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Ed Webb

Africa in the age of a new "Cold" War - by W. Gyude Moore - 0 views

gyudemoore.substack.com/...a-in-the-age-of-a-new-cold-war

Africa politics US USA analysis China development aid infrastructure

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • In much of Africa, at least going by their leaders’ statements, there is a revulsion toward anything that forces a choice “for” or “against”. For many of these African countries, there was no “cold” war. Largely protected from the civil wars, murders, coups d’etat and breakdown of social order that wreaked havoc across the then “third world”, westerners are comfortable with referring to the period as a “cold” war, not because they do not acknowledge the proxy wars in former colonies, but because Western countries were not kinetic theaters. Having suffered no direct deaths and destruction, it’s not unreasonable to look favorably upon that period – a luxury many Africans cannot afford.
  • On current trends, over 80 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in Africa by 2030. Intra-Africa trade has declined from 17 percent in the 1990s to 12.1 percent today. Foreign policy is a function of the domestic demands and the immediate environment. There is thus no incentive for African states to pursue a foreign policy of exclusion. China surpassed the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner 14 years ago. Two-way trade between China and Africa reached $282 billion last year, an 11% increase YoY. At about $40 billion, two-way trade between the US and Africa is about a fifth of China-Africa trade. It is difficult to imagine a material reduction in that economic relationship even under threat of US “punishment”.
  • The rise in China’s influence across lower- and middle-income countries did not come on the strength of Chinese ideology or the compelling logic of Chinese governance model – it has come on China’s ability to meet pressing needs in those economies, mainly infrastructure
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The US is still the world leader in supporting human capital development across the world. As we celebrate 20 years of PEPFAR history, it is important to recognize what an unrivaled achievement it has been. A world without PEPFAR is one of total carnage across the African continent. Over $100 billion in the fight against aids over those twenty years is the largest ever disbursement by any nation for the eradication of a single disease. US support through bilateral and multilateral channels for health, education and other social programs are crucial to the provision of those services across the developing world. It is the assumption that these acts are an argument for themselves that has left the US struggling for a narrative to “counter” its rivals. An estimated  $20  of the $55 billion commitment to Africa over the next three years will go toward health care – including pandemic preparedness and vaccine manufacturing. Without that scale of investment, we will measure the cost in lives and livelihoods across the continent. US human capital investment is thus complementary to China’s  hard infrastructure expertise. The insistence that one is better than the other or that China should reap no benefit (influence or otherwise) is ridiculous.
Ed Webb

Is Turkey's Foreign Policy Really Sunni? - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...rkey-sunni-foreign-policy.html

Turkey Syria Iran Iraq sectarianism diplomacy IR

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • it would be wrong to believe that bigoted Sunnis in Ankara embarked on an anti-Shiite mission in the Middle East that has left Turkey at odds with central governments in Syria, Iraq, and ultimately in Iran. To the contrary, Ankara has gone to great lengths to avoid the region's sectarianism, but its efforts have not been very fruitful.
  • it would be also wrong to assume that the reality of sectarianism in the Middle East isn't influencing feelings in Ankara and in Turkish society more broadly. The Alawite-Sunni conflict in Syria is creating bitterness between Turkey's Alevis and Sunnis, although violence seems highly improbable. On the other hand, Turkey is indeed beginning to be perceived as a Sunni power in the region.
Ed Webb

Stronger Egypt-Iran rapproachement could be a message to third parties | Egypt Independent - 3 views

www.egyptindependent.com/...could-be-message-third-parties

Iran Egypt GCC US USA Qatar UAE analysis diplomacy IR

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Ahmadinejad wants to convey regional leadership and to claim success in opening and warming relations with Egypt. He also benefits from having an Islamist leader, like Morsy, greet him warmly
  • “With so much trouble at home, Morsy may have wanted to look like a global statesman by welcoming Ahmadinejad. He may also want to signal his independence from Western political interests, as we’ve seen through his warming relations with the Hamas’ leadership,”
  • During a news conference, an Al-Azhar spokesperson gave the Iranian leader a public scolding, listing five demands, which included the protection of Sunni and Khuzestani minorities in Iran, ending political interference in Bahrain, ending its support of the Syrian regime, and ending Iran’s ostensible mission to spread Shia Islam across the region.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Morsy sends a clear message to the Gulf countries and especially the [United Arab Emirates] that he can easily create alternative strategic relationship,” Labbad says, adding that such “political vexing” is a response to the failure of the visit by Morsy adviser Essam al-Haddad to resolve the issue of 11 Egyptian detainees in the UAE. The latter are said to have strong connections to the Brotherhood’s international organization, in the midst of growing enmity between Egypt and the UAE.. Labbad argues that Morsy thus does not aim at real and deep rapprochement with Iran, but rather a cosmetic patch up to send signals to the Gulf. “The context here is very dangerous, because the revived relationship with Iran should be an addition to Egypt’s foreign policy, not a replacement of its relationship with the Gulf countries,” he adds. Momani doubts such an inclination by Morsy, as Egypt cannot afford the cost of such a policy. “This strategy can backfire and upset Gulf donors and benefactors. Iran can never supply the kinds of funds that are provided by the Gulf,” she says.
  • “I think neither Morsy nor Ahmadinejad enjoy the authority to have complete control or knowledge of their respective government’s grand strategies for Syria. What seems certain is that a realist agenda determines foreign policy on both sides. Both seek a Syrian government they can control or at least influence,”
  • Ed Webb on 18 Feb 13
     
    Various levels of analysis and perspectives at work here, including domestic, foreign policy and (regional) systemic levels and identity versus realist perspectives.
Ed Webb

Return to the Commonwealth? UK-Africa trade after Brexit will not be straightforward | ... - 0 views

blogs.lse.ac.uk/...h-uk-africa-trade-after-brexit

UK EU Brexit trade economy Africa analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • while the UK outside the EU may well look to maintain equivalence with existing European trade agreements in Africa, it is unlikely that these will be extended or reformed and the UK will lose the significant influence it once had in shaping EU trade policy towards Africa
  • Upon leaving the EU, the UK will cease to be party to EU trade agreements and third countries will lose any preferential access to the UK market that those agreements currently confer. However, there are political reasons why the UK may seek to preserve the duty and quota free access to the British market that the large majority of African countries currently enjoy.  Although trade with the UK accounts for only a small proportion of total African goods exports (3.6 per cent), any loss of market access would have a significant negative effect on certain industries (for example Kenya’s cut flower producers).  There will therefore be pressure on the UK from African governments and UK-based development organisations to make sure that African countries do not face increased trade barriers.
  • The UK seems unlikely to engage in drawn out negotiations to extend or replace existing EU-Africa trade arrangements given the severe constraints on UK trade negotiating capacity after Brexit – the UK currently has only a handful of the estimated 500–750 experienced negotiators that will be needed for post-Brexit trade talks.
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  • The UK’s trade negotiating efforts will instead be targeted, first, at reaching a satisfactory arrangement with the EU and renegotiating British membership of the World Trade Organisation.  A secondary priority will be to negotiate trade deals with other key markets and partners (for example the US, Canada, India, Brazil and China).
  • The UK will have no say in the EU’s plans to extend the Economic Partnership Agreements, in the EU’s ongoing efforts to promote regional integration in Africa, or in the future of European agricultural subsidies that continue to cause damage to African producers
Ed Webb

European Journal of International Relations-2014-Webber-341-65.pdf.pdf - 0 views

EU Brexit Germany Europe IR politics regionalism analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • the future of European integration and the European Union is more contingent than most integration theories allow
  • the role of domestic politics
  • he extent to which Europe’s uniquely high level of political integration depends on the engagement and support of the region’s economically most powerful ‘semi-hegemonic’ state, Germany
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  • The European Union’s current crisis is symptomatic of a broader crisis or malaise of regional and international multilateralism
  • he EU has proved an extraordinarily robust and crisis-resistant organization. It survived: the collapse of the European Defence Community project in 1954; France’s rejection of two British bids for accession in the 1960s; the empty-chair crisis precipitated by De Gaulle in 1965; the crisis concerning the UK’s contribution to the EU budget in the first half of the 1980s; the semi-destruction of the European Monetary System in 1992–1993; and the defeat of several proposed new treaties in referenda in Denmark, Ireland, France and the Netherlands since the end of the Cold War
  • From an IR institutionalist perspective, the critical questions relating to the EU’s future are thus whether, especially in the enlarged EU, there are sufficiently pervasive common interests linking member states and whether, much as for intergovernmental-ists, the ‘most powerful states’ (Keohane and Nye, 1993: 18) — by which the US is as much meant as the ‘big three’ EU members — continue to support the integration pro-cess
  • far more regional organizations have failed, in the sense that they collapsed, than succeeded
  • to ask to what extent there has been any change in the variables that have fuelled the integration process in the pas
  • growing distrust among Europe’s big powers over ‘hard’ security issues is not at the root of Europe’s current crisis
  • From a realist perspective à la Mearsheimer, European disintegration would hence most probably result from an American military withdrawal from Europe and a collapse of NATO
  • uncertainty as to the durability or reliability of the American com-mitment to European military security has led to more rather than less security and defence cooperation between EU member states
  • Classical intergovernmentalism focuses our attention on the evolution and degree of convergence of the stances of the French, German and British governments as determi-nants of the future of European integration. Trends in this trilateral relationship in the last two decades do not augur well for the EU’s future. Growing British Euro-scepticism has made Franco-German threats to exclude the UK from the integration process increas-ingly hollow — not because such threats cannot be implemented, but rather because the British government has been increasingly impervious to them
  • The Franco-German ‘tandem’ can still exercise a decisive influence in the EU even after the post-Cold War enlargements from 12 to 27 member states, especially where the two governments form ‘opposing poles’ in the EU around which other member states can coalesce
  • Intergovernmentalism implies that if a fundamental breakdown should occur in Franco-German relations, this would surely lead to European disintegration
  • IR institutionalists argue that such organizations can achieve a high level of durabil-ity or permanence by helping states to overcome collective action problems, carrying out functions that these cannot (notably ‘facilitating the making and keeping of agreements through the provision of information and reductions in transaction costs’), monitoring compliance, reducing uncertainty and stabilizing expectations
  • s serious as the EU’s crisis seemed to be in 2012, there was no unequivocal empirical evidence that the integration process had begun to unwind and the EU to disintegrate. Still no member state had ever left the EU, while several states were queuing to join it. Still no issue-area into which the EU’s competence had previ-ously been extended had been repatriated to the member states. There had still not been any observable formal or actual diminution of the EU’s decision-making and implemen-tation capacities
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      How do things look from the vantage point of 2016?
  • From an IR institutionalist as well as an intergovernmentalist perspective, the EU’s future seems likely to ride on the evolution of the Franco-German relationship,
  • While the governments of “sovereign” member-states remain free to tear up treaties and walk away at any time, the constantly increasing costs of exit in the densely integrated European polity have rendered this option virtually unthinkable’
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      For governments, perhaps. But when PM Cameron could not resolve this debate within his own party, he opted for a referendum he assumed he would win. It turned out to be thinkable for 52% of those who voted.
  • Whilst historical-institutionalist scholars generally focus on constraints and the ‘“stickiness” of historically evolved insti-tutional arrangements’ and provide ‘explanations of continuity rather than change’, they nonetheless recognize that critical junctures or crises can bring about ‘relatively abrupt institutional change’
  • ‘punctuated equilibrium’
  • ‘As transnational exchange rises, so does the societal demand for supranational rules and organizational capacity to regulate’
  • growing economic interdependence seems increasingly to fore-close other, unilateral policy options and to compel member governments to forge or acquiesce in closer integration
  • , Germany has increasingly visibly assumed the role of the Eurozone’s and the EU’s ‘indispensable’ member
  • it is still not evident that European-level political party groups can ‘discipline’ or ‘moderate’ the positions taken by their national member parties on EU issues
  • R institutionalism and, more so, clas-sical intergovernmentalism are more circumspect about the EU’s future. Viewed from these perspectives, European integration is a more contingent phenomenon, resting on the scope of member states’ common interests, which has arguably narrowed following successive waves of enlargement, and/or on the extent of hegemonic leadership or con-vergence of interests among the EU’s three big powers. The latter has diminished in as far as the UK has proved hostile to closer integration on most issues, leaving the EU’s fate in these perspectives increasingly in the hands of the Franco-German duo
  • Contrasting post-2000 EU politics with that of the preceding half-century, I sug-gest that European integration is threatened by sharply rising hostility towards the EU in the domestic politics of the member states. Contrasting Europe with other regions, I argue that a ‘semi-hegemonic’, pro-integrationist Germany accounts for the uniquely high level of political integration in Europe, but that there is a significant and growing risk that Germany’s commitment to the European ‘project’ will wane in future
  • Hegemonic stability theory derives the indispensability of hegemonic leadership for economic openness and stability from public-goods theory, holding that only large states have a material incentive to supply non-excludable ‘collective’ goods rather than to ‘free-ride’. Germany has strong economic and political incentives in the maintenance of a politically and economically stable Europe that its governments have historically seen as being best secured through integration
  • In some member states, notably but not only in the UK, there was of course always significant domestic political opposition to European integra-tion. Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War and post-Maastricht Treaty period and especially during the last decade, hostility towards the EU and closer European integration has arguably transformed the domestic political context of EU decision-making to the point where one could more accurately speak of an ‘unpermissive dissensus’ that severely constrains the room for manoeuvre of member governments on EU issues
  • At the same time as the balance of political power in many member states has tilted sharply towards ‘anti-European’ political forces, the capacity of governments to control the EU agenda in the member states — a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of the processes of negotiation and ratification of EU policies — has been eroded
  • tension between the requirements or logic of domestic politics, on the one hand, and those of the EU (and international financial markets), on the other
  • Most federations fail (Lemco, quoted in Kelemen, 2007: 53). Multinational federa-tions, of which the EU is certainly an example, may be more prone to failure than others (Kelemen, 2007: 61)
  • growing levels of economic exchange and economic interdependence do indeed create pressures on governments to institutionalize their economic ties. However, levels of political integration in East Asia, the Asia-Pacific and North America are not even remotely comparable to those in Europe
  • It is rather the presence, in the form of Germany, of a pro-integrationist regional hegemon that best explains Europe’s comparatively very high level of political integra-tion
  • What has made the EU exceptional in respect of regional political integration is neither an exceptionally high level of economic integration nor the presence of a ‘leading state’ as such, but rather the fact that, compared with other ‘lead-ing’ regional powers, the member state that occupies this role in the EU — Germany — has pursued a much more radical agenda involving the creation of a quasi-federal European state
  • Germany needs good and close relations with other European states to avert the risk of diplomatic isolation and a resurgence of traditional ‘balance-of-power’ politics in the region
  • EU policy choices do not disproportionately reflect German preferences. Compromise and consensus, not a German diktat, are the rules in EU decision-making
  • As a regional paymaster, but hitherto not typically a disproportionately influential rule-maker, Germany was long more a ‘semi-hegemonic’ than ‘normal’ hegemonic power in the EU
  • A Grand Coalition of pro-European Social and Christian Democrats, on the other hand, may, as the experience of other EU member states suggests, spawn the emergence and growth of new national-populist parties and/or, for electoral-political motives, the transformation into Euro-sceptical movements of those established parties that would then be in the opposition
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 08 Nov 16
       
      Since this article was written, the Alternativ für Deutschland party, a far-right populist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU, racist party, has made some inroads in local assemblies in Germany. They don't yet appear a major threat at the national level, though.
  • the EU’s future is more contingent
  • the EU is very vulnerable to domestic political backlashes manifested in the rise of national populism in the member states, particularly so long as few citizens in the member states share a strong European identity and there are no strong pan-European political parties that can effectively integrate and mediate their conflicting interests
  • German domestic politics therefore matters more for the EU’s future than that of any other member state
  • n more than 60 years, the European integration process has confronted and survived many crises. But it has never so far had to confront a crisis ‘made in Germany’.
  • The plethora of regional and pluri- or minilateral trade agreements signed across the world over the last decade or so cannot disguise the fact that most regions in the world remain at best only very weakly politically integrated and regionalorganizations therefore cannot be relied upon to institutionalize and secure peaceful cooperation among their members.
  • Is it possible that, as hegemonic stability theory would suggest, the roots of the gathering crisis of interna-tional multilateralism are to be found in the ‘end of the United States’ unipolar moment’ (Layne, 2006) and the arrival at long last of the long-anticipated decline in the capacity as well as willingness of the US to play the role of a stabilizing international hegemon?
Ed Webb

Are 'Water Wars' imminent in Central Asia? - Al Jazeera English - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...tral-asia-160321064118684.html

water conflict desertification CentralAsia

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The overpopulated, Israel-sized Ferghana Valley has attracted the armies of Alexander the Great, Arabs, Mongols and Russian tsars. It has also spawned some of the bloodiest conflicts in the former Soviet Union, including ethnic clashes, incursions of armed Islamists and the Uzbek government's merciless crackdown on a 2005 popular revolt.   The glaciers and snows of the Tian Shan mountains around the valley give birth to the Syr Darya, one of Central Asia's two major rivers, and turn the valley into a giant hothouse with nearly perfect conditions for farming. Border areas in nearby Xinjiang, China's troubled Muslim region, also depend on Tian Shan's glaciers for water. But between 1961 and 2012, the sky-scraping range whose name means "Heavenly Mountains" in Chinese, has lost 27 percent of its ice mass, the German Research Centre for Geosciences said last year. The annual loss amounts to up to 5.4 cubic kilometres of water a year, it said.
  • farmers here are "ready to kill each other for water," a local mirob, or community official responsible for distribution of piped water from a communal canal, told Al Jazeera. The official, who could not give his name because of his job's sensitivity, described how over the past decade farmers have increasingly resorted to quarrels and fistfights and used their connections to officials to influence the timing and duration of water allocation to their land lots. This year, there's next to nothing to irrigate the fields with. "There's been no winter this year, so we're begging God for water," farmer Rasul Azamatov told Al Jazeera
  • The Ferghana valley is a bit bigger than Israel, but lacks its proficiency in water conservation - and does not have many alternatives to farming. Cheap Chinese exports have killed local plants and factories, and the valley has become a major source of labour migration - mostly to Russia.
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  • "The root of the problem is the disintegration of the resource-sharing system the Soviet Union imposed on the region until its collapse in 1991," the International Crisis Group, a conflict studies think-tank, said in a 2014 report entitled Water Pressures in Central Asia.
  • These days, Kyrgyzstan is withholding water in massive upstream reservoirs releasing it according to electricity generation needs -  that is in winter - and not the interests of now-foreign farmers next door.
  • Unsurprisingly, the word "war" resurfaced when Moscow threw its weight and money to revive Soviet-era designs to build five more dams and hydropower stations in Kyrgyzstan. The Kremlin pledged to finance the $3.2bn project on the Naryn River, Syr Darya's tributary, as part of its political effort to restore its foothold in Central Asia. Uzbek President Islam Karimov wasn't very subtle with his warning. "Control over water resources in the republics of Central Asia may lead to a full-scale war," he said in October.
  • The Ferghana Valley's problems are replicated throughout Central Asia, a landlocked region of more than 60 million people where conditions for farming are far less favourable, but tens of millions still live off land. Their problems are exacerbated by desertification, old and decrepit infrastructure and poor water management.
  • Aral is now reduced to two smaller lakes, while most of its former seabed has turned into a desert that releases tens of thousands of tons of toxic salt-dust annually.  
  • In southeastern Kazakhstan, another major body of water faces Aral's fate. The shallow, boomerang-shaped Balkhash is the world's 15th largest freshwater lake mostly fed by the Ili River that flows from China. The lake that supplies three Kazakh regions with is shrinking as China amasses Ili's waters in a dozen reservoirs.   Given the Gordian knot of regional problems, some experts think that in the coming decades, an armed conflict in the region over water seems inevitable.
hernandezandy0

Obama Warns Britain on Trade if It Leaves European Union - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obama-britain-visit.html

US diplomacy opinion analysis politics

shared by hernandezandy0 on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • hernandezandy0 on 25 Apr 16
     
    The interaction between the U.S. and Britain was given more of a personal aspect when the article characterized the interaction between the two countries to rely solely upon the shoulders of its leaders. This reminded me of the article that unveiled Kennedys personal influence in the United States interactions with states during the Cold war.
Ed Webb

Editorial - British Nukes vs. British Troops - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...03sun2.html

nukes deterrence opinion analysis military spending UK Britain NATO

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Put simply, the most important choice is between nuclear weapons and troops — specifically, whether to build four new nuclear missile-launching submarines or to preserve an army large enough to contribute to allied missions overseas. Even with painful cuts in other areas, there will not be money enough for both.
  • It is also hard to see why — in today’s world — Britain needs four new subs, each of which can carry up to 160 nuclear warheads. Only a fraction of that capacity is currently used, roughly 48 warheads per submarine, for a total of 192. There are, of course, still nuclear dangers out there, most notably North Korea and Iran. But the United States nuclear umbrella plus a smaller Trident force should provide Britain with full deterrence.
  • Britain has been America’s most reliable military ally and a backbone of NATO. That is good for Britons — for their security and for their continuing influence. Britain will not be able to deliver if this government decides to sacrifice troop numbers for nuclear symbolism.
Ed Webb

WikiLeaks row: Putin labels US embassy cables 'slanderous' | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ow-putin-reaction-batman-robin

diplomacy wikileaks US USA Russia Turkey

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Russian prime minister condemns cable describing him and President Dmitry Medvedev as Batman and Robin
  • we didn't suspect that this would be done with such arrogance
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 01 Dec 10
       
      Irony alert!
  • Turkey's prime minister today accused US diplomats of slander after other leaked cables said he had accounts in Swiss banks, painted him as an authoritarian who hates Israel and said he leads a government with Islamist influences.
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  • Erdogan said he "did not have a penny in Swiss banks" and said he would resign if such accusations were proved.
Ed Webb

WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices | Busines... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-reserves-overstated-wikileaks

peak oil energy KSA US USA wikileaks economy

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.
  • possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as "peak oil".Husseini said that at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.One cable said: "According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray."It went on: "In a presentation, Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported that Aramco has 716bn barrels of total reserves, of which 51% are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco will have 900bn barrels of reserves."Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco's reserves are overstated by as much as 300bn barrels. In his view once 50% of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output."
  • "Our mission now questions how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged period."
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  • While fears of premature "peak oil" and Saudi production problems had been expressed before, no US official has come close to saying this in public.
  • Jeremy Leggett, convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "We are asleep at the wheel here: choosing to ignore a threat to the global economy that is quite as bad as the credit crunch, quite possibly worse."
Ed Webb

The demise of the dollar - Business News, Business - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html

oil currency China USA EU Iran KSA UAE GCC gold dollar Euro Yuan Japan Yen Russia IR energy politics foreignpolicy

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Oct 09 - Cached
  • The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.
  • a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."
  • World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations,"
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  • In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.
  • The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.
  • Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Oct 09
       
      Fisky always has been prone to alarmism. Iran is a much tougher target than Iraq. But if even some of what he reports here is true, economic power relations are indeed about to shift. And the move away from dollars for oil trading has been predictable for some time.
Ed Webb

Liberal peace transitions: a rethink is urgent | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...-transitions-rethink-is-urgent

peacebuilders conflict post-conflict nationbuilding IR

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Nov 09 - Cached
  • It is widely accepted among those working in, or on, international organisations, from the UN to the EU, UNDP, NATO or the World Bank, that statebuilding offers a way out of contemporary conflicts around the world: local, civil, regional and international conflicts, as well as complex emergencies, and for developmental issues. Most policymakers, officials, scholars and commentators involved think that they are applying proven knowledge unbiased by cultural or historical proclivities to the conflicts of others. This is not the case.
  • The broader idea has been that liberal democratic and market reform will provide for regional stability, leading to state stability and individual prosperity. Underlying all of this is the idea that individuals should be enabled to develop a social contract with their state and with international peacebuilders. Instead - in an effort to make local elites reform quickly, particularly in the process of marketisation and economic structural adjustment - those very international peacebuilders have often ended up removing or postponing the democratic and human rights that citizens so desired, and which legitimated international intervention in the first place. A peace dividend has only emerged for political and economic elites: the vast bulk of populations in these many countries have failed to see much benefit from trickle-down economics, or indeed from democracy so far.
  • this liberal peace is itself in crisis now
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  • What began as a humanitarian project has turned into an insidious form of conversion and riot control which has had many casualties. It has been profoundly anti-democratic in many cases, including in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From the ground, for many of its recipients, the various iterations of this liberal peace project have taken on a colonial appearance. It has become illiberal
  • local actors are reframing what they require from a viable, just, and durable peace, often quietly and in the margins, drawing on the liberal peace as well as their own customs and interests.
  • Talk of ‘human security’, ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘do no harm doctrines’ and ‘local ownership’ seems very empty from the perspective of most of the peoples these concepts have been visited upon. This in turn has often elicited from subject communities a 'post-colonial response', criticising peace interventions as self-interested, imperialistic, orientalist, and focusing on the interveners' interests rather than local interests. A local (transnational and transversal) attempt is under way to reclaim political agency and autonomy from the new post-Cold War 'civilising mission', which has over the last twenty years, shown itself unable to provide for basic needs, rights, security (state or human) at levels local actors expect, or to respect or understand local differences and non-liberal, and even non-state patterns of politics. Non-liberal and non-western forms of politics, economics, society, and custom, are clamouring for discursive and material space in many post-conflict zones, with mixed implications for sustainability and for the purpose of achieving a normatively (to liberals at least) and contextually acceptable, locally sustainable peace.
  • In some cases, as in Kosovo and Timor Leste this has led to a modified form of state emerging, heavily influenced by both liberal norms and local customs, practices, identities, and national agendas. Very difficult issues arise here for 'international planners' of peace and world order, not least in how they respond to such confrontations between very different political systems, customs, and agendas. But, it is also the case that synergies may arise, where these are sensitively handled and properly understood.
  • peace requires well-being via human needs stemming from rights defined by their contexts, (where context may mean local, customary, state, market, regional or international, not merely the 'local' it is often taken to mean). These contexts are of course connected to the ambit of liberal state and international institutions, but they are not defined by them. As a result, millions of people around the world do not have adequate rights or needs provision, nor proper access to representation, despite the best intentions of liberal peacebuilders.
  • To achieve this the ethically and methodologically dubious privatisation of security and peacebuilding and its connection to neoliberal marketisation strategies in the context of a classically sovereign state should be abandoned. The privatisation of peacebuilding means that no accountability is possible until after a specific development project has failed, and only then by refusing funding often to those who need it most. Such strategies have attracted to this sector a dangerous fringe of arrogant bureaucrats, 'ambulance chasers' and 'cowboys' rather than imbuing peacebuilding with the dynamics of grounded reconciliation.
  • democracy is rarely resisted other than by the most extreme of actors, but it is often criticized for being distant in outcome to local communities.
  • At the moment the impulse appears to be to illiberalise, to postpone democracy, to open markets further, and to depoliticise because a lack of local agency is seen to be the cause of these failures, rather than faulty international analytic and policy approaches and mistaken idealism.
Ed Webb

Trump Bends Over to Kiss the Blarney State - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...over-to-kiss-the-blarney-state

Eire Ireland US USA politics diplomacy Trump

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Jun 19 - Cached
  • One area in which the Trump administration is normal, after all, is in its approach to Irish relations. Appointing a wealthy Irish American donor to be ambassador? Check. Mumbling vaguely about what, exactly, the two leaders talked about in their substantive discussions? Check. (“We’re having some good talks about trade and about military and about cyber,” Trump said of his 2018 bilateral meeting with Varadkar.) Tired reliance on tropes about Irish tribalism? Also check. (“You don’t want to fight with the Irish. It’s too tough”; “The Irish are confident, fierce, faithful, tough, and true.”) Those sorts of gestures, even for the Trump White House, show a lack of seriousness and preparation that one wouldn’t expect in most other relations with a wealthy democracy. But they’re all too typical of the way U.S. politicians have treated Ireland—always with an eye toward the sizable percentage of American voters who claim Irish ancestry.
  • U.S. politicians soon paid Catholic Irish Americans the compliment they pay any important group: They pandered to them
  • As Ireland became secular and wealthy, the successful conclusion of talks between governments and militants in Northern Ireland—brokered largely by the United States—meant that it also became far more peaceful
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  • The Good Friday process also marked the last time that a U.S. administration would engage with Ireland as a modern country—as something more than a photo opportunity to impress clover-wearing, Riverdancing, green Guinness-drinking voters back home
  • failing to correct American misperceptions about Ireland helps Dublin tremendously – which gives the Irish good reason to keep up the tradition of putting on the poor mouth. If Americans treat Ireland as a poor country—and not as one that has a GDP per capita of $84,000, compared with the United States’ $62,500—that helps Irish diplomats lobby for special treatment. (Fair warning: The small size of Ireland’s population and its role in global finance make these comparisons difficult—but under just about any comparison, Ireland is fairly well ensconced in the high-income group and has the fourth-highest ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, well above the United States.)
  • Ireland’s historic cultural transformation—ending the ban on abortion and greatly easing divorce—is in many ways symbolized by Varadkar himself. The youngest premier in the republic’s history, Varadkar is also half-Indian by descent and is partnered with another man, Matthew Barrett. Varadkar has apparently found it is either morally necessary or politically expedient—or both—to push back against traditionalist American politicians. In March of this year, Varadkar and Barrett breakfasted with Vice President Mike Pence and his family, where the Irish leader pointedly called out discrimination against sexual minorities. That’s a far different relationship than Kennedy or Obama ever had with an Irish leader. And Varadkar’s frostiness toward Pence mirrors the gap between Ireland’s current progressive image and the largely older, conservative, and white-identifying traditional Irish American constituency.
  • The threat of a hard Brexit and the reimposition of a hard border between the republic and the North jeopardize both political and economic stability.
  • In the absence of any major U.S. strategic interest in Ireland (which isn’t even a member of NATO), the greatest Irish leverage in Washington comes from fraying ties of family and identity. But that is far from the level of sustained influence and power that earlier generations wielded
  • U.S. investment and tourism are welcome, of course, but the focus of Irish diplomacy is squarely on Brussels
Ed Webb

The World Bank's Doing Business Indicators Still Work - Foreign Policy - 1 views

foreignpolicy.com/...business-indicators-still-work

opinion worldbank data indicators

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • The Doing Business indicators measure the costs and the number of steps for starting a formal business — for example, a car dealership. If one were to open a car dealership in Madagascar, it would take eight days and cost 35.8 percent of the average annual income (this cost includes official fees and fees for legal or professional services). If one wanted to open a car dealership in Malaysia, it would take 18 to 19 days and cost 5.4 percent of the average annual income. Contrast this with opening a car dealership in United States, where it would only take around four days and cost 1.3 percent of the average annual income. The steps and costs reflect rules, and sometimes the corruption, in a system.
  • The existence of Doing Business has brought about thousands of reforms across the world over the last 15 years. They have led to job creation and improved access to credit and business registration, enhancing competition and investment opportunities worldwide.
  • Doing Business uses country pride and even national chauvinism as a form of jiu jitsu to get countries to reform policies that impact business regulations
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  • Doing Business is a sort of economic cholesterol check — important, even critical, but not the whole story.
  • some critics perceive Doing Business as a libertarian argument against the collection of taxes. On the contrary, Doing Business facilitates the participation of companies in the formal economy, including the payment of taxes and respect for the legal framework
  • The consensus, quite reasonably, calls for more women’s economic empowerment in the developing world. If we want to see empowerment, that generally means women participating in the formal economy, accessing loans from banks, and participating in global supply chains. Any business that seeks bank loans or seeks to participate in supply chains needs to be a formal business. Making it easier for anyone to start a business also has a positive impact on women’s economic empowerment
  • The Doing Business indicators have been subject to a number of methodological adjustments. These have been relatively minor in impact on most countries’ rankings. In the case of Chile, for a variety of reasons, the rankings swung more wildly, in such a way that the center-left Michelle Bachelet administration accused the World Bank and the rankings of being politically motivated. To make matters worse, Paul Romer, then the chief economist of the World Bank, in response to a question from the Wall Street Journal about the possibility of the the ranking being “tainted by the political motivations of bank staff” seemed to imply that he found the rankings unfair and misleading, and he said he would “recalculate national rankings of business competitiveness.” This caused a furor. Romer retracted his statement within 72 hours, the World Bank board reviewed the indicators, and management formally responded.
  • In the future, the World Bank’s money will be less and less important. Instead, its analytics, data, and ability to share lessons across countries are going to be increasingly valued. The World Bank imprimatur also matters more than we appreciate in the United States. The Doing Business indicators should be a big part of the World Bank’s future. Countries that seek to make improvements in their rankings of Doing Business are countries that seek to have better governance and have reform-minded governments. After 15 years of effort, Doing Business has improved with time and is one of the most valuable assets of the World Bank Group.
Ed Webb

Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...504134

climate environment politics conflict EU US USA migration refugees analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Jürgen Scheffran, a professor of geography at the University of Hamburg, has been investigating whether climate change makes armed conflict more likely for more than a decade. In 2012, he worked on a team that analyzed all 27 empirical studies investigating the link between war and climate change.“Sixteen found a significant link between climate and conflict, six did not find a link, and five found an ambiguous relationship,” he told me. He described these numbers as inconclusive. Trying to prove that climate change is linked to war, he said, would be like trying to prove that smoking causes cancer with only one available case study.
  • there is only one world, and not a million worlds, in which the temperature is rising, and you cannot associate a single event—like a single hurricane or a single conflict—to climate change. It’s a statistical problem, and we don’t have enough data yet
  • the U.S. Department of Defense already considers global warming a “threat multiplier” for national security. It expects hotter temperatures and acidified oceans to destabilize governments and worsen infectious pandemics
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  • Martin O’Malley was mocked for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria’s cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal divisions in the run-up to the war
  • Scheffran underlined these climate connections but declined to emphasize them. “The Syrian War has so many complex interrelated issues—and most of them are political and economic—that the drought is just one contributing factor to the instability in the region,”
  • it’s all about the exogenous shock. We were all interested in, to what extent does a big event like a flooding or a drought undermine society, or trigger a conflict outbreak?
  • Heatwaves, droughts, and other climate-related exogenous shocks do correlate to conflict outbreak—but only in countries primed for conflict by ethnic division. In the 30-year period, nearly a quarter of all ethnic-fueled armed conflict coincided with a climate-related calamity. By contrast, in the set of all countries, war only correlated to climatic disaster about 9 percent of the time
  • climate disaster will not cause a war, but it can influence whether one begins
  • Models predict that northern Africa and the Levant, both already drought-prone, will dry out significantly over the course of the century. On the phone, Schleussner also cited southern Africa and south-central Asia as regions to watch. (It’s no coincidence that some of the largest, longest wars this century have occurred in those places.)
  • a drought-and-flood-fueled armed conflict near the Mediterranean Basin could send people toward Western Europe in the hundreds of millions
  • “I wouldn’t say that there would be a mass migration to Europe, but I would expect to see a large number of people being displaced within Africa,”
  • There is literally, in legal parlance, no such thing as an environmental refugee,” says Edward Carr. “To meet the international standard for refugee, a changing environment is not a forcing. It doesn’t count.”
  • When would you attribute the decision to move to changes in the climate? Does a place have to be dry for five years? For 10 years? Does someone have to have three children die, and then they decide to move?
  • Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict, but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.
  • it could erode people’s sense of security, pushing them toward authoritarianism
  • Like the CEO in the 1950s who predicted that America would see flying cars and three-day workweeks by the year 1999, I’ve assumed that every ongoing trend line can be extrapolated out indefinitely. They can’t. The actual future will be far stranger.
  • climate change must be mitigated with all deliberate speed. But he also suggests certain cultural mechanisms. Some Americans may favor more restrictive immigration policies, but—in order to withstand against future waves of mass migration (and humanely deal with the victims of climate change)—racist fears must be unhooked from immigration restrictionism. In other words, as a matter of survival against future authoritarians, white supremacy must be rejected and defeated.
  • Improving the United States’s immune response to authoritarian leadership—a response that could be repeatedly tested in the century to come—can follow from weaving its civic fabric ever tighter. I don’t know what this will look like, exactly, for every person. But here are some places to start: Volunteer. Run for local or state office. Give to charity (whether due to religion or effective altruism). Organize at work. Join a church or a community choir or the local library staff. Make your hometown a better place for refugees to settle. Raise a child well.
  • climate realists have always split their work between mitigation—that is, trying to keep the climate from getting worse—and adaptation—trying to protect what we already have
Ed Webb

Nostalgia Is a National Security Threat - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-is-a-national-security-threat

analysis opinion US USA foreignpolicy prediction history IR

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jun 19 - Cached
  • Humans have a “tendency to look backward with misty eyes, to see the past as much more benign, simple, and innocent than it really was,” Mueller wrote in 1995. “That is, no matter how much better the present gets, the past gets better faster in reflection, and we are, accordingly, always notably worse off than we used to be. Golden ages, thus, do happen, but we are never actually in them: they are always back there somewhere.” What Mueller was describing was retrospection bias.
  • With the benefit of hindsight, the past seems relatively predictable and sensible, while the present is always chaotic and uncertain. “We are standing at an unprecedented moment in human history,” say respected politicians and generals, as if that is not always the case. Inevitably, what results are mistaken—and sometimes catastrophic—foreign-policy decisions
  • The practical consequences of misremembering a supposedly stable global past, and misrepresenting the allegedly threatening present (and future), are many. The first is the habitual practice of foreign threat inflation
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  • perpetual threat escalation leads to disproportionately spending finite taxpayer resources on the military
  • a strategic misdiagnosis about what actually threatens the American people—threats that are almost exclusively domestic, including guns, drugs, and noncommunicable diseases
  • when leaders believe the world is only getting worse and worse, it reduces America’s sense of agency and urgency to use its vast wealth and influence to improve things, both within the United States and abroad. This collective indifference has been made worse by the United States’ ever deepening partisanship, which prevents rational discussions or evidence-based policymaking
Ed Webb

Confucianism Isn't Helping South Korea Beat the Coronavirus - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ing-cultural-trope-orientalism

pandemics Korea opinion analysis culture orientalism

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Apr 20 - Cached
  • The United States and Europe are suffering from COVID-19 because they saw the virus as an “Asian disease,” somehow unable to reach their own shores. Now, they run the risk of rejecting the best practices of combating the pandemic as they imagine “Asian solutions” that can never be replicated in their countries.
  • This is a long-standing pattern of Orientalism. Whenever a social policy seems to work well in an Asian country (usually Japan and more recently South Korea), Westerners—Americans in particular—are quick to claim that such policy was possible only because of Asia’s supposedly homogenous populations and harmonious societies. Such harmony, however, exists only in a racist fantasy that imagines a society made up of meek, compliant Asians.
  • In a 2018 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, South Korea’s score for “average trust in others” was merely 0.32 in 2014. The country was outranked by such so-called individualistic Western societies as Norway (0.68), Sweden (0.65), the Netherlands (0.54), Canada (0.44), and even the United States (0.41).
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  • In the middle of the most serious global pandemic in a century, South Korea’s politics caused the nation’s foremost experts in infectious disease to cease advising the president.
  • Of course, culture is a real thing that guides people’s actions. It is entirely possible to have a sophisticated debate on, for example, how Confucianism influenced the South Korean public’s reception of the government’s response to the coronavirus. (The ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius provides rich material on practical governance in accordance with the Confucian web of obligations between ruler and subject.) But curiously, the Western media’s discussion of South Korea’s Confucian heritage never makes any reference to the actual Confucian texts. Instead, Confucianism is merely an excuse to introduce tired old stereotypes about Asians as mindless drones, ignorant to the true meaning of freedom.
  • South Korea’s success is thanks to competent leadership that inspired public trust.
  • Just as South Korea did, the United States and Europe could have moved in the earliest stage of the outbreak to implement a mass-scale test-and-quarantine program and minimize the damages of the coronavirus. By writing off South Korea’s response as culturally bound, the West is once again making the same mistake, failing to recognize that Asia’s solution could be its solution too.
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