China: Flexionando os musculos mais afirmadamente - Douglas H. Paal (Carnegie)

 Contradictions in China’s Foreign Policy

Douglas H. Paal

Carnegie Endowment, December 13, 2013

You may have missed the funeral, but China’s new leadership has quietly buried the admonition of former leader Deng Xiaoping that as China rises in wealth and power it should maintain a low profile (known as taoguang yanghui). In its place, the new leadership is advancing a more proactive diplomacy in surrounding regions. President Xi Jinping is displaying self-confidence that seems to match the mood of the times in China, one of renewed nationalism and self-assertion. In most neighboring capitals this development will be viewed positively but warily; in Manila and Tokyo, less positively.

The issue is that China wants the benefits of a charm offensive with its neighbors, but it also wants to jealously guard its far-flung territorial claims. It cannot do both.

Beijing held a major conference on peripheral diplomacy on October 24 and 25. Xi made what was described as an “important speech,” followed by remarks by Premier Li Keqiang and Beijing’s top party and government foreign policy officials. This was shortly before China announced its intention to create a State Security Commission (also variously translated as National Security Council or National Security Commission) at the third plenum of the 18th Party Congress. Taken together, these actions portend a concerted activism that will deploy China’s newly acquired wealth and influence to “maintain a stable peripheral environment.”

Xi’s speech catalogued the economic aid, trade, scientific and technological, financial, security, and public relations diplomacy tools for China’s regional strategy. The official press releases did not mention sensitive issues such as territorial disputes or the soon-to-be-imposed air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea. According to people familiar with the details of the meeting, however, these issues were very much on the agenda.

As if to foreshadow the peripheral diplomacy conference with examples of what China is undertaking, Xi conducted a four-nation state visit to Central Asia in September. During his stop in Kazakhstan, he called for a “new silk road” with enhanced infrastructure and financing for energy, trade, telecommunications, and regional development throughout the region. The trip was positively reviewed.

Also before the conference, Xi and Li participated in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Indonesia and the East Asia Summit in Brunei in October. While U.S. President Barack Obama stayed home to deal with a government shutdown, they conducted welcome visits to five Southeast Asian nations with promises of aid and trade.

One important announcement was the formation of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) infrastructure bank. According to one official, this concept envisions using China’s substantial foreign exchange holdings to finance ports, railways, highways, and other infrastructure to integrate China with Southeast Asian markets. Beijing intends to achieve regional buy-in with nominal contributions to the bank’s capital from some of the members of ASEAN. The long-term economic and soft-power implications of this scheme, if carried through, appear substantial.

Differentiated Treatment of Governments and Publics

One result of the conference on peripheral diplomacy was an affirmation of the benefits of trying to win public support among the populations with whose governments China is having difficulties. After months of relentlessly negative press about Japan in Chinese media, in late October China hosted the ninth Beijing-Tokyo Forum, composed of former officials and private sector representatives from both countries. The media coverage of this relatively small event was uncharacteristically positive, and Japanese participants were able to contribute signed articles to Beijing’s outlets.

Despite truly negative results for China in Japanese polls since the intensification of the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and the announcement of the East China Sea ADIZ on November 23, Beijing reportedly is prepared to continue seeking to improve the attitudes of ordinary Japanese while freezing high-level official exchanges. Japanese trade and investment with China has remained surprisingly resilient. Beijing’s goal is to isolate and press the government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to acknowledge the existence of a dispute over the islands.

Similarly, China is treating the Philippines in a differentiated fashion. President Benigno Aquino III was shut out of a China-hosted regional gathering because of ongoing disputes over offshore shoals and submerged rocks. Beijing is particularly irked by Manila’s so-far-successful pursuit of a case against Chinese territorial claims with the UN’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Nonetheless, when Typhoon Haiyan (known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines) devastated the southern Philippines, Beijing slowly but substantially assisted with humanitarian relief. China even dispatched its new naval hospital ship, the Peace Ark, to help treat those injured.

No Less Assertive About China’s Claims

Another result of the burial of Deng’s low-key approach to foreign affairs at the peripheral diplomacy conference was reinforcement of China’s claims to disputed maritime territories. The conference reportedly gave final approval to the long-gestating objective of establishing the East China Sea ADIZ. It may have also envisioned ADIZs in the Yellow and South China Seas.

The notion first surfaced publicly in 2008 and gained support as Japan increasingly reported Chinese intrusions into its ADIZ, leading many Chinese to seek parity with Japan. Beijing did extensive research into the subject and discovered that the zones are not governed by international law and are well within China’s rights to establish. When Japanese officials publicly discussed shooting down Chinese drones over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, the impulse in China to move toward the declaration of a Chinese zone was strengthened.

Officials saw the zone as a means to increase leverage on Japan. If China were to declare a zone encompassing the disputed islands and overlapping Japan’s ADIZ, it would presumably increase domestic and international pressure on Tokyo to negotiate rules of engagement to avoid incidents. This would give China the opportunity to insist as a precondition that Japan admit, as it has been unwilling to do, that a dispute exists over the sovereignty of the islands.

In light of the generally positive thrust of the policies intended with the peripheral diplomacy conference, the announcement of China’s new ADIZ seemed especially clumsy and counterproductive with regard to China’s neighbors. The People’s Liberation Army has responsibility for the ADIZ and thus for its declaration. The declaration initially sounded like all dire warnings and no reassurance. The intensely negative reaction from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Australia, and the nervous finger strumming of other neighbors, subsequently caused China to issue a series of reassuring clarifications.

This clumsiness, in contrast with the leadership’s generally positive intent to promote a stable regional environment for China’s continued development, may be due to the continuing effects of a military with scant diplomatic experience stepping into a diplomatic role. Former Chinese diplomats were quick to ask foreigners to tell the Chinese leadership that prior consultation on announcements such as that of the ADIZ should occur to avoid unnecessarily negative reactions. There is hope that China’s new State Security Commission will bridge some of the gaps in policy execution, despite experience that dictates otherwise.

But it is equally plausible that China’s leaders remain comfortable taking tough stances on issues involving sovereignty. Certainly, Xi’s track record for the past year has emphasized vigorous defense of Chinese claims to disputed territories and advocated an increasingly capable military, especially in new areas of maritime activity. During a recent visit there, it was much easier to find ordinary Chinese taking pride in the fact that their government established China’s growing influence through the declaration of the ADIZ than to locate critics.

Many Chinese are pleased that their government has taken a step to enhance and extend the reach of Chinese influence in a way that others cannot halt. This pride about the ADIZ announcement is consistent with the use of maritime administration vessels to assert Chinese presence in disputed waters, using ostensibly civilian means to circumvent direct military confrontation.

Policy Implications

China’s adoption of a well-resourced agenda seeking better relations with its neighbors offers the kind of competition for influence that the U.S. government has repeatedly said it welcomes. China pursued such an agenda between 1998 and 2008 with considerable success, especially in Southeast Asia.

After the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the global financial crisis, however, China became more outspoken and intolerant of its neighbors’ claims. It embarked on an approach that would seize on actions by others involving disputes, such as Vietnam creating a municipal jurisdiction for its disputed South China Sea islands, and respond even more forcefully with actions of its own. This has triggered a series of quid pro quo chain reactions across the region.

In any event, whether China’s neighbors are charmed or alarmed by Beijing’s actions, their demand for an American counterweight will continue to grow. It is incumbent on the United States and China’s neighbors to make the U.S. investment in their security rest within broader economic and diplomatic activities that will sustain the support of the American people. The Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations symbolize this productive path to greater economic interdependence as part and parcel of a continuing U.S. role in the region.

Unlike in Southeast Asia, where distances and lower levels of military development tend to soften the effects of frictions with China for now, in Northeast Asia, all parties are better armed and in fairly close proximity, so their air forces and navies are well within range of each other. Moreover, the present leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea appear more willing to accept risks than their predecessors. Indeed, each capital seems to have calculated that a simmering level of tension suits its political needs. This can be the tinder for conflagrations that quickly get out of control despite intentions of restraint.

In this environment, one normally reaches for a cookbook of confidence-building mechanisms, such as hotlines, agreements on incidents at sea, and mid- and high-level diplomacy. This may be possible and probably is worth seeking between South Korea and China, where ADIZs overlap but territorial claims do not. In the South China Sea disputes, stepped-up efforts to achieve a workable code of conduct would be preferable to a new round of ADIZ announcements.

If China continues to condition such mechanisms with Japan on acknowledgement of a territorial dispute, then the political will to agree will not be found in Tokyo. The United States should continue to combine messages urging restraint by all parties with robust reaffirmation of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.

A delicate balance must be struck between being unyielding to more unilateral efforts to change the status quo and getting trapped in escalatory behavior that might otherwise be avoided. This will require spokespeople for the Obama administration to speak with greater clarity and uniformity than they have at present on how the United States intends not to recognize China’s new ADIZ. There is a need to reconcile State Department and White House statements with notices from the Federal Aviation Administration to civilian airlines that imply acceptance of the new ADIZ.

As it has done, the Obama administration should insist on freedom of navigation despite the declared ADIZ and on abiding by international established practices within the zones. It should also assert that an ADIZ conveys no implications regarding sovereignty.

And the United States and its security partners need to maintain or increase the pace of deployments and exercises within the first island chain to dilute the Chinese sense of having diminished American influence there. They should also compete vigorously with China’s charm diplomacy in traditional and creative ways. There is considerable room for a range of multilateral initiatives on issues such as public health, the environment, education, and the sharing of fisheries as well as on more conventional security and diplomatic arrangements. The U.S. Congress should support and not impede the president’s ability to carry out the nation’s diplomacy.

In addition, the United States should sustain, deepen, and broaden its newly revived military-to-military interaction with China’s armed forces. Congress should trust the U.S. military and retract the 2000 National Defense Authorization Act’s constraints on that activity.

Finally, U.S. national security authorities should calmly seek opportunities to show China that the ADIZ surprise announcement was a costly mistake. Much as when North Korea launched a satellite and conducted its third nuclear-weapon test and the United States later announced an increase in anti-ballistic missile interceptor launchers in Alaska, Washington should patiently and nonprovocatively undermine the sense that American forces are being pushed out of China’s near seas.

Beijing should be helped to understand that it is not a zero-sum game.

Edward Snowden, a thinker? You are kidding... - Foreign Policy prize

Edward Snowden não é seguramente um pensador, embora ele tenha tido um papel útil ao alertar as sociedades sobre os exageros do Estado orwelliano.

A segurança só é considerada importante quando ela nos falta, justamente, como sempre recordaremos por causa do Onze de Setembro, de Madrid, Londres, Buenos Aires e tantos outros lugares que já sofreram ataques terroristas.

Nesse sentido, Snowden pode ter pensado errado, embora movido por outras preocupações também legítimas.

Mas, e se como resultado de suas ações, atentados não puderem ser prevenidos pelos constrangimentos que agora, graças a Snowden, serão postos aos serviços de segurança?

Os que agora o incensam irão censurá-lo?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Edward Snowden's Statement to FP on His Selection as a Global Thinker

Foreign Policy / by Shane Harris 

/ December 12, 2013

Edward Snowden, who has become the public face of an international debate over surveillance, tops the list of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers for 2013. The former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence operations has been living in Russia since June and is currently wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities and faces charges in federal court. In lieu of attending a reception in Washington on Wednesday for this year's Global Thinkers, Snowden sent the following statement:

It's an honor to address you tonight. I apologize for being unable to attend in person, but I've been having a bit of passport trouble. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras also regrettably could not accept their invitations. As it turns out, revealing matters of "legitimate concern" nowadays puts you on the list for more than "Global Thinker" awards.

2013 has been an important year for civil society. As we look back on the events of the past year and their implications for the state of surveillance within the United States and around the world, I suspect we will remember this year less for the changes in policies that are sure to come, than for changing our minds. In a single year, people from Indonesia to Indianapolis have come to realize that dragnet surveillance is not a mark of progress, but a problem to be solved.

We've learned that we've allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities. And take notice: this awareness, and these sentiments, are held most strongly among the young--those with lifetimes of votes ahead of them.

Even those who may not be persuaded that our surveillance technologies have dangerously outpaced democratic controls should agree that in democracies, surveillance of the public must be debated by the public. No official may decide the limit of our rights in secret.

Today we stand at the crossroads of policy, where parliaments and presidents on every continent are grappling with how to bring meaningful oversight to the darkest corners of our national security bureaucracies. The stakes are high. James Madison warned that our freedoms are most likely to be abridged by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power. I bet my life on the idea that together, in the light of day, we can find a better balance.

I'm grateful to Foreign Policy Magazine and the many others helping to expose those encroachments and to end that silence.

Thank you.

Governo Obama invade a privacidade dos cidadaos - Foreign Policy, New York Times

Uma tendência preocupante, e potencialmente mais ofensiva do que as patifarias do Nixon e as arbitrariedades do Bush W.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The PRISM through which the WH views privacy; An award for Mabus; An “out member” gets a second star; Five vet charities termed “the worst”; Sonenshine on public diplomacy; and a bit more.

By Gordon Lubold

Foreign Policy, June 7, 2013

After the Verizon story yesterday, new revelations about the Obama administration's tapping of Internet records. The WaPo obtained a top-secret document that shows that the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the servers of nine American Internet companies, "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets," according to the paper this morning. "The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley."

And: "Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: 'Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.' PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush's secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority."

The war ain't over.  Despite Obama's declaring that "all wars must end" in a recent speech at National Defense University, the revelations of Internet tapping and phone records show that at least behind that shadowy world, the administration is still very much on a war footing. The NYT's Peter Baker: "Whatever his ambivalence about what President George W. Bush called a global war, Mr. Obama has used some of the same aggressive powers in the name of guarding national security even, in the view of critics, at the expense of civil liberties. Rather than dismantling Mr. Bush's approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing."

Strange bed fellows: Baker notes how Dems like Al Gore and Tea Partiers like Rand Paul see the privacy issue in much the same way. "'Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?' former Vice President Al Gore, the former Democratic presidential nominee, wrote in a Twitter message. On his own Twitter account, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a possible Republican presidential candidate, condemned the surveillance as 'an astounding assault on the Constitution.'

WaPo published slides that describe the PRISM program, here.

Why you shouldn't be hyped about some of this. Writing on FP, Stewart Baker: "Does this mean the end of privacy, law, and the Constitution? Nope. There are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that these "scandals" signal a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties. Despite this apparent breadth, and even if we assume that the leaked FISA order is genuine, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that it signals a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties."

=======

EDITORIAL

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The New York Times, June 6, 2013

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

•

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose.

Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know whom Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and it repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said on Thursday that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

•

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the surveillance policy of the George W. Bush administration “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

Venezuela: a revolucao afoga seus filhos (e netos, e primos, e esposas) num mar de m..., de corrupcao, etc., etc., etc...

Dramas que seriam shakespeareanos são apenas sórdidos, na pior tradição das gangues de criminosos de certos morros cariocas ou de traficantes colombianos ou mexicanos.

Edificantes diálogos entre um agente cubano e um serviçal da mesma ditadura, tentando sobreviver à derrocada da pior liderança jamais conhecida na história dos país.

Pobre Venezuela, infelizes venezuelanos.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Chávez propagandist in leaked recording: 'We are in a sea of shit, my friend'

Foreign Policy, May 21, 2013

The Venezuelan opposition on Monday released a recording of what it says is a conversation between Mario Silva, a prominent Venezuelan television host and a favorite of the late Hugo Chávez, and a Cuban intelligence officer, in which Silva details a feud within the government between Chávez loyalists and Diosdado Cabello, the president of the National Assembly.
In the conversation with Aramis Palacios, a lieutenant colonel in the G2, the Cuban intelligence agency, Silva, the host of the state television program "La Hojilla," describes a government deeply divided against itself, with rival factions competing for power amid rampant corruption.
The conversation was allegedly recorded for the benefit of Cuban President Raúl Castro, but its authenticity has not been independently verified. Writing on Twitter, Silva dismissed the recording as a Zionist plot.
Assuming that's not the case, set against the backdrop of the recent highly contested presidential election and Chávez's death, Silva sketches a portrait of a government in turmoil marred by high-level corruption, shares rumors of a coup d'état against President Nicolás Maduro, and says he fears that Maduro is being manipulated by his wife. Additionally, according to Silva, on election day the Venezuelan National Electoral Council was the victim of a cyberattack that brought down its security protocol for at least an hour, an allegation that would seem to further call into question the integrity of the vote.
The full audio (a transcript, in Spanish, is here) is available below:
Prior to being selected by Chávez as his heir apparent, Maduro engaged in a bitter power strugglewith Cabello, and if Silva's account is correct, a great deal of tension remains between the two men. At one point, Silva, who might be described as the country's de facto propaganda minister, says that "Maduro is obligated to follow the path of el Comandante and is obligated to put Diosdado Cabello against the wall," a statement that is difficult to read as anything other than a suggestion to put Cabello before a firing squad.
But it's not entirely clear that Silva trusts Maduro either. "I am afraid, Palacios, that Nicolás ... is feeling manipulated by Cilia [his wife]," Silva tells the Cuban officer. "This is a continent ofcaudillos [strongmen], my friend, and the woman has to stay in the shade." Silva then compares Maduro's tendency to appear in public alongside his wife and to kiss her to the worst tendencies of an American poltician. "This isn't a North American campaign," he says. "This is a Latin American campaign." Elsewhere in the conversation, Silva wonders why Chávez didn't make a tape recording of his decision to anoint Maduro as his successor.
Although Chávez used the armed forces to consolidate his power, according to Silva, the army is now divided, with some factions in favor of staging a coup. According to Silva, Maduro has managed to alienate Diego Molero, the country's defense minister, whom Silva describes as an "operator" and a "commando." The strained relationship resulted in rumors circulating in Caracas that Molero was about to launch a coup attempt, leading Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, to dispatch Silva via intermediaries to find out if the rumours were true. They were not.
But for the man charged with selling the idea of the Bolivarian Revolution to the Venezuelan people, Silva speaks like a man who has become disillusioned with what has become of the government. He describes rampant corruption and officials dipping into public funds for their personal benefit. "We are in a sea of shit, my friend, and we have not yet realized it, Palacios," Silva says.
Despite the explosive nature of the conversation between Silva and Palacios -- never mind the crazy fact that he is having in-depth conversations with Cuban intelligence agents in the first place -- it is far from clear what repercussions this recording will have on the ground in Venezuela.Writing at Caracas Chronicles, Juan Nagel makes a compelling case that this recording may strip some of the revolutionary veneer off Maduro:

The important thing to keep in mind is that we are not the target audience for this recording.
Yes, we all knew that Cabello was a crook, Maduro a nincompoop, Silva a marxist Cuban mole, Rangel an evil power broker, and Flores a scheming Lady Macbeth. But the important thing is that rank-and-file chavistas … didn’t. Up until now, they have been immune from these facts because of the messenger.

Either way, take a moment to revel in the sweet irony of the fact that Chávez's favorite propagandist is now responsible for providing the most stinging critique to date of the Maduro government.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/20/leaked_recording_of_chavez_propagandist_and_cuban_intel_officer_reveals_deep_divisi

O Imperio repensa o seu exercito - Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy Situation Report
Foreign Policy February 9, 2013

FP Exclusive: Odierno says the Army must change

Whither the Army? At the end of more than a decade of two large land wars and budget cuts forcing new thinking in the military's role in the world, the Army is at a crossroads. While the much-hyped pivot to Asia seems to give the strategic nod to the Air Force and the Navy, with the small Marine Corps not far behind, the Army is now seen as having to adapt quickly to position itself for a new future. For the man who has to lead that transition, it's all about explaining what the Army does, how important decisions today will affect tomorrow, and what the service must do to change. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno is releasing his "strategic intent" this morning exclusively on FP and here in Situation Report, where he makes the case that his service is still critical, still relevant, and still necessary in an uncertain world. But he says the service must also adapt to meet an array of new challenges by making forces more scalable and investing heavily -- and earlier in their careers -- in building leaders, all while remaining accountable to the taxpayers who make the force possible.

Odierno: "To posture the force for the complexities of the strategic environment, we must simultaneously reform our processes and training to generate forces scalable from squad to corps. We cannot afford to limit our planning to brigade combat teams. Our success going forward will be built on deploying the right soldiers, with the right training, in the right size units, at the right time. Small unit leadership will be at a premium in this potential environment of dispersed, decentralized operations. In some circumstances that may require small teams of soldiers engaged in partnership activities. Others may require the combined mass of brigades, divisions, or corps. This does not necessarily suggest a smaller force, but an Army capable of deploying tailored packages to the point of need, while retaining the ability to rapidly reassemble into larger combat formations as requirements change or small conflicts expand."

On the Army of today: "[A]n objective assessment of what is required to fulfill our mission in a complex future environment against a constantly evolving range of threats demands that we continue to invest in the specific skills, equipment, and forces needed to do so effectively. This demands foresight and innovation, as well as a bottom-up engagement by our most valuable asset -- our soldiers and leaders. It also requires recognition that the Army, like our nation, must be good stewards of our resources in an era of increasing fiscal austerity."

On keeping pace with technology: "The cyber revolution has created new ways for people to connect. Information passes instantly over great distances, and entire virtual communities have been created through social media.... [M]any of our adversaries lack the ability to confront our forces physically, choosing instead to employ virtual weapons with potentially devastating effect. We must take full advantage of these technologies, building our own capabilities to operate in cyberspace with the same level of skill and confidence we enjoy on the land. We will either adapt to this reality or risk ceding the advantage to future enemies."

On equipment and the leaders it needs: "This effort requires equipment that gives our squads, as the foundation of the force, capabilities that overwhelm any potential foe, enabled by vehicles that improve mobility and lethality while retaining survivability. It needs a network that connects all our assets across the joint force together in the most austere of environments to deliver decisive results in the shortest time possible. It demands leaders with the ability to think broadly and critically, aware of the cultural lenses through which their actions will be viewed and cognizant of the potential strategic ramifications of their decisions."

The Navy's Adm. Jon Greenert wrote on FP about the Navy's pivot to Asia in November and the Marine Corps' Lt. Gen. Richard Mills wrote on FP last fall about the need for the Corps to return to the littorals for the bulk of the operations in the future.

Odierno's likely new boss will probably be confirmed by the full Senate next week, we're told. There are still a good many people who believe Chuck Hagel is the right man for the Pentagon's top job, but his showing at the confirmation hearing Thursday was roundly considered lackluster. That's why he's still working the Hill this week, visiting senators who are seen as key to getting him the 70 votes the Hagel camp wants. The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to vote Thursday, and the full Senate will take up the confirmation next week before the President's Day recess, Situation Report is told. That could put Hagel in office within a couple of weeks. Indeed, Panetta's Farewell Tour begins this week.

Republica Nacional Socialista da China - John Garnaut (Foreign Policy)

Parece que as semelhanças não são simples coincidências, e não são apenas superficiais, ou circunstanciais. 
Nada mais parecido do que um totalitarismo cinzento do que um totalitarismo vermelho, e isso não tem nada a ver com esquerda ou direita, apenas com tirania...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

National Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Meet He Di, the insider trying to save the Chinese Communist Party from itself.

BY JOHN GARNAUT |Foreign Policy,NOVEMBER 15, 2012

BEIJING — Two years ago, one of China's most successful investment bankers broke away from his meetings in Berlin to explore a special exhibit that had caught his eye: "Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime." In the basement of the German History Museum, He Di watched crowds uneasily coming to terms with how their ancestors had embraced the Nazi promise of "advancement, prosperity and the reinstatement of former national grandeur," as the curators wrote in their introduction to the exhibit. He, vice-chairman of investment banking at the Swiss firm UBS, found the exhibition so enthralling, and so disturbing for the parallels he saw with back home, that he spent three days absorbing everything on Nazi history that he could find.

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"I saw exactly how Hitler combined populism and nationalism to support Nazism," He told me in an interview in Beijing. "That's why the neighboring countries worry about China's situation. All these things we also worry about." On returning to China he sharpened the mission statement at the think tank he founded in 2007 and redoubled its ideological crusade.

He's Boyuan Foundation exists almost entirely under the radar, but is probably the most ambitious, radical, and consequential think tank in China. After helping bring the Chinese economy into the arena of global capital through his work at UBS, He now aspires to enable Chinese people to live in a world of what he and his ideological allies call "universal values": liberty, democracy, and free markets. While the foundation advises government institutions, including leaders at the banking and financial regulators, its core mission is to "achieve a societal consensus" around the universal values that it believes underpin a modern economic, political and social system.

"This is the transition from a traditional to a modern society," He says.

The challenge for Boyuan is that "universal values" clash with the ideology of the Communist Party, which holds itself above those values. "Boyuan is like the salons that initiated and incubated the governing ideas of the French revolution," says David Kelly, research director at a Beijing advisory group who has been mapping China's intellectual landscape. "They explicitly want to bring the liberal enlightenment to China."

The 65-year-old He is at the forefront of an ideological war that is playing out in the background of this week's epic leadership transition, where current Chinese President Hu Jintao officially yielded power to Xi Jinping. At one pole of this contest of ideas are He's universal values; at the other, the revolutionary ideology of the party's patriarch, Mao Zedong. This battle for China's future plays into the decade-long factional struggle between Hu and his recently resurgent predecessor, Jiang Zemin. Jiang's ideological disposition has evolved in chameleon fashion but in recent years he has hinted that if the party remains inflexibly beholden to Mao Zedong-era thought and Soviet-era institutions then it faces a risk of Soviet-style collapse.

When He Di stepped down as chairman of UBS China in 2008 -- after leading the investment banking capital raising charts for four straight years -- UBS gave him an office, a secretary, and a salary with no minimum work requirements. He continued to find UBS lucrative deals, capable princelings to hire (such as the son of former Vice Premier Li Ruihuan) and introductions to wealthy private banking clients. The Swiss bank also gave him $5 million to inject into Boyuan, just weeks before the 2008 global financial crisis, without any strings attached except the appointment of a UBS representative on his board, according to Boyuan representatives. He tipped in $1 million of his own as he redeployed his resources to build a platform for ideas. "One day I picked up the phone and called potential board members." he said. "I called 6 or 7 ministers or vice ministers, without any hesitation."

Boyuan's Beijing headquarters is an elegantly renovated courtyard home on the north side of the city. Behind He's desk is a wall of books on history, philosophy, and reform. Over a simple lunch of braised vegetables and endless cups of tea, he told me how his commitment to liberal values is rooted in a strand of Communist Party tradition that flourished in the 1980s and has since been subordinated but not entirely vanquished. "My grandfather and father were all fighting to establish not dictatorship, not feudalism, but so that people at the grassroots could enjoy a good life." He's grandfather was a vice-minister in the Kuomingtang government that ruled China until the Communists defeated it in 1949; he was beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution.

He's father was an influential agricultural minister in the reformist 1980s, a talented agriculturalscientist respected for his integrity who helped guide China's peasants to shed the communal owning of land. This was China's moment of enlightenment, He says, where the revolutionary veterans respected the judgment of peasants and entrepreneurs alike to choose what to plant, what to make, and how to take it to market. The trick, as any laissez-faire bureaucrat knows, was simply to get out of the way. "At that time, the top leaders really understand the concept of so-called ‘universal values,' which means human rights and allowing the people freedom to choose what they want," says He. "They respected the abilities of the people, reflecting a universal value not necessarily coming from the West but based on human beings basic needs."

He had originally intended the Boyuan Foundation to be a retirement pursuit, a project of collective self-enlightenment with close childhood friends. His worries grew as he watched a fellow princeling, Bo Xilai, breathe new life into the spirit of Mao and whip up a popular frenzy in Chongqing, the inland mega-city Bo governed. As he watched Chinese citizens embrace modernity and the party-state slide back toward the revolutionary ideology of his childhood, his ambitions turned from supporting China's modern evolution to saving it.

When He returned to Beijing after his visit to Berlin in late 2010, he discovered that renowned scholars had been investigating those same parallels, even if they could not publicize their work. Shanghai historian Xu Jilin had traced China's leftward turn (leftists in China are the more conservative, jingoistic faction) to the 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia which grew into a "nationalist cyclone," a moment when China's rising pride, power, and the political phenomenon of Bo Xilai started to gain momentum. "Statist thinking is gaining ground in the mainstream ideology of officialdom, and may even be practiced on a large-scale in some regions of "singing Red songs and striking hard at crime," Xu said in a recent talk delivered to the Boyuan Foundation. "The history of Germany and Japan in the 1930s shows that if statism fulfils its potential, it will lead the entire nation into catastrophe."

Xu's antidote is right out of the Boyuan mission statement: "What a strong state needs most is democratic institutions, a sound constitution and the rule of law to prevent power from doing evil."

"If you test how many Chinese people really want to return to Mao's period, to become North Korea, I don't believe it's 1 percent of them" he said.

He's adversaries -- which to a limited degree really do believe China should return to a Maoist era -- are skeptical of private capital, appalled by rampant corruption, and antagonistic towards what they see as dangerous Western values. These adversaries, whose heroes include the fallen political star Bo Xilai and the politically wounded corruption-fighting general Liu Yuan, have a term for everything that He Di's Boyuan represents: "The Western Hostile Forces." Luckily, He has the chips to play in such a high-stakes game.

Besides his own princeling roots, which protect him from the state, He has the backing of his foundation's chairman Qin Xiao, who held a ministerial-level position as chairman of one of China's top state-owned financial conglomerates. Boyuan's directors include Brent Scowcroft, the former U.S. national security advisor. The Boyuan steering committee includes the publisher of the path-breaking investigative magazine Caijing, a son of one of the most important generals of the revolution (Chen Yi), and a group of officials who, between them, manage the largest accumulation of financial assets in the history of global capital.

He's childhood friends who have worked closely with Boyuan include the governor of the People's Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, and Wang Qishan, the financial-system czar who is set to enter the Politburo Standing Committee, China's top decision making body, this week. They, along with several other princelings who have risen to the top of Chinese finance, became close friends, ironically, when they were red guards, fighting "capitalist roaders" in Mao's Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.

Many of the protagonists at Boyuan have levers of the state at their disposal, and are organizing and challenging the party line in ways that would lead ordinary citizens to be branded as dissidents. Further in the organization's background, offering clandestine support, are members of some of China's most powerful families -- including former security chief Qiao Shi, former premier Zhu Rongji, and former president Jiang Zemin.

He traces China's spiritual and policy drift to 2003, the year in which the team of then President Jiang and Premier Zhu entrusted the party and government apparatus to their successors Hu and Wen Jiabao. He says the administration moved away from "opening and reform" -- former leader Deng Xiaoping's policy of bringing China in line with the rest of the world -- and the resulting vacuum was filled with counterproductive criticism of privatization and reform. Leaders are isolated from their mid-level officials, each bureaucracy is siloed from the next, and there is no framework to mediate their interests or debate the wider merits of any particular proposal, he says. And once they started back down the old road of central planning, high-ranking officials grew addicted to the power it brought them. "The current leaders have really disappointed because I don't know what they believe," says He. "They were educated by the party, the old doctrines of Marxism, yet they lack growth experiences at the grassroots. They are really engineers who still want to enjoy the dividends from the previous generation leadership."

He believes in China's ability transform itself but knows it might not happen easily. He thinks Mao was an aberration who hurt his family's 100-year quest to bring China into modernity. Mao saw peasants and workers as an undifferentiated mass to be organized and mobilized, but not respected -- a man who represents China's past and used communism instead of Confucianism as his doctrine of control. "Mao called himself Qin Shihuang plus Stalin," He said, referring to China's first emperor. "He used revolution to repackage China's despotic tradition and crown himself emperor."

When Deng and his successors committed to the market they also committed to the values that underpinned it, He says, including the ideal of law. Hu, by contrast, eviscerated the integrity of the individual, and his administration's combination of extreme nationalism, extreme populism, and state capitalism means that history can repeat itself, He warns.

And that's why the Nazi exhibit scared him so.

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FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS: CHINA, POLITICS, EAST ASIA

 

John Garnaut is China correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, where a version of this article appears. He is the author of the just published e-book The Rise and Fall of the House of Bo.

Cuba Almost Became a Nuclear Power in 1962 - Foreign Policy

Cuba Almost Became a Nuclear Power in 1962

The scariest moment in history was even scarier than we thought.

BY SVETLANA SAVRANSKAYA | Foreign Policy, October 10, 2012

Cuba would have become the first nuclear power in Latin America 50 years ago, if not for the dynamics captured in this remarkable verbatim transcript -- published here for the first time -- of Fidel Castro's excruciating meeting with Soviet deputy prime minister Anastas Mikoyan, on November 22, 1962. The document comes from the personal archive of his son, the late Sergo Mikoyan, which was donated to theNational Security Archive and which appears for the first time in English this month in the new book, The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis.

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Long after the world thought the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's withdrawal of his medium-range nuclear missiles announced on October 28 -- and two days after President John F. Kennedy announced the lifting of the quarantine around Cuba -- the secret crisis still simmered. Unknown to the Americans, the Soviets had brought some 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba -- 80 nuclear-armed front cruise missiles (FKRs), 12 nuclear warheads for dual-use Luna short-range rockets, and 6 nuclear bombs for IL-28 bombers. Even with the pullout of the strategic missiles, the tacticals would stay, and Soviet documentation reveals the intention of training the Cubans to use them.

But Fidel Castro was livid. Khrushchev had not consulted or even informed Castro about any deals with the Americans -- Fidel heard about the missile withdrawal from the radio. The Cuban leader refused to go along with any onsite inspections in Cuba, and raised further demands. The Soviets had their own Cuban crisis: They had to take back what the Americans called the "offensive weapons," get the U.S. to confirm its non-invasion pledge, and most importantly, keep Cuba as an ally. At the Soviet Presidium, everyone agreed only one man could achieve such a resolution: Anastas Mikoyan.

Mikoyan arrived in Cuba on November 2, 1962, and over 20 days of often-bitter conversations with Cuban leaders -- culminating in this tense meeting -- Mikoyan began to appreciate the danger tactical nuclear weapons posed if they were left on the island, especially in Cuban hands. On one day, Castro would refuse to see Mikoyan; on another, Fidel would order his anti-aircraft crews to shoot at the American surveillance planes.

The final straw apparently came on November 20, when Castro sent instructions to Cuba's representative at the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga, to mention "we have tactical nuclear weapons, which we should keep" -- partly as leverage in negotiations over inspections, also to establish the fact that the weapons were in Cuban possession. Extremely worried, Mikoyan cabled the Soviet Presidium that he now planned to inform the Cuban leader that all tactical nuclear weapons would be withdrawn from Cuba. Mikoyan had to break this unpleasant news to his hosts, and he had to do it in such a way that they would remain Soviet allies.

This four-hour conversation on November 22 provided the final blow to the Cuban revolutionaries, now that the Soviet Union was removing all the weapons for which Cuba had to suffer so much. Castro opened the conversation saying that he was in a bad mood because Kennedy stated in his speech that all nuclear weapons were removed from Cuba, but surely the tacticals were still on the island. Mikoyan confirmed that "the Soviet government has not given any promises regarding the removal of the tactical nuclear weapons. The Americans do not even have any information that they are in Cuba." But the Soviet government itself, said Mikoyan, not under U.S. pressure, has now decided to take them back.

Castro's mood only got worse. Now the tacticals were coming out. Already the Soviets had given in to American pressure on the IL-28 bombers (technically the bombers could reach Florida so they qualified as "offensive" and they were nuclear capable). Mikoyan tried to persuade Castro that "as far as Il-28s are concerned, you know yourself that they are outdated. Presently, it is best to use them as a target plane." Castro retorts: "And why did you send them to us then?"

Castro was very emotional and at times rough with Mikoyan -- he criticized the Soviet military for failing to camouflage the missiles, for not using their anti-aircraft launchers to shoot down U.S. U-2 spy planes, essentially allowing them to photograph the sites. He went back to the initial offer of missiles and stated that the Cubans did not want the missiles, they only accepted the weapons as part of "fulfilling their duty to the socialist camp." The Cubans were ready to die in a nuclear war and were hoping that the Soviet Union would be also willing "to do the same for us." But the Soviets did not treat the Cubans as a partner, they caved in under U.S. pressure, and did not even consult the Cubans about the withdrawal. Castro expressed the humiliation the Cubans felt: "What do you think we are? A zero on the left, a dirty rag. We tried to help the Soviet Union to get out of a difficult situation."

In desperation, Castro almost begged Mikoyan to leave the tactical warheads in Cuba, especially because the Americans were not aware of them and they were not part of the agreement between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Castro claimed that the situation now was even worse than it was before the crisis -- Cuba was defenseless, and the U.S. non-invasion assurances did not mean much for the Cubans. But Mikoyan rejected Castro's pleas and cited a (nonexistent) Soviet law proscribing the transfer of nuclear weapons to third countries. Castro had a suggestion: "So you have a law that prohibits transfer of tactical nuclear weapons to other countries? It's a pity. And when are you going to repeal that law?" Mikoyan was non-committal: "We will see. It is our right [to do so]."

This ended Cuba's hope to become a Latin American nuclear power.

Ironically, if the Cubans were a little more pliant, and a little less independent, if they were more willing to be Soviet pawns, they would have kept the tactical nuclear weapons on the island. But they showed themselves to be much more than just a parking lot for the Soviet missiles. Cuba was a major independent variable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mikoyan treated his Cuban hosts with great empathy and respect, while being highly critical of his own political and military leadership. He admired the genuine character of the Cuban revolution, he saw its appeal for Latin America. But he also saw the danger of the situation spiraling out of control probably better than other leaders in this tense triangle, and thus brought about the final resolution of the crisis.

The following transcript was prepared by a Soviet note-taker, with the Soviet ambassador to Cuba, Alexandr Alexeyev, translating for Mikoyan.

Mikoyan Castro Memcon 11 22 62.PDF

Svetlana Savranskaya is director of Russia programs at the National Security Archive, George Washington University. Her new book, with the late Sergo Mikoyan, is The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of November (Stanford CA/Washington DC: Stanford University Press/Wilson Center Press, 2012).