I am beginning a new post category, Sublime News, in which I collate and comment on news bits and pieces that I find interesting over the past week. Whatever I write over the week will be automatically published every Saturday, 12pm (California time). This first post will be exceptional in that it will cover a longer prior timespan.
1. Rising tensions over the Falkland Islands between Argentina and the UK, following the discovery of oil in the region and Britain’s decision to start exploration drilling. Contrary to media hype, war is not imminent; even though Britain, like the US, suffers from “imperial overstretch” and a military-industrial “death spiral”, it is still far, far more powerful than Argentina. The Royal Navy has the world’s second best “power projection” capabilities (amphibious, logistics, aeronaval). Argentina’s military power, never impressive to begin with, has only stagnated since 1982.
On the other hand, this episode does represent two important things. First, the geopolitical factors that constitute negative feedback loops to the resource extraction sector that supports the global industrial system. For instance, as oil production peaks, we can expect an accelerating scramble for the remaining reserves. This may yield short-term benefits for the stronger Powers that will emerge victorious in the neo-colonial gunboat wars of the future, but will accelerate the decline at the global level. Second, we find that most Latin American countries expressed their support for Argentina, even including regional rivals like Brazil and Chile. This illustrates the rising prominence of the “World Without the West” / “Clash of Civilizations” paradigms that will replace neoliberal internationalism in the coming age of scarcity industrialism.
However, I must emphasize that these are incipient trends, not current realities. For now, the overwhelming fact on the ground is that 1) Argentina is weak and 2) it can only count on rhetorical support from its neighbors, not military (Brazil has no particular interest in allowing Argentina to become a potential challenger to its regional hegemony). However, many things can change within a decade. As I wrote earlier, Britain faces a panoply of problems – fiscal, debt, energy, separatism, etc – that will critically undermine its international power, including the ability to sustain the current scope of its armed forces. (In this respect, it is essentially a microcosm of the United States). Meanwhile, though it has plenty of its own problems, Argentina has shown signs that it has outgrown out of its traditional fiscal problems. Following six years of very fast growth, it was little affected by the 2008 economic crisis, its public finances are not unduly bad by global standards, and looking further ahead, its agricultural and natural resource wealth stand it in good stead for the coming age of scarcity industrialism.
If Argentina pursues a rational military procurement and modernization program (amphibious ships, cruise missiles, modern diesel subs, UAV’s, etc) - and assuming it is not once again derailed by the mismanagement and corruption that made it into a unique specimen of a country that went from “developed” to “developing” status after 1950 – then the military balance may swing sufficiently wide in its favor as to enable it to contemplate a successful military solution to the Las Malvinas issue by 2020.
2. Shortly after penning an anti-guvmint screed, Joe Stack crashed his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a symbolic copycatting of 9/11. Though legally an unequivocal terrorist (as defined by the PATRIOT Act), he is fast becoming a folk hero amongst the Tea Partiers.
Though I don’t care to comment much on the ethical and moral issues, this does shed light on pertinent current trends. Foremost, the growing disillusionment with the System, the increasing perception by the citizenry that the United States is becoming a “hypertrophied state” hijacked by connected elites, who use it to cushion themselves with corporate socialism while pushing capitalism on the rest. In terms of the Belief Matrix, the country is beginning to lose belief in itself (“rejection of tradition”) and move away from rational-liberalism towards the illiberal populism and patrimonialism that is the common refuge of many post-collapse societies. Also recalls this line from Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies:
According to RM Adams, “By the fifth century, men were ready to abandon civilization itself in order to escape the fearful load of taxes”.
Would this action have any real effect? Rehashing the arguments of proponents of the “propaganda of the deed”, Baudrillard would argue that it would have a profound symbolic impact.
The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system’s violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals.
But in this case Trotsky’s analysis is the more persuasive.
But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.
3. Yushenko goes out with a provocative bang, making Galician nationalist / Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera into a “Hero of Ukraine”. With Tymoshenko’s challenge to the election results dismissed, the new Ukrainian President is now Yanukovych, who represents the Russophone, pro-Russian eastern and southern regions and Donbass oligarchs. This should come as no surprise to S/O readers, given that I predicted Yanukovych would win the second round from the beginning. (Pic h/t @ Ukrainiana).
According to the election results, the final tally was Yanukovych 49%, Tymoshenko 45%. This was stunningly similar to the result I predicted from analyzing which other candidates’ supporters would vote for Mr. Blue or the Gas Princess.
Adding up these figures, Yanukovych gets 50% of the votes, whereas Tymoshenko gets 46%.
The only question now remaining is how fast Yanukovych will now move Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, perhaps starting with entry into the Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan customs union.
4. The Airborne Laser (ABL), mounted on a modified Boeing 747, finally succeeded in “killing” a low-tech Scud missile in testing. Yes, not very impressive so far. The range was short and the second test failed anyway. But the regular mechanical breakdowns of the first WW1 tanks, far from invalidating the concepts of armored warfare, were instead portents of the future. What we are seeing is nothing less than the dawning of the age of automated laser weaponry.
5. Its official. Russia’s population grew by 23,300 souls in 2009, for the first time since 1995. Though the rate of natural increase remained slightly negative for Russia as a whole (the Siberian and Urals Federal Regions actually saw positive natural population growth for the first time in 19 years), this was more than compensated for by immigration.
This improvement was in large part thanks to an impressive increase in the life expectancy, which rose to 69 years in 2009 – almost as high as in 1963-68 (before the alcoholism epidemic) and 1986-91 (Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. Birth rates also increased by 3%, hysterical Russophobe predictions of a crisis-induced “abortion apocalypse” to the contrary.
This of course should come as no great surprise to S/O readers, since back in mid-2008 my projections indicated that:
- Russia will see positive population growth starting from 2010 at the latest.
- Natural population increase will occur starting from 2013 at the latest.
- Russia’s total life expectancy will exceed 68 years by 2010 and reach 75 years by 2020.
Now according to my models, in the case of a total fertility rate of 1.5 (i.e., the same as in 2008, when it was 1.49, so that is actually discounting any further increases) and assuming a very modest life expectancy rise (74 years by 2025 – it is already close at 69), and 300k annual migration (currently around 200-250k), “the population size will remain basically stagnant, going from 142mn to 143mn by 2023 before slowly slipping down to 138mn by 2050″. Of course it is also entirely possible that Russia’s LE will converge to developed-country levels quicker and that the TFR will stabilize at 1.7-1.8, in which case its population may grow back to around 150mn by 2025.
Thus far, the reality of Russia’s demographic turn-around is actually exceeding both Rosstat‘s and my own most optimistic forecasts (not to even mention “pessimists” like Eberstadt, Steyn, etc). No wonder that pundits are beginning to read and propagandize the gist of my articles, e.g. from Mark Adomanis at True Slant (h/t poemless).
1) Its population is in steep decline and chronically afflicted by alcoholism.
These are actually two very separate issues, but what the hell, why not, we’ll combine them. As I’ve argued before Russia’s population decline has actually abated rather dramatically. What is Russia’s demographic future? No one really knows (predictions are hard, especially about the future!), but it stands to reason that it’s not nearly as bad as Black, Eberstadt, Steyn, Feshbach, and all the other nameless neocon apparatchiks, most of whom have made crude linear projections decades into the future, think. And alcoholism in Russia is not some eternal unchanging constant: the country’s current high rates of alcoholism are the result of a trend that started in the 1960’s, not in prehistory. Alcoholism in Russia was and is largely a reaction to bleak socioeconomic conditions and the easy availability and cheapness of alcohol,not the result of some quasi-mythical Russian predilection for booze and penchant for self destruction. Will this trend be reversed? Perhaps! Perhaps not! The truth is no one really knows, but to pretend that Russians are utterly passive in the face of some all-powerful and immutable force known as “alcoholism” is as condescending as it is stupid.
Now the next question – should I now rest on my laurels, or should I continue trying to refute the demographic doomers who continue to insist that Russia’s population will fall to 128mn within two decades?
6. Goldman Sachs helped Greece conceal its deficit spending shenanigans by providing it with loans disguised as currency trades. Can this get any dodgier? This also introduces an interesting philosophical exercise – who’s more responsible, the bank(st)ers or the politicos? (The drug pushers or the drug abusers?). And of course Greece is far from alone. The real elephant in the room is the United States.
7. Russian Twitter hero and unabashed patriot, Dmitri Rogozin, proves that Western diplomats are girly men.
8. Two stories that represent the two most important trends of our world systems – shortage of Rare Earth Metals could thwart innovation (limits to growth) and 10 profound innovations ahead (technological progress). If we could find some way to figure out which trend is the stronger and more stable one, you could make a good guess as to the meaning of the 21st century.
9. What blogging is all about… (h/t Lou). 
10. Yulia Latynina, Russian liberal par excellence (that is, in the anti-democratic 19th century sense of “liberal”), on why Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous. At least she is brave enough (or stupid enough?) to say what many liberasts think, but don’t have the guts to do so outright. H/t Sean.
Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in Sunday’s presidential election — not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler — once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader. Unfortunately, only wealthy people are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner. Poor people elect politicians like Yanukovych or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
When the Orange Revolution hit Ukraine five years ago, the people arose in a united wave and did not allow themselves to be deceived by the corrupt elite. That elite had reached an agreement with the criminals and oligarchs of Donetsk to make a minor criminal, who could not string two sentences together, the successor to former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
And by far my favorite bit:
Can you imagine U.S. voters putting a leader in the White House who is a puppet of the ruling elite and criminal clans?
Socialist democrat Allende = genocidal maniac Hitler? The same US whose regulatory bodies are captured by Wall Street, which confirmed itself as an oligarchy with the recent removal of campaign funding limits for corporations? (I can just about see a few post-peak oil decades down the line Exxon oligarchs sending American conscripts to fight national liberation movements in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria).
Really, why the fuck does anyone act surprised that Russia’s limousine liberals – part disconnected elitist, part neo-Bolshevik, part plain insane – only have the support of 3% of the Russian population?
PS. More inane rantings from Latynina. It appears her disdain for facts extends well beyond Russian politics.
“The global warming is an invention of the global bureaucracy,” says one of Russia’s leading journalists and authors, Yulia Latynina, who in most of her publications exposes controversial activities by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“The IPCC are unable to explain to me why the 10th century and the 16th century in Europe were far warmer than it is today. They are unable even to tell what the weather tomorrow is going to be like, that is doing something that can be verified,” Latynina says in a weekly magazine. “One simple question – why do they think that warmth is bad? Did the human race drown or perish in the 10-13th centuries?”
The global warming threat, she believes “is one of the brightest illustrations of the Global Bureaucracy’s ideology, a phenomenon that is still largely embryonic. But if the current trend continues, it may spell the end of the Western civilization, freedom and progress in science and engineering.”
11. Back in the real world, the news from the climate front, as usual, gets worse by the month if not the week.
Organizers of the recent climate conference in Copenhagen sought, unsuccessfully, to forge agreements to limit global warming to 2 degrees C by the end of the century. But even an increase that small would cause deadly harm. And far greater damage is likely if we do nothing.The numbers — and there are many to choose from — paint a grim picture. According to recent estimates from the Integrated Global Systems Model at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the median forecast is for a climb of 5 degrees C by century’s end, in the absence of effective countermeasures. That forecast, however, may underestimate the increase. According to the same M.I.T. model, there is a 10 percent chance that the average global temperature will rise more than 7 degrees C by 2100, and a 3 percent chance it will climb more than 8 degrees C. Warming on that scale would be truly catastrophic. Scientists say that even the 2-degree increase would spell widespread loss of life, so it’s hardly alarmist to view the risk of inaction as frightening… (The M.I.T. model estimates a zero probability of the temperature rising by less than 3.6 degrees by 2100.)
You bet. A rise of more than 5 degrees C will result in a global collapse of food production and the almost certain demise of industrial civilization. At above 7 degrees C, we may well be looking at human extinction as “zones of uninhabitability” begin to overspread much of the world.
An adaptability limit for large warmings–are we accounting for it?
Steven Sherwood(1), M Huber(2)
(1) Yale University, Department of Geology and Geophysics, New Haven, CT, USA
(2) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USAThe consequences of large warmings (>4C), which on current trends look increasingly likely in the 21stcentury if not the 20th, have received little attention. It seems to be widely assumed that humans can adapt to any amount of warming, on the basis that humans live in such a wide variety of climates now. We show that when examined in terms of the peak value of the wet-bulb temperature (Tw), which ultimately governs the possibility of transfer of metabolic heat to the environment, the world’s present-day climates are far less variable than one might think based on mean temperature. A warming of only a few degrees will cause large parts of the globe to experience peak Tw values that never occur today; 7C would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses (periods when the shedding of metabolic heat isthermodynamically impossible); and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today’s population. It is unknown how much of our present 7-10C cushion we can live without before experiencing significant problems, making it difficult to draw conclusions about more modest climatechanges, but the limits themselves rest squarely on basic thermodynamics. These inferences stand in contradiction to damage functions currently used in economic cost-benefit calculations. In these, climate damages increase with global mean temperature according to a polynomial form, and remain moderate (typically <30% of GDP) even for 10C or more despite the implication that most of the surface wouldbecome uninhabitable by humans and most livestock during the warm season…
12. Meanwhile, AGW deniers continue spreading their malicious lies and propaganda over the Internet like a horde of virtual locusts. See IPCC errors: facts and spin at Real Climate for a thorough debunking of their mendacious drivel.
13. Something a bit more encouraging. Old dude beats up pathetic wannabe gangsta on a public bus.
14. An intriguing attempt to rank national naval strengths from Strategy Page – Naval Forces of the World. Unsurprisingly, the US completely dominates with more than half the global naval power. The only other navies of real strength are considered to be the UK, Russia, Japan, China, and France. I more or less agree with this analysis, excpet to note that 1) the importance of specifics – whereas the UK has much better “power projection”, Russia’s strategic naval forces are far ahead and second only to the US, and 2) China’s naval power is growing rapidly, it will soon overtake Japan if it hasn’t already, and by 2020 may even be ahead of the US.
15. China sells $34.2bn of US treasury bonds, indicating its loss of confidence in the credibility of any US promises to ever rein back on its fiscal overstretch. The only nations still buying up US Treasuries are geopolitically-aligned ones (e.g. Japan) and private investors, but the endgame for Pax Americana has begun and the next global credit or geopolitical shock may finish it. Meanwhile, Tokyo welcomes Chinese destroyer. Perhaps this doesn’t mean anything important, or perhaps it is just the beginning of Japan’s road towards bandwagoning with China.
16. Andrey Ternovskiy, a Russian, is behind the site ChatRoulette which anonymously pairs you up with random Internet strangers via webcam. Sounds like the perfect hangout for weirdos… and it is. Wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re interested in live gay porn.
17. Turkish Foreign Minister Calls for Eurasian Union (Leos Tomicek). Turkey is a rising power with energy, cultural, and political interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and it will be freer to expand once NATO / the West starts becoming irrelevant.
18. Economic catastrophe in Latvia, previously hailed as a “Baltic tiger”. Latvia’s Economy Contracts Almost 18 Percent in Q4 2009 (Ed Hughes). From his Facebook updates:
“Latvia’s GDP fell by 17.7% year on year in the last quarter of 2009,meaning the economy has now shrunk by more than 25 percent in twoyears. The IMF projects another 4 percent drop this year and predictsthat the total loss of output from peak to bottom will reach 30percent. This would make Latvia’s loss more than that of the U.S. Great Depression downturn of 1929-1933.”
“The consequence of this strong recession in Latvia – more and moreLatvians are leaving in search of work elsewhere, while fewer andfewer young people feel confident enough to have children, making thelong term future of the country even more uncertain.”
There follows a graph of Latvia’s birth rates plummeting by around 8% in 2009 y/y, with the rate of decline accelerating to 12% by December 2009.
Perhaps a timely reminder of the dangers of too much economic openness, the (prior?) dogma of our times? In comparison, Russia’s GDP fell by 7.9% and Belarus’ GDP actually grew 0.2% in 2009, and both saw continuing demographic improvements.
19. On my reading list:
The Lucifer Principle – Nietzschean book by Howard Bloom. (h/t Lou).
The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima, my new hero, whose ritual suicide consitutes the epitome of artistic holism.
The Rediscovery of the Mind – Cognitive science is ”the ongoing research program of showing Searle’s Chinese Room Argument to be false”, and it’s not hard to see why.
Towards a New Socialism – Haven’t started reading this year, but looking forwards to it since it’s connected with many of my own ideas about how advances in cybernetics and computer science is making central planning feasible, even for highly complex and advanced economic systems.
Getting ready to post reviews of The Peak Oil Books, When the Rivers Run Dry (Pearce), and The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil).
Related posts:
On #1: Maybe the best thing the Brits could do is work out a “timeshare” on the Falklands, where Argentina gets nominal sovereignty, and the island’s inhabitants get certain special rights and privileges (sort of like the deal with the Aland Islands vis-a-vis Finland). In exchange for this “handover,” the Brits can get special deals on any oil found in the region.
Maybe not perfect from either side’s POV; but sure beats fighting another war.
Interesting article Anatoly
‘Can you imagine U.S. voters putting a leader in the White House who is a puppet of the ruling elite and criminal clans?’
She really is dumb. The only people who could get their heads around comparing Salvador Allende to Hitler are the very people who think that the White House incumbent IS an Islamo-fascist Stalinist crook. Who’s been elected by a coastal elite.
Incidentally, no word on Dubai? I think it COULD be meaningful in that Britain’s media-political establishment has been slavishly toeing the neo-con line for years even though it has never been popular (and ironically enough is most unpopular amongst traditional leftists and middle Englanders). Yet by now it must be painfully obvious to even the thickest Brit neocon that neither the USA nor Israel are pals of Britain. (Big surprise: both nations fought Britain for independence).
Could this result in Britain actually doing something clever? Could we try to realign relations with India and Latin America?
I doubt it: sadly it looks like our political media will be dominated by ever stupider voices. That’s why I don’t like making predictions: by all logic we should change. It’s just the world isn’t logic and we probably won’t: if only the idiots will respect the status quo then only idiots will be subsidised by media owners.
I don’t think it’s fair to write off Britain. We still have a respectable GDP, birth-rate and military. Independence movements sprung up when the EU was strong but the PIIGS implosion will probably stall these. Whilst I think Scottish independence would be a good idea within a strong Europe, the demographic and economic problems of Germany and France will probably make this a less viable possibility.
But whilst we should be moving on politically and strategically, I think we are trapped in quicksand of last decade’s received wisdom.
Dubai… didn’t really have anything clever or substantial to write about them. Perhaps next issue. I don’t think it is very significant, just the consequences of hubris in a single city-state, with no obvious wider ramifications (unlike Greece, say).
I’m not writing off Britain. However, I am fairly certain that in the next decade it will see a big relative decline, both on the global stage and relative to France / Germany. I’m not implying that even the likes of Argentina will overtake it in absolute power; however, I think it is safe to say that Britain will no longer feel as duty-bound to commit resources to defending far-flung and ultimately irrelevant imperial holdovers like the Falklands.
If Argentina manages the discipline needed for a modest military buildup, such that the regional military balance shifts in its favor from Britain (not exactly hard to do, even for a middling Power like Argentina, given Britain’s skeletal military presence there – e.g. it has just 4 Typhoons on the Falklands), then a settlement along the lines suggested by Scowspi becomes possible, even likely.
@Anatoly
Thanks for your reply. With Dubai I was referring to the assassination. If it does turn out that Mossad copied Brit passports, then I think it MIGHT be the straw that breaks the camels back.
Israel/Palestine is probably the one political issue I hate discussing the most. Largely because people respond by telling you their feelings, which I frankly couldn’t give a shit about. But anyway, I do think that the defenders of Israel adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach to propaganda, not seeing that much Zionist propaganda is unappealing to the Brit mindset and paradoxically I think the pro-Zionist stance of many Brit papers ultimately harms the country’s reputation.
Of course this is entirely hypothetical. Britain’s political outlook is marked by astounding apathy far more than any ideology. But I do seem to notice a resurgence of one-nation Toryism on the internet and the isolationist left has come out well from the Iraq fiasco and the ongoing unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
And on the note about the Falklands, I really don’t think Britain would hesitate to use military force to reclaim them. If nothing else, both of our political parties voted for war in Iraq. Subsequently they would look like quislings if they didn’t support a war no matter how ridiculous for a few KM of windswept crags.
As something of an ‘Argentinophile’ if there is such a word, I am sorry that relations are so tense because I think that Britain needs friends in Latin America. But our political class are so narrow-minded that I don’t think they can see beyond Europe, the Middle East and the USA.
> the country’s current high rates of alcoholism
Did you actually research this or you just assume it to be true? Because, you know, “experts” agree: “Russia’s dying out!”
As I recall, the statistic shows that there are plenty of countries where alcohol consumption is higher than in Russia, for example, Austria, Germany, France.
On the other hand, the use of illegal drugs is on the rise (perhaps 400%+ increase in illegal drugs production in the US-controlled Afghanistan has something to do with it). The number of smoking people is also high in Russia, which is also one of the main contributing factors.
Widespread alcoholism is a generally accepted fact about modern Russia that can easily be confirmed by visiting it.
Though you are correct that according to official statistics alcohol consumption is higher in some nations like Germany than in Russia, this does not take into account that 1) a lot of Russian consumption, perhaps as much as half, is “off the books”, e.g. bad quality moonshine, 2) 70% of it is in the form of hard spirits, and 3) most importantly, it is prevalent to consume alcohol in days-long binges as opposed to moderating it over time. Add all these together and you get a far worse alcohol problem than in any West European country and the main explanation for Russia’s abnormally low life expectancy relative to wealth / education levels.
Erm, the main point of all my Russia demography posts was that “expert” predictions of Russia dying out are unrealistic and vastly exaggerated. But pointing that out is not equivalent to denying real problems, of which alcoholism certainly is one of the biggest ones.
I like the new news in brief section.
I was thinking you could give it a name like SNews (Sublime News) but that sounds like snooze.
I liked the Russian liberals comment about electing a criminal gang. Just look at Obama’s economic advisors. Where did all that bail out money go?
I would agree though that the structure/system of government has to change for Russia to modernise and adapt for just now it is just not up to the task.
Surprised you didn’t mention the Mossad assassination in Dubai. I don’t know how much publicity it is getting over in the US but at least on the internet (I don’t watch TV) it has gotten a lot of attention.
I think British MI6 knew in advance and tipped off Dubai authorities as bad PR for the Israelis to discourage them and their considerable influence in the US with the Neocons backing Palin pushing for war against Iran.
What we have here is a European-US divide a full blown war against Eurasia or war against Iran.
I predict they will be an incident next year that will set up a war against Russia for the 2012 elections just like they try to do with Georgian war in 2008 and Russia is falling right into the trap.
Well, if Argentina becomes a more attractive country to be a citizen of (as the UK becomes less), and if Argentina tries seduction rather than menace, the islanders might vote to become Argentinians.
The Falklands War was triggered by the decisions of an exceptionally bloody-minded military junta that was immune from any sort of civilian oversight. For all of the Kirchners’ issues with good governance, Argentina is a country where the subordination of the military to a civilian government is entrenched. Why should the Falklands Anglo-Argentine dispute be any more likely to end in war than the Gibraltar Anglo-Spanish dispute?
(Also, Chile and Brazil are Argentina’s rivals? Historically, yes, but now?)
First, I should note that we come from different IR schools. You seem to subscribe to liberalism / democratic peace theory (DPT). I believe that geopolitical realism and cultural passions are the more powerful forces.
I agree that in the current circumstances, when the Argentine military is pretty laughable, the prospect of war is unrealistic. However, a decade down the line I expect there to be 1) vastly intensified competition for oil, energy, and mineral resources, 2) a pretty big drop in Britain’s global military power due to its current fiscal and imperial overstretch, 3) a general retreat of liberal values throughout the world, and 4) the Argentinians will presumably want Las Malvinas back as badly as ever.
Now I’m not one of those realist extremists who completely dismiss DPT. It does have some merit, though it should be stressed that there have always been small-scale exceptions, e.g. The Anglo-Dutch Wars, The War of 1812 – i.e. short, sharp, low-casualty commercial wars. So even if both Britain and Argentina remain liberal democracies, the possibility of a limited conflict over oil resources ought not to be excluded.
Hi!
“I agree that in the current circumstances, when the Argentine military is pretty laughable, the prospect of war is unrealistic. However, a decade down the line I expect there to be 1) vastly intensified competition for oil, energy, and mineral resources, 2) a pretty big drop in Britain’s global military power due to its current fiscal and imperial overstretch, 3) a general retreat of liberal values throughout the world, and 4) the Argentinians will presumably want Las Malvinas back as badly as ever.”
They always have wanted it; the claim to the Malvinas is still in the Argentine constitution. They probably will continue to want it: in a SF setting I’m involved in, Nuevas Malvinas is the heartland of Argentine settlement on the fertile garden world orbiting Alpha Centauri A.
The Falklands War was a major break from Argentian’s past behaviours, and not representative of its past or future decisionmaking: not only had the country not fought an actual war for a century, but it only happened at all because Argentina was run by a bloodthirsty yet incompetent military dictatorship that wanted to distract the citizenry from the disappearances with a bit of empire-building. Argentina under the junta was much more willing than at any time in its recent history to use the military to deal with its internal and external problems, as the nearness of the Argentine-Chilean war in 1978 suggests. The junta’s actions were essentially unprecedented in 20th century Argentine politics, and without the Argentine military actively working for war there would never have been a Falklands War–Britain wouldn’t have started one.
That doesn’t apply now. Argentina’s a more-or-less stable democracy with a military thoroughly under civilian government control, with the period of the junta seen almost universally as an abhorrent break from tradition, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to veer away from that, yes, but more importantly I don’t think that Argentina’s going to have a government run by the likes of Videla for the foreseeable future. The ongoing Argentine policies of gathering international support while promising Falklanders a sweet deal seem most likely in this context. Most Latin American states seem to support Argentina’s claims to the Falkands, sure, but I suspect this coalition organized for one purpose might be difficult to transform into regional support for Argentina in the case of a second Falklands War, especially if there’s another break from Argentine political culture that puts an anomalously militaristic regime in charge. Brazil’s the emerging regional superpower and it has renounced past militarism more thoroughly than Argentina–look what happened to the arms industry–and I don’t think it’d be interested in a second conflict.