OT alertsvinayak wrote:...
That asshole commentator Dan Glazebrook has been paid off by Pakis. He talks shitsvinayak wrote:
Obama approves US troops’ broader role in Afghanistan, breaks promises
Commentrator says that Uncle wants to keep the Af Pak destabilized for a long time for geo political advantage.
Schäuble granted the ideas a rejection that Europe should shut itself off against immigration: "The foreclosure is but what would make us broken, which could degenerate us in inbreeding.(dirty, last time they tried inbreeding they got Führer)
For us Muslims in Germany an enrichment of our openness and our diversity. Look at times but the third generation of Turks, especially the women! That is nevertheless an enormous innovatory potential! " (now that is a mercantile spirit)
I hope we do everything to damage this OBOR idea. Reclaiming POK and freeing up Balochistan from Bakis goes a long way to making this project toothless.The goal of the B&R, Chinese officials say, is to bring prosperity to the many developing Asian countries that lack the capacity to undertake major infrastructure projects on their own by connecting them through a web of airports, deep-water ports, fiber-optic networks, highways, railways, and oil and gas pipelines. The B&R’s unstated goal is equally ambitious: to save China from the economic decline that its slowing growth rate and high debt levels seem to portend.
Some quick thoughts.ramana wrote:How does BREXIT impact India?
Any takers?
Published on Jul 1, 2014
Zero Line with Dr. Kent Moors
The Great Game: Countries at War Over Oil Supplies
http://zerolinekentmoors.com/media/th...
The threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan is just one piece of a larger geopolitical conflict that is quickly escalating -Countries at War over Oil Reserves called "The Great Game" by Dr. Kent Moors. Larger, richer countries are at war over oil reserves. Pakistan & India are just a small piece of the list of countries at war over oil reserves.
As this Great Game plays out, the United States will enter a period that could be tremendously volatile for the U.S. economy, for world economies, and for all currencies.
The Cost of Countries at War Over Oil Reserves
Americans who fail to recognize the significance of the Great Game and who are caught off guard by the resultant stock market volatility stand to lose at least $1.41 trillion every year, not to mention having billions wiped from their bank accounts due to spikes in energy prices and sudden drops in the value of the dollar. In other words, countries aren't just going to war over oil reserves, they're going to war over money.
However, those who understand how all the pieces are moving in this Great Game have a chance to profit from the trillions of dollars that will be there for the taking...
panduranghari wrote:If US and India co-operate, Both win.GShankar wrote:Have to say, all those trips, 'weird' hugs and handshakes with Obomber was not for nothing. Some kind of an equilibrium has been established with both US and Russia. That should be the most concerning discovery for pakis and their tallel bros.
If US and India do not co-operate, both still win- but a lesser prize than if they did co-operate.
If India wishes to co-operate (as proven by Modi's initiatives) but US decides to not co-operate (as proven by SD machinations), India looses but US wins.
Game theory 101.
Choice is very stark.
In his organizational change framework, Kotter writes that it can take several years for change to take effect in organizations. “Until changes sink deeply into a company’s culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.”[8] Gates emphasizes the need for the leader to understand how much time they will have to implement change sharing. “As DCI, with a U.S. presidential election coming in less than a year, I didn’t know whether I had one or five years to implement change, so that uncertainty was part of my need for speed.”[9] In my experience in the military, commanders have 12-24 months to lead their organizations, not the numerous years Kotter describes in his change framework. Knowing how much time is available will prioritize the agenda where change will be initiated, as well as determine the speed of change that is appropriate.
Russia Today's UK bank accounts closed down, says editor
Unclear whether British government responsible for shutting down accounts of Moscow’s main instrument of propaganda in English-speaking world
Luke Harding
Monday 17 October 2016 12.24 BST Last modified on Monday 17 October 2016 13.13 BST
The UK bank accounts of Russian TV broadcaster Russia Today have been shut down, its editor-in-chief has said, in a move that the UK government appears to have been aware of.
In a tweet in Russian Margarita Simonyan said that “all the accounts” had been closed in the UK. She said the decision was final, adding sarcastically: “Long live freedom of speech!”
The channel received a letter from NatWest bank, Simonyan said. It said: “We have recently undertaken a review of your banking arrangements with us and reached the conclusion that we will no longer provide these facilities.”
The bank said that the entire Royal Bank of Scotland Group, of which NatWest is a part, would refuse to handle RT. According to Simonyan, the letter said the decision was final and that it was “not prepared to enter into any discussion in relation to it.”
It was unclear whether the British government was behind the move, but the foreign office was aware of the news when contacted by the Guardian and referred inquiries to the Treasury. The move – if confirmed – casts into doubt the ability of the Kremlin-backed news channel to carry on broadcasting. RT said on Monday it will continue operating.
The US and Britain said on Sunday that they were considering fresh measures and possible further sanctions against Moscow in protest at Russia’s continuing bombardment of civilians in eastern Aleppo.
NatWest has informed RT UK that it will no be one of its clients. Photograph: RT.com
Maria Zakharova, a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, wrote on Facebook: “It looks like, as it leaves the EU, London has decided to leave behind all its obligations towards freedom of speech. As they say, best to start a new life without bad habits.”
Russia Today – now known as RT – is the main instrument of propaganda for the Russian government in the English-speaking world. The channel presents itself as a left-leaning alternative to “mainstream news” under the slogan “Question More”?
In reality, however, its reporting assiduously reflects the Kremlin’s anti-western worldview. It has portrayed Russia’s military intervention in Syria as a campaign against terrorists, and reflects its official position that no civilians have been killed by Russian jets.
The channel typically invites studio guests who endorse the Kremlin’s anti-US views. Guests have included Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and George Galloway. Another frequent contributor is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who hosted his own chat show on RT.
Simonyan visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy during a trip to London in 2014.
In a statement on Monday RT struck a defiant tone, calling the decision “incomprehensible” and “without warning”. It added: “It is however not at odds with the countless measures that have been undertaken in the UK and Europe over the last few years to ostracize, shout down, or downright impede the work of RT.”
Since RT started broadcasting in the UK about 10 years ago, Ofcom has recorded breaches of the UK broadcasting rules on 14 occasions. It was last investigated in April for accusing the Turkish government of genocide against the Kurds.
Start another war soon, Hillary! Please.It has been only a quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, but the U.S. is already in the midst of its second great foreign-policy debate of the post-Soviet era. The first, which carried us from the administration of the first President Bush through the second, was over the appropriate extent of America’s global ambitions. It took place largely among foreign policy elites, between those who (roughly speaking) wanted to stabilize the world and decrease the chances of conflict, and those who sought to liberalize other countries, hoping to spread democracy and improve the lot of people suffering from tyranny and civil war.
The second debate, which is being played out today, centers on whether the U.S. should retain the leading international role it has held since the end of World War II. Unlike the earlier debate, this one is taking place among elites and non-elites. It pits internationalists of every stripe against those who are isolationists or very nearly that, holding to a minimal view of what the U.S. should be doing beyond its borders.
It is worth reviewing how we got to this point, because the seeds of the second debate were sown in part by the first. The 25 years since the end of the Cold War have been a time of uncharacteristic, even unprecedented, American primacy. Not surprisingly, some in the U.S. argued that this situation should be exploited. On the left and right alike, voices called for the U.S. to do things in the world not out of necessity but out of choice, not because vital national interests were at stake but because there were perceived opportunities to do good.
This view wasn’t universal. The principal alternative was a more modest view of what the U.S. could accomplish—one consistent with what is known as the realist school, which holds that the principal aim of U.S. foreign policy should be to shape the foreign policy of other governments, not their internal political arrangements.
This debate was intense and prolonged. It actually started before the Berlin Wall was torn down, when pro-democracy protests erupted in the spring of 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Voices across the political spectrum urged President George H.W. Bush to support the students and to severely sanction China’s communist government, but he resisted. He thought that U.S. pressure would serve only to alienate leaders with whom we needed to work in meeting a growing number of regional and global challenges.
Even more pronounced was the debate over the 1990-91 Gulf War. The George H.W. Bush administration, with its mostly realist approach to foreign policy, was content with forcing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, restoring that country’s sovereignty and reducing the threat posed by Iraq to the region. For others, this wasn’t enough. They were disappointed that U.S. forces didn’t march on to Baghdad and oust Saddam Hussein when he was on his heels.
Realism won out in this case, but the debate was hardly settled. Idealists were right to argue that a search for stability alone would never be enough to capture the imagination of the American people and that U.S. foreign policy needed to be premised on principles as well as interests. But after Bill Clinton’s defeat of President Bush in 1992, the new Democratic administration found it hard to reconcile its desire to do good with the difficulty of doing good. That tension helps to explain the Clinton administration’s limited and inconsistent responses to civil conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.
<snip>
But more than just foreign-policy failure explains how we got to where we are. A foreign policy dedicated to changing or saving the world is a foreign policy of luxury. It is one thing to sacrifice on behalf of vital interests, and another to pay in lives and dollars for preferences. Americans today are in no mood for such extravagance in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the slower-than-normal economic recovery, the realization that certain jobs are never returning and the mounting evidence of rising inequality.
<snip>
The world is not self-organizing. An invisible hand may help to guide the markets, but no such force is at work in geopolitics. For the past 75 years, the visible hand of the U.S., more than any other factor, has created and maintained conditions of stability. Given the number and strength of forces now undermining order around the globe, a capable and reliable U.S. is more essential than ever before.
<snip.
Commitments to allies serve two purposes. One is to deter would-be adversaries and to reduce the chances of conflict. The other is to reassure countries that would otherwise have to appease their more powerful neighbors or develop their own capacities for self-defense, which in this era could entail developing nuclear weapons. The benefits and influence that the U.S. derives from its longstanding alliance commitments far exceed the costs.
Nato and Russia playing dangerous game with military build-up
Russia wants to detract from problems at home and position itself as a superpower, and Nato troop movements can only help
Military performers take part in celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the Russian victory over Nazi Germany
Russia’s latest sabre-rattling is part of a hybrid Kremlin strategy – ‘willy-waving’ in the words of one analyst. Photograph: Alexander Aksakov/Getty r 2016 1
It has been billed as Nato’s biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the cold war. Britain is sending fighter jets next year to Romania. The US is dispatching troops, tanks and artillery to Poland. Germany, Canada and other Nato countries also pledged forces at a meeting on Wednesday of defence chiefs in Brussels.
UK deploys hundreds of troops and aircraft to eastern Europe
The move comes after Russia has been busy deploying hardware of its own. Earlier this month, Moscow said it was stationing nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave. This week, two Russian warships armed with cruise missiles slipped into the Baltic sea.
Meanwhile, the hulking Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov has been belching its way through the Channel en route to Syria. Spain said Moscow had withdrawn a request to refuel on Spain’s north African coast, amid western suspicions the Russian fleet will be used to flatten civilians in Aleppo.
Nato’s apparent goal here is to deter future acts of aggression on European territory by Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia. After a period in which Nato has seemed slow to react, and lacking in backbone, the alliance is now sending out a robust message. As the US defence secretary, Ash Carter, put it this week, these deployments are all about deterrence.
In particular, Nato wants to signal to Moscow that it is prepared to defend the embattled Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In May, Britain will send an 800-strong battalion to Estonia, supported by the French and Danes. By next summer, about 4,000 troops from Nato countries will face off against 330,000 Russian soldiers stationed on Moscow’s western border.
None of this means Europe is on the brink of an imminent east-west conflict. Or - as Donald Trump and some commentators have suggested apocalyptically - that the world is gearing up for a third world war. It isn’t. Speaking at a conference in Sochi on Thursday, Putin agreed. He told a group of western experts that it was “stupid and unrealistic” to think Russia might attack anyone in Europe.
Despite the cold war atmospherics, then, there’s little prospect of Russian tanks rolling across the border into the Baltic states anytime soon.
Rather, Russia’s latest sabre-rattling is part of a hybrid Kremlin strategy. Abroad, the goal is to project Russian military power and strength – “willy-waving” in the words of one analyst. Since Putin became president in 2000, he has been determined to restore Moscow’s superpower status, with Russia as a global co-equal of US “hegemony”.
Putin wants to show that no international problem can be solved without the Kremlin’s views being taken into account. That goes for the Middle East and Syria – where Russia has staged its first large-scale military action outside the borders of the former Soviet Union since communism.
And it goes for Ukraine, the neighbour Putin covertly invaded in 2014, and whose territory Crimea he annexed. Far from not attacking anyone in Europe, about 10,000 people have perished in eastern Ukraine in a war that the Kremlin kicked off and sustained.
Russia’s armed forces play a key role, but television is important, too. At home, Russian state channels have recently floated the prospect of nuclear war with Washington. (Russia’s military is inferior to that of the US, but in nuclear weapons it has parity.) Many Russians now dangerously believe their country is already in a state of almost-war, or pre-war, with the west.
This war rhetoric, of course, is designed to deflect attention from Russia’s domestic woes, which are numerous. They include a worsening economy, western sanctions, recent rigging in Russia’s parliamentary election and massive state corruption, led from the top by Putin and his billionaire cronies. At home, the propaganda has broadly worked.
Russia’s president sees Nato is an implacably hostile and aggressive bloc. Paradoxically, Nato’s newest deployments in eastern Europe merely serve to confirm the story that Putin and state television have been telling Russians for so long: that the west is hell-bent on “encircling” Russia and bringing it to its knees.
The danger now is not from an open military conflict. Rather with troops deployed in big numbers, and with Russian jets routinely buzzing US aircraft carriers, and other assets, the greater danger is from an accident or collision. In September, a Dutch investigation concluded that it was a Buk missile smuggled across the border from Russia that shot down Flight MH17 in 2014, killing 298 people.
For much of the 1990s, Nato had lost its rationale. In recent years, it has been short of cash. The US has repeatedly complained that many member states are unwilling to pay the price of collective European security. For better or worse, Nato now has a purpose: to contain a growing and unpredictable Kremlin threat.
The Guardian view on Russia: neither a partner nor an enemy
Editorial
Russia’s behaviour on the international stage is unsettling. But the western response should be neither aggressive nor complacent – and it should be based on transatlantic unity
The Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov passing through the English Channel on 21 October 2016 near Dover. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Tuesday 1 November 2016
Recent warnings about Russia’s behaviour have become as numerous as they have been, at times, alarmist. Which isn’t to say they are unfounded. The director general of MI5 in a Guardian interview has now added his voice to a widening group of western officials who describe Russia as a threat, and against which new thinking must be developed. In the past months, Russia has been accused of trying to disrupt the US election through hacking, it has deployed nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad and flown bomber planes across Europe. Moscow has pursued policies in Syria that have less to do with fighting Isis than with carpet bombing civilians.
If Vladimir Putin’s narrative is to make Russia great again, there is by now little doubt he will resort to a wide spectrum of actions, both hard and soft power, to attain that goal. That western officials have been repeatedly caught off-guard says perhaps as much about the illusions or shortfalls of past “reset” policies as it does about the slickness with which the Kremlin has learned, over the years, to read western societies and the way their leaders react – or fail to. More than a decade ago Mr Putin revealed his thinking in an annual address to parliament comparing the US to a Russian folk tale character, remarking: “Comrade wolf knows who to eat.” Few, at the time, could have predicted what would unfold: the first redrawing of borders in Europe through use of force since the second world war (annexation of Crimea), and a pattern of geopolitical confrontation that some have dubbed cold war 2.0.
The Kremlin believes the time has come to seek a form of revenge on the west for having “humiliated” Russia after the dissolution of the USSR. That Russia’s economic collapse in the 1990s and the enlargement of Nato and the EU resulted from decades of communist mismanagement and the legitimate aspirations of nations factors little into this vision. Today the west and Russia find themselves talking past each other on almost all issues. Putin’s propaganda machine has made inroads into the west by exploiting its openness, all the while repressing those who, inside Russia, dare dissent.
What is to be done to avoid escalation? Talk of nuclear confrontation has become commonplace in Russia, something that points to the need for renewed deterrence. Making sure eastern European allies are protected is not provocation. Nato’s new deployments in the Baltic region and Poland are a reaction to, and not the cause of, Russia’s military adventurism in its neighbourhood. The best way to discourage more Russian revisionism is to make clear that red lines will be defended. Europe can ill afford to let the worst of the 20th century catch up with it in the 21st century. On wider international issues, pressure must be applied wherever it is smart and effective to do so. Spain’s recent refusal to refuel Russia’s aircraft carrier on its way to Syria was an example of how to catch Moscow’s attention. Sanctions over Moscow’s activity in Ukraine should be kept in place until ceasefire requirements are met. Europeans would do well to forge a common response to Russian policies in Syria, which should be seen as part of a wider pattern: chaos on Europe’s doorstep, including refugee movements, serves Mr Putin’s interests because they feed the illiberal forces of which he approves.
This is not to say Russia must be quarantined, nor its leader entirely shunned. Partly what matters is language. Speaking of Russia as a “partner” no longer equates to realities, if only because Moscow consistently relinquishes genuine cooperation and openly casts itself as an alternative, hostile model no longer very interested in international rules. Diplomacy without leverage can be empty choreography, as talks over Syria have shown. Nor should Russia’s power be exaggerated. Its economy is ailing. It has few allies, with China an awkward friend. Mr Putin may choose to designate external enemies and encourage a fortress mentality for domestic consumption, but that does little to bring the investments his country badly needs if it is ever to modernise. The Russian president has shrewdly exploited whatever gaps western powers have offered him, whether through neglect, divisiveness or miscalculation. Mr Putin once said: “the weak get beaten”. He believes the west is weak, hypocritical and decadent. The short-term answer should be a resolute show of transatlantic unity – a question that hangs over the US election. Dialogue with Russia should come with smart leverage – neither aggressive nor complacent. It’s likely the Russian question will not go away for a long time yet – Mr Putin plans to get re-elected in 2018.
Nato puts 300,000 ground troops on 'high alert' as tensions with Russia mount
'We have seen a more assertive Russia implementing a substantial military build-up over many years,' Nato secretary-general says
Gabriel Samuels
Tensions between Russia and Nato have escalated in recent months Getty
Up to 300,000 Nato troops have been put on alert amid rising tensions between Russia and the Baltic states.
Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of Nato, said the alliance hoped to speed up the response time of thousands of its troops to allow it to react to a combat situation more effectively.
In October, it was reported Nato was preparing to station 4,000 troops on the Russian border with the Baltic states in its biggest military build-up since the Cold War. The troops will be summoned from nations across the alliance, including the UK.
“We have seen Russia being much more active in many different ways,” Mr Stoltenberg told The Times.
“We have seen a more assertive Russia implementing a substantial military build-up over many years – tripling defence spending since 2000 in real terms; developing new military capabilities; exercising their forces and using military force against neighbours.
“We have also seen Russia using propaganda in Europe among Nato allies and that is exactly the reason why Nato is responding. We are responding with the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War.”
Mr Stoltenberg refused to be drawn on the specific number of troops being put on alert, but Britain’s outgoing Nato representative Sir Adam Thomson said it was likely to be around 300,000.
Sir Adam said the aim was to find a way to mobilise the troops within two months, instead of the typical time of around six months.
The proposition was discussed by Nato defence ministers at a conference in October. “There are a large number of people in the armed forces of Nato allies, we are looking into how more of them can be ready at shorter notice,” Mr Stoltenberg added.
Nato is also responding to an increase in espionage, hybrid warfare and cyberattacks by Russia and other non-Nato states, according to Sir Adam.
The alliance’s response is in part a result of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as a bid to reassure ex-Soviet states, like Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all Nato members, who fear Moscow could try a similar tactic again.
A US think-tank has said it believes Russia could overrun Nato’s current military force in the Baltic states in a matter of hours, if a conflict began.
Nearly half of Russians fear Moscow's intervention in the Syrian conflict could lead to World War III, a recent poll found.
Last week, it was reported Russian troops were planning to conduct military training exercises in Serbia involving 150 paratroopers, while Nato holds an emergency exercise drill in neighbouring Montenegro.
The long read
There is no such thing as western civilisation
The values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Wednesday 9 November 2016
Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense ancient population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.
Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.
But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”, which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.
Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic. Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture” and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron. Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. Yet these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern western people. So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call the west.
Someone asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation, and he replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.” Like many of the best stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but also like many of the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavour of truth. But my own response would have been very different: I think you should give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is not at all a good idea, and western culture is no improvement.
One reason for the confusions “western culture” spawns comes from confusions about the west. We have used the expression “the west” to do very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet of empire, wrote, “Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”, contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain; “the east” its opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the world. Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic: Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed “the global south” – though many people in Latin America will claim a western inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South Africans, so that “western” here can look simply like a euphemism for white.
Of course, we often also talk today of the western world to contrast it not with the south but with the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr, the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition further. Because European and American debates today about whether western culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.
This civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years, then. But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier.
For the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents: he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia. Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to “why the earth, which is one, has three names, all women’s”. Still, despite his puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.
But here’s the important point: it would not have occurred to Herodotus to think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people: Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus – Bodrum in modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn’t make him an Asian; it left him a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an adjective, never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of Europeans as a people, either.
Then the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the prophet’s death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere 30 years to defeat the Persian empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest provinces from Rome’s residue in Byzantium.
The Umayyad dynasty, which began in 661, pushed on west into north Africa and east into central Asia. In early 711, it sent an army across the straits of Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of Hispania for two centuries. Within seven years, most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly 800 years later, was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.
The Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north. But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus, and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the conquest of Frankish Europe. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon, overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they could have sailed up the Thames. “Perhaps,” he added, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
The world according to Herodotus. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy/Alamy
What matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses”, Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims. (Even this, however, is a bit of a simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was not yet Christian.)
Now, nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “western” for that job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula – part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe – until nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between Islam and the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.
Starting in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman empire gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent’s army at Vienna, did the reconquest of eastern Europe begin. It was a slow process. It wasn’t until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early 19th century, Bulgaria even later.
Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer
We have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe – Christendom – defining itself through opposition. And yet the move from “Christendom” to “western culture” isn’t straightforward.
For one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred kilometres south-west of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: “Greece once had the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning,” he wrote. “Then chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has come to France.”
The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.”
So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally reunited – pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn – in the academies of Europe and the United States.
There are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the golden nugget the core of a civilisation opposed to Islam. Because the classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid, translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the Arabs.
In the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of Tours pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of al-Andalus, bellicose as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless others.
There were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut, leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century, was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the 12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.
The term 'western culture' is surprisingly modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph
But the golden-nugget story was bound to be beset by difficulties. It imagines western culture as the expression of an essence – a something – which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. The pitfalls of this sort of essentialism are evident in a wide range of cases. Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer, father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so, when some of those in one generation move from the territory to which English identity was once tied – move, for example, to a New England – the label can even travel beyond the territory. Identities can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences. You don’t get to be called “English” because there’s an essence that this label follows; you’re English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label by being somehow connected with a place called England.
So how did the people of the north Atlantic, and some of their kin around the world, get connected to a realm we call the west, and gain an identity as participants in something called western culture?
James Gillray’s 1805 cartoon, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, depicts prime minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world
It will help to recognise that the term “western culture” is surprisingly modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney. “One,” Tylor wrote, “had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine, whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred ... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and roasting an onion representing him.” Primitive culture, indeed.
So the very idea of the “west,” to name a heritage and object of study, doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century. When, around the time of the first world war, Oswald Spengler wrote the influential book translated as The Decline of the West – a book that introduced many readers to the concept – he scoffed at the notion that there were continuities between western culture and the classical world. During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, the writer and journalist Rebecca West recounted a visitor’s sense that “it’s uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our western culture”. The “recent blow” in question was the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up
If the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.
Of course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was bound to become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture, producing a photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.
Talk of “western culture” has had a larger implausibility to overcome. It places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted intellectual and artistic achievements – philosophy, literature, art, music; the things Arnold prized and humanists study. But if western culture was there in Troyes in the late 12th century when Chrétien was alive, it had little to do with the lives of most of his fellow citizens, who did not know Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato. Today the classical heritage plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans or Britons. Are these Arnoldian achievements that hold us together? Of course not. What holds us together, surely, is Tylor’s broad sense of culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behaviour that shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and civilians, shop assistants and consumers. Intellectuals like me have a tendency to suppose that the things we care about are the most important things. I don’t say they don’t matter. But they matter less than the story of the golden nugget suggests.
So how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to tell ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant, when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? Well, by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something that was already present in Tylor’s work. Remember his famous definition: it began with culture as “that complex whole”. What you’re hearing is something we can call organicism. A vision of culture not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an organic unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully adapted to occupy a particular place, each part essential to the functioning of the whole. The Eurovision song contest, the cutouts of Matisse, the dialogues of Plato are all parts of a larger whole. As such, each is a holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if you have never personally checked it out. Even if it isn’t your jam, it is still your heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our everyday selves could be dusted with gold.
Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s
Now, there are organic wholes in our cultural life: the music, the words, the set-design, the dance of an opera fit and are meant to fit together. It is, in the word Wagner invented, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. But there isn’t one great big whole called culture that organically unites all these parts. Spain, in the heart of “the west,” resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off in India and Japan in “the east,” the home of Oriental despotism. Jefferson’s cultural inheritance – Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom – did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily – perhaps even more easily – than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. The same is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s.
Once we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan picture in which every element of culture, from philosophy or cuisine to the style of bodily movement, is separable in principle from all the others – you really can walk and talk like an African-American and think with Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant, as well as with Martin Luther King and Miles Davis. No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam.
The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify playlist we have never quite listened to. If these thinkers are part of our Arnoldian culture, there is no guarantee that what is best in them will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in modern Muslim cultures.
Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the west, however you define it, being western, provides no guarantee that you will care about western civilisation. The values European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is true in the other direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests that we cannot help caring about the traditions of “the west” because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a western destiny.
In the year of Edward Burnett Tylor’s death, what we have been taught to call western civilisation stumbled into a death match with itself: the Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other, marching young men to their deaths in order to “defend civilisation”. The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked Tylor’s evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold’s worst fears about what civilisation really meant. Arnold and Tylor would have agreed, at least, on this: culture isn’t a box to check on the questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with others.
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Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.
We live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I can draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation, because I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African. He once wrote, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” Now there’s an identity worth holding on to.
• This is an edited version of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s BBC Reith lecture, Culture, the fourth part of the series Mistaken Identities, which is available on the Radio 4 website
The sun could start setting on the “Hydrocarbon Age” within a decade if the world gets serious about implementing the Paris Accord on limiting climate change.
That’s not the dream of eco-warriors wishing away the realities of global energy trends. That is the opinion of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, as expressed in its latest outlook for the world oil market.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agree to meet, usher in new era of 'constructive cooperation,' says Kremlin
The Trump-Putin waltz enters new stage as they agree current relationship 'unsatisfactory'
David Usborne New York
Traditional Russian wooden nesting dolls, Matryoshka dolls, depicting Russia's President Vladimir Putin, US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are seen on sale at a gift shop in central Moscow AFP/Getty
President-elect Donald Trump agreed to meet face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a telephone call between the two men, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Monday's phone conversation, in which Mr Putin formally congratulated Mr Trump on his election victory, came amid widespread expressions of hope from Moscow that the transition of power in Washington will see an easing of tensions between the two nations.
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In that vein, the Kremlin said in its brief reporting of the telephone exchange that the two leaders had agreed that relations between Moscow and Washington had become “unsatisfactory” and pledged to pursue a “partner-like” dialogue. Their goal, the statement said, was to open a new era of “constructive cooperation on a broad range of issues”.
More specifically, the Kremlin noted that the men agreed also to harness their energies to fight their “shared enemy number 1 - international terrorism and extremism”. That appeared to imply a shared determination to target Isis. Syria also featured in the conversation, Moscow said.
There were no details on when the two might have their face-to-face talks or whether such a meeting would take place in Russia, the United States or a third country. Mr Trump will be sworn as president on 20 January.
The Kremlin said that Mr Putin had wished Mr Trump “success in implementing the election programme,” adding that he was ready to engage in dialogue with the new administration based on ”the principles of equality“.
Vladimir Putin was quick to congratulate Donald Trump in a telegram (Getty)
In their trading of niceties, the two men also noted that 2017 will mark 210 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the countries, the Kremlin reported, “which in itself should stimulate a return to pragmatic, mutually beneficial cooperation”.
During his campaign for office, Mr Trump repeatedly voiced admiration for Mr Putin as a “strong leader” even comparing him favourably to President Barack Obama. His stance drew strong rebukes from Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who queried his willingness to put Mr Obama in second place to the leader of a country with which the US was at odds in several areas.
It was those disagreements, as well as a clear lack of personal chemistry, that frequently saw Mr Obama and Mr Putin clashing with one another. Not least, the US was forthright in condemning Russia’s taking of Crimea and its interference in eastern Urkaine. The two powers were also repeatedly at odds over Syria and the fate of its leader, Bashar al-Assad.
Mr Putin expressed his hopes of a better relationship with the US President-elect for the first time last week in the immediate aftermath of his victory over Ms Clinton.
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“Trump’s first statements give us hope that steps towards improving relations between the USA and Russia are possible,” Mr Putin said via spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “The U.S. election result does not mean that all contentious issues in relations between Moscow and Washington will be resolved,” he added. “The main thing is the intention to resolve them through dialogue.”
The apparent courtship of Mr Putin by President-elect Trump has sounded alarm bells among foreign policy experts in Washington who are concerned that a less firm stance by the US and the West might embolden the Russian president's expansionist instincts. It is of particular worry to the Baltic States, who are also awaiting Mr Trump’s cabinet choices with trepidation.
They are especially terrorised by the notion that Newt Gingrich could become Secretary of State who during the campaign suggested that Estonia was “in the suburbs of St Petersburg”.
Armenia Finally Counters Pakistan’s Anti-Armenian Policies
Last week, Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported that Armenia vetoed Pakistan’s request for observer status in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), in response to Pakistan’s anti-Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh/NKR) position.
http://armenianweekly.com/2016/11/29/armenia-pakistan/On Oct. 14, during his reciprocal visit to Azerbaijan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told President Aliyev about his country’s interest in holding joint military training. Nawaz also “called for complete return of occupied Azeri lands, withdrawal of Armenian forces, and return of displaced persons and refugees.” In return, President Aliyev expressed his country’s support for Pakistan’s position on Jammu and Kashmir, in opposition to India. A month later, when Azerbaijan’s First Deputy Prime Minister Yaqub Eyyubov visited Pakistan, President Mamnoon Hussain reminded him that Pakistan was the third country after Turkey and Romania to have recognized Azerbaijan. President Hussain also thanked Azerbaijan for supporting Pakistan in its dispute with India over Jammu and Kashmir, and pledged to continue backing Azerbaijan’s claims on Nagorno-Karabagh.
Military
Russian arms sales to China have been estimated at $1bn a year, the Russians were previously hesitant to give advanced weaponry to the Soviet Union’s one-time military rival. But the recent announcement by Russia’s state arms exporter of a deal to supply China with its S-400 surface-to-air missile systems has taken their relationship to a new level at a time when Beijing is seeking new air and naval defence technologies.
The higher-level arms sales have been accompanied by greater military cooperation, which was on display in May with the war games in the Mediterranean Sea. Such exercises in what has traditionally been a “Nato pond” are designed to expand the Chinese navy’s reach while showing the United States that Russia is a potentially important military partner, according to Trenin.
Following the Ukraine crisis, which soured relations with the west, he said the main considerations behind Russia’s “entente” with China were political. “Now Russia has an important stimulus to grow relations with China, because relations with the west are troubled, and China is the only large player in the world that can be considered as economic, political and to a certain extent military ally,” Trenin said.
China and Russia have repeatedly stated that they will become partners, not allies
Both sides, meanwhile, are concerned that the unrest in Pakistan and Afghanistan could spill over into their territory, or serve as incubators for militants who may one day return home.
But none of that means that either side has forgotten past disputes or present differences. Russia is nervous about China sapping its revenue by reverse engineering the equipment it buys, and is also monitoring Beijing closely for any attempts to project military power into central Asia.
“China and Russia’s strategic partnership is a result of the times, but it is totally different from a military alliance such as the one between the US and Japan,” the Global Times, a Chinese nationalist tabloid, said in a recent editorial.
“China and Russia have repeatedly stated that they will become partners, not allies. They do mean that. China also cares about relations with western countries. Russia does not want to see relations with the west become a deadlock.”
Speaking about Russia's relations with the West, Putin said attempts to create a unipolar world had failed: "The situation is changing. I think it is not a secret to anyone, everyone sees it, that many of our partners already prefer to stick to principles of international law, because the world's balance is being gradually restored."
Putin said when building relationships with other countries, Russia would respect their interests.
panduranghari wrote:....
Michael Steinhardt coined the term, and he said, “All of our big returns in life came from taking a variant perception, which is a materially different view than the consensus, because if it’s consensus it’s unlikely to happen.” So you have taken a materially different view and it’s not necessarily contrarian for contrarian sake, but when something becomes a broad consensus, you take a variant perception and you bet on the unexpected.
I used Nixon as a benchmark because he was happy to let million Hindus die in now Bangladesh. While other presidents since have not been any better, if there was anyone more hostile to India it was Nixon. He was assisted by his Cardinal Richelieu 'Kissinger' who opened up China for the US and thus started the idea of G2. The US deep state would have hoped China acts like its munna 'Pakistan' but it has not really worked out exactly. Though the visible shenanigans are like Elephants teeth. While every US president from Carter onwards have made noise about normalising Taiwan relations, all within the 1st year, have reneged and gone with the establishment guidelines of engaging in 'One China' policy.
Is Trump taking an alternative approach? Perhaps he is, perhaps he is not. Too soon to comment.
If his advisors are smart, they probably can sense the 'Westphalian' arrangement is breaking down. Europe has already more or less given up- Brexit proved it and Italy is following through with the same disruptive game plan'. The people are driving this and its the people who drove Trump into the WH. That he wont keep his promises to the rednecks is guaranteed. But he is possibly opening up avenues for India to exploit.
While Trump himself has expressed disgust at Chinese business practices, he along with his friend Robert Kiyosaki, have lost money in China big time and they never went back in. For Trump China is a loose-loose.
Will Mattis et al open up India to Trump (against China) like Kissinger did to China (against USSR). Don't know.
But I am willing to take a 'Variant Perception' with this. Who knows we might be in for a surprise.
The nuclear specter of China has always been India's overwhelming consideration.
Vivek Prahladan
December 9, 2016
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“The main argument in favor of India going nuclear is the Chinese threat” — L.K. Jha (Secretary to Prime Minister) March 5, 1967
“A nuclear stand-off with China is essential as soon as possible” — P.N. Haksar (Secretary to Prime Minister) 1968
The Counsel of History
Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar recently made a controversial “personal” comment that perhaps India must revisit its no first-use nuclear policy. However, the only available document on Indian nuclear policy has been the “Draft Nuclear Doctrine,” which has fostered perpetual speculation on the vector and valences of Indian strategic doctrine. We have had little historical perspective on how Indian doctrine has absorbed Chinese and Pakistan nuclear threats ever since India carried out its first underground nuclear test — “Smiling Buddha” — in May 1974. There is still no consensus on what the historical reasons were for India to cross the no-bomb line or what internal discussions were taking place between the scientists and the prime minister’s office. However, newly declassified documents from the prime minister’s office, which include letters between the prime minister’s office and the Department of Atomic Energy, as well as correspondence between the prime minister and scientists help establish the specific considerations that went into the making of India’s nuclear doctrine. It revises arguments such as those of George Perkovich, that, in the second half of the sixties, “the (Indian) scientists acted without benefit of a national security strategy or requirement.” The documents reveal disquiet among India’s strategists about China’s repeated nuclear tests from 1964 onwards.
India’s “Long Telegram” and Crossing the No-Bomb Line
Perhaps the single most important document for establishing the evolving history of India’s nuclear weapons policy comes from P.N. Haksar, Secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that may be dated to 1968. The note is titled “Need for India In a Changing World to Reassess her National Interest and Foreign policy.”
The revealing document tends to defy most assumptions held about India’s nuclear policy regarding the level of “stand-off capability” that was being considered in the Prime Minister Secretariat. P.N Haskar wrote:
i. the making of nuclear arms in the shape of medium range (2,000-3,000 miles) capable, from sites within India’s frontiers, of striking with success not only a few chosen targets in Tibet but of ranging as far afield as the industrial heart of China in Manchuria and in the great river valleys south of it which include some of her principal industries and urban centers of population
ii. The development simultaneously of submarines driven by nuclear power fitted out to carry nuclear missiles
iii. This nuclear arms program should be based on adequate stockpiling of those sensitive instruments and machinery…. which will be difficult to import from abroad increasingly
Haksar distinguished between the role of nuclear India as opposed to other nuclear powers. Haksar also reveals his thought that India’s nuclear ambition should be clearly communicated with the United States at a relevant time. The nuclear specter of China remained the overwhelming consideration. Haksar seemed to appreciate nuclear balancing in Europe and wrote of India’s “own security require that she becomes a nuclear power to establish a genuine balance of power with China.”
At its heart, this is a phenomenon of countries that are engaged in peripheral conflicts, not organic to their own interests, which take place at great geographic distance in a fundamentally frivolous attitude. When you hear somebody like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, or Samantha Power talking about Libya, for instance, they are essentially provincial minds speculating about a country far away, of which they know little.
For example, they intervened in Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi, who had developed a system to govern his geographic space, but they removed him without providing any alternative. If they had done their research, they would know that Libya does not exist, that Libya has never existed in history. Even in ancient times, there was Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, Cyrenaica spoke Greek, Tripolitania Latin. The modern artificial entity of Libya was only kept together by Muammar Gaddafi, and when you remove Gaddafi, you have to promptly occupy Libya with an army of 100,000, stay there for 50 years, and then maybe something will emerge.
TCB: If you were advising the next President, how would you tell them to remedy this situation?
EL: Remedy this by maintaining a very heavy presumption against intervention, and an understanding that wars have a purpose, and the purpose of wars is to bring about peace. There may even be an argument for intensifying wars, a case in which the United States would intervene on the winning side to accelerate the victory. This would be a way of minimizing human death and destruction, but it is not politically or psychologically plausible. So, given that interventions have failed again, again, and again, it would be appropriate to learn from this.
TCB: And specifically in the case of Syria, what would you advise the next president?
EL: I would let the Russians get on with it. Nonintervention means nonintervention, it doesn’t mean intervention here and there. Let the Russians get on with it, let the Russians be the protagonists of the victory of Assad, instead of the Iranians. Because a Russian victory is much less costly to the United States than an Iranian victory.