It’s obvious that the Asia-Pacific will dominate American strategic thought for the foreseeable future. Today an Obama administration official confirmed just that:
The Obama administration is “rebalancing” U.S. foreign policy by enacting a “turn to Asia,” a senior State Department official said Tuesday. “As the long shadow of 9/11 recedes, we are witnessing the re-emergence of the Asia-Pacific as a key theater of global politics and economics,” Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of State, told a House panel.
What does this mean for America’s NATO allies? This is a topic I addressed briefly in an op-ed for the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), which has launched an enjoyable online debate about transatlantic cooperation:
Since the Iraq war peaked, US strategic debate has increasingly shifted away from counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations to securing the Asia-Pacific. This has involved diplomatic outreach to India and South-East Asia and a military focus on China’s growing capabilities and its threat to US vessels in the western Pacific.
The European security debate is also evolving, but it is driven by financial concerns. While China’s rise will frame American security policy for years ahead – even in the event of a major terrorist attack – no comparable challenge shapes European worldviews. Russia’s uneven resurgence worries many EU and NATO members, but Moscow’s ambitions centre on energy deals and it does not present a true strategic game-changer. Instead, the need for austerity dominates European thinking.
Do European military forces have any role to play in Asian-Pacific affairs? In another contribution to the EUISS debate, Daniel Keohane argues that Europe won’t look far beyond its periphery, and he doesn’t find this surprising:
Put simply, the US is an Asian power, but the Europeans are not. This is not new. During the Cold war, France and Britain carried out a military operation in the Suez Canal, but they did not join the Americans in Vietnam.
Indeed, future historians may conclude that Afghanistan was the exception that proved this post-World War II rule. Most Europeans went to Afghanistan for the sake of their close relationship with the United States, not because it was an existential threat to their security. That unhappy experience makes it very unlikely that Europeans would follow Americans on future military operations beyond Europe’s neighbourhood.
Richard Gowan, therefore, is right about the emerging strategic divergence between Europeans and Americans. But for Europeans the issue is not so much that the Pentagon cares more about Asia; it is that Washington cares much less about Europe.
There are lots of other contributions to the EUISS debate, and they’re all worth a look. But most of them don’t really address the problem of Europe’s (ir)relevance in the Pacific theater. Quite a few contributors are still focused on the need for better Euro-American cooperation in the European theater instead, and all (including Daniel and me) recognize that financial concerns will affect both European and American security policy very deeply. Nonetheless, I wonder whether the European Security community – and U.S. commentators focused on Europe – have really grappled with the implications of a shift from an Atlantic-centered to a post-Atlantic security order…
October 4, 2011 at 5:35 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, North America | 9 Comments
Trying to navigate around the special security cordon for the UN General Assembly last week, I got stuck behind a fellow with closely-cropped hair, a massive American flag and a tee-shirt with “THE UN SUCKS” written on it by hand. That got me thinking, and I have summarized my thoughts in a new op-ed for E!Sharp:
Quite a few U.S. and European officials might have liked to march with the “UN SUCKS” guy. The Palestine debate appeared to confirm that UN diplomacy is weighted against Western interests.
Developing countries backed the Palestinians. The Obama administration stuck with Israel, but was vilified at home for not heading off the issue altogether. The Europeans, failing to declare a single position in advance, looked conciliatory but rather confused.
So is it finally time to give up on the UN? I don’t think so…
China and Russia – the West’s usual foes in the Security Council – have looked uneasy. Although the two powers have a reputation for defending sovereignty and opposing Western interventionism, both proved ready to compromise on these principles in 2011.
China approved tough measures to deal with the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire and let the U.S., France and Britain have their way over Libya. In the Libyan case in particular, Beijing calculated that grand-standing against the West would do its economic interests harm.
Russia, generally more pugilistic, seemed weak. It tried to defend the defeated Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo from Western pressure, but eventually backed down. It failed to follow through on threats to block any UN action over Libya. When they lack China’s support, the Russians appear to be an increasingly hollow power in the Security Council.
China and Russia have united in defence of the Syrian regime, heading off even the mildest Western resolutions condemning Assad’s crackdown on protestors. Brazil, India and South Africa – all holding temporary seats on the Security Council – followed along.
Yet in August, increasingly concerned for their international image, the Brazilians and Indians fixed a compromise deal to condemn Syria’s behavior. The agreed text was still extraordinarily mild. Yet the appearance of cracks among the non-Western powers holds out the possibility, however uncertain, that the Europeans and U.S. may be able to pull together unexpected coalitions of allies to push for action through the UN in future crises.
The problem, as the op-ed goes on to say, is that both the U.S. and EU have internal problems (looming elections in one case, a lack of political cohesion and the Euro crisis in the other) that may well prevent them from seizing this moment.
Nonetheless, a lot of recent coverage of UN affairs has been simplistic, with pundits applying a simple “with us or against us” test to countries like India, and concluding that they will be in the “against” column forever. The art of diplomacy is a bit more complicated that, and there are potential openings to reshape the UN (if gradually).
For a more detailed mapping of those openings, check out my latest report with Franziska Brantner on the UN and human rights for ECFR, published last week.
September 27, 2011 at 9:55 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Middle East and North Africa, North America | 1 Comment
When the current British government took office, it decreed a limit on the number of special advisers that each minister was allowed to appoint. Recent figures show that David Cameron has sixteen “spads”, Nick Clegg has eleven, and most other ministers have just one or two. Overall, there are still fewer than eighty advisers wandering around Whitehall today. Some civil servants probably think that’s still many too many.
Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, Nigeria, would beg to differ. Today he announced the appointment of a modest 924 special aides…
Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, on Monday, approved the appointment of 94 Senior Special Assistants (SSAs), 20 Special Advisers (SAs) and 810 Special Assistants.
A statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Ahmed Dandija, also announced the appointment of 24 Directors-General in charge of various sectors of the state.
Yuguda also approved the appointment of 20 Deputy Chairmen and 82 members for the Local Councils in the state.
The statement added that all the appointments were with immediate effect.
One can only imagine that the administration of Bauchi State is about to make a great leap forward. [H/T Teju Cole.]
September 27, 2011 at 7:05 pm | More on Africa, Influence and networks, Off topic, UK | Comments Off
Yesterday, I posted a preview of Thursday’s Security Council debate on preventive diplomacy, and predicted that it would be boring. The meeting certainly generated a fair bit of blather, but it wasn’t all diplomatic consensus-building:
“When conflict looms, the world looks to the U.N. for a decisive response,” said British Foreign Minister William Hague. “In Libya… our swift action prevented a human catastrophe and saved the lives of thousands of civilians.”
Hague went on to say that the British government viewed U.N. Security Council action as “long overdue” on Syria. “The consequences of inaction would weigh heavily upon us if we turn a blind eye to murder and oppression,” he said.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle called on the Security Council to “send a strong message to the government in Damascus to stop the killing of its people.”
Not all Security Council members were on the same page when it came to international intervention, however. The representatives from India, Brazil, and South Africa criticized what they saw as overreaching by the United Nations in Libya. South African President Jacob Zuma was particularly critical of the United Nations for ignoring the peacemaking efforts of the African Union.
“Such blatant acts of disregard of regional initiatives have the potential to undermine the confidence regional organizations have in the U.N. as an impartial and respected mediator in conflicts,” he said.
Indian Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna said that the international community needs to let peaceful processes play out longer before resorting to the use of force.
“The use of force also leads to collateral damage,” he said. “In many places, the use of force has prolonged conflicts and the cure has turned out to be worse that the disease itself.”
Ouch. It’s a sign of the ill-temper engendered Libya and Palestine at the UN that a debate on the motherhood-and-apple-pie issue of prevention got so tetchy…
September 23, 2011 at 8:35 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Middle East and North Africa, UK | Comments Off
EU President Herman Van Rompuy has managed to pull off a nice little joke by giving Henry Kissinger his phone number. Get it?
September 23, 2011 at 8:22 pm | More on Europe and Central Asia, Off topic | 4 Comments
This afternoon, taking the briefest of breaks from arguing over Palestine, leaders are gathering in the Security Council to talk about preventive diplomacy. Josh Rogin of FP’s Cable blog will be there. He’s excited by the turnout:
The meeting will be chaired by the President of Lebanon Michel Sleiman. Other heads of state in attendance will be Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa. Portugal will be represented by its prime minister, while the remaining council members will be represented at the level of foreign minister.
Oddly enough, I haven’t been invited. But my colleague Emily O’Brien and I have published a brief preview of the event over at World Politics Review. We’re not convinced it’s going to be a thriller:
The Security Council session is unlikely to generate anything more than well-aged truisms: Prevention is better than reaction; diplomacy is better than force, and so on.
That may sound cynical, but last month I somehow guessed that a similar (if lower-level) Security Council debate on peacekeeping would be stunningly dull, and I was right. But, just like peacekeeping, preventive diplomacy matters:
Officials at the U.N. have been working hard to frame a clearer picture of how and why preventive diplomacy succeeds and fails. The current thinking on the issue is summarized in a report from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with the pithy title, “Preventive Diplomacy: Delivering Results,” which will serve as the backgrounder for Thursday’s debate.
As the report states at the outset, Ban has been interested in boosting the U.N.’s role in preventive diplomacy ever since he took office in 2007 following a long career in South Korea’s foreign service. Ban felt that the U.N. was too heavily invested in large-scale, high-cost military peace operations and had given too little attention to diplomacy.
This was a huge oversimplification, one that failed to capture the stabilizing if imperfect role of hefty U.N. peace operations in places like Haiti and Liberia. But it contained a kernel of truth. So it is welcome that Ban and his undersecretary-general for political affairs, American diplomat B. Lynn Pascoe, set about retooling the U.N. secretariat’s preventive capacities.
Over the past four years, U.N. officials have scored some noteworthy successes, as the new report describes. These include helping resolve the crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008 that forced more than 200,000 civilians into flight; assisting Guinea emerge from a long political crisis in 2009-2010 to hold credible elections; and working with European diplomats to contain the horrific violence in Kyrgyzstan.
These successes have underlined the value of the U.N. Secretariat’s roster of experienced mediators, facilitators and diplomats. Still, Ban’s report emphasizes the need to boost the caliber of U.N. officials further and make their work easier by overcoming the phalanx of budgetary and staffing rules that can delay the U.N.’s efforts interminably.
These budgetary constraints and unwieldy hiring processes might seem irrelevant to anyone not immersed in the minutiae of the U.N.’s bureaucracy. But they matter. The organization’s attempts to engage meaningfully with the Arab Spring were held up by a lack of financial resources and a lack of experts in the region. The new report outlines options for increasing the U.N.’s readiness for future crises, like expanding its small network of regional political offices.
To be honest, I think that the UN report could have been a bit bolder in its proposals for boosting conflict prevention, but at least it will get some high-level attention this afternoon. Hopefully some UN members will be motivated to follow up with related policy initiatives. Nonetheless, Emily and I aren’t convinced that all the big powers on the Security Council are 100% committed to preventive diplomacy…
The actors most likely to stop an escalating crisis in its tracks remain the world’s great powers. But after the crises of the past year, it is hard to argue that these powers have a coherent grasp of this responsibility. Take the example of Syria. China and Russia have opposed even mild condemnations of the Syrian regime, while other emerging powers on the Security Council — notably Brazil, India and South Africa — have only been marginally more flexible. The U.S. and its European partners have also struggled to find a mix of economic, diplomatic and moral pressure to affect decisions in Damascus. The confusion reflects the many political, security and economic interests all the powers have in Syria.
So it’s nice that the Council’s talking about the importance of prevention. But treat its pronouncements on the topic with caution. I look forward to Josh Rogin’s take.
September 22, 2011 at 5:48 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Middle East and North Africa | 1 Comment
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.
August 29, 2011 at 1:13 am | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, South Asia | Comments Off
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:
August 25, 2011 at 4:54 pm | More on Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, Off topic | 1 Comment
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.
August 24, 2011 at 5:02 pm | More on Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development | Comments Off
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.
August 23, 2011 at 8:48 pm | More on Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, Off topic | 2 Comments
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.
August 23, 2011 at 6:30 pm | More on Middle East and North Africa, Off topic | Comments Off
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.
August 22, 2011 at 6:38 pm | More on Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America | Comments Off
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.)
August 21, 2011 at 9:37 pm | More on Economics and development, Influence and networks, North America | 1 Comment
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?
August 19, 2011 at 4:44 pm | More on Africa, Conflict and security, Influence and networks | Comments Off
There is no shortage of post-riot commentary pieces about what to do with Britain’s under-educated and unemployed teens. The prize for most dangerous proposal so far goes to Mr. Mark Street of Doha, Qatar, an expat Brit who writes to the Financial Times to express his “shame at these disgraceful scenes.” A lot of us share that sentiment. But I’m not quite so keen on Mr. Street’s proposed solution:
My suggestion would be to introduce legislation to create a compulsory two-year “national service” for young people leaving school with minimal qualifications. Not a military service, but one with military discipline, the objective of which is to help the less fortunate in places such as the Horn of Africa, building basic infrastructure or distributing food aid. That would give some purpose to their lives, and showing them how well off they are in relation to so many people in the world might teach some lessons that our education system has so profoundly failed in doing.
To which one can only say no, no and thrice no. I suppose I just about grasp the “moral education” argument here. But does anyone really think it would be feasible – let alone advisable – to ship thousands of narky British teenagers into a famine-stricken and violent part of the world like the Horn of Africa? Who would protect the truculent little fellows from bandits and Islamist militias? Would this army of hoodied road-builders have to be housed in a sort of gulag archipelago of work camps? How resistant would they be to disease? How many vats of high-factor sun cream would we need to ship through Mombasa to protect these pale-skinned sons of Britannia from the glaring African sun? Has anyone noticed that the Empire is dead yet?
And so on and so forth. While I am always sympathetic to conservative nostalgia, Mr. Street would probably be best advised to advocate more practicable old-school policy options, such as putting rioters in the stocks and pelting them with offal.
August 12, 2011 at 4:53 pm | More on Africa, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Off topic, UK | 1 Comment
Delicious
Rss
Twitter - David Steven