A Second Hand Conjecture

Iraq is buying 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks, along with wide range of other conventional hardware, as it prepares to shift its focus from internal security to defending the borders in a very hostile neighborhood. Iran, in case you’re wondering, can field approximately 1600 tanks, but mostly of the Soviet iron heap variety that the M1 annihilated in the Gulf War.

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(photo: 2 Dogs)

Modern China has a curious capacity to make otherwise very sensible capitalists instantly forget every experience they’ve ever had with government central planning. The Western businessman on a trip to Shanghai looks up and sees all those gleaming skyscrapers going up on the Yangtze, and he thinks massive state planning must be different somehow in the People’s Republic. It isn’t.

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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.

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What would have happened if in the 1960s you’d given every Soviet citizen his own printing press and free access to a global publishing distribution network? Couldn’t have good for the Politburo is my thinking. Thus it’s profoundly encouraging reading Magda Abu-Fadil on the explosion of blogging and social networking in the Arab world.

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Sober, secular and educated new residents to New Mexico can often be found painting the frames of their doors and windows a vivid bright blue. Having seen the habit practiced on the homes of locals, the newcomers invariably assume it’s a quaint regional decorative touch. They’re unaware of course that the locals have painted their frames the color of the Virgin, and the purpose isn’t decoration, but defense.

In superstitious, Catholic New Mexico, the Virgin’s color is believed to prevent the nomadic witches that prowl the streets at night from entering the house and murdering its inhabitants. Such is the manner in which old and very sinister traditions can be unknowingly perpetuated by people who have no interest in original intents.

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Over the last ten years, Russia has emerged from one of the unfortunate victims of the 1998 financial crisis to become a strong, almost fearsomely assertive country. Much of this is thanks to Vladimir Putin, a man who has won and maintained near mythical popularity by doing his best to “make Russia strong.” While this has resulted in a steady erosion of civil liberties, health indicators, rural development, and stalled overall GDP growth, his popularity even after relinquishing the Presidency remains as high as ever. Why is this? Anna Politkovskaya—one of the many journalists whose murder in Russia will never be solved—pondered this in her 2004 opus Putin’s Russia; four years later, Steve LeVine uses her book as a sort of jumping off point to more fully investigate the depths to which Russia has sunk.

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Video of Robert Amsterdam speaking at the University of Illinois about the political-symbolic nature of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s prosecution for fraud in 2005. The transformation of the Khodorkovsky trial into a grotesque perversion of justice is enormously revealing about the nature of the Russia Putin has made. That’s because the government had good evidence against him, and because Khodorkovsky was a person who aroused little public sympathy, having profited enormously from shady dealings during the hardships of the immediate post-Soviet privatization era. Yet these are the lengths to which a state goes when its purposes are not the enforcement of the law, but the creation of a new political order designed specifically to deliberately subvert it.

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