Monthly Archives: February 2009

Out of Iraq

February 27, 2009 6:44 pm by Gideon Rachman

I thought Obama’s speech outlining his plan for withdrawal from Iraq was extremely well-judged. The political task was as tricky as it gets. He had to stand in front of the cream of the American military and announce that a war that he had always opposed – but that they had fought – is now coming to a close.

As usual, the president got the tone just right. He paid a genuine and sincere tribute to military heroism. He stressed what has actually been achieved in Iraq. But he did not renounce his opposition to the war – it was the implict thread running through the speech. By the end of Obama’s address, the marines were cheering him to the rafters – a promise to increase their pay might have helped improve their mood.

The substance of the speech was also impressive. There was a clear and unequivocal-sounding committment that “by August 31st 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” But there was also enough wiggle-room to allow him to adjust the plan, according to circumstances.

And Obama also emphasised two crucial points. First, the Iraq withdrawal will be accompanied by a regional diplomatic offensive “and that will include Iran and Syria.” Second, he rightly stressed the fate of the millions of Iraqi refugees. In the past, the Americans have sometimes downplayed this problem – perhaps because they were embarrassed by the issue. But only when the Iraqi middle-classes can be persuaded that it is safe to return home, will the war truly be over.

Posted in Iraq |

Sarkozy’s swan dive (and the sorry state of the French press)

February 25, 2009 4:29 pm by Gideon Rachman

Until I arrived in Paris I was under the impression that Nicolas Sarkozy was experiencing something of a renaissance. The French presidency of the EU was generally felt to have gone well. Sarkozy is one of the few political figures in Europe who still radiates a sense of energy and purpose.

But it is not doing him much good in the opinion polls. The papers here report that the bounce he achieved in the second half of last year has now dwindled away and Sarko is now back down to approval levels of between 36% and 44% (according to which poll you choose) – and has fallen between 4% and 9% in just a month. He is back down to the (dis)approval ratings he was achieving during his bling period in the spring of last year. The main explanation for the fall in his popularity is pretty simple – the economy.

Sarkozy’s position at the G20 will be important. He has a good relationship with Gordon Brown and a famously frosty relationship with Angela Merkel. But the French position on international economic governance is actually closer to that of the Germans than the Brits. The French and Germans are keen on much tougher regulation of global finance, and think the Brits are still primarily concerned with warding off “over-regulation” of the City. And the French are also grumbling about the huge devaluation of the pound against the euro – and anxious about the impact this will have on French industry.

It has been fun talking about all this with French journalist friends. But like journalists everywhere, I find that first first and foremost they are pre-occupied by the sorry state of the press. Le Figaro is looking really thin and even Le Monde is under huge pressure. I was surprised to be told that Le Monde now has only one full-time reporter covering the EU in Brussels (plus another who does Belgium and Nato.) Just three years ago, they had a four-person Brussels bureau. These days even the French can’t afford to cover the EU properly.

Posted in French politics |

Chinese views of the crisis

February 25, 2009 11:11 am by Gideon Rachman

I have just spent a fascinating couple of days, closeted with some Chinese academics in a house outside Paris, at a seminar organised by Sweden’s “Glasshouse Forum“.

Several of the assembled profs were members of China’s “new left” – people like Zhiyuan Cui, an economist from Tsinghua University and Shaoguang Wang of Hong Kong university. I was surprised by how confident they seemed. The consensus seemed to be that China would weather the global economic crisis better than most – and that the Chinese political system is sufficiently robust to withstand higher unemployment and slower growth. One of the participants pointed out that in the late 1990s, 60m Chinese people had been thrown out of work in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis and the restructuring of China’s state-owned enterprises. But the country’s long-term trajectory remained ever upwards.

Another participant joked that China had discovered that whatever country it models itself on is doomed. In the 1950s China had modelled itself on the Soviet Union; in the 1980s there was a fashion for imitiating Japan; and more recently, there has been a fascination  with American capitalism.

Continue reading: “Chinese views of the crisis”

Posted in China, Foreign affairs |

Nuclear Iran? Decision time is here

February 23, 2009 11:16 pm by Gideon Rachman

Pinn

Barack Obama’s foreign policy team knew that sooner or later they would face a crisis over Iran. Unfortunately for the new US president, the crisis is already upon them.

On Friday, the Financial Times reported that “Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb”. That same day, Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to form Israel’s next government.

Mr Netanyahu thinks that the Iranian government is “preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state”. He has said: “It is 1938 and Iran is Germany.” Mr Netanyahu said this in 2006, so logically it is now 1941 – but the intervening years have not calmed him down. He thinks that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be a mortal threat to Israel.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post your comments below.

Posted in Iran, US foreign policy, US politics |

Three cheers for Vaclav Klaus

February 22, 2009 2:17 pm by Gideon Rachman

Vaclav Klaus is a difficult man. Vain, boorish, a “climate-change denier”, a Eurosceptic. But I couldn’t help cheering when I read the FT’s account of his address to the European Parliament, whcih was given late last week.

The parliament is a horribly pompous and pampered body – and the Czech president really stuck it to them. He observed, correctly, that the parliament completely marginalises those who dissent from the politically-approved view of the necessity of ever-deeper European integration. And he criticised those “claiming that the status quo, the present institutional form of the EU, is forever uncriticisable dogma.”

Comparing this suffocating political orthodoxy to the Soviet era in which he grew up was perhaps a little over-the-top. But the parliamentarians rather made his point for him – by walking out in large numbers, when Klaus suggested that, since there is no European demos, the EU’s democratic deficit would not be solved by increasing the powers of the European Parliament. Heresy!!

Continue reading: “Three cheers for Vaclav Klaus”

Posted in Europe |

In Churchill’s bunker, with the Germans and Pakistanis

February 20, 2009 12:07 pm by Gideon Rachman

As a “foreign affairs commentator”, I am meant to follow politics all over the world. At least in theory, I have cogent views on everything from the Bolivarian revolution to Chinese land reforms. This is an interesting, if tricky, assignment.

Wednesday was a particularly head-spinning day. At lunch-time I moderated a session at the LSE on the future of the Russian economy. In the afternoon, I took part in a conference call about a seminar on China that I am going to in France next week. Then at 6.30 pm I went over to the Policy Exchange think-tank in Westminster to interview Larry Lindsey, before an invited audience. Lindsey is a former economic adviser in the Bush White House, so we were talking about the Obama stimulus package. When that was over, I walked a few hundred yards across Whitehall to go to a dinner in Churchill’s War Rooms (an underground bunker, just near Downing Street). This was dedicated to the study of the problems of Pakistan’s tribal areas – and I found myself sitting between Pakistan’s deputy defence minister and a senior Nato general.

Fascinating – particularly the last event. Except by the end of the day, all these various problems had merged into one and I was confusing my TARPs and my FATAs. Should I be more worried by collapsing Russian banks, ballooning American deficits, jobless Chinese peasants or angry Pakistani mullahs? And can I come up with some sort of global strategy which solves all of these problems, simultaneously?

The Pakistan event was organised by the World Security Network, which is masterminded by Hubertus Hoffmann, a German entrepreneur – and so the event was full of German generals. I know it was all a long time ago, but it still seemed slightly odd for them to choose to dine in the rooms where Churchill organised the war effort. But, for Mr Hoffmann, this was evidently part of the point. In a short speech, he urged the Pakistani participants to take inspiration from their surroundings and from Churchill’s dedication to freedom. And he added that we should never forget how close Churchill came to defeat “at the hands of an Austrian – as we German like to think of him.”

Posted in Afghanistan |

The origins of the word “globalisation”

February 18, 2009 5:15 pm by Gideon Rachman

I have finally found a question that Martin Wolf does not know the answer to – who invented the term “globalisation” and when? I e-mailed Martin (now temporarily resident in New York) with this query. But he was flummoxed – and this despite having written books on the subject.

I then thought I had solved the conundrum when I came across this obituary of Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor, from the New York Times. The article claimed that Levitt had invented the term in a Harvard Business Review article in 1983 called the “Globalisation of Markets”. But then, disappointingly, I noticed that there was a correction appended to the bottom of the article – claiming that the term had been used by economists earlier in the 1980s and was first used in the 1940s. Disappointingly vague, I thought.

So let me appeal to the wider public. Does anybody know who coined the word “globalisation”? And, perhaps more important, when did the idea and the word really take off? And – last question – has the globalisation bubble burst, and if so what is the word to describe the opposite of globalisation?

Posted in Foreign affairs |

November 2012: a dystopian dream

February 16, 2009 11:24 pm by Gideon Rachman

On both sides of the Atlantic, senior officials are issuing dire warnings about global political turmoil. In the US, Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, says instability produced by the economic crisis is now the biggest short-term threat to US national security. In Britain, Ed Balls, a cabinet minister, argues that the financial crisis is “more serious” than that of the 1930s, adding cheerfully: “And we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy.”

All this is alarming - but also rather vague. So how might world politics look in four years’ time? Something like this, perhaps …

It is November 7 2012. At three in the morning, an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama appears before weeping supporters in the ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and concedes defeat. The euphoria of his victory-night speech in Grant Park four years earlier is a distant memory. The Obama administration has been overwhelmed by America’s economic problems. Sarah Palin is the new president of the US.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Posted in US politics |

The future of the Bolivarian revolution

February 16, 2009 11:43 am by Gideon Rachman

The FT today reports that ecstatic crowds in Venezuela greeted Hugo Chavez’s referendum victory with chants of “Hey ho, Chavez won’t go.” I wonder what that is in the original Spanish?

Perhaps more important, I wonder whether it’s true? Can Chavez continue to function and rule if the oil price is stuck well below $50 a barrel.

This is a very strange moment for Chavez and his followers. On the one hand, the prestige of the American model has suffered a terrible blow – so there has never been a better time to find an international audience for Chavez’s “21st-century socialism”. On the other hand, all that lovely social spending and international aid was dependent on high oil revenues.

In fact, it is very striking that if you look around the world for possible ideological challenges to the American way, three of the most prominent have all floated upwards on a sea of oil money. As well as Chavez’s Venezuela, there is Iran’s theocracy and Russia’s authoritarian capitalism. All three economies are now in serious trouble. Just because America is down, it does not mean its foes are on the up.

Posted in Foreign affairs |

Lunch with the FT: Abhisit Vejjajiva

February 15, 2009 6:32 pm by Gideon Rachman

 

Thailand never used to have an image problem. Put to one side the occasional negative story about sex tourism and heroin-trafficking and the country has been successfully marketed as the idealised Oriental paradise: exotic, beautiful, warm, welcoming and unthreatening.

But lately things have gone wrong. In November, political protesters occupied and closed Bangkok airport, turning Thailand from the “land of smiles” of tourist brochures into a vale of tears for stranded holidaymakers. International human rights groups are criticising the country for its treatment of refugees and for its use of lèse-majesté laws to harass and imprison critics of the Thai monarchy. And now, to top it all, there is an economic crisis.

Continue reading: “Lunch with the FT: Abhisit Vejjajiva”

Posted in US politics |
BackOlder entries

The World

with Gideon Rachman

About this blog About Gideon Blog guide
Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs. Read more on the authors.

Gideon became chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times in July 2006. He joined the FT after a 15-year career at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Bangkok. He also edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections.

His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation
To comment, please register for free with FT.com and read our policy on submitting comments.

All posts are published in UK time.

Contact gideon.rachman@ft.com about The World blog.

See the full list of FT blogs.

FT World News page

Read FT world news coverage from our network of international correspondents.

The FT’s Brussels blog

For views and opinions on the European Union from Peter Spiegel, Joshua Chaffin, Alex Barker and Stanley Pignal, follow the FT's Brussels blog here.

Tags

arab spring Argentina austerity bailout Barack Obama Berlusconi Bo Xilai Brussels China Colombia Cuba Davos ECB EFSF Egypt elections EU Europe European Commission Eurozone Eurozone crisis Fidel Castro France François Hollande Greece IMF In the Picture Iran Italy Klaus Schwab Live blog Merkel Mexico Nicolas Sarkozy Papademos Papandreou Putin Romney Sarkozy Spain Syria US election Venizelos WEF World Economic Forum

The blog day by day

« Jan Mar »February 2009
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728