The Economist held a debate earlier this week about taking military action against Iran’s nuclear program.
In favor of military action was General Chuck F. Wald, a director at Deloitte. Dr. Emily Landau, a senior research associate at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, opposed the option.
For military action
General Wald offered these forecasts:
Wired reports that the Air Force is developing tiny, armed drones.
The articles quotes a military document reporting the development of “a Micro-Air Vehicle (MAV) with innovative seeker/tracking sensor algorithms that can engage maneuvering high-value targets.” Such a system could allow precision and stealth, with small charges replacing relatively indiscriminate munitions such as the Hellfire missile.
Such systems could be enhanced much further. They might use small projectiles rather than explosives, and their targeting could be refined. Before too long, a killer MAV might even use facial recognition (with shades of the hunter-seeker anticipated in Dune).
Non-state combatants may have their own options that could rapidly equal many military capabilities. See this drone helicopter with visual feed and augmented reality gaming options for a hint.
Hobbyists have already developed model aircraft with intercontinental capabilities, and it is quite unlikely that governments are currently capable of stopping an albatross-size vehicle flying low over the ocean or a border.
Applications go beyond warfare, of course. See this post about human rights monitoring and journalism, for instance.
(Picture courtesy US Air Force)
Author Bruce Sterling offered his “State of the World 2010” on The Well this week. A few excerpts follow.
As a result of “an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism,” he says,
we’ve ended up with our current “It’s a Wonderful Life” Pottersville, where Rupert Murdoch plays our Mr Potter. …. Societies that are top-heavy in this way are just not gonna have major prosperity. Too much of the civil population has been fenced off from the trough. The wealth-generating capacity of the society has been short-circuited. There’s zero political will to socialize the entire planet and re-channel its currency flows, so that’s not gonna happen. Basically, the political class is waiting for the civil population to come back to the church of the free market and get over the fact that its cardinals walk in public with no clothes on.
So you’re just not gonna see a lively, vibrant scene in Pottersville. You can have a Japanese Pottersville, where everybody’s getting older and they’re building huge concrete bridges to nowhere. Or a Managed Democracy Putin-Pottersville, where everybody agrees not to say anything much about the many Potemkin aspects. You could even get some Rio de Janeiro Pottersville full of armed, dropout-ethnic shantytowns where everybody’s high on medical marijuana. But not prosperity.
Continue reading ‘Bruce Sterling’s State of the World’
Yemen has now joined the list of prominent theaters in the battle against Islamist extremism. This is no surprise to anyone who had noted its place in governance rankings.
Where next? Here’s the basic list: the 20 least-stable countries in the world, with those in play in that battle in red, and others with large Muslim populations in green.
It’s not that simple, of course, as receptivity to extremism varies widely, and recruitment can go on anywhere, as the apparent Nigerian underwear bomber illustrates, again. But this is a starter list of places that might matter in terms of instability, and where global Islamic groups might look to build safe havens.
Other than Bangladesh, they are all in Africa. Some, such as Sudan and Kenya, could serve to expand existing zones of instability. Others could provide new foci: Nigeria forms the border between West and Central Africa, and has about 60 million Muslims. Recent polling data suggests that about 26 million of these are potentially sympathetic to extremist causes.
The environment was prominent on the program of The Economist’s World in 2010 conference this week. Some particularly interesting points:
Joe Lockhart, Founding Partner and Managing Director, The Glover Park Group:
- The rest of world is going ahead on climate change. If the United States steps away from leading on climate change again, it will continue our slide away from global leadership in general.
Gary Lawrence, Urban Strategies Leader, Arup:
- People at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are telling him that “we’re using your debt” to create a green system “that will run the world.”
- Fifty-two percent of the US economy is located in coastal zones that would be affected by a one-meter rise in sea level.
Gawain Kripke, Director of Policy and Research, Oxfam America:
- Climate change is the single greatest threat to global poverty reduction.
Vijay Vaitheeswaram, Healthcare Editor, The Economist:
- New nuclear power will not be viable in Western, liberalized energy markets; only places like China where the cost of investment does not matter will be able to use it.
Twitter: @Geofutures
(Image courtesy Rob Brewer, Flickr)
I attended the Economist’s World in 2010 conference this week. The economic outlook was cautiously positive.
Carmen Reinhart, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics, University of Maryland:
- A rapid V-shaped recovery is unlikely, as the conditions are not in place.
- The revenue hit inflicted by the recession will accelerate the arrival of problems associated with paying for rising health care and Baby Boom retirement costs in the US.
- There is no natural successor to the dollar in view. The dollar has Treasuries behind it, but the euro has no unified debt market.
- A “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions would have to be orchestrated globally, or it would simply push business to markets that declined to implement it.
Leo Abruzzese, Economist Editorial Director, North America:
- By the 3rd quarter of 2011, world economic growth will not be back even to 2003 levels.
- The US economy will reach its 2007 size by the 3rd quarter of 2011. It will have taken 16-17 quarters, much worse than other recessions in recent decades.
- The US banking crisis is not over, and many more small- and medium-sized banks will still get in trouble.
- In China, stock and property bubbles are forming, and are likely to pop within 2 to 3 years.
- China should overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy in the next few months.
Twitter: @Geofutures
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com, usable with link and attribution)
This week Brendan Borrell suggested in the New York Times that it was time to reconsider the status of Antarctica.
Antarctica is now effectively an international, stateless, demilitarized zone, on the basis of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Many countries have land claims, but they effectively put them aside when they sign the treaty, as most powers have.
Borrell advocates dropping the treaty and letting nations claim pieces of Antarctica, as he thinks that national interests would drive stronger environmental protection. This could lead to significant downsides, however:
- Opening up national claims could expand environmental abuses, both in the fisheries that concern Borrell and on land. Do we really want Chinese and Russian companies to have free rein in parts of the continent?
- Abandoning the treaty would mean stepping away from a system that has been remarkably successful in fostering cooperation and non-militarization, even at the height of the Cold War. Borrell himself notes the British and Argentines exchanged gunfire in Antarctica before the treaty.
- Letting the treaty lapse would open up Antarctica to competition just as climate change may make exploitation of polar resources more plausible, setting the state for more conflict.
Perhaps instead the treaty could be strengthened, especially those aspects dealing with marine conservation?
(Image courtesy Eli Duke, Flickr)
The WaPo reported today on a trend that could have impacts from African stability to the global food supply: companies and governments from developing nations are leasing or buying large swaths of agricultural land, especially in Africa, but also in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
The WaPo article focuses on Ethiopia, which uses only about a quarter of its arable land despite facing chronic food shortages. Indian investment there has already reached $2.5 billion, and Saudi Arabian and Chinese firms are moving in as well, with active encouragement from the Ethiopian government.
This could have positive effects:
- This kind of project could increase global farmland and the global food supply.
- This could bring new flows of investment to poor nations, and improve their infrastructures.
- Access to inexpensive food might rise in the land-leasing countries.
- People could gain access to paid work, and learn modern farming skills.
However, the potential downsides seem serious:
- Land may be diverted from local food production to exports, increasing hunger.
- Poor locals might be deprived of land and water so that governments or elites can profit from it.
- This could extend the “resource curse” to agriculture, as it could enable elites to make money from farmland while largely excluding their own countrymen from the benefits. The WaPo article notes an Ethiopian river that is now to be used for irrigation, with locals banned from watering their cows in it.
- With many of the companies coming from India, Saudi Arabia, and China, the potential for serious ill-treatment of workers, and even human rights abuses, is vast. Indian and Chinese companies often treat their own workers abysmally, and Saudis sometimes revert to near-enslavement of foreigners, so the fate of African workers could be grim — especially if their own governments fail to protect them, which is likely in many poorly governed countries.
- The land leases run for as long as 99 years; exactly what this means, and how far the rights of the leasing country extend, could bring diplomatic clashes.
- The sum of the problems above points suggests that this trend could drive instability in some land-leasing countries.
(Image courtesy mrflip, Flickr)
In an attack on the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic reassurance,” Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal make an interesting point
“Strategic reassurance” seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America’s inevitable decline. Yet nothing would do more to hasten decline than to follow this path. The British accommodation of America’s rise was based on close ideological kinship. British leaders recognized the United States as a strategic ally in a dangerous world — as proved true throughout the 20th century. No serious person would imagine a similar grand alliance and “special relationship” between an autocratic China and a democratic United States.
Leaving aside that the writers are straining to detect how Obama differs from his predecessors — some see unusual continuity — it is true that the US lacks a natural protege. Brazil and India come much closer than China, as multicultural, democratic countries strongly shaped by Western culture, but real “kinship” is absent.
In any case, having a protege offers no guarantees: the US actively worked to deprive Britain of its chief global-power asset, its empire, even as the “special relationship” formed.
Given the strong odds that China and other countries will singly or collectively surpass the United States, the lack of proteges reinforces the value of the embedding the rising powers in an international system that Americans find amenable. It also argues for vigorous pursuit of soft power, converting rising powers to think more like us. Both of these tools were battered by the Bush administration, but Obama is pursuing them.
It should also be noted that an “autocratic China” is not forever. In many respects China is already less oppressive than South Korea and Taiwan were 50 years ago, when they were bastions of “the free world.” China may follow a similar course, and Kagan and Blumenthal imply that that matters. (Pure realists might object. After all, the US and Britain spent the first 100 years of their relationship warring or talking about warring with each other.)
Decline can be gradual: Britain remains a great power, 120 years after losing its place as the world’s largest economy. By that math, America will still matter in 2150.
(Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with link and permission)
Getting rid of Ahmadinejad or the current regime may not greatly change the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program, as some seem to assume.
As Iran vacillates — or appears to — on the uranium stockpile deal, the opposition is accusing Ahmadinejad of giving away too much to the West.
The WaPo reports that
The strongest criticism has come from Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leading opposition presidential candidate in Iran’s June 12 election. Even though the two-term government of his political partner, former president Mohammad Khatami, tried several times to reach a compromise with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, Mousavi charged that the current proposal would lead to disaster. “The discussions in Geneva were really surprising, and if the promises given [to the West] are realized, then the hard work of thousands of scientists would be ruined.”
Iran’s approach to security is not just about Ahmadinejad, nor about “extremism.” It has structural drivers as well, and those will not change rapidly.