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anonymous

U.S.-Brazil Tag Team Could Pique Beijing's Ire | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-team-could-pique-beijings-ire

geopolitics china brazil

shared by anonymous on 08 Feb 11 - Cached
  • China is using unilateral pro-export policies to flood foreign markets with its goods, undermining competitors, and it is using its massive cash surpluses to lock down foreign resources.
  • Even if Washington were not a military superpower on whose bad side Brazil would not want to be, the United States retains the world’s largest consumer market even with a relatively weak currency, and it imports a mix of Brazilian goods, rather than simply the raw materials.
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 11
     
    Geithner's comments in Sao Paulo gained extra attention because of the thinly veiled criticism of China's undervalued currency contained therein. Geithner said that the surge in capital flows into Brazil was not only the result of Brazil's rapid growth rates but has been intensified by "the policies of other emerging economies that are trying to sustain undervalued currencies, with tightly controlled exchange rate regimes." While Geithner has often pulled punches when speaking about China, and deliberately noted that China is not the only currency manipulator, nevertheless China remains the most conspicuous example of such exchange rate regimes and the obvious target of Geithner's comments. In short, he argued that because of nations like China with closed capital accounts and an exchange rate set by fiat, nations like Brazil are suffering excessive and rapid inflows that monetary policy is insufficient to control.
anonymous

Whoa There, Rising Powers! - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...whoa_there_rising_powers

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 26 May 10 - Cached
  • Some critics have alleged that the U.S. administration passed up a golden opportunity for peace in a fit of pique at diplomatic interlopers, or that Iran had made painful concessions to fellow emerging nations that it would not make to the West.
  • something important has shifted in the world order, and we will have to get over our flinch reflex. Brazil and Turkey are middle-sized powers -- eighth and 17th in the world, respectively, in GDP -- that live at peace with their neighbors and believe they have a calling to play a role on the global stage.
  • "rhythmic diplomacy," which sounds like jazzercise but in fact, as he put it, "implies active involvement in all international organizations and on all issues of global and international importance."
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  • The Brazils and Turkeys of the world are not likely to form a coherent new bloc, but they will be far less inclined than they were in the past to stay within the lines chalked in by the referees of the West.
  • Partisans of a "concert of democracies" have assumed that maturing democracies in the developing world would seek to advance the same, supposedly universal, values prized by their elders in the West, but it hasn't worked out that way.
  • There's no question that Brazil's interests, or Turkey's, overlap in many places with those of the U.S. and Europe; Turkey seeks nothing more ardently than full EU membership, for instance. But in many other places, interests diverge, and the middle powers are inclined to view the current world order as an instrument to advance Western designs, not theirs.
  • For Obama, the really important question is whether he should reconcile himself to an unavoidable clash of interests with rising powers, or try to win them over by offering a deeper and more substantive kind of engagement -- for example, by pushing for a greater democratization of the institutions from which those states now feel excluded. It may be that the only chance to get Brazil to act more like a global citizen is to treat it like one.
  • When I first read the news about the nuclear deal that Brazil and Turkey reached last week with Iran, I flinched. My reflex reaction was: Third-World troublemakers rally to the side of evil-doer in the face of Western pressure. That was, of course, the wrong reflex.
  • anonymous on 26 May 10
     
    "Brazil and Turkey's diplomatic forays may be annoying, but they also signal a huge shift in the way the world works. Is Obama paying attention?" By James Traub in Foreign Policy on May 25, 2010.
anonymous

Annual Forecast 2012 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2012

annual forecast stratfor

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - Cached
  • In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.
  • Our forecast for 2012 is framed by the idea that we are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
  • the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Normally, we would predict failure for such an effort: Sacrificing budgetary authority to an outside power would be the most dramatic sacrifice of state sovereignty yet in the European experiment -- a sacrifice that most European governments would strongly resist. However, the Germans have six key advantages in 2012.
  • First, there are very few scheduled electoral contests, so the general populace of most European states will not be consulted on the exercise.
  • Second, Germany only needs the approval of the 17 eurozone states -- rather than the 27 members of the full European Union -- to forward its plan with credibility.
  • Third, the process of approving a treaty such as this will take significant time, and some aspects of the reform process can be pushed back.
  • Fourth, the Germans are willing to apply significant pressure.
  • Fifth, the Europeans are scared, which makes them willing to do things they would not normally do -- such as implementing austerity and ratifying treaties they dislike.
  • The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012.
  • The economic deferment of that pain is the sixth German advantage. Here, the primary player is the ECB. The financial crisis has two aspects: Over-indebted European governments are lurching toward defaults that would collapse the European system, and European banks (the largest purchasers of European government debt) are broadly insolvent -- their collapse would similarly break apart the European system.
  • In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe.
  • Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES).
  • This larger institution will allow the scope of Russia's influence over Minsk and Astana, as well as new member countries such as Kyrgyzstan and possibly Tajikistan, to expand from the economic sphere into politics and security as Moscow lays the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Eurasian Union, which it is hoping to start around 2015.
  • In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies
  • Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe.
  • Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.
  • Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year.
  • Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012.
  • In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor.
  • Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult.
  • Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq.
  • Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
  • While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012.
  • As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society.
  • The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.
  • The most important development in South Asia is Pakistan's ongoing political evolution.
  • Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west.
  • Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    "There are periods when the international system undergoes radical shifts in a short time. The last such period was 1989-1991. During that time, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Japanese economic miracle ended. The Maastricht Treaty creating contemporary Europe was signed. Tiananmen Square defined China as a market economy dominated by an unchallenged Communist Party, and so on. Fundamental components of the international system shifted radically, changing the rules for the next 20 years. We are in a similar cycle, one that began in 2008 and is still playing out."
anonymous

Fourth Quarter Forecast 2010 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...7_fourth_quarter_forecast_2010

geopolitics forecast predictions

shared by anonymous on 13 Oct 10 - Cached
  • in Afghanistan, there is no real “victory” to be had, and the question is just how much needs to be accomplished before U.S. forces can withdraw.
  • The United States will be forced once again this quarter to balance the reality that Pakistan is both a necessary ally in the war in Afghanistan and a battlefield in its own right.
  • shape two other global trends
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Russia will strengthen its influence over former Soviet republics Belarus, Ukraine and the Central Asian “Stans” while reaching into Moldova and the Baltics to extend its influence along the European frontier.
  • China is often the focus of U.S. domestic politics, particularly during times of economic trouble, and the upcoming election is no different. China’s yuan policy is the most obvious target, but while Washington is unlikely to carry out any action that will fundamentally harm economic ties with Beijing, the political perception of actions could have a more immediate impact.
  • In this quarter, Washington will be both preoccupied with the Congressional elections and seeking ways to compromise enough to get out of its long-running wars. The election distraction gives China and Russia a brief opening, and neither is likely to pass up the opportunity to accelerate and consolidate its influence in its near abroad.
  • The U.S.-Iranian Struggle in Iraq
  • The War in Afghanistan
  • The Russian Resurgence
  • U.S.-Chinese Tensions
  • This sparring will continue in the fourth quarter, with one rather significant exception: Washington and Tehran are likely to reach a preliminary agreement on the factional balance in Baghdad, with a new power-sharing government for Iraq emerging.
  • no major strategic shift is likely to occur before the strategy review being prepared for the end of the year is completed.
  • consolidate gains made in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.
  • Moscow will also assert itself in Moldova and the Baltics to prepare the ground for the future expansion of Russian influence there.
  • With its sights on reinforcing its leadership in Europe, Berlin will not look for a break in its ties with Russia
  • the two countries will prevent their relationship from fundamentally breaking down this quarter.
  • a tenuous stability globally
  • Two areas where this could become unhinged in the quarter are Europe and U.S.-China relations.
  • The battle inside the Kremlin will intensify in the fourth quarter as the tandem of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin begins to purge high-level Russian figures and the campaign season leading up to the 2011 legislative and 2012 presidential elections starts.
  • Islamabad will continue working with Washington in the counterinsurgency offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda-led transnational jihadists, but tensions have become evident
  • Recovery from the massive floods that took place in the third quarter will consume most of the Pakistani state’s focus in the fourth quarter.
  • Domestically, the Justice and Development Party government will focus on consolidating the gains it made with the referendum on constitutional changes approved in September.
  • The bigger competition is playing out between Mubarak and his allies and the army’s top brass over a presidential succession plan.
  • China will continue showing a strong sense of purpose in pursuing its influence in its periphery.
  • Beijing will continue its active fiscal stimulus and relatively loose monetary policies amid concerns of slowing growth too quickly, with the intention of carrying out those structural reforms in a way that will limit the associated negative effects on growth and social stability.
  • The fourth quarter will see more such appearances by the new heir apparent as he begins to build his public image and the elder Kim manages the various elite interests in North Korea to build support for his son.
  • Nigeria will not see a sustained militant campaign this quarter, but there will still be an increased level of unrest in the Niger Delta, as well as in other parts of the country, as militants’ political patrons use their proxies to intimidate and undermine their political opponents.
  • Preparations for the referendum on Southern Sudanese independence will be the primary focus for both the north and the south this quarter.
  • High levels of violence between Islamist insurgents and African Union (AU) Mission in Somalia/Transitional Federal Government forces will continue, but neither side will be able to tip the scales enough to achieve a strategic victory.
  • Germany will continue using the economic crisis to impose its vision for more stringent European economic requirements on its neighbors.
  • A key issue that the two are already cooperating on is the debate on the European Union’s next budget period (2014-2020), which is set to intensify in the fourth quarter.
  • Central Europeans, including the Baltic States, will continue attempting to re-engage the United States in the region, particularly via ballistic missile defense and military cooperation.
  • After losing its two-thirds legislative majority, the ruling party now has an imperative to push through as much legislation as it can to expand the executive branch’s powers before the legislative session concludes at the end of the year and more opposition lawmakers are seated in January.
  • The more vulnerable Venezuela becomes, the harder-pressed it will be to find an external ally willing to provide the economic and political capital needed to sustain the regime.
  • Brazil will have a presidential runoff election Oct. 31, but the country’s attention is primarily occupied with its currency crisis.
  • Brazil will continue its military modernization plan and will play a more proactive rol
  • the coming quarter will see a more defined balance of power emerge among the drug-trafficking organizations within Mexico
  • anonymous on 13 Oct 10
     
    "The U.S. preparation to disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan will remain the international system's center of gravity in the fourth quarter." By StratFor on October 13, 2010.
anonymous

Einstein's Arrogance - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...einsteins_arrogance

criticalthinking layscience science

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 10 - Cached
  • To assign more than 50% probability to the correct candidate from a pool of 100,000,000 possible hypotheses, you need at least 27 bits of evidence (or thereabouts).
  • The Traditional phrasing implies that you start out with a hunch, or some private line of reasoning that leads you to a suggested hypothesis, and then you have to gather "evidence" to confirm it - to convince the scientific community, or justify saying that you believe in your hunch.
  • But from a Bayesian perspective, you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space.
  • anonymous on 21 Nov 10
     
    "In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington led expeditions to Brazil and to the island of Principe, aiming to observe solar eclipses and thereby test an experimental prediction of Einstein's novel theory of General Relativity. A journalist asked Einstein what he would do if Eddington's observations failed to match his theory. Einstein famously replied: 'Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.'" By Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong on September 25, 2007.
anonymous

The Geopolitics of the United States, Part 1: The Inevitable Empire - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tates-part-1-inevitable-empire

geopolitics u.s.

shared by anonymous on 24 Aug 11 - Cached
  • All of the New World entities struggled to carve a modern nation and state out of the American continents. Brazil is an excellent case of how that struggle can be a difficult one. The United States falls on the opposite end of the spectrum.
  • The Greater Mississippi Basin together with the Intracoastal Waterway has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. The American Midwest is both overlaid by this waterway, and is the world’s largest contiguous piece of farmland. The U.S. Atlantic Coast possesses more major ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined.
  • Two vast oceans insulated the United States from Asian and European powers, deserts separate the United States from Mexico to the south, while lakes and forests separate the population centers in Canada from those in the United States.
  • ...109 more annotations...
  • The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.
  • Climatically, the continent consists of a series of wide north-south precipitation bands largely shaped by the landmass’ longitudinal topography.
  • The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America
  • Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest
  • East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians.
  • North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil.
  • The continent’s final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other’s development.
  • The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent.
  • Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.
  • The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region’s usefulness and potential economic and political power.
  • shipping goods via water is an order of magnitude cheaper than shipping them via land.
  • in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland.
  • This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.
  • the watershed of the Greater Mississippi Basin largely overlays North America’s arable lands.
  • The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river.
  • the river network’s unity greatly eases the issue of political integration.
  • All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe, where a variety of separate river systems have given rise to multiple national identities.
  • It is worth briefly explaining why STRATFOR fixates on navigable rivers as opposed to coastlines.
  • First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one).
  • Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure.
  • Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports.
  • coastal regions are a poor second compared to lands with navigable rivers.
  • There are three other features — all maritime in nature — that further leverage the raw power that the Greater Mississippi Basin provides.
  • First are the severe indentations of North America’s coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports.
  • Second, there are the Great Lakes.
  • Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent’s East and Gulf coasts.
  • Thus, the Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent’s core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.
  • There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well
  • The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.
  • What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports.
  • Canada’s maritime transport zones
  • Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States.
  • The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers.
  • So long as the United States has uninterrupted control of the continental core — which itself enjoys independent and interconnected ocean access — the specific locations of the country’s northern and southern boundaries are somewhat immaterial to continental politics.
  • The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region’s southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 11
       
      As a fun project, I'd love to create a map that depicts what could be the outer edges of the American political map without changing its core strategic position.
  • In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast.
  • The border here could theoretically lie anywhere between the St. Lawrence Seaway and Massachusetts without compromising the American population centers on the East Coast
  • So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.
  • On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island.
  • Most of the former is United States territory, but the latter is Canadian — in fact, the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, sits on the southern tip of that strategic island for precisely that reason.
  • It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning
  • France controlled the bulk of the useful territory that in time would enable the United States to rise to power, while the Spanish empire boasted a larger and more robust economy and population in the New World than the fledgling United States.
  • Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.
  • But the young United States held two advantages.
  • First, without exception, all of the European empires saw their New World holdings as secondary concerns.
  • With European attentions diverted elsewhere, the young United States had an opportunity to carve out a future for itself relatively free of European entanglements.
  • Second, the early United States did not face any severe geographic challenges. The barrier island system and local rivers provided a number of options that allowed for rapid cultural and economic expansion up and down the East Coast.
  • This was not England, an island that forced the early state into the expense of a navy. This was not France, a country with three coasts and two land borders that forced Paris to constantly deal with threats from multiple directions. This was not Russia, a massive country suffering from short growing seasons that was forced to expend inordinate sums of capital on infrastructure simply to attempt to feed itself.
  • Instead, the United States could exist in relative peace for its first few decades without needing to worry about any large-scale, omnipresent military or economic challenges, so it did not have to garrison a large military.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 11
       
      Maybe our obsession with some mythical, truly free market stems from these early roots and is nourished by continued favorable geographic conditions. I wonder if that's one reason we're incredulous that other nations don't adopt our various policies. We have unique circumstances and are oblivious to the fact. 
  • it is inevitable that whoever controls the middle third of North America will be a great power.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 11
       
      In classic StratFor fashion, the monograph extensively lays out the geographic (and some brief historical relevance) situation without reference to founding fathers or 'sacred' mentalities. On a very personal note, this is a reason that I prefer this style. On the left and right, there's a strong desire to steer perceptions. Surely, StratFor is no different, but it steers perceptions to a particular frame of scale.
  • The United States’ strategic imperatives are presented here in five parts. Normally imperatives are pursued in order, but there is considerable time overlap between the first two and the second two.
  • 1. Dominate the Greater Mississippi Basin
  • The early nation was particularly vulnerable to its former colonial master.
  • There are only two ways to protect a coastal community from sea power. The first is to counter with another navy.
  • The second method of protecting a coastal community is to develop territories that are not utterly dependent upon the sea.
  • Achieving such strategic depth was both an economic and a military imperative.
  • The United States was entirely dependent upon the English imperial system not just for finished goods and markets but also for the bulk of its non-agricultural raw materials, in particular coal and iron ore.
  • The Appalachians may not be the Swiss Alps, but they were sufficiently rugged to put a check on any deep and rapid inland expansion.
  • The Ohio River faced the additional problem of draining into the Mississippi, the western shore of which was the French territory of Louisiana
  • The United States solved this problem in three phases.
  • First, there was the direct purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.
  • At the time, Napoleon was girding for a major series of wars that would bear his name. France not only needed cash but also to be relieved of the security burden of defending a large but lightly populated territory in a different hemisphere.
  • The Louisiana Purchase not only doubled the size of the United States but also gave it direct ownership of almost all of the Mississippi and Missouri river basins.
  • The inclusion of the city of New Orleans in the purchase granted the United States full control over the entire watershed.
  • The second phase of the strategic-depth strategy was the construction of that different route: the National Road (aka the Cumberland Road).
  • This single road (known in modern times as Interstate 40 or Interstate 70 for most of its length) allowed American pioneers to directly settle Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri and granted them initial access to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.
  • For the better part of a century, it was the most heavily trafficked route in the country
  • the original 13 colonies were finally lashed to the Greater Mississippi Basin via a route that could not be challenged by any outside power.
  • The third phase of the early American expansion strategy was in essence an extension of the National Road via a series of settlement trails, by far the most important and famous of which was the Oregon Trail.
  • The trail was directly responsible for the initial settling of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. A wealth of secondary trails branched off from the main artery — the Mormon, Bozeman, California and Denver trails — and extended the settlement efforts to Montana, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California.
  • That project’s completion reduced East Coast-West Coast travel time from six months to eight days and slashed the cost by 90 percent (to about $1,100 in 2011 dollars).
  • Collectively, the Louisiana Purchase, the National Road and the Oregon Trail facilitated the largest and fastest cultural expansion in human history.
  • From beginning to end, the entire process required less than 70 years.
  • The Columbia River Valley and California’s Central Valley are not critical American territories.
  • among other things, they grant the United States full access to the Pacific trading basin — only that control of them is not imperative to American security.
  • 2. Eliminate All Land-Based Threats to the Greater Mississippi Basin
  • The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War
  • the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float
  • Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada.
  • Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic.
  • Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure.
  • What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round.
  • Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network.
  • the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.
  • Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys
  • what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.
  • All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Aug 11
       
      Here's a key fact that I have never read anywhere else. I would love to learn more about this. It's surely plausible; I just find it funny that it's been omitted from view.
  • The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America.
  • the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge.
  • This left a geographically and culturally fractured Canada dreading a long-term, solitary confrontation with a hostile and strengthening local power. During the following decades, the Canadians had little choice but to downgrade their ties to the increasingly disinterested British Empire, adopt political neutrality vis-a-vis Washington, and begin formal economic integration with the United States. Any other choice would have put the Canadians on the path to another war with the Americans (this time likely without the British), and that war could have had only one outcome.
  • Using a combination of illegal settlements, military pressure and diplomacy, the United States was able to gain control of east and west Florida from Madrid in 1819 in exchange for recognizing Spanish claims to what is now known as Texas
  • the United States’ efforts to secure its southwestern borders shifted to a blatant attempt to undermine and ultimately carve up the one remaining Western Hemispheric entity that could potentially challenge the United States: Mexico.
  • the United States quickly transformed itself from a poor coastal nation to a massively capital-rich commodities exporter.
  • But these inner territories harbored a potentially fatal flaw: New Orleans.
  • the biggest potential security threat to the United States was newly independent Mexico, the border with which was only 150 kilometers from New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans’ security was even more precarious than such a small distance suggested.
  • Just as the American plan for dealing with Canada was shaped by Canada’s geographic weakness, Washington’s efforts to first shield against and ultimately take over parts of Mexico were shaped by Mexico’s geographic shortcomings.
  • In the United States, the cheap transport system allowed early settlers to quickly obtain their own small tracts of land.
  • in time the wealth accumulated to the point that portions of the United States had the capital necessary to industrialize.
  • Mexico, in contrast, suffered from a complete lack of navigable rivers and had only a single good port (Veracruz).
  • First and most obviously, the lack of navigable waterways and the non-abundance of ports drastically reduced Mexico’s ability to move goods and thereby generate its own capital. Second, the disassociated nature of Mexico’s agricultural regions forced the construction of separate, non-integrated infrastructures for each individual sub-region, drastically raising the costs of even basic development.
  • Third, the highland nature of the Mexico City core required an even more expensive infrastructure, since everything had to be transported up the mountains from Veracruz.
  • the 410-kilometer railway linking Mexico City and Veracruz was not completed until 1873. (By that point, the United States had two intercontinental lines and roughly 60,000 kilometers of railways.)
  • very different economic and social structure
  • Instead of small landholdings, Mexican agriculture was dominated by a small number of rich Spaniards
  • The Mexican landowners had, in essence, created their own company towns and saw little benefit in pooling their efforts to industrialize. Doing so would have undermined their control of their economic and political fiefdoms.
  • This social structure has survived to the modern day, with the bulk of Mexican political and economic power held by the same 300 families that dominated Mexico’s early years, each with its local geographic power center.
  • In just two generations — by 1870 — the American population had ballooned to 38.6 million while Mexico’s was only 8.8 million.
  • The American effort against Mexico took place in two theaters.
  • The first was Texas, and the primary means was settlement as enabled by the Austin family.
  • anonymous on 24 Aug 11
     
    "This installment on the United States, presented in two parts, is the 16th in a series of STRATFOR monographs on the geopolitics of countries influential in world affairs."
anonymous

When Geography Changes - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...when-geography-changes

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Geography is enduring, but it does occasionally change.
  • The extent and effect of climate change is still unknown, but it has the potential to make significant changes to what we think of as immovable geographic realities.
  • To be clear, we are not debating the causation of this warming trend, nor are we discussing measures aimed at limiting its impact. Rather, we would like to use this opportunity to discuss how climate change could impact geopolitics. Agriculture remains a key piece to this new puzzle; changes in the location of water and of land suited for food production could alter traditional geopolitical dynamics. Geography and climate shape regions and countries. If we accept that there will be changes to temperature, climate and perhaps weather, then there will also likely be variations in the availability of arable land that can support large populations and agriculture.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Climate, rainfall and land quality are key determinants of state power.
  • A country with significant amounts of arable land and easily traversed territory has an automatic advantage over other states.
  • changes in access to arable land can have profound effects on a country's ability to take care of its domestic population and to participate in global markets.
  • Brazil is a good example of this. Its coastal geography makes building roads and railways from the interior to the coast quite difficult, but its climate is perfectly suited to sugar cane growth, which has allowed the country to develop an impressive ethanol industry that has made Brazil's energy sources among the most diversified in the world.
  • China, which faces extreme population pressures and increasingly relies on foreign sources of many commodities, is using agricultural land in the Northeast -- specifically in Heilongjiang province -- to develop a state-controlled agricultural heartland to supplement the rest of the country's agriculture, which is for the most part family-run. China's population exceeds 1.3 billion, which makes food security a critical issue of state stability.
  • Russia's massive grain belt, which has in centuries past allowed the country to support outsized domestic armies, lacks adequate infrastructure, complicating the process of moving grain across the country's expanse.
  • The United States is an example of success anchored in favorable geography. The overlap of a wide swath of farmland and a large navigable river system has allowed the nation to thrive. Enough food is grown in the Midwestern farm belt and along the Mississippi River system to not only sustain the population of the United States, but to also make it the largest exporter of grain in the world.
  • Over the course of history, warmer eras have also been wetter ones, but we can expect rain patterns to fluctuate in ways we do not fully understand right now.
  • With increasing temperatures, we could very well see a shift in the location of the temperate zones in which agricultural development flourishes. As tropical zones expand to both the north and the south, the temperate zones shift north toward the Artic and south toward the Antarctic.
  • Warming in higher latitudes can affect glaciers, initially speeding and then slowing the runoff feeding streams and rivers. Arable land will increase for some regions and decrease for others. This could fundamentally change the hand of geographic cards a specific nation has been dealt.
  • The specific effects of climate change remain uncertain. When geography does change meaningfully -- whatever the nature of the change -- the parameters of analysis and human action change in profound ways that can be difficult to predict.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 13
     
    "A new study on global temperature trends will be published in the March 8 issue of Science. The study observes cyclical temperature patterns over the course of the last 11,300 years and determines that current temperatures have yet to exceed previous peaks. However, the study suggests that by 2100, temperatures will exceed those of any previous time period."
anonymous

The Turkish Role in Negotiations with Iran - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...turkish-role-negotiations-iran

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 11 - Cached
  • The Iranians have achieved a similar position. By far the weakest of the negotiators, they have created a dynamic whereby they are not only sitting across the table from the six most powerful countries in the world but are also, like the North Koreans, frequently being coaxed there.
  • If the United States withdraws from the region, Iran becomes the most powerful conventional power in the Persian Gulf, regardless of whether it has nuclear weapons.
  • Given that the United States is officially bound to leave Iraq by the end of this year, Iran is becoming substantially more powerful.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The drawdown of American forces in Iraq is the first step. As U.S. power declines in Iraq, Iranian power increases.
  • If it continues its withdrawal of forces from Iraq, Iraq will be on its way to becoming an Iranian satellite.
  • If Iraq becomes an Iranian ally or satellite, the Iraqi-Saudi and Iraqi-Kuwaiti frontier becomes, effectively, the frontier with Iran.
  • with the most strategically located country in the Middle East — Iraq — Iran now has the ability to become the dominant power in the Middle East and simultaneously reshape the politics of the Arabian Peninsula.
  • Assuming that the United States is not prepared to increase forces in Iraq dramatically, the Iranians now face a historic opportunity.
  • As STRATFOR has said and WikiLeaks has confirmed, it is the Saudis who are currently pressing the United States to do something about Iran, not because of nuclear weapons but because of the conventional shift in the balance of power.
  • The destruction of Iranian naval power is critical, since Iran’s most powerful countermove in a war would be to block the Strait of Hormuz with mines, anti-ship missiles and swarming suicide craft, cutting off the substantial flow of oil that comes out of the strait. Such a cutoff would shatter the global economic recovery. This is Iran’s true “nuclear” option.
  • Iran comes to the table with two goals
  • The first is to retain the powerful negotiating hand it has by playing the nuclear card. The second is to avoid an air campaign by the United States against Iran’s conventional capabilities.
  • The Iranians would not have to invade militarily to be able to reshape the region. It would be sufficient for there to be the potential for Iran to invade. It would shift the regime survival question away from Iran to Saudi Arabia.
  • the choices appear to be
  • accepting the shift in the regional balance in favor of Iran, reversing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq or attempting to destroy Iran’s conventional forces while preventing the disruption of oil from the Persian Gulf.
  • There is, of course, the option of maintaining or intensifying sanctions.
  • The Europeans are hardly of one mind on any subject save one: They do not want to see a disruption of oil from the Persian Gulf.
  • Therefore, at the table next week will be the Americans, painfully aware that its campaigns look promising at the beginning but frequently fail; the Europeans and Chinese, wanting a low-risk solution to a long-term problem; and the Russians, wanting to appear helpful while hoping the United States steps in it again and ready to live with soaring energy prices. And there are the Iranians, wanting to avoid a conventional war but not wanting to forego the opportunity that it has looked for since before the Islamic Republic — domination of the Persian Gulf.
  • The Turks opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq because they expected it to fail to establish a viable government in Baghdad and thereby to destroy the balance of power between Iraq and Iran.
  • the United States was unprepared for the unilateral role Turkey and Brazil played at the time they played it.
  • It is all very good to want to negotiate as a neutral party, but the most important party isn’t at the table: Saudi Arabia. Turkey wants to play a dominant role in the Muslim world without risking too much in terms of military force. The problem for Turkey, therefore, is not so much bringing the United States and Iran closer but bringing the Saudis and Iranians closer, and that is a tremendous challenge not only because of religious issues but also because Iran wants to be what Saudi Arabia opposes most: the dominant power in the region.
  • The nuclear issue is easy simply because it is not time-sensitive right now. The future of Iraq is time-sensitive and uncertain.
  • If Turkey wants to play a constructive role, it must find a formula that satisfies three needs.
  • The first is to facilitate the American withdrawal
  • The second is to limit the degree of control Iran has in Iraq
  • The third is to persuade Saudi Arabia that the degree of control ceded to Iranians will not threaten Saudi interests
  • Having regional power is not a concept. It is a complex and unpleasant process of balancing contradictory interests in order to prevent greater threats to a country’s interests emerging in the long run.
  • As the Americans have learned, no one will thank them for it, and no one will think better of them for doing it. The only reason for a deeper involvement as mediator in the P-5+1 talks is that stabilizing the region and maintaining the Persian-Arab balance of power is in Turkey’s national interest. But it will be a wrenching shift to Turkey’s internal political culture. It is also an inevitable shift. If not now, then later.
  • anonymous on 11 Jan 11
     
    "The P-5+1 talks with Iran will resume Jan. 21-22. For those not tuned into the obscure jargon of the diplomatic world, these are the talks between the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia), plus Germany - hence, P-5+1. These six countries will be negotiating with one country, Iran. The meetings will take place in Istanbul under the aegis of yet another country, Turkey. Turkey has said it would only host this meeting, not mediate it. It will be difficult for Turkey to stay in this role."
anonymous

Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nturn-crisis-political-economy

geopolitics criticalthinking politics economics u.s. crisis

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics.
  • The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century.
  • For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
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  • The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy.
  • Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.
  • the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.
  • To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing.
  • From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.
  • From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.
  • Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on.
  • Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.
  • A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.
  • Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis.
  • There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.
  • This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite.
  • The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.
  • Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
  • The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe.
  • What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
  • The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks
  • There are two narratives to the story.
  • One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government
  • The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.
  • Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
  • Which narrative is true is not the point.
  • The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
  • The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe.
  • The Chinese government had two responses.
  • The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.
  • The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
  • This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.
  • The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
  • China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.
  • In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.
  • In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.
  • In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.
  • In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
  • In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.
  • In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists
  • It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.
  • In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation
  • Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.
  • Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.
  • But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
  • Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on.
  • Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong.
  • China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis.
  • It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge.
  • Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Aug 11
       
      This is why so much of American life seems like that proverbial puppet show. Politicians, at their basest, have a vested interest in portraying this as a problem between us-vs-them. It reflects heat.
  • The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
  • This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.
  • In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
  • These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors.
  • But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things.
  • The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.
  • The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
  • The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term "economy" by itself. They always used the term "political economy." For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked.
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