WHAT YOU MUST READ

Into the Gulf

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:12:00 +0000

To what extent is Nick Turse right to point out that the U.S. is consolidating its military positions in the Gulf? Is there anything new here? A proactive strategy, or mere contingency moves? I've been reading similar things about Diego Garcia, but it's hard to tell what's standard procedure and what's noteworthy.

Forgetting what it's for

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:03:00 +0000

Here's a bit of insight on how a few Pakistanis might feel about the United States' position re: their nuclear arsenal:

A retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who worked with his C.I.A. counterparts to track down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that he was deeply troubled by the prospect of Pakistan ceding any control over its nuclear deterrent. “Suppose the jihadis strike at India again—another attack on the parliament. India will tell the United States to stay out of it, and ‘We’ll sort it out on our own,’ ” he said. “Then there would be a ground attack into Pakistan. As we begin to react, the Americans will be interested in protecting our nuclear assets, and urge us not to go nuclear—‘Let the Indians attack and do not respond!’ They would urge us instead to find those responsible for the attack on India. Our nuclear arsenal was supposed to be our savior, but we would end up protecting it. It doesn’t protect us,” he said. (Emphasis added.)

Apples and oranges

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:48:00 +0000

This reminds me of research I once had to do on the variations in volumes of chocolate and orange juice produced on a yearly basis throughout the world for a leading Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. The devil isn't the only thing to be found in details.

CIA magic

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:42:00 +0000

Thinking outside of the box is ALWAYS key. Employing magicians to craft better spy techniques is a good example...

Gazprom the American

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:39:00 +0000

Gazprom's potential integration into the U.S. economy shows once again that trade trumps trouble... most of the time.

Quick hits

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:19:00 +0000

AFGHANISTAN

Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal makes a pretty good case about how to solve the Afghan situation.

I was both very surprised and very happy to read that Richard Holbrooke had visited Afghanistan as a Peace Corps volunteer before the country descended into chaos, decades ago. One can hope that gives him a broader and deeper perspective on the country's future.

Also, interesting quote by Holbrooke himself in his 1975 article, "The smartest man in the room": "The way the government works, speed gets rewarded more than deliberation, brilliance more than depth."

On a related note, here's a short note from a NYT review of Gordon Goldstein's "Lessons in Disaster": "At one point, he coolly tells Johson that we should send ground troops even though the chances for success 'are between 25 percent to 75 percent' because it would be better for America to lose after sending troops than not to send troops at all!" PLEASE do not let us repeat that mistake (which is essentially what is happening already, to my great despair).

CHINA

Elizabeth Economy makes a few good points about how Obama (and U.S. presidents in general) should broaden their audience and sources when visiting allied and, most importantly, non-allied countries.

Ian Bremmer makes an arguably excellent conjecture about Chinese-American relations: "the players in these governments don't talk to each other. They have completely different world views, vocabularies, mindsets, institutions. They do not talk to each other - they talk past each other. This is the fundamental strategic challenge for the world over the next 10 years." I like the mention of the word "vocabularies."

OIL

And finally, on a totally different note, had you ever thought of the UK as a petro-state? Neither had I...

Conflicts Forum

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:41:00 +0000

David Samuels has an illuminating piece on Conflicts Forum, apparently a think tank facade for undercover diplomatic negotiations in Beirut. I love it.

By the way, keep an eye on Mother Jones: they've got some great reporting from time to time.

A green world

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:39:00 +0000

David Rothkopf has some interesting points on the future of energy tensions. What's the colour of peace again? Green?

China's take on Afghanistan

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:38:00 +0000

M K Bhadrakumar is right to point out that little has been made public of China's official views on the Afghan conflict, unti now.

The Arabian Gulf?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Eugene Gholz, in the current edition of Foreign Policy, makes a convincing case for why Iran really couldn't threaten the Strait of Hormuz as much as most analyst believe it would in retaliation of a possible airstrike on its nuclear facilities. I remain skeptical, but his arguments are noteworthy.

Nota: Thought this would be a good opportunity to read up on the Tanker War here and here.

Mechanics of times of crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:16:00 +0000

John Cassidy has a clear and informative article in the New Yorker about "rational irrationality" in the financial markets. Few brand new ideas, but a good sense of pedagogy.

Discontinuous quotes:

A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier and less amenable to reform: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.

[...] The same logic applies to the decisions made by Wall Street C.E.O.s like Citigroup’s Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch’s Stanley O’Neal. They’ve been roundly denounced for leading their companies into the mortgage business, where they suffered heavy losses. In the midst of a credit bubble, though, somebody running a big financial institution seldom has the option of sitting it out. What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution.

[...] According to orthodox economics, professional speculators play a stabilizing role in the financial markets: whenever prices rise above fundamentals, they step in and sell; whenever prices fall too far, they step in and buy. But history has demonstrated that much of the so-called “smart money” aims at getting in ahead of the crowd, and that only adds to the mispricing.

[...] When General Motors cuts its prices or offers interest-free loans, Ford and Chrysler come under pressure to match G.M.’s deals, even if their finances are already stretched. If Merrill Lynch sets up a hedge fund to invest in collateralized debt obligations, or some other shiny new kind of security, Morgan Stanley will feel obliged to launch a similar fund to keep its wealthy clients from defecting. A hedge fund that eschews an overinflated sector can lag behind its rivals, and lose its major clients. So you can go bust by avoiding a bubble. As Charles Prince and others discovered, there’s no good way out of this dilemma. Attempts to act responsibly and achieve a coöperative solution cannot be sustained, because they leave you vulnerable to exploitation by others. If Citigroup had sat out the credit boom while its rivals made huge profits, Prince would probably have been out of a job earlier. The same goes for individual traders at Wall Street firms. If a trader has one bad quarter, perhaps because he refused to participate in a bubble, the results can be career-threatening.

As the credit bubble continued, even the credit-rating agencies, which exist to provide investors with objective advice, got caught up in the same sort of competitive behavior that had persuaded banks like Citigroup, UBS, and Merrill Lynch to plunge into the subprime sector. Instead of adopting an arms-length approach and establishing a uniform set of standards for issuers of mortgage securities, the big three rating agencies—Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s—worked closely with Wall Street banks, and ended up giving AAA ratings to financial junk. But under the rating industry’s business model, in which the issuers of securities pay the agencies for rating them, the agencies are dependent on Wall Street for their revenues.

Before Goldman Sachs, say, issued a hundred million dollars of residential-mortgage bonds, it would pay an agency like Moody’s at least thirty or forty thousand dollars to issue a credit rating on the deal. As the boom continued, investment bankers played the agencies off one another, shopping around for a favorable rating. If one agency didn’t think a bond deserved an investment-grade rating, the business would go to a more generously disposed rival. To stay in business, and certainly to maintain market share, credit analysts had to accentuate the positive.

[...] It won’t be as easy to deal with the bouts of instability to which our financial system is prone. But the first step is simply to recognize that they aren’t aberrations; they are the inevitable result of individuals going about their normal business in a relatively unfettered marketplace. Our system of oversight fails to account for how sensible individual choices can add up to collective disaster.

[...] As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn’t so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms. “The window of opportunity for reform will not be open for long,” Hyun Song Shin wrote recently. Before the political will for reform dissipates, it is essential to reckon with the financial system’s fundamental design flaws. The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down.

3 possibilities for dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:00:00 +0000

It seems to me that despite all the chatter there really are only 3 options for dealing with Iran's nuclear program:

1) Very effective air strikes

Upside:
- eliminates the problem altogether – Osirak has shown this is possible

Downsides:
- difficult from a military standpoint
- expect instability in the oil market at a minimum
- potential war in the Strait of Hormuz
- likely terrorist counterattacks (either immediate or delayed and surprise)
- possible conventional attack on Israel or US presence in the region
- guaranteed uptick in nationalism
- possibility of Iran getting closer to US challengers like China and Russia

2) Real decoupling of civil and military nuclear development

Upside:
- peaceful solution

Downsides:
- we don’t know of any way to do so realistically
- it will not reassure Israel
- failure would come at the price of Iranian nuclear leverage

3) Getting Iran to abandon its nuclear programme altogether

Upside:
- everyone is happy (including Iran assuming this can be arranged to suit Tehran)

Downsides:
- hard to justify given the NPT
- would come at best at a very high diplomatic or economic price
- we don’t currently know of anything the Iranians would want badly enough to swap

China's limits in Burma

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:12:00 +0000

The International Crisis Group writes about the limits of China's influence in Burma:

China’s influence is limited by several factors. The generals in Naypyidaw harbour a profound distrust of China due and continuing ties with border ethnic groups, which prevents them from consolidating control and continuing ties with border ethnic groups, which prevents them from consolidating control over their territory. Although the military government relies on Beijing’s support, it still follows a foreign policy of non-alignment and pragmatism in order to balance China’s influence with that of other regional powers. The Myanmar government is also intensely nationalistic, unpredictable and sensitive to outside interference. Finally, China uses ASEAN as a shield against more robust action, which limits how far China is willing to go in pushing Myanmar.

A shrinked PLA?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:01:00 +0000

Interesting to note that China's military is moving towards transparency and self reappraisal. As we say in French: on n'arrête pas le progrès.

Bribing our way out

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:37:00 +0000

Fred Kaplan suggests we bribe our way into restoring confidence in the Afghan government. Sounds like a short-term / guaranteed backlash solution, but since for some reason our policymakers have decided we should maintain (and even increase) our presence in Afghanistan, I guess this might be better than nothing... Actually, it's pretty pathetic we've arrived to this stage.

Iraq's flourishing democracy

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:10:00 +0000

This is a classic, but it seems Iraq is increasingly moving towards authoritarianism, Maliki-style!

India's military pump reappraised

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:50:00 +0000

This Asia Times article about U.S. support to India's anti-terrorist reform efforts has me thinking that it's great the United States can project its power in such a "soft" way, but it would be even better if it could do so in less "friendly" countries like China. That would be a real success.

On another level, the article's emphasis on India's massive weapons purchases also has me thinking: why does this not bother me? Why does it not bother observers like me (and many others) that a country like India is progressively arming itself to the teeth, therefore making its region increasingly less stable?

Of course, the answer is obvious: for the past decade the United States has been banking on India's rise "against" China's (amongst other reasons because it is a democracy) and observers like myself therefore feel this is a second-best situation, a necessary evil so to speak.

The fact is, however, that one should sometimes take a step back and see the broader picture: when the second most populated country in the world is arming itself like mad (and you're selling it the weapons it's buying) to edge against the first most populated and fastest growing country in the world, that's not a good sign for the future. Neither theirs, nor yours.

So, in a word (note to self), next time you read about India's militarization, tone down the enthusiasm!

Chinese think tanks keep on growing

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Fascinating new progress report on the development of think tanks in China. Follows Mark Leonard's own work on the issue:

In contrast to many of their counterparts in the West, where independence from the government is usually seen as a mark of credibility, Chinese think tanks often strive for strong ties to the government, and especially value a close connection with the upper stratum of the Chinese leadership.

[...] At least three factors have contributed to the need to establish the new kind of think tanks and to make them more forward-looking and innovative in thinking about China’s future. First, the end of strongman politics and the emergence of a collective system of leadership have pushed officials to seek increased legitimacy for their policies through the support of think tanks. Second, China’s growing integration with the world economy requires input from scholars with professional expertise, especially those who specialize in international investment and finance. Third, the rapid development of China’s market economy has not only made the Chinese economic and sociopolitical structures more pluralistic, but has also created many new interest groups. These interest groups, especially those in the business sector, now work carefully to influence government policy and shape public opinion.

Infrastructure in Georgia

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:25:00 +0000

There is very little groundbreaking information in this Jamestown report on the impact of the Georgia-Russia War of August 2008 on the South Caucasus' transport infrastructure. But I did find its existence worth noting for at least two reasons.

The first is that it's the first report I've come across that analyzes the war under this highly significant (and obviously so) angle.

The second is this little bit that illustrates what "creative destruction" really looks like in action:

The major highways suffered only minor damage from the military conflict and repairs have already been carried out. Some road construction machinery and equipment was looted during the war. The conflict has, however, highlighted the vulnerability of the Georgian highway system, and especially the East-West freeway, Georgia’s strategic backbone. An upgrade of the alternative highways will have a significant security, developmental, and economic impact on Georgian transportation.

Turks believe

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:20:00 +0000

A recent poll whose results I found on the Jamestown Foundation's website is fascinating:

Apparently, only 5% of Turks feel their country is a Middle Eastern one!

Also interesting (though pathetic): the United States is still perceived as Ankarra's biggest threat according to Turks. What is most discomfiting is that I remember just a few years ago when Turkish public opinion's turn against the United States still came as a surprise and was perceived as a temporary phenomenon to be turned around within a few months.

There's work to be done!

India-China naval rivalry 2

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:16:00 +0000

By the way, India might suck at developing its navy, but it's sure doing a better job at making friends around the Indian Ocean, thereby pushing China's "string of pearls" strategy into a corner.

Quote of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:14:00 +0000

"One should not rely only on the players' descriptions of themselves. Yet this is precisely what has happened to the effort to understand the role of religion in shaping the political lives of Muslims."

Charles Tripp, "All (Muslim) Politics Is Local," Foreign Affairs

India-China naval rivalry

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:09:00 +0000

Bad news: India isn't succeeding in beating China at developping a 21st century blue water navy.

Good news: China isn't succeeding in developing one either.

Or maybe it's all good news: if less warships mean less wars.

Or maybe it's all bad news: if secured sea lanes and a stable balance of power means more peace.

Boot as an optimistic Powell

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Max Boot defends the Powell Doctrine in his own way by claiming that if we're going to be in Afghanistan, we've got to be in for real, not merely relying on "offshore" tactics. It's interesting to see someone so far to the right argue something so different from the Rumsfeldian view of military affairs these days (though it's not necessarily a paradox).

Yet there are two components to the Powell Doctrine: 1) don't go in, 2) but if you have to go in, give yourself the means to succeed. I agree with Boot on the second point, but he seems not to agree with me on the first: we really shouldn't be in Afghanistan at all!

Bernanke gets a free pass

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew D. Bishop) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:49:00 +0000

The NYT is right to point out that Ben Bernanke's reappointment as Fed Chairman should at least warrant a few minutes of criticism.