For many years, the US has influenced UK national security thinking and vice versa. The 1947 National Security Act, pushed through by Harry Truman, was in many ways an attempt at copying the British system of government, which US policy-makers and commanders had come to admire during the years of close US-UK collaboration during WWII.

Later on, the influence tended to move the other way. The 1986 Goldwater-Nicols Act, which put the “joint” into the Pentagon, had as profound an effect on UK military organisation as the general staff system originally employed in Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

But whereas previously the ideas were studied and adapted to the UK’s constitutional set-up, today it seems anything invented in the US should be imported wholesale to the UK, regardless of whether it fits the political, legal and constitutional set-up or not.

So Richard Holbroke’s appointment as President Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan has now been matched by the choice of Sherard Cowper-Coles as the Foreign Secretary’s Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. This adds to Jack McConnell’s role as Special Envoy for Conflict Resolution and what is rumoured to be Des Browne’s imminent appointment as the Prime Minster’s envoy to Sri Lanka. (more…)

Image Author: mike_is_scrumptious

Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.

Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.

Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.

This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.

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A few days ago, I did a post on the UK government’s current horizon scanning exercise – part of the process leading up to its second National Security Strategy – in which I suggested that “the really stand-out risk that barely got a mention in the events I attended was the possibility that serious erosion of states’ capacity and legitimacy [will undermine] their ability to respond to all the global trends that we were discussing”. 

As regular readers will know, that observation comes straight out of the writings of ‘fourth generation warfare’ theorists like William Lind, Martin van Creveld and John Robb.  But what may come as more of a surprise is the interesting revelation that Kaiser Wilhelm II made a similar point yesterday in his birthday conversation with Lind*:

“My generation of kings and emperors were fixated on the age-old contest between dynasties. Would the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern defeat those of Romanoff and Savoy or the other way around? We could not see the paradigm shift welling up all around us, the onward rush of democracy and equality and socialism and all the rest of that garbage. What we needed was an alliance of all monarchies against democracy. Instead we wiped each other out, putting the levellers in charge everywhere, to the world’s ruin.”

“Does that hold any lessons for our time?”, I asked.

“From Olympus, the picture could not be more clear,” His Majesty replied. “As we were mesmerized by dynastic quarrels, so your politicians cannot see beyond the state. They think only of states in conflict. Will America be threatened by China? Should India go to war with Pakistan? Is Iran a danger to Israel? They cannot see that states are now all in the same, sinking boat, just as all the dynasties were in 1914.”

“What should states then do?”, I enquired.

“Form an alliance of all states against non-state forces, what you call the Fourth Generation,” the Kaiser answered. “The hour is late, and the state system itself has grown fragile. That is the lesson of America’s quixotic war in Iraq. You destroyed the state there, and now no one can recreate it. That is what will happen almost everywhere when states fight other states. But none of your leaders can see it, because they, too, are time-blinded. It is the human condition.”

* Since you ask: in addition to being one of the top experts around on counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare, William Lind is also an ardent Prussian monarchist.  Consequently, he marks the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II (“my reporting senior and lawful sovereign”) with a column each year in which he records a conversation with that leader’s ghost.  Previous editions are highly recommended – e.g. here and here.

I’ve been in Japan today, speaking at ‘Reforming International Institutions – Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century’,  a seminar organized by the United Nations University and the British Embassy in Japan.

You can download my talk here (with pictures, references etc) – or the text only is available below the jump. There’s a webcast too.

Headlines:

• It’s going to be a tough year. The financial meltdown has a long way to go, and the downturn is risking turning into a global depression.
• Trade is a bell wether. Protectionist pressures are already on the rise. If they gain traction, take that as a warning of a wider loss of confidence in global institutions.
• The unravelling of global economic imbalances could prove corrosive to the international order. If countries start to devalue to protect exports, expect a tit-for-tat dynamic to kick in.
• Scarcity issues (energy, water, land, food, atmospheric space for emissions) remain the key medium term driver of global change. Commodity prices will spike again as soon as there’s recovery.
• The downturn has stemmed the uncontrolled growth of emissions, but also lessened the chance of a robust global deal on climate.
• Economic bad times could well drive increased conflict. A major new security threat might be the fabled black swan – hitting just when the global immune system is already overloaded.
• If we experience a long crisis (or a chain of interlinked crises), we are likely to see either a significant loss of trust in the system (globalization retreats), or a significant increase in trust (interdependence increases). 
• You need to stretch time horizons to get the latter – shared awareness (joint analysis of risks and challenges), as a basis for shared platforms (loose coalitions of leaders), which can lobby for a shared operating system (a new international institutional architecture).
• 2009 sets a challenging agenda for the G20 (financial reform and economic recovery – but framed by a broader vision on climate, resources, security etc.)…
• …the G8 (caucus of rich countries able to tee up Copenhagen and kick start development assistance if developing countries begin to teeter)…
• …the UN (especially Ban Ki-Moon’s proposed high level ‘friend’s group’ on climate, but also as a fora for getting to grips with scarcity issues)…
• and the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO (first of all ensuring they keep their heads above water, then looking to ’save globalization from itself’).
• Oh and be ready for the backlash – people are angry and rightfully so, but that may well lead us down some populist blind alleys.

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As everyone waits to see what Obama plans to do about reforming foreign assistance in the US, back here in Britain change is in the air too: the Conservatives are coming clean about what they really think about DFID, the Department for International Development.

For a while now, there have been whispers that the Tories don’t really buy into the idea of an independent DFID – and that perhaps (gasp!) they might be considering merging it back into the Foreign Office, where it resided until 1997. Well, following last week’s Independent interview with Conservative aid spokesman Andrew Mitchell, we can put that notion to rest: “We are very committed to DFID continuing as an independent department of state”, says he.

So, a ringing endorsement of DFID, then?  Er, not quite.  Here’s the full context:

The shadow International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, said DFID had begun to encroach on the work of other departments and to come “perilously close” to setting its own foreign policy, a role he said should be reserved for the Foreign Office. He said the Foreign Office will be given much greater influence over the use of overseas aid should the Tories win the next election …

“There are times when DFID comes perilously close to pursuing its own foreign policy and that is not right,” Mr Mitchell said. “Foreign policy is decided by the government and the Cabinet, led by the Foreign Office, and DFID should not be an alternative to this. We are very committed to DFID continuing as an independent department of state. But we would make it more of a specialised development department and a little less like an aid agency,” he said.

That left me wondering just which specific instances Mitchell was thinking of in arguing that DFID was coming close to having its own foreign policy.  Iraq? Afghanistan? Climate change? (Thinking that Paul Wolfowitz might not be such a great idea for President of the World Bank?) Sadly, we don’t know.  Earlier today I called his office to ask him to elaborate, but he declined to say more.

This is a shame, on two counts. First, because it’s a cop out.  For the Opposition front bench spokesman on international development to argue that the Department he shadows has come ‘close to pursuing its own foreign policy’ is a serious claim – and one which he ought to be prepared to substantiate.  To fail to do so leaves him open to accusations of offering soundbites rather than reasoned argument.

More fundamentally, though, it’s a shame that Andrew Mitchell wouldn’t elaborate because this debate needs to be had.   (more…)

In last month’s New Atlantic, James Fallows had a fascinating interview with Gao Xiqing, Chief Investment Officer at China’s sovereign investment fund, and the man responsible for a significant chunk of China’s huge holdings of American dollars.

Gao – who Fallows dubs one of the US’s new banking overlords – thinks Americans need to learn some humility and fast.

“The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy,” he says, “and it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.”

The US should disentangle itself from expensive overseas conflicts, Gao believes, raise its diplomatic game, and – above all – tell its citizens to get saving as part of a “long-term, sustainable financial policy.”

It’s all well and good, but maybe Fallows should have pushed Gao a little harder on whether China’s own financial policy is sustainable. After all, despite recent appreciation, the yuan remains substantially under-valued against both the dollar and the euro – the main reason why the Chinese has ended up holding so much Western debt.

Gao’s comments on the dollar are somewhat contradictory (and reflect all the ambiguity of China’s own dollar position). On the one hand, it defends its status as a reserve currency. The US is still the most viable and predictable market, he says. But on the other, Chinese investment in the dollar is widely unpopular at home. According to Gao, China’s citizens ‘hate’ its support of rich Americans (“people eating shark fins”) at the expense of “poor [Chinese] people eating porridge.”

More significant than public pressure, perhaps, is Gao’s belief that the dollar is highly likely to lose value over the short to medium term (with a corresponding appreciation for the yuan). This will wipe billions of Chinese reserves (reserves that have only been built up through consumption foregone) – while challenging China’s export-led growth model:

We are not quite at the bottom yet. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Everyone is saying, “Oh, look, the dollar is getting stronger!” [As it was at the time of the interview.] I say, that’s really temporary. It’s simply because a lot of people need to cash in, they need U.S. dollars in order to pay back their creditors.

But after a short while, the dollar may be going down again. I’d like to bet on that! The overall financial situation in the U.S. is changing, and that’s what we don’t know about. It’s going to be changed fundamentally in many ways.

Unravelling these imbalances seems certain to be ugly. Reading George Cooper’s book, The Origin of Financial Crises, on a plane the other day, I was struck by strong parallels between today’s economic woes, and a crisis we have heard little about recently – the ‘Nixon Shock’ that led to the end of the Bretton Woods system. (more…)

As the US responds to Somali piracy the only way it knows how – through force - Johann Hari in the Independent reveals that it is not just illegal foreign fishing vessels (which steal $300m worth of fish every year) that have aggravated Somalis and encouraged them to resort to piracy. Europeans have also been dumping nuclear waste in the sea off the Somali coast:

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

The UN envoy to Somalia told Hari, “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” According to Hari, “Much of the waste can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply…This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them.”

The buccaneers are popular with local people. 70 per cent of Somalis interviewed by a local news site “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.” The case against pirates has never been as black and white as the world’s great powers like to paint it. Hari tells the story of one of their number who was captured by an earlier superpower in the 4th century BC:

He was brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.”

Retired Navy Admiral and former commander of U.S. Pacific forces, Dennis C Blair, has reportedly been chosen as Barack Obama’s next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the country’s senior intelligence job.

Blair, a 6th generation, Oxford-educated naval officer, occupies a number of teaching posts and once served as the first associate director of CIA for military support. He also ran the federally-funded Institute for Defense Analysis before being forced out after a conflict of interest dispute.

But it is his role as the Deputy Director of the Project on National Security Reform, a bi-partisan, Congressionally-funded reform initiative, that may say most about how, if confirmed, Blair intends to manage the U.S intelligence community. For despite the misgiving of some like Bob Baer, the former CIA analyst, Blair is both a manager and a reformer.

During my time in Washington, DC, I spent a little time with Blair, who struck me as a reformer with deep insights into how both soldiers and spies work and think. See this clip where he argues that the U.S government needs to work on the basis of “integrated, agile, collaborative, inter-agency teams” rather than the departmental stove-pipes currently in existence. Not the sound of a status-quo thinker.

Being reform-minded, however, will only go so far. Blair will need to will reform, demand reform, and pursue reform. For most intelligence-watchers believe that the Bush administration’s post 9/11 intelligence reforms were hurried and have created as many problems as they have solved. The current spy chief, Admiral Mike McConnell has done what he could to improve the situation, launching a 100-day initiative when he took over from John Negroponte, to improve “integration and collaboration” across the many intelligence agencies. Meanwhile Robert Gates has scaled down the Pentagon’s footprint on intelligence.

Yet most people believe the situation needs to improve further if the U.S is to get more for the $43 billion it spends annually on intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become a large bureaucratic contraption with hundreds of personnel camped out in a Washington airbase. Many staff are unclear about their roles vis-à-vis their CIA colleagues.

The DNI himself, though he briefs the president daily, has only limited authority over the 16 agencies in the intelligence community as the reform legislation did not give the spy chief the kind of budgetary muscle needed to lead the intelligence community. In spite of the efforts of Gates and McConnell the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office remain under Pentagon’s command. 

Then there is the question of domestic intelligence. Many believe the U.S should create a domestic intelligence agency like Britain’s Security Service. But how to do so and avoid adding complexity to the intelligence system, slowing down rather than promoting information flows among the existing agencies, while respecting civil liberties? And who would run such an agency – the DNI, the Homeland Security Secretary, the FBI, the CIA?

Finally, there is a need to look again at Congress’ role. Oversight has deteriorated amid battles between different committees. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Intelligence Oversight Board have also atrophied in the last eight years while the Bush administration failed to create a Civil Liberties Board, despite being mandated to do so by Congress.

Blair seems well-placed to lead a reform process without allowing it to descend into something like the Church Committee hearings, which investigated intelligence-gathering by the CIA and FBI after the Watergate affair, but ended up encouraging many of the intelligence community’s bad traits. No doubt his confirmation process will drag up the conflict-of-interest case that forced him out of his last government-funded job, as well as his controversial role in opening diplomatic ties with Suharto’s Indonesia.

But the real question is: how ambitious will Obama be in leading changes in Congress; and reforms in the Executive Branch to ensure a well-functioning intelligence apparatus that can deal with foreign and domestic threats, produce politically-neutral assessments, work with other government departments and guarantee civil liberties. Obama’s choice of Blair shows the President Elect wants to reform, but also wants to keep the intelligence community on board.

It was a very busy weekend on Global Dashboard. So in case you missed it:

Somalia’s piracy is not just good news for the pirates themselves. Whole industries are springing up or expanding to take advantage of the bonanza.

In the town of Eyl, the pirates’ main base, where hundreds of foreign hostages are being held, new restaurants have opened to serve non-Somali food to the captives. Money changers, property developers and Land Rover dealers are doing a roaring trade as the pirates seek to invest their cash. And firms elsewhere in Africa and in the Middle East have spotted an opportunity for a quick buck by helping out with the payment system. Pirates want hard cash, not bank transfers, because getting the money from banks is slow and well-connected warlords can plunder it. So the ransoms have to be taken directly to the ships. This, however, increases the cost and the danger. As a security expert interviewed by the Sunday Times explains: “There have been attacks by other pirates on the way in [to deliver the ransom].” Air drop, he says, is safer, and “there are firms doing it out of Dubai and Mombasa.”

Smaller businesses are thriving too. Selling $3 cups of tea on credit to pirates before they brave the high seas is making life a little easier for a young mother in Eyl. Her clients pay her when they receive the ransoms. “If it wasn’t for them,” she told a Reuters reporter, “I wouldn’t be able to make a living.”

Do we need to call ‘time out’ on global risk analysis?  The NIC report on global trends 2025 is one of a plethora of recent publications on global risks and security challenges from think tanks, Government departments, the defence community, NGOs, business, academia, and the media. Do we really need any more?

3 questions spring to mind:

1. Are we suffocating under the weight of all this analysis?
2. Should we consider having a period of consolidation and reflection?
3. Do we need a transformational shift from analysis to action?

How many times do we need to be told that:

• Since the end of the Cold War, the international landscape has been transformed.
• During the next 30 years, every aspect of human life will change at an unprecedented rate, throwing up new features, challenges and opportunities.
• The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
• The formidable acceleration of information exchanges, the increased trade in goods and as well as the rapid circulation of individuals, have transformed our economic, social and political environment
• New players—Brazil, Russia, India and China will bring new stakes and rules of the game to the international high table.
• Increase in global population will put pressure on resources—particularly land, energy, food, and water—raising the spectre of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
• There are a set of interconnected set of threats and risks, including international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics, and trans-national crime.

Surely it is time to complement existing analytical work with some ideas for action or even, as someone suggested earlier, divert our focus to analysing potential ’solutions’ rather than identifying the same ‘problems’ time and again. Given the vast number of reports and papers in the system, surely now is the time to consider what improvements and upgrades can and need to be made to the global system in response to the myriad of issues the international community faces.

In order to do this we need to move away from the comfortable exercise of scene setting, describing the world around us and instead take a different approach. One simple way would be to look East and see what Indian & Chinese thinkers and academics are developing. Analysis obviously plays a crucial role in thinking through issues and in policy-making but the very process of analysis can be seductive; providing us with breathing space when we actually need to be pushing on and debilitating by creating ever greater complexity which can often lead to inaction.

In the words of the King:

A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark

The web-comic Shooting Wars, hit people’s screens in May 2006. It followed a young journalist named Jimmy Burns, who found himself video-blogging across the front lines of Iraq in the year 2011. At the time of its release, only a handful of people were ready to believe US forces would be in the country for much longer. In 2006 sectarian violence was spilling across streets and districts in Iraqi cities. Infighting, both between Iraqis and the coalition forces occurred with depressing regularity. Most notably, a British Brigadier attacked America’s ‘Hollywood’ generals in April, while later in the year, the Iraq Study Group “strongly urged” a large pull back of American troops in Iraq in a private note leaked to the media. The Independent’s Middle East journalist Patrick Cockburn summed up the hopelessness of the conflict at the end of 2006:

The sense of Iraqi identity may have been damaged beyond repair. But, more than most states, Iraq is dominated by its capital and Shia and Sunni will continue to fight to rule Baghdad until they either win or know there is no hope of victory.

View of Basra from a Merlin Helicopter

What a difference two years makes.

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Ahead of this weekend’s G20 summit, David and I have published a short paper entitled A Bretton Woods II worthy of the name.  Key points:

- The summit is unlikely to be able to live up to its billing.  Leaders do not yet understand the nature of the problem well enough to be able to implement viable solutions.  However, the problem is more fundamental than a simple lack of shared awareness. 

 - History suggests that leaders will only think the unthinkable on institutional reform once the challenge they face has really hit rock bottom. But history also suggests that we are wrong to think that the worst of the crisis is now past, given that many past banking crises have taken five years or more to unravel.

 - Bretton Woods 1 looked across the whole international economic waterfront in 1944, while this weekend’s summit will be much more narrowly focused.  Leaders will make a big mistake if they try and tackle finance in isolation, given the growing impact of resource scarcity, and that 2009 is supposed to see another ambitious global deal – on climate.

 - We need to recalibrate what we expect from globalization through a serious debate about subsidiarity. Where has globalization gone too far, too fast? Where do we need more integration at a global level? These were exactly the questions that preoccupied Keynes in 1933, when he weighed the relative benefits of global versus local across a range of variables.  We need a similar debate today as a precursor to serious international economic reform.

 - Leaders need to extend their horizons in (at least) five directions: onto longer time scales; beyond financial regulation into wider resource scarcity challenges; into other international processes, especially climate; towards grand bargains with emerging powers; and beyond government, to non-governmental networks.

Full version after the jump, or better yet here’s the pdf.

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The UK defence budget is tight. Defence spending plans are tighter still. While Alex has posted on what the credit crunch will mean for development and multilateralism I want to offer a quick thought or two on how the credit crunch may offer an opportunity to explore new missions for each of the three services. While the UK Government is committed to a replacement for Trident and two new aircraft carriers, both are likely to have an impact on the MoD’s procurement options in the future, unless… the three services adapt their missions and in doing so share the burden more between services and across Whitehall. Given the rapidly changing security environment is the Royal Navy’s future more likely to be in helicopters, hospitals and responding to hijacking on the high seas? Look at what’s happening over the pond.

Exhibit A:

The US Navy is trying to set a new course, embracing a shift in strategy that focuses heavily on administering humanitarian aid, disaster relief, and other forms of so-called soft power to woo allies to help the United States fight global terrorism. The Navy’s new maritime strategy, unveiled this fall and shared by the Marine Corps and Coast Guard, is a shift in tone that reflects a broader change in the Pentagon’s approach as it organizes itself for what many military officials refer to as a “generational conflict” against extremism. It’s a move away from the go-it-alone stance of the Bush White House and toward a new emphasis on building partnerships abroad and finding common interests. While the Navy says it will maintain its ability to use the “hard power” for which it’s known, the new focus represents an important change – the first major rewrite of strategy in more than 20 years. It puts greater emphasis on humanitarian aid, disaster relief, “partnering” with foreign navies also working to combat piracy, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Exhibit B:

Hospital ships are, by design, multi-use vehicles that are capable of serving in command and control, educational outreach, or as virtual sea bases. A future hospital ship should be tied into some sort of modularized container system that may mirror the modules used by the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. A ship that might be charged with high-tempo combat trauma care will need a flat deck that is able to withstand the heat and weight of large helicopters. A well deck also would be recommended, although it could be passed over if the ship is able to dock or maintains an organic docking system.  Under a two-tier system, smaller, cheaper ambulance-like platforms could work in tandem with a larger, more expensive command-and-control “trauma” platform or aid ship tenders where the crew of a smaller, low-endurance craft can take a breather or swap out crews.

Exhibit C

Piracy Map 2008

From the BBC: France has launched two operations already this year to free French ships and crew seized by Somali pirates. Pirates are still holding the Ukrainian ship, the MV Faina, and its cargo of tanks and military hardware, off the Somali coast. They demand $20m (£12m). The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) said on Thursday that 63 of 199 incidents of piracy worldwide recorded in the first nine months of this year had taken place off east Somalia and the Gulf of Aden. This was double the 36 attacks blamed on Somali pirates out of 198 worldwide in the same period last year, the bureau added.