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International crises will just have to wait until 2009

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

In the din of the U.S. long political season of clashing ideological, ethnic, regional, economic and trivial issues, it becomes increasingly clear that without a major unanticipated crisis – a rather unrealistic assumption in itself – much of Washington’s decision-making, and therefore the world’s, is on hold until early 2009. Not a few if not most of those strategic conundrums are in Asia.

Unfortunately that militates for a deepening of many of the threats to peace and stability that need attention.

Nor is there much predicting how a new Administration in Washington once elected would move on many of these issues. Yes, as his critics charge, a John McCain Administration would be more likely to pick up where the late if not the early George W. Bush policies left off. But that doesn’t tell us much in these last months of that Administration as it backtracks on so many of its earlier seeming fundamentals. Would a Hillary Clinton Administration simply be Bill Clinton redux, although it is hard to see the next secretary of state approaching the North Korean disarmament issue only with another of Madeleine Albright’s dances with Kim Il Sung or tossing an occasional missile at Osama Bin Laden? Would a Barack Obama White House, indeed, look like another John F. Kennedy’s court of naïve and theorizing academics or veer more in the direction of the tattered Old and New Left tendencies which seem to form his apprentice’s worldview?

But as noted earlier here, the world won’t stand still for the American political circus, however entertaining for the cognicenti abroad as it is for the home viewers.

The arrival of a shipload of its weapons in South Africa destined for troubled Zimbabwe has alerted the world, again, to the reckless Beijing pursuit of presumed self interest – oil – in Africa. That drive increasingly seems to characterize the Chinese regime’s policies based on growing hubris and corruption. Yet more important one has to wonder at the judgment of Chinese Communist geopoliticians who apparently believe that ownership of oil in Sudan is to solve what they appear to consider their growing security problem of hydrocarbon imports. In fact, getting those resources to Chinese ports resides with the security afforded on sealanes by the U.S. Navy. In the meantime, it complicates even more the attempt to reach peace and stability in one of the most violent regions of the world.

The skyrocketing price of rice and other foodstuffs in China as in much of the rest of Asia [as indeed food is rising too in the U.S. and Europe] is in large part of a failure of the Middle Kingdom and other newly successfully industrializing countries in the region to balance off agriculture development. A sudden ban on rice exports in India, for example, is not going to solve the problem of the lack of movement in most of its rural areas despite the substantial growth of GNP led by zooming exports, mostly to the U.S. A reexamination of biofuels policies in the U.S. and elsewhere which may have been the tipping point for what is turning into a world food crisis would have to wait out a new administration.

The recent appearance of new missiles in Iran – already capable of reaching some European targets – based largely on North Korean [and borrowed Chinese and Soviet] technology again demonstrates the complexity of problems in dealing with Pyongyang. They are as much the issue, that is proliferation of weaponry to pariah states, as North Korea’s own nuclear weapons effort. As always in arms control efforts, the devil is in the details: it is still unclear whether Washington and the other five members of the multilateral effort have not only failed to bring Kim to heel on his “known” weaponry, but there are no real assurances against a parallel enriched uranium effort as well as the plutonium derived bombs which were in the spotlight.

Washington’s success in encouraging Pakistan toward a more representative government through the same old discredited politicians has certainly in the short term only heightened the confusion and inability to tackle the frontier problem with Afghanistan. Negotiations with the tribals by civilian leaders – now backed with a generous American funding of an economic development program – isn’t likely to produce quick results. It ultimately faces the long-term problems a similar more modest strategy did for now civilian President Pervez Musharraf who still commands the loyalty, presumably, of the military, the only stabilizing force in the country but is a scapegoat for a feudal Pakistan class which does not want to relinquish real power.

Afghanistan represents not only a challenge for its own sake, whether it would again become a host for terrorists, but the test of NATO’s ability to project power and peace to areas which could indirectly threaten its security. Not only have Americans the memory of 9/11 coming out of Osama Ben Ladin’s lair in Afghainstan but the U.K. and Western Europe are increasingly aware of the training grounds for European Muslim natives converted to terrorism. Yet the fact that the Europeans do not want to pay the price for their commitment in Afghanistan could well undermine the authority and validity of the longest and most successful military alliance for peacekeeping in history.

Whether Iraq is the first line of defense against jihadist terrorists as the outgoing Bush Administration continues to maintain, it is clear that the stability and character of the Baghdad regime is essential for world security. If nothing else, its failure would again threaten much of the world’s fossil fuel supply, on which increasingly the world is dependent. Suggestions from critics on the campaign trail that the U.S. would be welcome as a fire brigade in the area were it to renege on its Iraq commitment is ridiculous on several counts. Thus whether Europeans are to continue to only kibitz and recriminate for what they see as Washington’s mistakes or contribute to the victory of democratic and peaceful forces there hangs in the air. And the process of getting European collaboration and contribution is more than his U.S. critics denouncing a perceived but absolutely bogus Bush unilateralism.

It appears clear that the good-cop, bad-cop routine of Washington and the Europeans to negotiate an end to Tehran’s ambitions for nuclear weapons is failing. The experience of such past scenarios is that the U.S. and even the scientific community has underestimated the time necessary to acquire weapons. But surely that moment is very close in political terms and the interregnum waiting for the generation of a new U.S. strategy is likely to speed it up if anything.

And last but not least, the world economy too suddenly appears in need of more integrated and effective policymaking if a major worldwide financial blowout and a resultant depression are not in the offing. The shell of a long desiccated Bretton Woods system lies in tatters. The world system is faced with an economic slowdown if not worse in the U.S., the generator for the world economy. That could be aggravated by overwhelming inflationary pressures from all directions -- everything from a growing American balance of payments debt and the recirculated credits it generates through extravagant foreign holdings, a resultant falling dollar leading to increasingly aggressive price hikes from the dollar-denominated raw materials producers, and food shortages.

How much all this will wait for January 2009 and after for attempted aggressive solutions is the question.

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