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.

The G8 is, analysts concur, in trouble.  Since the G20 shot to prominence during the financial crisis, the 8 have always looked, er, 12 members short of full credibility.

Next week, Canada hosts the G8 in Muskoka before the G20 meets in Toronto.   I’m struck by the logo for the Muskoka meeting, which seems to depict a tree being blown about in a storm and losing leaves.  This is doubtless meant to represent the fact that rural Muskoka is a dendrologist’s paradise.  But what an apt image for the G8!

UPDATE: I note that one Muskokan (?) blogger came up with this alternative image for the conference, featuring Barack, Hillary and… a symbol of Canadian power!

Sweet God, can Britain be trusted with anything these days?

Britain is facing a revolt against its rule of a group of Caribbean islands, amidst a gathering political and economic crisis in the country.  The Foreign Office suspended parliamentary democracy in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) last August after a group of visiting MPs uncovered evidence of widespread corruption in the territory, one of 14 colonial outposts for which the UK still has responsibility.

But an investigation by The Independent has found that the economic situation in the country has deteriorated sharply since then, and islanders are demanding a financial bailout of tens of millions of dollars.  Problems facing the British-appointed governor, Gordon Wetherell, include:

• Debts of tens of millions of dollars, which have left the TCI government unable to pay its bills and trying to impose swingeing cuts;
• The collapse of one of the country’s leading locally owned banks, which wiped out the savings of thousands of depositors and businesses;
• Doubts over the future of a legal investigation set up last year to prosecute former ministers accused of taking bribes.

Now, this is bad. Happily, the genius of British politics offers a solution: David Laws.

(Spoiler alert: what follows is not entirely unserious in intent.)

Mr Laws has, readers will be aware, had to resign as Chief Secretary of the Treasury for reasons that need not (and, I think, should not) concern us. This is a pity, as everyone seems to agree that he is the only person alive capable of reducing the British budget deficit in a competent fashion. Since he resigned, pretty much all of Whitehall and Fleet Street has concluded that they’d like him back sharpish.

There is a simple and happy solution here. Governor Wetherell of Turks and Caicos, who also seems to be a perfectly decent fellow, should be moved to some more fiscally sound speck of our imperial residue. Mr Laws should take his place, with a mandate to fix TCI’s budget in short order. Everyone would agree that he has then paid his penance – and then some – so we could have him back in government pronto.

That would still leave us with BP on our roster on national shame, but whatever.

Five years ago today, I had a chicken korma for dinner. I know this not because of quality of the curry (it was, as I recall, not bad) but because about half way through the meal I got a text message from a friend. This announced that the French had just voted “non” to the EU constitution.  I had been working on the possibility of a British referendum on the constitution. This suddenly seemed rather irrelevant.

That French “non” arguably started a period of political drift in Europe that, in spite the protracted passage of the Lisbon Treaty, has never really ended.  If you start talking about major reforms to the EU, it’s not long before someone says “but that will mean referendums!” And everyone knows that referendums mean trouble – not only because of the French experience but also because of the Dutch “nee” to the constitution that followed a few days later, and Ireland’s vote against Lisbon in 2008.

With the EU struggling to save the Euro – and almost every pundit in existence talking about the power-shift away from Europe – it’s tempting to look back and ask if things might be better if the French had said “oui” in May 2005.  There’s an alternative universe in which the constitution came into force in 2006 or 2007, the new EU structures were tried and tested before the financial crisis struck and, as a result, European leaders still treat the Union as a stirring political project.

But, before you shed a tear for this EU that never was, it’s worth recognizing that there’s another alternative EU universe out there in which a French “oui” led to an even worse crisis than we have today.  I explain how this could have happened in a short essay to mark the anniversary of the French vote:

A French Oui and Dutch Ja would not have marked the end of debates about the constitution. Instead, they would have signaled the start of a vicious referendum campaign in Britain that could have altered EU politics permanently.

Other countries also still had to vote on the constitution. The outcome looked very dicey in Denmark and the Czech Republic. But the political calculus was clear. If some smaller member states voted No while Britain said Yes, the constitution would get through in the end. If Britain voted No, a much more radical solution might be necessary.

Having spent much of 2004 and early 2005 chewing over polling data on British attitudes to the constitution, I am pretty sure it was on course to be rejected. The pro-constitution lobby included some awfully nice people – but they were just too nice to win. Some expected then Prime Minister Tony Blair to revitalise the campaign, but his grip on the country was waning.

If the then prime minister could not inspire the British to embrace the constitution, some politicians in France and Germany thought they could terrify them into doing so. By spring 2005, there was muttering about an “exit strategy” or, rather more credibly, a “Norwegian option” (leaving the EU but remaining in the European Economic Area) for Britain. This would have got a lot louder before a referendum.

Had Britain ended up teetering on the edge of a No vote in the spring or summer of 2006 – the likely poll dates – it would have been treated rather as Greece has been this year. It is easy to imagine a lot of talk about how German (or French, or Dutch) voters could not be expected to allow one trouble-making country to thwart their political dreams.

There would have been other strident voices in the mix. The Bush administration, yet to plunge into the grim torpor of its final years, might well have intervened vocally on behalf of its British allies. Warnings from Washington about Britain’s essential role in EU-US relations would have been counter-productive, reopening the wounds of Iraq and pushing France and Germany to form a united front as defenders of the constitution.

If Britain eventually rejected the constitution, it is unlikely that Tony Blair could have stayed in office, leaving Gordon Brown to take the reins of an exhausted Labour Party. Brown might have had to call an early election – with the Tories the guaranteed winners.

It would have been a sour victory. With Britain’s European status in doubt, the pound would have plummeted while City bankers looked for nice places to live near Frankfurt.

I can hear a few Euro-federalists muttering (if there are a few left) that what I’m describing here is not a crisis for Europe, just a crisis for Britain.  And there definitely was and is a camp of people in Brussels who feel that the EU can only achieve its potential by sidelining the Brits – and lots of Brits would be happy to be sidelined.  But the sort of fight I’m imaging here would have had unpredictable side-effects.

If, for example, France and Germany had shoved Britain out of the EU, a lot of other reasonably pro-British governments (I’m thinking of Denmark, Poland, etc.) would have been left deeply unhappy.  I can imagine headlines about France imposing a “Diplomatic Terror” on the rest of the Union, with Jacques Chirac as a latter-day Robespierre.  Cooperation on issues like the Balkans and Iran would have suffered.

It might not have been that nasty.  Charles Grant of the Center for European Reform published a widely-read paper in March 2005 looking at ways to navigate out of the crisis that would follow a British “no”.  Perhaps a “soft landing” could have been devised.  But, given the sort of diplomatic hysteria we’ve witnessed over the Euro crisis, I wonder if the voices of reason would have triumphed over Britain.

On balance, I think that the French voters may have saved the EU from some very unpleasant blood-letting with that “non” back in 2005.  I certainly wasn’t betting that the future would be bright for British EU analysts like me.  The day after that vote, and that korma, I moved to the United States.

Yesterday, I blogged about Hillary Clinton’s speech on the U.S. National Security Strategy at Brookings.  Since then, a good few pundits have popped up to knock the NSS, taking issue with its emphasis on international cooperation.  Here’s Les Gelb:

As for Mr. Obama’s strategic desire to build cooperation with nations around the world and get international institutions effectively on Washington’s side, forget about it—at least in any short or medium term. Most nations don’t do a damn thing and aren’t prepared to sacrifice a penny to what they see as “an American cause.” No amount of American niceness and understanding will change that.

And here’s the rather more measured Will Inboden:

Much of the document is devoted to heralding worthy things like “engagement,” “cooperation,” and “partnerships.” These are all essential methods of foreign policy, of course, but they are more means rather than ends in themselves.

Since hearing Clinton speak, I’ve had the chance to talk to a number of serious U.S. foreign policy types – a lot of them committed fans of the UN and other multilateral, cooperative outfits. But it’s fair to say that most of them at least shared Inboden’s qualms – and more than one agreed with Gelb. The general view seems to be “international engagement’s great, but what are your intended outcomes?” Another frequent question is “OK, if we try cooperation, when will we know that it’s working?”

What if cooperation turned out to be working on an issue like Iran, well, today? Look at this story about the growing tensions between Moscow and Tehran:

In one of the worst rows between the two countries in decades, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday admonished the Kremlin for bowing to what he said was U.S. pressure to agree to sanctions. Ahmadinejad bluntly warned President Dmitry Medvedev to be more cautious or risk being seen as an enemy of the Islamic Republic. The Kremlin told the Iranian president to refrain from “political demagoguery.”

When asked by a reporter about Ahmadinejad’s tirade, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he viewed the comments as “emotional.” Underscoring Moscow’s growing impatience with Iran, Lavrov said that Russian leaders had tried repeatedly to resolve the dispute but that Tehran had failed to respond properly.

“To our great regret, during years — not just months — Iran’s response to these efforts has been unsatisfactory, mildly speaking,” Lavrov said at a briefing in Moscow.

There may be posturing here (of course there is, Ahmadinejad’s involved). But it does look as if the U.S. strategy of working closely with Russia on Iran is having some impact. As American diplomacy improves, Iran’s gets creaky. Does that guarantee our security? No. Does it suggest that U.S. advocacy of international cooperation might alter other powers’ strategic calculations? Yes. Perhaps we’ve all been too busy asking if international cooperation works in theory to spot that it’s working in practice.

Hillary Clinton just spoke on the new U.S. National Security Strategy at Brookings.  Having been in the audience, the bits that stick in my mind are:

• Clinton defined the tensions inherent in globalization as creating a “race between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration”, which is snappy;
• She spoke convincingly about the paradox that while the U.S. needs “strategic patience and persistence” in applying “indirect power” in cases like Iran, these virtues are hard to maintain in the high-speed information age;
• We want to shift from a “multi-polar world to a multi-partner world”.

Clinton spoke a lot about China.  That’s not surprising as she’s just back from Asia.  She also highlighted America’s commitments to Japan and South Korea – again, a sine qua non given current events in that part of the world.

She didn’t mention Brazil in her main speech, which one questioner assumed was a rebuke over Lula’s efforts to befriend the Iranians.  But, rather gracefully, Clinton admitted that Brazil has a “theory of the case” when it comes to dealing with Iran – she even gave a fair summary of this theory, before saying she disagrees.

What was missing?  Europe, big-time.  NATO got two mentions in the main speech, and was raised in a follow-up question.  Answering, the Secretary of State complained about the Alliance’s “sprawling” committees.  The EU hardly featured at all.

UPDATE: read far better-informed commentaries on HC’s speech here.

FURTHER UPDATE: the speech transcript is here.

We interrupt our regular coverage to bring you breaking news from Geneva: WTO negotiators have managed to agree on something in the Doha Round!

Unfortunately, what they’re agreeing on is that we’re screwed, as ICTSD reports:

A meeting of senior officials from 19 WTO members last week was valuable primarily for helping participants reach “a common diagnosis” of the “seriousness and depth” of the problem governments face in trying to conclude the Doha Round trade talks, officials said.

Plus ca change. In other news, negotiators at the NPT review conference had been underway for 19 hours as at 6.30am UK time today – but John Duncan, the UK’s Ambassador for multilateral arms control, tweets that they’re “still some way from an agreement”.

Come on, multilateralism. Give us something this year. Anything.

Question: what does the following sorry tale have to do with the G20?

Two gay men in Malawi, convicted this week of unnatural acts and gross indecency, were sentenced Thursday to the maximum penalty allowed by law, 14 years of hard labor in prison.

Answer: Canada recently invited Malawi (currently heading up the African Union) to join the Toronto meeting of the G20 in June, along with Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Spain and Vietnam.  Cue a certain amount of embarrassment in Ottawa:

“Cases like this are cases we condemn,” Mr. Cannon said Thursday, hours after the two men were sentenced. “We will be following this case as every other case. Canada has a great reputation internationally because we stand up for human rights, and speak out on … things that need to be denounced.”

Well said, Mr Cannon. Will Canadian PM Stephen Harper and other liberally-minded G20 leaders say similar things to Malawi’s President, Bingu wa Mutharika, in Toronto?  The White House has announced that it “appalled” by the ruling, so Barack Obama might mention it.  Or perhaps Prime Minister Zapatero could use his guest status in Toronto to explain how gay marriage is legal in Spain, as it is in Canada?

Perhaps everyone will maintain a tactful silence.  But the gay rights movement has a golden opportunity to put Malawi on the spot by creating a rumpus around the G20… which would be far more interesting than the usual anti-globalization protests.

Yesterday’s meeting between Hillary Clinton and William Hague seems to have gone well.  The Washington Post reports that there was a “simpatico vibe” in the room.  Washington seems comfortable with Britain’s new politics – Mr Hague even noted that “Vice President Biden has had an excellent chat on the telephone with our new Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg”.  (I don’t know if Al Gore gave John Prescott a similar ring back in 1997, but if he did, I’d kill for a copy of the phone transcript).

The generally pro-EU Obama team are probably quite relieved that the Lib Dems will act as brake on the Tories’ Eurosceptic tendencies.  Still, Secretary Clinton used her joint press conference with Hague to underline their shared interest in “restoring confidence in the financial sector in Europe and in the Eurozone as well as the global economy.”  Given the kerfuffles over the last week over the UK’s refusal to get dragged into the fight to save the Eurozone, that was an interesting choice of words.

Mr. Hague, not a natural friend of the EU, responded thus:

I reiterated my determination that the European Union should be a strong partner with the United States in meeting our shared challenges and the determination of the new British Government to play a highly active and activist role in the European Union from the very beginning.

He went on to talk rather more fulsomely about how US-UK ties are “extraordinary”, and neither “backward-looking” nor “nostalgic”. But if you want to boil all this down to essentials, I’d suggest the following: (i) Mrs Clinton effectively said, “you’d better show discipline when it comes to the EU”; and (ii) Mr Hague basically said “OK”.

While there’s a lot of talk about the sheer size of the EU stability package agreed yesterday, doubts are already mounting about how much good it can do – as David describes below.  A familiar theme is coming through a lot of today’s analysis: the Eurogroup’s ability to react to future crises is still seriously compromised by its lack of real fiscal and political unity. Here’s Wolfgang Munchau:

This deal is going to be ineffective beyond the very short term, unless it is followed up by substantive reforms – the introduction of a single European bond, an agenda to co-ordinate economic reforms with specific relevance for the monetary union, policies to reduce economic imbalances, much tighter supervision of fiscal policies that kick in well before budgets have already been announced, and, in my view also a kernel of a fiscal union – in essence all the things over which the EU has been, and still is, in denial.

Ouch. Over at the Economist, Charlemagne rams the point home:

Is this the start of a fiscal union or political union, a great leap forwards in EU integration? I have been saying for ages that I did not sense such a leap in integration, and I stick to that. I think political will is increasing, but it is in the direction of intergovernmentalism, not federalism. In fact, as a wise colleague pointed out to me just now, this crisis has actually shattered the idea that the eurozone as a whole is a single unit. It is, in his words, the return of country risk, as markets test and probe the credit-worthiness of each member.

Another striking factor is that, like the Greek bailout, the new stability package offers the IMF a big role in propping up the Eurozone.  As I note in a short piece for Global Europe today, this is not what eurozone purists hoped for:

On Sunday, the International Monetary Fund’s board signed off on its part of the Greek bailout — a cool €30 billion, nearly a third of the total. The IMF’s involvement is arguably essential to securing the markets’ confidence in the deal and to reassuring the European governments providing the rest of the cash. It may be the only institution hard-hearted enough to hold the Greeks to account or turn up the heat if they start to go astray.

But if the IMF’s presence is reassuring, it’s also rather embarrassing for the EU. Two months ago Germany, France and the European Central Bank were against any major IMF role in Greece. The idea of an organization traditionally dominated by the U.S. propping up a Eurozone member (and so the Euro) was too much to bear. That was then.

Now there’s recognition that the EU simply can’t match the IMF’s experience in disciplining dysfunctional economies — not to mention ignoring the street protests this often involves. While European finance ministers discussed a “stabilization mechanism” to fend off future crises this weekend, this also relies on a promise of further funding from the IMF, potentially passing €200 billion. It would be an exceedingly confident EU or IMF official who entirely ruled out another IMF intervention in southern Europe this year.

All of which raises deep and difficult questions about the EU’s place in the world:

The Greek bailout marks a blow to European exceptionalism: the idea that the Union, although a friend of multilateral institutions like the IMF and UN worldwide, can run its own affairs without these organizations’ assistance (or interference).

This annoys many African, Asian and Latin American observers who complain that the EU urges them to do what multilateral organizations tell them on everything from finances to human rights. They’ve taken some grim satisfaction from events in Greece.

Pramit Pal Chauduri, a commentator for India’s Hindustan Times, summarized his view of Europe’s Mediterranean economies with a quotation from an African diplomat based in Switzerland: “Africa begins south of Geneva. The southern Europeans are just like us.”

It’s a fitting end to the British general election.

We have had thirty years of entrenched majorities – as a dominant party defined the terms of the debate, and the media made sure the opposition never caught a break. In 1997, the swing from Conservative to Labour dominance was sudden and decisive.

Now we have an utterly unpredictable polling day. Tiny shifts in the share of vote between parties and, especially, its geographical distribution could have a disproportionate impact on the political landscape that emerges on Friday.

If it’s close, it will all come down to spur-of-the-moment decisions by three very tired men. Constitutionally, Brown remains Prime Minister until someone else can command ‘the confidence of the House.’

As incumbent, he also should get first dibs on forming a new government, though it is widely expected that Cameron will declare victory early, and use the media to establish his right to govern.

As Alex has warned, there’s also a possibility that the bond markets will push the pace, as they open at 1 a.m. tomorrow morning to react to election news. Yields on UK 10-year bonds have spiked this morning, but are still lower than they have been for much of the year.

If Cameron gets the most votes and the most seats, he’ll surely go on to form a government. If not, a period of Florida-style uncertainty seems more than possible. What, one wonders, will be the UK’s equivalent of the hanging chad?

Either way, we can expect some exceptionally close Commons votes, perhaps a referendum on electoral reform, and  – surely – a Parliament that won’t last for a full term. That means more elections for parties that have bankrupted themselves during this one.

This unaccustomed volatility in the electoral system seems curiously appropriate. As the past few years have shown, we now live in an era where the UK is far from being in control of its own destiny.

Look forward and we can expect the following forces to frame the government’s strategic choices.

First, global risks will continue to drive domestic policy. Voters will not actively call for a more effective foreign policy, but they will notice and bemoan its absence.

Global forces will continue to have considerable impact on their lives, with the main sources of strategic surprise coming from beyond the UK’s borders.

Over the next ten years, moreover, most risks will be on the downside. We have lived, as I have argued, through a volatile decade. There is every reason to expect risks to continue to proliferate.

Each new crisis will create political aftershocks with demands for governments to clear up the mess, matched by inquiries into why they failed to prevent the problem in the first place.

Finally, the government will find that, in most cases, it does not have the levers to manage risks as effectively as it would like to.

Whatever the next Prime Minister wants to do, he is going to find that global volatility, a lack of money, and government mechanisms that are equipped for the problems of another age, constrain his scope for action.

On top of that, he’ll only be able to solve problems if he can rustle up a coalition of other countries, all of whom will be beset by the same problems.

If – and it’s a big if – there is to be a new dominant paradigm in British politics, replacing those established by Thatcher and New Labour, then it will be because a leader emerges who has the skill to govern well in an age of global uncertainty.

I can’t imagine a more exciting time to pitch up in Downing Street, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

[Read the rest of our After the Vote series.]

On Greece, Martin Wolf is bleak…

Yet [despite the bailout] it is hard to believe that Greece can avoid debt restructuring. First, assume, for the moment, that all goes to plan. Assume, too, that Greece’s average interest on long-term debt turns out to be as low as 5 per cent. The country must then run a primary surplus of 4.5 per cent of GDP, with revenue equal to 7.5 per cent of GDP devoted to interest payments. Will the Greek public bear that burden year after weary year? Second, even the IMF’s new forecasts look optimistic to me. Given the huge fiscal retrenchment now planned and the absence of exchange rate or monetary policy offsets, Greece is likely to find itself in a prolonged slump.

Would structural reform do the trick? Not unless it delivers a huge fall in nominal unit labour costs, since Greece will need a prolonged surge in net exports to offset the fiscal tightening. The alternative would be a huge expansion in the financial deficit of the Greek private sector. That seems inconceivable. Moreover, if nominal wages did fall, the debt burden would become worse than forecast.

…Felix Salmon depressing…

Even if Greece were running a zero primary deficit (and I’d love to know if it’s ever managed that particular feat), a default without devaluation would still keep the country mired in its current uncompetitive state. If you’re going to go through the massive pain of a default, you might as well get the upside of devaluation at the same time, and exit the euro.

At that point, the only question is: do you default and devalue now, or do you wait a couple of years? Germany and France might well want to wait, in the hope that their banks will be better able to cope with such a thing in a couple of years’ time. But from a Greek perspective, if the pain is coming, best to go through it now and bring forward the growth rebound, rather than push off the devaluation stimulus to an indefinite point in the future.

…while most of Simon Johnson’s readers have now slit their wrists:

The Europeans will do nothing this week or for the foreseeable future.  They have not planned for these events, they never gamed this scenario, and their decision-making structures are incapable of updating quickly enough.  The incompetence at the level of top European institutions is profound and complete; do not let anyone fool you otherwise.

What we need is a new approach, at the G20 level; this can definitely include debt restructuring, but it has to be done in a systematic fashion (and even then there will be a considerable degree of total mess).  Such a change in framework for dealing with these issues will not get broad support until after further chaos in Europe, but it now needs to be put into place.

The Europeans will not lift a constructive finger.  The leading emerging markets are too busy battening down the hatches (and accumulating ever more massive chests of reserves).  And the White House still seems determined to sleep through this crisis.  Expect nothing.

What are the chances of the Euro emerging from this unscathed? Increasingly slim, it seems – surely one or more countries are going to find it almost impossible to stay inside the currency union. While the UK gazes at its navel, phase 2 of the global financial crisis has firmly taken hold.

We now have an inter-related banking and sovereign debt crisis; no procedures for an orderly bankruptcy of countries (having ignored the lessons of the East Asian financial crisis); and no legal way to allow the destitute to exit the Euro.

What a mess.

Early today, I pointed out some of the difficulties Europe could cause David Cameron in his early months as PM (should he form either a minority government, find himself leading a coalition, or win a majority tomorrow).

But what would a positive agenda for a new Conservative (or Conservative-led) government look like on the EU, given (i) the dreadful problems facing the Euro (a debt crisis from which sterling is not immune); (ii) broader strains in global strains (fall out from the financial crisis, growing competition for resources, nuclear proliferation etc.); (iii) the Conservatives’ historic ambivalence about the European Union?

Here are six pointers for Cameron, should he become PM.

First, get stuck into the Eurozone crisis aiming for (in order of preference): (i) A strengthening of the Euro with greater sharing of economic sovereignty among Eurozone members (but with the UK left on one side); or (ii) An orderly removal of the weaker economies from the single currency.

Even on the Euro, the UK has some influence as an honest broker, given its position as an interested party, but not a full player. Cameron should adopt this role wholeheartedly – reminding British voters that the disorderly breakup of the single currency would be absolute disaster for the UK economy.

Second, recognise the severe dangers posed to the UK by a loss of cohesion in European societies.

It is tempting, but foolish, to see a breakdown in social order in Greece as only being a peripheral issue, or to fail to take seriously signs of a loss of trust between ethnic and religious groups across a number of European countries.

Maybe this is just a passing blip, but if I was Cameron I’d accept that it only makes sense to talk about a resilient nation within the context of a resilient European neighbourhood. We live in an era where social movements hop borders with ease. The last thing the UK needs is to get sucked into an era of riots, strikes and violence within its communities.

This may be a low probability/high impact threat to British national security, but we all remember a time when global economic collapse was regarded as so unlikely it wasn’t worth planning for, don’t we?

Third, pursue a vision of turning Europe into an outward-facing platform for managing global risks.

As Alex and I have argued, globalization is in the early stages of what is likely to prove a ‘long crisis’. The UK has made a one-way bet on a rules-based international order and we need to fight for our interests in this wager (even though meaningful progress on most issues is going to be hard to achieve).

The world is now shooting the rapids. The new government must be a clear and consistent voice arguing for Europeans to start looking outwards, making whatever contribution we can to charting a course through turbulent waters.

Another era of navel gazing is the last thing the EU can afford.

Fourth, accept that the development of a multi-layered Union is now inevitable, with the EU running at different speeds and on different tracks.

This could be good for the UK, if we: (i) don’t sulk on the sidelines; (ii) see that a distanced-but-engaged stance will often make us a more attractive partner (e.g. for the French, as they seek to balance German hegemony); (iii) take an extremely active leadership role on policy issues that matter most to the UK, compensating for times when we choose not to get involved.

Finally,  become an intelligent advocate for subsidiarity.

It should be absolutely clear that Europe is yet to work out which issues need to be managed at European, national, or more local levels. But, so far, the Eurosceptic position on this has won few friends, coming across as unconstructive and lacking nuance to many Europeans.

But that could change if Cameron is prepared to reframe Euroscepticism as an ongoing search for a more balanced, flexible and adaptable union between European nations.

Carefully tuned, that message could resonate well with at least some of our European partners, while also helping Cameron triangulate divergent camps at home, including the pro and anti-European factions on his own backbenches.

[Read the rest of our After the Vote series.]

As regular readers will know, I’ve been banging on for a long time about the need for a comprehensive database that tells us exactly how exposed international trade is to peak oil – or, for that matter, to the maritime sector being brought into the international climate regime and made subject to really severe emission controls.

After all, the bunker fuels used to power container ships and bulk carriers are much less easily substitutable than other kinds of fossil fuels. You can replace coal-fired power stations with renewables or nuclear; you can replace petrol-fuelled cars with ones that run on electricity or hydrogen.  But ships? That’s another story. As a UK government study published just before Copenhagen found, for instance, “it will be extremely challenging, and expensive, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from shipping and aviation … there are a number of options available in each sector, but currently most of these are not economically viable”.

But if we don’t have readily available substitutes for marine bunker fuels, then what happens to maritime trade – to globalisation itself, in other words – if oil costs start really soaring again, or governments start to get serious about carbon pricing?

In particular, as I asked in The Feeding of the Nine Billion, what happens to the import bills of countries that depend on food imports from overseas (like most of the fragile states in West Africa, for example)? And what does it mean for China – whose advantages on wage costs could easily end up offset by increased transport costs, as actually happened when oil costs went into triple digits?

Although a number of analysts have been asking that question ever since the oil price spiked in 2008 (most notably Jeff Rubin – see the link above and also this), what we’ve all lacked is a really serious database that works out the costs of maritime trade, and how exposed these are to energy prices. Until now.

For it turns out that the OECD have been compiling a large new Maritime Transport Costs database. Although they didn’t make a lot of noise about it, they also posted a working paper (pdf) on their website a few months back – which confirms the significance of the issue (emphasis added):

Maritime transport costs represent a high proportion of the imported value of agricultural products — 10% on average, which is a similar level of magnitude as agricultural tariffs. This study shows that a doubling in the cost of shipping is associated with a 42% drop in trade on average in agricultural goods overall. The tendency to source imports from countries with low transport costs is therefore strong. Trade in some products is particularly affected by changes in maritime transport costs, in particular cereals and oilseeds, which are shipped in bulk.

Most valuably of all, the database goes into massive levels of detail on fuel costs in particular – making it a truly indispensable part of the toolkit for working out what happens to globalisation in a world of emission controls and peak oil. So, where can you access the database?

Answer: you can’t. For news reaches me that its publication is being blocked, by one OECD member state alone – namely, the United States. For, it is said, reasons of national security. How do you like them apples? (Locally grown, I suppose.)

- Writing in the The New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman and Robin Wells highlight the importance of historical perspective in understanding the financial crisis. Experience, they suggest, shows that a failure to implement significant post-crisis reforms leads to “a resurgence of financial folly, which always flourishes given a chance.”

Michael Pomerleano explains the need for a new institution with the necessary legitimacy to provide global financial stability, arguing that “[n]ational public policies can no longer be independent of global collective-action problems”. Amartya Sen, meanwhile, explores the continuing significance of the 18^th Century ideas of Adam Smith to contemporary global economic troubles.

- Elsewhere, in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Henry Kissinger offers his views on Obama’s recent nuclear initiatives, US-China relations, and coherence among the BRICs. Over at World Politics Review, Nikolas Gvosdev reports on the lack of support forthcoming among BRIC countries for strict sanctions on Iran and highlights some of the other options open to the US administration in dealing with Tehran. Jonathan Holslag, meanwhile, assesses China’s recent diplomatic “charm offensive”, concluding that this will yield little over the long-term if words aren’t backed up by meaningful action.

- Finally, two television debates and nearly three weeks into the British general election campaign, David Marquand explains why this is “a moment for careful historical reconnaissance”. Assessing the rise of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, he explores comparisons with the three-party politics of Britain in the early 1920s. The FT’s Philip Stephens, meanwhile, assesses the impact of the debates and the implications of a hung parliament for the British electoral system.