19 February 2012
Power Shift to Asia: No Need To Panic
By Gwynne Dyer
On February 15th, just as Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping arrived in the United States for a four-day visit, US President Barack Obama told an audience of American workers in Milwaukee: “Manufacturing is coming back!” Coming back from China, that is. But while the Master Lock Company of Milwaukee has indeed moved some jobs back to the United States, everybody knows that the flow will really continue to be in the other direction.
It doesn’t matter whether China’s economy finally overtakes America’s in 2020, or 2025, or 2030. A great shift of productivity and wealth is underway, and economic power generally translates pretty directly into military power. So will the United States and China be able to manage the shift without a great war?
At the end of Vice-President Xi’s US visit on 18 February, the future Chinese leader assured delegates at a trade conference in Los Angeles: “A prosperous and stable China will not be a threat to any country. It will only be a positive force for world peace and development.” Perhaps, but everybody else is very nervous about it.
The transition from one dominant world economic power to another is always tricky, and the historical precedents are not encouraging. Spain was the 16th-century superpower, and the shift to French domination, though never complete, entailed several generations of war. Then Britain displaced France, amidst several more generations of war.
When Germany challenged British supremacy and Japan began building its empire in the Pacific and East Asia in the early 20th century, the transition involved two world wars – and resulted in the de facto division of the world between two non-European superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The omens are not promising, to say the least.
Both the US and the Chinese armed forces use these precedents to argue for greater military spending. The Chinese generals mostly do it privately, within the confines of Communist Party hierarchy. American military leaders do it more publicly, by coming up with risk assessments designed to frighten the public into keeping defence spending up, but they both groups play the same game.
They can’t help it. Their military training and their whole world-view condition them to expect conflict, and their corporate interest in a higher defence budget leads them to define almost any change as a threat. It sometimes feels like we are doomed to repeat the past endlessly.
But the past is a complicated place, and there is a systematic distortion of history that emphasises violent transitions at the expense of peaceful ones. In fact, at least one major power shift in the past century was entirely peaceful.
The US economy overtook Britain’s late in the 19th century, and it was not inevitable that the change in the pecking order would be peaceful. The time when the two countries would be close allies was still far in the future, and throughout the 19th century Americans continued to see Britain, their old colonial master, as their most dangerous enemy. The two countries fought their last war in 1812-1814, but Britain kept a garrison in Canada until 1870.
London then withdrew the garrison, but not because it trusted the United States. It just calculated that the United States was now so strong that Britain could never win a land war against it in North America. It also concluded that a large Royal Navy presence in American waters was likely to drive the United States into a naval arms race that Britain would lose, and so began thinning out the number of warships that it kept in the western Atlantic.
It was the right strategy. The United States never invaded Canada again, and although it meddled a great deal in the affairs of various Caribbean and Central American countries, that did not threaten any British vital interest. The thorny crown of being the world’s greatest power passed from Britain to the United States without a war, and within one more generation the two countries were actually allies.
So now it’s America’s turn to figure out what to do about an emerging great-power rival on the far side of a great ocean, and one option would be to copy Britain’s example. Don’t provoke the Chinese by hemming their country in with air bases, carrier fleets and military alliances, and they’ll probably behave well. If they don’t, then the other Asian great powers, Japan, India and Russia, are quite capable of protecting their own interests.
The United States has no truly vital interests on the Asian mainland, or at least none that it could protect by fighting China. It was entirely safe from foreign attack before it became the world’s greatest power, and it will still be militarily invulnerable long after it loses that distinction.
Britain is a lot more prosperous than it was when it ran the world, and its people are probably happier too. Decline (especially decline that is only relative) is not nearly as bad a fate as Americans imagine.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit, paragraphs 6 and 7. (“Both…endlessly”)
22 November 2011
Burma: Can you trust the army?
By Gwynne Dyer
Burma is the second poorest country in Asia (after North Korea), although fifty years ago it was the second richest. It is the second most repressive dictatorship in Asia, outdone again only by North Korea. It is third from the bottom on Transparency International’s list of the world’s most corrupt countries. And the credit for all these distinctions goes to the Burmese army, which has ruled the country with an iron hand for the past half-century.
So what should pro-democracy leaders in Burma do when the army shows signs of wanting to make a deal and withdraw from direct control over the country. Do you hold out for more, or do you co-operate with the generals in the hope that they can be persuaded to go further later on?
That’s the dilemma that faced Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the National League for Democracy, when the military staged the first elections Burma had seen for twenty years last November. Back then, she decided to boycott the elections, but last week she actually took the leap of faith and registered the NLD as a legal political party.
She had good reason to be wary last year, because 23 generals resigned and founded the Union Solidarity and Development Party just before the elections. They wouldn’t have done that unless the new party was going to “win,” and in the end it got a highly implausible 80% of the votes. But then Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest a few days after the election, and the regime began to offer further concessions.
Thein Sein, the former general who became the president of Burma last March, put out feelers to see if the NLD leader could be coaxed into participating in the new political arrangements. He wanted her help in giving his government more legitimacy, and she realised that she could probably win some major concessions in return.
She saw Thein Sein in private in August, and it’s likely that they made the deal there and then. Six weeks later a Human Rights Commission was created, and the media suddenly became much freer. In mid-October 200 political prisoners were freed (although 500 more remain in jail for the time being).
These changes were probably part of the price that the regime had agreed to pay for Aung San Suu Kyi’s agreement to participate in a political system still dominated by the army.
Later in October it paid another instalment, passing a law that legalised trade unions. And then it was time for Suu Kyi to fulfill her side of the bargain.
She did it last week, declaring that she would register the National League for Democracy as a political party under the new constitution. There is even talk of her running for parliament herself in the December by-elections.
There is nothing illegitimate about making deals in politics. The question is whether this deal is wise — or is Aung San Suu Kyi just being taken for a ride?
Aung San Suu Kyi has probably been told a great deal more in private about the army’s ultimate intentions, but even if they have promised to give up power eventually, she cannot know if they will keep their promises. Probably the generals themselves don’t know yet.
But she has decided to take the risk, and her supporters just have to trust her judgment.
24 May 2011
The World in 2050
by Gwynne Dyer
The economists, the statisticians and the investment bankers have done their work, and everybody in the financial world now has more or less the same picture of the future in their minds. The predictions are so consistent that even the general public thinks it knows where the trends are leading us: Asia and Latin America up, Europe and North America in a holding pattern, Africa and the Middle East down. But maybe the predictions are wrong.
Goldman Sachs started the game almost a decade ago with its study predicting that the BRICs, the four largest emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), would overtake the rich countries of the G7 (the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada) some time in the 2030s. The world’s economic centre of gravity, the study implied, was shifting from the West to Asia.
Hardly anybody disputes this model any more; the pundits just differ on the details, like when China’s economy will pass that of the United States. As soon as 2020, said PricewaterhouseCooper. 2027, says the latest Goldman Sachs prediction. 2035, says the Carnegie Institute. As late as the mid-2040s, according to Karen Ward’s recent study for HSBC. But they all agree it’s going to happen.
Ward’s study, “The World in 2050,” is particularly interesting for two reasons. One, because it is more realistic about China, whose economy is currently the biggest bubble in world history. And two, because it offers predictions for the world’s 30 biggest economies, not just the top ten.
China’s economy, at $25 trillion annually, is only a couple of trillion ahead of the United States in 2050. (All calculations are in constant dollars of the year 2000.) Then there is a long drop to India at $8 trillion and Japan at $6 trillion – and no other country reaches $5 trillion.
Places five to eleven are mostly filled by the rest of the G7 countries, with only Brazil and Mexico breaking into the magic circle. The rest of the Top Twenty, however, are almost all developing countries (Turkey, South Korea, Russia, Indonesia, Argentina, Egypt and Malaysia), with only Spain and Australia from the developed world. So in this model, Asia and Latin America really are taking over, with eleven out of the top twenty slots.
Now, you can quibble with bits of this, like categorising Russia as an emerging economy. In terms of infrastructure, average education level and birth rate, Russia is clearly a developed country. But if these predictions are roughly correct, then it is definitely Asia and Latin America up, and Europe and North America (plus Japan) in a holding pattern.
And are Africa and the Middle East really down? Up and down are purely relative, of course, and there are certainly some large African countries with quite respectable projected growth rates, like Nigeria and South Africa. But despite the world’s highest population growth rates, no African country’s economy makes it into the Top Twenty by 2050.
Of the Middle Eastern countries only Egypt scrapes in at No. 19, just ahead of Malaysia (which has only a third of Egypt’s population). Most of the non-oil economies face virtual stagnation, and there are big question marks over the claimed oil reserves of a number of the oil states. Africa and the Middle East down.
It’s only a game: only the very brave or the very foolish would base major investment decisions on such a long-term extrapolation of current trends. But it’s the sort of thing that the strategists and the geopolitics experts love – and it could be wrong. Not just wrong in detail, but utterly, spectacularly wrong.
All of these predictions assume that global conditions will remain essentially unchanged for the next forty years. That is highly unlikely.
The predictions are not simple-minded straight-line extrapolations. They all assume, for example, that China’s economy, which has grown at ten percent for the past twenty years (and therefore doubled in size every seven years), will drop to about half that growth rate (doubling only every fourteen years) well before 2050. But they do assume that energy – especially oil – will remain plentiful and relatively affordable for the next forty years.
Even more implausibly, they also assume that global warming will not cause serious disruptions in the world’s economies over the next two generations. Yet there is already enough warming locked into the system by past, present and near-future emissions that severe disruption is virtually guaranteed, especially in the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the planet.
The old-rich countries of the G7 are all in the temperate zone, which may get away with relatively minor damage from global warming in the period to 2050. All the big “emerging” economies except Russia and Argentina are located wholly or largely in the tropics and/or the sub-tropics. That means they will almost certainly suffer very serious disruption, including huge losses in food production.
This is monstrously unfair. Just when the poorer countries finally start to catch up economically with their former imperial masters, the warming caused by two centuries of greenhouse gas emissions by the rich countries knocks them back yet again. Which may also knock all those predictions that the emerging economies will soon overtake the developed ones into a cocked hat.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7, 8 and 9. (“Now…down”)
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
29 December 2009
2009 Year-Ender
By Gwynne Dyer
The year 2009 was most notable for the three bad things that didn’t happen. Firstly, the financial melt-down of late 2008 did not plunge us all into a 1930s-style depression, although there were plenty of pundits predicting that less than a year ago.
As Stephen Schwarzman, head of the private equity company Blackstone Group, said last March: “Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little more than a year and a half.” But all he was really saying was that a very specific kind of financial bubble has burst. All the land and houses are still there, and so are most of the factories and jobs.
There has certainly been a deep recession in the developed countries, and the current slow recovery may be a false dawn: a “double-dip” recession is still entirely possible. Moreover, the vast amounts of money spent by Western governments to save the banks has left them with a staggering burden of debt. But the worst has been avoided, and in the developing countries there was scarcely even a recession.
The second predicted disaster that did not come to pass was a killer global pandemic like the 1918 strain of influenza. Something of that order is probably still lying in wait for us down the road, but the swine flu turned out to be much less lethal than was initially feared. Considerable credit should go to those who made a vaccine available much faster than was thought possible, but basically we just got lucky.
And the third bad thing that didn’t happen? The same bad thing that hasn’t happened every year since 2001. There was no mass loss of life (by which I mean more than a thousand people murdered in a single incident) due to terrorist action in any Western country.
Even a relatively large death toll like that should not be a reason for any government to go berserk and start invading foreign countries. A thousand people is a lot to lose, but it really isn’t the end of the world. A thousand people die of natural and accidental causes in the United States (to pick a country not entirely at random) about every three hours. Terrorism is different, of course, but a rational and measured response is still required.
You know very well that it would be neither rational nor measured. Although an over-reaction is precisely what the terrorists are seeking to provoke, domestic political realities in the target country still make it likely that the response would be hugely stupid and violent. So we go from year to year waiting for the terrorists to succeed again on the scale of 9/11, knowing that Western countries will go crazy again if they do. But it didn’t happen in 2009.
What did finally happen at the beginning of 2009 was the long-overdue departure of the Bush administration. Almost everybody outside the United States, and many people within it, were profoundly relieved by that, but it imposed a huge burden of expectation on the shoulders of his successor as president, Barack Obama.
It has been a difficult first year for Obama, who presumably expected to have both his healthcare reforms and a climate change bill through Congress by now. His problems with Afghanistan, however, are largely of his own making.
Calling Afghanistan the “good war” (in contrast to Iraq) during the election campaign was a useful tactic to deflect accusations that he was too peace-loving, but now he’s stuck with it. He has already ordered a doubling of US troop numbers in Afghanistan, and he is now on a very slippery slope. This war is unwinnable, and it could destroy him politically.
In the meantime, Obama does small but useful things that do not require Congressional assent, like cancelling the Bush plan to put a missile defence system into eastern Europe. Or at least that do not need Congressional assent in advance, like a new and better Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia (although that is still being negotiated). He even tried to launch a new Middle East peace initiative, although that was doomed from the start.
The Middle East, with only a tenth of the world’s people, continued to generate more than its fair share of the news. The Israeli punishment attacks on the Gaza Strip that began on 27 December, 2008 continued through most of January, leaving over 1,300 Palestinians dead. More than half of them, according to all estimates except the Israeli military’s own, were civilians. Israeli fatalities from all causes, including friendly fire, were thirteen.
The Israeli election in February delivered Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader who had buried the Oslo accords in the late 1990s, back into the prime minister’s office, and any remaining hope for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal evaporated. Netanyahu is politically dependent on right-wing Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, and would be most unlikely to compromise on their demands even if he were personally so inclined (which he is not).
So the twenty-five-year dream of a “two-state” solution gradually fades, and the prospect of a third intifada grows. It didn’t happen this year, and it probably won’t happen next year either. But the Israeli military occupation has entered its fifth decade, and another generation of Palestinians is growing up so full of rage that they will confront Israeli power despite the obvious fact that they cannot win.
At the other end of the Middle East, Iran was hardly ever out of the news in 2009. The old question of whether or not it is seeking nuclear weapons stayed high on the international agenda, but it was overtaken by the new question of whether the present leadership could stay in power. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s implausibly high level of voter support in the June election ignited protests that have shaken the regime’s hold on power.
If it is a revolution, it’s a very slow-motion one: the protesters are not out on the streets every day, or even every month. Most of them do not even want to overthrow the Islamic system; just to reform it. But they keep coming out, most recently just this week, and they are not deterred by mass arrests and systematic rape of detainees, nor by Revolutionary Guards shooting to kill in the streets.
This is the way that the Shah was overthrown: by slow degrees, over a period of many months. It may not end the same way this time, but it looks like the same pattern – and the best thing everybody else can do is not to meddle. Iranian protesters do not need foreign support, and they certainly do not need foreign trade sanctions to be applied right now, because that makes them look like foreigners’ puppets.
In Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki emerged as a genuine strongman, centralising power in his own office, staffed by his own party and clan. In Afghanistan another American nominee, President Hamid Karzai, embarrassed his patrons by rigging his re-election last August too blatantly, but they had to accept him in the end. And in Fantasyland-on-the-Gulf, aka Dubai, they could not make interest payments on some $50 billion in loans until Abu Dhabi bailed them out.
Europe had a quieter year (as it generally does). Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany swept back into a second term in September with a “dream coalition” that freed her from having to compromise with the left. France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people’s patterns of energy use. The tax is seventeen euros (US$24) per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had a miserable year, being accused (probably correctly) of consorting with minors and with high-class prostitutes, sued for divorce by his wife, and struck in the face by a model of Milan cathedral. More seriously, an Italian court struck down the umpteenth law he had pushed through parliament to allow him to escape prosecution for corruption. But he would win another election today. Italian voters are very tolerant, or something.
At one extremity of Europe, Northern Ireland was threatened with a slide back into chronic violence, as radical Catholic groups who reject the IRA’s commitment to power-sharing tried to lure the Protestants and the British army back into the fight by committing random acts of terrorism. At the continent’s other extremity, the Georgian government was found guilty of starting last year’s war with Russia by an investigating commission of the European Union
The EU as a whole finally ratified the Treaty of Lisbon, which streamlines the operation of the organisation to cope with a membership that has now expanded to 27 countries. It took eight years, two Irish referendums (they got the answer wrong the first time), and some face-saving concessions to the Czech president to get it through. The EU, it would appear, is still not ready for prime time.
The principal political events in Asia were the Indian election in May, which gave the ruling Congress Party a resounding vote of confidence, and the August election in Japan, which brought the opposition Democratic party to power after 52 years of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party. But there was almost no connection between these two elections in anybody’s mind: Asia is still little more than a geographical expression.
Elsewhere in Asia, the most important military events were the Sri Lankan government’s decisive victory over the Tamil Tiger insurgency in May, which brought a 26-year civil war to an end, and the North Korean nuclear weapons test in the same month. The North Korean regime was mainly using the test as a way to blackmail the major powers into guaranteeing its future, and those powers are playing along as usual. They have no choice.
Thailand is caught up in a deepening struggle between the poor majority and the old royalist anti-democratic elites, incarnated in the recurrent street clashes between the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts. In Burma, pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, though still under house arrest, has supported efforts by the United States to open up channels of communication with the military junta. A military mutiny was successfully put down in Bangladesh in February.
In Pakistan in December, an amnesty for corruption charges that had protected hundreds of politicians including Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari was overruled by the Supreme Court, and the country was plunged into fresh political turmoil. The Maldives held a full cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear to dramatise the threat posed to the low-lying island country by rising sea levels. The Nepalese cabinet, not to be outdone, held a meeting on the slopes of Mount Everest to dramatise the threat posed to the country by melting glaciers.
China’s emergence as a world player continued, with attention focussed in particular on its expanding investments in Africa. The ex-imperial powers saw this as neo-imperialism, but the ex-colonies themselves mostly took a different view. They understood that China was trying to secure long-term supplies of food, fuel and minerals for a future in which it believed that all those commodities would be scarcer, but at least the Chinese paid well and didn’t subject their suppliers to hypocritical lectures on human rights.
A blow-by-blow list of all the things that went wrong in Africa in 2009 is depressing: a military massacre in Guinea, a coup in Madagascar, blood-drenched anarchy in Somalia, mini-wars between the police and extreme religious sects in northern Nigeria, and much more in the same vein. But it feels less hopeless if you recall that most of Africa’s 52 countries are at peace – and that African economies have been growing at an average of five percent a year since 2000, compared to only one percent in the previous decades since independence.
Much the same observation applies, in a minor key, to Latin America. What little news makes it out of the continent tends to be bad: the brutal war between the state and the drug cartels in Mexico, the alleged threat of war between Venezuela and Colombia, the messy sort-of-coup in Honduras, and so on. But most of the region is at peace, more or less democratic, and even making progress economically. Which may explain why it exports so little news.
Finally, Copenhagen. The vast, 192-country conference on climate change in December was a total failure in terms of its declared objectives. There is no new treaty to replace the Kyoto accord. Even modest Kyoto-style national targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions were omitted from the vague declaration that was cobbled together by the two biggest emitters, the United States and China, on the last day. Neither are there any deadlines for further action.
“The Chinese hate numbers,” as one participant put it – and the United States was quite happy to let China get the blame for killing a deal that Washington couldn’t have delivered on either. The problem is that nobody really knows where we go from here, and time is running short. If there is one thing that 2009 is remembered for, it may be for the historic failure at Copenhagen.
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This article is 2200 words. It’s written in modular form, for the most part, and you’re free to cut it wherever you want. If you need to write something to bridge the gap where you cut, just do it. Experience has taught me that people’s news priorities in different parts of the world are so different that it makes no sense for me to try to do the job.