Renegade
Michèle Flournoy likes to say that during her years at Balliol College, Oxford, she “majored in rowing” and had the shoulders to prove it. Now under-secretary of defence for policy (and known as the brain of the Pentagon) she is using her brawn to muscle through a fundamental shift in US strategic doctrine. Her thinking is based on the concept of the “global commons,” which is in turn based on the old Royal Navy idea of promoting maritime supremacy while touting the freedom of the seas. Flournoy sees these global commons in a wider context that includes air and space and cyberspace as well as the oceans. Her essay in the latest issue of Proceedings, published by the US Naval Institute, is becoming required reading around the Pentagon.
She warns that “a series of recent events, including anti-satellite missile tests, piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the east coast of Africa, and attacks in cyberspace” portend the worst challenge to American security since 1945. And ominously for the US Navy, one of the warning signals cited is a 2006 incident in which a Chinese submarine surfaced within the perimeter of a US carrier strike group. Carriers are meant to be protected from such incursions, so if Flournoy is right about the event’s implications this threatens both US Navy doctrine and plans to spend a massive amount of money building ten carriers and their 1,000-plus warplanes over the next three decades. It may also provide ammunition to cost-cutters in Britain’s treasury as they eye the Royal Navy’s plans for two new carriers.
Though stressing that the US military will maintain its dominance for the foreseeable future, the core of Fournoy’s argument is that, in years to come, the real geopolitical battles will be over stability and access to the global commons—which the US will no longer be able to guarantee. Since Fournoy is currently writing the defence department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which lays down strategic doctrine and spending plans for the future, the military, lobbyists, congress are all trying to work out what the article means for them.
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Jeffrey Henderson
Discuss this at Prospect’s blog, First Drafts
South Asia has been dominated by two military conflicts in past months: Pakistan pounding of the Taliban in the Swat Valley, and the obliteration of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Disturbing as these conflicts are, both may be dwarfed by a wider and more significant trend in the region—the rise of a newly assertive China.
At Hambantota in Sri Lanka, Chinese companies are building a new port that could serve as a refuelling and docking facility for the Chinese navy as it extends its presence (presently confined to helping police pirate activities off the Horn of Africa) across the Indian Ocean. China has also provided much of the military hardware that underpinned the Sri Lankan victory.
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prospect
Biden diplomacy
Vice-president Joe Biden is determined to follow in the footsteps of Al Gore and Dick Cheney, who have sharply raised the profile of the job. Biden says that Obama is on board. “The agreement he and I have is that I would be available for every single major decision that he makes,” he told ABC’s This Week. “I’m the last person in the room.” And as former chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, Biden sees himself as Team Obama’s foreign policy expert. His speech at the Wehrkunde security conference in Munich in February was the administration’s biggest foreign policy statement so far. Biden announced “a new tone”: that America would listen to its allies, adopt a more conciliatory approach towards Russia and a new readiness to deal with Iran. Indeed, in a little noticed speech during the election campaign, Biden said that the greatest error of the Bush administration was its failure “to face the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China and India as great powers. The Obama-Biden administration will repair those criminal mistakes.”
Where now for the Clintons?
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Renegade
Obama the lion tamer
Can Barack Obama play the lion-tamer and rein in his big beasts? Trouble may lurk ahead in the way that he intends to run the grander fiefdoms of his administration. Start with foreign policy, where Hillary Clinton at the state department, Robert Gates at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta at the CIA and Jim Jones, who as national security adviser is based in the White House, will all be growling from their separate dens. Off to one side is vice-president Joe Biden, who as former chairman of the senate foreign relations committee reckons that he knows more about foreign affairs than the rest combined.
Clinton’s loyalists are muttering about the “military axis” of Jones, a former Marine general, and the Pentagon. The buzz is that Hillary insisted that Panetta (Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff) replace General Mike Hayden at the CIA on the grounds that too many prominent generals would send the wrong message.
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Tumbler
The Republican race for 2012
Four years out, so far it’s a three-way race for the Republicans in 2012, between former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Alaska’s Sarah Palin and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (né Piyush Jindal), a clever young policy-wonk of Indian ancestry who claimed he and Louisiana were like curry and gumbo: a perfect match. A post-election Rasmussen poll makes Palin the frontrunner: 91 per cent of Republicans view her favourably. Presented with a list of all the candidates who ran in this cycle, nearly two thirds picked Palin. (Only one in ten plumped for either Mike Huckabee of Arkansas or Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.) Rupert Murdoch’s favourite conservative scribe Bill Kristol has even appointed himself Palin’s personal policy tutor. But it looks as if Newt will try to take over the party machine with a bid to become the new chairman of the Republican national committee. Jindal is biding his time. The likeable Cajun newcomer, the nearest thing the Republicans have to an Obama figure, is worth a flutter.
Obama’s small change
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Jonathan Ford
City gent caught out (again)
It has been another bad bubble for Chris Gent, the well-known businessman who used to run the world’s biggest mobile phone company, Vodafone. In 1999, at the height of the last investment mania—the so-called telecom, media and technology boom—Gent did what was in corporate terms the equivalent of buying a Semper Augustus tulip bulb in the late autumn of 1636. Under his direction, Vodafone paid £112bn for a German mobile phone company, Mannesmann. Despite doubling in size and becoming—in the modern parlance—too big to fail, Vodafone’s share price has never recovered from this act of largesse. Even now the whole company is worth only £57bn: roughly half what it offered for Mannesmann.
One might have thought that after this, Gent would have steered clear of any business with a bubbly feel the next time there was a screaming investment boom. But in 2003, just as the housing mania was getting underway, he joined the board of Lehman Brothers, one of the prime movers in the business of peddling mortgage-backed securities. Unfortunately, Lehman was—as was discovered in September—not too big to fail, although its collapse did result in one of the biggest and messiest bankruptcies ever, one which almost brought down whole the global financial system.
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James Crabtree
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
At Barack Obama’s press conference to announce his dozen-strong transition economic team, the faces behind him had a distinctly Clintonite look—including former treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Dotted among them were a few faces from the party’s left, including Clinton’s Labour secretary Robert Reich. But they looked isolated amid the centrist economists and big-name CEOs. Was this, some liberals asked, the change we voted for?
The appearance of Rubin and Summers at the heart of Obama’s economic team brought to the surface an old split in the Democratic party, often obscured during the campaign, between economic centrists and liberals. At the beginning of the 1990s, Rubin and his allies worried that excessive public spending and a ballooning deficit would lower American savings and, ultimately long-term growth. The victory of “Rubinomics” came when Clinton sided with Rubin over liberals like Reich, and prioritised deficit reduction over public investment.
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Stephen Boyle
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The Democrats haven’t been this happy since Bill Clinton’s unexpected victory in 1992. Then, as now, the new Democratic president will arrive in Washington on 20th January with a healthy Democratic majority in the house of representatives and a handy, if not decisive, majority in the senate. President Obama, fortified by his Democrat allies on Capitol Hill, can deliver a new era of liberal, inclusive government that restores trust in government and re-engages with the world at large. A new liberal dawn is breaking all across America.
There is, of course, a problem. Will Rogers, the cowboy, comedian and philosopher, probably put it best. “I am not a member of any organised political party,” he said. “I am a Democrat.” The truth is that Democrats are not good at getting along together.
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Tumbler
Hard times ahead for the president
It’s an open question whether the post-convention surge of the McCain-Palin ticket could have been stopped without the financial crisis. It certainly gave Obama the opportunity to say that Republican deregulation and free market mania got the country into this mess in the first place. The problem is that the next presidency will probably be defined by the hard times ahead. Pessimistic Democrats think that President Obama is going to be so overwhelmed by financial problems that he’ll be a one-term embarrassment like Jimmy Carter. Optimists hope he’ll rise to the challenge to become the new FDR, somehow finding a way to pay for healthcare reform, Kyoto-2 and middle-class tax cuts.
Tom Daschle, Obama’s top political adviser and a former senator, has already been damping down the euphoria about the new Democratic dawn in Congress, reminding Dems that the midterm elections in 2010 could be a disaster if the economy is still in the mire. Joe Biden takes another tack, warning that America’s enemies in Tehran and Pyongyang (not to mention Moscow and Beijing) and some of its putative friends in Baghdad and Kabul are going to be testing the backbone of the new president.
Who’d be in Obama’s cabinet?
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Joshua Kurlantzick
This article responds to to Prospect’s symposium on the credit crunch, “Reflections on the meltdown,” which can be read here .
The financial crisis will do great harm to the US economy. But more importantly America’s image as the global economic leader, which has carried it through past military victories and defeats, has been irreparably damaged. The sheer scope of US banks’ speculation is causing other nations to question whether America will ever be a safe investment again. And after years of lecturing others, the US dithered in its response, at first even failing to approve a rescue package. Now, Washington is even looking to London for leadership. But it is events in Beijing that should most worry US policy makers.
The financial crisis will not prove as damaging to China. With its $1.9 trillion in currency reserves, $370bn current account surplus, capital controls, and an essentially closed stock markets, China is well prepared to weather the financial panic. Though its economy remains driven by exports, which will be hit by falling demand in the west, the Chinese have amassed massive pools of savings. Their government can also rely on domestic consumer demand to power through global economic hard times. The World Bank predicts China will post over 9 per cent growth this year. That’s not a typo; by comparison, the US will almost certainly fall into recession.
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