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anonymous

Beyond the Post-Cold War World - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...beyond-post-cold-war-world

shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 13 - Cached
  • An era ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation.
  • Three things defined the post-Cold War world.
  • The first was U.S. power. The second was the rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages. The third was the re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power.
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  • Meanwhile, Russia, the main remnant of the Soviet Union, reeled while Japan shifted to a dramatically different economic mode.
  • The post-Cold War world had two phases. The first lasted from Dec. 31, 1991, until Sept. 11, 2001. The second lasted from 9/11 until now.
  • The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions.
  • The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers -- the United States, China and Europe -- but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters. 
  • In this new era, Europe is reeling economically and is divided politically.
  • Nothing is as it was in 1991.
  • Europe primarily defined itself as an economic power, with sovereignty largely retained by its members but shaped by the rule of the European Union. Europe tried to have it all: economic integration and individual states. But now this untenable idea has reached its end and Europe is fragmenting.
  • Germany wants to retain the European Union to protect German trade interests and because Berlin properly fears the political consequences of a fragmented Europe.
  • But as the creditor of last resort, Germany also wants to control the economic behavior of the EU nation-states.
  • In the indebted peripheral region, Cyprus has been treated with particular economic savagery as part of the bailout process. Certainly, the Cypriots acted irresponsibly. But that label applies to all of the EU members, including Germany, who created an economic plant so vast that it could not begin to consume what it produces -- making the country utterly dependent on the willingness of others to buy German goods.
  • There are thus many kinds of irresponsibility.
  • Europe can no longer afford pride, and it is every nation for itself. Cyprus set the precedent that the weak will be crushed. It serves as a lesson to other weakening nations, a lesson that over time will transform the European idea of integration and sovereignty.
  • In such an environment, sovereignty becomes sanctuary.
  • Authoritarian nationalism is an old European cure-all, one that is re-emerging, since no one wants to be the next Cyprus.
  • Leaving aside all the specific arguments, extraordinarily rapid growth in an export-oriented economy requires economic health among its customers.
  • It is nice to imagine expanded domestic demand, but in a country as impoverished as China, increasing demand requires revolutionizing life in the interior. China has tried this many times. It has never worked, and in any case China certainly couldn't make it work in the time needed.
  • Instead, Beijing is maintaining growth by slashing profit margins on exports.
  • It is interesting to recall the extravagant claims about the future of Japan in the 1980s. Awestruck by growth rates, Westerners did not see the hollowing out of the financial system as growth rates were sustained by cutting prices and profits. Japan's miracle seemed to be eternal. It wasn't, and neither is China's. And China has a problem that Japan didn't: a billion impoverished people. Japan exists, but behaves differently than it did before; the same is happening to China.
  • Both Europe and China thought about the world in the post-Cold War period similarly. Each believed that geopolitical questions and even questions of domestic politics could be suppressed and sometimes even ignored.
  • They believed this because they both thought they had entered a period of permanent prosperity.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      See also: All those 1990's op-eds about "the end of history" which now seem so completely ludicrious that it's hard for me to believe that so many Americans and Europeans ever bought it.
  • Periods of prosperity, of course, always alternate with periods of austerity, and now history has caught up with Europe and China.
  • And the United States has emerged from the post-Cold War period with one towering lesson: However attractive military intervention is, it always looks easier at the beginning than at the end.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      You think?
  • The greatest military power in the world has the ability to defeat armies. But it is far more difficult to reshape societies in America's image.
  • A Great Power manages the routine matters of the world not through military intervention, but through manipulating the balance of power.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is where I start to sound like a broken record: American civic perception is wildly at odds with MANY of the realities of international relations.
  • The United States has emerged into the new period with what is still the largest economy in the world with the fewest economic problems of the three pillars of the post-Cold War world. It has also emerged with the greatest military power.
  • But it has emerged far more mature and cautious than it entered the period. There are new phases in history, but not new world orders.
  • Eras unfold in strange ways until you suddenly realize they are over.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is so curt and quotable and (I think) so true. Like John Green says, one non-revolution leads to another until... well, you realize you HAD a revolution. :)
  • Now, we are at a point where the post-Cold War model no longer explains the behavior of the world. We are thus entering a new era. I don't have a good buzzword for the phase we're entering, since most periods are given a label in hindsight.
  • But already there are several defining characteristics to this era we can identify.
  • First, the United States remains the world's dominant power in all dimensions. It will act with caution, however, recognizing the crucial difference between pre-eminence and omnipotence.
  • Second, Europe is returning to its normal condition of multiple competing nation-states. While Germany will dream of a Europe in which it can write the budgets of lesser states, the EU nation-states will look at Cyprus and choose default before losing sovereignty.
  • Third, Russia is re-emerging. As the European Peninsula fragments, the Russians will do what they always do: fish in muddy waters.
  • The deals they are making, of which this is a small sample, are not in their economic interests, but they increase Moscow's political influence substantially. 
  • Fourth, China is becoming self-absorbed in trying to manage its new economic realities.
  • And fifth, a host of new countries will emerge to supplement China as the world's low-wage, high-growth epicenter. Latin America, Africa and less-developed parts of Southeast Asia are all emerging as contenders
  • There is a paradox in all of this. While the United States has committed many errors, the fragmentation of Europe and the weakening of China mean the United States emerges more powerful, since power is relative.
  • It was said that the post-Cold War world was America's time of dominance. I would argue that it was the preface of U.S. dominance.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is a hard sell to many Americans (and others) that don't have the benefit of hindsight to guide their judgements. Of course, I'm a bit of StratFor buff and so trust George & company on this, but there are plenty of aspects to explore and debate. I hope to do both with my readers in the coming years.
  • Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered. 
  • A fragmented Europe has no chance at balancing the United States.
  • And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 13
     
    "Many shifts in the international system accompanied the end of the Cold War. In fact, 1991 was an extraordinary and defining year. The Japanese economic miracle ended. China after Tiananmen Square inherited Japan's place as a rapidly growing, export-based economy, one defined by the continued pre-eminence of the Chinese Communist Party. The Maastricht Treaty was formulated, creating the structure of the subsequent European Union. A vast coalition dominated by the United States reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
anonymous

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities - 0 views

grist.org/...ies-according-to-u-s-utilities

shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
  • Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
  • You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
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  • But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money.
  • Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.”
  • The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits.
  • Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
  • First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product.
  • (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
  • It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.”
  • Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
  • This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
  • Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.”
  • What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
  • As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
  • One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers.
  • (“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
  • So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
  • The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies.
  • In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
  • Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention.
  • This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground."
anonymous

The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...strategy-against-islamic-state

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 14 - Cached
  • It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted.
  • A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
  • Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
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  • Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy.
  • The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.
  • A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him.
  • The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible.
  • For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
  • This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power.
  • For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
  • The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.
  • the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.
  • Finally, the Islamic State -- engaged in war with everyone around it -- is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack.
  • In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power.
  • There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways.
  • In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges.
  • The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
  • The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara.
  • The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.
  • It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins.
  • The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance.
  • The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue.
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed.
  • In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 14
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama said recently that he had no strategy as yet toward the Islamic State but that he would present a plan on Wednesday. It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it."
anonymous

U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...e-policy-wake-ukrainian-affair

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • There was a profoundly radical idea embedded in this line of thought. Wars between nations or dynastic powers had been a constant condition in Europe, and the rest of the world had been no less violent. Every century had had systemic wars in which the entire international system (increasingly dominated by Europe since the 16th century) had participated. In the 20th century, there were the two World Wars, in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars, in the 18th century the Seven Years' War, and in the 17th century the Thirty Years' War.
  • Those who argued that U.S. defense policy had to shift its focus away from peer-to-peer and systemic conflict were in effect arguing that the world had entered a new era in which what had been previously commonplace would now be rare or nonexistent.
  • The radical nature of this argument was rarely recognized by those who made it, and the evolving American defense policy that followed this reasoning was rarely seen as inappropriate.
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  • There were two reasons for this argument.
  • Military planners are always obsessed with the war they are fighting. It is only human to see the immediate task as a permanent task.
  • That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war.
  • The second reason was that no nation-state was in a position to challenge the United States militarily.
  • After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States.
  • No matter how benign a leading power is -- and the United States is not uniquely benign -- other nations will fear it, resent it or want to shame it for its behavior.
  • The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent. 
  • It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars.
  • Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars.
  • They can appear overwhelmingly important at the time. But just as the defeat of Britain by the Americans did not destroy British power, the outcomes of asymmetric wars rarely define long-term national power and hardly ever define the international system.
  • Asymmetric warfare is not a new style of war; it is a permanent dimension of warfare.
  • Peer-to-peer and systemic wars are also constant features but are far less frequent. They are also far more important.
  • There are a lot more asymmetric wars, but a defeat does not shift national power. If you lose a systemic war, the outcome can be catastrophic. 
  • A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important.
  • Military leaders and defense officials, obsessed with the moment, must bear in mind that the war currently being fought may be little remembered, the peace that is currently at hand is rarely permanent, and harboring the belief that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error.
  • Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.
  • But the events in Ukraine point to some realities.
  • First, the power of countries shifts, and the Russians had substantially increased their military capabilities since the 1990s.
  • Second, the divergent interests between the two countries, which seemed to disappear in the 1990s, re-emerged.
  • Third, this episode will cause each side to reconsider its military strategy and capabilities, and future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
  • Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on the assumption has little basis in reality. The human condition did not transform itself because of an interregnum in which the United States could not be challenged; the last two decades are an exception to the rule of global affairs defined by war.
  • U.S. national strategy must be founded on the control of the sea. The oceans protect the United States from everything but terrorism and nuclear missiles.
  • The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises. 
  • The main goal here is to avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon fully secure against land threats and with the economic power to challenge the United States at sea.
  • The U.S. strategy in World War I was to refuse to become involved until it appeared, with the abdication of the czar and increasing German aggression at sea, that the British and French might be defeated or the sea-lanes closed.
  • At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done.
  • Even then, it was only after Hitler's declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Congress approved Roosevelt's plan to intervene militarily in continental Europe.
  • And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.
  • In order for this strategy, which the U.S. inherited from the British, to work, the United States needs an effective and relevant alliance structure.
  • The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.
  • If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia.
  • The American relationship in all alliances is that the outcome of conflicts must matter more to the ally than to the United States. 
  • The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians.
  • And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.
  • It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power.
  • In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia.
  • In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against.
  • The only thing certain is that it will be far away and take a long time to build up a force. During Desert Storm, it took six months to go on the offensive.
  • American strategy requires a force that can project overwhelming power without massive delays.
  • In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over.
  • The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States.
  • Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment.
  • It also follows that the tempo of operations be reduced. The United States has been in constant warfare since 2001.
  • There need to be layers of options between threat and war. 
  • Defense policy must be built on three things: The United States does not know where it will fight. The United States must use war sparingly. The United States must have sufficient technology to compensate for the fact that Americans are always going to be outnumbered in Eurasia. The force that is delivered must overcome this, and it must get there fast.
  • Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered.
  • Losing an asymmetric war is unfortunate but tolerable. Losing a systemic war could be catastrophic. Not having to fight a war would be best.
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 14
     
    "Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare between reasonably developed nation-states had been abolished. During the 1990s, it was expected that the primary purpose of the military would be operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and the change of oppressive regimes. After 9/11, many began speaking of asymmetric warfare and "the long war." Under this model, the United States would be engaged in counterterrorism activities in a broad area of the Islamic world for a very long time. Peer-to-peer conflict seemed obsolete."
anonymous

Poland's Strategy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...polands-strategy

shared by anonymous on 28 Aug 12 - Cached
  • Located on the oft-invaded North European Plain, Poland's existence is heavily susceptible to the moves of major Eurasian powers. Therefore, Polish history has been erratic, with Poland moving from independence -- even regional dominance -- to simply disappearing from the map, surviving only in language and memory before emerging once again.
  • Poland's national strategy inevitably is designed with an underlying sense of fear and desperation. Nothing in Polish history would indicate that disaster is impossible.
  • To begin thinking about Poland's strategy, we must consider that in the 17th century, Poland, aligned with Lithuania, was one of the major European powers. It stretched from the Baltic Sea almost to the Black Sea, from western Ukraine into the Germanic regions. By 1795, it had ceased to exist as an independent country, divided among three emerging powers: Prussia, Russia and Austria.
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  • It did not regain independence until after World War I -- it was created by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) -- after which it had to fight the Soviets for its existence.
  • Poland again was brought under the power of a foreign nation when Germany invaded in 1939. Its statehood was formalized in 1945, but it was dominated by the Soviets until 1989.
  • Poland has two strategic problems.
  • The first problem is its geography. The Carpathian Mountains and the Tatra Mountains provide some security to Poland's south. But the lands to the east, west and southwest are flat plains with only rivers that provide limited protection. This plain was the natural line of attack of great powers, including Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany.
  • For Poland, the existence of a powerful Germany and Russia poses an existential problem, the ideal solution to which is to become a buffer that Berlin and Moscow respect. A secondary solution is an alliance with one for protection. The latter solution is extremely difficult because dependence on Russia or Germany invites the possibility of absorption or occupation. Poland's third solution is to find an outside power to guarantee its interests.
  • This is what Poland did in the 1930s with Britain and France.
  • This strategy's shortcomings are obvious. First, it may not be in the interests of the security guarantor to come to Poland's assistance. Second, it may not be possible at the time of danger for them to help Poland. The value of a third-party guarantee is only in deterring attack and, failing that, in the willingness and ability to honor the commitment.
  • Since 1991, Poland has sought a unique solution that was not available previously: membership in multilateral organizations such as the European Union and NATO.
  • Ostensibly, they guarantee Polish security and remove the potential threat of Germany.
  • The solution also is problematic in that it assumes NATO and the European Union are reliable institutions. Should Russia become aggressive, NATO's ability to field a force to resist Russia would depend less on the Europeans than on the Americans. The heart of the Cold War was a struggle of influence across the North European Plain, and it involved 40 years of risk and expense. Whether the Americans are prepared to do this again is not something Poland can count on, at least in the context of NATO.
  • Moreover, the European Union is not a military organization; it is an economic free trade zone.
  • The emergence of a Germany not intimately tied to a multinational European entity but with increasing economic ties with Russia is Poland's worst-case scenario.
  • Poland has three strategies available to it.
  • The first is to do everything it can to keep NATO and the European Union viable and Germany contained within them.
  • The second is to create a relationship with Germany or Russia that guarantees its interests.
  • The third strategy is to find an outside power prepared to guarantee its interests.
  • That power is currently the United States. But the United States, after the experiences in the Islamic world, is moving toward a more distant, balance-of-power approach to the world. This does not mean the United States is indifferent to what happens in northern Europe. The growth of Russian power and potential Russian expansionism that would upset the European balance of power obviously would not be in Washington's interest. But as the United States matures as a global power, it will allow the regional balance of power to stabilize naturally rather than intervene if the threat appears manageable.
  • In the 1930s, Poland's strategy was to find a guarantor as a first resort. It assumed correctly that its own military capability was insufficient to protect itself from the Germans or the Soviets, and certainly insufficient to protect itself from both. Therefore, it assumed that it would succumb to these powers without a security guarantor. Under these circumstances, no matter how much it increased its military power, Poland could not survive by itself. The Polish analysis of the situation was not incorrect, but it missed an essential component of intervention: time.
  • This points to two aspects of any Polish relationship to the United States.
  • On one hand, the collapse of Poland as Russia resurges would deprive the United States of a critical bulwark against Moscow on the North European Plain. On the other hand, intervention is inconceivable without time.
  • This is a question of economics and national will. The economic situation in Poland has improved dramatically over recent years, but building an effective force takes time and money. The Poles have time, since the Russian threat at this point is more theoretical than real, and their economy is sufficiently robust to support a significant capability.
  • Today, the will to believe in the European Union and in NATO, rather than to recognize that nations ultimately must guarantee their own national security, is an issue for Poland to settle.
  • As the Poles know, Germany and Russia can change regimes and strategies with startling speed. A conservative strategy requires a bilateral relationship with the United States, founded on the understanding that the United States is relying on the balance of power and not the direct intervention of its own forces except as a last resort.
  • anonymous on 28 Aug 12
     
    "Polish national strategy pivots around a single, existential issue: how to preserve its national identity and independence."
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

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

Libertarianism and Hegemony - 0 views

www.bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...libert.html

libertarianism

shared by anonymous on 01 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 May 11
     
    The comments are a hoot. "My views on foreign policy tend to diverge from mainstream libertarian doctrine. Take American hegemony. Many people are predicting (usually with glee) the demise of American power (see, for example, Ronald Dworkin). Regardless of the accuracy of these predictions, I think libertarians have reasons to support American global hegemony. Realistic alternatives to hegemony are the international state of nature, balance of power, and governance by an international institution such as the United Nations. The state of nature is undesirable for well-known Hobbesian reasons: defensive efforts would undermine productive cooperation. Balance of power is inherently unstable; sooner or later will morph into hegemonic power. And, at least in today's world, governance by an international institution would be plagued by legitimacy deficits and agency costs that would surely threaten liberal values. So, if we are going to have hegemony as the only arrangement capable of providing global public goods, the United States is the least bad because American institutions and culture embody liberal values. Any likely competitor is certainly to be worse for those who cherish liberal values. I believe history supports this, too: three times during the 20th century the United States saved liberal culture from onslaughts by illiberal forces. Objections to hegemony are often condemnations of means rather than ends, and I certainly agree with those where applicable. Let us concede that the United States sometimes pursues moral ends (say, helping other nations achieve freedom) with immoral means (say, bringing about unjustified collateral harm). Citizens in liberal democracies must oppose the use of immoral means, even for a good cause. However, this kind of criticism cannot be a wholesale condemnation of hegemony, because there are world powers, such as the Soviet Union, who pursue immoral ends. Surely these cannot be saved even when they use moral means (whi
anonymous

Britain's Strategy - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...britains-strategy

america pacific logic geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 May 12 - Cached
  • Britain's rise to its once-extraordinary power represented an unintended gift from Napoleon. It had global ambitions before the Napoleonic Wars, but its defeat in North America and competition with other European navies meant Britain was by no means assured pre-eminence.
  • The defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar and the ultimate French defeat at Waterloo then eliminated France as a significant naval challenger to Britain for several generations.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 07 Jun 12
       
      (Sorry I'm late) To be fair, most of the "French" ships were Spanish.
  • Not only was Britain the dominant political and military power, it also was emerging as the leader in the Industrial Revolution then occurring in Europe.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Napoleon's devastation of continental Europe, the collapse of French power and the underdevelopment of the United States gave Britain an advantage and an opportunity. 
  • Britain also benefitted from the Napoleonic Wars' having crippled most European powers. Britain was not under military pressure for most of the century, and was not forced into a singularly exploitative relationship with its empire to support its wars. It thus avoided Hitler's trap.
  • This began to change in the late 19th century with two major shifts.
  • The first was German unification in 1871
  • The second challenge came from the United States, which also was industrializing at a dramatic pace -- a process ironically underwritten by investors from Britain seeking higher returns than they could get at home.
  • The German challenge culminated in World War I, a catastrophe for Britain and for the rest of Europe. Apart from decimating a generation of men, the cost of the war undermined Britain's economic base, subtly shifting London's relationship with its empire. Moreover, British power no longer seemed inevitable
  • World War II, the second round of the German war, broke Britain's power.
  • Britain lost the war not to Germany but to the United States. It might have been a benign defeat in the sense that the United States, pursuing its own interests, saved Britain from being forced into an accommodation with Germany. Nevertheless, the balance of power between the United States and Britain completely shifted during the war. Britain emerged from the war vastly weaker economically and militarily than the United States. Though it retained its empire, its ability to hold it depended on the United States. Britain no longer could hold it unilaterally. 
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 07 Jun 12
       
      I think many would argue that Britain didn't retain its empire, but lost large parts of it, even if it clung to a few key colonies for a while longer.
  • British strategy at the end of the war was to remain aligned with the United States and try to find a foundation for the United States to underwrite the retention of the empire. But the United States had no interest in this. It saw its primary strategic interest as blocking the Soviet Union in what became known as the Cold War.
  • The U.S. political intervention against the British, French and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, which was designed to maintain British control of the Suez Canal, marked the empire's breaking point. Thereafter, the British retreated strategically and psychologically from the empire.
  • the British aligned themselves with the U.S.-dominated alliance system and the postwar financial arrangements lumped together under the Bretton Woods system.
  • The British, however, added a dimension to this. Unable to match the United States militarily, they outstripped other American allies both in the quantity of their military resources and in their willingness to use them at the behest of the Americans.
  • Britain could not be America's equal. However, it could in effect be America's lieutenant, wielding a military force that outstripped in number -- and technical sophistication -- the forces deployed by other European countries.
  • The goal was to accept a subordinate position without being simply another U.S. ally.
  • The United States was not motivated to go along merely out of sentiment based on shared history, although that played a part. Rather, like all great powers, the United States wanted to engage in coalition warfare and near warfare along with burden sharing.
  • A good example -- though not a very important one -- was London's ability to recruit U.S. support in Britain's war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, also known as the Malvinas. The United States had no interests at stake, but given that Britain did have an interest, the U.S. default setting was to support the British. 
  • There were two dangers for the British in this relationship.
  • The first was the cost of maintaining the force relative to the benefits.
  • The second was the danger of being drawn so deeply into the U.S. orbit that Britain would lose its own freedom of action, effectively becoming, as some warned, the 51st state.
  • Britain has developed a strategy of being enmeshed in Europe without France's enthusiasm, at the same time positioning itself as the single most important ally of the only global power. There are costs on both sides of this, but Britain has been able to retain its options while limiting its dependency on either side.
  • While the United States remains Britain's largest customer for exports if Europe is viewed as individual countries, Europe as a whole is a bigger customer.
  • Britain has positioned itself superbly for a strategy of waiting, watching and retaining options regardless of what happens. If the European Union fails and the European nation-states re-emerge as primary institutions, Britain will be in a position to exploit the fragmentation of Europe to its own economic and political advantage and have the United States available to support its strategy.
  • If the United States stumbles and Europe emerges more prominent, Britain can modulate its relationship with Europe at will and serve as the Europeans' interface with a weakened United States. If both Europe and the United States weaken, Britain is in a position to chart whatever independent course it must.
  • Whatever the British thought of Iraq, a strategy of remaining the most reliable ally of the United States dictated participation.
  • The British strategy represents a classic case of a nation accepting reversal, retaining autonomy, and accommodating itself to its environment while manipulating it. All the while Britain waits, holding its options open, waiting to see how the game plays out and positioning itself to take maximum advantage of its shifts in the environment.
  • anonymous on 01 May 12
     
    Britain controlled about one-fourth of the Earth's land surface and one-fifth of the world's population in 1939. Fifty years later, its holdings outside the British Isles had become trivial, and it even faced an insurgency in Northern Ireland. Britain spent the intervening years developing strategies to cope with what poet Rudyard Kipling called its "recessional," or the transient nature of Britain's imperial power. It has spent the last 20 years defining its place not in the world in general but between continental Europe and the United States in particular.
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

Iraq and Syria Follow Lebanon's Precedent - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...yria-follow-lebanons-precedent

shared by anonymous on 26 Aug 14 - Cached
  • For nearly 100 years, Sykes-Picot defined the region. A strong case can be made that the nation-states Sykes-Picot created are now defunct, and that what is occurring in Syria and Iraq represents the emergence of those post-British/French maps that the United States has been trying to maintain since the collapse of Franco-British power.
  • Sykes-Picot, named for French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot and his British counterpart, Sir Mark Sykes, did two things.
  • First, it created a British-dominated Iraq.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Second, it divided the Ottoman province of Syria on a line from the Mediterranean Sea east through Mount Hermon.
  • The British named the area to the west of the Jordan River after the Ottoman administrative district of Filistina, which turned into Palestine on the English tongue.
  • The British had promised postwar power to both. It gave the victorious Sauds the right to rule Arabia -- hence Saudi Arabia. The other tribe, the Hashemites, had already been given the newly invented Iraqi monarchy and, outside of Arabia
  • And thus, along with Syria, five entities were created between the Mediterranean and Tigris, and between Turkey and the new nation of Saudi Arabia.
  • The most important interest, the oil in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, was protected from the upheaval in their periphery as Turkey and Persia were undergoing upheaval. This gave the Europeans what they wanted.
  • What it did not do was create a framework that made a great deal of sense of the Arabs living in this region.
  • The Europeans used the concept of the nation-state to express divisions between "us" and "them." To the Arabs, this was an alien framework, which to this day still competes with religious and tribal identities.
  • It was Lebanon that came apart first. Lebanon was a pure invention carved out of Syria. As long as the Christians for whom Paris created Lebanon remained the dominant group, it worked, although the Christians themselves were divided into warring clans.
  • Lebanon's issues were not confined to Lebanon. The line dividing Lebanon from Syria was an arbitrary boundary drawn by the French.
  • From the outside it appeared to be strictly a religious war, but that was an incomplete view. It was a competition among clans for money, security, revenge and power. And religion played a role, but alliances crossed religious lines frequently.
  • The complexity of Lebanon goes far beyond this description, and the external meddling from Israel, Syria, Iran and the United States is even more complicated.
  • The point is that the clans became the reality of Lebanon, and the Lebanese government became irrelevant.
  • But in the end, the state existed at the forbearance of the clans. The map may show a nation, but it is really a country of microscopic clans engaged in a microscopic geopolitical struggle for security and power.
  • A similar process has taken place in Syria. The arbitrary nation-state has become a region of competing clans.
  • Something very similar happened in Iraq. As the Americans departed, the government that was created was dominated by Shia, who were fragmented. To a great degree, the government excluded the Sunnis, who saw themselves in danger of marginalization. The Sunnis consisted of various tribes and clans (some containing Shiites) and politico-religious movements like the Islamic State. They rose up in alliance and have now left Baghdad floundering, the Iraqi army seeking balance and the Kurds scrambling to secure their territory.
  • It is a three-way war, but in some ways it is a three-way war with more than 20 clans involved in temporary alliances.
  • the most likely outcome is what happened in Lebanon: the permanent power of the sub-national groups, with perhaps some agreement later on that creates a state in which power stays with the smaller groups, because that is where loyalty lies.
  • The boundary between Lebanon and Syria was always uncertain. The border between Syria and Iraq is now equally uncertain. But then these borders were never native to the region. The Europeans imposed them for European reasons.
  • Therefore, the idea of maintaining a united Iraq misses the point. There was never a united Iraq -- only the illusion of one created by invented kings and self-appointed dictators. The war does not have to continue, but as in Lebanon, it will take the exhaustion of the clans and factions to negotiate an end.
  • The idea that Shia, Sunnis and Kurds can live together is not a fantasy. The fantasy is that the United States has the power or interest to re-create a Franco-British invention crafted out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire.
  • There are two issues here.
  • The first is how far the disintegration of nation-states will go in the Arab world.
  • But the second issue is what regional powers will do about this process.
  • All of this aside, the point is that it is time to stop thinking about stabilizing Syria and Iraq and start thinking of a new dynamic outside of the artificial states that no longer function.
  • anonymous on 26 Aug 14
     
    "Lebanon was created out of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This agreement between Britain and France reshaped the collapsed Ottoman Empire south of Turkey into the states we know today -- Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and to some extent the Arabian Peninsula as well. For nearly 100 years, Sykes-Picot defined the region. A strong case can be made that the nation-states Sykes-Picot created are now defunct, and that what is occurring in Syria and Iraq represents the emergence of those post-British/French maps that the United States has been trying to maintain since the collapse of Franco-British power."
anonymous

Anarchy and Hegemony - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...anarchy-and-hegemony

shared by anonymous on 17 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars
  • East Asia, by contrast, from the 14th to the early 19th centuries, had its relations ordered by a tribute system in which China was roughly dominant. The result, according to political scientist David C. Kang of the University of Southern California, was a generally more peaceful climate in Asia than in Europe.
  • The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      That is quite the statement. On the surface, it *feels* true. Let's see the follow-through.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Columbia University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is not stability, but "hierarchy."
  • Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly "more equal" than others, and it is this formal inequality -- where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others -- that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.
  • Government is the most common form of hierarchy.
  • It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires "some coercive power."
  • The best sort of inequality is hegemony.
  • Whereas primacy, as Kang explains, is about preponderance purely through military or economic power, hegemony "involves legitimation and consensus."
  • That is to say, hegemony is some form of agreed-upon inequality, where the dominant power is expected by others to lead.
  • When a hegemon does not lead, it is acting irresponsibly.
  • hegemony has a bad reputation in media discourse.
  • But that is only because journalists are confused about the terminology, even as they sanctimoniously judge previous historical eras by the strict standards of their own. In fact, for most of human history, periods of relative peace have been the product of hegemony of one sort or another. And for many periods, the reigning hegemonic or imperial power was the most liberal, according to the standards of the age.
  • Rome, Venice and Britain were usually more liberal than the forces arranged against them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      I call BULLSHIT on the Rome thing. There is some strong evidence that they were quite lacking in human rights relative their northern Gaulish neighbors (which they smashed to claim their gold mines).
  • There are exceptions, of course, like Hapsburg Spain, with its combination of inquisition and conquest. But the point is that hegemony does not require tyrannical or absolutist rule.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      I'll buy it. I remember how John Green noted that the Greek city states won a war against the Persians - who had abolished slavery and had greater rights of expression for the multiplicity of ethnicities within their borders.
  • there are few things messier in geopolitics than the demise of an empire.
  • The collapse of the Hapsburgs, of the Ottoman Turks, of the Soviet Empire and the British Empire in Asia and Africa led to chronic wars and upheavals. Some uncomprehending commentators remind us that all empires end badly. Of course they do, but that is only after they have provided decades and centuries of relative peace.
  • Obviously, not all empires are morally equivalent.
  • Therefore, I am saying only in a general sense is order preferable to disorder.
  • Though captivating subtleties abound: For example, Napoleon betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution by creating an empire, but he also granted rights to Jews and Protestants and created a system of merit over one of just birth and privilege.
  • In any case, such order must come from hierarchal domination.
  • Indeed, from the end of World War II until very recently, the United States has performed the role of a hegemon in world politics. America may be democratic at home, but abroad it has been hegemonic.
  • That is, by some rough measure of international consent, it is America that has the responsibility to lead. America formed NATO in Europe, even as its Navy and Air Force exercise preponderant power in the Pacific Basin. And whenever there is a humanitarian catastrophe somewhere in the developing world, it is the United States that has been expected to organize the response.
  • Periodically, America has failed. But in general, it would be a different, much more anarchic world without American hegemony.
  • But that hegemony, in some aspects, seems to be on the wane. That is what makes this juncture in history unique.
  • When it comes to the Greater Middle East, Americans seem to want protection on the cheap, and Obama is giving them that. 
  • We will kill a terrorist with a drone, but outside of limited numbers of special operations forces there will be no boots on the ground for Libya, Syria or any other place.
  • Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were noted for American leadership and an effective, sometimes ruthless foreign policy.
  • Since the Cold War ended and Bill Clinton became president, American leadership has often seemed to be either unserious, inexpertly and crudely applied or relatively absent.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      Yeah, that pussy Clinton, who couldn't get UN support for the Balkans and then proceeded to move through Nato. Sure, it was airstrikes and logistics, but it was no equivocal. Whether you like the action or not. ::raspberry:: [citation needed]
  • Nevertheless, in the case of the Middle East, do not conflate chaos with democracy. Democracy itself implies an unequal, hierarchal order, albeit one determined by voters. What we have in the Middle East cannot be democracy because almost nowhere is there a new and sufficiently formalized hierarchy. No, what we have in many places in the Middle East is the weakening of central authority with no new hierarchy to adequately replace it.
  • Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy -- be it an American hegemon acting globally, or an international organization acting regionally or, say, an Egyptian military acting internally -- we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to.
  • anonymous on 17 Apr 13
     
    "Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars. "
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 5: Turkey - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...olitical_journey_part_5_turkey

geopolitics turkey

shared by anonymous on 23 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Consider the juxtaposition of ancient ritual sacrifice so widely practiced that it requires global trade to sustain it.
  • Turkey will emerge as one of the great regional powers of the next generation, or so I think. It is clear that this process is already under way when you look at Turkey’s rapid economic growth even in the face of the global financial crisis, and when you look at its growing regional influence
  • Turkey’s emergence in the current context makes that anxiety all the more intense. A newly powerful and self-confident Turkey perceived to be increasingly Islamic will create tensions, and it has.
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  • Turkey’s evolution is framed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
  • For Ataturk, the first step was contraction, abandoning any attempt to hold the Ottoman regions that surrounded Turkey.
  • The second step was to break the hold of Ottoman culture on Turkey itself.
  • The slaughter of World War I did more than destroy the Ottoman Empire. It shook its confidence in itself and its traditions.
  • Ataturk did not try to suppress Muslim life in the private sphere, but Islam is a political religion that seeks to regulate both private and public life.
  • For Ataturk, the military represented the most modern element of Turkish society and could serve two functions. It could drive Turkish modernization and protect the regime against those who would try to resurrect the Ottoman state and its Islamic character.
  • Ataturk came to power in a region being swept by European culture, which was what was considered modern.
  • the commonalities of life in poor, urban, religious neighborhoods don’t begin to overcome the profound differences — and importance — of the religions they adhere to.
  • That said, Carsamba drove home to me the problem the AKP, or any party that planned to govern Turkey, would have to deal with. There are large parts of Istanbul that are European in sensibility and values, and these are significant areas. But there is also Carsamba and the villages of Anatolia, and they have a self-confidence and assertiveness that can’t be ignored today.
  • They represent an increasingly important trend in the Islamic world and the option is not suppressing them (that’s gone) but accommodating them or facing protracted conflict, a kind of conflict that in the rest of the Islamic world is not confined to rhetoric. Carsamba is an extreme case in Istanbul, but it poses the issue most starkly.
  • given how healthy the Turkish economy is, wanting to join the European Union is odd. And the fact is that the European Union is not going to let Turkey in anyway.
  • But the AKP’s continued insistence that it wants to join the European Union is a signal to the secularists: The AKP is not abandoning the Europeanist/modernist project.
  • while Carsamba can’t be ignored, the secularists hold tremendous political power in their own right and have the general support of the military.
  • The problem for Turkey is how to bridge the gap between the secularists and the religious.
  • Never forget that at crucial points the Ottomans, as Muslim as they were, allied with the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians in order to dominate the Balkans. They made many other alliances of convenience and maintained a multinational and multireligious empire built on a pyramid of compromises. The AKP is not the party of the Wahhabi, and if it tried to become that, it would fall. The AKP, like most political parties, prefers to hold office.
  • The Turks failed to understand the American and European perception that Turkey had gone over to the radical Islamists.
  • When you take the 360-degree view that the AKP likes to talk about, it is an extraordinary and contradictory mixture of states. Turkey is a country that maintains relations with Iran, Israel and Egypt, a dizzying portfolio.
  • After an interregnum of nearly a century, Turkey is new to being a regional power, and everyone in the region is trying to draw Turkey into something for their own benefit.
  • Turkey’s strategy is to be friends with everyone, its “zero conflict with neighbors” policy, as the Turks call it. It is an explicit policy not to have enemies. The problem is that it is impossible to be friends with all of these countries.
  • Trying to be friendly with everyone is not going to work, but for the Turks, it is a better strategy now than being prematurely Byzantine.
  • I see Turkish foreign policy as simple and straightforward: What they say and what they intend to do are the same.
  • I am trying to understand the consequences of the re-emergence of Russia, the extent to which this will pose a geopolitical challenge and how the international system will respond.
  • The purpose of this trip is to get some sense of how the Turks think about Russia and where Russia fits into their strategic thinking.
  • There are no moves that Turkey can make that will not alienate some great power, and it cannot decline to make these moves.
  • Nevertheless, while the Russians aren’t an immediate threat, they are an existential threat to Turkey.
  • There is endless talk in Turkey of intentions, hidden meanings and conspiracies, some woven decades ago. It is not these things that matter.
  • Islam has replaced modernism as the dynamic force of the region, and Turkey will have to accommodate itself to that.
  • But modernism and secularism are woven into Turkish society. Those two strands cannot be ignored.
  • For all its complexity, I think Turkey is predictable. It will go through massive internal instability and foreign tests it is not ready for, but in the end, it will emerge as it once was: a great regional power.
  • As a subjective matter, I like Turkey and Turks. I suspect I will like them less as they become a great power. They are at the charming point where the United States was after World War I. Over time, global and great powers lose their charm under the pressure of a demanding and dissatisfied world. They become hard and curt. The Turks are neither today. But they are facing the kind of difficulties that only come with success, and those can be the hardest to deal with.
  • The tensions between the secularists and the religious must not be minimized. The tensions within the religious camp are daunting. The tensions between urban and rural are significant. The tensions between Turkey and its allies and neighbors are substantial, even if the AKP is not eager to emphasize this
  • But I think the answer to the question I came for is this: Turkey does not want to confront Russia. Nor does it want to be dependent on Russia. These two desires can’t be reconciled without tension with Russia.
  • anonymous on 23 Nov 10
     
    "This is the fifth installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States." By George Friedman at StratFor on November 23, 2010.
anonymous

The Israeli Periphery - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...israeli-periphery

shared by anonymous on 11 Dec 12 - Cached
  • Security, in the Israeli sense, is thus often characterized in terms of survival. And for Israel to survive, it needs just the right blend of geopolitical circumstance, complex diplomatic arrangements and military preparedness to respond to potential threats nearby. Over the past 33 years, a sense of complacency settled over Israel and gave rise to various theories that it could finally overcome its dependency on outside powers. But a familiar sense of unease crept back into the Israeli psyche before any of those arguments could take root. A survey of the Israeli periphery in Egypt, Syria and Jordan explains why.
  • To Israel's southwest lies the Sinai Desert. This land is economically useless; only hardened Bedouins who sparsely populate the desert expanse consider the terrain suitable for living. This makes the Sinai an ideal buffer.
  • Its economic lifelessness gives it extraordinary strategic importance in keeping the largest Arab army -- Egypt's -- at a safe distance from Israeli population centers. It is the maintenance of this buffer that forms the foundation of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Over the past month, the military's role in this new Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt quietly revealed itself.
  • There will be plenty of noise and confusion in the lead-up to the Dec. 15 referendum as the secular, anti-Muslim Brotherhood civilian opposition continues its protests against Morsi. But filter through that noise, and one can see that the military and the Muslim Brotherhood appear to be adjusting slowly to a new order of Nasserite-Islamist rule.
  • Unlike the 1979 peace treaty, this working arrangement between the military and the Islamists is alive and temperamental. Israel can find some comfort in seeing that the military remains central to the stability of the Egyptian state and will thus likely play a major role in protecting the Sinai buffer. However, merely observing this dance between the military and the Islamists from across the desert is enough to unnerve Israel and justify a more pre-emptive military posture on the border.
  • Israel lacks a good buffer to its north. The most natural, albeit imperfect, line of defense is the Litani River in modern-day Lebanon, with a second line of defense between Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee. Modern-day Israel encompasses this second barrier, a hilly area that has been the target of sporadic mortar shelling from Syrian government forces in pursuit of Sunni rebels.
  • Israel does not face a conventional military threat to its north, nor will it for some time.
  • It is only a matter of time before Alawite forces will have to retreat from Damascus and defend themselves against a Sunni majority from their coastal enclave. The conflict will necessarily subsume Lebanon, and the framework that Israel has relied on for decades to manage more sizable, unconventional threats like Hezbollah will come undone.
  • Somewhere along the way, there will be an internationally endorsed attempt to prop up a provisional government and maintain as much of the state machinery as possible to avoid the scenario of a post-U.S. invasion Iraq. But when decades-old, sectarian-driven vendettas are concerned, there is cause for pessimism in judging the viability of those plans. Israel cannot avoid thinking in terms of worst-case scenarios, so it will continue to reinforce its northern defenses ahead of more instability.
  • The vulnerability that the Hashemites felt as a foreign entity in charge of economically lackluster terrain created ideal conditions for Israel to protect its eastern approach.
  • In short, the Hashemites were vulnerable enough for Israel to be considered a useful security partner but not so vulnerable that Israel couldn't rely on the regime to protect its eastern approach.
  • That arrangement is now under considerable stress. The Hashemites are facing outright calls for deposition from the same tribal East Bankers, Palestinians and Islamists that for decades formed the foundation of the state.
  • the state itself is weakening under the pressure of high oil prices
  • In this fluctuating strategic environment, Israel cannot afford to be isolated politically. Its need for a power patron will grow alongside its insecurities in its periphery. Israel's current patron, the United States, is also grappling with the emerging Islamist order in the region. But in this new regional dynamic, the United States will eventually look past ideology in search of partners to help manage the region.
  • As U.S.-Turkish relations in recent years and the United States' recent interactions with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood reveal, it will be an awkward and bumpy experience while Washington tries to figure out who holds the reins of power and which brand of Islamists it can negotiate with amid messy power transitions. This is much harder for Israel to do independently by virtue of ideology, size and location.
  • The irony is that while Israel is a western-style democracy, it was most secure in an age of Arab dictatorships. As those dictatorships give way to weak and in some cases crumbling states, Israeli survival instincts will again be put to the test.
  • anonymous on 11 Dec 12
     
    "The state of Israel has a basic, inescapable geopolitical dilemma: Its national security requirements outstrip its military capabilities, making it dependent on an outside power. Not only must that power have significant military capabilities but it also must have enough common ground with Israel to align its foreign policy toward the Arab world with that of Israel's. These are rather heavy requirements for such a small nation."
anonymous

Considering a Succession Plan in Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...idering-succession-plan-russia

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Putin has worked since 2000 to consolidate Russia's government and political system under his leadership. Decisions regarding policy and strategy have for the most part been made by Putin himself, even as the country's networks of power circles and politicians have manifested themselves in various ways.
  • Over the past 13 years, Putin has shifted between the opposing camps as he has seen fit to strengthen and stabilize the country.
  • at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, the consolidation of Russia faced social and political challenges with United Russia losing credibility in contentious elections, the rise of anti-Kremlin protestors and the fracturing of Kremlin clans into a string of conflicting groups.
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  • The Kremlin was forced to start an accelerated political restructuring in 2012 -- one entailing a countrywide effort to devise programs to plan for Russia's future.
  • The Kremlin launched a major domestic anti-corruption campaign that began targeting the government in an attempt to curb behavior that has had a long-term decaying effect on the country.
  • Russians believe good health to be an important aspect of one's ability to lead, and Putin's back trouble caused many in the Kremlin to panic. The Russian media and the Russian people had never seen Putin falter due to ill health. This was in stark contrast to his predecessor, former President Boris Yeltsin, who was plagued with health issues that negatively impacted his ability to run the country.
  • Though Russia has a formal electoral process to choose its leaders, in reality Putin makes the choices regarding leadership.
  • due to the intricate workings of the internal power circles -- and especially because Medvedev is a reformist, not a security hawk -- Medvedev was quickly deemed irrelevant, and Putin remained in power as premier.
  • Putin is not just a president; he is the ultimate arbitrator of Russia's factions and sectors. Before Putin could find a successor capable of assuming that role, he had to break down the existing power structure and create a new system through which a successor could rise.
  • Since the end of 2012, a new system – coined the Politburo 2.0 by widely followed Kremlin analyst Yevgeni Minchenko – has broken down much of the previous clan system and created an inner Kremlin circle of nine men, with Putin as its overall leader. This is not a formal system, like the Cabinet of Ministers, which implements Putin’s vision. It is rather a way to balance the most powerful decision-makers in the country, each with connections and power bases in politics, energy, finance and the military. Outside of the Politburo 2.0 are political circles from which Politburo members may draw support.
  • With a newer, though untested, system in place, the concept of succession is now being considered, and a vice presidency is seen as one possible solution.
  • The concept of a vice presidency that would lead into a successor role is fraught with peril for Putin's new Politburo 2.0. There has never been a formalized second-in-command position under Putin for which various power groups could vie.
  • Creating such a position will most likely lead to vicious competition between the power circles, as well as attempts to discredit the person who becomes vice president.
  • There is also a danger to Putin himself: Previous attempts to install a vice president have led to moves to overthrow the president.
  • The first attempt took place in 1990, during the last years of the Soviet Union, when Gennady Yanayev held the office under former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Yanayev turned on Gorbachev in 1991, taking part in the coup that at first made Yanayev acting president of the Soviet Union. This was before he was arrested and replaced by Yeltsin. Under Yeltsin, Alexander Rustokoi held the role of vice president from 1991-1993. He eventually attempted to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993 during two weeks of mass violence across Moscow ending with Rustokoi’s arrest.
  • With so many dangers related to creating a vice presidency, and with the new Politburo 2.0 still untested, it may be too early for the implementation of a new succession system in the Kremlin.
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 13
     
    "Advisers to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday submitted proposals concerning a possible restoration of the office of vice president, a move that could create part of a succession plan for a post-Putin Russia."
anonymous

New Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-foreign-policy-toward-russia

shared by anonymous on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • This is a new twist not because it makes clear that the United States is not the only country intercepting phone calls, but because it puts U.S. policy in Ukraine in a new light and forces us to reconsider U.S. strategy toward Russia and Germany.
  • Nuland's cell phone conversation is hardly definitive, but it is an additional indicator of American strategic thinking.
  • Previously, the United States was focused heavily on the Islamic world and, more important, tended to regard the use of force as an early option in the execution of U.S. policy rather than as a last resort.
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  • The strategy was successful when its goal was to destroy an enemy military force. It proved far more difficult to use in occupying countries and shaping their internal and foreign policies. Military force has intrinsic limits.
  • The alternative has been a shift to a balance-of-power strategy in which the United States relies on the natural schisms that exist in every region to block the emergence of regional hegemons and contain unrest and groups that could threaten U.S. interests.
  • The new strategy can be seen in Syria, where rather than directly intervening the United States has stood back and allowed the warring factions to expend their energy on each other, preventing either side from diverting resources to activities that might challenge U.S. interests.
  • Behind this is a schism in U.S. foreign policy that has more to do with motivation than actual action.
  • On one side, there are those who consciously support the Syria model for the United States as not necessarily the best moral option but the only practical option there is.
  • On the other, there are those who argue on behalf of moral interventions, as we saw in Libya, and removing tyrants as an end in itself.
  • Given the outcome in Libya, this faction is on the defensive, as it must explain how an intervention will actually improve the moral situation.
  • for all the rhetoric, the United States is by default falling into a balance-of-power model.
  • Russia emerged as a problem for the United States after the Orange Revolution in 2004, when the United States, supporting anti-Russian factions in Ukraine, succeeded in crafting a relatively pro-Western, anti-Russian government.
  • The Russians read this as U.S. intelligence operations designed to create an anti-Russian Ukraine that, as we have written, would directly challenge Russian strategic and economic interests.
  • The Russian response was to use its own covert capabilities, in conjunction with economic pressure from natural gas cutoffs, to undermine Ukraine's government and to use its war with Georgia as a striking reminder of the resurrection of Russian military capabilities.
  • Washington had two options. One was to allow the balance of power to assert itself, in this case relying on the Europeans to contain the Russians. The other was to continue to follow the balance of power model but at a notch higher than pure passivity.
  • As Nuland's call shows, U.S. confidence in Europe's will for and interest in blocking the Russians was low; hence a purely passive model would not work.
  • The next step was the lowest possible level of involvement to contain the Russians and counter their moves in the Middle East.
  • The United States is not prepared to intervene in the former Soviet Union.
  • Russia is not a global power, and its military has many weaknesses, but it is by far the strongest in the region and is able to project power in the former Soviet periphery
  • At the moment, the U.S. military also has many weaknesses.
  •  A direct intervention, even were it contemplated (which it is not), is not an option.
  • The only correlation of forces that matters is what exists at a given point in time in a given place. In that sense, the closer U.S. forces get to the Russian homeland, the greater the advantage the Russians have.
  • Instead, the United States did the same thing that it did prior to the Orange Revolution: back the type of intervention that both the human rights advocates and the balance-of-power advocates could support.
  • it appeared that it was the Germans who were particularly pressing the issue, and that they were the ones virtually controlling one of the leaders of the protests, Vitali Klitschko.
  • Berlin's statements indicating that it is prepared to take a more assertive role in the world appeared to be a historic shift in German foreign policy.
  • Although Germany's move should not be dismissed, its meaning was not as clear as it seemed. In her cell phone call, Nuland is clearly dismissing the Germans, Klitschko and all their efforts in Ukraine.
  • This could mean that the strategy was too feeble for American tastes (Berlin cannot, after all, risk too big a confrontation with Moscow). Or it could mean that when the Germans said they were planning to be more assertive, their new boldness was meant to head off U.S. efforts. Looking at this week's events, it is not clear what the Germans meant.
  • What is clear is that the United States was not satisfied with Germany and the European Union.
  • This is a touchy issue for human rights advocates, or should be. Yanukovich is the elected president of Ukraine, winner of an election that is generally agreed to have been honest (even though his constitutional amendments and subsequent parliamentary elections may not have been). He was acting within his authority in rejecting the deal with the European Union. If demonstrators can unseat an elected president because they disagree with his actions, they have set a precedent that undermines constitutionalism. Even if he was rough in suppressing the demonstrators, it does not nullify his election.
  • From a balance of power strategy, however, it makes great sense.
  • A pro-Western, even ambiguous, Ukraine poses a profound strategic problem for Russia.
  • Using the demonstrations to create a massive problem for Russia does two things.
  • It creates a real strategic challenge for the Russians and forces them on the defensive. Second, it reminds Russia that Washington has capabilities and options that make challenging the United States difficult.
  • And it can be framed in a way that human rights advocates will applaud in spite of the constitutional issues, enemies of the Iranian talks will appreciate and Central Europeans from Poland to Romania will see as a sign of U.S. commitment to the region.
  • The United States will re-emerge as an alternative to Germany and Russia. It is a brilliant stroke.
  • Its one weakness, if we can call it that, is that it is hard to see how it can work.
  • Russia has significant economic leverage in Ukraine, it is not clear that pro-Western demonstrators are in the majority, and Russian covert capabilities in Ukraine outstrip American capabilities. The Federal Security Service and Foreign Intelligence Service have been collecting files on Ukrainians for a long time. We would expect that after the Olympics in Sochi, the Russians could play their trump cards.
  • even if the play fails, the United States will have demonstrated that it is back in the game
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Feb 14
       
      Whoopie.
  • The mere willingness of the United States to engage will change the expectations of Central Europe, cause tensions between the Central Europeans and the Germans and create an opening for the United States.
  • Of course, the question is whether and where the Russians will answer the Americans, or even if they will consider the U.S. actions significant at all.
  • if the United States ups the ante in Central Europe, Russian inroads there will dissolve.
  • If the Russians are now an American problem, which they are, and if the United States is not going to revert to a direct intervention mode, which it cannot, then this strategy makes sense.
  • The public interception of Nuland's phone call was not all that embarrassing. It showed the world that the United States, not Germany, is leading the way in Ukraine. And it showed the Russians that the Americans care so little, they will express it on an open cell phone line. Nuland's obscene dismissal of the European Union and treatment of Russia as a problem to deal with confirms a U.S. policy: The United States is not going to war, but passivity is over.
  • anonymous on 11 Feb 14
     
    "The struggle for some of the most strategic territory in the world took an interesting twist this week. Last week we discussed what appeared to be a significant shift in German national strategy in which Berlin seemed to declare a new doctrine of increased assertiveness in the world -- a shift that followed intense German interest in Ukraine. This week, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, in a now-famous cell phone conversation, declared her strong contempt for the European Union and its weakness and counseled the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine to proceed quickly and without the Europeans to piece together a specific opposition coalition before the Russians saw what was happening and took action."
anonymous

The Geopolitics of France: Maintaining Its Influence in a Changing Europe - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tralized_system_guarding_plain

geopolitics france

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Mountain ranges inhibit trade and armies alike while peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller ones. Because of such features, it isn’t as much of a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is that anyone has ever tried.
  • two other geographic features that push Europe together
  • The first is the North European Plain
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  • Northern Europe is home to the densest concentration of wealth in the world
  • The second feature — the Mediterranean Sea — plays a similar role to the continent’s south
  • Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place.
  • three places on the Continent where this pattern of fragmentation does not hold
  • The first are the Seine and Loire river valleys
  • The second and third places where the fragmentation pattern does not hold are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys
  • The one thing these three geographic exceptions have in common is that they all have long resided in the political entity known as France.
  • France is nearly always engaged but is only rarely ascendant.
  • Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain.
  • Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low-lying terrain with occasional hills.
  • The Beauce region is therefore the French core.
  • Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic — connected by the Seine — to benefit from oceanic trade routes but far enough away to be insulated somewhat from a direct naval invasion.
  • In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage because of its geography.
  • Phase I: Centralization (843-1453)
  • The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state because of its fertile land and strategic location on the North European Plain.
  • Early France faced two problems, both rooted in geography.
  • The first dealt with the plains.
  • The solution to this military reality was feudalism.
  • French, one of the Langue d’oil, did not become the official tongue until the 1500s, and linguistic unification was not completed until the 1800s.
  • England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions
  • As in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was toward centralization rather than decentralization.
  • The combination of the political disasters of the feudal period and the success of consolidation in the battles with the English served as the formative period of the French psyche.
  • Phase II: The Hapsburg Challenge and Balance of Power (1506-1700)
  • Europe’s Hapsburg era was a dangerous time for the French.
  • In three major wars — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763, against Britain in North America) — France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts.
  • Phase III: Nationalism and the Rise of Germany (1789-1945)
  • two equally damning results
  • First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789.
  • Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Hapsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.
  • One of the many unintended side effects of the French Revolution was the concept of nationalism,
  • From nationalism grew the nation-state, a political entity that harnesses all people sharing a similar ethnicity into a single governing unit.
  • The result was the one near-unipolar moment in European history.
  • Not only was France the only state to have embraced the concept of nationalism, but it also grafted the concept onto an already centralized system, allowing French power to pour forth across Europe and North Africa.
  • From 1803 to 1815, France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.
  • The lesson was a simple one, again rooted in geography. Even when France is united and whole, even when she is not under siege, even when her foes are internally distracted and off balance, even when she is led by one of the greatest organizational and military minds in human history, even when she holds the advantage of nationalism — she still lacks the resources and manpower to rule Europe.
  • But most of all the advantage of nationalism spread. Over the next few decades the political innovation of the nation-state spread throughout Europe and in time became a global phenomenon.
  • The culmination of this dichotomy was the events of May-June 1940, when the French military crumbled in less than six weeks. The defeat was by no means solely the result of geopolitical forces, but it sprang from the fundamental imbalance of power between France and a unified Germany.
  • Phase IV: Managing Germany
  • as France is concerned, however, STRATFOR views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase, France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.
  • And far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history.
  • The stated gains of the EEC/EU have always been economic and political, but the deeper truth is that the European project has always been about French geopolitical fear and ambition.
  • Eventually the Cold War ended, and the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France. While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted.
  • the Soviet collapse led to the reunification of Germany — and that was a top-tier issue.
  • Twenty years on, Germany cannot abandon the European Union without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought.
  • that leaves the French with two long-term concerns.
  • First, the cage breaks, Germany goes its own way and attempts to remake Europe to suit its purposes.
  • Second, the cage holds, but it constrains France more than Germany.
  • Geopolitical Imperatives
  • Secure a Larger Hinterland
  • France is the only country on the North European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power.
  • Always Look East
  • Being situated at the western end of the North European Plain makes France the only country on the plain that has only one land approach to defend against.
  • Maintain Influence in Regions Beyond Western Europe
  • Unlike the United Kingdom, whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial.
  • These colonial assets served one more critical role for Paris: They were disposable.
  • Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned — despite being home to some 1 million ethnic French — so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in the rest of Europe.
  • Be Flexible
  • Geopolitics is not ideological or personal, although few countries have the discipline to understand that.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "France is bound by the Alps in the southeast and the Pyrenees in the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea in the south and the Atlantic in both the west and north. In the east, France is bound by the river Rhine and the low mountains of the Ardennes, Vosges and Jura." At StratFor on September 13, 2010.
anonymous

U.S.-Chinese Thaw Before Midterm Elections? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0908_us_chinese_thaw_elections

geopolitics china

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Now, however, both sides have taken steps to reduce these tensions.
  • It seems both the United States and China, which are economically intertwined, would prefer not to upset relations at a time of deepening global economic uncertainty.
  • With midterm elections in November and a number of incumbents’ seats endangered by angry voters, the chorus against China’s trade policies is rising, as is the political risk of not taking action. Beijing may therefore soften its stance and seek ways to allay and deflect U.S. pressure.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 10
     
    "The thaw in Sino-American relations comes after a summer that saw a significant ramp up in tensions. Following the South Korean conclusion in late May that North Korea sank the ChonAn, one of its naval corvettes, the United States and South Korea launched a series of military exercises to demonstrate the strength of their alliance." At StratFor on September 9, 2010.
anonymous

Rising Solar Energy Output Drives German & French Power Prices to Record Lows - 0 views

cleantechnica.com/...ch-power-prices-to-record-lows

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Renewable energy critics and opponents continue to zoom in on the intermittent nature of solar and wind energy in their efforts to undermine and derail the transition away from centralized, mass production of energy based on burning fossil fuels.
  • Observed evidence (two examples here and here) indicates that coupled with adequate grid infrastructure and energy policy reform, solar and wind power generation — on and off-grid — can reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions and enhance the security and resiliency of power supplies without putting an excessive burden on consumers.
  • No doubt Germany is struggling to overcome obstacles and resistance to Premier Angela Merkel’s plan to eliminate reliance on nuclear power by building out solar and wind power generation capacity as replacements. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who cares to familiarize themselves with such revolutionary challenges. In fact, they make Germany’s success in this regard all the more remarkable.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "Even at this early stage of a much belated evolutionary process, empirical evidence and ongoing technological advances, as well as pro clean energy and sustainable development polices and market developments, highlight the fallacy of their arguments."
anonymous

StratFor Annual Forecast 2013 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2013

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Generational shifts take time to play out and often begin with a period of denial as the forces of the international system struggle to preserve the old order. In 2013, that state of denial will persist in many areas. But we are more than four years into this cyclical transformation, and change is becoming more palpable and much harder to deny with every passing month.
  • In Europe, short-term remedies that are so far preserving the integrity of the European Union are also papering over the deep, structural ailments of the bloc.
  • China is not so much in denial of its current predicament as it is constrained in its ability to cope with a dramatic shift from high export-oriented growth to more sustainable development of its interior.
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  • The emerging economies of the post-China world will take time to develop, but 2013 will be an important year in determining which are best positioned to fill the growing void left by China.
  • Change will be primarily violent in nature -- and thus harder to miss -- in the Middle East.
  • The United States is also not immune to change. In this generational shift, and all the tumult that comes with it, Washington will be forced to learn the value of restraint in balance-of-power politics, preferring to lean on regional partners and encourage strategic competition as a way of preserving its own power.
  • The Arab world is moving uncomfortably between two eras. The post-World War II era, in which Arab dictatorships and monarchies supplanted colonial rule, is now roughly blending with -- or in some cases outright colliding with -- a fractured landscape of long-repressed Islamist forces.
  • This dynamic will be particularly visible in the northern Levant region this year as Syria and Lebanon continue coming apart. From Stratfor's perspective, the regime in Syria has already fallen and is giving way to a familiar state of warlordism, where militias and clan interests reign supreme. There is no longer a political entity capable of wielding control over the entirety of Syrian territory, nor will there be for some time.
  • once Syrian President Bashar al Assad is removed from power, whether through a negotiated deal or by force, the Sunni forces will fragment along ideological, ethnic and geographic lines, with Salafist-jihadist forces battling against a more politically minded Muslim Brotherhood and secular Sunnis.
  • As their grip over Aleppo slips, Alawite forces will try to hold Damascus while preparing a mass retreat to their coastal enclave. The battle for Damascus could extend beyond the scope of this forecast.
  • The potential use of chemical weapons by Alawite forces in a state of desperation could accelerate the unraveling of the region; a U.S.-led coalition would have to assemble in haste to contain the chemical weapons threat.
  • To be clear, the United States is not looking for a pretext to intervene militarily in Syria. On the contrary, the United States will make every effort possible to avoid another military campaign in the Islamic world this year.
  • A military conflict between the United States and Iran remains unlikely in 2013.
  • The growing disparity in the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions will largely relegate Iran to the role of regional spoiler. So long as Iran can create pain for its regional adversaries, it can slow its own descent.
  • Iraq remains Iran's primary regional imperative, however. The momentum building among Sunni forces in Syria will eventually spill into Iraq and challenge Shiite dominance.
  • Iran's presidential elections in June will reveal the declining relevancy of the clerical elite and the populist faction embodied by outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This creates a political void for the Revolutionary Guard to fill. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will try to check the Corps' growing influence by bolstering rival military and security agencies and backing a less controversial and more politically malleable ally from the pragmatic conservative camp for the presidency.
  • In Egypt, the military will adapt to an emerging Islamist political order. The military will remain the ultimate arbiter of the state and will rely on a number of factors -- including a fragmented judiciary, the military's economic leverage, a divided Islamist political landscape and the military's foreign relationships -- to check the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Egypt's consuming political transition will leave opportunities for flare-ups in the Sinai Peninsula and in Gaza, but we do not expect a significant breach between Israel and Egypt this year.
  • Jordan, the oft-overlooked casualty of the Arab Spring, will continue to destabilize quietly and slowly in 2013
  • Israel and Turkey are both greatly affected by the shifting political dynamics of the Arab world, but both have little means to influence the change. The two former allies will continue exploring ways to restore a quiet working relationship under these new regional stresses, but a public restoration of diplomatic ties is less likely.
  • Israel will struggle internally over how to adapt to a new regional framework in which the reliability of old working partners is called into question.
  • Turkey sees an opportunity in the rise of Islamist forces in the Arab world but Ankara's limited influences restrain its actions beyond Turkish borders.
  • A more aggressive Saudi role in Syria will aggravate the civil war and create competition with other regional stakeholders, including Turkey, Qatar and Jordan.
  • In 2012, the European Union took numerous steps to mitigate the financial impact of its ongoing crisis.
  •  These actions, which helped to keep the eurozone afloat in 2012, will remain effective in 2013, making it very likely that the eurozone will survive another year. But these tools do not solve three fundamental aspects of the European crisis. 
  • First, the European crisis is fundamentally a crisis of competitiveness.
  • Second, the crisis has a political aspect. The European Union is not a federation but a collection of nation-states bound together by international treaties.
  • Third, the European crisis is threatening the social stability in some countries, especially in the eurozone's periphery.
  • In 2013, the two largest economies of the eurozone (Germany and France) will face low growth or even stagnation. This will have negative effects across Europe.
  • In 2013, the crisis will keep damaging economic conditions in the eurozone periphery. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy will see their economies shrink and unemployment rates rise. In all these countries, the social unrest will grow and the year will be marked by permanent protests and strikes. 
  • The conspicuous divide between the ruling elite and the populations of the periphery will be a key element in 2013, and some governments could fall. But even if opposition parties take power, they will face the same constraints as the governments that preceded them. In other words, a change in politicians will not bring a substantial change in policies regarding the European Union.
  • The only country in the eurozone periphery that has scheduled elections is Italy (in February). If the next Italian government fails to achieve political stability and apply economic reforms, the increased market pressure on Italy will make Rome more likely to require financial assistance from Brussels.
  • Because of the fundamental contradictions in the national interests and foreign policy strategies of the EU member states, the European crisis will continue generating political and economic divisions in the Continent in 2013.
  • Outside the eurozone, the United Kingdom will seek to protect its sovereignty and renegotiate its status within the European Union. But London will not leave the European Union in 2013.
  • Domestic Issues After the political tumult of 2012, Russia will face another year of anti-Kremlin protests, tensions among various political factions and ethnic groups, crackdowns and government reshuffles. Overall, the political tensions will remain manageable and will not pose a serious challenge to Moscow's control.
  • Russia has made significant progress recently in re-establishing influence in its former Soviet periphery.
  • Russia's relationship with Ukraine could be its most important connection in the former Soviet Union in 2013. Russia has been pursuing integration with Ukraine, primarily by taking over its natural gas transit infrastructure and calling on Kiev to join the Customs Union.
  • Georgia will be Russia's main concern in the Caucasus in 2013. With the political emergence of billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream movement, Russia's position in the country strengthened at the expense of the anti-Russian camp of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
  • In the past year, Russia has changed its tactics toward Europe to preserve its presence and leverage for the future. Russia's primary link to Europe is the Europeans' dependence on Russia's large energy supplies, which Moscow knows will be threatened when more non-Russian supplies become available.
  • In 2012, Russia began shifting away from its aggressive stance on energy -- particularly its high prices -- to strike long-term deals that will maintain Russia's market share with its primary strategic customers, such as Germany, Italy and Turkey. Russia will continue this strategy in 2013 as it continues to build new infrastructure to directly link its supplies to Europe.
  • The United States and Russia will continue sparring over trade matters, negotiations for a new nuclear arms treaty and Russia's role in Iran and Syria. Stratfor does not expect major changes from Washington or Moscow that would break the gridlock in negotiations on these issues.
  • The low-level violence and instability that occurred throughout Central Asia in 2012 will continue in 2013.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia in 2013: Beijing's struggle to maintain social and political stability amid lower economic growth rates; China's accelerating military modernization and increasingly aggressive moves to secure its territorial and economic interests in the region; and varied efforts by other regional players, including the United States, to adapt to China's changes. 
  • In 2013, the Chinese economy will continue the gradual, painful process of moving away from high export-driven growth and toward a model that is more sustainable in the long run.
  • But barring another global financial meltdown on the scale of 2008-2009, China's coastal manufacturing economy will not collapse outright. The decline will be gradual.
  • The ongoing, gradual eclipse of coastal China as a hub of global manufacturing over the next several years will lead to higher unemployment and social dislocation as more of China's 250 million-strong migrant labor force returns inland in search of work. 
  • Shadow banking is by no means new in China. But it has grown significantly in the past few years from the geographically isolated informal loan markets of coastal cities to a complex network of semi-legal entities that provides between 12 and 30 trillion yuan (between $1.9 trillion and $4.8 trillion) in credit -- at interest rates of 20-36 percent -- to thousands of struggling small businesses nationwide.
  • The Party's growing sense of insecurity -- both internally and with regard to the social consequences of China's economic transition -- likely will be reflected in continued censorship of online social platforms like Weibo, crackdowns on religious or other groups perceived as threatening, and the Chinese military's growing assertiveness over China's interests in the South and East China seas and Southeast Asia.
  • The decline of low-end coastal manufacturing in China will present enormous opportunities for Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and potentially Myanmar -- all of whom will continue to push strongly for foreign investment not only into natural resources and raw materials industries but also into developing better urban, transport, power generation and materials processing infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines -- China's most vocal opponents in Southeast Asia -- will continue to push for greater integration among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and for U.S. business and military engagement in the region.
  • The Coming U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan Ahead of the 2014 drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, efforts will intensify to negotiate a settlement that gives the Taliban a place in a new government.
  • The negotiations will face numerous obstacles this year. There will be an upsurge in violence -- both in terms of officially sanctioned attacks designed to gain advantage on the negotiating table and spoiler attacks by Taliban elements allied with al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
  • Washington's intention to reduce its presence in the region will spur regional actors to fill the void. Pakistan will increase its interactions with Russia, Central Asia and Iran to prepare for a post-U.S. Afghanistan.
  • India will also turn its attention eastward, where the United States is quietly trying to forge a coalition of regional partners to keep a check on China in the Indo-Pacific basin. Myanmar in particular will be an active battleground for influence this year.
  • Preparing for a Post-Chavez Venezuela After a year of successful campaigning for re-election, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in questionable health. Although the ultimate outcome of December's medical treatment for the ailing leader is unpredictable, Chavez's decision to name Vice President Nicolas Maduro as a political successor at the end of 2012 indicates that there is significant concern for his ability to remain in power.
  • Although it remains possible that Chavez will stay in power through the year, for Maduro to capitalize on Chavez's recent political gains, elections may need to be called sooner rather than later, regardless of Chavez's immediate health status.
  • Throughout 2013, Colombia will continue the incremental process of negotiating an end to the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC.
  • This will be a year of significant transition for Mexico. Policy issues that were bottled up by intra-party competition in the waning years of the National Action Party's administration have begun coming to the fore and will dominate 2013. These include socio-political issues like education, tax and pension reform.
  • The most important issue facing Mexico in 2013 will be energy policy.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "At the beginning of 2012, we argued that the international system is undergoing a generational transformation -- the kind that occurs every 20 years or so. The cycle we are now in started in 2008-2009, when global financial contagion exposed the underlying weaknesses of Europe and eventually cracked China's export-oriented economic model. The Middle East then began to deviate from its post-World War II paradigm with an attempted resurgence by Iran, the regional rise of Islamists and the decline of age-old autocratic regimes in the Arab world."
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