#Mexico has world's 11th-highest GDP based on PPP. As Europe weakens, it will be in the top 10 @johnfmauldin

Mexico as a Major Power

By George Friedman

March 14, 2016

This from Mauldin Economics



Mexico has the 11^th-highest GDP in the world based
on purchasing power parity, according to the International Monetary
Fund. As Europe weakens, it will be in the top 10 in the not-too-distant
future. Yet, this country is regarded by many Americans as a Third
World nation, dominated by drug cartels and impoverished people
desperate to get into the United States.

While it is true that organized crime exists in Mexico and
that many Mexicans want to immigrate to the US, a roughly equal number
are leaving the US and returning to Mexico… drawn by economic
opportunities in their home country. The largest auto plant in the
Western Hemisphere is in Mexico, and Bombardier builds major components
for aircraft there. Mexico has many problems, of course, but so does the
U.K. (the 10^th-largest economy) and Italy (12^th).

No one would be surprised by the U.K. or Italy rankings, but many
people would be stunned to find that Mexico is ranked right up with
them. Obviously, Mexico is not as developed as Britain is. Like most
nations transitioning from underdevelopment to greater development,
Mexico suffers from substantial class and regional inequality, and the
emergence of a dominant middle class is still unfolding.

At the same time, Italy also has substantial regional inequality.
Mexico can't aspire to British standards, but Italy is a reasonable
model. Inequality diminishes the significance of being 11th in some
ways, but it doesn't change the basic reality of Mexico’s relative
strength.

Mexico is commonly perceived, far too simplistically, as a Third
World country with a general breakdown of law and a population seeking
to flee north. That perception is also common among many Mexicans, who
seem to have internalized the contempt in which they are held.

Mexicans know that their country’s economy grew 2.5 percent last year
and is forecast to grow between 2 percent and 3 percent in 2016—roughly
equal to the growth projection for the US economy.  But, oddly, they
tend to discount the significance of Mexico’s competitive growth numbers
in a sluggish global economy.

Here, therefore, we have an interesting phenomenon. Mexico is, in
fact, one of the leading economies of the world, yet most people don’t
recognize it as such and tend to dismiss its importance.



Read the rest of the article here: Mexico as a Major Power

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Philippe Val receives the Morris Abram 2015 Award for Human Rights @UNWatch

What happened to the Left?

Islam has taken the passionate spot in the hearts of the world's intellectuals of the Left.

"We must not speak of Islam, because it stigmatizes the 'victim'"

Unfortunately it's only in French, but the speech is excellent.

Discours: Philippe Val reçoit le Prix Morris Abram 2015 pour les Droits de l'Homme



 See the video on YouTube here.

When #Iran, #Israel, and #Turkey Worked Together @ForeignAffairs

Between 1956 and 1979, Israel shared intelligence with Iran and Turkey on a scale not seen since, was one of Israel’s most far-reaching and comprehensive foreign policy accomplishments.

Trident’s Forgotten Legacy

Yossi Alpher 

May 7, 2015 Foreign Affairs 

The Trident alliance, through which, between 1956 and 1979, Israel shared intelligence with Iran and Turkey on a scale not seen since, was one of Israel’s most far-reaching and comprehensive foreign policy accomplishments. The program represented the vanguard of Israel’s doctrine for dealing with its neighbors and provided the nation with a grand strategy for the first time since its creation. Jerusalem’s relationship with Tehran lasted more than 20 years, until the fall of Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. Israel’s strategic relationship with Turkey continued on and off for several decades, ending with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s acerbic comments at the Davos summit in 2009. Although ambitious, Trident was just one in a series of Israeli attempts to find common ground with non-Arab allies—most of which yielded only fleeting success.

Iran and Turkey voted against the creation of Israel by the United Nations in 1947, and neither supported Israel’s request for UN membership in 1949. Nevertheless, both proceeded to recognize Israel on a de facto basis, establishing low-level or thinly concealed relations through trade missions. Iran and Turkey had a number of motives to enter into relations with Israel and maintain them at low and often deniable levels. For one, those countries’ relations with their Arab neighbors were often tense, and warming or cooling to Israel was useful leverage. Additionally, there was the U.S. dimension: Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion marketed Trident to Washington as an asset to the West against Soviet inroads into the Middle East and as a force to fight Arab radicalism. Both Iran and Turkey understood Jewish influence in the United States and perceived that a close relationship with Israel would mean that the U.S. Jewish lobby would convey their needs to Washington.

Although ambitious, Trident was just one in a series of Israeli attempts to find common ground with non-Arab allies—most of which yielded only fleeting success.

Trident also wrought regional geostrategic incentives. Israel’s achievements in the 1956 Sinai campaign, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s erratic regime in Egypt, the Iraqi coup in 1958, and growing fears of Soviet incursion all brought Iran, Israel, and Turkey into an intelligence relationship that took form in a series of separate meetings in Europe, Ankara, and Tehran from 1956 to 1958. At the first triangular meeting, heads of each national intelligence organization established an impressive array of cooperative intelligence ventures, some leading to subversion projects directed against Nasserist and Soviet regional influence.

"We face a #leadership deficit of global proportions" We Have Reached Peak President by @AaronDMiller2

From @ForeignPolicy, Aaron David Miller tackles the lack of leaders in the world today.

We face a leadership deficit of global proportions. In fact, we seem to be pretty well along into what you might call the post-heroic leadership era

We Have Reached Peak President

Why the time of great American leadership is over.

• BY AARON DAVID MILLER
• OCTOBER 14, 2014

A couple years back, I gave a talk to a group of Princeton graduate students and faculty on the indispensable role leaders play in successful Arab-Israeli negotiations. Having worked on the Middle East peace process for over 20 years, I had come to the conclusion that, far more than any other factor, it was willful leaders -- masters, not prisoners, of their political houses -- who produced the agreements that endure.

It proved to be a pretty tough crowd.

One graduate student insisted that I had been taken hostage by Thomas Carlyle and his "Great Man" theory of history. Another critic, a visiting professor from Turkey, protested that I had completely ignored the broader social and economic forces that really drive and determine change.

I conceded to both that the debate about what mattered more -- the individual or circumstances -- was a complicated business. But I reminded the professor that she hailed from a land in which one man,Mustafa Kemal -- otherwise known as Ataturk -- had fundamentally changed the entire direction of her country's modern history. We left it at that.

History, to be sure, is driven by the interaction between human agency and circumstance. Based on my own experiences in government and negotiations, individuals count greatly in this mix, particularly in matters of war, peace, and nation-building. Historian John Keegan made the stunning assertion that the story of much of the 20th century was a tale -- the biographies, really -- of six men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, FDR, and Mao. Wherever you stand on the issue of the individual's role in history, its impact must be factored into the equation, particularly when it comes to explaining turning points in a nation's history.

Nonetheless, the professor from Turkey had a point. Today we are consumed with leaders and leadership as the solution, if not the panacea, to just about everything that ails us. We admire the bold, transformational leader who seeks fundamental change, and value less the cautious transactor who negotiates, triangulates, and settles for less dramatic results. And we tend to forget too that great leaders almost always emerge in times of national crisis, trauma, and exigency, a risk we run if we hunger for the return of such leaders. Still, in Holy Grail-like pursuit, we search for some magic formula or key to try to understand what accounts for great leadership. Indeed, we seem nothing short of obsessed with the L-word.

Micah Zenko, my fellow columnist at Foreign Policy, in a column on this very word, notes that if you type "leadership books" into the Amazon search engine you get 126,288 results. Want to study leadership or, better yet, become a leader? There is certainly a program for you. The International Leadership Association lists over 1,500 academic programs in the field. Yale University alone has a Leadership Institute, a Women's Leadership Initiative, a Global Health Leadership Institute, and an MBA on Leadership in Healthcare.

This focus on leaders is understandable, particularly during times of great uncertainty and stress. The psychologists and mythologists tell us that the need to search for the great leader to guide or even rescue us is an ancient -- even primordial -- impulse. But what happens when we reach for something we may no longer be able to have?

Indeed, these days, those who favor and align with the Carlyle crowd and the "Great Man" view of history -- myself included -- have a serious problem.

We are now well into the 21st century, a full 70 years after Keegan's six transformers either tried to take over the world or to save it. Look around. Where are the giants of old, the transformers who changed the world and left great legacies? Plenty of very bad leaders have come and gone -- Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic -- and some larger-than-life good ones too, like Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela.

Leaders, to be sure, can emerge from the most unlikely places and at the least expected and most fortuitous times. Think only of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. And who knows what kind of leaders history's long arc might produce in the future?

That said, today things don't look that bright. We face a leadership deficit of global proportions. In fact, we seem to be pretty well along into what you might call the post-heroic leadership era.

Today, 193 countries sit in the United Nations, among them 88 free and functioning democracies. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the so-called great powers -- the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia -- are not led by great, transformative leaders. Nor do rising states such as Brazil, India, and South Africa boast leaders with strong and accomplished records. We certainly see leaders who are adept at maintaining power and keeping their seats -- some, like Russia's Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for many years. Germany's Angela Merkel is certainly a powerful leader and skilled politician.

But where are those whom we could honestly describe as potentially great, heroic, or inspirational? And how many are not only great, but good -- with compassion and high moral and ethical standards -- too? Today, if I were pressed to identify a potentially great leader, I might offer up not a traditional head of state at all, but rather a religious figure: Pope Francis I, whose greatness as well as goodness may well be defined by the irony of his anti-greatness, commonness, and humility.

Nowhere is this leadership vacuum more acutely felt than in the politics of the United States, the world's greatest and most consequential power.

Nowhere is this leadership vacuum more acutely felt than in the politics of the United States, the world's greatest and most consequential power. Greatness is certainly not missing in the American story. Despite talk of decline, America remains the world's sole superpower, with a better balance of military, political, economic, and soft power than any other nation in the world. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States accounts for a full 25 percent of the world's economic output, nearly half of its military expenditures, and has the best capacity to project its educational, cultural, and social media soft-power resources. We surely have no shortage of great athletes, actors, entrepreneurs, and scientists.

Still, great nations are supposed to have great political leaders too, right? And yet today in America we hear very little talk of greatness in our politics. Instead, the focus is on the leadership deficit, on America the ungovernable, and on the sorry state of its dysfunctional politics. One 2013 poll revealed that the public's view of Congress was significantly less positive than its view of root canal operations, NFL replacement refs, colonoscopies, France, and even cockroaches.

It should come as no surprise that the concern about the leadership deficit in our political class also extends to the presidency itself, an institution that has become, both for better and worse, the central element in our political system.

Yet the centrality of the presidency must be reconciled with the limitations of the office and the constraints that bind it. The presidency has always been an implausible, some might even say an impossible, job. But the following mix of challenges and constraints -- some old, some new -- has made the post-World War II presidency harder still: constitutional and practical constraints on the office itself; the president's expanding reach and responsibilities; the expanding role of a government we trust less, even when we demand more from it; America's global role; and an intrusive, omnipresent, and nonstop media.

These challenges have created the ultimate presidential bind. On one hand, we have become presidency-dependent in a president-centric system; on the other hand, our expectations have risen while the president's capacity to deliver has diminished.

In essence, we are lost in a kind of presidential Bermuda Triangle, adrift between the presidents we still want and the ones we can no longer have.

That bind is the subject of my new book, The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President. And three elements define and drive the core argument:

First, greatness in the presidency may be rare, but it is both real and measurable.

Three undeniably great presidents straddle the American story: Washington, the proverbial father of his country; Lincoln, who kept it whole through the Civil War; and Franklin Roosevelt, who shepherded the nation through its worst economic calamity and won its greatest war. Their very deeds define the meaning of greatness in American political life. So let me be clear about my definition of that greatness: Each of the undeniably great presidents overcame a truly nation-wrenching challenge or crisis; each used his crisis moment to fundamentally alter the way we see ourselves as a nation and the way we govern ourselves too, and in doing so changed the nation forever for the better; and each in the process transcended narrow partisanship and in time came to be seen even by critics as an extraordinary national leader.

In addition to these three undeniable greats, perhaps five others whom historians and the public judge favorably too -- their own legacies secured through great accomplishments at critical moments in the nation's story -- round out the group of top performers. The operative point is that this greatness club has created a frame of reference, a high bar really -- and a problematic one, at that -- against which we have come to judge and evaluate our modern presidents and they have come to judge themselves. In the book's early sections, I look at what defines greatness in the presidency and look at who gets admitted into this elite presidential club and why.

Second, historic greatness in the presidency has gone the way of the dodo.

And it is unlikely to return any time soon. The presidents we judge to be great are very much with us still -- everywhere, really. They are on our money and monuments, stars of our HBO specials and Hollywood movies, and subjects of best-selling presidential biographies. They are everywhere, that is, except in the White House.

As we will see, what I describe as "traces of greatness," both real and perceived, have appeared in several of our more contemporary presidents. But those "traces" are not to be confused with the performance of the three undeniables or the handful of other top performers we hold in high esteem. The greatness I described earlier belongs to an America of a different time and place, to a different country really. In the second part of the book, I explain why the history of the post-FDR presidency has been such a challenging tale, and why the times and circumstances have narrowed the prospects, the need, and the opportunity for sustained heroic action in the presidency.

Third, and there really is no other way to say this: We need to get over the greatness thing and stop pining for the return of leaders we can no longer have.

Like the ghosts in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, great presidents continue to hover, to teach, and to inspire. And we have much to learn from their successes and failures. But there is a risk in thinking, let alone succumbing to the illusion, that we will see their likes again, even in an altered contemporary guise. The world and country have changed and so have we. And besides, we should not want to see them again. Greatness in the presidency is too rare to be relevant in our modern times and -- driven as it is in our political system by big crisis -- too risky and dangerous to be desirable. Our continued search for idealized presidents raises our expectations and theirs, skews presidential performance, and leads to an impossible standard that can only frustrate and disappoint. To sum up: We can no longer have a truly great president, we seldom need one, and, as irrational as it sounds, we may not want one, either. And the final chapters of the book contemplate why.

So what do we do about our seemingly insatiable presidential addiction?

Americans will always aspire to more. And we can no more give up on our presidents than we can on ourselves.

Maybe our story, a journey really through a period of presidential greatness once revealed and now gone, will offer up some answers. And perhaps at journey's end we can even begin to discover a way to narrow the gap between the presidents we want and the ones we can realistically have.

This piece was adapted from Aaron David Miller's recent book, The End of Greatness: Why America Can't Have (and Doesn't Want) Another Great President.

We Have Reached Peak President

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What Really Happened in #Iran in 1953?

Conventional wisdom about the 1953 coup in Iran rests on the myth that the CIA toppled the country's democratically elected prime minister. In reality, the coup was primarily a domestic Iranian affair, and the CIA's impact was ultimately insignificant.

What Really Happened in Iran

Back in 2009, during his heavily promoted Cairo speech on American relations with the Muslim world, U.S. President Barack Obama noted, in passing, that “in the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Obama was referring to the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and consolidated the rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Obama would go on to remind his audience that Iran had also committed its share of misdeeds against Americans. But he clearly intended his allusion to Washington’s role in the coup as a concession -- a public acknowledgment that the United States shared some of the blame for its long-simmering conflict with the Islamic Republic.

Yet there was a supreme irony to Obama’s concession. The history of the U.S. role in Iran’s 1953 coup may be “well known,” as the president declared in his speech, but it is not well founded. On the contrary, it rests heavily on two related myths: that machinations by the CIA were the most important factor in Mosaddeq’s downfall and that Iran’s brief democratic interlude was spoiled primarily by American and British meddling. For decades, historians, journalists, and pundits have promoted these myths, injecting them not just into the political discourse but also into popular culture: most recently, Argo, a Hollywood thriller that won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture, suggested that Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution was a belated response to an injustice perpetrated by the United States a quarter century earlier. That version of events has also been promoted by Iran’s theocratic leaders, who have exploited it to stoke anti-Americanism and to obscure the fact that the clergy itself played a major role in toppling Mosaddeq.

In reality, the CIA’s impact on the events of 1953 was ultimately insignificant. Regardless of anything the United States did or did not do, Mosaddeq was bound to fall and the shah was bound to retain his throne and expand his power. Yet the narrative of American culpability has become so entrenched that it now shapes how many Americans understand the history of U.S.-Iranian relations and influences how American leaders think about Iran. In reaching out to the Islamic Republic, the United States has cast itself as a sinner expiating its previous transgressions. This has allowed the Iranian theocracy, which has abused history in a thousand ways, to claim the moral high ground, giving it an unearned advantage over Washington and the West, even in situations that have nothing to do with 1953 and in which Iran’s behavior is the sole cause of the conflict, such as the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program.

All of this makes developing a better and more accurate understanding of the real U.S. role in Iran’s past critically important. It’s far more than a matter of correcting the history books. Getting things right would help the United States develop a less self-defeating approach to the Islamic Republic today and would encourage Iranians -- especially the country’s clerical elite -- to claim ownership of their past.

Day in court: Mohammad Mosaddeq on trial, November 1953. (Getty / Carl Mydans)

HONEST BROKERS

In the years following World War II, Iran was a devastated country, recovering from famine and poverty brought on by the war. It was also a wealthy country, whose ample oil reserves fueled the engines of the British Empire. But Iran’s government didn’t control that oil: the wheel was held by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose majority shareholder happened to be the British government. By the early 1950s, as assertive nationalism swept the developing world, many Iranians were beginning to see this colonial-era arrangement as an unjust, undignified anachronism.

So strong was the desire to take back control of Iran’s national resources that it united the country’s liberal reformers, its intelligentsia, elements of its clerical establishment, and its middle-class professionals into a coherent political movement. At the center of that movement stood Mosaddeq, an upper-class lawyer who had been involved in Iranian politics from a young age, serving in various ministries and as a member of parliament. Toward the end of World War II, Mosaddeq reemerged on the political scene as a champion of Iranian anticolonialism and nationalism and managed to draw together many disparate elements into his political party, the National Front. Mosaddeq was not a revolutionary; he was respectful of the traditions of his social class and supported the idea of constitutional monarchy. But he also sought a more modern and more democratic Iran, and in addition to the nationalization of Iran’s oil, his party’s agenda called for improved public education, freedom of the press, judicial reforms, and a more representative government.

In April 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to appoint Mosaddeq prime minister. In a clever move, Mosaddeq insisted that he would not assume the office unless the parliament also approved an act he had proposed that would nationalize the Iranian oil industry. Mosaddeq got his way in a unanimous vote, and the easily intimidated shah capitulated to the parliament’s demands. Iran now entered a new and more dangerous crisis.

40 #maps that explain the world

Some pretty interesting maps that give you a better idea of the world we live in.

40 more maps that explain the world

Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. I've searched far and wide for maps that can reveal and surprise and inform in ways that the daily headlines might not, with a careful eye for sourcing and detail. I've included a link for more information on just about every one. Enjoy.
1. Where the world's people live, by economic status

Data source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, World Bank. (David Whitmore, John Grimwade / National Geographic)

Those dots represent people: the brighter the dot, the more people. The color shows their country's average income level: blue is richest and yellow is poorest. I want to start with this map because it's a reminder that the world is first and foremost made up of people; to me, the best maps are primarily about showing us people, not politics or geography. It's also a way of looking at the divisions in the world other than by political borders; that's a theme we'll come back to. (One caveat to this map: it doesn't show economic variations within countries, just the national averages.)

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2. How humans spread across the world

Click to enlarge. (New Scientist)

Human beings first left Africa about 60,000 years ago in a series of waves that peopled the globe. This map shows where those waves of migration went and when they occurred (the "40K" over Europe means humans arrived there about 40,000 years ago). You can see that humans have the most history in the Middle East, India and of course Africa itself (the map does not show the much longer history of migration within Africa). We are relative newcomers to the Americas, one of the reasons it has not until very recently been as densely populated as other parts of the world.

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3. When the Mongols took over the known world

(Wikimedia commons)

The Mongol conquests are difficult to fathom. Although their most important technology was the horse, they conquered much of the known world from China to Europe, a series of wars that killed tens of millions of people, then a substantial chunk of the world's population. The Mongols also established what may well have been the largest empire in history until the British surpassed them six long centuries later. It's difficult to understate how much we still feel their impact today; the country we know of today as Iraq has never fully recovered from the 1258 sacking of Baghdad, which until then had been a center of global wealth and knowledge.
4. When Spain and Portugal dominated the world

Click to enlarge. (Wikipedia)

This map shows the Spanish and Portuguese empires at their height. They didn't hold all of this territory concurrently, but they were most powerful from 1580 to 1640, when they were politically unified. Portugal would later pick up more territory in Africa, not shown on the map. We often forget that Spain controlled big parts of Europe, in Italy and the Netherlands. In the Middle Ages, Spain and Portugal were so powerful that they signed a set of treaties literally dividing up the globe between them. They became so rich so quickly that their trade with the Ottoman Empire, perhaps the other great imperial power of the time, filled the Ottoman economy with more gold than it could handle and plunged it economy into an inflationary crisis so severe that the empire never fully recovered.

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5. Major shipping routes in the colonial era

Data source: Climatological Database for the World's Oceans (James Cheshire)

This map shows British, Dutch and Spanish shipping routes from 1750 to 1800. It's been created from newly digitized logbooks of European ships during this period. (Unfortunately, the French data is not shown.) These lines are the contours of empire and of European colonialism, yes, but they're also the first intimations of the global trade and transportation system that are still with us today. This was the flattening of the world, for better and for worse.

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6. Actual European discoveries

Click to enlarge. (Bill Rankin/Radical Cartography)

Americans have mostly come around to accept that, despite what our grade school teachers may have told us, Europeans did not "discover" America; the original arrivals had done that 15,000 years earlier. But Europeans did discover lots of land that had never been before seen by human eyes. You can, embedded in this map, see successive waves of European exploration: first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, then the British and much later the Americans. The map's creator, the always-insightful Bill Rankin, writes, "this map particularly underscores the maritime expertise of Pacific Islanders. Unlike the islands of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, nearly all of the Pacific was settled by the 14th century."

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7. How countries compare on economic inequality

Bluer countries have better income equality. Redder countries are more unequal. Data: CGDev, DIIS (Max Fisher / Washington Post)

Yes, the United States has worse income inequality than Nigeria. That's according to a metric called the Palma Ratio that measures economic inequality. Read more here about how the metric works and the fascinating results of using it to compare the world's countries.

#Khodorkovsky Pardon Underscores #Russia’s Special Ties with #Germany @iimag

Or money talks...

Khodorkovsky Pardon Underscores Russia’s Special Ties with Germany

Mikhail Khodorkovsky showed an affinity for things American during his glory days as CEO of Yukos Oil Co. in the early 2000s. He discussed selling Yukos to Exxon Mobil Corp., acted as an adviser to an energy investment arm of the superconnected Washington-based private equity firm Carlyle Group and donated $1 million to the Library of Congress at the request of then–First Lady Laura Bush. But he has German politicians to thank for his freedom after ten years in Russian prisons on dubious charges of fraud and embezzlement.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the 86-year-old former foreign minister who oversaw German reunification in 1990, reportedly laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s presidential pardon of Khodorkovsky with two-and-a-half years of quiet negotiation. He flew personally to pick up Russia’s most famous prisoner from his camp near the Arctic Circle and whisk him away to Berlin; on German television, Genscher described the mission as “a humanitarian action.” Chancellor Angela Merkel did not hide her own participation in the release. Genscher “worked successfully on possibilities for a solution with a great level of commitment and the support of the chancellor,” she told a news conference shortly after Khodorkovsky’s arrival on German soil.
Genscher, who was Germany’s top diplomat from 1974 to 1992, crafted an elegant compromise between two stubborn antagonists, Khodorkovsky and Putin. The deposed magnate evidently agreed to leave Russia, stay away from politics and not fight to reclaim Yukos assets, most of which were scooped up by Russian state oil company Rosneft. Putin commuted Khodorkovsky’s sentence without a customary admission of guilt, a step that the former billionaire said would have put ex-Yukos colleagues at risk.
Merkel had reasons of her own to press Putin for a human rights concession. She has long been caught between a German business community pressing for warmer ties with Russia and civic groups that abhor the country’s autocratic ways. In 2012 a Bundestag dominated by her Christian Democratic Party passed a motion “expressing concern” about Russia’s law forbidding “homosexual propaganda.”
The timing was also ripe for Putin to toss a bone to Western neighbors enraged over Russia’s torpedoing of a free-trade agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, which provoked huge popular protests in Kiev. Khodorkovsky’s abrupt late-night release came just four days after Putin announced that Russia would buy $15 billion in new Ukrainian bonds, staving off for a few years the threat of bankruptcy for the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. The release also came seven weeks before the opening of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Putin personally lobbied for Russia to host this spectacle, which official media have trumpeted as an event of national prestige. Two terrorist attacks that killed 30 people in the southern Russian city of Volgograd on December 29 and 30 underscored the vulnerability of the Games, and Russia generally, to terrorism, and hence Putin’s need for international moral support.
But the Russian leader’s concession to the German establishment has much deeper economic roots. Americans like to assume that Washington speaks with the loudest voice on any foreign affair, but the U.S. is something of an afterthought for Russia, being only its eighth-largest trading partner. The EU remains Russia’s economic lifeline, and Germany its gateway to the EU.
Germany on its own holds sway as both the top market and supplier for Russia. It bought €39.8 billion ($54.5 billion) in Russian goods and services in 2012 and sent €37.9 billion in exports to the country, according to Eurostat. “Russia believes its historic reconciliation with Germany is creating a partnership that will bring immense benefits to both sides,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a speech in April.
The EU bought €213 billion of Russian exports and sent €123 billion worth of goods and services to the country. Those amounts dwarfed Russia’s two-way trade with China, which amounted to $88 billion in 2012, according to the Chinese General Customs Administration. The rebound in cross-border commerce has been a conspicuous bright spot for both the EU and Russia as they struggle to recover from the aftershocks of the 2008-’09 financial crisis. The two-way trade hit a record high in 2012 and was up 83 percent from the dark days of 2009. EU countries — including Cyprus, which largely recycles Russian oligarchs’ own capital — account for 75 percent of foreign direct investment in Russia, according to Eurostat figures.

The mutual dependence between Russia and Western Europe persists despite a decade of efforts on both sides to reduce it. Putin has sought to foster closer economic relations with China as a counterweight to the West, but efforts to strike a 30-year agreement to supply natural gas to China have stalled after nine years of negotiation, reportedly because Beijing is demanding much lower prices than Russia’s Gazprom charges European customers.
The EU has tried to cut its dependency on Russian gas with alternative pipelines stretching out to Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and even Iraq, but none have yet borne fruit. The most persistent project, Nabucco-West, which was meant to bring fuel from Azerbaijan’s giant Shah Deniz field through Turkey to Central Europe, was abandoned in July 2013 after 11 years of planning. Russia accounted for 34 percent of EU natural gas imports in 2012, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
Russia has also had limited success disentangling its all-important natural gas trade from Ukraine, which became an unreliable partner from Moscow’s point of view after the Orange Revolution of 2005. A new undersea pipeline direct to Germany, known as North Stream, started operating in 2011 (with Merkel’s predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, as its chairman), and the Blue Stream pipeline underneath the Black Sea has enabled modest Gazprom exports to Turkey. But a more ambitious end-run around Kiev, known as South Stream, has bogged down. Some 80 percent of supplies to Europe still flow through the pipelines Soviet planners laid out beneath Ukrainian soil.
Against this backdrop of Russia’s economic imperatives, Putin’s zigzag behavior during an eventful December looks less puzzling. The Kremlin feels it cannot afford to “lose” Ukraine. It scuttled Kiev’s pact with the EU not just from knee-jerk imperialism but also as a potential threat to its gas-fueled cash flows. Yet cordial relations with Western Europe, particularly Germany, remain essential. The release of Khodorkovsky, a man for whom Putin has never hidden his personal disgust, can be seen as an easy way to buy some goodwill.
Kremlin watchers hold out little hope that the Khodorkovsky release, and a broader year-end amnesty that also included the jailed rockers from punk group Pussy Riot, herald a Russian tack toward a liberal reform course. Earlier in December Putin disbanded the most respected state-owned news operation, RIA Novosti, and transferred its staff to Russia Today, which will be headed by a conspicuous Kremlin propagandist.
“Putin’s pardon of Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a confirmation of the omnipotence of one man who rules Russia and the fluctuation of his moods and whims,” Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on the think tank’s web site. “It is definitely not a confirmation of a political thaw.”
But the move does at least show that Putin remains in touch with reality after 13 years in autocratic power, and committed to a pragmatic course by his own lights.

http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/3293805/Banking-and-Capital-Markets-Banking/Khodorkovsky-Pardon-Underscores-Russias-Special-Ties-with-Germany.html#.UssiwX-9KSN

Khodorkovsky Pardon Underscores Russia’s Special Ties with Germany

In Defense of Henry #Kissinger - Robert D. Kaplan - The Atlantic

To be uncomfortable with Kissinger is, as [Lord] Palmerston might say, only natural. But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion. Kissinger has, in fact, been quite moral—provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated.



In Defense of Henry Kissinger - Robert D. Kaplan - The Atlantic




In the summer of 2002, during the initial buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, Henry Kissinger told me he was nevertheless concerned about the lack of critical thinking and planning for the occupation of a Middle Eastern country where, as he put it, “normal politics have not been practiced for decades, and where new power struggles would therefore have to be very violent.” Thus is pessimism morally superior to misplaced optimism.

I have been a close friend of Henry Kissinger’s for some time, but my relationship with him as a historical figure began decades ago. When I was growing up, the received wisdom painted him as the ogre of Vietnam. Later, as I experienced firsthand the stubborn realities of the developing world, and came to understand the task that a liberal polity like the United States faced in protecting its interests, Kissinger took his place among the other political philosophers whose books I consulted to make sense of it all. In the 1980s, when I was traveling through Central Europe and the Balkans, I encountered A World Restored, Kissinger’s first book, published in 1957, about the diplomatic aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In that book, he laid out the significance of Austria as a “polyglot Empire [that] could never be part of a structure legitimized by nationalism,” and he offered a telling truth about Greece, where I had been living for most of the decade: whatever attraction the war for Greek independence had held for the literati of the 1820s, it was not born of “a revolution of middle-class origin to achieve political liberty,” he cautioned, “but a national movement with a religious basis.”

When policy makers disparage Kissinger in private, they tend to do so in a manner that reveals how much they measure themselves against him. The former secretary of state turns 90 this month. To mark his legacy, we need to begin in the 19th century.

In August of 1822, Britain’s radical intelligentsia openly rejoiced upon hearing the news of Robert Stewart’s suicide. Lord Byron, the Romantic poet and heroic adventurer, described Stewart, better known as Viscount Castlereagh, as a “cold-blooded, … placid miscreant.” Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822, had helped organize the military coalition that defeated Napoleon and afterward helped negotiate a peace settlement that kept Europe free of large-scale violence for decades. But because the settlement restored the Bourbon dynasty in France, while providing the forces of Liberalism little reward for their efforts, Castlereagh’s accomplishment lacked any idealistic element, without which the radicals could not be mollified. Of course, this very lack of idealism, by safeguarding the aristocratic order, provided various sovereigns with the only point on which they could unite against Napoleon and establish a continent-wide peace—a peace, it should be noted, that helped Britain emerge as the dominant world power before the close of the 19th century.

One person who did not rejoice at Castlereagh’s death was Henry John Temple, the future British foreign secretary, better known as Lord Palmerston. “There could not have been a greater loss to the Government,” Palmerston declared, “and few greater to the country.” Palmerston himself would soon join the battle against the U.K.’s radical intellectuals, who in the early 1820s demanded that Britain go to war to help democracy take root in Spain, even though no vital British interest had been threatened—and even though this same intellectual class had at times shown only limited enthusiasm for the war against Napoleon, during which Britain’s very survival seemed at stake.

In a career spanning more than two decades in the Foreign Office, Palmerston was fated on occasion to be just as hated as Castlereagh. Like Castlereagh, Palmerston had only one immutable principle in foreign policy: British self-interest, synonymous with the preservation of the worldwide balance of power. But Palmerston also had clear liberal instincts. Because Britain’s was a constitutional government, he knew that the country’s self-interest lay in promoting constitutional governments abroad. He showed sympathy for the 1848 revolutions on the Continent, and consequently was beloved by the liberals. Still, Palmerston understood that his liberal internationalism, if one could call it that, was only a general principle—a principle that, given the variety of situations around the world, required constant bending. Thus, Palmerston encouraged liberalism in Germany in the 1830s but thwarted it there in the 1840s. He supported constitutionalism in Portugal, but opposed it in Serbia and Mexico. He supported any tribal chieftain who extended British India’s sphere of influence northwest into Afghanistan, toward Russia, and opposed any who extended Russia’s sphere of influence southeast, toward India—even as he cooperated with Russia in Persia.

Realizing that many people—and radicals in particular—tended to confuse foreign policy with their own private theology, Palmerston may have considered the moral condemnation that greeted him in some quarters as natural. (John Bright, the Liberal statesman, would later describe Palmerston’s tenure as “one long crime.”)

Yet without his flexible approach to the world, Palmerston could never have navigated the shoals of one foreign-policy crisis after another, helping Britain—despite the catastrophe of the Indian Mutiny in 1857—manage the transition from its ad hoc imperialism of the first half of the 19th century to the formal, steam-driven empire built on science and trade of the second half.

Decades passed before Palmerston’s accomplishments as arguably Britain’s greatest diplomat became fully apparent. In his own day, Palmerston labored hard to preserve the status quo, even as he sincerely desired a better world. “He wanted to prevent any power from becoming so strong that it might threaten Britain,” one of his biographers, Jasper Ridley, wrote. “To prevent the outbreak of major wars in which Britain might be involved and weakened,” Palmerston’s foreign policy “was therefore a series of tactical improvisations, which he carried out with great skill.”

Like Palmerston, Henry Kissinger believes that in difficult, uncertain times—times like the 1960s and ’70s in America, when the nation’s vulnerabilities appeared to outweigh its opportunities—the preservation of the status quo should constitute the highest morality. Other, luckier political leaders might later discover opportunities to encourage liberalism where before there had been none. The trick is to maintain one’s power undiminished until that moment.

Ensuring a nation’s survival sometimes leaves tragically little room for private morality. Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease among generations of well-meaning intellectuals who, free of the burden of real-world bureaucratic responsibility, make choices in the abstract and treat morality as an inflexible absolute.

Fernando Pessoa, the early-20th-century Portuguese poet and existentialist writer, observed that if the strategist “thought of the darkness he cast on a thousand homes and the pain he caused in three thousand hearts,” he would be “unable to act,” and then there would be no one to save civilization from its enemies. Because many artists and intellectuals cannot accept this horrible but necessary truth, their work, Pessoa said, “serves as an outlet for the sensitivity [that] action had to leave behind.” That is ultimately why Henry Kissinger is despised in some quarters, much as Castlereagh and Palmerston were.

To be uncomfortable with Kissinger is, as Palmerston might say, only natural. But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion. Kissinger has, in fact, been quite moral—provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated.

Best Foreign Affairs Web Stories of 2011 | Foreign Affairs

Best Foreign Affairs Web Stories of 2011
Foreign Affairs Magazine

The year began with the Arab Spring and ended with a dent in Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's armor. There were big budget talks in Washington, and Europe watched its fiscal union teeter on the brink of collapse. Of course, U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden. Perspectives and analysis on those world-changing developments and more

http://m.foreignaffairs.com/features/collections/best-foreign-affairs-web-stories-of-2011?cid=nlc-this_week_on_foreignaffairs_co-122911-best_foreign_affairs_web_stori_3-122911

FARC Is Weakened, But Far From Dead

FARC has been severely hit by the killing of its leader Alfonso Cano, but it has proven to be a resilient and adaptive insurgent movement and is unlikely to demobilize any time soon. For the Colombian conflict to be resolved, political measures will be crucial.

By Lisa Wüstholz for ISN Insights

There is no doubt that the death of Alfonso Cano, head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), on 4 November 2011 has dealt a severe blow to the guerrilla movement. Cano was the ideological leader of the Communist insurgent group and an old hand at rebelling against the Colombian government. He was the first Comandante en jefe in FARC's 47 years of history to be killed in combat. As a committed Marxist, he had sought to intensify the revolutionary fight against the government ever since taking over FARC from one of the group's founders, Manuel Marulanda, in 2008.
The death of Cano is the more troubling for FARC since it constitutes only the latest in a series of setbacks that the rebel group has recently been experiencing. On the level of leadership, three senior members of the Secretariat, FARC's seven-person high command, have been killed in the past three years: Raúl Reyes, el Mono Jojoy, and Iván Ríos. Like Cano, they were all iconic figures of FARC.
Cohesion and vulnerability
At the level of followers, FARC is estimated to have shrunk from 20,000 members at its peak a decade ago to around 8,000 fighters. There are reports of large-scale desertions and battle fatigue among the revolutionary troops. Generally, there are signs of growing fragmentation among the rebels. Some fronts are said to operate more and more autonomously from the central command, being more concerned with trading drugs than with the revolutionary struggle. Recently, FARC also had to give up some historical strongholds in the center of the country and move more to the west (in the direction of Cauca, where Cano was found) as well as towards the northeast, further splitting the group. Hence, cohesive action in the name of the group's stated goals has become ever more difficult. FARC has certainly lost its aura of invulnerability.
What is worse from FARC's perspective is that the Colombian armed forces are still advancing. Their fight against the rebels has intensified ever since former President Álvaro Uribe came to power. US support has significantly strengthened the military capabilities of the Colombian forces: Among other things, they received Blackhawk helicopters, making it possible to carry out air strikes against rebel camps, as well as help in improving surveillance obtained through satellites and the interception of phone calls in order to locate FARC's positions.
Additionally, the armed forces have improved their position thanks to valuable intelligence gained from FARC deserters and successful raids on FARC camps. In a raid on a camp in Ecuador, during which FARC international spokesman Raúl Reyes was killed, laptops, hard drives and memory sticks containing sensitive information about FARC operations were discovered.
With FARC on the run rather than on the march, the guerrillas have less time than ever to indoctrinate their new members. This, in turn, is bound to further the decrease in cohesion of the rebel troops.

A resilient and adaptive movement
For all these setbacks, it would be premature to expect the demise of FARC. The end of the group has been predicted several times already. For example, when he was serving as defense minister, current President Juan Manuel Santos declared FARC decidedly shaken. However, three years later, FARC is still fighting. The guerrilla movement has shown remarkable resilience in the face of campaigns to eradicate it. It has also demonstrated the ability to adapt, adjusting its way of fighting to match its own strengths and the actions of the Colombian armed forces.

Oman: The world's hostage negotiator | FP Passport

Oman: The world's hostage negotiator

Posted By Uri Friedman Monday, November 14, 2011 - 6:01 PM

Yes, it's Oman to the rescue yet again. Today we're learning that the Omani government helped negotiate the release of three French aid workers held by al-Qaeda militants in Yemen. A Yemeni tribal mediator tells the Associated Press that Oman and a Yemeni businessman paid an unspecified sum to the militants, who had been demanding $12 million in exchange for the hostages.
The state-run Oman News Agency reports that Oman's ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said, directed officials to "provide all facilities" to help France in recognition of the "distinguished relations" between the two countries. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for his part, has "warmly" thanked the sultan for his "decisive help." The aid workers crossed the Yemeni-Omani border by car, flew to Muscat on an Omani military plane, and then left for France.
If this scenario sounds familiar, that's because it is. In 2010, Omani sources paid $500,000 bail to win the release of American hiker Sarah Shourd, who had been detained by Iran along with her fiancé Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal a year earlier for straying across the Iran-Iraq border. This fall, Oman shelled out close to $1 million for the release of Bauer and Fattal. A diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks indicates that Oman helped secure the release of British sailors captured by Iranian forces in 2007 as well.
How did Oman become the Denzel Washington of Middle East hostage situations? The answer lies in Oman's pragmatic, Switzerland-esque approach to foreign policy. In 1970, Qaboos -- who maintains a tight grip on power and who Robert Kaplan has described as the "most worldly and best-informed leader in the Arab world" -- overthrew his father in a palace coup and set about transforming an isolated and unstable country into a nonaligned regional power. In the 1980s, for example, Oman somehow managed to maintain diplomatic relations with both sides in the Iran-Iraq war while backing U.N. Security Council calls to end the conflict.
This diplomatic balancing act has enabled Oman to enjoy good (but not excessively cozy) relations with both Iran and the U.S. and its Western allies. Qaboos, a supporter of the Shah before the Iranian revolution, has eschewed the hostile stance that Gulf neighbors like Saudi Arabia have adopted toward the Islamic regime. Instead, Oman and Iran cooperate to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which divides the two countries and transports 40 percent of the world's oil and gas.
"Oman views Iran as the strategic threat to the region but has chosen to manage the threat by fostering strong working relations with Tehran," a 2010 U.S. diplomatic cable explained. Iran, for its part, may not view the small sultanate as much of a threat and may value the alliance as it grows increasingly isolated. Oman has pressed Iran to negotiate with the U.S. over its nuclear program and even offered to facilitate secret talks.
America's friendly relationship with Oman, meanwhile, dates back to at least 1841, when Oman became the first Arab nation to recognize the U.S. The sultanate has a free trade agreement with the U.S. and has permitted American forces to use its military bases in the past (in 2010, however, Omani officials strongly denied reports that they had discussed deploying U.S. missile defenses in the country). Oman's role as a key interlocutor between Iran and the U.S. was underscored last month when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Qaboos following the revelation of an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. "We would expect that Omanis would use their relationship with Iran, as they have in the past, to help the Iranians understand the implications of what they're doing," a U.S. State Department official noted during the visit.
The hostage deals, then, may represent just one more weapon in Oman's arsenal for neutralizing threats to regional stability like the political paralysis in Yemen and deteriorating U.S.-Iranian relations. In a 2009 diplomatic cable, the U.S. ambassador to Oman informed an Omani foreign affairs official that securing the release of the three American hikers in Iran would "remove an unhelpful irritant" between Washington and Tehran. When Bauer and Fattal arrived safely in Muscat two years later, an Omani foreign ministry statement expressed hope that the deal would promote a "rapprochement between both the Americans and the Iranians" and "stability in the region." Oman's millions have yet to accomplish those elusive goals, but they have purchased several people their freedom.
Oman: The world's hostage negotiator | FP Passport

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America's Pacific Century - By Hillary Clinton | Foreign Policy

America's Pacific Century
The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.
BY HILLARY CLINTON | NOVEMBER 2011



As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Asia-Pacific has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas, the region spans two oceans -- the Pacific and the Indian -- that are increasingly linked by shipping and strategy. It boasts almost half the world's population. It includes many of the key engines of the global economy, as well as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is home to several of our key allies and important emerging powers like China, India, and Indonesia.

At a time when the region is building a more mature security and economic architecture to promote stability and prosperity, U.S. commitment there is essential. It will help build that architecture and pay dividends for continued American leadership well into this century, just as our post-World War II commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships has paid off many times over -- and continues to do so. The time has come for the United States to make similar investments as a Pacific power, a strategic course set by President Barack Obama from the outset of his administration and one that is already yielding benefits.



With Iraq and Afghanistan still in transition and serious economic challenges in our own country, there are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition, but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward -- we cannot afford not to. From opening new markets for American businesses to curbing nuclear proliferation to keeping the sea lanes free for commerce and navigation, our work abroad holds the key to our prosperity and security at home. For more than six decades, the United States has resisted the gravitational pull of these "come home" debates and the implicit zero-sum logic of these arguments. We must do so again.

How many military bases does the US have?

How many military bases does the US have? According to the Pentagon's own list, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand... Excluding U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about $102 billion a year to run its overseas bases If you're looking for a place to cut the budget, US Overseas Bases seem like a rational place to start, right? Empire of bases By Prof. Hugh Gusterson

Global Research, March 18, 2009

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Before reading this article, try to answer this question: How many military bases does the United States have in other countries: a) 100; b) 300; c) 700; or d) 1,000. According to the Pentagon's own list PDF, the answer is around 865, but if you include the new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan it is over a thousand. These thousand bases constitute 95 percent of all the military bases any country in the world maintains on any other country's territory. In other words, the United States is to military bases as Heinz is to ketchup. The old way of doing colonialism, practiced by the Europeans, was to take over entire countries and administer them. But this was clumsy. The United States has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire. As historian Chalmers Johnson says, "America's version of the colony is the military base." The United States, says Johnson, has an "empire of bases." Its 'empire of bases' gives the United States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War." These bases do not come cheap. Excluding U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States spends about $102 billion a year to run its overseas bases, according to Miriam Pemberton of the Institute for Policy Studies. And in many cases you have to ask what purpose they serve. For example, the United States has 227 bases in Germany. Maybe this made sense during the Cold War, when Germany was split in two by the iron curtain and U.S. policy makers sought to persuade the Soviets that the American people would see an attack on Europe as an attack on itself. But in a new era when Germany is reunited and the United States is concerned about flashpoints of conflict in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, it makes as much sense for the Pentagon to hold onto 227 military bases in Germany as it would for the post office to maintain a fleet of horses and buggies. Drowning in red ink, the White House is desperate to cut unnecessary costs in the federal budget, and Massachusetts Cong. Barney Frank, a Democrat, has suggested that the Pentagon budget could be cut by 25 percent. Whether or not one thinks Frank's number is politically realistic, foreign bases are surely a lucrative target for the budget cutter's axe. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the United States could save $12 billion by closing 200 or so foreign bases. This would also be relatively cost-free politically since the locals who may have become economically dependent upon the bases are foreigners and cannot vote retribution in U.S. elections. Yet those foreign bases seem invisible as budget cutters squint at the Pentagon's $664 billion proposed budget. Take the March 1st editorial in the New York Times, "The Pentagon Meets the Real World." The Times's editorialists called for "political courage" from the White House in cutting the defense budget. Their suggestions? Cut the air force's F-22 fighter and the navy's DDG-1000 destroyer and scale back missile defense and the army's Future Combat System to save $10 billion plus a year. All good suggestions, but what about those foreign bases?