by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
Krishna Kumar at Foreign Policy has the details:
On December 10, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his top-secret plan for saving the planet from global warming. Debuting at Washington’s Dulles Airport, and then being rolled out to all ports of entry to the United States in 2008, all incoming aliens between 14 and 79 must now have all 10 of their fingerprints electronically scanned and recorded.
Now you might think that this was all about spotting false identities – but only if you’re an idiot, as Kumar explains:
When you look at what’s actually been accomplished by fingerprinting aliens, it’s clear that mistaken identity can’t be the real purpose. Since 2000, according to Secretary Chertoff, the U.S. government has stopped nearly 2,000 people from entering the country because their fingerprints didn’t match. But the United States has more than 400 million visitors a year, including returning Americans—or roughly 2.8 billion visitors since starting the program. That translates to a success rate of well over one in a million.
So what can be the real reason? Well, this is where Chertoff’s genius starts to shine through. Already, the scheme has notched up one major success:
It has gotten the Europeans in a hissy fit. With the recent decline in the dollar, Americans ought to be seeing hordes of Europeans flying west to take advantage of the bargains. But while the number of international visitors is starting to recover from its 2001 low point, travelers from Europe are not returning in the same numbers. Many whine about “Soviet-style” border-control officials and say they’re being treated like criminals.
And thank goodness for that:
Europeans are so cheap they have entire countries, such as Luxembourg and Andorra, that exist only to sell discounted products to their neighbors. Imagine what would happen if they realized that the world’s largest consumer economy is having a 50-percent-off sale. Imagine the chaos in malls across the United States as non-English speaking Europeans tried to navigate parking spaces and checkout lines and buy what should rightfully be Americans’ post-Christmas discounts. And imagine if German- and French-speaking entrepreneurs had more opportunities to invest in U.S. assets, pushing up stock prices for the rest of us. Without the fingerprints in place, the prospect of Europeans streaming across our borders, armed with cash, could be a lot more alarming.
But even this can’t be the whole reason, given that today’s global economy still hampers Homeland Security’s valiants efforts to “keep unwanted euros out of the US economy”. And that’s where climate change comes in.
If DHS can reduce demand on those flights by scaring away Europeans (and hey, why not include the Japanese in this, too?), the department can help drive struggling U.S. airlines into further financial distress by eliminating their most profitable routes. And fewer flights means fewer emissions. Zero trans-oceanic flights would be the ultimate goal.
What kind of effect might even partial success have on carbon emissions? Here’s a back-of-the napkin estimate. Since 2000, there’s been a dramatic decline in visitors from the 27 (mostly European) countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program. Using 2000 as a baseline, there are more than 22 million missing visitors. By not taking trans-Atlantic flights (and flights from Australia and Japan), they have saved more than 60 million tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted by airplanes. By comparison, in 2006, we saved just 45 million tons of CO2 by installing windmills worldwide.
What’s even better is that this brilliant climate-change plan is being adopted globally. Japan has announced it is starting to fingerprint all visitors, and even the Europeans are getting into the act. If other countries begin to scare away the millions of Americans who travel abroad by fingerprinting them, too, a more carbon-free future surely awaits.
You know, a lot of people knocked the Department for Homeland Security when they started out. But you gotta hand it to them: they’ve become a veritable turbo engine for joined-up government…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | East Asia and Pacific, Influence and networks, UK
Benedict Brogan is off to China with the Prime Ministerial travelling circus, plus various business bigwigs including Richard Branson. But as a sequence of posts on Benedict’s blog yesterday record, all did not appear to be going smoothly as the trip got underway. At 12.27pm , the first indications that all might not be well began to emerge:
Oh dear. Bad enough that Sir Richard Branson has to fly to China on a BA plane, but he’s also fallen out with BAA and Ruth Kelly. There’s been an almighty cock up involving the Dept of Transport’s security guys here at Heathrow, and as a result it’s chaos at the Royal Suite. The business bigwigs were kept sitting in a coach outside the gates for 55 mins. Branson was so cross he called the head of BAA to complain. Mr Brown isn’t here yet, but he may want to have a word with Ruth. This may take quite a lot of in-flight champagne to fix.
But things were about to get worse. 1.13pm, and Brogan is showing that irresistible Daily Mail sangfroid:
It’s not for me to say this trip is cursed, but from where I sit on the PM’s BA charter (fabulous bacon sarnies, do hope Sir Richard likes them) I can see a BA airbus that has just come off the runway due to a lack of undercarriage. It doesn’t look too serious even if it is sitting at an odd angle, but rumour is all flights are grounded. So we are delayed until BAA gets the mess cleared. This is turning into a busy day for Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former spokesman, and now head of comms for BAA.
More drama was still to come. 1.35pm:
This gets weirder. The PM’s motorcade was coming up the A4 as the plane approached and at one point his detectives grew alarmed. The suggestion is the stricken Airbus misjudged its approach and nearly took out the PM. I can’t vouch for this, but this trip is getting more eventful by the minute and we’re only now taking off.
Now, fortunately, the intrepid crew are safely ensconced in Beijing, where there’s only one small snag:
For the past three days the Chinese have asked No10 staff to ensure we don’t ask about democracy. It was explained to them that this might not be possible, and sure enough Mr Wen got asked by both Nick Robinson and Tom Bradby why it was taking so long to democratise. I suspect it may take some time: we’ve been issued with a detailed list of what is expected of us, including ” please stand up and applaud when the two PMs enter the venue”. We didn’t, but that may just be because we are fast asleep.
We’ll be watching riveted over the next few days…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system
We’re off to tomorrow’s Fabian Society conference on foreign policy, and will be live blogging it throughout the day. Some tickets still available, apparently. David Miliband’s doing the keynote.
While we’re on the subject of David Miliband, someone at Landmine Action has a nice knack for comms: there’s a huge billboard ad in Westminster tube station that reads ‘Get cluster bombs Milibanned’. Nothing like the personal touch, is there? Should you wish to add your own personal touch, you can send him an email here…
by Alex Evans | Jan 18, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks
David and I will be working with Demos on a new project over the spring, called The New Public Diplomacy. Here’s the project outline:
Public diplomacy – diplomacy directed at people rather than other diplomats – is a subject of growing fascination for governments. While some in the foreign policy elite hanker for a time when foreign policy was the preserve of a technocratic priesthood, those days are largely gone. Somewhere between the anti-globalisation protestors who closed down the Seattle trade talks in 1999 and the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the world was disabused of the notion that foreign policy is only conducted by and between professionals.
Today, non-governmental actors of every variety demand a piece of the international action, and willingly use their agility, focus and passion to elbow states aside. The media is an ever more voracious force, even as the stock of human attention remains limited. And it is increasingly difficult to see where foreign policy stops and domestic policy begins, as the great global risks like climate change, terrorism or HIV obliterate geographic, disciplinary and organisational borders.
All this leaves governments in a frustrating position – huge responsibilities, fewer levers than ever to achieve change. They face some tough questions. Are cross-border currents of public opinion uncontrollable, or can they be dammed or redirected? Where are those fomenting future revolutions (benign or otherwise) to be found, and are they amenable to external pressure? What about the ideas, stories and values that people use to make sense of the world? Are they formed merely in reaction to events, or are they imbued with the power to reshape our environment? And where do governments get their own ideas and direction from? Who shapes them?
Answering these questions forces us to think about influence, the core currency of any country overseas. But herein lies a surprising paradox. Despite its importance, few governments have even a rudimentary theory of what influence is and how to exert it.
This gap in governments’ capabilities is relevant to the full gamut of foreign policy issues and more or less every area of activity that governments undertake in foreign policy: from fighting wars to providing aid, and from building coalitions for multilateral agreements to influencing perceptions in a country on the other side of the world.
Tackling them demands a style of diplomacy that is more politically engaged, more ambitious in its aims, more open to outside influences, and more cross-cutting in its approach. No longer can public diplomacy be seen as a fundamentally separate endeavour from the ‘rest of foreign policy’, that can be hived off to a dedicated (but low status) public diplomacy team. Instead, it represents a paradigm for understanding and undertaking foreign policy as a whole in the 21st century, and a skill set in which all foreign policy practitioners – wherever in government they work – need to be fluent.
