U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday stressed multilateralism over militarism in what was billed as a major foreign policy address and a rebuttal to an ever-louder chorus of criticism, mostly by Republicans and neo-conservatives, that his tenure has been marked by weakness and retreat.

Speaking at the graduation ceremonies of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York – the same forum at which his predecessor, George W. Bush, set forth his doctrine of military pre-emption nine months before invading Iraq – Obama insisted that the United States remains the world’s “indispensable nation” but emphasised that military force should be used only under very limited circumstances.

“Here’s my bottom line,” he told the cadets, some of whom may soon be deployed to Afghanistan from which Obama announced Tuesday he intends to withdraw all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2016. “America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

“But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail,” he declared.

“…I would betray my duty to you, and to the country we love, if I sent you into harm’s way simply because I saw a problem somewhere in the world that needed fixing, or because I was worried about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak,” he said.

Citing terrorism as the “the most direct threat to America at home and abroad …for the foreseeable future,” he argued that “a strategy that involves invading every country that harbours terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable.”

In that context, he stressed the importance of building the capacity of local security forces and announced he will ask Congress to provide five billion dollars to a proposed Counter-Terrorism Partnership Fund (CTPF).

And he devoted much of his speech to the importance of bolstering and relying on international institutions in dealing with geo-political crises and global challenges, including global warming.

“Sceptics often downplay the effectiveness of multilateral action. For them, working through international institutions, or respecting international law, is a sign of weakness. I think they’re wrong,” he said, citing what he depicted as Washington’s successes in isolating Russia after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and in building a great-power coalition that is negotiating curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme.

“This is American leadership. This is American strength,” he declared, adding that Washington must also strengthen institutions, notably NATO and the U.N., that can anticipate and prevent crises.

He also stressed that Washington’s influence in the world “is always stronger when we lead by example.”

While he insisted that he believed in “American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” he said “[w]e cannot exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everyone else…[W]hat makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions,” he said, adding that he will continue his efforts to close the Guantanamo detention facility.

Wednesday’s speech came amidst what has appeared to be a growing number of international crises – ranging from Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and growing tensions between China and its U.S.-backed neighbours in the South and East China seas to the ongoing civil war in Syria and the proliferation of local Al Qaeda affiliates, including Nigeria’s Boko Haram, across the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama’s domestic critics and some foreign allies, such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, and France, have argued that Washington has been too passive in reacting to these events.

That criticism was repeated Wednesday after Obama’s speech by Sen. John McCain who accused the president of “attacking strawmen” by “suggesting that the only alternative to his policies is the unilateral use of military force everywhere.”

“The real choice is how to combine our tools of soft power and hard power in order to avoid conflict, secure our interests and ideals, and meet our challenges through effective deterrence and diplomacy,” Obama’s 2008 Republican rival said, listing the various crises of the last few months. “None of these challenges are the fault of our President, but nothing he has done has been sufficient to address them.

“There is a growing perception worldwide that America is unreliable, distracted, and unwilling to lead. Our nation’s capacity is not in question, but our resolve and judgement are. Speeches alone did not cause this dangerous development, and more speeches will not correct it,” McCain said.

Analysts who have generally been more sympathetic to Obama’s approach also expressed some disappointment with the speech.

“The speech was strongest on what our foreign policy should not be. It should not be isolationist and it should not be military driven,” said Bruce Jentleson, a former senior State Department official under both Obama and Bill Clinton (1993-2001), who teaches at Duke University.

“At a time in which the world is in flux, we really need to think in terms of core strategic constructs like how to adapt deterrence, what are the requisites of coercive diplomacy and what does it really take to build partnerships not just on our part but on the part of others,” he said. “In these and other respects it dodges the really tough questions.”

Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor and one of the deans of the realism school of international relations, said the speech’s focus on terrorism suggested that the administration remains a prisoner of Bush’s paradigm.

“More than anything else, I thought the speech unwittingly underscored the degree to which the war on terror, the continued reliance on Special Forces, drones, etc., and the preoccupation with lesser but vivid dangers as opposed to more serious long-term problems, continue to drive the administration’s approach to national security policy,” he told IPS.

“Apart from the distinct threat of nuclear terrorism, the conventional terrorism danger to Americans is trivial… Yet he felt compelled to talk about it and to pony up another five billion dollars to train militaries in places we don’t understand.”

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.), who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s long-time chief of staff and now teaches at William & Mary University, largely agreed with Walt.

“This concentration on a less-then-existential threat at the expense of more concrete and possibly formidable threats is wrong-headed and, at least in part, a product of the terrorism-industrial complex we have constructed and that Obama seems unable to escape,” he told IPS in an email exchange.

“What passes for counter-terrorism help today seems a lot like what used to pass for assistance to fight communism during the Cold War,” he noted. “All manner of leaders, dictators prominent among them, used to pay lip service to anti-communist efforts while enriching themselves, staying in power, and oppressing their own people with our assistance as their main support for doing so.”

Indeed, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First, while praising Obama’s renewed commitment to close Guantanamo and respect international law, expressed concern that the proposed CPTF could benefit abusive governments and security forces.

Obama addressed some of those concerns in reference to U.S. drone strikes against alleged high-value Al Qaeda targets and efforts to prevent civilian casualties. “We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield,” he said.

By Gustavo Capdevila and - -
GENEVA, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Social unrest and demands for change are not a negative thing during times of crisis like today, says Rubens Ricupero, a prominent Brazilian diplomat and intellectual.

Full recovery of the global economy will take at least four or five years, says former head of UNCTAD Rubens Ricupero. Credit: UNCTAD

Ricupero, who has a long and distinguished diplomatic career in Brazil, where he has held several ministerial posts as well, also says numerous multilateral negotiations, like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha Round of talks, will remain stalled.

The deadlock, he says, is related to an ongoing phenomenon: a shift in global power from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific region.

In these circumstances, it is difficult to reach a consensus on deeper issues in multilateral talks, Ricupero told IPS in this exclusive interview.

Q: What is your assessment of the global situation? A: In the industrialised countries, I don’t think there can be much hope of short-term recovery. The Europeans do not even have a strategy to cope with the problems of the highly indebted countries. It will take quite a lot of suffering before any solution is reached.

Growth has practically disappeared in Germany, the country that matters. In others, like Italy and the Netherlands, there is recession. It looks like this will be another lost year for Europe.

Q: And in the United States? A: A lot will depend on the presidential elections in November. It’s not possible to predict the outcome, but I would venture to say President Barack Obama will be reelected.

The U.S. economy is starting to show signs of recovery, albeit slow and insufficient in terms of job creation, but the pace should pick up somewhat over the next few years.

Q: So the outlook is discouraging. A: This year and the next we won’t see major differences with respect to the dichotomy we have experienced in recent times. The economies of the developing South continue to grow, particularly China, India and other Asian countries, and as a result countries of Latin America and the Middle East are growing as well. I don’t see on the horizon either a major threat of a catastrophe like the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008 or a promising recovery.

Q: Will it be a long wait? A: Like in the 1930s, recovery will take a while. Full recovery of the global economy as a whole won’t be seen for at least four or five years.

Q: Does that go for Latin America as well? A: No. That doesn’t mean other regions won’t be able to recover earlier. You have to keep in mind that in the 1930s, with a few exceptions, like Argentina, which suffered more because of its dependence on exports to Great Britain and its decision to try to pay off its debt, the rest of the countries of Latin America were in a good position, like Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Mexico.

Q: Is the outlook similar today? A: I see two differences in our favour. First, in 1930 we didn’t have the current phenomenon of the economic growth in China, India and other Asian countries. The world basically depended on the industrialised countries.

The second difference is that in the 1930s, the countries of Latin America were already crushed by heavy foreign debt, and the great majority of countries in the region were unable to meet their payments.

This time we are starting out the decade in an incomparably better situation, with strong reserves, a low level of debt, and a more favourable internal situation in terms of growth, employment and improved social indices.

I’m talking about the situation in countries like Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Peru, not so much about those that depend more directly on the U.S. market – the countries in the northern part of the region.

Q: International negotiations are running up against serious difficulties in questions like disarmament, trade and the environment. What is your impression of the multilateral system? A: Things are not going well because there is a deadlock on nearly all of the major issues.

Q: What would you say are the reasons for that? A: There are two overlapping phenomena. One is circumstantial: the economic crisis that sooner or later will have to come to an end. Another runs deeper: for years we have been seeing a shift in the world’s centre of economic and demographic gravity from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific region.

This is a phenomenon that the great French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) would have called a very long-term secular tendency, such as in the case of the shift in the centre of world trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the 16th century, at the time of the big discoveries.

Q: Is that shift in power irreversible? A: It won’t stop happening. On the contrary, the short-term crises are fuelling it, reinforcing it. As the United States gets weaker economically, this obviously greatly favours the accumulation of reserves and financial power in countries like China.

It is at those rare times in history, which occur once every two or three centuries, that there is a change in global distribution. And at those times a consensus on how to cope with the deeper underlying issues is less likely to be reached in the multilateral bodies.

Q: Give me more details about this phenomenon. A: Until recently, the United States was an arbiter making the decisions in the world. It was the hegemonic power that guaranteed the liberal economic order.

It played that role since the end of World War II, with the reorganisation of the economic and financial system – the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the predecessor of the WTO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – and of the political system by means of the United Nations charter.

Throughout the long Cold War, the United States continued to be the country that guaranteed the production of results in the major conferences that gave rise to the so-called international regimes. That was so much the case that when the United States abstained, as in the case of law of the sea, things did not move forward.

Q: What is the new reality? A: Today the United States is starting to reassess its positions, to feel a stronger need to focus on its domestic problems, to change its military strategy. It is shifting the focus away from the Middle East and Islamic issues to Asia. And it is starting to realise that the big strategic adversary, in the long run, is China, not Al Qaeda or the Islamists.

So in this process no one is appearing to play the role of arbiter. That’s what is being seen in the incidents involving Syria in the U.N. Security Council, and also in the other major international negotiations.

Q: Are we looking at an imminent shift in power? A: No, I don’t see the possibility of a change in the short term. If Obama is reelected, he will pay more attention to big domestic problems, like he has been doing. And China and India are still facing huge challenges. They are not ready, nor do they want, to assume the weight of that responsibility.

It is a very difficult moment, which fits the great Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci’s (1891-1937) definition of crisis. Gramsci said crisis is the moment when the old world is dying away, and the new world is struggling to come forth, and in that interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

That is what we are experiencing now. Also the fact that even the industrialised countries have started to discuss the crisis of capitalism. But they can’t come up with a solution because the same people who created the crisis are still dealing the cards.

Q: Do you think there will be some kind of reaction? A: Things are going to be very agitated over the next few years. Not in the sense of a global conflict, but in this kind of thing we are seeing: dissatisfaction, indignation, unrest, a desire for change. Which isn’t negative, because we must not ever lose sight of the fact that history is driven by times of difficulty.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say, like the Marxists, that violence drives history. But dissatisfaction does. It is at the root of the big global changes, like the French Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the Rennaissance. During those times people were dissatisfied with how they were living.

Q: And today? A: That social unrest can be a highly creative force. It is upsetting for those who live during those periods, because it questions all values, all habits, but it is creative.

I don’t think it’s bad for people not to feel satisfied with a system that is based to such an extent on injustice and the lack of equality. People have to rebel against what the bankers have done, and are still doing.

That is why I have said: more power to the men and women who fight for an economy with greater equity, justice and balance. People must not resign themselves to this.

Q: Could the crisis affect the survival of the multilateral bodies? A: The U.N. in particular has demonstrated great flexibility. I’ll mention two episodes: In 1971, when communist China was admitted to and became a permanent member of the Security Council, it was said at the time, in the period following the Cultural Revolution, that it would cause great instability in the world. And that did not happen.

And the second: the end of communism brought about a total change in the map of the world. The Soviet Union fell apart into I don’t know how many pieces. The Yugoslav federation did too. And all of that happened with a relatively contained degree of violence, except in the case of the Yugoslavians, for other reasons.

At both times, what happened was that the organisations, particularly those of the U.N., managed to adapt to the changes. What is bad is when an organisation is so rigid that it cannot adapt, and it perishes.

The U.N. has that flexibility, which at times causes a great deal of perplexity and dissatisfaction.

Q: Do you believe the financial organisations, like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, will survive intact? A: No. I hope this movement demanding change will modify not only the internal economies of countries, in the sense of moving away from that market fundamentalism, but that it will also change the institutions that have represented that fundamentalist spirit.

And in order for that to happen, the central role has to be played by people around the world – not only in the (developing) South – who are aware of the problem, that it is not possible to continue with an organisation that foments the growth of inequality.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2011 (IPS)

A decade after its spectacular Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City’s twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and despite the killing earlier this year of its charismatic leader, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda appears to have largely succeeded in its hopes of accelerating the decline of U.S. global power, if not bringing it to the brink of collapse.

Since 9/11, the United States' global standing has plunged dramatically -- a decline largely fueled by its alienating and costly "war on terror". Credit: A. Golden/eyewash design

That over-reaction was driven in major part by a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and other hawks who seized control of Bush’s foreign policy even before the dust had settled over Lower Manhattan and set it on a radical course designed to consolidate Washington’s dominance of the Greater Middle East and “shock and awe” any aspiring global or regional rival powers into acquiescing to a “unipolar” world.

Led within the administration by Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and their mostly neo-conservative aides and supporters, the hawks had four years before joined the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The letter-head organisation was co- founded by neo-conservative ideologues William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who, in an important 1996 article, called for the U.S. to preserve its post-Cold War “hegemony as far into the future as possible.”

In a series of subsequent letters and publications, they urged ever more military spending; pre-emptive, and if necessary, unilateral military action against possible threats; and “regime change” for rogue states, beginning with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

On the eve of 9/11, PNAC’s notion that Washington could extend its “benevolent global hegemony” indefinitely did not appear unreasonable. With more than 30 percent of the global economy, the strongest fiscal position in a generation, and a defence budget greater than the 20 next-most-powerful militaries combined, Washington looked unchallengeable, a perception soon enhanced by the show of national unity that followed the attacks and the speed and apparent ease with which Washington orchestrated the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan later that year.

“I’ve gone back in world history and never seen anything like it,” exclaimed Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, a leading exponent of the “declinist” school of U.S. power 15 years before, about Washington’s dominance, which he compared favourably to the British Empire in its day.

PNAC’s associates were similarly impressed. “People are now coming out of the closet on the word ’empire’,” exulted the Washington Post’s neo-conservative columnist, Charles Krauthammer, a Cheney favourite and long-time advocate of a U.S.-led “unipolar” world. “The fact is no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the history of the world since the Roman Empire.”

Such exuberance (or hubris) naturally fueled the next phase in PNAC’s quest – originally laid out in an open letter to Bush published by the group just nine days after 9/11 – for victory in what was now called the “global war on terror”: regime change in Iraq.

“Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism,” PNAC had warned, arguing that Washington must expand its target list to include states — particularly those hostile to Israel — that support terrorist groups, as well as the terrorist groups themselves.

So, instead of focusing on capturing bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and providing the kind of security and material assistance needed to pacify and begin rebuilding Afghanistan, Bush turned his attention — and diverted U.S. military and intelligence resources — to preparing for war against Iraq.

That decision is now seen universally — with the exception of Cheney and his die-hard PNAC supporters — as perhaps the single-most disastrous foreign policy decision by a U.S. president in the past decade, if not the past century.

Not only did it effectively set the stage for an eventual Taliban comeback in Afghanistan (which is now costing the U.S. some 10 billion dollars a month), but it also destroyed the international support and solidarity Washington had enjoyed immediately after the 9/11 attacks — a fact made excruciatingly clear by Bush’s failure to gain U.N. Security Council backing for his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It also helped persuade tens of millions of Muslims that the U.S. was waging war on Islam, according to dozens of public-opinion surveys.

Indeed, by invading Iraq, the U.S. fell into a trap set by bin Laden who, convinced that Moscow’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan contributed critically to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse, clearly believed that the U.S. was susceptible to the same kind of over-extension.

“We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,” he said in a 2004 video-tape describing what he called a “war of attrition.”

“We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” he added. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘Al Qaeda’, in order to make generals race there and to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations,” he went on.

Of course, by the time bin Laden recorded those remarks, the U.S. forces in Iraq were battling a growing insurgency, one that not only would result in hugely costly abuses by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib that inflicted serious damage to Washington’s already-tattered moral image, but that would also push Iraq to the very brink of civil war and lead to an even deeper and more expensive intervention by the U.S. military.

True to bin Laden’s prediction, Washington, goaded by PNAC associates and alumni, also deployed forces — or drone missiles at the very least — to virtually wherever Al Qaeda or its alleged affiliates raised its flag, often at the cost of weakening local governments and incurring the wrath of local populations, particularly in Somalia and Yemen.

More importantly, the same held true in nuclear-armed Pakistan, not to mention Afghanistan, where Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, more than doubled U.S. troop strength to 100,000 in his first two years in office, even as he withdrew an equivalent number from Iraq.

The costs have been staggering in almost every respect. The estimated three to 4.4 trillion dollars Washington has incurred either directly or indirectly in conducting the “global war on terror” account for a substantial portion of the fiscal crisis that transformed the country’s politics and brought it to the edge of bankruptcy last month.

And while the U.S. military remains by far the strongest in the world, its veil of invincibility has been irreparably pierced by the success with which rag-tag groups of guerrillas have defied and frustrated it. The result, according to conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has been “a steady erosion of America’s position in the world,” which Obama has so far been unable to reverse.

“…(F)or a long time,” wrote Richard Clarke, a top national-security official under Bush who warned the White House several months before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major operation against the U.S. homeland, in the dailybeast.com, “we actually played into the hands of our opponents, doing precisely what they had wanted us to do, responding in the ways that they had sought to provoke, damaging our economy and alienating much of the Middle East.”

And leading the charge were precisely those hawks whose fondest wish was to extend, rather than cut short, Washington’s global hegemony.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Excerpt:

By Aprille Muscara
WASHINGTON, Mar 25 2011 (IPS)

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) prepares to assume command and control of military operations in Libya after five days of the United States at the helm, U.S. President Barack Obama’s doctrine of multilateralism is on the line.

Obama takes questions on Libya during a visit to El Salvador, Mar. 22, 2011. Credit: White House Photo, Pete Souza

In the contentious lead-up to intervention, Obama was unwavering in his message that any U.S. action would have to be in concert with the international community. He especially insisted on “Arab leadership and participation” in military strikes against the North African country, where more than 330,000 people have been displaced by fighting between pro-democracy rebels and soldiers loyal to long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Domestic debate raged about imposing a no-fly zone (NFZ), as some sceptics warned that U.S. influence abroad would suffer if Washington mired itself militarily in yet another Muslim country.

“With two wars going in Iraq and Afghanistan, with huge deficits at home, with neo-isolationist voices rising from the Tea Party and other parts of the political spectrum, you might have guessed that intervention would not have occurred,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), told IPS.

While allies like France and Britain were early supporters of military action, Washington was hesitant until the Arab League’s last-minute endorsement. Then, within days, the U.S. helped to negotiate the passage of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 authorising an NFZ, ostensibly to avert mass civilian casualties, and the hawks triumphed.

“The episode constitutes a victory for liberal interventionists” and “a sign of a continuing [domestic] appetite to expend blood and treasure in crises abroad – including a crisis like this, which does not pose a direct threat to the U.S.,” Kupchan argued.

But as Obama’s demands for international participation were met and public opinion polls showed popular support for U.S. action, the reluctant president was left with little choice, according to some observers.

“Not only do I think that this is a successful bout of multilateralism, but I think that the consensus-building that occurred elsewhere to some extent forced Obama’s hand,” Kupchan added.

“From the beginning, he said he would like other partners to do more in the world,” he continued. “In many respects, they gave Obama what he wanted.”

Writing in his ‘Foreign Policy’ blog Thursday, Rothkopf characterised the “abstainers” of resolution 1973 as being among the Libyan war’s “victors” – a coalition with the potential to be an “alternative to the old trans-Atlantic alliance”.

“The group, the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India and China] plus Germany, may have sat on the sidelines for the vote but by imagining the outcome had they not done so, their potential power is made clear,” he argued.

“China and Russia have veto power. And of the four countries most likely to join them as Security Council permanent members in the years ahead, three of them rounded out this group,” he explained.

For some, Washington’s late addition to the cacophony of voices calling for military intervention could be fodder for American declinists. For others, it is proof of the capitol’s enduring influence.

“[I]f something is going to get done, [the U.S. is] going to have to be in the lead,” Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign policy analyst at CFR, argued Wednesday, expressing scepticism about the transition to coalition command of military operations in Libya.

“And we saw that simply with the authorisation at the U.N. where, you know, Sarkozy, for example, was way out front in talking about the need to intervene, but it didn’t happen until last week when Obama said, OK, now we’re on board,” he continued.

As one of NATO’s 28 members and as part of the international coalition participating in the enforcement of Libya’s NFZ and arms embargo – which now includes Arab League members Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – the White House says it will play a mere support role in subsequent phases of the operation.

But, Boot argued, “we’re going to have the biggest say in terms of what happens no matter how Obama tries to camouflage it.”

“[E]verybody knows we’re the top dog here,” he contended. ” [Obama] can try to be, you know, humble and try to put the U.S. in the background as much as possible, but the reality is we are the number one power in the world.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Dec 21 2010 (IPS)

Commenting on the state of trans-Atlantic relations in 2008, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter argued that European Union governments are “not our vassals” but “occupy an equal position with the U.S.” Documents released over the past month appear to offer a different view.

In a report finalised earlier in December, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton signalled that the EU’s main purpose internationally is to “help” Washington “achieve its global objectives.” By coincidence, a series of secret cables from U.S. embassies around the world made public by the website WikiLeaks indicates that the U.S. expects Europe to constantly act as its subordinate.

A memo approved in 2005 by William Leach, then U.S. ambassador to Paris, deals with French opposition to the war declared against Iraq two years previously. Leach takes comfort in learning that the anti-war stance of then president Jacques Chirac was not supported by some prominent members of Chirac’s own party, the Union for a Popular Majority (known by its French acronym UMP).

The memo summarises a visit to Leach from Hervé de Charette, a former foreign minister and then head of international relations for the UMP. De Charette, according to the memo, called Chirac’s position on the war “embarrassing”. Giving the impression that he was speaking on behalf of Nicolas Sarkozy, now French president and the UMP leader at the time, de Charette identified a sturdy relationship with the U.S. as “the basis for French foreign relations.” De Charette also described the Israel-Palestine conflict as “the key issue” for both the EU and U.S. and suggested that he wished to counter the perception that France was more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel.

Another cable from 2005 pinpoints Britain and the Netherlands as the most trusted U.S. allies in western Europe. Drafted by Clifford Sobel, who was about to step down as the U.S. envoy to The Hague, it labels the Dutch as “go-to guys” when disagreements arise between the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Sobel says that the Dutch helped “push back” plans by France and Germany to develop a European military capability that could act independently of NATO, a U.S.-dominated alliance.

He applauds the Dutch, too, for providing “early logistic support” for the war in Iraq by allowing the U.S. military to pass through Rotterdam, when it was unable to use other European ports for that purpose.

Furthermore, the cable celebrates the willingness of Dutch diplomats to act as “eyes and ears” for the U.S. It recommends that – because the Netherlands has a history as a coloniser in the Caribbean – the Dutch should be given a role in countering the rise of left-wing politicians in Latin America.

According to Sobel, the Dutch are “deeply concerned” about “meddling” by Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez in the Caribbean. “As a Caribbean power, the Dutch have good reasons to lead an effort to balance traditional Spanish dominance on Latin American issues in the EU, but the U.S. and others will need to push them to take this role,” the cable adds.

Eva Golinger, a New York lawyer who has written several books on Chavez, said that the cables published by WikiLeaks underscore Washington’s “obsession” with relations between Cuba and Venezuela. Claims that Cubans have penetrated every aspect of Venezuelan government and economy are redolent of Cold War warnings about “communist expansion” in the Southern hemisphere, Golinger wrote on her Internet publication Postcards from the Revolution.

She also accused U.S. diplomats of painting a false picture of Venezuela. Whereas one cable alleges that the quality of hospitals has declined under Chavez, his administration has pumped billions into a public healthcare system which guarantees free treatment to all citizens.

Two decades after the Cold War was widely assumed to have ended, the cables show that at least 200 U.S. nuclear weapons remain on European soil. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey are named as some of the countries hosting these weapons.

In addition, the cables appear to offer proof that NATO is planning for a confrontation with Russia. A document from January 2010 shows that the alliance approved a plan during that month to expand an operation known as Eagle Guardian, under which preparations would be made for fighting with Russia in Poland and the three Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia).

The decision follows NATO’s encroachment into countries surrounding Russia over the past decade. This enlargement occurred despite promises made to Moscow by James Baker, the U.S. secretary of state from 1989 to 1992, that NATO would not expand eastwards. As members of NATO since 2004, the Baltic states have accommodated both military bases for the U.S. and operations training soldiers preparing attacks on Afghanistan.

Writing in September, Rick Rozoff, a blogger with the campaigning website Stop NATO, noted that the warplanes from a variety of NATO members fly “round-the-clock” over the three Baltic countries, all of which adjoin Russia. Rozoff intimated that these operations are bound to increase friction between Russia and the alliance.

“NATO’s new members on the Baltic Sea are delivering on the demands imposed upon them by accession to the alliance,” he added. “They host NATO – particularly U.S. – troops, bases, warplanes, warships and missiles. They provide troops for wars far abroad. They supply training opportunities on the ground and in the air for the war in Afghanistan and for future conflicts with none of the restrictions that exist in North America and Western Europe. And they render those multiple services near Russia’s western border.”

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 3 2009 (IPS)

Despite President Barack Obama’s emphasis on diplomatic engagement, the U.S. public has become more inward-looking and unilateralist than at any time since the early stages of the Vietnam War, according to the latest in a series of quadrennial surveys on foreign policy attitudes released Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

For the first time since 1964, a plurality (49 percent) of respondents said the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own” – a sharp increase from the 28 percent who took that position just four years ago.

Similarly, 44 percent of the 2,000 respondents in the latest survey agreed with the proposition that “we should go our own way in international matters, not worrying too much about whether other countries agree with us or not”.

While that percentage fell short of a majority – 51 percent disagreed – it was the highest in the past 45 years and a big jump from the 28 percent who endorsed that position in 2005.

“We see an extraordinary spike in isolationist, unilateralist sentiment,” said Pew director Andrew Kohout, who noted that such views have been typically held by only about 25 percent of the population since the mid-1960s.

He attributed the spike to the country’s slow economic recovery and the public’s weariness with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to a growing concern that the U.S. remains vulnerable to terrorism.

The survey, co-sponsored by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), also found a sharp drop in the public’s view of Washington’s importance as a global leader, especially compared to five years ago, after the 2003 Iraq invasion.

In a 2004 survey, 45 percent of respondents – an all-time high dating back to when the question was first asked in 1974 – said the U.S. was “more important” as a global leader than it had been 10 years before, while only 20 percent said it “less important”.

In late October and early November, when the latest poll was conducted, the numbers were virtually reversed. Forty-one percent of the 2,000 respondents said Washington’s importance had declined compared to a decade before, while only 25 percent said it had increased.

The latest survey also found a number of serious differences between the foreign policy views of the general public and elite foreign policy establishment (“influentials”), as represented by the nearly CFR 650 members who were also interviewed.

A substantially greater proportion of influentials favoured a more assertive leadership role on the part of the U.S. in world affairs than was favoured by the public respondents.

The influentials were also significantly more inclined to support a troop increase in Afghanistan; to view instability in Pakistan as a major threat to the U.S.; and to see China’s rise as a world power in a positive light. At the same time, they were less supportive of military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

On more general priorities, however, the survey found yawning gaps between the general public and the influentials; 85 percent of the public rated “protecting U.S. jobs” as a “top priority” of government policy, as opposed to only 21 percent of the elite respondents. Public respondents also gave much higher priorities to reducing illegal immigration and combating drug trafficking than the influentials.

“Part of what we’re seeing is the divergent response to globalisation,” said Charles Kupchan, a CFR foreign policy expert who teaches at Georgetown University.

“Foreign policy elites look out at an interdependent world and say the only way for U.S. to prosper in this world is to engage with others to tackle global problems,” he said. “But, for many Americans, globalisation is prompting the opposite response, which is that interdependence is causing unemployment because jobs are going overseas, and we’re mired in difficult conflicts with no light at the end of the tunnel, So why don’t we start tending our own garden.”

Indeed, asked whether they agreed that “we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home,” 76 percent of public respondents replied affirmatively.

That was higher than the 73 percent who took that position at the end of the Vietnam War and close to the 45-year high of 79 percent set in the early 1990s as the Cold War wound down.

“The public is not very excited about engagement overseas,” said James Lindsay, CFR’s director of studies, who warned that the sentiments expressed in the poll could pose serious obstacles to Obama’s internationalist agenda.

“Tough economic times turn the public’s attention inward,” he said.

“The president is sailing into a stiff wind, both in terms of the specific issue of Afghanistan, but also in general foreign policy more broadly,” he added, noting that both elite and public respondents in the survey were sceptical about the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan at the time the survey was conducted.

Indeed, Obama, himself noted this week that his decision to send 30,000 additional troops to the strife-torn country represents a major political risk “precisely because the American people are rightly focused on how do we rebuild America”.

While both the elite and the public respondents tend to see U.S. global power as diminished compared to 10 years ago, a majority of the public (57 percent) and a plurality of influentials (49 percent) believe Washington should try to maintain its position as the world’s sole military superpower.

About half of those who take that position in each group, however, say Washington should not try to do so if it risks alienating key allies.

In another indication of the public’s unilateralist mood, only 51 percent of respondents agreed that Washington should “cooperate fully with the United Nations” – the lowest level since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and down from 67 percent in 2002 following the ouster by U.S.-backed forces of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Public and elite respondents differed significantly on China’s emergence as a global power. Only 21 percent of influentials felt that Beijing’s rise posed a “major threat” to the U.S. – down from 38 percent in 2001. Fifty-three percent of the general public, by contrast, took that position, up slightly from 51 percent eight years ago.

Among influentials, the perception that China will become more important as a future ally has also grown steadily, from 31 percent who held that view in 2005 to 58 percent today.

Fifty-five percent – up from 43 percent in 2005 – of influentials saw India in a similar role, while 37 percent named Brazil as a future key ally, up from 17 percent. Their gains were made largely at the expense of Japan and Britain, which were seen as fading in importance as U.S. allies.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2009 (IPS)

The two-week long high-level segment of the U.N. General Assembly, which concluded last week, was characterised by historic moments, political controversies, and at times, routine boredom.

The president of the 192-member General Assembly, Dr. Ali Treki of Libya, boasted that the meetings were attended by 75 heads of state, 33 prime ministers and vice presidents, and 67 foreign ministers.

Asked to comment about Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi's long-drawn-out 95-minute rant, which virtually wrecked the Assembly's schedule for the day, Treki told reporters Friday: "I am not going to answer that question."

A follow-up question on Qaddafi's relentless but unsuccessful search for a place to pitch his Bedouin tent in New York City also went unanswered.

"It does not come within my competence as president of the General Assembly," Treki brusquely told the reporter.

Still, before Qaddafi addressed the General Assembly, Treki introduced him as "the leader of the revolution and king of kings", a title partly bestowed by the 53-member African Union which the Libyan leader currently chairs.

Qaddafi came to power in a bloodless military coup 40 years ago, yet ironically, the AU led a protest in the General Assembly last week to deprive a speaking slot to the Madagascar delegation because the new government in that country was installed following an army takeover.

The participation of Madagascar was called into question by only 23 out of 192 countries – reducing the vote to a political farce.

"This constitutes an affront to a universal organisation like the United Nations where the 'silent majority' was effectively reduced to silence," Ny Hasina Andriamanjato, the foreign minister of Madagascar said, in a letter of protest to Treki.

The letter also described the events in Madagascar as "a popular uprising", not a "military coup".

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another controversial star power, began addressing the Assembly, some of the Western delegates walked out in protest – primarily venting their anger at his repeated statements denying the holocaust.

Asked for his comments, Ahmadinejad told reporters he was not rattled by the incident and implied that the protest was a reflection, more on those who walked out, than on himself.

"Iran is a cultured nation," he said, "We have over 3,000 years of culture and civilisation."

Still, there were politically noteworthy moments, including a historic Security Council meeting on nuclear disarmament presided over by Barack Obama, the first for a U.S. president.

Obama, who addressed a summit meeting on climate change and also the opening of the General Assembly sessions, visited the United Nations on three consecutive days, perhaps another first for a U.S. leader.

James A. Paul, executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum and a veteran U.N.-watcher, described last week's events as "probably the most dramatic opening of a General Assembly in recent memory".

To the credit of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, he said, the United Nations called a climate change conference that really attracted the big players and appeared to have moved the issue substantially forward.

"Certainly the outcome was far short of what we need, but there was tangible progress and new commitments that seemed to change the nature of the discussion," Paul told IPS.

Summing up the summit, the secretary general described it as "the largest-ever summit on the climate crisis".

"We laid a solid foundation toward the Copenhagen conference," Ban said, referring to the mid-December meeting that will negotiate a new global treaty on climate change.

Ban said that leaders focused on climate change financing, with many expressing support for a proposal for 100 billion dollars in funding annually over the next decade for concrete adaptation and mitigation actions.

He also said the Security Council meeting helped place nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation "front and centre" on the U.N. agenda.

The second part of the U.N. fireworks, Paul said, was the General Assembly opening itself.

"Its hard to assess the import of all the speeches and all the posturing that always takes place," he noted.

But this event will probably be remembered more than anything for the engagement by President Obama and the vastly more positive approach by the United States.

This includes, he said, even the possibility that the United States will lift the U.N.'s long financial crisis by finally paying its dues on time, in full and without conditions.

"Naturally, it's tempting to ascribe too much to the eloquent Obama and to imagine that at long last the U.S. will be a real multilateral player at the U.N.," Paul said.

That is very unlikely, and crises like Iran, Palestine and Honduras prove that the Obama administration has its own great power agenda.

But still, the U.N. will be a stronger and more relevant organisation in the post-Bush era, not just because of Obama's vision but also because the U.S. can no longer play the sole superpower in a rapidly changing world, Paul added.

In passing, he said, it is worth noting that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's meeting with Ban Ki-moon on food security was another sign that Washington is using the U.N. more actively in its foreign policy.

"The U.N. outshone the trumpeted G20 meeting [of large economy leaders] in Pittsburgh and proved that it is important to have all the nations assembled in a serious institutional setting and not just a show for the press," Paul added.

No wonder even veteran U.N.-watchers were pleasantly surprised, he noted.

After a dynamic year in the last General Assembly, this was certainly a strong beginning for the new season, Paul declared.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 23 2009 (IPS)

The United Nations has long been described – rather contemptuously – as one of the world’s biggest talking shops.

But a new study, the first intellectual history of the United Nations scheduled to be released in September, credits the world body with ideas that have “proven crucial to improving the quality of life on the planet”.

Many view the United Nations as a “rigid bureaucracy without sparkle, wit or creativity”.

And the general public – heavily influenced by the mass media – “sees a travelling circus, a talk shop and a paper-pushing enterprise”.

But international organisations, the study points out, live or die by the quality and relevance of policy ideas they put forward and support.

While the World Bank and the International Monetary (IMF), two sister institutions of the world body, have documented their histories, the United Nations has been remiss.

The result is the birth of the United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) undertaken by the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York (CUNY).

The achievements listed in the 16-volume historical study, titled “U.N. Ideas that Changed the World”, cover human development, the environment, health and education, gender empowerment and human rights, among many others.

The Human Development Report, launched in 1990, was the first to initiate the idea that development policies should place more value in improving the quality of people’s lives and less on growth measured by gross domestic product (GDP) statistics. The series has continued over the last two decades.

The U.N.’s contributions to environmental debates have been described as “revolutionary”, including the awareness that climate change is to a large extent human-made: “a dramatic transformation of conventional wisdom”.

The Law of the Sea, which limits the ocean space belonging to sovereign nations, was the creation of the United Nations.

The eradication of the deadly disease smallpox, which was accomplished over a period of 11 years under the aegis of the World Health Organisation (WHO), is a “miracle of global cooperation” that saved millions of lives.

The study also says that the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights made human rights central to public policy and scrutiny.

Thomas G.Weiss, one of the authors of the study which followed about 10 years of intensive research, points out that a critical evaluation shows that the world body has achieved practical results in advances in human rights, improvement in health, nutrition and education – especially for women and children – and in contributing to ideas and actions on national and international policies.

Weiss, presidential professor of political science at the CUNY Graduate Centre, is a joint author, along with Richard Jolly, honorary professor and research associate of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex; and Louis Emmerij, a senior research fellow at the CUNY Graduate Centre.

The 16-volume publication consists of interviews and articles by over 79 personalities, including former senior U.N. officials and academics.

The study points out that the 65-year-old organisation’s “most important achievements” are not in the political field but in the economic and social arenas.

Asked about the U.N.’s political failures, Stephen Zunes, professor of political science and international studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS: “The greatest weakness of the U.N. system remains the archaic and undemocratic structure of the Security Council which allows five nations to block resolutions based not on a given resolution’s merits in regard to the U.N. Charter and international law, but on narrowly perceived national self-interests.”

Scores of legitimate resolutions have been vetoed, particularly in recent decades, by the United States, he said.

“Furthermore, simply the threat of a veto by the United States or another permanent member has resulted in countless draft resolutions either never coming to a vote or having the language so severely weakened as to make them meaningless,” said Zunes, who has authored several essays and publications on the politics of the Security Council.

Then there are the scores of Security Council resolutions that did manage to pass but are currently being violated because veto threats prevent them from being enforced under Chapter VII (which relates to action with respect to threats to peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression), he added.

Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, had a different take: “The question has to be asked, who considers the U.N. a failure?”

Certainly Palestinians recognise that the U.N. has so far been unable to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law and specifically U.N. resolutions and has been unable to wrest control of Palestine-Israel diplomacy out of U.S. hands and into the control of the U.N., she told IPS.

“But those same Palestinians recognise that the U.N. remains the one arena of struggle where Palestinians have a voice on the international stage – even if Palestinian diplomacy has badly misused it in recent years,” said Bennis, author of ‘Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power.’

She said Palestinian refugees are the first to recognise the crucial role that U.N. humanitarian assistance has played in providing the Palestinian refugees – now in the millions – access to not only basic food and shelter, but health care and crucial education and job training.

This is “not an acceptable replacement for all those human rights that remain out of reach, but a necessary role”, she added.

In official U.S. circles, Bennis argued, the U.N. is most consistently viewed as a failure on those occasions – all too rare – when it refuses to acquiesce to U.S. pressure.

When George H.W. Bush bribed, threatened, and punished Security Council members to assure enough votes to give a U.N. imprimatur to his 1990-91 Desert Storm war against Iraq, the U.N. was cheered as the appropriate centre of the first post-Cold War U.S.-led “coalition”, she said.

But 12 years later, Bush’s son excoriated the U.N. as a failure when it refused to endorse his war against Iraq.

During that brief eight-month span in which the U.N. joined the rising global anti-war mobilisation, to form what the New York Times called “the second super-power”, most of the world, governments and people alike, viewed the U.N. as a huge success, a partner in the effort to stop the latest drive towards empire.

On the day of the historic Feb. 15, 2003 mobilisations against the war in Iraq, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu told then-Secretary General Kofi Annan that “those people marching today in 665 cities across the world, we claim the United Nations as our own.” It was a moment of great triumph.

“But it didn’t last. And when the U.N. collapsed under U.S. pressure and embraced the U.S. occupation of Iraq as its own, people around the world then saw the U.N. as a huge failure,” Bennis declared.

The CUNY publication also points out that in the 1970s the United Nations sought fundamental changes in global policy by hosting a series of international conferences on key issues, including the environment, food and hunger, population, human settlements, employment and science and technology.

These included the U.N. Conference on Human Environment (1972), the World Population Conference (1974), the World Conference on the International Women’s Year (1975) and the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (1976).

These conferences were held following the blessings of the General Assembly, the highest policy making body at the United Nations.

Bennis said the most democratic part of the U.N., the General Assembly, has historically been the least powerful part.

Under Fr Miguel d’Escoto’s current presidency, the Assembly has emerged as a potential centerpiece of a new kind of U.N. power, able to challenge the U.S.-led global domination of the five permanent members of the Security Council and simultaneously challenge that of the Group of 8 industrial nations (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia).

“But the success remains elusive, because so far governments in the General Assembly have not taken advantage of this new moment to consolidate an empowered the Assembly as a crucial barometer of success in the U.N,” she said.

And it has failed to make good on its potential to challenge the undemocratic, veto-dependent Security Council, Bennis declared.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Jul 17 2009 (IPS)

In 2007, after eight months of detention in Iran – four in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison – Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari returned to the U.S. and held a press conference at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, where she directs the Middle East Programme.

When the floor was opened, the first questioner asked if Esfandiari – a longtime advocate of engagement with the Islamic Republic – still supported talks with Iran after her imprisonment there on false charges of fomenting a “velvet revolution”.

“I always have and will advocate talks between governments,” Esfandiari said, “be it the Iranian government and the United States or any other government. I think governments should talk to each other.”

But Esfandiari may have spoken too soon – she now says engagement should be put on the back burner.

At a 92nd Street Y event on Wednesday evening, Esfandiari was among three prominent Iran experts and previously staunch supporters of engagement with Iran who have changed their tunes since the disputed Jun. 12 election and its violent aftermath.

After 30 years of enmity where the U.S. and Iran have had no formal relations, said Esfandiari, she did not see the harm in waiting for a period – she suggested six months – to see how things shake out on the ground in Iran.

But, as Esfandiari acknowledged, it appears that the U.S. has already made up its mind to engage the Islamic Republic.

In what was billed as a major, comprehensive foreign policy speech on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the U.S. remained committed to engagement with all actors, including Iran.

While acknowledging that recent events in Iran had “certainly shifted” prospects for success, Clinton remained steadfast: “The choice is clear. We remain ready to engage with Iran.”

“But,” she warned, “the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.”

In contrast, all three of the experts on the 92nd Street Y panel said just the opposite: that engagement should not occur now, but the door should be open to it later.

Echoing Esfandiari, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Karim Sadjadpour, who has also advocated engagement, said he was reconsidering past positions.

“For the first time, I’m against engagement,” at least for now, he said.

But National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi said engagement might not need to be put completely on hold.

“I still think that engagement is the policy to pursue, but I don’t think we have to rush into it,” Parsi told IPS.

“What you want to avoid doing is have engagement in a manner that can tilt the balance in either direction when it comes to the internal political situation in Iran,” he said. “That, in my view, means that broad diplomatic engagement has to wait a little while.”

“If we are going wait for the dust to settle, as [U.S. President Barack Obama] has said, then we should wait for the dust to settle,” Parsi said, noting, “The opposition has not given up.”

But he said that certain talks, like the multilateral nuclear talks, could possibly go on.

Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist who was one of the last Western journalists on the streets of Tehran despite the fact that his press pass – but not his visa – had been revoked, admitted that other considerations had to be brought into the conversation about engagement.

“The strategic imperative for engagement remains,” he said, noting Iran’s “pivotal place in the region”.

Iran’s influence is apparent in many of the countries of interest to the U.S. Iran is allied with important states and actors in the Arab-Israeli arena – where the U.S. is making robust peace efforts – and Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. is respectively winding down and ramping up wars.

One of the top strategic concerns is Iran’s nuclear programme, which it claims is peaceful, but which adversaries – including, notably, close U.S. ally Israel – have charged is aimed at production of nuclear weapons.

However, the nuclear clock, noted Efandiari, will continue to tick whether or not the U.S. engages – and experts debate the possible timeframe for Iranian weapons capability.

Parsi said that engagement on the nuclear issue didn’t have to be put aside entirely, noting that a U.N. Security Council’s P5+1 group – not solely the U.S. – were conducting the ongoing nuclear negotiations.

Parsi said putting the full brakes on those talks could be complicated: “It’s difficult for the U.S. to say that without being in a [former President] George Bush administration position again.”

For most of his tenure, Bush roundly opposed talking to Iran, even through international bodies, labeling the country as part of the “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.

Many advocates of continuing with a plan of robust engagement, among them so-called foreign policy ‘realists’, cite historical precedent in dealing with U.S. adversaries, such as engagement with China despite its brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

In a recent article, New America Foundation’s (NAF) Flynt Leverett noted that the Iranian crackdown following massive demonstrations against the disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had “far less bloodshed” than Tiananmen Square.

Or as his NAF colleague Steve Clemons half-joked: “America has a rich history of dealing with thugs.”

But some Iran experts have dismissed the comparisons.

“Tehran was not Tiananmen Square,” said Esfandiari on Wednesday. “People went and voted and their votes were stolen. It was a different thing.”

According to Cohen, some of the realist strategic concerns must be put on the back burner.

“There’s also a moral imperative now,” he said. “So long as people are being killed in Iran… clubbed by the thousands, I don’t think it can be business as usual.”

Parsi also said that engagement that can bolster Ahmadinejad over the opposition, led by the ostensible losing candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, would be folly.

Citing Esfaniari’s comment that Iranian security services were worked up into a frenzy of “paranoia” about a velvet revolution, Cohen questioned whether U.S. talks with Iran could bear any fruit right now.

“I don’t think Iran has a national security team right now,” Cohen said. Such a cohesive group would be necessary to engagement on security issues.

“They’re in disarray,” Cohen said, because they’re dealing with the internal situation.

Cohen suggested waiting until at least the fall to make an attempt at engagement, at which time, he said, all the issues had to be put on the table at once.

“This is such a messed up relationship,” he said, pointing to decades of hostility and traumatic events like 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran and the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran that was televised nightly in the U.S. for more than a year.

“We need to get past the psychosis,” Cohen said. “That looks very remote to me.”

Excerpt:

By Stephen Leahy
BERLIN, Jul 13 2009 (IPS)

The G8’s failure to make meaningful commitments on climate last week pushes the world ever closer to global climate catastrophe, experts warn. Without commitments to take action, there is little comfort in G8 countries’ agreement to keep overall global warming below 2.0 degrees Celsius.

“If they took the 2.0-degree commitment seriously, it would imply a vigourous and immediate carbon emission reduction programme,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University in the U.S.

“It would mean carbon emissions would have to peak by 2020 and decline. That’s a tall order but that’s what needs to happen to stabilise at around 2.0 degrees C,” Oppenheimer told IPS.

The Group of Eight of the world’s largest economies comprises Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Canada, Japan and the United States.

Climate experts stress that 2.0 degrees is not in any way a guarantee of safety. There are already significant impacts currently from climate change. However, from what scientists know today, risks increase markedly over 2.0 degrees of warming, Oppenheimer warned.

Global temperatures have already risen 0.8 C in the last hundred years and will reach 1.2 to 1.5 C based on emissions already in the atmosphere.

“The climate system is unpredictable. Two degrees is just a guideline,” Oppenheimer said.

There are many silent, unknown thresholds where changes will not be reversible and we won’t see the consequences until much later. “We’re flying blind…we have to act in a pretty cautious manner,” he said.

Political caution is all that the G8 meeting in L’Aquila, Italy delivered. G8 commitments to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 have little significance without a far more important mid-term target of 2020, says Kim Carstensen, leader of the WWF Global Climate Initiative.

“We need an ambitious 2020 target of 40 percent reductions for the developed world,” Carstensen said in an interview from L’Aquila. “There has been no progress on the huge gap between what the science says is needed and what developed countries will commit to.”

Even the much-touted new U.S. climate change bill would only result in emissions of 5.0 to 6.0 percent below 1990 levels for the year 2020. And the bill’s passage is not a certainty. Japan’s latest commitment is 7.0 percent, the European Union has promised 20 percent, while Canada is not promising to do anything.

Remarkably, Canada, the U.S., China, India and the 13 other major greenhouse- gas emitting countries plus representatives of the European Union met just before the G8 to sort out the climate problem at the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate.

These countries represent 80 percent of global emissions and agreed to keep the temperature increase below 2.0 degrees C, but offered no commitments other than “support” for overall global reductions of 50 percent, with developed countries making 80 percent reductions by 2050.

After the G8, Canada promptly called such a target “aspirational”, with no need to change policy. And the U.S., along with other countries, fudged their commitment by insisting on leaving the door open to using different baseline years from which to measure their reductions.

All of this bodes ill for the final climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

If there is no 2020 emissions reduction target in Copenhagen, it indicates countries are not serious about tackling climate change, suggested Ged Davis, co-president of the Global Energy Assessment Council in Vienna.

“Without a 2020 target we can’t get the public debate about how to go forward,” Davis told IPS.

Talk of keeping warming under 2.0 degrees is also meaningless without that 2020 target and an outline of the policies on how to get there, he said.

China and India have said they will not agree to any 2020 target in Copenhagen. One of the reasons is the unresolved issue of how to address the fact that the bulk of the emissions in the atmosphere today have come from the rich, developed nations. Meanwhile the bulk of present and future emissions will come from China, India and the rest of the developing world.

These are extremely difficult negotiations, emotional and complex and we all need to play our part, he says. Copenhagen will not sort all this out because there are years of negotiations to come but “it is very important to get a strong outcome in Copenhagen”, Davis said.

“If we don’t have an agreed 2020 target and the paths forward, we could end up continuing to debate until the water rises around our necks,” he said.

Excerpt:

Jeffrey Owens, the tax “point person” of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was stung by activist critics of the OECD standards under which countries will be put on a tax haven blacklist and targeted for sanctions.

The blacklist was announced last month at the London meeting of the G20, which said in a communiqué that it would “take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens…to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems.”

Owens made the comment to IPS when he stopped to chat on his way to the podium to deliver the keynote address at the Financial Due Diligence Conference organised last week in Miami Beach by the industry newsletter “Offshore Alert.”

The OECD is composed of 30 of the world’s major economic powers, mostly from Europe. The G20 includes major western countries as well as Brazil, Russia, India, and China.

Key civil society criticisms are that the OECD standards require bilateral agreements for information on request, not automatic multilateral tax information exchange; that they call for only 12 such agreements to be signed by each tax haven; and that getting off the blacklist entails only promises, which have not been kept by tax havens in the past.

Oxfam International, the development organisation, said, “There is no reference to an automatic multilateral tax information exchange system. Anything less is unlikely to benefit poor countries, since they lack the information to prove their case before gaining access to tax information, or the administrative capacity to enter into negotiations on a case by case basis.”

What tax havens call “fishing expeditions” are not allowed, though often the information that could make a case resides only in the offshore centres – estimated at 50-70 depending on who is defining them.

Oxfam said, “Even for rich countries, it is incredibly difficult to make an information request under these agreements, and the tax haven can quite easily refuse the request. Jersey, for example, a well known tax haven, has had such an agreement with the USA since 2001, yet has only delivered just five pieces of data in all that time.”

Owens, director of the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told the conference audience that automatic information exchange would not work, because, “For developing countries, it would be very hard for them to manage an enormous flow of information.”

IPS pressed Owens to explain why the EU had insisted on automatic information sharing for its own European Union Tax Savings Directive effected in 2005, but those countries, who dominate the OECD, appeared to think it was not good for the rest of the world. (The OECD did fix a flaw in the EU standard by requiring information sharing about accounts of companies as well as individuals).

He replied, “There is nothing stopping developing countries in its treaties from using automatic information sharing, but you have to be sure you can use the information.” He said he had visited the office of an unnamed tax commissioner and noticed boxes marked “IRS” [the U.S. Internal Revenue Service] stacked against the wall. He explained that the commissioner said “he got all this information and didn’t know what to do with it.”

Owens said, “Targeted information is the key thing.”

“If I am a UK resident and think about evading taxes, does the country I want to use have an agreement for exchange of information on request? Don’t underestimate deterrent effect,” he added. “You’re taking a bigger risk when you put your money into a country that signed up to the standard.”

However, that deterrent effect hasn’t worked very well to date. The U.S. tax information exchange agreement with the Cayman Islands, established in 2002, has not perceptively reduced U.S. nationals’ extensive use of that tax haven, which is the world’s fifth largest financial centre by deposits.

Beyond that, how can 12 bilateral agreements be enough in a world with more than 190 countries? Action Aid UK, a development organisation, said, “Substantial implementation of the OECD standards is taken to mean signing 12 bilateral agreements. This sets too low a number to likely include developing countries.”

Owens countered that, “Twelve agreements between tax havens aren’t going to count. If a country gets 12 and then closes the door, no. We expect countries to continue to negotiate after they reach the 12.”

Will the OECD really put countries that finesse the rules on the blacklist? Oxfam wasn’t encouraged on the day of the G20 meeting when the OECD’s announced blacklist of “non-cooperative” tax havens included only Costa Rica, Malaysia, Philippines and Uruguay – none among the world’s major offshore centres. (Uruguay was almost immediately removed from the list after it formally endorsed the OECD standards).

Perhaps the four had been too naïve or inefficient to pledge to go with the programme, but the blacklist shrunk to zero when they hurriedly signed on. Were there really then no tax havens anywhere in the world still committed to impregnable bank and corporate secrecy?

Action Aid UK noted that “a number of major tax havens managed to jump through the hoops in time to escape even the grey list.” Oxfam agreed that, “Tax havens like Jersey and the Isle of Man appear on the white list, rather than the ‘grey list’ of jurisdictions that have committed to the internationally agreed tax standard but have not yet substantially implemented it. These lists reflect promises (rather than actions) from uncooperative jurisdictions to sign up to OECD standards.”

Maintaining that concern about tax havens’ impact on developing countries was indeed a factor in the decision by major financial powers to deal with them, Owens pointed out that discussions at the U.N. conference in Doha in November 2008 had focused on how secrecy jurisdictions deprive developing countries of the financial resources needed for development.

He said, “A link is being made between development, the Monterey commitments, and the impact on developing countries of tax havens. It changed the dynamics of the debate, broadening it beyond OECD countries.”

A key issue now is what happens to countries that don’t keep their promises. Owens said that sanctions – called “defensive measures” – would be extensive. Countries could deny the tax deductibility of certain expenses. They could reconsider existing tax treaties with those countries. They could demand that aid recipients commit to the standards. International institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank could reflect the standards in the investment policies. However, sanctions are up to each country and institution to apply.

Action Aid UK noted that there was no commitment to implement sanctions, but looked favourably at the fact that, “Sanctions must be ‘agreed’, implying a multilateral process of sanctions rather than a bilateral one that depends on a country’s economic might.”

The G8 in July will get the OECD’s report on how the process is going, and G20 finance ministers will consider the advances against offshore secrecy at their meeting in November.

*Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist who writes about the offshore bank and corporate secrecy system. Her articles are posted at http://thekomisarscoop.com/.

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 6 2009 (IPS)

The U. S. should quickly accede to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, according to a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report.

Concluded in 1982 after some 15 years of negotiations, the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is the international accord that sets rules governing most areas of ocean policy, including navigation, over-flights, exploitation of the seabed, conservation and research.

The report released by the influential think tank, “The National Interest and the Law of the Sea,” contends that ratifying LOST would benefit U.S. national security as well as the country’s economic and environmental interests. It would also help U.S. interests in combating piracy and in establishing its claims to the increasingly contested Arctic region, the report said.

“To fail to join the convention this year would be to lose a unique opportunity [as] the United States is experiencing a conjunction of circumstances that includes the ‘fresh start’ effect of a new administration, the ascendance of two national security strategies founded on conflict prevention and partnership building, and a community of nations eager for renewed American multilateralism,” according to the report.

The nearly 30-year-old treaty has been signed and ratified by 156 countries and the European Community, though not by the U.S. It was rejected by then-President Ronald Reagan who, under pressure from big U.S. mining and energy companies, objected to its provisions for deep-sea mining, particularly its requirements that mining claims be regulated by a Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA).

Reagan ordered the U.S. government to abide by all other sections of the treaty, which amounted essentially to a compilation and codification of existing international customary and maritime international law.

In 1994, the seabed provisions of the treaty were amended to satisfy U.S. objections, and the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush subsequently supported its ratification, though it never received Senate approval. The Obama administration also supports ratification, which is currently pending in the Senate.

“Like the president and the secretary of defence, I strongly support U.S. accession to the Law of the Sea Convention,” Alexander Vershbow, Obama’s choice for the post of assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearings in late March.

“By becoming a party to the convention, we would send a clear signal to all nations that we are committed to advancing the rule of law at sea. Additionally by joining the convention, we would provide the firmest possible legal foundation for the navigational rights and freedoms needed to project power, reassure friends and deter adversaries, respond to crises, sustain combat forces in the field, and secure sea and air lines of communication that underpin international trade and our own economic prosperity.”

The report, which was written by visiting CFR fellow Scott Borgerson, asserts that joining the convention will allow the U.S. to extend its sovereignty over as much as one million square kms of additional ocean and the resources beneath it.

Borgerson also argues that joining the treaty will advance other critical U.S. interests, such as leading anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden, opening up deep seabed mining to U.S. companies, championing environmental initiatives, and securing U.S. navigation rights for U.S. naval and commercial ships in strategic waterways.

Additionally, joining the treaty would also bolster the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a Bush administration initiative under which 15 core mainly western member states, including the U.S., and some 50 other co-operating states, claim the legal authority to interdict weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or their components on the high seas.

Supporters of the treaty contend that that the principles embodied in the treaty are the cornerstone of U.S. naval strategy and create the legal basis for prosecuting pirates and other non-state actors. The U.S. Navy has long supported Washington’s adherence to LOST.

Advocates highlight how oceans are, by their very nature, international and thus require a regime of international law and collaborative approaches to their management.

Opponents depict the treaty as a dangerous lethal threat to U.S. national sovereignty and an unacceptable constraint on Washington’s freedom of action.

“Our influence in the world derives from our economic power and most especially our naval power,” Frank Gaffney, the president of the far-right Centre for Security Policy (CSP), told the National Journal last November.

“And I cannot for the life of me see how those are going to be enhanced by being party to a treaty that imposes these constraints and limitations, and subordinates our sovereignty and decision-making to these multilateral entities (established by the treaty),” added Gaffney, a neo-conservative who has been the treaty’s most prolific foe.

Supporters counter by saying that the convention expands the rule of law over the vast expanse of the world’s oceans and contains provisions that could actually extend U.S. sovereignty over hundreds of thousands of square kms.

Though opponents say that the U.S. already adheres to and is thus protected by the treaty’s provisions under customary international law, advocates argue that because customary international law is constantly evolving, it does not offer the stability and predictability of the treaty.

One of its provisions pertains to the Arctic, a region undergoing rapid environmental change highlighted by faster-than-expected melting of the polar ice pack, and the potential exploitation of the natural resources, including oil, that lie beneath the surface or under its seabed.

The so-called “race to the Arctic” for new shipping routes and oil exploration rights is being carried out with growing intensity among the five countries that border the Arctic Ocean – Norway, Denmark, Russia, Canada, and the U.S., all of which, except the U.S., adhere to LOST. “By sitting on the sidelines,” according to a ‘National Journal’ article published last November, Washington may be jeopardising its claims in the region.

Gaffney’s views have been shared by a sufficient number of Republican senators to stave off ratification, which requires a two-thirds super-majority in the upper chamber, for 15 years. They have effectively prevented a floor vote on the treaty, although it was approved as recently as 18 months ago by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a 17-4 margin.

The current Committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, and the ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar, are long-time supporters of LOST and are expected to pass it in committee later this year, although hearings have yet to be scheduled. Much depends on how high a priority the Obama administration places on its ratification this year.

Quick action by the Senate would send “a tangible signal that the United States remains committed to its historic roles as an architect and defender of world order,” according to Borgerson.

“From this perspective, acceding to the convention is a low-hanging fruit to advance a much broader U.S. foreign policy agenda. It has the broadest bipartisan domestic support; supplies the most direct national security, economic, and environmental benefits for the United States; and has genuine global reach,” he noted.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hitting pay dirt with a novel legal tactic designed to catch tax evaders. And it’s going to use it to force international banks to give up the names of tax cheats.

It’s called the “John Doe” summons. Using “John Doe” means the IRS doesn’t know the names of the suspected tax evaders. So it sends a summons to a bank or credit card company that says, “Give us the names and account information of all your U.S. clients with secret offshore accounts.”

Daniel Reeves, an IRS agent in charge of the tax agency’s offshore compliance initiative, afforded an unusual look into the broad swath of projects that seek tax-cheating “John Doe’s” every place from accounts of the giant Swiss bank UBS to the records of Pay Pal.

Reeves detailed the IRS initiative at the Financial Due Diligence Conference organised by the industry newsletter “Offshore Alert” in Miami Beach, Florida, earlier this week. He commented privately to IPS that it was the first time he and other members of the compliance team had appeared at such a meeting and credited the openness of his bosses.

“Offshore” refers to tax havens – countries and jurisdictions that allow clients to set up bank accounts and sham companies with fake owners, and that deflect attempts by outside law enforcers on the trail of tax evaders as well as drug and arms traffickers, corrupt business people, terrorists, looting dictators and bribe-taking officials.

In July 2008, the IRS filed a “John Doe” legal action against UBS, seeking the names of 52,000 U.S. citizens who ignored the requirement to report those accounts on their tax returns. It’s the first time it has used that tactic against such a large financial institution. UBS, which acknowledged having 47,000 accounts belonging to U.S. nationals, turned over 300 names but is fighting in U.S. federal court the IRS demand for the rest of the accounts.

Private banks such as UBS handle and hide the money of very wealthy individuals. Often the minimum deposit is 5 million dollars. The legal action directed at UBS is part of the IRS’s private-bank initiative.

Reeves, a key agent in the UBS case, said, “We have identified other offshore banks that promote tax avoidance.” He noted, “We are developing additional John Doe summonses on some of those banks.” The IRS must receive approval for the summonses from a federal judge.

He declined to name the new targets, but one might imagine that UBS’s giant Swiss competitor, Credit Suisse, is among them. Swiss banks will provide information about drug traffickers and other criminals, but not tax evaders, because the Swiss don’t consider tax evasion a crime. The IRS list could also include U.S. banks such as Citi, which has 427 tax haven subsidiaries, including 91 in Luxembourg and 90 in the Cayman Islands.

The UBS “John Doe” initiative and others to follow ratchet up the use of a tactic that has proved successful on a smaller scale over this decade, targeting tax evaders through credit cards and other electronic payments.

The tax agency knew that tax cheaters who hid money offshore needed to get access to it. A favourite method was via credit and debit cards linked to bank accounts in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands. The IRS started with the premise that the international electronic systems that cheaters used to move and hide their money could be turned around to catch them.

In 2000, it got an order from a federal judge in Miami authorising the IRS to serve John Doe summonses on American Express and MasterCard for names of U.S. citizens with cards linked to banks in offshore Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, and the Cayman Islands.

Similar orders aimed at other companies followed, and the number of tax havens investigated was increased. More recently, the order was directed at Pay Pal, the web-based electronic payments system.

Reeves said the result has been “tens of thousands of U.S. citizens” identified as having offshore accounts they didn’t report and as moving and accessing money in tax havens. He said that had led to “hundreds of criminal prosecutions” and “hundreds of millions [of dollars] in taxes, interest and penalties.”

Reeves said, “Nearly half the cases involved failure to report foreign accounts.” And they often made use of “International Business Companies” (IBCs) – fake companies formed offshore. He said a large percentage were business accounts. Merchants are supposed to have accounts where they are incorporated and do their business. Shady companies get around this by setting up IBCs in offshore financial centers.

The IRS discovered that merchants were diverting credit card and other electronic payments to offshore accounts. It was a ploy that grew with e-commerce. So the IRS demanded that the U.S. processing companies that handled credit card transactions supply information about their “John Doe” clients who sent money offshore.

The IRS has built a searchable database so that any individual or company that comes to its attention can be cross-checked. Reeves said its staff continues to analyse the records to develop new cases.

Another scam targeted by the offshore compliance initiative was U.S. taxpayers’ use of sham companies formed in tax havens to disguise ownership of brokerage accounts. Reeves explained, “The U.S. taxpayer establishes an IBC in an offshore financial system, then opens a brokerage account in the name of the IBC. The brokerage account claims foreign status. The brokerage account, money, and bank accounts are all in the U.S. But by claiming foreign status, it claims to be exempt from capital gains tax in the U.S.”

Furthermore, he explained that the accounts were often funded with unreported income.

Reeves said the IRS is investigating brokers to identify U.S. owners of accounts claiming foreign status. And it is targeting brokers who market sham companies to help clients cheat on taxes.

The new IRS “John Doe” strategy represents a shift toward systemically targeting large numbers of unknown tax cheaters rather than individuals whose returns look suspicious or who are turned in by enemies. The returns have been impressive, and promise to grow apace.

*Lucy Komisar is an investigative journalist who writes about the offshore bank and corporate secrecy system. Her articles are posted at http://thekomisarscoop.com/.

By Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 2009 (IPS)

After nearly a decade of an often tense and estranged relationship with the United Nations, Washington appears to be taking a much more conciliatory and multilateral approach to the world body.

U.S. President Barack Obama formally restored funding for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Wednesday by signing a major spending bill, prompting U.N. officials to again welcome the policy shift on women’s health-related rights.

In January, Obama issued an executive order lifting an eight-year ban on U.S. funding for overseas family-planning groups and clinics that perform or promote abortion or lobby for its legalisation.

"We are delighted that the United States will, once again, take a leading role in championing women’s reproductive health, and rights," said UNFPA’s executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. "This is a great day for women and girls."

During the administration of George W. Bush, the UNFPA lost its U.S. funding on charges that it was trying to promote abortion, an allegation that Obaid and other officials strongly denied.

In a recent statement, Obama said the resumption of U.S. funding would help not only to reduce poverty, but also improve the health of women and children and prevent HIV/AIDS.

UNFPA says due to the U.S. restrictions on funding its programmes, millions of women in poor countries were unable to access health care during pregnancy and that many of them died as a result.

Earlier this week, Obama signed the legislative omnibus funding bill containing a 50-million-dollar contribution to UNFPA. The funding had been in limbo since 2002 when Bush began to implement his ideologically-driven policies towards women’s rights.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who had a day-long meeting with Obama and other key political figures in Washington Wednesday, appeared equally pleased with the political leadership in Washington.

"The new president is enormously engaged and a visionary leader," Ban told reporters on his return to the U.N. headquarters Thursday. "I am confident that he will bring to the international arena the same ambition and appetite for bold measures that he is bringing to U.S. affairs."

Ban said he had lengthy discussions with Obama about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, and Congo. They also discussed the global economic meltdown and its possible adverse impacts on development, as well as international efforts to fight climate change.

"On the economic crisis, President Obama and I agree that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people cannot be left behind," Ban said.

"With U.S. leadership in partnership with the U.N., we can and will reach a climate change deal that all nations can embrace," he added.

Among the world’s industrialised nations, the U.S. is the only country that has yet to sign the Kyoto treaty on climate change, which was rejected by Washington under the Bush administration.

Though supportive of global initiatives, Obama has yet to declare when the U.S., which accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s carbon emissions, would embrace an international treaty on climate change.

However, Ban said he and Obama agreed that 2009 "must be the year of climate change. That means reaching a comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen by year’s end."

Ban also said he and Obama are in agreement that "green" investments must be an essential part of any global stimulus plan. "If we are going to spend tremendous sums of money, let us be smart about it," he said.

Regarding the talks, the U.N. chief gave an impression that, despite agreements, they did differ on certain issues of war and peace. On the situation in Afghanistan, for example, Obama emphasised the need for a military build-up, whereas Ban holds a different view.

"The security [in Afghanistan] continues to deteriorate. The country is at another crossroads," he said. "I welcome the fresh thinking by the new U.S. administration. But any military surge, I emphasised to President Obama, must be accompanied by a political surge."

Ban is due to convene an international conference to be hosted by the government of Netherlands by the end of this month, which he believes would offer "an opportunity to define a common way forward."

On the question of the Middle East, however, both Ban and Obama seem to be on the same page: "[We] agreed on the need for an urgent push." He said donors at the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting on Gaza reconstruction made large pledges, "well beyond what was anticipated."

"The world has sent a clear message of solidarity to the Palestinian people," he told reporters. "We must turn this support not only into recovery for the people of Gaza, but also into a revitalised peace process in the Middle East and the Palestinians." At Thursday's news conference, Ban reiterated his gratification at U.S. pledges of support for the U.N., but, at the same time, criticised the world’s largest economic and military power for failing to keep its word.

"Of course the United States is the largest financial contributor," said Ban in response to a question. "[But] with such a large sum of amount in arrears, it’s very difficult for the United Nations to conduct smoothly all these peacekeeping operations and other activities."

The U.S. owes no less than 1.6 billion dollars in arrears. Long-time observers of U.N.-U.S. relations say this sum has accumulated over the years as a form of leverage for Washington to impose its will on the world body.

However, as many observers believe, the Obama administration is likely to behave in a different way. "Secretary of State [Hillary Clinton] and President [Obama] have showed their commitment to resolve this issue as soon as possible," Ban said.

Excerpt:

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Feb 19 2009 (IPS)

United States diplomats are back in force at the U.N., after having distanced themselves from the world body for several years. This week they contributed to successful mediation between Georgia and Russia, although they did not help resolve a stalemate on gay rights.

The United States played an active role this week in multilateral initiatives to broker peace in the Caucasus and in debates on racism, xenophobia and related intolerance, both sponsored by the United Nations.

The United States began to disengage from Geneva-based U.N. activities in November 2001, only weeks after the terrorist attacks on targets in New York and Washington.

The catalyst was a speech given to a working group on the U.N. Biological Weapons Convention by then Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton, regarded as a "hawk" in the government of former U.S. President George W. Bush (2001-2009).

The working group was debating mechanisms for identifying violators of the Convention, and the U.S. opposed inspections of its military facilities on the grounds of national security. Bolton was instrumental in derailing the working group, which did not meet at all for one year.

After that, U.S. participation in most of the multilateral bodies in Geneva fell off drastically, except in those of economic or commercial interest.

On Wednesday IPS asked Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Daniel Fried, if "the United States is back" at the U.N., to which he replied: "I wouldn't exactly put it that way. I don't think the United States ever left."

Fried, a high-profile negotiator in mediation sessions between Russia and Georgia, which concluded here on Wednesday, said that Vice President Joe Biden "made it clear that we plan to build a stronger and more dynamic trans-Atlantic relationship," in a Feb. 7 speech in Munich, Germany.

The diplomat said stronger links would be based on "the desire of the United States to consult our allies, and also on the hope and expectation that our allies will want to work with us."

Biden's clear message in Munich is consistent with U.S. President Barack Obama's statements throughout his electoral campaign, Fried said.

Fried took part in the latest round of peace negotiations between Russians and Georgians, co-sponsored by the U.N., the European Union and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

Russia and Georgia went to war with each other in August 2008, an act that sparked tension in the region and displaced thousands of people from their homes. Two autonomous regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, split off from Georgia, and were promptly recognised as independent states by Moscow.

EU special representative Pierre Morel said the parties had reached consensus on "proposals for joint incident prevention and response mechanisms."

All three mediators hailed the accord as a significant first breakthrough. "We think this is an important step to security and stability" in the region, said Morel.

Fried said the "positive and practical" agreement had been reached in spite of the fundamental differences "on the ground" between both sides with respect to the breakaway regions' political status. Georgia and most of the U.N. member countries have not recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The U.S. diplomat said he regretted that talks on the situation of internally displaced people and humanitarian issues had failed to make headway. However, he emphasised that an agreement has been reached to allow natural gas distribution to all parts of the region, and that discussions on reconnecting water supplies have begun.

The parties to the negotiations, including representatives of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, will meet again in Geneva in two months' time at a date to be decided.

The U.S. has also returned to the U.N. working group that is preparing a draft outcome declaration for the Durban Review Conference, to be held in Geneva from Apr. 20 to 24.

The Review Conference will assess the fulfilment of agreements adopted at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

The Israeli and U.S. delegations walked out of the 2001 conference against racism in Durban, in protest at what they said was the singling out of Israel "for censure and abuse."

In the years that followed, the U.S. progressively withdrew from U.N. human rights diplomacy. Its delegations to these U.N. sessions have been downsized, and only low-ranking representatives have been sent, many of whom have not even taken their seats nor participated in the debates.

The arrival of the U.S. delegation, headed by Mark Storella, Chargé d'Affaires of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, may herald an about-face on the part of the U.S. administration.

"We are here to explore with you whether it is possible to move beyond our differences and focus the Durban Review Conference on the racism and xenophobia that seriously persist today in our world," Storella said at the opening of the working group's deliberations.

"We will work with you this week in the hopes that this process will move in a positive direction that would allow the United States to participate in future preparatory meetings and, if possible, in the Durban Review Conference in April," he said.

"You are all aware of the strong reservations the United States has about this (outcome) document as it singles out Israel for criticism, places unacceptable restrictions on freedom of expression, under the guise of 'defaming religion', and calls for payment of reparations for slavery," he said.

The working group discussions ground to a halt on Wednesday as disagreement erupted over discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. One paragraph of the draft outcome document condemns "all forms of discrimination and all other human rights violations based on sexual orientation."

This paragraph was proposed by the Czech Republic, representing the EU, and was supported by the United States, New Zealand, Chile (speaking on behalf of the South American countries), the Netherlands, Colombia and Argentina.

But a large number of countries opposed to recognising gay rights rejected the text.

South Africa, on behalf of the African Group, said the issue of sexual orientation is beyond the scope of the declaration adopted in 2001 in Durban.

Opposition to the paragraph proposed by the Czechs came mainly from the Islamic countries, and also from China.

A representative from the Vatican, which has observer status at the United Nations, added his voice to those of the critics and maintained that "sexual orientation" is only a form of behaviour, rather than an integral part of a person's psyche.

Another aspect that has divided the working group is the proposal to add a separate paragraph condemning "Islamophobia." To cite persecution of Islam without acknowledging similar abuses committed against other religions would be wrong, a Czech diplomat said.

The U.S. delegate said that his country has serious concerns about this section of the draft outcome document.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 23 2008 (IPS)

After nearly a decade of defiance by Washington toward international efforts to protect the environment, notably its disengagement from the Kyoto treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions, there are high hopes that the United States will soon play a leading role in addressing what U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has described as “the defining challenge of our era”.

If 2008 was the “the year of multiple crises… 2009 will be the year of climate change,” Ban told an end-of-year news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York on Dec. 17.

This sentiment appears to be shared by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama. In a 2007 article for Foreign Affairs, he called for a renewal of U.S. leadership in the world, specifically on climate change.

“I intend to rebuild the alliances, partnerships and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security,” Obama wrote. Such a rebuilding, he asserted, would be crucial to “defeat[ing] the epochal, man-made threat to the planet: climate change”.

Historically, the position of the United States on international environmental cooperation has been ambivalent.

In 1972, the U.S. contributed 40 percent of the 100 million dollars that created the U.N. Environment Programme. Washington also led the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, the International Whaling Convention, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, and the Convention on Prevention of the Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter.

In the 1980s, the U.S. also boosted efforts to end use of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals that threaten Earth’s protective ozone stratum.

However, under the George W. Bush administration, critics say the U.S. has played a mostly obstructionist role, from rejecting the Kyoto Protocol to ignoring a conference in Bonn this year on biodiversity to undermining what many scientists and activists describe as the most successful environmental treaty ever created – the Montreal Protocol to save the ozone layer.

In an article last month titled “Reclaiming U.S. Leadership in Global Environmental Governance” published in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, Maria Ivanova and Daniel C. Esty wrote that “this dual-edged attitude toward international organisations has clearly diminished the U.S. leadership position and its ability to exert influence in the global environmental domain”.

Ivanova explained that the United States took the initiative because of bold political vision, but then later reduced its role because of the increased influence in the United States of industrial and corporate interests.

According to Ivanova, “When the U.S. led international environmental affairs, it did so because a group of individuals at high posts within the U.S. government ‘cared deeply about the environment’, as Russell Train, the head of the Council on Environmental Quality at the time [and later of the Environmental Protection Agency] said in an interview with me.”

“Economic interests were not well organised and lobbying by industry had not begun in earnest. Environmental groups were better organised than industry in the early days of the movement and managed to push through a lot of legislation, raise public awareness, and create a climate favorable to environmental action and leadership,” she said.

“In the last two decades, we have seen a very strong industrial lobby and a very receptive government, as well as a much more complacent public and environmental movement,” Ivanova told IPS.

The article concluded by urging the adoption of an “agenda for U.S. re-engagement”, noting that “the history of past success galvanizing the nation shows that the United States can and must take the lead.”

A coalition of environmental groups has been trying to position the United States again to take the lead on environmental matters, recently releasing an almost 400-page report, “Transition to green: leading the way to a healthy environment, a green economy and a sustainable future”.

The report offers the new administration a strategy for addressing global warming and contains detailed recommendations for each of the key federal agencies that deal with environmental issues.

According to the report, there are three major actions that the new administration should take to restore U.S. leadership on global warming: set mandatory limits on emissions of green house gases, agree to a new climate treaty at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference that keeps further warming from going above 2 degrees F, and lead an effort to finance clean energy and to reduce deforestation.

“The United States has to push forward with cap and trade legislation, assure that domestic growth is based on a green jobs strategy, restore American leadership in global warming by reengaging in negotiations, make climate change a core of our international engagements beginning with China, and invest in activities supporting our national adoption of strict standards,” Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defence Council, told IPS

Schmidt has also stressed that U.S. efforts cannot simply be focused on the United States. “What the United States needs to do must be a part of a global solution,” by “putting forward a strong agreement in Copenhagen and a sizable amount of money to help developing countries take action” to combat global warming, he explained.

At his end of year news conference, Ban echoed this view. He said that “success will require extraordinary leadership. The United States under its new president-elect, Barack Obama, promises bold new leadership. I myself will continue to push the pace and galvanise political will.”

Ban said he planned to convene a climate change summit at the 64th General Assembly next fall.

Edward Gresser, director of the Trade and Global Markets Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Jan Mazurek, director of PPI’s Center for Clean Technology, recently wrote a “memo to the next president” suggesting the creation of a Global Environmental Organisation (GEO).

“We need to have an institution or organisation ongoing and monitoring the agreements, able to arbitrate disputes, able to deal with cases of non-compliance,” Gresser told IPS.

Although the United States would undoubtedly have significant influence, Gresser stressed that there would be “a legal presumption of equality [among] countries that are parties of an agreement”.

Many observers, both within and outside the U.N. system, have argued that the world body’s environmental institutions are relatively weak, and the myriad challenges – of biodiversity loss, water pollution, climate change and others – can only be effectively tackled by the creation of a new GEO – hopefully with a specific leadership role for the United States.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 5 2008 (IPS)

With the election of Democratic Senator Barack Obama as the next president of the United States, many observers and diplomats believe the United Nations can look forward to stronger cooperation with Washington – after eight years of often contentious relations with the George W. Bush administration.

“I think we will see a greater engagement of the U.S. with the U.N.,” James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, told IPS.

Compared to the Bush years, when relations between the U.S. and the U.N. were “extremely strained” – mainly because of the controversial war in Iraq – Obama’s presidency “is likely to be an improvement”, Paul said.

Congratulating the president-elect, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed that he was “very optimistic that we will have a very strong relationship” and a “renewed partnership under his administration”.

He expressed his expectation of “a new multilateralism”, based on statements Obama made during his campaign regarding “a new era of global partnership” and of building “bridges of cooperation with the U.N. and other nations.”

The secretary-general recounted his first and thus far only encounter with Barack Obama – a coincidental meeting on an airplane shuttle from Washington to New York early last year.

“We spent more than half an hour on the airplane sitting together, discussing many issues,” Ban said. “He was very engaged and he knew a lot about the United Nations, and I was very much encouraged.”

Ban also congratulated his “good friend” Senator Joe Biden – the future vice president – with whom he worked during Biden’s years on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Apart from official statements, an informal survey among more than two dozen U.N. staff members and foreign delegates released by the Washington Post on Oct. 26 showed overwhelming support for Obama – and little for his opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain.

One of McCain’s proposals might have contributed to the U.N.’s clear preference for Obama – to create a “League of Democracies” to promote freedom and democracy in the world.

“It could have damaged the U.N. if some countries put their energy in the League, not in the U.N.,” Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told IPS. “But there has been so little support for the idea outside the U.S., anyway.”

Now that Obama has been elected in a landslide, Carothers sees “the chance for a fresh start” – as did Peter Maurer, Switzerland’s ambassador to the U.N., in an interview with The Nation.

“The new administration will find a kind of window of opportunity because there is enormous goodwill around the U.N. to see and to hear some new voices,” Maurer said.

In a letter to the U.N. Association of the U.S. (UNA-USA), Obama clarified his positions on some issues that have been “pending or somehow troublesome between the U.S. and the U.N.”, William Luers, president of UNA-USA, told IPS.

“His intention would be to work closer together with the U.N. in peacekeeping and humanitarian relief,” Luers said.

Obama also named arms control, the problem of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, and the payment of the U.S. debt to the U.N. as fields where conflicts could be resolved.

Luers expects Obama to recognise the fact that “every challenge we face in foreign policies – apart from the economic issue – are under some form of U.N. mandate.” As examples he mentioned nuclear weapons, climate change, and the planned withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Still, all the experts who spoke with IPS warned of overly high expectations for an Obama administration.

First, U.S.-U.N. cooperation has not always been better under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, as James Paul noted. “Under Democrat Bill Clinton, relations were never very cozy,” he said.

On the contrary, “George Bush senior had a very good relationship with the U.N.,” as William Luers said.

Secondly, during his campaign “Obama said very little about the United Nations”, Paul said, “and his approach to governing the U.S. will still be influenced by conservative forces in Washington and Wall Street, but also by more progressive forces in the world.”

“It remains to be seen how all this will play out at the U.N.,” Paul said.

Thirdly, some basic problems in U.S.-U.N. relations are likely to endure, as Thomas Carothers said, one of them being the U.S. “desire to protect sovereignty” and therefore its “hesitation over giving great power to international instruments and multilateral agreements.”

“And we cannot expect any real honeymoon of the Security Council,” Carothers added.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2008 (IPS)

When the United States and the former Soviet Union were on the verge of a military confrontation over Cuba during the height of the Cold War, the legendary U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson went eyeball-to-eyeball with Soviet envoy Valerian Zorin in the Security Council chamber.

As old U.N. hands would recall, Stevenson aggressively sought a response from Zorin over allegations of Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba.

“Yes or no?” Stevenson demanded, and added the punch line: “And don’t wait for the translation”, as he pressed for an immediate answer from the Russian-speaking envoy.

Zorin turned to Stevenson and said, through a translator: “I am not in an American court of law, and I do not wish to answer the question put to me in the manner of a prosecuting counsel.”

Stevenson famously responded he will wait for an answer “until hell freezes over”.

Judging by the recent deadlock in the Security Council – over Kosovo, Iran, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe, Sudan and most recently Georgia – one wonders whether the days of the Cold War are back in vogue. Or perhaps its political rhetoric?

In January last year, a Western-backed and U.S.-led move to castigate the Burmese government for human rights violations suffered a rare double veto, both from China and Russia.

And last month, history repeated itself when these two big powers exercised their vetoes again – this time to stall a resolution aimed at imposing sanctions against Zimbabwe.

The U.S.-Russian political confrontation in the Security Council has been intensified in recent weeks with the Russian invasion of Georgia, and Moscow’s subsequent decision to recognise the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

When U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad sought a response from Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin on whether or not the Russians were bent on violating the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia, Churkin said he had already provided an answer to the question.

Maybe, he added rather sarcastically, the U.S. representative had not been listening when Churkin had given his response. “Perhaps he had not had his earpiece on,” he added.

And when U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff recently blasted Russia for its perceived violations of international law and the U.N. charter during the invasion of Georgia, Churkin hit back with another dose of sarcasm.

“Did you find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?…And are you still looking for them?” he asked.

Speeches laced with sarcasm and personal insults are rare in the Council chamber. But is the United Nations now back to the days of the Cold War?

“The United Nations is not headed for a new Cold War,” predicts Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalist Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, and author of several studies on the United Nations.

As U.S. economic, political and diplomatic power has diminished around the world, she argued, military power has become ever more dominant as a viable tool of hegemony.

“The threat of U.S. unilateral military power continues to rise not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also with increasing U.S. military bases across the globe, as well as possible new interventions in Iran, in Georgia, in Pakistan and perhaps elsewhere,” Bennis told IPS.

Partly as a result of that rising militarism, and partly out of longstanding habit, she pointed out, governments around the world continue to treat the United States as if it were still an unchallengeable dominion.

“And in the United Nations, that means allowing Washington to continue to call the shots,” added Bennis, author of the recently-released ‘Understanding the U.S.-Iran Crisis: A Primer.’

“A return to the Cold War era? Not sure whether we can characterise it as such?” says an Asian envoy, who keeps close track of the state-of-play in the Security Council.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said it is a fact that the Security Council has not been functioning effectively for some time now.

“In my view, the last time it operated effectively was probably during the first Gulf War when Iraq invaded Kuwait and the then Bush [Sr.] administration (1990-91) worked hard to put together an international coalition to take on Saddam Hussein,” he told IPS.

It was just after the Cold War and Washington was in less of an “ideological mode”.

Maybe it was because they felt that they had won the Cold War and could now afford to be magnanimous without behaving in an overbearing and unilateral manner, he added. Or maybe they saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate true leadership and to work towards the preservation of a system where they remained at the top of the heap.

But, over time, especially in the last eight years, he argued, “the Americans have become extremely ideological and unilateral in their approach – they are always right and you are either with them or you are seen to be against them. It’s all black and while with no grey issues.”

“This was evident during the run-up to the Second Gulf War – it blinded American planning and strategising, with them thinking that they would hailed as liberators in Baghdad,” he added.

Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report, said that since 1990 the United Nations, and particularly the Security Council, has under U.S. domination (perhaps “proprietorship” is a more accurate term) increasingly become an instrument for the marginalisation of international law.

The United States, he said, has also been undermining the consensus of the vast majority of its constituent states on a range of issues, as opposed to an institution that works to uphold international law and enforce the will of the international community.

“In this context, the prospect of a new Cold War at the global organisation is to be enthusiastically welcomed,” Rabbani told IPS.

“At the very least there will be some daylight between the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) and the U.S. National Security Council, and hopefully some dimunition of the role of the UNSC itself,” Rabbani said.

The Asian envoy said the ideological zeal of the United States and the West is also seen in the disturbing tendency by the “West” to try to broaden the definition of what is a “threat to international peace and security”.

While the U.N. Charter leaves some room for interpretation, he said, this definition of a “threat” has generally been confined to wars and violence.

“Increasingly, what we are witnessing are attempts by the West to include all manner of transgressions as possible reasons that require Security Council action,” he said.

In the Zimbabwe case, he said, the argument was that democracy, elections, and human rights all fall under possible new definitions of “threats”.

“This is the same sort of reasoning that we have seen the West try to apply to Myanmar over the political process and the humanitarian crisis,” he added.

While Russia and China are becoming more assertive, it is primarily on issues that bear directly on their own national interests, like preventing the UNSC from producing a lopsided resolution on Georgia.

The real issue remains unchanged – whether the United Nations is capable of reforming itself to become an effective international organisation.

“And here the joint interests of the U.S. and Russia are likely to converge to prevent this from happening, as in the past,” Rabbani added.

The Asian envoy said: “I don’t see either side backing off for the time being. The West will continue to push the envelope and many amongst the Rest continuing to resist,” he added.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Jul 31 2008 (IPS)

Helena Cobban’s new book, “Re-Engage! America and the World After Bush”, is not aimed at a target audience of officials, policy wonks and Washington elite think-tank types. So much is clear from a tagline running across the bottom of the cover: “An informed citizen’s guide.”

But that doesn’t mean that all the politicians and policy-makers can’t learn something from picking up a copy of Cobban’s succinct, 110-page blueprint for bring the U.S. back into the international fold – and, in doing so, tackle some of the world’s problems.

Relying on years of experience as a journalist and activist – from both abroad and at home in the U.S. – and informed by her Quaker congregation, Cobban has developed an eye for global strategic affairs. In her book, her insight lays out simple reasons for rejoining the world community and how to go about doing so.

Cobban is quick to dismiss many of the unilateral policies of the President George W. Bush administration as the folly of the world’s “überpower” (a term borrowed from writer Josef Joffe). But the era of the überpower has passed, and the challenges of the future – more than ever, says Cobban – require cooperation.

She calls her alternative to the policies of unilateralism and U.S. exceptionalism “global inclusion”, whereby the U.S. acts as an equal player in the world both in terms of the U.S. role and the interests of the globe as a whole – which Cobban says will, in the interconnected, multi-polar world, no doubt serve long-term U.S interests as well.

Concepts like global inclusion are explained through small and clear asides, demarked by boxes, graphs and charts in the text. Global inclusion, itself, is laid out in six quick bullet points.

In even shorter form, inclusion would involve better relationships with the outside world, “recommitting” to international institutions, “restating” a U.S. belief in human equality and building from it, supporting the “principle of war avoidance”, reframing “strategic affairs through the people-centred lens of ‘human security’,” and including marginalised voices in “international decision-making”.

The first four of those ideas would not be unprecedented directions for U.S. foreign policy, as Cobban’s language makes abundantly clear; the corresponding numbered items in her box – “repair”, “recommit”, “restate”, and “reaffirm” – all a start with “re-” for a reason. The notion is particularly true of reengagement with international institutions, such as the United Nations, which the U.S. was historically a key player in starting and leading.

Even the last two points, including marginalized voices and a “human security”-centered perspective, would not necessitate radical shifts in U.S. thinking – both ideas have large followings both popularly and in policy circles both in the U.S. and abroad.

In fact, most of Cobban’s ideas require only subtle paradigm shifts to make them viable policy options. Cobban is admittedly a pacifist (a Quaker perspective she easily defends in the preface: “[T]oday pacifism is a more realistic and necessary approach to world affairs than ever before…raw military power is not able, on its own, to resolve the thorny international security challenges we face.”). But that doesn’t mean that she thinks the U.S. should sit back and let international terrorism run amok.

Instead, she suggests viewing terror – as well as other world problems – as “challenges” rather than as “threats”.

“In general, if we look at something as a challenge rather than a threat, we can feel more self-confident about our ability to deal with it effectively,” she writes in the first chapter. “It helps, too, to recognise that this situation of feeling our persons and out communities are insecure is not one that is faced by American alone.”

Her point is clear when she lays out some of humanity’s biggest continuing and upcoming challenges: “military security”, “global inequality”, “human rights abuse”, “climate change and environmental stability”, and “shifting power balances”.

With terrorism, Cobban suggests another subtle shift from the idea of “destroying” terrorism, which she says “gave the commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan broad permission to destroy people and infrastructures that may or may not have constituted valid military targets”, to “defeating” it.

She expands on the idea in another illuminating box where she states that terrorism was able to become “entrenched and beyond the reach of the law…as Al-Qaeda did in Afghanistan in the 1990’s and as many terror groups did in Iraq after [the U.S.-led invasion] in 2003.”

“In today’s hyperlinked world,” writes Cobban, “state failure anywhere puts all of humanity at risk.”

The connections between her challenges, as with human security and terrorism, only serve to strengthen Cobban’s thesis that working together on a global level is imperative to easing all of the world’s ills. And the connections are ever-present in “Re-Engage!”, with Cobban referring back and forwards to related concepts throughout.

Cobban connects, for example, human security, curbing human rights abuses, increased aid, reduced reliance on military force, and increased meaningful involvement in global institutions – again, through increased aid and focusing military action through the U.N. and by way of increased and equal participation in its mandated actions – in the book, particularly in the chapters on inequality and human rights.

The most readily understandable challenge of the interconnected world, however, is much simpler than that: climate change.

“Today, all of humanity is threatened by the consequences of global warming,” writes Cobban. “The costs of global warming know no national boundaries.”

During the Bush administration, U.S. exceptionalism in the realm of climate change has been particularly damning because, as Cobban points out, the U.S. has refused to do much on its own (until just recently, the U.S. led the world in carbon dioxide emissions) and has, at times, patently refused to lend its strength and credibility to the global effort by doing little on an international – or even domestic – level.

Speaking more broadly in her final chapter, “Rejoining the Rest of the World”, Cobban states plainly, “We U.S. citizens and our leaders need to make the simple but profound mindset shift of seeing ourselves as truly – and equally – a part of global humanity, rather than as somehow standing aside from (or above?) the rest of the world’s peoples.”

“So now,” Cobban continues, “we have a good basis on which to start building a foreign policy grounded more in a sense of hope and possibility than in a continuation of fear.”

But her book is a citizen’s guide, as she emphatically restates in her conclusion. Her book and its “good basis”, she says, speaking directly to the citizen-reader, “will be effective only if you find some of the information and ideas here useful – and then you go out and use them.”

Excerpt:

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Jul 25 2008 (IPS)

The extraordinary enthusiasm with which Germans greeted U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama in Berlin Thursday may have concealed a fear: once the presidency of George W. Bush ends, Germans might be forced to close ranks with the U.S. and go back to playing the role of military junior partner of a superpower at war.

But that was not immediately obvious through Obama's only public speech during his European tour this week in Berlin before some 200,000 Germans, many waving U.S. flags. They cheered Obama like he was a rock star.

As expected, Obama emphasised the symbolic character of Berlin's history since 1949 as a divided city during the Cold War and then as the starting point for epochal changes since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

"This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. In its darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning," he said, referring to the reunion of the once divided city.

Speaking of that struggle following World War II, Obaama said, "You know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both (Germany and the U.S.) came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life."

And he made clear the need for more military togetherness. "The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation."

The German government has been participating in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan since 2001, but the German military is not directly involved in war actions. Some 3,000 German soldiers are stationed in the north of the country as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to protect civilians involved in reconstruction and to handle logistics such as medical transport.

Besides, six German reconnaissance aircraft and some 500 soldiers are deployed in the violent south-eastern region. The German military is emphatic on its website that the only mission of this contingent is reconnaissance.

This declaration comes in the face of strong public opposition to military involvement in Afghanistan. Some two-thirds of people want German troops out, according to consistent opinion polls. And so Obama's call could be an eventual source of conflict.

Earlier, Obama's senior foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said in interviews to German media that if Obama is elected, Europe would have to "uphold responsibilities" in dealing with critical global security challenges.

"We (the U.S. and Europe) cannot afford a least common denominator approach. Both…will have to do more to uphold our respective responsibilities in the context of true partnership – whether the issue is climate change, halting Iran's nuclear programme or securing Afghanistan from al-Qaeda and the Taliban."

There are signs that such demands are getting sympathetic hearing. Horst Teltschik, a close aide of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1990s, said after Obama's speech that "Europeans must again learn that we are not an island of happiness in a troubled world."

Teltschik was all but paraphrasing Obama. In his speech, Obama said that while the 20th century "taught (U.S. and Europe) that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.

"The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers – dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean."

The Sep. 11 perpetrators of the terror attacks against the U.S., he said, "plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi (in Afghanistan and Pakistan) before killing thousands from all over the globe on U.S. soil."

According to opinion polls just ahead of Obama's visit to Berlin, 72 percent of Germans would vote for him as the next U.S. president. Through most of his campaign, Obama has portrayed himself as a liberal. But analysts say Germans may have ignored some positions Obama took during the campaign, and his recent political turnaround towards more conservative positions.

German correspondent Christoph von Marschall listed several issues on which Obama has changed his mind since he won the Democratic Party nomination last month.

"From his support for the death penalty and the right of citizens to possess weapons, to his sudden change on limiting donations for campaigns and political parties, and on his earlier criticism of free trade agreements the U.S. has launched in Latin America, especially with Mexico, Obama abandoned numerous liberal positions in a couple of days."

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Jun 10 2008 (IPS)

A radical foreign policy idea put forth by presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has drawn cheers of support from sources as varied as his campaign’s neo-conservative backers to liberal internationalists from the camp of his rival, Sen. Barack Obama. But the idea is not without some surprising detractors.

McCain’s “League of Democracies” would be a new international organisation whose membership is made up of democratic governments that meet certain minimal requirements.

The philosophical basis for the League is German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”, which argues that democratic governments are less likely to go to war – particularly with fellow democracies rather than autocratic regimes. But democratic nations may be at odds with non-democratic ones.

This is already well underway, according to neoconservative scholar and McCain adviser Robert Kagan, who sees a new “global competition” between democracies and autocracies.

Kagan believes that rising autocratic powers threaten the international order in part by blocking actions by the United Nations Security Council, where “autocratic states”, like Russia and China, have the power to veto actions.

The League is intended to give like-minded democracies a multilateral vehicle that could authorise intervention in cases where the Security Council cannot act. Together, they could act on humanitarian crises and security issues without having to convince non-democratic U.N. members to go along.

Those non-democratic autocracies have sometimes blocked U.N. efforts at interventions in crises – such as the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region and the recent blocking of international aid to cyclone victims in Burma – on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty.

The frustration caused by paralysis of the Security Council has also driven some liberal internationalists – notably Obama adviser Ivo Daalder – to support the idea of a League of Democracies. Preferring the moniker of a Concert of Democracies, Daalder and other liberals have written extensively in support of the idea, although Obama himself has yet to take a position on it.

Daalder and McCain agree that the League could serve U.S. interests above all by providing a new multilateral mechanism through which Washington could, with like-minded allies, intervene in international crises that paralyse the Security Coucil. They cite the example of NATO’s 1999 intervention against Serbia, a Russian ally, in Kosovo as a model.

Moreover, Washington’s reliance on a multilateral forum to authorise action would also help improve Washington’s image, which has been badly battered by the George W. Bush administration’s unilateralism.

But Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among others, believes that the logic behind a League of Democracies is flawed and potentially dangerous.

Even accepting “perpetual peace”, not fighting among themselves does not entail that democracies the world over will necessarily have similar foreign policies based on their democratic values, according to Carothers.

A clear example of this is South Africa’s reluctance – despite its democratic system – to endorse Western foreign policy. South Africa has resisted action against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, perhaps because it has been seen as Western imperialism in a part of the world still reeling from colonialism.

South Africa has also ardently resisted U.S. efforts to base its new military command for Africa (AFRICOM) on the continent.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has also been reluctant to enlist in various campaigns, such as isolating Burma or Iran, which Washington and its European allies, among others, have pushed.

“I think there is a serious under-appreciation in Washington for how strongly many democracies in the world, especially in the developing world, disagree fundamentally with the U.S. outlook on interventionism,” said Carothers at a recent event discussing the pros and cons of a League at the Carnegie.

Carothers sees a wide rift between the U.S. and developing country democracies that is not limited to interventionism, arguing that most of the over 50 developing country democracies would side with South Africa on key foreign policy issues.

Furthermore, historical evidence supports the notion of a lack of agreement amongst democracies – particularly over humanitarian intervention. Contrary to Kagan’s argument that autocratic regimes impede the U.N., democracies have also played a role in blocking key Security Council resolutions.

Under the Bill Clinton administration, the U.S. held up action in the Security Council against the genocide that occurred in Rwanda – where 800,000 people lost their lives in 100 days in 1994 – and the U.S. has blocked virtually every Security Council with its veto, from Israeli actions against Palestinians in the occupied territories to its bombardment and invasion of Lebanon during its 2006 war with Hezbollah.

Nonetheless, Daalder contends that the League of Democracies will be able to intervene in internal conflicts and with non-state actors in a way that the U.N. cannot because the Security Council is set up to prevent war between great powers – not lesser powers and actors.

Moreover, Daalder said that a League would be able to “socialise” U.S. foreign policy and tame its instinct for unilateral action. A McCain adviser on the panel at Carnegie, Tod Lindberg, added that while it may not have prevented the U.S. from going to war with Iraq, a League could have tightened sanctions against Iraq in a way that would have satisfied the Bush administration and made the war avoidable.

“I like that approach,” Carothers said. Still, he worries that McCain’s own nationalist streak, like Bush’s, would make him less willing to listen to others. “I wonder whether Senator McCain – and his enthusiasm for a League of Democracies – [includes] the idea of curtailing America’s appetite for certain kinds of assertions of national strength and national security.”

Some critics also doubt that creating an exclusive League of Democracies offers a prescription for mending the ills of U.S. unilateralism under Pres. Bush. The very exclusivity of its membership, they say, is both dangerous and likely to make the effort unsuccessful.

“It revives a Cold War mentality that pits the good guys (market democracies) against the bad (autocracies),” according to Ted Piccone and Mort Halperin, who as Clinton administration officials helped form the Community of Democracies – a multilateral forum of democracies that is designed to promote democracy through non-violent means.

Speaking at Carnegie, Halperin dismissed the notion that anyone else – even Western democracies – would be interested in joining a military and security alliance.

“[Other countries] are simply not interested in supplanting the U.N. as the only legitimate forum for the discussion of security questions,” Halperin said.

The extent to which a League of Democracies could undermine responses to universal crises seems to be particularly dangerous. Climate change, for example, is a global problem where China has surpassed the U.S. in emitting greenhouse gases.

“I don’t think China is any less a natural partner on climate change with the United States than India is; in fact, China’s probably more important,” Carothers said. “So I’m concerned about this idea of natural partners, given the reality of the configuration of issues and interests that face us.”

Excerpt:

By Zoltán Dujisin
PRAGUE, Apr 21 2008 (IPS)

NATO countries have given cautious support to U.S. plans to extend its missile defence system to Eastern Europe, just as Washington is working hard to fulfil Russia’s conditions to agree to its construction.

The U.S. wants to extend its missile defence system (MDS) to Eastern Europe by building a radar in the Czech Republic and a missile base in Poland that will allegedly protect Europe from missile attacks by ‘rogue’ states in the Middle East.

At their last meeting as heads of state, U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Sochi, Russia, on Apr. 6 to discuss the U.S. base, among other issues.

Bush promised to try to integrate Russia into the global missile defence shield project “as an equal partner to the U.S.”, although similar attempts at cooperation between the two sides have failed in the past.

This was in the wake of the Bucharest North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit Apr. 2-4, in which the organisation gave cool support to U.S. plans, welcoming the possibility of eventually integrating the U.S. shield into the alliance’s defence structures.

Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS that Europe does not seem worried about the questionable effectiveness and costs of the project and that Washington could have appeased worried European allies by assuring an agreement with Moscow would be reached.

“There might have been assurances as there is a growing sense the Russians are getting reconciled with the base. The U.S. has made a series of concessions on the system, and might have linked it to other issues, such as Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.”

NATO currently lacks missile defence capacities but is carrying out feasibility studies. With the extension of the system, “NATO only has to worry about covering the south-eastern corner of Europe,” Witney told IPS.

In its present shape, the MDS runs against NATO’s principle of collective and indivisible security, as it would only protect north-western Europe from a hypothetical missile attack.

“It won’t be a big bill for the alliance, and given the fact the majority of the investment will be done by Washington it is easier for Europeans to support the project,” added the former chief executive of the European Defence Agency in Brussels.

Russia and the U.S. could come to an agreement under which the radar station and the missile launchers would remain inactive until the hypothetical Middle Eastern threat materialises.

But Russia feels Washington’s confidence-building measures are not addressing the real issues, such as what prevents the U.S. from upgrading the base into a larger, possibly nuclear infrastructure in the future.

Moscow, convinced that the new elements in the MDS are aimed against it, is asking Washington to clarify under which conditions the U.S. plans to deploy the Eastern European base, and if it plans to build more deployment areas elsewhere. Experts point out that if Russia agrees to the construction of the base, it will have a long list of demands for Washington.

Otherwise, should the facilities be built in Eastern Europe, Moscow could take “measures of a military, technical nature,” in the words of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

Military officials in Moscow have repeatedly stated Russia would consider the new facilities military targets, against which even nuclear weapons could be deployed if necessary.

The U.S., in spite of Polish and Czech resistance, is apparently offering Russia the possibility to conduct inspections on the missile facilities, and technical monitoring of the base.

But Czech and Polish politicians refuse to accept a permanent presence of “Russian troops” in their countries, and would only agree to occasional inspections which they say should be reciprocated by Moscow.

Due to the presence of Soviet troops in Czech and Polish territory until 1989, for most of the public and politicians a permanent Russian presence in a military facility is unacceptable.

Russia is pushing hard for a permanent presence, possibly aware that Poland and the Czech Republic will never accept it. The Czech and Polish demand for similar inspections to be made by their officials in Russian territory were at most amusing to Russian officials.

“We have no plans to move our MDSs, to create MDSs around the USA, around Poland, around the Czech Republic. So we were quite satisfied with the state of reciprocity set out in the missile defence treaty – but the Americans withdrew from it, so there can be no talk of reciprocity now,” Lavrov told the media.

Czechs and Poles are not happy that the U.S. is negotiating with Russia over their heads, and recent reports go as far as claiming that negotiations with the more demanding Poland are stalled.

Polish media claim the U.S. has approached the Czech side to see whether it would be willing to host both the radar base and the missile launchers. But the Czech government, which plans to sign an agreement on the radar’s construction next month, will have to come to terms with opposition within its own coalition or risk the project’s refusal by parliament.

The Green Party, a junior coalition partner, says NATO’s declaration is not enough to convince them of the multilateral nature of the project, and several high-ranking Green officials have recently declared the radar should respond to NATO’s command from its inception.

Excerpt:

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Apr 14 2008 (IPS)

Germany&#39s decision to introduce controls on investments from the South in strategic domestic sectors is yet another indicator of growing protectionism in European and other industrialised countries against the neo-liberal globalisation they once masterminded.

The German government announced Apr. 9 that it was introducing controls on investments by Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF), investment funds managed by oil-rich Arab states and other rapidly developing countries such as China, Singapore and India. A SWF is a state-owned fund that invests capital comprising financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property or other financial instruments.

The German ministry for labour can now stop any major venture in local firms, especially in public services, if such investments threaten local jobs or if they are sought in strategic sectors such as electricity generation, a government spokesperson said at a press conference in Berlin.

Automatic controls will kick in if non-EU investors want more than 25 percent stake, the spokesperson added. The government can refuse any investment in what it considers strategic sectors, or when the venture is seen to threaten national security.

If the SWF does not report its stake, the government can force it to resell its shares.

The decision follows fears that the SWFs will take control of strategic sectors, much in the way that companies from Germany, France, the U.S. and Britain took over public sectors such as water and electricity generation in developing countries.

In France, the possibility that the China Investment Corporation, a state investment fund, and other Arab funds, could take up to 10 percent of the private oil company Total, has launched a debate on the need to establish controls against such ventures.

The company&#39s chief executive officer Christophe de Margerie has tried to defend the investments. "We were the ones who went searching for Chinese investment," de Margerie told the Paris newspaper Libération. He emphasised that Total had asked the Chinese fund not to invest beyond three percent of the company&#39s capital.

De Margerie said that during the 1980s the funds Adia, owned by the United Arab Emirates, controlled up to nine percent of Total&#39s capital, but then "nobody was paying attention."

Until the global financial crisis broke out in the U.S. in the summer of 2007, provoked by the collapse of the real estate market and the highly speculative financial instruments associated with the sub-prime mortgages, few were paying attention to the SWFs. Recent high-profile investments made by the SWFs, especially in U.S. banks in need of fresh liquidity, have put them in the spotlight.

"Today it has become fashionable to question the SWFs," de Margerie said. But "these funds are not trying to control our companies and societies. They say so, and I believe them."

But not everybody believes this. Christian Chavagneux, editor of the French monthly Alternatives Economiques says massive investments by the SWFs can endanger a company if the funds disinvest as suddenly and as massively as they poured money into the firm.

"Last November, the Singaporean fund Temasek did sell a tenth of its shares of the Bank of China, thus sending the market price of the bank&#39s shares down the pipes," Chavagneux told IPS. "You can imagine what can happen if a similar disinvestment takes place suddenly in one of the battered banks in the U.S. or Germany."

Chavagneux said "we can also imagine that the states controlling these sovereign funds could be tempted to use their financial leverage as a foreign policy weapon, or to use Western companies as a learning field for their young leaders.

"Of course," he added, "these are all speculations."

Similar speculation is about in many of the industrialised world&#39s capitals, and has moved the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to issue a warning urging SWFs to observe "high standards of transparency and governance" in order to avoid further protectionist measures in the industrialised world.

The OECD represents the 30 most industrialised countries, from the U.S., most EU members, to Australia, Japan and South Korea, but also Mexico.

In an oblique warning, OECD director general Angel Gurría wrote to the ministries of finance of the group of seven most industrialised countries (G7) Apr. 9 that "observance of high standards of transparency and governance (by SWFs) will help recipient countries implement their commitments and recommendations for preserving open markets while safeguarding national security."

The letter says that the OECD countries will "remain committed to keeping their investment frontiers open to Sovereign Wealth Funds as long as these funds invest for commercial, not political ends."

OECD members have agreed to base their investment policies on SWFs on existing instruments which call for fair treatment of investors. But these investment instruments also recognise the right of member countries to take action to protect their national security.

In another statement Apr. 9, the OECD pointed out that "investments by SWFs can raise concerns as to whether their objectives are commercial or driven by political, defence or foreign policy considerations."

Although more than 20 countries have these funds, Simon Johnson, economic counsellor and director of the International Monetary Fund&#39s Research Department, says they "remain quite concentrated, with the top five funds accounting for about 70 percent of total assets."

But the concern in the OECD countries arises from the main funds&#39 home countries: seven of the ten largest funds belong to Algeria, China, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

According to some estimates, global SWF investments added to about 48 billion dollars in 2007, a 165 percent increase over 2006. The SWFs&#39 total assets were around 3,300 billion dollars in 2007, an 18 percent increase over the previous year.

When other assets owned by the SWFs&#39 home countries are included, such as pension funds and their share of their own public services, their total assets skyrocketed in 2007 to 14,500 billion dollars.

The U.S. gross domestic product in 2007 was 12,000 billion dollars.

Excerpt:

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Apr 4 2008 (IPS)

NATO and Russia made little progress in settling their disputes during the alliance’s summit in Bucharest this week. But the two sides insisted the Cold War is over and that they are open to compromise.

Outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin was present in Bucharest during the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit this week for a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council Friday Apr. 4.

Talks at the Council meeting were described as “positive”, but major issues of contention between the alliance and Moscow such as NATO enlargement, the missile defence shield to be set up in Europe, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces, and Kosovo remained unsettled.

Both Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush gave assurances that the “Cold War is over” (Bush) and “a return to the Cold War is in nobody’s interests” (Putin).

During a press conference Apr. 4, Putin insisted on the necessity of defence cooperation between NATO and Russia – a necessity stemming from the fact that “nothing can be done without Russia, one of the largest nuclear powers in the world.”

NATO and Russia signed a deal “facilitating land transit through Russian territory of goods to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)” in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1386 on Afghanistan, which encourages neighbouring and member states (of Afghanistan) to “provide such necessary assistance as may be requested, including the provision of over flight clearances and transit.”

But Russia did not grant access to its air space, and most goods allowed to transit cannot be of a military nature.

The deal seemed to come in support Putin’s claim that the battle in Afghanistan and the fight against terrorism cannot be won without Russia.

During the Council meeting, Putin also declared that Russia could return to the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE), but only if “NATO countries are ready to make concessions as well,” especially on issues that are “sensitive” for Russia. Moscow withdrew from the treaty in December 2007, in protest against U.S. intentions to deploy a missile defence shield in Central Europe, and because of Western insistence that it should pull its armed forces from territories in Moldova and Georgia.

To Russia’s anger, NATO endorsed the U.S. plan to deploy elements of the shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Furthermore, the alliance agreed to take it upon itself to complement the U.S. system in order to cover those parts of Italy, the Western Balkans, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey left uncovered by the initial U.S. plan. Even more, the U.S. announced Apr. 4 that it had successfully tested central elements of the missile shield during the first day of the NATO summit.

The Russian President warned that the missile shield did not help build trust between the alliance and Russia. Moscow maintains that such a shield cannot be meant to protect U.S. allies against Iran because Tehran does not have long-range missiles that can reach as far as Europe, and therefore the shield is meant to be used against Russia. Putin said: “Rather than turn our backs to Iran, it would be smarter to think of a way to help Iran become more predictable and transparent.”

Bush and Putin will meet this weekend at the Russian President’s residence in Soci in order to discuss the shield further. The two are expected to build upon negotiations held in mid-March during a visit to Moscow by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates. At the time, the U.S. showed openness to three Russian demands: not to load the interceptor missiles until it is sure Iran is a threat, not to observe targets in Russia, and to give Russians access to facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Enlargement of NATO was another cause of tensions at the Bucharest summit. NATO did not grant Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans (MAPs), which would mark the starting point for preparations for membership. The decision was read as a defeat of the U.S. through the efforts of Germany, the most sensitive to Russian demands not to allow the two post-Soviet states into the alliance.

But the Russian delegation at the Bucharest summit also expressed dissatisfaction with the decision on Ukraine and Georgia. Sergei Riabkov, director of the department for cooperation with Europe in the Russian Ministry of External Affairs, reminded NATO that awarding membership to the two would be a “great tactical mistake”. In a similar vein, Vladimir Putin said during his press conference that NATO expansion represents a direct threat to Russia and that assurances to the contrary are not enough, as Russia had heard similar promises “before other imperialist expansions in the past.”

“No wonder Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko felt the need to say his country should not be seen as a residue of the Cold War,” said Romanian historian Zoe Petre, a former presidential advisor on foreign affairs issues. Petre told IPS that now that NATO clearly said Ukraine will become a member, tensions about the future of the region can only be settled if Ukraine is “strongly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic space” and Moscow “frees itself of a centuries-old obsession.”

The historian also noted that Putin seemed more open to negotiations during his Bucharest visit, and noted a journalist’s comment that Putin did not seem as intransigent “as in Munich”. During the Munich security conference in February 2007, the Russian President had accused the U.S. of trying to establish a uni-polar world. “The U.S. has overstepped its borders in all spheres – economic, political and humanitarian, and has imposed itself on other states,” Putin had said at the time.

Washington too expounded a more conciliatory attitude during the summit. According to Wayne Thompson, a U.S.-based specialist on NATO affiliated with the College of Europe in Bruges (Belgium), “the Bush administration has learned that the only thing worse than working with allies is trying to work without them.”

Excerpt:

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Apr 4 2008 (IPS)

At the Bucharest summit, NATO adopted an undisclosed "comprehensive" security strategy in Afghanistan, which combines military with civilian efforts. The publicised discussions on Afghanistan, however, were focused on the numbers of troops.

"I am very grateful to the international community," said Afghan President Hamid Karzai Apr. 2, during a conference organised by the German Marshall Fund on the sidelines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Bucharest. "We are very thankful. Give us more."

"We are not failing, we are succeeding in Afghanistan," said NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the meeting, when confronted with numbers illustrating the increase of violence in Afghanistan in 2007.

But the officials&#39 declaration of optimism is put into perspective by the mere fact that one of their most important missions at the summit in Bucharest was to sign a new document outlining a change of strategy for security in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan Compact, approved in January 2006 and drafted in 2005, introduced a "comprehensive approach" to security in place of a military-centred approach deemed unsuccessful. The "comprehensive approach" means not only fighting "enemies" but also training and subsequently relying more on Afghan security forces and leaders, rebuilding the infrastructure and the economy, and involving neighbours of Afghanistan in peace- building.

At the Bucharest summit, leaders from NATO, the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), the World Bank, and donor countries committed to a long-term "comprehensive political-military plan" for Afghanistan.

The text of this document was kept confidential, but its principles were made public as a "strategic vision" which includes an effort to give a more central role in peace-building to the Afghan government and other international organisations besides NATO. The "vision" document also states the goal of having an 80,000 strong Afghan army by 2010.

But with the details undisclosed, it remains unclear whether NATO will actually be able to pull off a change of strategy.

"NATO is a military alliance. It has no economic or political capacity to speak of," Barnett Rubin from New York University, author of a widely read blog on Afghanistan told IPS. "Therefore, NATO is not the right organisation to pull this off. The emphasis on NATO reinforces the emphasis on the military aspect of the struggle, which U.S. commanders estimate is about 20 percent of the whole."

Indeed, negotiations right before and during the NATO summit were centred on the number of supplementary troops that each contributor country would send to Afghanistan. Additionally, efforts were made to persuade countries to give up "caveats" on their contingents (specific restrictions on where divisions can be sent and what operations they can engage in).

Before the summit, 47,000 troops from 39 countries were serving in Afghanistan, and it was announced that between 6,000 and 10,000 more were needed. In spite of the triumphal announcement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that his country would increase its presence in Afghanistan by 1,000, an intervention by the French parliament reduced the number to 700. Other countries, such as the UK, Poland, Belgium and Romania, also revealed increases in their contributions.

"But numbers are not what really counts," says Dr. Ana Pejcinova, a development worker who recently returned from Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. "Posing the issue in terms of numbers is actually misdirecting attention away from the root of the problem and its potential solution. The latter seems to be not in hard power but in, plain and simple, economy – that is, livelihoods, poverty, &#39having something to lose&#39. Afghans have very little to lose, if any.

"NATO may not be able at all to offer the solution to ending the insurgency: it&#39s a military alliance, while the solution might be in economy and politics," Pejcinova told IPS, supporting Rubin&#39s views. "The discrepancy between funds invested into the international military forces and funds invested into development of the country should shame the West."

A recent report by a group of non-governmental organisations active in Afghanistan showed that, out of 25 billion dollars granted for the reconstruction of the country, only 15 billion have been spent, and 40 percent of this amount returned to the donors through salaries and profits of companies.

While NATO has started to acknowledge that peace in Afghanistan depends on a combination of military action and aid for development, and is asking for the help of other organisations for the latter, Ana Pejcinova warns that the alliance might be at fault also in its military approach.

According to the "strategic vision" document, NATO is fighting against "extremists and terrorists such as the Taleban or al-Quaeda." But Pejcinova says it is necessary to look behind the "extremism" tag. "The massive rise in attacks is mainly due not to the Taleban, but to numerous armed groups whose recruits have lost everything – land, assets, families, and so on – many from U.S. indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

"The Western conventional armies are facing unconventional, and what is turning into a popular armed movement in Afghanistan. Although every tactical battle is won by conventional hard power, the strategic goals are actually undermined by each tactical victory: winning (militarily) over locals only recruits more locals to join or support the insurgency."

All this points to one recommendation: much more funds and emphasis on the economy, complemented by a military component that needs to be more focused and restrained.

In his blog, Barnett Rubin points to specific non-military measures as central to peace in Afghanistan. "The rise in price of wheat and other commodities presents an opportunity for investing in other cash crops (than poppy and cannabis) and their marketing in Afghanistan. For all the rhetoric about how the drug economy is supporting insurgency and terrorism, where is the programme to seize this market opportunity?

"And for all the talk of the importance of Afghanistan to global security, where is the programme to assure Afghans of an affordable supply of basic food? This would do at least as much good as more NATO troops, and with less risk of collateral damage."

Excerpt:

By Stephen Leahy
TORONTO, Feb 2 2008 (IPS)

Jaguars have no place in the United States, although a handful still roam the southwest. Environmentalists suspect the real reason U.S. officials are allowing the jaguar to become extinct is the “security” wall being built along the Mexican border.

Ecologists have long warned that the border wall – actually a series of walls – will have big impacts on wildlife and the region’s fragile and unique ecology.

“There is no question that jaguars (Panthera onca) in the U.S. and northern Mexico would be significantly affected by the wall,” says Joe Cook, expert in mammal biology at the University of New Mexico.

“As best we can tell, the few remaining U.S. jaguars are part of a larger population based in northern Mexico,” Cook told Tierramérica.

The wall would stop the movement of jaguars north and south, greatly diminishing the genetic diversity of the animals trapped on either side. That loss of diversity could increase their susceptibility to disease and vulnerability to other environmental changes, he said.

“The only hope to preserve large carnivores in the wild is to have large areas of continuous, unfragmented habitat.”

Jaguars have roamed the southern United States, from Louisiana to California, for thousands of years. Extensive predator control efforts in the late 1800s and much of the last century decimated their numbers until very few remained.

Now a highly endangered species, U.S. conservation laws require that the Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) develop a plan to help the jaguar recover.

That has never happened and environmental groups, including the Centre for Biological Diversity, have filed lawsuits to have one created.

However, last week the USFWS announced it is abandoning all jaguar recovery efforts, stating that the United States represents only a small part of the animal’s range.

Not only is that a poor justification scientifically, it also sets a precedent for smaller, poorer nations to argue that since they are only a small part of the jaguar’s range, or the range of any other animal, they should not have to protect endangered species, says Cook.

“The (George W.) Bush administration has been horrific with respect to the conservation of America’s natural resources,” he adds.

“The New World’s largest cat is going extinct throughout North and South America, but rather than develop a plan to save it, the Bush administration is building a wall to forever keep it out of the U.S.,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Centre for Biological Diversity.

If there was a jaguar recovery plan it might slow or even force the relocation of large projects, like new mines, roads or the construction of a vast wall along the border.

This “was a short-sighted effort to keep Mexican nationals out of the U.S. with a militaristic wall that extends to Mexico’s animals as well,” Suckling told Tierramérica.

The 3,141-kilometre Mexican-U.S. border crosses a biologically diverse region of desert, mangrove forests, plains, mountains, river valleys, wetlands, cities and towns. The border region is home for many rare and endangered species.

And now a series of walls and barriers, along with roads, lights and power facilities, are being built along large portions of it without any environmental assessment, according to Laura López-Hoffman, an ecologist at the University of Arizona.

López-Hoffman, also linked to the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), is part of a group of scientists on both sides of the border who are trying to conduct a scientific assessment of the ecological impacts of the wall. But the wall is going up faster than they can scramble to collect data.

“The best we can do in the next year is create hypothetical models of the potential impacts. Collecting data on the actual responses of species will take another 10 years and it will be too late,” she said.

There is no doubt the wall will have profound ecological effects, most obviously preventing the movement of many species, such as the jaguars. Transboundary species like birds and bats will be affected by any lighting along the wall.

Mexico is considering filing a complaint against the United States in the International Court of Justice for the environmental damage caused by the wall. By building the wall, the U.S. is violating international treaties, according to Gerardo Ceballos, of UNAM’s Institute of Ecology.

Even before the wall project, the Border Service had done a lot of damage, including the burning of wide areas to improve visibility, the fencing off of wildlife trails, and the filling in of valleys, canyons and estuaries, says López-Hoffman.

In Mexico, ecologists also see the wall as a barrier to collaboration on cross-border environmental issues, she adds.

The expert stresses that it will be more difficult for U.S. and Mexican scientists to work together on water issues and the impacts of climate change, which are expected to hit the region particularly hard.

(*Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 2008 (IPS)

The 15-member U.N. Security Council (UNSC) is set to lose its credibility once again as it prepares to impose a third set of sanctions on Iran while failing to pass any strictures on Israel for its continued heavy-handed repression of Palestinians in Gaza.

"Many ask whether the UNSC still has any credibility left," says Mouin Rabbani, contributing editor to the Washington-based Middle East Report.

But the more pertinent question, he pointed out, "is whether it should have any – after its consistent failure to ensure either peace or security, and of turning a malignantly blind eye to so many threats to peace and security and the basic rights of many millions."

"Indeed, the UNSC&#39s continued obsession with Iran&#39s apparently non-existent nuclear weapons programme, and its dogged determination to do nothing of consequence to address Israel&#39s very real occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – to the point of currently failing to issue even the lamest of statements on the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip – speaks volumes," Rabbani said.

"And this is in a conflict the United Nations played a direct role in creating in 1947," he added.

After four days of intense closed-door negotiations last week, the UNSC failed to come up either with a resolution against Israel or a unanimous non-binding presidential statement.

With the United States demanding a stronger text critical of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, the UNSC lacked consensus for a collective statement condemning Israel&#39s decision to choke Palestinians in Gaza and cutting off electricity and humanitarian supplies.

The decision-makers in the UNSC, which also has 10 rotating non-permanent members, are the five veto-wielding permanent members, namely the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia.

In a strong statement issued last week, John Dugard, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, said that Israeli action violates the strict prohibition on collective punishment contained in the Fourth Geneva Convention governing conflicts.

"It also violates one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law that military action must distinguish between military targets and civilian targets," he said.

Dugard singled out the killing of some 40 Palestinians in Gaza and the targeting of a government office near a wedding party venue resulting in the loss of civilian lives.

"The closure of crossings into Gaza raises very serious questions about Israel&#39s respect for international law and its commitment to the (Middle East) peace process," he added.

While it remains paralysed over Israel – as often happens because of the protection afforded to the Jewish state by the United States, Britain and France – the UNSC is readying for a third set of sanctions against Iran.

"For the Security Council to bow to U.S. pressure to impose additional sanctions on Iran despite its lack of an active nuclear weapons programme will seriously harm the U.N.&#39s credibility," said Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.

For more than 26 years, he pointed out, Israel has been in violation of UNSC resolution 487 which calls upon Israel to "place its nuclear facilities under IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguard."

Yet – despite deciding to "remain seized of the matter" – the Security Council has refused to even threaten sanctions, Zunes told IPS.

Similarly, he said, there have been no threats of sanctions against India and Pakistan for remaining in violation of resolution 1172 to end their nuclear weapons programmes for almost a decade.

"It is particularly ironic that the United States is taking the lead in pushing for U.N. sanctions on a nuclear-related issue, given that, as a result of its recent deal with India, Washington is now in violation of article 8 of resolution 1172, which calls on all states to prevent the export of technology that could in any way assist that country&#39s nuclear weapons programme," said Zunes, who is also Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

The last two UNSC resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran, first in December 2006 and then in March 2007, called on Tehran to suspend all uranium-enrichment related activities and also banned arms sales and froze Iranian assets in overseas financial institutions.

But Iran has consistently maintained that its nuclear programme is essentially civilian-oriented, and that it has no plans to produce nuclear weapons.

Last month, the National Intelligence Estimate – a collective study by all U.S. intelligence agencies – said that Iran has not re-started its nuclear weapons programme, as of mid-2007.

The report, described as a political bombshell which jolted the administration of President George W. Bush, also declared Iran currently has no nuclear weapons.

Despite the widely-circulated report, the UNSC&#39s proposed move for a third set of sanctions against Iran has challenged the credibility of the U.S.-driven world body itself.

"It&#39s not much of an exaggeration to characterise the purported world body as the United Nations of America," said Rabbani.

A key reason for this, he argued, is the marginalisation of U.N. organs, like the 192-member General Assembly, and the growing monopoly on U.N. decision-making by the Security Council.

He said the latter was constituted in the days when empires still reigned supreme and most of the globe was dominated by less than a handful of great powers, and hasn&#39t changed since.

"For states like the UK and France to have powers of veto while, for example, Japan or Brazil aren&#39t even permanent members is an affront to the 21st century," Rabbani said.

Taken together, he said, this means the United Nations is a thoroughly undemocratic, indeed anti-democratic institution, certainly when compared to other multilateral institutions where decisions are made either by consensus or on the basis of majority votes.

"At least in the World Bank, money talks," he said.

In this context, the end of the Cold War and U.S.-Soviet rivalry removed many of the remaining obstacles to the ability of a single power to dominate U.N. decision-making.

If the U.S. proved unable to consistently get its own way, it has at least been able to ensure that not a single decision goes against it or favoured allies such as Israel.

A pertinent example was its rush to condemn the Basque separatist organisation, ETA, for the Madrid bombings, in a transparent attempt to bolster then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar&#39s prospects for re-election on the eve of the 2005 Spanish parliamentary elections.

"To the best of my knowledge, it has never issued a correction," said Rabbani.

"In my view, the extraordinary damage done to the U.N. system by the subordination of the entire organisation to the UNSC can only be reversed if and when other U.N. organs such as the General Assembly assume their rightful role in the organization," he declared. "But this is a virtually unimaginable development in the foreseeable future."

Meanwhile, "as for the Russians and the Chinese", an Arab diplomat told IPS, "They are trading off their vetoes in return for Western support to protect their own national interests."

"The Chinese will continue to cave in to American demands until the successful completion of the Olympics in August," he added. So, Chinese support for a sanctions resolution on Iran is no surprise.

The Bush administration has come under pressure from human rights activists who say that only a U.S. threat to boycott the Olympics could force the Chinese to drop their opposition to harsh sanctions against Burma (Myanmar) and Sudan, two countries with strong military and economic ties to Beijing.

But the White House is unlikely to support such a boycott.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 10 2008 (IPS)

As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon begins his second year in office, he has refused to claim any tangible successes during 2007, nor has he laid out any clear-cut strategy to meet the political and economic challenges facing the United Nations in 2008.

“So far his performance and what appears to be his future approach do not reflect anything close to the independence, strength of character, willingness to stand up to powerful governments and commitment to equality of nations and peoples,” says Phyllis Bennis, director, New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

These are qualities that would be required if the United Nations had any chance of rebuilding its tattered reputation and its potential capacity, said Bennis, author of several books on the world body, including “Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power”.

She said Ban Ki-moon’s end-of-first-year speech provided an example. “While he spoke of protection of the ‘global commons’ and the ‘bottom billion’ as U.N. priorities, he failed to provide any real programmatic blueprints for how those crucial goals might be brought about,” Bennis told IPS.

Addressing his first press conference for 2008, Ban told reporters Monday: “You know that I am not one to speak easily of successes.”

“The past year was one of immense challenges,” he said, pointing out only two areas where he has made “certain progress”: “a new chapter on climate change” and “new and daunting challenges in peacekeeping, most specifically in Darfur.”

But still, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur is in trouble even before it could get off the ground, primarily due to a shortage of both troops and helicopters.

At the press briefing, Ban was constrained to admit he has only 9,000 out of the estimated 26,000 soldiers needed.

“That is why we are very much concerned about this ongoing deteriorating situation in Darfur,” he said, tempering his short-lived optimism on peacekeeping in Sudan.

Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, a former U.N. Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Least Developed Countries (LDCs), says restoring the credibility and neutrality of the United Nations, as the most universal world body, is the organisation’s biggest challenge as the new secretary-general enters his second year.

“The United Nations has been losing the widespread respect and support it used to enjoy,” Chowdhury told IPS in an interview late December.

He cited several examples: there are demonstrations and protest marches against the U.N. A topmost official is prevented from visiting the U.N. office in the field. U.N. officials are being expelled by host governments. U.N. peacekeepers are being withdrawn on charges of sexual harassment. And it goes on and on, he said.

“Stigma of corrupt practices sticks on. U.N.’s esteem has never been that low worldwide. This should get top priority attention of the secretary-general and the senior management group,” said Chowdhury, a former permanent representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations and a diplomat who has been associated with the world body since the late 1960s.

Anuradha Mittal, founder and director of the San Francisco-based policy think tank Oakland Institute, said: “If allowed to be truly independent with necessary resources, an unbiased United Nations could have real impact and help affect real change when it comes to the most urgent issues of our times, including poverty, conflict resolution, HIV/AIDS and climate change.”

“Unfortunately, the United Nations and its agencies have become impotent as they have come to be controlled by western capitals such as Washington DC, who have held the United Nations hostage by withholding their contributions,” Mittal told IPS.

Therefore, the priority in 2008 would be for the United Nations and its agencies to live up to their original mandate, which was to bring all nations of the world together to work for peace and development, based on the principles of justice, human dignity and the well-being of all people, she declared.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is expected to face a rash of old and new political problems which it will try to resolve in 2008. These include the crisis in the Middle East, Darfur, Myanmar, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), amongst others.

At Monday’s press conference, the secretary-general pledged to galvanise world action on poverty alleviation – as he did on climate change at the General Assembly in September.

The demands on the United Nations grow ever greater, he said. “If anything, the coming year promises to be even tougher than the last.”

“Look how it has begun, with turmoil in Kenya and renewed violence in Sri Lanka. We must nurture a fragile peace process in the Middle East. We must do more to help the people of Iraq emerge from conflict and rebuild their shattered lives. We must stay the course in Afghanistan so that it does not again fall into lawless anarchy,” he said.

But can he really fulfill all – or most – of these pledges in 2008? Not a chance, says Bennis.

One of the most visible – and damaging – impacts of the foreign policy for the last seven years (of the administration of President George W. Bush) has been “a triumphalist assertion of unilateral militarism, ignoring or undermining or simply violating (largely without consequence) the United Nations Charter, U.N. resolutions and a host of other international laws”, she noted.

The United Nations was and remains one of the fundamental victims of the Iraq war – indeed, of the so-called “global war on terror”.

“A question for the uncertain future is whether the U.S. will lift its heavy-handed domination of the global body, and allow the U.N. at least the modicum of a chance to play the role mandated by its Charter: to end the scourge of war, to protect human rights for all people and peoples, and to work to eliminate global poverty and inequality,” Bennis told IPS.

So far the likelihood does not seem high – not least because U.S. domination of the U.N. has been for many years a bipartisan affair in Washington, she argued.

After all, it was Madeleine Albright, a former secretary of state in the ostensibly “multilateralist” administration of President Bill Clinton, who said in 1995 “the U.N. is a tool of American foreign policy.”

Certainly other countries – France and China among them – have played damaging roles in crucial U.N. developments in recent years, including reform efforts, Iran sanctions and more, Bennis said.

“But U.S. domination remains the single greatest obstacle to the U.N.’s realisation of its potential as part of an internationalist coalition, which would also include global social movements and a rotating cast of at least a few governments, standing against war, for human rights and protection of the planet, and providing the scaffolding for a world governed by laws instead of power,” she declared.

Excerpt:

By Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 27 2007 (IPS)

Calls for profound change in the environmental behaviour of the United States are on the rise as world leaders prepare to attend a major summit on climate change in Bali, Indonesia next month.

"The U.S. has a unique responsibility to &#39climate proof&#39 its growth, not only to protect Americans, but also to prevent reversals in health and education for the world&#39s poor," said the authors of a major U.N. report released Tuesday.

The 2007 Human Development Report, entitled "Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World", urged the United States to "take the lead" in balancing the global carbon budget by cutting emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Despite the fact that it is responsible for about 25 percent of carbon emissions, which play a significant role in global warming, the United States is the only nation in the industrialised world that continues to reject global calls for mandatory cuts in carbon emissions.

Until last week, Australia was the only other industrialised country that sided with Washington on the issue of climate change. Canberra has now taken a different position, with the new government declaring that it would set targets for cuts in carbon emissions.

As the world&#39s largest polluter, the United States has consistently argued that legally-binding cuts in carbon emissions would hurt the U.S. economy and that the best way to address the issue of climate change is to adopt voluntary measures.

This approach, according to many international scientists and economists, including those associated with the U.N., is not only hindering global efforts to fight climate change, but also poses serious risk to economic and social development in poor countries.

"Climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole," said Kemal Dervis, head of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) that prepared the annual report, adding that it could cause serious setbacks to the efforts for economic and social development in poor countries.

The authors of the U.N. report warned the industrialised countries that failure on their part to take drastic measures against global warming now would lead to disastrous consequences not only for the developing countries, but for them too.

There is a very "narrow window to act", they said in the report, adding, "if that window is missed," a potential increase in temperatures of up to four degrees C. could see no less than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa go hungry.

Not just that, they said. Within the next 10 years, more than 200 million people in the region will have no homes and another 400 million no protection against dangerous diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, according to the report.

"The carbon budget of the 21st century is being overspent and threatens to run out entirely by 2032," said Kevin Watkins, the study&#39s lead author, referring to the possibility that emissions levels could rise up to the critical level of four degrees C., if not checked in time.

Like many other researchers, Watkins has no doubt in his mind that it&#39s the world&#39s poor who are going to suffer the most from the effects of global warming, even though "their carbon footprint is the lightest" compared to the rich.

Calling the poor "the first victims of the developed countries&#39 energy rich lifestyle," he said in a statement: "If people in the developing world had generated per capita CO2 emissions at the same level as people in North America, we would need the atmosphere of nine planets to deal with the consequences."

According to the UNDP report, the 19 million residents of New York State have a bigger carbon footprint than the 766 million people living in the world&#39s 50 least developed countries.

"An average air-conditioning unit in Florida emits more CO2 in a year than a person in Afghanistan or Cambodia during his or her lifetime," the authors said.

A study released this month by the Centre for Global Development, a Washington-based independent think tank, revealed that on average, each individual in the U.S. is responsible for about nine tonnes of emissions every year.

The reports sets out a checklist for U.S. officials as they prepare for the Bali Conference, which will decide what further actions need to be taken after the Kyoto treaty expires in 2002.

The U.S. has refused to endorse the treaty and has given no indication as yet of its willingness to go along with the rest of the world in forging a new pact to fight climate change.

The Kyoto treaty requires five percent cuts in carbon emissions below the 1990 levels until 2012. The U.N. report calls for the U.S. to agree on at least a 30 percent reduction by 2030 against the base line.

In addition, the U.N. experts on development also want the U.S. to invest and promote the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) and commit to increased usage of renewable energy sources.

However, mitigation alone is not enough. The report concludes that even the most stringent cuts "will not start to have a major impact" until the mid-2030 and that temperatures will continue to rise through 2050.

The report criticised the U.S. for its reliance on coal-fired power plants to meet energy needs, as these plants are a leading source of source of carbon emissions.

The U.S. is considering proposals to build over 150 coal-fired power plants, with a planned investment of 145 billion dollars over the next two decades.

The current U.S. strategy on mitigating the impact of climate change is based on reducing greenhouse gas "intensity", not the level of emissions, a unilateralist approach that many experts see as deeply flawed.

The term "intensity" refers to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions released per dollar of gross domestic product (GDP). The report says that greenhouse gas intensity has fallen in the U.S. by 25 percent since 1990, but, at the same time, its total carbon emission have also risen by 25 percent.

Considering that the U.S. and other industrialised countries enjoy ample financial resources and advanced technologies to defend themselves against the disastrous effects of warming, the report reflects its authors&#39 grave concern about the fate of the millions of poor in developing countries.

In the low-lying Netherlands, for example, with official help, people are preparing for flooding. They are building homes with foundations like the hull of a ship that can float on water, according to the report. Yet in the Mekong delta in Vietnam, locals are left to adapt with swimming lessons and lifejackets.

"Leaving the world&#39s poor to sink or swim with their own meagre resources in the face of the threat posed by climate change is morally wrong," wrote Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning South African spiritual leader and human rights activist, in the 384-page report on human development.

"We are drifting in a world of adaptation apartheid," he said.

The report urges the United States to support a new global annual investment of 86 billion dollars for adaptation efforts to build "climate-proof" infrastructure and other measures to protect the poor in developing countries.

The required amount is equivalent to 0.2 percent of the Northern countries combined GDP.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Nov 21 2007 (IPS)

What do the current Pakistani political crisis, Israel’s September air strike against Syria, and Iran’s continued pursuit of nuclear enrichment all have in common? All three events reflect the aggressive policies adopted by the George W. Bush administration to deal with the growing threat of nuclear proliferation.

As U.S. soft power in the region diminishes and its disdain grows for the transnational bodies meant to monitor the nuclear threat, the stakes could not be higher.

The nuclear peril, a 70-year-old problem of mutual concern for most of the world, has been couched as an integral target for the architects of the “war on terror”. The Bush administration carefully outlined the threat – found at the “the crossroads of radicalism and technology” – in the 2002 National Security Strategy for the United States, a document that many Washington-Beltway insiders referred to as the “Bush Doctrine”.

As journalist Jonathan Schell convincingly wrote in a recent article in the Nation, the nuclear threat has become a “mere sub-category, albeit the most important one”.

In the post Sep. 11, 2001 universe, the Bush White House divided the world into two camps – those who were “with us”, and those “against us”. The first group – led by the U.S. – consisted of moral “good guys,” democratic countries, many of whom possessed the bomb. The second group consisted of malevolent dictators with designs on nuclear weapons, rogue regimes that could not be trusted, because they would presumably sell their technology to the highest-bidding transnational terrorist organisation.

As nuclear proliferation specialist Joseph Circione writes in his book, “Bomb Scare: the History and Future of Nuclear Weapons”, the White House “in effect changed the focus from ‘what’ to ‘who’.”

In addition to advocating for preemptive military strikes against the U.S. adversaries and terrorists possessing weapons of mass destruction, Washington’s new approach would disregard multilateral consensus as a prerequisite for foreign policy and embrace unilateral action to establish security and spread democracy. It is no secret that right-wing hawk John Bolton, the U.S.’s former representative to the U.N., held the organisation in contempt. He once quipped: “If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 storeys, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

And it appears that the Bush camp’s antipathy for the U.N., as well as its nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy (IAEA), continues to increase because of what the U.S. perceives as the agency’s failures in addressing the Iranian nuclear programme.

“Mr. [Mohamed] El-Baradei has coasted on the IAEA’s reputation as the authoritative source of information on the world’s nuclear secrets. Yet this is the same agency that was taken by surprise by nuclear projects in Libya, North Korea and Iraq in the 1980s,” said a November editorial written in the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper’s editorial page often takes neoconservative views of U.S. foreign policy.

“All this is reason enough for the U.S., Israel and any other country serious about stopping nuclear proliferation to refuse Mr. El-Baradei’s not-so-good diplomatic offices.”

An IAEA report released last Thursday – part of a deal brokered by El-Baradei and Iran to avert a possible military confrontation between Washington and Tehran – said that while Iran had been truthful about key aspects of its past nuclear activity, knowledge of Tehran’s programme was “diminishing”. In response, the White House lashed out by saying Iran’s continued defiance of the international community and its failure to halt uranium enrichment justified Washington’s push for a third round of sanctions.

This September, Israeli warplanes conducted a mysterious raid in northeast Syria, and there is growing consensus among U.S. government and independent analysts that the suspicious target was a nuclear facility. Whether or not it was, the episode – and Israeli, Syrian, and U.S. silence over the issue – raises even more questions as to the timing of the raid, and what the unilateral action portends for nuclear ambitions of Israel’s regional neighbours.

“The Bush administration’s decision NOT to share its intelligence on the Syrian site with the IAEA, and thereby encourage and support the international agency’s aggressive inspection and evaluation of this alleged threat to peace, was another demonstration of the contempt in which the present U.S. administration holds the U.N. organisation,” wrote former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Ray Close, in an e-mail to IPS.

“It suggests, in effect, that the United States intends to manage the international nuclear proliferation issue all by itself, independent of the rest of the international community – except for deputising Israel to be the nuclear policeman of the Middle East,” he said.

In a crowning irony, Bush’s dualistic narrative, and the policy he has implemented to conform to this narrative, has crumbled under the weight of realities on the ground. U.S. soft power is fading in the region for many different reasons – the Iraq quagmire, U.S. support for Israel’s 2006 aerial bombardment of Lebanese infrastructure, and the isolation of Gaza following the 2005 election victory of the Islamist group Hamas.

But the possible meltdown of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s government has accelerated the more immediate fear that – in the current environment of instability brought by Musharraf’s imposition of “emergency rule” – Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal could fall into terrorists’ hands.

A Times column co-authored by neo-conservative Fred Kagan and liberal interventionist Michael O’Hanlon, entitled “Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem”, is the latest example of the alarmist tone coming out of Washington, and it suggests that – in the absence of strong international mediators like the IAEA – the U.S. will consider military options. The piece also reflects the growing partnership between the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution.

“We do not intend to be fear mongers,” write O’Hanlon and Kagan, before warning that Washington should “think – now – about our feasible military options in Pakistan.” The idea is to act fast and secure Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile before the political situation deteriorates further. Washington spent nearly 100 million dollars in the past six years on a classified programme to help Pakistan secure its nuclear weapons, the New York Times reported this weekend.

All conversations about U.S. goals to deter nuclear weapons come back to the issue of Iraq. The Bush administration learned that Iraq had ended all of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes between 1991 and 1995, according to a 2004 report by the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA and Pentagon fact-finding mission sent to post-war Iraq to uncover the evidence to support the White House’s claims.

While administration officials tried to discredit U.N. inspections before the 2003 invasion, it appears that, in this case, sanctions did deter Saddam Hussein. And while the U.S. never found any WMD in Iraq, its presence has bolstered the ability of transnational terrorist groups like al Qaeda to propagandise Iraq as an icon of jihad, thus drawing more potential recruits, and actually increasing the threat of terrorism.

Excerpt:

By Mario de Queiroz
ALBUFEIRA, Portugal, Nov 20 2007 (IPS)

Everyone agrees: migration flows from the developing South to the industrialised North must be regulated to curb the appalling trafficking of human beings across the Mediterranean sea.

The 35 countries that took part in a two-day government meeting in Portugal agreed on everything that must be done to prevent especially the trafficking of women, who often fall prey to prostitution and sexual exploitation networks, and to strengthen the channels of legal migration.

The village of Albufeira, in the southern Portuguese region of Algarve, hosted the first Euro-Mediterranean conference on migration Sunday and Monday.

The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Euromed) is made up of 25 of the 27 European Union countries and 10 Mediterranean partners: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. Libya holds observer status since 1999.

Bulgaria and Rumania, which joined the EU on Jan. 1, are the only EU countries that do not belong to Euromed.

The interior ministers and other government representatives announced Monday that the EU would introduce training courses for migrant workers, pre-departure professional training and linguistic courses for potential migrants, information campaigns on legal migration and labour opportunities available in the countries of destination, and programmes and activities for newly arrived legal immigrants.

The main aim of these initiatives is to facilitate the flows of legal immigrants from non-EU Mediterranean countries and bolster their social and professional integration, according to the ministers, who also decided to create a joint working group to carry out an in-depth study of the labour situation and labour market needs for migrants.

Interior Minister Rui Pereira of Portugal, which holds the EU rotating presidency, said “these conclusions reflect a real will and interest in working together, in a partnership that will address the phenomenon of migration in a broad sense.”

The Algarve, whose name comes from al-Gharb, which means “the West” in Arabic, is the region with the strongest Moorish influence in Portugal.

The main aims of the meeting were to improve management of migration flows, fight trafficking in human beings, and strengthen opportunities for legal migration, economic development and cultural exchange.

“In order to promote the framework that allows for the orderly management of legal migration in the interest of all parties concerned, it is proposed to analyse the possibilities of facilitating and simplifying legal migration procedures for workers in demand, in order to improve legal channels for migration,” the ministers noted in their conclusions.

The final declaration says that cooperation among all Mediterranean countries is essential in order to stiffen border controls and obtain concrete results.

Despite the upbeat tone of the final document, non-EU countries complained of “brain drain” from North Africa to Europe.

Tunisian Minister of Social Affairs Ali Chaouch, who spoke with reporters after the meeting along with Ahmed El-Kewaisny, the coordinator of the group of Arab countries in Albufeira, told IPS that the countries of the Maghreb – Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania – “need their brains.”

With respect to economic questions, special emphasis was put on the remittances sent home by emigrants, an important source of revenues for the countries along the southern edge of the Mediterranean, and on microcredit, a mechanism that is becoming more and more important as a curb on migration flows to the EU.

Last week, Euromed released a study based on 2004 data that showed that the largest flows of expatriate remittances from the EU go to the Maghreb, especially Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, while the main source countries of those flows are Spain, Italy and France.

Morocco is by far the leading destination, receiving 4.2 billion dollars in remittances in 2004, followed by Algeria, with 828 million, and Tunisia, with 228 million.

“Remittance flows to non-EU countries increase(d) almost 25 percent during the period 2000-2004, from 15.5 billion estimated in 2000 to 18.7 billion in 2004”, with the biggest remittance growth seen in Spain and Italy, said the report.

In recent years, European civil society organisations have loudly criticised the EU’s lack of flexibility with respect to migration flows from Africa, and have called for measures like temporary worker programmes.

Non-governmental organisations see that as one solution to curtailing “the sinister trafficking across the Mediterranean, in flimsy boats, of dozens or sometimes hundreds of African adults and children, who try, often unsuccessfully and with fatal consequences, to reach ‘the promised land’ in Europe,” activist Ana Filgueiras, with the Brazilian-Portuguese NGO Cidadãos do Mundo (Citizens of the World), told IPS.

In one of the latest such tragedies, 56 Africans trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands starved to death, were killed or committed suicide when they found that the cans that supposedly carried fuel were actually full of water. Only the Senegalese skipper was found alive in late October in the boat, which had drifted south of the Cape Verde islands.

An increasingly frequent occurrence for people living in the Canary Islands or southern Italy – the EU destinations closest to Africa – is to come across bodies of migrants or starving survivors among the wreckage of boats that are far from suitable for an ocean crossing.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres sent the Portuguese government a message lamenting that the meeting in Albufeira failed to specifically address the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers.

Nor did the phenomenon of trafficking in human beings, announced as one of the key focuses of the gathering, receive much attention from the ministers.

The day before the meeting in Albufeira, Portugal’s Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF – Foreigners and Borders Service) held a seminar to launch the “You Are Not For Sale” campaign aimed at fighting trafficking in persons.

The characteristics of this illegal business in Portugal are similar to what happens in other EU countries where people trafficking rings have mushroomed, mainly run by people from the countries where the victims themselves are smuggled in from.

The typical victim is a young woman from the developing South or from central or eastern Europe who is lured to a rich country by a trafficker with promises of a decent, well-paid job. Once there, her passport is seized, and she is forced to work as a prostitute to pay off the debt incurred in smuggling her into the country.

Luísa Maia Gonçalves, SEF coordinator of the campaign that has the support of the Council of Europe and will include the publication of a book containing harrowing testimonies of victims, said the idea is to raise awareness and alert people to the reality of human beings “being transformed into merchandise on a daily basis.”

Two weeks from now, SEF will also distribute 10,000 copies of the book from the “You Are Not For Sale” seminar, in Brazil, the world’s biggest Portuguese-speaking country and the source of the largest community of immigrants in Portugal.

The U.S. State Department’s seventh annual “Trafficking in Persons Report”, released in June, says “Portugal is primarily a destination and transit country for women, men, and children trafficked from Brazil, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Romania, and to a lesser extent Africa. The majority of Brazilian female victims are trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation.”

The report adds that Portugal “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so.”

Jorge Lacão, secretary of state to the EU presidency, pointed to “the growing feminisation of poverty, which fuels situations of sexual and labour exploitation.”

In her doctoral thesis “Brazilian Immigration in Portugal: Identity and Perspective”, presented Saturday at the University of Coimbra, Brazilian researcher Benalva da Silva Vitória says people emigrate from Brazil to Portugal “with the hope of a better life,” but that they quickly “discover that it’s not easy here.”

And it is even more difficult for Brazilian women, who face the stereotype of being “sensual, loose, ‘easy’ and willing to take any kind of work,” said the researcher.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 13 2007 (IPS)

The United Nations Security Council has been warned by Iraqi parliamentarians of a potentially “serious” constitutional and political crisis if it decides to renew the mandate of the U.S.-led multinational force (MNF) beyond December 2007, without approval from lawmakers.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen tours Forward Operating Base Assassin in Iraq, Oct. 5, 2007. Credit: U.S. Defence Dept photo

“If we are asked to approve a trade agreement concerning olive oil, should we not have the right to pass an agreement concerning the stationing of foreign military forces on our national soil?” one senior Iraqi lawmaker was quoted as saying.

The existing MNF mandate, established by the U.N. Security Council in October 2003 and renewed in June 2004, November 2005 and November 2006, will terminate Dec. 31.

The Council, however, is expected to meet early next month to approve a fourth mandate renewal, at the request of the United States.

The New York-based Global Policy Forum (GPF) says the letter from the Iraqi legislators warns Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his cabinet against recommending a renewal for 2008 without parliamentary approval.

The six-page letter, dated April and made public by the GPF last week, reminds the Security Council that the “Iraqi parliament, as the elected representatives of the Iraqi people, has the exclusive right to approve and ratify international treaties and agreements, including those signed with the United Nations Security Council.”

A statement by GPF says the letter was apparently handed over to the U.N. office in Baghdad sometime in April but never delivered to the 15 members of the Security Council.

Signed by 144 legislators, the letter says: “We the Iraqi members of parliament signing below demand a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces (MNF) from our beloved Iraq.”

Article 58, Section 4 of the Iraqi constitution says the Council of Ministers (the cabinet) must gain the ratification of the Council of Representatives (the parliament) for international treaties and agreements.

James A. Paul, the executive director of GPF, who has been tracking the story, told IPS that Iraq’s parliament has called for a timetable for withdrawal of coalition forces from the country.

“And it has denounced as ‘unconstitutional and unilateral’ any move by the al-Maliki cabinet to request a renewed mandate by the U.N. Security Council for the so-called multinational force,” he added.

Paul also pointed out that parliamentarians taking this position include Shias, Sunnis, seculars and other blocs, in an alliance that unites formerly disparate sectarian groups.

The parliament’s action, he pointed out, reflects the views of 70-80 percent of Iraqis.

An August 2007 poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) found that 79 percent of Iraqis opposed “the presence of coalition forces in Iraq”, while 72 percent felt that “the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq” was “making security in our country” worse.

In a letter to members of the Security Council early this week, GPF said: “If the Security Council accepts the Iraqi cabinet’s request for an unqualified renewal, the Council will deepen the already serious constitutional and political crisis in Iraq”.

The letter said the Security Council would be well-advised to take into account the constitutional authority and political position of the Iraqi parliament and to seek a mandate renewal that would reflect the political realities in Iraq, including overwhelming public support for a timetable for MNF withdrawal.

“Only such realism can end the violence and prepare the country for reconciliation, towards a peaceful, democratic and fully-sovereign future,” the letter declared.

In approaching another renewal for the year 2008, the Security Council should be aware of the political and constitutional circumstances within which the Iraqi government may send such a request, GPF said.

A majority in the Iraqi Council of Representatives has charged that a request without due consultation and ratification is “unilateral” and “unconstitutional”.

In 2006, a number of leaders of parliamentary blocs had discussions with al-Maliki about the MNF renewal prospect, insisting that he consult with parliament prior to any renewal request, in the spirit of the constitution.

They say that he promised to conform to their demand. But while the parliament was having its own discussions in October and early November in preparation for the renewal process, the government sent a request letter to the Security Council dated Nov. 11, 2006 without submitting the request to parliamentary ratification or taking into account parliamentary concerns, the letter said.

The Council subsequently adopted Resolution 1723 renewing the MNF’s mandate on Nov. 28 last year.

“Washington – apparently unconcerned about democracy in Iraq – is determined to keep troops there, run the show, and to press forward with another U.N. mandate, irrespective of the parliament’s wishes,” says a Middle East analyst monitoring Iraq.

“The Iraqi cabinet and the Security Council can bend to Washington’s will, or move to recognise a democratic future for Iraq. That is the choice that lies immediately ahead,” he added.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 20 2007 (IPS)

A slew of co-operation agreements emerged from the second IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) summit in Pretoria, South Africa, this week.

South African President Thabo Mbeki, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were on hand in the South African capital Wednesday to initial the accords, which cover a broad range of issues: wind resources, health and medicines, culture, public administration, higher education, and customs and tax administration.

Certain analysts were critical of the summit’s achievements, saying it failed to make real headway with matters central to trade between the three regional powers – such as tariffs.

However, Tom Wheeler, a fellow at the Johannesburg-based South African Institute of International Affairs, said it was still early days for the trilateral grouping – and that the summit was a “political endorsement” of future co-operation plans.

Greg Mills – head of the Brenthurst Foundation, a policy research institute based in Johannesburg – further noted that boosting commerce and investment in the IBSA bloc was a daunting task, not least because South Africa and Brazil had economies with similar trade profiles.

Established in 2003, IBSA aims to promote South-South links, mainly through trade and investment. It operates by way of regular, high level gatherings and bi-annual summits. The next IBSA summit will take place in India, in 2008.

The 52-point declaration issued by the three governments Wednesday indicates their intention to double intra-IBSA trade to 15 billion dollars by 2010.

The group re-affirmed its goal of achieving a free trade agreement between India, the MERCOSUR bloc of South America and the Southern African Customs Union, while noting that “significant progress” in this regard was made in negotiations earlier this month.

Observing that the Doha round of global trade negotiations was entering a “crucial stage”, the summit also called for the removal of barriers in world-wide agricultural trade that undermine production in developing nations. (The round takes its name from the Qatari capital where it was initiated in 2001.)

Other issues dealt with by the summit include human rights, counter terrorism and the elimination of nuclear weapons, which India possesses. Delegates noted the lack of progress in nuclear non-proliferation.

“Considering that India has signed on, this is an important statement,” Wheeler said. But, “I suppose it’s on condition that others (nuclear powers) do the same.”

Brazil and South Africa are putting greater emphasis on nuclear enrichment for increased commercial use.

The countries identified defence as an area for future co-operation, South Africa revealing that in May next year the three nations’ navies would participate in joint exercises.

Two additional IBSA working groups, on human settlement development and environment and climate change, were established.

Endorsing multilateralism, IBSA nonetheless called for reform of the United Nations, especially an expansion of the Security Council to ensure that it “reflects contemporary realities”. Demands for change at the U.N. have gained currency in recent years. India, Brazil and South Africa all aspire to have permanent seats on the council.

Mills warned that the IBSA states should take care not to “appear like an exclusive club”, and should reach out to other countries in the group of emerging states. These include China, Mexico, Pakistan and Indonesia.

China and Mexico, along with Nigeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, were among the states Mbeki invited to take part in a proposed G8 of the South several years ago – a grouping that has not proved successful. The G8 comprises the world’s eight leading industrialised nations, all in the North.

Mbeki, da Silva and Singh also urged resolution of the crises in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 16 2007 (IPS)

Enthusiasm tempered with notes of caution has characterised the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) Business Forum, held in Johannesburg in the run up to the latest heads of state summit of the three countries.

Business Unity South Africa CEO Jerry Vilakazi. Credit: Paulo Jorge

"The current level of trade amongst the three countries is very low, dismally low, and business is worried about those levels of trade amongst the three countries," Jerry Vilakazi, chief executive officer of Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), told IPS, adding that only two percent of the combined foreign trade of the three states was conducted with each other. BUSA speaks for South African business on matters that concern it nationally and internationally.

Vilakazi said that more needs to be done to help business people in the IBSA nations recognise opportunities for trade and investment. "We need to understand: What are the trade opportunities that we have not leveraged within the three countries?"

To achieve this understanding, Vilakazi believes business people should meet each other more often between the heads of state summits, and hold special sessions dedicated to exploring trade opportunities.

Sceptics claims that IBSA trilateral trade is unlikely ever to reach heights that would challenge existing trade links with the industrialised North, because all three states essentially have emerging economies that produce similar exports.

However, this point of view was rejected by Habil Khorakiwala, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, who argued that there is in fact "a great degree of complementarity".

He also identified four areas where, in his view, there is considerable scope for synergy between the three countries: agriculture and food processing, pharmaceuticals, transport and energy.

Khorakiwala pointed out that India has a "huge energy deficit" while Brazil is a world leader in biofuels, and South Africa has developed innovative methods of producing synthetic fuels from coal. He believes that these differences in the energy sector provide ample opportunity for more South-South co-operation.

Khorakiwala, who also heads up a large pharmaceutical company in India, believes that although all three IBSA members manufacture pharmaceutical products, there is room for trade in this sector because they do not turn out the same products.

He noted, however, that trilateral trade is being seriously impeded by the inadequate transport links between India, Brazil and South Africa. It is notoriously difficult to book a flight between India and South Africa, and equally difficult to find a seat on the daily flights between South Africa and Brazil.

While the airline companies are eager to take advantage of the rising demand for travel between the IBSA countries, governments have been slow to negotiate and approve routes and landing rights. South African Trade and Industry Minister Mandisi Mpahlwa made a commitment to the forum to address this issue.

He also promised to deal with another complaint voiced by several Indian businessmen, concerning difficulties in arranging visas to visit South Africa. They said this had discouraged many of them from exploring business opportunities here.

Mpahlwa said that South-South trade was growing rapidly. He acknowledged, however, that there are still far more barriers to trade between countries of the South than there are for their Northern counterparts.

He also recognised that in many cases it is non-tariff barriers – bureaucracy and regulations – that have the greatest dampening effect on trade between developing nations.

Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Luiz Inácio da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India will sign a number of important agreements when they meet in the South African capital, Pretoria, Wednesday. These accords are stepping stones towards a free trade agreement covering all three countries.

Wednesday&#39s gathering will be the second IBSA summit.

IBSA was established in 2003, amidst hopes that the three regional powers could boost South-South co-operation and trade.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
JOHANNESBURG, Oct 14 2007 (IPS)

Brazil, India and South Africa will intensify their campaign for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council when their leaders meet in the South African capital, Pretoria, on Oct. 17. President Luiz Inácio da Silva of Brazil, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will discuss U.N. reforms and other issues of common interest at the second IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) summit later this week.

All three countries are strong candidates to take up permanent seats on an expanded Security Council, and appear certain to support each other’s efforts to represent their regions. This mutual endorsement will lend considerable weight to their respective bids, but at the same time could alienate them from potential supporters in their own regions.

IBSA was conceived in 2003 to counterbalance the powerful Group of Eight alliance of industrialised countries and to promote South-South cooperation. The three regional powers saw themselves as champions of developing world causes, and they felt that by forging closer ties between themselves they would be able to improve co-operation and trade between their regions.

South Africa is the super power of the Southern African Customs Union and the Southern African Development Community, Brazil is by far the most influential member of the Mercosur trading bloc of South America, and India has the largest economy in southern Asia.

Ahead of the summit, a number of related activities will take place in Sandton, Johannesburg. These include meetings of 14 working groups, the IBSA Woman’s Initiative, IBSA Academics Forum and IBSA Business Forum, as well as a seminar on technology transfer and a number of cultural events.

The 14 working groups representing various government departments cover agriculture, climate change, defence, education, energy, health, technology, social issues, tourism, trade and transport – amongst others.

The three IBSA countries drew together as they share common political objectives, representing emerging nations with similar socio-political goals. All three have rapidly growing economies, while at the same time large proportions of their populations are struggling to lift themselves out of poverty.

IBSA leaders have tried to transform their political and economic parallels into a basis for greater economic co-operation. They argue that working together, they will have greater leverage when negotiating with countries of the North for better trade conditions under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Since IBSA was formed in 2003, trade between the three member states has increased considerably. As ambassador Jerry Matjila, head of the Asia and Middle East section of the South African Department of Foreign Affairs has remarked, "Trade figures are healthy and stand now at between six and seven billion dollars."

He was optimistic that when a new free trade agreement is signed, the prospects for growth would be even greater: "…when we create a common framework (trilateral agreement) then we might well reach our target of ten billion dollars."

In spite of Matjila’s enthusiasm for the future of trilateral trade, a reality check reveals that all three IBSA members still do by far most of their business with industrialised countries.

In WTO trade figures for 2005, Brazil, India and South Africa list the European Union as their number one destination for exports, and the biggest source of imports. None of the IBSA countries features in the lists of the top five trading partners of any of the other member states.

Trilateral trade has grown impressively, but off a very low baseline. The WTO says that from 2004 to 2006, Brazil’s trade with India increased by 170 percent and its trade with South Africa by 86 percent.

While trade between the three countries is likely to carry on growing in the immediate future, it is unlikely to reach the lofty goals set by IBSA leaders, say certain commentators. "All three countries are essentially competitors for export share to developed markets," Dirk Ernst van Seventer, senior economist at Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies, a Johannesburg think-tank, explains.

He says that the IBSA member states will have to make significant sacrifices in their domestic economies in order to make the trading bloc less competitive internally, but more competitive externally. Van Seventer implied that he did not believe IBSA governments would make the short term political sacrifices required to attain the desired long term economic goals.

Da Silva, on his seventh trip to the African continent, is making controversial stopovers en route to the IBSA summit. Brazilian media have been critical of the leader, who has always been outspoken about his commitment to democratic values, yet chose to visit three countries with dubious track records in the practice of democracy: Burkina Faso, the Republic of Congo and Angola.

The Brazilian president will meet his Burkinabé counterpart, Blaise Compaoré, on Oct. 15, the 20th anniversary of the coup d’etat that brought Compaoré to power and saw the murder of his former ally, Thomas Sankara.

Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso and President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola have both held onto power firmly since 1979.

Singh will pay a short visit to Nigeria on his way to the IBSA summit.

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