International Relations

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I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with an officer from a British navy ship that had docked in Cork. The subject of the conversation varied, but it tended towards military/strategic plans of Britain and the US.

What I pointedly asked was why the British had embarked on a massive navy building programme in the last 10 years, specifically the Queen Elizabeth class carriers and the Type 45 destroyer. Besides replacing older generation vessels, to me it seemed to indicate something beyond current trends in conflict (counter-terrorist Littoral ships).

Since navies have to be planned decades in advance, I often look at them to see what the possible future strategic planning of nations are.

The discussion took place just prior to the conflict in Georgia. He indicated with some frankness that the first priority was securing shipping lanes, and the chief symmetrical threat was considered to be Russia, not China. Though China was an up and coming power, its abilities in terms of blue water navy was decades away.

Discussions then ranged around a number of topics, including possible defences against super-cavitation torpedoes, possible defences by carrier groups against supersonic cruise missiles, submarine defence mechanisms (specifically against ultra quiet subs such as the German Type 212).

Then it turned to energy security. Obviously in naval terms there are very few specific regional choke points. The Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Straits of Hormuz and the Malacca Straits are among the most notable. Since, I argued, so much of Western energy supplies are via Hormuz, and it borders with Iran, it would seem to be a weakness in energy security.

The solution he suggested was an interesting one. Navy survey ships, he said, from both the US and Britain were concentrating their efforts almost entirely on West Africa. Angola, for example, passed Nigeria to become Africa’s leading oil producer this year, at over 2.5m barrels of oil a day. Their reserves alone are estimated at over 10 billion barrels. The US imports 7% of its oil from Angola, about three times as much as it imported from Kuwait just prior to the Gulf War in 1991.

Other West African nations are also beginning production and the EIA has a good report here. It also reports on gas availability. Equatorial Guinea and Mauritania are also new producers.

And what is the biggest advantage of this region for the West, and our energy security? All that lies between West Africa and Europe/US is the Atlantic Ocean - no choke points. And their navies to secure the shipping lanes.

Update: I meant to add that earlier this year the US reactivated its Fourth Fleet after being deactivated for 58 years. This should allow the Second Fleet operate on the eastern Atlantic, while the Fourth concentrates on the Carribean and western Atlantic.

Mark Urban has a scoop over on his blog.

The murder of Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, according to Whitehall sources. A senior British security official has told Newsnight “we very strongly believe the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement; there are very strong indications that it was a state action”.

Direct Russian government involvement in the murder of a British citizen on British soil. Uh oh.

In recent months the Director General of the Security Service, Jonathan Evans, has expressed concern about the high level of espionage operations by Russian spies under diplomatic cover. The service believes there are about 30 operating from Russian diplomatic missions in the UK. However the evidence of FSB involvement in the Litvinenko and Berezovsky cases has taken tensions between the two countries to a new level.

This could get nasty. 30 agents operating in Britain is very high, is it not?

The ‘crackdown’ on Mugabe continues, laughably. Now he might not be able to print his zillions of dollars:

The Munich-based company that has supplied Zimbabwe with the special blank sheets to print its increasingly worthless dollar caved in to pressure on Tuesday from the German government for it to stop doing business with the African ruler.

Giesecke & Devrient — a secretive, family-owned Bavarian company that once made its money churning out worthless cash for the doomed Weimar Republic in the 1920s — has been airlifting tons of blank notes to the Zimbabwean capital Harare. The company, which has been doing business with the African nation since before Mr. Mugabe took power in 1980, is one of the few sources in the world for the specialized paper that is so important in an age when computers and laser printers have made forgery easy.

Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, phoned Karsten Ottenberg, Giesecke & Devrient’s chief executive, Tuesday to complain about the deliveries, according to a German diplomat. On Friday, Germany’s development minister denounced the company’s dealings with Zimbabwe as “terrible” and sent a fax demanding that they stop.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice writes an essay in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs. It is essentially a follow up to a similar essay she wrote back in 2000.

I like this bit:

The United States did not overthrow Saddam to democratize the Middle East. It did so to remove a long-standing threat to international security. But the administration was conscious of the goal of democratization in the aftermath of liberation. We discussed the question of whether we should be satisfied with the end of Saddam’s rule and the rise of another strongman to replace him. The answer was no, and it was thus avowedly U.S. policy from the outset to try to support the Iraqis in building a democratic Iraq. It is important to remember that we did not overthrow Adolf Hitler to bring democracy to Germany either. But the United States believed that only a democratic Germany could ultimately anchor a lasting peace in Europe.

Hm. That’s not the way I remember it. And as I’m reading Scott McLellan’s book What Happened at the moment, I don’t think that’s the way he recalls it either. The argument to democritise the Middle East was often times used by the administration.

Overall, Rice is extremely positive about everything, concluding:

How to describe this disposition of ours? It is realism, of a sort. But it is more than that — what I have called our uniquely American realism. This makes us an incredibly impatient nation. We live in the future, not the past. We do not linger over our own history. This has led our nation to make mistakes in the past, and we will surely make more in the future. Still, it is our impatience to improve less-than-ideal situations and to accelerate the pace of change that leads to our most enduring achievements, at home and abroad.

At the same time, ironically, our uniquely American realism also makes us deeply patient. We understand how long and trying the course of democracy is. We acknowledge our birth defect, a constitution founded on a compromise that reduced my ancestors each to three-fifths of a man. Yet we are healing old wounds and living as one American people, and this shapes our engagement with the world. We support democracy not because we think ourselves perfect but because we know ourselves to be deeply imperfect. This gives us reason to be humble in our own endeavors and patient with the endeavors of others. We know that today’s headlines are rarely the same as history’s judgments.

An international order that reflects our values is the best guarantee of our enduring national interest, and America continues to have a unique opportunity to shape this outcome. Indeed, we already see glimpses of this better world. We see it in Kuwaiti women gaining the right to vote, in a provincial council meeting in Kirkuk, and in the improbable sight of the American president standing with democratically elected leaders in front of the flags of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the future state of Palestine. Shaping that world will be the work of a generation, but we have done such work before. And if we remain confident in the power of our values, we can succeed in such work again.

I guess she has to be positive.

Long-time readers will be aware that the Mahon Tribunal, and more specifically Bertie Ahern’s role in that tribunal, have been a bugbear of mine for some time.

Today, finally, we have the announcement that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern will resign on May 6. It is welcome news.

Mr Ahern spent much of his speech spelling out his contribution to Irish political life, and his service to the State. In the latter part he dealt with the allegations that have been his undoing. While I accept that Ahern made a contribution to the peace process, in no way does this mean that somehow he has a right to stay on in political office, nor does it excuse him from being accountable.

Cian rightly points out that it was not the media, bloggers, or even Facebook groups that led to the appalling vista of Ahern’s incredible tales and ultimate resignation. It was Ahern himself that got himself into this mess. And the only recourse, ultimately, was his resignation.

I have called for his resignation several times since his now infamous interview with Bryan Dobson in September 2006. In truth, we have spent nearly 20 months stewing over his changing stories, his incredible tales, and the sums of money involved in those tales kept growing.

As time went on it became clear that at the time he spoke to the nation on national television he had yet to tell the tribunal half of what we now know. Celia Larkin’s accounts only came to light in April 2007. Ahern changed his story in relation to the second digout during evidence in September 2007. The list goes on.

Increasingly, critics said the tribunal was no longer about the original allegation that Owen O’Callaghan gave cash to Ahern, that it had become some sort of vendetta. To some degree they are right on the former but wrong on the latter. Simply put, it was Ahern’s reaction to the tribunal’s inquiry that led directly to his resignation.

Indeed, if the Tribunal reported tomorrow and found that there were no corrupt payments it simply would not matter. Ahern’s changing positions on his own finances are what led to this result - as far as I can see he was caught up in a tangled web of his prevarications. It became less about the original allegation and more about what tribunal found - and Ahern’s response to those discoveries.

But I don’t see this as a victory for accountability. Ahern was dragged kicking and screaming to a resignation, when he really should have resigned a very long time ago. If, for example, PTSB had not found the documents that they did, Ahern would very likely still be clinging on to power, and brazening it for as long as possible - and to hell with standards or perceived standards in public life.

We have to ask ourselves what sort of society we want. One where the leader of our country spends an inordinate amount of time answering questions about vasts sums of money in his accounts, appoints friends to State jobs, takes cash from businessmen… and all the rest… or one where politicians do all of the above - but when found out resign immediately for the good of the country.

Ireland is a very long way from a democracy which is accountable to its people, and Ahern’s games around the tribunal have only served to bring the country into disrepute and to blacken the highest political office in the country.

Ahern, Taoiseach or not, has very serious matters to answer. Tribunal matters. Cash matters. Corruption matters. Criminal matters. How we deal with those matters, and how we punish wrongdoing in public office, will define our nation.

If we fall short in that regard, we all lose.

Daniel Drezner seconds the question posed by Michael Totten at Instapundit this week.

Is Totten right to say that the current war is the first example of a democracy going to war with a democracy?

Excellent discussion over at Drezner’s blog.

Incidentally I agree with Drezner on this, given that the Lebanese forces themselves have failed to engage the IDF it seems fair to say that the democratic peace proposition has not been broken.

Hans Blix is in the IHT today, talking about the nukes that actually exist, as opposed to the ones Iran might want to build.

While it’s desirable that the foreign ministers talk about Iran, they don’t seem to devote any thought to the fact that there are still some 27,000 real nuclear weapons in the United States, Russia and other states, and that many of these are on hair-trigger alert.

He then argus in favour of the US signing the comprehensive test-ban treaty. He concludes:

A U.S. ratification of the comprehensive test-ban treaty would, in all likelihood, lead other states to ratify and bring all such tests to an end, making the development of nuclear weapons more difficult. Leaving the treaty in limbo, as has been done since 1996, is to risk new weapons testing.

The second measure would be to conclude an internationally verified agreement to cut off the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes.

This would close the tap everywhere for more weapons material and would be of special importance if an agreement on nuclear cooperation with the United States were to give India access to more uranium than it has at the moment.

It is positive that the U.S. has recently presented a draft cutoff agreement, but hard to understand why this agreement does not include international inspection. Do the drafters think that the recent record of national intelligence indicates that international verification is superfluous?

Surely it would put the US in a stronger position were it to take this line?

It was released last week, and is worth a look.

Readers might remember that I linked to a piece by Ben Shwarz in the Atlantic earlier this month, concerning a paper on the perils of US nuclear primacy. The paper Shwarz talked about is published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

Their conclusion is worth quoting in full.

During the Cold War, MAD rendered the debate about the wisdom of nuclear primacy little more than a theoretical exercise. Now that MAD and the awkward equilibrium it maintained are about to be upset, the argument has become deadly serious. Hawks will undoubtedly see the advent of U.S. nuclear primacy as a positive development. For them, MAD was regrettable because it left the United States vulnerable to nuclear attack. With the passing of MAD, they argue, Washington will have what strategists refer to as “escalation dominance” — the ability to win a war at any level of violence — and will thus be better positioned to check the ambitions of dangerous states such as China, North Korea, and Iran. Doves, on the other hand, are fearful of a world in which the United States feels free to threaten — and perhaps even use — force in pursuit of its foreign policy goals. In their view, nuclear weapons can produce peace and stability only when all nuclear powers are equally vulnerable. Owls worry that nuclear primacy will cause destabilizing reactions on the part of other governments regardless of the United States’ intentions. They assume that Russia and China will work furiously to reduce their vulnerability by building more missiles, submarines, and bombers; putting more warheads on each weapon; keeping their nuclear forces on higher peacetime levels of alert; and adopting hair-trigger retaliatory policies. If Russia and China take these steps, owls argue, the risk of accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear war — especially during moments of crisis — may climb to levels not seen for decades.

Ultimately, the wisdom of pursuing nuclear primacy must be evaluated in the context of the United States’ foreign policy goals. The United States is now seeking to maintain its global preeminence, which the Bush administration defines as the ability to stave off the emergence of a peer competitor and prevent weaker countries from being able to challenge the United States in critical regions such as the Persian Gulf. If Washington continues to believe such preeminence is necessary for its security, then the benefits of nuclear primacy might exceed the risks. But if the United States adopts a more restrained foreign policy — for example, one premised on greater skepticism of the wisdom of forcibly exporting democracy, launching military strikes to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and aggressively checking rising challengers — then the benefits of nuclear primacy will be trumped by the dangers.

Steve Clemons has launched Bolton Watch over at TPM Cafe. It should be good. Steve talks about a story that gives you some indication of the style of Bolton over on his own blog:

When he arrived at the UN, one of the first meetings he had with other Security Council principals had him stepping in and saying:

I’m John Bolton, and I’m here to pursue the interests of the United States.

Those who are here to pursue the interests of the world, please yourself.

I have been looking into the philosophy of Leo Strauss in more depth recently, and found the first episode of the BBC series, ‘The Power of Nightmares’ (60mins) quite helpful. It is worth a look. Some interesting stuff in there about the early days of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

This is related to a recent article by Robert Kagan in the Weekly Standard, denying that he is a Straussian.

Benjamin Shwarz has a thoughtful piece on how America must deal with it’s primacy. He argues that since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not fully dealt with its new position, and must seriously consider it’s position, and soon. He notes:

Defense analysts have grown increasingly nervous about the convergence of several strategic developments. In “The End of Mutual Assured Destruction?,” a brilliant and sobering study of military analysis that is being prepared for publication in an academic journal, Keir A. Lieber, a scholar at Notre Dame, and Daryl G. Press, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to the Defense Department and to RAND, have trenchantly surveyed the trends that are troubling the experts. The first is the precipitous erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Compared with its forces in 1990, Moscow has 55 percent fewer intercontinental ballistic missiles, 39 percent fewer strategic bombers, and 80 percent fewer ballistic-missile submarines, or SSBNs (the component of a nuclear arsenal most likely to survive a first strike). Moscow itself has stated that its nuclear forces will decline by an additional 35 percent in the coming years, but many experts believe the total Russian arsenal could shrink even more, from about 3,800 strategic warheads today to as few as 500 (the United States currently has more than 5,200). More important than this quantitative reduction, though, has been the even steeper qualitative decline. Owing to financial constraints, Russia can’t ensure unbroken monitoring of American ICBM fields, and can’t plug the holes in its missile-warning networks that render it blind to attacks from U.S. submarines in launch areas in the Pacific. Maintenance, supply, and training deficiencies afflict Russia’s nuclear forces generally and its submarines most crucially. A viable Russian deterrent demands that a number of SSBNs be at sea at any given time and that they successfully evade the U.S. attack submarines that stalk them. But in fact most Russian SSBNs must now remain pierside—the Russians weren’t able to conduct any patrols in 2002 and could carry out only two in 2004. This makes the SSBNs highly vulnerable to a U.S. first strike, and it means that the skills Russian SSBN crews need in order to elude U.S. subs have been greatly vitiated (most Russian crews haven’t been on patrol in years). Largely for these reasons former commanders of Russia’s ballistic-missile fleet warned as long ago as 1998 that their supposedly invulnerable submarines would be detected and destroyed in a conflict with the United States.

And he concludes, crucially:

Confronted with the growing nuclear imbalance, Russia and China will be forced to try to redress it; but given America’s advantages, that effort, as Lieber and Press note, could take well over a decade. Until a nuclear stalemate is restored—if it ever is—Moscow and Beijing will surely buy deterrence by spreading out their nuclear forces, decentralizing their command-and-control systems, and implementing “launch on warning” policies. If more than half a century of analyzing nuclear dangers and “crisis stability” has taught us anything, it is that all these steps can cause crises to escalate uncontrollably. They could trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons; this could lead to inadvertent nuclear war.

American military preponderance now embraces the entire “spectrum of conflict,” as Pentagon planners put it. That is to say, we’re miles ahead of everyone in every type of warfare. But if that preponderance is leading to a world in which Russian and Chinese launch commanders are fingering nuclear hair triggers, the game may not be worth the candle. Without any public scrutiny or debate the United States has emerged as the nuclear hegemon, in possession of a destabilizing first-strike capability. It does not matter whether this has come about by accident or design, or whether America’s motives are worthy or malign; the condition itself is the problem. The ramifications of this state of affairs are of the gravest significance to America’s security—and the world’s. It’s time for scrutiny and debate to begin.

Following on from my post last month about the apparent spread of peace, the Atlantic have a helpful graph that summarises the Human Security Report.

The number of ongoing armed conflicts is 40 percent lower now than in 1992, and the number of deadly conflicts—defined as wars leading to 1,000 or more combat deaths—is 80 percent lower. The number of military coups and attempted coups was 60 percent lower in 2004 than in 1963. And the annual number of victims of genocides and mass killings fell by 80 percent from 1989 to 2001, even taking such places as Bosnia and Rwanda into account. 
The exception to this generally positive trend, of course, is terrorism.

Dan Drezner links to an article by Fred Kaplan in Slate. Kaplan questions the veracity of claims in the Human Security Report that the world has become a more peaceful place since the end of the Cold War.

Kaplan is unconvinced:

All the report’s graphs end in 2002, the final year for which the authors could gather data. The events of 2003-06—the war in Iraq and a possible civil war in the works, the slackening of dictatorship (but possibly the resurgence of ethnic conflict) in Lebanon and Ukraine, tensions rising with Iran, continued fighting in various hotspots of Africa—seem more discouraging than hopeful. The best thing that can be said about these conflicts, whether raging or brewing, is they could go either way.

Drezner disagrees though:

1) If you look at the figure, it seems like the world was more peaceful 60 years ago — but that’s only because the total number of states in the system was much smaller than today. It’s not surprising that the number of intrastate conflicts increased from 1946 to 1991 — that’s because the number of states in the system increased as well. What’s interesting about the post-1991 system is that it’s gotten more peaceful even as the number of states has increased. True, a lot of these new countries are microstates like Tonga — but they also includes the former Soviet and Yugoslav republics.

Kaplan’s focus is on the numerator — but you have to look at the denominator as well. That’s what makes the decline in wars so surprising.

2) Unstated in the Human Security Report, but vital to the perception of a “peace epidemic,” is the absence since 1945 of the most deadly form of international conflict — a genuine great power war. For the near future, the U.S. won’t be fighting China, India, Russia, or even the European Union. Great power wars are indeed rare, but the current peace of 60 years is the longest stretch of time without one breaking out since the birth of the modern state system.

Kaplan is correct to point out that the current downturn in armed conflict might not be permanent — but it’s still a downturn.

A good friend of the staff here at Gavin’s Blog, Steve Clemons, has a story on an array of departures at the World Bank, since neo-conservative/neo-idealist Paul Wolfowitz became head of the organisation. The money quote:

In recent months, picking up steam in recent weeks, there has been a massive exodus of top talent from the World Bank. According to reports, the senior Ethics Officer at the Bank has departed. Also on the exit roster are the Vice President for East Asia & Pacific, the Chief Legal Counsel, the Bank’s top Managing Director, the Director of Institutional Integrity (which monitors internal and external corruption), the Vice President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development, and the head of ISG (Information Solutions Group).

According to one senior insider who feels as if Wolfowitz is gut-punching the most talented teams at the bank and indicated that morale is plummeting, “Wolfowitz just does not talk to his Vice Presidents. He speaks to a few close advisors — Kevin Kellems, Robin Cleveland, Karl Jackson, some others — but a lot of very good people are leaving.”

What Wolfowitz has done that has started a serious wave of negative sentiment against him among his ranks is that he has appointed Kevin Kellems — Vice President Cheney’s former Communications Director and Spokesman — as a “director” of the bank, which formally reports to a Vice President of the Bank — while at the same time making him Senior Advisor to Wolfowitz.

In other words, Wolfowitz is forcing a political appointment at the “director level” of the bank — which is never done. “Director” positions are fairly low in the World Bank bureaucracy and are filled by a competitive process and the merits of one’s work — not political imposition.

But read the whole post. Is Wolfowitz taking lessons from Bolton?

The latest issue of FP has a catchy cover, I like it…

Dan Drezner wrote a really entertaining open letter to Karen Hughes about how the US could help out Pakistan with regard to the recent earthquake, and in doing so improve US-Islam relations immensely. Indeed after US involvement in Indonesia subsequent to the tsunami, polls showed that hostility to the US decreased dramatically.

The money quote:

The reason I bring this up is that the tsunami aid brought about a tremendous amount of goodwill in places like India and Indonesia. There’s already some evidence that the aid sent to Pakistan is helping to burnish America’s image in a distinctly anti-American portion of the globe. Anne-Marie Slaughter reprinted one letter on America Abroad that makes the point in a plain manner:

[H]aving just visited the region and spoken to many community leaders across the NWFP and Pakistani-held Kashmir, it is apparent that there is a tremendous strategic opportunity for the United States and its allies. For a fraction of the cost of what is spent in other arenas of the War on Terror, an extremely volatile region and country’s hearts and minds can be won over. All that is required is a very substantial, very visible US relief effort.

To date, the US has provided helicopters and commitments of up to $50 million. What is needed– for adequate relief and for this opportunity-born-of-tragedy to be capitalized upon– is not a contribution, but a massive US presence and effort. The entire country is desperate, the entire Muslim world is watching; I cannot overstate how glaring and massive the opportunity is.

My sympathies for Pakistan aside, the US can buy a great deal of affection and moral currency by responding to this emergency– it must not let this be just another cause for further alienation.

This is one of those instances where the U.S. can do good and do well by following through with significant relief and humanitarian efforts. It’s the best kind of public diplomacy you could ever buy. And bear in mind that the costs of inaction here would be considerable.

I am at the Hilton in Washington now, and hope to live blog at least some of this event. It is also being webcast for those of you interested in watching it. It is also available on C-Span.

Oh I just spotted Philip Bobbitt! Am I the only one who looks at professors and thinks of them as celebrities?

The latest edition of Foreign Affairs is full to brim with excellent essays. One of my favourites is Perkovich’s essay on justice. It is wide ranging and well written, taking in various disciplines from economics to evolutionary psychology. I will post more about it once I get near a computer. Perkovich is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Bill Clinton writes on the anniversary of the Tsunami in Asia in the IHT. Worth a look.

I meant to post this a while ago, but Atlantic journalist Robert Kaplan has responded to criticism of his recent cover story. He deals with some of the issues raised, that I mentioned here. It seems Kaplan was mostly responding to Thomas Barnett, as he deals specifically with issues Barnett raised. Kaplan notes:

The article has elicited some rants on the Web that express the following concerns. First, that in return for highlighting the military viewpoint, I am granted unusual access to the military. In fact, I am granted access because I am willing to spend six months yearly away from my family, out of e-mail contact for weeks on end, living in tight quarters with enlisted men, on deployments that the public would find fascinating but rarely gets to hear about because they often lack hard-news value. Any reporter, including a left-wing one, willing to do this would find many doors open for him in the military. Second, and related, is the criticism that I have bought into the Pacific Command-Navy view of the world. The PACOM view of the world is one that I judge to be worth knowing, especially as it constitutes one of the big blocks of the China story that has gotten relatively little attention from the media. The PACOM viewpoint offends those on the right who see nothing good about China because it is not yet a democracy, and thus believe that the whole concept of managing and constraining China’s military is doomed to fail without more hard-line policies. It also offends those on the other side of the political aisle, who define any reference to China’s growing military capability as war-mongering. Pacific Command, whatever its shortcomings and internal divisions, falls in the reasonable middle between these extremes. My conclusion is expressed in the article’s last “callout”: that China’s reemergence is natural and legitimate. But PACOM, as a military organization, is forced to think in worst-case scenarios, even as it chooses moderate Bismarckian methods to prevent their occurrence. I have internalized that outlook in my narrative.

Remember, we worst-cased the scenario in our original invasion of Iraq and got the best possible result. But we best-cased the occupation and got the worst possible result. Worst-casing China may be the way to peaceful outcomes.

This article introduces PACOM to the reader. That is probably the most important thing that it does, because I’m making a bet in this article: that PACOM is going to be in the news a lot over the next years and decades. Even if China emerges peacefully, there is going to be relatively more military activity in the Pacific. Yet PACOM is not monolithic, and will change. The new combatant commander, Admiral William Fallon, a carrier aviator, comes from a different tradition than the previous PACOM commander, Admiral Thomas Fargo, a submariner. Admiral Fallon may turn out to be more of a traditionalist in regards to China and other matters. Submariners—who have been very active in the post-Cold War off the coasts of the Balkans, Iraq, and elsewhere—can tend to be a bit more aggressive.

On the subject of aircraft carriers specifically:

We will have aircraft carriers or the equivalent of them through most of this new century. The question is, Should we invest in building even more of them? Or rather, should we just keep upgrading the ones we have in a slow gradual phase-out over many decades? This is something about which there are terrible fights that get very, very technical. The bad thing about putting all your marbles in carriers is that at some point adversaries will be able to penetrate their defense shield. The good thing about them, as you saw during the tsunami, is they’re offshore bases for all intents and purposes.

Apologies to those who have not been following this debate.

Tom Friedman with a warning:

This is not a joke. If North Korea and Iran both go nuclear, that step may trigger a major realignment of geopolitics - the like of which has not been seen since the end of the cold war.

If North Korea sets off a nuclear test, how long will Japan continue relying on the United States for its nuclear shield? And what will South Korea and Taiwan do? And if Japan or South Korea goes nuclear, how may an anxious China react? And if Shiite Iran becomes a nuclear power - in tandem with Iraq’s being run by Shiites - the Sunni Arab world will go nuts, not to mention the Israelis. Will Saudi Arabia then feel compelled to acquire a nuclear deterrent? Will Egypt?

We’re talking nuclear dominoes.

So there you have it - my annual nonproliferation column. Unless China and Europe get serious about the problem, it’s not going to get fixed. And for now, neither one seems ready, willing or interested in eating its brussels sprouts.

Robert McNamara’s piece has appeared on the FP website, go have a read.

…just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, “I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.â€? I share his fears.

Sarah Carey will be on telly tomorrow (Tuesday), 2.30pm, and was in the Sunday Times this week. Were the words ‘what women want’ the final words of Sigmund Freud, or is that an urban legend?

Some ongoing tensions between Japan and China are detailed here.

Japan has begun planning for the worst. A conflict with China over rich gas deposits in the East China Sea has escalated since late January when two Chinese destroyers entered the area, which has been in dispute for decades. Japan warned China that it would defend its resources there.

But conflict is not inevitable. China’s June 2004 proposal to jointly develop a large gas field that straddles a boundary claimed by Japan is an opportunity to cap rising tension, and at long last harvest the resources in the disputed area.

The East China Sea is thought to contain up to 100 billion barrels of oil - it is one of the last unexplored high-potential resource areas located near large markets. The development of oil and gas in much of the area has been prevented for decades by the boundary dispute. The Japanese government has refused to let companies explore and develop the resources in the area because it says that it could adversely affect relations and negotiations with China on the boundary.

But now China is drilling near the boundary claimed by Japan. Tokyo has officially protested the drilling and is now considering allowing some companies to drill on Japan’s side of its claimed boundary. Just the possibility has been protested by Beijing.

This archive is a great place if you have broadband…some good debates. I liked the James Fallows one especially.

In case anyone missed it, back in 2000 Condi Rice wrote this piece for Foreign Affairs. It’s a good insight into the mind of the new Secretary of State.

Foreign policy in a Republican administration will most certainly be internationalist; the leading contenders in the party’s presidential race have strong credentials in that regard. But it will also proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community. America can exercise power without arrogance and pursue its interests without hectoring and bluster. When it does so in concert with those who share its core values, the world becomes more prosperous, democratic, and peaceful. That has been America’s special role in the past, and it should be again as we enter the next century.

William Pfaff writes:

PARIS Tony Blair gave a major talk last Friday on terrorism and the intervention in Iraq that was a strange combination of apocalyptic warning and anodyne remedy, very different from what has been said on the same subjects by the George W. Bush administration in Washington.

The British prime minister declared that Islamic extremism constitutes a threat that could “engulf” the world. The scale of this threat, according to Blair, requires abandoning the framework of international law and interstate relations that has served society for the last three and a half centuries.

Blair told his parliamentary constituents in northern England that Islamic extremist collaboration with rogue states to obtain weapons of mass destruction warrants an aggressive new international legal standard justifying international or state intervention in other countries, overriding their sovereignty.

This superficially resembles the claim made by the Bush administration’s national security strategy statement of September 2002, that when circumstances make it seem necessary, Washington intends to take pre-emptive action “to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.”

Blair placed his argument concerning weapons of mass destruction in the context of “humanitarian” interventions into the affairs of other countries to remove despotic regimes, an idea that has been making its way since the Yugoslav wars of secession and the Rwanda genocide.

His references were all to Iraq and to radical Islam, however, and the purpose of his talk was to justify his decision to take Britain into the war in Iraq - where, unfortunately for his argument, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and until after the occupation began, there were no Islamic terrorists.

The difference between the British and American positions lies in the robust nationalism of the American statement. It concerns threats to U.S. security. It says that it was possible in the past for the United States to rely on deterrence based on the threat of retaliation. Nuclear weapons were then mutually “considered weapons of last resort” that risked the survival of those who used them.

Today, the statement went on, weapons of mass destruction are seen by America’s enemies “as weapons of choice” for aggression or to intimidate neighbors, and are considered usable in order to blackmail the United States and its allies so that they do not attack rogue regimes.

Established international law concerning pre-emptive defense must be modified, it said, to allow “anticipatory action,” to disarm threats to the United States. References to allies and global interests in the security statement were infrequent and perfunctory.

The American position was challenged for just that reason. Its claim to a right of unilateral American pre-emption in the national interest, against a unilaterally determined threat, was criticized internationally in the historical context of powerful or dominant nations who do what they please. The United States was accused of merely rationalizing its own self-interested conduct.

Blair, making his argument in terms of the common international interest, failed to suggest a standard of evidence or a forum for international decision that an armed “humanitarian” intervention is justified.

Who decides? The prime minister says of the United Nations that even now “it is strange that the United Nations is so reluctant” to enforce its own Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But as the United Nations acts in such a matter only when it is told to act by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member, this would seem a reproach to Britain itself.

Blair says that the United Nations should be reformed, adding that “poverty in Africa” and “justice in Palestine” should also be addressed, and “our duty” should be acknowledged “to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan as stable and democratic nations.” This does not lend much weight to his case. Iraq and Afghanistan have yet to become conclusive arguments for the humanitarian benefits of overthrowing tyrannical regimes, with or without weapons of mass destruction.

Blair actually abandons his argument at just the point where it becomes interesting. Interventions to seize weapons of mass destruction and interventions meant to impose humanitarian standards of government are quite different things. Are we talking about North Korea, or Zimbabwe and Haiti?

Blair and Bush ultimately build their case on their personal intuitions, provoked by the Sept. 11 attacks, that something new had appeared in the world. They both concluded, as Bush was to put it, that they had to “rid the world of evil.” But their argument that Islamic extremism is a “global threat” is indefensible. The Islamists can make spectacular attacks on Britain or the United States, but neither country, nor any of the other democracies, is in the slightest danger of being “engulfed” by terrorism, or shaken from its democratic foundations.

The Islamists are a challenge to Islamic society itself, but a limited one. Their doctrine will run its course, and eventually be rejected by Muslims as a futile strategy for dealing with the modern world.

Yglesias continued the discussion here after mentioning Andrew Sulliva’ns views. I think Pfaff is right - they are a limited threat to both Islamic society and Western society.

The Irish Times had an opinion piece today from none other than Bono and Bill Gates. You can read the text here. They have a four point plan:

For a start, we hope that the leaders of every developed nation will resolve to take four crucial steps in 2005. The wealthy world has already committed itself to some of these ideas. Promises made must be promises kept. First: double the amount of effective foreign assistance - possibly through the International Finance Facility, a UK proposal to frontload aid and get it flowing immediately.

A British- and French-backed initiative using the same principles is ready to roll now and could save five million lives by increasing child immunisation. Second: finish the job on poor countries’ debts. They need more than relief - they need full debt cancellation. Third: change unfair trade rules, creating a pathway for poor countries to reach self-reliance. Fourth: provide funding for the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, a more aggressive and coordinated approach to developing an HIV vaccine.

Laudable objectives - and serious weight has been added with Bill Gates’ name.

It is looking like by early next year the EU will have lifted arms sanctions with China, imposed after Tiananmen. France seems to be the major proponent of lifting the ban. A code is being considered:

The EU is drawing up a tighter code of conduct, which Europeans believe will be enough to govern arms sales after the ban is lifted.

Negotiations over the code of conduct are a current source of tension between EU capitals, and its completion is seen as a prerequisite for the ending of the arms embargo. Current rules allow some military sales: In 2002, the EU exported $280 million in arms to China, with France making up half the total. The new code could be agreed next month, diplomats said.

Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, said: “Within the EU there is a willingness toward lifting the arms embargo.”

However, this would only come after “certain adjustments to the EU code of conduct on arms exports,” said Balkenende, the acting EU president.

Code of conduct my ass. Is it not clear to everyone that the Chinese authorities will do what they like? I mean how likely is that the situation will get better after the ban is lifted? Or is it more likely the situation will get worse?

Putin has been busy - but I would imagine there is still quite a way to go before the technology is perfected.

Russia has successfully tested a modernised anti-ballistic missile at a range in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, its defence ministry says. The A-135 missile is said to have successfully hit a training target.

The Guardian have published an edited version of a speech Hans Blix gave last week at the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. The full text can be found here.

His criticism of the American right is telling:

This all comes around the time of the latest UN report - billed as one of the most important since the founding of the organisation.

James Fallows in the Atlantic asks the question posed on here not so long ago - will Iran be next in line? A subscription is required for this lengthy piece…

Prospect has an interesting interview with uber-hawk, Paul Wolfowitz. He makes some curious remarks. Go have a look.

Anne-Marie Slaughter in the IHT, with a piece on the EU. She cites the number of times both George Bush and John Kerry have referred to the European Union - and it’s not often. This bit is good:

Suppose the citizens of Ohio or Oregon or Alabama understood that the EU has a larger population and gross domestic product than the United States. That English is widely and increasingly spoken as a second language. That most of the students who are either no longer applying to American schools or unable to enter the United States for a lack of a visa are choosing European universities instead. And that EU representatives are thick on the ground in many developing countries, both trolling for business and doling out aid and advice.

Suppose further that at a time when one of the most important issues in the U.S. election is which candidate is better placed to “win the peace” in Iraq and Afghanistan, American voters knew something about the EU model of building democracy - through assistance, admonition and accession negotiations. Americans would not likely believe that the prospect of EU membership, even if such a thing were possible, would have convinced the Taliban or Saddam Hussein to lay down their arms. But they might think that after the first flush of military victory the EU could teach America quite a lot about the exercise of civilian rather than military power.

EU citizens may be dubious about the EU’s effectiveness, particularly in political and military affairs. They may be unhappy about the democracy deficit. And they may be skeptical about their new constitution. But they know that the EU is an entity distinct from “Europe,” a rising entity of their own creation that is not simply an imitation of the United States. As a result, American voters are genuinely living in a different world from their European counterparts.

This trans-Atlantic divide results not from policies but from the most basic perceptions of relevant political actors in the international system. It should worry us all, well beyond the election.

Nick Kristof praises the US president for his action on Darfur, but laments the tardy and inadequate response to the overall situation. He pointedly asks if a mediocre effort saved so many lives, how many lives could a full and immediate international response have saved? And to those out there who seem to either dislike or even despise the United Nations, read the figures:

Even within Darfur itself, the UN World Food Program managed to get food to 1.3 million people last month out of the 2 million who need it.

Sterling work indeed. Do people still think the UN is a waste of time?

George A. Lopez, Director of Policy Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and David Cortright, President of the Fourth Freedom Forum and Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute, argue in favour of the sanctions regime in Iraq during the 1990’s.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, they propose that far from being a complete disaster, the sanctions regime, and the subsequent introduction of “smart� sanctions, was a resounding success.

They base their argument largely on the fact that the UN inspection teams, UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, were successful in both destroying existing weaponry (as evidenced by the non-existence of WMD after the invasion) – and in monitoring the Iraqi regime to a sufficient extent that a new weapons program could not be implemented. The sanctions were essentially the stick with which the inspectors could threaten the regime, while the carrot was the lifting of sanctions.

The sanctions regime was also successful in stopping Saddam reconstituting his conventional weapons, as evidenced by the lack of medium to heavy weaponry after the March 2003 invasion.

Lopez and Cortright are quite convincing, while also being critical of the current administration, they note:

Having failed to understand how sanctions and inspections worked in Iraq, the United States risks repeating its mistake in the future. The crisis of intelligence that pundits and politicians should be considering is not why so many officials overestimated what was wrong in Iraq; it is why they ignored so much readily available evidence of what was right about existing policies. By disregarding the success of inspections and sanctions, Washington discarded an effective system of containment and deterrence and, on the basis of faulty intelligence and wrong assumptions, launch a preventive war in its place.

Critics might point out that the war in Iraq had the effect of getting Libya into line, and abandoning its WMD program. But Lopez and Cortright deal with this issue too:

The case of Libya shows that sanctions can indeed influence regime behaviour in the long term. Muammar al-Qadaffi was once as much an outlaw as Saddam Hussein. But over time, and under the weigh of international sanctions, Libya accepted international norms, ended its support of terrorism, and gave up its clandestine efforts to acquire or build WMD. President Bush and other supporters of the war in Iraq have attributed Libya’s dramatic turnaround to what Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif) termed the “pedagogic value� of the war. But in reality, Libya’s reversal began years earlier. UN sanctions during the 1990s brought about the negotiations that convinced Libya to turn over suspected terrorists for trial in The Hague.

Are Lopez and Cortright correct? Could the introduction of smart sanctions brought about a more prosperous Iraq while preventing the spread of WMD? And would this have brought an eventual end to Saddam’s regime without the need for invasion? We will never know.

Viktor Yushchenko, candidate in the upcoming Ukrainian presidential elections, makes some interesting points about the future of the Ukraine, and worries concerning the expanded European Union.

He states:

While welcoming the enlargement of the European Union, Ukrainians are anxious about European integration halting at our western frontier and in fact creating a new dividing line.

Our neighbors in Belarus, Moldova and Russia feel the same way. Our anxiety is also shared by Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states - neighbors who understand the gravity of problems resulting from the incomplete unification of Europe and the emergence of a new phenomenon: a bipolar Europe

There is an interesting concept. What is also interesting is that Ukraine has a population of some 48 million people. A healthy injection of people in the future, for Europe’s aging population. A bipolar Europe is a worry, but Europe really has to decide where exactly Europe stops and Asia/Middle East begin.

Is there ever a case for EU borders extending all the way to the Eastern parts of Belarus and Ukraine? Turkey will almost certainly join within the next 6 years, meaning that an EU country would border Iraq - a strange thought indeed.

It’s all quite hard to call, but important decision on the future expansion of Europe will have to be made.

Bernard Bot, minister of foreign affairs of the Netherlands and the current president of the EU Council of Ministers writes about Europe’s efforts in relation to Darfur.

If the European Union talks to the rebels, we will declare a unilateral cease-fire,â€? said Vice President Ali Osman Taha of Sudan after his meeting with a Dutch government delegation visiting Khartoum on Jan. 30. This was one of the first results of the EU’s diplomatic involvement in the crisis in Darfur, an involvement that began long before the international media became interested in events there.

Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 have I been as frightened by a single news story as I was by the revelation late last year that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on the black market. The story began to break last summer, after U.S. and British intelligence operatives intercepted a shipment of parts for centrifuges (which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs as well as fuel) on its way from Dubai to Libya. The centrifuges turned out to have been designed by Khan, and before long investigators had uncovered what the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has called a “Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation”—a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs, technologies, and consulting services, all run out of Pakistan.

Jiang Zemin, China’s military chief and senior-most leader, has told Communist Party officials that he plans to resign, prompting an intense and so far inconclusive struggle for control of the armed forces, two people with leadership connections say.

Jiang’s offer to relinquish authority as chairman of the Central Military Commission potentially gives Hu Jintao, who became Communist Party chief and president in 2002 and is now vice chairman of the military commission, a chance to become China’s undisputed top leader, commanding the state, the army and the ruling party.

But people here who were informed about a bargaining session under way at a government compound in western Beijing said it remained unclear whether Jiang genuinely intended to step aside or if he would do so on terms acceptable to Hu.

I wonder how this one will play out.

Dan Drezner links to an informative article in the New York Times.

Drezner sings her praises, perhaps correctly, she notes:

American military supremacy remains unquestioned, regional officials say. But the United States appears to be on the losing side of trade patterns. China is now South Korea’s biggest trade partner, and two years ago Japan’s imports from China surpassed those from the United States. Current trends show China is likely to top American trade with Southeast Asia in just a few years.

China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, as much as threw down the gauntlet last year, saying he believed that China’s trade with Southeast Asia would reach $100 billion by 2005, just shy of the $120 billion in trade the United States does with the region.

Mr. Wen’s claim was no idle boast. Almost no country has escaped the pull of China’s enormous craving for trade and, above all, energy and other natural resources to fuel its still galloping expansion and growing consumer demand. Though the Chinese government’s growth target for 2004 is 7 percent, compared with 9.1 percent for 2003, few are worried about a slowdown soon.

Will Pfaff muses on the situation developing in Iran. There seems to be increasing media comment on a likely intervention by US forces in Iran - prompted in part by stories that Iraqi Shia militias are being armed with advanced weaponry by the Iranian government. Worries over their nuclear facilities are also making headlines, while Israel considers its position. Pfaff notes:

Israel reportedly contemplates a unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. It would want America’s permission, so it needs to get it while it is sure Bush is president.

The recent decision in Israel to distribute antiradiation kits to people living in areas that might be contaminated by “an accident” at its own nuclear weapons facility is aimed at American opinion. The indirect message is that Israel is preparing for an Iranian attack on Israel’s nuclear weapons manufacturing installations; hence, pre-emption is necessary.

Israel’s basic position is forthright and simple to understand. Iran, like Iraq before it, is a major - and hostile - neighboring Islamic state. If the danger it potentially presents can be removed without disproportionate political or military costs, Israel - under Ariel Sharon - will probably do it.

The American case against Iran is entirely different. Its rests on the neoconservative notion that every society instinctively yearns to become an American-style democracy, and would do so if its despotic leaders were removed, by force if necessary. As the world’s leading democracy, the United States has an obligation to propagate democracy. Overturning despots is therefore a duty, and the result will be a better world. The argument, of course, is familiar: It is why the United States invaded Iraq.

Another piece by Martin van Creveld goes into more detail on the Israeli position.

A summary of the essays in Foreign Policy:

“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds” noted Albert Einstein. Ideas can be good things, but sometimes, as in Einstein’s case, good ideas can lead to the creation of destructive power. Ideas are benign things, but some ideas once applied can result in serious consequences.

Atomic weapons were developed some 60 years ago, and their development ha