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]

NATO Finds Its War (I&W)

NATO FINDS ITS WAR

Did NATO miss an opportunity at its recent summit in Vilnius? Some critics have said as much, pointing to divisions within the alliance about the measures that it should adopt in offering assistance to Ukraine. But NATO is aiming at something much larger: the transformation of an old Cold War alliance into an institution fit for the new Cold War. It may in fact have achieved it at Vilnius.

Ukraine is the key that opened the door. Until Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, NATO had been organizing itself around the two challenges of terrorism and cybersecurity, finally adopting a Comprehensive Cyber Defense Policy in 2021. Since then, and at a quickening pace after the Biden administration found its feet and Russia invaded non-Crimean Ukraine on 24 February 2022, NATO has been focusing on democratic principles and the rule of law in order to shape a strategic approach. The emphasis on these values at Vilnius underscores their role in guiding NATO’s strategic evolution within the paradigm of the New Cold War.

What is often missed is that an emphasis on values – just the sort of approach that is often dismissed as mere piety – marks the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance into an ideological alliance. Although attempts by the Biden administration to promote ideological initiatives such as the Summits for Democracy have gained little traction, NATO is different. It has been steadily expanding a conventional concept of security to encompass the global commons, including oceans, space, technology, and cyberspace. Departing from a conventional summit declaration, the Vilnius outcome document suggests a strategic roadmap, delineating NATO’s envisioned trajectory in a global order now characterized by constant transformation.

It makes no obvious sense that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should have any responsibility for the global commons. However, the reality is that conflict between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other leaves the global commons up for grabs. Due to technological shifts and innovations, the means for conflict and the platforms for conflict are in effect global, specifically the Internet, cyberspace, and space itself, where military command and control by major powers is dependent not only on satellites in fixed positions above national territory but also on a system of satellites in constant orbit around the planet. The global commons has become a zone of conflict because certain aspects of conflict have become globalized. An organization that includes the specifically geographical definition “North Atlantic” in its name and its mission is now embracing a more global role.

While post-summit commentary centered on NATO’s relationship with Ukraine, perhaps the most crucial immediate outcome lies in the adoption of new Regional Defense Plans. Devised for the protection of NATO’s northern, central, and southern flanks, they signify a new chapter in its strategy. Prepared by SACEUR General Cavoli and his team, and totaling over four thousand pages, the regional plans offer intricate and precise delineations of the alliance's intended actions in the event of an assault on any of its member states. This marks the first time since the Cold War that NATO has formulated such comprehensive and detailed plans, rendering the deterrence and defense capabilities of the alliance more credible than ever before. The impetus behind the completion of these regional defense plans has been the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Looking to the next summit, which will be held at Washington in 2024, we anticipate the full emergence of Global NATO on the 75th anniversary of founding of the alliance. The North Atlantic Council has been assigned the task of producing a comprehensive threat assessment. The results will accelerate deliberations about the future of Ukraine, provide clarity on NATO’s relationship with China, and demonstrate the ways in which the alliance is preparing to confront the globalization of major-power national security. The Washington summit may well grapple with the same unresolved questions that linger after the Vilnius Summit: Does the Alliance’s door remain open? When will Ukraine find a place among its members? On the largest and most important questions, however, NATO will already have found its answers.

Food’s Carbon Footprint (I&W)

Food’s Carbon Footprint

Twenty years or so ago, premium pre-packaged pineapple from Ghana began appearing on the shelves of Waitrose supermarkets in London. Advertised on the label as helping to fund smallholder community projects in Ghana, the pineapple’s appeal lay in its being unusually sweet and juicy. This was apparently due in large part to the local climate in Ghana being drier than that in many other pineapple-producing areas and thus concentrating sweetness in the fruit. The pineapple was hand-picked, trimmed, and packaged in Ghana, helping to keep more of the value chain in-country and support the villages where the pineapple was grown. It was then refrigerated and flown to London, where it was finally displayed on the shelves of Waitrose. It was a “win-win” equation: the consumer got especially delicious pineapple, and the producing communities got a fair deal.

At the time, the “carbon footprint” of the pineapple would have been only an afterthought, and only for a few people. Today, the question should be front and center.

The ongoing revision of global supply chains could have some positive effects in terms of carbon reduction. Long, globalized supply chains are being deconstructed and revised, in part because long supply chains mean high energy costs for transport. This accelerated during the pandemic, although it has larger causes, including global geopolitical splintering and concerns for national security. Reshoring, near-shoring, and supply-chain simplification to emphasize robustness over efficiency are the focus today. But when carbon is part of this, it is mostly as an afterthought.

The dichotomy between economic development and climate issues is becoming more widely recognized.  As Martin Wolf observed recently in the Financial Times:

The question of development assistance links with the challenge of climate. As everyone in developing countries knows, the reason the climate problem is now urgent is the historic emissions of high-income countries. The latter were able to use the atmosphere as a sink, while today’s developing countries cannot. So, today we tell them they must embark on a very different development path from our own. Needless to say, this is quite infuriating. Nevertheless, emissions must now be sharply reduced. This requires a global effort, including in many emerging and developing countries. Have we made progress on this task, in reality rather than rhetorically? The answer is “no.” Emissions have not fallen at all.

Wolf goes on to say that emissions must decline rapidly “while emerging and developing countries still deliver the prosperity that their populations demand,” and he reminds us that this will require a huge flow of resources towards them. “Countries with above average emissions per head [should] compensate those with below average ones,” and “high-income democracies are failing to offer adequate help in this, just as they did over Covid.”

This is factually accurate and morally valid. But is it realistic?

Even within democracies, the better-off seldom want, en masse, to help the worse-off, unless and until it becomes a matter of specific self-interest or even self-preservation and government policy leaves them no choice. By now, only the foolish or willfully ignorant would dismiss the possibility that high-income countries may themselves in the future need to survive with fewer resources—possibly with far fewer—across all socio-economic levels. So there may overall be less to spread around. Whatever lifestyle improvements and development that populations expect or demand in rich and in not-so-rich countries, it may simply not be possible to fulfill this. Many well-informed and intelligent individuals seem to have a strange blind spot about even admitting this as a possibility. It may be too emotionally painful to come to terms with a future that looks so much bleaker than the present or the recent past. Yet the abundance that globalization made possible, whether in delicious pineapple and other foods or in affordable apparel and electronics, cannot easily be squared with either decarbonization or reshoring.

Moreover, the extant systems that have been developed for global or even national redistribution of material assets—which is what Wolf is talking about—are far too inefficient and far too prone to corruption on both the transferring and receiving sides of the equation. Astonishing inefficiency occurs every day, even when redistribution is not being attempted: in the US we waste 30 to 40 percent of our food, for example, while 800 million people go to bed hungry around the world every night. Those on the deficit end of this imbalance are aware of the problem, and of course it is the source of enormous anger. As climate change makes agriculture less predictable, with dramatic effects for those least able to withstand food shortages, that anger will get worse.

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You Choose, You Lose? (I&W)

You Choose, You Lose?

The idea that the world’s states need to choose between the U.S. and China has been an article of faith in the U.S. intelligence community for some time. It broke the surface this week in a Foreign Affairs piece by Richard Fontaine, CEO of the influential think tank the Center for New American Security (CNAS), entitled “The Myth of Neutrality: Countries Will Have to Choose between America and China.” While Fontaine’s article is, as is usually the case, more modulated than the headline, he nonetheless concludes that the “time for choosing has arrived,” focusing in particular on “the effort to separate and safeguard technological supply chains.” SIG questions whether this is really the case.

The first problem with this argument is that technological supply chains are in private hands. The ability of any state, even China, to control its private-sector tech supply chains is uneven at best. This is true not just in present terms — the extent and nature of supply chains are not easy to measure, and measurement and enforcement can use government resources that might be better applied elsewhere — but also in prospective terms: supply-chain inputs and their providers change constantly. Moreover, Chinese and U.S. tech companies alike have multiple subsidiaries, JVs, equity investments, strategic partnerships, and so on outside their home markets, and those entities in turn have their own relationships. SIG’s experience in investigating Chinese and U.S. corporate ownership and part-ownership structures like these across the globe strongly suggests that arranging tech supply chains to conform with the political map will be difficult indeed.

The second problem with the choice argument is that it misses the non-equivalency of the U.S. and China in terms of tech sectors. At least since the expulsion of Google more than a decade ago, China has built its tech sector on the basis of a protected domestic market. As companies like Huawei, Alibaba, Didi Chuxing, and Tencent established themselves and grew, they enjoyed many advantages in having a gigantic captive market. However, that growth model had a dependency built into it, and when the Communist Party decided that Chinese tech companies were gaining too much social power it was easily able to clip their wings. The Party did not blink at liquidating tens of billions in equity value. Chinese tech companies are being obliged to subordinate themselves to state policy priorities, a process that shows no signs of easing. While the Party also works hard to build Chinese self-reliance in terms of supply chains and much else, supply-chain inputs really are the least of it, because the state has so much leverage in the C-suite already. The problem of Chinese tech companies is not guarding the home country’s supply chains but getting into other countries’ supply chains — and China’s autarkic policies, because they amount to a kind of nationalization, only make that problem worse.

The situation in the U.S. is nearly the opposite. The U.S. is an open market. It sources supply-chain inputs, capital, and talent from all over the planet. The most onerous government tech regulations prevent some (not many) U.S. companies from selling into the China market, but in this the U.S. has a willing assistant in Chinese state policy. Corporate espionage and IP theft aside, the Chinese state does not want U.S. companies supplying Chinese markets, except in those instances where Chinese companies still can’t match non-Chinese producers.

There really isn’t much of a choice to be made. China is a non-market economy with a security obsession and it sources supply-chain inputs for those things it can’t locate domestically. The U.S. is a market economy that sources supply-chain inputs from wherever they currently are cheapest. Yes, there are constraints for U.S. companies on sourcing from China, but that leaves all of the rest of the world for U.S. companies to work with.

That points to a third major problem with the choice argument as regards tech supply chains. Companies in the rest of the world can also make things and sell them into their domestic markets and into the 193 national markets that are not the U.S. or China. To the degree that the U.S. or China try to force a choice, the most attractive choice will usually be “both” while reserving the option of “neither.” If these choices are rendered impossible, most countries will choose the U.S., not because of its values but because its open economy has greater possibilities for them. From the supply point of view, as Fontaine notes, China competes well on price — ZTE will build a 5G network for less than Nokia would charge — but as non-Chinese, non-U.S. suppliers increasingly come online, how long can a country with rising wages and government debt, a shrinking workforce, and a non-convertible currency compete on price?

The security question is a separate one: It will not be (and never has been) easy to be an ally of both the U.S. and China, or to be neutral. But in terms of tech supply chains, the choice between the U.S. and China, in most sectors and for most countries, is a false one.