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The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Developing the Interior - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...gtze-river-developing-interior yangtze geopolitics river developing interior
shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • As the competitive advantage of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing in China's coastal industrial hubs wanes, Beijing will rely more heavily on the cities along the western and central stretches of the Yangtze River to drive the development of a supplemental industrial base throughout the country's interior.
  • Managing the migration of industrial activity from the coast to the interior -- and the social, political and economic strains that migration will create -- is a necessary precondition for the Communist Party's long-term goal of rebalancing toward a more stable and sustainable growth model based on higher domestic consumption. In other words, it is critical to ensuring long-term regime security.
  • China is in many ways as geographically, culturally, ethnically and economically diverse as Europe. That regional diversity, which breeds inequality and in turn competition, makes unified China an inherently fragile entity. It must constantly balance between the interests of the center and those of regions with distinct and often contradictory economic and political interests.
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  • the central government has targeted the Yangtze River economic corridor -- the urban industrial zones lining the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai -- as a key area for investment, development and urbanization in the coming years. Ultimately, the Party hopes to transform the Yangtze's main 2,800-kilometer-long (1,700-mile-long) navigable channel into a central superhighway for goods and people, better connecting China's less developed interior provinces to the coast and to each other by way of water -- a significantly cheaper form of transport than road or railway.
  • The Yangtze River is the key geographic, ecological, cultural and economic feature of China.
  • Stretching 6,418 kilometers from its source in the Tibetan Plateau to its terminus in the East China Sea, the river both divides and connects the country. To its north lie the wheat fields and coal mines of the North China Plain and Loess Plateau, unified China's traditional political cores. Along its banks and to the south are the riverine wetlands and terraced mountain faces that historically supplied China with rice, tea, cotton and timber.
  • The river passes through the highlands of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the fertile Sichuan Basin, the lakes and marshes of the Middle Yangtze and on to the trade hubs of the Yangtze River Delta. Its watershed touches 19 provinces and is central to the economic life of more people than the populations of Russia and the United States combined.
  • The river's dozens of tributaries reach from Xian, in the southern Shaanxi province, to northern Guangdong -- a complex of capillaries without which China likely would never have coalesced into a single political entity.
  • The Yangtze, even more than the Yellow River, dictates the internal constraints on and strategic imperatives of China's rulers.
  • The Yellow River may be the origin of the Han Chinese civilization, but on its own it is far too weak to support the economic life of a great power.
  • The Yellow River is China's Hudson or Delaware. By contrast, the Yangtze is China's Mississippi -- the river that enabled China to become an empire.
  • Just as the Mississippi splits the United States into east and west, the Yangtze divides China into its two most basic geopolitical units: north and south.
  • This division, more than any other, forms the basis of Chinese political history and provides China's rulers with their most fundamental strategic imperative: unity of the lands above and below the river. Without both north and south, there is no China, only regional powers.
  • The constant cycle between periods of unity (when one power takes the lands north and south of the Yangtze) and disunity (when that power breaks into its constituent regional parts) constitutes Chinese political history.
  • If the Yangtze did not exist, or if its route had veered downward into South and Southeast Asia (like most of the rivers that begin on the Tibetan Plateau), China would be an altogether different and much less significant place.
  • The provinces of central China, which today produce more rice than all of India, would be as barren as Central Asia. Regional commercial and political power bases like the Yangtze River Delta or the Sichuan Basin would never have emerged. The entire flow of Chinese history would be different.
  • Three regions in particular make up the bulk of the Yangtze River Basin
  • the Upper (encompassing present-day Sichuan and Chongqing), Middle (Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi) and Lower Yangtze (Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Shanghai and parts of Anhui).
  • Geography and time have made these regions into distinct and relatively autonomous units, each with its own history, culture and language. Each region has its own hubs -- Chengdu and Chongqing for the Upper Yangtze; Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang for the Middle Yangtze; and Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for the Lower Yangtze.
  • In many ways, China was more deeply united under Mao Zedong than under any emperor since Kangxi in the 18th century. After 1978, the foundations of internal cohesion began to shift and crack as the reform and opening process directed central government attention and investment away from the interior (Mao's power base) and toward the coast.
  • Today, faced with the political and social consequences of that process, the Party is once again working to reintegrate and recentralize -- both in the sense of slowly reconsolidating central government control over key sectors of the economy and, more fundamentally, forcibly shifting the economy's productive core inland.
  • Today, the Yangtze River is by far the world's busiest inland waterway for freight transport.
  • In 2011, more than 1.6 billion metric tons of goods passed through it, representing 40 percent of the nation's total inland waterborne cargo traffic and about 5 percent of all domestic goods transport that year
  • By 2011, the nine provincial capitals that sit along the Yangtze and its major tributaries had a combined gross domestic product of $1 trillion, up from $155 billion in 2001. That gives these cities a total wealth roughly comparable to the gross domestic products of South Korea and Mexico.
  • Investment in further industrial development along the Yangtze River reflects not only an organic transformation in the structure of the Chinese economy but also the intersection of complex political forces
  • First, there is a clear shift in central government policy away from intensive focus on coastal manufacturing at the expense of the interior (the dominant approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and toward better integrating China's diverse regions into a coherent national economy.
  • Thirty years of export-oriented manufacturing centered in a handful of coastal cities generated huge wealth and created hundreds of millions of jobs. But it also created an economy characterized by deep discrepancies in the geographic allocation of resources and by very little internal cohesion.
  • By 2001, the economies of Shanghai and Shenzhen, for instance, were in many ways more connected to those of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles than of the hinterlands of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.
  • The foundation of this model was an unending supply of cheap labor. In the 1980s, such workers came primarily from the coast. In the 1990s, when coastal labor pools had been largely exhausted, factories welcomed the influx of migrants from the interior. Soon, labor came to replace coal, iron ore and other raw materials as the interior's most important export to coastal industrial hubs. By the mid-2000s, between 250 million and 300 million migrant workers had fled from provinces like Henan, Anhui and Sichuan (where most people still lived on near-subsistence farming) in search of work in coastal cities.
  • This continual supply of cheap labor from the interior kept Chinese manufacturing cost-competitive throughout the 2000s -- far longer than if Chinese factories had only had the existing coastal labor pool to rely on.
  • But in doing so, it kept wages artificially low and, in turn, systematically undermined the development of a domestic consumer base. This was compounded by the fact that very little of the wealth generated by coastal manufacturing went to the workers.
  • Instead, it went to the state in the form of savings deposits into state-owned banks, revenue from taxes and land sales, or profits for the state-owned and state-affiliated enterprises
  • This dual process -- accumulation of wealth by the state and systematic wage repression in low-end coastal manufacturing -- significantly hampered the development of China's domestic consumer base. But even more troubling was the effect of labor migration, coupled with the relative lack of central government attention to enhancing inland industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, on the economies of interior provinces.
  • In trying to urbanize and industrialize the interior, Beijing is going against the grain of Chinese history -- a multimillennia saga of failed attempts to overcome the radical constraints of geography, population, food supply and culture through ambitious central government development programs.
  • Though its efforts thus far have yielded notable successes, such as rapid expansion of the country's railway system and soaring economic growth rates among inland provinces, they have not yet addressed a number of pivotal questions. Before it can move forward, Beijing must address the reform of the hukou (or household registration) system and the continued reliance on centrally allocated investment, as opposed to consumption, as a driver of growth.
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    "This is the first piece in a three-part series on the geopolitical implications of China's move to transform the Yangtze River into a major internal economic corridor."
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Beyond the Post-Cold War World - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...beyond-post-cold-war-world
shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 13 - Cached
  • An era ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation.
  • Three things defined the post-Cold War world.
  • The first was U.S. power. The second was the rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages. The third was the re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power.
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  • Meanwhile, Russia, the main remnant of the Soviet Union, reeled while Japan shifted to a dramatically different economic mode.
  • The post-Cold War world had two phases. The first lasted from Dec. 31, 1991, until Sept. 11, 2001. The second lasted from 9/11 until now.
  • The initial phase of the post-Cold War world was built on two assumptions.
  • The first assumption was that the United States was the dominant political and military power but that such power was less significant than before, since economics was the new focus. The second phase still revolved around the three Great Powers -- the United States, China and Europe -- but involved a major shift in the worldview of the United States, which then assumed that pre-eminence included the power to reshape the Islamic world through military action while China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic matters. 
  • In this new era, Europe is reeling economically and is divided politically.
  • Nothing is as it was in 1991.
  • Europe primarily defined itself as an economic power, with sovereignty largely retained by its members but shaped by the rule of the European Union. Europe tried to have it all: economic integration and individual states. But now this untenable idea has reached its end and Europe is fragmenting.
  • Germany wants to retain the European Union to protect German trade interests and because Berlin properly fears the political consequences of a fragmented Europe.
  • But as the creditor of last resort, Germany also wants to control the economic behavior of the EU nation-states.
  • In the indebted peripheral region, Cyprus has been treated with particular economic savagery as part of the bailout process. Certainly, the Cypriots acted irresponsibly. But that label applies to all of the EU members, including Germany, who created an economic plant so vast that it could not begin to consume what it produces -- making the country utterly dependent on the willingness of others to buy German goods.
  • There are thus many kinds of irresponsibility.
  • Europe can no longer afford pride, and it is every nation for itself. Cyprus set the precedent that the weak will be crushed. It serves as a lesson to other weakening nations, a lesson that over time will transform the European idea of integration and sovereignty.
  • In such an environment, sovereignty becomes sanctuary.
  • Authoritarian nationalism is an old European cure-all, one that is re-emerging, since no one wants to be the next Cyprus.
  • Leaving aside all the specific arguments, extraordinarily rapid growth in an export-oriented economy requires economic health among its customers.
  • It is nice to imagine expanded domestic demand, but in a country as impoverished as China, increasing demand requires revolutionizing life in the interior. China has tried this many times. It has never worked, and in any case China certainly couldn't make it work in the time needed.
  • Instead, Beijing is maintaining growth by slashing profit margins on exports.
  • It is interesting to recall the extravagant claims about the future of Japan in the 1980s. Awestruck by growth rates, Westerners did not see the hollowing out of the financial system as growth rates were sustained by cutting prices and profits. Japan's miracle seemed to be eternal. It wasn't, and neither is China's. And China has a problem that Japan didn't: a billion impoverished people. Japan exists, but behaves differently than it did before; the same is happening to China.
  • Both Europe and China thought about the world in the post-Cold War period similarly. Each believed that geopolitical questions and even questions of domestic politics could be suppressed and sometimes even ignored.
  • They believed this because they both thought they had entered a period of permanent prosperity.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      See also: All those 1990's op-eds about "the end of history" which now seem so completely ludicrious that it's hard for me to believe that so many Americans and Europeans ever bought it.
  • Periods of prosperity, of course, always alternate with periods of austerity, and now history has caught up with Europe and China.
  • And the United States has emerged from the post-Cold War period with one towering lesson: However attractive military intervention is, it always looks easier at the beginning than at the end.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      You think?
  • The greatest military power in the world has the ability to defeat armies. But it is far more difficult to reshape societies in America's image.
  • A Great Power manages the routine matters of the world not through military intervention, but through manipulating the balance of power.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is where I start to sound like a broken record: American civic perception is wildly at odds with MANY of the realities of international relations.
  • The United States has emerged into the new period with what is still the largest economy in the world with the fewest economic problems of the three pillars of the post-Cold War world. It has also emerged with the greatest military power.
  • But it has emerged far more mature and cautious than it entered the period. There are new phases in history, but not new world orders.
  • Eras unfold in strange ways until you suddenly realize they are over.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is so curt and quotable and (I think) so true. Like John Green says, one non-revolution leads to another until... well, you realize you HAD a revolution. :)
  • Now, we are at a point where the post-Cold War model no longer explains the behavior of the world. We are thus entering a new era. I don't have a good buzzword for the phase we're entering, since most periods are given a label in hindsight.
  • But already there are several defining characteristics to this era we can identify.
  • First, the United States remains the world's dominant power in all dimensions. It will act with caution, however, recognizing the crucial difference between pre-eminence and omnipotence.
  • Second, Europe is returning to its normal condition of multiple competing nation-states. While Germany will dream of a Europe in which it can write the budgets of lesser states, the EU nation-states will look at Cyprus and choose default before losing sovereignty.
  • Third, Russia is re-emerging. As the European Peninsula fragments, the Russians will do what they always do: fish in muddy waters.
  • The deals they are making, of which this is a small sample, are not in their economic interests, but they increase Moscow's political influence substantially. 
  • Fourth, China is becoming self-absorbed in trying to manage its new economic realities.
  • And fifth, a host of new countries will emerge to supplement China as the world's low-wage, high-growth epicenter. Latin America, Africa and less-developed parts of Southeast Asia are all emerging as contenders
  • There is a paradox in all of this. While the United States has committed many errors, the fragmentation of Europe and the weakening of China mean the United States emerges more powerful, since power is relative.
  • It was said that the post-Cold War world was America's time of dominance. I would argue that it was the preface of U.S. dominance.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 13
       
      This is a hard sell to many Americans (and others) that don't have the benefit of hindsight to guide their judgements. Of course, I'm a bit of StratFor buff and so trust George & company on this, but there are plenty of aspects to explore and debate. I hope to do both with my readers in the coming years.
  • Its two great counterbalances are losing their ability to counter U.S. power because they mistakenly believed that real power was economic power. The United States had combined power -- economic, political and military -- and that allowed it to maintain its overall power when economic power faltered. 
  • A fragmented Europe has no chance at balancing the United States.
  • And while China is reaching for military power, it will take many years to produce the kind of power that is global, and it can do so only if its economy allows it to. The United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War because of its balanced power. Europe and China defeated themselves because they placed all their chips on economics. And now we enter the new era.
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 13
     
    "Many shifts in the international system accompanied the end of the Cold War. In fact, 1991 was an extraordinary and defining year. The Japanese economic miracle ended. China after Tiananmen Square inherited Japan's place as a rapidly growing, export-based economy, one defined by the continued pre-eminence of the Chinese Communist Party. The Maastricht Treaty was formulated, creating the structure of the subsequent European Union. A vast coalition dominated by the United States reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait."
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The Next Stage of Russia's Resurgence: Introduction - 3 views

stratfor.com/...ussias-resurgence-introduction
shared by anonymous on 07 Feb 12 - Cached
  • In many ways, Russia's geopolitical strength is derived from its inherent geographic weaknesses. There are few natural barriers protecting Russia's core, and this has required Russia to expand into and consolidate territories around its core to acquire buffers from external powers.
  • this expansion created two fundamental problems for any Russian state:
  • It brought Moscow into conflict with numerous external powers and gave it the difficult task of ruling over conquered peoples (who were not necessarily happy to be ruled by Russia).
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  • when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 at the end of the Cold War and Moscow lost control of its constituent republics and fell into internal chaos, those circumstances did not guarantee that Russia was permanently removed from the international scene and that a unipolar world dominated by the United States would last forever
  • Russia has returned to its traditional status of legitimate regional power, and its influence is increasing in its historic geographic buffer zones, which are currently made up of more than a dozen independent states.
  • In the context of its resurgence, Russia's broad imperative has been to prevent foreign influence while building and ingraining its own.
  • anonymous on 07 Feb 12
     
    Stratfor has long followed and chronicled Russia's resurgence, which has included bolder foreign policy moves and resuming the role of regional power. In particular, Moscow has focused its energy in its former Soviet periphery: the Eastern European states of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the Caucasus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In recent years, Russia has increased its influence in many of these states politically, economically, militarily and in the area of security, with the most obvious sign of its return to power coming in the August 2008 war with Georgia. Now, Moscow is preparing for the next stage of its resurgence. This new phase will include the institutionalization of Russia's position as the regional hub, but will also include the use of more subtle levers and influence in areas Moscow wants to bring into its fold -- though not all of these efforts will go unchallenged.
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  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    Again with the "geographic weakness." I maintain that the biggest geographic strength that still counts is simply space, which Russia has plenty of. They could build a massive Maginot Line across the entire border and be no more secure for it. If Russia is being characterized as geographically vulnerable, it's by someone who's trying to leverage that notion or who hasn't realized that war has changed since WWI.
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 12
     
    I have to disagree with you, there. While the term "geographic weakness" can be flexible, I think that it applies to a lot more than just missile ranges. It also applies to things like how almost all the arable land in Russia is as far to the west as possible, or how the Russian interior is mostly inaccessible. Or think how the southmost end of its reach is so cut-up that we actually use the term "Balkanization." If you plopped that kind of geography in the center of north America, we likely wouldn't have extended from sea to shining sea. Russia proper doesn't have many geographic buffers. They surely don't have two oceans, like we do. This matters. We don't have a host of uneasy neighbors, either. You're right that a line wouldn't help. That's kind of the point, actually. By putting more miles between itself and any possibly hostile state - by charm or by threat - the entity increases its security.
  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    I think that the way "geographic weakness" usually is used, it's not in reference to what I might call "infrastructural weakness." Even there, I think that there is a very real geographic similarity you're overlooking in your "sea to shining sea" comparison: The Great Plains of North America are a steppe, followed by one of the more troublesome mountain ranges in the world. How the two nations crossed and filled their steppes is I think part of what makes the two so different. I might also argue that Russia's interior is naturally richer in resources--we put a lot (financially and chemically) into the "Great Desert" to make it viable for farming, and now we still daydream about swapping that into a source of energy. Russia's backyard is built for industrial exploitation, not agricultural, and I think that's probably worth more. As for actual physical buffers, It's been a while, but the US certainly has had to mess around militarily along and within its land borders over the years. Russia does have ocean on the north and east ends, and that ain't nothing. I'd like to know what percent of both our borders are sea borders. I'd guess we're within 10% of each other.
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StratFor Annual Forecast 2013 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2013
shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Generational shifts take time to play out and often begin with a period of denial as the forces of the international system struggle to preserve the old order. In 2013, that state of denial will persist in many areas. But we are more than four years into this cyclical transformation, and change is becoming more palpable and much harder to deny with every passing month.
  • In Europe, short-term remedies that are so far preserving the integrity of the European Union are also papering over the deep, structural ailments of the bloc.
  • China is not so much in denial of its current predicament as it is constrained in its ability to cope with a dramatic shift from high export-oriented growth to more sustainable development of its interior.
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  • The emerging economies of the post-China world will take time to develop, but 2013 will be an important year in determining which are best positioned to fill the growing void left by China.
  • Change will be primarily violent in nature -- and thus harder to miss -- in the Middle East.
  • The United States is also not immune to change. In this generational shift, and all the tumult that comes with it, Washington will be forced to learn the value of restraint in balance-of-power politics, preferring to lean on regional partners and encourage strategic competition as a way of preserving its own power.
  • The Arab world is moving uncomfortably between two eras. The post-World War II era, in which Arab dictatorships and monarchies supplanted colonial rule, is now roughly blending with -- or in some cases outright colliding with -- a fractured landscape of long-repressed Islamist forces.
  • This dynamic will be particularly visible in the northern Levant region this year as Syria and Lebanon continue coming apart. From Stratfor's perspective, the regime in Syria has already fallen and is giving way to a familiar state of warlordism, where militias and clan interests reign supreme. There is no longer a political entity capable of wielding control over the entirety of Syrian territory, nor will there be for some time.
  • once Syrian President Bashar al Assad is removed from power, whether through a negotiated deal or by force, the Sunni forces will fragment along ideological, ethnic and geographic lines, with Salafist-jihadist forces battling against a more politically minded Muslim Brotherhood and secular Sunnis.
  • As their grip over Aleppo slips, Alawite forces will try to hold Damascus while preparing a mass retreat to their coastal enclave. The battle for Damascus could extend beyond the scope of this forecast.
  • The potential use of chemical weapons by Alawite forces in a state of desperation could accelerate the unraveling of the region; a U.S.-led coalition would have to assemble in haste to contain the chemical weapons threat.
  • To be clear, the United States is not looking for a pretext to intervene militarily in Syria. On the contrary, the United States will make every effort possible to avoid another military campaign in the Islamic world this year.
  • A military conflict between the United States and Iran remains unlikely in 2013.
  • The growing disparity in the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions will largely relegate Iran to the role of regional spoiler. So long as Iran can create pain for its regional adversaries, it can slow its own descent.
  • Iraq remains Iran's primary regional imperative, however. The momentum building among Sunni forces in Syria will eventually spill into Iraq and challenge Shiite dominance.
  • Iran's presidential elections in June will reveal the declining relevancy of the clerical elite and the populist faction embodied by outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This creates a political void for the Revolutionary Guard to fill. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will try to check the Corps' growing influence by bolstering rival military and security agencies and backing a less controversial and more politically malleable ally from the pragmatic conservative camp for the presidency.
  • In Egypt, the military will adapt to an emerging Islamist political order. The military will remain the ultimate arbiter of the state and will rely on a number of factors -- including a fragmented judiciary, the military's economic leverage, a divided Islamist political landscape and the military's foreign relationships -- to check the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Egypt's consuming political transition will leave opportunities for flare-ups in the Sinai Peninsula and in Gaza, but we do not expect a significant breach between Israel and Egypt this year.
  • Jordan, the oft-overlooked casualty of the Arab Spring, will continue to destabilize quietly and slowly in 2013
  • Israel and Turkey are both greatly affected by the shifting political dynamics of the Arab world, but both have little means to influence the change. The two former allies will continue exploring ways to restore a quiet working relationship under these new regional stresses, but a public restoration of diplomatic ties is less likely.
  • Israel will struggle internally over how to adapt to a new regional framework in which the reliability of old working partners is called into question.
  • Turkey sees an opportunity in the rise of Islamist forces in the Arab world but Ankara's limited influences restrain its actions beyond Turkish borders.
  • A more aggressive Saudi role in Syria will aggravate the civil war and create competition with other regional stakeholders, including Turkey, Qatar and Jordan.
  • In 2012, the European Union took numerous steps to mitigate the financial impact of its ongoing crisis.
  •  These actions, which helped to keep the eurozone afloat in 2012, will remain effective in 2013, making it very likely that the eurozone will survive another year. But these tools do not solve three fundamental aspects of the European crisis. 
  • First, the European crisis is fundamentally a crisis of competitiveness.
  • Second, the crisis has a political aspect. The European Union is not a federation but a collection of nation-states bound together by international treaties.
  • Third, the European crisis is threatening the social stability in some countries, especially in the eurozone's periphery.
  • In 2013, the two largest economies of the eurozone (Germany and France) will face low growth or even stagnation. This will have negative effects across Europe.
  • In 2013, the crisis will keep damaging economic conditions in the eurozone periphery. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy will see their economies shrink and unemployment rates rise. In all these countries, the social unrest will grow and the year will be marked by permanent protests and strikes. 
  • The conspicuous divide between the ruling elite and the populations of the periphery will be a key element in 2013, and some governments could fall. But even if opposition parties take power, they will face the same constraints as the governments that preceded them. In other words, a change in politicians will not bring a substantial change in policies regarding the European Union.
  • The only country in the eurozone periphery that has scheduled elections is Italy (in February). If the next Italian government fails to achieve political stability and apply economic reforms, the increased market pressure on Italy will make Rome more likely to require financial assistance from Brussels.
  • Because of the fundamental contradictions in the national interests and foreign policy strategies of the EU member states, the European crisis will continue generating political and economic divisions in the Continent in 2013.
  • Outside the eurozone, the United Kingdom will seek to protect its sovereignty and renegotiate its status within the European Union. But London will not leave the European Union in 2013.
  • Domestic Issues After the political tumult of 2012, Russia will face another year of anti-Kremlin protests, tensions among various political factions and ethnic groups, crackdowns and government reshuffles. Overall, the political tensions will remain manageable and will not pose a serious challenge to Moscow's control.
  • Russia has made significant progress recently in re-establishing influence in its former Soviet periphery.
  • Russia's relationship with Ukraine could be its most important connection in the former Soviet Union in 2013. Russia has been pursuing integration with Ukraine, primarily by taking over its natural gas transit infrastructure and calling on Kiev to join the Customs Union.
  • Georgia will be Russia's main concern in the Caucasus in 2013. With the political emergence of billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream movement, Russia's position in the country strengthened at the expense of the anti-Russian camp of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
  • In the past year, Russia has changed its tactics toward Europe to preserve its presence and leverage for the future. Russia's primary link to Europe is the Europeans' dependence on Russia's large energy supplies, which Moscow knows will be threatened when more non-Russian supplies become available.
  • In 2012, Russia began shifting away from its aggressive stance on energy -- particularly its high prices -- to strike long-term deals that will maintain Russia's market share with its primary strategic customers, such as Germany, Italy and Turkey. Russia will continue this strategy in 2013 as it continues to build new infrastructure to directly link its supplies to Europe.
  • The United States and Russia will continue sparring over trade matters, negotiations for a new nuclear arms treaty and Russia's role in Iran and Syria. Stratfor does not expect major changes from Washington or Moscow that would break the gridlock in negotiations on these issues.
  • The low-level violence and instability that occurred throughout Central Asia in 2012 will continue in 2013.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia in 2013: Beijing's struggle to maintain social and political stability amid lower economic growth rates; China's accelerating military modernization and increasingly aggressive moves to secure its territorial and economic interests in the region; and varied efforts by other regional players, including the United States, to adapt to China's changes. 
  • In 2013, the Chinese economy will continue the gradual, painful process of moving away from high export-driven growth and toward a model that is more sustainable in the long run.
  • But barring another global financial meltdown on the scale of 2008-2009, China's coastal manufacturing economy will not collapse outright. The decline will be gradual.
  • The ongoing, gradual eclipse of coastal China as a hub of global manufacturing over the next several years will lead to higher unemployment and social dislocation as more of China's 250 million-strong migrant labor force returns inland in search of work. 
  • Shadow banking is by no means new in China. But it has grown significantly in the past few years from the geographically isolated informal loan markets of coastal cities to a complex network of semi-legal entities that provides between 12 and 30 trillion yuan (between $1.9 trillion and $4.8 trillion) in credit -- at interest rates of 20-36 percent -- to thousands of struggling small businesses nationwide.
  • The Party's growing sense of insecurity -- both internally and with regard to the social consequences of China's economic transition -- likely will be reflected in continued censorship of online social platforms like Weibo, crackdowns on religious or other groups perceived as threatening, and the Chinese military's growing assertiveness over China's interests in the South and East China seas and Southeast Asia.
  • The decline of low-end coastal manufacturing in China will present enormous opportunities for Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and potentially Myanmar -- all of whom will continue to push strongly for foreign investment not only into natural resources and raw materials industries but also into developing better urban, transport, power generation and materials processing infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines -- China's most vocal opponents in Southeast Asia -- will continue to push for greater integration among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and for U.S. business and military engagement in the region.
  • The Coming U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan Ahead of the 2014 drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, efforts will intensify to negotiate a settlement that gives the Taliban a place in a new government.
  • The negotiations will face numerous obstacles this year. There will be an upsurge in violence -- both in terms of officially sanctioned attacks designed to gain advantage on the negotiating table and spoiler attacks by Taliban elements allied with al Qaeda on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.
  • Washington's intention to reduce its presence in the region will spur regional actors to fill the void. Pakistan will increase its interactions with Russia, Central Asia and Iran to prepare for a post-U.S. Afghanistan.
  • India will also turn its attention eastward, where the United States is quietly trying to forge a coalition of regional partners to keep a check on China in the Indo-Pacific basin. Myanmar in particular will be an active battleground for influence this year.
  • Preparing for a Post-Chavez Venezuela After a year of successful campaigning for re-election, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in questionable health. Although the ultimate outcome of December's medical treatment for the ailing leader is unpredictable, Chavez's decision to name Vice President Nicolas Maduro as a political successor at the end of 2012 indicates that there is significant concern for his ability to remain in power.
  • Although it remains possible that Chavez will stay in power through the year, for Maduro to capitalize on Chavez's recent political gains, elections may need to be called sooner rather than later, regardless of Chavez's immediate health status.
  • Throughout 2013, Colombia will continue the incremental process of negotiating an end to the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC.
  • This will be a year of significant transition for Mexico. Policy issues that were bottled up by intra-party competition in the waning years of the National Action Party's administration have begun coming to the fore and will dominate 2013. These include socio-political issues like education, tax and pension reform.
  • The most important issue facing Mexico in 2013 will be energy policy.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "At the beginning of 2012, we argued that the international system is undergoing a generational transformation -- the kind that occurs every 20 years or so. The cycle we are now in started in 2008-2009, when global financial contagion exposed the underlying weaknesses of Europe and eventually cracked China's export-oriented economic model. The Middle East then began to deviate from its post-World War II paradigm with an attempted resurgence by Iran, the regional rise of Islamists and the decline of age-old autocratic regimes in the Arab world."
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When Geography Changes - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Geography is enduring, but it does occasionally change.
  • The extent and effect of climate change is still unknown, but it has the potential to make significant changes to what we think of as immovable geographic realities.
  • To be clear, we are not debating the causation of this warming trend, nor are we discussing measures aimed at limiting its impact. Rather, we would like to use this opportunity to discuss how climate change could impact geopolitics. Agriculture remains a key piece to this new puzzle; changes in the location of water and of land suited for food production could alter traditional geopolitical dynamics. Geography and climate shape regions and countries. If we accept that there will be changes to temperature, climate and perhaps weather, then there will also likely be variations in the availability of arable land that can support large populations and agriculture.
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  • Climate, rainfall and land quality are key determinants of state power.
  • A country with significant amounts of arable land and easily traversed territory has an automatic advantage over other states.
  • changes in access to arable land can have profound effects on a country's ability to take care of its domestic population and to participate in global markets.
  • Brazil is a good example of this. Its coastal geography makes building roads and railways from the interior to the coast quite difficult, but its climate is perfectly suited to sugar cane growth, which has allowed the country to develop an impressive ethanol industry that has made Brazil's energy sources among the most diversified in the world.
  • China, which faces extreme population pressures and increasingly relies on foreign sources of many commodities, is using agricultural land in the Northeast -- specifically in Heilongjiang province -- to develop a state-controlled agricultural heartland to supplement the rest of the country's agriculture, which is for the most part family-run. China's population exceeds 1.3 billion, which makes food security a critical issue of state stability.
  • Russia's massive grain belt, which has in centuries past allowed the country to support outsized domestic armies, lacks adequate infrastructure, complicating the process of moving grain across the country's expanse.
  • The United States is an example of success anchored in favorable geography. The overlap of a wide swath of farmland and a large navigable river system has allowed the nation to thrive. Enough food is grown in the Midwestern farm belt and along the Mississippi River system to not only sustain the population of the United States, but to also make it the largest exporter of grain in the world.
  • Over the course of history, warmer eras have also been wetter ones, but we can expect rain patterns to fluctuate in ways we do not fully understand right now.
  • With increasing temperatures, we could very well see a shift in the location of the temperate zones in which agricultural development flourishes. As tropical zones expand to both the north and the south, the temperate zones shift north toward the Artic and south toward the Antarctic.
  • Warming in higher latitudes can affect glaciers, initially speeding and then slowing the runoff feeding streams and rivers. Arable land will increase for some regions and decrease for others. This could fundamentally change the hand of geographic cards a specific nation has been dealt.
  • The specific effects of climate change remain uncertain. When geography does change meaningfully -- whatever the nature of the change -- the parameters of analysis and human action change in profound ways that can be difficult to predict.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 13
     
    "A new study on global temperature trends will be published in the March 8 issue of Science. The study observes cyclical temperature patterns over the course of the last 11,300 years and determines that current temperatures have yet to exceed previous peaks. However, the study suggests that by 2100, temperatures will exceed those of any previous time period."
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The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Conflicting Imperatives - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In the case of Yangtze development, an official from China's National Development and Reform Commission noted in May 2011 a shift in the focus of central government port development policy from the coast to the interior, adding that most of the opportunities for future port-related investment would be in cities along the Yangtze River.
  • Wuhan's 10-year port redevelopment program is set to consume a large percentage of that investment -- at $28.6 billion, the program accounts for around 70 percent of the country's total ongoing and planned port construction -- though another $4 billion to $5 billion has been set aside for dredging and port expansion everywhere from Chongqing municipality in southwest China to Wuhu in Anhui province.
  • The central government's heightened emphasis on inland waterway port expansion is incongruous with port throughput trends during the previous five-year period, 2007-2011.
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  • Not surprisingly, China's coastal ports dwarf inland ports in terms of both overall throughput and throughput growth. But more telling is that of the major Yangtze ports for which the National Bureau of Statistics provides freight traffic data, only three (at Chongqing, Yueyang and Wuhu) showed significant growth in throughput between 2007 and 2011.
  • Wuhan, the flagship of new port investment on the Yangtze as well as nationally, actually saw declines in both the number of berths and freight throughput during that period.
  • The apparent gap between central government policy prerogatives and the reality of port traffic growth trends exemplifies the way economic development policy under the Communist Party not only responds to present needs but also in many ways actively shapes future realities.
  • Going forward, the question for Beijing will be whether and to what extent it is able to realize its ambitious plans for the Yangtze River corridor and inland China as a whole. Even then, it is not clear that expanding and industrializing a handful of inland cities will reduce mounting economic imbalances or social tensions unless combined with significant changes to a range of other policies, including the hukou (or household registration) system and the fiscal and financial relationship between city, provincial and national governments. Significant changes to these policies will, in turn, meet steep resistance from entrenched bureaucratic interests. More fundamentally, such changes would likely unleash the social unrest that Beijing's entire political economic system is intended to manage.
  • port development in Wuhan is similar to projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the ongoing South-North Water Transfer Project, which seeks to divert up to 10 percent of the Yangtze River's flow to water-starved provinces in northern China. All three are attempts to reconcile immense geographic and environmental constraints with the ballooning demands (both consumer and industrial) of an enormous population and an ever-expanding economy -- all while providing enough jobs to maintain a degree of stability.
  • The problem, then, is not simply that the Chinese government's approach to economic development is inconsistent with the needs of the economy and population as a whole
  • Rather, it is that the needs of the economy -- growth with stability, and energy security despite energy demands that far outstrip domestic resources -- are themselves inconsistent and contradictory.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "Beijing pursues far-reaching development programs such as the industrialization of the Yangtze River region not always because they make economic sense -- often they do not -- but because it must do so to sustain the basic social and economic structures that secure the regime."
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Russia's Shifting Political Landscape, Part 1: An Overview of Political Changes - 6 views

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shared by anonymous on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • When Putin came to power in 1999, he ruled a country that was in utter political disarray, economically broken and threatened by internal and external forces. He aggressively consolidated the country politically, economically and socially and quashed the security threats. The country rallied around him as Russia's "savior," a sentiment that in recent years evolved into a cult based on the belief that Putin is the sole heartbeat of the country.
  • The first shift in Russia's political landscape occurred because Putin's complex network of clans inside the Kremlin has utterly collapsed.
  • Anti-Kremlin sentiment stems from many issues. Years of relative stability have led to a sense of political, social and economic security, which has fostered a belief among some Russians that the country no longer needs a "savior" like Putin. Prolonged periods of high energy prices and a strengthening Russian economy have created a new growing middle class, something not really seen in Russia before. Furthermore, much of the generation now coming of age was not raised under the Soviet Union or during the chaotic years immediately following its collapse. An extremist brand of nationalism has also risen across the country, leading more Russians to have no interest in a balanced government. Putin's government did not anticipate these shifts in recent years, and that failure has fed into dissent from within United Russia and the further rise of anti-Kremlin sentiment.
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  • This kind of adjustment has occurred cyclically throughout Russian history as the country has shifted between stability and chaos.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 Feb 12
       
      See also: Dark horse and light horse concepts.
  • the longer Putin takes to resolve these crises, the weaker he will appear to the rest of the world.
  • Other countries, especially the United States, have taken advantage of the instability inside Russia and are attempting to exploit the image that Moscow is not as strong or powerful as it claims to be. As Russia continues to pressure Central Europe and Washington's interests in the region, Moscow cannot allow internal issues to erode its position.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      No, you are quite right. There is no threat (yet) to Russia's core. But since Russia has such indefensible geography, they extend their reach to create buffer zones. Even with the U.S./Islamic world diversion, the U.S. is still aggressively planting itself in Central Asia. Russia wants the U.S. and the rest of Europe to concede that *Eastern* Europe be considered their playground. With that recognized - the thinking goes - Russia will breathe easier.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Oh yes, geography is still quite relevant. In order to fly planes over a place, you have to have supply lines and obey flight range constraints. One aspect of geography that is perennially overlooked is: rivers. Russia's one of the best examples. Look at the major river systems of the U.S. and Russia and two things become quite clear: 1) Russia has only one navigable river and it doesn't empty to the ocean, but rather a mostly landlocked sea. 2) America has a complex, navigable river system that meanders through the center of the land mass. We couldn't ask for better rivers. Using those rivers, as we do, we are able to save substantially on shipping costs. Russia, by contrast, has a sparsely populated interior precisely because there are no river systems that can be used in such a manner. Everything's imported over rail and truck. I need to find a graphic, but there's a great one which highlights why Russia wants to keep, say, Ukraine in its sphere of influence. Basically, you could position tons of short range missiles to threaten Moscow quite easily. I would pose that the only reason that we can't imagine that large-scale combat is a thing anymore (I share a bit of that in my gut) is simply because we have not lived through a conflict with anything near the scope of World War II. But just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it won't.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
       
      I'm saying that were such a thing to happen, the only tactical elements of geography would be range and infrastructure. It's no longer important to hold the high ground or worry about "defensible positions" unless you're taking to bunkers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Ah. I got you. Yes. I'd agree with that. Russian planners' fear has to do with American troops stationed in a nation, not necessarily what hill they're on. :)
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    Russia's political landscape has been relatively calm and consolidated for the past decade under former President and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. However, recent months have seen instability rise sharply, with a purge in the government, a shift in parliamentary election results and large protests in the streets. None of these is new to Russia, but these and other factors are converging and creating changes in Russia's political landscape.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Feb 12
     
    I know that Russia was threatened internally when Putin came to power, but I feel that the "external" threats were more threats on Russia's external claims. Am I missing something?
  • Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
     
    Is defensibility of terrain really that important anymore? It seems that beyond small-scale, local-level action, most geography is flown over or sailed around these days, and Russia has plenty of space between where they'd be able to pick up a threat and where that threat could actually do damage. Seriously. Are large-scale land (vs. marine/air) invasions even a thing anymore?
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The PC16: Identifying China's Successors | Stratfor - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 30 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • China will have to behave differently from the way it does now, and thus other countries are poised to take its place.
  • Since the Industrial Revolution, there have always been countries where comparative advantage in international trade has been rooted in low wages and a large work force. If these countries can capitalize on their advantages, they can transform themselves dramatically. These transformations, in turn, reorganize global power structures.
  • When it is not in the throes of war, trade reshapes the international order. After World War II, Germany and Japan climbed out of their wreckage by using their skilled, low-wage labor to not only rebuild their economy but to become great exporting powers.
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  • It's not just their work; it's their way of life. As workers move to factories, the social fabric is torn apart. But that rending of life opens the door for a mobile workforce able to take advantage of new opportunities. Traditional life disappears; in its place stand the efficiencies of capitalism.
  • As the process matures, low wages rise -- producing simple products for the world market is not as profitable as producing more sophisticated products -- and the rate of growth slows down in favor of more predictable profits from more complex goods and services. All nations undergo this process, and China is no exception. This is always a dangerous time for a country. Japan handled it well. China has more complex challenges.
  • Low-wage countries seize the opportunity and climb upon the escalator of the international system, and with them come the political and business elite and the poor, for whom even the brutality of early industrialism is a relief.
  • In looking at this historically, two markers showed themselves. One is a historical first step: garment and footwear manufacturing, a highly competitive area that demands low wages but provides work opportunities that the population, particularly women, understand in principle. A second marker is mobile phone assembly, which requires a work force that can master relatively simple operations. Price matters greatly in this ruthlessly competitive market.
  • We were not looking for the kind of large-scale movements that would be noticed globally, but the first movements that appear to be successful. Where a handful of companies are successful, others will follow, so long as there is labor, some order and transportation.
  • Some things are not necessary or expected. The rule of law, understood in Anglo-Saxon terms of the written law, isn't there at this stage. Things are managed through custom and relationships with the elite. Partnerships are established. Frequently there is political uncertainty, and violence may have recently occurred. These are places that are at the beginning of their development cycle, and they may not develop successfully. Investors here are risk takers -- otherwise they wouldn't be here.
  • The Cultural Revolution had ended a few years before. It was a national upheaval of violence with few precedents. Mao Zedong died in 1976, and there had been an intense power struggle, with Deng Xiaoping consolidating power in 1977. China was politically unstable, had no clear legal system, sporadic violence and everything else that would make it appear economically hopeless. In fact, Egbert F. Dernberger and David Fasenfest of the University of Michigan wrote a paper for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress titled "China's Post-Mao Economic Future." In this paper, the authors state: "In the next seven years as a whole, the rate of industrial investment and production, more than the total of the last 28 years, imply a level of imports and industrial labor force such that the exports, transportation facilities, social overhead capital, energy and middle-level technical personnel requirements would exceed any realistic assessment of Chinese capabilities."
  • I don't mean to criticize the authors. This was the reasonable, conventional wisdom at the time. It assumed that the creation of infrastructure and a managerial class was the foundation of economic growth. In fact in China, it was the result of economic growth. The same can be said for rule of law, civil society, transparency and the other social infrastructure that emerges out of the social, financial and managerial chaos that a low-wage economy almost always manifests.
  • Low-wage societies develop these characteristics possibly out of the capital formation that low-wage exports generates. The virtues of advanced industrial society and the advantages of pre-industrial society don't coincide.
  • There is no single country that can replace China. Its size is staggering. That means that its successors will not be one country but several countries, most at roughly the same stage of development.
  • The point to emphasize is that identifying the PC16 is not a forecast. It is a list of countries in which we see significant movement of stage industries, particularly garment and footwear manufacturing and mobile phone assembly.
  • we have excluded countries growing because of energy and mineral extraction. These countries follow different paths of development. The PC16 are strictly successors to China as low wage, underdeveloped countries with opportunities to grow their manufacturing sectors dramatically.
  • When you look at map, much of this new activity is focused in the Indian Ocean Basin. The most interesting pattern is in the eastern edge of Sub-Saharan Africa: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh are directly on the Indian Ocean.
  • A special word needs to be included on Mexico. The area north of Mexico City and south of the U.S. borderlands has been developing intensely in recent years. We normally would not include Mexico but the area in central-southern Mexico is large, populous and still relatively underdeveloped.
  • It is in this area, which includes the states of Campeche, Veracruz, Chiapas and Yucatan, where we see the type of low-end development that fits our criteria. Mexico's ability to develop its low-wage regions does not face the multitude of challenges China faces in doing the same with its interior.
  • All of this has to be placed in context. This is not the only growth process underway. It is most unlikely that all of these countries will succeed. They are not yet ready, with some exceptions, for advanced financial markets or quantitative modeling. They are entering into a process that has been underway in the world since the late 1700s: globalism and industrialism combined.
  • It can be an agonizing process and many have tried to stop it. They have failed not because of their respective ruling classes, which would have the most to lose. It doesn't take place because of multinational corporations. They come in later. It takes place because of profit-driven jobbers who know how to live with instability and corruption. It also takes place because of potential workers looking to escape their lives for what to them seems like a magnificent opportunity but for us seems unthinkable.
  • The parabola of economic development dictates that what has not yet risen will rise and eventually fall. The process unleashed in the Industrial Revolution does not seem to be stoppable. In our view, this is the next turning of the wheel.
  • anonymous on 30 Jul 13
     
    "China has become a metaphor. It represents a certain phase of economic development, which is driven by low wages, foreign appetite for investment and a chaotic and disorderly development, magnificent in scale but deeply flawed in many ways. Its magnificence spawned the flaws, and the flaws helped create the magnificence."
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In Telangana Decision, a Microcosm of India's Geopolitical Challenge - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Some Congress Party officials, eager to seize political momentum and in hopes that the move will translate into votes in the 2014 general elections, claim the process can be completed in as little as four to five months, but that is probably too optimistic an estimate.
  • The Indian government has deployed an additional 1,500 paramilitary personnel to the state in anticipation of riots, fearing that clashes will ensue between celebrating pro-Telangana activists and opponents protesting the split of Andhra Pradesh.
  • The soon-to-be-altered boundaries of Andhra Pradesh currently encompass three geographically distinct areas:
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  • Telangana, the Andhra coastal plain and the interior Rayalaseema region.
  • The area that will become Telangana is sandwiched between the Godavari and Krishna rivers and sits on the Deccan plateau, west of the Eastern Ghats mountain range. Though the mostly barren north suffers from acute power shortages, has a high rate of poverty and is a hotbed for Naxalism -- India's Maoist militant movement -- its geographic boundaries include Hyderabad, one of India's most vibrant economic regions.
  • The new plan to divide Andhra Pradesh would have the residual non-Telangana parts -- coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema -- form the state of Seemandhra.
  • Further, the most controversial element of the Congress Party's current proposal entitles Telangana to the economic prize of Hyderabad, which would serve as a joint capital for 10 years during which Seemandhra is tasked with appointing or building its own capital.
  • Telangana is poised to join a long list of states that have been created since India's independence in 1947. Before Telangana, the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, in 2000. Goa defined its state boundaries in 1987, while Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in the country’s far-flung northeast grew out of Assam in the same year. Manipur and Tripura earned their statehood in 1972, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh were carved out of Punjab state in 1966 and Bombay state in 1960 was divided along linguistic lines into Maharashtra and Gujarat.
  • India's constantly shifting map is no accident. Nation-building can be a messy process, and politicians, activists and militants of various stripes are still grappling with a score of unsettled issues left by India's chaotic transition from the British Raj to an Indian republic in the mid-20th century.
  • Like a cracked window pane, India's multiple river systems cut across the subcontinent and give shape to hundreds of distinct geographic, ethnic, religious and linguistic identities.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the father of the Indian republic, quickly realized that the three-tier division the British Raj used to divide and administer India's governorships and princely states was ill-suited to the new country. In 1953, he launched a commission to figure out how to reorganize the country. Controversial political questions naturally emerged -- whether to redraw states along lines of linguistic and cultural unity, as well as how to preserve geographic continuity and financial viability. Leaders worried about the precedents any action could set in a country that speaks hundreds of languages and dialects and is beset by overlapping boundaries and economic interests.
  • The decided course of action -- as often happens when government commissions confront politically explosive tasks -- was to maintain ambiguity.
  • The creation of a new state that affects Hyderabad, a major economic hub home to a number of multinational corporations, is going to be a messy affair. And the statehood question is being addressed at a time when the government is desperately trying to attract and retain long-term foreign direct investment to help it cope with the global economic crisis.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 13
     
    "India is set to inaugurate its 29th state: Telangana will be carved out of the existing southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the highest working body of India's ruling Congress Party decided late July 30 to find the legal means to create the new entity. The success of the Telangana movement for statehood encapsulates the deep-rooted struggles New Delhi faces in trying to preserve and manage a nation riven with internal complexities."
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Forget Offshore Drilling Until We Get Some Answers - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...ling-until-we-get-some-answers politics
shared by anonymous on 04 May 10 - Cached
  • a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service (or MMS, the division of the Interior Department responsible for offshore drilling) found that this procedure was implicated in 18 out of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over the 14 years it studied—more than any other factor. Cementing, which was handled by Halliburton, had just been completed prior to the recent explosion. The Journal notes that Halliburton was also the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea off Australia.
  • anonymous on 04 May 10
     
    By William Galston at The New Republic on May 4, 2010.
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Intelligence Turnover: After bin Laden, Who Will the U.S. Target Next? - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 03 May 11 - Cached
  • There is only a short window of time in which any material from the bin Laden compound will hold actionable intelligence — information that will enable U.S. operatives to chase down bin Laden’s associates.
  • Often, the web of intelligence that leads to a breakthrough like the pinpointing of bin Laden, combined with the intelligence gleaned from a direct action, can have a snowball effect, with multiple hits in quick succession.
  • Photos taken inside the house indicated that the interior had been pulled apart quickly in search of any possible material of intelligence value. CNN reported May 3 that a U.S. official told them the raid collected 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices such as discs, DVDs and thumb drives. The number of electronic devices is surprising given that bin Laden had no communications links with the outside world and has not produced a propaganda video since 2007.
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  • unlike the success of special operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior al Qaeda officials maintain higher levels of operational security and will be the most difficult to link together.
  • Even if the intelligence haul was limited and the U.S. statements are disinformation, it would likely represent an attempt to provoke a reaction from other major al Qaeda figures, which could result in operational errors that would expose them.
  • Even if intelligence analysis and retasking fails to find other al Qaeda operatives, longer-term operations will probably expose funding sources and allow the United States and its allies to shut them down.
  • anonymous on 03 May 11
     
    "U.S. media are reporting that an "impressive amount" of intelligence material was gathered during the May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It is unclear what, if any, actionable intelligence was collected, but U.S. analysts and special operations personnel are no doubt working quickly to exploit the intelligence and plan follow-on raids. Much of the media talk by U.S. officials could also be disinformation to scare other al Qaeda operatives into thinking the United States found a mother lode of intelligence and will soon be coming after them."
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