International Relations Blog

The Obama administration is turning to Asia for the defining competition of the next century. But if the United States actually wants to win, it’ll need Latin America.

By Parag Khanna

With Barack Obama’s administration pivoting toward Asia and with the U.S. president now off to Hawaii for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (and then to Australia and Indonesia), let’s remember that the most important trip of his time in office was not east but south. In March, in the midst of the fallout from Japan’s tsunami and nuclear meltdown and the brutal escalation in Libya, Obama made an international trip the Western media almost entirely ignored. His destination: Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador. There was pressure to cancel the visits, and photos and media reports revealed that Obama was accompanied by his military advisors and was getting constant updates on both crises from a secure camouflage tent.

Of course, the date for the trip was not movable, especially as it was precisely the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s declaration of the “Alliance for Progress,” which brought about an industrial expansion from Mexico to Argentina. Obama’s journey thus had a grand strategic purpose missed by Washington’s Mideast- and China-obsessed elites (not to mention previous administrations — one recalls George W. Bush in 2005 being startled by a map of South America and exclaiming, “Wow! Brazil is big!”) By setting out to “forge new alliances across the Americas,” Obama has implicitly acknowledged the emerging geopolitical reality that Latin America is nothing less than the third pillar of the West, alongside Europe and North America.

The United States certainly can’t take Latin American loyalty for granted, if it ever could. This is an age of multialignment, with most powers playing all sides. South America has rolled out the welcome mat to the new Asian power, with Brasilia and Beijing declaring a strategic partnership years ago and many South American commodities exporters like Chile and Argentina owing much of their recent growth to China’s massive appetite for raw materials.

Indeed, the first aim of geopolitics is access to resources, which South America has in abundant supply. Some 30 percent of the world’s total biocapacity resides in South America. It may sound cliché to say that the Amazonian rain forest is the world’s lungs, but it’s true. The continent is also the world’s breadbasket. Most of the global supply of bananas, sugar, oranges, coffee, soybeans, and salmon, as well as a major share of beef and pork, come from South America. It also has massive mineral deposits: silver, copper, lead, tin, zinc, iron ore, and lithium.

Perhaps most importantly, Latin America is fundamental to any strategy for energy self-sufficiency. North America’s energy future already looks strong with oil and gas deposits under the Arctic seabed, Canada’s gigantic oil sands, wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and newfound shale-gas deposits in the United States. Add to this the major discoveries of oil off Brazil’s Atlantic coast, plus Venezuela’s abundant reserves, and you have a comprehensive solution for total energy independence from the turbulence of Eurasia and Africa. There is also a sustainability angle here. Brazilian sugar cane-based ethanol is four times more efficient to produce than North American grain-based ethanol.

According to energy expert Daniel Yergin, the new Western Hemispheric energy axis runs from Alberta, Canada — from which the United States gets another 1 percent of its oil imports each year — through Texas and the Gulf of Mexico down to Venezuela, French Guiana, and Brazil. U.S. energy policy should be increasingly Western Hemispheric — just as China’s energy policy is increasingly Middle Eastern. In this context, the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas can be delayed (as it just was), but it is nonetheless inevitable. Read more…

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance.

As published in www.foreignpolicy.com on November 11, 2011.

Sonja Be (MIR Alumna, Class of 2011)

Sonja Be, a 2011 graduate of the Master in International Relations at IE School of Arts & Humanities, has launched her very own blog. Sonja has combined her interests, knowledge, and passion for international relations with media, and created a website that serves as a platform to confront, educate and inspire with thorough and creative communication, shedding light on the world’s often unnoticed problems. Sonja has launched this site in an attempt to promote discussion and debate on a variety of issues in international relations.  It covers topics on women, youth, human rights, international community, media, and education. Sonja’s blog has received over 1600 page visits since it was created, just two days ago.

Sonja is an aspiring young journalist of Iranian-Swedish-Canadian descent. In addition to the Master in International Relations from IE School of Arts & Humanities, Sonja also holds a BA in Professional Communications from Royal Roads University and a Diploma in Radio Broadcasting from British Columbia Institute of Technology. She has ample professional experience in media and communications. Sonja has lived, worked, and studied in three different countries.

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By José Ignacio Torreblanca, Associate Professor at IE School of Arts & Humanities

Eleven in favour, 11 abstentions and five against, is the result of the diplomatic work done by the 27 EU governments to coordinate their positions on the admission of Palestine to Unesco.

The two EU members with permanent seats on the Security Council voted differently (the UK abstained, France was in favour), while Germany voted against. Italy followed the UK, while Spain went with France, so not even the so-called big five agreed. Nor were the countries of the Mediterranean coast. The German no was followed by Czechs, Dutch, Lithuanians and Swedes; the French yes by Austrians, Belgians, Cypriots, Finns, Greeks, Irish, Luxembourgeois, Maltese, Slovenes and Spaniards; the British abstention by Bulgarians, Danish, Estonians, Hungarians, Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians and Slovaks. All this ridicule for nothing, for the general vote went heavily in favour of Palestine. The Europeans were not only disunited, but irrelevant.

Summed up here are the 10 years of negotiation to write and ratify the Treaty of Lisbon, which was aimed at making the EU speak with a single voice on the international scene. And the two years spent in creating the European External Action Service, supposedly meant to coordinate the foreign policies of member states, the European Commission and the Council. And the established EU policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has advanced little since 1980 since the (then) European Community endorsed a solution based on two states (provided, of course, that the solution was merely theoretical, and showed no signs of taking any real form under conditions different from those blessed by Israel and the United States).

It will be said, as usual, that none of this is the fault of Lady Ashton, the EU’s invisible high representative for foreign policy; that she is only a symptom of the EU states’ general rejection of pooling their foreign policy; that her weakness is only a consequence, not a cause. But it is hard to imagine how the good lady looks in the mirror in the morning, and goes off to do her job in the name of Europe after a vote where the EU has mired itself in international ridicule. The fact that nobody has called for her resignation should not be any cause for satisfaction on the high representative’s part. She is either assuming responsibility for the result, or she is broadcasting the message that this form of ridicule and irrelevance is something that enters into the area of routine, of what is merely to be expected.

It has to be remembered that the 27 European member states keep open more than 3,200 embassies and consulates, employ more than 110,000 persons in their diplomatic services, are the greatest financial contributors to the United Nations, and meet at least 1,000 times a year to coordinate their positions in international organisations. Europe is also the first-ranking trading partner of Israel, and of the United States as well. Read more…

As published in ecfr.eu on November 9, 2011 (a version of this article also appeared in El País on November 3, 2011)

By David Remnick

Around a year ago, I visited the Hatzor Air Force Base in central Israel. While interviewing a high-ranking officer about the training that was going on there for a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, I noticed a large picture on the wall of Israeli fighter jets flying over the territory of Auschwitz. The planes were there to participate in a commemoration, in 2003, of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Polish Air Force. The photograph, the officer told me, was a gift from a leading Israeli Air Force official. It came with the caption, “Israeli warplanes over Auschwitz. Remember and do not forget. Always rely on ourselves.”

The officer did not express an opinion about whether Israel should launch a strike against Iran. That was not his job, he said. “What we’re trying to do is to give the political level a choice,” he said. “It’s not easy. It’s a leadership decision, probably the biggest such decision since the establishment of the state of Israel. We are building the opportunity, the capability.”

Later this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog outfit, will issue a report to its member states on Iran’s nuclear program. According to various press accounts, Western diplomats who have been briefed describe the report as finding, more explicitly than before, that Iran, despite its own denials and despite international sanctions, has been developing capabilities that appear intended for the production of a nuclear weapon. The I.A.E.A.’s evidence, the BBC reported, will include “intelligence that Iran made computer models of a nuclear warhead,” and satellite images of a steel container that could potentially be used to test explosives “related to nuclear arms.” The Guardian’s account of developing events, by Julian Borger, is truly alarming.

The details will emerge—and they, inevitably, will be denied in Tehran. At a group interview that I attended in New York two months ago, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted yet again that Iran’s nuclear program was solely for civilian purposes, and, in advance of the new I.A.E.A. report, Iranian officials have declared the evidence that has leaked false, part of an overall fabrication.

An important article by Seymour M. Hersh published in The New Yorker last June, “Iran and the Bomb,” has made plain the complexity—and the potential perils—of trying to assess the nature and the pace of Iran’s nuclear program. Hersh quoted Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the I.A.E.A., as saying, “I don’t believe Iran is a clear and present danger. All I see is the hype about the threat posed by Iran.” The article, while taking into account the contradictions in Iranian statements and the nature of the regime (including its vicious crackdown on dissidents last year), began by reminding the reader of where hasty, exaggerated, and even manipulated intelligence led the Bush Administration, and the country, in 2003. (In that spirit, we should wait to read the I.A.E.A. report itself before coming to premature conclusions via diplomatic leaks. ElBaradei’s successor is less sanguine about evidence of Iranian intentions.)

From talking to American officials, I get the clear sense that President Barack Obama is deeply concerned about the I.A.E.A. report and the Iranian situation in general, but is hardly eager to lead, or even sanction, a military strike on Tehran. Hawks like Dick Cheney say that this is because Obama is weak and allergic to the use of military strength—a Republican talking point rendered ridiculous, time and again, by the President’s actions, from the killing of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to the use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen to his actions in Libya. In Cannes this week, Obama discussed with Nicolas Sarkozy of France and others ways to further isolate Iran in the U.N. and tighten sanctions, possibly making moves on Iranian financial institutions, including its central bank. On a trip to Asia later this week, Obama will try to persuade the Russians and Chinese, who are slower to act against Iran, to cooperate. The tension here is marked: The I.A.E.A. report comes not long after the United States accused Iran of hatching a plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington. Read more…

David Remnick is editor of The New Yorker.

As published in www.newyorker.com on November 6, 2011.