well, um, after that diversion I went back to https://dennisargall.blogspot.com/
Thursday, 30 January 2020
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
Where will the ground shift in the United States?
Robert Reich, in today's Eurasia Review, has the shortest political article I have ever seen. So good I take the liberty of quoting in full:
You will hear pundits analyze the New Hampshire primaries and conclude that the political “extremes” are now gaining in American politics – that the Democrats have moved to the left and the Republicans have moved to the right, and the “center” will not hold.
Baloney. The truth is that the putative “center” – where the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” of the 1990s found refuge, where George W. Bush and his corporate buddies and neoconservative advisers held sway, and where Barack Obama’s Treasury Department granted Wall Street banks huge bailouts but didn’t rescue desperate homeowners – did a job on the rest of America, and is now facing a reckoning.
The “extremes” are not gaining ground. The anti-establishment ground forces of the American people are gaining. Some are so fed up they’re following an authoritarian bigot. Others, more wisely, are signing up for a “political revolution” to take back America from the moneyed interests.
That’s the real choice ahead.As described at Eurasia Review:
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause's board chairman. His website is: http://robertreich.org
The rise of populist demagoguery: economic destruction, international horrors?
While most of us here in Australia and hopefully most people in the United States are repelled by and anxious at the prospect of possible election of Donald Trump in the United States, Jacek Rostowski who was Poland’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister from 2007 to 2013 has written a valuable commentary at Project Syndicate, in which he links the Trump phenomenon with the the rise of the 'PEKOs':
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/politicians-pose-risk-to-global-stability-by-jacek-rostowski-2016-02#v2yHkU45zrVZTqgF.99
[T]he West is coming under pressure again, including in its own backyard. This time, the challenge is political, not economic: the rise of politicians who relish conflict and disdain national and international law and democratic norms.
I call such leaders “PEKOs,” after the four most prominent examples of their kind: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdoğan (see also) the Polish politician Jarosław Kaczyński (see also) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (see also).
PEKOs do not view politics as the management of collective emotions in order to achieve broad policy goals: faster economic growth, a more equitable distribution of income, or greater national security, power, and prestige. Instead, they regard politics as an endless series of intrigues and purges aimed at preserving personal power and privilege.
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/politicians-pose-risk-to-global-stability-by-jacek-rostowski-2016-02#v2yHkU45zrVZTqgF.99
To link Trump with these is valuable, because much media attention focuses on Trump as an anomaly, not part of a pattern. Rostowki notes that the PEKOs have to face elections and are highly successful electorally, even though those in office are presiding over economic decline.
If we take his argument to the electorate level and put aside Trump, in the USA clearly the success of the Tea Party (and this week their intent to crush the Obama budget) reflects the same kind of success. An appeal to personal prejudices and apprehensions, unadorned by vision of consequences of selfish perspective.
The same pattern has been evident in Australia with the Abbott victory: knucklehead phrase and cut the taxes. In a so-far coherent way Malcolm Turnbull (and also) (and also) has shifted the balance away from that but his appeal is far from connected to policy vision in the hearts of the electorate, which just wearied of embarrassing leadership and has been entranced by good looks and longer sentences. Meanwhile we might sensibly look upon PM Turnbull as more enlightened than previous leaders in serving the 1% or 10% given his own wealth.
Monday, 25 January 2016
To have a strategic direction we have to be a nation
Sounds obvious, but we are in a muddled state here.
In recent years I have become uneasy about chauvinistic displays of the Australian flag by more and more around Australia Day, tomorrow, 26 January. Glad to see all the chauvinalia stacked in the front of local supermarket at half price yesterday. Long may they decline in significance.
I have also been uncomfortable with the rising enthusiasm for war-remembering and marching, with less questioning of commitments we take to go to war and more snarling at suggestions we should lift into the Australian calendar those dreadful wars in Australia, the only wars in Australia, against indigenous Australians, by white invaders.
I am pleased that there exists a radical Australian news-on-line source with whole-Australia including Aboriginal focus and that I am a supporter of it, albeit a very modest supporter. Please read and become a contributor to New Matilda.
I am pleased that people have begun to say they will not sing the Australian National Anthem because it spits on the full history of Australia, with its dirty dark side. because it claims that Australia is "young and free" when in fact it is an old continent with the oldest people and it is far from free in many senses, in my view least free in its entrapment by fantasies about itself and the world. I'm pleased that we've begun to think about all this and I hope we can move forward collectively without great ructure. But there will be quite a lot of ructure and we need energy and determination for it. Though I am 72 and disabled, I will do what I can.
Former Prime Minister John Howard said we should put the origins of the Iraq war behind us, as also he and a conservative phalanx want us to put behind us the real history of Australia with its dirtiness and brutality towards indigenous people.
We cannot. We must not. Though we hit a muddy rock bottom of racism during 2015.
There is a chance that the tide may turn.
A speech last week, embedded below, on how racism is destroying the Australian dream, by experienced journalist Stan Grant, these days indigenous affairs editor of The Guardian, has reportedly now gone viral.
When we begin to deal with the dark history of Australia:—
Sending a fool as ambassador to Washington and having press fawn over him is not a good start.
May we go forward from here to find an identity without which sensible strategy not possible. State Premiers, all but one of them, today called for an Australian Head of State, but we have to gouge much deeper into systems and psyches.
Think upon this: Stan Grant's speech. Let us hope banners are raised and battles won, towards a new kind of Australia, not just the nice multicultural society we used to have but something more robustly, thoughtfully decent, inclusive, respecting and empowered. That's my Australia Day wish.
In recent years I have become uneasy about chauvinistic displays of the Australian flag by more and more around Australia Day, tomorrow, 26 January. Glad to see all the chauvinalia stacked in the front of local supermarket at half price yesterday. Long may they decline in significance.
I have also been uncomfortable with the rising enthusiasm for war-remembering and marching, with less questioning of commitments we take to go to war and more snarling at suggestions we should lift into the Australian calendar those dreadful wars in Australia, the only wars in Australia, against indigenous Australians, by white invaders.
I am pleased that there exists a radical Australian news-on-line source with whole-Australia including Aboriginal focus and that I am a supporter of it, albeit a very modest supporter. Please read and become a contributor to New Matilda.
Former Prime Minister John Howard said we should put the origins of the Iraq war behind us, as also he and a conservative phalanx want us to put behind us the real history of Australia with its dirtiness and brutality towards indigenous people.
We cannot. We must not. Though we hit a muddy rock bottom of racism during 2015.
There is a chance that the tide may turn.
When we begin to deal with the dark history of Australia:—
... then may we be able to go on and deal with our culpability for the shit we have created variously in the middle east and in the rise of terrorism by going into a stupid war in Iraq...
... and then maybe we might be able become a sensible ally of the USA, a thoughtful one, with opinions and wisdoms, if we must be an ally, if the USA remains worthy of our alliance (another subject).
Sending a fool as ambassador to Washington and having press fawn over him is not a good start.
May we go forward from here to find an identity without which sensible strategy not possible. State Premiers, all but one of them, today called for an Australian Head of State, but we have to gouge much deeper into systems and psyches.
Think upon this: Stan Grant's speech. Let us hope banners are raised and battles won, towards a new kind of Australia, not just the nice multicultural society we used to have but something more robustly, thoughtfully decent, inclusive, respecting and empowered. That's my Australia Day wish.
North Korea (DPRK)
Again I mention the references to the importance of empathy over there in the right column (or probably missing if you read this on a phone).
I wrote this below at The Guardian recently, after North Korea's latest nuclear test.
It was interesting that one person commented TLDR. I learned that TLDR means 'too long, didn't read.' No empathy possible without thought. The translater of TLDR had a nice comment:
I wrote this below at The Guardian recently, after North Korea's latest nuclear test.
It was interesting that one person commented TLDR. I learned that TLDR means 'too long, didn't read.' No empathy possible without thought. The translater of TLDR had a nice comment:
- It's important to recognise that North Korea's behaviour is much as one might expect of a country locked in a broom cupboard for over half a century. Also to recognise that in that time North Korea has been subjected to more overt [nuclear] threats than any other country, including the breach in 1974 of US policy never to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons when US Defense Secretary James Schlesinger affirmed the location of nuclear weapons in South Korea aimed at the north.
And to recognise that in the 1990s the US failed to meet commitments agreed with North Korea.
While also recognising that North Korea's attempts at independent technical innovation have more often been ragged than not, and North Korea's ventures in trying to follow China in more open economic relations with the world were terribly timed and they were badly burned especially by the 1979 oil shock... as well as by lousy trade associates.
And recognising that they have tended to fulfil all the dreadful sarcastic characterisations of North Korea by both US military planners and the whole rang of media pundits and commentators. Be careful what you wish for and plan and militarily manoeuvre against. It is plain that the annual summer reinforcement exercises between the US and South Korea are carried on in a manner to antagonise North Korea, to prod North Korean electronic intelligence and cause agitation in the North Korean leadership. While no more under civilian policy control on the US side than was Douglas MacArthur when in 1950 he wanted to carry the Korean War to Beijing, nuking all the way, until Truman yanked him out.
And in this situation, particularly worryingly, recognising that reports of widespread use of crystal meths in North Korea, including by leaders, may be true ... and that in consequence decision making may be coloured to say the least.
In longer history, Korea has had the difficult role of living between China and Korea, with different culture and language more closely related to Finnish and Turkish. A hermit kingdom. Remembering for comparison that up to 150 years ago, in Japan, attempt to leave that country was punishable by death. And that thus there are traditional values deep in the tormented psyche of Pyongyang.
I come back to the 'locked in the broom cupboard of Asia' analogy with which I began. Having had some role in the 1970s in Australian efforts to recognise and open the door to North Korea, under Whitlam's policy of recognising realities, which saw also recognition of Beijing and Hanoi. Against hostility and ridicule from Washington, Seoul and a wider range of countries that should know better. Over and again, fixing the Korean Question has been put aside, left to be seen as soldiers see it, while other issues given priority in Washington... till we get to this appalling point. Getting the demon we caricatured. But still some have to venture into engagement with the broom cupboard. On terms other than castigation and stick waving.
Some effort needs to be made to see the world as seen from Pyongyang if ever we are to resolve issues with Pyongyang. And not with ridicule and sensationalist description as seems the norm in the west. So often we succeed in proving to Pyongyang that opening to the world is very dangerous. Sit for a moment in Pyongyang and try to understand Donald Trump. Consider the wisdom and success of US policy in the Middle East. Consider what has happened in countries recently open to 'democracy' and the west. To liberation, like Libya and Syria and of course Iraq, Afghanistan ... and the USSR. Baby it's cold outside. All our perspectives are distorted, all our hands are dirty. Let's step back from righteous giggling out here. At least setting off a bomb stops the giggling, let's see how those Americans react with shit in their pants: that's what they are thinking in Pyongyang, let's get some respect round here, respect the way they've sought respect out there.
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- 1 2tldr
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0
1
Too lazy, didn't read... Too bad, it was interesting.
Saturday, 23 January 2016
January 2016
I have not written for half a year here. Looking back on what I wrote in most recent posts I am pleased to rediscover what I said, that it still seems to make sense... and almost that there is nothing more to say. Things seem so cut and dried in our political system right now when our Australian Prime Minister has an approval rating of 80%, we know so little about what his policies and capabilities ... and we have an Opposition Leader with popularity below 20% and policies which may be quite good but who will never be seen as a leader.
Russell Brand decided he had no more to say, but his final message was exhausting. I will try to learn from that...
In the right column I quote two fiction writers on the importance of empathy. We need to read and think and put ourselves in the places of others.
We also need to be aware of history. I commented on a recent quality article at The Guardian about Saudi Arabia and the oil outlook as follows (links and some tidying now added). My intention is just to offer one subject among many where we can benefit from deeper understanding rather than just instant manic policy lurch or godlike strategic pronouncement:
Can I offer these thoughts for those who scoff at Saudi princelings.
in 1900 the only member of the British cabinet who was not a princeling was Joseph Chamberlain, the millionaire who moved his politics to the right to become a monster of empire and start the Second Boer War. That he came from Manchester: Manchester that rose to wealth on the backs of poor Irish workers and, earlier on, southern American cotton picking slaves, then empire-cheap workers. From such sprang mighty Immodest Britain.
Can I note as historical record that the beginning of significant oil taxation in the west began with the first oil shock in 1973, when the Saudis organised OPEC and prices went up. That the intention was to restrain consumption but it is evident that consumers are not so daunted by price... until we compare with the effect of negligible restraint in the USA and the persistence there of gas guzzling. Thank you Europe for restraint, taxation, more sensible prices and vehicles. And thank you Saudis for taking a hold of your resources and getting the world on a slightly better course.
Can I mention that the great USA-Saudi-Aramco relationship can be traced to the rivalry between Lawrence of Arabia and Philby Senior, father of Philby Spy, for influence in London. Lawrence was the bigger charmer and sold London on giving first place to relations with Amman and Baghdad. Philby, fuming over his conditions as consul in Jeddah [dip toes here] and annoyed that London had spurned the Saudis, introduced the Americans, which some might say a greater betrayal of England than his boy achieved. But not greater than Lawrence's betrayal of us all, teaching Arabs the virtue of blowing things up. I cite Basil Liddell-Hart's opinion on that, Lawrence's responsibility for legitimising terrorism.
Can I also note that turbulence in Iran can be traced back to British and American intervention. http://www.iranchamber.com/history/coup53/coup53p1.php says that the 1953 coup was the CIA's first success, but we may well consider the long view and the dreadfulnesses since the 1970s especially.
Can I mention to those that scoff at free education and capital expenditure based on oil in Saudi Arabia that Australia's roads and hospitals and schools have been sustained in the last several decades by China and others buying resources.
And note that indicative of our higher intellects we will abandon public schools and hospitals before we abandon road spending. Or consider sensible redistributive taxation. Electing conservative leaders similar to those in the UK and USA who though in the great scheme of things not hugely rich perversely consider it a goddess-given virtue to work wholeheartedly for the 1%.
If people don't begin to see such perspectives then ... Well the world will be as much at risk as if its fate were in the hands of young history-naive children in banks and trading places wherever.
Partly when people are scoffing at Arabia and enthusiastic about bombing we can see race prejudice. Partly we can see the influence of computer games and enthusiasm for swift winner hits. And desire that problems can be solved from a safe distance.
We have a problem in the Australian state of New South Wales that the only planning body is the roads authority: therefore we get world's-best roads proliferating without much tethering to comparative value of expenditure of billions of dollars on this or other purpose, or on other means of transport, or other more modest standards for roads. Similarly in national strategy, we have mainly a defence-oriented, or rather defence-force-focused way of making policy. And for so long as we have members of the defence force in Afghanistan and Iraq it is necessary for governments to mindlessly chant what a wonderful job they are doing to good purpose... though this is really precisely when we should review rigorously. This extraordinary review of the last decade or so by George Soros is a good place to start any thinking about the future.
In Washington the US President exclaims that Australia is the second largest contributor to war against ISIL, read this fodder for Murdoch tabloid. But in Australia we have no debate on this extraordinary contribution, there is just the macho--national-security-bug-squash reflex. There is no discussion of our own direct contribution, by going to war in Iraq in 2003, to precisely the problem of ISIL.
We march to the drum beat, policy subordinated to that of a major ally partner, let no one discuss the decline of American power, the demonstrated inefficacy of military force, the demonstrated fact that our essays in war create monstrous new problems.
In this bright new year, emerging from the summer holiday season in Australia, we do look with horror at the dreadful prospect of a possible Republican president in the United States. In the 1970s when I was counsellor and acting Minister in the Washington Embassy, it was a bit droll to have Prime Minister Fraser visit President Ford and say "I agree with you" and the next year visit President Carter and say "I agree with you"... when obviously these presidents did not agree with each other.
We have an election late this year in Australia too. We enter the election year with a recently-installed-in-party-coup conservative Prime Minister Turnbull with a popularity of 80%, being a man of elegance, eloquence and wealth, about whose policies there is deep uncertainty. We have an Opposition Leader, Labor's Bill Shorten with popularity <20% whose appearances in public are fumbling and excruciatingly embarrassing, and whose policies may be more merciful but ... it is unimaginable to think of him as an inspiring leader, driving us towards whatever future, commanding relations with other countries. So we may expect the nation to continue with negligible mental preoccupation beyond rages of Facebook and Twitter. And the price of petrol. And the smoothness of roads. And the occasional annoyance about people who have no work. And occasional mad paroxysms about people who are different. Government spending will be significantly altered with the commencement of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in 2016-2017... We wait to see from where funds will be taken.
Tuesday, 2 June 2015
neglected
I have been neglecting you dear blog.
Various reasons including desultory health but also standing back and watching the energy so many people put into having opinions and wondering if somewhere there is some mechanism, some magic ingredient to make the utterances of more and more mean anything more than addition to mass brass instrument cacophany. Do a web search for number of books published to see the explosion just in books... but books are a declining element in public writing.
Perhaps this metaphor is apposite because I am writing this in often quite noisy Mexico City.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.
Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of SolitudeThis may have greater meaning now that the internet becomes as noisy as a Mexican street. But do those of us who write to the web write for others, to engage with others? Or to express the urge to utter?
There are a number of my generation who have been active in government policy who write about their past fields, repeating what they said before or with l'esprit de l'escalier what they wished they'd said before. But I do not sense a connect to younger generations who must be the ones to find sensible new international policies.
I'd just recommend that younger generations reject a lot of the silly and dangerous adventurist and posturing baggage of Australian strategic utterances and deployments. We have been shown by Ireland just how slow and backward we are on equality issues.
Generations seem to be getting both dumber and more cautious, their world full of threats, disemployment, apprehension about saying the wrong thing. As I said in a 2004 speech about the Iraq war, the right to speak is reduced, vocabulary is reduced, distorted:
In 1914 and over the years that followed, as in 2001 and years that follow it, we see political leaders create a situation where they must remain consistent with already failed strategy. They must chew up more lives, because to do otherwise risks not just their own positions but the whole posture and shape of state power they have built up to reinforce their strategies. So much so, that rivals... have to speak the same language, have to say yes they will fight the War on Terror, otherwise they themselves fear being political losers because the whole political vocabulary has been distorted by fear and misinformation. We say to ALL political leaders this: we reject the macho thick-skull notion that you can’t change your mind. We will support you in any pursuit of sane new policy directions to other than war.
In Washington in the 1970s and next in writing speeches for the Labor Party in opposition I thought I made some way with the argument that a good ally is one which helps a big friend to see some course of action is unwise, rather than trotting behind. Huh! It seems so blindingly obvious. Why grasp the coat-tail of someone who won't listen. Why imagine you are more than a doormat if all you do is say yes.
Meanwhile my partner and I have been finding happier times visiting family in the USA and going on for several weeks in Mexico. From which two blogs. It's a slog but good for the brain to try to write up a day's travel or a moment's something. And you can change yourself and be fully alive by thinking freely. There is so much to learn and if you don't take it in you won't learn, won't change.
Here are the two current blogs:
Seattle to San Francisco
Mexico
Saturday, 17 January 2015
What does the Australian Labor Party stand for?
 |
| National Archives photo forty years ago when Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department. |
Read it here.
Please.
A sample of the clarity and sense:
"If Labor is to differentiate itself from conservative parties, it needs to express that difference in a clear set of principles which accord with the best of Australians’ values. Otherwise the political contest is reduced to satisfying short-term materialist ‘aspirations’, appeasing vested interests and managing the media cycle. In such a contest, Labor is engaged in a futile struggle, for the Coalition is adept at conveying the misleading impression that it is the ‘natural party of government’, particularly because of its supposed competence in economic management. Joe Hockey’s performance as Treasurer shows that this supposed competence is a myth but conservative commentators still persist with the myth."
That's from part 1. John has also reposted his concluding elegant part 6. The language is clear, the arguments important.
Even conservatives acknowledge that only the public sector can provide some services such as national defence and management of the money supply. In addition, however there are economic functions where private funding or provision is possible but only at high economic cost, with distorted incentives and with serious consequences for equity. These include education, health insurance, energy and water utilities and communication and transport infrastructure. In these and other areas there are market failures for which prudent economic principles require a strong government role in funding or provision. Unless Labor articulates and defends the proper economic role of government – a pre-requisite to improving Australia’s weak taxation base – economic growth will be restrained by inadequate public spending and investment.
Of these investments, the most important is human capital to ensure that people can develop their capabilities so that they can contribute to their full potential through employment, business or unpaid work...
...[Labor] should present its human capital policies in the context of a unified set of principles in infrastructure, education, health, environmental protection, underpinned by principles of investing in capabilities, nurturing individual freedom and autonomy and supporting social inclusion.
Charlie Hebdo, Paris 17; Baga, Nigeria 2000
My entry in this blog on 9 January about Charlie Hebdo and 9/11 may have been gloomier than necessary. OR not gloomy enough. The quality of transient passion whipped by social media was nicely summed up in the New Yorker's daily cartoon 26 December.
John Menadue, at his blog, has written and linked to some good thoughts on Charlie Hebdo.
The Independent carried this report which makes sobering reading about the way the virtual world and political pompery of the developed world has reacted to the massacre of 17 rude people in Paris, while the murder of 2000 innocents in a Nigerian village arouses scant attention, though its strategic consequences are large, much as Ebola has strategic consequences.
As to what to do about Charlie, Russell Brand again makes good sense.
Friday, 9 January 2015
Charlie Hebdo and 9/11
I'm afraid that the global reaction to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity reminds me more than anything else of the mad response to 9/11.
The Guardian has offered an editorial and a commentary urging moderation and thoughtful response and quite quickly shut down commenting with bricks being hurled at the paper. It has highlighted some letters which point to the need to maintain perspective, not least the context of western military violence, including against media, this without offering room for comments.
In my view the mass outpouring of sympathy is one thing, the mass leaning towards retribution is very dangerous, especially as it seems more global and crowd-pushed than 9/11. It will be difficult for governments to be moderate, it will be easier for security perspectives to prevail if people demand hostile responses and if people use the event to tag every Muslim. And easier for far right politics to come to the fore. Along with anarchic leftish activity, the old left being as comfortable as President Hollande is popular in this swirling stream.
And some pillars of progressive editorial virtue are ready to pillory any murmur of doubt about the righteousness of Charlie.
I find myself very uncomfortable finding any measure of agreement with the disagreeable Bill Donohue, given his demeanour and his ugly outpourings generally, but there is a germ of reality in his comment on this event.
While social media and much mass entertainment depends upon and stokes extravagant rudeness and wildness there are things which work towards peace and freedom and things which reinforce intolerance and whip up hatreds. As did many of the cartoons, the wild-child nose thumbing and toilet humour of Charlie Hebdo and your everyday wave of nastiness on social media. It is of the fabric of bullying, of American exceptionalism, of the right to rush into other countries, the right to bash a spouse for disagreeing or just to vilify. Vilification is vilification.
And if we are concerned for war avoidance and enhancement of development and stability in the world, we need to be very concerned about what has happened in the reaction as much as the atrocity. Or more, because if we assert that we are better people, we should try to be better people.
The atrocity in Paris is criminal, not an act of war... of if it is found to have been directed rather than inspired by some known terrorist organisation, then we should look carefully at its effects and our responses have to be deliberate and constructive. If is is an act of war it has been immensely successful in causing political chaos in the enemy. Clausewitz discussed the tendency of war to drive out policy:
And now we have Charlie exceptionalism, driven as wildly as extreme Islamist exceptionalism. And shouting drowns out thinking, war drowns out policy, war in its own exceptionalism, war as a virtue for some industry, war easily made and easily armed, war increasingly unconventional.
---
See how even my local tourist office wants to exploit terrorism-mindedness for business.
I recall, in the wake of 9/11 and at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, in 2003, listening to talkback radio, driving at night, in which people in Sydney were ringing in with all sorts of apprehensions, explaining how their attitudes and behaviours had changed, how they looked at parked cars, how they did not want to stop in strange places in the dark... There is a recent shift in body language, in how people smile or seem to smile less, meet the eye less in negotiating passage through confined spaces in shopping places. I'm thinking it's not just Howard-encouraged self-centredness, it's a depth of irrational apprehension, adding now with economic insecurities with their real base and as fomented by government doomsaying.
The Guardian has offered an editorial and a commentary urging moderation and thoughtful response and quite quickly shut down commenting with bricks being hurled at the paper. It has highlighted some letters which point to the need to maintain perspective, not least the context of western military violence, including against media, this without offering room for comments.
In my view the mass outpouring of sympathy is one thing, the mass leaning towards retribution is very dangerous, especially as it seems more global and crowd-pushed than 9/11. It will be difficult for governments to be moderate, it will be easier for security perspectives to prevail if people demand hostile responses and if people use the event to tag every Muslim. And easier for far right politics to come to the fore. Along with anarchic leftish activity, the old left being as comfortable as President Hollande is popular in this swirling stream.
And some pillars of progressive editorial virtue are ready to pillory any murmur of doubt about the righteousness of Charlie.
I find myself very uncomfortable finding any measure of agreement with the disagreeable Bill Donohue, given his demeanour and his ugly outpourings generally, but there is a germ of reality in his comment on this event.
While social media and much mass entertainment depends upon and stokes extravagant rudeness and wildness there are things which work towards peace and freedom and things which reinforce intolerance and whip up hatreds. As did many of the cartoons, the wild-child nose thumbing and toilet humour of Charlie Hebdo and your everyday wave of nastiness on social media. It is of the fabric of bullying, of American exceptionalism, of the right to rush into other countries, the right to bash a spouse for disagreeing or just to vilify. Vilification is vilification.
And if we are concerned for war avoidance and enhancement of development and stability in the world, we need to be very concerned about what has happened in the reaction as much as the atrocity. Or more, because if we assert that we are better people, we should try to be better people.
The atrocity in Paris is criminal, not an act of war... of if it is found to have been directed rather than inspired by some known terrorist organisation, then we should look carefully at its effects and our responses have to be deliberate and constructive. If is is an act of war it has been immensely successful in causing political chaos in the enemy. Clausewitz discussed the tendency of war to drive out policy:
Were [war] a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation
of violence (as the pure concept would require), war would of
its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment
policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out
of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a
mine that can explode only in the manner or direction
predetermined by the setting. This, in fact, is the view that
has been taken of the matter whenever some discord between
policy and the conduct of war has stimulated theoretical
distinctions of this kind. But in reality things are different,
and this view is thoroughly mistaken.
.... As quoted by Suzanne Nielsen, POLITICAL CONTROL OVER THE USE OF FORCE: A CLAUSEWITZIAN PERSPECTIVE, May 2001, p.16Sadly I think Clausewitz's last sentence quoted above, while relevant to war in the early 1800s, is not relevant now, in a period of absolute and pervasive war, with proliferation of tools of violence and mobility and independence of decision that he could not have imagined. He wrote in the wake of the Congress of Vienna, the great moment in which 'the state' was affirmed as the definition of international life and strategy and power. Presided over by Metternich, hero and role model of Henry Kissinger, whose metternichian approach to international affairs as national security advisor to Nixon, later Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford in the United States, 1968-1976, saw pursuit and promotion of notions of a two or three power world model in which the interests of lesser states were utterly disregarded, creating the basis for many ongoing miserable conflicts which have become more inflamed with the removal of the cold war packaging, direction and savagery. That mindset evident in the embalmed perspectives of such as Edward Luttwak. Mindset that is part of the blood stream of American exceptionalism, Clintonist we-will-be-great-again (see second last para) as well as the now dominant American right.
And now we have Charlie exceptionalism, driven as wildly as extreme Islamist exceptionalism. And shouting drowns out thinking, war drowns out policy, war in its own exceptionalism, war as a virtue for some industry, war easily made and easily armed, war increasingly unconventional.
---
See how even my local tourist office wants to exploit terrorism-mindedness for business.
I recall, in the wake of 9/11 and at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, in 2003, listening to talkback radio, driving at night, in which people in Sydney were ringing in with all sorts of apprehensions, explaining how their attitudes and behaviours had changed, how they looked at parked cars, how they did not want to stop in strange places in the dark... There is a recent shift in body language, in how people smile or seem to smile less, meet the eye less in negotiating passage through confined spaces in shopping places. I'm thinking it's not just Howard-encouraged self-centredness, it's a depth of irrational apprehension, adding now with economic insecurities with their real base and as fomented by government doomsaying.
Thursday, 1 January 2015
China-Australia: Hawke, Tiananmen, cabinet papers 1989
I contributed to discussion at The Guardian of former Prime Minister Hawke's action in 1989 in deciding to grant resident rights to many Chinese in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen incident.
After the usual array of mainly drivel comments, a person with a Chinese name made an earnest comment to which I replied.
After the usual array of mainly drivel comments, a person with a Chinese name made an earnest comment to which I replied.
Most of the Chinese students here never supported the Tiananmen protest, they just used that as an excuse to get PR here. Many years later, some of those actually praise the Chinese government for the crackdown, citing the reason that the crackdown ensured the decades of prosperity to come. Many, once they got their Australian citizenship, made friends with the Chinese embassy and consulates here, actively participated in their functions and started doing business in China. They owe whatever good lives they've got here to the students massacred in Beijing, even though they never joined the protest, and they were never personally at risk of persecution.
I think that such developments will always be the case, Mr Lee. If you look back at the circumstances of the time, and the passionate commitment of this prime minister both to multiculturalism and to relations with China, it was an incisive step. To do nothing then? To undergo a process of examining the claims of every Chinese person here who did not want to go back, one by one? Remember that this Prime Minister, in his speech welcoming Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang to parliament house in 1985, ended with the words: "Our relations with no other country is more important than our relationship with China." I drafted the rest of that speech, he added that ending. His regard for China and for Hu was very high. You are aware, I know, as other may not know, that Hu Yaobang was subsequently removed from office by Deng Xiaoping and dinosaurs for being too open to social change and student views, and his very popular 'sankuan' campaign in 1986, advocating 'generosity, tolerance and relaxation' (good account here). As you know it was Hu's death in 1989 that led to the events in Tiananmen. You also know that Hu's successor as General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, similarly held in high regard by Hawke, met with and struggled to find accommodation with the protesting students in 1989 and you know that after the uproar and martial law, Zhao was placed under house arrest. So it's important to understand that Hawke's judgement was informed by a deep despair at the direction of events in China, but also a determinedly strategic perspective in relation to China and in relation to multiculturalism in Australia.Someone earlier in this discussion suggested the Hawke decision was calculated politically, another said it was just emotional. I recommend that people study the complexity instead.Mr Lee, Mr Hawke went on to continue dealing with China, but he had made an important stand at a critical time. It is surely in Australia's interest that China survive as an intact nation. We have such crappy political management and lousy international international strategy and a seriously declining human rights record that we can hardly preach to anyone, though we continue to do that and in our broad culture see little of Asia other than through the prism of beer glasses in Phuket and Bali.We cannot point fingers constructively, though present leaders, with ten fleas under ten fingers, to use a Chinese expression, have to resort to hitting with heads and chests to maintain their sense of right to bully.China has no foreign example to follow in finding its political way: not the US, not Russia, not India, certainly not Australia. I am conscious of strictures on life in China. At the same time, I do wish people would recognise that what has happened in China in the period since 1978 is the greatest revolution and change in human history, unprecedented in scale and in the increase in the quality of life of people.And all the while, in this country, people choose to be led by fools, can't see their good fortune, grow more selfish (what an example to the Chinese middle classes) and have so little knowledge of history they approach the future rudderless.- My comment on Tianamen in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June 1989, is crudely copied here.
Wednesday, 24 December 2014
influencing the future
In my previous blog entry "Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance" I suggested that the future needs greater engagement and collaboration of people younger than myself (aged 71) for the political health of the nation.
An eminent person who has had a major role in encouraging public debate and sensible policy development wrote privately, with exclamation marks: "But is our generation... not able to influence how we proceed."
I warmly endorse the idea that we should seek to influence how the nation proceeds... and I note that 'our generation' includes an Argentinian pope who seems influential. Gone are the days when policemen looked young and prime ministers looked young, now the pope is a contemporary. The pope has the advantage of being still in office.
I do not see MF's arguments about Australian strategic policy having much influence. There is a lack of connect. There are problems in that parts of the electorate do not forgive him for past events, but those people are not very much younger people. There is a problem, more importantly, in my view, that younger generations do not react well to lecturing from the ancient. We need to avoid the first disease mentioned by the pope in his team pep-talk on 22 December. The public, not least many of those who thought Abbott would bring deliverance, is being shocked away from the shockers who pronounce they've got the answers. So we have to offer something other than gold-plated opinion.
Noely of Yathink shoved me into resuming this kind of writing–starting this blog–a couple of months ago. Specifically she was concerned, in her rage against the betrayers of the present, that people like me, knowing the history and depth of issues, must not remain silent.
I think the answer is in there, in the ability, if willing, of our generation to speak not only of current opinion but with introspection and self-critically about the past. I note however Harold Nicholson's alleged observation that he had never, in the archives of any foreign ministry on the planet, read a record of conversation in which the person taking the record had not won. It's not easy to be frank about the past.
I suspect that having had my career mucked by illness I have had a longer space in which to become independent minded and feel a freedom and a need to speak publicly than some of my generation, with notable wonderful exceptions. Imagine if many more of those who used to argue policy within the walls of government or political apparatus were to bring minds into the open and demonstrate policy argument. Not to demand control of debate–we do not need a gerontocracy–but to show how to throw light on complex issues.
---
What is the prospective political process that we seek to influence.
This week the print edition of Guardian Weekly led its front page with editorial beginning: "In 2014, people power took on the state in a battle for minds and the streets." Despite March in March, people 'in the streets' in Australia are those on the internet. There is a readiness for ideas but haste to conclusions, anxiety for answers and results. Somehow the 24 hour news cycle and the 24 second social media cycle have to mature. And in a wider view, looking at what has happened in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, I have to say, um but... Taking to the streets is only the beginning of a process. If political stability as used to be a mantra of Australian policy towards Asia, depends, as we seldom realised, not on people staying in power but sensible regime change, we should also understand that taking to the streets–or indeed being a parliamentary opposition–is only really effective if there are good policy-making processes present or achievable.
Leonore Taylor's concluding comment in her roundup of 2014 in The Guardian is important:
We are however, habituated in a distinctly British kind of process, in which the man on horseback commanded and told people what to do. That is still the main model of those who grab for power in our parliaments, also the historical expectation of serfly voters. That's not the future: the country has more diversity culturally and the young are declining to register to vote, see this and this. The anger of the young against older generations relates to power as well as money. For our generation to influence, why and to what should anyone listen? That's a serous question, not a rhetorical conclusion. And for the Asian, or Arab, or African, or other Australians of different background, do we show them anything to trust? Must they assimilate in coming into the tent or do they have new ways to offer?
Basil Liddell-Hart, great British military strategist at the end of his life came to the view that it's not what you say you you want or say you are doing it's what you do that has lasting effect
: that the savagery of the Spanish Civil War could be related to the savagery of the Peninsular War with Napoleon from which the word guerrilla arose; and that the terrorist violence arising in the Middle East in the end of the 1960s could be connected to the violence of Lawrence of Arabia. My view, as expressed in writing to the then Australia Foreign Minister in 2003 (no reply) was that:
An eminent person who has had a major role in encouraging public debate and sensible policy development wrote privately, with exclamation marks: "But is our generation... not able to influence how we proceed."
I warmly endorse the idea that we should seek to influence how the nation proceeds... and I note that 'our generation' includes an Argentinian pope who seems influential. Gone are the days when policemen looked young and prime ministers looked young, now the pope is a contemporary. The pope has the advantage of being still in office.
I do not see MF's arguments about Australian strategic policy having much influence. There is a lack of connect. There are problems in that parts of the electorate do not forgive him for past events, but those people are not very much younger people. There is a problem, more importantly, in my view, that younger generations do not react well to lecturing from the ancient. We need to avoid the first disease mentioned by the pope in his team pep-talk on 22 December. The public, not least many of those who thought Abbott would bring deliverance, is being shocked away from the shockers who pronounce they've got the answers. So we have to offer something other than gold-plated opinion.
Noely of Yathink shoved me into resuming this kind of writing–starting this blog–a couple of months ago. Specifically she was concerned, in her rage against the betrayers of the present, that people like me, knowing the history and depth of issues, must not remain silent.
I think the answer is in there, in the ability, if willing, of our generation to speak not only of current opinion but with introspection and self-critically about the past. I note however Harold Nicholson's alleged observation that he had never, in the archives of any foreign ministry on the planet, read a record of conversation in which the person taking the record had not won. It's not easy to be frank about the past.
I suspect that having had my career mucked by illness I have had a longer space in which to become independent minded and feel a freedom and a need to speak publicly than some of my generation, with notable wonderful exceptions. Imagine if many more of those who used to argue policy within the walls of government or political apparatus were to bring minds into the open and demonstrate policy argument. Not to demand control of debate–we do not need a gerontocracy–but to show how to throw light on complex issues.
---
What is the prospective political process that we seek to influence.
This week the print edition of Guardian Weekly led its front page with editorial beginning: "In 2014, people power took on the state in a battle for minds and the streets." Despite March in March, people 'in the streets' in Australia are those on the internet. There is a readiness for ideas but haste to conclusions, anxiety for answers and results. Somehow the 24 hour news cycle and the 24 second social media cycle have to mature. And in a wider view, looking at what has happened in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, I have to say, um but... Taking to the streets is only the beginning of a process. If political stability as used to be a mantra of Australian policy towards Asia, depends, as we seldom realised, not on people staying in power but sensible regime change, we should also understand that taking to the streets–or indeed being a parliamentary opposition–is only really effective if there are good policy-making processes present or achievable.
Leonore Taylor's concluding comment in her roundup of 2014 in The Guardian is important:
... the electorate can barely remember a political leader who tried to level with them to conduct a bigger public conversation, an actual discussion of detailed policies and their consequences. The question for 2015 is, will either of the present major party leaders dare to try?Perhaps 'our generation' can contribute in some ways here if we bring our skills and habits of private policy out into the open. Openness has to start and influence is surely only going to be achieved via openness.
We are however, habituated in a distinctly British kind of process, in which the man on horseback commanded and told people what to do. That is still the main model of those who grab for power in our parliaments, also the historical expectation of serfly voters. That's not the future: the country has more diversity culturally and the young are declining to register to vote, see this and this. The anger of the young against older generations relates to power as well as money. For our generation to influence, why and to what should anyone listen? That's a serous question, not a rhetorical conclusion. And for the Asian, or Arab, or African, or other Australians of different background, do we show them anything to trust? Must they assimilate in coming into the tent or do they have new ways to offer?
Basil Liddell-Hart, great British military strategist at the end of his life came to the view that it's not what you say you you want or say you are doing it's what you do that has lasting effect
: that the savagery of the Spanish Civil War could be related to the savagery of the Peninsular War with Napoleon from which the word guerrilla arose; and that the terrorist violence arising in the Middle East in the end of the 1960s could be connected to the violence of Lawrence of Arabia. My view, as expressed in writing to the then Australia Foreign Minister in 2003 (no reply) was that:
...it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension. [Shortly after going to war in Iraq the government had ironically launched an expensive media campaign against domestic violence, that is, against the presumption by anyone of the right to bash up others because they think they are right and have a right.]Whether my generation can help get us into a better ethical dimension remains to be seen.
Thursday, 18 December 2014
Malcolm Fraser: end the alliance
In the January-February 2015 edition of the American journal The National Interest, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser sets out his arguments for ending the Australia-United States alliance. The introduction of the argument is below. It is a vision statement deserving attention, but at the present time it seems unlikely to draw much political support in Australia. More the pity. It is a sensible case.
My own argument has tended to be that within the alliance we can be a better ally by having a more independent-minded voice and arguing sense to the United States. This is an concern I have expressed for a long time, and which I believe is very feasible. But even that kind of mature adjustment within the alliance seems elusive in a situation where the present Australian government is lame-brained and capable at best of marching up and down whinging its own importance and shaking its fists ridiculously at too many other governments, while the alternative government seems dedicated to simpering sniffling anxiety to hide behind this Prime Minister whose capacity and judgement they should vigorously question.
The question with Malcolm Fraser's vision statement is how on earth do we get to consider it?
At the core is the seeming inability of younger generations (I am 71, it really isn't my job) to collaborate to find new Australian national political identity. There is a modicum of support for The Greens, who offer the only existing institutional base around which new perspectives might coalesce, but The Greens have a somewhat self-isolating purist approach which limits their prospects.
A great deal of the problem of the future, of the Australia of younger generations, must rest with Fraser's successor as conservative prime minister, John Howard, who so thoroughly endorsed and encouraged perspectives of self interest and led the way now being followed vigorously by Howard's successor on the conservative side, Abbott, in destruction of the infrastructure of community.
I think it's here, back in here, inside national affairs, that the change process must begin and have wider effect. And it seems to me that change has to come relatively from the conservative side of politics. Certainly Labor on the notional left has more progressive policies which benefit community, but they are shy of articulating strategy, stuck in the madness of hoping to slip into government on the basis of Abbott's hopelessness, perhaps also hamstrung because the union movement at the party's core serves not only those on modest incomes, but also those whose incomes have become massive. Things may change as more and more jobs are shed in the construction and manufacturing industries in the next several years. There will not however then arise a mass of working class passion, but a rage among displaced affluent middle class. There is a timidity in the electorate at large, a timidity born of obsession with consumption, high mortgages and working and private lifestyles that gives people a very narrow focus on self-interest and notions of economic management. (Along with a simplicity of American(Hollywood)-oriented cultural values.) Even young people seem unthinkingly to say "the Liberals are better at economic management" when there is so much evidence that they are making a muck of it.
What is needed is a coalition of younger people, if they exist, of the kind of persuasion of the old 'wet' side of the Liberal Party, the party of Baume and Chaney and McPhee and the like, to come out of hiding and start spanking the madness of the domestic policies of the present government. So long as the arguments of Fraser and Burnside and the like speak mainly to international and refugee issues, the battle is not even engaged; rather, they are placed on the outer. The main battle is over economics and the place of community. Whether we serve the economy or the economy serves community.
The next debate must also embrace other cultures in Australia, which must be encouraged to enter the mainstream. Another book there...I note that Moslem men who bring their families to my seaside town on summer holidays articulate passionate and reasoned hostility towards the United States and the Australian alliance in private conversation. These arguments need to get to them too, so they see that there are sensible thinkers in the Anglo community.
....So I don't think that the laudable arguments below will not get traction until the debate front goes domestic too.
This is the opening of Malcolm Fraser's essay in the January-February 2015 edition of The National Interest:
My own argument has tended to be that within the alliance we can be a better ally by having a more independent-minded voice and arguing sense to the United States. This is an concern I have expressed for a long time, and which I believe is very feasible. But even that kind of mature adjustment within the alliance seems elusive in a situation where the present Australian government is lame-brained and capable at best of marching up and down whinging its own importance and shaking its fists ridiculously at too many other governments, while the alternative government seems dedicated to simpering sniffling anxiety to hide behind this Prime Minister whose capacity and judgement they should vigorously question.
The question with Malcolm Fraser's vision statement is how on earth do we get to consider it?
At the core is the seeming inability of younger generations (I am 71, it really isn't my job) to collaborate to find new Australian national political identity. There is a modicum of support for The Greens, who offer the only existing institutional base around which new perspectives might coalesce, but The Greens have a somewhat self-isolating purist approach which limits their prospects.
A great deal of the problem of the future, of the Australia of younger generations, must rest with Fraser's successor as conservative prime minister, John Howard, who so thoroughly endorsed and encouraged perspectives of self interest and led the way now being followed vigorously by Howard's successor on the conservative side, Abbott, in destruction of the infrastructure of community.
I think it's here, back in here, inside national affairs, that the change process must begin and have wider effect. And it seems to me that change has to come relatively from the conservative side of politics. Certainly Labor on the notional left has more progressive policies which benefit community, but they are shy of articulating strategy, stuck in the madness of hoping to slip into government on the basis of Abbott's hopelessness, perhaps also hamstrung because the union movement at the party's core serves not only those on modest incomes, but also those whose incomes have become massive. Things may change as more and more jobs are shed in the construction and manufacturing industries in the next several years. There will not however then arise a mass of working class passion, but a rage among displaced affluent middle class. There is a timidity in the electorate at large, a timidity born of obsession with consumption, high mortgages and working and private lifestyles that gives people a very narrow focus on self-interest and notions of economic management. (Along with a simplicity of American(Hollywood)-oriented cultural values.) Even young people seem unthinkingly to say "the Liberals are better at economic management" when there is so much evidence that they are making a muck of it.
What is needed is a coalition of younger people, if they exist, of the kind of persuasion of the old 'wet' side of the Liberal Party, the party of Baume and Chaney and McPhee and the like, to come out of hiding and start spanking the madness of the domestic policies of the present government. So long as the arguments of Fraser and Burnside and the like speak mainly to international and refugee issues, the battle is not even engaged; rather, they are placed on the outer. The main battle is over economics and the place of community. Whether we serve the economy or the economy serves community.
The next debate must also embrace other cultures in Australia, which must be encouraged to enter the mainstream. Another book there...I note that Moslem men who bring their families to my seaside town on summer holidays articulate passionate and reasoned hostility towards the United States and the Australian alliance in private conversation. These arguments need to get to them too, so they see that there are sensible thinkers in the Anglo community.
....So I don't think that the laudable arguments below will not get traction until the debate front goes domestic too.
This is the opening of Malcolm Fraser's essay in the January-February 2015 edition of The National Interest:
IT IS time for Australia to end its strategic dependence on the United States. The relationship with America, which has long been regarded as beneficial, has now become dangerous to Australia’s future. We have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war. Even if America were the most perfect and benign power, this posture would still be incompatible with the integrity of Australia as a sovereign nation. It entails not simply deference but submission to Washington, an intolerable state of affairs for a country whose power and prosperity are increasing and whose national interests dictate that it enjoy amicable, not hostile, relations with its neighbors, including China.
As painful as a reassessment of relations may be for intellectual and policy elites, there are four principal reasons why one is long overdue. First, despite much blather about a supposed unanimity of national purpose, the truth is that the United States and Australia have substantially different values systems. The idea of American exceptionalism is contrary to Australia’s sense of egalitarianism. Second, we have seen the United States act in an arbitrary, imprudent and capricious fashion. It has made a number of ill-advised and ill-informed decisions concerning Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Third, at the moment, because of U.S. military installations in Australia, if America goes to war in the Pacific, it will take us to war as well—without an independent decision by Australia. Finally, under current circumstances, in any major contest in the Pacific, our relationship with America would make us a strategic target for America’s enemies. It is not in Australia’s interest to be in that position.
meanwhile in Syria... and Sydney
This is a valuable account of life among jihadis by Theo Padnos, American would-be journalist and student of Arabic and Islam, for 20 months a prisoner of the Al Nusra front, fighting ISIS on the ground. The realities of a 'normal' brutality, of expectation of martyrdom among young men who will preach or bully and then ask about meeting single European women.
While there is evidently no oeganisational link between this world and the tragic figure who took hostages in a Sydney cafe this week (variously described straightforwardly here, by New Matilda's Chris Graham here and incisively critically by Russell Brand here), his mind would seem cut from the same cloth as the jihadis described by Padnos.
We do well to step away from our conventional perspectives if we are to understand what this whole jihadi business is. Noting that too much of our perspectives in the west are from the remoteness of satellites, drones, fighter aircraft and wishful thinking and amateur ideological assertions of political leaders seeking to simplify and prance... or just fall into line. I commend Russell Brand for his lively interpretation of the way the issues are perverted and made more difficult by much government and media action and interpretation.
(Also see Russell Brand in this video on poverty and the virtue of spending money currently used for bombing the Middle East on building better societies)
Clint Watts, writing in Eurasia Review, offers interpretation of Padnos's story, in particular that given the fluidity of loyalty among jihadis, the bombing of one or the training of one to fight another has only destructive effects, especially in the absence of any plan of dealing with the Assad regime in Damascus. We stand, by current western policies, to inherit only wider and more dangerous jihadism, more savvy in attacking the west, better armed and skilled.
Again in Eurasia Review, this article by Nicola Nasser, an Arab journalist on the Palestine West Bank, describes or asserts Israeli support and sanctuary for Al Nusra and collaboration in attacks on the Syrian government. Israel's interest being in weakening and diverting the strength of its Syrian enemy away from Israel. I am reminded that several years ago in Sydney a Lebanese Moslem man asserted to me that Israel now pursued a policy of encouraging war between Moslems. There is more news of Israeli air strikes accessible with this search,... and about Israel and al Nusra here. See Haaretz for an Israeli perspective.
Friday, 12 December 2014
The complex issues associated with Ukraine's nuclear energy industry and export of urainium from Australia to Ukraine
The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said he wants to supply uranium to the Ukraine for its power industry. He said this in the same moment as expressing a desire to visit Ukraine to see established a memorial to the passengers of the downed Malaysian Airlines flight in eastern Ukraine. My initial reaction was towards the continuing absurdity of this prime minister in his obsession with issues he somehow thinks make him a hero, but which in reality make him look unsuitable for office to many Australians. Many people, I am sure, share my visceral reaction towards the notion of exporting uranium to the Ukraine. It seems desirable, however, to do some serious analysis.
END PARENTHETICAL BIT... (another book)
Ukraine (in parallel with Kazakhstan, also former soviet republic) was only the second country to abandon nuclear weapons, after South Africa.
Australia's uranium export policies have, since the 1970s, with their slow evolution, maintained focus on nuclear safeguards rather than nuclear safety. This reflecting our obligations under the NPT. (Another book needed to discuss safety, but my general position is that while the technology is not bad, the problem is the absence of any evidence that any human society can be durable enough to handle operation and waste management issues for as long as needed.)
In terms of the NPT and the general drift of Australian uranium export policy, Ukraine gets a tick.
But the situation is much more complicated than that and it would, to use technical terms, be bone-headed crazy to approve uranium export on just that basis.
As another legacy from the USSR, Ukraine produces half its power needs from nuclear power stations. Ukraine consumes twice as much energy as Germany per capita. The other half of Ukraine's energy needs come from oil and gas supplied by Russia. Pipelines for supply of Russian oil and gas to western Europe run through Ukraine.
Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant whose accident in 1986 was the worst ever nuclear power station disaster, is in Ukraine. Other nuclear power stations in Ukraine are of similar age and similar design quality and maintainability as Chernobyl #4.
The political history of Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR has been to say the least complex. In the course of this, Russia has a number of times exerted pressure on Ukraine through oil supply and cut-off, usually in circumstances where Ukraine is not paying its bills.
The current agreement on continued oil and gas supplies from Russia to Ukraine also tangles with agreement to continue Russian supplies to western Europe. This is the soft underbelly to all the talk of sanctions against Russia. There may be a point when substitution may be possible away from Russian supply of western Europe, indeed, the United States has recently become an oil exporter and would enjoy that. As noted in an earlier blog entry however, the driving down of the international oil price recently by Saudi Arabia and the United States not only weakens Russia and its efforts in Ukraine and Syria, it also has grave consequences for the United States and world economy: world price now around $70 a barrel, break even for junk bond financed shale oil producers in the US around $90.
Supplying uranium to Ukraine would solve no issues, the idea is adequately described in The Australian's headline "Uranium talks thumb nose at Vladimir Putin" ... perhaps a linguistic step upwards from shirtfronting, but a very very bad approach to international relations. Yes, it's elementally of the same cloth as Abbott's conflict-promoting approach the national politics, but it's very dangerous and frivolous internationally.
It would seem likely that any sale of uranium to Ukraine would mean delivery to a United States entity most likely Westinghouse, who have been selling fuel rods to Ukraine. So the income stream from any sale of Australian uranium to Ukraine would mainly be to the enricher and fuel rod fabricators in the United States. Note this in reading any advocacy for this sale.
—————————
So, to cut this short (it really needs a book or two, submit any questions in comment section) how should we score Ukraine as a customer for uranium?
This perhaps notionally simple question brings together a complex of difficult issues.
Here are key background factors:
Ukraine was for a very long time a republic within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR] which disintegrated in 1991. At that time there were some four and a half thousand Soviet missiles aimed at the United States located in the Ukraine. Almost two thousand of these were transferred to the USSR in 1991-2, and the remainder became the subject initially of trilateral agreement between the US, Russia and Ukraine in January 1994 and then the Budapest Memorandum of December 1994 between those three plus the adherance of other nuclear weapon states notably United Kingdom. This declaration gave assurances of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, in a context of the remaining nuclear weapons on Ukraine's territory being transferred to Russia and being dismantled, and Ukraine acceding to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state (NNWS). It is a political statement, not a treaty. In addition to the Memorandum there was annexed to it a declaration: Annex II - see the text here. I encourage you to read that. Russia argues that the continuing recruitment of former Soviet allies into NATO and placement of new defence systems in such countries was contrary to the spirit of the declaration. Please also read former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's appeal for sanity on this subject.
The NPT recognised as nuclear weapon states those states which at the time the treaty was signed already possessed nuclear weapons: the USA, USSR, UK, France and the People's Republic of China. These countries undertook not to transfer control or capacity to develop nuclear weapons technology to NNWS. A new nuclear safeguards regime was established under the treaty to prevent diversion of nuclear materials to non-peaceful purposes. There was then, in the text of the NPT a great emphasis on the right of NNWS to have access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. To enable which NNWS had to enter into safeguards arrangements of a new kind as set out in the IAEA's InfCirc 153.
PARENTHESIS: When I returned to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs from an overseas posting in January 1970 I found a great deal of agitation among my colleagues about whether Australia, having signed the NPT, would ratify. The treaty was to come into force (see Article IX in text at link above) when forty countries had ratified it. Signature is a step governments take when they put their name on a new treaty. Ratification of treaties takes place under constitutional processes of different countries. This is a debated issue in Australia (see this paper) but in 1970 all it required was the will of the executive government to do the job, no consultation with the parliament. There were substantial lobbies in Australia for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The decision to ratify was taken at the last moment in March 1970. Someone else can research how the US brought pressure on Australia then, or what security guarantees Australia sought.
Had we not signed before ratification we could have acceded later, but that would have a smell of recalcitrance and leave the farm gate open for the raging advocates of Australian possession of nuclear weapons. A space had been cleared in the commonwealth owned Jervis Bay Territory for a Canadian designed CANDU reactor, which was easier to operate as it did not require enrichment of uranium (a difficult and expensive process of increasing the proportion of the isotope U235 over the predominant U238), reaction being developed by using heavy water rather than light water, meaning a need to separate the rare deuterium, H20 with an extra neutron on, easier than the separation of the heavy and toxic uranium isotopes. The nuclear advocates within and around the government would also have known that this reactor could provide a sneaky route to acquisition of weapons usable plutonium, something that only entered political consciousness in the USA in the mid-1970s and especially with the arrival of the Carter Administration and the appointment of Joe Nye as Deputy Undersecretary of State for Nuclear Non-Proliferation. When urgent steps were taken to stop Pakistan, Iran and South Korea getting CANDU reactors and plutonium separation facilities.
 |
| Few people using the car park at the end of the Jervis Bay Road know that it was the site cleared for a nuclear power station |
Ukraine (in parallel with Kazakhstan, also former soviet republic) was only the second country to abandon nuclear weapons, after South Africa.
Australia's uranium export policies have, since the 1970s, with their slow evolution, maintained focus on nuclear safeguards rather than nuclear safety. This reflecting our obligations under the NPT. (Another book needed to discuss safety, but my general position is that while the technology is not bad, the problem is the absence of any evidence that any human society can be durable enough to handle operation and waste management issues for as long as needed.)
In terms of the NPT and the general drift of Australian uranium export policy, Ukraine gets a tick.
But the situation is much more complicated than that and it would, to use technical terms, be bone-headed crazy to approve uranium export on just that basis.
As another legacy from the USSR, Ukraine produces half its power needs from nuclear power stations. Ukraine consumes twice as much energy as Germany per capita. The other half of Ukraine's energy needs come from oil and gas supplied by Russia. Pipelines for supply of Russian oil and gas to western Europe run through Ukraine.
Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant whose accident in 1986 was the worst ever nuclear power station disaster, is in Ukraine. Other nuclear power stations in Ukraine are of similar age and similar design quality and maintainability as Chernobyl #4.
The political history of Ukraine since the collapse of the USSR has been to say the least complex. In the course of this, Russia has a number of times exerted pressure on Ukraine through oil supply and cut-off, usually in circumstances where Ukraine is not paying its bills.
The current agreement on continued oil and gas supplies from Russia to Ukraine also tangles with agreement to continue Russian supplies to western Europe. This is the soft underbelly to all the talk of sanctions against Russia. There may be a point when substitution may be possible away from Russian supply of western Europe, indeed, the United States has recently become an oil exporter and would enjoy that. As noted in an earlier blog entry however, the driving down of the international oil price recently by Saudi Arabia and the United States not only weakens Russia and its efforts in Ukraine and Syria, it also has grave consequences for the United States and world economy: world price now around $70 a barrel, break even for junk bond financed shale oil producers in the US around $90.
Supplying uranium to Ukraine would solve no issues, the idea is adequately described in The Australian's headline "Uranium talks thumb nose at Vladimir Putin" ... perhaps a linguistic step upwards from shirtfronting, but a very very bad approach to international relations. Yes, it's elementally of the same cloth as Abbott's conflict-promoting approach the national politics, but it's very dangerous and frivolous internationally.
It would seem likely that any sale of uranium to Ukraine would mean delivery to a United States entity most likely Westinghouse, who have been selling fuel rods to Ukraine. So the income stream from any sale of Australian uranium to Ukraine would mainly be to the enricher and fuel rod fabricators in the United States. Note this in reading any advocacy for this sale.
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So, to cut this short (it really needs a book or two, submit any questions in comment section) how should we score Ukraine as a customer for uranium?
- NPT and nuclear safeguards compliance — 10/10
- Nuclear industry safety history — 1/10
- Current state of nuclear plant — 1/10
- Stability of regime, assurance of viable state control, war risks — 1/10
- Contribution to general arms control and conflict resolution — 0/10
- Solution of an energy problem — 2/10
- Prospect of being paid — 4/10
- Australian national interest — 0/10
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