by Alex Evans | Jun 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
PIPA’s latest global opinion poll is a bit of a downer on world leaders: it finds that in 20 nations around the world, “none of the national leaders on the world stage inspire wide confidence”. Still, while it’s obviously a source of some amusement that more publics trust Ahmadinejad than Bush, the real story for me here is that
Only UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon received largely positive ratings in a worldwide poll that asked respondents whether they trusted international leaders “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
It just goes to prove the point about the nature of the ‘global interregnum’ in which we find ourselves. As David and I observed in our memo to Gordon Brown on fixing the UK’s foreign policy (over a year ago now), the leadership of an awfully big range of countries and institutions changes hands between mid-06 and the end of 08; in such a context, it’s easy for leaders to emerge rapidly to the forefront of global statesmanship.
And for all that UN watchers sometimes carp, Ban Ki-moon has actually been terrific in starting to set out a joined-up narrative on scarcity issues (a point also now spotted by The Economist). He deserves real personal credit for driving the UN’s food prices agenda, including setting up its High Level Task Force; he’s been emphatic about the importance of getting to grips with water scarcity; and on climate change (his stated number one priority), he teed up the Bali outcome with his High Level Event in September last year, and then used his personal authority to drive the deal through later in the year. Go Ban.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, North America, UK
Doing some Google “research” this morning, I dug up this 1977 Foreign Affairs piece by Stanley Hoffmann on “The Uses of American Power”. You wouldn’t need to alter much of the opening to suppose it was from the latest edition…
There has been much discussion in the last few years about the decline of American power. While American military capabilities remain enormous thanks largely to persistent technological advance and while the American economy remains the most powerful in the world, many observers have noted the discrepancy between capabilities and achievements. As the fall of Indochina, the rise of OPEC and recent events in Angola attest, the United States has had difficulty shaping the movements and outcomes of world affairs.
American power has been inhibited by several factors. First among these has been the increase in the number of actors on the world’s stage. This has led to a greater emphasis on multilateral diplomacy and has allowed many of the new actors, though weak, to form coalitions which have damped the use of American power, particularly in arenas where the resort to force is inapplicable.
Second, the exercise of American power has been inhibited by the increased economic interdependence of the world. Measures aimed at hurting others can boomerang, injuring allies or those whose cooperation we might seek in other areas. Our very interest in preserving the open world economy from cartels or an epidemic of protectionist measures induces us to seek compromises even on efforts, such as the exploitation of the seabeds, which we could undertake on our own.
Hoffmann adds growing Soviet military reach as a third factor – whatever you think of China’s hard power, it’s not quite on the same level yet. Conversely, the economic fundamentals are even less favorable to the U.S. – although that has only reinforced the interdependence effect, for reasons any semi-capable IR undergrad can explain at length. Still, it’s useful for sprightly young(ish) analysts such as those of us who blog here to recall that we’re actually retreading old themes…
by Richard Gowan | Jun 17, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
Yesterday I recorded that Chadian rebels had congratulated Irish EU troops on their “courageous” and “neutral” (i.e. defensive) response to a firefight in the east of the country. But not everyone in Chad is quite so happy with their performance. The rebels are pushing ahead with a big offensive against the government, and President Idriss Deby is getting edgy. According to the BBC, he’s decided to blame the EU Force (Eufor):
In a televised address, President Deby accused Eufor of failing to prevent the killings of civilians and refugees by the rebels. “We’ve been surprised to see that, in its first hostile test, this force has rather cooperated with the invaders, allowing humanitarian workers’ vehicles to be stolen and their food and fuel stocks burned and closing its eyes before the systematic massacre of civilians and refugees,” he said. “We have the right to ask ourselves about the effectiveness of such a force, of the usefulness of its presence in Chad.”
Now this is a tough one. Although Eufor’s primary task is to provide security for UN police and humanitarian workers in the refugee camps on Chad’s border with Darfur, it is also meant “to contribute to protecting civilians in danger, particularly refugees and displaced persons”.
This is actually pretty standard stuff. Virtually all UN peacekeepers have similar “protection of civilians” clauses in their mandates, part of a broader trend towards “robust peacekeeping” explored in this 2006 article by Ian Johnstone (who did all the hard thinking), Ben Tortolani and me. The EU’s just catching up.
But what happens when, as now in Chad, protecting civilians would mean taking sides in a civil war? That’s definitely not in Eufor’s mandate, but it has been a lurking problem ever since the mission started to deploy in February.
As I noted back then, the French (who, I need hardly remind you, provide most of the troops and political impetus for this mission) were somewhat ambiguous on this point. In Paris, the foreign minister underlined that Eufor was neutral, but that it would complicate the Chadian rebels’ plans by limiting their freedom of movement through its presence on the ground… but now the rebels seem to be toddling around unobstructed, and Mr Deby may feel he deserves a refund.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
This is the University of Maryland’s scale model of New Orleans where they are in the process of recreating Katrina’s floodwaters.
After the hurricane, academics and government departments looked at their sophisticated mathematical models for predicting damage from big Gulf Coast storms and found that the models they had been using were incomplete, out of date or just plain wrong.
While the levees have long since been fixed and upgraded, the risk assessment -based on a mind-boggling 2 million equations – has only now been completed. Gathering the data for the levee upgrade and the risk maps took three years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort by hundreds of team members using a surprising mix of high technology, old-fashioned detective work, trick psychology and, when all else failed, intuition. The results have revolutionized authorities’ understanding of Gulf Coast hurricanes and. the US Army Corps have published Google maps on their website in an effort to show Gulf Coast residents what kind of danger they will face from hurricanes in the future. You can see them here, and here.
