Notes by Tom Barnett...
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ARTICLE: "India's Edge Goes Beyond Outsourcing," by Anand Giridharadas, New York Times, 4 April 2007, p. C1.
ARTICLE: "Vermont Becomes 'Offshore' Insurance Haven," by Lynnley Browning, New York Times, 4 April 2007, p. C1.

ARTICLE: "Seeking a Fix, by Russian Satellite: A Challenge to America's Global Positioning System," by Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, 4 April 2007, p. C1.

Interesting trio describing globalization's irresistible forces.
India, in a flat world, redefines the question of reasonably accessed labor pool.
So what must be the U.S. response?
It must make parts of America, wonderfully fungible in the form of these things we call states, into competitive images of the competition, and thus the sourcecode of globalization itself is increasingly recast in the form of the once-student, now master--the global rule set that none control but some can at times lead in terms of new definitions.
We clearly did that on GPS for a long time, but we naturally attract competition in that process (GLONASS revived!), and so the great game simply enters another phase.

April 11, 2007
Romania, a Poor Land, Imports Poorer Workers

By MATTHEW BRUNWASSER
BACAU, Romania — To get around the chronic labor shortages hampering this traditional textile center and in other industries across Romania, Sorin Nicolescu, who runs a clothing factory, came up with an original solution: import 800 workers from China.

“The explanation is very simple,” said Mr. Nicolescu, general manager of a Swiss concern, the Wear Company. “We don’t have any Romanian workers because they have all left to work” in Western and Central Europe.

Foreign investors have been attracted to Romania, a poor Balkan country, because of its low wages and, since Jan. 1, its membership in the European Union. At the same time, those low wages and freedom of movement through Europe, which is now easier, have been fueling a wave of emigration that threatens to slow an economic boom in recent years in Romania.

“This was happening before we joined the E.U.,” said Ana Murariu, a production manager at Wear. “Now it’s even worse.”

Romania, a nation of 21.6 million (and declining 0.2 percent annually), received 9 billion euros, or about $12 billion, in foreign direct investment last year. That helped the economy grow last year as much as 7 percent, with an unemployment rate in January of 5.4 percent — well below the European Union average.

But with monthly wages averaging around $375 after taxes, roughly two million people, or more than 8 percent of the population, have left since the Stalinist government of President Nicolae V. Ceausescu fell in 1989, according to analysts’ estimates.

Italy and Spain are the most popular destinations for Romanian workers, where they usually perform manual labor, legally and illegally, and generally for lower wages than local people.

Mr. Nicolescu said he decided to look for workers in China because he had contracts there, and those companies had put him in touch with an employment agency. Those who are hired pay about $2,000 for transportation and the employment agency’s fee, according to one worker.

Once they reach Bacau, a drab industrial city of 181,000 some 150 miles northeast of the capital, Bucharest, they go to work in a large, inconspicuous warehouse on the outskirts of town.

Inside, about 170 Chinese women operate sewing machines attached to tables stacked with finished and unfinished garments. Most of the tables, arranged in long rows, are empty. The plant expects 500 more Chinese workers by the end of May.

The factory is clean, freshly painted and well lighted. The only sound is the rapid, repetitive thud of the sewing machines as the workers stitch together previously tailored pieces of garments. They make mostly sportswear for a range of brands, including Prada and Carrefour. All the production is for export.

Mr. Nicolescu said he paid the women about $347 a month after taxes. The legal minimum wage is 132 euros a month ($176) after taxes.

The company operated with Romanian workers until 2003, when operations were suspended because the work force had dwindled to 200. Mr. Nicolescu said the company had posted hundreds of job offers at a local agency, but they had gone unanswered.

“It’s very difficult work, and it’s not well paid,” Mr. Nicolescu acknowledged. He said the industry found it hard to attract young workers to replace the current ones, most of whom are nearing retirement.

“I’m not very pleased about working with foreign workers because I have to provide them food and housing” on top of their salaries, Mr. Nicolescu said. That amounts to $130 a month for each employee, he said, in addition to more than $500,000 he has spent building worker dormitories.

Critics say the company would find Romanian workers if it offered better wages. But Mr. Nicolescu replied that higher wages would make his products uncompetitive internationally, pointing out that textile manufacturers had already left much of Europe in search of lower costs in regions like China.

Cornelia Barbu, deputy director of the Bacau County employment agency, said inspectors had thoroughly inspected conditions for the Chinese workers. “They are treated very well,” she said. “They have a social club and a kitchen. They live much better than most of the Romanians living abroad.”

Xiu Xian Hong, from Fujian Province, who came here last July, described life as better than in China.

“It is quiet here, and the air is much cleaner,” she said through a translator who worked at the plant. “The work is the same, but the pay is more.” But she said she missed her 3-year-old daughter and her husband back home.

Ms. Xiu said she had come to Romania because it was the only place being offered when she sought work at an agency in China. She said she planned to stay at least three years, hoping to save enough money to start a business, perhaps a shop, when she returned.

Although the city center is easily accessible by public transportation, the workers spend most of their free time in five-bed dormitory rooms in the factory complex, playing cards, reading books and watching Chinese satellite television.

Few local residents have seen the workers in town. People in a city park one recent afternoon said that they had learned about their new neighbors from newspapers and television.

“Our people have gone to the West and all over the world, so we need others to replace them,” said Dumitru Padure, a retired aircraft factory technician.

Andrea Grigoras, a translator, sitting with her toddler daughter, expressed the view that the Chinese workers received better pay than Romanians and would probably be more focused than Romanian workers. “I know a lot of Romanians who would do the work for less,” she said, adding: “I’m not worried. But I’d get worried if there were many foreign workers coming here.”

A variety of intra-European transportation links here illustrates the scale of emigration. A discount Romanian-based airline, Blue Air, offers six direct flights a week from Bacau to Italy — two to Turin and four to Rome. A bus company, Atlassib, one of many, runs 10 buses daily to Italy from Bacau.

The population of Romania is projected to fall by 29 percent, below 15.5 million, by 2050, according to the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. Villages and towns outside Bucharest have been hit especially hard.

Ms. Barbu of the Bacau employment agency suggested that wages would need to reach levels about three-quarters of those in the West for Romanian workers to return.

“We have to get used to it because the E.U. means greater mobility,” she said. “Just as we have left, others will come here.”

U.S. READY TO UPGRADE TIES WITH LIBYA

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- The United States has been preparing to expand relations with Libya.
Officials said the Bush administration has approved talks that could pave the way for strategic and military relations with Libya. They said the effort could result in U.S. defense sales to the North African country.
"There has been a decision to accelerate the pace of relations with Libya, and the two sides will discuss options in several areas," an official said.
The administration program was expected to be launched during the visit by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte to Tripoli this week. Negroponte, the highest ranking U.S. diplomat to visit the country since 1953, was scheduled to arrive in Libya as part of an African tour that would include Chad, Mauritania and Sudan.

April 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Upsetting the Balance

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Masai Mara, Kenya

Surely of all God’s creations, none is more beautiful than the sunrise on the Masai Mara grassland, Kenya’s spectacular nature reserve and a backdrop for the movie “Out of Africa.” The sun’s ascent here is like a curtain going up on one of Mother Nature’s richest ecosystems. Through the day you can be greeted by a bull elephant in hot pursuit of a cow, serenaded by tropical boubou birds, intimidated by two lionesses devouring a warthog, amused by the cattle egrets riding on the backs of African buffalos and impressed by how each small cluster of topi antelope “assigns” one topi to stand on a small hill and keep watch for predators while the others graze. Everything seems in perfect balance.

Except ... behind the curtain, deforestation, the poaching of wildlife and now climate change present a trio of threats to the Mara, which have Kenyans, and all those concerned about biodiversity, worried.

Over the last 10 years, “the weather has changed,” explained our Masai naturalist, Daniel Memusi. “All of a sudden it is becoming unpredictable. ...April has always been a rainy month — every afternoon and all night. You expect rain, but no rain.” If the few scattered rains this April don’t become more intense, he added, the farmers who just planted their crops will have serious problems. “This should be a very wet month for anyone who knows the Mara, but instead the rains came in January and February,” he said.

One should never extrapolate about climate change from any single ecosystem or brief period. But as The Times’s environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin recently noted, scientists say it’s increasingly clear “that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles.”

“Rainfall has changed dramatically in the last 30 years — it is less predictable now,” said Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, which manages Kenya’s Noah’s ark of endangered species. If climate changes bring more severe droughts and floods, and the animal migrations are disrupted, “the brand of the Mara dies,” added Mr. Kipng’etich, referring to Kenya’s “Lion King” grassland. That would really hurt Kenya’s economy. “When every Kenyan meets a wild animal, they should bow and say thank you.”

Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya’s forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country’s landmass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 percent today, while in the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population from 20,000 to around 500. “When you see a rhino today, you are very lucky,” said Mr. Kipng’etich. “Your children or grandchildren may never see one.”

Climate change could worsen this. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just concluded that two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has come — in roughly equal parts — from the U.S. and Western Europe. These countries have the resources to deal with climate change, and may even benefit from some warming. Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global CO2 emissions since 1900, the report noted, yet its 840 million people could suffer enormously from global-warming-induced droughts and floods and have the fewest resources to deal with them.

“We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming,” President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told an African Union summit in Ethiopia last February. “Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?”

A study by Oxfam, entitled “Africa — Up in Smoke,” noted that in line with climate models, droughts in northwest Kenya appear to becoming more frequent. It profiled the impact on the nomadic pastoralists of Kenya’s northwest Turkana region, who graze cattle, camels and goats. They’ve always known droughts, but because they are now more frequent, families and animals have less chance to recover.

The Turkana people, said Oxfam, call this more persistent drought “ ‘Atiaktiak ng’awiyei’ or ‘the one that divided homes’ because so many families split up to survive, migrating in all directions.”

It really is wrong that those least responsible for climate change should pay the most. “My recommendation is that the biggest polluter pays,” said Mr. Kipng’etich. “We are one planet, one system.” He has a point. He deserves an answer.

The Limitations and Necessity of Naval Power
By George Friedman
It has now been four years since the fall of Baghdad concluded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We have said much about the Iraq war, and for the moment there is little left to say. The question is whether the United States will withdraw forces from Iraq or whether it will be able to craft some sort of political resolution to the war, both within Iraq and in the region. Military victory, in the sense of the unfettered imposition of U.S. will in Iraq, does not appear to us a possibility. Therefore, over the next few months, against the background of the U.S. offensive in Baghdad, the political equation will play out. The action continues. The analysis must pause and await results.
During this pause, we have been thinking about some of the broader questions involved in Iraq -- and about the nature and limits of American military power in particular. We recently considered the purpose of U.S. wars since World War II in our discussion of U.S. warfare as strategic spoiling attack. Now we turn to another dimension of U.S. military power -- the U.S. Navy -- and consider what role, if any, it plays in national security at this point.
Recent events have directed our attention to the role and limits of naval power. During the detention of the 15 British sailors and marines, an idea floated by many people was that the United States should impose a blockade against Iran. The argument was driven partly by a lack of other options: Neither an invasion nor an extended air campaign seemed a viable alternative. Moreover, the United States' experience in erecting blockades is rich with decisive examples: the Cuban missile crisis, barring Germany's ability to trade during World War II or that of the American South during the Civil War. The one unquestionable military asset the United States has is its Navy, which can impose sea-lane control anywhere in the world. Finally, Iran -- which is rich in oil (all of which is exported by sea) but lacks sufficient refinery capacity of its own -- relies on imported gasoline. Therefore, the argument went, imposing a naval blockade would cripple Iran's economy and bring the leadership to the negotiating table.
Washington never seriously considered the option. This was partly because of diplomatic discussions that indicated that the British detainees would be released under any circumstances. And it was partly because of the difficulties involved in blockading Iran at this time:
1. Iran could mount strategic counters to a blockade, either by increasing anti-U.S. operations by its Shiite allies in Iraq or by inciting Shiite communities in the Arabian Peninsula to unrest. The United States didn't have appetite for the risk.
2. Blockades always involve the interdiction of vessels operated by third countries -- countries that might not appreciate being interdicted. The potential repercussions of interdicting merchant vessels belonging to powers that did not accept the blockade was a price the United States would not pay at this time.
A blockade was not selected because it was not needed, because Iran could retaliate in other ways and because a blockade might damage countries other than Iran that the United States didn't want to damage. It was, therefore, not in the cards. Not imposing a blockade made sense.
The Value of Naval Power
This raises a more fundamental question: What is the value of naval power in a world in which naval battles are not fought? To frame the question more clearly, let us begin by noting that the United States has maintained global maritime hegemony since the end of World War II. Except for the failed Soviet attempt to partially challenge the United States, the most important geopolitical fact since World War II was that the world's oceans were effectively under the control of the U.S. Navy. Prior to World War II, there were multiple contenders for maritime power, such as Britain, Japan and most major powers. No one power, not even Britain, had global maritime hegemony. The United States now does. The question is whether this hegemony has any real value at this time -- a question made relevant by the issue of whether to blockade Iran.
The United States controls the blue water. To be a little more precise, the U.S. Navy can assert direct and overwhelming control over any portion of the blue water it wishes, and it can do so in multiple places. It cannot directly control all of the oceans at the same time. However, the total available naval force that can be deployed by non-U.S. powers (friendly and other) is so limited that they lack the ability, even taken together, to assert control anywhere should the United States challenge their presence. This is an unprecedented situation historically.
The current situation is, of course, invaluable to the United States. It means that a seaborne invasion of the United States by any power is completely impractical. Given the geopolitical condition of the United States, the homeland is secure from conventional military attack but vulnerable to terrorist strikes and nuclear attacks. At the same time, the United States is in a position to project forces at will to any part of the globe. Such power projection might not be wise at times, but even failure does not lead to reciprocation. For instance, no matter how badly U.S. forces fare in Iraq, the Iraqis will not invade the United States if the Americans are defeated there.
This is not a trivial fact. Control of the seas means that military or political failure in Eurasia will not result in a direct conventional threat to the United States. Nor does such failure necessarily preclude future U.S. intervention in that region. It also means that no other state can choose to invade the United States. Control of the seas allows the United States to intervene where it wants, survive the consequences of failure and be immune to occupation itself. It was the most important geopolitical consequence of World War II, and one that still defines the world.
The issue for the United States is not whether it should abandon control of the seas -- that would be irrational in the extreme. Rather, the question is whether it has to exert itself at all in order to retain that control. Other powers either have abandoned attempts to challenge the United States, have fallen short of challenging the United States or have confined their efforts to building navies for extremely limited uses, or for uses aligned with the United States. No one has a shipbuilding program under way that could challenge the United States for several generations.
One argument, then, is that the United States should cut its naval forces radically -- since they have, in effect, done their job. Mothballing a good portion of the fleet would free up resources for other military requirements without threatening U.S. ability to control the sea-lanes. Should other powers attempt to build fleets to challenge the United States, the lead time involved in naval construction is such that the United States would have plenty of opportunities for re-commissioning ships or building new generations of vessels to thwart the potential challenge.
The counterargument normally given is that the U.S. Navy provides a critical service in what is called littoral warfare. In other words, while the Navy might not be needed immediately to control sea-lanes, it carries out critical functions in securing access to those lanes and projecting rapid power into countries where the United States might want to intervene. Thus, U.S. aircraft carriers can bring tactical airpower to bear relatively quickly in any intervention. Moreover, the Navy's amphibious capabilities -- particularly those of deploying and supplying the U.S. Marines -- make for a rapid deployment force that, when coupled with Naval airpower, can secure hostile areas of interest for the United States.
That argument is persuasive, but it poses this problem: The Navy provides a powerful option for war initiation by the United States, but it cannot by itself sustain the war. In any sustained conflict, the Army must be brought in to occupy territory -- or, as in Iraq, the Marines must be diverted from the amphibious specialty to serve essentially as Army units. Naval air by itself is a powerful opening move, but greater infusions of airpower are needed for a longer conflict. Naval transport might well be critically important in the opening stages, but commercial transport sustains the operation.
If one accepts this argument, the case for a Navy of the current size and shape is not proven. How many carrier battle groups are needed and, given the threat to the carriers, is an entire battle group needed to protect them?
If we consider the Iraq war in isolation, for example, it is apparent that the Navy served a function in the defeat of Iraq's conventional forces. It is not clear, however, that the Navy has served an important role in the attempt to occupy and pacify Iraq. And, as we have seen in the case of Iran, a blockade is such a complex politico-military matter that the option not to blockade tends to emerge as the obvious choice.
The Risk Not Taken
The argument for slashing the Navy can be tempting. But consider the counterargument. First, and most important, we must consider the crises the United States has not experienced. The presence of the U.S. Navy has shaped the ambitions of primary and secondary powers. The threshold for challenging the Navy has been so high that few have even initiated serious challenges. Those that might be trying to do so, like the Chinese, understand that it requires a substantial diversion of resources. Therefore, the mere existence of U.S. naval power has been effective in averting crises that likely would have occurred otherwise. Reducing the power of the U.S. Navy, or fine-tuning it, would not only open the door to challenges but also eliminate a useful, if not essential, element in U.S. strategy -- the ability to bring relatively rapid force to bear.
There are times when the Navy's use is tactical, and times when it is strategic. At this moment in U.S. history, the role of naval power is highly strategic. The domination of the world's oceans represents the foundation stone of U.S. grand strategy. It allows the United States to take risks while minimizing consequences. It facilitates risk-taking. Above all, it eliminates the threat of sustained conventional attack against the homeland. U.S. grand strategy has worked so well that this risk appears to be a phantom. The dispersal of U.S. forces around the world attests to what naval power can achieve. It is illusory to believe that this situation cannot be reversed, but it is ultimately a generational threat. Just as U.S. maritime hegemony is measured in generations, the threat to that hegemony will emerge over generations. The apparent lack of utility of naval forces in secondary campaigns, like Iraq, masks the fundamentally indispensable role the Navy plays in U.S. national security.
That does not mean that the Navy as currently structured is sacrosanct -- far from it. Peer powers will be able to challenge the U.S. fleet, but not by building their own fleets. Rather, the construction of effective anti-ship missile systems -- which can destroy merchant ships as well as overwhelm U.S. naval anti-missile systems -- represents a low-cost challenge to U.S. naval power. This is particularly true when these anti-ship missiles are tied to space-based, real-time reconnaissance systems. A major power such as China need not be able to mirror the U.S. Navy in order to challenge it.
Whatever happens in Iraq -- or Iran -- the centrality of naval power is unchanging. But the threat to naval power evolves. The fact that there is no threat to U.S. control of the sea-lanes at this moment does not mean one will not emerge. Whether with simple threats like mines or the most sophisticated anti-ship system, the ability to keep the U.S. Navy from an area or to close off strategic chokepoints for shipping remains the major threat to the United States -- which is, first and foremost, a maritime power.
One of the dangers of wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they soak up resources and intellectual bandwidth. It is said that generals always fight the last war. Another way of stating that is to say they believe the war they are fighting now will go on forever in some form. That belief leads to neglect of capabilities that appear superfluous for the current conflict. That is the true hollowing-out that extended warfare creates. It is an intellectual hollowing-out.

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