Left Flank

Michael T. Klare first warned about "conflict over valuable resources" in Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict in 2001, and he has now updated that geo-economic argument.

The great risk is that this struggle will someday breach the boundaries of economic and diplomatic competition and enter the military realm. This will not be because any of the states involved make a deliberate decision to provoke a conflict with a competitor--the leaders of all these countries know that the price of violence is far too high to pay for any conceivable return. The problem, instead, is that all are engaging in behaviors that make the outbreak of inadvertent escalation ever more likely. These include, for example, the deployment of growing numbers of American, Russian and Chinese military instructors and advisers in areas of instability where there is every risk that these outsiders will someday be caught up in local conflicts on opposite sides.

This risk is made all the greater because intensified production of oil, natural gas, uranium and minerals is itself a source of instability, acting as a magnet for arms deliveries and outside intervention. The nations involved are largely poor, so whoever controls the resources controls the one sure source of abundant wealth. This is an invitation for the monopolization of power by greedy elites who use control over military and police to suppress rivals. The result, more often than not, is a wealthy strata of crony capitalists kept in power by brutal security forces and surrounded by disaffected and impoverished masses, often belonging to a different ethnic group--a recipe for unrest and insurgency. This is the situation today in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, in Darfur and southern Sudan, in the uranium-producing areas of Niger, in Zimbabwe, in the Cabinda province of Angola (where most of that country's oil lies) and in numerous other areas suffering from what's been called the "resource curse."

The danger, of course, is that the great powers will be sucked into these internal conflicts. This is not a far-fetched scenario; the United States, Russia and China are already providing arms and military-support services to factions in many of these disputes. The United States is arming government forces in Nigeria and Angola, China is aiding government forces in Sudan and Zimbabwe, and so on. An even more dangerous situation prevails in Georgia, where the United States is backing the pro-Western government of President Mikhail Saakashvili with arms and military support while Russia is backing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgia plays an important strategic role for both countries because it harbors the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a US-backed conduit carrying Caspian Sea oil to markets in the West. There are US and Russian military advisers/instructors in both areas, in some cases within visual range of each other. It is not difficult, therefore, to conjure up scenarios in which a future blow-up between Georgian and separatist forces could lead, willy-nilly, to a clash between American and Russian soldiers, sparking a much greater crisis.

What makes the 2008 version "new", though is, that Klare has dropped his 2001 call for a "global authority", an extension of the International Energy Agency, to coordinate research on alternative fuels and protect current resources. Instead, Klare tepidly advocates "...rather than engage in militarized competition with China, we should cooperate with Beijing in developing alternative energy sources and more efficient transportation systems." Klare reprises Alfred Thayer Mahan, to underscore the US Navy's redeployment from its Cold War Rimland strategy to routes near Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the Malacca Strait, and bases in Iraq. Finally, Klare raises the issue of the military industrial complex: military spending to compete with PRC and Russia will dry up funds for research into alternative sources of energy. But, that funding also perversely ensures the US will seek conflict.

I'm uneasy about Klare's retreat. Certainly, PRC is a formidable competitor—CIA Director Michael Hayden's comment is encouraging—for resources and diplomatic influence, and the Washington should engage it. However, bilateral relationships can degenerate into animosity. In the wake of Iraq, the US needs to simplify its relationship with the world to facilitate better ties with the rest of the states it has marginalized in the last eight years. In other words, it needs a policy, not a monkey on its back. Global cooperation on energy spurring global growth, backed by American naval power, is as good as any power point presentation could offer. The monster of military procurement needs to be shoved into a cave where it can scare pirates and dictators but not impede commerce. Klare can only follow the last eight years' nightmare of nationalism with a stronger dose of responsible internationalism.

Let's stop canonizing or demonizing (unfortunately, both left and right have latched on to this cause celebre) celebrities for taking safe political stands. Case in point: Steven Spielberg (and Mia Farrow). Why stop at boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when we can just end the Olympic movement!

Who cares for weeks of spectator sports most viewers will never practice, and the mere viewing of which is even more harmful to health. Why support a movement fueled by corporate endorsement of drugs-abusing spoiled, isolated monsters whose entire lives have revolved around celebrity and abuse of their own bodies? Why support a movement that allows governments to build worthless infrastructure with public money, and then forces tax-payers to alter their life's for weeks to cater to foreigners for the governments' benefit?

It's not that I agree with Beijing's human rights abuses, or its Sudan policy. It's that the reason Beijing, and other developing states, want to host an Olympics is, to justify building infrastructure.

«It's like approaching the Forbidden City, it's absolutely incredible.» The adjective is one that Mouzhan Majidi, chief executive of Foster + Partners, liberally attaches to Beijing's new airport terminal, designed by his British firm. The world's largest, designed in the gently sinuous form of a Chinese dragon, it was planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers. «The columns on the outside are red and you see them marching for miles and miles,» says Mr Majidi.

A little hyperbole is understandable. The terminal is 3km (1.8 miles) long. The floor space is 17% bigger than all the terminals at London's Heathrow combined (including about-to-open Terminal Five). Chinese officials like the Forbidden City analogy. Just as the towering vermilion walls and golden roofs of the imperial palace inspire visitors with awe, China wants its golden-roofed terminal to impress those arriving for the Olympic games in August. Part of a $3.8 billion expansion, which included the opening of a third runway in October, it is due to open on February 29th, weeks ahead of schedule.

(…)

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing's third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents. Beijing is now planning a second airport (even with Mr Majidi's terminal, the current airport is expected to exceed its designed capacity of 60m passengers this year, seven years before schedule). The location is being considered in secret. Xu Li, an official at the Ministry of Communications' transport research institute, agrees that China's infrastructure expansion is not as restrained by rules as it is in America. Once a plan is made, it is executed. «Democracy», she says, «sacrifices efficiency.»

An often heavy-handed approach to land appropriation also helps. For Beijing's airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and their more than 10,000 residents resettled nearby. But several of the former farmers told your correspondent that they were still barred from the unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges of city dwellers even though their farmland had been grabbed from them. One elderly man said that officials had threatened them with violence if they refused to leave their villages.

(…)

A show-off tendency among Chinese urban planners (as well as a dire lack of suburban rail networks) has helped to fuel a rapid expansion of costly underground railways. In some cases, says the World Bank, this is diverting resources away from urgent needs in the bus systems. Two decades ago only two cities, Beijing and Tianjin, had subways (and only three lines between them). Now 15 cities are building them at a total cost of tens of billions of dollars. Beijing and Shanghai are leading the way, spurred on by their desire to impress the world at the Olympic games and, in Shanghai's case, the World Expo which it will host in 2010. Beijing's official Olympics website displays a story saying that the city will have the biggest underground network in the world by 2015.

Such abuse is not limited to Beijing, or even East Asian autocracies.

• For the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, 720,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes and homeless people were rounded up and detained in facilities outside the city, the report said.
• Leading up to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, more than 400 families were displaced to make room for the Olympic Village, 20 families were evicted from the site of the Olympic stadium and 200 other families were displaced for the construction of ring roads. Housing prices and rents increased 139 and 149 percent respectively during the six-year period before the games and the lack of affordable housing forced low-income earners out of the city.
• For the 1996 Atlanta Games, some 30,000 poor residents were displaced due to gentrification.About 2,000 public housing units were demolished. Legislation was introduced to criminalize homelessness, the report said.
• Legislative measures also were introduced ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics to simplify the expropriation of private property. Hundreds of Roma were evicted from their settlements. Homeless people were also locked up and stuck in mental hospitals
• Because the main sporting complex for the 2000 Sydney Games was built on surplus government wasteland, no one was directly evicted or displaced for those games. But the city's gentrification led to house prices more than doubling between 1996 and 2003. Rents soared 40 percent, forcing many to move to the city's fringe.

In short, the real human rights abuse is not just Beijing, but the Olympics itself. Even The Economist has to admit, that the modern Olympic movement has never lived up to its own hype:

Lofty words are always a hostage to fortune. The Olympic movement boasts that the games «have always brought people together in peace to respect universal moral principles.» Yet history suggests otherwise. Boycotts marred the jamborees of 1956, 1976, 1980 and 1984. In 1968 two American sprinters gave a Black Power salute on the podium. The 1972 games were blighted when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes.

It's not as if athletes will miss opportunities for competition, or corporations for advertising. World Cups are just as prestigious, and incur their own abuse (that will be the next boycott!). But, if we want to use the Olympics to make a one-time statement about Sudan, then why not take the extra effort and avoid future abuse on a two-year rotating schedule?

The African nation of Malawi has flipped from Taiwan to PRC, but at least its foreign minister was honest. " 'We have decided to switch from Taiwan to mainland China after careful consideration of the benefits that we will be getting from mainland China,' " Joyce Banda, minister for foreign affairs, said Monday in the capital, Lilongwe."

Taiwan's hopes of maintaining that relationship were dealt a blow when Taipei said it could not match a Chinese offer to provide it with $6 billion in aid. Malawi is one of Africa's poorest countries.

Banda, the foreign minister, said she did not know how much money China would ultimately donate to Malawi. She said projects financed by Taiwan, including a highway that extends to the border with Zambia, were discussed with China and would not be affected by the change in diplomatic relations.

I guess roads are just too lowly a task for Beijing!

A remarkable «Discussion about Counterinsurgency on The Charlie Rose Show. Two scholars, Sarah Sewall and Montgomery McFate take credit for their contributions to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and offer further commentary on Iraq and Sudan. Both praise the US military organization's adaptation to the counterinsurgency model and caution that «the American way of war» will probably never recur. Both bemoan how American political leadership lags the military leadership's ability to understand and accept local conditions outside of American standards. Sewall for her part also cautioned about how to minimize the consequences of withdrawal in Iraq, and how little the counterinsurgency model might apply to that war. Finally, there is the hope American political and military leadership will not evaluate the counterinsurgency model based on the failures in Iraq.

A must-view interview!

Yes, that's right! Pirates. The US Navy can do a job and entertain.

Lost Nomad's Gar recounts the thrilling tale of how the USS James E. Williams helped North Koreans to retake their ship. But, the dastardly pirates are winning, it seems.

The U.S. Navy said on Tuesday coalition naval forces belonging to Combined Task Force 150 had pursued the pirates into Somali waters and opened fire, destroying speedboats the seized vessel had in tow that were used in the raid.

«CTF-150 responded to a distress call from the tanker Golden Nory, warning shots were fired and the skiffs in tow were engaged and sunk,» a spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet said by telephone from Bahrain.

There were no reports of any casualties. He said coalition forces had opened fire in the Gulf of Aden.

«The operation is ongoing (to recover the ship) and there are indications a number of pirates are still on board,» the spokesman said, adding that a number of battleships were in the area.

Mwangura said the Golden Nory was carrying the inflammable and toxic chemical, benzene, and was being held off the northern Somali province of Puntland.

Still, for my tax money, in a debate about how the US should spend its defense dollars, I'd take Robert D. Kaplan's argument.

A great navy is like oxygen: You notice it only when it is gone. But the strength of a nation’s sea presence, more than any other indicator, has throughout history often been the best barometer of that nation’s power and prospects. â€ūThose far-distant storm-beaten ships upon which [Napoleon’s] Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world,â€? Mahan wrote, describing how the British Royal Navy had checked Napoleon’s ambitions. In our day, carrier strike groups, floating in international waters only a few miles off enemy territory, require no visas or exit strategies. Despite the quagmire of Iraq, we remain the greatest outside power in the Middle East because of our ability to project destructive fire from warships in the Indian Ocean and its tributary waters such as the Persian Gulf. Our sea power allows us to lose a limited war on land without catastrophic consequences. The Navy, together with the Air Force, constitutes our insurance policy. The Navy also plays a crucial role as the bus driver for most of the Army’s equipment, whenever the Army deploys overseas.

Army units can’t forward-deploy anywhere in significant numbers without a national debate. Not so the Navy. Forget the cliché about the essence of the Navy being tradition; I’ve spent enough time with junior officers and enlisted sailors on Pacific deployments to know that the essence of our Navy is operations: disaster relief, tracking Chinese subs, guarding sea-lanes, and so forth. American sailors don’t care what the mission is, as long as there is one, and the farther forward the better. The seminal event for the U.S. Navy was John Paul Jones’s interdiction of the British during the Revolutionary War—which occurred off Yorkshire, on the other side of the Atlantic. During the quasi-war that President John Adams waged against France from 1798 to 1800, U.S. warships protected American merchant vessels off what is today Indonesia. American warships operated off North Africa in the First Barbary War of 1801 to 1805. The War of 1812 found the Navy as far down the globe as the coast of Brazil and as far up as the North Cape of Scandinavia. Peter Swartz, an expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, observes that because operating thousands of miles from home ports is so ingrained in U.S. naval tradition, no one thinks it odd that even the Coast Guard has ships in service from Greenland to South America.

Great navies help preserve international stability. When the British navy began to decline, the vacuum it left behind helped engender the competition among major powers that led to World War I. After the U.S. Navy was forced to depart Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992, piracy quintupled in the Southeast Asian archipelago—which includes one of the world’s busiest waterways, the Strait of Malacca. In an age when 90 percent of global commerce travels by sea, and 95 percent of our imports and exports from outside North America do the same (even as that trade volume is set to double by 2020), and when 75 percent of the world’s population is clustered within 200 miles of the sea, the relative decline of our Navy is a big, dangerous fact to which our elites appear blind.

Norman Polmar points out an alternative to producing 12 of the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.

While aircraft carriers have proved to be invaluable for U.S. military operations, from the Korean War through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, today many of their traditional missions can be carried out as effectively and possibly more so in some scenarios by other «systems.» These mission areas include strike, reconnaissance, and anti-submarine warfare.

At the same time that the cost of carriers is increasing and the carrier force is below the authorized level of 12 ships, Navy shipbuilding programs are coming under increased congressional and executive branch scrutiny as the littoral combat ship (LCS), new amphibious ships (LPD), and some other ships are suffering massive cost overruns. It is unlikely that - with an average shipbuilding budget of $11 billion planned for the foreseeable future - the Navy will be able to afford building to the current goal of 313 ships. The Navy now operates about 279 ships.

The world situation for the foreseeable future will see a need for additional «carriers» to support U.S. political-military interests.

An alternative to constructing «the next» large CVN-type ship is to procure additional LHA/LHD-type amphibious ships. These VSTOL/helicopter carriers, which can operate the new F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, could carry out some mission that traditionally required a large-deck ship. The LHA/LHD-type ships, of some 40,000 tons full-load displacement, can carry some 1,700 troops for sustained periods as well as operating about 40 VSTOLs and helicopters. These «amphibs» - currently in production - cost about $2.5 billion per ship.

Large-deck carriers are important, but it is unlikely that the U.S. Navy will be able to afford the planned 12 ships or even maintain the current 11 carriers. Alternatives must be considered.

The Navy should get the money. At least it knows how to entertain Americans, assist diplomacy, and not pour dollars and blood into the sand.

As three Talibs brag about how much evil South Korean ransom buys (via Lost Nomad), South Korean hostages not fortunate enough to be kidnapped in Afghanistan or to be recruited from a rich congregation in Seoul, have languished in limbo since May, 2007.

Of course unlike the 23 Christian missionaries and Kim-Sun-il for that matter, the 4 Koreans in Somalia aren?t getting that much media attention, and as a result the Korean government may have decided to ?forget? about the hostages and hope that the problem will go away.

Rather than a matter of public support for dumb evangelicals, perhaps it's cost-benefit analysis. It's a matter of how to use taxpayer won most wisely. Four sailors just can't give Seoul the sort of anti-American bang for the won - that keeps on killing - blundering into a Muslim battlefront can.

I decided to lump these three Taiwan-related posts compiled by Michael Turton together:

1. Calling Beijing's «Neo-Colonial» Africa policy what it is:

On one hand, I think any petroleum-importing state ridiculing another is just rich, since, in the absence of a sensible global energy policy, it's just a grab bag free for all. There's really no difference between Taipei and Beijing on the ends, but African states are wise to consider the pros and cons of economic cooperation and diplomatic recognition of either state. The more Taiwan, or pundits, make of Taiwan's right to compete against Beijing, the more the overall system becomes antagonistic.

On the other hand, Beijing's inflated rhetoric deserves ridicule just for its own sake.

2. Why the UN doesn't deserve respect:

Mike in Taipei's long list of grievances against the UN features Taiwan as a slighted suitor. I would only include Iraq and Iran as two UN responsibilities that are driving nails into its coffin.

But, I would argue the UN has done its job: stabilizing the post-WW2 order that FDR argued would require 60 years.

3. Education in Taiwan:

I intentionally avoid most discussions of ESL education, or education in general, in East Asia, because of strict libel laws in the ROK. Also, my blog is just a refuge for me from work. But, Michael Turton makes some points applicable to the ROK:

What is the function of all this advancement? First, it is important to stop thinking about Taiwanese education as education. Education means enhancement where Mark and I come from, but education in Taiwan is not an enhancement process, it is a weeding out process. In Taiwan we should stop thinking about education and start thinking about competition. The work is piled on at the beginning, in order to weed out the weak and the inferior and the lazy. This reaches a crescendo in the high schools: but notice the colleges - they are nowhere near as good as their counterparts in the US. How can it be that such great kids in elementary school produce such awful colleges? People forget that the educational system is a system - it starts in kindergarten and extends through the PHD programs. The US system, which does not exist to weed out kids, sensibly distributes its tasks throughout the school years.

In this vein (and, I think this observation is well-put), I would argue that it's not that sadism of this «weeding out» that is at issue, but the future of those who are abandoned. I think a globalized world puts a premium on the contributions of each and every student, and every adult later on. The issue here, then, is how does the political and economic system allow those who fail to make a living and contribute to society later. I would argue that South Korean, or Taiwanese society, fails in that respect.