global politics – Page 5

The Long War

I’m scrabbling around trying to get a lot of my disorganised thoughts on the War on Terror into proper relation.

The “long war” rationale for the Iraq war is essentially a return to the Heinlein theory that in a world of nuclear weapons, potential enemies cannot be tolerated. The Middle East is a threat for the indefinite future, and therefore must be reshaped politically to remove the danger.

The problem with the theory for me is the scale of its ambition. The project aims at achieving a world, in the relevant 10-30 year timescale, where no medium-sized industrial nation capable of developing nuclear weapons will be hostile enough to be a risk of passing on the weapons to terrorists, or using them.

The strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% successful to be worthwhile, if a partial success would reduce the danger. But a partial success, while reducing the pool of potentially lethal enemies, might well at the same time increase the danger from those remaining in the pool, mostly by increasing their motivation to obtain nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

This is why, in the division of long-term projects I made in the previous piece, the project falls on the “hubris” side. We can be reasonably sure that having more fertile land, or having cheaper energy, 30 or 50 years in the future will be a good thing. It’s difficult to say how good, but the beneficial nature of these things are robust with respect to all sorts of unpredictable developments.

It’s not obvious in the same way that having a military presence in the Middle East will be a good thing. It might well be, but it easily might be a bad thing – there are well-known downsides to empire. The rationale for undertaking the project relies on a number of assumptions about political, technological and economic developments over several decades. They are not silly assumptions, but in combination they are not at all reliable.

Against that objection, there is a “desperation” argument. That says that the long-run prospects as they stand are so bad, that even if an attempt to remove the nuclear threat has a low chance of success, it is a chance worth pursuing, because it’s the best chance we have.

Again, I think that’s too pessimistic. I don’t know how we will deal with the increasing nuclear threat over the coming decades, but as a statement of ignorance of the future, that is not particularly interesting. Something may well turn up. I’m not saying we should assume it must, but the “desperation” argument assumes that nothing will turn up, and I think that is invalid.

A brief history of Nuclear War

In 1945, one nation had nuclear weapons. By 1949, there were two. 1964, five. Today, probably nine.

By now, any industrial nation could develop fission weapons if not actively prevented. Any advanced nation could probably develop fusion weapons.

A matter of a decade or two, it will be possible for half the countries on Earth to make nuclear weapons. A while ago, I suggested that one day a kitchen device would be able to synthesize arbitrary chemicals; if nanotechnology fulfils its promise, then uranium enrichment could become a garage activity. Twenty-five years? Fifty? I can’t see it taking a hundred.

Since 1945, various strategies have been put forward to protect against nuclear attack.

One of the first suggested was world conquest. Robert Heinlein was very insistent in the 40s that the only sane course was for the USA to conquer the entire world before any potential enemy could develop nuclear weapons.

Disarmament was another widely recommended option – stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

The two strategies that were actually pursued were deterrence and non-proliferation. Deterrence worked – and innovations such as submarine-launched missiles reduced the first-strike threat. But as the number of nuclear powers increases, the reliability of deterrence falls, as the possibility of a concealed or deniable attack increase, and there is more chance of a foreign power being desperate or crazy enough to not care about deterrence.

Non-proliferation may have slowed down the spread of nuclear weapon technology, but in the long run, it is failing.

So how bad is the long-run outlook? It is seriously worrying. If, in 2060, the likes of Mohammed Siddique Khan and his associates (or Timothy McVeigh, or David Copeland) can produce a few atomic bombs in a house, it seems inevitable that sooner or later we would see a level of destructive nuclear terrorism which could totally destabilize our society – in the way that present-day terrorism – with home-made bombs, sabotage, and assasination – simply can’t.

What about the nearer future? Say 2025 – enriched uranium is still outside the reach of the hobbyist, but there are 100 or 200 potential or actual nuclear powers in the world. Some of them are politically unstable. Some of them are our enemies. How long can such a situation endure without a society-destroying state or state-sponsored-terrorist nuclear attack?

It’s very difficult to say.

Somehow, I’m just not too worried by all this. It’s just too hard to predict politics that far into the future with any confidence. You can pick one issue – nuclear proliferation – and project and speculate as to how it will develop, which is what I’ve done. What you can’t do is take all the other areas which might change the environment, and predict how all of them will develop over decades. What countermeasures might be developed? How will the world economy change? How powerful will satellite surveillance become? What totally unexpected technological, political or economic development will change the game beyond recognition?

That’s not a conclusive reason for letting the future fend for itself. I’m trying to draw a distinction between the forseeable consequences of our actions, which we must evaluate and include in our calculations, and the attempt to predict and manipulate the state of the world in the far future, which is hubris. Projects which will bring long-term benefits are certainly worthy of consideration, whether they be irrigating the deserts, or developing new energy sources, or anything else useful – we are not sure how valuable their results will be, but if, appropriately discounted, our best estimate is that they will pay for their costs, then they are worth doing. But projects whose value depends on particular assumptions as to the state of the world in the far future – that we will be allied to certain types of government, or that the balance of state versus individual power will move in a certain way – well, given the right assumptions almost any policy can be justified, including policies of “bringing forward” future and actually quite unlikely conflicts to the present.

Update: A more alarming assesment of the current nuclear threat from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Humanitarian Intervention

Chrenkoff asks, since there are 250,000 Iraqis living in Britain, how come none of them are doing suicide bombings?

Separately, Judith Klinghoffer points out that two of the suspects are from Somalia, where the invasion by Westerners was carried out at the urging of the U.N., but was abandoned in the face of strong resistance.

At the same time, the anti-war Neil Craig reminds us of some of the uncomfortable facts about Western intervention in Yugoslavia.

Now my gut feeling has always been against sending armies overseas. It may come as a surprise to my (literally several) readers, and I tend to forget it myself, but if asked outright whether it was the right policy to invade Iraq in 2003, I would say I think it was probably wrong.

There are several reasons why, believing this, I still am generally much closer to the “Pro-war” side than the “Anti-war” side.

I think the policy, mistaken as it may have been, was nevertheless an improvement on the policy it replaced, as I discussed here.

I felt that the previous attack on Yugoslavia was so outrageous and unjustifiable, that to make a big fuss about the much more finely balanced question of Iraq was to show a lack of sense of proportion.
I had expected the operation in Afghanistan to be a failure, and, seeing it now as largely a success, I entertain the possibility that George Bush knows something I don’t.
Whatever the right answer to the difficult question in 2003, I am convinced that to cut and run from Iraq now would be a catastrophe. It would reinforce the most damaging belief held by Islamist terrorists — the illusion that they can beat us.
And at least there was a plausible national interest proposed for intervening in Iraq, unlike Yugoslavia or Somalia, and Bush was clear and explicit about it. I didn’t agree with Bush’s conclusions, but I liked his style.

Why are “humanitarian” military interventions so much worse in their effects than self-interested ones? I think partly it is related to the tragedy of plentiful raw materials.

It has often been observed that some of the richest countries are the ones with the least raw materials — Japan, the Netherlands, etc. At the same time some of the countries with the richest raw materials — much of Africa, Russia, South America, are among the poorest countries.

The most likely explanation is that, where things of value are easily available, either diamonds in Sierra Leone, or plentiful wild food crops, power will all go to those that can most easily dominate the available resources – bandits and warlords. Where survival requires actually making things, banditry will still exist, but there must be a structure in society that leaves some power to the people who make or grow stuff. It is that societal structure that enables further development.

Likewise, when a “humanitarian” force gets involved in a conflict the incentives for the factions change. It becomes most important to influence the “humanitarians” I remember a British officer on U.N. duty in Sarajevo, in a press conference, saying that he had proof that both sides had deliberately shelled their own civilians, in an attempt to win sympathy from the other end of the TV cameras. I thought this was one of the most astonishing and major pieces of newsof the whole conflict, but I have never heard any mention of it again from that day to this.

Influencing the humanitarians is, in general, easy, because those who sent them are mainly concerned with “doing something to help”, and not with the nasty details of the situation. One of the reasons that I find Neil Craig‘s conspiracy theories about Yugoslavia far more believable than, for instance those of about the London bombs, is that fundamentally, nobody here really cared what was actually happening in Yugoslavia. We heard some sob stories, we said “something must be done”, we did something, the details of context and consequence are of only idle or passing interest. Conversely, we care deeply about what happens on the Piccadilly Line and why, and it will be very difficult to pull the wool over our eyes for more than a very short time. (Another consequence of the “fire-and-forget” nature of humanitarian interventions is the opportunity of private exploitation of the situation by the personnel involved, as I discussed here.)

Little Europe

“I only know that the British did not want the summit to be a success,” Michel says: “[The British] have a different kind of roadmap. They want Europe to be a purely economic space. If we follow them we risk turning the EU into a miniature copy of the United States. If we restrict the EU to a free market association without common rules, without this constitution, without shared political values, then Europe will no longer be able to make the citizens dream.”

Various people – Stephen Pollard, Paul Belien, The England Project, have had a go at this. But to my mind they miss the most revealing aspect.

Louis Michel alleges that Britain would turn the EU into a miniature copy of the United States. Miniature? The EU has getting on for twice the population of the United States. Yet its apologist is still under the impression that the US is larger. American power and wealth, for him, are just facts of nature or geography.

It’s not true. The USA is not bigger than the EU, except in having 5 million square kilometres of empty desert and ice sheet. It just has better economic policies. Its relative power and wealth are not facts of nature. They are the result of the policies Michel is defending. If the EU became like the USA, far from being a “miniature copy”, the result would be a richer world, by (off the top of my head) a factor of getting on for 2.

Of course, Michel is correct that the purpose of the EU is to prevent this, which is why I advocate disbanding it rather than pursuing the “British” vision Michel fears.

Two Years on

Two years ago yesterday, I posted the following as my view of the Iraq war. I’d like to revisit it.

Why the UN is to blame for the 2003 Iraq War

Responsibility for this war lies squarely with the UN, despite the last-minute chickening-out. If the UN Security Council had wanted to establish peaceful relations between Saddam Hussein and the rest of the world (which would have been a Good Thing), it wouldn’t have set up the stupid “safe havens”. You can’t make peace with a government while you’re protecting a rebel army inside that government’s own territory. The only options are

1. Leave things as they were and wait for Saddam Hussein to find some way of getting revenge on us.
2. Pull right out and let Saddam Hussein take control of the Kurdish areas, thereby showing up the half-hearted assertiveness of 1991 for what it was.
3. End the whole mess by changing the government of Iraq by military means.

The UN Security Council plumped for option 1. I favour option 2, but I can see that politicians might see it as politically impossible to watch the Kurds get cut to ribbons again as a result of international dithering. Bush went for 3, which would be my second choice.

Read the rest of this post…

The #1 neoconservative

If the term “Neoconservative” means anything, it refers to a centre-leftist who moves to embrace a more centre-right stance on economic policy, while retaining the desire to improve the world through foreign policy.

The appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank has attracted media attention to him, but to me, the politician who most perfectly exhibits neoconservatism is that ex-leftist Tony Blair.

He (more than his predecessor) is the man who took privatisation on from where Lady Thatcher left off (though in a Reagan/Bush way, without actually cutting government spending).

He is also the man who talked Clinton into attacking Yugoslavia in the name of human rights (and with an obvious byproduct of spreading Western politics at least into Slovenia and Croatia). For all we know, he is the man who talked George W Bush into attacking Iraq. Blair might not have needed to do much persuading, but if he had needed to, he would have given it his best shot.

And yet there are still those who seem to think that Britain is fighting this war “for America”. They ask what Blair has got “in exchange for British troops in Iraq”.

Tony Blair got a huge amount in exchange: he got American troops in Iraq.

Why is the EU so corrupt?

For the benefit of those surprised by the software patent scandal, it is worth asking, why is this style of behaviour so characteristic of the EU institutions? A caricature of a Eurosceptic might say that it is to be expected of “foreigners”, but in fact the EU is more corrupt than any of its member countries.

Like asking why some countries are poor, this is in a sense a reversal of the real question. It is normal for people to be poor, and it is normal for governments to be corrupt, and it is the exceptions that need explanations, not the normal case. Nonetheless, there is still a discrepancy to be explained, as the EU is unusually corrupt when compared to governemnts in the developed world.

I see two major reasons. First, necessity puts a lower limit on national governments’ corruption and incompentence. Even in the modern era of bloated state sectors, there is a lot which a national government does which is considered essential to the lives of its citizens. If the Italian government could not keep order in the cities, if it could not keep the state-run transport system and basic nationalised services running, it would collapse. It would be overthrown as its failure became obvious to everyone.

In contrast, absolutely nothing that the EU does is essential. Every member government is capable of running its own country, and some have done so for centuries. There is no minimum level of competence or effectiveness below which the EU cannot fall, no degree of corruption which is unsupportable.

Secondly, the EU has a huge weight of idealism supporting it. While other state enterprises are judged on their achievements and their merits, the EU project can count on a large body of support on the basis of its ideals, independently of its actual structure or behaviour. It can upset one group or another with individual acts of defiance of law and democracy, but there are always more people who assume, in ignorance, that it is a force for good. When it comes to a vote, the diffuse good feeling outweighs the outrage of those that have experienced the Eurocrats directly.

The weakness of these two arguments is that they apply equally to the USA. It also is a federal layer over states capable of running their own affairs, and it also commands a unionist idealism. While by no means free of corruption, it is not so mired as the EU.

It is important to recognise that the USA is unique in this. There have been a number of other superstates, but none of them have been democratically controlled except for the USA. They have all been effectively ruled, as the EU is, by nominal civil servants with control of the bureaucracy. Though an opponent of Communism, I think the problems of the USSR were as much the result of federalism as they were of Marxism.

So why has the USA succeeded? I think its exceptional status comes from a number of different elements, but here are a few:

It was founded on a principle of strictly limited government. The founders had a clearer idea of what they were against than of what they were for.
In particular, federal powers are much more sharply circumscribed by the Bill of Rights than by any vague doctrine of “subsidiarity” in the EU lexicon.
Its population does not consist of distinct nations (ignoring Native Americans, which they did). Citizens see the federal institutions as being part of their own country.
Americans have a more “legalistic” attitude than Europeans, who have a more “pragmatic” attitude to law. This pragmatism tends to dissolve separations of powers.

Legitimacy, America and the World

Superb lecture by Robert Kagan (via Dr. Frank). It just oozes quotes:

Samuel Huntington warned about the “arrogance” and “unilateralism” of U.S. policies when Bush was still governor of Texas.

Europeans do not fear that the United States will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the United States, and, by extension, over the direction of world affairs.

The EU, most of its members believe, enjoys a natural legitimacy, simply by virtue of being a collective body.

[The UN Security Council] has never been accepted as the sole source of international legitimacy, not even by Europeans. Europe’s recent demand that the United States seek UN authorization for the Iraq war… was a novel — even revolutionary — proposition.

The core thesis, though, does not really stand up. Under the title “The Importance of Being Legitimate”, Kagan says:

Europe matters because it and the United States form the heart of the liberal, democratic world. The United States’ liberal, democratic sensibilities make it difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to ignore the fears, concerns, interests, and demands of their fellows in liberal democracies

That ignores the role of dissent within the USA and within Europe. The fact of the invasion of Iraq was that it was always controversial, opposed from the start by a substantial minority in America and a majority in Europe. The (spurious) issue of “legitimacy” was used tactically by opponents in Europe. They did not decide publicly that the legitimacy of military action would from now on always depend on specific Security Council authorisation; a clique in the media just chose to pretend it had always been that way, and a majority of the population believed them.Similarly, the anti-war faction in the US did not oppose the war because it was “unilateral”; they cried out for “multilateralism” because they were against the war. If the invasion had been overwhelmingly popular with the US population, on its merits, nobody would have cared whether Jaques Chirac agreed or not, just as, when action in Yugoslavia was generally desired by Europeans, no-one saw any need to bother the Security Council for permission.

Europe's Future

When I wrote the first article here, my main subject was Europe and Islam, but to explain that I had to say more about Europe’s attitude to America, and that’s what has caught people’s attention.

Something I seem not to have made clear is the diversity of views in Europe. The position I described — that Europe must become a superpower to challenge American hegemony and halt the intrusion of an American-style market economy — is by no means unchallenged.

As I wrote, it appears to be the dominant view in France and Germany. The Transatlantic Intelligencer blog is much better-informed than I am and seems to bear that out. Here in Britain, the same faction does exist, but it is relatively small. In the new EU members to the East, it seems not to exist. (I would imagine there would be a few who would be nostalgic for the Warsaw Pact, but they are not visible from here).

What I want to emphasise is the extent to which this is an active and debated issue. Tony Blair, obviously, is not opposed to the US exercising its power. He does not carry his whole party with him by any means, but his likely successor, Finance Minister Gordon Brown is not likely to change course drastically. Looking at today’s paper, the lead article starts “Leading pro-European businessmen and politicians have berated Gordon Brown over his long-running scepticism about the EU economy.”

Opposition leader Michael Howard was also quoted in the FT today, saying”One of my worries is that for some people, the main motive for greater political union in Europe is to establish a rival to the US. I don’t want rivalry, I want partnership.”

Last month, the Dutch Minister of the Economy, Jan Brinkhorst, gave this speech (pdf) as the Rousseau Lecture. this article gives a brief summary:

‘I will argue that the updated European social model should differ distinctly from the current one’ explained Mr Brinkhorst. ‘It will inevitably resemble the US model more than is the case today.

So, the Europe’s future is, as the film said, not set. The EU project is seen in some circles as the way to overthrow American hegemony, but other members are in it for diffent outcomes. France and Germany have traditionally dominated, but their influence, in Europe and in the world, is diminishing.

We live in interesting times.

French Diplomacy

Richard at EU Referendum has a go at Jaques Chirac, for complaining that the invasion of Iraq made the world “more dangerous”, but not doing anything to make the world safer, like joining in.

Now there are reasonable arguments that invading Iraq made the world more dangerous, and also reasonable arguments that it made the world safer. Personally I’m in the John Kerry camp: I think it was right. Then again, perhaps it was wrong. Well, maybe it was right. Hmmm, actually I’m not sure.

(Strangely, Kerry’s views, despite being so closely aligned with my own, failed to impress me).

But enough dithering, I’m talking about Chirac. The point is that Chirac did try to make the world safer. He tried to stop the invasion. The interesting point is that he thought he could stop it. He really believes in this Diplomacy stuff. I call it “Diplomacy” with a capital D, because to me, diplomacy is just making deals: what do you want, what have you got to offer, what threats can you make. Chirac, and, descending into generalisation, the French, seem to believe in Diplomacy, a force independent of economies and armies, by which France can influence the rest of the world.

Of course, there is one way in which a nation can gain what it wants by negotiation without offering rewards or punishments: it can trick other countries into doing what it wants. If there is such as thing as Diplomacy, it is another word for trickery. One would think that governments would be fairly immune to being deceived into acting against their interests, but then again, the history of the EU would tend to contradict such an assumption.

The irony in this case, of course, is that Chirac not only believed he could prevent the invasion, he also seems to have convinced his friend Saddam Hussein of the same thing. The result of Diplomacy was to give him the confidence to defy George Bush and the U.N., something that even I am sure made the world a more dangerous place.