Winter work break is a good time to do some catch-up reading. Just in case youre curious, here’s the reading list. It ranges from the political stuff to Arthurian romances to SU’s obligatory readings in Slavic literature.
If you have any suggestions, feel free to mention them in the comments section.
StrategyUnit will be back sometime later…nothing major until after the New Year.
Happy Holidays and Have a Happy New Year
Introduction
Everyone is talking about China as the raising superpower, with growing voices of China as a threat to the United States. There is not doubt that if China’s economic course continues, it will be a regional than global challenger to the U.S.
But what is generally never discussed or even ignored is China’s geopolitical challenges.
(Map showing major countries surrounding China)
China is Surrounded?
Look past the landmasses and to the oceans, we see that in the Indian Ocean, critical for energy supplies from the Middle East, the United States remains dominant. This is one reason why China will have to create a blue-water navy and why it is building a port in Gwadar, Pakistan.
There is also Japan’s navy to contend with, which packs quite the punch. Keep in mind that Japan’s military has one hand tied behind its back because of the Constitution, which may change in the intermediate future. Indeed, China and Japan are now in a diplomatic spat - with China asking Japan to “explain” its military posture and Japanese FM calling China a threat. China raise to power is being met by hawkish nationalism in Japan.
Conclusion
There are at least three conclusions to derive from the map:
1. If you look at the map, the idea of containment of China by a US-Japan-Indian plus Russia group almost appears possible. I find this idea of “containing China” utterly dubious, but the map demonstrate that some natural constraints to China’s power.
Perhaps if China was still a closed economy, containment would be possible, but too much money is at stake for anyone, even Americans, to ignore.
2. Surrounded by such major states, we would expect China to be insecure in its own neighborhood. After all, there are US bases in Japan, Korea, Guam and formerly in Uzbekistan, along with US-India military cooperation. Is there a Chinese military base in Mexico?
So when we hear of China’s growing influence in the world, just remember China’s neighbor to better appreciate its own regional challenges.
3. If China ever aligns with one of its major neighbors, the U.S. will truly have a big worry on its hands. India, Japan and S. Korea are not possible partners at this point, but Russia (despite its fear of the Yellow Scare) is a potential partner.
Like China, Russia has been criticized for its lack of democracy, transparency and human rights; such criticisms, may drive the two to uniting. Indeed, if Russia follows a “Primakov Doctrine” of seeking a multi-polar world, it follows that Russia should help prop up China to challenge the U.S.
China would supply the capital and discipline, while Russia would provide access to its military technology and raw commodities. On a lower level, this is already happening, but a full blown alignment has yet to happen any time soon.
Introduction
I wrote a paper some years ago that I’d like to bring out to StrategyUnit, since I feel there is still a lot of room to discuss the (mislabeled) Global War on Terror (GWOT). Indeed, I believe that there is a supreme lacking in the mature development of a conceptual framework to understand the Global Islamist Insurgency (GII). Theoretical and conceptual frameworks are needed; it functions as a systematic “outline”, on which we can organize a strategy and devise proper policy. What follows before is shortened version of the original 20+ page paper.
The Premise
In the formulation of my own conceptual framework for understanding GWOT, I submit the following general premises:
1. The need to look beyond the traditional levels of analysis of international relations - personal, state and system level – and to take account local and transnational social cleavages.
2. Instability today is principally caused by the lack of “global connectivity” in certain counties and societies, resulting in local and regional crises and conflicts.
3. Variants of Salafi-Jihadi/Pan-Islamism have conflated these crises and conflicts as a global conflict against Islam and the Ummah by the “Other.”
Of course, there will alway be outlier cases, but the premises serves to cover the vast majority of situations relating to GWOT.
Thomas Barnett v. Samuel Huntington
There is no current theory or framework that can easily match with these premises. However, we can build this framework by synthesizing Barnett and Huntington. Below is a mini-review of their concepts and some of their shortfalls when taken alone.
Thomas Barnett declares that the amount of global “connectivity” in the world defines security issues in the international environment. It is the amount of connectivity a state possesses – in the transnational flow of trade, media, finances, information, culture et cetera – that distinguish between a peaceful, integrated “Core” state and a hostile or unstable “Gap” state. As Barnett states, the “new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root [the Core] and where it has not [the Gap].”(1) In short, the level of strategic regional and global security is directly linked to the level of globalization. This is no difference.
While Thomas Barnett presents a long term “big picture” framework for understanding the source of instability in the world, it cannot alone fully describe the nature of GWOT. It does not explain why certain peoples in certain regions are engaging in a confrontation against the members of the Core. In other words, if the international security environment is defined by those in the Gap and those in the Core, why were the majority of the 9/11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia, and not shamans from Indonesia or Orthodox Christians from Belarus?
The essential variables that need to be added to Barnett’s framework are those of religious and ultimately of socio-cultural factors.
While Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” goes to the extreme in treating cultural regions as nearly monolithic political blocks (that is, civilizations), Huntington does well in thrusting cultural, religious, social, and historical as variables in the calculus that influences the foreign policy orientations of states and non-state organizations. Indeed, Huntington must be acknowledged as prescient in declaring the revival of religions, particularly non-Western religions, as remerging as an important cultural and political force in the world.(2)
Huntington-Barnett with a Social Level of Analysis: Gap Societies?
I agree with Barnett on the instability of regions lacking “global connectivity” and Huntington’s emphasis on cultural and religions as important variables in international politics and his concept of “civilization faultlines.” Barnett’s builds a framework for understanding all global and local conflicts in the long term. Huntington emphasizes culture as the central factor.
Barnett and Huntington’s frameworks are not mutually exclusive and this paper builds on their scholarship and research to explain the nature of this war. Both Huntington and Barnett rely on system – Civilization vs. Civilization, Core vs. Gap – and state level of analysis, where does one place non-state groups like Al-Qaeda, Al Takfir Wal Hijra, Hizb ut-Tahrir and including their support structures and sympathizers? Additionally, how we explain the presence of such groups in the Core states of Western Europe or within the Western Civilization?
An elegant solution to this problem is applying social cleavages as another level of analysis complementing the state and system level of analysis. Organizations like Al-Qaeda to Hizb ut-Tahrir are not just “terrorist groups” or “Islamist extremist,” but groups that represent a worldwide social movement that transcend nation-states, Core or Gap states or civilization blocks. Thus, there is a need to focus on different social groups inside Core and Gap states that are disconnected from the larger society and how they related to other states and societies globally.
Towards a More Total Concept of Warfare
Beyond abandoning the Western concept of state-to-state warfare, this is conflict where the enemy employs a new “combined arms” strategy beyond the traditional means of Western warfare and follows John Robb’s “Global Guerilla” on the more tactical and operational level.
In traditional military usage, the term “combined arms” is defined by the U.S. Department of Defense as “The full integration and application of two or more arms or elements of one Military Service into an operation”(3) -such as the integrated and coordinated use of infantry, tank, precision bombers, and reconnaissance under one unified command. As war on the social level against the states and other societies, we see “combined arms” taking not only a purely military dimension but the integration of a full spectrum of human concerns – political issues, social issues, cultural issues, religious issues, etc – under the banner of a unifying ideology. In this case, this ideology is religious in nature.
GWOT as a Radical, Global and Muslim Social Movement
The use of social, cultural and religious issues as important dimensions of the war has it roots in the religious nature of this war – that is, religious as defined by the enemy. Stemming from its roots from Islam, Salafi-Jihadist share the tradition of embracing religion as a totality inseparable from any social sphere. In contrasts with the Peace of Westphalia that helped brought about the separation of the Christian church away from the state in the West, Islam has kept itself as the sole truth for all totality – it applies to and encompasses all aspects of human activity. In the West, the Muslim Brotherhood was most famous in emphasizing this fact of Islam, with its statement of recognizing “Islam as a total system” and the “final arbiter of life in all of its categories.” The most famous quote by the Muslim Brotherhood was its founder’s, Hassan al-Banna, proclamation that “Islam is a faith and a ritual, a nation and a nationality, a religion and a state, spirit and deed, holy text and sword.”(4) Indeed, other Muslim scholars, such as Sayyid Qutb, have criticized the West for its corruption of Christianity with its “schizophrenic” separation between the secular and the sacred, between church and state.(5) In contrasts to Christianity today, he declares Islam as a “system [that] extend into all aspects of life; it discusses all minor and major affairs of mankind.”(6)
Indeed, by actively uniting and linking all human activities to a single religious belief, it is easy to see how local conflicts affecting Muslims can be exploited to be seen as an attack on the entire global Muslim community – the Ummah. This combined with the concept of jihad al-asghar (lesser jihad) explains the confluence of local conflicts involving Muslims – Chechnya, Palestinian Issue, Moro in the Philippines – to being seen as a global conflict against Muslims.(7) And borrowing from John Robb, we see how quickly the conflict can become a social movement and a “Global Swarm”.
The relationship between social conflict and the fanatical organizations that exploit these conflicts are not only self-reinforcing, but help export and spread instability in the region and internationally (as illustrated above). In the primary link, each local conflict begins to be linked to a cause (Islamist jihad) and is transformed to being seen as one of many conflicts (reaching towards secondary linkage). This conflation of the socio-political and socio-economic issues with the Islamist movement reaches the point that, in some cases, it is difficult to distinguish between what are social problems and what is part of the war.
Conclusion
As this war is more of cross between an insurgency and a social movement, there maybe no clean cessation of violence in the near or distant future. And in this conflict, there will be no battlefield,s, but rather our adversaries will be attached as a Global Swarm as Global Guerillas.
If the U.S. and it allies achive victory (how can we even defien this?), there will be neither a ceremony on USS Missouri nor televised collapse of an “Evil Empire”. In the words of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, “Some people see war and peace as a light switch. When the lights are off, it’s peacetime. When the lights go on, it’s wartime. I see more of a dimmer switch. We’ll see the intensity wax and wane, but there will always be some level of conflict going on.” (8) Let us hope that the United States and its allies dims that switch, least it will be a long hard slog.
—–
Sources
1. Barnett, Thomas P.M. “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Esquire. March 2003.
2. Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 95-101.
3. United States of America. Defense Department. DOD Dictionary of Military and 3. Associated Terms, 30 November 2004,
4. Daniel Pipes, “Fundamentalist Muslims Between America and Russia”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1986, Accessed Online: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/279 (04 February 2004).
5. Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 89.
6. Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, (New Jersey: Islamic Publications International, 2000), 32.
7. For a comparative to the Islamic concept of jihad al-asghar within the Abrahamic religions, see the Judaic concept of milchemet mitzvah (obligatory war) and the Christian concept of Just War as described in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
8. No Author. “Changing and Fighting, Simultaneously”, 30 October, 2004, National Journal, Available at
This week begins the first East Asia Summit (EAS) with over 16 countries invited, representing “3 billion people and one-fifth of global trade“. As the Washington Post writes:
As proposed by Malaysia and championed by China, the summit was conceived as a way for the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to cooperate with China, Japan and South Korea — but not the United States — on security, social and economic problems. Many officials viewed it as a vehicle for Chinese leadership, making China the motor of an Asian bloc with a voice distinct from that of other Asia-Pacific groupings that include the United States.
Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea were some of the major nations invited to EAS. Russia was invited as well as an observer, making it all the more striking that the US wasnt.
Despite the growth in China’s clout in its region, the U.S. is still the de facto security guarantor of the region. While East Asia Summit, like ASEAN, will probably be mired by discord and inability to create concrete action, the fact that the U.S. is not part of the discussion in Kuala Lumpur is the ill-gotten fruit of our publicly voiced insecurity regarding China.
All this talk of China as the threat is driving China to play the game in Asia as zero-sum: its either the U.S. (pun intended) or China.
Given geography and culture, the East and South-East Asia is not the “natural” sphere of influence for the U.S. and we need to be reminded this. World War II gave our position in Asia, we should be careful not to squander it by driving China to carve its sphere and fight for influence at our expense.
Instead of containment in China, we should encourage tying China in to a mesh of pan-Asian institutions that will help China gain confidence in the region despite U.S. presence, while also constrain its range of maneuver.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia is a demonstration of China ability to create its own regional institutions as a tool to challenge the U.S. We need to build our own tool by putting China and the U.S. together in it.
Additionally, India is also looking to assert itself globally, we encourage and guide them on this process as partenrs, least they form their partnership with states that hold interests contrary to ours.
Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore was quoted as saying : “We have little choice but to construct a new architecture for East Asia…If East Asia does not coalesce, it will lose out to the Americas and Europe…The key question is not whether East Asia will integrate. It is how quickly and the form East Asian regionalism will assume.”
Indeed, Gok Chok Tong is correct and it is even more the reason the U.S. needs to be able to partipate in these dicussion (EAS specifically and the future of Asia in general). We cannot ignore a region as sizeable and vibrant as Asia.
Someone needs to ask why what’s going on in the State Department and why isnt President Bush at the EAS?
As in update to my previous posting “Barnett’s Path to a U.S. Grand Strategy in Three Paragraphs“, Curzon at “Coming Anarchy” has an excellent post (”The New Allies”):
The United Kingdom is our main ally inside the EU. Althouh a part of the union, Britain does not use the Euro and emphasizes the “one market” aspect of the union, not a unanimous foreign policy. There is no better way to limit EU meddling than by allying with a powerful country inside the union that wish to limit the scope of its power.
Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic Three fear Russia and yet are wary of Franco-German dominance in the EU. The US has brought all these countries into NATO, Poland has the fourth largest number of troops in Iraq, and Bulgaria and Romania are in the final stages of negotiating the installation of US “lilypad” bases.
Ukraine and Georgia look to the EU and the United States as their possible protectors in the face of Russian aggression.
Strong relations with Vietnam, Mongolia, and Japan can be attributed to the fear of China flexing its muscle in the region.
All of these countries save Vietnam have troops in Iraq.
Though its a great overview, I think Curzon could have gone in greater depth in analysis. Most suprisingly for me is his omission of India from the map. Here’s my initial response to his posting, which attempts to inject further analysis on this topic:
The majors players working with the US are the major players of the Angolosphere (India, UK and Australia) and US former quasi-colonies in the East (Japan and possibly Philippines). Israel is also a strategic partner.
The other states are to all some degree buffer states with Poland the exception. In Europe, the Baltic states are too small to matter, while Romanian and Bulgaria don’t count so much other than possible military bases. With its internal political issues, Ukraine is a toss up at this point. Poland is still out to make a name for itself within a New Europe, but I dont know if it’ll ever have even comparable clout to Germany, France and the UK. Not until Poland can pull its GDP up.
The mentioning of Mongolia etc as part of the “Coalition of the Willing” is a joke. Only the UK, Poland, formerly the Ukraine and 1-2 other countries contributed substantial troops. Mongolia sent a token force of less than 300 troops. And the Ukrainian troops were famous for retreating under fire from the Insurgents.
Overall, the map looks pretty lonely. What about Turkey, South Korea, Latin America (lots of lng and oil) or Canada (possible large source of future oil)?
Heck, what about China as a limited partner? We have common interests in the security of the sealanes (where oil is transported); stability in the Korean Peinusula and also in the overall world; our mutual economic relationship direct and indirect; and stability in energy supplies.
Also, the question of where Russia fits into the “New World Order” is still in question. Russia has historically needed to expend its sphere of influence to feel secure. Indeed, the U.S. needs a stronger Russia to keep Central Asia and the Caucasus in line, while also holding a check against China.
Iraq maybe a future partner, but only fools would consider this so early in the game. Overall, we are pretty isolated in the Middle East, Israel excepted. With Iraq, Iran is a major puzzle to U.S. foreign policy there.
In the future, China may or may not be the next superpower, but no doubt it will be an even bigger player in the world. We need a major player in every region, especially those growing in power, e.g. China and Brazil. We can either ride the wave to the future or try to stubbornly stop it like fools.
Overall, the US is in a diplomatic low point, but it also presents the real partners we can depend on, mainly the UK and Austrialia. I would hope that soon we can add India (a new raising power) into this category.
Sorry for the very late posting, work has been extra busy with the coming holidays. I am working on 2-3 articles, but for now here is an interesting development via AsiaTimes’s “The foundations for an Asian oil and gas grid“:
Stung by the rising international price of oil and domestic shortages coupled with high requirements of a growing economy, India has revived a plan for an oil and gas grid for the Asian continent.
The grid is part of a two-fold strategy by the two top Asian oil guzzlers, China and India, to ensure reliable delivery networks and energy security. The other element involves acquiring stakes in production and exploration projects for which New Delhi and Beijing continue to cooperate as well as compete.
The emphasis on the grid comes in wake of reports that India and China, the most aggressive shoppers for oil and gas assets in the world, are coming together to put in a joint bid. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), two of the most high-profile emerging global oil companies in the past year, could jointly bid for Petro-Canada’s $1-billion oil and gas fields in Syria. Both India and China feel the strategic need to diversify their energy sources from the current dependence on West Asia.
It will take years before this project turns into fruition if it ever gets there, but such a bold statement alone is a testament of new realities that the Bush Administration nor any political leader in the U.S. have began to address.
Too many people are stuck in the old ways of thinking, be it ideaologues like neoconservatives to International ANSWER or jingoism of the Anti-China folks. Thomas Barnett is not one of them.
In his blog posting today, Thomas Barnett succinctly offers a very different perspective and game plan on what the U.S. must pursue to adjust to a true “New World Order” (in the words of Bush senior):
We should be promoting India as a regional security pillar in the Middle East, but we do not. We should be pushing hard for Russia’s fully admittance into NATO and some prioritized pathway into the EU, but we do not. We should be encouraging China’s use of the ASEAN group to create the genesis of an Asian Union, with us included in a special status, but we do not. Instead, we promote China’s encirclement through military alliances and then express surprise that China seeks to do the same to us.
The dynamics of the 21st century security environment will inevitably push the U.S. to greater reliance upon, and alliance with, Russia, India, China and Brazil. This is simply too big of a change for the current administration, just too far of a conceptual leap. So we end up waiting out the second Bush administration, hoping that we don’t fall too far behind, strategically speaking, in this process.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to look ripe for the connecting. When your best and brightest all seek to make a run for greener pastures, like Dubai just across the gulf, then it’s clear the current regime is failing. We can either prop it up by obsessing over the WMD issue, repeating the same myopic focus we had with Iraq, or we can judge the case on its merits and kill that tired authoritarian regime with economic and social connectivity.
Gone are the days when we think of state power in a state v. state way.
As mentioned earlier in StrategyUnit (”Events in Context: Paris Riots and SAFTA“), globalization has forced the national-state to evolve. While I think the overall Weberian notion of the nation-state still hold, nation-states must include greater connectivity (internall, externally and overall in the world) as part of its security considerations, and an increasing one at that.
Introduction
Koffi Annan’s push for UN reform has come and gone. Indeed, as the Washington Post reported last week, there are already moves to push for candidates as Annan retires on December 2005.
But it’s unlikely that Koffi Annan can make any reforms in his remaining tenure; and indeed, it must be said that it is also unlikely for any future Secretary General to enact any ambitious reforms. It’s a Herculean task that is highly improbable, unless the big 5 work in concert.
In today’s NYT, Ruth Wedgwood (from John Hopkins University) purposes to bring market forces to reform the UN:
Monopoly can be corrosive for any institution, and many of the problems addressed by the United Nations can be and have been handled in other forums. Washington and Turtle Bay would both be aided by recognizing the virtues of “competitive multilateralism.”
Wedgwood goes through the two main benefits of “competitive multilateralism”: 1) More policy options for the U.S. instead of a “Go with the UN or go it alone” strategy; and 2) that competition would reinvigorate the UN:
If the United Nations can’t reform on its own, America needs to support other multilateral venues. In fact, our seeking parallel paths to international intervention can help the United Nations as well.
…
The idea of competitive multilateralism avoids the stark choice of going alone or going to the United Nations. America must still support the purposes of the United Nations; it is a historic alliance, a product of World War II, and remains the only all-inclusive political organization around. America enjoys prerogatives as a permanent Security Council member that would be hard to gain again. But we do have some flexibility in how we choose to approach international cooperation.
..
In the Internet age, there is no single venue for cooperation. This is true for politics and business alike. The United Nations may gain a second wind and a youthful gait if it discovers that it has some real competition.
Commentary
While I find Wedgwood’s perspective very interesting, there several weaknesses I need to point out:
1) I am not sure how the UN responds to any sort of “market pressure” - the pressure that creates innovation in a marketplace. It is not a single organization with one voice per se, but rather represents (or the result of) 191 different nations vying for a voice and power in a large international organization.
In a normal market situation, if say the U.S. (the “customer”) stopped paying attention to the UN, the UN might make concessions to bring the U.S. back. But at this current trend of anti-Americanism around the globe, no one can honestly see China, France and Russia (UK maybe excepted) offering concessions for the U.S. to come back.
When Wedgwood speaks ‘The idea of competitive multilateralism avoids the stark choice of going alone or going to the United Nations”, I would assume that she alludes to the War in Iraq. But, what organization could the U.S. have reached out to? NATO? OSCE? League of Arab Nations?
Indeed, President Bush said that UN action on Iraq would define its legitimacy. But in the end, the U.S. went along with its “coalition of the willing” and it is the U.S. that today has no legitimacy.
2) Who wants a stronger UN? In any area, some nation would lost out. Stronger intervention powers for the UN would not be in US interests when Indonesia annexed East Timor. I doubt China would be too eager for the UN to intervene in Sudan, where it gets its oil. If more transparency is provided, that would limit the ability for nations to use cloak-and-dagger tricks to gain the upper hand in the UN.
In an effort to fit every nations’ interest, the UN is left to be the lowest common denominator - rarely doing anything bold that would upset any of the powers or a bloc of smaller ones.
3) States are already using organizations outside the UN. When the U.S. led an intervention force against Yugoslavia over Kosovo, it was done under the NATO - not UN. When China and Russia issued a statement asking the U.S. to leave Central Asia, they did it under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - not the U.N.
Sometimes the U.S. has been somewhat successful such as with U.S.-led NATO action in Kosovo and other times lukewarm to disastrous like the “Coalition of the Willing”.
Ruth Wedgwood is right to say the U.N. should not have a monopoly in what defines the international community and the U.S. should nurture relationships with other international organizations for its own foreign policy goals. But, it wont be catalyst for U.N. reform.
Indeed, it can lead to the fragmentation of the international community space - with major power getting “legitimacy” for its policies from whatever regional or international organizations out there.
In the end, its not impossible to reform the U.N. - but U.S. using the dynamics of competition and market forces will not be the answer.
NAZI! Communists! Hippies!
Its easy to hate and focus on someone when you have a nice quick, short name for them. Lashing out against “Nationalist Socialist”, “Total Socialist System under Centralized Planning” and “Free Spirited non-Conformist” is not easy to do. (And yes, I know some of my descriptions are not absolutely accurate and I included hippies as a joke.)
But same goes for what we are fighting against in this “Global War on Terrorism”. Just who are the bad guys? And what makes them different from the other past bad guys?
I think there is a true strategic and psychological weakness on our side to accurately name our adversary. The guys on the other side can do it easily, condemning us as secular, western, infidels, non-believers and so on. But what are they? How can we fight an enemy when we cant even describe them.
Islamists? “Those that hate our freedom”? Salafist? Global Guerillas?
Islamist or Muslim Fundamentalist sound fine, but we are not fighting some national Muslim Brotherhood movement. We are fighting 1000s of Islamicly inspired groups with a diverse range of immediate goals, motivation, tactics, doctrines…but a common enemy - the West.
There is a constant struggle to define our enemy (which is more of a “swarm” than a singular organizational entity) and we are unable to even define a name for it. This leaves us intellectual and conceptual vulnerable to the enemy.
In my future postings, I’ll dive through this issue deeper and try to offer some suggestions. It will definitely take some time for me to write on this.
This posting was inspired by a commenter on this blog who asked me why I used the word “Islamofacist” and by Dan Darling and John Robb who touched on this issue this week.
Introduction
The Oil Drum has an excellent post covering the recently released findings over the major drop (30%) in the temperature of the the Gulf Stream, the warm currents that from the N. America flow east to warm Europe. (Note that this report was curiously timed against current discussion in Montreal on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol.)
Immediate Implication
What are the obviously implications if the Gulf Stream deteriorates further?
1) Emphasizes the growing need for a stable energy supply to warm a chilling Europe, while the oil peak grows ever nearer and UK is already facing a potential energy crisis this winter.
2) As best said by Oil Drum’s Stuart Staniford:
That’s the warm water that didn’t go to Europe, and is now coming back into the tropics. Where’s it going again?
Smack into the region where North Atlantic hurricanes form, that’s where it’s going.
So if this result holds up and these trends continue, I think we can expect to see plenty more of this in the future: [Staniford shows a picture of wrecked oil rig in the Gulf Coast]
Broader Implications
The changes in the Gulf Steam is a microcosm for the broader implication of climate change:
1. There will be more extreme weather - very cold and very dry/hot. Both will lead to the increase use of heaters on one side and the use of air conditioners on the other. All energy hogs.
2. Extreme weather (like hurricanes) will make it more difficult and *expensive* to extract hydrocarbons (oil, natural gas etc) and difficult to transport.
Closing Remarks
In the distant land of Sudan (distant for the West, that is), a prolonged and extreme drought is partly to blame for the genocide, as conflict for water and land between herders and peasants gave with to a more ethnic conflict between Arabs (mostly herders) and Furs (mostly peasants).
While the role of climate change is little mentioned in the ongoing Darfur Genocide, with the climate change now bearing its weight to Europe we should expect to here more on this. While I doubt Europe will descend so easily to genocide, Sudan represents the extreme changes in human behavior to government policy that are possible and caused partly by climate changes.
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