should not be necessarily be chosen to cater to various interest groups.

Google meddles again

“On Thursday, the Palestine News Network noticed that the Internet giant had changed the tagline for the Palestinian edition of its search engine, Google.ps, from the “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine.” The decision comes after a November vote by the U.N. General Assembly to recognize Palestine as a non-member state over the objections of Israel and the United States”.