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Ed Webb

Eurafrica and the myth of African independence | Colonialism | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ependence-191124063734264.html

Africa politics EU Europe colonialism independence decolonization economy trade opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • although many on the continent have tended to equate decolonisation with the dawn of independence in the 1960s, independence, in fact, turned out to be a bit of a hoax. While it undoubtedly improved life for some on the continent, for the most part, it did not mean freedom. Rather, it marked the internationalisation and indigenisation of colonialism. It was to become a tool to transform Africans from being the objects of colonial subjugation into partners in their own exploitation.
  • "the EU (or the European Economic Community, EEC, as it was called at its foundation) was from the outset designed, among other things, to enable a rational, co-European colonial management of the African continent".
  • As the Chinese do today, in the years following the end of World War II, many in Europe saw in Africa the resources and markets they required to rebuild their shattered economies and to join the United States and the USSR as a third superpower
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  • The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa. In Rome, six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.
  • Senghor personified the contradictions of independence. A formidable intellect, he led his nation into the Yaounde agreement, was the foremost proponent of negritude and ruled for two decades before retiring on New Year's Eve 1980, the first African president to leave office voluntarily. He then promptly left for France, where he had been a citizen since 1932.
  • It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies. Under the agreement, the Europeans allowed free access to their domestic markets to products from the African members, while the latter were, at least initially, permitted to impose restrictions on the entry of European goods into their territories in order to protect their own infant industries. Three years earlier, however, the UN Economic Commission for Africa had warned, as related by Hansen and Jonsson, that the arrangements were likely to lead to economic dependency by tempting the Africans "to prefer the short-run advantage of tariff concessions [in EEC markets] to the long-run gains of industrial development".
  • By 1962, an American observer in Paris, Schofield Coryell, declared that African countries remained "essentially what they were: agricultural appendages to Europe". If this sounds familiar, it is because African elites are, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, still heading to foreign capitals to loudly proclaim their tigritude, while consigning their countrymen into debt and bondage.
  • Although Europe was "the home of nationalism" according to Macmillan, Africans were encouraged to think of it as genuine indigenous expression. Even though the African nations espousing it were born out of the 1884 Berlin Conference and African nationalist leaders were the products of colonial schools and European universities, African nationalism was still cast as the antidote to colonialism rather than an outgrowth of it.
  • True decolonisation requires more than just the physical absence of the coloniser. It means deconstructing the frameworks that have been used to define the African's place for him. That is the work that remains to be done.
  • Patrick Gathara is a communications consultant, writer, and award-winning political cartoonist based in Nairobi.
Ed Webb

Poverty isn't a lack of character. It's a lack of cash - The Correspondent - 0 views

thecorrespondent.com/...4562319410-db0c28ba

analysis opinion economy poverty sustainability economics psychology development

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 20 - Cached
  • Scarcity impinges on your mind. People behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.What that thing is doesn’t much matter. Whether it’s too little time, money, friendship, food – it all contributes to a “scarcity mentality”. And this has benefits. People who experience a sense of scarcity are good at managing their short-term problems. Poor people have an incredible ability – in the short term – to make ends meet, the same way that overworked CEOs can power through to close a deal
  • Despite all this, the drawbacks of a “scarcity mentality” are greater than the benefits. Scarcity narrows your focus to your immediate lack – to the meeting that’s starting in five minutes, or the bills that need to be paid tomorrow. The long-term perspective goes out the window. “Scarcity consumes you,” Shafir explains. “You’re less able to focus on other things that are also important to you.”
  • “Mental bandwidth,” Shafir and Mullainathan call it. “If you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with your mind elsewhere,” they write. “Self-control feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day.” This is how scarcity – whether of time or of money – leads to unwise decisions.
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  • you can’t take a break from poverty
  • what difference can a nudge really make? The nudge epitomises an era in which politics is concerned chiefly with combatting symptoms. Nudges might serve to make poverty infinitesimally more bearable, but when you zoom out, you see that they solve exactly nothing
  • “Our effects correspond to between 13 and 14 IQ points,” Shafir says. “That’s comparable to losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism.” What’s remarkable is that we could have figured all this out 30 years ago. Shafir and Mullainathan weren’t relying on anything so complicated as brain scans. “Economists have been studying poverty for years and psychologists have been studying cognitive limitations for years. We just put two and two together.”
  • Randall Akee, an economist at the University of Los Angeles, calculated that the casino cash distributed to Cherokee kids ultimately cut expenditures. According to his conservative estimates, eliminating poverty actually generated more money than the total of all casino payments through reductions in crime, use of care facilities, and repetition of school grades.
  • “Fighting poverty has huge benefits that we have been blind to until now,” Shafir points out. In fact, he suggests, in addition to measuring our gross domestic product, maybe it’s time we also started considering our gross domestic mental bandwidth. Greater mental bandwidth equates to better child-rearing, better health, more productive employees – you name it. “Fighting scarcity could even reduce costs,” he says.
  • Granted, it would take a big programme to eradicate poverty in the US. According to economist Matt Bruenig’s calculations, it would cost $175bn. But poverty is even more expensive. One study
  • “Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult,” said the British essayist Samuel Johnson in 1782. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he understood that poverty is not a lack of character.It’s a lack of cash.
Ed Webb

Outgrowing growth: why quality of life, not GDP, should be our measure of success - The... - 0 views

thecorrespondent.com/...5755293390-151d5c4e

analysis opinion economy growth globalization sustainability climate energy development

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 20 - Cached
  • The old fantasy that market mechanisms will somehow magically solve the climate crisis has been thoroughly dashed, and a new consensus is emerging: we need coordinated government action on a massive scale. 
  • Climate scientists are warning that it’s not feasible for high-income nations to transition to renewables fast enough to stay within the carbon budget for 1.5C, or even 2C, if they continue to pursue economic growth at the usual rates. Why? Because more growth means more energy demand, and more demand makes it all the more difficult to roll out enough renewable energy capacity. According to a team of scientists based in Canada,
  • Our dogged insistence on economic growth is making this vital task much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s like choosing to fight a life-or-death battle while going uphill, blindfolded, with both hands tied behind your back. We are voluntarily sabotaging our chances at success. 
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  • if we want a decent shot at climate stability, high-income nations will have to shift to post-growth economic principles
  • Post-growth thinking is starting to trickle into policy, too. Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, captured headlines in 2019
  • Economists have long assumed that we need growth to improve people’s lives. But it turns out there’s no empirical evidence for this argument. Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long since surpassed, the relationship between GDP and human wellbeing completely breaks down.
  • dozens of countries beat the US in life expectancy with only a fraction of the income
  • universal public services are significantly more cost-efficient than their private counterparts. Spain spends $2,300 per person on healthcare,
  • The reason that GDP growth tends not to deliver the outcomes that we might expect is because the vast majority of it goes straight into the pockets of the rich. They are the real beneficiaries of growth. In the United States, the incomes of the richest 1% have more than tripled since the 1970s,
  • growthism
  • We can accomplish our social goals right now, without any growth at all, simply by sharing what we already have more fairly, and by investing in generous public goods. It turns out justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.
  • The less energy we use, the easier it is to accomplish a rapid transition to renewables. This is perhaps the single most important lesson that climate science has taught us in the past few years.
  • Think of all the energy that’s needed to extract and produce and transport all of the material commodities that the economy churns out each year. Think of the mining, the logging, the factories, the packaging, the container ships, the warehouses, the retail outlets and the waste disposal facilities. The material economy is a giant energy-sucking machine. By reducing the material "throughput" of our economy – the amount of stuff we produce and consume – we can reduce our energy demand. 
  • The key thing to grasp is that a huge chunk of material production in our economy is intended, literally, to be wasted. Firms desperate to overcome the limits of saturated markets resort to all sorts of devious tactics to artificially increase turnover. Take planned obsolescence, for example. The lifespan of household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines has plummeted over the past few decades.
  • Research by US sociologists has revealed that advertising expenditures have a direct impact
  • We like to think of capitalism as a system that’s rational and efficient when it comes to meeting human needs. But in some respects, it’s exactly the opposite. In pursuit of constant growth, firms resort to intentional inefficiencies. This might be rational from the perspective of profits, but from the perspective of human need, and from the perspective of ecology, it is a kind of madness. It is madness in terms of human labour, too. Think about the millions of hours that are poured into producing stuff that’s designed to break down, or that people don’t actually need in the first place.
  • We can legislate for long-term warranties, rights to repair, and mandatory take-back schemes. We can regulate marketing expenditures, and we can liberate public spaces from ads telling us to buy even more – both offline and online. The gains from this could be enormous. Think about it: if clothes and refrigerators and smartphones last twice as long, we will consume half as many. That’s half the extraction, half the shipping, half the warehouses, half the transport, half the waste – and half the energy it takes to power it all. 
  • There are also a number of other steps we can take. We can shift from private cars to public transport. We can ban food waste by supermarkets and farms. We can cut single-use packaging. And we can choose to scale down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary industries, such as SUVs,
  • But, you might ask, what about jobs? As we scale down unnecessary industrial activity, won’t that cause unemployment to rise? Under normal circumstances, yes. But ecological economists have a surprisingly simple solution to this: shorten the working week. Add a job guarantee to the mix (a policy that happens to be resoundingly popular)
  • What’s exciting about this move is that it has a substantial positive impact on wellbeing. Studies in the US have found that people who work shorter hours are happier than those who work longer hours, even when controlling for income. And it has a big impact on energy demand, too. If the United States were to reduce its working hours to the levels of western Europe, its energy use would decline by a staggering 20%. 
  • Public interest in post-growth economics has soared over the past year as the climate crisis worsens. With fires blazing through Australia and the Amazon, floods swamping northern England, droughts driving migration, and record heatwaves searing across Antarctica, people realise that the status quo has us hurtling toward disaster, and they’re increasingly open to new ideas. In the 2020s, we can expect that the climate movement will rally around the Green New Deal and a vision for a completely new economy. 
Ed Webb

U.N. Is Preparing for the Coronavirus to Strike the Most Vulnerable Among Refugees, Mig... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...yemen-south-sudanthe-next-wave

pandemics aid UN UNICEF WHO Yemen Iran Venezuela SouthSudan Syria refugees development

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Mar 20 - Cached
  • United Nations is preparing to issue a major funding appeal for more than $1.5 billion on Wednesday to prepare for outbreaks of the new coronavirus in areas suffering some of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, including Gaza, Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan, and Yemen, according to diplomatic and relief officials familiar with the plan
  • the request—which would be in addition to ongoing humanitarian operations—comes at a time when the world’s leading economies are reeling from the economic shock induced by one of the most virulent pandemics since the 1918 Spanish flu
  • “Some of the biggest donors are seeing global recession about to hit them,” said one senior relief official. “How generous are they going to be when they have a crisis looming in their own backyards?”
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  • U.N. relief officials and aid organizations are bracing for what they fear could be a cataclysmic second phase of the pandemic: spreading in the close-quarters encampments of the world’s more than 25 million refugees and another 40 million internally displaced people.
  • More than 3 billion people lack access to hand-washing facilities, depriving them of one of the most effective first lines of defense against the spread of the coronavirus, according to UNICEF
  • the effort to ramp up an international aid response is being hampered by the quest to ensure the safety of international staff. Those concerns have been amplified by the announcement last week that David Beasley, the executive director of the Rome-based World Food Program, had been infected with the coronavirus. Some international relief agencies have recalled senior field officers, fearing they could be infected.
  • Konyndyk, who worked on the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that U.N. and relief agencies are having to balance ensuring the health of their own staff with delivering care to needy communities.
  • “You would have a hard time designing a more dangerous setting for the spread of this disease than an informal IDP settlement,” he said. “You have a crowded population, very poor sanitation … very poor disease surveillance, very poor health services. This could be extraordinarily dangerous … and I don’t think that’s getting enough global attention yet.”
  • In conflict-riven countries from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Yemen, dismal health care infrastructures are already overburdened after years of fighting
  • After five years of war, with millions of people on the brink of famine, Yemen’s population is more vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak than those of most other countries. The conflict has left most of the country’s population effectively immunocompromised,
  • “For many population groups, living in overcrowded conditions, social distancing is a challenge or impossible,” according to the Assessment Capacities Project report. Many countries that host refugee camps, such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, are likely to be overwhelmed by the health needs of their own citizens. Nations with weak health systems “may struggle to screen, test, and contain the epidemic for the host population let alone the refugees,”
  • In Gaza, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides primary care for about 70 percent of the territory’s more than 1.8 million people, is bracing for the likely arrival of the coronavirus in one of the most densely populated place in the world. The U.N. agency—which the Trump administration defunded last year and has sought to dismantle—has some 22 medical clinics in Gaza, putting it on the front lines of the defense of the coronavirus.
  • “I’m told that there are 60 ICU beds in the hospitals,” Matthias Schmale, the director of Gaza’s UNRWA operations, told Foreign Policy. “If there is a full-scale outbreak the hospital sector won’t cope.”
  • The leaders of major relief organizations are pressing donors to grant them greater flexibility to redirect funding from existing programs that are likely to be paralyzed by the pandemic and use that money for programs—including clean water and sanitation projects—that could help stem the crisis.
  • “As bad as it is now in the well-organized and affluent north, with health systems, good sanitation, and big infrastructure, imagine how it will be when it will hit crowded camps with refugees and displaced people,” said Egeland, who spoke by telephone from quarantine in Norway.
  • sweeping U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions imposed on governments in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are hampering relief efforts.
  • Egeland acknowledged that most U.N. sanctions regimes, including those for Iran and North Korea, include exemptions for the import of humanitarian goods. But the sanctions have scared financial institutions from providing vital financial services to relief agencies. “Not a single bank had the guts to transfer money, because they were all afraid to be sued by the U.S. government,”
  • The World Health Organization announced earlier this year that more than $675 million will be required through April—including $61 million for its own activities—to mount an international campaign against the virus. Though WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that more money would be needed. On Feb. 17, UNICEF issued an urgent request for $42.3 million to support the coronavirus response. It will be used to reduce transmission of the virus by promoting distance learning for kids who can’t attend school and public information aimed at shooting down misinformation.
  • Guterres, meanwhile, expressed concern that the pandemic could claw back decades of efforts to raise international health standards and to scale back the most extreme levels of poverty, and undercut U.N. sustainable development goals, which are designed to improve the standard of living around the world by the year 2030.
  • “COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core—trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs,” Guterres said. “Workers around the world could lose as much as $3.4 trillion.”
  • “We need to focus on people—the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises,” Guterres said. “That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss. That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest—and we cannot create a legion of new poor. We need to get resources directly into the hands of people.”
Ed Webb

Coronavirus and food supply: Visa bottleneck raises labor concerns - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...s-agriculture-food-supply-visa

pandemics food labor US USA California foodsecurity security

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Mar 20 - Cached
  • California’s nearly $50-billion agricultural industry is bracing for a potential labor shortfall that could hinder efforts to maintain the nation’s fresh food supply amid the widening coronavirus outbreak.The immediate concern centers on a backlog in the recruitment of foreign guest workers because of the virus-related shutdown of consul offices processing agricultural H2-A visas in Mexico.
  • fears highlight a gap in the Trump administration’s market-centered approach to keeping vital industries running, which includes numerous measures aimed at supporting aid, credit and the major commodity crops in the nation’s heartland. There has been little done to address the labor-intensive fresh food crops that form the backbone of California agriculture.
  • Assurance from USDA and State were not enough to satisfy growers, shippers and contractors in California, who have been pressing for more clear answers as the scope of the pandemic comes into focus. The state has faced years of labor shortages caused by the aging of the local workforce, immigration crackdowns, improvements in job prospects in Mexico and other factors.“We don’t have enough H-2A workers coming across in normal times,”
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  • “A halt or a drastic slowdown in processing visas will have an immediate domino effect of the domestic food supply of this country,” said David Scaroni, vice president of Fresh Harvest, the country’s largest private contractor of H-2A workers. “No emergency declaration or short term provision will change this fact.”
  • “We believe because of what’s planted and what’s going to be harvested that we can meet the demand and maintain the continuity of the food supply,” Valadez said. “The question is the labor equation. The crops are going to be there. But what are we going to be able to do to get the crops out of the ground?”
  • labor contracting surges dramatically as produce shifts from the winter desert regions of California and Arizona and gets underway along the central coast. That region hosts the bulk of the state’s strawberry production and much of its spring and summer leafy greens, broccoli and cauliflower, among other crops.
  • deep, short-term dependency within crops and harvest areas
  • Any shortfall or slowdown, however, would have a cascade effect across production, harvest, processing and distribution within weeks, Scaroni said. “Plants already in the ground do not know that there is a pandemic occurring. It is crucial to keep this process going as close to the prior normal to ensure a stable food supply for the coming months.”
  • There is no evidence that contact with produce is contributing to the spread of coronavirus, federal health and safety agencies have said.
  • “Historically, farmworkers are so used to not having healthcare they just put up with being sick,” said Armando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers. “They’re going to go to work, and on the way to work, they’ll be in a car with four, five or six workers. So ‘social distancing’? Forget that.”
  • An agriculture industry source said operations dependent on food-service clients could suffer irreparable economic harm. The inability of the retail side to absorb the unused supply could leave a paradox of empty bins in grocery stores while food rots in the fields.
  • Rabobank Research predicts that effects of the pandemic will last several months. It already has affected parts of the food economy few think about, such as the boxes it’s packed in — cardboard production largely halted in China in January and February, driving up prices.
  • Wholesalers report that unusually heavy rains have created an “extreme” market for many produce items, including carrots, peppers, squash, potatoes and cauliflower. California’s citrus industry has had to slow or pause harvest during the prolonged rains of the last week, according to California Citrus Mutual. The industry had hoped to overcome most of the supply imbalances as it shifted production north and into additional states. Then the pandemic hit.
Ed Webb

Coronavirus makes Taliban realise they need health workers alive not dead - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...s-alive-not-dead-idUSL4N2BB2E3

pandemics Afghanistan Taliban

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Scared by the prospect a coronavirus epidemic in parts of Afghanistan under their control, the Taliban have pledged their readiness to work with healthcare workers instead of killing them, as they have been accused of in the past. Back in September, the Taliban lifted a ban on the World Health Organisation and Red Cross from operating in militant-held territory, having warned them off in April because of suspicions over polio vaccination campaigns. Whatever reservations the militants held over eradicating that crippling disease, they have clearly grasped the dangers posed by coronavirus pandemic sweeping the rest of the world.
Ed Webb

Opinion | The Case for Closing the Pentagon - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...department-21st-century-117110

US USA military analysis opinion diplomacy IR China politics spending budget liberalism

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Feb 20 - Cached
  • Charles Kenny is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. This article is adapted from his new book Close the Pentagon: Rethinking National Security for a Positive Sum World.
  • the Pentagon a potent symbol of America’s foreign-policy infrastructure in general, which is dominated by a massive, increasingly inefficient military machine better suited to the challenges of the mid-20th century than the early 21st. It is a machine that carries considerable direct economic costs but, more important, overshadows other foreign-policy tools more effective in confronting the global problems that the United States faces today. And just as the Pentagon is no longer fit for its backup purpose of records storage center in an age of cloud computing, nor is the Department of Defense well-placed to readjust to new roles, such as anti-terror or cybersecurity, let alone responding to climate change, pandemic threats or global financial crises.
  • interstate conflicts are going away. The last great power war began eight decades ago, and battlefield conflict has been on a declining trend since 1945. Battle deaths per 1 million people worldwide since World War II peaked at above 200 during the Korean War, reached about 100 at the height of the Vietnam War and plateaued at about 50 during the Cold War conflicts of the 1980s. In 2018, the number of deaths was around seven per 1 million people. Journalist Gregg Easterbrook reports that the last major naval engagement was in 1944, the last large air battle was in 1972 and the last major tank engagement was in the early 1990s.
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  • the United States needs a dramatic overhaul to adapt to the global threats of the 21st century, which should include moving away from military engagement and toward international cooperation on issues from peacekeeping to greenhouse gas reduction to global health to banking reform. Such an overhaul should also include cutting the defense budget in half by 2035, and perhaps even getting rid of the Pentagon itself.
  • the United States retains a massive global military advantage, responsible for one out of every three dollars spent on defense worldwide and outspending the countries with the next seven biggest military budgets combined. But while that ensures dominance at confrontation on the battlefield, it is not so useful for the kind of conflicts the world still fights, dominated by guerrilla warfare. That is demonstrated by America’s not-winning streak over the past seven decades in civil conflict: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The “Global War on Terror” drags on; the two countries suffering the most terror attacks in the world are also the two countries the United States has invaded in the past 20 years.
  • The World Bank estimates that nearly two thirds of global wealth is intangible—inventions such as the internal combustion engine or the solar panel that allow people to produce more power with less resources than older technologies, institutions including systems of property rights and education—leaving only around a third to be accounted for by built infrastructure, land and natural resources combined. Only in poorer countries are natural resources a large proportion of total wealth
  • the technological underpinnings of high productivity, such as the engines and solar panels and property rights, are “non-rival”—we don’t have to fight for them. If I occupy land, you cannot. If I use the technology of the internal combustion engine or double-entry bookkeeping, you can use it at the same time. In fact, if we both use the same technologies, we both benefit even more.
  • land and resources simply aren’t worth the cost of the fight for successful economies. And that helps to explain why the conflict that remains is increasingly concentrated in poorer countries where natural resources are still relatively important, especially in sub-Saharan Africa
  • The low returns of war may also help to explain the limited military ambitions of China, which has the world’s second-largest defense budget—about 40 percent the size of America’s. While China clearly wants dominance in the South China Sea, the country has only two aircraft carriers—one of which is a secondhand boat left over from the days of the Soviet Union. It conducts bomber flights in international waters, but the two warships are limited to the same area. And it spends a smaller percentage of its gross domestic product on the military than does the United States: 1.9 percent compared with America’s 3.2 percent. China’s recent success has been built on global connections that have left it the world’s largest trading nation. A world war would tear apart those connections
  • one big, underappreciated reason for declining interstate war is that it doesn’t pay. Through most of history, global power and wealth have been determined by control of people, land and resources. Wars were fought over bodies and territory in zero-sum conflicts in which the victor took the spoils. Caesar was considered a Roman hero because he brought as many as 1 million slaves back from his Gallic wars alone. And as late as World War II, physical resources were still a key concern—Japan’s need for oil, Germany’s desire for Lebensraum (“living space”).
  • This low efficacy of the Department of Defense is primarily because the military is limited in its ability to keep the peace in countries where much of the population doesn’t want it there at a cost in lives, finance and time that is acceptable to U.S. voters and lawmakers.
  • Rising productivity has increased carbon emissions and other pressures on global sustainability. Connectivity leaves people worldwide more exposed to threats from elsewhere including viruses real and virtual alongside financial contagion. These new national security challenges require a collective response: We can’t bomb our way out of climate change or financial crises—we have to cooperate through international organizations, agreements and the shared financial incentives for signing on to them.
  • The total number of people working in the Department of Defense itself (none of whom are in the field actually defending or deterring war) climbed from 140,000 in 2002 to just shy of 200,000 in 2012. Nearly three-quarters of a million civilian federal employees work for the Defense Department—add in the Department of Veterans Affairs and that’s about half of the total civilian federal workforce
  • an institution that was recently declared simply unauditable due to complexity, failed systems and missing records—this after a $400 million effort involving over 1,200 auditors
  • Retired Lieutenant General David Barno and colleagues from the Center for a New American Security have listed seven “deadly sins” of defense spending in a recent report, ranging from redundant overhead through inefficient procurement systems to excess infrastructure to a bloated retirement system that could generate annual savings of $49 billion if rectified. If that sounds too large to be plausible, in 2015, the Department of Defense itself reported administrative waste and excess bureaucracy cost the institution an annual $25 billion.
  • A budget cut to 1.5 times the military spending of our nearest competitor (China) would free up about $150 billion of the current $649 billion in U.S. spending (as reported by the World Bank). Taking $100 billion of that and adding it to the U.S. overseas development assistance budget would also bring the U.S. aid ratio up to 0.7 percent of gross national Income—the U.N. target.
  • over 10 years, the United States could move toward 2 percent of GDP going to defense, down from today’s 3.2 percent—that’s the target set for NATO as a whole back in 2006. And perhaps in 15 years, U.S. military spending could reach the current global median: 1.5 percent of GDP
  • Each American citizen—man, woman and child—currently pays an average of $1,983 a year to the Department of Defense. Over an average lifetime, that adds up to $156,000 per person. It is a simply incredible sum for a country at zero risk of invasion and with a reasonable aversion to violent territorial expansion
Ed Webb

10 Conflicts to Watch in 2020 - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...10-conflicts-to-watch-2020

USA US Israel Syria Iran military diplomacy politics analysis Yemen Algeria Sudan Libya KSA Saudi Ethiopia

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Only time will tell how much of the United States’ transactional unilateralism, contempt for traditional allies, and dalliance with traditional rivals will endure—and how much will vanish with Donald Trump’s presidency. Still, it would be hard to deny that something is afoot. The understandings and balance of power on which the global order had once been predicated—imperfect, unfair, and problematic as they were—are no longer operative. Washington is both eager to retain the benefits of its leadership and unwilling to shoulder the burdens of carrying it. As a consequence, it is guilty of the cardinal sin of any great power: allowing the gap between ends and means to grow. These days, neither friend nor foe knows quite where America stands
  • Moscow’s policy abroad is opportunistic—seeking to turn crises to its advantage—though today that is perhaps as much strategy as it needs
  • Exaggerated faith in outside assistance can distort local actors’ calculations, pushing them toward uncompromising positions and encouraging them to court dangers against which they believe they are immune. In Libya, a crisis risks dangerous metastasis as Russia intervenes on behalf of a rebel general marching on the capital, the United States sends muddled messages, Turkey threatens to come to the government’s rescue, and Europe—a stone’s throw away—displays impotence amid internal rifts. In Venezuela, the government’s obstinacy, fueled by faith that Russia and China will cushion its economic downfall, clashes with the opposition’s lack of realism, powered by U.S. suggestions it will oust President Nicolás Maduro.
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  • As leaders understand the limits of allies’ backing, reality sinks in. Saudi Arabia, initially encouraged by the Trump administration’s apparent blank check, flexed its regional muscle until a series of brazen Iranian attacks and noticeable U.S. nonresponses showed the kingdom the extent of its exposure, driving it to seek a settlement in Yemen and, perhaps, de-escalation with Iran.
  • another trend that warrants attention: the phenomenon of mass protests across the globe. It is an equal-opportunity discontent, shaking countries governed by both the left and right, democracies and autocracies, rich and poor, from Latin America to Asia and Africa. Particularly striking are those in the Middle East—because many observers thought that the broken illusions and horrific bloodshed that came in the wake of the 2011 uprisings would dissuade another round.
  • In Sudan, arguably one of this past year’s better news stories, protests led to long-serving autocrat Omar al-Bashir’s downfall and ushered in a transition that could yield a more democratic and peaceful order. In Algeria, meanwhile, leaders have merely played musical chairs. In too many other places, they have cracked down. Still, in almost all, the pervasive sense of economic injustice that brought people onto the streets remains. If governments new or old cannot address that, the world should expect more cities ablaze this coming year.
  • More people are being killed as a result of fighting in Afghanistan than in any other current conflict in the world.
  • In 2018, aggressive international intervention in Yemen prevented what U.N. officials deemed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from deteriorating further; 2020 could offer a rare opportunity to wind down the war. That chance, however, is the product of a confluence of local, regional, and international factors and, if not seized now, may quickly fade.
  • Burkina Faso is the latest country to fall victim to the instability plaguing Africa’s Sahel region.
  • Mass protests between 2015 and 2018 that brought Abiy to power were motivated primarily by political and socioeconomic grievances. But they had ethnic undertones too, particularly in Ethiopia’s most populous regions, Amhara and Oromia, whose leaders hoped to reduce the long-dominant Tigray minority’s influence. Abiy’s liberalization and efforts to dismantle the existing order have given new energy to ethnonationalism, while weakening the central state.
  • Perhaps nowhere are both promise and peril for the coming year starker than in Ethiopia, East Africa’s most populous and influential state.
  • Burkina Faso’s volatility matters not only because of harm inflicted on its own citizens, but because the country borders other nations, including several along West Africa’s coast. Those countries have suffered few attacks since jihadis struck resorts in Ivory Coast in 2016. But some evidence, including militants’ own statements, suggest they might use Burkina Faso as a launching pad for operations along the coast or to put down roots in the northernmost regions of countries such as Ivory Coast, Ghana, or Benin.
  • The war in Libya risks getting worse in the coming months, as rival factions increasingly rely on foreign military backing to change the balance of power. The threat of major violence has loomed since the country split into two parallel administrations following contested elections in 2014. U.N. attempts at reunification faltered, and since 2016 Libya has been divided between the internationally recognized government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in Tripoli and a rival government based in eastern Libya. The Islamic State established a small foothold but was defeated; militias fought over Libya’s oil infrastructure on the coast; and tribal clashes unsettled the country’s vast southern desert. But fighting never tipped into a broader confrontation.
  • In April 2019, forces commanded by Khalifa Haftar, which are backed by the government in the east, laid siege to Tripoli, edging the country toward all-out war.
  • Emirati drones and airplanes, hundreds of Russian private military contractors, and African soldiers recruited into Haftar’s forces confront Turkish drones and military vehicles, raising the specter of an escalating proxy battle on the Mediterranean
  • A diplomatic breakthrough to de-escalate tensions between the Gulf states and Iran or between Washington and Tehran remains possible. But, as sanctions take their toll and Iran fights back, time is running out.
  • After falling off the international radar for years, a flare-up between India and Pakistan in 2019 over the disputed region of Kashmir brought the crisis back into sharp focus. Both countries lay claim to the Himalayan territory, split by an informal boundary, known as the Line of Control, since the first Indian-Pakistani war of 1947-48.
Ed Webb

NATO Viewed Favorably Across Member States | Pew Research Center - 0 views

www.pewresearch.org/...favorably-across-member-states

IR US USA Russia Europe NATO opinion borders military

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Feb 20 - Cached
  • when asked if there are parts of neighboring countries that really belong to their country, relatively few surveyed agree. However, among NATO member states, majorities in Hungary, Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria agree that parts of other countries belong to them. In many European countries, those with a favorable view of right-wing populist parties are more likely to support this statement.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 15 Feb 20
       
      Potential for irredentism
  • In France, favorable views of NATO dropped from 71% in 2009 to 49% in 2019, a decrease of 22 percentage points. In Germany, favorable views of the organization declined by 16 points, and in Bulgaria favorable views are down by 12 points. In nonmember Russia, positive views have been nearly cut in half: In 2007, 30% had a favorable view of NATO. By 2019, just 16% expressed the same sentiment.
  • Both Democratic and Republican views of NATO remained generally stable until 2017, when Democrats grew much more likely to support NATO than their counterparts, a difference that has not changed significantly since. In 2017, 74% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans had a favorable opinion of the alliance, a difference of 26 percentage points. Since 2018, U.S. views of NATO have declined among supporters of both parties. Positive views among Democrats fell 15 points, while views among Republicans dropped 7 points.
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  • Positive ratings of NATO among members range from a high of 82% in Poland to 21% in Turkey, with the United States and Germany in the middle at 52% and 57%, respectively. And in the three nonmember states surveyed, Sweden and Ukraine see the alliance positively (63% and 53%, respectively), but only 16% of Russians say the same.
  • Since the late 2000s, favorable opinions of NATO are up 10 percentage points or more in Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland. However, positive opinions of NATO are down significantly in Bulgaria, Russia, Germany and France over the past decade, with double-digit percentage point declines in each of these countries. Favorable views of the organization are also down significantly in Spain and the Czech Republic.
  • there is widespread reluctance to fulfill the collective defense commitment outlined in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty. When asked if their country should defend a fellow NATO ally against a potential attack from Russia, a median of 50% across 16 NATO member states say their country should not defend an ally, compared with 38% who say their country should defend an ally against a Russian attack.
  • some Western European publics prefer a close relationship with the U.S., but many others prefer a close relationship with both the U.S. and Russia. Nevertheless, few want to prioritize their relationship with Russia over their U.S. relations
Ed Webb

Trump Ambassadors at Embassies Abroad Forcing Out Career Diplomats - 2 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ca-diplomacy-pompeo-lana-marks

US USA diplomacy foreignservice Trump

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Feb 20 - Cached
  • several of Trump’s political allies-turned-ambassadors—he has appointed a higher percentage than most previous presidents—have sacked their deputies amid a culture of mistrust between politically appointed and career State Department officials
  • It’s not the first time the State Department has had to respond to allegations of mismanagement at embassies abroad, nor is it unique to the current administration. But Trump’s politically appointed ambassadors are sacking their deputy chiefs of mission—an embassy’s second-in-command post held by foreign service officers—in unusually high numbers, officials say. 
  • Ambassadors have full authority to remove their deputy chief of mission, even without cause, given how important the relationship between an ambassador and his or her deputy is to ensuring the smooth management of an embassy. But the high rate at which it’s happening now reflects how wide the gulf can be between politically appointed ambassadors and the diplomatic corps—an issue laid bare by Trump’s impeachment trial that dragged the State Department into Congressional impeachment investigations. Behind the scenes, some officials fear it is hampering embassies’ abilities to carry out their missions.
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  • The embassies where deputy chiefs are being sacked are all led by deep-pocketed Republican political donors whom Trump tapped to be ambassadors, despite some having no prior diplomatic or government experience.
  • one of at least eight members of Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to be offered senior administration positions, according to a 2019 investigation by USA Today.
  • The United States is one of the only countries in the world with a practice of giving ambassador posts to high-end political donors. Some of those ambassadors receive high marks and plaudits from foreign service officers, and some foreign countries prefer such U.S. ambassadors, in instances where they have closer ties to the White House or president’s inner circles. 
  • Traditionally, two-thirds of ambassador posts are held by career diplomats, while one-third are held by political appointees. Under Trump, the ratio of ambassador posts held by political appointees has increased—42 percent of Trump’s ambassador appointees are political, and 58 percent are career, according to data from the American Foreign Service Association—though that number constantly shifts as ambassadors cycle in and out of posts.
  • “There’s zero support or pushback from the department for the career people,”
  • “When I was being told I had to leave seven months early, the answer from the department was, ‘Look, the ambassador is a friend of the president’s, he’s a friend of Trump’s, and there’s nothing we can do,’”
  • “The level of mistrust of the career service by incoming political appointees is extraordinarily high on average,”
  • An unusually high number of ambassador posts have sat empty under Trump, leaving deputy chiefs to lead the embassy for years on end. Since Pompeo came into office, that trend has declined as more ambassador nominations move through the White House and Republican-controlled Senate. 
Ed Webb

Emma Belcher: 3 questions we should ask about nuclear weapons | TED Talk - 1 views

www.ted.com/...ould_ask_about_nuclear_weapons

nuclear nukes IR politics security

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • There are more than 10,000 nuclear weapons in existence today, each one capable of causing immense destruction. Why don't we talk about this threat as much as some other major issues? In this practical talk, nuclear security expert Emma Belcher shares three questions you can ask your elected officials to gain a better understanding of nuclear weapons and the measures we need to stay safe.
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