Re-engage! America and the World After Bush

The costs of sprawl for family budgets

Via the Sydney Morning Herald, The Oil Drum, and the NYT's Paul Krugman, we have this fascinating graphic of how, in Greater Sydney, Australia, families that live in the new developments that sprawl further away from the city center find that, as global gas prices rise, their gas (petrol) charges will take up an even greater percentage of their annual income than those living closer in:

I think the black areas there are the sea.  The percentages of annual income given there are based on the idea of a liter of gas costing AUS$1.50.

I think it would be handy if planners in some US cities could produce similar graphics...  That would help us understand that present planning norms in the US which-- as in Australia-- encourage sprawl that ends up forcing families into a deep dependency of private autos, need to change.

One of the problems with sprawled out habitation patterns like these is that even if people living in these widely scattered suburbs and exurbs want to use public transportation, it is extremely expensive to provide such services to communities that don't have a basic density of both population and transit ridership.

Long-distance bike-riding , anyone?

Discussing the reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons

Last week I went to a fascinating panel discussion in Washington, DC at which three longtime experts in strategic affairs debated what policies the next US president should adopt regarding our country's own large arsenal of nuclear weapons.  One of the presenters, Barry Blechman of the Henry Stimson Center, made a robust argument that the next president should fairly rapidly bring together all the world's nuclear powers to negotiate an agreement on the elimination of all nuclear weapons by a date certain.

Blechman suggested that this date should probably be at least 20 years or more into the future. But he produced some strong arguments as to why a broad, inclusive negotiation like that might be the best way forward. (More details, below.)

The two other presenters, Arnold Kanter of the Scowcroft Group and Morton Halperin of the Open Society Institute both argued against that proposal. These two men have been members of a continuing study group convened by the DC-based New America Foundation (NAF) that has been looking at the nuclear-policy options for the next president.  Their group-- which spans a fairly broad ideological spectrum-- has not yet reached final agreement on a proposal. But Kanter and Halperin rteported that their group has reached a large measure of agreement on a proposal that, rather than aiming at the kind of worldwide agreement that Blechman talked about, the next president should rapidly announce and undertake a unilateral reduction of the US nuclear arsenals. 

Jeffrey Lewis, the convenor of the NAF group, chaired the panel discussion I was at, which was hosted by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and also made a short presentation of his own. He and the two NAF group members explained that the aim of the group's emerging proposal would be to stimulate similar actions on behalf of other nuclear powers, and to reduce the incentive for non-nuclear powers to cross the nuclear-weapons threshold.  Only after the original US reductions had been undertaken, and the international reaction to them gauged, should the US move toward negotiating further reductions with other powers.

The NAF's group plan would thus take considerably longer than Blechman's plan to reach the point of the US engaging in any negotiations over nuclear arms reductions with other powers; and Kanter and Halperin made fairly clear that they thought that even those negotiations should not aim at the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. (At one point, Halperin seemed to get a little carried away when he even referred to "the specter of elimination." Pardon me?)

This panel discussion came just a few days after I'd finished reading Hans Blix's elegantly argued little book titled Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters. Blix, as you may know, is the long-time Swedish arms control negotiator (and former Swedish Foreign Minister) who in 2002-03 was the head of UNMOVIC, the body that the UN set up to monitor, inspect, and verify the state of Saddam Hussein's alleged-- but in the event, no longer existing-- WMD programs.

Echoing an argument I made in Re-engage!, Blix wrote (p.58):

A crucial mark oif a civilkized society is that the citizens have given up the personal possession of arms and conferred upon public authorities a monopoly on the right to possess and use arms in accordance with the law... In the international community, states continue to possess their own arms and the possibility of using them.  We need to identify and promote changes that will transform this community of individually armed states into a society in which the states have disarmed drastically, and common institutions control the use of force in accordance with agreed rules.

Blix is not, obviously, a US citizen.  But one of the recommendations he describes for how the world's nuclear powers should deal with the arsenals they now have is broadly similar to Barry Blechman's.  Blix writes (p.64):

The General Assembly should convene a new World Summit on disarmament, non-proliferation, and the use of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists.  Since thorough preparations would be be necessary, planning should start as soon as possible.

The whole of Blix's little book is well worth reading. Maybe you could get your local library to order in a copy at the same time as they order Re-engage! for their patrons.

But the discussion among Kanter, Blechman, and Halperin was interesting, too.

Kanter explained the background to the NAF group's emerging proposal for unilateral US nuclear-force reductions in the following terms.

1. The reason the US needs nuclear weapons in the current era is because others have or seek them.
2. The primary objective of the US must be to prevent any use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, and to prevent the p[roliferation of nuclear weapons technology.
3. Our country's current nuclear policy needs some radical re-thinking.
4. The main reason to change our policy is to affect the judgments and behavior of others.  The goal is to encrouage others, especially the Russians, to take similar steps.
5. The US needs to keep "the capabilityies required to protect our vital interests, and to provide a hedge force against ubncertainties... This rtequires that we keep a nuclear-weapons production/modification complex in operation, that can give us the capability to "respond to the unforeseen."

That was the background to the suggestion of having the three-stage proces of (a) undertaking unilateral reductions; (b) assessing the reactions; and then (c) seeking multilateral negotiations.

Kanter said the group had not yet reached agreement on how bold the unilateral reductions proposed under (a) should be.

Blechman spoke next.  Like Sen. Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, and former cabinet members George Shultz and William Perry in their January 2007 op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, Blechman situated his argument in the context of the greatly increased risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism in the modern world.

He also based his argument to some degree on an assessment of the domestic US politics around any proposal to reduce or eliminate the US nuclear arsenal.  He said,

Until now, all the proposals made for arms control by successive presidents have run into foreseeable opposition from at least twenty senators as well as from huge vested interests in this country. But there has never been any equally strong group that has supported these proposals.  What has shown the ability to really moblize people in this country, however, is a proposal to go to zero nuclear weapons.

He noted that the next review conference of the NPT is coming up in 2010, and that the US should be prepared to go to that conference with a compelling proposal.

Regarding the process of reducing the world's nuclear arsenals to zero, he said, "We would do it gradually without harming anyone's security." He also said there would have to be certain conditions attached:

1. All the signatories to the proposed agreement would have to declare all their NW-related facilities.  He noted that some NW possessors, like Israel, might be holdouts at first., but they could be included in the process further along. "At a minimum, though, to make it work, we would need the US, Russia, China, and India to take part."
2. The phased reductions-to-zero of the arsenals of participating states would be monitored and verified by a multilateral agency, "perhas the IAEA."
3. The first states to start reducing their arsenals under this plan should be the US and Russia.
4. The treaty should guarantee access by all countries to peaceful nuclear technology, but would keep all the world's nuclear fuel cycles under multinational, not national, control.
5. There should be specified sanctions for cheaters, including holding personally responsible any of the government officials involved.
6. There shouold be specified "off-ramps" to allow signatories to leave the treaty under certain circumstances, including if the whole treaty seemed to be coming apart.

Blechman also said there might be some role of "a reserve, multilaterally controlled, force of disassembled nuclear weapons," to be retained as an international hedge against future acts of proliferation.

Anyway, he said he and colleagues at the Stimson center are contoinuing to flesh out their proposal, which will be published sometime in the fall. He noted that pursuit of this plan wouldn't rule out thre US also undertaking some unilateral reductions of its nuclear arsenal, or some restructuring of the US nuclear weapons complax-- but the main focus should be on the multlateral negotiation aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons.

After Blechman spoke, Halperin weighed in to say that his proposal would be not just ineffective but also "dangerous." His main argument was this:

If the president proposes this, he wouldn't get anything else done on nuclear weapons... The US political system would be overwhelmed by this.

No-one believes it is realistic to negotiate the elimination of all nuclear weapons!

One of the pieces of evidence he adduced for this last judgment came from Russia. "The Russians probably see a greater need for nuclear weapons now than they did during the Cold War, because their conventinal weapons are so weak."

Though Halperin was firmly opposed to the idea of any rapid or even medium-term move toward elimination of nuclear weapons, he did say that as part of its "opening" unilateral move, the US should move to reducing its nuclear arsenal to "less than 1,000 warheads-- perhaps a lot less."  He also said that if it is generally agreed that the US only has nuclear weapons in order to deter their use by others, then we should publicly announce a "No first use" policy and sign and ratify the Comprehenisve Test Ban Treaty-- while makng sure that the US nuclear arsenal is in fact resilient enough to survive any first use by others.

He also said the US should do a lot to back the nuclear posture considerably away from its present, almost hair-trigger stance. "Most Americans would be astonished to know how ready the US still is to launching a massive nuclear strike."

Anyway, it was all a fascinating discussion.  While doing the research needed for the links above, I found a couple of other really helpful online resources.  The Nuclear Security Project has a new website that provides resources about the continuing campaign by Nunn, Kissinger, Shultz, and Perry to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons.  And the Nuclear Threat Initiative has this handy on-line tutorial on the NPT.

New figures show continuing failure of 'GWOT'

In Chapter 2 of the book I present a chart (Fig.2.1) that displays the numbers of fatalities inflicted worldwide by terrorists, 1998-2006.  Now, the State Department's National Counter-Terrorism Center has just published its report on how the "Global War on Terror" went in 2007, and once again the picture is sobering. Their main page of statistics is here.  Scroll down to see just how badly the GWOT has been going over the past three years.

However, the figures for just those years don't show the size of the contrast between the situation before the US invaded Iraq, and the situation after.  Before 2003, the annual global fatalities from terror never exceeded 5,300.  In 2003 they climbed just above 6,000; and every year since 2004 they have exceeded 12,000, showing a continuing increase each year. 

In 2007, the number reached 22,685.

I have now updated the chart on global fatalities.  You can download it as a Word document from here.

This record provides additional, very tragic evidence to my argument that the way the Bush administration has responded to the challenge posed by the terrorists has not worked. I still strongly maintain that a more effective policy would be based  on (1) solid, but always rights-respecting police work and cooperation among police agencies across borders; (2) a recognition that terrorist violence is a challenge faced by many of the world's peoples, and not just Americans; and (3) pursuit of a holistic, 'human security' approach to building the security of all the world's nations, interdependent as we all are.

The use of massive military force to invade distant countries has not worked.  We are surely smart enough to recognize that we need to try something different?

Ethanol and the U.S. 'National Interest'

Yesterday, Pres. Bush referred to the huge subsidies the US government gives to farmers to grow corn for conversion into ethanol, a car fuel, by saying:

"the truth of the matter is it's in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us."

For many years, those two words "national interest" have been widely used in US political discussions as a kind of conversation-stopping trump card.  "Oh! The 'national interest' is at stake! Then I'd better stop criticizing the president!" -- that was the kind of reaction past leaders sought, and too often won. But who defines this slippery thing called the "national interest", anyway?  In Chap. 7 of  Re-engage!, I write:

[I]n line with the human security precept that true security is people-centered rather than state-centered, we can start thinking about our own country’s national interest in a new, more people-centered way, very different from the “big power” way it has generally been understood until now.

I then go on to ask some questions about how the adoption of this definition of the US "national interest" might actually change many aspects of our relationship with the rest of the world. (Posing queries intended to stimulate further discussion is a very Quaker thing to do. Anyway, I hope you find these queries in my book thought-provoking, when you read them.)

This currently mounting global food crisis is an instance in which we certainly need to adopt the people-centered rather than big-business-centered definition of "national interest".

It is certainly not in our interest, as US citizens, that the activities of our country's very well-funded Big Ag sector and the financial sectors that have been speculating heavily in foodstuffs-- and fuel-- over recent months should be allowed to continue to pursue policies that are driving hundreds of millions of our fellow-humans in poor countries into hunger, and towards outright, directly life-threatening starvation.

These big business sectors need to be effectively controlled and regulated by a political leadership that understands-- finally!-- that the greed of US car-owners should never be allowed to over-ride the right that all the world's men, women, and children have to adequate and assured sources of nutrition. (Elsewhere in the book, by the way, I note that most "rights" activists in the US have focused far too tightly on issues of civil and political rights around the world, and have given short shrift to the frequently far more pressing issues of social and economic rights.)

The Washington Post's smart and thoughtful business columnist Steve Pearlstein has a good column in today's paper  on the role that speculators have been playing in the current food crisis.  For those of you who are interested, the whole of the column is worth reading. (As was his previous column, here. )

Some highlights from today's Pearlstein:

Speculators have always played a prominent role in commodities markets, but in the past year, they have literally overwhelmed them, causing a dramatic increase in trading volume, volatility and prices and disrupting many of the normal relationships between producers and end-users.

Many of these were the same hedge funds and hot-money investors who had gorged on sovereign debt of developing countries, tech and telecom stocks, subprime mortgages and commercial real estate and now needed a new thing to focus on. Others -- including, it is said, some sovereign wealth funds -- looked to commodities as a hedge against the falling dollar. But perhaps the biggest push came from pension funds, foundations and university endowments whose managers had all gone to the same conferences and read the same academic papers, suggesting that a basket of commodity futures would provide a good hedge against stock and bond market declines.

...[T]he Bank for International Settlements estimates that the value of all the derivative contracts traded on the unregulated over-the-counter markets surged from about $3 trillion in the spring of 2005 to more than $8 trillion today. Whatever the number, it's hard to imagine that it wasn't a significant factor in skyrocking prices...

... [T]he only people who don't believe speculation is driving a commodities bubble are the big commodity traders and the commodities exchanges, which are profiting handsomely from the soaring prices and trading volumes, and the regulators at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose economists cannot seem to find statistical evidence that financial investors have had much of an impact on commodity prices.

US citizens need to start acting responsibly and quickly to bring these devastating speculations in basic foodstuffs under some form of rational and accountable control.  This is in our direct interest as a citizenry, since so many of our own citizens are being harmed by the food-price rises.

But in today's irreversibly hyperconnected world it is always, also, in our interest to make sure that actions taken by our government and our fellow-citizens on Wall Street, in Big Ag, and other big-business sectors stop inflicting harm on the world's poorest, most vulnerable people.

(Cross-posted at Just World News.)

A great resource on food scarcity issues

Raj Patel, a South African specialist in development economics, has published an intriguing-looking book on global food issues.  It's called Stuffed and Starved.  I definitely want to read it!  He also has a very informative blog, of the same name, about the global food crisis. (Hat-tip Rami Zurayk.)

In this post, about the food crisis in Haiti, Patel writes,

The fact that Haiti produced more rice in 1984 than it does now isn’t an accident. The fact that the bags of rice to be found in Haiti have US flags stamped on them is no accident. As former secretary of state for Agriculture, Earl Butz, put it: ‘Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit.’

And that’s also one of the ironies behind the complaints of institutions like the IMF and World Bank. At the same time as they bemoan the food crisis, they are its architects. They have aggressively prohibited the kinds of policy that might have mitigated the price shock. No grain reserves. No support for domestic agriculture. No tariff barriers. All so that weapon in the US toolkit could be honed a little sharper.

In this post, about the global rice market, he notes that though many rice-eating countries have been hit by massive price increases in recent weeks, China, South Korea, and Japan have not.

He asks,

What distinguishes all three of these countries from others in Asia? First, they have their own domestic production. Second, they augment domestic production with domestic grain reserves. Third, they're only able to do this because they're aggressive and powerful negotiators in international trade agreements. Japan has long held that its rice isn't just a commodity but a way of life.

The political commitment to sustain this way of life, in China, South Korea and Japan, using some Old School economic policy (subsidies, protection, grain reserves) means that in the lean times, these countries will be able to survive. That's great for them - there's no indication that the lean times are going to end any time soon. And it's tough for the weaker countries in Asia, who find themselves cut loose, in the perfect storm that the free market has produced.

Patel's bio says he used to work at the World Bank and has interned at the WTO.  He certainly seems to know a lot about what he's writing about. This page on his website gives a handy list of "ten things that we all can do to promote justice and food sovereignty."  Definitely worth looking at!

 

George Soros on the financial crisis, military spending, and more

I just had the good fortune to participate in a media teleconference organized with legendary financier and social entrepreneur George Soros by the New America Foundation.  Soros was speaking about his latest book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means, which was released yesterday exclusively as an e-book, cost $22.95. (Details here.)

Soros is well-known as a big-picture thinker, and one of the things that fascinated me about the teleconference discussion was how he talked about the deep connectedness between many of the issues that are covered in the Re-engage! book.  For example, he said that though he judged that the United States' military spending on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had not yet become a huge burden on national economy, this situation was set to change over the years immediately ahead.  The level of these military expenditures will most likely be rising, he said; and this would act as an ever-increasing burden on the national economy and a motor for inflation.

He also, in response to a separate question, identified investment in pro-green technology as one of the best possible ways to provide a broad stimulus to the economy, now that the stimulus effect of consumption by US consumers can no longer play that role.

In the teleconference, he projected a generally cautious optimism that the worst is past in the current global financial crisis.  In his introductory presentation he mentioned a recent "turning point" min this regard, but did not elaborate on that until I asked him to.  He then said his view was that the global financial system "had a moment of truth in early '07.  Then there was a sort of twilight period until August '07, when we did have the turning-point, and now we have the fallout from that and the financial crisis."

He based his argument on a broad analysis of the thinking of the leading participants in world financial markets.  Basically, he said, the dominant thinking in both the US and the UK since 1980 has been that of "market fundamentalism", including the view that controlling money supply is a sufficient way to control not only money markets but also credit markets.  That view, he said, is based on an assumption that all participants are acting on the basis of perfect information (and also, I would add, that they are all acting in good faith toward each other and everyone else.)  But, he continued, the assumption about perfect information has now been shown to be false; and the imperfections in the information base of leading investors then allowed the rise of "bubbles" at two different levels: the US-based housing bubble, which we have all seen, and also a supervening "super-bubble" affecting the world credit markets as a whole...

He expressed himself as generally hopeful (though by no means certain) that the worst is now past, and that the US authorities will step in with appropriate actions to minimize the negative fallout from the financial crisis. However, in an op-ed in yesterday's Financial Times, he also warned that there are still serious risks ahead:

the authorities ought to prepare for the next shoes to drop. I shall mention only two. There is an esoteric financial instrument called credit default swaps. The notional amount of CDS contracts outstanding is roughly $45,000bn (£23,000bn). To put it into perspective, that is about equal to half the total US household wealth and about five times the national debt. The market is totally unregulated and those who hold the contracts do not know whether their counterparties have adequately protected themselves. If and when defaults occur, some of the counterparties are likely to prove unable to fulfil their obligations. This prospect hangs over the financial markets like a sword of Damocles that is bound to fall, but only after some defaults have occurred...

The other issue is rising foreclosures. About 40 per cent of the 6m subprime loans outstanding will default in the next two years. The defaults of option-adjustable-rate mortgages and other mortgages subject to rate reset will be of the same order of magnitude but occur over a longer period. With single family home sales running at an annual rate of 600,000, foreclosures will overwhelm the market and cause prices to overshoot on the downside. This will swell the number of homeowners with negative equity who may be tempted to turn in their keys. The fall in house prices will become practically bottomless until the government intervenes. Cutting foreclosures should be a priority but the measures so far are public relations exercises.

My own judgment of the probability that we are "past the worst" in the current crisis is more pessimistic than George Soros's.  This is based not only on information of the kind  he provides there but also on my evaluation of the readiness of the U.S. Congress to undertake a meaningful intervention in the financial arena.

In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank provided a great public service when he wrote a report of the Senate Banking Committee's hearings into the Federal Reserve's $30 billion bailout of teetering investment firm Bear Stearns in which he listed each member of the committee according to how much money they have received from securities and investment firms.  Hence, he refers to Committee Chair Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut not in the usual way as (D-CT) but as  (D-$5,796,000).

The biggest receiver there seemed to be Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, described by Milbank as (D-$6,162,000).

Milbank was basing his designations on data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, whose very helpful website is here. Their page on political donations made by securities and investment firms is here.

Regarding George Soros, meanwhile, I have to say I find him a fascinating person with considerable-- if not always well-organized-- intellectual talents. In December 2003, he published a book titled The Bubble of American Supremacy, whose title alone is food for considerable thought. In an article he published based on the book, he made these very accurate observations:

The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and have right on our side. The very first sentence of the September 2002 National Security Strategy (the President's annual laying out to Congress of the country's security objectives) reads, "The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."

The assumptions behind this statement are false on two counts. First, there is no single sustainable model for national success. Second, the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it.

Anyway, I'll be looking for his new book with interest.

Fun facts: How big is the US national debt? Who holds it?

When I was writing Re-engage! last year, I got to do a lot of research about issues and areas I'd never written about much before.  One was the macroeconomics of the relationship between the US and the rest of the world (for Chapter 6 of the book.)  It's amazing how much data and information you can find, quite easily, on Web these days.

So if you go to this page on the US Treasury Dept.'s "Treasury Direct" website, you can then click through to the most up-to-date information available about the total level of the US public (national) debt.  I just downloaded the PDF file of the most recent of the monthly reports posted there-- the one for February 2008.  And I learned that the total amount of US federal government debt that's held by the public on Feb. 29 was $5,259,804 million. That is, $5.26 trillion.

Here is a graph, made from 2007 White House budget numbers, that shows the trend in national debt levels over time, since 1950.

And which other countries hold the current US debt?  This page, on the U.S. Treasury's main website, is automatically updated with the latest info on who the "Major Foreign Holders" of Treasury securities are.  The latest figures there right now are for the end of December 2007.  Non-US entities-- and I am not sure if this includes "sovereign wealth funds" and other quasi-non-governmental entities and non-governmental entities, as well as central banks-- are recorded as owning a total of $2.354 trillion of our debt on December 31, 2007, up from $2.103 trn a year earlier. 

Of the December 31, 2007 holdings, the top five foreign holders were:

1. Japan: $581.2 billion ($622.9 bn in Dec. '06)
2. Chine: $477.6 billion ($396.9 bn in Dec. '06)
3. United Kingdom: $157.4 bn ($92.6 bn in Dec. '06)
4. "Oil exporters"*:  $137.9 bn ($110.2 bn in Dec. '06)
5. Brazil: $129.9 bn ($52.1 bn in Dec. '06)

*Oil exporters include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar,     Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.

I guess for me, the big surprises there are the steep increases in US Debt holdings by the U.K. and Brazil.  It looks as if Brazil must have had a huge trade surplus with the US in 2007!

Reflections on the new urgency of climate change

I always find that when I have to write something I learn a lot during the process!  When I was writing Re-engage!, one of the things I learned most about was the newly pivotal role that climate issues are coming to play in world politics.  When I was writing Chapter Five of the book, which is the one on climate change, I had to do a lot of catch-up learning about the issue! 

Fortunately I had a couple of great personal resources I was able to draw on.  One was my son, Tarek Rached, who has been working on environmental engineering issues (and related policy issues) for a number of years now.  Another was a long-time friend, Ruth Greenspan Bell, who has worked on environmental policy issues for many years now-- first as a staff lawyer with the US Environmental Protection Agency, and then as a project leader with the non-government group Resources For the Future. Of course, as I state in the Preface to the book, neither of those two nor any of the other people I consulted as I completed the writing of the book to definitely a very crazy schedule can be held responsible for the way I eventually phrased things.

I also did a lot of book-based and online research on the topic.  If you go to this web-page I've created, you can find some of the resources that I found most helpful.  (Sorry, that web-page still has a few small editing glitches in it right now.  I'll try to fix them as soon as I can.) You will find other identified in the footnotes to Chapter 5 itself.

One of the most informative, useful, and just beautiful of all of these is the World Wildlife Organization's "Living Planet Report 2006", which you can find in English as a 4.5 MB PDF file here. I think the paper version of that  book would make a great gift, or a great resource for any  library!

Anyway, I had to finish the first complete draft of the book back in September 2007, but I have kept thinking a lot about the new importance of climate change in international politics ever since then. At the end of December I wrote a suitably end-of-year-ish op-ed on the topic for The Christian Science Monitor. It appeared under the title: America: Step up on climate change: Global warming is the nuclear issue of our age.

In it, I argued,

Our per capita emissions rate ... is more than twice that of the advanced economies of Japan or the European Union, more than five times that of China, and 20 times India's. Clearly, as we ask other countries to cut back their emissions, we should also be ready to credibly promise that we will be making deep reductions of our own.

America's environmental policy also matters deeply because climate change has become such a critical issue in world affairs. The world's 6 billion non-Americans, and their governments, will be carefully monitoring whether Washington participates fully in the technological and lifestyle transformation that will be required to reduce emissions in the years ahead – and whether we deal fairly with other countries as we do so.

And I concluded the piece with this:

Climate change now looks set to be the same kind of touchstone issue in global politics that nuclear weapons has been since 1945. As with nuclear weapons, the threats posed by climate change know no national boundaries. They could, in some circumstances, threaten all of human life. As with nuclear weapons, good-faith international cooperation is a must if the climate problem is to be brought under control.

The people of the rest of today's richly interconnected world will be monitoring Washington's performance carefully. How will Americans and our leaders respond?          

After the piece appeared, I wondered if perhaps my language there was too apocalyptic, and perhaps even unhelpfully so.  But every time I've returned to thinking hard about the issue I've concluded it was not-- except, perhaps, that in line with the advice I offered in Chapter 1 of the book I should not have used the language of "threats" there but rather, the language of ""challenges."

What does anyone else think about this? Was my language too apocalyptic?

'Survival' and how we think about war

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which I've been a member for some 20 years, is this year celebrating its 50th birthday. To mark the occasion they've published a special issue of their quarterly journal Survival, under the title "The Bush Years and Beyond."  It is a generally excellent edition, by a short and informative account by British strategic-studies grandee Michael Howard of the history of the IISS.  Of special note there: that back in 1958, the IISS was founded to provide a specifically British kind of counterpart to pre-existing US think-tanks like the Rand Corporation; and that the British Council of Churches was one of the organizations that-- moved by the ethical concerns some of its leaders had over the whole question of Britain's nuclear arsenal-- participated in founding the IISS

Since 1958, the IIS has changed in many ways.  It has tried hard to become much more international, even if with only mixed success. And it has become far less concerned with the big ethical/philosophical questions around nuclear war and warfare in general, and far more in thrall to the big defense contractors who are well represented in the membership, and far less connected to any religious bodies or individuals. (Regarding Quakers, I know of only one other apart from myself  who is an IISS member. And I confess that I am unaware if any other members of IISS bring  any specifically religious sensibility to their engagement with it, though doubtless there are some who do.)

Be those broader fact as they may be, there are a number ofexcellent articles in this anniversary edition of Survival.  Far and away the most thought-provoking, in my view, is "Strategy and the Limitation of War", by Hew Strachan of All Souls College, Oxford.  Strachan's article is an excellent and much-needed exploration of how specialists, policymakers, and commentators think about different forms of war. He notes that the way wars are described almost inevitably frame the way that we think about them.  He notes, in particular, that the rhetoric that members of the Bush administration have generated about the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) and about this being a "long war" is at one and the same time:

(1) actually unknowable, since no-one knows the length of a war going in (though I would add that inasmuch as people enter a "long war" mindset, the use of the term from the get-go might itself act as a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy); and

(2) an intellectually slovenly and in practice very counter-productive way of aggregating under the "long war/GWOT" rubric situations, clashes, and armed confrontations that in reality often have little to do with each other.

Strachan is particularly percipient when he describes how the legacies of the "total war" thinking of the Cold War shaped the way that most western strategic theorists approached the challenges posed by the attacks of September 11, 2001. He writes:

The stock of strategic ideas developed against the background of the Cold War ... continues to have greater purchase than perhaps we recognize. Pre-emption became a principle of strategy within the context of nuclear deterrence.  Although aggressive in its effects, its employment was predicated on the evidence of an immediate and probable attack, which was never forthcoming...  After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the term was given a different conceptual context as a free-standing element in the defence postures of the United States and the United Kingdom.  It implied an early attack against threats that were latent, before they became imminent. A concept developed within one security structure was shoe-horned into another in order to give it a legitimating ledigree.  Moreover, whereas in its earlier incarnation it was designed to prevent war, in its new format it was intended to provoke it.

The mutation of pre-emption was replicated for deterrence as a whole... (pp.39-40)

Strachan writes,

The book's table of contents

Ch. 1  America and the world after Bush

Ch. 2  Traditional security challenges

Ch. 3  The challenge of global inequality

Ch. 4  Strengthening human rights

Ch. 5  Dealing seriously with climate change

Ch. 6  Global power shifts

Ch. 7  Rejoining the rest of the world

Resource section: Action Toolkit and Topics Toolkit