- Over at The Diplomat, Thomas Wright explores how China’s self-confidence in initial relations with the Obama administration may prove the “catalyst for a more competitive – and geopolitically savvy – US multilateralism.” Der Spiegel, meanwhile, highlights the extent of Chinese soft power, while Charles Grant sees a chance to enhance the EU’s relations with the emerging superpower.

- Focusing on Chinese domestic society, the Economist highlights the growing activism and changing dynamics of the country’s vast labour force, with its associated implications for the global economy. Analysis over at VoxEU, meanwhile, assesses evidence of a potential Chinese property bubble.

- Elsewhere, with David Cameron back from his visit to India, Adrian Hamilton and Geoffrey Wheatcroft offer their views on his approach to international affairs. Kim Sengupta meanwhile remarks that the new Prime Minister “has started his foreign policy journey with a series of very deliberate steps”.

- Finally, Sir John Sulston talks to the New Scientist about the implications of global population change for sustainable development – the subject of a new initiative that he’s leading for The Royal Society.  Prospect Magazine‘s blog, meanwhile, highlights favourable demographic trends in the developing world, while figures this week confirm that the EU’s population has now passed the 500 million mark.

Someone at the World Bank just leaked the FT’s Javier Blas a draft copy of a report on ‘landgrabs’ that was due to come out in August (the leaker apparently wanted to prevent the Bank from publishing the report when everyone was off on holiday). According to Javier,

Investors in farmland are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments, according to the draft of a report by the World Bank.

“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.

In addition, “the level of formal payments required was low”, making speculation a key motive for purchases. “Payments for land are often waived … and large investors often pay lower taxes than smallholders … or none at all.”

The full report will be worth a close look when it everntually comes out. I’ve been working on land and food issues with the Bank in recent months (though not with the department working on this report), and they’ve been doing a lot of good analysis – including some pretty alarming maps I’ve seen that show (a) community land and (b) land access deals. Guess what? They overlap massively.

Interestingly, the World Bank draft apparently enthuses about the idea of developing a ‘Land Transparency Initiative’ – kind of like an EITI for land. I’ll be interested to hear what Global Witness make of that – but have to admit that my default position will be with the critics referred to in the FT article who point out that “eight years after its launch, only Liberia, Timor-Leste and Azerbaijan, were full members of the EITI”.

Sure, it’s worth exploring international standards like this. But let’s be clear: the battle for fair access to land and water will really take place at country level, between those that stand to be winners and those that stand to be losers in a world of growing scarcity - and let’s not forget that in many countries, it’s the home government, rather than overseas investors, that’s the most voracious grabber of land.

The reporting on China’s handling of its recent oil spill in the Global Times – an affiliate of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily – was characteristically smug:

It is astonishing how a State-owned company can get back on its feet again in such a short time after a big explosion and oil spill. People will probably forget about it as soon as the news stories fade away.

On the other side of the world, another oil giant is in a similar position as CNPC, except that BP must envy the ease with which CNPC has dealt with a major oil spill. (see full article here)

The authorities were indeed quick to dispatch “more than 1,300 professional cleaners and 5,300 workers from the province to clean up the mess”. Here’s a photo of one such rescue crew hard at work cleaning up the mess, which appeared in the NY Times this weekend (see article here):

With what appears to be a kitchen ladle, this particular worker is better equipped, it seems, than many of her co-workers. According to Zhong Yu, a Greenpeace campaigner observing the clean-up efforts:

The citizens-turned-cleaners we saw yesterday in the sea basically did not have any protective gear and could only use their hands to clean up the oil (quoted in AFP article: Clean-up crews use bare hands against China oil spill)

At least give them ladles!

And a great time was had by all… Thanks so much to ace photographer, Brent Jones, for taking the pics… (Head here for the full size slideshow.)

- Writing in The World Today, General Tim Cross and Brigadier Nigel Hall examine the prospects of the UK’s Strategic Defence and Security Review, suggesting that any reforms it ushers in “must give operational reality to the new concept of comprehensive security”. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, Defence Secretary Liam Fox suggests that “[w]e don’t have the money as a country to protect ourselves against every potential future threat”, with fiscal constraints necessitating Armed Forces tailored to those threats that are “realistic”.

- Yevgeny Bazhanov explores the “triangle” of geopolitical relations between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, while over at Global Europe Shada Islam suggests that the EU must redoubled efforts to improve engagement with Asia.

- In the first of a new column on international affairs, Shashi Tharoor, former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, explores the importance of internationalism in foreign policy and why it “has always been a vital part of [the Indian] national DNA”. The economist Jagdish Bhagwati, meanwhile, assesses US-Indian tensions at the heart of the Doha Round and the prospects of reinvigorating the trade talks.

- Elsewhere, in The Walrus John Schram has an in-depth account of Ghana’s post-colonial transition and how its democratic experience provides an example to other African countries.

- Finally, Keith Simpson, William Hague’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, presents his annual offering of summer reading in foreign affairs. Iain Dale has the full list here.

The LSE has just published a very worrying report about the potential for violence in South Sudan, which holds a referendum on secession from Khartoum next year. The list of bad guys and their inspirations includes some eye-openers:

Several youth gangs are emerging in Southern Sudan; the ‘Niggaz’ and ‘Outlaws’ are two of the best-known youth gangs in Southern Sudan, with the term ‘Niggaz’ describing both members of a specific
gang as well as generally bad behaviour by groups of young people. Members of the gangs model themselves on US-rap stars such as Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Lil Wayne and 2Pac.

Gang-members have not, however, imitated (i) Jay-Z by marrying Beyonce or (ii) 50 Cent by endorsing a grape-flavored brand of vitamin water (above).  Instead…

They wear baggy trousers, loose t-shirts and sunglasses and are said to be drunk and lascivious at parties they organise in the bush. A large proportion of the members are reportedly women who wear short skirts, tight jeans and have been accused of killing. The older generation decries the activities of the groups (likened by [one] official to ‘Sodom and Gomorrha’) and criticise the dress style. The reverend of the Diocese of Torit laments: ‘The trousers down the buttocks, is it a good dress? They are copying the black Americans who move half naked around the streets killing people.’

So who can stop this lunacy?  Wait… didn’t Jay-Z once hang with Kof-I at the UN?

Time to get him on a plane to Sudan!

Tht’s pretty much the gist of a US Supreme Court ruling last month, according to the 3D Security Initiative, who say the Court

upheld a contentious US counterterrorism law that calls “negotiation training” and “offering advice on peacebuilding” to be a crime when it is done with groups listed by the US as terrorist organizations.

Other countries make a distinction between supporting a terrorist organization’s violent cause, or conversely, communicating with these groups to promote nonviolent solutions.

3D’s director, Lisa Schirch, has a rebuttal of the Supreme Court’s reasoning over on Huffington Post which is worth a read. She argues that there’s still scope for a remedy: Congress should react to the ruling by being much more specific about exactly what kinds of communication are and aren’t allowed with terrorist groups.

For fuller details of the  Court’s ruling, see this summary from AP.

Just by way of kite-flying, here’s a hypothesis I tried out this morning at a seminar that Chatham House hosted for the US National Intelligence Council:

“Over the next 10 years, neither the UK, nor any other EU governnment, nor any Democrat Administration in the US will embark on any major military intervention for reasons of counter-terrorism or humanitarian peacemaking.” *

(* Where ’major’ means a large scale deployment of land forces – say of at least brigade strength. Drone strikes, air strikes, covert special forces deployments, non-military actions etc. don’t count.)

The reasoning underpinning this hypothesis basically goes like this:

- Following Iraq and now Afghanistan, UK, EU and US publics are war-weary, and have more or less concluded that their governments have no real strategy for winning such conflicts. The political space for another Afghanistan-style deployment is simply not there.

- So while policymakers argue for NATO’s continued presence in Afghanistan on the basis that “we can’t allow terrorists safe havens”, the fact is that other safe havens – Somalia, Yemen, the federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan – are being handled instead through a policy of containment (drone strikes, special forces – but no major land deployments by western governments).

- On the humantarian intervention side, meanwhile, the Responsibility to Protect was stillborn, as Darfur showed. By and large, the US and EU are willing to support UN and AU peace enforcement missions with kit and a few specialised soldiers (e.g. to beef up command and control capacities), but again, not with large scale troop deployments.

- The hypothesis implicitly admits the possibility of US or EU troops being deployed for peacekeeping (as opposed to peace enforcement) missions, where key interests are at stake; or of US troops fighting in order to support security guarantees to key geopolitical allies (e.g. to counter a salafist takeover in Saudi Arabia, or in a scenario of war on the Korean Peninsula).

- But as far as new large scale US or EU land deployments designed to counter terrorist safe havens or widespread atrocities go, the only circumstances in which this hypothesis sees that happening in the next decade are under a Republican President - and even then without UK or EU support. The post-9/11 ‘moment’ on military intervention, in other words, is now over.

That’s the hypothesis I put forward. I’m not sure I agree with it myself, but it’s at least plausible.

Carne Ross – who now runs Independent Diplomat, but who used to be a Foreign Office diplomat based at the UK Mission to the UN until he resigned in protest at the decision to go to war in Iraq – gave evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry last week; here’s his testimony.

Carne comments in an email to me and others (quoted with his permission) that:

Before I testified, FCO officials refused to give me access to all the documents I requested.  They also pressured me – apparently on behalf of the Cabinet Office – to delete references to some of the most egregious documents including those directly illustrating how the government exaggerated the WMD case (I refused, though I agreed to a couple of insignificant redactions at FCO request).  It was not a pleasant experience nor was I left feeling that Chilcot et al are equipped for the task of dismantling a well-constructed infrastructure justifying the government’s decisions. 

Chilcot’s panel has largely been offered a narrative that war was more or less unavoidable because Iraq was escaping from sanctions and containment was collapsing.  There is some truth to this, but there is also an alternate account – namely, what the Foreign Office actually believed at the time.  The testimonies of other witnesses showed clearly that many are painting a picture at odds with that evident in the internal policy documents and, secondly, that the panel is not forcing them to reveal the true picture, and instead letting them proffer their account without much challenge.

Tediously therefore, for these reasons, the fight for full revelation and the truth must continue.  My main conclusion is that the answer lies in more or less full disclosure of the relevant documents (as no less than the Deputy Prime Minister seems to have suggested).  Chilcot instead seems to be proposing partial disclosure when requested by witnesses.  This is in no ways adequate.

See also this by Chris Ames in the Guardian.

Speaking together at the White House today, Barack Obama and David Cameron had a lot to say about the “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK.  But this was hard-headed stuff.  Here’s Obama (with emphasis added by GD):

Above all, our alliance thrives because it advances our common interests. Whether it’s preventing the spread of nuclear weapons or securing vulnerable nuclear materials, thwarting terrorist attacks, or confronting climate change, or promoting global economic growth and development, when the United States and the United Kingdom stand together, our people —- and people around the world — are more secure and they are more prosperous.

And here’s Cameron:

Our relationship is one that has an incredibly rich history. It is based on ties of culture and history and, yes, emotion, too. But for all those things, I think it has also an incredibly strong future that is based on results — results of a positive partnership of working together, agreeing where we agree; when we have disagreements, working through them and coming to a fair conclusion.

So, this is a special relationship, but should be judged on (i) interests and (ii) results. Who does this remind me of?

As you knew at once, it’s Henry John Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston and British PM during the U.S. civil war.  Palmerston is famous for saying this:

We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

To which he added, a bit less famously:

With every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy.

Obama and Cameron both seem to be in a Palmerstonian mood.  This replaces the Churchillian mood that characterized the Bush-Blair era (remember the bust?).  That’s a downgrade, but we are not back in the days of Washington and Lord North!

Note 1: For earlier thoughts on Palmerston and U.S.-UK relations (and the “shibboleth” line) check out this 1969 Foreign Affairs article by another PM, Edward Heath.

Note 2: For more recent thoughts on “the Palmerstonian moment” in U.S. policy, see this 2008 piece by Richard Haass of CFR.

Note 3: Am I the first to compare the new UK leadership to Palmerston?  No.

Note 4: That said, if you search for “Palmerston” on Google News right now, the first hit is a rather diverting story about a “naked pie man” in New Zealand.  Here he is!

Note 5: Palmerston was a Liberal.  The Liberal Democrat History Group notes that, while he was still a relatively junior politico, he and his party backed a coalition administration with the Tories led by the Duke of Wellington, “but only reluctantly in what they saw as an ultra-Tory government.”  It didn’t last long.

Britain’s new National Security Council is built along much the same lines as its counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic – but if we’re copying the American model, how come we didn’t create a National Intelligence Council to go with it?

In the US, the NIC partly plays the role that the Joint Intelligence Committee performs in the UK system (although the National Intelligence Estimates that NIC produces are much more in-depth than JIC assessments). But the NIC also performs several additional tasks which are not well performed in Britain’s new system for foreign policy co-ordination.

For instance, in the US the NIC has the job of overall risk surveillance in the foreign policy domain over a 3-5 year timescale, including transnational threats and global issues as well as individual regions, and with strong emphasis on connecting the dots to see the larger picture (as for instance in NIC’s recent report on Global Trends to 2025). Unlike the JIC, the NIC uses both secret and open source data in drawing together this composite assessment – rather than falling into the Cold War trap of assuming that all the important information will come from covertly obtained data. And while the UK has experimented with a Strategic Horizons Unit in the Cabinet Office, it has suffered from being divorced from actual policymaking – unlike the NIC, which is firmly embedded in all levels of the NSC process.

This in turn allows the NIC to perform the second key role missing from the current UK configuration: the ‘red team’ challenge function that David and I call for in our Chatham House report Organising for Influence.  The NIC’s seat at the NSC table in Washington comes with a clear mandate from the President to test other players’ assumptions, challenge policy options, and provide an additional view for policymakers. In the UK, by contrast, no part of the government enjoys the same ‘licence to be awkward’ – which creates a risk of groupthink, or alternatively of inter-departmental turf warfare with inadequate attention paid to the big picture.

Third, the NIC has a critical role in briefing Congress on long range foreign policy issues, increasing legislative awareness of the foreign policy context (senior NIC staff describe the role as complementary to that of the Congressional Budget Office in creating shared awareness of challenges facing the US). While the UK’s Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee does get access to (some) JIC data, the security classification of JIC assessments clearly prevents them from being shared with, say, the Foreign Affairs, Defence and International Development Select Committees. A UK version of the NIC, on the other hand, could provide unclassified, open source assessments to Parliament – enhancing Parliamentary involvement in, and oversight of, Britain’s foreign policy context.

Finally, the NIC plays a crucial role in bringing external thinking in to government on foreign policy issues by trawling the academic and think tank communities for ideas, including through its NIC Associates program. The UK, by contrast, tends to find this a lot more difficult.  While the Strategic Horizons Unit undertook extensive outreach for the update of the NSS, it was badly linked to actual policymaking as noted above; and while FCO’s Policy Planning Staff is theoretically charged with maintaining close links with think tanks, in practice it has not done so for several years.

Admittedly, the NSC probably needs a bit of time to bed down before any more changes are made to the UK’s foreign policy architecture (there’s also the small matter of the Strategic Defence and Security Review to get out of the way). But when the government reviews its new arrangements, probably some time next year, it should give serious thought to a UK NIC.

- This week’s Economist sees Lexington bemoan those advancing the discourse of American exceptionalism, suggesting that “[t]he last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness”. Elsewhere, The Spectator’s Coffee House blog remembers Jimmy Carter’s fabled 1979 speech in which he spoke of a US “crisis of confidence”.

Delivering the annual lecture at The Ditchley Foundation last week, Strobe Talbott suggested that the “promise” of the Obama Presidency – both in the domestic and the international arenas – is now “at risk”. “[W]hatever fate is in store for the current president of the United States”, Talbott argued,

“one thing is for sure.  His success in tackling the major issues of our time will depend on his establishing a degree of common purpose with his partners in national governance at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and with his partners in global governance around the world.”

- Elsewhere, over at The Cable, Josh Rogin reports on the slow progress of reviews into US development policy – the Presidential Study Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.  The Economist, meanwhile, highlights Brazil’s growing identity as a significant aid donor.

- Finally, the head of the UK Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, cautions against the default acceptance of prevailing economic ideology, suggesting that policymakers would do well to draw on a diversity of economic opinion. Joseph Stiglitz, meanwhile, explores the Keynesian prescription for the global economy.

Lest any GD readers are labouring under the misapprehension that Frank Luntz is actually a serious pollster (unlikely, I know), feast your eyes on this excerpt from a 2 page orgy of huff-and-puff in the last issue of GQ:

The public have now decided, wisely, that a bigger, more powerful government won’t solve the problems that government itself created. In fact, roughly 70 per cent of Americans agree with the following statement:

“Washington doesn’t have to get rid of everything that’s right with America to fix what is wrong with our country. Even though our economy faltered, we must not replace the economic freedoms that made this country great with new regulations, new bureaucracies and a government takeover of individual opportunity.”

Awesome in its scientific rigour, isn’t it? Put like that, the real surprise is that Frank managed to find 30% of Americans to disagree. Oh, and if you were wondering who the pollwas conducted for – yeah, Fox News.

Frank ends his diatribe with a call on politicians to commit to “find at least one per cent of waste to cut in current government spending”. Perhaps we could start with that portion of the TV license fee that pays for Frank’s appearances on Newsnight.

About a quarter of a billion people spend time every week inside some kind of virtual world (like World of Warcraft, or Second Life, or IMVU). That’s one of the arresting statistics in an extraordinary talk on virtual worlds given by Rohan Freeman last November, reproduced in full at the end of this post.

Freeman doesn’t like the term ‘virtual’ to describe what he terms the ‘metaverse’, arguing that ”it is meaningless in this context. These ‘virtual’ worlds are real. Just as an MP3 file is real, a phone call is real and the intellectual property vested in a Gucci handbag is real. Ideas are real. People are being found guilty of real crimes in real courts if they steal ‘virtual goods’”. Above all, the relationships forged in the metaverse are real:

Let me give you an example from personal experience. When I first started to investigate virtual worlds I bought a small piece of land and I had a neighbour on each side. My neighbour on one side was a single mother, living in a town in Scotland. She was on income support, living in council accommodation, she had no qualifications and was struggling to keep her two sons from playing truant. My neighbour on the other side was a Director of The National Physics Institute. And they knew each other. And she was reading some papers of his, talking about plans they have to create a constellation of satellites that can better measure climate change.

 Two years ago, by her own statement, she spent her days watching Ricky Lake. One year ago she was playing online bingo. Now she lives in virtual reality. She could have found his papers on Internet anyway. She could have gone to the library and requested them there. But the reason she was reading his papers was; she met him. They literally struck up a conversation over the garden wall. The presence of their avatars in a shared space changed things psychologically for both parties.

One of the most significant things about the metaverse, he continues, is how effective it is at creating trust – so much so that people fall in love there, the whole time. This is different from other social networking technologies. “People don’t fall in love on Facebook. It’s not really that easy to fall in love on the phone.” Why? In a nutshell, he argues, because of bandwidth. That’s why, after all, people still like to meet face to face:

When we meet face to face and communicate with each other we inevitably give away thousands of things about ourselves; thousands of tells, our body language and the direction of our eyes, how we respond to the space occupied by other people. Other people pick all this up, both consciously and unconsciously. And this is the basis of trust. We know we all give things away about ourselves when we meet. And that allows us to evaluate each other and take a decision; I trust this guy with my life. I don’t trust him with my life but I trust his opinions on Japanese cinema. I wouldn’t trust him to find his own arse with both hands.

Move that process to the telephone and it’s harder. There is considerably less unwitting information on which to base a decision. Move it to an email it gets harder still. Reduce the bandwidth that dramatically and you necessarily reduce the information on which to base decisions of trust.

But a live 3D metaverse? Very different story.

It’s live; so if someone starts spouting off about what the don’t like about a movie, for instance, then people can gather round if they want and respond in real time. And if I want to be a part of that, the first step to engagement is so low that anyone can take it. I just need to stand near them and listen. I don’t even need to say anything to begin to feel like part of the discussion. I might, after a few minutes, volunteer a ‘”LOL”when someone else says something funny. Maybe I’ll chime in on a comment with others. I might just stand around and take it all in. 

 The entry barrier being much lower, far greater social liquidity and subtlety is created. It  may not seem like I contributed a great deal to the conversation by chipping in with a “LOL” half way through. But my presence, my attention, my occasional displays of alertness created context for everyone else. I was part of what brought other people over to hear this guy. They saw me and a few others. And he was encouraged because he could see people like me paying attention and laughing. I can only repeat; it’s all real.

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