IRANIAN BLOGGERS DENOUNCE WRITER'S DEATH SENTENCE. The Association of Iranian Blogwriters, or "Penlog," (http://penlog.blogspot.com) has issued a statement condemning the recent death sentence handed down to journalist and activist Yaqub Mehrnahad (see "RFE/RL Newsline," February 20, 2008), Radio Farda reported on February 21. Mehrnahad was sentenced to death after being found guilty of colluding with Jundullah, a group blamed for bombings and banditry in the southeastern Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province. Penlog stated that Mehrnahad "is the director-general of the Voice of Justice youth association, which implements programs for young people in Baluchistan within the framework of" Iran's laws. The statement added that "he was arrested before a question-and-answer session in which some Zahedan officials were taking part, and no reason was given for his arrest." Zahedan is a city in Sistan-va-Baluchistan. Mehrnahad was reportedly arrested in April or May 2007. Penlog members asked all "supporters of human rights" to protest the "savage violation of human rights in Iran and merciless suppression of bloggers and freethinkers." VS

Fishing for a Way to Change the World
Bush thought his father lacked a grand doctrine. His greatest failures have come from trying to craft one.

NEWSWEEK
Updated: 1:30 PM ET Jan 19, 2008
There's some support for the dynastic reading that George W. Bush intended to invade Iraq from the outset of his presidency to avenge his father. "After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time," Bush declared at a political fund-raiser in Houston in September 2002. Considerable doubt has since arisen around the incident Bush was referring to, a supposed plot by Saddam to blow up the former president with a car bomb on a visit to Kuwait in 1993. But there's little doubt that Bush himself believed what intelligence officials told the family after that incident: that Saddam planned to murder not just George W.'s father, but the other family members visiting Kuwait with him: his mother, Barbara, his wife, Laura, and his two youngest brothers, Neil and Marvin. The incident cast a long shadow in the family. According to family intimates, the Bushes felt they were at risk so long as Saddam remained in power.

Yet of the top-level players in the administration, only Paul Wolfowitz directly advocated military action against Iraq before September 11. From the collective perspective of Bush's foreign-policy team, Iraq fell into the category of big problems that weren't urgent. His people were instinctually critical of Clinton's proportionate responses to Saddam's provocations and felt they might have to act more decisively at some point in the future. But the same category of problem also included North Korea and Pakistan's nuclear programs, Russia's growing authoritarianism, and China's belligerence toward Taiwan. There were no preparations or significant planning for war in Iraq until September 2002 and no point-of-no-return buildup until January 2003.

In other words, George W. Bush did not arrive in the White House determined to invade Iraq. So why did he ultimately decide to do it? Bush's struggle to vindicate his family and outdo his father predisposed him toward completing a job his dad left unfinished. But it was his broader attempt to develop a foreign policy different from his father's that led him into his biggest mistake. Act One of the Bush Tragedy is the son's struggle to be like his dad until the age of forty. Act Two is his growing success over the next fifteen years as he learned to be different. The botched search for a doctrine to clarify world affairs and the president's progressive descent into messianism constitute the conclusive third act.

Bush Doctrine 1.0 was Unipolar Realism (3/7/99–9/10/01). Driven more by the refutation of Clinton's liberal internationalism than of 41's diplomatic realism, it challenged his father's worldview only obliquely. Bush steered clear of his father's men, former Secretary of State James Baker and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, but was advised by Colin Powell and Scowcroft's protégée Condoleezza Rice, who was likewise grounded in classic "balance of power" realism.

He was a realist with a different list of things to do, a harder shell, and less use for the "smiles and scowls of diplomacy." In his first eight months he showed how much less. Bush declared his intention to abrogate the ABM Treaty and move ahead with developing missile defense. Where his father was a Sinophile, the son saw a growing military threat. He talked tough when the Chinese forced down a U.S. military plane violating their airspace and held its crew hostage. He spoke ambiguously about whether he supported continuing the long-standing policy of "strategic ambiguity" with respect to Taiwan. He repudiated the Kyoto Accords on global warming. He spurned Yasir Arafat and stood by Ariel Sharon in Israel. He broke off negotiations with North Korea.

Unipolar realism survived its initial encounters with reality, but not with September 11. By the end of that day, the president had a new approach. Bush Doctrine 2.0 was With Us or Against Us (9/11/01–5/31/02). The new doctrine didn't represent a repudiation of the first one so much as an elaboration of it to deal with the previously neglected problem of terrorism. It provided the justification for not just pursuing Al Qaeda, but for deposing the Taliban, its host in Afghanistan. If Rice first came up with the "no distinction" idea, it was [Vice President Dick] Cheney who first started calling it the "Bush Doctrine" in public. In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."

But by the time Cheney spoke those words, a second wave of terrorism had already exposed the inadequacy of Doctrine 2.0. The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a larger impact than is generally appreciated—one in many ways bigger than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.

At that point, nearly everyone involved in national security assumed there would be another wave of terrorist attacks. The daily intelligence summary substantiated this panic; "chatter" was at record levels. In an effort to understand the potential threat, Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ordered up a briefing on a war game, known as "Dark Winter," which modeled a smallpox outbreak in an American city in much the way "continuity of government" exercises Cheney had participated in during the 1980s simulated nuclear catastrophe.

According to a source close to Bush, Cheney swiftly reported back to the Oval Office with a sobering message: the United States was essentially defenseless against the most likely form of assault, a biological attack. "I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses," Bush's first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told me in the summer of 2007. "Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and need to prepare for it."

Then on October 4 the worst fears inside the White House were realized. Bush choked up as he thanked government workers in a morning speech at the State Department. Ari Fleischer reports that he had "never before and never since seen the president look as tired and as troubled as he did that morning." When they returned to the White House, Bush called Fleischer into his office and explained the reason: he had just learned that a Florida man had been stricken with anthrax. Bush feared it was the dreaded second wave.

Another anthrax letter, never recovered (or at least never disclosed), was apparently sent to the White House. On October 22, anthrax was found on an automated slitter used to open letters at a Secret Service facility in an undisclosed location some miles away. This meant the White House was a target of biological terrorism. "I think the seminal event of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks," someone close to the president told me. "It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss."

Cheney and Libby began spending time at the Health and Human Services department, which was leading the confused response to the anthrax attacks and making preparations for the possibility of something much worse. The greatest fear of officials there was an attack involving smallpox. The smallpox virus killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century. It was still taking 2 million lives a year as late as 1967, when the World Health Organization began the massive campaign that wiped out the disease a decade later. After smallpox was eradicated in 1977, only the United States and Russia were permitted to retain research samples of the virus, under closely monitored, secure conditions. But an intelligence review ordered by Cheney determined that Iraq, North Korea, and Russia were all likely to possess undeclared stocks.

Cheney and Libby believed that Iraq's potential to produce a smallpox weapon necessitated universal vaccination of the general population, something that hadn't happened in the United States since 1972. On the other side of the argument was Donald Henderson, the heroic epidemiologist who led the WHO smallpox eradication program and later became Bush 41's science adviser. After the anthrax attacks, HHS brought Henderson in as a consultant to help develop emergency plans.

When I visited him at his office at the Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore, Henderson recounted a surprise, unpublicized visit he paid to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with Cheney and Libby on July 18, 2002. Henderson flew down with them on Air Force Two and spent most of the trip explaining to the vice president and his chief of staff why he and other epidemiologists thought a massive vaccination program would be a terrible idea. Even medical professionals were horrified when they saw the range of normal reactions to a vaccination: grotesque scabs, lesions, and pustules. Henderson showed me a pamphlet that HHS distributed to hospitals to document the abnormal reactions: blackened limbs, uncontrolled swelling, and a reaction called progressive vaccinia, in which sores cover the body from head to toe.

Worse than the panic these reactions would cause would be the predictable casualties. According to Henderson, adverse reactions to the vaccine were estimated to kill between one and two out of every million people inoculated. The question of legal liability would be a nightmare. Henderson said that Cheney and Libby didn't seem to disagree with his arguments, which he reviewed with them on the return flight. "I thought, Thank God they've finally gotten the message. Finally we've been able to get it through to them that this just does not make sense," Henderson said.

When he reached his home in Baltimore two hours later, Henderson's wife was waiting with an urgent message to call the office. "They were going to have a press release the next morning announcing that they were going to vaccinate the entire country immediately," Henderson said. "I couldn't believe it." But after girding for battle and taking a 5:00 a.m. train to HHS the next morning, Henderson was relieved to be told that the vaccination plan was off after all. Bush had overruled Cheney. Bush eventually announced a compromise: mandatory vaccination of 500,000 military personnel, and voluntary vaccination for the same number of health-care workers or "first responders." But by the time the vaccine was ready for use, in early 2004, the panic was over. Saddam didn't have a smallpox weapon after all. Bush was vaccinated at the White House, but decided that members of his family and the White House staff didn't need to run the risk. Cheney himself chose not to be vaccinated.

Those who believe the vice president operates in bad faith—that he concocted evidence of Iraqi WMD to justify a war—should consider his stance on universal smallpox vaccination. By most estimates, even a safe vaccine would have killed a few hundred Americans and made thousands seriously ill. Cheney's readiness to sacrifice hundreds of civilian lives may make him sound like Dr. Strangelove. But if the idea was mad, it was sincerely mad, testifying to how seriously he took the possibility that Saddam had biological weapons and might use them, or give them to terrorists to use, against the United States.

Cheney accepted without reservations that Saddam was a "state sponsor of terrorism." Libby and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had long been interested in their friend Laurie Mylroie's unified field theory of terrorism. Mylroie argued that Saddam was behind every major terrorist attack against Americans in the 1990s, including the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Mylroie's book "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" was published by the American Enterprise Institute, where she was a fellow. On the back cover are glowing blurbs from Libby, Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Cheney followed these men into the tortured pathways of Mylroie's conspiracy theory, including her seizing on reports that the 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.

In another administration, there would have been various checks on this kind of collective delusion. A Kennedy, a Nixon, a Clinton, and a George H. W. Bush all would have considered evidence to some degree. But once Bush's mind was made up that Saddam was building biological and nuclear weapons, it closed to alternative explanations. He thought picking through evidence was beneath him. In 43's White House, as his communications director Dan Bartlett put it in an anonymous background briefing, "The President of the United States is not a fact checker." If the Director of the CIA told him the case for Saddam's WMD was a "slam dunk," that was all Bush needed to hear.

The problem with the earlier idea of With Us or Against Us was that it didn't promulgate any strategy for protecting the United States in an age of biotechnology, miniaturization, nonstate actors, and porous borders. To make the country more secure, we'd have to find a way of cutting off these threats at the root, not just by taking on hosts, but by disabling known and potential WMD proliferators. This was Bush Doctrine 3.0, Preemption (6/1/02–11/5/03). Where Doctrine 2.0 justified the war in Afghanistan, which was harboring Al Qaeda, Doctrine 3.0 would provide a basis for invading Iraq, which might assist Al Qaeda in the future.

The neoconservatives had a different motivation for going to war with Iraq. They were less focused on preventing what Saddam might do to the United States than on what getting rid of him could do for the United States. The neocons thought pulling the plug on his toxic regime would transform the sick political culture of the Arab Middle East.

Many neocons believed that turning secularized Iraq into a third pro-Western democracy in the region would cause other authoritarian regimes to topple. As it liberalized, the Middle East would cease to provide a breeding ground for terrorism. Arabs would also come to accept the presence of Israel, something the mostly Jewish neoconservatives cared about especially. Wolfowitz has often been described as the "architect" of war in Iraq. The war could have used an architect—someone responsible for planning what would happen during the occupation. In reality, he was more like the war's theologian, coming up with a variety of theorems, arguments, and justifications for his abiding faith that the political nature of the Arab world could be transformed from without.

Wolfowitz and his protégé Scooter Libby, the other most influential neoconservative inside the administration, were driven by a particular notion about how to transform the sick political culture of the Middle East. The big thinker behind their theory was the Arab scholar Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus at Princeton. The originator of the phrase "the clash of civilizations," Lewis believed Muslims had been engaged in a "cosmic struggle for world domination" since the time of Muhammad. Centuries of defeat, subjugation, and misrule, to which the United States contributed by supporting corrupt and incompetent dictators, prepared the way for Islamist terrorism. Cheney met Lewis when he was Secretary of Defense, and the two became friends. After September 11, he became interested in Lewis's argument about what had gone wrong in the Arab world.

Over a series of lunches at the vice president's residence in 2002, Lewis laid out his case for using American military power to change the regime in Iraq. Years of "anxious propitiation" had left the Muslim world convinced of our weakness. Force was what Arabs respected. A conclusive show of strength could catalyze a change in the opposite direction. The neoconservatives have a weakness for historical analogies—and for one analogy in particular. "Anxious propitiation" was a fancy name for appeasement, compromising with an enemy that needed confronting. In this analogy, Saddam was Hitler, who grew in strength as the West postponed challenging him. Or, if not Nazi Germany, Iraq was a Soviet-style totalitarian state, vulnerable to a combination of American moral and military pressure.

By mid-2002, Cheney had become a down-the-line ally of the neoconservatives. But that does not mean he had turned into some sort of democratic idealist. He never cited Bernard Lewis's theory in any of his public advocacy for the war. For the congenitally pessimistic vice president, transforming the political culture of the Middle East can't have been more than a castle in the sky, a long-shot best-case scenario. But the vice president surely recognized that the grandiosity of the neocon vision of a new Arab world would resonate with the president. For Bush, boldness had a constant allure. Remaking the Middle East via Iraq was just the kind of game-changing idea he went for.

After the invasion, as the WMD mirage melted away, Bush's retrospective case for the war shifted, and his theory of foreign policy along with it. Bush Doctrine 4.0 became Democracy in the Middle East (11/6/03–1/19/05). Bush's November 6, 2003, speech at the National Endowment for Democracy framed a new theory of international relations around the way he now hoped to justify his war. The United States, he announced, "has adopted a new policy," which he described as "a forward strategy for freedom in the Middle East." Bush argued that excusing and accommodating tyranny over the previous sixty years hadn't made Americans safe "because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." Stability was one of Scowcroft's watchwords. Bush called liberty "the design of nature" and "the direction of history."

Here finally was the grand vision Bush had been looking for. Democratizing the Arab world was a clear, moral goal, the ambitious work of a consequential presidency. Like compassionate conservatism, it was a form of social evangelism, a mission inspired by faith but secular in application. Bush's new formulation had the added advantage of extending the term of evaluation. If we were witnessing what Rice called "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," the first report card wouldn't be in for some time.

But Bush's stirring words underscored the difficulty with his ever-changing foreign policy. The problem wasn't that he wanted to spread democracy and human rights—a goal that in other contexts unites liberal hawks and doves with many conservatives—but his relentless ebb into abstraction, incompetent execution, and glaring inconsistency. Had he been someone capable of acknowledging error, Bush's misjudgment in invading Iraq might have been mitigated by skillful improvisation. How might such a person have reacted? He would have told his Secretary of Defense that the spectacle of looters stripping government buildings down to their concrete skeletons wasn't the kind of untidy freedom the United States could tolerate. As the Pentagon failed to create viable structures, he might have shifted control to the State Department and devolved power to the United Nations, instead of trying to fend it off.

He could have acknowledged the emergence of an insurgency, and adopted a different strategy to combat it before 2007. He should have blocked, reversed, or at least understood the significance of Paul Bremer's two first and most disastrous orders, to disband the Iraqi army and bar those with Ba'ath Party connections from serving in the government. (Bush later told author Robert Draper that disbanding the army wasn't his policy, and that he wasn't sure why it had happened.) He would have fired Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib, if not sooner. He would have taken steps to dismantle the echo chamber around him, instead of adding layers of insulation. None of that would have ensured a better outcome, but it surely would have diminished the harm from his original mistake.

Why couldn't Bush respond in a more supple fashion, even after his reelection? Partly, his inability to adjust reflects his limitations as an executive. Despite his MBA training, Bush emphasizes leadership and decision-making to the exclusion of administration and management. He delegates manfully, but doesn't solicit feedback, evaluate results, or hold people accountable, except in extraordinary circumstances. Unlike his father, he isn't comfortable entertaining inconclusive debate. Bush sees reconsidering decisions or openly changing course as evidence of weak leadership. This stubbornness was born of a success that came from not giving in to his parents' doubts about him and not listening to their advice.

At a temperamental level, the president has almost no ability to accept blame or learn from mistakes. Disagreement, whether from critics or allies, sounds like his mother's nagging and his father's disappointment. Thus criticism has the opposite of its intended effect on him. Disapproval hardens Bush's conviction that he must be right and reinforces his refusal to surrender. Believing he earned his position in life through willpower, he feels he shouldn't have to ask anyone for permission. This obstinacy has been evident in his personnel practices as well as policy choices. The more the media demanded Bush yield up a head—CIA Director George Tenet, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—the longer that person was likely to be staying around.

Bush's inflexibility is rooted in the old family drama. It reflects not just a personality forged in opposition to his father, but an idea of leadership developed in conscious contrast to him. Where George H. W. Bush weighed options, W. sizes you up and decides. Where 41 saw shades of gray, 43 finds moral clarity. "The son prides himself on being the guy who cuts through it all, who is decisive, not wishy-washy," Brent Scowcroft told me in November 2007. "The subtleties, partly because of his inexperience, don't seem to matter as much. His father, with the background he has, knows that at best you're operating forty-nine/fifty-one—and you'd better be sure that the fifty-one is on your side and not the forty-nine."

Bush makes a point of saying, whenever it comes up, that he doesn't get advice from his father about the conduct of the war. Judging from his father's roundabout efforts to influence him, this seems likely to be true. In his book, "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy," Andrew Cockburn reports a visit 43 paid to Kennebunkport during the summer of 2004. His father gave him a memo that Scowcroft had asked him to pass along about Iraq. The president glanced at it before throwing it aside, telling his dad, "I'm sick and tired of getting papers from Brent Scowcroft telling me what to do, and I never want to see another one again." With that, 43 stalked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

The collapse of his preemption justification for the war (terrorism + WMD = intolerable threat) sent Bush not into any reexamination of his decision, but toward grander and grander justification. Shortly before the election in 2004, Bush's friend and former Texas Rangers partner Tom Bernstein gave him the galley proofs of "The Case for Democracy" by the former Soviet refusenik and right-wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. Sharansky's book portrays Bush in a heroic light, comparing the war against terrorism to the struggle against the Nazis and the Soviets. Sharansky draws a contrast to Bush's father's "notorious" Chicken Kiev speech in 1991 telling the Ukrainians to avoid "suicidal nationalism," which he calls "an unmitigated disaster."

Sharanskyism, the exfoliated version of the Freedom Agenda, became Bush Doctrine 5.0, Freedom Everywhere (1/20/05– 11/7/06). Bush unveiled his newest foreign policy in his second inaugural address, which announced the goal of abolishing oppression on planet Earth: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Democracy is God's gift to humanity, Bush declared, and the United States would help extend its blessings.

It is hard to believe that anyone other than Bush and his speechwriters, who seemed increasingly to be making his foreign policy, thought about the issue of democracy promotion in such shallow, utopian terms. Though his inaugural address sounded religious, there is no theological basis for democracy as God's chosen system of government. The Old Testament favors monarchy, the New Testament, a kind of socialism. It was as if Bush now simply identified his democratic crusade with the will of God.

Bush Doctrine 5.0 flopped in practice faster than any of its predecessors. Within a year, no one in the administration other than Rice wanted to talk about the Freedom Agenda. This idea did the impossible: it caused Dick Cheney and the State Department bureaucracy to agree about something, namely that the president's policy was a pipe dream. The dissonance between Bush's message and his cavalier attitude toward civil liberties discredited him as a moral messenger. While pressing for divinely ordained liberty in the Middle East, Bush was still taking Dick Cheney's advice on keeping Guantánamo open, allowing torture, and listening in on phone conversations by American citizens. Thus did Bush's universal call for democracy not only become an exercise in futility but in many places actually proved counterproductive. From Russia to Venezuela, associating democratic opponents with Bush's foreign policy became a pretext for taking rights away. In Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize– winning human-rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi complained that Bush's advocacy was setting her cause back. Thus did the fifth Bush Doctrine recede into what the president called, in a phrase from his second inaugural, the "work of generations."

Bush's final foreign policy (11/8/06 to date) was the absence of any functioning doctrine at all. After the Republican loss of both houses of Congress, his administration cobbled together an enfeebled hybrid based on the collapse of the previous five: a retreat from unipolarity, a moratorium on the application of preemption (though bombing Iran remained under discussion), and a tacit consensus to regard the Freedom Agenda as presidential hot air. Bush and his speechwriters have not acknowledged his final doctrine's demise. He has said that he will make democracy promotion his major post-presidential project, and that he intends to set up a freedom institute as part of the presidential library to be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The final irony of Bush's foreign-policy crackup was the way it vindicated his father's choices. Not "finishing the job" and taking ownership of Iraq in 1991 now looked like an act of wisdom. Not making a triumphal speech when the Berlin Wall came down appeared as shrewd management of a dicey situation, which advanced the practical cause of freedom more than a provocative speech would have. Appreciating the value of stability sounded like maturity. Avoiding needlessly bellicose rhetoric seemed like common sense. As the historian Timothy Naftali writes in his generally admiring 2007 biography of George H. W. Bush, "As the younger Bush's own presidency limped to an end, many missed the elder Bush's realism, his diplomacy, his political modesty, and, yes, even his prudence." The more the son's faults glared, the more his father's reputation grew.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/96372

February 21, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Change to Believe In

By ROGER COHEN
Fidel Castro has quit after a half-century in power. An African-American has become a serious contender for the U.S. presidency, winning a 10th consecutive victory over his rival for the Democratic nomination. A new European state, Kosovo, has been born.

And that’s just in the last week.

Communist dictators don’t quit. Blacks don’t have broad U.S. electoral appeal. European borders don’t shift without bloodshed. History has been upended. Change, as Barack Obama would put it, is something you can believe in.

After the cold war’s end, and close to one million dead in the genocides of Bosnia (1992) and Rwanda (1994), and the digitally-induced dissolution of barriers and distances and hierarchies, some governments thought everything could remain the same.

They thought wrong, and not just in Havana and Pyongyang. They believed that in the age of globalization the principles of the Treaties of Westphalia, dating back to 1648, would be enough. In places like Moscow and Beijing and Belgrade, they clung to the idea that state sovereignty — the unfettered power of a state within its own jurisdiction — was the inviolable basis of international law.

Boris Tadic, the Serbian president, took this line at the United Nations this week, insisting that Kosovo’s independence ”annuls international law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.”

He’s wrong. Let’s set aside the fact that Kosovo held one of the eight seats in the rotating presidency of a defunct state, Yugoslavia, and other holders of those federal seats from Slovenia to Bosnia to Macedonia all become independent.

At a deeper level, the story of little Kosovo is the story of changing notions of sovereignty and international law.

After the above-mentioned genocides, one perpetrated by the late Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, both revealing a U.N. Security Council too divided to stop mass slaughter, NATO circumvented the council in 1999. It waged war for the first time to prevent Milosevic doing his worst again in Kosovo.

The war, in the words of Thomas Weiss, a political scientist at the City University of New York, ”had legitimacy even if its legality was questioned.” This legitimacy stemmed from an evolving consensus that, as Tony Blair once put it, ”acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter.”

Sovereignty, after Bosnia, after Rwanda, in a globalized world, was more than authority over territory and people. It was also responsibility.

When that responsibility to protect was flouted, when a government abused the basic rights of its citizens through slaughter or ethnic cleansing, sovereignty could in effect be suspended. As Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, put it: ”State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined.” For Annan, as Weiss has noted, ”Human rights transcended narrow claims of state sovereignty.”

Which brings us to ”R2P.” That’s not a rock band or a chemical compound.

In 2005, the World Summit adopted the ”responsibility to protect,” known by that acronym. R2P formalized the notion that when a state proves unable or unwilling to protect its people, and crimes against humanity are perpetrated, the international community has an obligation to intervene — if necessary, and as a last resort, with military force.

Member states declared that, with Security Council approval, they were prepared "to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner" when "national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

An independent Kosovo, recognized by major Western powers, is in effect the first major fruit of the ideas behind R2P. It could not have happened if the rights of human beings were not catching up at last with the rights of states.

Appropriately, Kosovo’s emergence coincided with the establishment in New York of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, directed by Weiss. Backed by the Canadian, British and Dutch governments, among others, and with support from Ban Ki Moon, Annan’s successor, the organization’s mission is the spread of R2P principles.

They need bolstering. The Iraq war has revived a 21st century sovereignty fetish exploited by Sudan to stall U.N. efforts to stop genocide in Darfur, where the government has failed utterly in its ”responsibility to protect” without provoking "timely and decisive" international action.

Interventionism is increasingly seen in the Middle East and Africa as a camouflage for Western interests.

But I believe the tide will eventually turn. R2P will be a reference. It is part of what Lawrence Weschler has called ”the decades-long, at times maddeningly halting, vexed, and compromised effort to expand the territory of law itself.”

The ”territory of law” is now also the universal territory on which human life is protected. Westphalian principles meet R2P. An R2P generation is coming. The prizing open of the world is slow work, but from Kosovo to Cuba it continues.

Blog: www.iht.com/passages

February 20, 2008

By George Friedman
Related Special Topic Pages

Kosovo, Russia and the West
The Russian Resurgence

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday. The United States and many, but not all, European countries recognized it. The Serbian government did not impose an economic blockade on — or take any military action against — Kosovo, although it declared the Albanian leadership of Kosovo traitors to Serbia. The Russians vehemently repeated their objection to an independent Kosovo but did not take any overt action. An informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was announced last week; it will take place in Moscow on Feb. 21. With Kosovo’s declaration, a river was crossed. We will now see whether that river was the Rubicon.
Kosovo’s independence declaration is an important event for two main reasons. First, it potentially creates a precedent that could lead to redrawn borders in Europe and around the world. Second, it puts the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany in the position of challenging what Russia has defined as a fundamental national interest — and this at a time when the Russians have been seeking to assert their power and authority. Taken together, each of these makes this a geopolitically significant event.
Begin with the precedent. Kosovo historically has been part of Serbia; indeed, Serbs consider it the cradle of their country. Over the course of the 20th century, it has become predominantly Albanian and Muslim (though the Albanian version of Islam is about as secular as one can get). The Serbian Orthodox Christian community has become a minority. During the 1990s, Serbia — then the heart of the now-defunct Yugoslavia — carried out a program of repression against the Albanians. Whether the repression rose to the level of genocide has been debated. In any case, the United States and other members of NATO conducted an air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 until the Yugoslavians capitulated, allowing the entry of NATO troops into the province of Kosovo. Since then, Kosovo, for all practical purposes, has been a protectorate of a consortium of NATO countries but has formally remained a province of Serbia. After the Kosovo war, wartime Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic died in The Hague in the course of his trial for war crimes; a new leadership took over; and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself ultimately dissolved, giving way to a new Republic of Serbia.
The United Nations did not sanction the war in Kosovo. Russian opposition in the U.N. Security Council prevented any U.N. diplomatic cover for the Western military action. Following the war — in a similar process to what happened with regard to Iraq — the Security Council authorized the administration of Kosovo by the occupying powers, but it never clearly authorized independence for Kosovo. The powers administering Kosovo included the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and other European states, organized as the Kosovo Force (KFOR).
While the logic of the situation pointed toward an independent Kosovo, the mechanism envisioned for the province’s independence was a negotiated agreement with Serbia. The general view was that the new government and personalities in Belgrade would be far more interested in the benefits of EU membership than they would be in retaining control of Kosovo. Over nearly a decade, the expectation therefore was that the Serbian government would accede to an independent Kosovo in exchange for being put on a course for EU membership. As frequently happens — and amazes people for reasons we have never understood — nationalism trumped economic interests. The majority of Serbs never accepted secession. The United States and the Europeans, therefore, decided to create an independent Kosovo without Serbian acquiescence. The military and ethnic reality thus was converted into a political reality.
Those recognizing Kosovo’s independence have gone out of their way specifically to argue that this decision in no way constitutes a precedent. They argue that the Serbian oppression of the late 1990s, which necessitated intervention by outside military forces to protect the Kosovars, made returning Kosovo to Serbian rule impossible. The argument therefore goes that Kosovo’s independence must be viewed as an idiosyncratic event related to the behavior of the Serbs, not as a model for the future.
Other European countries, including Spain, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus, have expressly rejected this reasoning. So have Russia and China. Each of these countries has a specific, well-defined area dominated by a specific ethnic minority group. In these countries and others like them, these ethnic groups have demanded, are demanding or potentially will demand autonomy, secession or integration with a neighboring country. Such ethnic groups could claim, and have claimed, oppression by the majority group. And each country facing this scenario fears that if Kosovo can be taken from Serbia, a precedent for secession will be created.
The Spanish have Basque separatists. Romania and Slovakia each contain large numbers of Hungarians concentrated in certain areas. The Cypriots — backed by the Greeks — are worried that the Turkish region of Cyprus, which already is under a separate government, might proclaim formal independence. The Chinese are concerned about potential separatist movements in Muslim Xinjiang and, above all, fear potential Taiwanese independence. And the Russians are concerned about independence movements in Chechnya and elsewhere. All of these countries see the Kosovo decision as setting a precedent, and they therefore oppose it.
Europe is a case in point. Prior to World War II, Europe’s borders constantly remained in violent flux. One of the principles of a stable Europe has been the inviolability of borders from outside interference, as well as the principle that borders cannot be redefined except with mutual agreement. This principle repeatedly was reinforced by international consensus, most notably at Yalta in 1945 and Helsinki in 1973.
Thus, the Czech Republic and Slovakia could agree to separate, and the Soviet Union could dissolve itself into its component republics, but the Germans cannot demand the return of Silesia from Poland; outsiders cannot demand a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland; and the Russians cannot be forced to give up Chechnya. The principle that outside powers can’t redefine boundaries, and that secessionist movements can’t create new nations unilaterally, has been a pillar of European stability.
The critics of Kosovo’s independence believe that larger powers can’t redraw the boundaries of smaller ones without recourse to the United Nations. They view the claim that Yugoslavia’s crimes in Kosovo justify doing so as unreasonable; Yugoslavia has dissolved, and the Serbian state is run by different people. The Russians view the major European powers and the Americans as arrogating rights that international law does not grant them, and they see the West as setting itself up as judge and jury without right of appeal.
This debate is not trivial. But there is a more immediate geopolitical issue that we have discussed before: the Russian response. The Russians have turned Kosovo into a significant issue. Moscow has objected to Kosovo’s independence on all of the diplomatic and legal grounds discussed. But behind that is a significant challenge to Russia’s strategic position. Russia wants to be seen as a great power and the dominant power in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Serbia is a Russian ally. Russia is trying to convince countries in the FSU, such as Ukraine, that looking to the West for help is futile because Russian power can block Western power. It wants to make the Russian return to great power status seem irresistible.
The decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence in the face of Russian opposition undermines Russian credibility. That is doubly the case because Russia can make a credible argument that the Western decision flies in the face of international law — and certainly of the conventions that have governed Europe for decades. Moscow also is asking for something that would not be difficult for the Americans and Europeans to give. The resources being devoted to Kosovo are not going to decline dramatically because of independence. Putting off independence until the last possible moment — which is to say forever, considering the utter inability of Kosovo to care for itself — thus certainly would have been something the West could have done with little effort.
But it didn’t. The reason for this is unclear. It does not appear that anyone was intent on challenging the Russians. The Kosovo situation was embedded in a process in which the endgame was going to be independence, and all of the military force and the bureaucratic inertia of the European Union was committed to this process. Russian displeasure was noted, but in the end, it was not taken seriously. This was simply because no one believed the Russians could or would do anything about Kosovar independence beyond issuing impotent protestations. Simply put, the nations that decided to recognize Kosovo were aware of Russian objections but viewed Moscow as they did in 1999: a weak power whose wishes are heard but discarded as irrelevant. Serbia was an ally of Russia. Russia intervened diplomatically on its behalf. Russia was ignored.
If Russia simply walks away from this, its growing reputation as a great power will be badly hurt in the one arena that matters to Moscow the most: the FSU. A Europe that dismisses Russian power is one that has little compunction about working with the Americans to whittle away at Russian power in Russia’s own backyard. Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko — who, in many ways, is more anti-Western than Russian President Vladimir Putin and is highly critical of Putin as well — has said it is too late to “sing songs” about Kosovo. He maintains that the time to stop the partition of Kosovo was in 1999, in effect arguing that Putin’s attempts to stop it were ineffective because it was a lost cause. Translation: Putin and Russia are not the powers they pretend to be.
That is not something that Putin in particular can easily tolerate. Russian grand strategy calls for Russia to base its economy on the export of primary commodities. To succeed at this, Russia must align its production and exports with those of other FSU countries. For reasons of both national security and economics, being the regional hegemon in the FSU is crucial to Russia’s strategy and to Putin’s personal credibility. He is giving up the presidency on the assumption that his personal power will remain intact. That assumption is based on his effectiveness and decisiveness. The way he deals with the West — and the way the West deals with him — is a measure of his personal power. Being completely disregarded by the West will cost him. He needs to react.
The Russians are therefore hosting an “informal” CIS summit in Moscow on Friday. This is not the first such summit, by any means, and one was supposed to be held before this but was postponed. On Feb. 11, however, after it became clear that Kosovo would declare independence, the decision to hold the summit was announced. If Putin has a response to the West on Kosovo, it should reveal itself at the summit.
There are three basic strategies the Russians can pursue. One is to try to create a coalition of CIS countries to aid Serbia. This is complex in that Serbia may have no appetite for this move, and the other CIS countries may not even symbolically want to play.
The second option is opening the wider issue of altering borders. This could be aimed at sticking it to the Europeans by backing Serbian secessionist efforts in bifurcated Bosnia-Herzegovina. It also could involve announcing Russia’s plans to annex Russian-friendly separatist regions on its borders — most notably the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and perhaps even eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. (Annexation would be preferred over recognizing independence, since it would reduce the chances of Russia’s own separatist regions agitating for secession.) Russia thus would argue that Kosovo’s independence opens the door for Russia to shift its borders, too. That would make the summit exciting, particularly with regard to the Georgians, who are allied with the United States and at odds with Russia on Abkhazia and other issues.
The third option involves creating problems for the West elsewhere. An Iranian delegation will be attending the summit as “observers.” That creates the option for Russia to signal to Washington that the price it will pay for Kosovo will be extracted elsewhere. Apart from increased Russian support for Iran — which would complicate matters in Iraq for Washington — there are issues concerning Azerbaijan, which is sandwiched between Russia and Iran. In the course of discussions with Iranians, the Russians could create problems for Azerbaijan. The Russians also could increase pressure on the Baltic states, which recognized Kosovo and whose NATO membership is a challenge to the Russians. During the Cold War, the Russians were masters of linkage. They responded not where they were weak but where the West was weak. There are many venues for that.
What is the hardest to believe — but is, of course, possible — is that Putin simply will allow the Kosovo issue to pass. He clearly knew this was coming. He maintained vocal opposition to it beforehand and reiterated his opposition afterward. The more he talks and the less he does, the weaker he appears to be. He personally can’t afford that, and neither can Russia. He had opportunities to cut his losses before Kosovo’s independence was declared. He didn’t. That means either he has blundered badly or he has something on his mind. Our experience with Putin is that the latter is more likely, and this suddenly called summit may be where we see his plans play out.
Tell George what you think

Emerging-market multinationals

The challengers
Jan 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition

A new breed of multinational company has emerged

Illustration by Bill Butcher

WHEN Ford Motor Company bought Jaguar in 1989 and Land Rover 11 years later, it marked a low point for Britain's ailing industrial heritage. Last year Ford concluded that it could not make money from the illustrious British marques—equally a sign of its waning fortunes. The two firms shortlisted to take the prize come from India. Their ambition and confidence is a sign of something new in global business: the arrival in force of emerging-market multinationals.

Tata Motors, the carmaking bit of Tata Group, India's biggest industrial conglomerate, has edged ahead of Mahindra & Mahindra, a sprawling group that makes tractors and off-road vehicles, to become the preferred bidder. Ford told Jaguar workers this month that it was “in substantive discussions” with Tata. The future of these two grand old badges will be shaped not in Coventry, cradle of the British motor industry, but in Pune, home of Tata Motors.

Another indication of this newcomer's growing strength was the unveiling this week of the revolutionary, cheap “one lakh” car, which will sell in India and South-East Asia for the equivalent of $2,500. Thus the Indian company, which launched its first saloon car barely ten years ago, is beating the industry's established giants in a new market segment in which sales will surely grow fast.

Tata is certainly not the only company from an emerging economy striding onto the global stage. A study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found 100 companies from emerging markets with total assets in 2006 of $520 billion, more than the world's top 20 car companies. By 2004 the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) even noted that five companies from emerging Asia had made it into the list of the world's 100 biggest multinationals measured by overseas assets; ten more emerging-economy firms made it into the top 200.

By 2006 foreign direct investment (including mergers and acquisitions) from developing economies had reached $174 billion, 14% of the world's total, giving such countries a 13% share (worth $1.6 trillion) of the stock of global FDI. In 1990 emerging economies accounted for just 5% of the flow (see chart 1) and 8% of the stock. Their slice of global cross-border M&A has been climbing. It reached 14% in value terms in 2006 (chart 2). That year they spent $123 billion in more than 1,000 cross-border deals.

Since UNCTAD's first analysis in the early 1970s there has been concern about the power wielded by companies from rich countries in poorer ones. Developed countries have had their bouts of anxiety too. In the 1960s the French fretted about le défi américain, as IBM, Ford, General Motors, Dow Chemical and ITT spread their tentacles across Europe; in the 1980s it was America's turn to squirm as Japanese firms bought up Hollywood and Manhattan.

The latest trend reflects a new, fundamental shift. In a more open world, emerging economies are spawning their own giants. UNCTAD is turning its attention to the new shape of global business: investment now flows increasingly from south to north and south to south, as emerging economies invest both in the rich world and in less developed countries.

Meet the new boys
The rest of the world has woken up to the newcomers in the past couple of years thanks to some huge cross-border deals. In early 2006 Arcelor, a steelmaker of French, Luxembourgeois and Spanish extraction and Europe's biggest, faced a bid from Mittal, an international steel group largely owned by the family of Lakshmi Mittal, an expatriate Indian based in London. Mr Mittal and his son, Aditya, had cooked up the deal two days before Christmas 2005, during their annual skiing holiday in St Moritz. When the French government heard about the deal in January, recalls Mr Mittal, ministers wondered whether his company was Indian or American. Arcelor turned to another emerging-economy steelmaker, Russia's Severstal, as a possible white knight, before eventually succumbing to Mittal six months later. Thus was born Arcelor Mittal, the first steel company with an annual output of more than 100m tonnes.

The confusion over Mittal's origins among French government ministers reflects the novelty of the group. Unable to expand the family's steel business in stuffy, over-regulated India, Mr Mittal took off to lead an international wing, with a steel mill in Indonesia, which soon prospered “under the noses of the Japanese” as he gleefully recalls. His reputation there led to a contract to turn around the state-owned steel industry in Trinidad, which he later acquired. Next was Mexico, where he bought steel plants in the country's 1990s privatisation wave, before buying Inland Steel and International Steel in America, as traditional steelmakers there wilted in the rust-belt meltdown. Then he snapped up old state steel firms in eastern Europe.

Even before Mr Mittal bought Arcelor, Corus, an Anglo-Dutch steel firm, had approached Ratan Tata, head of Tata Group, about joining forces with Tata Steel, which owned plants in Singapore and elsewhere in South-East Asia as well as in India. Months of discussion led to the conclusion that the only efficient way to combine would be for the Indian firm to take over Corus (most Tata group companies are separately quoted, with the holding company having about 20% of the shares). This agreement led to another dramatic demonstration of power: a bidding war for Corus between Tata Steel and Brazil's CSN group, which broke out in late 2006. Tata eventually secured its prize in an all-night auction organised by the takeover panel in London a year ago.

Besides the companies making such big deals, a whole squad of well-known new multinationals from developing countries have been growing organically and through smaller deals. The Indian trio of Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have built an IT outsourcing industry that has moved upmarket, has gone global and is chasing rich-country leaders such as Accenture and IBM. China has Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business, the Haier and Hisense groups in domestic appliances and consumer electronics, and BYD, the world's largest maker of nickel-cadmium batteries.

Others now being watched by western analysts include Chery Automobile, China's leading car exporter, which aims to build plants in eastern Europe, the Middle East and South America. Johnson Electric, of Hong Kong, has cornered half the world's market for tiny electric motors. Cemex, a Mexican cement company, has already taken over a big British group, RMC. Embraer of Brazil has become the world's third-largest aircraft company, specialising in regional jets. Half the sales of Sadia and Perdigão, two Brazilian food companies, which amount to around $6 billion combined, are exports.

India's Bharat Forge, now the world's second-largest forging company and a leading supplier to the motor industry around the world, recently tied up with a French company to get close to PSA Peugeot Citroën. Indian private-equity groups have been eyeing this tactic and aim to take over small European car-parts companies. Their motivation is not to own assets in France or Germany, but to acquire relationships with manufacturers. “We are not really buying factories,” says such an investor. “We are buying orders, which we can eventually fulfil with cheaper supplies from India.”

The rationale
According to BCG, thousands of companies like these are expanding sales and production internationally. Their home markets offer several advantages. Rapid growth gives companies scale and spare cash to invest abroad. Costs are low. The difficulties of operating in an emerging market may make managers adaptable and resilient. Finally, gradual liberalisation in their home markets—as in India since the early 1990s—has exposed them to competition from multinationals. The threat to their domestic dominance has encouraged their managers to hone their skills, exposed them to best international practice and spurred them to seek growth abroad to compensate for lost market share at home.

Ratan Tata spent his first ten years at the helm of the family company tidying up its rambling and often decrepit Indian businesses before turning his attention to foreign markets in the late 1990s. When the Indian market opened up, he recalls, Indian companies thought they would all have to merge with each other, because years of protection had made them too weak to face the new foreign competition. That soon passed as other industries saw the success of Indian IT and outsourcing, textile and pharmaceutical companies; Ranbaxy was on the way to becoming one of the world's leading makers of generic drugs, just as the boom in such products was taking off in the mid-1990s.

While Tata's IT business, TCS, was cutting a swathe through North America, Mr Tata was planning other international moves. He bought Tetley Tea, an English brand, and NatSteel Asia, based in Singapore, whose rolling mills could use the slab steel produced in Tata's Indian plants. He also bought Daewoo trucks, after the stricken South Korean chaebol had to be broken up. Mr Tata says that he looks beyond sheer size in search of a strategic fit when he acquires companies.

The new brigades are fanning out around the world using a selection of five strategies, according to BCG. The first is taking brands from local to global. China's Hisense, a $3.3 billion consumer-electronics group, is a prime example. With over 10% of the market for TV sets at home, it has turned its attention to the wider world with a product range that includes air conditioners, PCs and telecoms equipment. It manufactures in Algeria, Hungary, Iran, Pakistan and South Africa. It now sells over 10m TVs and 3m air conditioners a year in more than 40 countries. Hisense owns the best-selling brand of flat-screen TVs in France. The home Chinese market gives the company a vast, cheap manufacturing base, to which it adds other advantages such as stylish design and a world-class R&D centre.

Bajaj Auto, based like Tata Motors in Pune, is another developing-country brand going global. It is India's biggest maker of two- and three-wheeled vehicles. Its sales have more than doubled since 2000, to $2.3 billion. Under the former boss, Rahul Bajaj, the company was typical of a stratum of Indian entrepreneurs, known as the Bombay club, who wanted to keep foreign competition at bay with tariff walls and domestic mergers. Now, under Rahul's son, Rajiv, Bajaj has taken its own first steps onto the global stage with organic growth of exports, mostly to South-East Asia.

A second strategy is to turn local engineering excellence into innovation on a global scale, as Embraer has done. Supported by the Brazilian government and later largely privatised, Embraer has overtaken Canada's Bombardier to become the world's leading maker of regional jets. It has timed its push to take advantage of regional airlines' desire to replace traditional, noisy turbo-prop aircraft with sleeker, faster small jets. By 2006 over 95% of its $3.8 billion sales were outside Brazil. It is one of Brazil's biggest exporters, combining low-cost manufacturing with advanced R&D. In addition, Embraer has a joint venture with China Aviation Industry Corporation II. In this it was even ahead of Boeing and Airbus, both now scrambling to transform themselves from rich-world exporters into global producers, with long, difficult-to-manage supply chains spanning the world.

The third path to international success is going for global leadership in a narrow product category. Two Chinese companies are notable for taking this route. One is BYD, the battery-maker. It uses a more labour-intensive production system than the Japanese firms it competes with to take advantage of low labour costs. The other is Johnson Electric, which though based in Hong Kong now produces chiefly in mainland China. It makes tiny electric motors for products such as cameras or cars. A BMW 5 series, for instance, has over 100 tiny motors (of less than one horsepower) to move the wing mirrors, adjust the seats, open the sun roof and so on. Johnson churns out 3m a day, most of them for export. Manufacturers prefer to have them designed to their specifications than to buy them off the shelf. Johnson has landed its half-share of the market by catering to these requirements.

In this way an industry that used to be in the hands of American or European companies, with factories in the Midwest, the English Midlands or Germany's industrial heartland, has moved to China. That said, Johnson has built its strength partly through well-timed acquisitions (including parts of America's Lear and ArvinMeritor) in target markets to get closer to customers. It now has plants in America and western Europe and R&D centres in Israel, Italy, Japan and America.

Brazil's Sadia and Perdigão exemplify the fourth strategy: taking advantage of natural resources at home, and boosting them with first-class marketing and distribution. They have built sales organisations around the world to make the most of the abundant resources for producing pork, poultry and grain in Brazil, complemented by ideal growing conditions and low labour costs. Another Brazilian firm, Vale, has exploited its home country's huge, cheap sources of iron ore to become one of the world's leading suppliers.

The fifth strategy is to have a new or better business model to roll out to many different markets. This is the approach of Mexico's Cemex, one of the world's biggest suppliers of ready-mixed concrete. Its annual sales topped $18 billion in 2006.

Industries such as cement and other building materials are usually considered “territorial goods”, meaning they are bulky, basic and too expensive to transport long distances. But now this wisdom is being stood on its head: though it may not be worth shipping cement from Mexico to Europe, know-how and investment can be swiftly poured into any market. Whereas rich-world companies, such as Lafarge and Saint-Gobain, are investing in developing countries to increase sales of their cement and building products, Cemex is showing that the same thing can flow in reverse.

Few in Europe had taken much note of Cemex until it swooped to buy RMC in 2005. But by that time four-fifths of its revenue was already coming from beyond Mexico's borders. It had bought or built businesses in Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States before it set its sights on Europe.

The secret of the company's success is the rigorous development of its own style of managing acquisitions, which it calls “the Cemex way”. A British manager who left RMC, somewhat discomfited, shortly after its purchase by the Mexicans nevertheless praises their approach. “They have their own systems, very heavily dependent on standardised procedures built around highly developed IT systems,” he concedes.

The new multinationals have some distinct advantages in their sprint to the fore of global business. They are often family-owned or family-controlled (even when they are public companies), which helps them to make decisions quickly. They often enjoy cheap finance from state banks. But they also face particular problems, because they are trying to break into a world economy in which globalisation is already well advanced.

When rich-world companies were going international, everything moved at a slower pace. Now, as Gordon Orr, who works in McKinsey's Shanghai office points out, the prizes go to the top few firms in any industry. Organic growth is generally too slow to turn companies into winners.

Tariffs and anti-dumping actions can also prevent developing-country companies from getting into the rich world. Firms may be ignorant of the markets they are entering. Their brands, though well established at home, are unknown in Europe or America. They may lack the necessary management talent. Pay structures are hard to devise when middle managers in rich-world subsidiaries expect to earn more than their seniors in head office.

The future is Mittalic
But the new boys have often leapt these hurdles impressively. TCL, a Chinese consumer-electronics company, broke into Europe by buying the French Thomson TV brand. Cemex started investing in America when its cement exports were hit by anti-dumping suits: it became the market leader. Lenovo bought IBM's PC business partly to acquire management talent, and went on to create a firm that blended the best of the two businesses. Sunil Kakkad of LG, a London-based business-law firm, says that Indian multinationals are reversing the usual brain-drain by sucking non-resident Indians back from branch offices in America and Europe, where they have gained experience that could be useful at the centre.

Possibly, more newcomers will not build out from home markets but will amass businesses in all parts of the world, as Mr Mittal's group has done. He likes to point out that having a strong base in both developing and rich countries gives his company a balanced portfolio. “I see plenty of scope for growth in developing countries and plenty of opportunities for consolidation in developed countries,” he beams in his office overlooking London's Berkeley Square.

Success in one developing country led Mr Mittal to opportunities on the other side of the world. Family ownership helped with quick decisions to outsmart competitors. There will be more Mittals: not just Tatas or Cherys, emerging from giant, booming domestic markets; but new creatures, bursting out of nowhere to take the world by storm.

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