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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

What Happened to the American Declaration of War? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pened-american-declaration-war

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war.
  • the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think.
  • The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress.
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  • Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him.
  • But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
  • In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea.
  • Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways.
  • First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter.
  • Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered.
  • It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties.
  • Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general.
  • In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
  • Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
  • All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
  • The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
  • One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done
  • A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things.
  • First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously.
  • Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens.
  • Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war.
  • And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided.
  • The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
  • I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
  • As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 11
     
    "In my book "The Next Decade," I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic."
anonymous

Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ervention-wars-humanitarianism

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars — wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering.
  • In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side.
  • That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.
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  • In international wars, where the aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy’s right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual problem.
  • In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or the right of national self-determination.
  • I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values.
  • They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.
  • What we are seeing in Libya is a classic slow escalation motivated by two factors.
  • The first is the hope that the leader of the country responsible for the bloodshed will capitulate.
  • The second is a genuine reluctance of intervening nations to spend excessive wealth or blood on a project they view in effect as charitable.
  • The expectation of capitulation in the case of Libya is made unlikely by another aspect of humanitarian war fighting, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC).
  • While a logical extension of humanitarian warfare — having intervened against atrocities, the perpetrators ought to be brought to justice — the effect is a prolongation of the war. The example of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, who ended the Kosovo War with what he thought was a promise that he would not be prosecuted, undoubtedly is on Gadhafi’s mind.
  • But the war is also prolonged by the unwillingness of the intervening forces to inflict civilian casualties.
  • The application of minimal and insufficient force, combined with the unwillingness of people like Gadhafi and his equally guilty supporters to face The Hague, creates the framework for a long and inconclusive war in which the intervention in favor of humanitarian considerations turns into an intervention in a civil war on the side that opposes the regime.
  • It should be remembered that many of Libya’s opposition leaders are former senior officials of the Gadhafi government. They did not survive as long as they did in that regime without having themselves committed crimes, and without being prepared to commit more.
  • At some point, the interveners have the choice of walking away and leaving chaos, as the United States did in Somalia, or staying for a long time and fighting, as they did in Iraq.
  • Regardless of the United States’ other motivations in both conflicts, it would seem that those who favor humanitarian intervention would have favored the Iraq war. That they generally opposed the Iraq war from the beginning requires a return to the concept of immaculate intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Apr 11
       
      For those generally anti-war, this is a less-than-delightful realization, but (I think) jibes with reality more. However, former President Bush and his advisers established justification (WMD's) that affected both intentions and expectations from people on all sides of the debate. Notwithstanding the good intentions of those who advocate humanitarian wars, the effect can never be what is desired.
  • Hussein was a war criminal and a danger to his people. However, the American justification for intervention was not immaculate.
  • That it also had a humanitarian outcome — the destruction of the Hussein regime — made the American intervention inappropriate in the view of those who favor immaculate interventions for two reasons.
  • First, the humanitarian outcome was intended as part of a broader war.
  • Second, regardless of the fact that humanitarian interventions almost always result in regime change, the explicit intention to usurp Iraq’s national self-determination openly undermined in principle what the humanitarian interveners wanted to undermine only in practice.
  • for the humanitarian warrior, there are other political considerations.
  • In the case of the French, the contrast between their absolute opposition to Iraq and their aggressive desire to intervene in Libya needs to be explained. I suspect it will not be.
  • Perhaps it was about oil in this case, but Gadhafi was happily shipping oil to Europe, so intervening to ensure that it continues makes no sense.
  • Sometimes the lack of a persuasive reason for a war generates theories to fill the vacuum. In all humanitarian wars, there is a belief that the war could not be about humanitarian matters.
  • Therein lays the dilemma of humanitarian wars. They have a tendency to go far beyond the original intent behind them, as the interveners, trapped in the logic of humanitarian war, are drawn further in. Over time, the ideological zeal frays and the lack of national interest saps the intervener’s will.
  • My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don’t think the intent is good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end is not achieved. Ideology, like passion, fades. But interest has a certain enduring quality.
  • A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war.
  • In the end, the ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that “this won’t hurt much” and “it will be over fast.”
  • If you must go in, go in heavy, go in hard and get out fast. Humanitarian warfare says that you go in light, you go in soft and you stay there long.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology."
anonymous

World War II and the Origins of American Unease - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ii-and-origins-american-unease

shared by anonymous on 13 May 15 - Cached
  • The first thing that leaps to mind is the manner in which World War II began for the three great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
  • For all three, the war started with a shock that redefined their view of the world.
  • There was little doubt among American leaders that war with Japan was coming. The general public had forebodings, but not with the clarity of its leaders.
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  • Neither the leaders nor the public thought the Japanese were nearly so competent.
  • Pearl Harbor intersected with another shock to the American psyche — the Great Depression. These two events shared common characteristics:
  • First, they seemed to come out of nowhere.
  • This introduced a new dimension into American culture.
  • The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor created a different sensibility that suspected that prosperity and security were an illusion, with disaster lurking behind them.
  • The two shocks created a dark sense of foreboding that undergirds American society to this day.
  • Catastrophe therefore might come at any moment. The American approach to the Cold War is symbolized by Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.
  • The Americans analyzed their forced entry into World War II and identified what they took to be the root cause: the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.
  • If the origin of World War II was the failure to take pre-emptive action against the Germans in 1938, then it followed that the Pacific War might have been prevented by more aggressive actions early on.
  • Acting early and decisively remains the foundation of U.S. foreign policy to this day. The idea that not acting in a timely and forceful fashion led to World War II underlies much American discourse on Iran or Russia.
  • Pearl Harbor (and the 1929 crash) not only led to a sense of foreboding and a distrust in the wisdom of political and military leaders, but it also replaced a strategy of mobilization after war begins, with a strategy of permanent mobilization.
  • The Soviet Union had its own Pearl Harbor on June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded in spite of the friendship treaty signed between them in 1939.
  • That treaty was struck for two reasons: First, the Russians couldn't persuade the British or French to sign an anti-Hitler pact. Second, a treaty with Hitler would allow the Soviets to move their border further west without firing a shot.
  • The Soviets made a single miscalculation: They assumed a German campaign in France would replay the previous Great War.
  • That the moment of attack was a surprise compounded the challenge, but the real problem was strategic miscalculation, not simply an intelligence or command failure.
  • The Soviet forces were not ready for an attack, and their strategy collapsed with France, so the decision for war was entirely Germany's.
  • What the Soviets took away from the June 1941 invasion was a conviction that political complexity could not substitute for a robust military. The United States ended World War II with the conviction that a core reason for that war was the failure of the United States. The Soviets ended World War II with the belief that their complex efforts at coalition building and maintaining the balance of power had left them utterly exposed by one miscalculation on France — one that defied the conventional wisdom.
  • The Warsaw Pact was less an alliance than a geopolitical reality. For the most part it consisted of states under the direct military, intelligence or political control of the Soviet Union. The military value of the block might be limited, and its room for maneuver was equally limited.
  • nuclear attack was not the Soviet's primordial fear, though the fear must not be minimized. The primordial fear in Moscow was an attack from the West. The Soviet Union's strategy was to position its own forces as far to the west as possible.
  • The Soviets were not ideologues. They were geopoliticians, and China represented a potential threat that the Soviets could not control. Ideology didn't matter. China would never serve the role that Poland had to. The Sino-Soviet relationship fell apart fairly quickly.
  • Beneath communist fervor, cynical indifference and dread of the Soviet secret police, the Russians found something new while the Americans found something old.
  • The collapse of France caused them to depend on only two things:
  • One was that the English Channel, combined with the fleet and the Royal Air Force, would hold the Germans at bay. The second was that in due course, the United States would be drawn into the war. Their two calculations proved correct.
  • The Americans did not take the British Empire. It was taken away by the shocking performance of the French. On paper, the French had an excellent army — superior to the Germans, in many ways. Yet they collapsed in weeks. If we were to summarize the British sensibility, after defiance came exhaustion and then resentment.
  • The Americans retain their dread even though World War II was in many ways good to the United States. It ended the Great Depression, and in the aftermath, between the G.I. Bill, VA loans and the Interstate Highway System, the war created the American professional middle class, with private homes for many and distance and space that could be accessed easily.
  • Rather than a Machiavellian genius, Putin is the heir to the German invasion on June 22, 1941. He seeks strategic depth controlled by his own military. And his public has rallied to him.
  • While we are celebrating the end of World War II, it is useful to examine its beginnings. So much of what constitutes the political-military culture, particularly of the Americans, was forged by the way that World War II began.
  • anonymous on 13 May 15
     
    "We are at the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. That victory did not usher in an era of universal peace. Rather, it introduced a new constellation of powers and a complex balance among them. Europe's great powers and empires declined, and the United States and the Soviet Union replaced them, performing an old dance to new musical instruments. Technology, geopolitics' companion, evolved dramatically as nuclear weapons, satellites and the microchip - among myriad wonders and horrors - changed not only the rules of war but also the circumstances under which war was possible. But one thing remained constant: Geopolitics, technology and war remained inseparable comrades."
anonymous

Syria and the Limits of Comparison - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...syria-and-limits-comparison

shared by anonymous on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Syria has a population ten times the size of Kosovo's in 1999.
  • a low-intensity separatist campaign by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Violence was widespread but not nearly on the scale of Syria's.
  • Kosovo was more or less contained within the southern Balkans, with relatively limited chance for a spillover
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  • The Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria.
  • Kosovo did not have a complex of chemical weapons facilities scattered throughout its territory
  • The Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia, which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule.
  • The Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has.
  • The Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes, but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two years now
  • The goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster.
  • Those goals were achieved: Milosevic was forced from power in the fall of 2000, largely because of a chain of events stemming from that war.
  • Kosovo thus symbolized the power of human agency over impersonal forces in order to wrest a victory for human rights. This is a popular cause among liberal journalists and intellectuals, as is the desire to do something to punish the massive human rights violations of the al Assad regime.
  • The comparison between Kosovo and Syria follows from that. But it is a flawed comparison: Elegantly toppling Milosevic incurred no negative side effects. Toppling al Assad could lead to a power center in the Levant as friendly to transnational jihadists as the one in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was in the late 1990s until 2001.
  • If he chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry.
  • If he chooses regime change -- while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare.
  • He may try a middle option calibrated to seriously erode al Assad's power base while sending a message to Russia and Iran to help him negotiate a stable transfer of authority in Damascus -- something that might yet open up a wider diplomatic process with Iran. But that is obviously very difficult to do.
  • Keep another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were not weary of war.
  • Even so, Clinton rightly calculated that the public would not tolerate casualties on the ground in a war that did not involve a naked American interest. But the American public is now tottering from more than a decade of bloody ground war, and so Obama has even less leeway than Clinton, even as Syria presents a greater military challenge than Kosovo.
  • Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable power in the region at the same time.
  • anonymous on 29 Aug 13
     
    "Because so many war plans simply do not survive the reality of war itself, each war is a unique universe unto its own and thus comparisons with previous wars, while useful, may also prove illusory. One of the many wrong assumptions about the Second Gulf War before it started was that it would somehow be like the First Gulf War, in which the pessimists had been humiliated by the ease of the victory. Indeed, the Second Gulf War unfolded in vastly different ways, this time proving the pessimists right. That is why the recent media refrain comparing a military operation in Syria with the one in Kosovo in 1999 worries me."
anonymous

Hellfire, Morality and Strategy - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...hellfire-morality-and-strategy

shared by anonymous on 19 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets.
  • On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.
  • Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link.
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  • Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.
  • Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.
  • The Argument Against Airstrikes
  • The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.
  • This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began.
  • There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process.
  • Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.
  • The Argument for Airstrikes
  • The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.
  • The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
  • The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.
  • The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken.
  • It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II.
  • Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.
  • Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths.
  • the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.
  • There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially.
  • In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.
  • If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States.
  • since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.
  • There are two points I have been driving toward.
  • The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds.
  • The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.
  • The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.
  • In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.
  • The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.
  • In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.     
  • In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles.
  • anonymous on 19 Feb 13
     
    "Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process."
  • Erik Hanson on 21 Feb 13
     
    I'm starting to come around to the objections of expeditionary troops trying to put down the American colonial revolt. There's something to having to look someone in the face when you kill them.
anonymous

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war - 1 views

www.salon.com/...libya

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 13 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
  • I have two points to make about all this:
  • The reason -- the only reason -- we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya?  After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya?
  • Instead, what distinguished Gaddafi and made him a war target was that he had become insufficiently compliant -- an unreliable and unstable servant to the West.
  • Wars are typically caused by the interests of multiple factions and rarely have just one motive.  As Jim Webb explained in arguing that the U.S. has no vital interest in Libya, the French and British are far more reliant on Libyan oil than the U.S. is (and this reader offers a rational dissent and alternative explanation for the war).  But the U.S. has long made clear that it will not tolerate hostile or disobedient rulers in countries where it believes it has vital interests, and that's particularly true in oil rich nations (which is one reason for the American obsession with Iran).
  • anonymous on 13 Jun 11
     
    "When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point." - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
anonymous

Never Fight a Land War in Asia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0228-never-fight-land-war-asia

shared by anonymous on 01 Mar 11 - Cached
  • First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?
  • Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.
  • When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of materiel, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.
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  • Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States — tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.
  • The United States compensates with technology,
  • from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.
  • The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war.
  • the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with.
  • The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited
  • The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines.
  • The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians.
  • As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them — and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender.
  • Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly.
  • Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.
  • The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country.
  • Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home.
  • The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.
  • Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II.
  • In each case it is obvious: for political reasons.
  • In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome — defeating the enemy — was unattainable.
  • There are two problems with American strategy.
  • The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission.
  • Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory.
  • Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale.
  • The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak.
  • By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end?
  • Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient.
  • Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States.
  • Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating.
  • The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results.
  • An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message
  • As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.
  • anonymous on 01 Mar 11
     
    "U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that "Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.""
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.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • 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

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.
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  • 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

War and the American Republic - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...and-the-american-republic.html

war geopolitics america ideas

shared by anonymous on 14 Sep 10 - Cached
  • I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism.
  • The Demographics of the American Military 
  • The composition of most militaries today, including the U.S., suggests that this is indeed the case. The economic and political elites tend not to serve in the military, but very much dictate its priorities. They increasingly have no skin in the game, and a diminishing sense of its human cost.
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  • Thucydides clearly cautioned against such trends: ‘The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.’
  • Historical Inexperience of War and the World
  • The last real war on the U.S. mainland was the Civil War, 150 years ago. Not since then has the U.S. experienced war at home.
  • Europeans are also shrewder than Americans about non-Western societies—a byproduct of Europe’s geography, colonial empires, and in some ways, their salad-bowl model of immigration
  • and of this Kantian insight: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’ Keener than the Americans that is, whose relative naivete, insularity, and evangelical instincts (religious, political, and economic) only make them more vulnerable to demagogues who cry wolf about threats from foreign cultures.
  • The Impetus from Corporate Capitalism
  • Not usually through boardroom conspiracies, which surely happen, but by staying true to its dominant class character, like an animal who cannot help being any other way, whose one authentic instinct is to sustain and engorge itself. To that end, it uses every tool at its disposal.
  • One such tool is the news media, which has changed drastically in recent decades.
  • It tends to employ company men and women who uphold their bosses’ values and viewpoints—not from coercion but consent, in exchange for some of the spoils.
  • War often boosts the economy (especially via the military-industrial complex) and is usually good for the media.
  • anonymous on 14 Sep 10
     
    "War is always spoken of as an option; to be averse to it is taken as a sign of weakness. Indeed, why are the Americans so much more jingoistic today than, say, the Europeans? I offer three reasons that I believe, taken together, provide an answer: (a) The demographics of the American military (b) Historical inexperience of war and the world, and (c) The impetus from corporate capitalism. " By Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily on September 13, 2010.
anonymous

Pakistan and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...kistan_and_us_exit_afghanistan

geopolitics gwot

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • But while the military’s top generals and senior civilian leadership are responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the commander-in-chief directs them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      Which is why I scratch my head when I read or hear (as I did at a recent family function) "Obama is just leaving because of political reasons." Of course he - I mean *we* are - we got into it for political reasons and we'll leave that way. At its core, war is political. I'm amazed at how ridiculously basic a concept that is, and yet its lacking from many person-to-person narratives.
  • The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what he is fighting for. The occupier’s patience is calculated against the cost of the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in this country, what is happening elsewhere?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      See also: The rise of conventional powers during this decade-long overmagnification on one region.
  • The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival.
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  • While the occupier is not winning decisively, even while suffering only some casualties, he is losing. While the guerrilla is not losing decisively, even if suffering significant casualties, he is winning.
  • There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that Americans can’t endure the long war has no empirical basis.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      This is another one of those fascinating bits of conventional wisdom that's completely wrong. Another is the idea that Afghanistan is the *graveyard of empires*. Both these misconceptions feed our basic need for explanatory stories, but they do so at the expense of realistic observation.
  • Far more relevant than casualties to whether Americans continue a war is the question of the conflict’s strategic importance, for which the president is ultimately responsible.
  • Washington’s primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the U.S. homeland from follow-on attacks to 9/11.
  • STRATFOR has long held that Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism does not represent a strategic, existential threat to the United States. While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people.
  • They are dangerous and must be defended against, but transnational terrorism is and remains a tactical problem that for nearly a decade has been treated as if it were the pre-eminent strategic threat to the United States.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      Initial criticisms of the GWOT is that you can't have a "war" on a method. I believe that criticism still stands. It's certainly an untenable basis for conducing national security.
  • disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan.
  • The strategic problem is that simply terminating the war after nine years would destabilize the Islamic world.
  • The political problem is domestic. Obama’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent. This is not unprecedented, but it means he is politically weak. One of the charges against him, fair or not, is that he is inherently anti-war by background and so not fully committed to the war effort.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      To which I respond: Presidents are not the same as partisan constituents. They may enter office with one perspective, but the reality of the damnedable profession changes you. Being "anti-war" is a sort of childlike triviality once you've had to manage the unweildy apparatus of the state.
  • The American solution, one that we suspect is already under way, is the Pakistanization of the war. By this, we do not mean extending the war into Pakistan but rather extending Pakistan into Afghanistan.
  • In the past, the United States has endeavored to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime in Pakistan separate.
  • The Pakistani relationship to the Taliban, which was a liability for the United States in the past, now becomes an advantage for Washington because it creates a trusted channel for meaningful communication with the Taliban.
  • The United States isn’t going to defeat the Taliban. The original goal of the war is irrelevant, and the current goal is rather difficult to take seriously. Even a victory, whatever that would look like, would make little difference in the fight against transnational jihad, but a defeat could harm U.S. interests.
  • Therefore, the United States needs a withdrawal that is not a defeat.
  • Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration.
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration. As all his books do, the book has riveted Washington. It reveals that intense debate occurred over what course to take, that the president sought alternative strategies and that compromises were reached. But while knowing the details of these things is interesting, what would have been shocking is if they hadn't taken place." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 28, 2010.
anonymous

North Korea's Threat to End the Armistice Agreement - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...threat-end-armistice-agreement

shared by anonymous on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
  • North Korea makes frequent threats, but even so, the buildup of rhetoric warning that the nearly 60-year-old armistice is fraying -- and blaming what it calls hostile U.S. policies -- is notable.
  • If North Korea stops respecting the 1953 agreement, it would in essence be declaring that the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas is no longer in effect and the war against the United States is once again active.
  • There are plenty of reasons to believe the threat is merely rhetorical.
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  • Despite recent missile and nuclear tests meant to demonstrate Pyongyang's deterrent capabilities, the North Korean military would stand little chance in a full-on war against South Korea and the United States. Pyongyang has little trust that it could rely on Chinese assistance this time around were war to break out. Beijing has hinted for several years now that if hostilities erupt again, Chinese forces are more likely to seize North Korea -- on behalf of the United Nations, Beijing says -- than engage in a major war against the United States on the peninsula.
  • However, the threat of war remains a major tool by which North Korea tries to achieve its political ends.
  • A war on the Korean Peninsula is an unlikely prospect, but if it occurred it would devastate both Koreas
  • This assumes the best-case scenario, where the United States and China do not end up on opposite sides of the conflict.
  • This posturing has allowed North Korea, since the end of the Cold War, to pose enough of a threat to have countries like China, the United States, Japan and South Korea offer incentives at times to avoid a war. But over the years, North Korea has found that its message of impending doom is growing ever less alarming.
  • In 1993, the mere threat of leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty raised tensions to a near fever pitch, and the intervention of Jimmy Carter gave North Korea the reprieve it was looking for, along with the promise of light-water nuclear reactors and food and economic aid. As the effects wore off, North Korea carried out its first long-range rocket test in 1998, triggering another crisis that led to renewed diplomatic ties with several countries and to the first inter-Korean summit.
  • A decade later, in 2003, North Korea completed its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, setting in motion the six-party talks that Pyongyang used to manipulate the competing interests of the other parties. As the talks began losing steam, North Korea raised the stakes again, testing its first nuclear device in 2006, just months after an attempted long-range rocket test. Within a year, the six-party talks had produced results from Pyongyang's perspective, and North Korea hosted the second leadership summit with a South Korean president. By 2008, Pyongyang had convinced the United States to drop North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
  • A year later, in 2009, North Korea saw the need to raise the stakes yet again, so Pyongyang attempted a satellite launch and performed its second nuclear test. Pyongyang also suggested it was no longer bound by the 1953 Armistice Agreement. When the world effectively yawned at this action, North Korea followed with the sinking of the South Korean navy corvette ChonAn and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, along the maritime Northern Limit Line. North Korea also showed a visiting U.S. scholar one of its uranium enrichment facilities, confirming Washington's accusations that Pyongyang was pursuing an alternate nuclear program.
  • With a somewhat successful satellite launch and another nuclear test under his belt, the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has established himself as someone willing to continue the hard-line independent stance of his predecessors and has attempted once again to foster a sense of crisis internationally.
  • But, as in 2009, the latest missile and nuclear tests have largely been brushed aside, leading to verbal retorts and a new round of sanction talks rather than any significant economic or political concessions to Pyongyang. The threat to revoke the Armistice Agreement is, once again, meant to heighten tensions. North Korea is trying to show it has something to trade away as it seeks economic incentives to return to the status quo.
  • But beyond continuing the pattern of a brinksmanship that is showing diminishing returns, Pyongyang has another reason for calling attention to the armistice. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War. The Koreans, not by coincidence, threatened to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty ahead of the 40th anniversary, and indeed they left that treaty on the 50th anniversary. Symbolism matters, but so does the replacement of the armistice with a formal peace accord.
  • By threatening to end the armistice, Pyongyang is hoping to force the United States back to the negotiating table, this time not to discuss North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, but to address the underlying structure of U.S.-North Korean confrontation.
  • For North Korea's new leader, there are few options aside from the path of his father if the basic structure of relations cannot be altered. There can be no experiments in economic opening, not even minor adjustments in social policies, so long as the technical state of war remains.
  • The circuitous route of North Korean diplomacy, and its pattern of issuing threats to seek rewards, may also help explain why North Korea's new leader has chosen Dennis Rodman to transmit his eagerness for talks with the United States. So long as North Korea remains quirky and unpredictable, and so long as Kim Jong Un remains somewhat unreadable, Pyongyang may be able to keep the West guessing -- and perhaps even awaken interest in what Kim could do if North Korea were no longer a pariah.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Mar 13
       
      StratFor printing the words "Dennis Rodman" is definitely a first.
  • anonymous on 06 Mar 13
     
    "North Korea has threatened to annul the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War if the United States and South Korea do not cease joint military exercises by March 11. Pyongyang issued this threat as Washington and Beijing agreed on the language to be used for new U.N. sanctions against North Korea in response to its most recent nuclear test. North Korea makes frequent threats, but even so, the buildup of rhetoric warning that the nearly 60-year-old armistice is fraying -- and blaming what it calls hostile U.S. policies -- is notable."
anonymous

The Origin of Wars - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...origin-wars

shared by anonymous on 20 Feb 13 - Cached
  • Thucydides chronicles how the Peloponnesian War began in the latter part of the late fifth century B.C. with disputes over the island of Corcyra in northwestern Greece and Potidaea in northeastern Greece. These places were not very strategically crucial in and of themselves. To think that wars must start over important places is to misread Thucydides.
  • Corcyra and Potidaea, among other locales, were only where the Peloponnesian War started; not what caused it. What caused it, he writes in the first book of his eight-book history, was the growth of perceived maritime power in Athens and the alarm that it inspired in Sparta and among Sparta's allies.
  • Hobbes writes that a pretext for war over some worthless place "is always an injury received, or pretended to be received." Whereas the "inward motive to hostility is but conjectural; and not of the evidence." In other words, the historian or journalist might find it hard to find literal documentation for the real reasons states go to war; thus, he often must infer them. He often must tease them out of the pattern of events, and still in many cases be forced to speculate.
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  • The South China Sea conflict, for example, becomes understandable. Here are geographical features which, in their own right, are valuable because of the measureable energy deposits in surrounding waters. They also fall in the path of sea lines of communications vital for access to the Indian Ocean in one direction, and the East China Sea and Sea of Japan in the other, making the South China Sea part of the word's global energy interstate.
  • Indeed, nobody would prefer to say they are provoking a conflict because of rising Chinese sea power; rather, they would say they are doing so because of this or that infringement of maritime sovereignty over this or that islet. All the rest might have to be conjectured.
  • Even if one argues that these islets are worthless, he or she would miss the point. Rather, the dispute over these islets is a pretext for the rise of Chinese sea power and the fear that it inspires in Japan, helping to ease Japan out of its quasi-pacifistic shell and rediscover nationalism and military power.
  • Then there is North Korea. With a gross domestic product of only that of Latvia or Turkmenistan, it might be assumed to be another worthless piece of real estate. Geography tells a different story. Jutting out from Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China's largest offshore oil reserve.
  • India and China have territorial tripwires in the Himalayan foothills, an area which, again, might be judged by some as worthless. But these tripwires become more meaningful as India partially shifts its defense procurements away from confronting Pakistan and towards confronting China. It is doing so because the advance of technology has created a new and claustrophobic strategic geography uniting India and China, with warships, fighter jets and space satellites allowing each country to infringe on the other's battlespace. If a conflict ever does erupt between these two demographic and economic behemoths, it probably will not be because of the specific reasons stated but because of these deeper geographical and technological causes.
  • Israel has other fears that are less frequently expressed. For example, a nuclear Iran would make every crisis between Israel and Hezbollah, between Israel and Hamas, and between Israel and the West Bank Palestinians more fraught with risk. Israel cannot accept such augmentation of Iranian power. That could signal the real cause of a conflict, were Israel ever able to drag the United States into a war with Iran.
  • In all these cases, and others, the most profound lesson of Thucydides and Hobbes is to concentrate on what goes unstated in crises, on what can only be deduced. For the genius of analysis lies in quiet deductions, not in the mere parroting of public statements. What starts conflicts is public, and therefore much less interesting -- and less crucial -- than the causes of conflicts, which are not often public.
  • anonymous on 20 Feb 13
     
    Another must-read. "Just as Herodotus is the father of history, Thucydides is the father of realism. To understand the geopolitical conflict zones of the 21st century, you must begin with the ancient Greeks. Among the many important lessons Thucydides teaches in his History of the Peloponnesian War is that what starts a war is different from what causes it."
anonymous

The history of inequality (by Peter Turchin) - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...peter-turchin-wealth-poverty

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth.
  • As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: ‘the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood’.
  • In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of wealth inequality in the US.
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  • He looked at the net wealth of the nation’s median household and compared it with the size of the largest fortune in the US. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and that’s what he tracked, touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present.
  • We found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures
  • From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold.
  • Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century.
  • From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      I'd like to pull this citation and superimpose another period-chart onto my timeline.
  • when looked at over a long period, the development of wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. And if it’s cyclical, we can predict what happens next.
  • Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t.
  • In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome.
  • And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.
  • Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.
  • Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      Cliodynamics - Another thing to learn a bit more about.
  • First, we need to think about jobs.
  • One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration
  • it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality.
  • Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.
  • This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust generalisations in history.
  • The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.
  • causing the population of London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000.
  • fourfold increase in food prices and a halving of real wages.
  • when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348, carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse.
  • The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but in practice it often is
  • Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate.
  • Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important new element was globalisation
  • an oversupply of labour tends to depress wages for the poorer section of the population. And just as in Roman Egypt, the poor in the US today eat more energy-dense foods — bread, pasta, and potatoes — while the wealthy eat more fruit and drink wine.
  • Falling wages isn’t the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up.
  • And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden Age for the aristocrats.
  • the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300.
  • Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000.
  • In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.
  • And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the population to 19 per million.
  • In our current cycle, the proportion of decamillionaires (those whose net worth exceeds 10 million in 1995 dollars) grew tenfold between 1992 and 2007 — from 0.04 to 0.4 per cent of the US population.
  • On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Don’t forget that most people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the social pyramid to become top-heavy.
  • As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.
  • The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.
  • So far I have been talking about the elites as if they are all the same. But they aren’t: the differences within the wealthiest one per cent are almost as stark as the difference between the top one per cent and the remaining 99.
  • very intense status rivalry
  • Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic shift towards luxury.
  • Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand (who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age.
  • Twilight of the Elites (2012): ‘defenders of the status quo invoke a kind of neo-Calvinist logic by saying that those at the top, by virtue of their placement there, must be the most deserving’. By the same reasoning, those at the bottom are not deserving. As such social norms spread, it becomes increasingly easy for CEOs to justify giving themselves huge bonuses while cutting the wages of workers.
  • Labour markets are especially sensitive to cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences.
  • the US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor.
  • Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).
  • In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980.
  • The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent.
  • In one era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.
  • How, though, can we account for the much more broadly inclusive policies of the Great Compression era? And what caused the reversal that ended the Gilded Age and ushered in the Great Compression? Or the second switch, which took place around 1980?
  • Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability.
  • We see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history — towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century.
  • Put simply, it is fear of revolution that restores equality. And my analysis of US history in a forthcoming book suggests that this is precisely what happened in the US around 1920.
  • The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920—21, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
  • Although it started as a workers’ dispute, the Mine War eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies.
  • Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.
  • The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it.
  • The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution).
  • The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.
  • while making such ‘categorical inequalities’ worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall economic inequality.
  • The co-operating group was mainly native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated against.
  • When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential elections, he couldn’t win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for their triumph.
  • But by the late 1970s, a new generation of political and business leaders had come to power. To them the revolutionary situation of 1919-21 was just history. In this they were similar to the French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution, who did not see that their actions could bring down the Ancien Régime — the last great social breakdown, the Fronde, being so far in the past.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      This heavily mirrors many aspects of Strauss & Howe's observations. Namely that generational cohorts roughly conform to archetypes precisely *because* memory of prior situations moves from accessible-memory (in those who have it) to history/myth once those who remember it have died.
  • It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era.
  • when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. It’s true that the Soviet economy could not compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity.
  • Yet the fall of the Soviet Union was interpreted as a vindication of free markets, period. The triumphalist, heady atmosphere of the 1990s was highly conducive to the spread of Ayn Randism and other individualist ideologies. The unwritten social contract that had emerged during the New Deal and braved the challenges of the Second World War had faded from memory.
  • all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous.
  • Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change.
  • Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.
  • Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      2020-2025 is a date-range that continues to pop up in my forecasting readings - and from quite a variety of sources.
  • In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.
  • anonymous on 21 Nov 13
     
    "After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we don't. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: 'the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood'. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism."
anonymous

Think Again: Ronald Reagan - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...think_again_ronald_reagan

criticalthinking politics

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.
  • These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.
  • He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.
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  • at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion "scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan," according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley.
  • Reagan's political genius lay in recognizing that what Americans wanted was a president who exorcised the ghost of the Vietnam War without fighting another Vietnam. Although Americans enjoyed Reagan's thunderous denunciations of Central American communism, 75 percent of them, according to a 1985 Louis Harris survey, opposed invading Nicaragua.
  • So Reagan created Potemkin Vietnams. His biographer Lou Cannon calls him "shameless" in using Grenada to revive America's Vietnam-wounded pride. The war resulted in more medals per soldier than any military operation in U.S. history. When he bombed Libya in 1986, Reagan goosed American nationalism again, declaring, "Every nickel-and-dime dictator the world over knows that if he tangles with the United States of America, he will pay a price."
  • Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology.
  • The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.
  • Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power.
  • Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished.
  • In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one.
  • According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."
  • When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands."
  • An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours.
  • By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend."
  • Commentary's Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were "sinking into a state of near political despair."
  • By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that "in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained" than his right-wing supporters had hoped.
  • In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store.
  • Will wrote that he "is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement taken from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' Any time, any place, that is nonsense."
  • the irony is that in Reagan's own "war on terror," his policies more closely resembled Obama's than Bush's.
  • Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.
  • Of course, the 9/11 attacks gave Bush a massive jolt of popularity and sent Congress diving for cover, all of which made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq much easier.
  • For many contemporary conservatives, being a Reagan disciple means acting as if there are no limits to American strength. But the real lessons of Reaganism are about how to wield national power and bolster national pride when your hands are partially tied.
  • That means understanding that America's foreign-policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise.
  • If Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter, if he does not want Americans to equate his restraint with their humiliation, he must be as aggressive as Reagan in finding symbolic ways to soothe Americans' wounded pride.
  • Obama needs to remind Americans that their most successful Cold War presidents -- Reagan included -- saw the conflict as a primarily economic struggle.
  • In the nascent economic and ideological struggle between the United States and China, wars that Washington cannot possibly pay for -- and which leave the country more reliant on foreign central bankers -- don't make America stronger; they make it weaker.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    By Peter Beinart at Foreign Policy on June 7, 2010. I have always been fascinated by the difference between perception and reality when it comes to Reagan.
anonymous

"Stuff" by squid314 at LiveJournal - 0 views

squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html

history whimsy

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.
  • So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics.
  • ...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    Eventual Money: On the cliche implausibility of World War II." I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II"."
anonymous

The 30-Year War in Afghanistan - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...100628_30_year_war_afghanistan

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The Afghan War is the longest war in U.S. history. It began in 1980 and continues to rage. It began under Democrats but has been fought under both Republican and Democratic administrations, making it truly a bipartisan war. The conflict is an odd obsession of U.S. foreign policy, one that never goes away and never seems to end. As the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal reminds us, the Afghan War is now in its fourth phase.
  • The first phase of the Afghan War began with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, when the United States, along with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, organized and sustained Afghan resistance to the Soviets.
  • The second phase lasted from 1989 until 2001.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The third phase began on Sept. 11, 2001, when al Qaeda launched attacks on the mainland United States.
  • The fourth phase of the war began in 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama decided to pursue a more aggressive strategy in Afghanistan. Though the Bush administration had toyed with this idea, it was Obama who implemented it fully.
  • While al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghanistan is no longer its primary base of operations. The group has shifted to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. As al Qaeda is thus not dependent on any one country for its operational base, denying it bases in Afghanistan does not address the reality of its dispersion. Securing Afghanistan, in other words, is no longer the solution to al Qaeda.
  • the real strategy is to return to the historical principles of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan: alliance with indigenous forces.
  • The American strategy is, therefore, to maintain a sufficient force to shape the political evolution on the ground, and to use that force to motivate and intimidate while also using economic incentives to draw together a coalition in the countryside.
  • Afghanistan ultimately is not strategically essential, and this is why the United States has not historically used its own forces there.
  • The forces the United States and its allies had trained and armed now fought each other in complex coalitions for control of Afghanistan. Though the United States did not take part in this war directly, it did not lose all interest in Afghanistan.
  • First, the Americans intended to keep al Qaeda bottled up and to impose as much damage as possible on the group.
  • Second, they intended to establish an Afghan government, regardless of how ineffective it might be, to serve as a symbolic core.
  • Third, they planned very limited operations against the Taliban, which had regrouped and increasingly controlled the countryside.
  • The three phases of American involvement in Afghanistan had a common point: All three were heavily dependent on non-U.S. forces to do the heavy lifting. In the first phase, the mujahideen performed this task. In the second phase, the United States relied on Pakistan to manage Afghanistan’s civil war. In the third phase, especially in the beginning, the United States depended on Afghan forces to fight the Taliban.
  • The United States commenced operations barely 30 days after Sept. 11, which was not enough time to mount an invasion using U.S. troops as the primary instrument. Rather, the United States made arrangements with factions that were opposed to the Taliban (and defeated in the Afghan civil war).
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By George Friedman on July 29, 2010
anonymous

The Seen, the Unseen, War, and Peace - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...the_seen_the_un.html

criticalthinking geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 10 - Cached
  • If people judged war purely on the basis of its obvious, immediate consequences, then, pacifism would be almost universal.
  • To sell war, you've got to convince people that its non-obvious, distant consequences are positively fantastic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      This is where the fuzzy-promises of war fit into things. There may very well be a geopolitical rationale behind it (good or bad, right or wrong), but that is not how it is sold to the public. As irritating as that makes me, I believe that this citizenry lacks the analytical thinking - especially regarding economics and geopolitics - required to evaluate it on its merits. And then, as I think further, that sort of person is lible to decline engagement if it looks like a minor loss of "empire" could avoid those horrible examples of war's effect.
  • My best explanation is that Bastiat's seen/unseen fallacy is not a general psychological tendency.  Instead, it's an expression of anti-market bias: Since people dislike markets, they're quick to dismiss claims about their hidden benefits. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      As of this writing, I don't quite understand this.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the unseen benefits of war, there's actually a perfect storm of irrationality.
  • Not only do people like government, the institution responsible for running the war.  Support for war also neatly coheres with the public's anti-foreign bias.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      But this "Us Vs. Them" mentality continues to erode in the slow moving churning of years. To half remember a TED lecture I watched - We've come a long way from thinking the people in the next village aren't human - but there's still so very much to go.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 10
     
    By Bryan Caplan at EconLog (Library of Economics and Liberty) on June 21, 2010. Thanks to David Gottlieb for the find: http://www.google.com/buzz/dmgottlieb/PBNvVHN9CDr/The-Seen-the-Unseen-War-and-Peace-EconLog-Library
anonymous

The United States, Europe and Bretton Woods II - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...es_europe_and_bretton_woods_ii

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 30 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods crafted the modern international economic architecture, lashing the trading and currency systems to the gold standard to achieve global stability.
  • The origin of Bretton Woods lies in the Great Depression.
  • Economically, World War II was a godsend. The military effort generated demand for goods and labor. The goods part is pretty straightforward, but the labor issue is what really allowed the global economy to turn the corner.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • The war removed tens of millions of men from the labor force, shipping them off to — economically speaking — nonproductive endeavors.
  • Policymakers of the time realized that the prosecution of the war had suspended the depression, but few were confident that the war had actually ended the conditions that made the depression possible.
  • When all was said and done, the delegates agreed to a system of exchangeable currencies and broadly open rules of trade. The system would be based on the gold standard to prevent currency fluctuations, and a pair of institutions — what would become known as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank — would serve as guardians of the system’s financial and fiduciary particulars.
  • In fact, we are still using Bretton Woods, and while nothing that has been discussed to this point is wrong exactly, it is only part of the story.
  • Think back to July 1944. The Normandy invasion was in its first month. The United Kingdom served as the staging ground, but with London exhausted, its military commitment to the operation was modest.
  • The shape of the Cold War was already beginning to unfold. Between the United States and the Soviet Union, the rest of the modern world — namely, Europe — was going to either experience Soviet occupation or become a U.S. protectorate.
  • The Continental states — and even the United Kingdom — were not simply economically spent and indebted but were, to be perfectly blunt, destitute.
  • This was not World War I, where most of the fighting had occurred along a single series of trenches. This was blitzkrieg and saturation bombings, which left the Continent in ruins, and there was almost nothing left from which to rebuild.
  • For the United States, the issue was one of seizing a historic opportunity.
  • The United States entered World War II late and the war did not occur on U.S. soil. So — uniquely among all the world’s major powers of the day — U.S. infrastructure and industrial capacity would emerge from the war larger (far, far larger) than when it entered.
  • The United States had to have not just the participation of the Western Europeans in holding back the Soviet tide, it needed the Europeans to defer to American political and military demands — and to do so willingly. Considering the desperation and destitution of the Europeans, and the unprecedented and unparalleled U.S. economic strength, economic carrots were the obvious way to go.
  • Put another way, Bretton Woods was part of a broader American effort to extend the wartime alliance — sans the Soviets — beyond Germany’s surrender.
  • The United States would allow Europe near tariff-free access to its markets, and turn a blind eye to Europe’s own tariffs so long as they did not become too egregious — something that at least in part flew in the face of the Great Depression’s lessons.
  • The “free world” alliance would not consist of a series of equal states. Instead, it would consist of the United States and everyone else.
  • When loans to fund Western Europe’s redevelopment failed to stimulate growth, those loans became grants, aka the Marshall Plan.
  • And fast-forwarding to when the world went off of the gold standard and Bretton Woods supposedly died, gold was actually replaced by the U.S. dollar. Far from dying, the political/military understanding that underpinned Bretton Woods had only become more entrenched.
  • For many of the states that will be attending what is already being dubbed Bretton Woods II, having this American centrality as such a key pillar of the system is the core of the problem.
  • a crisis in the U.S. economy becomes global.
  • The U.S. economy remains the largest, and dysfunctions there affect the world. That is the reality of the international system, and that is ultimately what the French call for a new Bretton Woods is about.
  • Relying on a currency that is not in the hands of a sovereign taxing power, but dependent on the political will of (so far) 15 countries with very different interests, does not make for a reliable reserve currency.
  • The French in particular look at the current crisis as the result of a failure in the U.S. regulatory system.
  • The Bretton Woods institutions — specifically the IMF, which is supposed to serve the role of financial lighthouse and crisis manager — proved irrelevant to the problems the world is currently passing through.
  • Fundamentally, the Europeans are not simply hoping to modernize Bretton Woods, but instead to Europeanize the American financial markets. This is ultimately not a financial question, but a political one.
  • Far more important, any international system that oversees aspects of American finance would, by definition, not be under full American control, but under some sort of quasi-Brussels-like organization. And no American president is going to engage gleefully on that sort of topic.
  • anonymous on 30 Mar 10
     
    An article about this misunderstood institution. From StratFor back on October 20, 2008.
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