Tag: Geopolitics

China Gobbles Up the World’s Copper

China is prospecting for mineral treasures around the world as it develops faster than any major economy in history. Its copper use is growing so quickly that by 2035 global demand for the metal may outstrip supply by 11 million tons, according to CRU, a London-based mining and metals consulting firm.

More than half of China’s 1.3 billion people live in rural areas. Over the next 15 years, the country will need 50,000 skyscrapers, 170 mass transit systems and urban housing for 350 million people as it develops the interior, according to a 2009 study by the McKinsey Global Institute, a research arm of New York-based McKinsey & Co. That represents a potential doubling of the domestic market for autos, appliances, televisions and other consumer goods.

Copper—first smelted over wood fires 10,000 years ago—is at the center of it all, conveying the country’s electrical pulse and providing the nervous system for the computers, dishwashers and microwaves China makes for the world.

via China Boss in Peru on $50 Billion Peak Bought for $810 Million – BusinessWeek.

Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’

This was the “long leash”. The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its “fellow travellers” in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.

Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.Thanks to Caroline Collier

via Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’ – World, News – The Independent.

Iran’s Secular Dictatorship

The latest salvo, via a Web site called Mashanews run by Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, didn’t mince words. “Iran needs to remove the mullahs from power once for all,” it read, “and return to a great civilization without the Arab-style clerics who have tainted and destroyed the country for the past 31 years.” The executive branch’s current stance on the Shiite clergymen who have shaped Iranian politics since 1979 is summed up as, “din (religion) should be distinct from dowla (state).” Indeed, Ahmadinejad’s supporters have begun comparing him to King Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire who kept those two institutions separate.

The shift is based on the political realities in Tehran. Having survived the last election thanks to his allies in the civil bureaucracy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and the Basij paramilitary, Ahmadinejad now has little to fear from the mullahs and their supporters. So he has begun to insist that “the executive is the most important branch of government,” thereby challenging oversight by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Islamic political institutions.

WPR Article | Ahmadinejad’s Nationalist Attack on the Islamic Republic.

Here Comes The China Navy

China has the world’s second-largest naval service, after only the United States. Rather than purchase warships across the board, it is developing niche capacities in sub-surface warfare and missile technology designed to hit moving targets at sea. At some point, the U.S. Navy is likely to be denied unimpeded access to the waters off East Asia. China’s 66 submarines constitute roughly twice as many warships as the entire British Royal Navy. If China expands its submarine fleet to 78 by 2020 as planned, it would be on par with the U.S. Navy’s undersea fleet in quantity, if not in quality. If our economy remains wobbly while China’s continues to rise — China’s defense budget is growing nearly 10 percent annually — this will have repercussions for each nation’s sea power. And with 90 percent of commercial goods worldwide still transported by ship, sea control is critical.

The geographical heart of America’s hard-power competition with China will be the South China Sea, through which passes a third of all commercial maritime traffic worldwide and half of the hydrocarbons destined for Japan, the Korean Peninsula and northeastern China. The United States and others consider the South China Sea an international waterway; China considers it a “core interest.” Much like when the Panama Canal was being dug, and the United States sought domination of the Caribbean to be the preeminent power in the Western Hemisphere, China seeks domination of the South China Sea to be the dominant power in much of the Eastern Hemisphere.

via Robert D. Kaplan – While U.S. is distracted, China develops sea power.

Cuban Communism Faces the Unthinkable

The global financial crisis, and the $10 billion in damage inflicted by three hurricanes in 2008, have forced authorities to run a deficit of 5 percent of GDP, leaving them unable to pay back credits received from China and elsewhere. Cuba slashed spending on importing food and other basics by 34 percent to $9.6 billion in 2009, from $12.7 billion the previous year. But so far, the moves have not been enough to rein in the deficit.

President Raul Castro has startled the nation lately by saying about one in five Cuban workers may be redundant. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a Cuba economics expert and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, said Cuban officials have spent months debating cuts in the labor force and economic reforms. He said they know what’s needed, but face “a problem of political viability.”

Various government perks like cars, gas, uniforms and office supplies have become incentives to bloat the payroll, since they are based on the size of a company’s work force.

But low pay means low productivity. On Obispo street, a state-run cafeteria sells heavily subsidized soft ice cream and pork sandwiches for the equivalent of a few American pennies — meaning wages and tips are so tiny that the staff is complete indifferent toward customers. Three waiters sit at the counter cracking jokes. A fourth is the only one working, making coffee for three tables. Nearby, a cashier stares into space, a cook flirts with a scantily clad teen and a supervisor sits idly by.

Here, nearly everyone works for the state and official unemployment is minuscule, but pay is so low that Cubans like to joke that “the state pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.” –  monthly salaries worth only $20 a month on average.

via Jobless in Cuba? Communism faces the unthinkable – Yahoo! News.

China Grows Protectionist Alienating Business Supporters

In some ways, I do think the Chinese government has been pretty stupid over the past year in executing its “Pissing Off As Many Countries As Possible” strategy. China rankled the Europeans over its climate change diplomacy at Copenhagen. For all of Beijing’s bluster, it failed to alter U.S. policies on Tibet and Taiwan. It backed down on the Google controversy. It overestimated the power that comes with holding U.S. debt. It alienated South Korea and Japan over its handling of the Cheonan incident, leading to joint naval exercises with the United States — exactly what China didn’t want. It’s growing more isolated within the G-20. And, increasingly, no one trusts its economic data.

This doesn’t sound like a government that has executed a brilliant grand strategy. It sounds like a country that’s benefiting from important structural trends, while frittering away its geopolitical advantages. Alienating key supporters in the country’s primary export markets — and even if Chinese consumption is rising, exports still matter an awful lot to the Chinese economy — seems counterproductive to China’s long-term strategic and economic interests.

via Beijing has alienated the most pro-China interest groups in the United States and Europe | Daniel W. Drezner.

Natural Gas Replacing Oil Has Big Geopoltical Implications

The coal industry will not surrender the power sector without a fight. The gasification of transport, if it happens, could also take a less direct form, with cars fuelled by electricity generated from gas.

A gasified American economy would have profound effects on both international politics and the battle against climate change. Displacement of oil by natural gas would strengthen a trend away from crude in rich countries, where the IEA believes demand has already peaked as a result of the recent spike in oil prices. Another consequence of the energy market’s bull run, the unearthing of vast new supplies of gas, could bring further upheaval. If the past decade was characterised by the energy-security concerns of consumers, the coming years could give even the world’s powerful oil producers reason to worry, as a subterranean revolution shifts the geopolitics of global energy supply again.

via Natural gas: An unconventional glut | The Economist.

A Food Fight for Hugo Chavez

El Presidente’s efforts to transform his country into a Cuban-style socialist state are sputtering. With its vast oil wealth, Venezuela shouldn’t suffer from shortages, yet inefficient farms, government takeovers of supermarkets, and a 50% currency devaluation in January have thrown the food supply into disarray. Chávez’s approval rating among Venezuelans has dropped to about 45% from 70% three years ago.

Supplying low-cost food to the poor has been a centerpiece of Chávez’s presidency. He has expropriated food processors, stores, and more than 6 million acres of farms and ranches, convinced that the government can feed Venezuela better than the private sector does. Under state ownership, though, production has suffered. From 1999 to 2008, per capita, sugar cane was off by 8%, fruit declined by 25%, and beef production dropped by 38%, according to Carlos Machado, an expert in agriculture at the Institute of Higher Administrative Studies, a business school in Caracas. “The cooperatives have failed and our cattle ranching has been decimated,” Machado says.

In a poll by researcher DATOS 86% don’t think Cuba is an appropriate model for Venezuela. Chávez “is moving in the opposite direction from what people say they want for their country,” says DATOS director Joseph Saade. “People look at everything the government has taken over and they’re seeing that the companies have become dysfunctional.”

via A Food Fight for Hugo Chavez – BusinessWeek.

Wiil China Develop Like US or Japan Did?

Is China like the US in 1890? Or is it more like Japan in 1980? If the parallel with America is right, China is likely to be the dominant power of the next century. If the Japanese comparison is more accurate, then the Chinese challenge to American hegemony could prove ephemeral.

The current mood in the US certainly feels like an exaggerated version of the “declinism” that set in towards the end of the 1980s, when the US was transfixed by the rise of Japan. A recent Pew opinion survey showed that a majority of Americans now believe that the Chinese economy is larger than that of the US. This is plain wrong. At the time the poll was taken, the Chinese economy was around half the size of America’s.

It was this kind of scare that took hold in the late 1980s. Japanese investors provoked angst by buying the Rockefeller Centre in New York – and it was Japan that was the world’s largest creditor nation. Continue reading “Wiil China Develop Like US or Japan Did?”

Moderate Muslim Leaders Beat Extremists

In 2005 a man of wisdom and moderation, King Abdullah, formally ascended to the throne and inaugurated a large-scale political and intellectual effort aimed at discrediting the ideology of jihadism. Mullahs were ordered to denounce suicide bombings, and violence more generally. Education was pried out of the hands of the clerics. Terrorists and terror suspects were “rehabilitated” through extensive programs of education, job training, and counseling. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus said to me, “The Saudi role in taking on Al Qaeda, both by force but also using political, social, religious, and educational tools, is one of the most important, least reported positive developments in the war on terror.”

Perhaps the most successful country to combat jihadism has been the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia. In 2002 that country seemed destined for a long and painful struggle with the forces of radical Islam. The nation was rocked by terror attacks, and a local Qaeda affiliate, Jemaah Islamiah, appeared to be gaining strength. But eight years later, JI has been marginalized and main-stream political parties have gained ground, all while a young democracy has flowered after the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship.

Moderate Muslim Leaders Beat Extremists – Newsweek.com.