How to Run the World

by Parag Khanna

  Borderless trade and communications technology, the forces that empower citizens and consumers, also empower the terrorism-warfare-criminality nexus of banks, gunrunners, charities, training camps, spies, gangs, and corrupt officials reaching every corner of the globe. The notion of “allies” fully united and committed to a global counterterrorism compact is antiquated. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan aren’t unified in any such way. Some parts of their governments cooperate, while others are among the main feeders and financiers of terrorist groups. The U.S. State Department blocked families of 9/11 victims from suing Saudi Arabia, but not Saudi charities that directly and indirectly fund the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The transnational nature of the new terrorist-criminal enterprises has thus ripped apart the traditional confines of international negotiation. Nonstate groups such as the FARC in Colombia or the Taliban in Afghanistan have held territory without having statehood, but we treat them much the same. Even the truly stateless Osama bin Laden has made peace offers and called for negotiations, which European diplomats have seriously considered despite accusations of appeasement.

  States sponsor terrorism through public-private networks—so thwarting terrorism requires the same approach. Cross-border problems need cross-border solutions, not UN resolutions. Chasing terrorists across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, drug smugglers across the Colombian-Venezuelan border, and arms traffickers across the Moldovan-Ukrainian border all require cooperation among neighbors to catch and prosecute the miscreants. International terrorist groups by definition violate state sovereignty, so violating it further to catch them should hardly be illegal. In the aftermath of 9/11, UN resolution 1373 mandated greater international intelligence cooperation. From there, some officials suggested the creation of a global counterterrorism organization. But how would such a central body be even remotely nimble enough to deal with the diffuse threat of terrorism? What value could it add to the more than seventy regional and subregional counterterrorism efforts that already exist?

  The hodgepodge of UN and other international agencies and committees that deal with transnational threats treat terrorism, organized crime, weapons proliferation, small arms, and drugs as if they each have a unique set of solutions. But they don’t: Border security, export controls, legal reform, well-paid police, and well-trained judges and prosecutors are part of any effective strategy against these ills. A far greater premium should be placed on networking that allows intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information on terrorist suspects and money-laundering charities and financial institutions. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which names and shames countries with weak money-laundering safeguards, and Interpol, which receives only $60 million per year from its member states, deserve much larger budgets. Without the FATF, the U.S. Treasury’s outreach to more than forty major international banks such as Barclays to freeze and reduce dealings with Iran would have been much more difficult to coordinate.

  Intelligence cooperation can catch terrorists before they blow up buses, trains, planes, police stations, and parliaments, but it doesn’t address underlying grievances. American foreign policy has favored the “long war” over the more important local war. We no longer use the term “global war on terror,” yet the reality of multinational jihadism remains a daily ordeal in the Mideast and southern and Southeast Asia. Despite its global connections, most terrorism is local. Al-Qaeda can strike worldwide, but its grievances are local, as are most of its targets. Some Islamist militias in Pakistan and radical Salafists in North Africa have clearly benefited from al-Qaeda links, but when we refer to groups as al-Qaeda “affiliates” or “copycats” we reify them into amorphous global movements, ignoring their tangible local agendas, which, if addressed, could take the wind out of their sails. The poor political performance of Islamist parties in Indonesia or Hezbollah in Lebanon is at least partially explained by this. As a 2008 RAND study of more than five hundred terrorist campaigns unequivocally demonstrates, integration into political processes and joint intelligence-police operations (rather than military operations) are the most successful mechanisms sapping terrorist support.1 But if poor and fractured societies could do this by themselves, they wouldn’t be criminal-narco-terrorist havens to begin with. Indeed, beefed-up security alone isn’t a total solution to terrorism, simply because most countries can’t afford it. More police cameras in the West and in authoritarian states simply drive terrorists to lawless safe havens such as Yemen or Pakistan. Military strikes kill the terrorists of today, but they also alienate local populations and breed the terrorists of tomorrow. Australia’s goal in Indonesia, therefore, is not only to conduct joint ’operations and training with the army, but also to provide a steady flow of experts in police and justice reform to improve the quality of governance in restive areas.

  Instead of a high-altitude “war of ideas,” the way to win “hearts and minds” is through the wallet and the stomach. Tacky television programs boasting the virtuous lifestyle of Muslim Americans and appeals to brotherhood with a mythically vast global Islamic community do nothing for the prosaic problems of Muslim youth. The Obama administration has moved beyond conflating the global struggle against al-Qaeda with the larger challenge of rehabilitating the economy and governance of postcolonial Muslim societies, but has yet to penetrate deep enough to help them see a better future. The Arab world has the greatest share of its population in Generation Y, but this cohort is also a generation in waiting: waiting for jobs, education, marriage, and homes. All the reports about a “missing middle class” and “youth bulge” should focus on how to build more vocational centers, factories, and call centers in the Middle East.

  This is the time for American companies—not its military—to be the tip of the spear. Foreign investment reinforces alliances: Now that the U.S. military has pulled out of Saudi Arabia, it’s increasingly up to multinationals such as Alcoa, which recently announced a $10 billion investment in a new aluminum complex, to bring jobs in modern facilities and goodwill to the Saudi people. In the other direction, Saudi prince Alwaleed is the largest single private investor in the United States. Together Alcoa and Alwaleed are the new Army and Aramco.

  America’s universities can also “drain the swamp” better than any invasion. From the outskirts of Cairo to glitzy new quadrangles in Qatar, top-tier schools—including Georgetown, Cornell, Texas A&M, NYU, and Carnegie Mellon—are now the best face of American foreign policy in the Middle East, educating the next generation of Arab entrepreneurs and politicians in making business plans and managing ministries.

  Business for Diplomatic Action, a private group of executives alarmed by America’s diminished global brand, has also taken matters into its own hands. It has launched a CultureSpan program to promote dialogue between American businesspeople and foreign citizens, urged American firms to maintain robust overseas operations, and partnered with business schools and companies such as Boeing and Microsoft to fund dozens of Arab entrepreneurs to tour American firms and visit the United States. One Arab participant exclaimed, “We don’t like America.… We love America!”

  Terror on the High Seas

  As if there were not enough ungoverned spaces on land, there are even more at sea. Even though globalization has brought us jet travel and e-commerce, 70 percent of all interregional trade, including two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments, is still transported by sea. With the rise of Asian economies, most of the world’s container and tanker traffic crisscrosses the Indian Ocean from the Mideast to the Pacific Rim, passing through the narrow choke points of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, the Strait of Hormuz connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, or the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. Land and sea are not unconnected spaces—they give way to and shape each other. From Somalia to Aceh in Indonesia, whenever instability has risen on land, so, too, has piracy at sea.

  Most of the world is covered by oceans that are mostly controlled by no one. The eighteenth ce
ntury was not only a pivotal period of global capitalist expansion and colonialism, but also an age of piracy from the English Channel to the Straits of Malacca. The Barbary pirates of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli demanded $1 million from Thomas Jefferson (then one-tenth of the U.S. budget) to suspend attacks on American ships. While Europeans regularly paid such tribute, the United States eventually dispatched the precursor of today’s Mediterranean fleet to crush the pirates and restore free commercial flows. But clearly, robbery on the high seas has not gone away. Across the centuries, the combination of depraved conditions on land and opportunism at sea has always led to piracy. Indeed, as coastal development continues along the sea lanes of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, we are entering another era of global piracy.

  The violence in Yemen and Somalia, the littoral states of the Gulf of Aden, knows no shoreline as pirates threaten the twenty thousand ships passing through the water between them every year. In early 2008, pirates seized a Ukrainian ship loaded with dozens of battle tanks. Later the same year, when Somali pirates hijacked the Saudi-owned supertanker Sirius Star, carrying two million barrels of oil worth $100 million, a ransom of $3 million was air-dropped in a giant brick of $100 bills at a designated beach. In 2010, a ransom of $7 million was paid for the release of the crew of a Greek supertanker. Somali pirates don’t care whether the ships they raid are owned or flagged European, Arab, or Asian—often they have no idea whom they’re assaulting or what booty they might win. And since their country’s banking system is virtually nonexistent, cash is king.

  Somalia-based piracy is estimated to be a $100 million annual business, a substantial amount for one of the world’s most destitute countries. Many suspect that the pirates now have links with the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab, creating a pirate-fundamentalist nexus potentially capable of taking over the lawless country. But Islam and piracy aren’t necessarily a deadly combination. When the Islamic Courts Union united Somalia’s clans in 2006, piracy went down and the country witnessed the only brief months of stability it had experienced in twenty years.2

  The fact that ransom money is divided up in equitable portions among clan members and that pirate attacks diminish when families of fishermen can take care of themselves tells us that Somalis are not driven purely by greed. Indeed, it seems that Somali grievances, like those of many current and would-be terrorists, have been more often exploited than addressed. Since the 1990s, international mafia have made the coastal waters of southern Somalia a favored location for the dumping of toxic—even nuclear—waste, while commercial Asian (particularly Chinese) trawlers have overfished Somali waters for tuna, leaving locals with little to catch, feed on, or sell. Somali pirates therefore claim they have no choice but to raid ships in order to demand their fair share. They see themselves as protectors of their waters against foreign intrusion.

  Still, with shipping volumes and values so crucial to the global economy, the United States, European Union, India, China, and other strong nations are taking as tough a line today on piracy as America did more than two hundred years ago, their navies patrolling and killing pirates wherever possible as well as raiding onshore pirate hideaways (with some prosecutions in Kenya’s courts). International vessels passing through the Gulf of Aden are pursuing a mixed strategy: using fire hoses to repel pirates, paying bribes and ransoms when necessary, and even arming themselves. Blackwater, the notorious private military contractor, has deployed a small flotilla to escort oil and cargo vessels, while other companies are offering electric fencing and stun guns to shipping companies.

  Even though the gloves have come off, deploying expensive military convoys to float in the Gulf of Aden is hardly cost-effective. To avoid both an asymmetric arms race between Western navies and impoverished pirates, as well as potential friendly fire incidents among the dozen or more countries now patrolling the Arabian Sea, a more multidimensional strategy is required. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia jointly patrol the Strait of Malacca, with Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan funding the improvement of Indonesia’s coast guard capacity so that it can be a stronger participant in policing the waters rather than the weakest link. For the explosive Gulf of Aden, the money spent on perpetual naval patrols would be better spent on improving Somalia’s ability to curb pirates from going offshore in the first place—for example, by strengthening the African Union’s presence there.

  The autonomous and dysfunctional Puntland region of northern Somalia is not only the source of most Somali piracy but also the area in which the underlying problems are being dealt with most promisingly. With its depraved coast guard of only three tiny ships, Puntland has been hiring private military companies since 1999 to harass Chinese trawlers illegally fishing in Somali waters, levying fines on them, and splitting the fees. Western governments are now offering to build an anti-piracy coast guard as well, while local Puntland sheikhs are cooperating with international agencies to offer jobs to young men to lure them away from a life of seaborne jihad. Like their land-based terrorist counterparts, pirates will keep popping up until they have incentives not to. Supplying Somali fisherman with new boats to boost their catch and fend off illegal competition makes more sense than trying to sink every pirate closing in on the horizon.

  Nuclear Terror

  Who wants to wake up in the morning and find out that Iran or North Korea has acquired sizeable nuclear arsenals capable of reaching their capital city? The fear of nuclear weapons spreading to rogue regimes or terrorists is particularly acute among the (nuclear-armed) great powers themselves, which are the most likely targets of nuclear terrorism. As President Obama said on NATO’s sixtieth anniversary, “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.” Surrounding rogue regimes and threatening attacks on nuclear facilities seem only to accelerate proliferation, so how can diplomacy slow the spread of nukes?

  The 1986 Gorbachev-Reagan summit at Reykjavík was a turning point in the nuclear arms race and the Cold War, the moment at which the superpowers pledged to cap and potentially reduce their arsenals. A quarter century later, the United States and Russia might finally complete this process as they embark on a series of agreements to cut their arsenals—together 95 percent of the world’s total—and advance a global treaty to eliminate fissile material production. Not only will this liberate Russia from its current defense budget, which is half eaten up by the mere task of maintaining a redundant arsenal, but it allows the dynamic of disarmament to be taken seriously for perhaps the first time since the advent of the nuclear age. If Russia and America actually drop their existing arsenals to several hundred warheads each, declare no-first-use policies, and forgo ballistic missile defense programs and the weaponization of space, a credible movement toward a nuclear-free world could actually take root.

  Until that time, however, most of the world considers the forty-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) a symbol of “nuclear apartheid,” with the already nuclear-armed states in the West most loudly denouncing India, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, and North Korea for their nuclear quests. The NPT can’t stop proliferation, particularly since it grants the right to nuclear enrichment and processing. States seek nuclear weapons to deter the United States and nearby enemies, to compel neighbors to accept their dominance, and to gain status in the world’s nuclear club. In the Bush administration, disarmament disappeared from the diplomatic lexicon and proliferation increased. The rollback of Libya’s nuclear program was achieved through secret negotiation, but that success was overshadowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which, rather than scare Iran and North Korea, inspired the former to accelerate its centrifuge development program and the latter to kick out weapons inspectors and test a low-grade nuclear weapon. Scolding North Korea for “further isolating itself from the community of nations” doesn’t seem to bother its leaders much, since they could not have been more isolated to begin with.

  All the while, the nuclear issue g
rows ever more complex: weapons proliferation by states such as Iran, the risk of nuclear bombs or highly enriched uranium being stolen by terrorists, and the renewed prominence of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, making nuclear technology an increasingly sensitive and dangerous trade. Nuclear diplomacy has thus become a cat-and-mouse game in which nuclear cheaters manipulate reports, block inspections, and evade safeguards while continuing to build centrifuges, and nuclear sheriffs publish reports and intelligence, name and shame, hold international hearings, and threaten sanctions and military attacks. As more unstable countries from Egypt to Jordan to Pakistan expand their nuclear technology (or weapons) programs, the likelihood of nuclear theft and blackmail grows.

  No issue blends such high tension with such low expectations. Many assert that America’s approach to Iran and North Korea has been that of a reckless gorilla, but if anything it has been too narrow and cautious, focused on containment and isolation rather than on engagement and resolution. Each encounter between American and Iranian officials has been suffused with a significance rivaled only by an extraterrestrial encounter. Demanding that no negotiations would take place until Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program and allowed full inspections wasted three years during which enrichment accelerated. The so-called carrot-and-stick approach to Iran has been a self-serving euphemism for coercion, since the preconditions for negotiation are already too patronizing for the Iranians. As one Iranian scholar put it, “No more carrots and no more sticks—and please no more sticks in the shape of carrots either.”