The Malthusian Wing of the Party in Power: When Will They Speak Up? By Robert Bradley
Master Resource, Mar 01, 2009
“The economic recession/depression is good, not bad. It lowers our carbon footprint in countless ways. It saves resources. It throttles back industrial society to sustainable levels that were exceeded long ago. Let the downturn continue to get us out of the growth mentality. Let rising expectations fall! Less is more!”
When will some prominent Left environmentalist slip and say something like this? No doubt the tongues are tied right now, but as time goes on it will be harder to keep the Malthusians muted.
Consider Paul Ehrlich’s advice for families, which can be extended to the economy as a whole:
Once a cooperative movement had gained momentum, it could also engage in an enormous campaign to re-educate other consumers and to change their buying habits. The pitch might be: ‘Try to live below your means! It will be good for your family’s economic situation, and may also help to save the world.’
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 149.
The literature is chock full of anti-growth, anti-industrial sentiment, including statements from John Holdren, Obama’s confirmed top science advisor, who said (with Ehrlich):
Only one rational path is open to us—simultaneous de-development of the [over developed countries or] ODC’s and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDC’s), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.
- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, “Introduction,” in Holdren and Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 3.
and:
A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . . Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political.
- John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.
Al Gore has blessed a “wrenching transformation of society,” which does not bode well for a future of economic prosperity:
Minor shifts in policy, marginal adjustments in ongoing programs, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change—these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 274.
Lifestyle changes are required, notes Amory Lovins:
Governments and their constituencies in rich countries should begin to contemplate seriously and to decide upon the changes in lifestyles that energetic and other constraints will soon impose—changes that may well be desirable on other grounds.
- Amory Lovins, World Energy Strategies: Facts, Issues, and Options (New York: Friends of the Earth International, 1975), p. 127.
Adds Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute:
Global climate change will not be slowed with a simple law or regulation. More than any other environmental problem, climate change is woven into the very structure of today’s societies. . . . Major changes in technology, infrastructure, and even life-style are needed to slow it.
- Christopher Flavin and Odil Tunali, Climate of Hope: New Strategies for Stabilizing the World’s Atmosphere (Washington: Worldwatch Institute, 1996), p. 53.
Laws, laws, more laws
What might some of these lifestyle changes entail. Paul Ehrlich, the mentor of John Holdren, has been explicit:
Laws may well be passed strictly limiting the number of appliances a single family may possess. Learning to survive with only one TV set will, for instance, be simpler than learning to live on a planet made uninhabitable by an unending quest for material possessions.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 69.
Many of the conservation measures temporarily undertaken when the mini-crisis was in its acute stage—lowered speed limits, car-pools, reset thermostats, etc.—should be instituted on a permanent basis. . . . In the long run, energy should be made expensive, especially for large users, as an incentive to conservation.
- Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Riverside, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 48.
The large automobile should disappear entirely, except for some taxis, and these could be designed to run economically.
- Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Riverside, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 223.
Except in special circumstances, all construction of power generating facilities should cease immediately. . . . Power is much too cheap. It should certainly be made more expensive and perhaps rationed, in order to reduce its frivolous use.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be A Survivor (Rivercity, Mass.: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 72.
Unnecessary lighting in offices and factories should . . . be banned.
- Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Riverside, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 226.
It should immediately be made illegal to construct a building with windows which cannot be opened.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be A Survivor (Rivercity, Mass.: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), pp. 73-74.
Completely frivolous uses of power, such as gas yard lamps that are permanently lit, should be outlawed altogether.
- Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Riverside, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 227.
Who, for instance, benefits from the garish use of electric signs that deface the nighttime sky of our cities? Many of then, of course, carry the kind of deceptive advertising that fuels our frenzied economy. . . . Advertising signs on restaurants, motels, and the like could be shut off by law at night when the establishment was not open. If everyone had to do it there would be little, if any, competitive loss.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 73.
Making Fun of Consumption
Somewhere shortly after the Second World War the people of the United States made a colossal blunder. . . . TVs, boats, hi-fi’s, driers, disposals, and a myriad other items appeared on the lists of ‘musts.’ Suddenly we needed two or three of everything, and a new model of each every year.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), pp. 58-59.
Cars are for transportation, and proper use of the media could once again persuade American men to get their sexual kicks out of sex (not reproduction) instead of a series of automotive sexual surrogates. Restriction of families to ownership of single small cars also would put some pressure against over-reproducers. Our stress on the world’s supply of nonrenewable resources would be greatly alleviated by limiting the fuel consumption of the cars and by designing them for recycling.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 67.
First everyone had to have a small black-and-white TV set, then a large screen, then color, then a VCR, then a Dolby stereo sound system, then a VCR with a Dolby stereo sound system. Soon anyone who can’t download any of 514 European, Asian, and cable television channels into his TV’s quadraplexed digital memory over the cellular modem in his moving car, transmit it to his home while moving, and play it back for his kids later than night will probably feel deprived.
- Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, New World New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 56.
Over the longer term, America’s transportation system could be redesigned to minimize the need for automobiles and trucks and maximize the use of feet and bicycles for local transport and trains and aircraft, i.e. public transport, for long distances.
- Paul Ehrlich and Richard Harriman, How To Be a Survivor (Rivercity, Mass: Rivercity Press, 1971, 1975), p. 68.
It is not a stretch of the imagination to think that the carbon police will be need to enforce all of the carbon laws that would be needed in an Ehrlich-Holdren-Gore-Lovins-Flavin world. Will civil libertarians catch on and turn against the “Limits to Growth” wing of today’s dominant political party?
Monday, March 2, 2009
China’s Naval Force Projection off Somalia
China’s Naval Force Projection off Somalia. By S.Rajasimman
Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, March 02, 2009
Call it China’s new military diplomacy or emerging naval strategy. A Chinese naval fleet arrived in the Gulf of Aden off the Somalian coast on January 6, 2009 to carry out the first escort mission against pirates. On February 18, 2009, in an efficient display of its growing naval capabilities, the fleet completed its twenty first mission (the largest held so far in the series) of escorting merchant ships in this region. Ten Chinese merchant ships were part of the convoy while three foreign ones, including Hermione from Germany, Viking Crux from Singapore and Princess Nataly from Cyprus requested protection and were escorted by the Chinese fleet. The fleet sailed from a port in Sanya city of China’s southernmost island province of Hainan on December 26, 2008. The fleet comprises two destroyers (Haikou and DDG-169 Wuhan) and a supply ship (Weishanhu) from the South China Sea Fleet. The fleet carried about 800 crew members, including 70 soldiers from the Navy’s special force, and was equipped with ship-borne missiles and light weapons.
It is timely to explore this issue given the Chinese motivation in conducting naval operations far away from the mainland for the first time. There seems to be a general consensus among many Chinese military and non-military experts that circumstances were favourable for projecting force at such a distance. Firstly, China has gained enough experience in long distance naval force deployment due its frequent military exchanges with other countries. The logistics problem of supply and refuelling was no longer seen as a constraint. While on its way to the Somalian coast, the fleet displayed its supply and refuelling capability as it entered the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits. The supply ship Weishanhu refuelled the two destroyers with several hundred tons of oil, an operation that an official described as “highly efficient”.
The fact that two Chinese ships, a fishing vessel and a Hong Kong-flag ship with a 25-member crew, were seized by Somalian pirates in October 2008 does not qualify as a potential reason for this long distance naval deployment. These hijacks occurred off the Kenyan coast, and the total number of hijacks of Chinese vessels so far constitutes only 0.7 per cent of the total passages. Therefore, the decision may be due to other factors over and above the one involving immediate Chinese interest. Prior to deployment, China explicitly believed that any action in the Gulf of Aden must be carried out within the “United Nations Framework”. In his address to the United Nations on December 16, 2008 China’s Vice Foreign Minister had said that “China is seriously considering sending naval ships to the Gulf of Aden and waters off the Somali coast for escorting operations in the near future.” The minister also added that China appreciated the efforts made by other Navies to curb the problem of piracy. This needs to be contrasted with the Chinese government’s stand on growing intervention based military strategies. The China Defence White Paper, 2000 stated that the UN role in securing international peace was on the decline because of unilateral actions taken by some countries outside the United Nations Security Council framework (e.g. the Kosovo intervention). In the above mentioned address to the UN by the Vice Foreign Minister, he had said that the UN should also attempt to resolve the root causes of piracy in Somalia. The Chinese believe that piracy is a direct consequence of the domestic politico-military-economic condition within Somalia. The transitional federal government in place in Somalia had worked up the power ladder with American support and displaced the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which still holds huge mass support especially in Southern Somalia. This is indicative of US efforts in the war against terrorism. Furthermore, in the absence of multilateral operations under the UN, Somalia may in the future become a scene of unilateral intervention by the US and Britain or both. Piracy thus seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. However, Chinese behaviour is inconsistent with its political rhetoric at least at the level of policy. On June 24, 2007 C.N.O.O.P signed a deal with Somali President Abdullah Yusuf to explore the northern Puntland region for oil. This deal was signed in a hurry prior to the Somali government framing the National Oil Rules (NOR). Chinese firms backed by their government seem to be willing to take economic and political risks which western firms would shy away from. Any unilateral military action by western powers would affect Chinese interests in the region. Like the anti-satellite test in early January 2007, China seems to project its capabilities as part of its extending diplomacy without breaking any rules.
China, which became a permanent member of the UN Security Council only in 1971, did not engage in peace keeping operations until 1989. In 1989, it began its first exploratory foray into UN peacekeeping missions, sending non-military observers to join the UN Namibia Transitional Period Aid Group overseeing a general election. In 1990, China dispatched military observers to the Middle East in support of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO). One reason for this transition was the Tiananmen Square incident, when the People’s Liberation Army was caught on the wrong foot with its own people. This incident stimulated the need for the PLA to conduct more people-oriented activities such as disaster relief, domestic security, and other measures, but also, very importantly, participation in UN peacekeeping operations. This transition has now made China the largest contributor by a permanent member of the UN Security Council (in close competition with France).The second reason is the PRC’s concern over sovereignty and its violation through intervention. China was not supportive of UN mandated Blue Helmet operations due to its national experience. During the Cold War, the United Nations had formally sanctioned the use of force only once and China itself was at the receiving end during the UN-mandated operations in the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. With the Cold War world order overthrown in this era of intense economic interdependence, China’s concern seems to be reorienting. The third reason could be that Chinese concerns over Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang, which, if left uncontrolled, could become cases for intervention.
Another important motivation behind the decision to deploy a Chinese naval force off Somalia could be the fact that this involves the African continent where Beijing has substantial economic investments. Chinese leaders have been frequenting Africa since 2000. As a leading importer of crude oil, China depends on Africa for 25 per cent of its oil needs, which is projected to go up to 40 per cent by 2020. It has granted extensive debt packages to Africa on a no strings attached basis and its bilateral trade is expected with the continent is expected to touch US $100 billion by 2010. Suffice it to say that China’s stakes and advantages in Africa are high. The overall expected output of oil by Chinese firms in Africa is 78 million tons (presently the output is 40.3 million tons). China also depends on Saudi Arabia for its crude oil imports and has huge markets in Europe. Chinese merchant ships will have to necessarily frequent the waters off the Somali coast.
Given the country’s limited force projection capability, China’s action is consistent with its overall policy strategy of creating an international order that is different from the Cold War order. Securing international peace and development is currently an objective of China’s foreign policy. The current international environment will only help China achieve its strategic and developmental goals. It will enhance its image as a responsible power in the twenty first century and give it the experience to conduct naval operations far from its shores.
A few decades ago, while articulating new ways to use the National Defence Force (NFD), Deng Xiaoping’s had stated that “When our country is developed and more prosperous, we shall have a bigger role to play in the world.” After almost three decades this seems to be coming true.
S.Rajasimman is Research Assistant at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.
Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, March 02, 2009
Call it China’s new military diplomacy or emerging naval strategy. A Chinese naval fleet arrived in the Gulf of Aden off the Somalian coast on January 6, 2009 to carry out the first escort mission against pirates. On February 18, 2009, in an efficient display of its growing naval capabilities, the fleet completed its twenty first mission (the largest held so far in the series) of escorting merchant ships in this region. Ten Chinese merchant ships were part of the convoy while three foreign ones, including Hermione from Germany, Viking Crux from Singapore and Princess Nataly from Cyprus requested protection and were escorted by the Chinese fleet. The fleet sailed from a port in Sanya city of China’s southernmost island province of Hainan on December 26, 2008. The fleet comprises two destroyers (Haikou and DDG-169 Wuhan) and a supply ship (Weishanhu) from the South China Sea Fleet. The fleet carried about 800 crew members, including 70 soldiers from the Navy’s special force, and was equipped with ship-borne missiles and light weapons.
It is timely to explore this issue given the Chinese motivation in conducting naval operations far away from the mainland for the first time. There seems to be a general consensus among many Chinese military and non-military experts that circumstances were favourable for projecting force at such a distance. Firstly, China has gained enough experience in long distance naval force deployment due its frequent military exchanges with other countries. The logistics problem of supply and refuelling was no longer seen as a constraint. While on its way to the Somalian coast, the fleet displayed its supply and refuelling capability as it entered the Indian Ocean through the Malacca Straits. The supply ship Weishanhu refuelled the two destroyers with several hundred tons of oil, an operation that an official described as “highly efficient”.
The fact that two Chinese ships, a fishing vessel and a Hong Kong-flag ship with a 25-member crew, were seized by Somalian pirates in October 2008 does not qualify as a potential reason for this long distance naval deployment. These hijacks occurred off the Kenyan coast, and the total number of hijacks of Chinese vessels so far constitutes only 0.7 per cent of the total passages. Therefore, the decision may be due to other factors over and above the one involving immediate Chinese interest. Prior to deployment, China explicitly believed that any action in the Gulf of Aden must be carried out within the “United Nations Framework”. In his address to the United Nations on December 16, 2008 China’s Vice Foreign Minister had said that “China is seriously considering sending naval ships to the Gulf of Aden and waters off the Somali coast for escorting operations in the near future.” The minister also added that China appreciated the efforts made by other Navies to curb the problem of piracy. This needs to be contrasted with the Chinese government’s stand on growing intervention based military strategies. The China Defence White Paper, 2000 stated that the UN role in securing international peace was on the decline because of unilateral actions taken by some countries outside the United Nations Security Council framework (e.g. the Kosovo intervention). In the above mentioned address to the UN by the Vice Foreign Minister, he had said that the UN should also attempt to resolve the root causes of piracy in Somalia. The Chinese believe that piracy is a direct consequence of the domestic politico-military-economic condition within Somalia. The transitional federal government in place in Somalia had worked up the power ladder with American support and displaced the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which still holds huge mass support especially in Southern Somalia. This is indicative of US efforts in the war against terrorism. Furthermore, in the absence of multilateral operations under the UN, Somalia may in the future become a scene of unilateral intervention by the US and Britain or both. Piracy thus seems to be only the tip of the iceberg. However, Chinese behaviour is inconsistent with its political rhetoric at least at the level of policy. On June 24, 2007 C.N.O.O.P signed a deal with Somali President Abdullah Yusuf to explore the northern Puntland region for oil. This deal was signed in a hurry prior to the Somali government framing the National Oil Rules (NOR). Chinese firms backed by their government seem to be willing to take economic and political risks which western firms would shy away from. Any unilateral military action by western powers would affect Chinese interests in the region. Like the anti-satellite test in early January 2007, China seems to project its capabilities as part of its extending diplomacy without breaking any rules.
China, which became a permanent member of the UN Security Council only in 1971, did not engage in peace keeping operations until 1989. In 1989, it began its first exploratory foray into UN peacekeeping missions, sending non-military observers to join the UN Namibia Transitional Period Aid Group overseeing a general election. In 1990, China dispatched military observers to the Middle East in support of the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO). One reason for this transition was the Tiananmen Square incident, when the People’s Liberation Army was caught on the wrong foot with its own people. This incident stimulated the need for the PLA to conduct more people-oriented activities such as disaster relief, domestic security, and other measures, but also, very importantly, participation in UN peacekeeping operations. This transition has now made China the largest contributor by a permanent member of the UN Security Council (in close competition with France).The second reason is the PRC’s concern over sovereignty and its violation through intervention. China was not supportive of UN mandated Blue Helmet operations due to its national experience. During the Cold War, the United Nations had formally sanctioned the use of force only once and China itself was at the receiving end during the UN-mandated operations in the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. With the Cold War world order overthrown in this era of intense economic interdependence, China’s concern seems to be reorienting. The third reason could be that Chinese concerns over Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang, which, if left uncontrolled, could become cases for intervention.
Another important motivation behind the decision to deploy a Chinese naval force off Somalia could be the fact that this involves the African continent where Beijing has substantial economic investments. Chinese leaders have been frequenting Africa since 2000. As a leading importer of crude oil, China depends on Africa for 25 per cent of its oil needs, which is projected to go up to 40 per cent by 2020. It has granted extensive debt packages to Africa on a no strings attached basis and its bilateral trade is expected with the continent is expected to touch US $100 billion by 2010. Suffice it to say that China’s stakes and advantages in Africa are high. The overall expected output of oil by Chinese firms in Africa is 78 million tons (presently the output is 40.3 million tons). China also depends on Saudi Arabia for its crude oil imports and has huge markets in Europe. Chinese merchant ships will have to necessarily frequent the waters off the Somali coast.
Given the country’s limited force projection capability, China’s action is consistent with its overall policy strategy of creating an international order that is different from the Cold War order. Securing international peace and development is currently an objective of China’s foreign policy. The current international environment will only help China achieve its strategic and developmental goals. It will enhance its image as a responsible power in the twenty first century and give it the experience to conduct naval operations far from its shores.
A few decades ago, while articulating new ways to use the National Defence Force (NFD), Deng Xiaoping’s had stated that “When our country is developed and more prosperous, we shall have a bigger role to play in the world.” After almost three decades this seems to be coming true.
S.Rajasimman is Research Assistant at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.
Soft Toilet Paper: Mankind’s Doom?
Soft Toilet Paper: Mankind’s Doom? By Ryan Young
Open Market/CEI, February 28, 2009 @ 5:38 pm
The kerfuffle over soft toilet paper has hit a new low. The NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz is now saying that “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”
I had to chuckle after reading that last sentence (it is silly, is it not?). But then I decided to take Hershkowitz seriously. Hardcore environmentalists like the NRDC are sometimes loosey-goosey with the data; science and their religion rarely get along.
Let’s see how big the impact of softer toilet paper really is. Maybe, hyperbole aside, Hershkowitz has a point. Let’s look at the data and find out.
Despite the proliferation of tree-intensive soft toilet paper, forest area in the U.S. has remained almost unchanged over the last century. Right around 33% of total land area.
Over that same time period, U.S. population more than tripled. That’s a lot more bottoms, demanding ever softer toilet paper. And yet — no net deforestation.
That doesn’t sound like ecological destruction. To use one of the New Religion’s buzzwords, that sounds… sustainable.
Deforestation is happening on a worldwide scale, according to a handy table from the Earth Policy Institute (data from the UN). They try to make it sound scary, but it isn’t. I crunched the numbers. The decline amounts to roughly 0.2% per year. Not exactly a crisis. Even that slow rate appears to be in decline.
I’m going to go ahead and say that Hershkowitz and the NRDC are promoting a baseless scare story.
There is still a tremendous upside to all this hemming and hawing. If toilet paper is all that environmental activists have to get worked up over these days, it is a sign that, environmentally speaking, we live in good times.
Open Market/CEI, February 28, 2009 @ 5:38 pm
The kerfuffle over soft toilet paper has hit a new low. The NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz is now saying that “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”
I had to chuckle after reading that last sentence (it is silly, is it not?). But then I decided to take Hershkowitz seriously. Hardcore environmentalists like the NRDC are sometimes loosey-goosey with the data; science and their religion rarely get along.
Let’s see how big the impact of softer toilet paper really is. Maybe, hyperbole aside, Hershkowitz has a point. Let’s look at the data and find out.
Despite the proliferation of tree-intensive soft toilet paper, forest area in the U.S. has remained almost unchanged over the last century. Right around 33% of total land area.
Over that same time period, U.S. population more than tripled. That’s a lot more bottoms, demanding ever softer toilet paper. And yet — no net deforestation.
That doesn’t sound like ecological destruction. To use one of the New Religion’s buzzwords, that sounds… sustainable.
Deforestation is happening on a worldwide scale, according to a handy table from the Earth Policy Institute (data from the UN). They try to make it sound scary, but it isn’t. I crunched the numbers. The decline amounts to roughly 0.2% per year. Not exactly a crisis. Even that slow rate appears to be in decline.
I’m going to go ahead and say that Hershkowitz and the NRDC are promoting a baseless scare story.
There is still a tremendous upside to all this hemming and hawing. If toilet paper is all that environmental activists have to get worked up over these days, it is a sign that, environmentally speaking, we live in good times.
It’s Time to Consider the Cost of Regulation
It’s Time to Consider the Cost of Regulation. By Clyde Wayne Crews
CEI, February 26, 2009
As President Obama took the podium Tuesday night, all minds were fixed on the economy. As expected, the President addressed the economy first, front and center. “Now is the time to act boldly and wisely,” he said, “to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.”
However, if by “boldly and wisely” he means increasing government spending to unprecedented levels, the near future will bring not a foundation for lasting growth, but a still-limping economy.
The President praised the passage of the $787-billion stimulus bill "the largest spending bill in history. While a lot of that money will go back into the economy, it will do so according to decisions made by politicians and regulators. In other words, it’s all top down.
A better approach is to empower citizens and businesses "who pay the taxes, anyhow "to stimulate from the bottom up. Unfortunately, removing burdensome regulations on businesses, both large and small, hasn’t figured much into the economic recovery program thus far. But alternatives to “porkulus” and “bailout to nowhere” do exist.Let’s call it “liberate to stimulate.” Such a campaign would include fiscal reforms (both taxing and spending), deregulatory stimulus, infrastructure investment liberalization, financial reforms that shift risk back on the institutions rather than on taxpayers, a regulatory reduction commission, and much more.
Starting from the basics of the free market, we can go a long way toward laying the right foundation for unimpeded economic recovery.
Consider regulation of business in America today. We’ve all heard of the trillions of dollars in new government spending. But the compliance costs generated by thousands of regulations pouring forth from over 50 departments, agencies and commissions impose another trillion-plus more, as CEI’s Ten Thousand Commandments survey shows.
Agency bureaucrats don’t answer to voters. Congress, although responsible for the underlying statutes that propel those agencies, can blame the agencies for regulatory excesses. That’s how we get “regulation without representation.”
Administrative reforms like cost-benefit analysis cannot tame the regulatory state as long as agencies themselves get to evaluate the benefits of their own rules, and as long as legislative constraints on the scope of the regulatory state remain weak.Thus, reducing the scope of government control in the economy is the true end game. But until then, measures like a regulatory budget could promote accountability by limiting the amount of regulatory costs that agencies can impose on the private sector, and holding Congress responsible for those costs.
Of course, regulatory costs can never be precisely measured, so a budget could not achieve absolute precision. And enforcement will never be easy, since agencies will have incentives to overstate benefits and understate compliance costs. Still, regulatory budgeting could help restore congressional primacy in the legislative and rulemaking processes from which regulations spring.
As information "sorely lacking now "accumulates, Congress can begin to divide a “total” budget among agencies roughly in proportion to potential benefits, such as lives saved. Agencies’ incentives would be to rank hazards from most to least severe, and address them within their budget constraint. Unwise regulating could mean transfer of the squandered budgetary allocation to a “rival” agency, while Congress would weigh an agency’s claimed benefits against alternative means of protecting public health and safety.
A well designed regulatory budget should explicitly recognize that agencies’ basic impulse is to overstate the benefits of its activities, and therefore relieve agencies of benefit calculation responsibilities altogether.
Other ways to promote the success of a budget are to: start small, compile a periodic “report card” on the numbers and costs of regulations in each agency, establish a regulatory cost freeze, set up a Regulatory Reduction Commission to assemble a package of regulations to cut, and employ separate budgets for economic regulation and environmental/social regulation.
A regulatory budget will not magically reduce the current $1.3- trillion annual regulatory burden. But better information about the size and scope of the regulatory state will aid future economic stimulus efforts. And as Washington sets out on a massive growth spurt, any enhancement of congressional accountability and limitations on the delegation of regulatory power can only help.
Wayne Crews is Vice President for Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
CEI, February 26, 2009
As President Obama took the podium Tuesday night, all minds were fixed on the economy. As expected, the President addressed the economy first, front and center. “Now is the time to act boldly and wisely,” he said, “to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.”
However, if by “boldly and wisely” he means increasing government spending to unprecedented levels, the near future will bring not a foundation for lasting growth, but a still-limping economy.
The President praised the passage of the $787-billion stimulus bill "the largest spending bill in history. While a lot of that money will go back into the economy, it will do so according to decisions made by politicians and regulators. In other words, it’s all top down.
A better approach is to empower citizens and businesses "who pay the taxes, anyhow "to stimulate from the bottom up. Unfortunately, removing burdensome regulations on businesses, both large and small, hasn’t figured much into the economic recovery program thus far. But alternatives to “porkulus” and “bailout to nowhere” do exist.Let’s call it “liberate to stimulate.” Such a campaign would include fiscal reforms (both taxing and spending), deregulatory stimulus, infrastructure investment liberalization, financial reforms that shift risk back on the institutions rather than on taxpayers, a regulatory reduction commission, and much more.
Starting from the basics of the free market, we can go a long way toward laying the right foundation for unimpeded economic recovery.
Consider regulation of business in America today. We’ve all heard of the trillions of dollars in new government spending. But the compliance costs generated by thousands of regulations pouring forth from over 50 departments, agencies and commissions impose another trillion-plus more, as CEI’s Ten Thousand Commandments survey shows.
Agency bureaucrats don’t answer to voters. Congress, although responsible for the underlying statutes that propel those agencies, can blame the agencies for regulatory excesses. That’s how we get “regulation without representation.”
Administrative reforms like cost-benefit analysis cannot tame the regulatory state as long as agencies themselves get to evaluate the benefits of their own rules, and as long as legislative constraints on the scope of the regulatory state remain weak.Thus, reducing the scope of government control in the economy is the true end game. But until then, measures like a regulatory budget could promote accountability by limiting the amount of regulatory costs that agencies can impose on the private sector, and holding Congress responsible for those costs.
Of course, regulatory costs can never be precisely measured, so a budget could not achieve absolute precision. And enforcement will never be easy, since agencies will have incentives to overstate benefits and understate compliance costs. Still, regulatory budgeting could help restore congressional primacy in the legislative and rulemaking processes from which regulations spring.
As information "sorely lacking now "accumulates, Congress can begin to divide a “total” budget among agencies roughly in proportion to potential benefits, such as lives saved. Agencies’ incentives would be to rank hazards from most to least severe, and address them within their budget constraint. Unwise regulating could mean transfer of the squandered budgetary allocation to a “rival” agency, while Congress would weigh an agency’s claimed benefits against alternative means of protecting public health and safety.
A well designed regulatory budget should explicitly recognize that agencies’ basic impulse is to overstate the benefits of its activities, and therefore relieve agencies of benefit calculation responsibilities altogether.
Other ways to promote the success of a budget are to: start small, compile a periodic “report card” on the numbers and costs of regulations in each agency, establish a regulatory cost freeze, set up a Regulatory Reduction Commission to assemble a package of regulations to cut, and employ separate budgets for economic regulation and environmental/social regulation.
A regulatory budget will not magically reduce the current $1.3- trillion annual regulatory burden. But better information about the size and scope of the regulatory state will aid future economic stimulus efforts. And as Washington sets out on a massive growth spurt, any enhancement of congressional accountability and limitations on the delegation of regulatory power can only help.
Wayne Crews is Vice President for Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Why Acquisition Reform Fails
Why Acquisition Reform Fails, by Benjamin H. Friedman
Cato at Liberty, Feb 27, 2009
Senators Carl Levin and John McCain this week introduced legislation to improve how the Pentagon buys things — defense acquisition reform. The President is on the same page. So chances are the Pentagon’s acquisition workforce will have a new set of rules to learn some time this year.
Here’s the bill. Highlights: a series of new reporting requirements about systems analysis of new programs, a new official to come up with cost estimates of weapons systems, another official to oversee developmental testing, a requirement for competitive prototyping of new weapons, which can be waived, and an effort to make waiving Nunn-McCurty breaches a little more onerous (the idea was that you cancel weapons systems that experience excessive cost growth, but it never happens), plus some other minor bureaucratic changes. McCain claims that the legislation will cut back on cost plus contracts in favor of the fixed price variety, but the legislation does not address that.
At best this bill will create some marginal improvements in defense acquisition. More likely it will simply add hassle.
Acquisition reform is practically seasonal at the Pentagon, as this PowerPoint slide show comically demonstrates. And things have only gotten worse — more programs over budget and behind schedule over time. (Read this recent testimony from a Congressional Research Service expert for details.) According to another expert, former Pentagon weapons testing chief Tom Christie, the trouble is not the existing acquisition rules but the failure to use them to control costs. He says so in a chapter for the book America’s Defense Meltdown, which we will be discussing here at a forum on March 13.
The reasons for the failure of acquisition reform are complicated, but one surely is that these are technocratic solutions to political problems. The trouble is what we want, which is several technological miracles in each new platform, not how we buy it, as my professor and sometimes co-author Harvey Sapolsky explains in a recent Defense News op-ed:
The truth is you can’t fix the acquisition system. All the insiders know this…We can’t fix it because we want crazy things. We want a system that can fire missiles from a submarine hiding beneath the surface of the sea and hit a target thousands of miles away. Or we want a tank that can survive a shaped charge round, pack its own lethal punch and is airlifted by a C-130.
Systems have to perform reliably in the snow, in the mud, in the sand. They have to communicate with every friend and not reveal themselves to any foe. And we want them soon, not later.
Worse, we already have a lot of first-class ships, aircraft, missiles and tanks; proposed new weapon systems have to be a lot better than them or any obvious modification we can make. To be worthy of our approval, the advocates of the new system have to dazzle us with expectations of what will soon be in our arsenal, something no enemy can match. It will likely cost billions, but it will be great.
With that gleam in their eye, the services seek bids for the weapons that will define their futures. Only a few contractors can qualify to make offers. After all, only a few firms know the acquisition regulations well enough and have sufficient engineering talent to manage complex projects.
Moreover, government-encouraged mergers have further thinned the ranks of eligible firms. Given that new starts in most weapon lines are once-in-a-decade-or-more events, project awards are survival tests. Not surprisingly, false optimism abounds.
For more, read his recently co-authored book.
What about using more fixed price contracts and less cost-plus contracts, as McCain suggests? Isn’t it obvious that unless you pay someone a set price rather than whatever he says it costs, he will rip you off? Actually, no, not in defense contracting. Chris Preble and I addressed this in an oped last October:
In a cost-plus contract, the contractor gets paid whatever it costs to make a good, plus a profit. McCain claims that these agreements encourage contractors to spend as much possible and send the government the bill. This argument is confused. Defense contractors have essentially one customer: the Pentagon. Repeatedly gouging your only customer, one with a small army of auditors, is likely to lead to bankruptcy.
New technology is hard to price. If we used fixed price contracts— as McCain proposes—for new complex projects, like the next-generation bomber the air force will soon build, the contractors would simply ask for more money up front to limit their risks. If we force a low price on them, they will likely blow through what is allocated and ask for a new contract. Because military services badly want the weapons they contract for—and starting over would take years—Pentagon officials would then be forced to rewrite the deal.
What acquisition reform would work? It might help to increase the number of civilian acquisition overseers and pay them more, given that their workload has expanded, and to allow them more flexibility in their work, not less, as this legislation would. But these are still minor fixes. You can’t fix acquisition until you change the incentive structure that produces its outcomes. Until the services and their Congressional backers start to accept platforms that push the technological envelop less, the problems will persist.
Cato at Liberty, Feb 27, 2009
Senators Carl Levin and John McCain this week introduced legislation to improve how the Pentagon buys things — defense acquisition reform. The President is on the same page. So chances are the Pentagon’s acquisition workforce will have a new set of rules to learn some time this year.
Here’s the bill. Highlights: a series of new reporting requirements about systems analysis of new programs, a new official to come up with cost estimates of weapons systems, another official to oversee developmental testing, a requirement for competitive prototyping of new weapons, which can be waived, and an effort to make waiving Nunn-McCurty breaches a little more onerous (the idea was that you cancel weapons systems that experience excessive cost growth, but it never happens), plus some other minor bureaucratic changes. McCain claims that the legislation will cut back on cost plus contracts in favor of the fixed price variety, but the legislation does not address that.
At best this bill will create some marginal improvements in defense acquisition. More likely it will simply add hassle.
Acquisition reform is practically seasonal at the Pentagon, as this PowerPoint slide show comically demonstrates. And things have only gotten worse — more programs over budget and behind schedule over time. (Read this recent testimony from a Congressional Research Service expert for details.) According to another expert, former Pentagon weapons testing chief Tom Christie, the trouble is not the existing acquisition rules but the failure to use them to control costs. He says so in a chapter for the book America’s Defense Meltdown, which we will be discussing here at a forum on March 13.
The reasons for the failure of acquisition reform are complicated, but one surely is that these are technocratic solutions to political problems. The trouble is what we want, which is several technological miracles in each new platform, not how we buy it, as my professor and sometimes co-author Harvey Sapolsky explains in a recent Defense News op-ed:
The truth is you can’t fix the acquisition system. All the insiders know this…We can’t fix it because we want crazy things. We want a system that can fire missiles from a submarine hiding beneath the surface of the sea and hit a target thousands of miles away. Or we want a tank that can survive a shaped charge round, pack its own lethal punch and is airlifted by a C-130.
Systems have to perform reliably in the snow, in the mud, in the sand. They have to communicate with every friend and not reveal themselves to any foe. And we want them soon, not later.
Worse, we already have a lot of first-class ships, aircraft, missiles and tanks; proposed new weapon systems have to be a lot better than them or any obvious modification we can make. To be worthy of our approval, the advocates of the new system have to dazzle us with expectations of what will soon be in our arsenal, something no enemy can match. It will likely cost billions, but it will be great.
With that gleam in their eye, the services seek bids for the weapons that will define their futures. Only a few contractors can qualify to make offers. After all, only a few firms know the acquisition regulations well enough and have sufficient engineering talent to manage complex projects.
Moreover, government-encouraged mergers have further thinned the ranks of eligible firms. Given that new starts in most weapon lines are once-in-a-decade-or-more events, project awards are survival tests. Not surprisingly, false optimism abounds.
For more, read his recently co-authored book.
What about using more fixed price contracts and less cost-plus contracts, as McCain suggests? Isn’t it obvious that unless you pay someone a set price rather than whatever he says it costs, he will rip you off? Actually, no, not in defense contracting. Chris Preble and I addressed this in an oped last October:
In a cost-plus contract, the contractor gets paid whatever it costs to make a good, plus a profit. McCain claims that these agreements encourage contractors to spend as much possible and send the government the bill. This argument is confused. Defense contractors have essentially one customer: the Pentagon. Repeatedly gouging your only customer, one with a small army of auditors, is likely to lead to bankruptcy.
New technology is hard to price. If we used fixed price contracts— as McCain proposes—for new complex projects, like the next-generation bomber the air force will soon build, the contractors would simply ask for more money up front to limit their risks. If we force a low price on them, they will likely blow through what is allocated and ask for a new contract. Because military services badly want the weapons they contract for—and starting over would take years—Pentagon officials would then be forced to rewrite the deal.
What acquisition reform would work? It might help to increase the number of civilian acquisition overseers and pay them more, given that their workload has expanded, and to allow them more flexibility in their work, not less, as this legislation would. But these are still minor fixes. You can’t fix acquisition until you change the incentive structure that produces its outcomes. Until the services and their Congressional backers start to accept platforms that push the technological envelop less, the problems will persist.
The Obama–Brown White House Talks: The U.S.–U.K. Special Relationship Must Be Maintained
The Obama–Brown White House Talks: The U.S.–U.K. Special Relationship Must Be Maintained. By Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.
Heritage, March 1, 2009
WebMemo #2317
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be the first European leader to meet with President Barack Obama when he visits the White House on March 3. The two world leaders are expected to discuss a range of issues, including the war in Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear threat, and the global financial crisis, as well as the upcoming G-20 talks in London and the NATO 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg/Kehl.
In addition to meeting with the President, Brown will address a joint session of Congress on March 4, making him only the fifth British prime minister to be given the honor.
A Shift Away from Britain?
The Brown–Obama meeting will be overshadowed by growing concerns about a possible weakening of the U.S.–U.K. Special Relationship, tensions over strategy in the war in Afghanistan, and the threat of a renewed American protectionism.
The Anglo-American alliance is being eroded on several fronts, from falling levels of U.K. defense spending and the gutting of Britain's armed forces by the Labour government to the gradual erosion of British sovereignty in Europe and the rise of a European Union defense identity now being backed by Washington. It is also threatened by the new U.S. Administration's apathy and indifference toward the U.K.
President Obama's surprise decision to remove a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and return it to the British government sent an early signal to London that the new Administration will adopt a far less robust approach toward the historic Anglo-American alliance. The White House is already recalibrating the alliance as a "special partnership," —not a "special relationship"—a subtle play on words indicating a potential shift away from a decades-long policy of according Britain a unique status as America's most important ally.
U.S. Overtures to Europe
The Obama White House is keen to significantly strengthen America's relationship with both France and Germany, continental Europe's biggest powers, as well as with Brussels, the institutional heart of the European Union. This approach is partly the product of a distinctly pro-European outlook on the part of the new Administration following transatlantic tensions during the Bush Administration. It is also based on a naive belief that major European allies will actually increase defense spending and reduce the burden on America and that the EU will play a more supportive role in world affairs alongside the United States.
Washington is already making major concessions to France in the NATO alliance, with French officers reportedly in line to take two senior NATO command positions: Allied Command Transformation (one of NATO's two supreme commands, based in Norfolk, Virginia) and Joint Command Lisbon (one of NATO's three main operations headquarters, which also commands the NATO Rapid Reaction Force).
The White House is also sending clear signals that it supports a greater military and defense role for the European Union. In his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early February, Vice President Joe Biden made it clear that the United States will "support the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, [and] a fundamentally stronger NATO–EU partnership."
Anglo-American Leadership Is Needed
Since the Second World War, there has scarcely been a more important period for joint U.S.–British leadership. The Anglo-American Special Relationship would be imperiled if the new U.S. Administration looks to Brussels instead of London for its most important strategic partnership. Jeopardizing this relationship would be a huge mistake. The EU is obsessed with challenging American global leadership rather than working with it, and the European Project is ultimately all about building a counterweight to American power.
The Obama–Brown White House meeting will be an important opportunity for the President and the Prime Minister to establish a stronger framework for Anglo-American cooperation on the world stage, particularly in regard to key issues such as Afghanistan, the future of NATO, and the Iranian nuclear crisis.The War in Afghanistan
Despite all the fashionable rhetoric in European capitals about Iraq being a distraction from the war against the Taliban, on the battlefields of Afghanistan almost two-thirds of the 47,000 troops currently serving as part of the 40-nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force are from the English-speaking countries of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia. These nations have also taken roughly 85 percent of the casualties. Britain has nearly as many troops in the country as all the other major European Union powers combined, some of whom, like Germany, cower under dozens of "caveats" aimed at keeping their troops out of harm's way. The United States has pledged to send an additional 17,000 troops, and the U.K. is also considering the deployment of further forces to boost the nearly 9,000 British soldiers already serving in Helmand province.
President Obama and Prime Minister Brown should directly challenge European complacency and indifference over Afghanistan and issue a strong statement calling on European allies to pull their weight in the conflict by sending more combat troops to the south of the country. NATO is a war-fighting alliance, not a peacekeeping organization. The stakes are extremely high, and there is a danger that the brutal Taliban, backed by al-Qaeda, will reassert control over vast swathes of the country.
Europe's NATO members must make a no-strings attached commitment to step up to the plate and bear a bigger part of the burden. If this does not happen, the consequences for the future of the alliance will be dire. European apathy over Afghanistan threatens to tear NATO apart, and an institution that has for decades succeeded as the most effective international organization of its time could become irrelevant. It is time for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other European leaders to roll up their sleeves and commit their troops and resources to winning the war against the Taliban.
The Future of NATO
In the lead-up to the NATO 60th anniversary summit, both the United States and Great Britain must take a step back and launch a fundamental, wide-ranging review of the long-term implications of French demands for the future of the alliance.
It would be a huge strategic error of judgment by the new U.S. Administration and the British government to support French ambitions for restructuring Europe's security architecture. This would ultimately weaken the Anglo-American Special Relationship as the engine of the transatlantic alliance and pave the way for the development of a separate European Union defense identity, which will ultimately undermine NATO.
Washington and London must also commit to advancing the expansion of the NATO alliance—specifically the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the Membership Action Plan. The new U.S. Administration, together with Britain, should send a clear signal to Moscow that NATO expansion is an internal matter for the alliance and not open to Russian veto. A firm commitment must also be made by the Obama Administration to establish a third site missile defense system in Eastern and Central Europe, a vital part of a global defense shield that is needed to protect the West from rogue regimes such as Iran.
The Iranian Nuclear Threat
President Obama and Prime Minister Brown should issue a strong statement calling for the strengthening of both U.N. Security Council and European sanctions against Tehran. The U.S. and British leaders must push for European countries to support a complete investment freeze—including a ban on investment in Iranian liquefied natural gas operations—and the possible use of military force as a last resort against Iran's nuclear facilities. They should reject the idea of direct negotiations with a tyranny that has threatened to wipe a key ally, Israel, off the face of the earth. This is a time for tough resolve in the face of an extremely dangerous foe—a rogue state close to nuclear capability ruled by fanatical Islamists that will have no qualms about using their power to dominate the Middle East or to arm a wide array of proxy international terrorist groups.
The EU has tried to negotiate with Tehran for several years under the guise of "constructive engagement," an approach that has resulted in an emboldened Iran that grows closer by the day to building a nuclear weapon. The EU's policy toward Iran has been all carrot and no stick—a futile exercise that has achieved nothing but failure.
Great Britain Is America's Most Reliable Friend
The Special Relationship is vital to American and British interests on many levels, from military, diplomatic, and intelligence cooperation to transatlantic trading ties. If President Obama does not invest in its preservation, the end result will be a weaker United States that is less able to stand up to terrorism and tyranny, and project power and influence on the world stage.
Whether waging war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, standing up to the Russian bear, or halting Iran's nuclear ambitions, President Obama should maintain the Anglo-American Special Relationship as the centerpiece of the transatlantic alliance. As nearly every post-war President has found, when it comes to securing the free world, there is simply no alternative to U.S.–British leadership
Nile Gardiner is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. Erica Munkwitz assisted with research for this paper.
Heritage, March 1, 2009
WebMemo #2317
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be the first European leader to meet with President Barack Obama when he visits the White House on March 3. The two world leaders are expected to discuss a range of issues, including the war in Afghanistan, the Iranian nuclear threat, and the global financial crisis, as well as the upcoming G-20 talks in London and the NATO 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg/Kehl.
In addition to meeting with the President, Brown will address a joint session of Congress on March 4, making him only the fifth British prime minister to be given the honor.
A Shift Away from Britain?
The Brown–Obama meeting will be overshadowed by growing concerns about a possible weakening of the U.S.–U.K. Special Relationship, tensions over strategy in the war in Afghanistan, and the threat of a renewed American protectionism.
The Anglo-American alliance is being eroded on several fronts, from falling levels of U.K. defense spending and the gutting of Britain's armed forces by the Labour government to the gradual erosion of British sovereignty in Europe and the rise of a European Union defense identity now being backed by Washington. It is also threatened by the new U.S. Administration's apathy and indifference toward the U.K.
President Obama's surprise decision to remove a bust of Sir Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and return it to the British government sent an early signal to London that the new Administration will adopt a far less robust approach toward the historic Anglo-American alliance. The White House is already recalibrating the alliance as a "special partnership," —not a "special relationship"—a subtle play on words indicating a potential shift away from a decades-long policy of according Britain a unique status as America's most important ally.
U.S. Overtures to Europe
The Obama White House is keen to significantly strengthen America's relationship with both France and Germany, continental Europe's biggest powers, as well as with Brussels, the institutional heart of the European Union. This approach is partly the product of a distinctly pro-European outlook on the part of the new Administration following transatlantic tensions during the Bush Administration. It is also based on a naive belief that major European allies will actually increase defense spending and reduce the burden on America and that the EU will play a more supportive role in world affairs alongside the United States.
Washington is already making major concessions to France in the NATO alliance, with French officers reportedly in line to take two senior NATO command positions: Allied Command Transformation (one of NATO's two supreme commands, based in Norfolk, Virginia) and Joint Command Lisbon (one of NATO's three main operations headquarters, which also commands the NATO Rapid Reaction Force).
The White House is also sending clear signals that it supports a greater military and defense role for the European Union. In his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early February, Vice President Joe Biden made it clear that the United States will "support the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, [and] a fundamentally stronger NATO–EU partnership."
Anglo-American Leadership Is Needed
Since the Second World War, there has scarcely been a more important period for joint U.S.–British leadership. The Anglo-American Special Relationship would be imperiled if the new U.S. Administration looks to Brussels instead of London for its most important strategic partnership. Jeopardizing this relationship would be a huge mistake. The EU is obsessed with challenging American global leadership rather than working with it, and the European Project is ultimately all about building a counterweight to American power.
The Obama–Brown White House meeting will be an important opportunity for the President and the Prime Minister to establish a stronger framework for Anglo-American cooperation on the world stage, particularly in regard to key issues such as Afghanistan, the future of NATO, and the Iranian nuclear crisis.The War in Afghanistan
Despite all the fashionable rhetoric in European capitals about Iraq being a distraction from the war against the Taliban, on the battlefields of Afghanistan almost two-thirds of the 47,000 troops currently serving as part of the 40-nation NATO-led International Security Assistance Force are from the English-speaking countries of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia. These nations have also taken roughly 85 percent of the casualties. Britain has nearly as many troops in the country as all the other major European Union powers combined, some of whom, like Germany, cower under dozens of "caveats" aimed at keeping their troops out of harm's way. The United States has pledged to send an additional 17,000 troops, and the U.K. is also considering the deployment of further forces to boost the nearly 9,000 British soldiers already serving in Helmand province.
President Obama and Prime Minister Brown should directly challenge European complacency and indifference over Afghanistan and issue a strong statement calling on European allies to pull their weight in the conflict by sending more combat troops to the south of the country. NATO is a war-fighting alliance, not a peacekeeping organization. The stakes are extremely high, and there is a danger that the brutal Taliban, backed by al-Qaeda, will reassert control over vast swathes of the country.
Europe's NATO members must make a no-strings attached commitment to step up to the plate and bear a bigger part of the burden. If this does not happen, the consequences for the future of the alliance will be dire. European apathy over Afghanistan threatens to tear NATO apart, and an institution that has for decades succeeded as the most effective international organization of its time could become irrelevant. It is time for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other European leaders to roll up their sleeves and commit their troops and resources to winning the war against the Taliban.
The Future of NATO
In the lead-up to the NATO 60th anniversary summit, both the United States and Great Britain must take a step back and launch a fundamental, wide-ranging review of the long-term implications of French demands for the future of the alliance.
It would be a huge strategic error of judgment by the new U.S. Administration and the British government to support French ambitions for restructuring Europe's security architecture. This would ultimately weaken the Anglo-American Special Relationship as the engine of the transatlantic alliance and pave the way for the development of a separate European Union defense identity, which will ultimately undermine NATO.
Washington and London must also commit to advancing the expansion of the NATO alliance—specifically the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the Membership Action Plan. The new U.S. Administration, together with Britain, should send a clear signal to Moscow that NATO expansion is an internal matter for the alliance and not open to Russian veto. A firm commitment must also be made by the Obama Administration to establish a third site missile defense system in Eastern and Central Europe, a vital part of a global defense shield that is needed to protect the West from rogue regimes such as Iran.
The Iranian Nuclear Threat
President Obama and Prime Minister Brown should issue a strong statement calling for the strengthening of both U.N. Security Council and European sanctions against Tehran. The U.S. and British leaders must push for European countries to support a complete investment freeze—including a ban on investment in Iranian liquefied natural gas operations—and the possible use of military force as a last resort against Iran's nuclear facilities. They should reject the idea of direct negotiations with a tyranny that has threatened to wipe a key ally, Israel, off the face of the earth. This is a time for tough resolve in the face of an extremely dangerous foe—a rogue state close to nuclear capability ruled by fanatical Islamists that will have no qualms about using their power to dominate the Middle East or to arm a wide array of proxy international terrorist groups.
The EU has tried to negotiate with Tehran for several years under the guise of "constructive engagement," an approach that has resulted in an emboldened Iran that grows closer by the day to building a nuclear weapon. The EU's policy toward Iran has been all carrot and no stick—a futile exercise that has achieved nothing but failure.
Great Britain Is America's Most Reliable Friend
The Special Relationship is vital to American and British interests on many levels, from military, diplomatic, and intelligence cooperation to transatlantic trading ties. If President Obama does not invest in its preservation, the end result will be a weaker United States that is less able to stand up to terrorism and tyranny, and project power and influence on the world stage.
Whether waging war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, standing up to the Russian bear, or halting Iran's nuclear ambitions, President Obama should maintain the Anglo-American Special Relationship as the centerpiece of the transatlantic alliance. As nearly every post-war President has found, when it comes to securing the free world, there is simply no alternative to U.S.–British leadership
Nile Gardiner is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. Erica Munkwitz assisted with research for this paper.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
WaPo: Ending D.C. school vouchers would dash the best hopes of hundreds of children
'Potential' Disruption? WaPo Editorial
Ending D.C. school vouchers would dash the best hopes of hundreds of children.
WaPo, Monday, March 2, 2009; Page A16
REP. DAVID R. Obey (Wis.) and other congressional Democrats should spare us their phony concern about the children participating in the District's school voucher program. If they cared for the future of these students, they wouldn't be so quick as to try to kill the program that affords low-income, minority children a chance at a better education. Their refusal to even give the program a fair hearing makes it critical that D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) seek help from voucher supporters in the Senate and, if need be, President Obama.
Last week, the Democrat-controlled House passed a spending bill that spells the end, after the 2009-10 school year, of the federally funded program that enables poor students to attend private schools with scholarships of up to $7,500. A statement signed by Mr. Obey as Appropriations Committee chairman that accompanied the $410 billion spending package directs D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to "promptly take steps to minimize potential disruption and ensure smooth transition" for students forced back into the public schools.
We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible "disruption" with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. "The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me," Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities -- such as a trip to China for her son -- made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don't work, and she'll list her children's improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.
But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?
This week, the Senate takes up the omnibus spending bill, and we hope that, with the help of supporters such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the program gets the reprieve it deserves. If it doesn't, someone needs to tell Ms. Parker why a bunch of elected officials who can send their children to any school they choose are taking that option from her.
Ending D.C. school vouchers would dash the best hopes of hundreds of children.
WaPo, Monday, March 2, 2009; Page A16
REP. DAVID R. Obey (Wis.) and other congressional Democrats should spare us their phony concern about the children participating in the District's school voucher program. If they cared for the future of these students, they wouldn't be so quick as to try to kill the program that affords low-income, minority children a chance at a better education. Their refusal to even give the program a fair hearing makes it critical that D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) seek help from voucher supporters in the Senate and, if need be, President Obama.
Last week, the Democrat-controlled House passed a spending bill that spells the end, after the 2009-10 school year, of the federally funded program that enables poor students to attend private schools with scholarships of up to $7,500. A statement signed by Mr. Obey as Appropriations Committee chairman that accompanied the $410 billion spending package directs D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to "promptly take steps to minimize potential disruption and ensure smooth transition" for students forced back into the public schools.
We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible "disruption" with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. "The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me," Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities -- such as a trip to China for her son -- made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don't work, and she'll list her children's improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.
But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn't about facts. It's about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn't Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?
This week, the Senate takes up the omnibus spending bill, and we hope that, with the help of supporters such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), the program gets the reprieve it deserves. If it doesn't, someone needs to tell Ms. Parker why a bunch of elected officials who can send their children to any school they choose are taking that option from her.
Conservative views: The Dangerous Allure of Arms Control
The Dangerous Allure of Arms Control. By John R. Bolton
Washington Times, February 27, 2009
The Ringwraiths of arms control are again with us, returned from well-deserved obscurity, and back in the saddle in Washington. Through public statements and private preparations the Obama administration is signaling clearly that its approach to Russia will center on Cold War-era arms control precepts and objectives.
Although the Washington-Moscow relationship has, at Moscow's behest, become increasingly contentious and unpleasant, arms control is an odd and backward-looking way to try to improve relations and ameliorate Russia's objectionable international conduct. A long Cold War history demonstrates that arms control tends to make the relationship even more adversarial than it needs to be, concentrates attention on peripheral issues, and fails to deliver the security that supposedly is its central objective.
The Obama arms control agenda reflects the longstanding, attractive and woefully simplistic notion that ever-lower numbers of Russian and American nuclear weapons will create a more stable strategic relationship, diminishing the threat of nuclear war. Arms controllers, relying on this superficial analysis for decades, argued that reducing weapons levels would not harm U.S. security because nuclear war was so destructive it was simply unthinkable, a concept known as "automatic deterrence." Later, they adopted a slightly more nuanced position, acknowledging the need for a small nuclear force that could survive a first strike, thus providing a "second strike" capability. These flawed theories are back from the dead.
Accordingly, we now see suggestions for U.S. weapons levels that have more to do with numerology than national security. Moreover, the Obama approach appears to ignore the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, which represented a substantial change in managing strategic relations between America and Russia, a change also reflected in U.S. development of strategic missile defense capabilities. Ironically, the treaty actually reflected the reduced role of nuclear weapons in American strategy and enhanced roles for long-range, precision-guided conventional weapons that the Obama administration now risks reversing by returning to the arms-control approach of the SALT (strategic arms limitations) and START (strategic arms reduction) models.
What should we do instead, and on what should Congress insist before the negotiations proceed beyond the point of no return?
First, we must understand that agreed-upon levels of nuclear weapons address only the most visible areas of military competition, not others that actually may be more important. This has been a central fallacy of arms control since the post-World War I naval arms negotiations, ignoring as it does wide and important variances between the United States and Russia, such as weapons production capabilities, levels of tactical nuclear weapons, intelligence assets, and total national economic strength.
Moreover, U.S. nuclear capabilities provide a deterrence umbrella for its allied countries, whereas Russia plays no such positive role.
Thus, the two countries are simply not "symmetrical," but treaties with specific warhead limits gave the illusion they are.
Second, the United States should decide what levels of nuclear forces we actually need, and make that our objective, not pursuing an arbitrary number and then trying to find national security justification for it. The latter approach is not only dangerous but opens us to manipulation by our negotiating adversaries, since under this approach one number has no greater intrinsic security value than another.
This is especially true when we understand that no current or prior arms control treaty has ever actually required destruction of existing warheads, nor do we have any known verification methodology that could actually demonstrate compliance even if we could reach agreement on warhead destruction as an objective.
Third, how we "count" nuclear capabilities is important. This is not a merely technical issue, but carries profound implications for both our nuclear and conventional capabilities. Under START counting rules, weapons levels were imputed based on the capabilities of delivery systems, rather than actual warhead levels. Thus, for example, each Soviet SS-18, capable of carrying 10 nuclear warheads was imputed to do so no matter how many were actually under the nosecones.
Counting actual numbers is far more accurate. In the Treaty of Moscow, we did so by counting only operationally deployed strategic warheads rather than using imputed levels derived from artificial counting rules. Not only was this more accurate, it freed up large numbers of delivery systems for conventional warheads, making them more useful against the non-nuclear threats we increasingly face.
Abandoning Treaty of Moscow concepts and retreating to the START approach would severely impede U.S. conventional capabilities well into the future without in any way improving the U.S. strategic nuclear posture.
Arms control is one area where there will be substantial "change" between the Bush and Obama administrations, one fraught with considerable risks, especially if future negotiations embrace, as Russia wants, missile defense and space-based capabilities.
The real arms control debate is not between those relaxed about nuclear war and those seeking to avoid it, but between those who approach the problem realistically and empirically, and those who approach it as a matter of dogma. Unfortunately, the Ringwraiths now have the upper hand.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.
Washington Times, February 27, 2009
The Ringwraiths of arms control are again with us, returned from well-deserved obscurity, and back in the saddle in Washington. Through public statements and private preparations the Obama administration is signaling clearly that its approach to Russia will center on Cold War-era arms control precepts and objectives.
Although the Washington-Moscow relationship has, at Moscow's behest, become increasingly contentious and unpleasant, arms control is an odd and backward-looking way to try to improve relations and ameliorate Russia's objectionable international conduct. A long Cold War history demonstrates that arms control tends to make the relationship even more adversarial than it needs to be, concentrates attention on peripheral issues, and fails to deliver the security that supposedly is its central objective.
The Obama arms control agenda reflects the longstanding, attractive and woefully simplistic notion that ever-lower numbers of Russian and American nuclear weapons will create a more stable strategic relationship, diminishing the threat of nuclear war. Arms controllers, relying on this superficial analysis for decades, argued that reducing weapons levels would not harm U.S. security because nuclear war was so destructive it was simply unthinkable, a concept known as "automatic deterrence." Later, they adopted a slightly more nuanced position, acknowledging the need for a small nuclear force that could survive a first strike, thus providing a "second strike" capability. These flawed theories are back from the dead.
Accordingly, we now see suggestions for U.S. weapons levels that have more to do with numerology than national security. Moreover, the Obama approach appears to ignore the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, which represented a substantial change in managing strategic relations between America and Russia, a change also reflected in U.S. development of strategic missile defense capabilities. Ironically, the treaty actually reflected the reduced role of nuclear weapons in American strategy and enhanced roles for long-range, precision-guided conventional weapons that the Obama administration now risks reversing by returning to the arms-control approach of the SALT (strategic arms limitations) and START (strategic arms reduction) models.
What should we do instead, and on what should Congress insist before the negotiations proceed beyond the point of no return?
First, we must understand that agreed-upon levels of nuclear weapons address only the most visible areas of military competition, not others that actually may be more important. This has been a central fallacy of arms control since the post-World War I naval arms negotiations, ignoring as it does wide and important variances between the United States and Russia, such as weapons production capabilities, levels of tactical nuclear weapons, intelligence assets, and total national economic strength.
Moreover, U.S. nuclear capabilities provide a deterrence umbrella for its allied countries, whereas Russia plays no such positive role.
Thus, the two countries are simply not "symmetrical," but treaties with specific warhead limits gave the illusion they are.
Second, the United States should decide what levels of nuclear forces we actually need, and make that our objective, not pursuing an arbitrary number and then trying to find national security justification for it. The latter approach is not only dangerous but opens us to manipulation by our negotiating adversaries, since under this approach one number has no greater intrinsic security value than another.
This is especially true when we understand that no current or prior arms control treaty has ever actually required destruction of existing warheads, nor do we have any known verification methodology that could actually demonstrate compliance even if we could reach agreement on warhead destruction as an objective.
Third, how we "count" nuclear capabilities is important. This is not a merely technical issue, but carries profound implications for both our nuclear and conventional capabilities. Under START counting rules, weapons levels were imputed based on the capabilities of delivery systems, rather than actual warhead levels. Thus, for example, each Soviet SS-18, capable of carrying 10 nuclear warheads was imputed to do so no matter how many were actually under the nosecones.
Counting actual numbers is far more accurate. In the Treaty of Moscow, we did so by counting only operationally deployed strategic warheads rather than using imputed levels derived from artificial counting rules. Not only was this more accurate, it freed up large numbers of delivery systems for conventional warheads, making them more useful against the non-nuclear threats we increasingly face.
Abandoning Treaty of Moscow concepts and retreating to the START approach would severely impede U.S. conventional capabilities well into the future without in any way improving the U.S. strategic nuclear posture.
Arms control is one area where there will be substantial "change" between the Bush and Obama administrations, one fraught with considerable risks, especially if future negotiations embrace, as Russia wants, missile defense and space-based capabilities.
The real arms control debate is not between those relaxed about nuclear war and those seeking to avoid it, but between those who approach the problem realistically and empirically, and those who approach it as a matter of dogma. Unfortunately, the Ringwraiths now have the upper hand.
John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
WaPo: President Obama's strategy aims at success. Is that a goal congressional Democrats can support?
Time for Iraq. WaPo Editorial
President Obama's strategy aims at success. Is that a goal congressional Democrats can support?
The WaPo, Saturday, February 28, 2009; Page A12
THE IRAQ strategy that President Obama announced yesterday was broadly faithful to his campaign promises, but it contained some important and praiseworthy adjustments. The president lengthened his 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops to 19 months, thus adopting the middle of the three options the Pentagon studied. He set a ceiling of 50,000 troops for the "residual" force he has always said would remain -- a figure that quickly prompted sniping from his party's left wing. He gave up his formula of withdrawing forces at the rate of a brigade a month, which will allow U.S. commanders to maintain a large force in the country through Iraq's crucial parliamentary elections at the end of this year.
Most important, Mr. Obama spoke of Iraq not as a fiasco to be abandoned but as a "great nation" whose "future . . . is inseparable from the future of the broader Middle East." He said his administration aimed for "a new era of American leadership and engagement" in the region and "will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists." That is almost exactly how the Bush administration defined "victory" in Iraq. Thanks to the military and political successes of Mr. Bush's last two years, there is reason for hope that Mr. Obama's strategy can achieve that aim.
The president's speech was not without hedges and contradictions. He said there would be limits to what the United States would do to stabilize Iraq, and he put Iraqis on notice that they must "seize" the opportunity they have been offered. Perhaps with his antiwar base in mind, he pronounced "as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end." In the next breath, he promised to "proceed carefully" and "consult closely" with military commanders and the Iraqi government, and he said "there will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments." Does that mean Mr. Obama is open to altering his plan if al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed militias rebound as U.S. troop levels decline? Some of the congressional leaders he briefed, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed to think so; Mr. McCain called Mr. Obama's plan "reasonable."
Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, the initial response of some congressional Democrats was anything but reasonable. A number objected to the size of the residual force: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) declared that 15,000 or 20,000 would be more appropriate. Neither she nor other objectors explained why fewer troops were needed or expressed any interest in nurturing what Mr. Obama described as the "renewed cause for hope in Iraq." That is a measure of Mr. Obama's statesmanship: Though he opposed the war, his strategy recognizes what has been achieved in Iraq, even at a terrible cost, and aims at preserving it. His party would do well to follow his lead.
President Obama's strategy aims at success. Is that a goal congressional Democrats can support?
The WaPo, Saturday, February 28, 2009; Page A12
THE IRAQ strategy that President Obama announced yesterday was broadly faithful to his campaign promises, but it contained some important and praiseworthy adjustments. The president lengthened his 16-month timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops to 19 months, thus adopting the middle of the three options the Pentagon studied. He set a ceiling of 50,000 troops for the "residual" force he has always said would remain -- a figure that quickly prompted sniping from his party's left wing. He gave up his formula of withdrawing forces at the rate of a brigade a month, which will allow U.S. commanders to maintain a large force in the country through Iraq's crucial parliamentary elections at the end of this year.
Most important, Mr. Obama spoke of Iraq not as a fiasco to be abandoned but as a "great nation" whose "future . . . is inseparable from the future of the broader Middle East." He said his administration aimed for "a new era of American leadership and engagement" in the region and "will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists." That is almost exactly how the Bush administration defined "victory" in Iraq. Thanks to the military and political successes of Mr. Bush's last two years, there is reason for hope that Mr. Obama's strategy can achieve that aim.
The president's speech was not without hedges and contradictions. He said there would be limits to what the United States would do to stabilize Iraq, and he put Iraqis on notice that they must "seize" the opportunity they have been offered. Perhaps with his antiwar base in mind, he pronounced "as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end." In the next breath, he promised to "proceed carefully" and "consult closely" with military commanders and the Iraqi government, and he said "there will surely be difficult periods and tactical adjustments." Does that mean Mr. Obama is open to altering his plan if al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed militias rebound as U.S. troop levels decline? Some of the congressional leaders he briefed, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed to think so; Mr. McCain called Mr. Obama's plan "reasonable."
Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, the initial response of some congressional Democrats was anything but reasonable. A number objected to the size of the residual force: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) declared that 15,000 or 20,000 would be more appropriate. Neither she nor other objectors explained why fewer troops were needed or expressed any interest in nurturing what Mr. Obama described as the "renewed cause for hope in Iraq." That is a measure of Mr. Obama's statesmanship: Though he opposed the war, his strategy recognizes what has been achieved in Iraq, even at a terrible cost, and aims at preserving it. His party would do well to follow his lead.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Energy Dept Partner Begins Injecting 50,000 Tons of Carbon Dioxide in Michigan Basin
DOE Partner Begins Injecting 50,000 Tons of Carbon Dioxide in Michigan Basin
Project Expected to Advance National Carbon Sequestration Program, Create Jobs
February 27, 2009
Washington, D.C. — Building on an initial injection project of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into a Michigan geologic formation, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) team of regional partners has begun injecting 50,000 additional tons into the formation, which is believed capable of storing hundreds of years worth of CO2, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
DOE’s Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP), led by Battelle of Columbus, Ohio, began injecting the CO2 this week in the Michigan Basin near Gaylord, Mich., in a deep saline formation, the Silurian-age Bass Island dolomite. The MRCSP is one of seven partnerships in DOE’s Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program, which was created to assess optimal CO2 storage approaches in each region of the country. The program is managed for DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).
"This injection test, one of three performed by our Midwest partner, will significantly increase our understanding of CO2 storage technologies and practices in a real-world setting," said Victor Der, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. "This project will not only provide important information about promising sequestration techniques but it will also go a long way toward creating jobs in the energy sector."
When the current project is completed, the total 60,000 metric ton injection at the Michigan site will mark the largest deep saline reservoir injection in the United States to date and will allow scientists to more fully evaluate how CO2 moves through the basin’s geologic formation. Injections are expected to take place at an average rate of 250 tons per day up to a maximum rate of 600 tons. The 6-month project and related activities of the MRCSP are expected to create more than 230 jobs and 2,900 total project job years. The latter figure represents the number of full-time jobs per year times the number of years that the jobs are supported.
During the Michigan basin injection process, the Midwest team will provide additional insight to the knowledge gained from the initial test in 2008. The team will record geochemical changes to the system, as well as the distribution of the CO2 along the wellbore. A larger volume of CO2 injected over a longer period of time will also provide scientists with additional insight into temperature and pressure responses in the geologic formation, as well as any seasonal changes to the system.
Since the test is taking place within an existing oil and gas field, continuing enhanced oil recovery operations — which are being conducted by well owner, Core Energy LLC — makes this area ideal for the injection test. The area already contains much of the needed infrastructure, such as CO2 compressors, injection systems, existing wells, and pipelines, including an 8-mile-long transport pipeline.
The CO2 being injected comes from a natural gas processing plant owned by DTE Energy, located near Gaylord, where the CO2 will be transported via the 8-mile pipeline to the well. The depth of the injection (3,500 feet) is significantly below the 1,000-foot level of drinking water sources and does not pose any danger to them.
DOE launched the Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program in 2003 to develop and validate technologies to store and monitor CO2 in various geologic formations around the country as part of a national strategy to combat global climate change.
The MRCSP team includes more than 30 partners from state and federal organizations, leading universities, state geological surveys, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies in the eight-state region of Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. In addition to Battelle, Core Energy, and DTE, other participants include the Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education at Western Michigan University, Stanford University Geophysics Department, Schlumberger, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Geological Survey.
Project Expected to Advance National Carbon Sequestration Program, Create Jobs
February 27, 2009
Washington, D.C. — Building on an initial injection project of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into a Michigan geologic formation, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) team of regional partners has begun injecting 50,000 additional tons into the formation, which is believed capable of storing hundreds of years worth of CO2, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
DOE’s Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP), led by Battelle of Columbus, Ohio, began injecting the CO2 this week in the Michigan Basin near Gaylord, Mich., in a deep saline formation, the Silurian-age Bass Island dolomite. The MRCSP is one of seven partnerships in DOE’s Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program, which was created to assess optimal CO2 storage approaches in each region of the country. The program is managed for DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).
"This injection test, one of three performed by our Midwest partner, will significantly increase our understanding of CO2 storage technologies and practices in a real-world setting," said Victor Der, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. "This project will not only provide important information about promising sequestration techniques but it will also go a long way toward creating jobs in the energy sector."
When the current project is completed, the total 60,000 metric ton injection at the Michigan site will mark the largest deep saline reservoir injection in the United States to date and will allow scientists to more fully evaluate how CO2 moves through the basin’s geologic formation. Injections are expected to take place at an average rate of 250 tons per day up to a maximum rate of 600 tons. The 6-month project and related activities of the MRCSP are expected to create more than 230 jobs and 2,900 total project job years. The latter figure represents the number of full-time jobs per year times the number of years that the jobs are supported.
During the Michigan basin injection process, the Midwest team will provide additional insight to the knowledge gained from the initial test in 2008. The team will record geochemical changes to the system, as well as the distribution of the CO2 along the wellbore. A larger volume of CO2 injected over a longer period of time will also provide scientists with additional insight into temperature and pressure responses in the geologic formation, as well as any seasonal changes to the system.
Since the test is taking place within an existing oil and gas field, continuing enhanced oil recovery operations — which are being conducted by well owner, Core Energy LLC — makes this area ideal for the injection test. The area already contains much of the needed infrastructure, such as CO2 compressors, injection systems, existing wells, and pipelines, including an 8-mile-long transport pipeline.
The CO2 being injected comes from a natural gas processing plant owned by DTE Energy, located near Gaylord, where the CO2 will be transported via the 8-mile pipeline to the well. The depth of the injection (3,500 feet) is significantly below the 1,000-foot level of drinking water sources and does not pose any danger to them.
DOE launched the Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program in 2003 to develop and validate technologies to store and monitor CO2 in various geologic formations around the country as part of a national strategy to combat global climate change.
The MRCSP team includes more than 30 partners from state and federal organizations, leading universities, state geological surveys, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies in the eight-state region of Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. In addition to Battelle, Core Energy, and DTE, other participants include the Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education at Western Michigan University, Stanford University Geophysics Department, Schlumberger, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Geological Survey.
Libertarian: The Two Faces of Barack Obama - A president contradicts himself all night long
The Two Faces of Barack Obama. By Matt Welch
A president contradicts himself all night long
Reason, February 25, 2009
"But I also know," President Barack Obama said last night, in his typically self-referential fashion, "that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job—our job—is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility."
It was a pleasingly presidential sentiment for a subdued, not-quite-a-State-of-the-Union speech. Unfortunately for Obama—and us—it was also contradicted, and blatantly so, not four paragraphs prior, by a guy named Barack Obama. "This time," the president warned us the minute before, while giving that stern schoolmaster look of his, "CEOs won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over!" Democrats leaped to their feet.
Obama aims to be the president of all Americans, a position that appears to be sincere. But I wonder whether in the process he might also want to consider appointing himself chief executive of his own head. All night long, with equally sonorous vigor, he served up confident assertions, only to state moments later, with equal conviction, their near opposite.
"We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama crowd-pleased near the beginning, in the slot normally reserved for lines like "the state of our union is strong." Not long after, though, Americans learned that our very "survival depends on finding new sources of energy." Also, "there will be no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis...our recovery will be choked off before it even begins," and if we don't do whatever Obama wants us to do about the banking system, "it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade." Better! Stronger! Crippled for a decade!
After detailing some clean-energy advancements in China, Germany, Japan, and Korea, the president averred, "Well, I do not accept"—there's that self-referencing again—"a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders." A few paragraphs later, however, zero-sum gave way to kumbaya: "The world depends on us to have a strong economy, just as our economy depends on the strength of the world's." Just don't you get strong by producing clean energy, Koreans!
It was like this all night. The president's stimulus package "will save or create 3.5 million jobs." One of those, anyway! His administration has "created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent," unless they try to use it to find out how and where their money is being spent. Importantly, Obama vowed to "act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times," a pledge he took so seriously that later on he stressed, twice, that "it's not about helping banks—it's about helping people."
The contradictions came flying even in his read-my-lips moment: "If your family earns less than $250,000 a year," he said, "you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime." But as recently as the previous paragraph the president vowed to "restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas." And a few paragraphs before that, he called for a "market-based cap on carbon pollution." So: You will not see your federal taxes increased a single dime...unless you own a company that emits carbon or hires some of those dastardly Koreans.
The two faces of Obama reveal more than just a man hard-wired to work both sides of a room. There is an essential contradiction at the heart of his populist economics. He wants to jump-start the "flow of credit"—it's "the lifeblood of our economy," after all—but somehow surgically remove the "speculators" from the process. "I will not spend a single penny," he promised, undeliverably, last night, "for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can't pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can't get a mortgage." His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declared last week that, "I think we left [behind] a few months ago the adage that if it was good for a derivatives trader, that it's good for Main Street. I think the verdict is in on that."
Here is one of the many problems with that line of thinking: Wall Street isn't just some abstract pit of snakes that can be drowned in poison oil or otherwise given a wide berth—it's the heart (if tattered) of the country's financial industry. Which, among other things, does more to unleash the lifebloody "flow of credit" than any other power center in America. Not only does Obama get it wrong when he thinks you can best "help the small business" without involving the best single source of small-business funding, he also wildly misses the political and financial ethos of the abstraction he can't stop campaigning against. "I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bailouts with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions," he said with a smirk. "But such an approach won't solve the problem." Nor will erecting a giant straw man in Lower Manhattan.
But there's more: Not only is Wall Street going to be key to any recovery, the reviled "derivatives trader" is right at the clenched heart of the financial blockage. As Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson pointed out earlier this month, "Contrary to popular wisdom, banks—institutions that take deposits—aren't the main problem. In December, total U.S. bank credit stood at $9.95 trillion, up 8 percent from a year earlier, reports the Federal Reserve. Business, consumer and real estate loans all increased....The real collapse has occurred in securities markets."
Securitized lending instruments, and the various insurance and pricing bets placed on them, sloshed hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, but have now locked up. The point is not that the derivatives trader needs a bailout—he most certainly does not—it's that inaccurately demonizing him is not the shortest route to economic wisdom.
There were some promising notes in Obama's speech last night, particularly his vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," and discontinue the dishonest and irresponsible way that Congress has funded wars for the past seven years. But the biggest promise was the one that his contradictions—or maybe just his ideology—did not let him fulfill. "It is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment," he said near the beginning, "that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament." Too true. Moments later, however, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, he said: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."
If understanding root causes is the key to good economic policy, we may have longer to go than even the pessimistic half of Obama thinks.
Matt Welch is the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.
A president contradicts himself all night long
Reason, February 25, 2009
"But I also know," President Barack Obama said last night, in his typically self-referential fashion, "that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job—our job—is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility."
It was a pleasingly presidential sentiment for a subdued, not-quite-a-State-of-the-Union speech. Unfortunately for Obama—and us—it was also contradicted, and blatantly so, not four paragraphs prior, by a guy named Barack Obama. "This time," the president warned us the minute before, while giving that stern schoolmaster look of his, "CEOs won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over!" Democrats leaped to their feet.
Obama aims to be the president of all Americans, a position that appears to be sincere. But I wonder whether in the process he might also want to consider appointing himself chief executive of his own head. All night long, with equally sonorous vigor, he served up confident assertions, only to state moments later, with equal conviction, their near opposite.
"We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama crowd-pleased near the beginning, in the slot normally reserved for lines like "the state of our union is strong." Not long after, though, Americans learned that our very "survival depends on finding new sources of energy." Also, "there will be no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis...our recovery will be choked off before it even begins," and if we don't do whatever Obama wants us to do about the banking system, "it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade." Better! Stronger! Crippled for a decade!
After detailing some clean-energy advancements in China, Germany, Japan, and Korea, the president averred, "Well, I do not accept"—there's that self-referencing again—"a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders." A few paragraphs later, however, zero-sum gave way to kumbaya: "The world depends on us to have a strong economy, just as our economy depends on the strength of the world's." Just don't you get strong by producing clean energy, Koreans!
It was like this all night. The president's stimulus package "will save or create 3.5 million jobs." One of those, anyway! His administration has "created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent," unless they try to use it to find out how and where their money is being spent. Importantly, Obama vowed to "act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times," a pledge he took so seriously that later on he stressed, twice, that "it's not about helping banks—it's about helping people."
The contradictions came flying even in his read-my-lips moment: "If your family earns less than $250,000 a year," he said, "you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime." But as recently as the previous paragraph the president vowed to "restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas." And a few paragraphs before that, he called for a "market-based cap on carbon pollution." So: You will not see your federal taxes increased a single dime...unless you own a company that emits carbon or hires some of those dastardly Koreans.
The two faces of Obama reveal more than just a man hard-wired to work both sides of a room. There is an essential contradiction at the heart of his populist economics. He wants to jump-start the "flow of credit"—it's "the lifeblood of our economy," after all—but somehow surgically remove the "speculators" from the process. "I will not spend a single penny," he promised, undeliverably, last night, "for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can't pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can't get a mortgage." His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declared last week that, "I think we left [behind] a few months ago the adage that if it was good for a derivatives trader, that it's good for Main Street. I think the verdict is in on that."
Here is one of the many problems with that line of thinking: Wall Street isn't just some abstract pit of snakes that can be drowned in poison oil or otherwise given a wide berth—it's the heart (if tattered) of the country's financial industry. Which, among other things, does more to unleash the lifebloody "flow of credit" than any other power center in America. Not only does Obama get it wrong when he thinks you can best "help the small business" without involving the best single source of small-business funding, he also wildly misses the political and financial ethos of the abstraction he can't stop campaigning against. "I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bailouts with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions," he said with a smirk. "But such an approach won't solve the problem." Nor will erecting a giant straw man in Lower Manhattan.
But there's more: Not only is Wall Street going to be key to any recovery, the reviled "derivatives trader" is right at the clenched heart of the financial blockage. As Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson pointed out earlier this month, "Contrary to popular wisdom, banks—institutions that take deposits—aren't the main problem. In December, total U.S. bank credit stood at $9.95 trillion, up 8 percent from a year earlier, reports the Federal Reserve. Business, consumer and real estate loans all increased....The real collapse has occurred in securities markets."
Securitized lending instruments, and the various insurance and pricing bets placed on them, sloshed hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, but have now locked up. The point is not that the derivatives trader needs a bailout—he most certainly does not—it's that inaccurately demonizing him is not the shortest route to economic wisdom.
There were some promising notes in Obama's speech last night, particularly his vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," and discontinue the dishonest and irresponsible way that Congress has funded wars for the past seven years. But the biggest promise was the one that his contradictions—or maybe just his ideology—did not let him fulfill. "It is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment," he said near the beginning, "that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament." Too true. Moments later, however, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, he said: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."
If understanding root causes is the key to good economic policy, we may have longer to go than even the pessimistic half of Obama thinks.
Matt Welch is the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine.
Can Newspapers Survive? Only if they work harder to earn and maintain respect
Can Newspapers Survive? By Cathy Young
Only if they work harder to earn and maintain respect
Reason, February 27, 2009
As media giants totter, battered by the Internet and the economic crisis, saving the newspapers has become a hot topic. It is richly ironic that the Net, which has both greatly facilitated the work of journalists and expanded their readership, has also left many unemployed. There are concerns that the death of journalism as we know it will leave our culture ill-informed—blogs are good for opinion and fact-checking, but they are no substitute for original reporting—and endanger democracy by removing a vital part of its checks and balances.
The debate revolves around two key questions. One, does society truly need the professional media? Two, how can professional journalism survive in a new media environment?
On the first question, my answer is a resounding, though possibly self-serving "yes." While I am a fan of blogs, I believe they work best when the "mainstream media" and the blogs complement each other. Otherwise, the blogosphere is all too liable to disintegrate into shrill partisan screaming and irresponsible rumor-mongering.
The responsible media do have a vital role to play in a democracy. However, the mainstream media's defenders would do well to acknowledge some of their failings. A recent editorial in The New Republic laments that "press-bashing"—whether from right-wing media critics such as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, or leftists on the Huffington Post site who accuse the media of conformism—has created a "poisonous atmosphere," undermining the authority of the press.
But what if the critiques have merit? Goldberg's anti-media broadsides may be over the top, but his basic argument—that the liberal politics of most journalists influence media coverage, not because journalists don't strive to be objective but because their cultural milieu influences their perceptions of objectivity—has a great deal of truth to it. Few people doubt that Barack Obama got breaks from the press. And there are well-documented instances of media bias leading to sloppy reporting, with journalists all but recycling the press releases of advocacy groups on such issues as domestic violence, homelessness, or the perils of gun ownership. The press has been the target of unfair criticism, but it cannot be absolved of blame for the damage to its reputation.
That said, the media's present financial woes have little to do with its real or perceived lack of balance, and everything to do with the economics of publishing. News corporations have always subsidized serious reporting and commentary with revenues from other functions of the newspapers, such as classified advertising or sports news. Today, most of those functions have been diverted to other media, including the Internet.
Promising solutions include non-profit programs to support investigative reporting and news analysis. Just because we need professional journalism does not mean that it has to come only in the traditional package of the newspaper. Independent journalists, working as individuals or as teams, may thrive if they can have access to resources outside the conventional structure of a media organization.
Far more controversial is the quest to get readers to pay for online content. In fact, there is no good reason that online content should be free, other than "people are used to it." Is it impossible to persuade people to pay for something they are used to getting for free? Not at all. Online music downloads are a good example; so is television. While TV had been free since its inception, large numbers of people proved willing to pay for cable and digital television.
A subscriber-only model for individual websites has repeatedly proven unworkable. (The Wall Street Journal—a notable exception—gets people to pay for financial information while providing most editorial content free of charge.) The main reason it cannot work is that people who read news and commentary on the Internet usually get their content from many different sites. That is the great advantage of the Internet: you can go from The Washington Post to The London Times at the click of a mouse, and follow a link within one story to read another. If every news site started hiding its content behind a pay wall, reader would face either huge bills or greatly restricted choices, and many would seek to circumvent the subscription requirements.
Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time, recently got into the fray with a proposal to make web media content available for micropayments similar to iTunes, "a one-click system with a really simple interface." If you see a link to an interesting article on, say, the San Jose Mercury News website, you don't have to buy a $20 subscription to the publication—you can pay a nickel or a dime to read the individual item.
While this is a promising idea, it has substantial drawbacks. Those nickels and dimes can add up, and if your monthly bill is high enough, you may think twice the next time you feel like clicking on a link.
A better approach may be to make news and analysis content available only through media portals or carriers, similar to cable television providers. A subscription to a carrier would give access to any news site (newspaper, magazine, blog) that is a part of its package. The subscription price could be set by level of consumption—$20 a month for 40 hours of media access, $40 for 100 hours, and so on. Or it could vary depending on which publications are included, while content outside the customer's standard package could be available for one-time micropayments. Different media portals could experiment with different fee scales. This would allow people to surf the Web without having to ponder each click of a link. Revenues could be distributed to individual websites depending on their readership.
This strategy would still require a drastic departure from Internet business as usual. The migration of participating sites behind media-portal walls would have to be coordinated. Some policing would be needed to ensure that premium content is not reposted on free-access sites. This could make the carriers look like bad guys, at least in the eyes of those for whom free online content has become an entitlement if not an article of faith.
Yet, if there is a will to adopt the media-portal subscription model, there will be a way. Even in the age of celebrity gossip sites and reality shows, millions of Americans still respect real journalism enough to be willing to pay to help keep it alive.
Provided, of course, that the media work harder to deserve and retain that respect.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at Real Clear Politics.
Only if they work harder to earn and maintain respect
Reason, February 27, 2009
As media giants totter, battered by the Internet and the economic crisis, saving the newspapers has become a hot topic. It is richly ironic that the Net, which has both greatly facilitated the work of journalists and expanded their readership, has also left many unemployed. There are concerns that the death of journalism as we know it will leave our culture ill-informed—blogs are good for opinion and fact-checking, but they are no substitute for original reporting—and endanger democracy by removing a vital part of its checks and balances.
The debate revolves around two key questions. One, does society truly need the professional media? Two, how can professional journalism survive in a new media environment?
On the first question, my answer is a resounding, though possibly self-serving "yes." While I am a fan of blogs, I believe they work best when the "mainstream media" and the blogs complement each other. Otherwise, the blogosphere is all too liable to disintegrate into shrill partisan screaming and irresponsible rumor-mongering.
The responsible media do have a vital role to play in a democracy. However, the mainstream media's defenders would do well to acknowledge some of their failings. A recent editorial in The New Republic laments that "press-bashing"—whether from right-wing media critics such as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, or leftists on the Huffington Post site who accuse the media of conformism—has created a "poisonous atmosphere," undermining the authority of the press.
But what if the critiques have merit? Goldberg's anti-media broadsides may be over the top, but his basic argument—that the liberal politics of most journalists influence media coverage, not because journalists don't strive to be objective but because their cultural milieu influences their perceptions of objectivity—has a great deal of truth to it. Few people doubt that Barack Obama got breaks from the press. And there are well-documented instances of media bias leading to sloppy reporting, with journalists all but recycling the press releases of advocacy groups on such issues as domestic violence, homelessness, or the perils of gun ownership. The press has been the target of unfair criticism, but it cannot be absolved of blame for the damage to its reputation.
That said, the media's present financial woes have little to do with its real or perceived lack of balance, and everything to do with the economics of publishing. News corporations have always subsidized serious reporting and commentary with revenues from other functions of the newspapers, such as classified advertising or sports news. Today, most of those functions have been diverted to other media, including the Internet.
Promising solutions include non-profit programs to support investigative reporting and news analysis. Just because we need professional journalism does not mean that it has to come only in the traditional package of the newspaper. Independent journalists, working as individuals or as teams, may thrive if they can have access to resources outside the conventional structure of a media organization.
Far more controversial is the quest to get readers to pay for online content. In fact, there is no good reason that online content should be free, other than "people are used to it." Is it impossible to persuade people to pay for something they are used to getting for free? Not at all. Online music downloads are a good example; so is television. While TV had been free since its inception, large numbers of people proved willing to pay for cable and digital television.
A subscriber-only model for individual websites has repeatedly proven unworkable. (The Wall Street Journal—a notable exception—gets people to pay for financial information while providing most editorial content free of charge.) The main reason it cannot work is that people who read news and commentary on the Internet usually get their content from many different sites. That is the great advantage of the Internet: you can go from The Washington Post to The London Times at the click of a mouse, and follow a link within one story to read another. If every news site started hiding its content behind a pay wall, reader would face either huge bills or greatly restricted choices, and many would seek to circumvent the subscription requirements.
Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time, recently got into the fray with a proposal to make web media content available for micropayments similar to iTunes, "a one-click system with a really simple interface." If you see a link to an interesting article on, say, the San Jose Mercury News website, you don't have to buy a $20 subscription to the publication—you can pay a nickel or a dime to read the individual item.
While this is a promising idea, it has substantial drawbacks. Those nickels and dimes can add up, and if your monthly bill is high enough, you may think twice the next time you feel like clicking on a link.
A better approach may be to make news and analysis content available only through media portals or carriers, similar to cable television providers. A subscription to a carrier would give access to any news site (newspaper, magazine, blog) that is a part of its package. The subscription price could be set by level of consumption—$20 a month for 40 hours of media access, $40 for 100 hours, and so on. Or it could vary depending on which publications are included, while content outside the customer's standard package could be available for one-time micropayments. Different media portals could experiment with different fee scales. This would allow people to surf the Web without having to ponder each click of a link. Revenues could be distributed to individual websites depending on their readership.
This strategy would still require a drastic departure from Internet business as usual. The migration of participating sites behind media-portal walls would have to be coordinated. Some policing would be needed to ensure that premium content is not reposted on free-access sites. This could make the carriers look like bad guys, at least in the eyes of those for whom free online content has become an entitlement if not an article of faith.
Yet, if there is a will to adopt the media-portal subscription model, there will be a way. Even in the age of celebrity gossip sites and reality shows, millions of Americans still respect real journalism enough to be willing to pay to help keep it alive.
Provided, of course, that the media work harder to deserve and retain that respect.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at Real Clear Politics.
Pros and Cons of Multilateral Nonproliferation: Lessons Learned from the Bush Administration
Pros and Cons of Multilateral Nonproliferation: Lessons Learned from the Bush Administration. By Ambassador Jackie WolcottHeritage, February 25, 2009Heritage Lecture #1112
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl1112.cfm
Excerpts:
[...]
First on that list is, of course, Kim Holmes. I had the great honor and fun of working with Kim as his political deputy at State. One of my lasting impressions from that time was working with him as we re-entered the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 2003 after having been voted off it for the first time ever.
The first issue we faced was Libya's candidacy to chair the Commission. With Kim's able leadership-- and believe me, not everyone at the State Department wanted to do this--we waged a worldwide campaign against Libya, then under U.N. sanctions as a terrorist state, eventually calling for a vote to decide its fate. It was the first time in the history of the Human Rights Commission that anyone had forced such a vote. Yes, we went down in flames, but we did it for the right reasons and performed what I think was a badly needed reality check on an institution that had grown comfortable with absurdity.
When my friends here at Heritage first invited me to speak, I pondered what best I might offer that is not already well known and obvious to experts who follow U.S. nonproliferation policy. It seemed to me that perhaps my experience over the past several years might provide a somewhat unique view of the various, related multilateral efforts still underway today. Obviously, now that I am outside of government, I am no longer confined by the bureaucratic "clearance" process, so I hope we can have an informal, non-technical discussion of the challenges and opportunities we face with respect to nuclear nonproliferation.
[...]
While I will address several broad themes today, I would be remiss if I did not draw often on my experiences dealing with the case of Iran. For in a very real sense, Iran has shaken the traditional multilateral system--piece by piece--to its core, and despite the machinations of the blame-America-first crowd, its nuclear weapons program remains the greatest common challenge to each of the institutions in which I served.
At the outset, let me be clear that my remarks here today are based on what I consider to be the inconvenient truth some still try to deny. Diplomats and analysts can debate the size, scope, and pace of the program, or the role of hardliners vs. reformers in Tehran, but Iran's actions over the past several decades cannot lead but to one inexorable conclusion: Iran desires and--if left to its own devices-- will soon have a nuclear weapons capability. No sane person really thinks Iran continues to test a ballistic missile capability in order to launch satellites, but even the most wishful thinking cannot ignore the reams of internationally acquired evidence regarding Iran's covert uranium enrichment program, its weaponization research, and the involvement of its military in almost every facet of these programs.
The Shortcomings of Existing Multilateral Institutions
To better understand how we might move forward, let me take a moment to discuss as a baseline where we have been and where we are now. Broadly speaking, I think it is a fair and accurate assessment to state that existing multilateral institutions are ill equipped, unable, or in some cases unwilling to address the most urgent proliferation security-related threats we face. One could even make the case that these institutions, when they fail to act decisively, in effect legitimize illicit programs. While we should not ignore the role these institutions might play, it is naïve--dangerously so--to assume they can resolve the urgent proliferation matters we confront.
Conference on Disarmament. Some might find that a rather sweeping statement, so I hope you will allow me to illustrate through some specific cases. But before I do, I'd like to talk about time travel. No, I haven't been spending too much time with my colleagues from our national labs discussing the folding of space, although that at times sounds easier than convincing certain countries to forgo the fuel cycle. Trust me, though: Time travel is possible.
All you have to do is visit the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva. The mustaches and sideburns have disappeared, but the crusaders of disarmament are still waging the Cold War in Geneva. And worst of all, they let these people loose several times a year, most notably on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference rooms, to argue--no doubt to Iran's and North Korea's great satisfaction--that proliferation threats would simply cease to exist if the U.S. dismantled its nuclear arsenal. Given this time warp, it is no wonder the organization hasn't produced one solitary piece of work since 1996.
I have spent many a meeting listening to its proponents attempt to tug and stretch the disarmament philosophy into relevancy, but when pressed it is difficult for them to argue that a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, for example, would address current or emerging threats. They offer no credible assurance that a new Cold War treaty could avoid the now-familiar pitfalls associated with the systematic failure to prosecute existing treaty violations.
And so these proponents of disarmament return to the political path of least resistance and focus their attention on the United States and hand the Irans and North Koreas of the world an incredibly valuable gift--time and diplomatic cover to continue their illicit work.
It is a shame so much time and effort is wasted at the CD, but most of us here will agree that on balance, in a venue so mired in the past, no work is good work. Still, the CD illustrates well how outdated, unwilling machinery can infect the workings of the system as a whole.
You really have to hand it to John Bolton. Despite the mustache, he understood the Geneva Mafia--a term that even they use--and he thought it would be useful to speak with one consistent voice wherever they appeared in the world. So when he tapped me as Ambassador to the CD in late 2003, he gave me diplomatic responsibility for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well. The charge was fairly simple: Defend the United States and its interests; utilize each venue as a platform for exposing the true threats to international peace and security; and when in doubt, say no to the CD.
Later, when he and Kim also gave me interim responsibility for the International Atomic Energy Agency, let me tell you, it became very complicated.
International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created, according to its statute, as "an independent intergovernmental, science and technology-based organization, in the United Nations family, that serves as the global focal point for nuclear cooperation." Put differently, it was largely established as a technical organization to help facilitate the peaceful development of civil nuclear programs. In this regard, it has served the international community reasonably well.
The problem, of course, is in its dealings with countries that are pursuing weapons under the guise of peaceful nuclear programs. In some cases, its technical response has been beneficial, as in the case of the IAEA developing the Additional Protocol in 1997. One can also point to its decision to refer North Korea to the U.N. Security Council in both 1993 and 2003. But a fair cost-benefit analysis also would have to include its track record as the world's so-called nuclear watchdog.
There have been several well-documented instances in which it simply did not detect or adequately judge illicit nuclear programs, but obviously, the hallmark failure of the IAEA has been the case of Iran, most notably in 2003 when it failed its mandate by refusing to formally find Iran in non-compliance with IAEA statutes and refer it to the Security Council. While the Security Council is by no means a panacea, it is quite clear that the international community in the fall of 2003 missed an important opportunity to signal to Iran that its nuclear weapons program was unacceptable. Some board members and IAEA officials alike--for assorted reasons--didn't want to lose jurisdiction over the Iran issue from Vienna. Despite our best efforts at home and abroad, the referral didn't come until early 2006.
While some IAEA officials certainly enabled this delay, responsibility ultimately falls to states and their often tried, often failed policy of negotiation. Many of you here have correctly argued that negotiation is not policy, just one of a number of available tools to achieve a policy, and when we fail to recognize the distinction, we end up with nothing or worse. Europe's negotiations with Iran achieved nothing, but what's worse is that they delayed the referral process in Vienna for over two years.
First the Europeans promised negotiations would dismantle Iran's nuclear program, and when the operative negotiating term quickly became "suspend," we were promised that it soon would be changed to "halt." Dismantlement became a wish rather than a goal. At the same time, the Europeans promised Iran that if it agreed to a temporary suspension and some form of verification, the U.S. would eventually accept its program. Though the resulting so-called Treaty of Paris was lauded as bringing the world back from the brink of another Iraq-like U.N. Security Council drama, it was a failure even before it was abrogated. The goalposts weren't just moved; they were disposed of altogether at a very early stage.
The Europeans still like to claim that their negotiations slowed Iran's nuclear progress. Iran, of course, took a different view, with their chief negotiator even boasting later that the ongoing negotiations afforded Iran the necessary time to complete a critical part of the fuel cycle. Iran, like North Korea, has recycled this tactic many times to great success: If they delay, the West will eventually negotiate with itself and back down.
The last several years have also been witness to a rather new phenomenon that has further weakened the ability of the IAEA to do its job. For years, the IAEA had been known as an apolitical technical agency. It was thought that consensus decisions, an unwritten rule known affectionately as the "Spirit of Vienna," would guard against the kind of deadlocking politicization so common in Geneva and other U.N. cities. As the U.S. Representative to the IAEA Board of Governors from 2004-2005, I had a front-row seat as Iran and its Non-Aligned Movement allies quickly turned the "Spirit of Vienna" on its ear. Board meetings now are often highly politicized events, complete with anti-Western tirades, procedural obfuscation, and other tactics used to derail action on cases like Iran.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, broadly speaking, established a bargain where countries have both entitlements and obligations with respect to their acquisition and handling of nuclear materials. Perhaps the NPT's greatest contribution has been to help strengthen the abstract norm that countries outside of the five which already possessed nuclear weapons should forgo such programs. Unfortunately, we don't just deal in abstract norms; we must deal with real-world, empirical cases of countries manipulating the so-called right to peaceful nuclear energy to further their pursuit of a weapons capability.
Rather than confront these serious issues, however, many NPT members devote all of their efforts year after year, conference after conference, to blaming the world's problems on the United States and, to some degree, the other nuclear weapons states. Interestingly, in my experience, China largely gets a pass. Given the incongruity of events inside and outside these conference rooms, I felt little guilt when irritating my colleagues--both foreign and domestic--by reminding them that we were working on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not the Nuclear Peaceful Uses Treaty or the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.
Form over substance almost uniformly dominates NPT meetings, as evidenced by members' reaction to North Korea's announced withdrawal from the Treaty in 2003. At first, member states appeared to be in denial, even going so far as to argue that the DPRK was still a Treaty party because it didn't follow the proper technical procedures of withdrawal. At several meetings, organizers even put out a name placard for the DPRK, knowing there would be an empty seat. This certainly addressed threats to decorum, just as it ensured against what might have been a useful debate on how to address those who violate and then withdraw from the Treaty.
There is very little within the NPT about how to formally find or address noncompliance. Indeed, as IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei likes to point out, the IAEA, as a technical agency, only verifies safeguards agreements; it is up to member states to judge compliance with the NPT itself.
One would think that the mounting evidence and multilateral action to date would indicate some general agreement regarding Iran's noncompliance with the NPT. In the world of multilateral diplomacy, however, nothing is agreed until it is negotiated and printed in a resolution. And once agreed, for better or worse, a document's content will be repeated and reused in conference rooms and texts for years and years. Iran fully understands this, so naturally it sought to exploit ElBaradei's--shall we say-- nuanced verdicts, its political base, and the West's penchant for consensus negotiations to influence the content of the various multilateral resolutions on its nuclear program. The resulting paper trail is a mixed bag, with a little something for everyone. On balance, Iran might have lost some battles, but it is still winning the multilateral paper war.
United Nations Security Council. Turning to the U.N. Security Council, I find it deeply troubling that the only body charged with addressing threats to international peace and security persists in punting the Iran file back to Vienna. I think it is fair to say that the Security Council's reaction to Iran has been not just ineffective, but tragically counterproductive. The reason is pretty straightforward: A bad resolution is worse than no resolution.
At the highest levels, the U.S. was well aware that consensus as a precondition to a vote in the Security Council would weaken the substance of the provisions aimed at countering Iranian proliferation, but a conscious decision was made to follow the Europeans and let them put form before substance. In effect, we handed Russia, China, and even Germany a line-item veto and surrendered our ability to leverage the harsh public scrutiny associated with formal Security Council vetoes.
This is not to say that we didn't do our damnedest to push the diplomatic envelope--and we did score some, albeit temporary, victories. I have here in my hand one special memory, a note John Bolton handed me toward the end of a particularly tough meeting of the P-5, the five permanent members of the Security Council. It reads, "Headline for this meeting: British-French effort to surrender thwarted." In the end, however, we were bound by instructions and consensus, and bearing witness to the evisceration of each draft resolution was like watching a car crash that you know is about to happen. At one point, the Russian ambassador in New York quipped that he would not receive instructions to conclude negotiations in New York until Washington, Paris, and London stopped sending concessions to Moscow.
Unfortunately, a tepid symbol of consensus in New York does very little to provide countries concrete authority for dealing with real-world proliferation. When we shy away from provoking a clear choice--meaning, pressing to a vote--the Security Council can enable a dangerous status quo. In the case of Iran, this allowed it to gain significant time, space, and negotiating advantage in the process.
John Bolton has referred to a phenomenon he calls the "We Never Fail in New York Syndrome." The consequence of this "impossibility of failure" attitude is that many of the resolutions passed, such as those on Iran, are toothless while others are simply thematic in nature.
These thematic resolutions in the Security Council were a particular pet peeve of mine. No civilized person, for example, supports using children in armed conflict, but it is unclear to me what a generic statement on the subject from the Security Council serves or solves. That's why we have the U.N. General Assembly: to produce statements on every issue known to man. It always seemed suspiciously as if the Council used these debates to deflect the fact that it was incapable of actually resolving true threats to international peace and security.
To be sure, the Security Council does address important regional security threats from time to time, but this occurs only when there is convergence in views of the P-5 members. It is for this reason that the Council spends roughly 70 percent of its time discussing regional peacekeeping conflicts, largely confined to Africa.
Returning to the case of Iran, I believe it is unrealistic to expect the Security Council to play an important role in resolving Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program. Simply, if bluntly, put, Russia and China have divergent interests from ours, and we have handed them the ability to avoid the public outcry that would accompany a veto. Both Russia and China have significant commercial and military interests in Iran which underlie much of their approach on this issue. Let me add that, from my vantage point in the Security Council, there was clearly an understanding between the two that China would back Russia's positions on Iran, and Russia in return would support China on North Korea. This dynamic drove much of our closed-door debate each time we negotiated Security Council resolutions on these two biggest threats to international peace and security.
Efforts Outside of Formal Institutions
The point of my remarks is not to disparage all multilateral action--indeed, quite the contrary. But it is important to have a clear-eyed view of the limitations of formal institutions, particularly when we allow our fear of failure or illegitimacy to delay the adoption of more creative, ad hoc arrangements.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group. A first important movement away from formal multilateral mechanisms was promoted in the mid-1970s--interestingly, by the United States and the Soviet Union. Acknowledging that there remained unaddressed proliferation risks involved with the transfer of nuclear material and equipment, a set of 15 like-minded nations, known as the "London Club," began meeting to discuss the creation of a uniform set of nuclear supply standards that did not disrupt the commercial market.
Today, this group, which includes over 40 participating governments, is better known as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, or NSG. While the NSG does not take action per se, NSG members seek to strengthen nonproliferation efforts through adherence to a set of nuclear export guidelines. Recently, amid renewed concerns about the transfer of sensitive fuel-cycle technologies, the U.S. has led an effort to further strengthen these guidelines, a campaign that still unfolds today.
The Proliferation Security Initiative. One of the Bush Administration's most creative and groundbreaking efforts in this regard was the Proliferation Security Initiative. It is a stark departure from multilateral business as usual. Rather than waste time on speeches and conference agendas, PSI supporters concentrate their cooperative efforts on interdicting shipments of weapons of mass destruction at sea, in the air, and on land. Today, more than 90 countries around the world support PSI and stand ready to utilize existing authorities and resources to actively prevent the trafficking of the world's worst weapons. Libya is just one success story of PSI.
Another innovative development sought to sever the lines of support proliferators use to finance their activities. The financial measures the Bush Administration pioneered have since become multilateral with the European Union, even the U.N. Security Council, coming on board in select cases. More broadly, the Financial Action Task Force, a coalition of 34 countries, originally focused primarily on money laundering but today is helping banks and financial institutions to avoid becoming unwitting partners in proliferation activities. These types of activities should be strengthened and expanded.
Managing the Fuel Cycle. As I have mentioned earlier, the fundamental flaw in the NPT's grand bargain is that it allows would-be proliferators to develop a weapons capability under the guise of peaceful nuclear energy programs. I would like finally to discuss initiatives that aim to help seal this loophole by stemming the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies.
To further extend the benefits of nuclear power to more states, as well as enhance measures of nonproliferation and waste management, the United States initiated the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, in 2006. GNEP offers a single, informal forum that spans the full spectrum of nuclear energy experience where states speak freely in search of mutually beneficial approaches to the development or further expansion of nuclear energy. Today, 24 other states have joined us as partners in this initiative.
GNEP aims to tackle some of nuclear power's greatest impediments and offers potential for widely acceptable solutions to these challenges, but realization of its objectives will surely take time. This fact was recognized by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, the founders of the GNEP vision.
As a result, a second initiative was the Joint Declaration on Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation, issued July 3, 2007, in Washington and Moscow. It described a pragmatic course through which the United States, Russia, and other supplier states could assist the responsible development of nuclear energy and, most important, create a viable alternative to uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing.
Guided by the Joint Declaration, which I was tasked as Special Envoy to implement, the U.S. began building cooperative relationships with key states in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa that were willing to pursue nuclear power in a responsible and transparent way and consider alternatives to the development of sensitive fuel technologies. I quickly found that our embassies around the world were quite inconsistent--perhaps not surprisingly so--on reporting what was actually happening in their host countries regarding nuclear energy development plans. Firsthand knowledge of programs and intentions is key to assessing motivations as well as transparency, and it was that that we sought in our travels around the world, meeting with key energy and foreign ministry officials.
You may ask, why promote nuclear power at all? Simply put, nuclear energy development around the world is happening now, with or without us. Other supplier countries are actively courting business, and some do not have the high standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation that we have. In my view, we would be irresponsible not to engage.
In the past year alone, the U.S. signed nuclear cooperation Memoranda of Understanding with Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. These agreements symbolize our shared political commitments to pursue cooperation consistent with the highest nuclear standards and to pursue deployment of nuclear power without the transfer of the most sensitive technologies. Significantly, in each of these agreements, there is explicit language of our partners' intent to rely on the international market and not pursue enrichment and reprocessing.
The goals of this effort will take some time to accomplish, but my experience over the past year convinced me that we were on the right track. I believe that if we create a groundswell of partners, especially in the Middle East, who are committed to transparency and forgoing these technologies, we can further isolate Iran, expose its activities for what they really are, and convince others who might consider following Iran's approach to make the right strategic choice.
Conclusion
So what lessons can we draw from these experiences? I have intentionally avoided a formal road map for the Obama Administration, partly because I will be the first to admit I do not have all the answers. With that said, though, a "new tone in foreign policy," as referred to by Vice President Joseph Biden last week in Germany, will not correct the existing impediments within today's multilateral nonproliferation architecture.
Put differently, I don't think being "nicer" or adopting a different "tone" is going to persuade the Iranians or North Koreans to abandon their nuclear weapons programs. As many Bush Administration critics conveniently forget to point out, the case of Libya reminds us that critical security decisions are based on perceived national interests--not the niceties of diplomacy.
We need to recognize and acknowledge that international institutions sometimes fail. It would better serve our interests and those of the wider nonproliferation community if we realize that it is not really our job to save these organizations from themselves. As our multilateral adventures with Iran clearly demonstrate, when we hold the prestige of an organization itself above its stated purpose, we risk sending a message that unacceptable threats can indeed become tolerable. Failure, on the other hand, could actually force these institutions to adapt to the true challenges confronting the international community or naturally lead the U.S. and other like-minded partners to seek solutions elsewhere.
This does not mean abandoning all multilateral tools. There is room for multilateral cooperation, and it can be effective, but it needs to be sensible and targeted. I often found it deeply ironic that as much as the Bush Administration was accused of being unilateralist, we were the ones who were pushing to make PSI an accepted norm within the international community; who pressed to have the IAEA and the Security Council fulfill their mandates; who organized GNEP and the Joint Declaration as multilateral ways to positively influence the nuclear energy renaissance.
In an increasingly interconnected global economy, we must identify which levers to use to give us maximum strategic advantage; I think targeting proliferation financing, for example, is a good start. The U.S. has demonstrated tremendous leadership in these areas, and when we have led, other countries have come on board.
Let me close by saying that it was a great privilege to work on these issues, and with some terrific people, including some in this room. And I thank The Heritage Foundation again for giving me this forum and opportunity to share these observations.
Ambassador Jackie Wolcott most recently served as Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation. She has also served as U.S. Representative to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Representative to the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, and Special Representative of the President for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons with lead responsibility for U.S. participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review process.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl1112.cfm
Excerpts:
[...]
First on that list is, of course, Kim Holmes. I had the great honor and fun of working with Kim as his political deputy at State. One of my lasting impressions from that time was working with him as we re-entered the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 2003 after having been voted off it for the first time ever.
The first issue we faced was Libya's candidacy to chair the Commission. With Kim's able leadership-- and believe me, not everyone at the State Department wanted to do this--we waged a worldwide campaign against Libya, then under U.N. sanctions as a terrorist state, eventually calling for a vote to decide its fate. It was the first time in the history of the Human Rights Commission that anyone had forced such a vote. Yes, we went down in flames, but we did it for the right reasons and performed what I think was a badly needed reality check on an institution that had grown comfortable with absurdity.
When my friends here at Heritage first invited me to speak, I pondered what best I might offer that is not already well known and obvious to experts who follow U.S. nonproliferation policy. It seemed to me that perhaps my experience over the past several years might provide a somewhat unique view of the various, related multilateral efforts still underway today. Obviously, now that I am outside of government, I am no longer confined by the bureaucratic "clearance" process, so I hope we can have an informal, non-technical discussion of the challenges and opportunities we face with respect to nuclear nonproliferation.
[...]
While I will address several broad themes today, I would be remiss if I did not draw often on my experiences dealing with the case of Iran. For in a very real sense, Iran has shaken the traditional multilateral system--piece by piece--to its core, and despite the machinations of the blame-America-first crowd, its nuclear weapons program remains the greatest common challenge to each of the institutions in which I served.
At the outset, let me be clear that my remarks here today are based on what I consider to be the inconvenient truth some still try to deny. Diplomats and analysts can debate the size, scope, and pace of the program, or the role of hardliners vs. reformers in Tehran, but Iran's actions over the past several decades cannot lead but to one inexorable conclusion: Iran desires and--if left to its own devices-- will soon have a nuclear weapons capability. No sane person really thinks Iran continues to test a ballistic missile capability in order to launch satellites, but even the most wishful thinking cannot ignore the reams of internationally acquired evidence regarding Iran's covert uranium enrichment program, its weaponization research, and the involvement of its military in almost every facet of these programs.
The Shortcomings of Existing Multilateral Institutions
To better understand how we might move forward, let me take a moment to discuss as a baseline where we have been and where we are now. Broadly speaking, I think it is a fair and accurate assessment to state that existing multilateral institutions are ill equipped, unable, or in some cases unwilling to address the most urgent proliferation security-related threats we face. One could even make the case that these institutions, when they fail to act decisively, in effect legitimize illicit programs. While we should not ignore the role these institutions might play, it is naïve--dangerously so--to assume they can resolve the urgent proliferation matters we confront.
Conference on Disarmament. Some might find that a rather sweeping statement, so I hope you will allow me to illustrate through some specific cases. But before I do, I'd like to talk about time travel. No, I haven't been spending too much time with my colleagues from our national labs discussing the folding of space, although that at times sounds easier than convincing certain countries to forgo the fuel cycle. Trust me, though: Time travel is possible.
All you have to do is visit the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva. The mustaches and sideburns have disappeared, but the crusaders of disarmament are still waging the Cold War in Geneva. And worst of all, they let these people loose several times a year, most notably on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference rooms, to argue--no doubt to Iran's and North Korea's great satisfaction--that proliferation threats would simply cease to exist if the U.S. dismantled its nuclear arsenal. Given this time warp, it is no wonder the organization hasn't produced one solitary piece of work since 1996.
I have spent many a meeting listening to its proponents attempt to tug and stretch the disarmament philosophy into relevancy, but when pressed it is difficult for them to argue that a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, for example, would address current or emerging threats. They offer no credible assurance that a new Cold War treaty could avoid the now-familiar pitfalls associated with the systematic failure to prosecute existing treaty violations.
And so these proponents of disarmament return to the political path of least resistance and focus their attention on the United States and hand the Irans and North Koreas of the world an incredibly valuable gift--time and diplomatic cover to continue their illicit work.
It is a shame so much time and effort is wasted at the CD, but most of us here will agree that on balance, in a venue so mired in the past, no work is good work. Still, the CD illustrates well how outdated, unwilling machinery can infect the workings of the system as a whole.
You really have to hand it to John Bolton. Despite the mustache, he understood the Geneva Mafia--a term that even they use--and he thought it would be useful to speak with one consistent voice wherever they appeared in the world. So when he tapped me as Ambassador to the CD in late 2003, he gave me diplomatic responsibility for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well. The charge was fairly simple: Defend the United States and its interests; utilize each venue as a platform for exposing the true threats to international peace and security; and when in doubt, say no to the CD.
Later, when he and Kim also gave me interim responsibility for the International Atomic Energy Agency, let me tell you, it became very complicated.
International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was created, according to its statute, as "an independent intergovernmental, science and technology-based organization, in the United Nations family, that serves as the global focal point for nuclear cooperation." Put differently, it was largely established as a technical organization to help facilitate the peaceful development of civil nuclear programs. In this regard, it has served the international community reasonably well.
The problem, of course, is in its dealings with countries that are pursuing weapons under the guise of peaceful nuclear programs. In some cases, its technical response has been beneficial, as in the case of the IAEA developing the Additional Protocol in 1997. One can also point to its decision to refer North Korea to the U.N. Security Council in both 1993 and 2003. But a fair cost-benefit analysis also would have to include its track record as the world's so-called nuclear watchdog.
There have been several well-documented instances in which it simply did not detect or adequately judge illicit nuclear programs, but obviously, the hallmark failure of the IAEA has been the case of Iran, most notably in 2003 when it failed its mandate by refusing to formally find Iran in non-compliance with IAEA statutes and refer it to the Security Council. While the Security Council is by no means a panacea, it is quite clear that the international community in the fall of 2003 missed an important opportunity to signal to Iran that its nuclear weapons program was unacceptable. Some board members and IAEA officials alike--for assorted reasons--didn't want to lose jurisdiction over the Iran issue from Vienna. Despite our best efforts at home and abroad, the referral didn't come until early 2006.
While some IAEA officials certainly enabled this delay, responsibility ultimately falls to states and their often tried, often failed policy of negotiation. Many of you here have correctly argued that negotiation is not policy, just one of a number of available tools to achieve a policy, and when we fail to recognize the distinction, we end up with nothing or worse. Europe's negotiations with Iran achieved nothing, but what's worse is that they delayed the referral process in Vienna for over two years.
First the Europeans promised negotiations would dismantle Iran's nuclear program, and when the operative negotiating term quickly became "suspend," we were promised that it soon would be changed to "halt." Dismantlement became a wish rather than a goal. At the same time, the Europeans promised Iran that if it agreed to a temporary suspension and some form of verification, the U.S. would eventually accept its program. Though the resulting so-called Treaty of Paris was lauded as bringing the world back from the brink of another Iraq-like U.N. Security Council drama, it was a failure even before it was abrogated. The goalposts weren't just moved; they were disposed of altogether at a very early stage.
The Europeans still like to claim that their negotiations slowed Iran's nuclear progress. Iran, of course, took a different view, with their chief negotiator even boasting later that the ongoing negotiations afforded Iran the necessary time to complete a critical part of the fuel cycle. Iran, like North Korea, has recycled this tactic many times to great success: If they delay, the West will eventually negotiate with itself and back down.
The last several years have also been witness to a rather new phenomenon that has further weakened the ability of the IAEA to do its job. For years, the IAEA had been known as an apolitical technical agency. It was thought that consensus decisions, an unwritten rule known affectionately as the "Spirit of Vienna," would guard against the kind of deadlocking politicization so common in Geneva and other U.N. cities. As the U.S. Representative to the IAEA Board of Governors from 2004-2005, I had a front-row seat as Iran and its Non-Aligned Movement allies quickly turned the "Spirit of Vienna" on its ear. Board meetings now are often highly politicized events, complete with anti-Western tirades, procedural obfuscation, and other tactics used to derail action on cases like Iran.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, broadly speaking, established a bargain where countries have both entitlements and obligations with respect to their acquisition and handling of nuclear materials. Perhaps the NPT's greatest contribution has been to help strengthen the abstract norm that countries outside of the five which already possessed nuclear weapons should forgo such programs. Unfortunately, we don't just deal in abstract norms; we must deal with real-world, empirical cases of countries manipulating the so-called right to peaceful nuclear energy to further their pursuit of a weapons capability.
Rather than confront these serious issues, however, many NPT members devote all of their efforts year after year, conference after conference, to blaming the world's problems on the United States and, to some degree, the other nuclear weapons states. Interestingly, in my experience, China largely gets a pass. Given the incongruity of events inside and outside these conference rooms, I felt little guilt when irritating my colleagues--both foreign and domestic--by reminding them that we were working on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not the Nuclear Peaceful Uses Treaty or the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.
Form over substance almost uniformly dominates NPT meetings, as evidenced by members' reaction to North Korea's announced withdrawal from the Treaty in 2003. At first, member states appeared to be in denial, even going so far as to argue that the DPRK was still a Treaty party because it didn't follow the proper technical procedures of withdrawal. At several meetings, organizers even put out a name placard for the DPRK, knowing there would be an empty seat. This certainly addressed threats to decorum, just as it ensured against what might have been a useful debate on how to address those who violate and then withdraw from the Treaty.
There is very little within the NPT about how to formally find or address noncompliance. Indeed, as IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei likes to point out, the IAEA, as a technical agency, only verifies safeguards agreements; it is up to member states to judge compliance with the NPT itself.
One would think that the mounting evidence and multilateral action to date would indicate some general agreement regarding Iran's noncompliance with the NPT. In the world of multilateral diplomacy, however, nothing is agreed until it is negotiated and printed in a resolution. And once agreed, for better or worse, a document's content will be repeated and reused in conference rooms and texts for years and years. Iran fully understands this, so naturally it sought to exploit ElBaradei's--shall we say-- nuanced verdicts, its political base, and the West's penchant for consensus negotiations to influence the content of the various multilateral resolutions on its nuclear program. The resulting paper trail is a mixed bag, with a little something for everyone. On balance, Iran might have lost some battles, but it is still winning the multilateral paper war.
United Nations Security Council. Turning to the U.N. Security Council, I find it deeply troubling that the only body charged with addressing threats to international peace and security persists in punting the Iran file back to Vienna. I think it is fair to say that the Security Council's reaction to Iran has been not just ineffective, but tragically counterproductive. The reason is pretty straightforward: A bad resolution is worse than no resolution.
At the highest levels, the U.S. was well aware that consensus as a precondition to a vote in the Security Council would weaken the substance of the provisions aimed at countering Iranian proliferation, but a conscious decision was made to follow the Europeans and let them put form before substance. In effect, we handed Russia, China, and even Germany a line-item veto and surrendered our ability to leverage the harsh public scrutiny associated with formal Security Council vetoes.
This is not to say that we didn't do our damnedest to push the diplomatic envelope--and we did score some, albeit temporary, victories. I have here in my hand one special memory, a note John Bolton handed me toward the end of a particularly tough meeting of the P-5, the five permanent members of the Security Council. It reads, "Headline for this meeting: British-French effort to surrender thwarted." In the end, however, we were bound by instructions and consensus, and bearing witness to the evisceration of each draft resolution was like watching a car crash that you know is about to happen. At one point, the Russian ambassador in New York quipped that he would not receive instructions to conclude negotiations in New York until Washington, Paris, and London stopped sending concessions to Moscow.
Unfortunately, a tepid symbol of consensus in New York does very little to provide countries concrete authority for dealing with real-world proliferation. When we shy away from provoking a clear choice--meaning, pressing to a vote--the Security Council can enable a dangerous status quo. In the case of Iran, this allowed it to gain significant time, space, and negotiating advantage in the process.
John Bolton has referred to a phenomenon he calls the "We Never Fail in New York Syndrome." The consequence of this "impossibility of failure" attitude is that many of the resolutions passed, such as those on Iran, are toothless while others are simply thematic in nature.
These thematic resolutions in the Security Council were a particular pet peeve of mine. No civilized person, for example, supports using children in armed conflict, but it is unclear to me what a generic statement on the subject from the Security Council serves or solves. That's why we have the U.N. General Assembly: to produce statements on every issue known to man. It always seemed suspiciously as if the Council used these debates to deflect the fact that it was incapable of actually resolving true threats to international peace and security.
To be sure, the Security Council does address important regional security threats from time to time, but this occurs only when there is convergence in views of the P-5 members. It is for this reason that the Council spends roughly 70 percent of its time discussing regional peacekeeping conflicts, largely confined to Africa.
Returning to the case of Iran, I believe it is unrealistic to expect the Security Council to play an important role in resolving Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program. Simply, if bluntly, put, Russia and China have divergent interests from ours, and we have handed them the ability to avoid the public outcry that would accompany a veto. Both Russia and China have significant commercial and military interests in Iran which underlie much of their approach on this issue. Let me add that, from my vantage point in the Security Council, there was clearly an understanding between the two that China would back Russia's positions on Iran, and Russia in return would support China on North Korea. This dynamic drove much of our closed-door debate each time we negotiated Security Council resolutions on these two biggest threats to international peace and security.
Efforts Outside of Formal Institutions
The point of my remarks is not to disparage all multilateral action--indeed, quite the contrary. But it is important to have a clear-eyed view of the limitations of formal institutions, particularly when we allow our fear of failure or illegitimacy to delay the adoption of more creative, ad hoc arrangements.
The Nuclear Suppliers Group. A first important movement away from formal multilateral mechanisms was promoted in the mid-1970s--interestingly, by the United States and the Soviet Union. Acknowledging that there remained unaddressed proliferation risks involved with the transfer of nuclear material and equipment, a set of 15 like-minded nations, known as the "London Club," began meeting to discuss the creation of a uniform set of nuclear supply standards that did not disrupt the commercial market.
Today, this group, which includes over 40 participating governments, is better known as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, or NSG. While the NSG does not take action per se, NSG members seek to strengthen nonproliferation efforts through adherence to a set of nuclear export guidelines. Recently, amid renewed concerns about the transfer of sensitive fuel-cycle technologies, the U.S. has led an effort to further strengthen these guidelines, a campaign that still unfolds today.
The Proliferation Security Initiative. One of the Bush Administration's most creative and groundbreaking efforts in this regard was the Proliferation Security Initiative. It is a stark departure from multilateral business as usual. Rather than waste time on speeches and conference agendas, PSI supporters concentrate their cooperative efforts on interdicting shipments of weapons of mass destruction at sea, in the air, and on land. Today, more than 90 countries around the world support PSI and stand ready to utilize existing authorities and resources to actively prevent the trafficking of the world's worst weapons. Libya is just one success story of PSI.
Another innovative development sought to sever the lines of support proliferators use to finance their activities. The financial measures the Bush Administration pioneered have since become multilateral with the European Union, even the U.N. Security Council, coming on board in select cases. More broadly, the Financial Action Task Force, a coalition of 34 countries, originally focused primarily on money laundering but today is helping banks and financial institutions to avoid becoming unwitting partners in proliferation activities. These types of activities should be strengthened and expanded.
Managing the Fuel Cycle. As I have mentioned earlier, the fundamental flaw in the NPT's grand bargain is that it allows would-be proliferators to develop a weapons capability under the guise of peaceful nuclear energy programs. I would like finally to discuss initiatives that aim to help seal this loophole by stemming the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies.
To further extend the benefits of nuclear power to more states, as well as enhance measures of nonproliferation and waste management, the United States initiated the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, in 2006. GNEP offers a single, informal forum that spans the full spectrum of nuclear energy experience where states speak freely in search of mutually beneficial approaches to the development or further expansion of nuclear energy. Today, 24 other states have joined us as partners in this initiative.
GNEP aims to tackle some of nuclear power's greatest impediments and offers potential for widely acceptable solutions to these challenges, but realization of its objectives will surely take time. This fact was recognized by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, the founders of the GNEP vision.
As a result, a second initiative was the Joint Declaration on Nuclear Energy and Nonproliferation, issued July 3, 2007, in Washington and Moscow. It described a pragmatic course through which the United States, Russia, and other supplier states could assist the responsible development of nuclear energy and, most important, create a viable alternative to uranium enrichment and spent-fuel reprocessing.
Guided by the Joint Declaration, which I was tasked as Special Envoy to implement, the U.S. began building cooperative relationships with key states in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa that were willing to pursue nuclear power in a responsible and transparent way and consider alternatives to the development of sensitive fuel technologies. I quickly found that our embassies around the world were quite inconsistent--perhaps not surprisingly so--on reporting what was actually happening in their host countries regarding nuclear energy development plans. Firsthand knowledge of programs and intentions is key to assessing motivations as well as transparency, and it was that that we sought in our travels around the world, meeting with key energy and foreign ministry officials.
You may ask, why promote nuclear power at all? Simply put, nuclear energy development around the world is happening now, with or without us. Other supplier countries are actively courting business, and some do not have the high standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation that we have. In my view, we would be irresponsible not to engage.
In the past year alone, the U.S. signed nuclear cooperation Memoranda of Understanding with Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. These agreements symbolize our shared political commitments to pursue cooperation consistent with the highest nuclear standards and to pursue deployment of nuclear power without the transfer of the most sensitive technologies. Significantly, in each of these agreements, there is explicit language of our partners' intent to rely on the international market and not pursue enrichment and reprocessing.
The goals of this effort will take some time to accomplish, but my experience over the past year convinced me that we were on the right track. I believe that if we create a groundswell of partners, especially in the Middle East, who are committed to transparency and forgoing these technologies, we can further isolate Iran, expose its activities for what they really are, and convince others who might consider following Iran's approach to make the right strategic choice.
Conclusion
So what lessons can we draw from these experiences? I have intentionally avoided a formal road map for the Obama Administration, partly because I will be the first to admit I do not have all the answers. With that said, though, a "new tone in foreign policy," as referred to by Vice President Joseph Biden last week in Germany, will not correct the existing impediments within today's multilateral nonproliferation architecture.
Put differently, I don't think being "nicer" or adopting a different "tone" is going to persuade the Iranians or North Koreans to abandon their nuclear weapons programs. As many Bush Administration critics conveniently forget to point out, the case of Libya reminds us that critical security decisions are based on perceived national interests--not the niceties of diplomacy.
We need to recognize and acknowledge that international institutions sometimes fail. It would better serve our interests and those of the wider nonproliferation community if we realize that it is not really our job to save these organizations from themselves. As our multilateral adventures with Iran clearly demonstrate, when we hold the prestige of an organization itself above its stated purpose, we risk sending a message that unacceptable threats can indeed become tolerable. Failure, on the other hand, could actually force these institutions to adapt to the true challenges confronting the international community or naturally lead the U.S. and other like-minded partners to seek solutions elsewhere.
This does not mean abandoning all multilateral tools. There is room for multilateral cooperation, and it can be effective, but it needs to be sensible and targeted. I often found it deeply ironic that as much as the Bush Administration was accused of being unilateralist, we were the ones who were pushing to make PSI an accepted norm within the international community; who pressed to have the IAEA and the Security Council fulfill their mandates; who organized GNEP and the Joint Declaration as multilateral ways to positively influence the nuclear energy renaissance.
In an increasingly interconnected global economy, we must identify which levers to use to give us maximum strategic advantage; I think targeting proliferation financing, for example, is a good start. The U.S. has demonstrated tremendous leadership in these areas, and when we have led, other countries have come on board.
Let me close by saying that it was a great privilege to work on these issues, and with some terrific people, including some in this room. And I thank The Heritage Foundation again for giving me this forum and opportunity to share these observations.
Ambassador Jackie Wolcott most recently served as Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation. She has also served as U.S. Representative to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Representative to the U.N. Conference on Disarmament, and Special Representative of the President for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons with lead responsibility for U.S. participation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review process.
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