I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession. A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much. And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline? Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad. The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end? So someone else can take his place? And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?
Diplomats are in some ways like university presidents: little hope for job advancement, serving many constituencies, and having little ability to control events. Plus they are underpaid relative to human capital. They must speak carefully. They must learn how to wield power in the subtlest ways possible. Who was it that said?: ” Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice Doggie” until you can find a stick”.
Colum Lynch, meanwhile, is chewing on the hypothesis that if being a diplomat sucks, being one at the UN really sucks:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1965 until 1968, approached his job with trepidation, recalling that a generation of top American officials had been sent to New York to see their careers run aground. “I had seen Stevenson humiliated. Goldberg betrayed. Ball diminished. Wiggins patronized. Yost ignored. Bush traduced. Scali savaged,” Moynihan recalled in his memoirs on his U.N. days, Dangerous Place. “I had twice said no to the post I was now to assume.”
Dean Acheson, an affirmed believer in multilateral diplomacy, ran into Moynihan at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan to convey his contempt for the top American job at the U.N. “Moynihan,” Acheson said. “My respect for you took a precipitous decline when I learned you even considered that ridiculous job.”
On the fight brewing between the US and Europe over IMF board seats that I wrote about last week, David Bosco at Foreign Policy has been talking to Ted Truman, a former US Treasury official now at the Institute for International Economics. Truman’s take:
First, he argues that the American gambit was not sudden but is a response to what he characterizes as longstanding European intransigence. He believes that Europe has failed repeatedly to respond to American signals of discontent over the past five years. “In 2008 and 2009, they basically said that this issue was not on the table,” he recalls. In that context, the new U.S. position is “an aggressive move in the context of a pretty aggressive defense.”
He also emphasizes the oddity of current European policymaking in a body like the IMF. It’s not as if each of the European seats offers a unique policy perspective. Through the EU, individual member states coordinate their positions in advance. “They just get eight to ten voices every time an issue comes up,” he says. Truman contends that it might actually be better to revert to a smaller board, not least for reasons of cost. IMF executive directors and their staffs are relatively expensive, and in today’s environment of budget-slimming there could be some non-trivial savings for the Fund in a pared-down board.
On this issue, Washington is aligned with India, China and Brazil in an effort to tame traditional European prerogatives. If that trend continues, it could spell trouble for Europe in the world of multilateral institutions.
If you missed it, Channel 4 News ran an exclusive last night that seems to put Metropolitan Police accounts of the circumstances of Gareth Williams’s death at odds with those emerging in anonymous briefings from Vauxhall Cross. Channel 4 News’s website has this to say:
The police who found the corpse of MI6 employee Gareth Williams described his death as a “neat job”, suggesting professionals may have been involved rather than the more lurid speculation that his death was linked to a sex game, Channel 4 News learns.
The evidence obtained by Channel 4 News from the day the MI6 employee was found dead in his central London flat suggests that reports that he was secretly gay or owed bondage equipment are untrue. The evidence also suggests his mobile phone sim cards were not arranged in a “ritualistic” way and there were no numbers for male escort agencies on them.
This, Channel 4 News understands, is what the police know about the death of the MI6 code breaker, contrary to the speculation which has been in other reports which is apparently based on MI6 briefings.
Last night’s C4 News report below…
August 29, 2010 at 12:48 pm | More on UK | 7 Comments
From the FT this morning, the following newsflash:
It is unfortunate for private equity boss Lyndon Lea that colourful details of his summer party leaked just as his Lion Capital buy-out firm is hitting the road to raise €2bn ($2.5bn) from strait-laced institutional investors.
Potential pension fund backers might have been surprised to read about the party at his Californian beach house last weekend, involving scantily clad Cirque de Soleil dancers and sushi served on the bodies of near-naked women.
One of the 200 guests was quoted in The New York Post as saying the evening’s entertainment featured a woman wearing tassels “sitting in a Victorian claw-foot bathtub with a muscular hunk, clad only in a thong, pouring milk over her”.
Sounds like the US is playing hardball at the IMF. The Economist’s Free Exchangeblog takes up the tale:
When the IMF was formed, it was agreed that its executive board, which is its main decision-making body, would have 20 seats. Later, this was expanded to 24, but the expansion is technically an ad-hoc change which has to be reconfirmed by voting every couple of years. So far, it has always been renewed. But earlier this month, America simply did not vote on this year’s renewal, and because America has an effective veto (it has 16.74% of the votes in an institution that requires a super-majority of 85%), the renewal is hanging fire.
And no, the Treasury says, it wasn’t a mistake. So what gives? Well, if the US doesn’t renew the arrangement, then 24 seats have to go back down to 20. It’s time to play… international monetary musical chairs!
All this raises two intriguing questions. First, of course: who’ll be standing up when the music stops? Here’s a clue: Europe holds 9 of the current 24 seats. So, the Economist speculates, the likeliest outcome is that some of them will be merged: “for instance, there could be three euro area seats and two non-euro area seats (at the moment, there are 6 euro area countries with seats on the board, and 3 non-euro area Europeans (Britain, Denmark and Switzerland)”. So the likeliest losers? “Belgium, the Netherlands and their ilk”, who will be “furious” about being represented by (say) Germany what with the Euro crisis and all.
And question number two: what’s the US up to? Here’s a clue:
America also gains subtly by taking the side of emerging economies. They might be less likely, for example, to make a big fuss about America’s effective veto at the fund. This is something some have been highlighting as a rule that needs to change—but perhaps now that America is using its veto to make emerging countries’ case, they might prefer to pipe down about what a terrible thing it is. Which would probably suit America just fine.
So, to sum up: the real action is happening between the US and the emerging economies while the hapless EU founders around outside the room, looking lame. It’s Copenhagen 2.0!
Over the weekend, Richard blogged about the Iranians’ scary new bomber drones, and their uncanny resemblance to Thunderbird 2. Alas for the Iranians, the project has been set back by some bad news:
A few weeks ago, according to official and private reports, the Iranian air force shot down three drones near the southwestern city of Bushehr, where a Russian-supplied nuclear reactor has just started up. When the Revolutionary Guards inspected the debris, they expected to find proof of high-altitude spying. Instead, the Guards had to report to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that the air force had blasted Iran’s own unmanned aircraft out of the sky.
Apparently, according to official Iranian press accounts, the Iranian military had created a special unit to deploy the drones—some for surveillance and others, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bragged on Sunday, to carry bombs—but hadn’t informed the air force.
GD readers will doubtless share a particular appreciation for the fact that in the middle of the world’s most unstable neighbourhood, with Israel straining at the leash to let loose its F16s, the Iranians’ nemesis emerged to be… their own lack of policy coherence.
Over at the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer – one of the best thinkers out there on what happens after oil production peaks (see also the excellent Gregor Macdonald, whom I’ve just discovered) - makes the useful and important observation that when we think about agriculture, we have to think about two agricultures, not one. Before industrialisation, he writes,
Each farm [in the US] had, apart from its main acreage for corn or wheat or what have you, a kitchen garden, an orchard, a henhouse, and a bit of pasture for a cow or two. Those had a completely different economic function from that of the main acreage, and they were managed in a completely different way. Their function was to produce food for the farm family and farmhands, where the main acreage was used to produce a cash crop for sale; and they were worked intensively, while the main acreage was farmed extensively.
Extensive farming, he continues, “involves significant acreage”, and “maintains soil fertility through crop rotation and fallow periods, rather than through fertilizers or soil amendments”;
the crops that you can grow with extensive farming in temperate regions, in the absence of cheap abundant energy, are pretty much limited to grains, dry beans and dry peas, but you can produce these in very substantial amounts, and they store and ship well, so they make good cash crops even if the only way to get them to market is a wagon to the nearest river system and a canal boat from there.
Intensive farming, on the other hand, is a different story. It “has to be done on a much smaller scale”; the labour it requires is “too substantial to be applied to acreage of any size”; it ”maintains soil fertility by adding whatever soil amendments are available – compost, manure, leaf mold, a fish buried in every corn hill, you name it – and the basic tools of the trade are a hoe and somebody who knows how to use it”.
The crops you can grow in an intensive garden account for everything other than grains and dry legumes, from the first spring radishes to the leeks you overwinter under straw; the chickens, the cow, and the fruit from the orchard all belong to this same intensive sector and participate in its tight cycles of nutrients. In an age without fossil fuels, very little of what can be grown intensively can be transported over any distance without spoiling, so intensive growing is always done close to where the food will be eaten.
So far, so good. But significantly, Greer thinks that as peak oil approaches and is passed, it’s on the intensive farming front that change is most urgently needed – and that developed countries will face the biggest challenge:
For the world’s nonindustrial nations … the end of the industrial age thus ushers in a difficult but ultimately positive shift in which the mechanisms of foreign export, along with the wild distortions of political and economic power they produced, come apart at the seams. For the world’s industrial nations, on the other hand, the end of a system that kept shoppers happily supplied with strawberries in January promises to usher in a time of food crisis in which a system of intensive local production will need to be revived in a hurry.
And here, I think that Greer and I part company - because it seems to me that (a) it’s very much developing countries who are most in the firing line, and (b) that the challenge on extensive farming is every bit as demanding and urgent as the one on intensive farming.
During the 2008 food price spike – in many ways a taste of what we can expect under peak oil – poor countries manifestly had the worst of it. The global total of undernourished shot up, from about 850m to over 1bn. At the same time, malnutrition went off the scale too – humanitarian assistance practitioners I know are still horrified by the fact that an entire generation of kids’ cognitive development was basically stunted for life by missing out on key nutrients in their early years.
Both intensive and extensive agriculture are relevant here. Intensive horticulture is what provides the micronutrients, vitamins, minerals etc. that prevent malnutrition; extensive agriculture that provides the calories that keep people alive.
Now, I don’t disagree with Greer that we’ve got a lot to do on the intensive front; that there’s much to learn here from recent experience in the organics movement; that we’re probably headed for a much more localised model; and so on. But I’m not sure I buy the premise that the revolution we need today is all about intensive, and that the revolution on the extensive front is a task for another day.
True, enough calories are produced today to feed everyone amply, so in that sense the current problem is one of politics, not production. But as population rises and as the world’s middle class gets more affluent, demand is rocketing (the World Bank reckons global food demand will be up 50% by 2030). That’s twenty years to produce half as much food again, during a period in which we’ll face intensifying climate impacts, peak oil, dramatically scaled up water scarcity, intensifying competition for land (food, feed, fuel, fiber, cities, carbon sequestration, conservation), and doubtless wider economic volatility too.
So it looks to me like we need to get cracking right now on the extensive as well as the intensive front. And I’m especially interested in two big questions here.
First: even if we assume that we’re headed for a more localised future for intensive horticulture, do we think the same applies to extensive agriculture? I honestly don’t know.
On one hand, I can see that peak oil might have the effect of reducing trade volumes – especially for bulky, low value-added goods like grain. But on the other, what the hell would that mean for food import dependent countries that have no realistic prospect of feeding themselves? Set aside for a moment import-dependent countries like the Gulf states or the Asian emerging economies, who can afford to land grab their way out; instead, look at West Africa’s vulnerability to price spikes as a result of its dependence on imported rice. The food localisation agenda is worryingly silent about what’s supposed to happen there, it seems to me.
Second: even if we assume that the future for intensive horticulture is organic, can we assume the same for extensive agriculture? As Greer says in his post, after all, most of the innovation and R&D on organics in recent years has been focused on the intensive side of things. So by extension, there’s not much data to back up the argument that we can provide enough calories – as opposed to micronutrients – to feed a world of 9 billion with no fertilisers, just traditional crop rotation.
Of course, peak oil means that fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilisers are likely to become more expensive; other fertilisers, like phosphorus, look set to become scarcer too. I’m not saying there’s a non-organic panacea here (and n.b. I’m certainly not arguing that “GM crops can feed the world” – if only it were so simple); and of course all of this is as much to do with politics as with food production systems. I’m just not sure that we can be confident that organic agriculture is a panacea either.
Back when Barack Obama was running for President, he promised “a break with the past” on how America’s intelligence machinery was managed: no more renditions, no more torture, no more secret prisons.
Odd, then, as this excellent piece in the Washingtonian from back in March observes, that the President then confirmed Steve Kappes as Leon Panetta’s deputy at the CIA – in large part at the behest of Democrats on the Hill. Consider:
When Obama’s intelligence transition team had visited Langley, it had gotten a pitch from Kappes and other CIA officials to “retain the option of reestablishing secret prisons and using aggressive interrogation methods,” according to an anecdote buried in a Washington Post story.
“It was one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had,” David Boren, the moderate Oklahoma Democrat and former Senate Intelligence committee chair who led the transition team, told the Post.
Or:
…the case of Khaled El-Masri, a German car salesman abducted by the CIA. Masri was picked up while on vacation in Macedonia in December 2003, flown to Afghanistan, and thrown into a secret dungeon, where he was interrogated and tortured for five months. Eventually he was released with no charges against him, flown back to Albania, and dumped onto a highway. In 2007, the Supreme Court let stand an appeals-court ruling that rejected Masri’s suit against the CIA, saying it posed a “grave risk” of damage to national security by revealing “state secrets.”
“From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity,” Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker last year. “But the CIA officer in charge at Langley—the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld—insisted that Masri be further interrogated.”
Even after it was determined that Masri’s German passport wasn’t a forgery and that he wasn’t the man the CIA was looking for, the officer in charge refused to release him, Mayer and others say. Masri went on a hunger strike, losing 60 pounds, until finally “skeptics in the agency went directly over the officer’s head to [CIA director George] Tenet, who realized that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man,” Mayer wrote.
Despite all this, the woman in charge of the operation has been promoted—twice—by Kappes, according to Mayer and sources who corroborated her story.
If you’re in DC on 2nd September, the environmental change and security program at the Woodrow Wilson Center is organising an event on resource scarcity and integrated analysis with me and the National Intelligence Council’s Mat Burrows as speakers and New Security Beat‘s Geoff Dabelko, who’ll be guesting on GD this autumn, as chair - invitation below. The event will also be webcast live at www.wilsoncenter.org at 12pm EST / 5pm UK time (you’ll need Windows Media Player to watch).
Integrated Analysis for Development & Security: Scarcity and Climate, Population, and Natural Resources
Alex Evans, Head of Program, Climate Change, Resource Scarcity and Multilateralism, Center on International Cooperation, New York University and Writer and Editor, Global Dashboard
Mathew J. Burrows, Counselor and Director, Analysis and Production Staff, National Intelligence Council (NIC)
Geoffrey D. Dabelko (Moderator), Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson Center
Thursday, September 2, 2010, 12 noon – 2:00 p.m.; 5th Floor Conference Room, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004 USA. Please RSVP to ecsp@wilsoncenter.org with your name and affiliation.
Alex Evans thinks energy, climate, food, natural resources, and population trends are mistakenly considered separate challenges with a few shared attributes. He suggests instead that scarcity provides a frame for tying these sectors together and better understanding of the collective implications for development and security. As a regular advisor to the United Nations and national governments, Evans will outline practical policy conclusions that flow from a focus on scarcity and integrated analysis.
As counselor and director of the analysis and production staff, Mathew J. Burrows manages a staff of senior analysts and production technicians who guide and shepherd all NIC products from inception to dissemination. He was the principal drafter for the NIC publication, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, the NIC’s flagship, long-range integrated analysis assessment that prominently featured natural resource, climate, and demographic trends. Burrows will share insights on producing and presenting integrated analysis for practitioners and policymakers.
Lots of agitation on the internets this weekend with news of cancellation of various DFID funding priorities. It all seems to stem from this leaked submission from DFID’s Policy Director, Nick Dyer, on the subject of “which previous public commitments DFID should track and honour”.
The new government took office with over a hundred such commitments on the books, the submission notes – before recommending keeping just 19 of them (including, thankfully, the £1 billion for food and agriculture and the £1.5 billion for fast start climate finance). Here’s the list of which commitments the submission proposes dropping.
Cue predictable howls of outrage from, well, everyone you’d expect (see this post on Left Foot Forward, and this Observer piece from over the weekend), plus an accusation from Caroline Crampton in the Statesman that “a silent withdrawal from the ringfencing policy seems to be underway”.
Well, hmmm… I’m not so sure. I have questions of my own about where Andrew Mitchell is taking DFID – I really hope the ultra-low profile he’s been keeping on big global policy issues like climate change is a reflection of a tactical decision to lie low until after the Spending Review, rather than a ‘new normal’; I’m seriously worried about what’ll happen to DFID’s headcount if its admin (rather than programme) budget is deemed eligible for the 25-40% cuts other departments are facing, given that DFID’s lost 1 in 6 staff since 2005 as it is; and of course I disagree with some of the items included on the proposed cancellation list (Gareth Thomas is right, for example, that cancelling funding to CERF would be a seriously bad idea, and would undermine the UK’s track record of leadership in pushing for a more coherent and effective UN humanitarian assistance system).
But overall, the howls look a bit overdone to me. For one thing, reviewing how DFID spends its budget is not the same as undoing the ringfencing over the size of that budget (as Caroline Crampton must realise). There’s no sign of the coalition backing away from its commitment on 0.7, and I honestly can’t see them doing it after all the political capital they’ve committed on the issue (for sure, there are questions about what else may be counted as aid, but that’s not what this submission is about).
More fundamentally, it’s legitimate to question some of these funding commitments. How exactly are we honouring the principle that developing countries get to decide how to spend the aid the UK gives them, if ministers keep announcing one sectoral fund after another? And what about the fact that a good few of the items on the proposed list of cancellations were the result not of careful policymaking, but of Gordon Brown phoning up DFID and demanding an announceable (usually less than 24 hours before a speech)?
Me, I think the jury’s still out on Andrew Mitchell. The themes he’s developed so far – transparency, outputs and outcomes, accountability – are all OK as far as they go, if a bit boring. I don’t see the outlines of his ‘grand strategy’ on development yet, but hopefully we’ll hear more about that in the autumn. In the meantime, reviewing where DFID’s money goes and which of the ancien regime‘s commitments he’ll retain seems not unreasonable to me.
What soldiers actually think about media reporting of inadequate provision of vehicles to troops in Afghanistan:
I didn’t doubt that someone somewhere, tired on stag, had whinged to a reporter. There were enough of them around and they knew what they were doing: giving a wide berth to the officers, who at least had rudimentary media training, chumming up to the boys with satellite phones and fresh rations and then waiting for something controversial to slip out. I suppose what riled us about the media, especially the journalists who flitted in and out like butterflies, got snaps of themselves looking stubbly in the desert and then back up to Kabul to flirt with the NGO girls, was that they hadn’t earned the right to broadcast our whingeing.
Soldiers whinge and purge and moan, that’s what kept us going, and, as the old saying went, the top brass should only really start worrying when the guys on the ground stop complaining. The well-intentioned journalists might even have been bemused at our resentment, thought they were doing us a favour, fighting our corner in public in a way we weren’t allowed to – but that was the point. We were like a family, allowed to slag each other off and curse and damn each other for all we were worth, but someone who wasn’t related didn’t have that right.
Of course there weren’t enough vehicles and of course communications were rubbish, of course we needed more helicopters and of course the boys were tired, but it had ever been and ever would be thus. No army in the world ever had all it needed, no commander had ever suffered from too many resources, and the funny thing was we resented the presumptuous journalism more than the shortages.
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