Strategic Trust-Building

The event brought together  high-ranking current and former political and military figures from OSCE countries, including Ambassador Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference and former Ambassador of Germany to the U.S.; Dr. Celeste A. Wallander, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia of the U.S. Department of Defense; Dr. Joris Voorhoeve, former Minister of Defense of the Netherlands and Member of the Council of State; Dr. Andrzej Olechowski, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland and Member of European Council on Foreign Relations; high-level representatives from OSCE, CSTO and NATO including General Nikolay Bordyuzha, Secretary General, Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO); Dr. Oleksandr Pavlyuk, Head of the External Co-operation of the Office of the OSCE Secretary General; Dr. Goran Svilanović, Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities and former Foreign Minister of FR Yugoslavia; Ambassador Dmitriy Rogozin, Head of the Russian Mission to NATO; representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Ambassador Kairat Abusseitov, Head of the Kazakh Embassy in London; and select prominent security experts from the diplomatic and think tank communities to identify action-oriented recommendations and explore cooperative paths to strengthen Euro-Atlantic Security.

Participants at the meeting argued that there are a lot of real possibilities to activate the OSCE countries in strengthening the Euro-Atlantic Security.

The key findings of the meeting will be circulated to all OSCE governments ahead of the upcoming Lisbon NATO summit in November 2010 and Astana OSCE Summit in December 2010.

Click here to download the full report from this meeting.

“In theory these three countries forging a true partnership could start a new chapter in world history,” states Sibal.

But Sibal maintains that the RIC dialogue may not have as much promise as originally anticipated because “the validity of most of the premises underlying it has been shaken.”  Now that the United State’s sole superpower status has waned, as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 financial crisis, there is not as much need for Russia, India and China to come together to balance the global power structure.

China provides the most dramatic example of the current realignment in geopolitics. As Sibal puts it: “Since the RIC dialogue began China’s economic rise has been spectacular, with its economy now overtaking Japan’s in size.  China’s self-confidence has bounded and nationalist feelings are being fed at home.”

Despite its rapidly growing economy and population, Sibal believes India is in many ways the weakest member of the RIC dialogue.  Though India is a member of the G20, it is not a permanent member of the Security Council, which limits its role in the RIC in key decisions on global peace and security issues. 

Of the three countries, India and Russia have the most common interests—especially when it come to countering the terrorism and religious extremism that is ravaging Afghanistan and Pakistan, endangering Central Asia and even southern Russia.  Even so, this bond may not prove strong enough to successfully maintain the RIC dialogue.

Sibal concludes: “The RIC dialogue was a grand idea that failed to live up to expectations because the conditions in which it was set up changed rapidly.”

Photo: "Moscow Kremlin" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Alexey Kljatov (ChaoticMind75)

“Last month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repugnant claim that the events of 9/11 were a U.S. conspiracy set an all-time low in this regard, triggering a walkout by the representatives of 33 countries—a new record,” writes Sidhu.

Sidhu argues that Washington DC’s and Tehran’s mutual misperceptions lie at the heart of this problematic relationship.  With Ahmadinejad’s pronouncements of the U.S.’s immoral political and economic system, and the U.S.’s belief that Iran is on the verge of collapse, neither country evaluates the other realistically.  Both countries’ assessments are too extreme.

Sidhu concludes that Iran made a serious mistake in choosing to attack the U.S. rather than communicate at this year’s UN General Assembly: “Clearly, both sides missed a ‘golden opportunity’ to negotiate their way out of the dangerous impasse on the sidelines of the UN.  In this instance, the blame lies squarely with Ahmadinejad.”

Click here to read Sidhu's piece on livemint.com.

On 23 April 2010, the New York Times referenced a meeting in March between US and Chinese officials as “the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet”. The report also said that a visit by a Chinese warship to Abu Dhabi in 2010 was the “first time the modern Chinese Navy made a port visit in the Middle East.”

Sorry, but the famous newspaper and its sources in this report have been misleading. Chinese naval ships have visited the Middle East before this year, with three ships visiting Egypt in 2002. A small Chinese naval flotilla has been on anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden beginning in 2008 – alongside NATO. By early 2010, these ships had reportedly made more than 16 visits to Oman. The New York Times might have said more correctly the “Persian Gulf”.

On the bigger issue, there is no stronger core interest for a state than sovereignty over territory. The two main island groups of the South China Sea (Paracel and Spratly) have been identified both by the Republic of China (ROC) since 1946 and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1951 as China’s vital national interest. In 1951, China demanded recognition of its sovereignty over the islands. Through various acts since, China has made clear its view of these islands as vital interests, most visibly in 1974 with the military eviction of South Vietnamese forces from the Paracel Islands, and then through successive shows of force around the Spratly Islands.

For almost five decades, both the PRC and ROC have drawn maps, using the so-called U-shaped line, showing almost the entirety of the South China Sea as within China’s domain. That line has no legal standing but the subsequent evolution of the Law of the Sea would, in the Chinese view and reasonable expectation, place large slices of the South China (though not even half of it) under Chinese jurisdiction for the exploitation of maritime resources.

According to a Pentagon report this year, China “has the largest force of principal combatants, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships in Asia”. The report notes that “China’s naval forces include some 75 principal combatants, more than 60 submarines, 55 medium and large amphibious ships, and roughly 85 missile-equipped patrol craft.” According to an August 2010 report of the United States Congressional Research Service, China has only commissioned around two new major surface combatants per year for the past twenty years. The CRS also obliquely criticized the Pentagon report, not least because “China’s navy includes significant numbers of older, obsolescent ships”. The Office of Naval Intelligence predicts a small decline in the number of major surface combatants by 2015 and a further small decline by 2020.

At the end of the day, the Pentagon statement that China has the “largest” naval force “in Asia” – though true – is misleading. It really needs to be qualified by clearer assessments of the technology levels compared with potential enemies, the age of the ships, procurement rates, China’s relative maritime military power in Asia, the capability of related air assets, the missions assigned the naval forces as part of national strategy, or even perhaps the amounts of maritime territory. Japan alone has around 50 principal combatants even if it has far fewer though more capable submarines and far fewer amphibious ships. If we add the capability of the US Pacific Forces and the political commitment of other Pacific allies to the strategic power of Japan, then PLA naval strength is not the game changer some are suggesting – even on its own door step.

The Pentagon report on China, like the misleading newspaper coverage of China, needs to be handled with care.

Greg Austin is the author of "China's Ocean Frontier."

Christine Loh is the founder of Civic Exchange, a Hong Kong based think tank focused on environmental, social, and economic issues. She visited the New York offices of EastWest institute on September 16th 2010 to discuss her new book Underground Front: the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Her talk, featured in this two-part video series, is followed by a Q & A session. To watch, simply click on the links below:

Christine Loh Book Presentation (Part I)

Christine Loh Book Presentation (Part II)

EWI Vice President, Greg Austin, is quoted in a Reuters article about crisis response.

“An attack on Russia would be regarded as an attack on NATO!” In November 2013, ten months after being sworn in as President of the United States for a second term, this is President Obama’s declaration to the NATO summit.

The United States and NATO had provided a similar security guarantee to Japan for decades, which in the 1980s was often called the “sixteenth member” of NATO. In 1969, the United States gave a similar private assurance to the Soviet Union when Moscow was considering nuclear retaliation against an increasingly belligerent China in the grip of the Cultural Revolution.  

In 2009, under a new wave of military reforms instituted by President Medvedev, and backed by Prime Minister Putin, Russia began dismantling what was left of its capability for protracted conventional war. By 2012, Russia certainly needed NATO, and the latter needed reassurance that Russia’s almost exclusive reliance on nuclear weapons alone for its defence would not be called into play in potential conflicts in Northeast Asia.
The 2013 decision to align so closely with Russia grew out of three broad commitments in NATO’s 2010 security concept.

The first was affirmation that while NATO is a defensive regional military alliance, there were several “out of area” developments that directly brought into play its security interests. This had been evident even before 2010. In the 1987 war on shipping in the Persian Gulf, several NATO allies used the fig-leaf of the moribund 1948 Western European Union defence treaty to provide legal cover for a joint military operation to protect oil tankers “an ocean away” from NATO territory.  The direct security interests of NATO in remote areas had also been manifested in the acceptance by it in 2003 of the UN mandate to undertake defence of the Afghanistan government. As one diplomat put it prophetically in 2010, “Afghanistan changed NATO forever”.

In this vein, NATO came to understand that its explicit commit to “exporting security” was a deeper commitment than a temporary, “out of area” deployment of troops or the coordination of security sector reform in what were then called “partner” countries. In fact, the idea that NATO involvement in reforming the military establishment of distant countries was somehow apolitical had by 2012 become widely acknowledged as a big illusion. There is nothing more profoundly political and more potentially entangling in security terms that a commitment by one country to shore up the military establishment of another.  The second stream of policy development that contributed to the NATO decision to offer a security guarantee to Russia was the determination to respond positively to the growing demand from “out of area” countries for close ties that represented, as for Japan, de facto but non-voting membership of NATO. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had been de facto members since 1990 when NATO forces joined those of many others in Operation “Desert Shield”, which a year later became the “Desert Storm” that liberated Kuwait. By 2012, other tiny and defenceless Arab states were all too willing to sign up as “partners”, and NATO’s heavy dependence on their oil and the value of their investment capital sealed the deal.

The third stream of NATO policy development that led to the security guarantee for Russia was not as explicit in the 2010 security review, but the seeds of it were there in several ways. The foundation was recognition of the treaty commitment of all NATO countries to finding security “with Russia”, not “against it”. If NATO was the cornerstone of European security and European security (including Russia) was “indivisible”, then NATO had to be at least one cornerstone of Russian security. But that was only a “legal” explanation. NATO extended the security guarantee to Russia in 2013 because of a shared sense of urgent need to protect common security interests in the Korean peninsula, Central and South Asia, the Red Sea hinterland – and cyber space.

They unanimously adopted  a final document, including an ambitious 64-point action plan that detailed steps for strengthening  non-proliferation norms, reducing nuclear dangers and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons. Perhaps the most ambitious agenda ever produced by an NPT Review Conference, the plan still did not address some pressing challenges, such as the North Korea’s nuclear weapon capabilities and status. The plan also poses tough questions: which of the 64 steps should be given priority and how to undertake them?

To address this issue and help put the plan into action, the EastWest Institute and the Permanent Mission of Kazakhstan held a High Level Consultation on “Prioritizing the NPT Action Plan” at the United Nations on September 9.

The event opened with remarks by Francis Finlay, EWI’s Chairman of the Board, and His Excellency Kairat Umarov, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. Recognizing Kazakhstan’s precedent-setting elimination of nuclear arms in 1991, Finlay further identified Umarov as a “leader in nonproliferation and disarmament efforts.” (click here for remarks by Francis Finlay and Kairat Umarov)

Kairat Umarov and Francis Finlay

Umarov spoke on issues he called vital for the success of the next NPT Review Conference in 2015, three of which became focus points in the discussion, namely: the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) by “influential states”; the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East; and the support of regulated, peaceful use of nuclear power.

The following panel of experts, all of whom were involved in the successfully concluded NPT Rev Con, included:

• His Excellency Libran N. Cabactulan, Ambassador E. and P. and Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of the Republic of the Philippines to the United Nations (speech)

• Mr. Sergio Duarte, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, United Nations (speech, courtesy of the United Nations)

•  His Excellency Ambassador Tibor Tóth, Executive Secretary, Preparatory Commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO)  (speech)

• The Honorable Susan F. Burk, Special Representative of the President for Nuclear Nonproliferation, Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, United States Department of State (speech)

• His Excellency Maged A. Abdelaziz, Ambassador E. and P. and Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of the Arab Republic of Egypt to the United Nations

The panel members, moderated by Dr. W. Pal Sidhu, EWI’s Vice President of Programs, identified their “top three priorities” among the final document’s 64 point action plan.  All panelists agreed that the 2010 final document was a “historical achievement” and had helped to “reset” the Treaty. However, there was also concern that if progress was not made following the reset it would seriously endanger the future of the Treaty.

Action 5, which calls for the nuclear-weapon States to “commit to accelerate concrete progress on the steps leading to nuclear disarmament,” emerged as the highest priority. Significantly, Action 5 asks states to report progress on specific tasks to a Preparatory Committee at 2014 – showing a commitment not only to accountability and transparency, but to the NPT’s ongoing process.  In fact, prioritizing the continued health of the NPT – which once broken, as an audience member pointed out, would be impossible to reconstitute – became one of the afternoon’s few clear guiding ideas.

Similarly, while ratification of the CTBT by key states and its entry into force was considered a priority, there was also an appreciation that this could not be guaranteed in the near future.

Finally, the proposed 2012 Middle East conference to implement the 1995 NPT Rev Con resolution on establishing a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons was also identified as a high priority. The panelist discussed the significant challenges in this endeavor, particularly the constructive participation of Iran and Israel. The speakers also identified key actions which would be essential to ensure that the conference is held at all. One such was the requirement of the appointment of a high-profile facilitator who did not come from either the permanent member states of the UN Security Council or the middle and who would be equally acceptable to Iran, Israel or the Arab states. There was a consensus that to ensure a successful conference, the states involved will have to address the various challenges either formally or informally at the track 2 level.

As readers of this newspaper will know, the OSCE spans three continents, brings together about 15 per cent of humanity, has 56 members, and has four out of five permanent seats in the UNSC. There is another regional organization that also spans three continents, represents the aspirations of a bigger slice of humanity (about 25 per cent), and has 57 countries as members, but none with a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

The group in question is the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the world’s only “regional organization” based around a religious attribution. Apart from its 57 members (Muslim majority states), there are a number of states or entities as observers: Bosnia and Hercegovina, Thailand, Russia, the Central African Republic and the Turkish Cypriot government.

The OIC has its own Development Bank, its Islamic UNESCO (ISESCO), the Islamic International Court, the International Islamic News Agency, and a host of subsidiary and affiliated organizations. It does not of course represent in a direct political sense all Muslims, but it does purport to speak on behalf of the “umma” (the community of Muslim believers worldwide).

Osama bin Laden wrote often of the Umma, expressing on occasion the hope that it would rise again to a prominent place in world political affairs, and be recognized again for high achievement in the arts and sciences. I mention that not to credit the source in any way, but to demonstrate that the sentiment about an organized Islamic resurgence is seen as a good mobilizing tool. That aspiration is shared by many leaders in the Islamic world, and it is captured in the Charter of the OIC: “to work for revitalizing Islam’s pioneering role in the world”. This vision, one I share, is the departure point of this analysis.

There are other high ambitions expressed in the OIC charter, including the more familiar idea of a “common market”, albeit an “Islamic Common Market”. Turkey, also an aspirant for EU membership, is actively promoting both parts of this OIC agenda: scientific and technological advance and regional economic integration.

The OIC revised its original 1972 Charter only in 2008. At the time, Indonesia’s President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, declared that as a result of the new charter "the possibility of an Islamic Renaissance lies before us".

The OIC is a leading force in the fight globally against violent extremism.  In 2008, the conference declaration noted: “We continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism which are incompatible with Islam”. The OIC is also leading a global campaign against rising Islamophobia around the world, a phenomenon documented by independent sources.

To many observers, the OIC is an imperfect organization, to be faulted for its internal divisions, for its hostile attitude to Israel, for what some see as its ingrained anti-semitism, and for its extreme political diversity (from monarchies, dictatorships, and radical regimes to democracies of varying stripe).

That view does not capture the essential dynamism and progressive character of the evolutionary path on which the OIC has been set for number of years. Nor does it speak to the sense of injustice over Palestine that for its part, it carries into many political forums.

A full assessment of the trajectory of this interesting organization would be very useful. One thing is clear. The OIC wants a new partnership with the West, and some countries are beginning to respond to that. The path to regional and wider international power and authority may be long and rocky, but the OIC and its member states have a vision for regional and global economic and scientific development that is definitely beginning to change the world for the better. Let’s work with them.