Tag Archives: geopolitics

my proposal to reform the United Nations Security Council

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Most of this article in National Interest (which I’m not too familar with) is an opinion piece about Iran sanctions, but a little more than half way it does a good job explaining the rationale behind the UN Security Council.

The UN Security Council is the most important multilateral institution engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting. Created in the aftermath of two successive and catastrophic world wars, the council’s legal structure of giving veto power to the major world powers has helped maintain peace between major powers for over seventy-five years. Its decisions mark the highest level of international law.

The raison d’être of the UNSC is to prevent the unilateral use of force by countries. The council relies on consensus decision-making among the five permanent members, ensuring the world’s most powerful countries are constantly in dialogue over pressing security matters. The council’s approval is required to launch wars and the resolutions it passes are binding on all UN members.

Crucially, the veto power the UNSC affords the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France gives these leading powers a stake in the global order. This helps obstruct zero-sum competition from taking hold among them, which could easily spiral into the kind of worldwide conflicts that reaped immense suffering in the last century.

National Interest

So, one way to state the purpose is to avoid cross-border aggression by major powers against other major powers, because such aggression by any one would automatically be opposed by the other four. No one country is so powerful that the balance of power would be in its favor.

To have a future, the Security Council clearly needs to be expanded to include today’s most powerful countries. It is unlikely it could kick off less powerful countries already there (looking at you, England and France). However, there is some limit to how many parties could be expected to reach consensus. How many? We need more than 5, and more than 10 seems like too many.

How do you define “powerful”? How about a formula? I pulled stats on GDP (at purchasing power parity) from the CIA World Factbook. GDP correlates to economic power, and potential though not necessarily military might. The top 10 look like this:

1China
2United States
3India
4Japan
5Germany
6Russia
7Indonesia
8Brazil
9United Kingdom
10France

That would include all the current members, plus add Japan, Germany (news flash: WWII is over!), India, Brazil, and Indonesia (hands down the world’s most populous and powerful nation that westerners never think about.)

Who barely misses the cut? #11-15 are Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, and Spain.

What if we decided actual military spending mattered. I pulled those numbers, gave 50% weight each to GDP and military spending, and it looks like this:

United States
China
India
Russia
Japan
Saudi Arabia
Germany
United Kingdom
Brazil
France

So this would trade Indonesia for Saudi Arabia, which seems odd. If you rate GDP 75% and 25%, you keep Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and leave out France. That seems like a non-starter.

Giving 10% weight to military spending doesn’t change the top 10 compared to straight-up GDP.

So I think my proposal is straight-up GDP. To summarize, it wouldn’t cut out any current member, and would add Germany and Japan, major developed countries and economic powers who lost a war 70 years ago, and major developing countries India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It would be harder to reach consensus with 10 than 5, but the effort of adding these important voices to the conversation would be worth it, and any hard-won consensus would have more legitimacy as representing the majority of the world’s power.

Iran attacking its own customers? Why?

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I try to avoid commenting on rapidly unfolding current events, but I’ll make an exception for this supposed attack by Iran on Japanese and Norwegian oil tankers. I can’t actually find this in news stories, but it seems that these tankers must be either on their way to pick up Iranian oil for delivery to world markets, or on their way to world markets with Iranian oil. So what incentive could Iran possibly have for attacking its customers? None that I can see, and this makes the U.S. claim that Iran is responsible completely incoherent. Part of the U.S. claim, if I can understand it correctly, is based on seeing Iranian boats in the area that were involved in rescuing survivors of the attacks. The only possible incentive I can think of for Iran is to demonstrate they can disrupt ships at the mouth of the Persian Gulf if they want to. But there is no need for that – the entire area is bristling with advanced anti-ship missiles and this is not a secret. So to sneak out and secretly attach mines to these ships, then secretly remove them, then rescue the survivors – well, I already said it a couple times, and it is not making any more sense to me the more I think about it.

Who would have an incentive to give Iran’s customers pause in doing business with it. Well, any of Iran’s enemies. This list would include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States, and Israel.

Or any non-state terrorist group that just wants to sew chaos and make states and oil companies nervous. Sneaking out to secretly attach a mine sounds like their playbook to me. These groups have a tendency to want people to know they are responsible though, and it is strange that there is no mention of that happening.

U.S. officials aren’t even trying to make a plausible case here. It’s embarrassing. The other thing people are point out is the U.S. making the case that Iran is breaching the agreement it made in 2015 to limit uranium enrichment, when it is the U.S. that has declared that agreement null and void.

Belt and Road

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The Council on Foreign Relations has a primer on China’s Belt and Road initiative here.

Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Such a network would expand the international use of Chinese currency, the renminbi, while new infrastructure could “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity,” according to Xi. (The Asian Development Bank estimates that the region faces a yearly infrastructure financing shortfall of nearly $800 billion.) In addition to physical infrastructure, China plans to build fifty special economic zones, modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which China launched in 1980 during its economic reforms under leader Deng Xiaoping.

Xi subsequently announced plans for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road at the 2013 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia. To accommodate expanding maritime trade traffic, China would invest in port development along the Indian Ocean, from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa.

Oliver Stone on Recent U.S. History

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Oliver Stone is adding a chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States covering 2012-2019. He basically argues that in 2012 things were not great but getting better, while in 2019 “the unthinkable has become thinkable”. The litany includes continued threats of NATO expansion, wars in the greater Middle East, backing out of the Iran deal and historic Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaties, expanding the nuclear arsenal, threatening behavior against North Korea and China, and continuing to deny and ignore climate change.

In my view, while the U.S. adversaries are not blameless, we need to understand that their governments feel legitimately threatened by our government. The U.S. government has the world’s largest military, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and has used its military frequently and unilaterally against weaker countries. A path to real peace would have to include some credible means of convincing other countries that we will not attack except in self defense, and we don’t have the track record to convince anyone of this. And in a world where the food supply and coastal population centers are going to start coming under threat from nature, humanity needs to be unified and undistracted to have a chance to deal with other threats.

NYT on Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Program

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The New York Times has a disturbing article about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program. It is somewhat of an open secret that their nuclear program has been to bankroll Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program over the years. The U.S. and most media outlets that I am aware of have turned a blind eye to that, even as we have been attacked by some of their citizens and fought against their extremist proxies for 17 years now. We also fought two wars in Iraq at least partly to protect their government against aggression. Apparently they are asking for nuclear energy technology that can be used for peaceful purposes, but it can also be weaponized, and they are resisting efforts to include unconditional UN weapons inspections in any deal. Putting more nuclear materials within potential reach of these extremists, whether in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia itself, seems like a bad idea.

the most dangerous country in the world?

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Axios says it could be Pakistan, if the extremist elements the military has cultivated as weapons against neighbors India and Afghanistan ever gain control at home.

Pakistan has the world’s 5th largest population, 5th largest military and 6th largest nuclear arsenal. The danger begins, Morell says, with a dysfunctional economy and a rapidly growing population of young people without education or job prospects. Add to that a military that continues to call the shots as though war could break out at any moment.

“The main reason the military has a grip on decision-making is because of a long-held and now mistaken belief in Pakistan that India is an existential threat to Pakistan and that Islamabad must do everything it can to protect itself from that threat,” he says.

Simultaneous Policy

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Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions). It’s supposed to solve the prisoner’s dilemma problem. The policy doesn’t go into effect until all or a certain number of nations agree to it. I think it’s a good idea, but idealistic because people often perceive problems as zero sum when they are not, and politicians either have the same misconceptions or cynically exploit the misconceptions of voters. And in the U.S. of course, politicians are captive to industrial interests that profit from policies that result in a loss to everyone else, while using cynical propaganda to convince voters of the opposite.

Here’s a blog post with a little more detail on how it is supposed to work:

The Simultaneous Policy (SIMPOL) will consist of a series of multi-issue global problem-solving policy packages, each of which is to be implemented by all or sufficient nations simultaneously, on the same date, so that no nation loses out. Citizens who join the campaign can contribute to the design of those policies and to getting them implemented. But how?

By joining the campaign, citizens agree to ‘give strong voting preference in all future national elections to politicians or parties that have signed a pledge to implement Simpol simultaneously alongside other governments, to the probable exclusion of those who choose not to sign’. This pledge (the ‘Pledge’) commits a politician, party or government to implement SIMPOL’s policies alongside other governments, if and when sufficient other governments have also signed on.

In this simple way, politicians who sign enhance their electoral chances, while those who refuse risk losing our votes to politicians who signed instead. Thus, in tightly contested electoral areas, failing to sign could cost a politician their seat.

 

Novichok

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A toxicology expert at Michigan State University says Russia (or Russians) may have used a class of extremely deadly weaponized nerve agents called Novichok to kill people inside the UK.

Novichok has been implicated in the poisoning of two couples in Great Britain, causing the death of one woman. The chemical structures of Novichok agents are not known for sure, but they bind more tightly and rapidly to their enzyme target, called acetylcholinesterase, found in nerves and muscle cells than other nerve poisons such as sarin or tabun. This causes death within minutes by making normal nerve-muscle, nerve-gland, and nerve-heart function impossible.

The deaths have been attributed to Russia, either the country’s intelligence service or a rogue who obtained them illegally. Russia vehemently denies either involvement in the poisonings or development of the Novichok chemicals…

First, the chemicals are reported by Soviet chemists to be the most potent agents ever made, with potency between 6-10 times higher than VX, the chemical used to kill the half brother of Kim Jong-Un, or sarin, the prototypical poisonous nerve gas the Iraqi government allegedly used in 1989, and which was used Syria last April. Thus extremely low doses, powder or liquid, the exact concentration of which remains unknown, are lethal.

CIA World Fact Book: U.S. vs. Russia

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Is the U.S. vs. Russia really a contest of equals? Well no, other than nuclear arsenals, it shouldn’t be. Here are some facts and figures from the CIA World Factbook, with China thrown in for good measure.

GDP (purchasing power parity)

  • USA: $19.36 trillion
  • Russia: $4 trillion
  • China: $23.12 trillion

GDP per capita (purchasing power parity)

  • USA: $59,500
  • Russia: $27,900
  • China: $17,000

Military budget

  • USA: 3.29% of GDP ($637 billion)
  • Russia: 5.4% of GDP ($216 billion)
  • China: 1.9% of GDP ($439 billion)

So compared to the U.S., China has a slightly larger overall economy spread out over a lot more people, but directs less of its economic output to the military and ultimately underspends the U.S. Russia’s economy is only 1/5th the size of the U.S., but it diverts a lot of its people’s wealth to military spending so it can be roughly 1/3rd the size of the U.S. military. So Russia really is not a worthy adversary at all, it’s a poor country whose leaders want to project an image of strength to its people as a substitute for actually making their lives better. The average American still has a much higher living standard than the average Chinese in spite of our military spending, but we shouldn’t just take this for granted as we may be still riding past momentum and slowly drifting into the slow lane.