2014 Predictions for International Relations

Having previously enjoyed myself immensely on New Year's Eve when on ABC's Nightline various pundits had their political predictions played back to them before blithely charging once more into the breach of ignorance, I will now entertain anyone willing to read this blog with my own predictions for 2014.

1) Narendra Modi will defeat Rahul Gandhi in national elections in India later this year. This will be the third electoral defeat for a member of the Gandhi dynasty--Rahul's grandmother Indira was defeated in 1977 after having declared a state of emergency in 1975 and ruled for 18 months in a highly-autocratic fashion. She came back to win again and served as prime minister from 1980-84. Her son Rajiv, Rahul's father, followed her as prime minister following her assassination in October 1984. He was defeated in 1989 and campaigning for a come back when he was himself assassinated in 1991 only a week before the election. If the Congress Party in 1989 was like the Israeli Labor Party in 1977, today it is like the Labor Party in 2001. Merely having another Gandhi on the ticket will not be enough to save Congress from defeat this year. Here is why.

Nuclear Arms Control for South Asia?

In 2012 veteran nuclear strategist and arms control theorist Paul Bracken wrote a book entitled The Second Nuclear Age dealing with the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the original five nuclear states grandfathered into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. He discusses in some detail the problems created by nuclear proliferation efforts by Israel, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and North Korea and the problems and complications that these introduce into international relations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Northeast Asia. He claims that whereas the first nuclear age was bipolar and involved the superpowers the second nuclear age is multipolar and involves several regional powers. Furthermore, instead of following chronologically after the first nuclear age, the second nuclear age overlapped with it and could be said to have several different starting points ranging from 1964 when China acquired nuclear capacity to 1974 when India did so. 

Bracken suggested that a return to nuclear arms control for the Third World might be in order. Nuclear arms control began with a number of multilateral treaties in the early 1960s that prohibited above ground nuclear testing, prohibited nuclear weapons in Antarctica, on the ocean floor and in outer space--basically in all the places where the superpowers had no interest in stationing nuclear weapons. Then after the NPT in 1968 that prohibited the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those states that already were declared nuclear powers, nuclear arms control became a bilateral process between the two superpowers in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START).

South Asian Politics: Dynastic Feuds

I have just finished reading Fatima Bhutto's reconstructed memoir of her father Mir Murtaza Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir, published in 2010 by Nation Books. I read the book because I wanted to read what she had written about her grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was prime minister of Pakistan from late December 1971 until July 1977 when he was overthrown in a coup d'etat by General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. I also wanted to see what she wrote about her aunt, Benazir Bhutto, who was prime minister from December 1988 until  November 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996 and who was assassinated while campaigning for a third term in December 2007. I had earlier read Benazir's own memoir, Daughter of Destiny aka Daughter of the East. I was disappointed because this contained little about her father's term in office or his personality. I am still disappointed.

Comparing Dynasties: India and Pakistan

It was said in defense of the existence of the Nehru-Gandhi ruling dynasty of the Congress Party in India that political dynasties were common throughout South Asia. This is certainly true in India where politics in the Indian states are usually a family affair with the party founder usually passing on control either to a son or daughter or, if a suitable heir is not available in his immediate family, to a nephew or niece. 

While there are many political dynasties in America with most states possessing at least one, the most successful at the national level has been the Bush family of Connecticut, which has had three generations of politicians in Washington at the senior level starting with Senator Prescott Bush and ending with President George W. Bush, whose younger brother Jeb was also governor of Florida. The Kennedys of Boston, Massachusetts have had three generations but there was a major upgrade from the first to second generation and then a major downgrade to the third generation. Joseph Kennedy was ambassador to London in the late 1930s but ended his political career early when he fell afoul of President Roosevelt and was judged to be a Nazi sympathizer. But three of Joe's sons did quite well: John F. was president from 1961 to 1963, when he was assassinated in Dallas; Robert F. was attorney general under his brother, senator from New York and then the leading contender for the Democratic nomination before he was in turn murdered in June 1968; and Edward M. was one of the longest serving senators in the Senate from 1962 until his death. But the next generation has produced a representative, Patrick, and nothing higher. 

Indian Democracy: A Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

Back in the 1980s I did not believe that India was a real democracy. I remember explaining to a family friend who is Indian that no country that has been ruled by a single family for 90 percent of the time since independence can be democratic. It was really an elected monarchy. She mentioned the Kennedy family (and later she could have mentioned the Bushes as well). I simply pointed out that the Kennedys had held the presidency for a total of less than three years. When one adds the widespread corruption in Indian politics and the widespread sectarian pogroms that broke out in 1947, in 1984, and in 2002 one can make a very good case that India is not really a democracy by Western standards. But is this fair to India? After all, India is not located either culturally or geographically in the West but in South Asia. So let's examine what the standards for governance are in the region.

Which weapons are illegal?

As I have noted in previous posts, I think that intervening in the Syrian civil war is a bad idea. This is for several reasons but chiefly because no American interest is at stake. No vital economic resource is at stake; no ally is being threatened; there is not even genocide being committed in Syria. As a result of this the Obama administration is reduced to arguing for retaliation to defend the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1925, which Syria is not even a party to. This would be like attacking India or Pakistan or, God forbid!, Israel for violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 that they are not signatories to.

Let's look at chemical weapons and why they were banned. They were first used in World War I by the Germans in April 1915 on a large scale, although the French might have used chemical grenades before then in the war. The Allies quickly developed their own chemical weapons--blister agents designed to burn the skin and tissues upon contact. Both sides experimented with various blister agents (mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene) and improved the effectiveness of the weapons. But simple gases masks rendered the blister agents much less deadly than conventional artillery. By 1918 chemical shells were almost half of the shells fired at the start of both the German spring offensive in March-April and the Allied offensive in July-August. But despite this chemical weapons accounted for only two percent of total casualties in the war and one percent of total deaths. Conventional artillery accounted for over three-quarters of all battlefield deaths with machine-guns accounted for the majority of the remainder. Britain suffered less than 6,000 combat deaths due to chemical weapons.  This was compared to over 180,000 total British casualties due to chemical weapons. Chemical weapons were mainly a psychological weapon meant to induce fear and a means of denying space to the enemy because of their persistence. It was like sowing a minefield by artillery and particularly useful in taking out the enemy's artillery at the start of an offensive. But because of shifting winds the use of chemical weapons could easily backfire on the army employing them.

South Asian Nuclear Triangle

Toby Dalton at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace's Nuclear Policy Program recently wrote a piece that was reprinted in the Proliferation News email newsletter put out by the Endowment's Global Think Tank.  The gist of the article was that whereas most analysts and policy makers dealing with South Asia though in terms of an Indian-Pakistani dyad and an Indian-Chinese dyad it make much more sense to think in terms of an Indian-Pakistani-Chinese triad in which each country had a relationship with the other two that affected both of them. He wrote that China had a much closer connection to Pakistan's nuclear development than many people realized.

By chance I just finished reading a 2000 report from the RAND Corp. on India's nuclear options. This 700 plus page report by analyst Ashley Tellis, India's Emerging Nuclear Posture, in very clear readable English spelled out the likely doctrine, size, and policy options for India in the decades ahead regarding her nuclear options.

Iranian and North Korean nuclear cooperation?

Conservative journalist (specializing in the Middle East) Lee Smith last week raised the possibility that Iran and North Korea have a technological partnership or alliance in developing nuclear weapons and  missile technology as well.  He compared it to the Anglo-American nuclear cooperation agreement that called for American testing of joint designs. Smith thinks that North Korea in its recent nuclear test may have actually been testing an Iranian or joint design. This means that Tehran would never actually have to conduct its own nuclear tests to ensure that it has a reliable design. Mark Fitzpatrick in an article in the UAE's The National seemed to back Smith's basic thesis.