A USEFUL IGNORANCE

- The myth of the ‘Nehruvian consensus’

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POLITICS AND PLAY - RAMACHANDRA GUHA

In recent weeks, there has been much talk of a growing challenge to the ‘Nehruvian consensus’. Influenced by this chatter, two journalists, one Indian, the other Western, asked me to comment on whether Narendra Modi becoming prime minister would mean the end of this ‘consensus’. I declined to answer, since the topic required more than a short sound-bite. Indeed, the question itself needed to be seriously interrogated. For the Nehruvian consensus — if there ever was one — broke down a very long time ago.

Nehru’s vision for India rested on four pillars — multi-party democracy on the Westminster model; State guarantees for the equality of all citizens regardless of gender, class and religion; a mixed economy, with the State playing a ‘commanding role’ in promoting industrial development; a foreign policy based on pan-Asianism and equidistance from the two superpowers (the United States of America and the Soviet Union). As a gifted writer and speaker, Nehru articulated his ideas with an uncommon eloquence. Since he served as prime minister for 17 continuous years, he also was able to get his vision — or at least large parts of it — enacted into practice.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Nehru and Nehruvians played a dominant role in Indian political discourse. Yet even at the height of their influence they were by no means unchallenged. From the right, Nehru was opposed by the Jana Sangh, which insisted that Hinduism defined the essence of the Indian nation, and therefore Hindu faith and sentiment must guide the State’s programmes and policies. From the Left, Nehru and his Congress party were challenged by the communists, who advocated a thoroughgoing nationalization of private property, a closer relationship with the Soviet Union, and active opposition to American policies everywhere.

The Hindu Right and the communist Left had both stayed away from the Congress-led national movement. Interestingly, among the most effective of Nehru’s critics were former Congressmen who had broken ranks with him. There was C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), who, in 1959, at the age of 80, started a new party, Swatantra, that promoted free-market economics as well as better relations with the Americans. There was Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), who opposed to Nehru’s top-down model the virtues of political decentralization, and the revival of the village economy. There was Rammanohar Lohia, who argued that Nehru represented an alien, English-speaking, upper-caste sensibility and was thus out of touch with the ordinary folk. A true Indian democracy, he believed, would only come to pass when lower castes, tribals, and other oppressed groups acquired effective political power themselves.

A country of dead women

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By Rafia Zakaria

Before Farzana Parveen was bludgeoned to death with bricks there was Shahida Parveen who was sentenced to be stoned. In early 1988, when democracy was new and a woman was about to take over the helm of the country, another woman was condemned to being stoned to death.

The case of Shahida Parveen and Mohammad Sarwar (NLR 1988(SD) FSC 188) came before a trial court because Shahida’s previous husband alleged that he had never really divorced her. When Shahida declared that he had orally declared the divorce three times and sent her home to her family, the trial court did not believe her.

When she produced a written divorce decree they still did not believe her.

There was a requirement that the divorce be registered they insisted. Based on this premise, the trial court found the marriage of Shahida Parveen and her new husband Mohammad Sarwar to be illegal and their cohabitation was considered a confession of “zina”.

Shahida Parveen and Mohammad Sarwar were thus found guilty of zina and awarded the maximum hadd punishment, stoning to death. Like Farzana Parveen who was pregnant when she was bludgeoned to death with bricks, Shahida Parveen was also pregnant when sentenced to being stoned to death.

But Shahida Parveen was lucky, she was not killed instantly and upon retrial she and Mohammad Sarwar were finally acquitted. That, however, was not the end of the punishment.

More recently, in a case from 2002 (PLD 2002 FSC 1) a sessions court in Kohat found a woman, Zafran Bibi guilty of adultery and sentenced her to be stoned to death. The prosecution in that case had alleged that Zafran Bibi’s pregnancy was proof of adultery. Zafran Bibi’s own remonstrations, that she had been raped by her husband’s brother while her husband was in prison were discarded because she could not prove that she had physically resisted the rape.

While this verdict was also eventually overturned for other reasons, the rendering of the verdict by the trial court, illustrates the truth of Pakistan’s current law; that women can be sentenced to being stoned to death.

If the state can stone to death, the people cannot be far behind. In this lies the pathos of Farzana Parveen’s final moments. Before she was attacked, before she was bludgeoned to death, she believed that the State would listen, that courts cared and that there was a real possibility of justice.

In her hope, thus she was unaware as many of Pakistan’s women are about the institutional degradations that the law of their own country imposes on them. Not only does the Qanun-e-Shahadat Ordinance reduce women to half witnesses in certain cases, the still standing Zina and Hudood Ordinances continue to require four witnesses for women to prove rape.

Horror of horrors: is Harvard losing it?

- Why Stanford is seen as the place to be as campus pecking order wobbles

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RICHARD PEREZ-PENA

The Stanford University campus

Cambridge (Massachusetts), May 30: In academia, where brand reputation is everything, one university holds an especially enviable place these days when it comes to attracting students and money. To find it from this centre of learning, turn west and go about 4,300km.

Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures that Harvard once dominated.

Stanford, based in California, has had America’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row (a low acceptance rate — the percentage of applicants who secured admission — means an institution is extremely selective). In five of the last six years, Stanford has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their “dream college”; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.

For now at least, there is reason to doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher education is Harvard, founded 378 years ago, which held its commencement on Thursday.

“There’s no question that right now, Stanford is seen as the place to be,” said Robert Franek, who oversees the Princeton Review’s college guidebooks and student surveys. Of course, that is more a measure of popularity than of quality, he said, and whether it will last is anyone’s guess.

Professors, administrators and students at Harvard insist that on the whole, they are not afraid that their institution will be knocked off its perch, in substance or reputation. But some concede, now that you mention it, that in particularly contemporary measures, like excellence in computer science, engineering and technology, Harvard could find much to emulate in that place out in California.

“Harvard for a long time had sort of an ambiguous relationship to applied science and engineering,” said Harry R. Lewis, a computer science professor and a former dean of Harvard College. “It wasn’t considered the sort of thing gentlemen did.”

People in academia tend to roll their eyes at the incessant effort to rank colleges and universities, insisting that they pay little attention to the ratings that their institutions spend so much time and energy chasing.

Who’s afraid of Pakistan’s military?

May 31, 2014

S. Akbar Zaidi

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/whos-afraid-of-pakistans-military/article6067176.ece

Its hegemony has been questioned and at times even challenged since 2007 by institutions which have not been able to do so until now

The general impression people outside Pakistan have of its military is that it is the most powerful institution there which determines every move by civilian representatives, particularly those who have supposedly been given the permission to be elected to higher office and govern the country. This perception may be more pronounced in India, where Mr. Nawaz Sharif’s recent visit for the swearing-in of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seen as a very “bold move,” perhaps going against the military’s wishes, yet showing the mettle of the twice-dismissed elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. Little do people outside Pakistan know that in the last month, the social media in Pakistan — which is far from being a mere plaything in the hands of radicals and anti-military types — has been scoffing at Pakistan’s military for the situation it finds itself in today. From being an institution which governed and managed the entire country (for a decade, its two wings, the east and the west), it has now been reduced to one involved in issues as varied as imposing a ban on a television channel to preventing newspapers from a media house being distributed in cantonment areas. As a well-respected newspaper editor tweeted recently, “good to know the gens now have cable management as part of their job description. One would have thought DHAs [Defence Housing Authorities] & bakeries were enuff.” Another popular participant added, “used to be time when Pakistan army used to overthrow governments. Now they are overthrowing news channels. Sigh. How the mighty have fallen!”

Changing political equation

However, lest one is misled, this active and aggressive campaign against Geo by the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has some public support. Moreover, the first and immediate response to Mr. Sharif’s New Delhi visitwas from a large number of Pakistani pro-military television anchors and so-called “security experts” appearing on talk shows, who gave the talks between the two leaders, and the subsequent statements a twist which only military minds could have constructed. They have already termed the visit to be a failure and have cast Mr. Sharif as a wimp.

'This Is How Wars End in the 21st Century'

'This Is How Wars End in the 21st Century' 

The new unsettling normal of victory. 

SGT John Pacarello rests along a ridgeline following a patrol up a mountainside near Forward Operating Base (FOB) Shank on March 31, 2014 near Pul-e Alam, Afghanistan.

By Major Garrett

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May 27, 2014

In a sun-splashed Rose Garden, warmer and more humid than that sun-splashed September morning of horror in September 2001, President Obama declared an end to the war in Afghanistan provoked by al-Qaida's atrocities.

It had about as much fanfare as the science fair Obama celebrated hours earlier.

"I love this event."

Obama said that about whiz kids and their science inventions in the East Room, not his decision to decide exactly how and when to end the nearly 13-year war in Afghanistan.

"I think Americans have learned that it's harder to end wars than it is to begin them," the president said, restating a truism embedded within Pentagon planning at least since the Korean War. "Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century—not through signing ceremonies but through decisive blows against our adversaries, transitions to elected governments, security forces who are trained to take the lead and ultimately full responsibility."

"I think Americans have learned that it's harder to end wars than it is to begin them."

Underwhelming.

In fact, most wars involving the United States since World War II have ended vaguely, ingloriously, or semi-ceremonially. In the first instance, think Korea—it's technically still a war because there was no peace treaty, only an armistice. In the second instance, think of the frantic U.S. pullout from Saigon. In the third, the end of the first Gulf War carried a surrender, but with it came flinching (in the eyes of neoconservative hawks), unfinished business defined by no-fly zones and a trade embargo.

It's not that the Afghanistan war is ending differently. It's that it's ending the same way other recent wars have, with one big difference. This time the United States was attacked, the casualties were civilians, and the yearning for decisive victory was as clear as it's been since Pearl Harbor. And yet there's damn little that's decisive in Afghanistan after all we've deployed, spent [see figure 1.27], and lost.

The Afghan army and police forces are improving, but it's unclear if they are prepared for a Taliban onslaught or merely toned up for a fight against phantoms that never come. Already the Taliban has stepped up attacks in this summer fighting season, and the peril is such that one of the two remaining presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani, has called off large-scale rallies during the runoff election. There are White House optimists about the grit and eventual guile of Afghan security forces.

Connecting the Dots on Buddhist Fundamentalism

http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/connecting-the-dots-on-buddhist-fundamentalism/?allpages=yes&print=yes

There has been a rise in Buddhist extremism in several Asian countries recently. Is there a link? 

By Vishal Arora

May 30, 2014

Buddhist fundamentalism seems to be fast spreading its tentacles in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, as newspapers report violent attacks on religious minorities and shrill demands to ban “blasphemy” against Buddhism.

Sri Lanka’s Muslim legislators this month urged President Mahinda Rajapaksa to protect their minority community from “Buddhist extremist elements,” with hundreds of attacks on Muslims and Christians reported over the last two years.

Last month, a British woman was deported from Sri Lanka for sporting a Buddha tattoo. Meanwhile, the country’s Religious Affairs Ministry has proposed a new law banning religious defamation. The draft bill provides for a Buddhist Publications Regulatory Board to check for any violation of Buddhism, its philosophy or traditions.

In Myanmar, “concerns persist regarding ongoing conflict and human rights abuses in ethnic minority areas, particularly in Rakhine State,” U.S. President Barack Obama recently said while extending some economic sanctions against that nation for another year.

In Myanmar’s Rakhine State, the ongoing violence against Rohingya Muslims, whose ancestors were migrants from Bangladesh, has resulted in the killing of hundreds allegedly by ethnic Arakanese Buddhists. More than 180,000 Rohingyas remain internally displaced while many others have fled the country.

In addition, a coalition of Buddhist monks and laypersons in Myanmar has proposed a law against inter-faith marriage, known as the Emergency Provisions on Marriage Act for Burmese Buddhist Women, which would strip Buddhist women of the right to freely choose whom they marry.

In Thailand, where tensions between Malay Muslims and Buddhist residents have existed in the south since 2004, a Buddhist group called the Knowing Buddha Foundation has identified another “threat” to Buddhism. This group is running campaigns to teach the world certain do’s and don’ts on the treatment of the Buddha and his images. “For example, in a movie, a dog’s name is ‘Buddha.’ There is an ice cream shop named ‘Buddhi Belly’ and a bar called ‘Buddha Bar,’” it complains on its website, demanding a law to protect Buddhism and declaration of Buddhism as the country’s state religion.

Shangri-La Dialogue Highlights Regional Tensions

http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/shangri-la-dialogue-highlights-regional-tensions/

With numerous Asia-Pacific spats going on, the annual security dialogue in Singapore revealed intra-regional fractures.

By Shannon Tiezzi

May 31, 2014

This year’s edition of the annual Shangi-La Dialogue was bound to be testy. China-Japan relations are in tatters, as they have been since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine last year (and, going even further back, since 2012, when Japan nationalized the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands). China-Vietnam relations aren’t much better off; the confrontation over a Chinese oil rig near the Paracel Islands shows no sign of abating. And U.S.-China relations recently took a nosedive as well with the announcement that the Department of Justice has indicted five PLA officers for hacking and economic espionage.

Against this backdrop, officials from around the Asia-Pacific arrived at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore for the annual gathering of defense ministers, diplomats, and security experts. China was represented by Wang Guanzhong, the deputy chief of the PLA general staff, and by Fu Ying, the chairwoman of the National People’s Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee. From the U.S., Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and commander of Pacific Command Samuel Locklear were in attendance. Vietnam’s Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh attended, as did Deputy Defense Minister Nguyen Chi Vinh. And Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave the keynote speech on Friday.

The scene was set on Friday before the dialogue even officially opened. During a televised debate, Fu Ying was not shy about lambasting Japan and the Philippines for their conduct in separate territorial disputes with China. Fu accused Abe of constructing a “myth” about China “posting a threat to Japan” — a myth she said Abe was now using as a pretext to alter Japan’s security policies. Fu also accused the Philippines of being the cause of increased tensions between Beijing and Manila. Referencing the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff, Fu said that the Philippines had created a “unilateral provocation to the status quo” by sending “a naval vessel to harass fishermen.”

Meanwhile, Wang Guanzhong, China’s senior military representative, held separate bilateral meetings with Russia and Vietnam’s Deputy Ministers of Defense. No details were released on the content of their talks, but it’s a safe bet that the meeting with Nguyen Chi Vinh was a prickly one. The meeting with Anatoly Antonov likely went much better, as China-Russia ties are riding high after a landmark gas deal and a joint military exercise. Wang is also scheduled to meet U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel this weekend in what is likely to be a frosty exchange. Hagel said that during his meeting he would discuss with Wang “areas where we think China is overplaying its hand in presenting new challenges and new tensions.” Hagel in turn can expected to be harangued on cyber issues.

Connecting the Dots on Buddhist Fundamentalism

There has been a rise in Buddhist extremism in several Asian countries recently. Is there a link?

By Vishal Arora

May 30, 2014

Buddhist fundamentalism seems to be fast spreading its tentacles in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand, as newspapers report violent attacks on religious minorities and shrill demands to ban “blasphemy” against Buddhism.

Sri Lanka’s Muslim legislators this month urged President Mahinda Rajapaksa to protect their minority community from “Buddhist extremist elements,” with hundreds of attacks on Muslims and Christians reportedover the last two years.

Last month, a British woman was deported from Sri Lanka for sporting a Buddha tattoo. Meanwhile, the country’s Religious Affairs Ministry has proposed a new law banning religious defamation. The draft bill provides for a Buddhist Publications Regulatory Board to check for any violation of Buddhism, its philosophy or traditions.

In Myanmar, “concerns persist regarding ongoing conflict and human rights abuses in ethnic minority areas, particularly in Rakhine State,” U.S. President Barack Obama recently said while extending some economic sanctions against that nation for another year.

In Myanmar’s Rakhine State, the ongoing violence against Rohingya Muslims, whose ancestors were migrants from Bangladesh, has resulted in the killing of hundreds allegedly by ethnic Arakanese Buddhists. More than 180,000 Rohingyas remain internally displaced while many others have fled the country.

In addition, a coalition of Buddhist monks and laypersons in Myanmar has proposed a law against inter-faith marriage, known as the Emergency Provisions on Marriage Act for Burmese Buddhist Women, which would strip Buddhist women of the right to freely choose whom they marry.

Amol Rajan: Be very afraid, a storm is coming in from China

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/amol-rajan-be-very-afraid-a-storm-is-coming-in-from-china-9452294.html

A storm is coming: the Chinese economy is on the edge, and the effects of a crash will be truly global

AMOL RAJAN 

Published: 29 May 2014

Updated: 11:54, 29 May 2014

I know what you’re thinking, as you sit exhausted, shoulders slouched, on the 17.32 to Guildford via Clapham Junction and (your stop) Weybridge, summoning the strength to give your teenager a roasting after he got suspended from school for selling dope in the middle of exam season. 

You’re thinking, well at least it’s Thursday, which means I get to read Amol’s column in the Standard, and what a thrilling thing it would be if he were to examine the systemic threat to the global economy not from capitalism’s inherent contradictions but from the indebtedness of China’s banks. Well, just for you, and quite against my better judgment, here’s the analysis you were hoping for.

Essentially, we’re in trouble. After the financial crash, the authorities in Beijing unleashed one of the biggest stimulus packages anywhere, around four trillion yuan. The effect of this has been massive growth in the debt of its local governments. According to China’s National Audit Office, that debt has surged by 20 per cent every year for the past three years, to 10.6 trillion yuan by last summer.

Then there are China’s banks. According to a report on Bloomberg yesterday: “China’s biggest banks are poised to report the highest proportion of bad debts since 2009 after late payments on loans surged to a five-year high.” But that’s not half the trouble: China’s shadow banking system is estimated to account for 70 to 100 per cent of the country’s GDP. It is an impenetrable fog of dodgy deals and toxic debt, the complexity of which nobody can fully grasp.

On top of this, Morgan Stanley argues that China’s corporate debt is equal to the whole country’s national income, and China’s consumers are in more debt than ever. In fact, when you add it up, since 2008 China’s public and private debt has ballooned from 135 per cent of GDP to more than 200 per cent today. That growth in credit is faster than in Japan before 1990 — and the US in 2008.

China Sets America’s Mental Trap

STEPHEN S. ROACH

Stephen S. Roach, former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm's chief economist, is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and a senior lecturer at Yale’s School of Management. He is the author of the new book Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and … READ MORE

MAY 29, 2014

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stephen-s--roach-forecasts-stiffening-economic-headwinds-for-the-us-as-excess-chinese-saving-dries-up

NEW HAVEN – The temptations of extrapolation are hard to resist. The trend exerts a powerful influence on markets, policymakers, households, and businesses. But discerning observers understand the limits of linear thinking, because they know that lines bend, or sometimes even break. That is the case today in assessing two key factors shaping the global economy: the risks associated with America’s policy gambit and the state of the Chinese economy.

Quantitative easing, or QE (the Federal Reserve’s program of monthly purchases of long-term assets), began as a noble endeavor – well timed and well articulated as the Fed’s desperate antidote to a wrenching crisis. Counterfactuals are always tricky, but it is hard to argue that the liquidity injections of late 2008 and early 2009 did not play an important role in saving the world from something far worse than the Great Recession.

The combination of product-specific funding facilities and the first round of quantitative easing sent the Fed’s balance sheet soaring to $2.3 trillion by March 2009, from its pre-crisis level of $900 billion in the summer of 2008. And the deep freeze in crisis-ravaged markets thawed.

The Fed’s mistake was to extrapolate – that is, to believe that shock therapy could not only save the patient but also foster sustained recovery. Two further rounds of QE expanded the Fed’s balance sheet by another $2.1 trillion between late 2009 and today, but yielded little in terms of jump-starting the real economy.

This becomes clear when the Fed’s liquidity injections are compared with increases in nominal GDP. From late 2008 to May 2014, the Fed’s balance sheet increased by a total of $3.4 trillion, well in excess of the $2.6 trillion increase in nominal GDP over the same period. This is hardly “Mission accomplished,” as QE supporters claim. Every dollar of QE generated only 76 cents of nominal GDP.

Unlike the United States, which relied largely on its central bank’s efforts to cushion the crisis and foster recovery, China deployed a CN¥4 trillion fiscal stimulus (about 12% of its 2008 GDP) to jump-start its sagging economy in the depths of the crisis. Whereas the US fiscal stimulus of $787 billion (5.5% of its 2009 GDP) gained limited traction, at best, on the real economy, the Chinese effort produced an immediate and sharp increase in “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects that boosted the fixed-investment share of GDP from 44% in 2008 to 47% in 2009.

To be sure, China also eased monetary policy. But such efforts fell well short of those of the Fed, with no zero-interest-rate or quantitative-easing gambits – only standard reductions in policy rates (five cuts in late 2008) and reserve requirements (four adjustments).

The Global Pivot to China

The United States is not alone in its pivot toward Asia. The Asia Pacific region is a center of bustling potential and security pitfalls. And China is the center of that region, notes Jean-Pierre Lehmann, international political economist. The United States claims its pivot is not intended to contain China, but other Asian nations seek such security. China is a lead trading partner for Japan and most ASEAN member nations, and a main source of territorial disputes. China also has territorial disputes with India, yet controls part of the latter's water supply with upstream rivers flowing through Tibet. Armed with lots of cash, China invests around the globe, funding US debt, rescuing failing European firms and just concluding a 30-year natural gas deal with Russia. China is increasingly assertive, as signaled this week with Chinese fighter jets flying close to Japanese reconnaissance aircraft near disputed islands and a report of a Chinese vessel sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat near a controversial oil rig. Chinese plans for the coming century have big implications for the wider global order. – YaleGlobal

China’s plans for the 21st century have big implications for wider global order

Jean-Pierre Lehmann

YaleGlobal, 27 May 2014

The Kingdom in the Middle: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrate $400 billion gas deal (top); President Barack Obama with Asian allies, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe 

HONG KONG: Only halfway through 2014 and it is clear the year will be remembered for a number of seismic shifts occurring in the Asia Pacific region. Because Asia in the early 21st century is, as Europe was in the early 20th, the center of world power and potential, the implications for the wider global order are considerable.

The center of the Asia Pacific Region is China. The “pivot to Asia,” whether in its original American form, or its many reiterations, is in fact a “pivot to China.” During his Asian “pivot” tour to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines in April, US President Barack Obama kept insisting that his policies – whether the Transpacific Partnership, from which China is currently excluded; mega-regional trade pact; or the 10-year defense pact with the Philippines – were not meant to contain or control China. He seems to protest too much!

In the meantime, Japan, which has a fair number of current and historical issues with China, including a tense dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, is proposing under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to “reinterpret” the pacifist constitution so as to allow Tokyo greater maneuvrability in boosting collective defense: another “pivot to China.” 

The Global Pivot to China

May 28, 2014

By Jean-Pierre Lehmann

HONG KONG: Only halfway through 2014 and it is clear the year will be remembered for a number of seismic shifts occurring in the Asia Pacific region. Because Asia in the early 21st century is, as Europe was in the early 20th, the center of world power and potential, the implications for the wider global order are considerable.

The center of the Asia Pacific Region is China. The "pivot to Asia," whether in its original American form, or its many reiterations, is in fact a "pivot to China." During his Asian "pivot" tour to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines in April, US President Barack Obama kept insisting that his policies - whether the Transpacific Partnership, from which China is currently excluded; mega-regional trade pact; or the 10-year defense pact with the Philippines - were not meant to contain or control China. He seems to protest too much!

In the meantime, Japan, which has a fair number of current and historical issues with China, including a tense dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, is proposing under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to "reinterpret" the pacifist constitution so as to allow Tokyo greater maneuvrability in boosting collective defense: another "pivot to China."

Russia is making its own "pivot to Asia," after the recent Ukraine kerfuffle, as highlighted by the May meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in Shanghai culminating in a 30-year energy agreement. This apparent Sino-Russian "rapprochement" - complete with a joint naval exercise - reversed a frigid relationship arising from the 1960 Sino-Soviet split, only marginally improved in the 1990s, of tense distance between Beijing and Moscow.

To the South, China is engaged in hostilities with Vietnam in the South-China Sea, as it was and almost certainly will be again with the Philippines, as well as having disputes with Brunei and Malaysia. That Hanoi looks to Washington for support in its confrontation with Beijing is perhaps one of the more flagrant paradoxes of history. All ASEAN member countries are torn between economic benefits of a rising China and security assurances from a seemingly retreating America.

The landslide election of Narendra Modi has electrified India and observers throughout the world. Can this "strongman," as The Economist dubs him, "unleash India"? The Republic of India and the People's Republic of China, respectively established in 1947 and 1949, are geographically close, but not are not congenial neighbors, politically or emotionally. There was a war between the two in 1962, the bitterness of which is ingrained in the collective Indian memory. There are territorial issues - as recently as May 2013 the Chinese People's Liberation Army made a deep incursion into the Ladakh region in India causing widespread resentment and alarm. Perhaps most ominously there is a potential major confrontation between India and China over water, as China controls the flows from the Tibetan plateau, sources of which are vital to India and surrounding countries. Modi's "pivot to China" could either take the form of "doing a Nixon," as some Chinese commentators have suggested - referring to US President Richard Nixon's historic visit to Beijing in 1972 thereby laying foundations for renewed Sino-American relations - or, as he seems inclined, beefing up the relationship between Tokyo and Delhi as a means to enhance both economic and security partnership: a sort of Indo-Japanese entente cordiale.

Amid South China Sea Tensions, Vietnam Seeks Closer Ties with US

THE EDITOR

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh in Hanoi, Vietnam, on December 16, 2013.

Against the backdrop of China’s maritime claims, Hanoi and Washington are drawing closer together. 

By Shannon Tiezzi

May 29, 2014

With the sinking of a Vietnamese boat yesterday in the South China Sea, tensions between Vietnam and China continue to climb. Vietnam has accused Chinese fishing boats of ramming its vessel; China places the blame on Hanoi. Against this backdrop, Vietnam has called on the international community to denounce China’s moves in the disputed maritime territories.

The U.S. has been quite willing to lend at least vocal support to Vietnam, even though Hanoi (unlike Japan and the Philippines) is not a U.S. ally. Yesterday, when asked for clarification on Washington’s view of the current China-Vietnam tensions, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said that “the provocative actions have largely been from the Chinese side.” Earlier, Psaki described the placement of the Chinese oil rig as part of “a pattern of unilateral moves by the Chinese Government in the region.” Though the U.S. maintains its neutrality on the actual question of sovereignty, public comments by officials have left no doubt that the U.S. disapproves of China’s efforts to exert control over disputed areas.

With friendly rhetoric coming from Washington, Vietnam sees a chance to boost its position in the disputes by edging closer to the U.S. As Carl Thayer wrote yesterday for Flashpoints, Vietnam has few strategic options open to it in its dispute with China — and developing closer ties with both the U.S. and America’s regional allies appears to be its strategy of choice.

Last Wednesday, Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Pham Binh Minh, spoke with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on the phone about the ongoing clashes in the South China Sea. Minh outlined Vietnam’s position and, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there was substantial agreement between Kerry and Minh. “Mr. Kerry spoke highly of Viet Nam’s self-restraint and goodwill in using peaceful measures and dialogue channels,” the MFA said in a summary of the conversation.

Vietnam and the U.S. are also bolstering their cooperation in other areas, a process that has been accelerated by Hanoi’s unease over Chinese moves in disputed areas. On May 20, Vietnam announced that it would participate in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a move that the U.S. welcomed. During his phone conversation with Kerry, Minh also highlighted the increased economic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam and promised increased cooperation in the future. Vietnam “stands ready to coordinate with the US to deploy concrete measures to continue strengthening the comprehensive partnership between the two countries,” Minh said.

Iraq in Crisis

By Anthony H. Cordesman, Sam Khazai 

MAY 30, 2014 

Iraq is a nation in crisis bordering on civil war in 2014. The country now faces growing violence, a steady rise in Sunni Islamist extremism, an increasingly authoritarian leader that favors Iraq’s Sunnis, and growing ethnic tension between Arabs and Kurds. The recent Iraqi election offers little promise that it can correct the corruption, the weaknesses in its security forces, and the critical failures in governance, economic development, and leadership. The problems Iraq faces in 2014 are a legacy of mistakes made during and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but increasingly the nation is dealing with the self-inflicted wounds of its leaders who abuse human rights, repress opposing factions, and misuse the Iraqi police and security forces to their own end.

Iraq in Crisis traces the history of these problems and projects current trends. It supports its narrative analysis with the latest data from the World Bank, United Nations, Transparency International, the Congressional Research Service, International Crisis Group, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, U.S. Census Bureau, and others to aggregate a comprehensive picture of Iraq’s real-world security, economic, energy, ethnic, political, resource, and development challenges. 

Publisher CSIS/Rowman & Littlefield 

ISBN 978-1-4422-2855-9 (pb); 978-1-4422-2856-6 (eBook) 

Download PDF file of "Iraq in Crisis"

Lebanon’s Hizbollah Turns Eastward to Syria

Middle East Report N°153 27 May 2014 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Lebanese Shiite armed movement Hizbollah has gone all-in for Syrian President Bashar Assad. It has shown it will back his regime by any means necessary, despite doubts about its capacity to win a decisive victory and regardless of the risks to the movement’s own moral standing and cross-sectarian appeal. As it is drawn ever-deeper into its neighbour’s civil war that seems poised to endure for years, it finds itself increasingly distracted from its original anti-Israel focus and risking a profound reshaping of its identity.

Hizbollah’s original military objectives in Syria were clear: to save a regime it sees as a vital ally and distance Sunni jihadis from its borders and neighbourhoods. Its contributions have been crucial. Its forces reversed the regime’s flagging momentum and enabled it to gain the relative advantage it enjoys today. Its fight against the Syrian opposition, which it has cast in harsh sectarian terms, has shored up its support base. But the long-term costs – for both Hizbollah and the region – of involvement in a sectarian, zero-sum war could be as steep as the short-term benefits are significant.

The movement welcomed the initial “Arab Spring” uprisings directed at its foes. But it drew a line at Syria, and as Bashar Assad’s grip slipped, it came to see its own survival as a function of his. His fall would have deprived it of a vital ally and an important supply route for weapons from Iran; moreover, with the Syrian uprising having morphed into a regional proxy war, Assad’s fall would have recalibrated the regional balance of power to Hizbollah’s detriment. As al-Qaeda offshoots or affiliates emerged within rebel ranks, the Shiite movement, like its constituency, came to see the civil war as existential.

Allegations of Hizbollah’s military involvement in Syria surfaced in mid-2012, after armed opposition groups made notable gains in the south and east; surrounded Damascus, thus potentially endangering the regime; and took control of key border zones that connected the rebels with Sunni enclaves on the Lebanese side. After months of rumoured support, Hizbollah in May 2013 publicly took the lead in evicting rebels from the border town of Qusayr. Its fall in June boosted the regime and encouraged the Shiite group to extend its fight to the Qalamoun Mountains and beyond.

Its full-fledged military intervention steered Hizbollah into unchartered territory. From its perspective, it had little choice; subsequent events have confirmed to the movement that it took the right turn. Its military campaign has been successful, bolstering Assad’s position, and though dozens of Shiites in Lebanon have been killed in a wave of unprecedented al-Qaeda-inspired suicide bomb attacks since Qusayr, the movement is convinced that more would have died had it not distanced the Syrian rebels from Lebanon’s borders. These retaliatory attacks also benefited the movement by cementing its base, through seeming confirmation that Syrian rebels are Sunni extremists who all along have had Lebanon’s Shiites in their crosshairs. 

FATAL ATTRACTION? RUSSIA’S SOFT POWER IN ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD – ANALYSIS

MAY 29, 2014 

FRIDE

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By FRIDE

By Eleonora Tafuro

Much current analysis of Russian influence in its neighbourhood focuses on its use of ‘hard power’ tools. However, analysing Russia’s soft power efforts is no less important for understanding the full nature of Moscow’s power strategy in its neighbourhood. When Harvard scholar Joseph Nye developed the concept of ‘smart power’, he described it as the ability to combine the tools of hard and soft power, that is, to use both sticks and carrots (coercion and payment) and the power of attraction (making others want what you want).

To date, Russia appears to be more confident using hard power measures to pursue its neighbourhood interests, in particular trying to dissuade neighbours from a closer relationship with the European Union (EU). Ukraine is the most glaring example. First the Kremlin tried ‘carrots’ (such as large loans with few strings attached, gas price discounts etc.), then moved onto ‘sticks’ (trade embargoes, gas price hikes, and eventually the annexation of Crimea and further destabilisation of the East). Most of the other five countries in the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova – have also experienced Russian hard power in recent years. Plus, Russia has plenty of leverage to do so in many of the five Central Asian republics. For example, Russia is the main destination for their migrant workers, and according to the World Bank, remittances account for 48 per cent of Tajikistan’s GDP and 31 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s.

Even so, Russia is not neglecting the use of soft power. The Putin regime perceives Russia as an alternative geopolitical pole with an anti-liberal social outlook, a type of ‘Conservative International’ in opposition to the West. It offers its neighbours a path for regional integration through the Customs Union, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and the envisaged Eurasian Union, in competition with that of the EU and NATO. Plus, Moscow funds cultural programmes based on the idea of a common identity, language and history in the post-Soviet space, and tries to spread its messages through well-resourced Kremlin-linked media outlets.

CULTURE, VALUES AND THE EURASIAN UNION

Russia has a number of advantages for implementing a soft power strategy in its neighbourhood: the presence of large Russian minorities; a shared history; cultural and linguistic proximity; a larger economy and energy resources. The Kremlin’s soft power tools include cultural and linguistic programmes, scholarships for foreign students, well-equipped media outlets, Christian Orthodoxy, and a visa-free regime with many neighbours that makes Russia’s labour market relatively accessible. The power of international attraction is based on political values, and the Kremlin tries to offer an alternative narrative to the West. This vision is not only based on multi-polarity, but also as a defender of conservative (anti-liberal) values – a world view that appeals to many in the neighbours.

During his presidential address to the Russian Federal Assembly in December 2013, Putin outlined his conservative vision, presenting the EU and the West more generally as decadent places where traditions and values are ‘eroding’, accepting ‘without question the equality of good and evil’.

New Energy, New Geopolitics

Background Report 1: Energy Impacts

By Sarah O. Ladislaw, Maren Leed, Molly A. Walton

Contributor: Michelle Melton, Andrew Metrick, Jane Nakano, and Frank Verrastro

MAY 29, 2014

The first background report in the New Energy, New Geopolitics series, this report outlines the changes that have taken place in U.S. and global energy markets thus far, including a description of U.S. tight oil and shale gas production and the domestic impacts, how the shifts in the U.S. energy posture are affecting global energy markets, and the challenges faced by other countries that seek to replicate the U.S. experience.

Publisher CSIS/Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN 978-1-4422-2849-8 (pb); 978-1-4422-2850-4 (eBook)

Download PDF file of "New Energy, New Geopolitics: Background Report 1: Energy Impacts"

Strategic Blindness

MAY 30, 2014

Strategic Blindness

The West has stumbled into its only successes lately. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379027/strategic-blindness-conrad-black/page/0/1

By Conrad Black

It is not clear that anyone in a position of authority in any important country has been doing any strategic thinking since the end of the Cold War. Yet despite this, the West has had some strategic bonanzas. The Chinese, still widely toasted as the coming force in the world, were shown the door in Burma and have met sharp resistance from Vietnam and in the adjacent seas, from the Filipinos and Japanese. By miraculous luck, and despite the bipartisan bungling of almost every involved person in the U.S. government, we have dodged the bullet in Egypt, as the Muslim Brotherhood, the nightmare of the Arab world for 70 years, exploited the George W. Bush–Obama aversion to (some) dictators and won Egypt’s first free election, squandered their window of opportunity, forfeited popular approval, and were evicted by a regime more heavy-handed than that which the U.S. helped to force from office. As India opted for Thatcherism with Narendra Modi, Egypt for secular military rule, and Ukraine for its wealthiest industrialist as president, Europe, and especially Britain, almost vaporized the Euro-myth, all in elections last week.

Since the great triumphs of World War II and the Cold War, the United States has gone from George H. W. Bush’s New World Order to President Clinton’s “New Democrats,” to George W.’s crusade for democracy, to President Obama’s pell-mell American withdrawal from almost everywhere. President Clinton reaped the harvest of Reaganomics and the victory in the Cold War and delivered peace and prosperity, and rather smoothly handled the expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc, behind the benignly obfuscatory smokescreen of the “Partnership for Peace.” Unfortunately, it was with him that the terrible current-account deficits and official promotion of the housing bubble began. There was no need or excuse to invade Iraq twice in twelve years, nor any justification for trying to reconstruct the country entirely as a democracy, as if Iraq, which was arbitrarily created by the British and French from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, were as homogeneous and susceptible to responsible self-government as the State of Connecticut. Next to failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail to South Vietnam and to detect the infiltration of North Korea by 130,000 Communist Chinese guerrillas in 1950, the greatest military blunder in U.S. history since the Civil War was dismissing the entire government of Iraq, down to schoolteachers and street cleaners, and especially the 400,000 military and police, and allowing them to keep their weapons and munitions. The resulting bloodbath was far greater than it need have been, and killed and wounded many thousands of Americans and allied personnel.