What on earth was with this painfully cringeworthy waving at the Seoul G20? Heavens above – this is supposed to be a summit, not a school outing. If you look closely at the big version (click on photo), you can see that the world’s leaders fall into 4 categories:

1) Those who are waving and – horror of horrors – think that the whole thing is not only acceptable, but great fun. Ban Ki-moon, Silvio Berlusconi, Herman Van Rompuy – fire your PR advisers and get new ones immediately. (Especially you, Van Rompuy – I just had to look you up on Wikipedia to confirm your first name. That’s how much impact you’ve had, that is.)

2) Those who are waving, but dying inside as they do so. Look at Hu Jintao or Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Fellas - we feel your pain, but we’re a bit alarmed that you felt the need to go with the crowd and wave anyway. Your citizens pay you to lead.

3) Those who refuse to wave, but give embarrassed rictus smiles instead. David Cameron and Jose Barroso, you get modest props for not going with the crowd. But those sheepish looks tell a different tale. You pass, but without distinction.

4) Those who not only refuse to wave, but make no secret of their amused contempt for everyone else for going along with what some duff photographer is demanding of them. Meles Zenawi, Angela Merkel, Lula da Silva, Nicolas Sarkozy – we salute you. Go set up a G4 together. You have my vote.

Last Thursday, I published a grumpy post over on the blog of the Takshashila Institution, an excellent Indian think-tank. Why was I in a bad mood?

On Friday, India will use its month-long presidency of the United Nations Security Council to convene a discussion on the state of peacekeeping.  This is timely, as UN operations have been through a turbulent year, navigating crises in Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan.  There is talk of a new mission in Libya.  But this meeting is likely to be a bore.

And why did I think that the debate would be a snooze-fest?  Demonstrating a remarkable degree of foresight, I guessed that “Security Council diplomats will be thinking of how to beat the traffic from New York to Long Island’s beach resorts once the debate is finished.”  Er, no.  With Hurricane Irene almost literally on the horizon, everyone was probably wondering when they could go and stock up on bottled water and black truffles, or whatever ambassadors consume during hurricanes.

The debate was also overshadowed by the tragic attack on the UN offices in Nigeria.  Nonetheless, a quick read of the summary of the discussions suggests that they were every bit as tedious as I had predicted. Let’s get a quick taster:

Most speakers in the ensuing discussion stressed the continuing importance of United Nations peacekeeping and the need for increased engagement by the partners involved.  In that context, many welcomed more regularized consultations with troop- and police-contributing countries and urged continuous improvement in cooperation among all stakeholders.  Many also called for innovative thinking in closing resource gaps, particularly in supplying such enablers as helicopters, and in implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews.

Enough already!  When multiple speakers are highlighting the  importance of “implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews”, you know that “innovative thinking” is probably in short supply.  I’m afraid that I fault the Indian conveners for not shaking up the discussions:

A background paper prepared for the Security Council’s meeting contains a solid but all-too-familiar litany of diplomatic statements about how peace operations are resourced and managed.  It fails to grapple seriously with the hardest cases facing the UN or offer a serious framework for resolving them.

As I’ve argued before, peacekeeping is an issue on which New Delhi can show global leadership, but holding debates in New York in which everyone says more or less exactly what they’ve always said isn’t the way to achieve that.

Foreign aid from ‘new donors’ (aka emerging economies) now makes up around $10bn/year.

And this has doubled in the last five years as the Economist noted last week in a piece on ‘aid 2.0′ triggered by the news that India is to set up its own aid agency with a budget of at least US$1.5-$2bn/year (or triple the annual value of UK aid to India leading to the appearance UK aid is being subcontracted).

One might well ask what if most of the world’s poor live in new donor countries – does it suggest the poor overseas are more deserving than the poor at home?

So, what might aid 2.0 looks like?

One way to take a look is with Chinese foreign aid now that there’s a fascinating dataset on Chinese aid projects (here) that has been painstakingly put together by the Aid Data guys. (By the way a health warning: I am not a Chinese aid expert – read a good read here or the new Chinese government aid white paper here or search Duncan Green’s blog for various China pieces).

The Aid Data dataset of Chinese aid projects covers some 500 Chinese foreign aid projects from 1990-2005 by the year, project description and country recipient and in a very few cases the financial value. For example, in 1991 Chinese aid funded a duck breeding farm in Ecuador breeding 70,000 ducklings a year (wonder if it’s had a Randomised Evaluation yet?).

Of course this is just the project aid declared by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and data only runs up to 2005 but it makes fascinating reading if you’ve ever wondered what ‘new’ donor’s aid looks like and how different or not it is from ‘traditional’ donors aid (meaning the OECD countries).

So what does Chinese project aid look like based on the Aid Data dataset?

A quick scan suggests: (i) About a half of the projects listed have a direct relation to standards of living via social investments in health equipment or education facilities or via economic growth and production or income generation; (ii) As is well known there’s lots of infrastructure spending (aka aid as concrete) – about a quarter of the projects listed relate to infrastructure – water and power infrastructure in particular; and (iii) Perhaps surprisingly, a quarter or so of all the projects listed relate to leisure and sport – there are numerous new or renovated gymnasiums in Africa (eg Niger, Rwanda and Benin to name a few) and new sports stadiums – one of the biggest being a 30,000 seater stadium in Togo ‘covering an area of 36,000 square metres and including, one Olympic track, an electronic scoreboard, quality pitches and a giant screen’.

So, how different is all this from ‘traditional’ aid or aid 1.0? Much bilateral aid in recent years might well fit into the first grouping of social investments and income generation; some would fit into infrastructure but perhaps less so and probably little ‘traditional’ aid would be leisure or sport related I’m guessing…

And, more importantly perhaps is all of this is probably not where the big money is given the package aid deals of trade and investment from China, the real value probably lies in those non-aid, trade and investment aspects of the deal than in gyms and duck farms (even if they do breed 70,000 ducklings a year which sounds pretty impressive to me).

I am an exceptionally excited man.  Next week brings the publishing event of 2011: the appearance of Dick Cheney’s memoirs.  The NYT has seen an advance copy, and highlights the former Veep’s claim that he advised President Bush to bomb Syria in 2007.  Prescient, huh?  But it looks like In My Time: a Personal and Political Memoir is going to be utterly jam-packed with enjoyable nuggets:

He [writes] that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”

I literally don’t know what I’m going to do with myself until I get my hands on a copy of this tome.  Cheney has predicted that there “will be heads exploding all over Washington” when it comes out.  The book is #3 on the Amazon best-sellers list.  I only wish that the publishers had picked a more suitable cover design, like this:

While I am not a regular reader of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, I know people who are.  And they are not happy about this story from the Congo…

Congolese security forces have seized a jeep belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping operation and arrested a UN employee suspected of trying to smuggle over tonne of minerals out of the country, the government said on Monday.

The incident will embarrass the UN force, MONUSCO, which has helped prop up Democratic Republic of Congo’s weak armed forces but is also often accused of not doing enough to protect civilians and has been involved in sexual abuse scandals.

What happened?

Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said the incident took place on Sunday evening at the border crossing in the eastern city of Goma.

“Border police … and other security services … have seized a load consisting of 24 packages of cassiterite (tin ore) each weighing 50kg, on board a MONUSCO jeep,” he said.

A police investigation is under way and two people, including a Congolese U.N. staff member, have been arrested, Mende said.

As the lovely portrait of a lump of cassiterite at the top of this post suggests, trying to move a tonne of the stuff around by jeep might not to be the most subtle plan ever.   For good discussions of how to monitor, rather than exploit, the DRC’s extractive industries, look at the papers from CIC collected here.

Readers of academic journal Addiction will have become rampant eurosceptics after perusing a recent article by Rebecca Gordon and Peter Anderson entitled “Science and alcohol policy: a case study of the EU Strategy on Alcohol”.   I didn’t know that the EU had a strategy on booze, but the bloc has a habit of launching “strategies” with variable amounts of substance.  In this case, the EU Council asked the European Commission to devise a strategy on reducing alcohol-related harm.  The Commission published a Communication on the subject in 2006.  Is it any good?

Although the Communication acknowledges and supports existing interventions which have high evidence for effectiveness, such as enforcing blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits for drivers, it extensively promotes other interventions which have been shown to be ineffective; for example, recommending education and persuasion strategies as a measure across all its five priority areas.

In other words, dear readers, the Commission is boosting policies that don’t work.

Measures to influence price are mentioned only once in relation to sales in drinking venues limiting two-for-one drinks offers. Measures to control physical availability are mentioned infrequently.

It doesn’t really sound like the Commission’s heart was in it…

It also focuses its efforts more on mapping member state actions and coordinating knowledge exchange than on providing concrete recommendations for action or developing Europe-wide policy measures. This may be a compromise between the rights of Member States to develop national policy and legislation and the obligation of the European Union as a collaborative body to protect health.

So this is all about sovereignty and subsidiarity?  Not quite…

Furthermore, it has been suggested that the European Union’s roots as a trading block emphasizes collaboration with industry stakeholders and this influences the ability to prioritize health over trade considerations.

Who might these powerful “industry stakeholders” be?  I have a faint idea, as I once had a brush with them myself.   Late last year, I co-authored a piece in the European Voice with Sushant K. Singh on the EU’s relations with India.  We noted that efforts to sign off on an EU-India free trade agreement had been held up by disputes over liquor tariffs, and expressed surprise that a potentially important strategic relationship was being complicated by the price of booze.  Soon afterwards, a representative of the European Spirits Organisation wrote a sniffy letter to the European Voice arguing that “that spirits are the EU’s most important agri-food export (worth €5.7 billion in 2009).”

I am told that EU-China relations are similarly complicated by the interventions of the, er, liquid lobbyists in Brussels on liquor tariff issues.    I’m all for boosting agri-food exports, of course.  But one would think that the EU could at least set aside “trade considerations” when it comes to stopping its citizens drinking themselves to death.

The New York Times reports that this sculpture of a golden fist crushing a U.S. jet was one of Colonel Gaddafi’s favorite works of art.  What is the point of being a tyrant if you surround yourself with such rubbish?

A further thought on the Gaddafis’ style choices: there has been much excitement about Gaddafi’s son Seif al-Islam marauding around Tripoli after he had reportedly been captured.  A number of journalists have noted that he was sporting “a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers.”  This has been read as evidence of his willingness to fight on.  But this overlooks the fact that Seif notoriously undertook postgraduate study at the LSE.  In my experience, a high percentage of LSE students can be found with “a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers” at almost any time, and it is usually a sign that they are going to tell you something complicated about Habermas, not fight to the death.

So, it’s all over in Libya.  Or is it?  I tend to concur with Stephen Walt’s nervous take:

The danger is that we will have another “Mission Accomplished” moment, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, President Obama, and their various pro-intervention advisors give each other a lot of high-fives, utter solemn words about having vindicated the new “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, and then turn to some new set of problems while Libya deteriorates. And as an anonymous “senior American military officer” told the New York Times: “The leaders I’ve talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out.”

What is to be done?  I have published a short post over on the ECFR blog, arguing that it’s not clear that the Libyan rebels can restore stability and normality on their own:

Luckily, outside help is forthcoming.  The next weeks will see international officials (and no doubt a lot of spooks) hurry to Tripoli with offers of assistance. Months ago, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a Special Adviser on Post-Conflict Planning on Libya to prepare for this moment.  The adviser, Ian Martin (who I previously had the privilege of working with on a review of the UN’s political missions) has had time to make detailed preparations. While European governments and EU officials will want to play a part in reconstructing Libya, the UN is best-placed to coordinate the overall international effort.

But the next few weeks may well be chaotic, with regime die-hards and criminal opportunists on the loose, and it will be necessary to ensure that UN and other civilian officials are sufficiently well-protected to do their job properly. It’s unlikely that Libya will turn into another Iraq, but it’s certainly conceivable that someone might try to repeat the attack on the UN’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003 that killed its chief Sergio Viera de Mello.

In this context, the EU could help Libya’s transition to stability by resurrecting a proposal that failed to work out earlier this year. Back in April, the EU Council approved an EU military mission (EUFOR Libya) to help get humanitarian aid into Libya if UN aid officials requested help. As I pointed out in an op-ed in June, the proposal wasn’t very well thought-out, and the mission never got off the ground.

But now the idea’s time may have come. If the EU Council wants to help speed up the Libyan transition, it should declare its willingness to offer one or two of the EU’s Battle Groups to protect and assist UN and other civilian officials for up to three months.  This wouldn’t be full-scale peacekeeping, but a narrower job of guarding compounds and convoys and providing secure communications while Libya moves towards stability.

What happens after that?  It’s worth checking out this new piece by Daniel Serwer on stabilizing Libya and (with apologies for the immoderate self-advertising) a piece that I wrote with Bruce Jones and Jake Sherman on the same topic back in April.  Long-time hawk Max Boot also deserves credit for persistently raising the subject but I find his solution - a big Western operation comparable to that in Kosovo in 1999 - incredible.

The New York Times has done a series of mini-interviews with “leaders in fields other than politics”, asking them what they would do if they were President.  Their answers underline that many very clever people would make very bad politicians.  Danny Meyer, for example, is an entrepreneur who has created some of New York’s best restaurants.  But his presidential proposal sounds like something cooked up by undergraduates:

If I were president, I’d appoint a blue-ribbon committee of 14 accomplished citizens — one each representing these nonpolitical walks of American life: arts, science, sports, big business, entrepreneurs, tech, medicine, law, education, environment, defense, religion, farming and philanthropy — and charge them with imagining innovative industries that put Americans to work and add value to our world. I’d prioritize among the committee’s ideas, then advocate for a tax code rewarding sustainable job-rich industries, especially those that liberate us from imported oil.

Yeah man, it’s just like if only we didn’t listen to all the squares in suits, we’d totally realize that America’s woes can be resolved by a better dialogue between farmers, defense analysts and David Beckham.  Without that, we’ll never be able to produce a new generation of robots able to kill people with soccer balls entirely powered by excess corn starch and pig excrement.  Or something like that.

Or perhaps not.  But what am I saying?  As the NYT underlined in a very enjoyable recent profile, Mr. Meyer is devoted to perfecting the beef burger, and that’s more than good enough for me.  I’d expected a slightly surer political touch from James Q. Wilson, one of the academic godfathers of neoconservatism (if you’re into social policy, you’ll know he’s the brain behind the “broken windows” theory of policing) and an alumnus of any number of White House advisory groups.  What does he suggest?

With my staff, I would decide what my administration was for. Once I had clarified that, I would write several speeches on how to cope with a stagnant economy, how to deal with countries (such as Iran and Syria) that harass their own populations, and how the United States is committed to the survival of Israel. These speeches would not attack the other party or previous presidents but would describe the views I supported. On the economy: do I favor tax cuts or increases, expenditure reductions or increases? On terrorist regimes: what sanctions will I support? On Israel: under what circumstances would an attack on Israel be regarded as an attack on the United States? People would disagree with some of what I said, but they would know where I stand. After delivering the speeches, I would submit to Congress my specific proposals, on which I would ask them to vote.

Seriously?  “Write several speeches”?  Not just one or two?  Is that it?

I guess that Wilson is trying to imply that the current U.S. President has not always been 100% clear about his beliefs and not been tough enough with Congress.  Fair enough.  But can Professor Wilson really think that the essence of wielding power is so simple?  I sincerely doubt it.  Nonetheless, the NYT‘s exercise is a good reminder that great political thinkers aren’t necessarily great guides to how to do politics.

(PS: for those with any time left for summer reading, I thoroughly recommend going out and getting a copy of Jan-Werner Müller’s outstanding new book Contesting Democracy.  It’s a history of European political thought in the twentieth century, and it deals with hard political questions about what leaders like Mussolini actually thought they were doing.  It starts out with a fine dissection of Max Weber’s lecture “Politics as a Vocation”, which is still the best explanation of what it takes to be a serious politician.)

This Wednesday (17 August) Foreign Policy published a piece by Ban Ki-moon’s Chief of Staff, Vijay Nambiar, rebutting an earlier article by former South African President Thabo Mbeki in FP about the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. It’s worth a look.

Mbeki argued that the international community was “fundamentally wrong” to insist that Côte d’Ivoire hold elections for which it was not ready in 2010.  Nambiar says that Mbeki offers an “inaccurate account” of the crisis.

This is heated stuff.  But one can’t help noticing that Mbeki’s article appeared on, er, 29 April.   It’s good that the UN is standing up for its principles.  But did it really need the best part of four months to draft a rebuttal?

Jeff Sachs in the FT on how OECD countries could finally get their acts together:

An improved fiscal policy in the transatlantic economies would therefore be based on three realities. First, it would expand investments in human and infrastructure capital [especially, Sachs makes clear elsewhere in the article, low carbon energy]. Second, it would cut wasteful spending, for instance in misguided military engagements in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Third, it would balance budgets in the medium term, in no small part through tax increases on high personal incomes and international corporate profits that are shielded by loopholes and overseas tax havens.

All sounds good and sensible to me. Now read it again and reflect on the fact that Britain’s coalition flunks on all three counts. Hope Ed Miliband subscribes to the FT.

Never mind deckchairs on the Titanic. Vinay Gupta (find him here on Twitter) has come up with the perfect metaphor to describe governance breakdown in the face of systemic global risks:

When is soon, probably. We could keep rolling sixes and spin it out another 22 years, but we’re getting to the point where relatively small system shocks could propagate uncontrollably like a fat man falling through ice on a pond. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you that the US is in trouble, Europe is in trouble, they’ve printed insane amounts of money and it hasn’t stabilized things, assets are being devalued in complex processes which hide inflation and still there are no new jobs. People kick around terms like “stagflation” but what’s happening is simple and subtle: nothing.

We’re treading water. We’re like a shark that’s stopped swimming. We’re a cartoon character, all flailing legs, hovering above the abyss.

And at the bottom of it are those poor bastards in Africa, in rural India, South America, Asia, eating rice and bugs because there’s nothing else to eat. And you’ve ignored them your entire life as the money poured from “we know not where” into the First World Lifestyle, which squandered the wealth which could have fed and housed every human being on earth on an extractive economy which wastes 40% of the food produced and has a billion fat people, including me.