Showing posts from category foreign policy.
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Not All Water Cooperation Is Pretty
›As Karin Bencala and Geoff Dabelko point out in the current issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, transboundary rivers and aquifers all over the world can, and do, provide opportunities to bring riparian parties together. We can identify a degree of cooperation in the management of most of the transboundary water resources in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. But now is the time to stop the pendulum from swinging too far towards mistaken notions of “water peace.” Tensions linger on the Tigris and simmer on the Jordan. The Nile is allocated in a remarkably inequitable and unsustainable manner, as are many of the rivers falling in all directions off the Tibetan plateau. We must continue to question regimes that preserve inequity, treaties that are ineffective “paper tigers” (Bernauer 2003, p. 547), and organisations designed chiefly as sinks for lending and donor agencies. We will be doing the world no great service if our gaze shifts to under-qualified examples of cooperation and away from the root causes of water conflict.
We should be wary of applying the “cooperation” label to transboundary interactions where asymmetric cooperation merely poisons relations and prolongs unfair arrangements. Cooperation has many faces, and not all of them are pretty. The 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty is regularly cited as a model of cooperation, for example, yet as Itay Fischhendler (2008) (subscription required) has shown, the ambiguity built into the agreement favours the more powerful (Israeli) side. In private conversations, Jordanian officials concede frustration that the agreement they signed fell far short of guaranteeing Jordan an equitable share of the waters. Last month, the Economist highlighted several other cases of such asymmetric water cooperation.
Recent efforts by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) demonstrate cooperation of a completely different nature. FOEME’s Good Water Neighbors project brings together mayors from Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli towns on the Jordan River in an effort to improve its quality. The project, like the organisation itself, represents all sides in equal measure. This equitable cooperation should be the standard analysts and policymakers shoot for.
We must be careful not to divorce small-scale cooperation from the broader water conflict within which it takes place, however. At the state level, the distribution of transboundary freshwater between Israel and the Palestinian territories remains an inequitable 90-10 split. The Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) established following the 1995 Oslo II interim agreement gives the Israeli side an effective veto over even basic rainwater catchment projects (for instance, in the southern West Bank). Multiple USAID, European, and UN development projects remain stalled because they have not cleared the JWC’s triple hurdle requiring that all water-related projects obtain Israeli technical (fine), political (?) and military (!) approval. Jan Selby (2003) (subscription required) insists this is not cooperation, but “domination dressed up as cooperation.”
While asymmetric, dominative, strategic, self-interested, and token cooperation all fall short of violent conflict, we should bear in mind that the tensions relating to the uglier faces of cooperation do not disappear with time. At the very least, treaties must be structured more equitably, in accordance with the basic water-sharing principles of international water law. They should also include re-visiting clauses, to modify the agreement when changes in politics or climate present the people dependent on the waters with a different set of circumstances. The ongoing water negotiations between Israel and Palestine and the imminent negotiations between Israel and Syria make understanding water cooperation much more than an academic indulgence. We must all push where we can to get it right.
Mark Zeitoun is a fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance and heads the London School of Economics/King’s College London London Water Research Group. -
Weekly Reading
›The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States, the long-awaited report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, was released this week.
The Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman discussed his recent book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
Saleem Ali urges Pakistan and India to amicably resolve the Sir Creek dispute in an op-ed in Pakistan’s Daily Times.
“Reducing carbon dependency also goes to the heart of our basic security needs for the future,” writes Tony Blair in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
A new guide from the Population Reference Bureau on sexual and reproductive health in the Middle East and North Africa targets journalists. -
Will Burmese Junta’s Response to Cyclone Nargis Provoke Protests?
›May 9, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarBurma’s ruling military junta is prohibiting almost all foreign aid workers from entering the country, despite the massive devastation wreaked by Cyclone Nargis last week. The military has also impounded an aid shipment from the UN World Food Program (WFP) and has refused aid from the United States, among other countries. “We are very concerned that this food is not reaching—on day six after a cyclone—the very victims of that cyclone,” said WFP spokesman Paul Risley. The United Nations has suspended aid to Burma pending resolution of the situation.
In a statement released earlier this week, the junta said it would be willing to accept foreign aid, as long as it could distribute the shipments itself. But so far, the statement has not matched up with reality.
The official death toll from the cyclone is approximately 23,000, but experts say this figure could rise significantly, as approximately 40,000 people remain missing. Hundreds of thousands are currently without shelter, food, safe water, or medical care, and international experts agree that the Burmese military does not have the capacity to meet the need. Further compounding the problem, Burma’s military rulers have pressed on with plans to conduct a national constitutional referendum in the less-affected areas tomorrow. Soldiers who could be delivering much-needed aid to survivors have instead been assigned to guard and run polling places. The ruling generals claim that approval of the referendum will set Burma on a gradual path to democracy; nearly all other observers say the vote is a sham. “If you believe in gnomes, trolls and elves, you can believe in this democratic process in Myanmar,” said chief UN human rights investigator Paulo Sergio Pinheiro last year.
Many of Burma’s citizens are probably too preoccupied with immediate survival right now to be thinking about protesting the junta’s delay of humanitarian relief. But in a few weeks or months, when the situation has (hopefully) stabilized somewhat and word has spread of the holdup of humanitarian aid, one wonders whether the junta will find itself the target of popular outrage. By dragging their feet on international humanitarian relief, Burma’s military rulers seem to be begging for an uprising. -
New Paper Says Longer-Term, Innovative Approach to Security Analysis Needed to Address Climate Change Threats
›May 1, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarClimate change will create hard security problems—including increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, pandemic disease, desertification, and mass migration—but these challenges will not have hard security solutions, argues Nick Mabey in Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World (subscription or purchase required), a policy paper published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Instead, policymakers, NGOs, the private sector, and the security community will need to develop nontraditional, innovative policies and programs to mitigate these threats.
Mabey, who served as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit before becoming founding director and chief executive of E3G, an NGO working on sustainable development, thoughtfully outlines the security challenges that many previous reports on climate security (including by the CNA Corporation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security) have discussed. But he also examines several less frequently mentioned risks. For instance, he warns that some countries will try to use the need for renewable energy as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology for military purposes. Mabey argues that the development and dissemination of less risky energy technologies is the best way to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
In addition, Mabey notes, if the international system fails to address the threat of climate change effectively, its legitimacy will be undermined, and it will find it more difficult to resolve other global threats.
Mabey also calls our attention to the critical role that the environment plays in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Strategic planners developing 10-15-year security strategies for Afghanistan based on sustainable livelihoods must take climate change into account. Attempts to use a “hearts and minds” strategy against Islamist extremism may fall short as higher temperatures and lower rainfall dry up some of the main sources of jobs for young men in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Mabey notes, terrorists are likely to use climate change to feed existing grievances; Osama bin Laden has already spoken several times on climate change’s unequal impacts on different parts of the globe.
“Information on present and future serious climate security impacts is as good, if not better, than other information routinely used in security planning and assessment,” asserts Mabey. Therefore, he argues, the security community has no excuse for not planning for the worst-case climate change scenarios, just as it plans for the worst-case terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation scenarios. Yet Mabey believes the international response to climate change so far has been “slow and inadequate.” He urges nations and international institutions to devote far greater resources to addressing the myriad threats it will pose to political stability and human well-being. -
Jeffrey Sachs’ Memo to the Next U.S. President
›April 22, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffIn his keynote address at the 5th Annual Unite for Sight International Health Conference, held earlier this month, Jeffrey Sachs argued that world leaders must redouble their efforts to alleviate poverty, protect human and environmental health, and balance economic growth and sustainable development. He advocated many of the same solutions that appear in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, including increasing investment in sustainable technology research and development; hastening the diffusion of sustainable technologies to the poorer regions of the world; and allocating a smaller percentage of the national budget for military spending and instead achieving the international target of 0.7 percent of GNP for foreign aid.
One part of Sachs’ presentation that was not included in his book was a memo to the next U.S. president, consisting of ten objectives to achieve global sustainability. Included in this list were the following recommendations, which illustrate Sachs’ view that human health, the environment, economic growth, and security are all integrally linked:
- “Stop putting food into the gas tank.” Sachs spoke out against the current U.S. subsidies for converting corn into ethanol. He linked the initiative to the recent global increase in food prices and the resulting turmoil in areas such as Haiti and Burkina Faso.
- Create a global forum for the leaders of dry lands. Sachs argued that it is important for leaders of areas such as Senegal, Mali, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and California to discuss water scarcity, its impact on livelihoods, and strategies to ensure human security.
- Immediately send a U.S. envoy around the world to back climate change negotiations. Sachs emphasized the need for the United States to step up as a leader on curbing climate change and its environmental and social impacts, rather than stalling international cooperation and progress, as he believes the current administration has done.
- Increase U.S. funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Sachs disapproved of the U.S. government’s decision to decrease its financial support of the UNFPA, which he argued is instrumental in fueling the voluntary decline of fertility rates in less developed countries. He identified access to contraceptives and reproductive services, the empowerment of girls and women, and the promotion of maternal and child health as crucial strategies for slowing population growth and maintaining resource sustainability.
- Make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the heart of international development policy. Sachs noted that he had heard President Bush make reference to the MDGs only once during his two terms in office. He hoped the new administration’s approach to foreign relations and international aid would put a stronger emphasis on achieving the MDGs, which aim to increase health, stability, and prosperity worldwide.
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Three Out of Three Candidates Agree: Climate Is a Security Issue
›April 17, 2008 // By Meaghan ParkerIt was hard to tell which environmental adviser was representing which presidential candidate at a recent news conference sponsored by SEJ on climate change (watch; listen; read)—all three explicitly named it a security priority, and called for a mandatory cap and trade program and the development of new technology. (The question of whether to build new nuclear power plants revealed the only major difference: Clinton’s generally con, McCain is pro, and Obama falls somewhere in the middle.)
Clinton adviser and WilmerHale partner Todd Stern charged out of the gate first, deeming climate a “first-order national security issue” that is “going to exacerbate food security problems. It’s going to exacerbate water scarcity. It’s going to make desertification worse, increase resource competition, and produce, undoubtedly, large-scale migration and refugee problems and increase border tension.” Citing the CNA report, he called climate change a “threat multiplier for instability in volatile parts of the world.” He also quoted Sir Nicholas Stern’s claim that climate change has the potential to cause “economic disruption at a scale of the Great Depression and the wars of the last century.” Clinton will establish a National Energy Council (à la the National Security Council), form an “E8” of major emitters, and increase R&D; efforts—including creating a government agency for energy R&D; modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). No proposals, however, on how to mitigate the existing impacts on our current security situation.
Quoting McCain, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said climate change was “a serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenge.” Taking a harder security stance, Woolsey linked U.S. oil dependence to terrorism not only because it increases “our vulnerability to cutoffs, to terrorist attacks in Middle East” on energy infrastructure, but also because oil fuels oil fuels “Saudi Arabia’s spreading of its hateful Wahhabi doctrine, into madrasas and religious schools around the world”—and funds Iran’s belligerence as well. Unlike Clinton’s representative, Woolsey did not focus on environmental degradation’s links to conflict. He supports market-based incentives to encourage the commercialization of existing technologies—such as plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles, new lighter car body construction, alternative liquid fuels—that could end the “oil monopoly on transportation” and thus fight terrorism at same time. Somewhat cynically, he promoted this vastly oversimplified argument as a politically practical way to convince climate change skeptics to back mitigation efforts.
Like his boss, Obama’s representative Jason Grumet took a big-picture approach, telling the crowd that Obama “gets it”; he recognizes that energy “affects our national security in a dramatic way” and thus requires “dramatic change”—a fundamental transformation of our energy policies to “make us safe and secure.” However, he offered few specific details. Obama supports the development of clean coal (he’s from Illinois, putative site of the now-stalled FutureGen project) and advanced nuclear power, but says we must solve the existing problems with nuclear technology before beginning new development. -
Climate Change and the DoD
›Global climate change is extremely complex, and the potential responses to it are equally complicated, involving efforts to both mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. These efforts will require domestic, regional, and global leadership—and, most certainly, U.S. leadership. The Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest producer of greenhouse gases within the U.S. federal government and will therefore need to be heavily involved in any U.S. response to climate change. Typically, the DoD explores future U.S. national security interests and strategy in congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs). However, the current QDR (2007) does not address climate change, so I have taken the liberty of crafting an article, “Climate Change, National Security, and the Quadrennial Defense Review: Avoiding the Perfect Storm,” that addresses climate change in a QDR-like manner. If you want the DoD’s attention, you must speak their language.
The 2007 QDR groups potential international security challenges into four broad categories: traditional, irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic. Traditional challenges to U.S. interests require employing military forces in conventional activities to prevent military competition and conflict. Irregular challenges to U.S. national security can come from state and non-state actors employing asymmetric tactics (such as terrorism or insurgency) to counter U.S. strengths. Disruptive challenges include situations where competitors employ revolutionary technologies or methods that might counter or negate current U.S. military advantages. Finally, as defined by the March 2005 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, catastrophic challenges encompass terrorists or rogue states employing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or other methods producing WMD-like effects against U.S. interests. In my article, I classify several climate change-driven security threats into the four categories employed by the QDR. If several of these threats happened concurrently, they could create a “perfect storm” with cataclysmic results.
The DoD can help avert this perfect storm, but to do so, it must act quickly, decisively, and comprehensively to achieve what I call “sustainable security.” This involves integrating the democratic peace theory with the core principles of sustainability. Let me briefly explain these two ideas. The democratic peace theory is based on the presumption that democracies do not fight with each other because they share certain pacifying characteristics (e.g., democratic governments, membership in international organizations, economic interdependence) that encourage them to resolve conflicts peacefully. The core principles of sustainability have been described as the 3 Es: equity, economics, and environment. However, I have modified them for my argument; my modified 3 Es are: social/ecological equity, ecological economics, and environmental security. (Additional detail on how the DoD can work toward sustainable security is provided in my article.)
U.S.—including DoD—efforts to achieve sustainable security will enhance “freedom, justice, and human dignity” around the world, “grow the community of democracies,” increase global stability, prosperity, and security, and make it possible for the international community to “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable” consequences of climate change. Some may consider my proposal a pipe dream. But in solving the biggest security threat of them all, dreaming big is not a luxury—it is a necessity.
John T. Ackerman is an assistant professor of national security studies at the Air Command and Staff College (ACSC), Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and the research course director for the ACSC Department of Distance Learning. The opinions expressed in this article are solely his own and do not reflect the positions of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, or ACSC. -
Changes Wrought By Melting Arctic Demand U.S. Leadership, Argues Expert
›April 8, 2008 // By Sonia Schmanski“Washington must awaken to the broader economic and security implications of climate change,” writes Scott G. Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, in an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that explores the consequences of a melting Arctic. “Being green,” emphasizes Borgerson, “is no longer a slogan just for Greenpeace supporters and campus activists; foreign policy hawks must also view the environment as part of the national security calculus.”
Borgerson outlines a mixed bag of sometimes-dramatic changes with important environmental and security implications for the United States. There will be damaging consequences for the fragile Arctic ecosystem, where polar bears are becoming increasingly endangered and fish have been appearing much farther north than ever before. Conversely, the huge new swaths of water now open to shipping and naval vessels will cut the distance between Rotterdam and Yokohama by 40 percent, and between Rotterdam and Seattle by 20 percent, significantly reducing ships’ fuel needs. Ships will also find it easier to avoid potentially unstable waters around the South China Sea and the Middle East (recall the Strait of Hormuz confrontation in January of this year).
During the last 23 years, 41 percent of the Artic’s multi-year ice has melted, and the American Geophysical Union predicts the first ice-free Arctic summer will occur in 2013. Russia’s behavior last summer indicates that it is keenly aware of the new ocean territory being uncovered; there could be as much as 586 billion barrels of oil in the territory it will seek to claim under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). And Russia is not the only country poised to lay claim to the newly available Arctic sea; Norway, Denmark, and Canada have also petitioned the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for additional Arctic territory. Additionally, because Greenland’s recent farming boom could only be helped by a warming climate, Borgerson believes the country might be emboldened to petition Denmark for independence.
The United States has remained largely on the periphery of these issues, last issuing an executive statement in 1994. Borgerson writes that “the combination of new shipping routes, trillions of dollars in possible oil and gas resources, and a poorly defined picture of state ownership makes for a toxic brew.” The situation is especially unstable because it is not progressing within a single, clearly defined international legal framework. UNCLOS cannot be easily applied to the Arctic because of the region’s unique geography and a host of other complexities—the world’s longest and most geographically complicated continental shelf, legally defining the “Northwest Passage,” competing claims to the territory—working to confuse the situation. In addition, it deals exclusively with territory and does not address the many other ramifications of a warming Arctic. Furthermore, the United States prohibited the 1996 Arctic Council from addressing security concerns, so it is unavailable to deal with many of the burgeoning questions.
Borgerson calls for more robust U.S. involvement in shaping the future of this important territory, recalling the successful 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement between Canada and the United States that demilitarized the Great Lakes and eventually formed the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation to manage the area. He also argues that because the United States and Canada jointly administer the North American Aerospace Defense Council (NORAD), they should be “perfectly capable of doing the same on the Arctic frontier.” Eventually, they could include other states in this management, especially Russia. “Self-preservation in the face of massive climate change,” writes Borgerson, “requires an enlightened, humble, and strategic response.”
