Featured Find: Lake Vostok!

Russian scientists have acheived what's being called the moon landing of our generation:

MOSCOW — In the coldest spot on the earth’s coldest continent, Russian scientists have reached a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario after spending a decade drilling through more than two miles of solid ice, the scientists said Wednesday.

A statement by the chief of the Vostok Research Station, A. M. Yelagin, released by the director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, said the drill made contact with the lake water at a depth of 12,366 feet. As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100 to 130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination. Next Antarctic season, the scientists will return to take samples of the water.

The first hint of contact with the lake was on Saturday, but it was not until Sunday that pressure sensors showed that the drill had fully entered the lake. Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the miles-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent, and the first one to have a drill bit break through to liquid water from the ice that has kept it sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years.

Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

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Eagle and Bear: Who's a Hawk?

Russia’s big week in the headlines proved a mixed blessing.  The announced START nuclear arms reduction agreement represented new progress and cooperation with the United States and brought a renewed sense that Cold War clash of civilizations is forever past; meanwhile the graphic violence of the subway bombings demonstrated that Islamic terrorism‘s barbarism has radicalized even the most violent asymmetric conflict in the world with new methods of casual murder.  The stories critically inform one another: the juxtaposition reminds of the opportunities that lie in even slightly improving on policy currently executed counter-productively, even if that just means finding a crappy equilibrium rather than struggling deeper into the quicksand.

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The Gift that Never Gives

Jeffery Goldberg doesn't like the trend he sees in Israel's foreign policy:

A pattern has emerged in recent weeks of an Israeli government that seems to go far out of its way to alienate countries it has no business alienating. First, there was the gross insult directed at the Turkish ambassador to Israel by the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon. [...]

Then came the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai. Israel hasn't claimed responsibility for the assassination, but evidence points to the Mossad. It is one thing to kill Hamas officials -- Hamas, after all, has declared a war of destruction on Israel -- but it is another to do so in the United Arab Emirates, the most open-minded country in the Gulf, especially on matters related to Israel, and a country that is obviously important to the formation of a broad, anti-Iran coalition. 

Then, of course, came the humiliation dealt to Vice President Biden on his visit to Israel, about which enough ink has been spilled. [...]

Then this week came a snub by Danny Ayalon's boss, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who boycotted a speech to the Knesset by the president of Brazil because Lula apparently wouldn't pay a visit to the grave of Theodore Herzl, who is now spinning in said grave, because he was a pragmatist as well as a dreamer and he knew that the Jews, a small, embattled people, need friends to survive. [...]

Bibi Netanyahu is not in control of his government. He has brought into his coalition parties -- Lieberman's party, the Shas Party -- that are narrow-focused, excessively-rightist, stubborn and prideful, and now he's paying the price. The problem is that Israel is paying the price as well. America can afford stupid politicians. Israel can't.  

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How to Lose an Arm's Race in One Year

Herbert Block's "Speak Loudly and Poke them with a Big Stick"A recent Harvard simulation of the next year of geo-political wrangling over the Iranian nuclear program concluded with a startling result: Iran succeeded and in the process strained U.S. diplomatic relations with Europe, Russia, China and especially Israel.  In the scenario, which featured senior diplomats and academics role-played as various heads of state, the U.S. initially focused exclusively on implementing broad sanctions.  Iran ignored the sanctions entirely and continued its program apace.  Eventually, China and Russia balked at the sanctions and secretly offered to help Iran.  The U.S., realizing that it was incapable of stopping Iran diplomatically and unwilling to intervene militarily, decides to adopt a policy of containment based on its earlier experience in the Cold War.  Israel, however, refuses to accept a nuclear Iran and the U.S. threatens to publicly condemn an attack on Iran by Israel.  The game ends with Iran gaining strengthened ties to Russia and China, and hard break between Israel and Washington.

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Could a Major Iran Nuclear Deal Happen?

I love that the snap consensus on nearly any foreign policy news of the day turns out to be lacking the nuanced information that the real players have.  When Obama announced that he was pulling Bush's plan for an Eastern European missile shield, the snap reaction was that it was done to placate Russia and gain leverage for sanctions on Iran and that it was a huge concession with no guarantee of results.  The reality turned out to be that not only was Obama barely changing the status quo on the missile shield - he still plans to have missile interceptors in Poland - but that rather than tougher new sanctions, the plan was a deal with important concessions on both sides and, despite the "setback" that Russia wouldn't agree to new sanctions - Russia plays a huge role in the deal.  It is creative diplomacy in other words, rather than a strict adherence to a failed plan.

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Status of Forces Agreements Worldwide

This map of US military presence throughout the world reveals four things:

1.  The US military is definitely worried about Iran.

2.  The US military is definitely worried about Russia.

3.  The US military is definitely worried about China.

4.  The proposed Polish base has nothing to do with defending Denmark from Iranian missiles.

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Tamerlane for the Twenty-First Century

Several months ago, I read John Darwin's book "After Tamerlane".  It chronicles the history of empire-building from the Central-Asian-controlled world empire paradigm to the coastal-powers paradigm with which the world is now most familiar.  China, India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the West all originated or suffered sweeping dynastic and social changes from this paradigm shift.

Money to be made by controlling the Silk Road had before 1399 created an incentive for consolidation.  The conventional wisdom is that, as sea power became more important for global trade, control of the Silk Road became obsolete.  Naval powers such as Portugal, Britain, Japan, and the United States took over, while cities such as Samarkand, once the cultural, military, and commercial center of the world, were forgotten.

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Iran's Party Crashers

After yesterday’s unrest in Iran it is clear that the revolution is hot again, after conveniently taking a week off so the Western media could breathlessly cover the whereabouts of Michael Jackson’s body.  The green revolution is less convenient from the point of view of nearly everyone attempting to prevent Iran’s nuclear program.

After Obama took office his strategy on Iran seemed clear: by taking a hard line with Israel and reaching out to the Muslim World in Cairo he was attempting to reestablish the U.S. as an impartial actor in the region, even as he solidified support from Russia and China to present a unified international front.  Israel was crucial to this plan, both because progress on a Palestinian final status agreement would weaken Iran’s position in the Muslim world and because Israel’s bluster was the bad cop to Obama’s good cop.  The leadership in the Arab world is certainly receptive to Obama, though whether or not China and Russia would agree to tougher sanctions remains unclear.  However, this measured plan has been upset by the events in Tehran.

The brutal crackdown against the protesters demonstrates that the regime is, and probably always has been, illegitimate and brutally repressive.  Iran’s credibility on the Muslim streets as the antidote to American imperialism is damaged, making it unaccountable to foreign public opinion as it suppresses domestic unrest.  Thus, Iran’s current leadership has “gone rogue” (I can’t remember if that is a Palinism or a description of Palin), and it must be prevented from further destabilization of the region at any cost.

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