ASANTEHENE’S WISE WORDS?

The Chief of Asanteman, Otumfuor Osei Tutu II

By Ekow Mensah.

Since last week-end, Otumfuor the Asantehene has been the recipient of unfettered praise from friends and foes.

He has been described variously as visionary, courageous and wise and the loud applause has come from both sides of the political divide.

No doubt the Otumfuor made statements which by all standards associated with his office and class are extraordinary at this year’s democracy lecture.

Here comes one of the most outstanding feudal lords of our time, challenging the status quo and calling for practices which would enrich the nurturing of democracy in Ghana.

Otumfuor was obviously appalled by the growing political partisanship which is threatening to split the nation apart.

The phenomena of serial calling which has obviously debased national debate and reduced it to nothing more than a propaganda contest between the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was also not pleasing for the monarch.

His critical views on the abuse of religion by all manner of persons came as sweet music to many ears.

However, a few issues which were left out of his presentation remain most problematic.

Is it possible to develop democratic practice in any society where citizens are divided into royals, citizens and slaves? 

The whole chieftaincy institution is built on the right of royals to lead and insists that slaves should forever be kept at the bottom. How democratic!

 

Only those from a particular blood line can rise to be leaders.

The discrimination against people with disability by the institution of chieftaincy cannot also pass any democratic test.

How come that the blind, the cripple and the infirm are debarred from becoming chiefs?

How about albinos?

The biggest threat to democracy   in Ghana and everywhere is a system which discriminates on the basis of social background and orientation.

It would be helpful if the Otumfuor would pronounce on these issues as well.

Editorial

STRUGGLE OVER RESOURCES

Current in the news is the struggle between the people of Nkroful and Adamus Gold Resources at Nkroful. This is happening at a time the government is pretending to fight galamsey operations in the country.

The Insight believes that the mineral resources of this country belong to the people of this country. Nevertheless their exploitation should not be at the expense of the people. It seems while the government is concerned about galamsey and small scale miners and the environment, the government seems to keep a blind eye on the massive destruction of the environment by the big mining companies.

If truth is to be told however, the big mining companies export all the raw gold bullions out of the country. By the act of the NPP Government the major mining companies in Ghana-Newmont, Anglogold Ashanti Obuasi, Anglogold Ashanti Iduapriem, Goldfields etc, do not pay the 10% carrying shares stipulated in the Mineral and Mining Law 2006 Act 703 and rather have been touting the taxes they pay to the Government which amounts to nothing.

The Insight support the people of Nkroful in their struggle to protect their resources and  guarantee their human rights over the activities of Adamus Gold Resources and calls on the government to bring the mining companies to order. 

Where Did David Mark Get the Funds for His Private University?

David Mark, Nigeria Senate President

By Pius Adesanmi

(to the accompaniment of Fela’s “Just Like That”)

David Bonaventure Alechenu Mark, Nigeria’s Senate President, is one of those extremely wealthy rogue soldiers produced by Ibrahim Babangida’s settlement philosophy. Fate has blessed him with an illustrious looting career. He has been stealing money from the Nigerian people for a very long time. When he got tired of stealing money, he graduated to loftier preoccupations: stealing elections.

Thus, in one of those only in Nigeria self-destructive travesties, the occupant of the third highest office in the land actually never won any of the elections that got him to the National Assembly. Like others, he is a beneficiary of the PDP’s phenomenal rigging machine. He is openly pretending not to eye the presidency in 2015 but, deep down, he won’t mind adding tenancy in Aso Rock to his personal legacy of rigged elections. In the meantime, David Mark has graduated from stealing elections to being lucky.​

Luck, for David Mark, is not about your head auspiciously making you the number two man to bosses destined to run into trouble or die along the way. Luck, for the Senate President, comes in the shape of a succession of overwhelming national tragedies which makes the personal transgressions of Nigeria’s political rapists pass unnoticed. Such has been the harvest of corpses lately in Nigeria, from Baga to Bama to Nassarawa and counting, that it would have been politically incorrect for anybody to pay attention to the regular but less violent ways in which the political class continues to kill more Nigerians than Boko Haram or armed robbers combined. 

With Boko Haram, a hundred lives, two hundred lives, go out in a bang and photos of calcified bodies go viral on social media to remind us of the tragic errors of our national rendering. With every billion looted by a politician, thousands of lives go but not in a bang. They go smiling to their graves. They go installmentally. For every billion looted translates to hospitals and roads not built. There are no calcified images to show us that these thousands of slow, installmental, shuffering and smiling deaths are directly linked to the billions looted by a particular politician.

Hundreds of lives taken weekly in the blitzkrieg of Boko Haram, armed robbery, and our other national demons are more newsworthy and have more spectacle value on social media than the somber reality of hundreds of thousands walking deads on our streets, all candidates for the grave, because a politician has looted the money meant for hospitals, roads, and clean water provision. This is why luck shined on David Mark and another recent evidence of his brazen looting of our commonwealth went grossly under-reported and totally ignored by Nigerians.

Like most Nigerians, I nearly missed the news, partly because only one newspaper (Nigerian Tribune) considered it newsworthy and partly because I was distracted and anguished by other national tragedies associated with Boko Haram. Although, somehow, the editors of Nigerian Tribune did not consider it front page material, they still displayed enough critical acuity to give it an appropriately ominous headline in the Sunday, 12 May 2013 online edition of the newspaper. “3 Policemen, 5 Others Injured Over Proposed David Mark University”, screamed Nigerian Tribune.

 

Now, that caught my attention. Wait a minute, I thought, David Mark, a sitting Senate President, is building his own private University? How on earth did Sahara Reporters and Premium Times miss this story and the attendant necessity of investigating how David Mark is funding his University? The opening paragraph of the Tribune story confirmed my worst fears. Says Tribune: “No fewer than eight people, including three policemen, were said to have been injured in a clash between youths in Asa community area of Otukpo town in Otukpo Local Government Area of Benue State over the location of a private university owned by the Senate President, Senator David Mark. The youth were said to have converged on the Otukpo-Oju federal highway mid-week to protest what they described as unlawful acquisition of their land by the Senate President, while the policemen drafted to the area were said to have received stiff resistance from the youth. Efforts by policemen to disperse the youth were rebuffed, which reportedly left eight people, including three policemen, injured.”

Like most things Nigerian, this piece of bad news comes in tangled layers. Tragic trees always fall on tragic trees in our situation and it is always a very difficult task determining which to remove first. So, we shall pretend not to notice that David Mark is also apparently involved in a messy land grab that has now caused injury to fellow Nigerians (poor Benue! When they are not robbed blind via contract rackets by Doyin Okupe, they are robbed silly by one of their unelected representatives in the Senate) and focus on the more sinister news of a salaried Senator funding a private University.

There is a sense in which David Mark’s venture into higher education (my dear brother, Tade Aina, Program Director of Higher Education in Africa for the Carnegie Corporation, must be gnashing his teeth in agony over the new meaning that politicians in his country are giving to higher education) reminds me of ace British colonialist empire builder, Cecil Rhodes. Starring at the heavens from his compound in South Africa one beautiful evening, Rhodes famously exclaimed: “I would annex the planets if I could.” Just as Rhodes wanted no part of the solar system left uncolonized by the British, no part of our national life is left uncolonized by the loot of the political class.

For members of Nigeria’s political class, looting the treasury is no longer just about stealing money to rival the material acquisitions of Arab oil sheikhs in choice locations all over the world; it is no longer just about aping the glamorous lifestyle of Hollywood royalty, it has now acquired a psychological dimension with a tinge of impunity. Beyond material acquisition, loot creates the desire in the rapists of Nigeria to invade and make their odoriferous presence felt in those areas of national life which still provide some form of psychological cushion for the people. Thus, when the Nigerian politician or government official has acquired enough property in Abuja, Lagos, Dubai, Johannesburg, London, Washington, and Toronto; when he has acquired a private jet; when his fleet of expensive exotic cars in Nigeria makes his compound look like a car dealership; when he boasts a permanent year-round reserved room in Sheraton or Nicon Hilton, agony and restlessness set in. What to do next? Ah, yes, let me colonize other areas of life of Nigerians. Let me take my loot into other zones, other spaces that ordinarily ought to be inviolable.

This is the point at which they begin to invade and colonize faith. Thus far, only the traditional religions are safe from their depredations. They are not building ultramodern shrines yet for Babalawos and Dibias. Nigerian Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, have been very badly hit as I indicated in my open letter to John Cardinal Onaiyekan and Pastor Tunde Bakare. The loot of politicians and government officials has invaded Nigerian faith. They build churches (and mosques but mostly churches) and donate such glamorous buildings with fanfare. The Body of Christ in Nigeria has learnt that talking while eating from the hands of corrupt politicians is bad table manners. Thus, nobody asks any questions about the source of the funds when a politician builds and donates a church to a congregation. I am still waiting for the Nigerian Anglican Communion, especially the Anglican clergy, to ask Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, where he got the money to build a flamboyant church for the Anglican community in his village.

When they get tired of colonizing faith with their loot, they move on to colonize higher education, mushrooming private universities all over the place. The University idea ought to sue Nigeria for what we are doing to it. Just like we bastardized democracy, we are bastardizing the University idea. Every looter, every crook in Nigeria wants to start a private University after building a Church or a Mosque. Obasanjo built Bells University and we asked no questions. Ibrahim Babangida started Heritage University. His license was withdrawn by the NUC not because of questions over his sources of funds but because he delayed admitting students. Atiku Abubakar bought a franchise of the American University system while still in office as Vice President and we asked no questions about the sources of his funds. Now, a sitting Senate President has ventured into the same terrain and no questions are asked, no eyebrows raised anywhere in Nigeria. Next, a politician will wake up, create, and privately fund Nigeria’s 37^th state and there will be no questions asked.

This is precisely what worries me: our transition into a society that no longer sees anything wrong with the bastardization of ideals and the violation of national psychic spaces by the criminals in the political class. Bring your loot into faith and try to buy God and Allah, no problem, we the clergy will broker the deal for you. Bring your loot into higher education and try to buy inviolable ideals, no problem, we won’t ask any questions about how and where you got your money. We have thus created a society in which there are no institutions primed to swing into action the moment public servants display expenditure beyond their determined salaries. 

A US Congressman suddenly buying a Lamborghini or appearing in Congress in choice Ferragamo loafers everyday is asking for swift and immediate trouble with the IRS; a Canadian parliamentarian who suddenly buys the latest Range Rover in a country where most of his colleagues take public transport to work is asking for immediate and swift investigation by Canada Revenue Agency. If word got out that the Speaker of the House in Canada (David Mark’s counterpart in Ottawa) was privately building and funding a University in his village, Andrew Treusch, Commissioner of Revenue and Chief Executive Officer, Canada Revenue Agency, would have a heart attack.

However, in Nigeria, David Mark will steal the land he is busy stealing.

And build his private University.

Just like that!

Europe: Economy falling, nine countries are in recession

 The euro zone economy is declining for six consecutive quarters. Nine of the 17 countries are in recession: Spain, France, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and Slovenia. The austerity policy imposed by the troika and the German government of Angela Merkel is sinking Europe.

Eurostat data was released on Wednesday (15th) and are relative to GDP in the euro area in the first quarter of 2013.

On average, the regional GDP fell 0.2% in the first part of 2013 compared to the previous quarter and 1% in the previous year.

The euro zone is in recession for six consecutive quarters, the longest recession since the area data began to be recorded in 1995.

France's GDP fell 0.2% in the first quarter of 2013, compared to the previous quarter, with a decrease for two consecutive quarters and therefore in technical recession. In the previous year, the GDP of France fell 0.4%, down 0.3% higher than that recorded at the end of 2012 compared with the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, Germany was able to prevent entry into recession as it grew 0.1% in the first quarter, but it is a high below the forecasts of analysts who had expected growth of 0.3%.
In the euro zone nine in 17 countries are in recession: Spain, France, Italy, Finland, Netherlands, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece and Slovenia (country whose GDP is falling, although they have not been published for the first quarter data).

Carsten Brzeski, senior economist at ING in Brussels, told Reuters: "The misery continues. Almost all major countries except Germany, are in recession, and so far nothing has helped stop this downward spiral."

Italy, the third largest economy in the euro zone, recorded the seventh consecutive quarter of decline, the longest since data started being recorded in 1970.

The Portuguese economy fell for the ninth consecutive quarter and the decline is accentuated. In the first quarter of 2013, it decreased 0.3% compared to the last quarter of 2012 and 3.9% over the first quarter of 2012. These data are even worse than the European Commission predicted.

Translated from the Portuguese version by:
Lisa Karpova
Pravda.Ru
Translator's note:
 In its economic report for 2013, the UNO states that the pace of growth it estimates for the coming two years will not be enough to address the jobs crisis. The report is a condemnation of the approach to the economic crisis following the market-oriented liberalism preached by western countries. Does it indicate that a depression is looming?

The United Nations is clear in its economic report The World Economic Situation and Prospects 2013, stating that the pace of growth it estimates for the coming two years will not be enough to address the jobs crisis. The report is a condemnation of the puerile approach to the economic crisis following the market-oriented liberalism preached by western countries. Does it indicate that a depression is looming?

A recession is when everyone you know loses their jobs. A depression is when you lose yours. Joking apart, if a depression is a recession that lasts for a longer time and has a lasting effect on business activity, and if the economic crisis has lasted since 2008-2009, then with a further two years of economic hardship looming, it would appear clear that a depression is not coming, it is already here.

Christianity

By John Bingham

A new analysis of the 2011 census shows that a decade of mass immigration helped mask the scale of decline in Christian affiliation among the British-born population – while driving a dramatic increase in Islam, particularly among the young.

It suggests that only a minority of people will describe themselves as Christians within the next decade, for first time. 

Meanwhile almost one in 10 under 25s in Britain is now a Muslim.

The proportion of young people who describe themselves as even nominal Christians has dropped below half for the first time. 

Initial results from the 2011 census published last year showed that the total number of people in England and Wales who described themselves as Christian fell by 4.1 million – a decline of 10 per cent.

But new analysis from the Office for National Statistics shows that that figure was bolstered by 1.2 million foreign-born Christians, including Polish Catholics and evangelicals from countries such as Nigeria. 

They disclosed that there were in fact 5.3 million fewer British-born people describing themselves as Christians, a decline of 15 per cent in just a decade.

At the same time the number of Muslims in England and Wales surged by 75 per cent – boosted by almost 600,000 more foreign born followers of the Islamic faith.

While almost half of British Muslims are under the age of 25, almost a quarter of Christians are over 65. 

The average age of a British Muslim is just 25, not far off half that of a British Christian.

Younger people also drove a shift away from religion altogether, with 6.4 million more people describing themselves as having no faith than 10 years earlier. 

Secular campaigners said the new figures showed that Christianity had now dropped below “critical mass” making the case for disestablishing the Church of England stronger.

But the Church insisted that while there had been a significant drop in “nominal” Christians, the core of the Church remained firm.

Prof David Coleman, Professor of demography at Oxford University, said: “This is a very substantial change – it is difficult to see whether any other change in the census could have been remotely as big.

“But I wonder how far it reflects an overarching change in society where it is more acceptable more normal to say that you are not religious or are not Christian.”

Dr Fraser Watts, a Cambridge theologian, said it was “entirely possible” the people identifying themselves as Christians could become a minority within the next decade on the basis of the figures. 

“It is still pretty striking and it is a worrying trend and confirms what anyone can observe - that in many churches the majority of the congregation are over 60,” he said.

Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said the long-term reduction of Christianity, particularly among young people, was now “unstoppable”.

“In another 20 years there are going to be more active Muslims than there are churchgoers,” he said. 

“The time has now come that institutional Christianity is no longer justified, the number has dropped below critical mass for which there is no longer any justification for the established Church, for example, or the monarch going through a religious ceremony at coronation.

“The expressions of optimism by the church are just completely misplaced.”

But a spokesman for the Church of England said: “These figures highlight the diversity of Christianity in this country today, something which has been increasing for decades and shows the relevance of Christianity to people from all backgrounds. 

“These figures once again confirm that this remains a faithful nation and that the fall in the numbers identifying themselves as Christians is a challenge but – as you can see from the stability of Church of England attendance figures – the committed worshipping centre of the church remains firm.

“The challenge to the Church is to reconnect with the nominal.” 

Could the United States really go to war with China?

 By Noah Feldman

Are we on the brink of a new Cold War? The question isn't as outlandish as it seemed only a few years ago. The United States is still the sole reigning superpower, but it is being challenged by the rising power of China, just as ancient Rome was challenged by Carthage, and Britain was challenged by Germany in the years before World War I. Should we therefore think of the United States and China as we once did about the United States and the Soviet Union, two gladiators doomed to an increasingly globalized combat until one side fades? 

Or are we entering a new period of diversified global economic cooperation in which the very idea of old-fashioned imperial power politics has become obsolete? Should we see the United States and China as more like France and Germany after World War II, adversaries wise enough to draw together in an increasingly close circle of cooperation that subsumes neighbors and substitutes economic exchange for geopolitical confrontation?

This is the central global question of our as-yet-unnamed historical moment. What will happen now that America's post-Cold War engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan have run their courses and U.S. attention has pivoted to Asia? Can the United States continue to engage China while somehow hedging against the strategic threat it poses? Can China go on seeing the United States as both an object of emulation and a barrier to its rightful place on the world stage?

The answer to these questions is a paradox: the paradox of Cool War. 

The term Cool War aims to capture two different, contradictory historical developments that are taking place simultaneously: A classic struggle for power between two countries is unfolding at the same time that economic cooperation between them is becoming deeper and more fundamental. 

The current situation differs from global power struggles of the past. The world's major power and its leading challenger are economically interdependent to an unprecedented degree. China needs the United States to continue buying its products. The United States needs China to continue lending it money. Their economic fates are, for the foreseeable future, tied together. At the same time, China's consistent military growth and increasingly aggressive stance in the seas that surround it portend regional struggle. The United States has officially "pivoted" to Asia, which means that it has acknowledged the strategic reality that China is the only country on Earth with the capacity and will to strip it of its current superpower status. In the first decade of the 21st century, the major international question was the relation between Islam and democracy. In this second decade of this still-young century, the great issues of conflict and cooperation have shifted. Now U.S. leadership and Western democracy are juxtaposed with China's global aspirations and its protean, emergent governing system. The effects of terrorism can still be felt, as they were recently in Boston, and America's political and media elite often still acts as if the Middle East is the only region that matters for U.S. national security. But for more farsighted observers and policymakers, attention is already shifting east. 

The stakes of the debate over whether to contain China or engage it could not possibly be higher. One side argues that the United States must either accept decline or prepare for war. Only by military strength can the United States convince China that it is not worth challenging America's status as the sole superpower. Projecting weakness would lead to instability and make war all the more likely. The other side counters that trying to contain China is the worst thing the United States can do. Excessive defense spending will make the United States less competitive economically. Worse, it will encourage China to become aggressive itself, leading to an arms race that neither side wants and that would itself increase the chance of violence. Much better, they argue, to engage China politically and economically and encourage it to share the burdens of superpower status.

What we need is to change the way we think and talk about the U.S.-China relationship -- to develop an alternative to simple images of inevitable conflict or utopian cooperation. We need a way to understand the new structure that draws on historical precedent while recognizing why things are different this time. We need to understand where the United States and China can see eye to eye and where they cannot compromise. Most of all, we need a way forward to help avoid the real dangers that lie ahead. 

We also need a more sophisticated understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. No longer ideologically communist, the leadership is pragmatic and committed to preserving its position of power. It seeks to maintain legitimacy through continued growth, regular transitions, and a tentative form of public accountability. It aims to manage deep internal divisions between entitled princelings and self-made meritocrats via a hybrid system that makes room for both types of elites. 

The emerging Cool War will have profound significance for countries around the world, for institutions that exist to keep the peace through international cooperation, for multinational corporations that operate everywhere, and for the future of human rights. Ultimately, like the Cold War before it, this new kind of international engagement will involve every country on Earth.

* * *

A powerful argument can be made that despite its economic rise, China will not try to challenge the position of the United States as the preeminent global leader because of the profound economic interdependence between the two countries. This is the essence of the official, though dated, Chinese slogan of "peaceful rise." Trade accounts for half of China's GDP, with exports significantly out­stripping imports. The United States alone accounts for roughly 25 percent of Chinese sales. Total trade between the countries amounts to a stunning $500 billion a year. The Chinese government holds some $1.2 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt, or 8 percent of the outstanding total. Only the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Social Security trust fund hold more; all American households combined hold less. 

As of the most recent count, 194,000 Chinese students attend U.S. universities; some 70,000 Americans live and study and work in mainland China. We are no longer in the realm of ping-pong diplomacy: We are in the world of economic and cultural partnership. These many cooperative projects require trust, credibility, and commitment -- all of which were lacking between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the long run, China would like to rely less on exports and expand its customer base to include a bigger domestic market. The United States, for its part, would clearly prefer a more dispersed ownership of its debt. But for now, each side is stuck. For the foreseeable future, the U.S.-China economic relationship is going to remain a tight mutual embrace.
The argument that the United States and China will not find themselves in a struggle for global power depends on one historical fact: Never before has the dominant world power been so economically interdependent with the rising challenger it must confront. Under these conditions, trade and debt provide overwhelming economic incentives to avoid conflict that would be costly to all. Over time, the two countries' mutual interests will outweigh any tensions that arise between them. 

Appealing as this liberal internationalist argument may be, seen through the lens of realism, China's economic rise, accompanied by America's relative economic decline, changes the global balance of power. It gives China the means, opportunity, and motive to alter the global arrangement in which the United States is the world's sole superpower. According to the logic of realism, the two countries are therefore already at odds in a struggle for geopolitical dominance. Under the circumstances, a shooting war is not unavoidable -- but conflict is. 

Of all the potential direct flash points for real violent conflict between the United States and China, Taiwan is the scariest. In 2012, Tsai Ing-wen's Democratic Progressive Party won 47 percent of the vote on a platform of active independence. This was a sign that younger Taiwanese want to solidify the de facto independence they have enjoyed for most of their lives. The best Chinese offer is one state, two systems -- along the lines of Hong Kong -- and most Taiwanese tell pollsters they consider that unacceptable. If Tsai or another like-minded politician were to be elected in the future and Beijing wanted to shore up its legitimacy by distracting the public from a lagging economy, a hawkish Chinese leadership with close ties to the People's Liberation Army could send an as-yet-unbuilt aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. president would then face an immediate and pressing dilemma: to respond in kind, inviting war, or to hold back and compromise America's global superpower status in an instant. The Cuban missile crisis looked a lot like this.

But to alter the balance of power in a fundamental way, China does not need to reach military parity with the United States -- and once again, Taiwan is the demonstration case. From Beijing's standpoint, the optimal strategy toward Taiwan is to build up China's military capacity and acquire the island without a fight. The idea is that the United States might be prepared to tolerate the abandonment of its historical ally out of necessity, the way Britain ceded control over Hong Kong when it had no choice. 

To see why this scenario is so plausible, all that is required is to ask the following question: Would the president of the United States go to war with China over Taiwan absent some high-profile immediate crisis capable of mobilizing domestic support? If the United States were to abandon Taipei, it would have to insist to China, as well as Japan, South Korea, and U.S. citizens, that Taiwan was in a basic sense different from the rest of Asia -- that the United States would protect Asian allies from hegemony despite letting Taiwan go.

Failure to do so credibly would transform capitulation on Taiwan into the end of U.S. military hegemony in Asia. It would represent a reversal of the victories in the Pacific during World War II. It would put much of the world's economic power within China's sphere of control, not only its sphere of influence. To be the regional hegemon in Asia would mean dominating more than half the world's population and more than half its economy. Even without increasing its position in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Latin America -- and without achieving military parity -- China could nonetheless be on a par with the United States in terms of global influence. 

That moment of imagination may already have arrived: Although U.S. defense experts might think otherwise, many close watchers of U.S. domestic policy can conceive of a compromise on Taiwan that would restore Chinese sovereignty over the island. The future is now. For the United States to concede Asia to China's domination would entail stepping down from being the world's sole superpower to being one of two competing superpowers. But notice what this means. The only way the United States can credibly commit itself to the protection of its Asian allies is for the United States to remain committed to sole superpower status. China, for its part, need only grow its military capacity to the point where it would be big enough not to have to use it. 

Military rise takes place over decades, not months. Too fast a buildup of Chinese capabilities would spook Washington and encourage hawks. Complete secrecy with regard to such a major buildup would be impossible, especially in an age of self-appointed blogger-spies. The Chinese Communist Party has done a good job of convincing China's public that the country's rise must proceed slowly, with economic growth first. It helps that the party is not subjected to the electoral cycles of democratic governments, with the limited time horizon that such a structure imposes. 

Nevertheless, as most Chinese seem to realize, Beijing's long-term geopolitical interest lies in removing the United States from the position of sole global superpower. The reasons are both psychological and material. Like the United States, China is a continental power with vast reach. It has a glorious imperial history, including regional dominance of what was, for China, much of the known world. In the same way that the United States is proud of democracy and its global spread, China has its own rich civilizational ideal, Confucianism. During the years of China's ascendance, the cultures of Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam -- sometimes called the Sinosphere -- were deeply influenced by Chinese ideas. And Confucianism still plays a meaningful part in the thinking of at least 1.7 billion people. The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating. And as all Chinese know, the country has suffered its fair share of humiliation in the last two centuries. 

This does not mean making Japan or South Korea into part of China. It does mean eventually replacing the existing regional security system that is designed to contain and balance it. The increasingly belligerent conflicts over small islands in the East China and South China seas are products of this emerging trend. In some cases, the islands are strategically important in and of themselves, but more often they represent the nationalist impulses of the competing states involved. Beijing's assertiveness signals that it thinks it should be deferred to because of its new status, while its neighbors' aggressive responses signal that they are unwilling for China to dominate without pushback.   

Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean leader who has been a mentor to every major Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, was recently asked whether China's leaders intend to displace the United States as Asia's preeminent power. "Of course," Lee replied. "Their reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force." Indeed, Lee explained bluntly, "It is China's intention to be the greatest power in the world."


There is plenty of hard evidence to support this interpretation. China's defense budget has grown more than 10 percent annually for several years, rising officially to $116 billion in the most recent published reports, with actual defense spending likely as high as $180 billion. In just the past couple of years, China commissioned its first aircraft carrier (a refitted Soviet model), announced plans to build several more, and openly tested several stealth aircraft and drones. In 2012, Communist Party-controlled media acknowledged more ambitious plans to develop ballistic missiles that would carry multiple warheads -- and therefore be able to get around the U.S. missile defense shield. China is also working on submarine-­launched missiles that would avoid U.S. early-warning systems left over from the Cold War. And it's building up its space program on both the civilian and military sides. 

Cyberwar, a fast-developing new front in global conflict, is another facet of China's effort to change its power relationship with the United States. Cyberattacks are not what makes the Cool War "cool," as some writers on ForeignPolicy.com have suggested. As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage. But cyberattacks are just now an especially fruitful method from the Chinese perspective because they do not (yet) involve traditional military mobilization and they exploit a dimension in which U.S. and Chinese power are more symmetrical. Cyberattacks involve a certain amount of deniability, as efforts can be made to mask the origin of attacks, making attribution difficult. They may have a significant economic upside, especially if they involve theft of intellectual property from U.S. firms. Moreover, cyberwar takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides. Best of all for China, the rules for cyberwar are still very much in flux. Regular cyberattacks are therefore likely to be an ongoing facet of a Cool War, even if they are not definitional.

* * *

Faced with the reality of conflict falling short of war, both sides need to cultivate allies as a component of their struggle. The Cold War's major strategic developments, from Soviet expansion to containment, from détente to Richard Nixon's opening to China, all clustered around the question of who would be aligned with whom. The Cool War, too, will involve a struggle to gain and keep allies. The meaning of alliance, however, will differ from what it meant during earlier wars, in which trade between the different camps was severely constricted. In the Cool War, the primary antagonists are each other's largest trading partners. Each side can try to offer security and economic partnership, but cannot easily demand an exclusive relationship with potential client states of the kind that obtained in the Cold War. Instead the goal will be to deepen connections over time so that the targeted ally comes to see its interests as more closely aligned with one side rather than the other. Much more than during the Cold War, key players may try to have it both ways. This is why many countries attempt to negotiating free trade with one or both sides, while keeping security ties with the other. 

The Pacific region is the first and most obvious place where the game of alliances has begun to be played -- and it challenges the post-World War II "hub and spokes" arrangement of bilateral treaties between the United States and Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia that guaranteed security without joining them into a single regional alliance on the model of NATO. 

Over the course of the last decade, China has replaced the United States as the largest trading partner with each of these Pacific countries. Consider this: In some fashion, the United States is now engaged in guaranteeing these countries' freedom to trade with China.
In November 2012, China joined Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to announce negotiations for what the group calls a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Taken as a whole, the proposed free trade group would include a population of some 3 billion people with as much as $20 trillion in GDP and approximately 40 percent of the world's trade. It represents an alternative to the American-proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would include the United States but not China. For the moment, neither is mutually exclusive, but the exclusions are significant. 

China's long-term interest is to supplant and eventually replace the United States as the most important regional actor. It has benefited from U.S. security guarantees and now sees no reason why it should be hemmed in by American proxies. At the same time, it must be careful not to frighten Japan and South Korea so much that they cling to Washington's embrace. Creating a regional trade alliance that included traditional U.S. regional allies but not the United States would serve these complicated and slightly contradictory goals. It would provide countries like Japan and South Korea with the incentive to draw closer to China while framing that movement in terms of economic advantage rather than security.
Emblematic of the Cool War's contradictory new reality is that China is negotiating for free trade with Japan at precisely the moment when geopolitical tensions between them are at their highest point in decades. The conflict over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands went from civilian to military in a matter of months, as both sides scrambled jet fighters and mobilized navies. This conflict is itself logical: the product of uncertainty over the changing balance of power. Yet the economic partnership is strengthening simultaneously. 

The U.S. response to the changing geostrategic situation has been to signal increasing willingness to empower its regional allies, particularly Japan. The incorporation of a Japanese admiral as the second in command at last summer's RIMPAC exercise, the world's largest joint naval drill, was a signal that the United States views with favor a potential Japanese shift away from pacifism and toward a more active regional security role. And though U.S. President Barack Obama recently extended its agreement with South Korea to avoid its military nuclearization, the option remains on the table. 

But this regional response will not be enough. The United States will also have to broaden its base of allies using the tools of ideology. The strongest argument that can be made to countries that trade freely with China is that Chinese hegemony would threaten their democratic freedoms. Sen. John McCain's proposed league of democracies -- a kind of free-form alliance of ideologically similar states designed to leave out China and Russia -- is therefore likely to be revived eventually, though probably under another name. 

India is the leading candidate for membership. The originator of the Non-Aligned Movement is not in the same position as it was during the Cold War. Today, nonalignment risks letting China rise to regionally dominant status. India's interest is to balance China in the realm of geopolitics while urging it to respect international law, especially the laws of intellectual property and trade. India must, of course, be careful not to push the Chinese too far. China could use border troubles with India to feed domestic nationalism. But India could potentially be increasingly open to joining a democratic league to help contain China. The natural ground for the alliance is democracy and human rights -- the features that the United States and India share but China lacks. 

China's great advantage in the race to find allies is its pragmatism. Unlike the United States, which often struggles awkwardly with its autocratic allies, China typically makes no demands that its allies comply with international norms of human rights or other responsible behavior. China's natural allies are, as a result, often bad international actors, as the examples of Iran, North Korea, and Syria make clear. Meanwhile, Beijing has an independent interest in opposing any form of humanitarian intervention or regime change based on a human rights justification -- hence its opposition to any justifications by the U.N. Security Council for intervention in Syria. 

So it is natural -- and so far, cost-effective -- for China to provide cover for such allies. Russia shares the same interests, and the once-chilly China-Russia relationship has been considerably warmed by overlapping interests in trying to limit Western regime change. Indeed, Russia may emerge as China's most important geostrategic ally -- a development signaled recently by Xi Jinping making Russia his first foreign trip after assuming the Chinese presidency. Nothing of the kind had happened since Nixon's opening to China created a 30-year rift between the former allies. If the United States reached out to China in the Cold War to weaken the Soviet Union, China may try to use Russia similarly in the Cool War. Certainly, Russia's Vladimir Putin seems like he would oblige. 

China has also been highly effective in creating alliances with resource-rich African states. China became Africa's leading trading partner in 2010. China typically opts to work with existing governments -- whether they are autocratic does not matter -- to build infrastructure that is sorely lacking. The Chinese tout their own expertise in rapid development; they bring Chinese labor to do the job; and they promise to deliver the benefits of improved roads, rivers, and revenue streams for government. 

China's pragmatic approach to Africa is free of any evangelical spirit and appeals to its interlocutors' naked self-interest -- and the Chinese make no bones about the fact that they are pursuing their own self-interest as well. They make little or no attempt to reform African governance or African ways of life. They may condescend, but they do not lecture. Unlike Western interactions with Africa, the Chinese encounter does not seem plagued by bad conscience. How much this will ultimately matter to Africans remains to be seen. Backlash has begun in some places, and there will no doubt be more. But a policy of pragmatic honesty may confer real advantages when dealing with countries and peoples who are accustomed to being met with self-serving lies. China aims to get the benefits of resource colonization without paying the international price of being hated as a colonizer -- and it has a reasonable chance of succeeding.

* * *

Extensive cooperation in economics, intense competition in geopolitics: This new situation poses extraordinary risks. Yet economic interdependence also poses unique opportunities for the peaceful resolution of conflict. What's more, it creates common interests that mitigate the impulse to domination. Trade is the area where cooperation can have the greatest transformative effects -- and the greatest potential avenue for resolution of conflicts. Today, China is an active participant in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, which is the most effective expression of international law ever created. Countries obey the decisions of WTO tribunals out of straightforward self-interest: The cost of defection is outweighed by the benefits of staying in the international trade regime. This is not a route to world government, utopian or dystopian, but rather a model of self-interested rule of law in an important economic realm. 

To manage the Cool War, we must always keep in mind the tremendous gains that both the United States and China have achieved and will continue to experience as a result of economic cooperation. Both sides should use the leverage of their mutually beneficial economic relationship to make fighting less attractive. The positive benefits of trade will not render geopolitical conflict obsolete. But focusing on them can help discourage a too rapid recourse to violence. 

The world is going to change under conditions of Cool War, and efforts to keep the conflict from heating up must take account of these changes. New networks of international alliances are emerging. International organizations like the WTO will have more power than before and should be deployed judiciously and creatively. International economic law can increasingly be enforced as a result of participants' mutual self-interest. Global corporations will have to develop new national allegiances as part of a Cool War world, but they can also provide incentives to discourage violence and associated economic losses. Human rights, long treated as a rhetorical prop in the struggle between great powers, will still be used as a tool. But over time, respecting rights may come to be in China's interests, with major consequences for the enforcement of human rights everywhere. 

What unifies these conclusions is a willingness to embrace persistent contradiction as a fact of our world. We must be prepared to acknowledge both diverging interests and also areas of profound overlap. We must be forthright about ideological distance, yet remain open to the possibility that it can gradually be bridged. We must pay attention to the role of enduring self-interest while also remembering that what we believe our interest to be can change what it actually is. 

The United States and China really are opponents -- and they really do need each other to prosper. Accepting all this requires changing some of our assumptions about friends and enemies, allies and competitors. It means acknowledging that opposed forces and ideas do not always merge into a grand synthesis and that their struggle also need not issue in an epic battle to the finish. 

It would be uplifting to conclude that peace is logical, that rational people on all sides will avert conflict by acting sensibly. But such a conclusion simply betrays the facts -- and possibilities -- of this tense relationship. Instead I offer a more modest claim: Geostrategic conflict is inevitable, but mutual economic interdependence can help manage that conflict and keep it from spiraling out of control.

We cannot project a winner in the Cool War. If violence can be avoided, human well-being improved, and human rights expanded, perhaps everybody could emerge as a winner. If, however, confrontation leads to violence, we will all lose.