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”)
27 January 2012
Scotland: Begging the Question
By Gwynne Dyer
The answer to a question often depends on how you ask it, and Alex Salmond is doing all he can to get a “yes”. Scotland’s separatist First Minister wants independence for his country, which has been part of the United Kingdom for the past 300 years, and he has just revealed the question he wants to ask in the referendum he has promised: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?”
It seems to be a simple question, but it’s psychologically loaded. A more neutral question would offer the Scottish voters two choices: “Scotland should become independent” or “Scotland should remain in the United Kingdom.” Tick one box. But if he did that, most of the voters would surely vote for the status quo.
People don’t usually choose to leap into the unknown unless they are brimming with self-confidence or living in intolerable misery. Neither applies to the Scots, so Salmond twists the question a bit: “Do you agree (with all the rest of us, implicitly, or at least with all sensible people) that Scotland should be an independent country?” People also don’t like to contradict the (implicit) majority, so putting it that way might win a few thousand extra “yes” votes.
In his heart, Salmond would probably prefer a more inflammatory question like “Do you want to seize Scotland’s independence back from the Sassenach (Saxon, i.e English) oppressors, or would you rather live as slaves?” That would delight the tartan super-patriots who are his core constituency, but it would alienate the moderate middle whose support he must gain to win the vote.
A more promising tack would be the one that the Quebec separatists in Canada took in their 1995 referendum: “Do you agree to the independence of Scotland if we promise that it won’t hurt a bit: the English will still be our friends, we’ll be richer than we are now, and we can even go on using the pound. In fact, you’ll hardly notice the difference, except that you’ll feel much better about yourself.” (I’m paraphrasing a bit here.)
The question in Quebec’s 1995 referendum was actually: “Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”
“Do you agree?” again: everybody knows that trick. “Sovereign”, a positive, vague word, not “independent”, an explicit word meaning irreversible change. (Salmond has missed a trick there.) And “the agreement signed on June 12, 1995”, which the average ill-informed voter would assume is some reassuring deal with the federal government, when actually it was just a joint statement by Quebec political parties.
The 1995 referendum in Quebec came close to yielding a majority for “yes”. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien responded by passing a “Clarity Act,” which stated that the question in any future referendum on secession must be accepted as clear by the federal House of Commons; that any question not referring solely to secession would be considered unclear; and that a simple majority of 50 percent of the votes plus one would not be enough to mandate such a large and irreversible change.
The Canadian “Clarity Act” has subsequently become the international standard for secession referendums. It is regularly cited in Spain, for example, as the standard that a Basque or Catalan referendum on independence would have to meet, and in Belgium with regard to Flemish or Walloon secession. It has similarly limited Alex Salmond’s freedom to shape the Scottish referendum question, which is why it is relatively clear.
Salmond still has two cards up his sleeve. One is a proposal to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in the referendum, on the calculation that the younger they are, the likelier they will be to support radical change. (The normal voting age in the UK is 18.)
He is also still talking about adding a further option in the referendum for “maximum devolution” of power to the Scottish government, a halfway house that would leave the United Kingdom government responsible for little except defence and foreign affairs. But he will probably end up trading that for an agreement with London to postpone the referendum until late in 2014.
He needs to postpone it because Scottish independence would lose by a majority of almost two-to-one if the referendum were held today. But if Salmond has more than two years to pick quarrels with London that will incense Scottish nationalists, he might be able to change that.
Just two months before the independence referendum in Quebec, only one-third of Quebecers planned to vote “yes”. On the day, almost half did (49.5 percent). Even more than in normal politics, questions of national independence tend to be decided on emotional grounds – and once the question is on the table, it is there forever.
Quebec has held two referendums on independence, in 1980 and 1995. The voters rejected it both times, but the separatists are still waiting for a third opportunity. (English-speakers in Quebec call it the “neverendum”.) Must get a winner one day.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 6 and 7. (“The question…parties”)
4 December 2009
Copenhagen: Let the Failure Be Clear
By Gwynne Dyer
Sometimes the best is the enemy of the good – and sometimes“good enough” is the enemy of all mankind. That is why Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, wants the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen to fail.
The summit is supposed to work out a successor to the Kyoto accord, which expires in 2012. In theory, the follow-on treaty would mandate deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and find some way of bringing the developing countries into the process as well. But for Hansen, the methodology is so flawed that the new treaty is not worth having.
“I would rather it not happen,” he told The Guardian recently. “The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation.” In diplomacy, “good enough” solutions predominate because of the need for compromise, but in this case, Hansen argues, it is better to have no deal than the wrong deal.
“This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50 percent or 40 percent.”
He’s right – and most of the negotiators at Copenhagen know it. It’s surprisingly common in international negotiations. Almost everybody involved knows what the one really fair and effective deal would look like, although they feel doomed to settle for something much worse. In this case, the fair and effective deal would take full account of the history, and it would look like this.
It would require the rich, industrialised countries to take really deep cuts in their emissions: 40 percent by 2020, say, and another 40 percent by 2035. The developing countries would cap the growth in their emissions at a level not much higher than where they are now – but they must be allowed to go on growing their economies, which means that they will need more energy.
All that extra energy has to be clean, or else they will break through the cap. They will therefore have to get their new energy from wind farms or solar arrays or nuclear plants, all of which are more expensive than the cheap coal-fired power plants they rely on now. Who pays the difference in the cost? The rich countries do, by technology transfers and direct subsidies.
What makes this lopsided deal fair is the history behind it. Emissions in the developed countries have stabilised or declined slightly (except for Canada, where they continue to soar), but they are still at a very high level. Indeed, what has made these countries rich is burning fossil fuels for the past 150-200 years – and in doing so, they have taken up almost all the available space.
In the early 19th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air was 280 parts per million. It is now 390 ppm, and four-fifths of that extra CO2 was put there by the ancestors of the one billion people who live in the developed countries. The point of no return, after which we risk runaway warming, is a rise in average global temperature of two degrees Celsius. That is equivalent to 450 ppm of carbon dioxide.
All we have left to play with is the distance between 390 ppm and 450 ppm, and on a business-as-usual basis we’ll cover it in less than thirty years. All the economic growth of rapidly developing countries like China, India and Brazil – 3-4 billion people – has to fit into that narrow band of 60 ppm that the developed countries left for them.
That is why the post-Kyoto deal must be lopsided – but it is still politically impossible to sell that deal to people in the developed countries, most of whom are (wilfully) ignorant of that history. What we have on the table instead at Copenhagen is a bastard version of the deal in which the rich countries buy the right to go on emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases by subsidising clean power and other emissions reductions in the poor countries.
“This is analogous to the indulgences that the Catholic church sold in the Middle Ages,” said Hansen. “The bishops collected lots of money and the sinners got redemption. Both parties liked that arrangement despite its absurdity.” And everybody goes to Hell together.
The Copenhagen summit will certainly fail to deliver the right deal. The danger is that it will lock us into the wrong deal, and leave no political space for countries to go back and try to get it right later. Public opinion is climbing a steep learning curve, and the assymetrical deal that cannot be sold politically today might be quite saleable in as little as a year or two.
So the best outcome at Copenhagen would be a ringing declaration of principles, and an agreement to get back round the table and do the hard negotiations over the next 12-18 months. Since the US Congress has still not mandated any reduction in American emissions and Canada will do its best to subvert the proceedings, that is also a quite likely outcome.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2, 4 and 12. (“The summit…having”; “This is…percent”; and “This is…together”)
15 September 2009
The Northern Passages
By Gwynne Dyer
Early next week two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That’s much faster than usual – but then, they didn’t take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal (pay toll here), across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.
It’s the first-ever commercial transit of the Northeast Passage by non-Russian ships, and it shortens the sea trip between East Asia and Europe by almost a third. It’s the melting of the Arctic sea ice that has made it possible, although for the moment it’s only possible for a couple of months at the end of the summer melt season, when the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover has shrunk dramatically. But it is a sign of things to come.
The voyage is more evidence that climate change is well underway, and will strike the Arctic region hard. But it also shows that all the fuss about the Northwest Passage is irrelevant.
It’s the Northwest Passage, another potential short-cut between Europe and East Asia that goes through the Canadian Arctic archipelago, that has got the attention in the past few years. Although ice-breakers have traversed it from time to time, no ordinary commercial ship has ever carried cargo through it. But when the Russians put on their little propaganda show at the North Pole two years ago, the Canadian government had kittens.
In 2007 Artur Chilingarov, a Russian scientist famous for his work in the polar regions and personal Arctic adviser to then-president Vladimir Putin, took a mini-sub to the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper immediately flew to Iqaluit in the high Arctic and responded with a rabble-rousing speech.
“Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty in the Arctic,” he said. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake: this government intends to use it.” He then announced a programme to build six to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels to assert Canadian control over the Northwest Passage, and a deep-water naval base on Baffin Island to support them.
“I don’t know why the Canadians reacted as they did,” Chilingarov told me a few months later in Moscow, and on the face of it he had a case. After all, Russia has no claims over any land or water that might conceivably belong to Canada, and Canada makes no claim on the North Pole. But Chilingarov actually understood the game that Harper was playing quite well.
Canada’s dispute over sovereignty in the Northwest Passage is actually with the United States, not with Russia. The Russians have absolutely no interest in the Northwest Passage, since they have their own rival, the Northeast Passage. But the United States used to believe that the Northwest Passage could be very useful if it were ice-free, so Washington has long maintained that it is an international waterway which Canada has no right to control.
Canada disputes that position, pointing out that all six potential routes for a commercially viable Northwest Passage wind between islands that are close together and indisputably Canadian. But Ottawa has never asserted MILITARY control over the Northwest Passage until now, because to do so would risk an awkward confrontation with the United States. However, if you can pretend that you are building those warships and that naval base to hold the wicked Russians at bay, not to defy the Americans….
That is Harper’s game, and he now visits the high north every summer to re-assert Canada’s sovereignty claims. But in the end it will make no difference, because the Northwest Passage will never become a major shipping route. The Northeast Passage is just too much easier.
The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.
Whereas the Northeast Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time – and the distances ARE comparable.
Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia’s Arctic coast (the Northeast Passage) or weaving between Canada’s Arctic islands (the Northwest Passage).
The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America. The Northwest Passage will never be commercially viable.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 3 and 7. (The voyage…irrelevant”; and “I don’t…well”)