Jonathan Power
Iran could become another Turkey: "democratic, pro-western and bomb free"
As the possibility of a UN-backed plan aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons has been given a glimmer of hope—in not being rejected outright by the Iranian government—it is worth considering why Iran is being singled out so acutely and unfairly over its nuclear policy.
Clearly, the west and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear-enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a reprocessing facility to make plutonium, and a missile programme). In the 1980s it built two nuclear devices.
Three years ago I asked the chief of mission at the US embassy in Brasilia if Washington was worried about Brazil. “Not at all,” he replied. “In the early 1990s Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons’ programme, and Argentina, its supposed enemy, has done the same.” “But,” I insisted, “Brazil still has its enrichment programme and a reprocessing facility.” His answer: “We have no worries about Brazil. We see eye to eye.” However Brazil still resists, in part, the probing eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
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Prospect
James Carville will advice Ashraf Ghani
Foreign Policy (FP) today launched a AfPak Channel where they offer a preview of the Afghan election. They report that with just two weeks to go “what had been a yawn of a race is suddenly a pulse-pumping sprint for the finish, with no clear winner in sight. What rocked Karzai’s formerly sturdy campaign boat?” Instead of focusing on Hamid Karzai, we should instead pay attention to a trio of contenders – and be “prepared for the unexpected.”
Barely has the world recovered from one dubious election in a nation vital to global security than another is on the cards. But while Iran paid for its dodgy poll, Afghanistan’s tab is being picked up by the US and Britain. Afghans vote on 20th August, against a backdrop of bloodshed and worries that rigging will make a mockery of the £16m being offered by DfID for fair elections.
Obama worries that overt US support will harm opposition candidates. But US aid has arrived nonetheless, in the form of James Carville, the fiery political consultant who engineered Bill Clinton’s 1992 election win, and who is now adviser to Afghan presidential candidate (and Prospect contributor) Ashraf Ghani. Carville once described his strategy as “when your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.” But Ghani has his own plans. “I aim to persuade more warlords to support Karzai,” he said, “it’s getting expensive for him to keep them all on board.”
This diary item appeared in the August edition of Prospect
Brian Semple
One of the Chinese naval ships that surrounded as US surveillance boat near Hainan Island
With the war in Afghanistan and the recent Sri Lankin onslaught against the Tamil Tigers, you could be forgiven for missing another potential flashpoint in southeast Asia. In March of this year, a US maritime surveillance ship sailing near Hainan Island, south of mainland China, found itself surrounded by Chinese naval vessels. China accused the US of having violated international law by conducting surveillance activities in waters where China claims jurisdiction, while the US insisted the area is international waters.
Regardless of which country was legally in the right, the stand-off was evidence of the US government’s increasing anxiety about China’s naval expansion in the region. In a web exclusive for Prospect today, Jeffrey Henderson asks: who will step in to prevent potential escalation of this superpower rivalry in the Indian ocean? Henderson, who is professor of International Development at the University of Bristol, argues that perhaps only a strengthened EU can mediate between the two nations before the conflict intensifies. As ever, let us know your thoughts below.
Jonathan Power
Obama and Medvedev's summit is an opportunity for bold action
The first summit between President Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev is only days away and so far there has only been perfunctory mention of this in the media. Odd, not to say irresponsible.
If played right this could be the most important summit since presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush, having torn down the Iron Curtain, decided that they had enough confidence in the other side to introduce unilateral nuclear arms cuts, a valuable ancillary to what they formally agreed.
In the opinion of Georgi Arbatov, Gorbachev’s (and before that Brezhnev’s) foreign affairs advisor, the time is overdue for more unilateral cuts. “Being honest”, he told me two summers’ ago, “we in Russia are not right in our approach. We have so many weapons we could decrease the numbers unilaterally and set an example. We could dismantle our rockets, take others off alert, and the Americans would be obliged to follow us.”
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JONATHAN_FORD
Quantitative easing: hair shirts for monetarist economists
The credit crisis is producing some odd bedfellows. Take Tim Congdon, who is one of our more hair-shirted monetarists. Congdon has been one of the leading supporters (and intellectual authors, if some are to be believed) of the quantitative easing policy pursued by the treasury and the Bank of England. This lines him up alongside those he would usually count as his intellectual foes—the Keynesians and big government men.
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Tumbler
Pelosi: Unaccustomed popularity
The first weeks of any administration are marked by a jostling for power as Congress, regardless of political affiliation, reminds the new president that it controls the money. When he let Speaker Nancy Pelosi write the stimulus bill, Obama started losing the fight. The Republicans seized the chance to run a “Democrats-as-usual” campaign over the bill’s special clauses for research on catfish genetics and skin bloom on grapes. Such gems, inserted by congressman with an axe to grind or a donor to reward, are known as earmarks, and after campaigning against them, Obama has said he’ll let them through just this once and fight them later.
Later may not be so easy. Obama is having trouble with his centrist Democrats, who are not sold on his strategy of spending his way out of the recession while pushing ahead with health and education reform.
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Jonathan Power
Samuel Huntington in 2004
Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, was harping on an old theme at her Senate confirmation hearing last week. She said her top international principle was to â€strengthen America’s position of global leadership.†This reminds one of her Clinton administration predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who said that â€America is the indispensable nation†and â€We stand tall and hence see further than any other nation.†It suggests that other nations are dispensable and that American indispensability is the source of wisdom. What, then, about Iraq, global warming, Palestine/Israel, the International Criminal Court and financial probity?
â€One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership in the United States”, a high British diplomat told me. â€Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralismâ€. And this was said before George W. Bush came to power. Today, even the instinctively pro American British Conservative Party has sought to step back from American hubris, no vote winner on this side of the pond. Sad to say, even President Barack Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs two years ago that the US â€must lead the world once more.â€
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Jonathan Power
A British anti-torture protester: being heard by Obama?
The courtrooms of America sometimes take us by surprise. Last week, Charles â€Chuckie†Taylor, the son of the former Liberian president and notorious warlord, Charles Taylor, was sentenced in a Miami court to 97 years in prison for torture. It was the first time than an American court had applied a law passed in 1994 allowing the prosecution of citizens who commit torture overseas. (Taylor was born in the US, but then moved to Liberia to join his father.)
Is there now one law in America for those who commit torture overseas and another for those who commit it at home with the authority of government? Perhaps for not much longer. In a television interview last weekend, President-elect Barack Obama said that the attorney general would investigate whether some senior members of the Bush administration should be prosecuted for their part in torture, although he said that his belief was that â€what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future.â€
Also last week he said that he had given his new appointees to top intelligence positions a clear charge to restore the US’s stance as a protector of human rights. “Under my administration the United States does not torture.†Obama should also have reminded his audience that it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that the US helped push for the UN to agree to a legally binding treaty against torture, and then propelled Congress rapidly to ratify it. It is this treaty that provides the legal underpinning for the prosecution of Taylor. Read more »
Manneken Pis
Extract: Prospect's Brussels diary
It has not been widely noticed but the Czech Republic takes over the EU presidency in January just at the time that Barack Obama is inaugurated in Washington. Vaclav Klaus, the Czech Republic president, is both a Euro and a climate change sceptic. So we can look forward to an intriguing role reversal, at least on the environment, as the man representing the supposedly progressive Europeans meets the leader of the supposedly reactionary Americans. Barack Obama has already pledged to invest $15bn a year in renewable energy, create 5m “green jobs” in the US and set a firm target for reducing emissions. Will the EU be able to keep up?
Yet the environment might be the exception. Now that liberal Europeans have got what they wanted with Obama’s election, some are starting to wonder if much is really going to change. One view is that, although George W Bush’s first term marked the high point of the neocons, Bush’s second term was rather different. In recent years European co-operation with Washington has improved and therefore the room for positive change is less than you might think. And, from what is known of Obama’s politics, there may be both opportunities and problems.
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