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Neocons Love Nukes

By Steve Hynd

President Obama has won some praise from most arms control experts for his tentative deal with Russia's President Medvedev to replace the expiring Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with a new treaty that could see both nations' nuclear arsenals cut by about 500 warheads each. It's something that should have been done earlier, but the Bush administration - with it's neocon hatred of anything called a "treaty" - had dragged its feet and refused to talk.

The treaty that this deal replaces reduced US and Russian arsenals by 80%. The proposed next reduction represents about 25% of Russia and America's remaining stockpiles of nuclear warheads, which together still amount for 95% of all the nuclear weapons on the planet. The inescapable logic is that it's always going to be difficult-to-impossible to ask small nations to give up their own weapons, or even civilian programs, while the two nuclear superpowers have such vast stockpiles themselves. Not to mention that reductions make it significantly harder for humanity to be wiped from the face of the earth.

But that's not something the neocons are interested in. Witness Keith B. Payne in the pages of the WSJ today.

In the first place, locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse. The Obama administration's team at the Pentagon is currently examining U.S. strategic force requirements. Before specific limits are set on U.S. forces, it should complete the review. Strategic requirements should drive force numbers; arms-control numbers should not dictate strategy.

Second, the new agreement not only calls for reductions in the number of nuclear warheads (to between 1,500 and 1,675), but for cuts in the number of strategic force launchers. Under the 1991 START I Treaty, each side was limited to 1,600 launchers. Yesterday's agreement calls for each side to be limited to between 500 and 1,100 launchers each.

According to open Russian sources, it was Russia that pushed for the lower limit of 500 launchers in negotiations. In the weeks leading up to this summit, it also has been openly stated that Moscow would like the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMS), and strategic bombers to be reduced "several times" below the current limit of 1,600. Moving toward very low numbers of launchers is a smart position for Russia, but not for the U.S.

Why? Because the number of deployed Russian strategic ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers will drop dramatically simply as a result of their aging. In other words, a large number of Russian launchers will be removed from service with or without a new arms-control agreement.

I'd think that if the strategy is to avoid worldwide nuclear holocaust then arms control numbers are a perfect metric to use to drive that strategy. Payne obviously doesn't care about sane strategy so much as that the U.S. shouldn't give something away for nothing. It's a ridiculous posture to take. So what if the Russians end up with a treaty to do what they were going to have to do anyway? We all end up safer by both sides' reductions and their agreement that such reductions are a good thing.

But Payne, the leader of the neoconservative National Institute for Public Policy which has been a staunch cheerleader for Bush's missile defense plans and replacement warhead program, is more interested in might makes right than in the safety of humanity. He argued in 1980 that the "United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally" and that "the West needs to devise ways in which it can employ strategic nuclear forces coercively, while minimizing the potentially paralyzing impact of self-deterrence." Payne also served on Donald Rumsfield's notorious Missile Commission which in 1998 said Iran was only five years away from a nuclear missile - the same gap as many analysts believe still exists today.

For the neocons, exemplified by Payne and heartily endorsed by his fellow neocons at the Heritage Foundation, the notion that America must stay militarily supreme in order to be a Hegemony still rules supreme. Nukes enable that and so neocons love nukes. But the rest of us should be aware of their underlying motive in their professed skepticism about Obama's nuclear treaty.

Obama's First Real Foreign Policy Success

By Steve Hynd

Credit where credit is due.

The United States and Russia set a newly ambitious course for global cooperation Wednesday as presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev ordered negotiators into immediate action on a treaty to further reduce nuclear weapons.

Going into their first face-to-face meeting in London, Medvedev had voiced openness to Obama's call for resetting the deeply troubled U.S.-Russian relationship, but few had expected the kind of sweeping statements that emerged from weeks of intense preparatory talks.

...They set a nominal July deadline for a substitute treaty for START, a date that coincides with Obama's first presidential visit to Russia. That conceivably would leave time to get the new treaty approved in the U.S. Senate by the December expiration of the current agreement. But arms control experts say December is not a hard deadline so long as there is progress.

Nicely done and a pleasant change from the Bush administration's blind recalcitrance and obstructionism on a treaty which will do more tro guarantee world security than any number of Iraqi and Afghan surges at a fraction of the price. Then again, all Obama had to do was stop the U.S. being the wrench in the dimplomatic gears. It's not as if the Russians had to be convinced to do this - they've been clamoring for it for years now.

Ukraine and urban takedowns

By Fester:

Cities are complex, expensive, messy and seemingly inefficient beasts.  They exist as aggregators and concentrators of physical and social capital that can innovate and create solutions that otherwise are too expensive to work on in a dispersed and atomized society.  Cities can be very rich, but a good deal of their wealth is tied up in maintaining the networks of complexity and infrastructure that enable a city to have a competitive and comparative advantage.  So what happens when there is a system wide shock that most likely destroys the surplus that fuels this advantage? 

The Ukraine will most likely find out.  Edward Hughes at A Fistful of Euros declares a depression:

the Great Depression may now reasonably be considered to have arrived in Ukraine. Ukraine’s GDP declined 20 percent in January year-on-year, according to Valeriy Lytvytsky chief advisor to the chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine. “The decline in GDP in January was about 20 percent according to my reckoning. It’s the biggest drop ever. It’s a bad start,” he said. According to Lytvytsky the construction and industry sectors have been the hardest hit by the economic crisis....

Industrial output fell in January for the sixth month in a row, with a 16.1 percent decline between January and December 2008. This was the biggest decrease since January 1994, when there was an 18.6 percent drop. Industrial production in January was 34.1 percent down on January 2008. The year-on-year decline in construction also increased ten-fold, hitting 57.6 percent, Lytvytsky said.

The New York Federal Reserve Bank in 2002 estimated that cities were able to maintain current levels of social and economic complexity with roughly a five to ten percent cushion.  That cushion was estimated as the 'terrorism tax'  needed to render current urban configurations inefficient.

an ongoing terror tax (that is, higher costs paid by urban firms and residents that have no economic return) in the range of 5 percent to 10 percent might be enough to dissipate the economic rationale for the continuing existence of cities. (p.10)

This is a bit of an extrapolation as I am replacing 'terror tax' with a systemic economic shock.  We have the examples of Detroit and Pittsburgh in the United States were economic system shocks in the secular decline of a highly clustered industry has led to the relatively orderly unwind of major urban areas.  Those managed declines have taken place with some forethought (Pittsburgh has known that it was overconcentrated in steel since the 1920s) and over a significant period of time.

The Ukraine is undergoing a second round of economic shock therapy which is especially focused on the cities.  The only growing economic sector in the Ukraine is the agricultural sector, so the GDP shock is primarily urban.  This shock has been fairly rapid and comparatively unforeseen from even a few years ago.

The typical responses are for very high levels of out-migration as well a slowdown of any ongoing complexity adding projects.  At the same time, it disrupts pre-exisiting social capital agglomerations as people who previously had sharable resources either no longer have those resources or no longer have the inclination to share out of fear of future shocks.  Or more commonly, critical network nodes leave and are not effectively replace.  This may be good for the creation of Kiev-bars throughout Europe, much like there are Steelers bars throughout the United States, but it is a further source of urban pain. 

Will a depression in the Ukraine kick the crap out of its cities to a lower level of industrial and economic complexity as well as output? 

The Tests to Come

By BJ

I’ve been watching the reaction to Obama’s election from around the world.  As might be expected after eight years of Bush’s cowboy diplomacy, the reaction is mostly highly positive, and while the domestic right wing won’t be allowing him any honeymoon, (at least when the pro- and anti-Palin camps remember to stop sniping at each other), he will to some extent have a much easier go of it with America’s traditional allies and those that don’t hold any particular enmity.

For those who have reason to oppose the US, on the other hand, this transition period between the Bush and Obama presidencies presents numerous opportunities to push the envelope.  Cernig noted yesterday Russia’s announcement to possibly deploy missiles near the Baltics and Poland in response to the Bush administration’s ABM deployment.  While he’s right that this is a mess almost entirely of Bush’s making, it is also clear that this will prove to be one the first major tests of an Obama administration.

Assuming the Bush administration doesn’t muck things up more in an attempt to lock in certain options as they did over Syria recently, Obama will still face considerable pressure at home not to take the reasonable route of scrapping the ABM boondoogle and improving relations with Russia.  Cries of “appeaser!” will be shouted from the highest rooftops by probably more than just the right.  For that matter, Poland and the Baltic states may feel abandoned should the US pull out of the agreements they have with them.  It’s also hard to say what reaction places like Iran and China will have to any move he makes.

Frankly, Obama’s reaction during the Georgia crisis, while not as knee-jerkingly belligerent as McCain’s, was hardly something I was impressed with.  The anti-Russian tact of the foreign policy crowd in the US seemed to infect Obama as much as everyone else.

So will he choose reasonable compromise or unreasonable confrontation?  If he’s smart and can get away with it, he’ll do as Kennedy did and go with reasonable compromise while selling it as unreasonable confrontation, but that’s a lot harder to get away with in these days of new media.

Whatever he does, it will tell us a great deal about how much change his administration will actually bring.

Bail out friends

By Fester:

What was that old t-shirt --- Friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies

The new saying is that Friends help you make money, real friends bail out your currency ---
Via Obsidian Wings is the follow-up report on Pakistan’s foreign currency reserve crisis:

China has assured Pakistan it will not allow its south Asian ally to be forced to default on upcoming international debt payments, according to Pakistani officials.
Such a pledge would offer a potentially crucial boost to Pakistan, which faces a $10bn (€7.5bn, £5.8bn) gap in external financing in the financial year to June 2009, amid a falling currency and declining liquid foreign currency reserves.

Iceland is looking for assistance from Scandinavia and Russia.  Norway and Russia have large reserves available because of their hard currency oil exports. 

Hungary is facing a massive run on its foreign reserves.  The IMF and energy exporters are about the only sources of liquid hard currency available to the Hungarian government as the European Union lacks sufficient marginal capacity to worry about anything besides the bank crisis in the core of the EU.  Bailing countries out allows the bailer to buy the bailee’s assets cheaply, strengthen influence and relationships and if done well, realign international interest profiles. 

Russia Launches ICBM Tests

by anderson

We haven't seen much of that chilling Cold War acronym, ICBM, in awhile. Ah, the good ol' days:

Russia test-fired three long-range missiles on Sunday and pronounced its nuclear deterrent strong in a show of force that experts said had not been seen since the days of the Cold War.

Two of the missiles were fired from nuclear submarines in the Asian and European extremes of the sprawling country while a third was watched by President Dmitry Medvedev on land in northwest Russia, news agencies reported.

It was the second Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test in as many days and the latest in a series of high-profile military exercises of conventional land, sea and air forces as well as strategic nuclear units.

"This shows that our deterrent is in order," Medvedev was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying after Sunday's missile launches.

"We will of course be introducing new types of forces and means into the military," he added, without elaborating.

Independent military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said the exercises reflected Russia's determination to prepare for major military conflict.

"This was a dry run for a war with the United States," Felgenhauer said of the missile launches, part of major military manoeuvres billed "Stability 2008" involving all military branches.

"These are the biggest strategic war games in more than 20 years. They are on a parallel with those held in the first half of the 1980s. Nothing of the sort has been seen either in Russia or the United States since then," he said.

More …

Slim Pickins awaits!

Terror Attack in South Ossetia

By BJ

Another in the long line of indicators that in the world today, wars don't end just because the armies have stopped fighting. The situation in Georgia still hasn't fully played out.

A blast in Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia killed seven Russian soldiers, a Russian commander says.

The deaths happened when a car full of explosives blew up near a Russian military base in the regional capital, Tskhinvali, local officials said.

Granted "Terror Attack", may be the wrong term to use. After all, the perpetrators were most certainly Christians and it was Russian soldiers being killed instead of American ones. Maybe this is one those good, "freedom-type" bombs that the forces of democracy use. After all, as we've been told over the last several years, terrorism isn't so much a tactic as it is the philosophy behind the attacks, or something.

Now, it is too early to say who is ultimately responsible for this attack, but you can be certain that the American response to any possible Georgian government role will be far different than the kinds of charges they throw out routinely to nations like Iran whenever a bomb goes off in Iraq or Afghanistan. Perhaps someone can ask them after we've given them membership in NATO? (Granted none too likely these days.) Hypocrisy in action is ever amusing to observe.

Russia Says US Stonewalling Nuke Reduction Talks

By Cernig

How dumb is it to court the breakdown of decades of nuclear arms treaties and meaningful warhead reductions between the US and Russia?

Republican dumb.

"Negotiations between us and Washington to make sure that after START I treaty expires in December 2009 we have some meaningful strategic arms control regime, these negotiations are not so far heading anywhere," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START I, between the United States and Soviet Union came was signed in 1991 and eventually resulted in an estimated reduction of around 80 percent of all nuclear weapons in existence at the time.

Speaking on the sidelines of the annual open debate of the U.N. General Assembly, which ends later on Monday, Lavrov said the reason the talks had stalled was that "our American colleagues do not want to keep limits on the delivery vehicles (missile) and on nuclear warheads in storage."

"They only want to keep some limits on the operationally deployed nuclear warheads," he told reporters.

That's the real reason, but the excuse is to prop up McCain's insane chum Saakashvili, a man on borrowed political time anyway. Rather than just come right out and say that they hate treaties of all kinds, the ultra-hawks and neocons still in charge of Bush's main foreign policy direction - and very definitely in charge of McCain's - are using the recent Caucusus conflict to restart the Cold War and unilaterally defeat international agreements (including START and treaties against the weaponization of space)that way.

If the financial meltdown doesn't get us, maybe the nuclear one will.

It All Falls Down

By BJ

Cernig has already noted earlier that the financial implosion engulfing Wall Street will likely be enough to end the hegemony of the US as the sole financial superpower. It is not the only area in which America's influence is starting to unravel.

The deepest freeze in U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War has brought diplomatic efforts to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions to a halt just as Western governments and U.N. inspectors are warning that Tehran could be gaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

. . .

The Bush administration's other major effort to curb the spread of nuclear weapons suffered a significant setback Wednesday, when North Korea, which has tested a crude nuclear device, told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to restart a reprocessing plant that produces plutonium for nuclear weapons.

An IAEA spokeswoman North Korea told the IAEA that the U.N. agency's inspectors "will have no further access to the reprocessing plant," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in a statement.

The North Korean move appears to be in response to the US not removing North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism as promised in the disarmament for aid deal. However, I can't think of a nation with less credibility than North Korea, and its hard to say just what they hope to accomplish with their latest moves.

The situation regarding negotiations over Iran, on the other hand, is an easily foreseen result of America's and much of the West's response to the conflict in Georgia.

Russia's sense of grievance over the Georgian war stems from Western governments' unwillingness to acknowledge publicly what many say privately -- that Tbilisi started the conflict.

Adding insult to injury for the Russians is strong Western support for Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili -- loathed by Moscow -- and Western media coverage which has overwhelmingly favored Georgia during the conflict.

. . .

Further stoking resentment is a string of recent Western moves seen as hostile by Moscow.

In Russian eyes, the West snubbed it by recognizing the independence of Kosovo, ignored its objections to a U.S. anti-missile system in eastern Europe, didn't listen to its criticism of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and broke a promise made to Moscow in the 1990s not to expand NATO to its borders.

Now Russia's patience has snapped.

Top diplomats stationed in Moscow privately despair over how, as one put it, "we have lost Russia completely over Georgia." Even normally pro-Western intellectuals and their own Russian embassy employees had turned against them.

"There's no one in this society who sees things our way," one senior Western diplomat commented.

"Russians are reacting to 18 years of condescension and being ignored by the West. They have had enough."

Many of us warned that the over-the-top anti-Russian bais of the West over the Georgian conflict was bound to have serious repercussions in areas where Russian cooperation was a necessity, and more than a few of the remaining realists have made the plea to restore a good working relationship with the Russians. The pleas have fallen on deaf ears in Washington, and the Iran talks appear to be one of the first major casualties to result. There are number of other areas such as the increasing Islamic militancy in the Caucasus, Afghanistan, and energy security which the Russians have an important roles to play, and will have increased incentive to play spoiler should the West continue on its, "demonize the Russian Bear", tack.

If the US is to be successful in any of its future international endeavours, it is going to have to adapt to the new multi-polar world the Bush administration's recklessness has created. The US can't afford to do otherwise, but it remains to be seen if its leadership will understand that.

Admiral Mullen Pleads For Co-operation With Russia

By Cernig

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has disagreed fundamentally with John McCain's saber-rattling against Russia and at the same time put himself in opposition to all of the civilian leadership of the Bush administration except perhaps his boss Bob Gates.

"I believe we've got to have a relationship with Russia," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Los Angeles.

"I don't believe we should discontinue engagement on the military side because that relationship is going to be very important in the future," Mullen said.

..."We need to approach this in a measured way and do it in a way that recognizes we have mutual interests with Russia," he told a gathering organized Town Hall Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that sponsors debates on topical issues.

Mullen's measured remarks chimed with comments last week by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who said Russia did not pose a threat on a par with the Soviet Union.

They stand in contrast to harsher rhetoric from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and particularly Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who has said Russia would face severe consequences for its actions in Georgia. 

One of the areas where Mullen said the US and Russia must continue co-operation is nuclear non-proliferation, including safeguarding loose nuclear materials which might fall into the hands of terrorists.

However, the Bush administration doesn't think that's as important as tough talk for domestic consumption.

Some high-level meetings have been postponed indefinitely, including a trip to Russia by John Rood, the acting undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, to discuss various security issues and to negotiate a new pact to replace the existing Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START.

And the congressionally appointed Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism has been asked to not go on its upcoming fact-finding visit to Moscow.

Hat tip to Cheryl Rofer at WhirledView, who notes that START I is due to expire at the end of 2009. It provides the only means by which the Moscow Treaty, which limits the number of nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can posses, can be verified. But the neocons wanted an excuse to dump START - they hate treaties - and this hasty excuse of the Georgia conflict is just more convenient than outright abrogating it with no cause.

Then there's that Congressional factfinding trip. That's just as outrageous as the Commission was set up "to build on the work of the 9/11 Commission ... to assess our nation’s progress in preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

The Bush administration (and John McCain) need to be asked which they think is more important: petty diplomatic posturing - when even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs thinks Russia/US co-operation is crucial to US national security - or the threat of unsecured nuclear material falling into terrorist hands.