Transcript The Big Problems

Questions and Big
Problems
The Future of American Foreign
Policy
A new World
• The end of the Cold War was not the “end of
history” but the start of a painful process of
global transformation –
• from stable, long-term confrontation governed by
well-defined rules to something entirely new.:
– no status quo,
– a world of dynamic power shifts, the most unstable of
all
• A dangerous world but a world in which the
American “unipolar moment” has passed
Questions
• with regard to weapons of mass destruction, deterrence
no longer seems feasible. The weapons' technology
spreads through illegal markets to non-state actors, and
if and when such weapons are created, their delivery
will be non-conventional. How should this issue be
handled?
• What should we do with terrorists who do not consider
themselves part of any country and who commit acts of
violence across international borders? Where should
they be taken? Do these lawless fighters deserve the
full protections of the Geneva Convention?
Big Problems
• Financial Crisis: Impact on Foreign Policy
• Ethnonationalism and Human Rights
crises
• Militarization
• Weakening of International Institutions and
Laws
First Problem: Financial Crisis
impact on foreign policy
• Reduction in foreign aid
• Reduction in willingness to address
climate change issues
• Trade Protectionism
Less U.S. foreign aid?
• How will the US meet its entitlement obligations, pay interest on the
$10 trillion debt, and bail out states and cities unable to balance their
budgets?
• Down the road, ballooning deficits will bring inflation and cause
problems for the dollar.
• What will be cut? There are few targets available to reduce federal
spending.
• Will Congress want to cut the defense and foreign-aid budgets?
• If so, this will limit the availability of tools central to asserting U.S.
power and influence abroad.
Climate Change on the Back
Burner?
• Will it be more difficult to negotiate an
international accord on climate change?
• Countries such as China and India are
likely to resist anything that could be an
impediment to growth.
• And the U.S. as well…..
Trade Protectionism?
• Trade is a boon to developing countries, and
one way to link countries in a web of
dependencies that restrains nationalist impulses.
• We still take in the world’s goods. Will U.S.
trade protectionism slow growth around the
world, increasing poverty and straining political
stability in many countries?
• We should not be surprised when governments
fail and societies suffer from violence.
Commodity price decline
• the decline in commodity prices will be as
influential in boosting incomes and
spending in advanced economies as their
rise was in sparking a vicious circle of
weakness that put further pressure on an
already stressed financial system.
Decline of Potential Rivals?
• Recession has caused a major decline in
the world price of oil, to roughly $70 a
barrel from over $140.
• What does this mean for Russia and Iran?
Iran
•Decline in oil price will make
financial sanctions more
meaningful
•could well make the Iranians
more open to diplomacy that
would limit or better yet end
their independent uranium
enrichment effort in exchange
for economic relief.
•It might even lead the
Iranians to examine some of
their expensive support for
Hamas, Hezbollah and Shiite
militias in Iraq.
Russia
• is feeling the pain -- of falling energy
prices and a plummeting stock market that
has come down two-thirds from its high
and was closed by authorities more than a
dozen times.
• Will Russia be more or less aggressive as
a result?
Lingering issues and growing
problems
• Ethnonationalism
• Militarization
• Decline in international institutions
Second Problem: A World of
Ethnonationalism
•
•
•
A world divided by ethnic and sectarian
nationalist states and the rise of
extremist ethno-national and sectarian
nationalist ideologies.
more “ethnonationalist” nation-states
now than at the beginning of the 20th
century
states dominated by a single ethnic or
religious group.
National Identity in this World……
• Exclusive “Nations” with unique
citizenship rights have aligned with both
– “states”
– and territory in the 21st Century.
– This trio forms the core of national identity for
most of the world—
National Self-Determination
• Many would argue that providing
exclusive “states” for these ethnically
and religiously defined “nations” is a
good thing.
• A state and piece of land for each “nation.”
• It is closely linked in many people’s
minds to “national self-determination.”
But there is not enough land to go
around…
• But there are not enough “states” to go
around, given the multiplicity of “nations” in
the world.
• ……There aren’t enough states to
house all the world’s nations
Gross Human Rights Violations
• the UN Security Council still finds itself
unable to agree to do much to protect the
people of Darfur, Congo, and others from
the murderous contempt of their rulers—
and opposing ethnic or sectarian
groups….just as in the 1990s the UN
failed the genocide victims in Rwanda.
Refugees as a Humanitarian
Crisis
At the end of 2007, 11.4 million
refugees in the world and 26
million displaced within their own
country -- known as internally
displaced people, or IDPs.
underlying causes:
•Ethnic and sectarian conflict
•climate-induced
environmental degradation
that increases competition
for scarce resources,
•extreme price hikes that
have hit the poor the hardest
and are generating instability
in many places," said
Guterres.
Conflict
• Groups that hate and fear one another look for a
“state of their own” on territory that privileges
their own national group. This has led to
unspeakable horrors, such as genocide and
ethnic cleansing.
• Conflict over the right to Land
• IMMIGRATION HAS often GIVEN RISE TO
COMMUNAL CONFLICT IN THESE STATES,
IN WHICH IMMIGRANTS ARE NOT
CONSIDERED PART OF THE “NATION”
National self-determination?
• The fact of ethnonationalism combined
with many gross human rights violations
leads to the “easy” conflation of human
rights with “national self determination.”
• is seen as the answer to the human rights
abuses that these ‘nations’ have suffered.
Demonstrators supporting the Abkhazians and
South Ossetians protest against Georgia in
front of the Georgian Embassy in Ankara
Should the U.S. intervene militarily to end these
conflicts, protect human rights, bring national selfdetermination?
• goal is neither annexation nor interference with territorial
integrity, but
• minimization of the suffering of civilians.
• rationale behind such an intervention is the belief,
embodied in international customary law in a duty to
disregard a state's sovereignty to preserve our common
humanity.
• From the 1990s the understanding of what what justified
humanitarian military intervention broadened to include
hunger and famine, state repression, the movement of
refugees, to justify intervention
Nato bombing of Serb military
headquarters
Somalia…..
Responsibility to Protect
• the 2005 Security Council resolution sanctions
military intervention
• seeks to establish a clearer code of conduct for
humanitarian interventions
• advocates a greater reliance on non-military
measures.
• But establishes the right to military intervention
in the conduct of other states to protect its
citizens where that other state has failed in its
obligation to protect its own citizens.
Genocide survivor Grace
Mukagabiro from Rwanda
stands in the mock
graveyard erected by
Oxfam campaigners
outside the United Nations
headquarters in New York
in order to urge
governments to endorse
the responsibility to protect
civilians against future
mass killings. The graves
have been marked with
'Never again'' in reference
to what the world said after
the atrocities in Rwanda.
Humanitarian intervention rarely succeeds
• Thresholds for intervention difficult to determine
• Can lead to cynicism with choice to intervene in some states rather
than others
• Concern that the responsibility to Protect will be abused and serve
to allow powerful states to further their own interests
• making and keeping peace between groups that have come to hate
and fear one another is likely to require costly ongoing military
missions rather than relatively cheap temporary ones.
• When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover,
the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a
cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even
undesirable, for it merely sets the stage for a further round of conflict
down the road.
Something I wrote on this issue….
• http://rpgp.berkeley.edu/?q=node/87
Third Problem: A world that is
dangerously militarized.
• "Horizontal" nuclear proliferation
• "vertical" proliferation, i.e. the continued
existence of huge arsenals of sophisticated
nuclear weapons held by major powers,
particularly the United States and Russia.
• Huge stockpiles of conventional arms around
the world, including the newest types, some so
devastating as to be comparable to weapons of
mass destruction.
• World military expenditure reached $1 Trillion in
2007
Arms Trade
•
in 2006 reaching an all-time high in current dollars of $45.6 billion
(from $38.9 billion in 2004).
• Arms trade fuels regional conflicts, when they are not solidifying
undemocratic and abusive regimes.
• increases poverty in countries that are already poor.
• But is it realistic to want to reduce arms exports without at the same
time attempting to reduce military production?
• Indeed, the fundamental cause of the flourishing international trade
in armaments is the large military establishments that industrial
countries subsidize year after year.
• While international attention is focused on the need to control
weapons of mass destruction, the trade in conventional weapons
continues to operate in a legal and moral vacuum.
Military industries
• It is not realistic to reduce arms exports
without at the same time attempting to
reduce military production.
• Indeed, the fundamental cause of the
flourishing international trade in
armaments is the large military
establishments that industrial countries
subsidize year after year.
Who buys arms?
Military expenditure
• arms transfer agreements with developing nations constituted 67.7%
of all such agreements globally from 2004-2007, and 70.5% of these
agreements in 2007.
• A central barrier to third world development—or to solving the
current third world food crisis-- is military expenditure.
• Worldwide military expenses average ten percent of the public
expenditure.
• For developing countries military this amounts to fifteen percent of
public expenditure.
• This very often equates several times the amount spent on
education and healthcare.
• According to the UNDP, Development is not possible without
reducing military expenses.
• This means reforms by exporters of arms as well as recipients.
Who sells Arms?
• Permanent UN Security Council
members—the USA, UK, France, Russia,
and China—are not only nuclear powers
but they dominate the world trade in arms.
• U.S. is first, Russia second
US contribution to militarization
• Today the United States produces about
half of the world's military hardware and
has over 700 military bases, from Europe
to the most remote corners of the world.
• Historically, only empires had such an
expansive approach to assuring their
security.
Where is the threat?
• In the 21st century, many threats cannot
be met with military might. We cannot, for
example, bomb terrorists hiding in
Germany —
• we can’t even bomb them in Pakistan
without creating more.
• Gunboat diplomacy cannot force China to
keep its poisoned milk off our shelves.
Fourth Problem: weakening of
international institutions and laws
• The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in tatters.
• The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
fireman in previous financial crises, has been a
bystander during the current crisis.
• The World Trade Organisation’s Doha round is
stuck.
• The UN. Security Council is increasingly
irrelevant:
– When the P5, constituted the security council, the UN
had 51 members;
– decades of decolonisation and splintering selfdetermination later, it has 192.
The more global problems, the
weaker the institutions
– increasing trend of prominence of
dictatorships in UN
– growing number of bilateral trade agreements
replacing multilateral trade
– and sovereign wealth funds replacing lending
and investment by International Financial
Institutions.
G-8
• The G7 democracies plus Russia
• Can they discuss the oil price without Saudi Arabia, the
world’s biggest producer?
• Can they try to stabilize the dollar without China, which holds
so many American Treasury bills?
• Can they make decisions about global warming, AIDS or
inflation without anybody from the emerging world?
• On present trends, somewhere between 2025 and 2030
three of the world’s four largest economies will be from Asia.
• new nations have emerged as international leaders, and they
are declaring their right to participate in defining the rules of
the global game. The current international institutions,
however, were designed to meet the needs of the old bipolar
world.
• G8 should expand……..
The G20
• In the financial sector, leaders should act
quickly, strengthening and coordinating the
emergency measures to staunch the bleeding; I
• In the real sector, they should use fiscal stimulus
to get the patient’s heart pumping again;
• They should act immediately to strengthen the
ability of the IMF and other existing institutions to
deal with the crisis in emerging markets;
• They should start thinking outside the box about
longer term financial and monetary reforms; and
• Do no harm.
Which direction will foreign policy take?
high global danger
global danger can be
reduced
unilateralism
Multilateralism
Protect America’s vital
interests
Pull Back to
repair democracy
and civil rights at
home
Grounds for hope? That politics and policies will
prevent a downturn becoming a depression.