Regional Organizations

Nigeria–the giant of West Africa–could be expected to play an outsized role in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) force to intervene in Mali. The commander of the force is Nigerian, and Nigeria has reported it will supply 900 of the total force of 3,300. In the past, Nigeria has also footed the lion’s share of the costs of regional intervention forces. However, at present Nigeria’s military is overstretched. There are troops on active duty in thirty-three of the thirty-six Nigerian states and the army, in effect, has the lead in responding to the Boko Haram insurgency in the north. Therefore, it is no surprise that President Goodluck Jonathan last week reported a cut to Nigeria’s initial troop pledge to the ECOWAS Mali force and signaled that his country would be unable to fund most of the operation, unlike in the past. Unfolding events appear to have bolstered that troop pledge again, however. With the acceleration of Mali-centric activity following the French intervention, President Jonathan announced that Nigerian troops would arrive in Mali imminently. There are reports that some are already there. It is unclear what, if any, operational significance the presence of small numbers of troops from ECOWAS states will have on the current fighting. However, the Nigerian presence keeps open the ECOWAS role. France already has around 750 troops on the ground, and is planning to more than triple that to at least 2,500. The United States, UK, Belgium, Denmark, and Canada have all pledged transport planes, and in some cases, logistical and training support. Many Nigerians inside the government have maintained that Boko Haram has links with international jihad networks, especially al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), one of the leading elements among Mali’s Islamic insurgency. Mali has used that claim as a basis of requests for outside help. If such links do exist on meaningful terms, it would seem likely that Boko Haram will escalate their attacks in northern Nigeria in solidarity with its Islamic brothers. If that happens, there will be yet more pressure on the already overstretched Nigerian forces.

The Nigerian press, citing foreign ministry sources, reports that the federal government has cut its pledge of 600 military personnel to 450 for the planned Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) UN Security Council-mandated intervention force in northern Mali. Again citing the foreign ministry, the press reports that such are the domestic security challenges, that the Nigerian military is currently actively engaged in thirty-four of the thirty-six states of the Federation. Nigeria also stated that it is no position to carry almost all of the costs of the regional operations, as it did in the interventions into Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nigeria continues to be challenged by ethnic and religious strife, much of it related to Boko Haram, a radical Islamic movement. Data currently being processed by the Council’s Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) for November 2012, indicates more than 400 deaths that month. December is likely to be at least as deadly. Based on the media, there appear to have been sixty deaths during Christmas week. All such statistics almost certainly understate casualties. Under these circumstances, Nigeria’s pullback from regional involvement in Mali should be no surprise. Nevertheless, it is bad news. In the past, with the region’s largest and most sophisticated military, Nigeria played a positive role in the resolution of security issues in West Africa, and carried most of the financial burden. It remains to be seen whether the other ECOWAS states will be able to make up for the Nigerian shortfall. In the meantime, there is little progress toward a political solution in Mali. The Malian military forced out the civilian prime minister in Bamako shortly before Christmas. The northern Islamic radicals are pushing south, and one of the most important Islamic groups, Ansar Dine, has called off its cease fire. Reuters and other international news agencies are reporting that Ansar Dine troops are moving toward government-held positions with the potential for renewed fighting.

The new year is a time of hope. As 2013 dawns, optimists yearn for a period of sustained global economic growth after five years of recession, turbulence, and sluggish recovery. Achieving this scenario will require close policy coordination among governments of the world’s major economies. This places a heavy burden on the Russian Federation, which on December 1 assumed the rotating chairmanship of the Group of Twenty (G20). It has become fashionable to dismiss the G20 as irrelevant at best or a failure at worst. Neither critique is fair. During the depths of the global financial crisis, the G20 proved its value by helping to set the global agenda, shape new international rules and norms, and address practical challenges of macroeconomic policy coordination. As an uneven recovery began to take hold and national interests came to the fore, however, the group’s momentum stalled. The question now is whether the G20 can serve not only as a short-term crisis manager but also as a longer-term steering group for the global economy—and other global challenges. The Kremlin does not lack for outside advice about how to manage its tenure. At the invitation of Russian officials, the Council of Councils (CoC)—a global network of think tanks convened by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)—recently offered the Russian Government eleven separate memos suggesting priorities for its chairmanship, which will culminate in September at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg. My own contribution recommends several steps for success. Given space constraints, I’ll focus here on the three most important. Moscow should persuade its partners to: - Embrace a G20 mandate encompassing both crisis management and long-term challenges. The G20 provided an indispensable forum to respond to the 2008 global financial crisis. The body must remain prepared to coordinate multilateral responses to future crises, including convening emergency meetings outside the regular summit schedule to grapple with extraordinary crises. At the same time, the Russian chair should encourage the G20 to confront and resolve longer-term structural issues. Several long-term priorities come to mind. First, the G20 must continue to press surplus and deficit countries to rectify longstanding global imbalances. While China’s undervalued exchange rate has already appreciated gradually, easing some frictions,  significant international imbalances persist, imperiling global recovery. Second, the G20 must press for the evolution of the new Financial Stability Board into a fully-fledged international organization, with adequate staff, resources and authority to monitor and enforce the new financial regulatory standards it is promulgating. Third, the G20 must engage the global trade agenda. In a shaky recovery, holding the line against protectionism is insufficient. With the death of Doha, the era of comprehensive trade deals may be over. But the G20 can spearhead negotiation of more limited sectoral and plurilateral agreements, to which interested parties can adhere. - Strengthen the Mutual Assessment Process (MAP) to permit candid evaluation of G20 efforts. When it comes to summit meetings, nothing breeds cynicism like perceived failure of states to live up to their past pledges. Russia can help dispel such skepticism by pressing fellow G20 members to give real teeth to the MAP. Currently, each G20 member agrees, on a purely voluntary basis, to share economic information and policy targets with one another and the staff of the IMF, which then ascertains whether national policy choices are consistent with the Pittsburgh Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth. At Los Cabos, the G20 strengthened this peer review process by establishing a new Accountability Assessment Framework, accompanied by a public, annual report. While the MAP provides a useful global forum for the negotiation and sharing of national commitments, it remains a weak instrument for policy coordination. To strengthen the MAP, Moscow should push its G20 partners to support reforms outlined in a recent report by the Canadian think tank CIGI: create a transparent, online database permitting analysts to review international commitments; adopt a more rigorous peer review process; create a more robust analytical capability (notionally within the IMF) to assess the global impact of national policies; and establish an enhanced negotiating forum where G20 members can engage in bargaining over respective national commitments. - Craft a broader agenda and create a foreign ministers’ track. Among the biggest debates about the G20’s future is whether it should hew closely to its initial macroeconomic and financial focus, or expand its vision to address a wider array of global challenges. G20 finance ministries, which have dominated the summit process to date, are nearly unanimous in resisting any “mission creep”, fearing that a sprawling list of tasks would dilute its coherence and effectiveness. Over time, however, leaders themselves are likely to find the G20 an irresistible setting to tackle other pressing items on the global agenda. Already, successive hosts have broadened the G20’s substantive agenda, adding items like a new approach to development in Seoul and a commitment to “green growth” in Los Cabos. The quandary for Russia is to manage the G20’s expanding agenda so that it does not jeopardize the body’s crisis management capacity, overwhelm the annual summit process, or jeopardize the informality that makes such leaders-level gatherings attractive. The G20 can reduce these risks by taking three related steps. First, it should create a permanent foreign ministers’ track to complement the finance ministers’ track. Here, Russia can build on the “informal” meeting of G20 foreign ministers hosted by Mexico in February 2012. Potential agenda items would include climate change, development cooperation, nuclear non-proliferation, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and efforts to combat transnational crime. Second,  it should sharpen the agenda of G20 finance ministers (and central bank governors), so that they can focus more narrowly on their core missions of promoting global growth, improving financial regulation, and advancing governance reforms within international financial institutions. Third, the G20 should raise the bar for including new items on the actual G20 summit agenda. An issues should be raised to the leaders’ level only rarely—notably when it requires a high-level decision and when no existing global institution has already been seized of the problem

In Nigeria, it is often said that the Arab racism inoculates the Sahel against al-Qaeda. Now, there is a credible report of black African defections from al-Qaeda linked groups in northern Mali. Hicham Bilal, who claims to have been the only black battalion leader within the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), defected in November and returned to his native Niger. In a press interview he accused jihadist groups in Mali of racism. The leadership is “white,” while blacks are "cannon fodder," he said. He also complained that MUJAO included drug traffickers. MUJAO controls the city of Gao. According to another journalist, race may also play a role in Ansar Dine-controlled Timbuktu. Its leadership is “white,” from Algeria and Mauritania. Racial tensions within the northern Malian radical jihadist groups could become a source of weakness, perhaps providing diplomatic opportunities once there is a credible government in Bamako. If, however, the UN Security Council votes on December 20, 2012, to approve the deployment of a force in northern Mali put together by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the jihadist groups may pull together. The UN Security Council resolution, sponsored by France, is widely supported in West Africa, and the New York Times expects the vote in favor to be unanimous. The resolution includes provision for Western training and equipment for the Malian army. However, it may be a long time before intervention actually takes place. It is foreseen that the ECOWAS force would number some 3,300, but it is not clear where that number of troops will come from. In the past, Nigeria was the powerhouse of West Africa and would supply a large percentage of the troops for multinational forces. The Nigerian military, however, is currently stretched thin with the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria.

This week’s latest South China Sea incident, in which a Chinese fishing boat cut a Vietnamese seismic cable —at least according to Hanoi— is a reminder that, despite the South China Sea dominating nearly every meeting in Southeast Asia this year, the situation in the Sea appears to be getting worse. This is in contrast to flare-ups in the past, when after a period of tension, as in the mid-1990s, there was usually a cooling-off period. Although there have been several brief cooling-off periods in the past two years, including some initiated by senior Chinese leaders traveling to Southeast Asia, they have not stuck, and the situation continues to deteriorate and get more dangerous. In the new year, it will likely get even worse. Here’s why: The new Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) secretary-general comes from Vietnam. Over the past three years, a more openly forceful China has found it difficult to deal with ASEAN leaders who even voice ASEAN concerns. But these leaders, like former Thai foreign minister and ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, were nothing compared to the new ASEAN secretary-general, Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Luong Minh. Although he is a career diplomat and certainly can be suave and attentive, he is still a former Vietnamese official, and undoubtedly will bring with him some of the Vietnamese perspective toward China, which is quickly turning more acrid. This year’s ASEAN chair is Brunei. Keeping to its tradition of rotating the chair every year, in 2013 ASEAN will be headed by Brunei. Although some might think Brunei’s leadership will be better for stability than the 2012 ASEAN leadership of Cambodia, perceived by many other ASEAN members as carrying China’s water, the fact that Brunei is just as much of a diplomatic minnow as Cambodia will mean there is no powerful wrangler in the chair’s seat to hammer out a common ASEAN perspective. Were Indonesia or Singapore the chair, the situation might be different. India is playing a larger and larger role in the South China Sea, adding even more potential players to the mix, and more powerful navies. The recent warning by Beijing that India and Vietnam should not engage in joint exploration is only going to lead to a harsher Indian response, since Indian elites pay far more attention to —and are more easily aggrieved by— China than the reverse. The more they look, the more likely they will find. As reported by the New York Times, “On Monday, China’s National Energy Administration named the South China Sea as the main offshore site for natural gas production. Within two years, China aims to produce 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas from fields in the sea, a significant increase from the 20 billion cubic meters produced so far, the agency said.” Although I do not think that the oil and gas potential in the Sea is the biggest driver of conflict, compared to its strategic value, the more China (and anyone else) explores for energy in the Sea, the more likely they will (eventually) come up with potential deposits that will only raise the stakes, if the forecasts of the Sea’s petroleum potential are to be believed. A new Chinese leadership is unlikely to want to show any weakness. With the leadership of this generation even more split than in the past, following a contentious Party Congress, continued infighting among acolytes of the major Chinese leaders, and the Bo Xilai fiasco, the new leadership is in no position, with Party members and the general educated public, to give any room on a contentious issue like the South China Sea. The Obama administration has passed its period of focusing on more effective dialogue and crisis mediation with China. Officials from the administration’s first term, who naturally had the highest hopes for better dialogue, are gone, with many of them leaving just as convinced as their Bush predecessors that real dialogue was difficult if not impossible. Don’t expect a second term to yield better results with such a dialogue. Happy New Year, South China Sea.  

In the wake of ASEAN’s disastrous year, which included open fissures in the organization over how to handle the South China Sea, spats between Cambodia and the Philippines, and the utter failure to play any role in helping resolve growing violence in western Myanmar, many commentators —including the current ASEAN secretary-general— have argued that the organization needs to change substantially over the next decade if it is to remain, as it hopes, at the center of East Asian integration. I took my own stab at proposing some far-reaching —some might say idealistic— goals for ASEAN to meet over the next twenty years. Many of the goals that I set out in the paper might seem far-reaching for an organization that has always moved slowly and prided itself on operating, Quaker-style, through consensus. And yet powerful voices within ASEAN, including inside the Secretariat, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam, do realize the organization needs to change substantially. Having the tiny sultanate of Brunei chair ASEAN next year, per the organization’s practice of rotating chairs, is hardly going to help ASEAN, since Brunei is a diplomatic flyweight and does not have the power to mediate disputes between members. You can read my Working Paper “ASEAN’s Future and Asian Integration” here. Because of ASEAN’s problems, and the growing potential for a conflict between China and the United States over Southeast Asia, the organization actually has attracted far more interest from the international community than in the past.  One of the most experienced and prolific analysts of ASEAN, Amitav Acharya, now himself has a newly updated work analyzing how Southeast Asia has emerged as a viable community, examining the region’s challenges, and offering potential pathways to a future in which ASEAN remains the center of regional integration. Amitav’s book, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region, is available for purchase here.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau delivered a video speech in Arabic posted November 29, on jihadist websites. In it, he associates the United States, Britain, Nigeria, “and other crusaders” with Israeli oppression. Shekau salutes fighters for “the Islamic state in Mali,” Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Palestine. Unless the Nigerian police repent, they will be killed: “Allah the Glorious and Almighty made your blood permissible to us, because you worship the laws of the government and not the laws of Allah the Almighty.  Democracy is also a disbelieving system, O Obama, O Jonathan…” It is not clear when or where the video was made. Shekau has made anti-American statements before, though it has not been a major theme in his rhetoric.  One previous statement linking Boko Haram to global jihadism was released soon after Shekau took over the reins of Mohammed Yusuf’s disciples and the group re-emerged on the Nigerian stage. According to Reuters he said in July 2010, “infidels, hypocrites and apostates:  Do not think jihad is over.  Rather jihad has just begun. O America, die with your fury!” What may be new in this latest statement is a focus on Mali.  While there are many possible hypotheses, one is that Shekau is reaching out to the radical Islamic leadership in northern Mali as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) prepares for possible intervention under U.N. auspices. If Shekau is broadening his focus beyond Nigeria, individuals, institutions, or interests associated with the United States in Nigeria, or elsewhere in the Sahel, could become targets. H/T to Jacob Zenn

This is a guest post by Geoff Porter, an analyst with North Africa Risk Consulting, Inc. (NARCO). He is a specialist in North Africa and the Sahel. One month ago, Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz was shot and evacuated to Paris. He has not returned. At the best of times, the president’s absence is not good, but this timing is especially troublesome because of the uncertainty next door in Mali. Almost half the country is clumsily controlled by non-state actors, some of whom have links to al-Qaeda. Is Mauritania the next shoe to drop in the Sahara/Sahel crisis? A month on, it is still not clear how President Abdelaziz was shot. The official version is well known: the president was returning late at night from his farm outside the capital; security around the capital was high because of unspecified threats; the president was traveling off road, ahead of his security detail; jittery soldiers fired on a speeding car. Other interpretations have since flourished, ranging from the plausible to the salacious. The shooting was a coup attempt by disgruntled officers. It was an assassination attempt by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). It didn’t take place on the road at all, but was at the hands of a cuckolded officer at the president’s farmhouse. And it goes on. This begs the question of who is in control. Ostensibly, Abdelaziz is still president. He allegedly delegated some powers to Prime Minister Moulay Ould Mohamed Laghdaf. Army Chief of Staff Mohamed Ould Ghazouani has assumed some responsibilities. The Coordination of Democratic Opposition (COD) is calling for greater clarity around both the shooting and who’s in charge. A presidential spokesman dismissed the whole episode–presidents get sick. Where does this leave us? There’s always the possibility of Abdelaziz’s imminent return. The longer he stays in Paris, however, the less likely this is. If he does not return, he could orchestrate a handoff–likely through some compromise with Ghazouani, Laghdaf, and Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, speaker of the parliament. This would probably result in new elections with a President Abdelaziz lookalike elected. Worst-case scenario? The military seizes upon President Abdelaziz’s absence to stage a coup (bloodless except for President Abdelaziz,) which is met by widespread popular opposition. The situation in Mauritania is especially problematic given the situation in neighboring Mali. The non-state actors there have varying islamist and jihadist orientations. Mauritania itself has had its share of problems with AQIM. A power vacuum in Nouakchott could broaden the belt of instability in Mali further west toward the Atlantic coast, and transform ECOWAS efforts to address Mali into a Mali/Mauritania situation. ECOWAS does not currently have the political wherewithal or bureaucratic capacity to deal with both situations.

It’s telling that President Obama’s first foreign trip after winning reelection takes him to Asia, the historical hinge of the twenty-first century. The president will visit three Southeast Asian nations: He’ll mark one hundred and eighty years of diplomatic relations with Thailand, a staunch U.S. ally in the region. He’ll become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Myanmar, a nation emerging from five decades of military rule. And he’ll attend the East Asia Summit in Cambodia, reaffirming the presence of the United States as a Pacific power and a geopolitical counterweight to China. At a symbolic level, the president’s visit is intended to reinforce America’s strategic “rebalancing” (née “pivot”) toward East Asia, after a decade of U.S. distraction and overextension in the broader Middle East. The White House recognizes that East Asia will remain the dynamic core of global growth for the foreseeable future—and that the United States must be present and active to encourage its economic openness and strategic stability, at a time when China’s neighbors are increasingly wary of its ultimate intentions. Critical to the success of U.S. objectives in Asia will be the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a more coherent and robust regional organization.That is the thesis of a new working paper by CFR fellow Joshua Kurlantzick, “ASEAN’s Future and Asian Integration.” To be sure, “coherent” and “robust” are two words not generally associated with ASEAN. Since its founding in 1967, ASEAN has been synonymous with vapid communiqués and lowest-common-denominator policy positions. The “ASEAN way” has included a commitment to consensus-based decisionmaking, accompanied by extreme reluctance to intervene—or even to comment on—internal political conditions in member states. The result has been a body repeatedly hamstrung by internal divisions and unable to respond in any coordinated manner to regional crises. After ignoring the regional body during the 2000s, the United States has begun taking the organization seriously, appointing the first U.S. ambassador to ASEAN and signing ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. During the administration of George W. Bush, regional officials often complained that the United States was AWOL. The Obama administration has reversed  that impression, embracing the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), launching a U.S.-Indonesian Comprehensive Partnership, expanding defense links and naval exercises with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, initiating a diplomatic dialogue with the nations of the Mekong River basin, and moving briskly to normalize U.S. relations with Myanmar. President Obama should use this trip to deepen U.S. ties with ASEAN. Despite its obvious institutional flaws, Kurlantzick observes, “Over the past two decades, ASEAN has been the leader of East Asian trade, economic, and security integration.” To begin with, ASEAN’s more economically liberal nations have generated “a kind of regional free-trade arms race,” by signaling their willingness to pursue free trade agreements (FTAs) with non-ASEAN members. Likewise, ASEAN has accelerated the region’s financial integration, sponsoring with China, Japan and Korea the Chiang Mai Initiative in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Finally, the annual ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), although lacking formal mechanisms for conflict resolution, has provided an important venue to increase dialogue and confidence-building. What is less clear is whether ASEAN, as currently structured, can address today’s emerging security, political, and economic challenges. The past year has witnessed extraordinary divisions not only between ASEAN and China, but also within ASEAN itself, over China’s sweeping claims in the South China Sea. Neither has ASEAN developed the will and capacity to handle an entire slew of non-traditional security threats, encompassing “drug trafficking, human trafficking, pandemic disease outbreaks, [and] terrorism,” nor shown any willingness to criticize human rights abuses among its member states.  (Contrary to the assertions of ASEAN leaders, the body’s soft, speak-no-evil approach had zero impact on Myanmar’s recent political reforms, which were entirely internally generated). ASEAN—a bloc comprising six hundred million inhabitants and some of the world’s most dynamic economies (responsible for 3 percent of global GDP)—has the potential to serve as an anchor of regional stability and prosperity in East Asia. But living up to this potential, Kurlantzick argues, will require ASEAN to face up to six major challenges: Avoiding Chinese Dominance: The sheer economic and diplomatic weight of China has already transformed Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar into de facto client states. Meanwhile, more independent-minded countries in the region, including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia, lack defensive capabilities to confront China in a crisis. Beyond greater defense expenditures and reliance on the United States, ASEAN countries must move to create a genuine security community, as well as increase collaboration with other regional actors, including India, Australia and Japan, concerned about China’s rise. Leveraging a Rising Indonesia: After a painful political and economic transition at the turn of the century, Indonesia has experienced a rapid revival, boasting a stable democracy and a fast-growing economy, not to mention a coveted spot within the Group of 20. The challenge for ASEAN will be to harness the dynamism and power of its most populous member (population 240 million), at a time when Jakarta may be contemplating more global ambitions. Reconciling Economic Disparities: ASEAN stands apart from most other regional organizations in the tremendous gulf in per capita wealth among its members—ranging from $48,357 for Singapore to $3,585 for Myanmar (calculated at purchasing power parity). The group also includes economies that are among the world’s most open and free (like Singapore) and those (like Laos and Cambodia) that are among the most closed and protected. To address such disparities, Kurlantzick proposes a transfer system from wealthier to poorer members, akin to the EU’s “structural funds.” Abandoning Consensus Decisionmaking: Perhaps the paper’s most controversial proposal is that ASEAN jettison its historical commitment to consensus-based decision-making, perhaps by adopting majority (or qualified majority) voting along the lines of the European Union. Likewise, Kurlantzick also calls upon ASEAN countries to abandon the annual rotation of ASEAN’s leadership, in which each country serves once every ten years, for a more realistic system that places leadership in the hands of its most powerful and capable members. Strengthening the ASEAN Secretariat: As ASEAN begins to grapple with a broader spectrum of economic as well as nontraditional security issues, it is critical for the secretary-general to be chosen from among a high-quality pool of former statesmen, with staff who are equipped to provide timely, accurate analysis and policy guidance. Furthermore, to become a vigorous organization capable of responding effectively to regional crises, ASEAN will need to bolster the profile and authority of its secretary-general, as well as improve the capabilities of the bare-bones secretariat on which he or she relies. Shaping the Future of Asian Integration: Kurlantzick notes that China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States each have their own ideas about the sort of regional order they would like to emerge. In such a context, a united ASEAN could play the role of honest broker, backing a future for East Asia that involves a place for both China and the United States and meets the security needs of Japan and South Korea. The coming decade may be ASEAN’s time to shine—in part because of increased U.S. engagement. President Obama’s upcoming trip offers the United  States a welcome opportunity to throw its weight behind ASEAN’s emergence as a more dynamic regional player, so that it can play a catalytic role in Asian integration.

Next week,  leaders from Asia and around the world will gather in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for the twenty-first annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit and related meetings. On the eve of this event, I have published a new CFR Working Paper, in partnership with the International Institutions and Global Governance program, on ASEAN’s future and its role in the region. While ASEAN has accomplished several notable acheivements in the economic and nonproliferation realms, I argue that ASEAN today lags woefully behind its full potential. In the paper, I analyze the major obstacles currently facing ASEAN, and I  prescribe recommmendations for the both the United States and ASEAN that will enable ASEAN to firmly establish itself as the essential regional organization in Asia. You can read “ASEAN’s Future and Asian Integration” here.

—Cairo, November 12, 2012 It is a paradox of the modern Middle East that an area so rife with common security, economic, and ecological challenges should be such an institutional desert when it comes to regional cooperation. A fascinating two-day conference this weekend at the American University in Cairo (AUC) discussed whether recent political openings might portend deeper multilateral cooperation in the near future. Sponsored by AUC and the Council on Foreign Relations, the meeting on “Regional Cooperation in the New Middle East” offered only the faintest glimmers of hope that the Arab Spring would auger a new burst of multilateralism in the Middle East. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is one of the most barren areas in the world when it comes to regional—or even subregional—organizations. There is no robust structure for cooperative security. Nor is there a political framework for negotiating differences and advancing collaboration on common challenges, from promoting counterterrorism to advancing energy security to combating desertification. Existing institutions (like the Arab League) have historically been weak. The region is also among the least economically integrated in the world, whether measured in terms of trade and investment flows, transportation and telecommunications links, or the free flow of labor; less than 10 percent of the region’s trade is intra-regional. Six factors appear to explain the lack of robust regional institutions in the MENA area: Perhaps most important, the region’s regimes are among the world’s leading defenders of national sovereignty—suggesting that national leaders have purposely designed weak regional institutions. Stark differences among regimes (including constitutional monarchies and authoritarian republics) over the sources of domestic political legitimacy cripple multilateral cooperation. The region is characterized by enormous disparities in national wealth, particularly between “oil haves” and “oil have-nots.” The growing influence of Turkey and Iran, two powerful non-Arab players with distinct regional visions, one a member of NATO and the other a sworn enemy of the West, poses an enormous obstacle to regional integration. The endless Palestinian-Israeli dispute continues to divide the region. The overwhelming weight of the United States in the region, and the preference that many nations give to bilateral relationships with Washington, cannot help but detract from alternative, regional approaches to cooperative security. Yet, in the wake of the Arab Spring, as citizens demand more responsive governance, we’ve seen some glimmers of deepening regional cooperation. The most prominent shift has been the apparent reinvigoration of the Arab League. For decades, the League was a paragon of fecklessness and lowest-common denominator policies, offering Arab regimes a convenient scapegoat. Last year, the League suddenly sprang into action over Libya, providing invaluable diplomatic cover for UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of March 2011, authorizing “all necessary means” to protect Libyan citizens from Moammar al-Qaddafi’s forces. (Such vigor contrasted favorably with the League’s refusal to condemn Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity in Darfur.) In the aftermath of Libya, the Arab League worked to engineer the orderly departure of longstanding Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh. More recently, the League has suspended the membership of Syria, called for the orderly departure of Bashar al-Assad, and pressed for a negotiated settlement among all Syrian forces toward a democratic transition in that country. The League has also participated actively in ongoing mediation efforts, jointly sponsoring the work of a special mediator with the United Nations. These developments suggested that the Arab League might be poised to transform itself along the lines of the African Union (AU), whose founding Constitutive Act replaced the “non-intervention” absolutism of the preceding Organization of African Unity with a  declaration of “non-indifference” toward internal assaults on democracy. Still, the Cairo conference suggested we should not expect robust multilateral institutions in the Middle East anytime soon. The European experience suggests that strong regional institutions are most likely to arise in the presence of strong states. And the fact remains that most states in the MENA region are institutionally anemic and can claim little legitimacy. Vulnerable at home and abroad, most regimes in the region will cling to national sovereignty and resist constraints on their freedom of action at all costs. The Arab Spring, moreover, has deepened a disjunction between two camps in the Arab world: in Egypt and Tunisia, newly empowered Islamist governments are pushing toward greater citizen participation, whereas reactionary regimes, including in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, are fighting a counterrevolution. (Moderate monarchies, as in Morocco and Jordan, are somewhere between). Partly as a result, the emerging regional order is likely to be fragmented. Going forward, the Arab League’s continued renaissance will depend on whether it expands its mandate, as well as capabilities, to address humanitarian, human rights, good governance, and peacekeeping challenges in the MENA region. Such reforms are essential if the League is to fulfill the seldom-invoked collective defense provisions of its Charter. Given the aforementioned divisions among its members, it is possible that we will see the emergence of a multi-speed Arab League—characterized by emerging coalitions of the willing that want to move faster and further to develop real instruments of regional cooperative security. The emergence of a prosperous Middle East will also require stronger regional institutions to foster economic integration and release the entrepreneurial energies of young populations desperate for economic opportunities. With a population expected to double over the next twenty-five years, the MENA region needs dramatic growth to meet even modest employment goals, much less the social justice objectives of governing coalitions like Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party.  One of many challenges includes policy responses to dire projections about climate change-induced water scarcity. Particularly in the context of rapid population growth and urbanization, the region must embrace deeper cooperation on the sustainable management of shared watercourses and aquifiers, as well as the deployment of new technologies like desalination and solar energy. Whether the countries of the region will rise to the occasion multilaterally will depend on the commitment of ruling regimes to improving the lives of their citizens.  

--Singapore (November 2, 2012) The dynamic city-state and commercial entrepot of Singapore offers an ideal vantage point to consider the geopolitical and economic crosscurrents washing over East Asia. The past three years have underscored the contradictions between East Asia’s dual geoeconomic and geopolitical orders. Notwithstanding China’s modest recent slowdown, three decades of explosive growth have made it the region’s clear economic fulcrum. At the same time, regional stability remains undergirded by a “hub and spoke” system of longstanding bilateral alliances between the United States and China’s neighbors—including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand—as well as emerging security partnerships with Indonesia, Vietnam, and others. The growing tension between these two orders was a hot topic of discussion at the first regional conference of the Council of Councils (CoC), a CFR-sponsored initiative that periodically assembles leading global think tanks to debate the biggest challenges on the global agenda. Hosted by the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore, the meeting (“Asia at the Crossroads”) underscored the dangerous disjunction between Asia’s emergence as the world’s economic motor, on the one hand, and its deepening security rivalries, on the other. A comparison with contemporary Europe is instructive. During the Cold War the United States   served, in Josef Jeffe’s memorable phrase, as “Europe’s American Pacifier,” providing strategic reassurance against Soviet aggression and creating the space for Western European democracies to pursue joint prosperity and economic integration. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. presence facilitated the EU’s (and NATO’s) eastward expansion. Today, Europe, notwithstanding its economic difficulties, is a continent whole, free, and at peace. The security role of the United States has become residual at best , despite periodic concerns about Russian revanchism. Not so in East Asia. Here, the United States is more critical to regional stability than at any time in the past two decades, thanks to China’s growing assertiveness, not least in the maritime domain. Through a series of self-inflicted wounds, China has managed in short order to undercut confidence among its neighbors in the “peaceful rise” scenario long advanced by its leadership. Increasingly wary of China’s ultimate intentions, Tokyo, Seoul, Manila, Hanoi, Jakarta, and Canberra have welcomed Washington’s decision—after a decade of costly misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq--to “pivot” (or rebalance”, in the now preferred term)  back to East Asia. For China’s neighbors, the deepening U.S. military presence--including mutual defense exercises and forward deployment of U.S. naval, air, and ground assets—provides indispensable strategic reassurance. Predictably, the reassertion of U.S. power has elicited howls of protest from Beijing, which condemns these U.S. actions as part of a larger agenda to “contain” China. The Obama administration denies any such motive, and indeed depicts the enhanced U.S. presence as fundamentally in Beijing’s own interest, since it will diminish concerns that China’s rise will upset the Asian apple cart. In America’s absence, U.S. officials worry, regional arms races could easily accelerate and ultimately divide East Asia into mistrustful, armed camps. To the degree that Beijing feels increasingly “encircled”, it need look no further than the nearest mirror for the cause. The shift in regional perceptions began in reaction to a series of provocative and unsettling Chinese actions during 2009-2010. The South China Sea has attracted the most attention recently, given competing claims among China, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei concerning sovereign jurisdiction over territorial waters, contested islets, and the exploitation of (presumably extensive) undersea oil and gas resources. Ultimately, the differences there and in the East Asia Sea need to be resolved in multilateral forums and be consistent with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Instead, China has taken a bilateral, heavy-handed approach. The result is to escalate tensions in a region through which more than five trillion dollars of oceanic trade passes each year. Among other actions, Beijing has advanced a historically dubious “nine dashes” formula, which would give it sovereignty over more than 80 percent of the South China Sea. It has confronted its rivals on the open ocean, including by cutting undersea cables of a Vietnamese seismic survey and sending law enforcement ships to meet a Philippine navy ship attempting to retrieve poached sharks from Chinese fisherman operating in the Scarborough Shoal. And it has intimidated Exxon Mobil and other multinational corporations with the temerity to assist ASEAN states in oil and gas exploration. The geopolitical stakes are high. As my former State Department colleagues Evan Feigenbaum and Robert Manning write in an excellent Foreign Policy piece, contemporary East Asia is worringly reminiscent of Europe a century ago. Then as now, analysts like Norman Angel argued that unprecedented economic interdependence had rendered war an act of supreme folly. Angel’s diagnosis proved correct but irrelevant. Gnawing vulnerability, strategic miscalculation, and nationalist passions drew European powers into the world’s most pointless and destructive war anyway. These trends pose serious risks for the United States. The most dangerous contingency would be a direct military clash with China at sea. Prospects for such an incident have risen, as the United States increases freedom of navigation exercises in the littoral waters of East Asia, including the South China Sea. More broadly, there is a growing risk that the United States, despite its best intentions, might be drawn into a military confrontation with China by the reckless actions of a formal treaty ally (the Philippines or, in the East China Sea, Japan) or emerging partner (such as Vietnam) that assumes that Washington will “have its back,” come what may. America’s strategic challenge is to provide its allies and partners with sufficient strategic reassurance without giving (as Germany did so disastrously with the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914) its client a blank check that could set disaster in motion. Ultimately, peaceful resolution of competing maritime claims in the South China Sea will require multilateral negotiations in conformity with international law, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has observed. The brass ring is a binding Code of Conduct among rival claimants, which has proved elusive. Achieving this result will require at least two shifts. The first is a united front among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose summit in Pnomn Penh in July collapsed into acrimony on this question, thanks to Chinese pressure on the Cambodian hosts. Cambodia gets a second chance to get it right this month, when it hosts the final major meeting of its ASEAN chairmanship, which will consider an Indonesian-proposed draft of the code. The second is real movement from China. At stake in the South China Sea is the entire concept of China’s peaceful rise. Recent weeks provide a glimmer of hope in this regard, including Beijing’s endorsement in mid-October of a joint declaration with ASEAN counterparts, which among other provisions commits the parties to peaceful resolution of disputes and the ultimate goal of a code of conduct. The end of China’s protracted leadership transition , which will officially begin during the eighteenth Communist Party Conference on November 8 may allow a mellowing of recent Chinese behavior, giving the incoming government of Xi Jinping an opportunity to rein in the more assertive positions of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) on maritime issues. The Obama administration should encourage all parties to move as promptly as possible toward a binding code of conduct. To be sure, as Tom Wright points out, the United States would have much more diplomatic credibility and influence if it were actually a party to UNCLOS, which would demonstrate that it is willing to play by the same rules that it seeks for others. In this regard, the upcoming lame duck session of Congress would be an ideal time for the Senate to finally ratify UNCLOS.

This is a guest post by Janet Goldner, a Senior Fulbright Scholar who has worked in Mali for the past fifteen years.  She works on a variety of grassroots, cultural, and women’s empowerment projects. She visited Mali again in July and August 2012. Her perspective, different from the more conventional discussion of the Mali crisis, reflects a wide range of indigenous contacts.   The western media, to the extent that it covers Mali at all, feeds us a steady diet of information about the refugee crisis and the horrors of the barbarous crimes occurring regularly in the occupied northern territory. And indeed it is terrible. But there is little attention to the crisis in the south that allowed the occupation of the north to occur. The current Government of National Unity, headed by Interim Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra is rarely covered in the western press. On the rare occasions when Mali is the topic of governmental hearings, Malians are rarely, if ever, included in the deliberations. What happened on March 21, 2012, was not a coup d’état. What began as an unplanned mutiny by soldiers disgruntled at being sent to fight a war without munitions, supplies, or support, culminated with the resignation of President Amadou Toumani Touré. Neither planned nor violent, this event was the beginning of a still incomplete revolution against deep-seated corruption spanning the entire twenty years of the so called Malian democracy. This mutiny occurred six weeks before planned elections. Many Malians did not believe that the elections could dislodge the ruling kleptocracy. Now, elections must wait until the north is liberated. Then Malians can try to build a true democracy as opposed to the corrupt illusion of democracy that existed before this crisis. Malians want real change and will respond vigorously if the old order tries to turn back the clock. The coup leader, Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, is often portrayed by commentors as a mad man, an imbecile. But, he was not present at the Presidential Palace the day of the mutiny, only later did he agree to become the leader of the mutiny. He has no political experience and was not well advised. He made mistakes. In contrast, Sanogo is seen by many Malians as a savior because he delivered Mali from the corrupt leaders and awoke the nation to previously unknown depths of the corruption, including kickbacks from narcotics trafficking and ransoms paid by European countries for hostages held in Mali. ECOWAS is viewed with suspicion as defending of the old corrupt regime since it is led by presidents of west African countries who are no less corrupt than the old Malian regime. Their actions are seen as an effort to protect their own hold on power from the revolutionary aspirations in play in Mali. It is important to listen to ordinary Malians who have not had a voice in the international media’s narrative of the ongoing crisis nor have they been consulted by the international community.