Preparing for a Dangerous Year

When we began SIG’s blog in June of this year, our goal was to provide original and timely analysis of trends that the mainstream consensus was missing. Clients told us they had much more information about global markets and political trends than they could possibly process. What they were missing was actionable and fresh information that was not merely canned trend-spotting followed by a company recommendation or two. They wanted to go beyond the obvious.

To address that need, we spent a lot of time on Asia this year — traditionally a strong region for SIG and one of enduring interest for our clients. The nature of Southeast Asia’s growing centrality, and the shifting strategic approaches of Japan and South Korea, kept our attention and helped us not get too stuck in the US-China struggle, crucial as it is.

In 2024, we expect both of these focuses to continue, both because US policy on China is unlikely to change much in an election year and because Chinese policy toward Chinese tech multinationals won’t change much either. American and Chinese experiments with varieties of economic nationalism will continue. They are in turn the main drivers of what we have described as Southeast Asian non-alignment, especially digital non-alignment, and of Korean-Japanese rapprochement.

China’s increasing nationalism is notable, although in the last half of 2024 its opposition to the U.S. was modulated by the dire economic conditions it was facing. Xi Jinping’s opposition to the U.S. eased. Nevertheless, China’s long-term goals and strategic opposition to the US in East Asia have not changed, nor have Xi’s designs on Taiwan. He has stated that reunifying China will be his legacy.

We have also looked closely this year at India. Narendra Modi’s extraordinary consolidation of policy power — combining a market orientation with strong state policies and a cultural nationalism of alarming strength — continued in 2023. Modi’s popular support remained very strong, and state elections earlier this month confirmed his BJP party as the political anchor of the 600-million-person Indian electorate. Most importantly, per capita GDP growth has stayed vigorous as the BJP has made massive transfers to low-income groups and steadily empowered the lower Hindu castes. The BJP has apparently succeeded in generating increased demand domestically by strengthening the lower classes through policy. How sustainable this progress is remains to be seen, but the BJP certainly is in pole position going into national elections next April.

In regional terms, our final major focus since June has been the Middle East. The set of initiatives known as the Abraham Accords, alongside a surge in successful Chinese diplomacy in the region, led many to think the Middle East would be stabilizing after the years of violence that followed the rise of Daesh/Islamic State and the suppression of the Arab Spring. Hamas had something else in mind, and mainstream commentary on the Middle East has swung from mildly optimistic to apocalyptic. But the strong drivers of normalization between Israel and key Arab states will not necessarily weaken in 2024 and might well grow stronger. The relatively subdued reaction of these states to Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack continues to remain notable. Both the OIC/Arab League solidarity on Gaza and the petrostates’ reluctant acceptance at COP28 of a fossil-fuel phaseout suggest a relative political steadiness in Muslim interstate relations and even some sense of common purpose.

Common purpose is what we have looked for in Europe, without great success. True, hostility toward poorer immigrants has become one source of greater solidarity; so has opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Yet both also contain seeds of disunion as political forces in individual states gain power by sharpening themselves against the European consensus. Given general European declines in both productivity and population, the relative power of Poland and other Central European countries has been expanding as they grow more quickly than the Western states. Germany has begun to imagine what a long-term estrangement of oil-rich Russia might mean for the European solidarity on which Germany bases its positioning of itself in the world. At the same time, Germany and, especially, France are trying to adjust to the continued rise in autarkic industrial policies in both the US (EV subsidies, semiconductor chips) and China. About half of the EU’s population is older than 45. In parts of Western and Northern Europe the median age is above 50. All of this puts European productivity under greater pressure and will increase tension between demographically older and younger parts of the continent. Age will be no guarantee of stability. It also creates a tension around immigration from Africa and the Middle East — the only means for many European countries to have an increased number of younger workers.

Since we launched in June, we have put great emphasis on various technology sectors because the peacetime capacity of economies to innovate in technology has become so wrapped up in major-state calculations about war and military competition. Borders are being erected across the Internet in a displaced strategic competition that is lacking in historical analogies to guide us (and that was predicted years ago by SIG’s Scott Malcomson in his book Splinternet). The level of popular and state-level anxiety about technologies that hardly exist yet is extraordinary. US policy now aims squarely at perpetual superiority to China in any technology that might prove to have strategic significance; Chinese policy aims just as squarely at achieving whatever advances it can on the basis of a military-technological-industrial complex bent to establishing breakneck progress if not primacy. The logic has become well established. In 2024 we will stay focused on identifying its effects.

Which brings us to the Americas. An elected right-wing leader had plunged Argentina into political chaos while an elected left-wing leader in Brazil is pushing through long-needed reforms of investment regulation. Mexico will have elections in 2024 and Canada might too, as large majorities of Canadians say Trudeau should move aside. The American superpower will definitely have an election, this time with a desperately low level of predictability. For almost a decade, mainstream analysis has consistently underestimated both Donald Trump and the level of popular alienation from the Democratic Party consensus. The results in November are impossible to predict with accuracy, but it seems certain that the road to get there will be very rocky indeed. Social unrest and violence in the U.S. cannot be ruled out.

There are national elections in 40 countries in 2024, representing more than 40 percent of the population of the world, many in countries where people have lost faith in institutions and incumbent leaders, resulting in a wide tendency to reject them and their parties, further increasing volatility. 

It has been said that 2023 was the year in which business accepted that politics could not be safely ignored, especially the multi-player geopolitics that we have focused on in our blog and our work. The liberal rules-based order sometimes continued in the letter in 2023 but the spirit was gone and won’t soon—if ever—be back. This leaves the world in a kind of systems vacuum, resulting in movement back toward a balance-of-power, sphere-of-influence geopolitics. The unstable and fracturing conditions within and among nations are still not really priced in to markets, as can be seen by how quickly they continue to bounce back from shocks that in the past would have had significantly more long-lasting negative effects, such as the Israel-Hamas war.

2024 will be a pivotal, perhaps decisive year. We look forward to helping our readers and our clients navigate ways to prosper in a very treacherous time. We will take a break next week and look forward to re-engaging with you in the New Year. 

Faith-based geopolitics: A Russian Example

Modern interstate relations are generally thought to have begun with the 17th-century treaties of Prague and Westphalia, which sought to remove religion from among the causes of interstate conflict: cuius regio, eius religio (“whose land, his religion”) was the legal principle, associating state sovereignty with a single dominant faith, and putting an end, however imperfectly, to wars of religion. Modern international relations were built on this segregation of religion from the struggles of states with each other. The resurgence of religion since the demise of aggressive Communist atheism in the 1980s has often been seen as anti-modern, or as a revival of the pre-modern — certainly as far as international relations are concerned. However that may be, religion cannot be ignored by international investors. Shariah compliance and acceptance of Hindutva priorities are two examples. Less obvious is the type of strategic calculation that has led the unlikely figure of Vladimir Putin to embrace Islam as part of his geopolitical practice.

Putin has been viewed as having a significant connection to the Russian Orthodox church since at least 2000, just after he assumed power, when he referred to Orthodoxy as having “largely determined the character of Russian civilization.” He expected the traditional church to speed “the spiritual and moral rebirth of the Fatherland.” After more than two decades in power, Putin has continued to partner with Russian Orthodoxy in his attempts to solidify Russian cultural nationalism, not least in anti-LGBTQ laws (framed as part of Putin’s struggle with a spiritually degraded West) and in his justifications for the invasion of Ukraine, which has been strongly backed by the Orthodox church. Cuius regio, eius religio.

Yet at the same time Putin has sought to leverage the fact that Russia has the largest Muslim population of any European country, assuming Turkey is not seen as European. On the strength of that fact, Russia acquired observer status at the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in 2005 and is still the only major non-Muslim-majority country to do so. (India was invited but declined.) As a petroleum exporter, Russia is also in constant communication with Middle East petrostates and shares strategic interests with them. These connections make it slightly less peculiar that Orthodox Russia has embarked this year on a two-year experiment with Islamic banking in four Muslim-majority regions: Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Daghestan and Tatarstan. The experiment is being managed by the Russian Central Bank.

Russia has multiple reasons to position itself as friendly to Islam. Russia’s hinterland from the Caucasus to Mongolia is majority-Muslim and its post-Soviet economy has depended on Muslim migrant labor to compensate for domestic demographic decline. In the Middle East, the Kremlin seeks to establish itself as a significant player in the Arab-Muslim world amid the Washington-Beijing confrontation and the Persian Gulf countries’ pursuit of an augmented role on the international stage. In this context, Russia’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its support for Palestinian refugees, many of whom resettled in the North Caucasus under a humanitarian program instituted by Russian authorities, contribute to bolstering Moscow’s image in the Middle East.

Putin frames the ongoing Palestine conflict as a manifestation of US diplomatic failure and proffers Russia as a potential mediator, leveraging its amicable relationships with both Israel and the Palestinians. Putin’s official visits to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia last week aimed to weaken the Western narrative of Russian isolation over Ukraine. The Islamic-banking initiative is similarly seen as in part a response to Ukraine-related financial sanctions. The visits themselves had ultimately to do with money as much as politics: the UAE and Saudi Arabia can withstand a drop in oil prices, but Putin faces a pressing need for revenue, given the costs of the Ukraine war and their impact on his domestic support.

Since the inception of the Ukraine conflict, the Kremlin has increased its efforts to strengthen relations with the Arab-Muslim world, orchestrating various events within the territorial confines of the Russian Federation, particularly in regions with significant Muslim populations. The Kazan Forum 2023 was a prominent event featuring Moscow’s ties to Arab-Muslim countries, particularly Gulf Cooperation Council members. The focus was on accentuating Russia's role in ensuring a harmonious, multi-confessional, and multicultural society. Moscow is likely to intensify its relations and collaborative initiatives with the Gulf Cooperation Council members in energy, defense and logistics.

The lesson for investors is that 21st century religious revivalism is both powerful and not simple. For many centuries, Russian Orthodoxy was animated by the dream of retaking Istanbul (Constantinople) from the infidel Muslim usurpers Much of the tsar’s 19th century imperial gains were at the cost of Central Asian Muslim rulers, and after the Bolshevik revolution Islamic culture was often suppressed. Yet now the Orthodox paragon Putin is strengthening Russia’s Muslim ties on multiple fronts, domestic as well as international, and at least some Muslim states are responding in kind.

In Southeast Asia, Non-Alignment Is Development Policy

India may have been the pioneer of political non-alignment in the 1960s — proposing that countries should align themselves neither with the West nor the Communist bloc — but 21st century non-alignment is more economic than political and its homeland is Southeast Asia.

Over the summer, Singapore decided to split its decision on who would build the next tranche of data centers on the island: Chinese companies got two contracts (with an assist from Australia’s AirTrunk) and US companies got two. While the US has been trying, with some success, to corral countries into a kind of digital alliance that keeps China out, states in the global economy’s fastest-growing region are refusing to choose. This will prove to be the non-aligned movement that matters for the near future.

Compared to other of the world’s regions, Southeast Asia has had far more experience of both China and the US in the role of major powers: the US since its defeat of Spain in 1898 and especially since 1942, when it entered World War II; China over two millennia, most recently following a policy of Maoist subversion in the 1950s-1970s and commercial expansion and influence from the 1990s to today. Southeast Asia has also had a unique experience of consistent inward investment from other highly developed economies with labor shortages such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Indian capital began to look more seriously at the region a few years ago, as has some European and Middle Eastern capital. The gradual redirection of US capital away from the Chinese mainland after 2016 and the slowing of China’s economy strengthened pre-existing trends favoring Southeast Asian growth.

One result is a regional political culture with a deep tradition of not taking sides. The elevation of Chinese-American strategic and economic competition into the digital realm — begun under Trump and greatly extended under Biden — has been met in Southeast Asia by a determination to maintain digital non-alignment. The term itself has been toyed with by Russia and has been more substantively explored by India since its initial banning of Chinese apps in 2020. But Russia has neither tradition nor credibility as a disinterested actor outside its borders and its declining IT sector is increasingly hostage to China, while India’s mini-hegemonic aspirations and hostility toward Islam hinder its acceptance by others as a leader. Southeast Asia walks the walk as well as talking the talk.

Ultimately the US and China have little choice but to go along, because in the digital realm their strategic positions are decisively shaped by their respective private sectors. The politically driven “techlashes” in both the US and China over the past five years were driven by state and popular (in the US) fears of overweening private-tech power, but the tech sector can only be reined in up to a point or it starts to lose its vitality, as may be happening already to some degree in China — and that leads to the sort of strategic weakening that is precisely what the American and Chinese states are most hoping to avoid. For the good of the state, they need their tech sectors to thrive in private markets. The most important of those, for a great many reasons, is Southeast Asia, which is why the 21st century’s distinctive form of non-alignment is being born there.

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An Unexpected Unity at Riyadh Summit

An Unexpected Unity at Riyadh Summit

On Saturday, 57 Arab and Muslim nations called for a halt to military operations in Gaza, dismissing Israel's self-defense rationale for its actions against Palestinians. In an extraordinary joint summit in Riyadh, the 22-member Arab League and the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (to which all Arab League members belong) unanimously called for the International Criminal Court to probe “war crimes and crimes against humanity” being perpetrated by Israel in the Palestinian territories. The summit also urged an arms embargo against Israel and the establishment of an Arab-Islamic committee to supervise diplomatic efforts aimed at securing a ceasefire in Gaza. The summit called for the immediate entry of humanitarian aid convoys to bring food, medicine and fuel into the Gaza Strip. Leaders including Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani attended: the Sunni and Shia worlds alike, and the newly welcomed-back Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Raisi’s trip to Saudi Arabia is the first by an Iranian head of state in more than a decade. Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman presented himself as leader of the Arab-Muslim world, inviting both allies and foes.

Led by Algeria, certain Arab nations advocated for a total severance of diplomatic ties with Israel. However, other Arab countries that have established diplomatic relations with Israel resisted this stance, emphasizing the importance of maintaining open channels with the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Just as interesting was the abrupt resurgence of the Palestinian cause in the awareness of Arab and Muslim nations. Deep divisions continue to impede the formulation of a shared vision to conclude the ongoing conflict and establish a diplomatic framework for what lies ahead. But what led to the merging of the Arab League and OIC conferences was precisely disagreement. The lack of unity created political pressure, and MBS and others responded with a move to show unity. The surprising thing is not that there are still sharp regional divisions but that the joint summit occurred at all.

Hamas’s action on 7 October, grotesque as it was, did have a rationale: To upset the emerging consensus, as the Abraham Accords continued to bring Israel and various Muslim states into a new and less hostile configuration, that the fate of Palestinians could safely be ignored. That message was sent not just to Israel but also, perhaps primarily, to Arab states like Saudi Arabia. The illusion that the Palestinians could be ignored indefinitely as the Abraham Accords process expanded has now been dispelled.

The global community is confronted with a radical Israeli government uninterested in compromise, an ineffectual Palestinian leadership further weakened by recent events, and a U.S. administration preoccupied with impending presidential elections. The conditions for a political initiative are unfavorable.Therapidly diminishing window for peace and regional integration signals a heightened risk for Israel of regression to the conditions of 1948. The swift reversal of the United States' role as a security provider has invited comparison in the region to the speed with which France in West Africa went from the center to near the margins of the regional security balance. What was really striking, then, about the Arab League-OIC joint summit was that it showed the regional players, large and small, willing to get together with some urgency and compromise on reaching a modest common platform. What that might mean for Palestinians is unclear but it does suggest a certain reflex for peaceful discussion and a minimal unity that have not been features of regional politics before.

Going Global Goes South

Going Global Goes South

Recently Joseph Nye, a venerable and influential Harvard professor and former government official, and the Financial Times’s senior trade writer, Alan Beattie, have taken against the popular political term Global South. They attack it as inaccurate, misleading, and “deeply unhelpful” (Beattie). They are not exactly wrong, but getting rid of the term will not make any difference. Another will replace it, because, like “less developed countries” and “developing countries” and “emerging markets” and “frontier markets” and the Third World, it serves a genuine need. Unlike globalization 1.0 (1830-1914), which concerned a world divided into imperial powers and colonies, globalization 2.0 (1960 -?) has taken place in a world of relatively stable sovereign states among poor as well as rich, and with much higher rates of capital mobility, common education, and intellectual-property transfer. Very crudely put, the colonized of the 19th century have enough power and shared experience in the 21st century to constitute a kind of collective. Banning the use of Global South won’t change that, and ignoring the realities that generated the term and its many ancestors will lead to bad analysis.

Nye and Beattie rightly point out that much of the Global South is in the North. China and the U.S. are at about the same latitude. China, India and most of Africa are above the Equator, as is most of the world, while prosperous countries like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are south of it. (Nye’s article is here. Beattie’s Trade Secrets columns are behind a paywall but appeared on 14 September and 5 October.) If you were to mark out the Global South on a map the result would be interesting but also a bit silly. On political-economic grounds, the attack on the Global South is less compelling. The inclusion of Russia, because Jim Neill put it in the BRICS in 2001 and Vladimir Putin has sought to exploit this position to harry his wealthy enemies, is scarcely credible, even to Russians. More plausibly, Nye and Beattie underline that the Global South’s aspiring champions, India and China, are at odds with each other and opportunistic in their support for other Southerners. China, indeed, is not looking very Southern any more along its prosperous eastern seaboard, where its world-beating high-technology companies gather. And its Belt and Road Initiative, useful as it was for off-loading excess heavy-industrial capacity a decade ago, no longer looks much like disinterested solidarity.

All this may be granted. However, Global South and its terminological ancestors did not come into being for geographical reasons or to satisfy the ambitions of the largest players. The Global South would still be a thing under whatever name even if China were to move on, which it well might as it pursues autarkic policies of self-sufficiency (zili gengsheng, a revived Maoist term) under Xi Jinping. Global South exists primarily because Global North exists. The U.S. under Trump and now Biden has been moving toward its own zili gengsheng, what Trump called “economic nationalism”, for seven years. One of the core reasons for the European Union was to create a common market that could rival the North American one is achieving economies of scale, growth through the refinement of internal comparative advantages, and efficiencies of regulation and distribution.  Intensification of anti-immigrant policies in Italy, Britain, Germany and Austria — the Netherlands might join in after 22 November elections — only increases the sense that the non-South wants to take its winnings and leave the table. Given the size and centrality of Northern markets, capital, and technology, their clear desire to withdraw inside themselves will only increase the importance of the Global South concept if not its current name.

But there is a twist. The Global South is not just about staring forlornly at a border wall or dying on a raft near Lampedusa. As Beattie acknowledges, in analyzing possible changes in voting shares at the International Monetary Fund, the Global South has a large and growing share of global production. He cites this as more evidence of its misleading nature. But the idea of the West didn’t weaken as its wealth increased. Neither, interestingly, has the idea of Asia. (See Parag Khanna’s The Future Is Asian.) Nor, in a global context of both splintering and forms of consolidation like large-market self-sufficiency, will the idea of a Global South. It should be able to generate its own credibility for some time to come.

https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/21/omtzigt-calls-firm-cap-many-forms-immigration-50000-people-per-year 

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-south-is-a-misleading-term-by-joseph-s-nye-2023-11

The Pulling Apart

The Pulling Apart

By Dee Smith

We live in a singular moment in history: the world has been knitted together by technology and commerce, but it has become in the process an extraordinarily unhappy human family. And that brings a huge, largely unrecognized, problem.

From the 1940s onward, there was an assumption, particularly in the West, that trade and consumerism would bring convergence. The universal desire for washing machines and the like and the triumph of American popular culture would make life in Jakarta very similar to life in Miami.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the true age of globalization arrived and with it the American unipolar moment. The US was the only superpower, militarily, economically and culturally. American-style market economics were ascendant. Production could be located where costs were lowest; products could be sold where prices were high. To make global markets work smoothly, rules were required and readily accepted as necessary for participation in global prosperity. Economic self-interest reigned and everyone would play nice because it was in their economic interest to do so. “People who trade don’t fight” became an article of faith. This was The End of History and the world was flat.

But a series of signal events—the dot-com bust, the 9-11 attacks, the global economic crash of 2007 and 2008, and the arrival of widespread social media—were harbingers of a sea change. For many sophisticated observers, such events had to be seen as anomalies, so strong was their faith in the economics-based and rules-based global system, and so convinced were they of its inevitability. Why was it thought to be inevitable? Because we believed that we had finally discovered and mastered the true drivers of human activity: economic need and desire. So, when trouble arrived, the tendency was to double down and keep going. The systems had to be right; they just needed to be tweaked. In the intelligence world, this is called confirmation bias. It is a failure of imagination.

But there is more than one kind of self-interest and more than one driver of meaning and purpose. Some are more compelling than economic self-interest. Perhaps the most important is the need for identity. The desire to gather into groups based on similar beliefs and passions (the latter often to redress past or current wrongs) can be more powerful as a driver of human action than the supposedly cooler forces of economic self-interest. Even some economists are now saying this.

The networking technologies that have become globally ubiquitous over the past 25 years — first visual telecommunications, then social media — have had the opposite of the effect they were meant to have. They have led people to compare, and then to celebrate and intensify their differences rather than their similarities. They have increased attachments to identity, rather than decreasing them. And they have provided just enough evidence to falsify the claims of politicians without providing the facts and discipline to counter and improve on them. Social media provide people with enough evidence to conclude they are being betrayed but no means to do anything about it except to create grievance communities. This has led to an immediacy of visual and visceral information about attacks, wars, political disturbances, and so forth, self-selected by adherents to these new groups to reinforce the beliefs they share. Such effects can and do have triggering and multiplying effects across the planet, literally in seconds.

We do not all believe in the same rules. We never did, actually, but now we are no longer prepared to pretend that we do, even for the sake of almighty trade.

How is it possible to have a rules-based order — international or domestic — when we can’t even agree on the rules under which we are to live and by which we are to be governed?

Simply put, it isn’t.

So where will this lead? It is hard to see how it leads to anything other than much more pronounced splintering and fragmentation, both within societies and between nations. Groups within countries may separate into smaller societies that internally share beliefs and rules. As with the USSR at the end of the past century, some nation-states and political units — even large ones — may collapse due to internal stresses. Resource depletion, especially of food and water, and climate change — addressing either of which would require global rules-based agreements — as well as vastly increased numbers of displaced and migrating people, plus a nostalgia for the old world and politicians who exploit this emotion by making impossible promises about restoring it, are adding to the feedback loops driving a political and social pulling apart. Because the problem is global as well as internal and often intensely local, it is hard to discern what possible countervailing forces there might be. We are moving from a largely centrifugal world to a largely centripetal world.

To survive this with an intact civilizational system of some kind — or at least without ubiquitous and utterly devastating conflict — will require us all to think far outside the proverbial box. The solutions to these problems have not yet been found. They are probably not to be found in the structures of the past.

Deliberate Speed: Morocco’s Earthquake Response

Deliberate Speed: Morocco’s Earthquake Response

Shortly after 11.00 pm on 8 September, a massive earthquake struck the High Atlas of Morocco, some 45 miles southwest of Marrakech. Its tremors were felt far to the north, in cities such as Fès and Taza, where people fled into the streets. In Marrakech, close to the epicenter, the impact was terrifying. In the villages of the High Atlas, however, it was devastating. Within ten days, official estimates were suggesting almost 3,000 dead and more than 5,500 injured.

Accusations and recriminations appeared almost immediately in the international press. The scale of death and suffering was due, it was claimed, to King Mohammed VI waiting at his residence in Paris before returning to his people, to his failure to issue an immediate statement, to the hesitation of the prime minister Aziz Akhannouch to respond without delay because protocol forbade him to act before the king had spoken, to a reluctance to accept international aid – especially from France – without hesitation, and to the inability of government rescue teams to reach mountain villages with the necessary speed.

But did the allegations acknowledge the fundamental problem? The period for saving the lives of anyone buried after buildings collapse during an earthquake is very short. Early reports from rescuers stated that many residents had extricated themselves or been rescued by their families or neighbours. At least where possible, the injured had been taken to seek medical assistance, but roads were often blocked, transport unavailable, and hospitals or clinics distant and soon overwhelmed. Remaining in a village without shelter could itself prove fatal. Nights in the High Atlas were already cold.

While the earthquake itself was a disaster, it occurred in a region that was not only remote but also impoverished and marginalized. Most of the inhabitants are not Arab but Amazigh, the indigenous “free people” who were pushed into the Rif and the Atlas by the arrival of Arab armies at the end of the seventh century. They were often known as “Berber,” because their speech was unintelligible to the conquerors, and they still possess a distinct culture, language, and alphabet. Although Mohammed VI has made a concerted attempt to reduce differences in status among the peoples of Morocco, and Tamazight is now widely seen alongside Arabic and French in official documents and public notices, life in regions such as the Rif or the Atlas remains difficult. The villages of the High Atlas have been described as “another Morocco” of which most foreign visitors and even many Moroccans have little knowledge.

News cycles are very short. Two days after the earthquake, massive floods in Libya provided an even more compelling version of a theme that many journalists find irresistible: desperate suffering in Africa where a state was failing to address a crisis and victims were in need of urgent help from the West to have any hope of surviving. Morocco is quite different from Libya, however. The state might have been slower than its critics might have liked, but it did exist and it did act.

It also had its own concerns. The government was clearly thinking of the political implications of accepting international aid. While the influence of France remains ubiquitous more than fifty years after independence in what was French North Africa and French West Africa, it is increasingly seen in the region as intrusive, arrogant, and not always effective. Official announcements from Rabat were clear about the sources from which assistance would be welcome. The countries that were chosen – Spain, the United Kingdom, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – have all favored Moroccan views about the status of the former Spanish colony in the Western Sahara and their involvement is not seen as compromising Moroccan sovereignty on this or other issues. Statements in the French press in particular suggest that Moroccan suspicion is not exaggerated.

Beyond the immediate concerns of the government itself, Moroccan society is still remarkably robust. Even before the machinery of state applied itself to the crisis, citizens and community organizations throughout the country were collecting food, medical supplies, clothing, and money and delivering them to the affected region. The scale of public involvement continues to be impressive. While foreign assistance will undoubtedly be important, Moroccans were in a very real sense saving themselves.

But will anyone be able to save the Amazigh villages of the High Atlas? Some villages have been completely destroyed, the cost of rebuilding is almost certain to exceed even the large amounts of money that are being promised, and younger Amazigh men in particular had already begun to leave the village in the hope of finding work in cities. A rich and distinctive culture is at risk of being lost.

This is not a problem unique to the High Atlas, of course, or to Morocco. Distinctive rural cultures with ancient ways of life are vanishing just as urban elites become more aware of the importance of preserving them. This “other Morocco” is far removed from the gleaming world of high-speed rail projects, international airports, digital technology, and renewable energy. Its value may be more difficult to calculate in purely economic terms, but its marginalization has meant that much of Morocco has never seen it and has not yet begun to consider its significance for the life of the nation. It has been suggested that Moroccan authorities might have moved slowly at first because the High Atlas seems so different from Morocco’s new identity as a bridge between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

The real task will therefore lie not so much in rebuilding but in ensuring a way of life that can be viable without compromising the traditions of local communities. If the people of the High Atlas leave their villages, what of importance will remain to be saved?

For corporations and investors, the attraction of Morocco remains undiminished by the earthquake. The resilience and ingenuity of the people and the diplomatic acumen of its leaders should be reassuring. The deliberation in selecting the countries from which Morocco would receive international aid can be seen as evidence of a sophisticated and measured approach to questions of sovereignty and international relations. In a part of Africa where military coups in the Sahel, the withdrawal of the French military, and the arrival of Russian mercenaries are unsettling, such careful calculation is not just impressive but essential.

Japan's Power Play

Japan’s Power Plays

Coverage of the US-China agon has become ubiquitous, especially in the United States, where politicians turn to China policy with relief as the only major area of bipartisan accord. Military and economic threats are always news, and China and the US are both generating plenty of them. Coverage of Japan, by contrast, is comparatively rare. This is a mistake, because Japan — the third-largest economy in the world by one measure — is undergoing a strategic transformation of great significance. And it is much more than a sideshow to the US-China drama.

There is a great deal going on in US-Japan relations right now — the Center for New American Security has an excellent report out this week on the subject — but in many ways the most interesting Japanese moves have to do with regional and European relations. Japan-Korea relations went into a deep freeze in 2018 after the Korean supreme court ruled that specific Japanese companies should compensate individuals who had endured forced labor during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula that ended in 1945. Only three of the original plaintiffs remain alive, but Japan reacted negatively, Korea responded, and the two nations nearly ceased to communicate. The conservative government of Yoon Suk-yeol broke the logjam earlier this year with a plan to have Korean companies pay the compensation. Japan responded positively, although the three plaintiffs refused to accept Korean money, and Japan-Korea relations have blossomed. Both countries have developed new security strategies — in response to China, in particular — based on the fundamental needs that they share, as trade-dependent economies with shrinking populations, for free navigation throughout the Indo-Pacific. The US encouraged the Japan-Korea rapprochement, including greater security roles for both countries and culminating in the trilateral meeting at Camp David in August. But greater strategic autonomy for both Asian nations means greater autonomy from the US.

Japan has also prioritized relations with the United Kingdom. The reciprocal defense agreement signed by prime ministers Kishida and Sunak in January was hailed by one British defense official as the most important British-Japanese agreement for “more than a century,” presumably referring to the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. (Japan had earlier signed a similar agreement with Australia, which more than a century ago was the sworn enemy of the Anglo-Japanese pact.) Just as important was the announcement on 12 September of closer cooperation between Japan, Britain, and Italy on the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to produce “sixth-generation” fighter planes. The project is at once a way for the United Kingdom and Italy to address their own non-participation in the Eurofighter program, while also evading dependence on the Americans’ Next Generation Air Dominance platform (NGAD).  GCAP is the largest defense project that Japan has ever undertaken with European partners.

It is worth noting that GCAP is an example of what might be called strategic software autonomy. The fifth-generation F-35 fighter tied the buyer to the manufacturer (Lockheed Martin), who kept the code proprietary along with necessary software updates. The Pentagon itself didn’t like this level of dependence and is determined to avoid it with NGAD. The F-35 software approach did have the advantage for the US of bringing F-35 buyers into dependence on the US, creating a form of digital alliance in the name of interoperability. It will be interesting to see how the GCAP fighter, which is meant for export as well as for the British, Italian, and Japanese air forces, will handle the question of software and data. What seems clear is that US policy and Lockheed Martin’s contracts pushed some major US allies into developing defense technology that will reduce their dependence on the US. Japan now intends to build its own missiles to arm the GCAP fighter. 

Japan has also emphasized better military relations with India. Kishida unveiled Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy in India earlier this year and returned to the theme on 10 September at the G-20 meeting in New Delhi. The Quad (India-Japan-Australia-US) may always look curious from a diplomatic perspective, but it is having real results. Historians will appreciate, as the British defense official did, that Japan is revisiting its period of collaboration with the British Empire from the 1890s to the 1920s. There has even been talk over the past two years of Japan joining the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing group (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada), another body created in the long shadow of empire.

Japan still has a constitution that limits its military to self-defense. Japan (after 1945) and South Korea are therefore relative newcomers to this kind of global jockeying. Their prosperity, their front-line status against not only China but also North Korea and Russia, and their world-class tech sectors combine to make them instant major players — if they continue to want to be.  

For global investors, this means that the policies and foreign-relations strategies of Japan, in particular, are now significant for investment decisions and will remain so for the foreseeable future. This had previously not been the case when investors were assessing participation in the world’s third-largest economy. Japan is creating more space for itself under the American umbrella. This has consequences; the GCAP program is only one example.

“Gradually, then Suddenly”: Why Change Has Become So Quick (Part Two)

“Gradually, then Suddenly”:

Why Change Has Become So Quick (Part Two)

by Dee Smith, CEO

[part two of two]

If you ask a room full of people what color the sky is, those who answer will almost always say “blue.” But is the sky really blue? About half of the time, it is black sprinkled with stars. At other times it can be grey, orange, yellow, red, all these colors at once, or even green or purple.

The sky is blue much less than half of the time. So why do almost all of us say it is “blue”?

We do it because it is a practical shorthand, or “heuristic,” that might not be perfect or rational but will enable us to keep moving forward. Heuristics let us categorize things and move through life without expending too much thought. If you see a coil on a stove that is orange in color, you will assume that it must be hot before you assume that someone painted it with orange glow paint.

We are entering a time in which such rules of thumb, developed for an earlier era, are becoming unreliable and deceptive. They can be serious impediments to our success and even to our survival. For the reasons discussed in the first instalment of this article, the near future is becoming less and less predictable. Specifically, it is becoming less like the immediate past and less like anything that we might expect on the basis of previous experience—what we think we “know.” And so the rules of thumb that come from that experience—the heuristics—are increasingly likely to lead us astray and threaten us.

How do we deal with this?

First, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, do not assume that it actually is a duck!

Second, avoid thinking fast—which relies on assumptions, biases, and heuristics—and focus on thinking slow, as Daniel Khaneman and Amos Tversky described in the famous book Thinking, Fast and Slow, a distillation of work for which they both won a Nobel Prize. And as you change your way of thinking, you might want to remove a few words from your working business vocabulary. These include “always,” “never,” and “I’ve seen this before.” Today, it is always better to believe you have not seen it before.

Expectations have a great deal to do with what we see and understand. If you expect to see the same things that you have seen in the past, your mind will often filter out any elements that are different. In a situation of rapid change, this ingrained mental process is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusions. So you need to train your mind to expect different patterns and at the same time not to expect a repeat of what you know. In other words, avoid getting comfortable.

Third, inculcate some new mental models. For example, look at the data—the indicators—that are before you. If you jettison preconceived ideas, then what do they really tell you? Think about “what-ifs.” What might you see if a situation began to emerge that was very different from anything that you had learned to expect? Imagination is your friend in understanding divergent situations, which is why intelligence failures are often called “failures of imagination.” A useful thought trick is to suppose that a situation you encounter is the opposite of what it seems to be, and then go from there.

Mental agility is an equally critical skill. Be prepared for eventualities—but in a general way—because these days you don’t know what is going to happen, or where, or how, or when. Be prepared to turn on a dime, and then turn on a dime again.

Monitoring elements of interest to detect early warnings—subtle signals that can tell you if change is coming—can be very valuable, but it needs to be ongoing. And you also need to be attuned to paying attention to conflicting or “abnormal” signals. Major changes often announce their arrival through subtle and contradictory indicators, also called anomalous indicators because they violate expected patterns.

The single most important tool, however, is an analytical mindset. To deal with complexity and emerging risk, be objective and systematically investigative. Don’t be political, polemical, or emotional. You might not like what you are forced to confront—you will almost certainly not like some of it—but flying blind because you refuse to accept what the evidence is telling you would be even worse. “That can’t be the case” is another phrase to remove from your vocabulary.

None of this is easy or “natural.” It is more work—it requires more energy—to think through things instead of choosing the “automatic pilot” that heuristics provide. The autopilot can fly you straight into a mountain. 

In a time of pervasive change, if you continue to employ existing and preconceived ideas, frameworks, or mental models, you will miss the signals, misinterpret or misunderstand them, and make profound mistakes.

The near future will not be easy to navigate. There are no fixed or “right” answers, only what is effective in circumstances that are constantly changing but does not contradict or betray your values. If you open your mind to seeing new patterns and finding new approaches, a course can be charted much more effectively.

As a very wise CEO once told me, “All conditions are temporary.”

Turkey’s Autocrat Shifts the Balance (I&W)

Turkey’s Autocrat Shifts the Balance

During the NATO summit in July 2023, a sudden change in policy was announced: Turkey would not veto the application by Sweden for admission. In apparent exchange, Turkey would receive F-16s from the United States along with access to advanced upgrades for its existing F-16s. As part of a “general normalization and improvement” of relations with the EU as well as with the United States, Sweden would work closely with Turkey on “counter-terrorism.” Turkish accession talks with the EU would resume, along with discussions about the Turkish role in the European Customs Union and the possibility of visa-free travel for Turks to the 27 countries of the Schengen Area.

The news was generally received in the Western press with a mixture of delight, incredulity, and suspicion, especially as Erdoğan had repeatedly denounced the behavior of the West during his campaign to win the presidential election of May 2023. How could a country, or at least a president, alter his course so suddenly and so dramatically?  

One point to bear in mind is that capriciousness is part of Erdoğan’s autocratic style.  The persona that he affects as a political leader is often volatile and irascible. He frequently berates Turkey’s citizens, shouting at them as a disappointed and exasperated father while he castigates other nations and their leaders for their failure to treat Turkey, Turks, or Muslims in general with the respect he believes they deserve.

As second point is that autocratic caprice has been part of modern Turkish political tradition.  Since the founding of the republic in 1923, Turkish politicians have rarely hesitated to embark on ambitious programs of social engineering. The first president, Kemal Atatürk, transformed the subjects of the sultan into citizens of a new secular society, changing their clothing, their names, their alphabet, and their language. Erdoğan was intent on promoting a revolution in attitudes toward the history of the Turkish nation and especially the Ottoman Empire, the last and greatest of the Muslim empires, which collapsed in the aftermath of the First World War. He was determined that it would no longer be seen as an embarrassment.

This affected foreign policy. Under Erdoğan, Turkish strategists became increasingly interested in extending their reach into lands that the Ottomans had lost, or into regions they had not controlled but were nonetheless seen as part of the wider Turkic world of Central Asia. Since the 19th century, of course, Central Asia had been under the control of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Indeed, Russia still assumes that the Central Asian republics remain within its sphere of influence. But, many Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and other inhabitants of the region are increasingly inclined to disagree, seeing Russia as an imperial power to be resisted.

As Russia weakens, strategists in Ankara have become aware that the opportunity to realize the Pan-Turkic dream of the late 19th and early 20th century is growing, especially if it is understood in terms of the “soft power” implied by closer cultural and economic ties. Even when relations with Russia seem relatively cordial, therefore, it is not seen in Turkey as an ally. Although it is not really an enemy, at least at the moment, it will definitely be seen as a rival and an obstacle.

It should be emphasized that a pan-Turkic Central Asia is not just a romantic fantasy. A region in which Chinese, Iranian, and Russian areas of influence meet is undoubtedly of strategic interest for the United States. America’s rivals possess far more extensive ties than its bureaucrats or corporate executives could hope to acquire by themselves; Turks, therefore, are ideally positioned to support American aspirations if they so choose. Turkish religious, linguistic, and cultural affinities have existed for many centuries and Turkey is not only an American ally but also a member of NATO. This gives it a status to exploit in the former Ottoman lands.

Erdoğan is sometimes misunderstood as merely an Islamist politician. It is more accurate to say he recalls the fusion of Islam and Turkish nationalism that was encouraged by Kenan Evren and the generals who led the coup in 1980 against the ineffective coalition of Süleyman Demirel. This is one of the reasons why his alliance with the MHP on the far right of the political spectrum has not diminished the support that he receives from more conservative or traditional Muslims. He offers something that very different sections of Turkish society can admire, or at least support in elections.

Turkish neo-Ottoman nationalism is enough to get Erdoğan his electoral majorities, however slim (just 4% in 2023). His reversal of position on Sweden and NATO in July was a sign of how much Erdoğan values Turkey’s membership in the alliance, not because of any shared values but because it could serve, in the moment, his strategic goal of neo-Ottoman revival. Erdoğan has long since proved he can provoke the West; that was always just one stage in a broader agenda.

Niger’s Anti-Foreign Coup (I&W)

Niger’s Anti-Foreign Coup

The coup in Niger on 26 July was rightly condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and France. It was also denounced by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which has been the main regional security actor since its intervention in Liberia in 1990. The African Union took the further step of issuing an ultimatum to the new government threatening to use “all measures” against the coup-makers if they did not back down after 15 days.

These immediate and threatening responses were due in part to fear. Since 2020, there has been a wave of military coups across the Sahel, including in Chad, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Mali, and these have overturned an earlier trend toward democratization and presumed stability. Along with fear, however, there has been a sense of disappointment and loss. Niger had been a democratic standout until the coup, receiving thereby a great deal of foreign aid: more than half a billion US dollars from the EU alone between 2021 and 2024. The international system has been badly shaken by the chronic instability in South Sudan since its creation in 2011 as a very expensive experiment in internationally backed state formation. The trend since then had been to devolve international power to the African Union and regional bodies such as ECOWAS, while also allowing a greater role to Western powers, especially France, in providing lift capacity and firepower for fighting the numerous local insurgencies, many of which are Islamist. During the same period after 2011, Niger held three democratic elections and enjoyed a peaceful transfer of power in 2021 from Mahamadou Issoufou, who came up against a term limit, to Mohamed Bazoum. Niger could be and was seen as a rare example of success—right up to 26 July.

Then it became a nightmare. Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, and Algeria all issued statements saying they would oppose any military attempt by ECOWAS to unseat the new government of General Abdourahamane Tiani, the head of Bazoum’s presidential guard who feared he might be next in a military cleanup campaign initiated by Bazoum and backed by the US and France. The Wagner Group’s Yevgheny Prigozhin, who has been active in the region as both a mercenary leader and an investor (see SIGnal, “How Putin Goes,” 5 July 2023), endorsed the coup and offered his help in securing it. But the deeper problem was that Africans in the region did not all respond to the coup as a setback. As of this writing, ECOWAS did not seem to be following through on its threat of decisive action if the coup makers did not stand down; the deadline Sunday came and went. Many in Africa expressed their solidarity with the coup makers in rejecting outside interference, especially by France.

This should not have been quite such a surprise. When Emmanuel Macron took office in 2017, he gave a celebrated speech in Ouagadougou aimed at burying neocolonialism and entering a new era of partnership. The security part of that partnership did not go well, however, and Macron made a four-day tour of central Africa earlier this year, announcing a shift towards a greater appreciation and respect for local authority. Meant as an assurance that the condescension of earlier decades would be discarded, it was evidently seen by some as a sign of irresolution and withdrawal. Military forces in the Sahel seem to be moving toward a view that France is their primary adversary, adamantly opposing any foreign intervention in their internal affairs. What is most striking in the Nigerien case is that ECOWAS and the AU, whose own security capacities have been strengthening for a decade as a result of French and international support, are now being seen as “foreign,” or at least as inimical to the independence of African states, despite their being African themselves.

Russia, meanwhile, has been gaining influence. By appearing to treat African states as equals and giving their leaders a grandiose reception at the Russia-Africa Summit, Russia has appealed to African leaders weary of their low status in the global arena. Russia’s actions—including the cancellation of a substantial African debt of USD 23 billion and the exploration of mutually beneficial partnerships—align with the aspirations of African states, as have somewhat similar Chinese initiatives. The refusal of many African states to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine is to some degree a reward for Russia’s Africa policy.

The overarching concern among the people of Niger is that the foreign military presence and bases, in cooperation with Bazoum’s elected government, have not effectively addressed the insurgent threats in the region. Consequently, there exists a growing belief that the Nigerien military, with support from Russia, might be better equipped to combat the insurgency and handle security challenges within the country.

ECOWAS and the African Union need to adopt a more proactive approach to curbing military power seizures, promoting instead the principles of democracy, good governance, and respect for constitutional order. Doing so might restore some confidence in the efficacy of these regional bodies and foster African stability.

However, a pattern of institutional weakness at the regional and continental levels, accompanied by the rejection of elected governments by Africans themselves in individual states, could also lead major players such as France, the US, the EU, and even the UN to back away from existing commitments and focus more narrowly on particular interests. In the case of the EU, this would mean taking an even harder line against African migrants, thousands of whom die every year as they attempt to reach Europe. France is likely to become less internationalist and more inward-looking, an ongoing trend alongside attempts by Macron to reconcile the traditional French pursuit of la gloire with the demands of internationalism. At the same time, the US and other powers are likely to become less reticent about fighting Russia and China on African soil for access to strategic minerals.

The result will be an increasing divide between African economies able to grow their own productive capacity and those that, like many today in the Sahel, will choose the appearance of independence and the likely reality of chronic under-development as authoritarian states such as Russia and China are allowed to set the prices. An entirely understandable revolt against foreign dominance could then introduce an era that will feature a version of neocolonialism different from its predecessor, but not nearly different enough.

“Gradually, then Suddenly”: Why Change Has Become So Quick

“Gradually, then Suddenly”:

Why Change Has Become So Quick

by Dee Smith, CEO

[part one of two]

We are suddenly confronted—on all sides, it seems—with abrupt and wrenching change, with transformations that few if any of us expected to see or can easily understand.

Why is this occurring? Or perhaps more to the point, why is it so surprising to so many of us? These are two distinct but nevertheless related questions.

In the late 20th century, new mathematical models and enhanced computational power fueled a real revolution in our understanding of complex systems. Much of this revolution remains poorly understood—if it is understood at all by the general public.

Why is it important? Because discoveries about complex systems revealed that they all exhibit a shared set of attributes. They have hidden links and feedback loops. They engender enormous unintended and unexpected consequences. They are inherently unstable and fragile under certain conditions. Furthermore, they are liable to abrupt change including “tipping points,” cascading phenomena, and amplification of events.

The rigorous mathematical study of what is known as non-linear dynamics has revealed key characteristics that such complex systems display. They are not complicated to explain, although some of them seem counterintuitive, or even contradictory.

One of the most intriguing is homeostasis, a dynamic process that is characteristic of complex systems that maintain stability, despite disturbances, as long as conditions stay within a certain range. And yet outside that range, even small changes can have dramatic consequences. Inputs of the “right” kind, at the “right” time, into a system that has been stable can cause massive changes in the system’s state.

In some cases, systems can generate dramatic change themselves when they approach a critical point of phase transition. More generally, however, systems remain vulnerable to massive changes in state caused by external agents. Think of the introduction of a small amount of cyanide or polonium-210 into a living human body. It will change its state from living to dead very quickly in most cases.

The key point of all this is that change often happens abruptly, not gradually. And there are many reasons why abrupt change happens. The more complex a system is, the more vectors—the more inputs—of change will impact all the elements within the system. So change can increase exponentially.

The nature of abrupt change has been demonstrated and modeled mathematically. A Danish physicist named Per Bak studied it through the seemingly unlikely medium of sand piles. As it turns out, if you drop grains of sand on a sand pile, one by one, the pile becomes larger and more unstable. But grains of sand do not fall off in sequence, one by one, as each additional grain is added. Instead, they build up until, at a moment that cannot be predicted with any precision, a large part of the sand pile suddenly collapses in a kind of tiny avalanche. It is a bit like how Ernest Hemingway answered the question of how he went bankrupt: “Gradually. Then suddenly.”

This may seem mundane, but ask yourself why you are so surprised by sudden change and you will see that it is not. Think of putting a glass of ice outside on one of the hot days we are now experiencing almost everywhere. Once it warms to 0°C (32°F), it quickly changes its phase state from solid to liquid—in other words, it melts. It doesn’t stay part water and part ice for long on a hot day. And no single molecule is ever half-frozen and half-melted. It changes abruptly from frozen to liquid.

Many unimportant as well as very important changes in our own lives happen suddenly. You don’t have a car wreck over a period of several weeks, or a heart attack over a period of months. Why then are we so surprised when we encounter sudden change?

There are various ideas about this—including the suggestion that it may be due to the human brain’s inbuilt need to conserve energy. After all, it takes less thinking to deal with continuity than with change. There is also an evolutionary argument. Homo sapiens and our progenitors adapted over millions of years to a world in which change was usually very slow and sudden change simply resulted in death. This is all speculation, but whatever the reason, it is a very old question, closely related to one known to philosophers as the “problem of induction”—simply put, that things stay the same until they don’t.

It is a real problem, however, and it skews our perception time and time again. In the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, many highly informed experts were certain that Russia would not invade. Their rationale was primarily that there had been no major war in Europe for 70 years. This is the problem with induction—believing that the past is a reliable guide to the future—and it leads to what in the intelligence world is called “failure of imagination.”

Putin himself was apparently subject to a “failure of imagination” in making his decision to invade Ukraine. The various tepid responses of the West and of the United States in particular to his actions during the previous 2 decades—in Georgia, in Syria, and in Ukraine itself in 2014 —and the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, impressed the idea on Putin that the West would do little if he simply took Ukraine by force.

So, if we can’t use the past as a reliable guide to the future, what can we use? This is a good question.

If we step back, however, we should now be able to suggest at least provisional responses to the two questions that I asked in the opening paragraphs.

Why does it seem change is so much more sudden and wrenching today? Because it is! We have unquestionably created the most complex human society with the most multifarious and most interlocking systems that have ever existed. And its complexity is increasing daily—even hourly. Dynamic complex systems in which complexity is increasing are especially prone to rapid transformation and unpredictability. So it should not seem hard to understand that this is resulting in more accelerated change—of larger scope, across more domains, at greater speed, and with more unpredictability— than we have ever seen before. Simply because of the nature of complex systems, we have passed into a state where change is accelerating and becoming more non-linear, with more unforeseen—and sometimes unforeseeable—effects and outcomes. And again because of the nature of the system and because of where we are at this point in history—a point to which I will return in a later post—change is becoming more radical. It represents departures further and further away from what we have known in the very recent past and what we have assumed will exist in the near future.

So why are we so surprised all the time? We are simply not mentally suited—we are not evolved—to deal with the current pace and scope of change. We have created a world transforming—technologically, socially, and environmentally—more rapidly than we can accept as individuals, as societies, and in fact as a planetary biological system.

More complexity equals more change equals more unpredictability equals more and greater risk. This is the world we have engineered, like it or not. We have made our bed.

[part one of two]

Elections and Earthquakes (I&W)

Elections and Earthquakes

The first round of the Turkish presidential election on 14 May was a disappointment for almost everyone. There was no winner. The opposition was convinced that years of economic mismanagement, along with a devastating earthquake exacerbated by the notorious corruption of the Turkish construction industry, would drive Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from office. His supporters believed that the great man would crush his enemies once again. But as neither side secured more than 50% of the vote, a second ballot needed to be held. When it was, Erdoğan was clearly the winner.

In North America and most of Europe, the result has generally been described as unwelcome and perhaps even disastrous. But is it?

There is little doubt that Erdoğan’s success was due to policies that became ruthless and vindictive following protests against his plans to build a mosque at Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013 and a coup attempt against him in 2016. The only two politicians who might have led a credible challenge to his authority both faced criminal prosecution and imprisonment. The press and television stations had been placed in the hands of AKP and its supporters by an obliging judiciary and voices opposed to Erdoğan were rarely heard during the campaign. The result was an election that has been seen as “free but not fair”, although it was not really either. While some degree of irregularity appears undeniable – Turkish nationalist candidates received an astonishing number of votes in Kurdish areas of the country, for example – no one seems to doubt that Erdoğan really won the election. He is therefore in a stronger position than he was before. His reign and his policies will endure for another five years, at least if his health remains robust. 

His undoubted appeal lies in an ability to display a patriarchal authority as well as an unwavering devotion to traditional values that half the country finds inspiring and reassuring. The other half, of course, disagrees. Nevertheless, after more than two decades of AKP government, Erdoğan continues to represent hope for the new middle classes in Turkey that a more affluent way of life will continue even though levels of personal debt have become almost insupportable. Whatever the risks, millions of Turks thought them less alarming than those posed by a rival candidate who had never held a position of greater responsibility than leader of the opposition and who never appeared to be tough enough for the job.

This may be worth remembering, especially in Europe. In the hope of winning the second ballot if he could attract support from the far right, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu promised to expel “more than 10 million” refugees from Turkish territory. Would he have made a serious attempt to do it? Who really knows, but the consequences would have been appalling. Even the risk that he might try would have been profoundly alarming in most of Europe, especially given a war in Ukraine and rising tension in the Balkans. European politicians have years of experience in negotiating with Erdoğan when refugees are used as political weapons, and a known quantity is undoubtedly preferable at a time of rising uncertainty.

Erdoğan also wants something. His position requires the appearance of power as well as the reality of it. Sophisticated American weaponry is fundamental to both, especially as Russian equipment has been seen to be no more effective in Ukraine than Russian tactics. Erdoğan has been allowed by Washington to purchase much of what he wants from the United States, but not yet everything that he wants, including the most advanced versions of the F16. At the same time, he has the ability to grant favors that are of great importance to American strategists, including an agreement that Sweden will have the unanimous support it needs to enter NATO just as Finland has done. There is clearly an opportunity for both sides in the conversation.

Erdoğan’s attitude to NATO is undoubtedly ambivalent. Although a man of considerable intelligence and a politician of extraordinary ability, he has little formal education and no real knowledge of English or other foreign languages. He is therefore suspicious of a world that he sees as alien, even if his attitude tends to be pragmatic and transactional. His ambitions also extend beyond Europe and into Africa and Asia.

While Turkey was certainly involved in the rivalries of the Cold War, it played little more than a supporting role. The alternative at the time, the Non-Aligned Movement or NAM, was in large part a reaction to the bellicosity of the Great Powers, but a new unwillingness to choose sides, often known as NAM 2.0, reflects growing unease or alarm at the implications of a globalized economy dominated by the United States and its rivalry with China and Russia. In countries such as India and Turkey, it is not surprising that a vision of a new international order has also been accompanied by enthusiastic or aggressive forms of ethnic and religious nationalism.

So what will Erdoğan choose? He would naturally prefer Turkish prominence within the enduring structures of earlier decades as well as a leading role in a new NAM 2.0. Can he have both? His country has extended its reach throughout the world by relying on the soft power of its media as well as the harder forms of power displayed in its successful aerial drones. Turkish military technology is highly attractive to foreign investors as well as foreign customers, and it is only one in a series of lucrative possibilities that include property development in Istanbul or along the Mediterranean coast and the growing markets offered by Turkish consumers. For the rest of the world, therefore, Turkey remains tantalizing. In that sense, Erdoğan’s victory has changed little. The claims that it represents a defeat for either American or European interests and that Kılıçdaroğlu would have been a more effective or at least a more amenable president seem excitable as well as condescending.