Peacekeepers have refused to leave a rebel-held town in Darfur, despite warnings from the Sudanese government that an attack is imminent. About 5,000 civilians took shelter at the UN-African Union base after the government said the army was preparing to take Muhajiriya from rebels. A spokesperson for the peacekeeping force – called Unamid – said they would not leave civilians unprotected.

Mediators are talking to both sides to try to prevent more fighting.

The rebel Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) seized Muhajiriya two weeks ago, sparking fierce fighting, including air strikes.

“We are not going to leave while there are thousands of displaced people around our camp,” Unamid spokesman Noureddine Mezni told Reuters news agency. “The Sudanese government should be aware that their actions are endangering civilians and Unamid.”

On Sunday, Khartoum had warned peacekeepers to leave the town. “We are not ordering them around, we are asking them,” said Akuei Bona Malwal, Sudan’s ambassador to the African Union. “It’s sort of like informing them: ‘Something will be happening here,’” the AP news agency reports him as saying.

Meanwhile, Tahir al-Feki, of the Jem rebels, said they were expecting “a large attack.”

“They [government forces] are bringing tanks so they must be preparing to pound the town,” he told Reuters.

This may augur the organization’s redemption – or a catastrophe.

The financial and economic crash of 2008, the worst in over 75 years, is a major geopolitical setback for the United States and Europe. Over the medium term, Washington and European governments will have neither the resources nor the economic credibility to play the role in global affairs that they otherwise would have played. These weaknesses will eventually be repaired, but in the interim, they will accelerate trends that are shifting the world’s center of gravity away from the United States.

On the other hand, he argues that China will be a net beneficiary.  True, it’s taking an economic hit, its exports are falling fast, urban real estate is falling, and growth is slowing rapidly. But its financial system is relatively unaffected by toxic assets, and in any case doesn’t play that big a role in its economy. Plus, it has a huge budget surplus and current account surplus, little government debt, and moumental foreign exchange reserves.  So,

China’s global influence will thus increase, and Beijing will be able to undertake political and economic initiatives to increase it further. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are just concluding an agreement that would create the world’s largest free-trade area, and Beijing could take additional steps toward Asian interdependence and play a stronger leadership role within the region.

China could also expand its diplomatic presence in the developing world, in order to further its model of capitalism and, in places such as Angola, Kazakhstan, and Sudan, satisfy its thirst for natural resources. In the midst of this crisis, it might also help finance emergency loans, either directly, through bilateral financing arrangements, or indirectly, by creating an additional facility at the IMF that could expand the organization’s available credit beyond what current quotas allow.

India, on the other hand, may also emerge relatively unscathed, but Altman thinks it lacks “the wealth or the internal cohesion of China”, noting that Manmohan Singh’s government only just avoided losing a confidence vote over its nuclear deal with the US. [I take Altman's point about the wealth,but I'm not sure that India has lower internal cohesion than China - I suspect India would prove a good deal more socially resilient than China in the case of a worse downturn than he's predicting in both countries.]

Overall conclusion:

This historic crisis raises the question of whether a new global approach to controlling currencies and banking and financial systems is needed. Many economists and leaders are advocating such a reordering and calling for a Bretton Woods II. But creating a wholly new global financial order would be unworkable. Financial and currency markets are too large and too powerful to be contained; the days of managed exchange rates are over. Global financial regulation would probably cause more problems than it would solve, if only because the reforms needed in the West differ too much from those required elsewhere. A better approach is to focus on a few key measures.

Specifically, strengthening the IMF (enlarge the capital base, suspending conditionality, make China and other cash-rich states bigger shareholders); replace the “obsolete” G8 with the G20; and revise the Basel II guidelines on bank capitalisation.

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.  There are big questions about DFID’s relationship with the Foreign Office, and how coherent UK foreign policy as a whole is now, or could be in the future.  And to be fair, most people in the aid sector trust Andrew Mitchell and think he’s one of the good guys (indeed, one suggestion I heard today was that Mitchell’s interview was part of a settlement thrashed out between him and Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague – whereby having DFID ‘brought to heel’ was the price Mitchell had to pay for the Conservatives committing to keep DFID independent, with its budget intact).

So what to make of the substance of Mitchell’s argument?  Well, NGOs – and many within DFID – will have alarm bells ringing in their ears at the notion that “the Foreign Office will be given much greater influence over the use of overseas aid ” under a Conservative government.

After all, last time that was the case it didn’t work out so well: just look at the Pergau Dam, a hydroelectric project in Malaysia that hoovered up £230 million of British aid, with negligible impact on poverty (“an abuse of the aid system” is how DFID’s former Perm Sec Tim Lankester described it), but a fat pay-off for the British firms involved in construction.  It was precisely to prevent such abuses from recurring in future that Labour enacted the International Development Act, which enshrines in law that DFID’s budget is only to be used for purposes of poverty reduction.

Today, though, various commentators – including, now, Andrew Mitchell – wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far.  Fine, aid should be about poverty reduction – but couldn’t DFID be a little more flexible in how this is interpreted?

And in fact, there’s often something to these arguments. It’s only recently, for example, that the UK development community has really accepted that conflict prevention is a core part of poverty reduction – pretty extraordinary, when you reflect on the impact that conflict has on prospects for achieving the MDGs in places like Congo, Sierra Leone or Sudan. On the other hand, there’s also a big risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Is the aid budget really there to repatriate failed asylum seekers to refugee camps in developing countries, for instance? Someone once thought so…

But in a larger sense, to zone out immediately on the implications of Mitchell’s comments for the aid budget is perhaps also to miss the point. In most developing countries, it’s not at all clear that the principal obstacle to development is the lack of aid cash, however much Bono and Jeff Sachs might want us to think so (though there are exceptions). More fundamentally, development prospects depend on:

1) the quality of the country’s institutions, its governance, its political process; and

2) all the ways in which actions taken elsewhere in the world affect prospects for development in the country – e.g. emitting carbon, selling arms, providing tax havens, imposing one-size-fits-all aid conditionality, diverting food to biofuels, subsidising EU and US agriculture, and so on.

And this is where I think Andrew Mitchell’s argument is a missed opportunity. Fine, if you think DFID is just a tube through which to funnel money into developing countries then by all means clip its wings, put it back in its box, and leave the politics to the big boys over at King Charles Street. But if, on the other hand, you think that delivering development involves being politically sophisticated – both in partner countries and on the global stage – then a strong, independent-minded DFID, with views of its own about foreign policy, is an absolute sine qua non.

To be sure, the fact remains that DFID’s relationship with the FCO is probably overdue for a review.  But to begin that process from the premise that DFID needs to be brought to heel is not the right starting point. If we’re honest, after all, FCO is just as capable of dysfunctionality as is DFID.  And if DFID is sometimes a bit too cocksure about its mission in the world, FCO is sometimes pretty unsure of what its role is in a world of transboundary issues in which every government department has its little bit of foreign policy.

The real problem is not, as Mitchell argues, that DFID has begun to ‘encroach’ on other areas of foreign policy; it’s that everyone is encroaching on everyone.  The old organisational silos simply don’t match the reality of a world in which the borders between areas of policy are as porous as those between countries.  Even if DFID were abolished tomorrow, the FCO still wouldn’t be in charge of foreign policy – because European integration and globalisation have between them scattered foreign policy from one end of Whitehall to the other.

By extension, where I do agree with Andrew Mitchell is where his interview ends up – with the need to ask what a coherent, integrated approach to all foreign policy issues would look like (something David and I have written about before – here’s the note on same that we did just before Gordon Brown became PM).  This is a much bigger issue than just DFID’s relationship with the FCO (and actually, I think that most people in DFID would welcome the chance to have this big picture discussion – if only the old guard at FCO could restrain themselves from rattling DFID’s cage and bringing all the old fears back to the surface).

Still, perhaps we’ll get there in the end.  As chance would have it, discussions of what a more integrated foreign policy strategy might look like are just getting underway as the Government embarks on the second iteration of its National Security Strategy, due for publication some time this summer.  As I write, I’m at a Wilton Park conference organised by several UK government departments, which will be feeding in indirectly to that review.  While naturally respecting Wilton Park’s firm rules about discussions being off the record, I don’t think I’m giving away any state secrets if I report that the DFID and FCO officials who are here, at least, seem to be able to work together rather well. Finding the right context for discussions of shared futures is half the battle, it seems.

If she were given the State Department, she is more likely to follow Colin Powell’s management style -– which a place like Foggy Bottom sorely needs –- than emulate Condi Rice’s neglect of the department. At the same time, she is likely to play a key role in foreign policy, unlike General Powell, as President Obama is compelled to focus on the economy.

It is just that I think Senator Clinton would do better at the Pentagon. She supported the Iraq War, which will make her better at coaxing the military into a draw-down of forces and a shift of focus onto Afghanistan. Though the officers and soldiers will accept the democratic transition from Bush to Obama, a military that has gone to war twice, suffered both casualties and reputationally, and seen itself as the sharp end of U.S foreign policy for eight years will need to be helped to make the switch by someone they trust. With her hawkish views, time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and work on Unified Action, a large U.S military exercise, the New York senator is well placed to take this role on.

Being the first female Pentagon chief would also be in keeping with her ceiling-busting ambitions and President Elect Obama’s transformational creed. If she handles the portfolio competently –- and is not tired by politics or mired in scandal — she would be well-placed to make a run for the White House in 2016 (as a sprightly 69-year old, a year younger than when Ronald Regan was elected).

Finally, Hillary Clinton also seems to realize something which seems to be missing from the Obama transition: the need for the U.S National Security System to be reformed. She was an early supported of a so-called Goldwater-Nichols reform of the U.S government and would bring a reforming zeal to the Pentagon, which is needed if the U.S military is to take on task such as counter-insurgency, stabilisation and security assistance with the same zeal that it embraces war-fighting.

At the State Department, President Obama needs someone that’s both hawkish but also a natural negotiator. To me, Bill Richardson fits this bill. His Hispanic heritage and Roman Catholic faith would make his appointment another first. But better still, he knows the UN from his time as U.S ambassador to the world body and has been a key negotiator in talks with North Korea and Sudan.

Though Clinton may have boasted of visiting 80-some countries, Richardson has toured some of the most hostile corners of the planet, venturing into nations where Americans are seldom welcome. In 1998, Richardson was the first Cabinet-level official to visit Afghanistan in 24 years. He went to persuade Taliban leaders to expel Osama Bin Laden. But Richardson is no softie. Shortly after Richardson’s Afghan visit, the Al Qaeda chief threatened to kill Richardson. That sentiment is mutual, with Richardson responding he’d try to “kill him first.”

Appointing Richardson is not without problems, especially for the ascetic Obama administration. It has previously been suggested that Governor Richardson suffers from some of Bill Clinton’s weaknesses. Nor is Richardson known to be a particularly well-organised manager and would need a details-oriented deputy.

But neither problem is insurmountable and would be outweighed by the benefits of having Richardson at State, and Clinton at the Pentagon America’s three faces to world would be those of an African American president, a Hispanic diplomat-negotiator and a hawkish female Pentagon chief. Good luck portraying the U.S as on a crusade.

And I still don’t.  But I’ve outlined some initial thoughts in a piece over on the Guardian website, timed to pre-empt the arrival of the UN’s new peacekeeping boss – Alain Le Roy - next Monday.  I run through the current list of short-term UN woes (where are the helicopters?), but then turn to “longer-term, strategic challenges”:

These aren’t about management. They involve adapting to a less American, more multipolar world. The current scale of UN peacekeeping is a product of the last, all-too-American decade. The Bush administration favoured hefty UN missions to stabilise places where it did not want to get bogged down itself: Haiti, Liberia, Darfur.

UN officials, shaken by their impotence over Iraq, have often felt obliged to look “relevant” elsewhere. The result has been a trend towards bigger peace operations with ever-more ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, mandates to rebuild these shattered states. In private, many of the organisation’s experts worry that they cannot fulfil these mandates – almost all would prefer less expansive alternatives with realistic targets.

But the greatest obstacle to effective peace operations is that tensions between the US and its rivals can reduce the UN to paralysis. China has ensured that the UN mission in Darfur cannot push back much (if at all) against pressure from the Sudanese government. Throughout 2008, Russia has stymied efforts to transfer UN peacekeeping responsibilities to the EU in Kosovo. UN observers in Georgia evacuated as Russian troops advanced this month.

If great power tensions increase further, the chances for more UN missions can only decrease. That would be tragic for the vulnerable who rely on the UN from, Port-au-Prince to Kinshasa. It might be dangerous for the great powers too. Without the UN to provide basic security, the odds of small flare-ups escalating into big crises will grow.

So as Alain Le Roy looks beyond his first round of crises, he may decide that his overarching strategic task is to build up a minimal consensus between the US, its allies and its rivals about what UN peacekeeping is for in an age of tensions between them.

Minimal consensus, eh? What might that look like? Stand by for answers sooner or, more probably, later. But I have started to spot quite a few symptoms of a “new minimalism” around the UN of late.  These include its first ever peacekeeping doctrine, which is sharp and thoughtful document but feels conservative relative to earlier UN statements on peacebuilding and statebuilding (there’s textual analysis in my recent International Peacekeeping article, if you like that sort of thing). 

It’s also worth checking out the state of debate on the Responsibility to Protect - Ban Ki-moon’s staff have been rather skillfully guiding discussions, emphasizing “soft” aspects of R2P like conflict prevention over “hard” military interventions.  It’s worth having a close read of this really good report on the subject from the International Peace Institute.  Now, a couple of policy documents do not equal a new ideology, but I think we’re seeing the first signs of a deeper minimalist trend…

But now there’s a new front opening up. Rwanda has just published a detailed report accusing France of complicity in the 1994 genocide, pointing fingers at Mitterand, de Villepin and other former Gallic high-ups. That comes less than a month after Rwanda threatened to pull its troops out of Darfur when a Spanish judge accused their general of involvement in revenge killings after the genocide. French prosecutors have also been going after members of the Rwandan government, up to and including President Paul Kagame, on similar charges – the AU has, unsurprisingly, come out in favor of the Rwandans against this.

Where on earth is this all going? Check out an interview Kagame gave to the FT in early July, when the latest report was in the works. Edited highlights:

Q: So it will name names?

PK: Yes. And hopefully our judges will enjoy indicting some of those people. There is no justice for Europe and justice for Africa that are different. And if they are to be different it cannot just be Europe extending its jurisdiction into other countries Africa if it is to be universal.

Q: So you will launch some indictments on the basis of the report?

PK: I don’t rule that out unless there is progress on these issues.

Q: To an outsider it seems like the political tensions between Rwanda and France are being exercised through the legal system?

PK: Legal systems are systems of government. No one will believe the French when they say it is the judge we are not concerned. Judges don’t make laws they only carry out their duties based on the laws of the country. There are problems relating to that between us and France and Spain. And probably there would be problems between us and any other country that would want to come up with this. First of all there is no basis in terms of fact and no basis in terms of process. It is hugely questionable what is meant by universal jurisdiction when it comes to basing things on their own law and extending it to other territories. One would have expected there to be an international regulatory mechanism, otherwise you will not avoid chaos. Everyone will be indicting everyone else.

That certainly seems to be an option. Of course, there are multitudinous differences between an ICC indictment (as on Darfur) and national courts claiming universal jurisdiction (as on Rwanda). Nonetheless, the convergence of these tensions – specifically the way they all seem to get tangled up in the Darfur peace operation and AU-Western relations – rather disrupts the legal niceties. Does this mean that promoting the rule of law is about to join democratization as an unacceptable foreign policy goal for Western governments? Not quite: the once and (I rather suspect) future Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power argues in the current NYRB that Barack should effectively launch a “Presidency of the Law”:

In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words “liberty” eleven times, “freedom” forty-six times, and “dignity” nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush’s freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, “Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear.” The gulf between America’s rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt’s core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term “rule of law” initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.

Be careful what you wish for. The task may not be building legal systems, but reconciling them. Or reconciling the various leaders indicted by them…

And closing it down was the only option, as the Eritreans had cut off its fuel supplies through their territory last December, forcing a troop withdrawal this February.  The remarkable thing about UNMEE is that it stayed in place so long, as the Eritreans began to bugger about with it in December 2005 and never really let up.  Their excuse was that Ethiopia has refused to comply with international rulings on the delineation of the border with the UN was meant to monitor, so why bother?

Eritrea had a point.  But its behavior towards UNMEE has been an important part of the trend towards greater resistance to UN missions that I blogged about earlier in July.  One UN staffer responded to my post, which argued that Darfur is now a textbook for anti-UN spoilers, by pointing out that “the Eritreans provided the Sudanese with a wonderful case study in how to ‘red team’ a UN mission through de facto withdrawal of consent by removing critical mission enablers [that'd be the helicopters, etc.] and not honoring Status of Forces Agreements”. 

So Eritrea has earned its place in the roster of UN failures (a sign that the UN will probably be back there sooner or later, as in the DR Congo, Central African Republic and maybe Somalia).  The Eritreans are trying to be reassuring that this doesn’t mean war with Ethiopia straight away, but given that they managed to pick a fight with tiny Djibouti recently, I wouldn’t get too relaxed.  Last month, I suggested in an op-ed for ECFR that the way out of this impasse is to enlarge the context by several orders of magnitude, addressing East Africa’ problems en bloc:

There is a need for an international drive for a regional security conference that could hammer out a credible framework for resolving border disputes, guaranteeing peace agreements and rehabilitating rebel groups. The African Union and UN should take a political lead. The U.S. (which sees East Africa as a front against terror) and China (which buys its raw materials) must join in. The EU could play a role in coordinating conditional financial support to back up the deal-making.

All rather grandiose, and observant readers may wonder how this proposal squares with my recent warning against “piling international institution on international institution in Africa”.  My answer would be that such a conference, involving horizontal negotiations between African governments, may be the best Plan B when trying to impose security frameworks from New York stops working.

General Martin Luther Agwai greeted the report’s recognition that the force was short of critical resources, saying that people had had unrealistic expectations. “If really you have an organisation that lacks critical resources and you expect that force to do magic then I think you are not being fair to the force,” he told the BBC.

He said many people had overlooked logistical constraints including delays at Sudan’s single sea port, and the large distance from the port to the area of operation in Darfur across land routes that are unusable during the rainy season. “People thought that things would work faster and better but the reality from the ground does not translate that way.”

But he also rejected concerns that the mission was doomed to fail, saying that it had the backing of the UN and the AU. “I’m not sure the United Nations and the African Union would want to fail because if they do, the whole world would fail. So based on that, I am optimistic.”

I find that optimism genuinely inspiring – analysts like me punch out our prophesies of doom while veteran peacekeepers get on with the actual job.  But I fear that the whole world may be keen to avoid a perception of failure in Darfur, while having no idea of how to achieve (or even define) “success”.  It’s Agwai’s task to provide as much security as he can with the resources he has.  But for how long?