A Second Hand Conjecture

You know you’re in an American recession when British observers start reflecting on the inevitability of American decline, and volunteering their allegedly privileged perspective gained from the fall of the British Empire (Mark Steyn, as always, excepted). So it is that Matthew Parris joins an old tradition and writes this of the incoming Obama administration:

Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline.
(The Times)

It should still be within our memory of course, that it was widely believed that Richard Nixon held this dubious distinction in 1968. Indeed, Nixon himself believed it, and his assessment that the United States had passed into decline informed almost all of his foreign policies. Mr. Parris’ countryman, the historian and strategist Paul Kennedy, had thought even more seriously on this issue and concluded in 1987 that the apex of American power had been reached in the 1970s, after which the United States had passed into another ultimately nonexistent long-term decline.

Retrospectively, this is all rather embarrassing. The United States is naturally vastly more powerful today than it was in the 1960s or 1970s, and the structure which enabled those gains commercially, socially and politically, remains unassailed. Given past experience, it’s entirely likely in coming years that we will feel similarly embarrassed by the current declinism.

But Mr. Parris is obliquely correct on one matter though:

Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country’s fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.
(The Times)

The experience of Nixon –pursuing policies to cushion the fall of an America which was just beginning to scale new heights– might suggest that it doesn’t really matter what Obama thinks. But if Americans themselves genuinely started to believe in their impending decline, and shelved their ambitions in favor of the crowded retirement home of great powers, they could actualize the prediction.

As with American greatness in light of her continental scale, vast and growing labor force, enormous capital resources and limitless dreams, a prophecy of American decline is largely contingent on whether or not Americans can be persuaded to self-fulfill it. If they cannot, that faint light on the horizon is another dawn, not an inevitable sunset. After all, the retirement home for the false futurists of American decline is an even more crowded house.

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(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

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Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni (of Rogue Economics fame), blames the lingering financial crisis in part on the American War on Terrorism, which inaugurated an allegedly “suspicious attitude…toward Muslim investors.” She goes further though, and argues that the only solution to the turmoil lies in embracing the financial rules mandated by the doctrines of medieval Islamic Sharia:

Islamic finance is a system based in shariah law. Central principals include a prohibition against charging interest and a code of ethics for investments – for example, barring investments in prostitution. Napoleoni said these principals are actually quite similar to the principles of classical economics.

“A bank should be a profit organization, but the moment in which the social role is forgotten and the profit role takes over, then a bank is actually working against the people who are putting their money into the bank, the clients. Now that, of course, in Islamic finance could not happen, because there is this partnership between the client and the banks. There is a social commitment within finance which we had before, but we lost it.”
(UNM)

Makes sense. When you’re looking for lessons in the administration of an advanced, adaptive, and sophisticated modern financial system, clearly we have a lot to learn from economic titans like Yemen. Lately financial sharia in that country has produced a permanently premodern economy with 40 times the population of Vermont, subsisting on about 80% of Vermont’s annual GSP. Sounds like a good deal to me.

(more…)

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(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)

In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.

So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.

Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors. (more…)

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Russia wants Saakashvili gone and then categorically rejects the French ceasefire agreement Saakashvili signed. Even while the increasingly uncomfortable Medvedev says they’re all but finished with military operations. The humiliating exposure of Medvedev’s “presidency” is one of the more comical aspects of this episode.

Putin, the master of I’m-not-you-are school of geopolitical disputation, accuses the US of a “Cold War mentality.” I would agree, of course it does tend to happen when you start acting like the Soviet Union.

He’s also rather upset that the United States flew the Georgian contingent home from Iraq. Quite literally, the absolute least we could do. One gets the feeling that an IBM sales office in Tbilisi would constitute unwarranted American influence in Georgia for Putin.

And…Estonia “the other plucky”, speaks:

‘Russia’s military strikes in Georgia toll a knell for many of Europe’s hopes, such as the possibility of sharing common fundamental values with Russia,’ Toomas Sildam said Ilves told the European Union’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana on Sunday.
(Forbes)

Enough to turn you green.

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of victims of the Terror recounting their experiences at the hands of the secret police. The levity that many exhibit in revisiting the systematic decimation of human dignity they experienced, is the ageless strength of Russia as a nation. The inhuman brutality they describe, is the curse of that great and unfortunate nation’s state.

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Francis Fukuyama chats with Robert Kagan on a number of interesting things: Flash | WMV | MP3 (via: The American Interest).

Of immediate interest is Kagan’s notion that the the emergence of global multipolarity induces an imperfect, baseline bipolarity of ideological division in diplomacy, between the West and the surging authoritarians of the “New East.”

In the opening minutes, Fukuyama argues that while the recent diplomatic concord on Zimbabwe between China and Russia might suggest this, the two reborn Eastern powers have certain fundamental divisions of world-view which impact alliance structure, due to their historical relationship to power. He argues that China has traditionally perceived itself as a kind of destination for power and politics. The mandate of heaven makes China the imperial center of the universe, of which the rest of the world can only envy in political sinocentrism.

Whereas Russia –increasingly animated today by Soviet nostalgia– may again begin to see itself as a kind of departure point for power and politics. In Russia at least there is a political tradition of the country serving as a aggressive universalist tutor for the developing world. Perhaps Moscow could even perceive itself in the way Lenin saw the role of Russia in the context of international revolution. Lenin after all, went so far as to argue that the Soviet Union could not survive absent a world revolution driven by his exportable political principles.

In essence, Fukuyama seems to be wondering whether Russia could be an internationalist while China remains a nationalist,with both representing not dissimilar models for authoritarian power, but presumably finding difficulty in unified action at the United Nations and elsewhere.

(more…)

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The impact of this man on the world is not part of the memory of many today. I’ll be breaking out a few of his books this week in his memory. A true Giant has passed away.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of fiction and history written in the 20th century, died late Sunday in Russia, his son Yermolai said early Monday in Moscow. He said the cause was a heart condition. He was 89.

He outlived by nearly 17 years the state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly, he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.

Over the next four decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.”

“Gulag” was a monumental account and analysis of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

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In much of the former Soviet Union, urban heating is still managed at the block rather than per-building level. This is causing some protest from a population growing accustomed to a new ethos of individual convenience. Something we’ve always taken for granted in the the largely non-centrally planned West.

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Isn’t it unfortunate when a truly awful movie has a truly .

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Fabulous of scenes in the Soviet Union in 1983. From the author: “We entered Moscow with a tourist visa, a tiny super8 camera, b/w film material and a nice piece of hashish. we wanted to know how Moscow did look like off the red square parades.”

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The tomb of Jonas Savimbi in Moxico has been looted by graverobbers. A number of items were stolen including his bronze epitaph. A bit of a sad addendum for the former US ally and UNITA leader who had battled the Soviet and Cuban backed MPLA for decades in the Angolan Civil War, but in the end was unable to stop his own ferocious impulse for the permanent war he’d know for most of life. Even when offered the Vice Presidency of the country for peace in 1998.

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Some are scary, some aren’t. The last one is pretty terrifying.

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With the red stars back on the MiGs, criticism of the government illegal and dissident arrests again in fashion, Soviet reversion is all the rage in Russia. Jim Hill revealed a couple of days ago that apparently Disney is in for the show, having dusted off old plans for a Soviet pavilion at Epcot Center from the early 1990s. That project was of course shelved when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the cycles of Russian history have once again aligned for another ill-advised go at it. This time around of course, the pavilion will advertise the new and “democratic” Russian Federation with the Putin government’s enthusiastic endorsement (and financing?).

Although for me it’s not clear anything would need be changed from the original plan. With its distinctly pre-socialist-modernist architecture, the conceptual designs for the planned 1990s USSR edition looked decidedly more 18th century Tsarist than 20th century Marxist-Leninist anyway. To capture the true spirit of the times, a better and more accurate Soviet pavilion plan would have been a gigantic, grimy, ferro-concrete apartment block with unlighted halls, a pervasive scent of urine and rotting cabbage reeking from the floors, and machine gunners awaiting your attempt at an exit.

But it occurs to me that Disney could save itself the risk of another potential cancellation by making two Russian pavilions (and you would only need two). Call them the Freeze pavilion and the Thaw pavilion. You could begin with the Freeze edition today and when Putin’s authoritarianism inevitably passes out of fashion, it could be temporarily closed and the Thaw exhibit opened. As the well-known and long-running cycles of Russian history attest, these two pavilions would cover the entirety of any future developments in Russia for all time. Just a thought.

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