Tag: Geopolitics

Globilization’s Religious Revival

Here’s the indisputable reality: All of the world’s major religions were formed during the Malthusian era of human economics, before the Industrial Revolution shifted Western societies from a subsistence paradigm to questions of how to deal with abundance.

Survival economies demand a strict code, but abundance offers a choice: Do I adapt the ancient rules to this economic liberation or do I reject it as a socially driven moral evil?

Once the “go forth and multiply” logic is disrupted, then long-held strictures regarding marriage, family, sex, homosexuality, and other social institutions are suddenly put in jeopardy. This is where globalization’s economic connectivity generates revolutionary social change, unleashing personal freedom that by historical standards is stunning — even perverse.

The upside, of course, is the commensurate unleashing of personal creativity and innovation, something we’ll need in superabundance for the many resource-utilization challenges that lie ahead.

Globalization divides societies into short-term economic winners and losers, for the simple fact that some people adapt faster than others. The temptation for those who come out on the losing end is an end-times ideology that promises deliverance from these unacceptable circumstances. Such fundamentalism pursued peacefully presents no problem. The faithful simply live apart from the “evil world.”

This is how religion’s fundamentalist variants came to replace communism as the worldwide organizing principle for violent resistance to capitalism’s continued evolution and expansion around the planet.

via WPR Article | The New Rules: West Must Bridge Globalization’s ‘God Gap’.

Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!

About a quarter of the world's economic output is produced by the United States, whose population is less than a fourth of China's 1.3 billion. So there's a very long way to catch up for a country beset by a variety of Third World problems, from lack of paved roads in many rural areas to water pollution so severe that 700 million people have to drink contaminated water every day, according to the World Bank.

via Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!- International Business-News-The Economic Times.

How America Can Rise Again

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.

via How America Can Rise Again – The Atlantic (January/February 2010).

Some in Congress Get Smart on Iran

Beyond smarter sanctions, though, the US needs to start exercising smart power in Iran. This means identifying areas in which our current policies are counterproductive — and getting out of our own way. For example, the world recognized what a crucial role social media services like Twitter and Facebook played in the events in Iran this summer, yet current US sanctions actually prohibit Americans from providing Internet communications software to the Iranian people. Microsoft and Google have both shut down instant messenger services because their programs are enabled by a download not authorized for export to Iran under US law. The same can be said for anti-surveillance software that allows Iranian users to surf the web free of government spying.

Just this summer, the Senate authorized $20 million for the development of software and other programs that allow users in Iran to bypass government censorship and monitoring efforts. But current laws still prohibit an American from sending these programs to Iran!

Did you know that after one of Iran’s most terrible natural disasters — the 2003 earthquake in Bam that killed over 25,000 people — the Iranian government sought advice from American engineers to reinforce thousands of primary schools around the country to make them more earthquake-proof? Sadly, that type of assistance was deemed “dual-use” under US sanctions, and the Americans were barred from making the trip. –Patrick Disney – Assistant Policy Director at the National Iranian American Council

via Patrick Disney: Some in Congress Get Smart on Iran.

Don’t Get Giddy About China

There is a Russian proverb that says our fate plays out on the exact path we take to avoid it. This is the story of China in a nutshell. Policy makers have accumulated forex reserves in large part to avoid a balance of payments crisis, and yet the massive reserve accumulation has meant a parallel accumulation of high-powered money and an epic credit expansion over not just the past year, but over the past four or five leading to dangerous asset and credit bubbles manifesting throughout China’s real economy and financial markets.

Chinese policymakers appear to be trying to spur private consumption by building out social safety nets. While better social safety nets are an important and positive development, the fundamental answer for policy makers to improve the allocation of capital (and in so doing to shift China Inc. away from its export/production orientation to a more sustainable consumption driven model) is only going to come from a combination of four key policy initiatives, in order of importance:
·         Interest rate liberalization
·         Exchange rate regime liberalization
·         Major reform liberalization in the service sector, especially in financial / banking sector, which is currently dominated by state players.
·         Liberalization of rural land ownership rules.
None of these is likely to happen soon, unfortunately, given the political reality – even in a one-party country like China – that it is difficult to implement tough-medicine reforms during a period of global economic stress, and this is especially true for President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao as the country gets closer to its next leadership transition cycle in 2012.

If I am wrong about the bearish scenario for China above, I think it will be because I am too optimistic. A possible worst-case scenario is that the bursting of China’s credit bubble leads to a second-wave global credit crisis and a freeze in global financial markets no matter what the People’s Bank of China or the US Federal Reserve does to reflate markets – and we get a classic global liquidity trap scenario and a major debt-deflation Great Depression redux.

via Asia Sentinel – Don’t Get Giddy About China.

As the World Turns

Even though the waning of American hegemony can be clearly seen on the horizon, the fundamental reality is that it’s a long way off. China’s economy is basically only Japan-sized, and the country faces massive challenges starting with the fact that the majority of the population is still impoverished peasant farmers. India is even worse off. Japan is in demographic decline. Europe isn’t an actual country and can’t really make foreign-policy decisions.

In other words, our power is slipping away, but only very slowly.

via As the World Turns | The American Prospect.

Can Russia Modernize?

Putin is the tsar. He has both money — the government’s budget and the oligarchs’ fortunes — and the coercive power of the state firmly in his hand. He is the arbiter at the top and the trouble-shooter in social conflicts below. His most precious resource is his personal popularity, which adds a flavor of consent to his authoritarian regime.

But none of that is good enough. The 75 percent of Russians who make up the Putin majority are essentially passive and seek only the preservation of a paternalistic state. Putin can sit comfortably on their support, but he cannot ride forward with it. The best and brightest are not there.

Enter Medvedev. His Internet-surfing, compassionate and generally liberal image helps recruit a key constituency — those beyond the reach of Putin himself — to Putin’s plan. They include the country’s most apolitical citizens and its brainy, techy youth. Whether the plan succeeds is another matter.

via The Kremlin Two-Step | Opinion | The Moscow Times.

Cracks in the Jihad

Today, the holy war is set to slip into three distinct ideological and organizational niches.

The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe, fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.

Al Qaeda’s altered design has a number of immediate consequences. The global jihad is losing what David Galula called a strong cause, and with it its political character. This change is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish jihad from organized crime on the one side and rudderless fanaticism on the other. This calls into question the notion that war is still, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of politics by other means,” and therefore whether it can be discontinued politically. Second, coerced by adversaries and enabled by the Internet, the global jihadi movement has dismantled and disrupted its own ability to act as one coherent entity. No leader is in a position to articulate the movement’s will, let alone enforce it. It is doubtful, to quote Clausewitz again, whether war can still be “an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.” And because jihad has no single center of gravity, it has no single critical vulnerability. No matter what the outcome of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and other places, a general risk of terrorist attacks will persist for the foreseeable future.

via Cracks in the Jihad.

How America Can Rise Again

Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future. – by James Fallows

via How America Can Rise Again – The Atlantic (January/February 2010).

From September 2001 To June 2009 – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

This is a deep struggle in the Muslim soul – a struggle to come to terms with its own sectarian past, the bloodiness of some of its scriptures, and the real and present threat of modernity as it crashes down on their medieval order with the power of technology they cannot control.

This process will take time, and Americans’ well-meant determination to fix this state of affairs is, however understandable, naive. The arc of history is far slower than our 24-hour news cycle or our ADD blog-posting. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism at this moment of technological marvel and global integration is an utterly predictable phenomenon, and it will not end soon. And when it does end, it will do so by collapsing under its own lies and delusions and denial, just as communism did. We can do a little to nudge this along, but we cannot be the decisive force – or we will merely reignite the civiliizational conflict. Maybe a hot war is inevitable. But if it is, it is essential to our civilization and its core values that we do not initiate it. If Iraq did not convince us of that, nothing will.

I believe that the election of Obama and the Green Revolution in Iran were signs that the next generation understands the magnitude of this crisis and are seeking a new way to overcome it. I believe that in my heart and soul. Which is why I found those events as inspiring as they are now imperiled.

via From September 2001 To June 2009 – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.