International Affairs: November 2012 Archives

President Obama traveled to Phnom Penh to invite Asian countries (excluding China) to join a new Trans-Pacific Parternship. The only problem? No one joined.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States.

President Obama is a national embarrassment. The reason he's so popular internationally is that most of the world is pleased to see America humiliated and weak.

Everyone knows that China exports zillions of gadgets and trinkets every year and benefits from this huge trade surplus, but China isn't self-sufficient. China imports vast quantities of oil and natural gas over the ocean and also suffers a staggering food deficit.

Structurally, China is at a huge disadvantage as it accounts for 20% of the world's population, but only 7% of arable land. Compare that with Brazil which has the reverse of those ratios. What that does for a country like China is to incentivise the adoption of technification. Let's look at their porcine market, which represents 50% of global production and consumption. In China, to slaughter roughly 600 mn pigs per year, which is about six times the demand in the US, they have a breeding herd of about 50 mn animals. In the US, the comparable number is only about 6 mn so there is a huge productivity lag. Owing to its structural disadvantages, China is much more focused on increasing efficiency. For that, it needs to accelerate technification. So, we're seeing a whole series of government incentives at a national level, a provincial level and a local level, focusing on the need to move toward integrated pork production because that's a key way to optimise total economics, both in terms of pig production, slaughtering, processing and also actually taking the pork out into the marketplace.

Using Wikipedia for a source here's a table I made of the ten most populous countries and their arable land to population ratio (both as a percentage of the world's total).

The bimodal distribution is surprising to me... it's as if food self-sufficiency plays no role in limiting population. I wonder if this is a modern phenomena or has held true throughout history?

Also interesting is that Russia has a huge reserve of arable land to go along with its huge reserve of energy resources. Given their proximity to China, I wonder if Russia be able to hold on to their territory as their population shrinks? Russia's land isn't all of high quality, but there's a lot of it.

(HT: Via Meadia.)

David Horovitz describes how Iron Dome has protected Israel from rockets while simultaneously creating political complications.

Successive days of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and efforts to reach Jerusalem? Well, that's worrying for sure. Those alarms are terrifying, no question. Plenty of Israelis from the center will now join the traumatized ranks of the Kassam-worn south. But injuries and death on the scale so gleefully contemplated by Hamas? Sorry. No, actually. We brought protection. We've got Iron Dome.

This being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, even in Israel's defensive victory, even in its staggering success in keeping its people physically safe, lies the danger of defeat.

When Israel's short-sighted critics insistently refuse to look beyond the numerical asymmetry, the very effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the latest weapon with which to attack Israel for its purported aggression. All those Gazans are suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet hardly any Israelis are dying? That can't be right. How can the Israelis claim to be the victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression? They're still alive.

Here's the problem: it's easy for the media to report on suffering, because very few people deserve to suffer. The audience instinctively knows how to line up its sympathies and the journalists don't have to work very hard to explain anything. It would be a lot more work for journalists to explain why the audience should side against the people who are most immediately, most visibly suffering.

The success of Iron Dome can be explained in one story. Each Hamas rocket that doesn't land and kill anyone doesn't get its own treatment because the potential victims are vague and faceless. When an actual Palestinian is killed the victim is specific and has a face, and the tragedy of the suffering wrenches the heart and draws viewers.

Our world is perverse in that we glorify people who suffer without looking into the cause of their suffering. A person who suffers for doing wrong deserves our pity, but should also stand as a warning to others and not simply be excused out of sympathy. In reality the suffering of the Palestinians is caused not by Israel, but by Hamas.

And Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing numbers because they are either directly involved in trying to kill us or -- to our genuine sorrow and Hamas's cynical delight -- they had the misfortune to be sleeping, walking, talking, studying or praying very close to a key Hamas terror chief, missile launch site, ammunition store or other element of the sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.

To put it succinctly, Hamas is doing its best to kill any and all of us in Israel, while cynically seeking to protect itself from attack by emplacing its offensive capacity among Gaza's often unwitting civilians. And Israel is doing its best to prevent its citizens being killed, while trying to thwart the attacks without harming Gaza's civilians. There's the relevant asymmetry.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.