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February 08, 2010
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Leading Indicators: Off the Radar News Roundup

Posted By Judah Grunstein 08 Feb 2010 - The U.S. decision to follow through on Taiwan arms sales might have damaged U.S.-China relations, but for now, it doesn't seem to have had an impact on China-Taiwan relations, in particular upcoming trade talks.

- China will turn to increased imports of Luiquefied Natural Gas to relieve energy shortfalls, according to a report citing the director of its National Energy Administration.

- The U.S. and China continued their burgeoning trade skirmish, swapping tariffs on chicken products and gift ribbons. Pretty ignominious stuff for a battle of the titans.

- Could Gazprom participate in Nabucco? That's what Richard Morningstar, the U.S. envoy for Eurasian energy affairs, suggested at a recent conference. That would be a curious outcome for a pipeline whose original purpose was to reduce Europe's dependence on Russian gas. But the only other alternative would be using Iranian gas to supply the project, something Morningstar has also suggested be considered in offhand comments at a Nabucco meeting last year. Both remarks are probably irresponsible for an official energy envoy, which of course means that I'm officially a big Richard Morningstar fan.

- Contrary to previous reports, Russia has begun construction of its fourth Borey-class nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarine. The subs will be ultimately be equipped with the Bulava sub-launched nuclear missile, if Moscow ever gets that to fly straight. Four more subs are scheduled to be built by 2015.

- Russia loaned Sri Lanka $300 million to buy Russian-made arms and service previously purchased material. That's pretty lousy timing, coming in the aftermath of a Sri Lankan election that did nothing to resolve the lingering social grievances behind the recently defeated Tamil insurgency, and on the day the losing presidential candidate and former commanding general of the Sri Lankan military was arrested.

- Russia and Argentina signed an MoU for civil nuclear cooperation.

- Kenya and Ethiopia signed a major energy-sharing agreement on the sidelines of the African Union summit. The planned power grid connection will allow Kenya to tap into an upcoming Ethiopian hydro-electric project, while cementing economic and security ties between the already friendly neighbors.

Researched by Kari Lipschutz.

European Airport Security, Redux

Posted By Judah Grunstein 08 Feb 2010 I wrote recently about the fundamental disconnect between the "privacy versus security" trade-off that Americans are willing to make compared to Europeans when it comes to airport security. The matter at hand at the time was full-body scanners, but what I was trying to illustrate was the cultural divide between American and European perceptions of the urgency of airport security in particular and counterterrorism in general.

And I think this video from an Italian journalist at L'Espresso, hosted at Le Figaro's Web site, does a good job of backing that up. According to the article accompanying the video, the reporter basically roamed freely through Rome's Fiumicino airport -- including areas with restricted access -- because between the hours of 1-3 a.m., the airport "closes" and security is non-existent, even if many passengers remain in the terminal. I could be wrong, but I have a hard time imagining this sort of thing happening in a U.S. airport these days.

The same cultural divide extends to other aspects of U.S.-European joint counterterrorism efforts, such as a bank data-sharing program that the EU parliament is poised to cancel on privacy concerns. The U.S. has warned that canceling the program -- which was already in operation but now requires parliament's approval to continue post-Lisbon -- will result in the U.S. seeking the same cooperation through bilateral agreements with member states, as opposed to through the EU.

This is, of course, a good example of how the U.S. can generally bypass the EU through bilateral agreements. But it's also an example of how, when invasive counterterrorism initiatives are subjected to popular scrutiny -- and consent -- in Europe, the threshhold of privacy concerns is higher. For the U.S., the less-scrutinized bilateral option still exists. But it will very likely come with political costs for our European partners, and even more so as the range of post-9/11 joint efforts continues to come to light.

The War Literature This Time

Posted By Judah Grunstein 08 Feb 2010 The NY Times has two interesting articles on a subject I've written about before: film and literature inspired by the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Like me, they note the lack of novels, as compared to memoirs, although this is to be expected given the lag-time before good fiction usually appears.

Interestingly, they also discuss something that I'd ignored, namely the lack of political criticism in both the literature and cinema that has come out of the wars to date. In some ways, that was implied in my previous remarks, given the nature of the great post-War and Vietnam-era film and literature (which targeted war's absurdity in the former case, and its inhumanity in the latter). The Times piece on war literature traces the lack of political criticism to the preponderence of the officer class among the current crop of authors, leading to a "neo-Victorian" portrayal of the duty and honor that accompanies war. The piece on film suggests that a fixation on "reality," in both documentary and fictional portrayals, has pre-empted the usual political content.

There's certainly a case to be made for the argument that the courage and sacrifice demonstrated by our soldiers demands that they not be turned into vehicles for political agendas. I'd suggest, though, that this case resides very squarely outside the realm of "reality" that has otherwise become the watchword of the artistic treatment of the wars. In addition to receiving a great deal of well-deserved, politically disinterested gratitude, our soldiers are also the instrument of political manipulation, whether wielded by the White House, Congress, the Pentagon or locally elected officials across the country. We, and they, all know this. So the depoliticization of the artistic portrayal of our current wars represents, not "reality," but a significant victory of a particular view of them.

This Week's WPR Video Highlights

Posted By Kari Lipschutz 05 Feb 2010 Here are a few of this week's highlights from WPR's video section:

- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returns to the negotiating table with a deal that makes some observers wary. WorldFocus discusses the warranted skepticism in this video.

- Afghan farmers receive attention from the USDA as one of the United States' top non-military priorities. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack briefs the press in this video. And agricultural initiatives can be seen at work in this video.

- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discussed positive developments in N. Ireland in this video.

Our video section is updated daily. I'll highlight videos we post there from time to time on this blog. Got a tip for where we can find embeddable videos of interest to WPR readers? Send it to video[at]worldpoliticsreview.com.

Leading Indicators: Off the Radar News Roundup

Posted By Judah Grunstein 05 Feb 2010 - China's foreign minister called 2010 a year of opportunity for French-Chinese relations. Certainly relations between the two countries could get no worse than 2009, when they hit a rough patch following President Nicolas Sarkozy's meeting with the Dalia Lama in December 2008. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means U.S.-China relations should get back on track sometime in mid-2011.

- A Chinese state researcher suggested that China might let the yuan appreciate due to inflation concerns, lending weight to Daniel McDowell's argument in a recent WPR briefing that perhaps patience will be more effective than pressure when it comes to revaluing the yuan.

- India and the U.K. have finalized their bilateral civil nuclear energy deal, with a signing to be announced soon. That leaves the U.S. as among the last to enter India's nuclear energy market, despite being instrumental in opening it for international business.

- Kazakhstan is considering a plan to lease 2.5 million acres of agricultural land to China, an idea that has been met by fierce domestic opposition.

- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will use the Munich Security Conference to make one last push for a recent Russian proposal for a new European security treaty. The proposed pact, which the West has ignored so far, would more closely integrate U.S., NATO and Russian security interests on the continent.

- If EADS subsidiary Eurocopter didn't purposely time its helicopter sale to Taiwan to minimize the potential Chinese response to it, then it should have. Fallout from the recently announced U.S.-Taiwan arms deal combined with warming EU-China relations -- including a possible lifting of the EU arms embargo on China -- could provide cover for the $111 million deal.

Researched by Kari Lipschutz.

Lawfare in the South China Sea

Posted By Judah Grunstein 05 Feb 2010 In another UNCLOS-related story, the NY Times reports that Vietnam is increasingly trying to multilateralize its territorial disputes with China over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Instead of negotiating bilaterally, Hanoi is pushing a collective negotiation between all the parties -- Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei -- that have conflicting claims. In the "Integrate but CYA" formula I've used to refer to Asia, this would be the "Integrate to CYA" correlary.

There's nothing terribly novel about a collection of weaker states banding together to counterbalance the influence of a more powerful one, and China is predictably opposed to the effort. But it does raise the question of whether further regional integration would actually be in the interest of Asia's smaller states. After all, the same logic explains why ASEAN makes a better instrument for SE Asian states to negotiate free trade deals with China, Japan and South Korea. A larger grouping that subsumes it would dilute this collective power.

It also illustrates a major difference between regional integration in Europe and Asia. European integration began with the larger states included and later absorbed the smaller and weaker ones. The reverse has been true in Asia. And the structural problem mentioned above is complicated by the politically motivated trust issues regarding China.

But if Asia is going to integrate further, the resolution of boundary disputes is a prerequisite. So how those disputes are actually resolved will be a revealing indicator of the region's future.

Thawfare in the Arctic

Posted By Judah Grunstein 05 Feb 2010 After "lawfare," it's time to add "thawfare" to the lexicon of how to pursue politics by other means (especially since a quick Google scan indicates that I have indeed coined this neologism):

Russia will invest some 1.5 billion rubles ($49.7 million) in defining the extent of its continental shelf in the Arctic in 2010, in order to prove its right to more of the Arctic floor, the country's Natural Resources Ministry has said.

"These funds will be spent on additional hydrographic and geophysical research in the Arctic Ocean," the ministry said in a statement.

For more background on what's at stake in the Arctic as it melts, see Katie Drummond's WPR briefing on the Pentagon's New Arctic Map, as well as Caitlyn Antrim's WPR feature on Russia and the Changing Geopolitics of the Arctic. Antrim's article, in particular, illustrates how despite the focus on the underwater resources at stake, the Arctic thaw will also dramatically impact Russia's ability to extract Siberian resources through a navigable northern sea route.

Another significant aspect here is the use of established multilateral legal channels, in this case the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, to determine claims and resolve disputes. Yet another case of "resource wars" losing out to "resource litigation."

Leading Indicators: Off the Radar News Roundup

Posted By Judah Grunstein 04 Feb 2010 - China and Serbia signed the preliminary contracts for a power-station project valued at $1.25 billion.

- South Korea will formally turn over eight light attack aircraft to the Peruvian air force on Friday. South Korea offered the planes as a gift, in an effort to raise its profile as an arms provider in South America. The planes date back to the Vietnam War era, and had already been retired from the South Korean air force.

- Meanwhile, Russia has become the top arms exporter to South America, largely as a result of increased sales to Venezuela. U.S. arms sales to the region have been reduced due to restrictions imposed on various countries for failure to cooperate fully with counterterrorism efforts.

- A village in Calabria, Italy, has adopted a policy of welcoming refugees and immigrants as a way to reverse its population decline. Despite initial successes, the Calabrian Mafia is not pleased.

- Nigeria's Niger Delta insurgency has ruled out talks with Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, because he has not been mandated by the country's ailing and absent president to negotiate on the issue. This is just one of many serious issues that the country's power vacuum has left unattended, but there's something refreshing about an armed insurgency being such a stickler for constitutional process.

- The president of a national engineering association warned that, in the absence of measures to increase capacity, South Africa's rapid urbanization will result in water shortages by 2019, with demand exceeding supplies by 2025.

Researched by Kari Lipschutz.

Reintegrating the Taliban, Really

Posted By Judah Grunstein 04 Feb 2010 The whole question of reintegrating the Taliban bears some attention, since it's now become the new buzzword with regard to creating the political conditions necessary to ending the insurgency. Yesterday, Craig Davis' WPR Briefing examined some of the cultural challenges reintegration will present. Today, Joshua Partlow examines some of the political challenges it raises in terms of negotiating with the Taliban leadership, and Martine van Bijlert recently examined some of the potential pitfalls of implementation in terms of ground-level foot soldiers.

Clearly, there are a lot of circles to square, and it seems obvious that any power-sharing arrangement will be fragile at best. One concrete question I haven't seen raised yet, for instance, is whether it would be an arrangement based on including the Taliban in the central government, or whether it would be based on decentralized regional autonomy for Afghanistan's Pashtun belt. If the former, what ministries would the Taliban get? If the latter, which would be at cross-purposes with President Hamid Karzai's efforts to centralize power, how much autonomy would be granted?

Those are two simplistic questions, perhaps, but they illustrate how even a "frozen solution" of the sort we've seen in Zimbabwe and Kenya, or in Morocco and the Western Sahara, might be out of reach in Afghanistan.

It also demonstrates the danger of buzzword- and narrative-driven policy. I realize that a lot of my recent thinking on Afghanistan has been based on both. So this is my way of recognizing that it's a tenuous foundation on which to build a workable solution.

The World Last Week

04 Feb 2010 France 24 just posted last Friday's panel discussion program, The World This Week, which I took part in along with John Vinocur from the IHT, Pierre Rousselin from Le Figaro and Gerry Feehily from Presseurop.eu. . Part one is here, part two is here.

I developed the thought behind the first point I made, on Tony Blair's justification for the Iraq War, in a blog post here. As I mention in the post, the idea occurred to me pretty spontaneously, and I'm not sure I articulated it very clearly on the program.

Besides that, we discussed the London conference on Afghanistan, France's efforts to restrict the wearing of the burqa, and the renewed calls -- by Presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy -- for banking reform. And I somehow managed to say "essentially" 12 times in the first 20-minute segment.