Tag: global politics

Falkland Island Oil

This Guardian article (via L&P) talks about national claims to mineral rights beyond territorial waters — in particular the UK’s claims around the Falkland Islands and Rockall.

My immediate response was to the claim in the article:

the value of the oil under the sea in the region [of the Falkland Islands] is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be up to 60m barrels under the ocean floor.

60 million barrels. At $80/barrel, that is worth a bit under 5 billion dollars, or 2.5 billion pounds — less than a third of the cost of the 2012 Olympics, and probably much less than the cost of setting up extraction infrastructure. Either The Guardian has lost a lot of zeros, or the oil in the region is utterly insignificant.Luckily, I didn’t get where I am today by believing everything the Guardian told me. Looking at Wikipedia, it appears the Guardian is confusing millions and billions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_the_Falkland_Islands#Petroleum_exploration_and_reserves It is considered probable that more than 60 billion petroleum barrels (10 km³) have been generated in the North Falkland Basin(I also learned that 60 million barrels is about two weeks’ current production from the North Sea.)

Things to consider:

  • There is believed to be significant oil near the Falklands.
  • The Guardian doesn’t know millions from billions.
  • Liberty and Power can’t see at a glance that 60 million barrels of oil is nothing, despite the fact that the price of a barrel of oil is hardly an obscure piece of knowledge these days.
  • I was going to go on about much-maligned Wikipedia being more reliable than the Guardian, but between drafting and posting this, the Guardian has (a) corrected the error and (b) left a note explaining the correction. Perhaps I should say that Wikipedia is more reliable than today’s Guardian, in that today’s Guardian has had little time to be fixed. However, if the fact in question is actually new (as opposed to background, like the 6 million barrels), which is at least suggested by insisting on today’s paper, then we all know Wikipedia is unreliable too. So scrub that one. Full marks to the Guardian for the promptness and manner of the correction.

In the long term, we cannot hold onto valuable mineral reserves in the South Atlantic. Defending them is justifiable, but probably not practical.

The time to negotiate is now. (Well, I’ve been saying this for 10+ years, so the best time has passed, but there is still an opportunity). We want:

  • A revenue-sharing agreement for mineral rights for 50 years.
  • Rights of the inhabitants guaranteed for 50 years.
  • A Northern Ireland style arrangement with oversight by the South American partner.
  • Sovereignty to devolve to the South American partner after the 50 years, Hong Kong style.

Argentina is the obvious partner for such a deal, but not the only possible one. Chile is, I believe, the closest mainland. Venezuela has the oil production infrastructure. And if none of them offer anything decent, hey, maybe the US would like a naval base or something. Let the bidding commence.

John Gray on progress

I spotted the latest book by John Gray in a bookshop, and was a little confused because I remembered him as a classical liberal from reading his book Liberalism when I was a student. I wondered whether there was another John Gray. Wikipedia sorted me out: there is only one John Gray (apart from this one, who isn’t relevant), but his views have changed over the years.

The links from the Wikipedia article are engrossing – this attack on Blair and neoconservatism is very persuasive, and led me to the 1999 speech I referred to in my previous piece. The discussion with Laurie Taylor about the religious and utopian aspects of modern humanism chimes very closely with the cryptocalvinism theory of Unqualified Reservations blog, which I have already praised.

But one of the major thrusts of his current arguments is one that would never have struck me as being necessary to make. In the Laurie Taylor piece, particularly, he is very keen to insist that there is not really any such thing as progress. We have progressed in technology, and science is dragged forwards as a result, but morality is not on a steadily improving track.

This is so obvious: anyone can tell the difference between a machine that works and one that doesn’t, so technology does not regress unless the economy producing it is destroyed. It is hard to deny the science underlying working technology, so science tends to progress along with the technology – it can on occasionally jump ahead, and even drop back level again, but it does not fall behind.

There is no equivalent incontrovertible test between good morality and bad morality, so morality can wander all over the shop, go round in circles, or go wild. In the long run, one could say that good morality works for its society and bad morality doesn’t, but so many other things affect the success of a society – movements of power and technology – that it doesn’t constitute an obvious experimental test.

History is one damned thing after another; there is no meaning to our lives unless we choose to pick one; humanity can probably solve most of the problems it encounters, but more will come along and there is no good reason to believe they can all be solved. It’s disorienting that people I consider sensible might doubt any of these things.

Black Mass is on my paperback list, anyway.

Internationalism

I commented on a post at Tim’s:

The gist is that the CiF poster he quotes does not believe that we can go on with national governments acting purely in their own countries’ interests:

“Gordon Brown needs to change the course of New Labour and replace the national agenda with a new cosmopolitan realism in order to tackle the challenges of terrorism, globalisation and climate change.”

The problem is that this is anything but a change of course for New Labour. As I quoted in my comment:

Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction this doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community – the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest – is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo. Global financial markets, the global environment, global security and disarmament issues: none of these can he solved without intense international co-operation.

That was Tony Blair in 1999, encouraging the US to stay the course – behind Bill Clinton – of subjugating the Balkans.

The election of the relatively anti-internationalist Bush in 2000 was a setback for New Labour’s “International Community”, but luckily for Blair, September 2001 brought him over into the internationalist camp.

If one truly wants a global authority to deal with global warming, or anything else, there are two things that need to be done:

  • Create a global authority.
  • Get it to agree with your policies.

It’s conceivable that a global authority, once existing, could change its policies, but not that a bunch of people that agree with some policy, but have no power, could become a global authority. So the appropriate strategy would be to encourage whatever practical internationalism exists, and then to change its policy. The only internationalist movements with realistic access to power in the world today are the US neoconservatives, and the EU. I have already explained why the EU does not, and will not, have sufficient power to challenge the US, so any internationalism today must start with neconservatism.

If I believed what Ulrich claims – that only a system of global cooperation can save us from catastrophe, my political strategy would be to throw in totally with the War on Terror. If the US gained the support of the EU to make Iraq into a colony, and then conquer Iran, world government would be that much closer. A powerful military base in the Middle East would put more pressure on the other major oil producers in the region. Venezuela, Canada and Nigeria are all relatively easy to handle. The next stage would be to bring Putin to heel. I admit I can’t see an easy way to do that, unless our Empire’s oil production can be hugely ramped up. A carefully placed nuclear “accident” might do the job, perhaps.

Once substantially all the world’s oil comes under the control of the Empire, it could rule the world. The politics of environmentalism would at that stage be very useful as a rationale for politically managing the oil supply, so it should not be too difficult to apply stage 2 of the climate change strategy, and convert the Emperor to the desired policy.

This whole political programme is, I must admit, very unpleasant. We are talking about at least two decades of continuous war of Imperial conquest. But, as Ulrich Beck says:

When taken seriously and thought through to its logical conclusions, climate change demands a political paradigm shift.

so, we must ask, are we prepared to make the necessary sacrifices, or aren’t we?

Unexpected Sense of Proportion

I think my fears, expressed on Friday, that too much of a fuss had been made over the captured boarding party in Iran, were misplaced.
Certainly there was a lot of media attention, but on reflection, the attention was not so much the result of an unhealthy over-sentimental concern whether they lived or died, but was just the latest Reality TV spectacle.
The Sun caught exactly the right note with the headline “We went to Iran and all we got were these lousy suits”.
On the same basis, I think the authorities are right to allow them to sell their stories. Treating global conflict as “I’m a Lieutenant, get me out of here” might make us look decadent, but, let’s face it, we are decadent, and it’s going to be very difficult to appear otherwise.
On the other hand, it also makes us look strong in a strange way. The Iranian regime is fighting for its life, and perhaps hit on the desperate tactic of kidnapping a British naval unit in international waters. If, rather than panicking, we treat the whole affair as a joke or a bit of cheap entertainment, it really drives home the fact that we’re not really even trying. Just imagine how much damage we could do if we actually gave a shit!

The 15 in Iran

I didn’t comment on the capture of the Naval personnel in the Gulf, because I think it’s fundamentally a bad idea to make such a big deal out of it. It becomes impossible to use military force effectively if you’re prepared to look at your troops as hostages that way.

If the 15 had been killed by Iraqis two weeks ago the media would pretty nearly have forgotten them by now. If they’d been killed by Iranians, there would be a bit of fuss, but everybody knows that people get trigger-happy on borders sometimes, and it would probably be on the way to blowing over by now.

The British government has been made to look very foolish, not so much by the way the situation was handled, but by getting into it in the first place. It does seem to demonstrate that Blair believes his own propaganda – that Britain has a perfect right to be in Iraq, and no-one else has any right to interfere. As I’ve said before, while Britain’s intervention can be defended, Iran’s taking steps can be defended just as well. Britain’s right to be in control of southern Iraq rests at least in part on possession of superior force. That being the case, there can be no excuse for the navy wandering around the Shatt-Al-Arab with its hands in its pockets as if it was the Serpentine. The accounts I have seen seem to indicate that the boarding party should have been well able to defend itself if not caught unprepared, and that in any case plenty of force was available to protect it had it occurred to anyone that it might be needed. That the party was caught both unprepared and unprotected suggests to me that they did not understand they were in a hostile part of the world among people who did not recognise their God- or UN- given right to be there bossing people around. I find that lack of awareness extremely worrying.

When to leave Iraq

Some of the violence in Iraq is caused by the presence of occupying troops there.
Some of it is caused by rival factions within Iraq.

If the Iraqi government can get to the stage where it is able to control the country and hold it together with just its own forces, the whole regime-change process will have been, by some measures, a success.

Opinions differ as to how likely that is. I am going to assume for the purposes of this discussion that there is a realistic chance it will happen.

If this stage is to be reached, there will come a point where the dangers of staying outweigh the dangers of leaving. I think it would be very optimistic to think that the country will be completely stabilised and pacified while a substantial US and British military presence remains.
Because there is a deep-seated tendency to overestimate risks which are completely outside one’s own control, compared to risks over which one has some control, when that point is reached, it will look as if it is still a long way off.

That is, at the optimal time to leave, it will look far too early. The risks caused by leaving will appear greater than the risks caused by staying.

The time might even have come already. I think there is a considerable risk that, if the Iraqi government were left to try to manage on its own now, it would fail. But there is a risk it will fail anyway. The question is which risk is greater, after correcting for our own biases.

I do not pretend to have sufficient knowledge of the situation on the ground to answer whether the time has come. But, just playing with the basic principles, I am fairly sure that when the time comes, it will not be at all obvious.

The Iran Thing

I’m not well-informed as to the current state of affairs on the ground in Iraq, but there is an important general point that is not being made.

The USA and its allies invaded Iraq with the stated justification that the existing regime was a danger. As I wrote earlier, that is a reasonable justification. One can certainly argue whether the invasion was advisable, but I accept that it was justifiable.

However, whatever strategic interest the allies have in what happens in Iraq, the Iranians have more. Expecting the government of Iran to stand idly by while western countries attempt to fashion a new government there is not only unrealistic but unfair. Of course Iran is going to seek out allies among the factions struggling for influence, and of course it is going to support them, and, in a a situation of civil war, of course that support is going to involve arming them as well as funding them. It would be stupidly reckless of the Iranian government not to arm its allies in Iraq.

Now, if, as is alleged, Iranian-backed groups are fighting against US and British forces in Iraq, there is a problem that needs to be addressed. But pure outrage that Iran could seek to challenge the “rightful invaders” of Iraq will not do. The same logic that puts American and British guns in Iraq puts Iranian ones there too.

One could argue that Iran should refrain from intefering based on an ideal of absolute subservience to the U.N., which recognises the current Iraqi government. I challenge the commentators most hostile to Iran to make that argument with a straight face: I would be quite unable to do so myself.

Alternatively one could take an absolute imperialist line, and say that a Pax Americana is being imposed in Iraq, it will all be for the best, and everybody else better help, stay out of the way, or be squashed. I think that is the line that is taken in effect by the hawkish commentators, but I’m not sure they are really doing so consciously. Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing if such a peace could be imposed without local allies or compromises, but I am sure it is practically out of the question.

I would favour an acceptance that Iran has legitimate strategic interests in the internal struggles of Iraq, and a positive outcome is more likely to flow from some level of cooperation and compromise. Such an approach is made more difficult by the hysterical rhetoric that both parties have used against the other, as well as by the outstanding dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. At the very least, Iran will be seeking assurance that a powerful enemy is not being created on its border, either in the form of a hostile Iraqi administration, or an American base for further aggression. Neither seems likely to me, but governments of every country tend towards the paranoid in assessing the intentions of such unstable regimes.

If the USA does not make it absolutely clear that it has no intention of attacking Iran, then the natural assumption is that it does have such an intention. And that being the case, it would be an essential act of self-defense for Iran to attempt to prevent such an attack by keeping Iraq too unstable. And then, of course, that would be used to show that Iran is part of the problem and that regime change there would be desirable.

The only case in which it would make sense to make a fuss about Iran’s interference in Iraq would be if it was insignificant. In that case it can be used to build up opinion for an attack on Iran, while forcing the interference to continue to escalate wouldn’t matter because it’s not significant anyway. If it is a major problem, the only way to stop it would be to not make a fuss about it, but to try to assure Iran that it is safe. Threats will not be successful, as the more Iran is threatened, the more incentive it has to keep Iraq unstable.

Iran could be expected to favour an outcome in Iraq of a stable representative government, provided it is confident that would not lead to an American leader saying “we have achieved what we set out to do in Iraq, we no longer need the army in Iraq, let’s do the same now to Iran, after all it worked in Iraq.”

Michael Wolff

Astonishingly ignorant column in Vanity Fair by Michael Wolff.

“Brand America, which ruled the global marketplace with its vision of cool capitalism, has been discontinued. This is Bush Country now, and the world is recoiling from a new image that makes the U.S. as much a danger to its friends—including chief enabler Tony Blair—as it is to its enemies”

You WHAT?? “cool capitalism”? Capitalism may be tolerated in Britain, more than in mainland Europe, as a necessary evil, but only a handful of lunatic-fringies like me would ever have called it “cool”.

Similarly with the YouGov poll Wolff quotes – I’m sure the results would not have been greatly different in August 2001 or in 1998. Clinton was talked about in very much the same terms as Bush is now. The first reaction in Britain to September 2001 was largely a sniggering “Now they see what it’s like”.

As the infinitely better-informed Robert Kagan wrote in the lecture I mentioned here, ‘Samuel Huntington warned about the “arrogance” and “unilateralism” of U.S. policies when Bush was still governor of Texas.’

If American commentators like Wolff can be so unaware of what is really going on in Britain, of all places, what are the chances of there being any insight into what’s going on in Iraq or Pakistan?

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam: The major global conflict today is between the EU core and the USA; Britain is very divided regarding the conflict; the antics of primitivist Islam and the war on terror are a sideshow, but may in the long run develop into a proxy war, if the EU position goes from hoping the Islamists can damage the USA to supporting them outright. Blair is as enthusiastic about invading Iraq as he was about invading Yugoslavia, and would have been pushing Bush to invade Iraq had any pushing been necessary.

Online Gambling

This is tricky because it’s about who has the right to be wrong about what.

I think gambling is generally a bad thing. It can be fun, but it can also be generally destructive. While I’m not sure its helpful to throw around words like “addiction”, it’s pretty clear that many people who gamble are behaving very strongly against their own interests.

Should gambling therefore be illegal? Absolutely not. The problems are threefold – you are stopping the harmless entertainment as well as the self-destructive behaviour; you are raising your (and my) judgement as to what is good for someone else over their own judgement*, and you are introducing the plagues of prohibition, including a criminal class and a corrupt enforcement bureaucracy.

However, despite these very strong arguments, the governments of the USA and many of its States have banned gambling (with various indefensible and illogical exceptions for State lotteries, etc).

One of my more eccentric beliefs is in National Sovereignty. If a foreign state (however constituted) wants to get stuff wrong, then unless it directly affects me, it’s really none of my business. They’re entitled to do stuff differently; that’s what being foreign is all about.

That proposition doesn’t flow easily from any theoretical statement of morality or justice. You could build up to it from a concept of democratic rights, but as I don’t restrict sovereign rights to democratic states, that doesn’t help me. For me, sovereignty is a pragmatic rule, a compromise which reduces the amount of conflict between countries – and conflict between countries is one of the major causes of human suffering and poverty. As such, the principle can be overridden in very extreme cases – such as the Rwandan genocide – but those familiar with this blog will be aware that I am very much more cautious than most regarding “humanitarian violence”.

Of course, since no-one is suggesting starting a war to protect the human rights of Americans to play online video poker, I’ve gone off on a slight tangent here. Mind, we did once fight a war for the human rights of the Chinese to take opium, but even those of us who favour drug liberalisation generally give less than wholehearted approval to that project.

There is a kind of consistency to my views: just as Beryl should be free to damage herself by buying lottery tickets (but I would prefer her not to), the USA should be free to damage itself by prohibiting gambling (but I would prefer it not to).**

Now we come to the tricky stuff. What if an American flies to Britain, walks into a bookmaker’s shop in Luton, and puts a bet on a horse.

Well, that’s OK, I think obviously. The US government might choose to deal with the visitor when he gets home (but in fact, according to current law, wouldn’t).

What if the horse race doesn’t run until the visitor has gone home. Can the bookmaker pay the visitor’s winnings, by sending him a cheque or crediting his bank account? The question is whether the bookmaker is simply settling a debt (and the fact that the transaction which gave rise to the debt would have been illegal if it had taken place in the US is beside the point, because the transaction didn’t take place in the US), or whether the payment itself is a transaction with someone in the US which is in breach of US law.

I think the US government is entitled to consider it the latter. Gambling is, after all, not much other than an exchange of money; if you send a cheque to America in settlement of a gambling transaction, you are gambling with someone in America.

Since you are outside US jurisdiction, you are safe, since the US ought to respect your country’s sovereignty.

But if you later travel to the US, their government can justly claim that you have been dealing with the US in a way that is against US law.

To take a parallel but less morally confusing example, if a Nigerian scams me out of a stack of money by claiming to to be MIRIAM ABACHA, and then later comes to Britain on unrelated business, he should be arrested. Exactly what country he was in when he conned me, and what the law is in that country, is beside the point.

When we come to the actual cases that are in the news, most recently Peter Dicks, another question arises. Was he knowingly dealing with the US? I think that matters: if, as far as he knew, he was simply carrying on a legal business, and unknown to him, some of his users were actually in a jurisdiction where the business was not legal, then he hasn’t done anything wrong – it is like my very first example of a bookmaker completing a transaction in Luton with an American visitor.

On the other hand, if he is knowingly transacting business with people in America, he is like the second example of the bookmaker sending a cheque to America – the transaction is taking place between two countries and is illegal in one of them. I would think that in the concrete cases existing, this is the case.

The structure of the internet makes it possible to not know the location or nationality of your customers. This makes the question really difficult. I suppose the US government is still entitled to make its own rules about how careful those who come within its reach should be to avoid acting, while abroad, in a way that it considers illegal. But if it does act against those who as far as they know are behaving totally legally within the jurisdictions they are working in, it is stepping over a line of what is generally considered reasonable behaviour of a state. Note it has not yet done that over the gambling question, as far as I can see.

What I’m really arguing against here is the idea that the internet changes the rules – that if what the server is doing is legal in the place where it happens to be sitting, then no other government should be able to do anything about it. It would be nice if it did, but I say that only because I am generally in favour of freedom, and that would bring more freedom. I can’t defend it in terms of logic or history, though. The internet isn’t the first mechanism to allow people in different countries to deal with each other, and governments have always held that they can restrict or prohibit such dealings according to their own policies.

*It is OK to make a judgement about someone else’s interests – as I have done. It is another matter to deny that person their own (bad) judgement
**That is an analogy – I do not claim that states and individuals should always be looked at in the same way.