The Pentagon was ratcheting up pressure for military action against Iran last night as America’s top uniformed official said for the first time that a strike on nuclear targets would “go a long way” towards delaying Tehran’s uranium enrichment programme.

The remarks by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were his strongest yet in support of a strategy that both the Pentagon and the Obama Administration still regard as a last resort and possibly a recipe for a regional war.

They came as President Ahmadinejad taunted the US with a potent display of missile technology, while a leaked top-secret memo by Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, forced the White House to insist that it was preparing for all contingencies.

Read it all.

If China’s shift is a real one, there appear to be three possible sources of change:

1) Domestic factors and actors convinced China’s leadership that diminishing marginal returns for keeping the yuan fixed and masively undervalued had kicked in;

2) China responded to mounting multilateral pressure and feared being isolated at the upcoming G-20 meetings.

3) China responded to threats of unilateral U.S. action, such as being named as a currency manipulator, and/or calls for a trade war….

Read it all.

[The New York Times]… carried a very troubling article on the front page on Monday. It detailed how President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan had invited Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Kabul ”” in order to stick a thumb in the eye of the Obama administration ”” after the White House had rescinded an invitation to Mr. Karzai to come to Washington because the Afghan president had gutted an independent panel that had discovered widespread fraud in his re-election last year.

The article, written by two of our best reporters, Dexter Filkins and Mark Landler, noted that “according to Afghan associates, Mr. Karzai recently told lunch guests at the presidential palace that he believes the Americans are in Afghanistan because they want to dominate his country and the region, and that they pose an obstacle to striking a peace deal with the Taliban.”

The article added about Karzai: “ ”˜He has developed a complete theory of American power,’ said an Afghan who attended the lunch and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. ”˜He believes that America is trying to dominate the region, and that he is the only one who can stand up to them.’ ”

That is what we’re getting for risking thousands of U.S. soldiers and having spent $200 billion already. This news is a flashing red light, warning that the Obama team is violating at least three cardinal rules of Middle East diplomacy.

Read it all.

They do things differently in China. As the four Rio Tinto executives have found to their cost, the fact that corruption is endemic in China does not mean that foreigners who transgress get a free pass. Indeed it is because corruption is so evident that it suits the authorities to have periodic high-profile cases to try to counter it. So the case was, as in Voltaire’s Candide, “pour encourager les autres”.

There may be further objectives. The former mayor of Shanghai, Chen Liangyu, the man credited with choreographing the city’s economic renaissance, is currently serving an 18-year sentence for corruption in what many saw as a politically motivated move. So all foreign companies operating in China should take heed of what has happened, as of course they will.

However, this particular case exposes just one of many difficulties the West has and will have in dealing with the world’s new great commercial power. Multinational companies have long been aware of the political risks of operating in different jurisdictions around the world. They have had their assets nationalised, their executives under house arrest and, worse, their bank balances frozen.

Read it all.

If anyone still doubts that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were the closest of allies, the text of a July 2002 note from the U.K. Premier to the U.S. President, revealed in a new book, should dispel any lingering skepticism. “You know, George, whatever you decide to do [about Iraq], I’m with you,” Blair assured his friend.

The End of the Party, an account by British political commentator Andrew Rawnsley of how Britain’s Labour government came to squander a huge popular mandate to face possible defeat in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, identifies a multiplicity of contributory factors. Blair’s unwavering determination to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with a martial U.S. is prominent among them.

The damage may be permanent. On March 28 an influential cross-party committee of MPs in Britain weighed in on the wider impact of that policy. “The perception that the British Government was a subservient ‘poodle’ to the U.S. Administration leading up to the period of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is widespread both among the British public and overseas,” states a report from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. “This perception, whatever its relation to reality, is deeply damaging to the reputation and interests of the U.K.”

Read it all.

Foreign policy is a deep study, unsuited to the short attention spans of democratic politics. It is unlikely to figure in the forthcoming election. Yet there is still enough time for long views before the campaigning starts, and two interesting contributions to foreign affairs have recently been published. One of them made headlines: the report of the House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee which advocated a more cautious approach to the US and proclaimed the death of the special relationship.

Scepticism is in order. The coroner has often been called on to deal with that supposed corpse, and a wise coroner would come to two conclusions: that it never existed, and that it will last for the indefinite future. As the Irishman said, “This pig doesn’t weigh as much as I thought it did, but then again, I never thought it would”.

Those who announce the relationship’s death usually start with a shocking discovery: that America always places its own interests first. This would not have come as news to Winston Churchill, who invented the phrase “special relationship” and who could have provided a score of examples of American unilateralism.

Read it all.

BRITAIN’S special relationship with the US ”” forged by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the second world war ”” no longer exists, says a committee of influential MPs.

Instead, America’s relationship with Britain is no more special than with its other main allies, according to a report by the Commons foreign affairs committee published today.

The report also warns that the perception of the UK after the Iraq war as America’s “subservient poodle” has been highly damaging to Britain’s reputation and interests around the world. The MPs conclude that British prime ministers have to learn to be less deferential to US presidents and be “willing to say no” to America.

Read it all.

In diplomacy, no news is usually bad news. On Tuesday Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, met President Obama in talks that stretched over a period of three and a half hours. But Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu failed to pose for a single photograph afterwards, or provide even a cursory joint statement. What had made it impossible for the two men to present even a mask of optimism and agreement? The silence fuelled suspicions that relations between Israel and its closest ally are at their lowest ebb for decades.

The cause of the impasse is the Israeli settlements in Arab east Jerusalem. Mr Netanyahu’s position has been that the settlements are nonnegotiable, setting Israel on a collision course with Mr Obama. Israel’s timing could scarcely be worse. In January, Israel sparked a row with Turkey over a diplomatic snub. And this week Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat in the belief that Mossad had forged British passports to effect an assassination in Dubai. So Israel has snubbed the world’s most powerful nation, alienated its closest Muslim ally and infuriated Britain. After three own goals in quick succession, how many more simultaneous problems can Israel handle?

Read it all.

Differences remain between Israel and the US, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the White House has said.

President Obama urged the Israeli PM to take steps to build confidence in the peace process, during “honest” talks on Tuesday, said spokesman Robert Gibbs.

Mr Gibbs also said the US was seeking “clarification” of the latest plans to build homes in occupied East Jerusalem.

Mr Netanyahu’s trip came amid the worst crisis in US-Israeli ties for decades.

Read it all.

As Google began redirecting tens of millions of Chinese users on Tuesday to its uncensored Web site in Hong Kong, the company’s remaining mainland operations came under pressure from its Chinese partners and from the government itself.

For weeks, Google had been holding out hope that the Chinese government would allow it to keep its pledge to end censorship while retaining its share of China’s fast-growing Internet search market.

But the government has shown no sign of budging. Mainland Chinese users still could not see much of the unfiltered Hong Kong search results Tuesday because government firewalls either disabled searches for highly objectionable terms completely or blocked links to certain results. That had typically been the case before Google’s action, only now millions more visitors were liable to encounter the disrupted access to an uncensored site.

Beijing officials were clearly angered Tuesday by Google’s decision to close its Internet search service in China and redirect users to the Hong Kong site, a move that focused global attention on the government’s censorship policies, and there were signs of possible escalation in the dispute.

Read it all.

Just over two months after threatening to leave China because of censorship and intrusions by Chinese hackers, Google said Monday that it was closing its China-based Internet search service and instead directing Chinese users to a Hong Kong-based uncensored version of its search engine, which may get blocked in mainland China.

In a blog post, Google also said that it would retain much of its existing China operations, including its research and development team and its local sales force. The stunning move represents a powerful slap at Beijing regulators but also a risky ploy in which Google ”” one of the world’s technology powerhouses ”” will essentially turn its back on the world’s largest Internet market, with nearly 400 million Web users and growing quickly.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in the blog post. “We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.”

Read it all.

Israel will defy American pressure to halt the construction of controversial Jewish housing in Arab east Jerusalem, when President Obama meets Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, in the White House today.

Fresh from his historic victory to reform American healthcare, the US leader is to be confronted, within hours, with a foreign policy crisis. This time Mr Obama must resolve the worst breakdown in relations in decades between America and its closest regional ally, Israel, and try to get the Arab-Israeli peace process moving again.

But any hopes of a compromise were dashed yesterday when Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem, insisted that Jewish settlements would go ahead in spite of US objections.

Read it all.

Israel signaled it won’t halt its building plans in the disputed territory of east Jerusalem, deepening a rift with the U.S. that threatens efforts to contain Iran and other American security goals in the Middle East.

Officials on both sides fear relations between the two allies are at their worst point in decades, after Israel scuttled hope for a new round of peace talks by announcing new settlement plans last week during a visit by Vice President Joseph Biden. That led to an extraordinary public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Netanyahu apologized for the timing, but he has declined to retract the plans for the settlements and others that have become among the biggest obstacles to peace talks. On Monday, a leading member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party said the prime minister told members in a closed-door session that Israel wouldn’t bow to pressure and reverse course on its planned 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.

Read it all.

Israel signaled it won’t halt its building plans in the disputed territory of east Jerusalem, deepening a rift with the U.S. that threatens efforts to contain Iran and other American security goals in the Middle East.

Officials on both sides fear relations between the two allies are at their worst point in decades, after Israel scuttled hope for a new round of peace talks by announcing new settlement plans last week during a visit by Vice President Joseph Biden. That led to an extraordinary public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Netanyahu apologized for the timing, but he has declined to retract the plans for the settlements and others that have become among the biggest obstacles to peace talks. On Monday, a leading member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party said the prime minister told members in a closed-door session that Israel wouldn’t bow to pressure and reverse course on its planned 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.

Read it all.

Premier Wen Jiabao aimed sharp words at Washington on Sunday, ceding little ground on China’s currency policy and suggesting that U.S. efforts to boost its exports by weakening the dollar amounted to “a kind of trade protectionism.”

In his once-yearly news conference, Mr. Wen blamed the recent deterioration in what he called China’s most important foreign relationship on U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan and President Barack Obama’s meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

“These moves have violated China’s territorial integrity,” Mr. Wen said. “The responsibility does not lie with the Chinese side but with the United States.” Mr. Wen said a good China-U.S. relationship “makes both sides winners while a confrontational one makes both sides losers.”

Because Mr. Wen comments so rarely in public, his annual press conferences have a magnified importance. This year’s comments were a rare opportunity to hear candidly, and in unusual depth, a Chinese leader’s perspective on the U.S.

Read it all.

Premier Wen Jiabao aimed sharp words at Washington on Sunday, ceding little ground on China’s currency policy and suggesting that U.S. efforts to boost its exports by weakening the dollar amounted to “a kind of trade protectionism.”

In his once-yearly news conference, Mr. Wen blamed the recent deterioration in what he called China’s most important foreign relationship on U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan and President Barack Obama’s meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

“These moves have violated China’s territorial integrity,” Mr. Wen said. “The responsibility does not lie with the Chinese side but with the United States.” Mr. Wen said a good China-U.S. relationship “makes both sides winners while a confrontational one makes both sides losers.”

Because Mr. Wen comments so rarely in public, his annual press conferences have a magnified importance. This year’s comments were a rare opportunity to hear candidly, and in unusual depth, a Chinese leader’s perspective on the U.S.

Read it all.

As long as the U.S. national debt is entirely denominated in dollars, there is no risk that we will run into the sort of financial crisis that small countries often run into. What gets them into trouble isn’t the debt per se, but an inability to acquire sufficient foreign exchange with their own currency to service it. While the U.S. Treasury has never issued bonds denominated in foreign currencies, it is conceivable that it could be forced to do so if the dollar falls sharply and foreign demand for U.S. bonds wanes. That will be the point at which our debt problem becomes more than theoretical and we are really on the road to national bankruptcy.

Read it all.

As long as the U.S. national debt is entirely denominated in dollars, there is no risk that we will run into the sort of financial crisis that small countries often run into. What gets them into trouble isn’t the debt per se, but an inability to acquire sufficient foreign exchange with their own currency to service it. While the U.S. Treasury has never issued bonds denominated in foreign currencies, it is conceivable that it could be forced to do so if the dollar falls sharply and foreign demand for U.S. bonds wanes. That will be the point at which our debt problem becomes more than theoretical and we are really on the road to national bankruptcy.

Read it all.

In a tense, 43-minute phone call on Friday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s plan for new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israeli-American relations, and not just because it spoiled a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Biden, in Israel this week to declare American support for its security, had already condemned the move as undermining the peace process. But Mrs. Clinton went a good deal further in her conversation with Mr. Netanyahu, saying it had harmed “the bilateral relationship,” according to the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley.

Such blunt language toward Israel is very rare from an American administration, and several officials said Mrs. Clinton was relaying the anger of President Obama at the announcement, which was made by Israel’s Interior Ministry and which Mr. Netanyahu said caught him off guard.

The Israeli leader repeated his surprise about the plan to Mrs. Clinton, a senior official said, and apologized again for the timing. But that did not appear to mollify Mrs. Clinton, who said she “could not understand how this happened, particularly in light of the United States’ strong commitment to Israel’s security,” Mr. Crowley said.

Read it all.

In a tense, 43-minute phone call on Friday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s plan for new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israeli-American relations, and not just because it spoiled a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Biden, in Israel this week to declare American support for its security, had already condemned the move as undermining the peace process. But Mrs. Clinton went a good deal further in her conversation with Mr. Netanyahu, saying it had harmed “the bilateral relationship,” according to the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley.

Such blunt language toward Israel is very rare from an American administration, and several officials said Mrs. Clinton was relaying the anger of President Obama at the announcement, which was made by Israel’s Interior Ministry and which Mr. Netanyahu said caught him off guard.

The Israeli leader repeated his surprise about the plan to Mrs. Clinton, a senior official said, and apologized again for the timing. But that did not appear to mollify Mrs. Clinton, who said she “could not understand how this happened, particularly in light of the United States’ strong commitment to Israel’s security,” Mr. Crowley said.

Read it all.

Religious freedom advocates were encouraged by the President’s stated views and allowed themselves to hope that America’s international religious freedom policy, long isolated at the State Department, would be strengthened under the new administration.

Their hopes are fading.

Almost 14 months into the Obama presidency, the ambassador at large for international religious freedom — a position mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act — has not been named, even though other positions of less weight and importance to our national interests have long been filled.

The leading candidate for the religious freedom job is said to be a highly intelligent and charismatic pastor, an author and a thoroughly good person who has the friendship of Secretary Hillary Clinton. Those are important attributes. Indeed, having the trust of the Secretary is vital. But more is needed. To be successful, this ambassador at large needs foreign policy experience. Without it, it will be extremely difficult to succeed within Foggy Bottom’s notoriously thorny bureaucracy, let alone deal with foreign officials who believe (as many do) that U.S. international religious freedom policy is a vehicle of cultural imperialism.

Worse, it appears that the new ambassador will be demoted before she is even nominated. Like her predecessors under Presidents Clinton and Bush, she will not be treated as an ambassador at large at all, but will report to a lower ranking official – the assistant secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Her placement alone will signal to American diplomats and foreign governments that they need not take U.S. religious freedom policy seriously.

Read it all.

China offered its first real sign of flexibility in years over the exchange rate of its currency, a growing source of friction with the U.S., but gave little hope that it would accommodate Washington on Iran and other thorny foreign-policy issues.

Central bank Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan said China will eventually move away from its current exchange-rate policies, which he described as a temporary response to the global financial crisis, but played down the idea that a move could come in the near future.

Mr. Zhou’s comments Saturday at a press conference during the annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, could fuel optimism in the U.S. and other countries upset over China’s currency policy that Beijing may start letting the yuan appreciate, although not as quickly as many foreign governments desire. Critics complain that the yuan’s suppressed value makes China’s exports unfairly inexpensive, disadvantaging other countries.

China’s foreign minister sounded a defiant note on other sensitive issues with the U.S. in a separate briefing Sunday. Yang Jiechi told reporters it is up to the U.S. to mend frayed relations, which he said had been hurt by American arms sales to Taiwan and by President Barack Obama’s meeting with exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Read it all.

What was she thinking? By taking a last-minute detour, on her five-day trip to Latin America, to visit President Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires, Hillary Clinton has ”” recklessly ”” given the appearance of throwing America’s weight behind Argentina in its row with Britain over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands…

Intruding in the dispute was lamentable enough. But in further offering to mediate between Buenos Aires and London, the US Secretary of State is implying that there may be some fruitful area of grey between their rival black-and-white claims. By suggesting so boldly that there may be room for negotiation when Britain has insisted that there is none, Mrs Clinton gives the impression that Argentina has America’s tacit support in the dispute.

Read it all.

A town of 60,000 souls, Marjah is ringed by poppy fields that are watered by irrigation canals built in the 1950s and ’60s by U.S. engineers. McChrystal chose this location to launch the reconquest of Afghanistan because it is the western end of a population belt that extends from central Helmand province through Kandahar province ”” both infested with the Taliban. McChrystal has set out to secure that belt, starting in Marjah, then moving to Lashkar Gah, Kandahar city and finally Spin Boldak. “It’s where we hadn’t been, it’s where the enemy still was, and it’s where the population is,” says a senior Administration official.

Since it’s an opening salvo in what promises to be a long, hard-fought year, McChrystal knew Operation Moshtarak would influence perceptions, among allies and enemies alike, about how the war would be fought ”” and how the peace would be waged. Managing those perceptions would be key to victory. “This is not a physical war, in terms of how many people we kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up,” he told reporters in Istanbul on Feb. 4. “This is all in the minds of the participants. The Afghan people are the most important, but the insurgents are [too]. And of course, part of what we’ve had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this.”

The offensive was months in the planning, and little effort was made to keep it secret. If the Taliban chose to melt away rather than resist, McChrystal reasoned, it would give him more time to set up a robust administration ”” a good advertisement for those in other towns where NATO troops would soon have to fight. U.S. commanders even ordered an opinion poll of Marjah residents: they wanted to know how they felt about the U.S. and the Taliban and to gauge what they might want from his government in a box.

Read the whole thing.

WE may scoff at the idea that the Olympic Games have anything to do with the “endeavor to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace,” as the Olympic charter enshrines as its ideal. But at least nations across the world were able to put aside differences for two weeks of friendly competition in Vancouver.

A mundane achievement, perhaps, but it’s one that’s beyond the grasp of the Islamic world. The Islamic Solidarity Games, the Olympics of the Muslim world, which were to be held in Iran in April, have been called off by the Arab states because Tehran inscribed “Persian Gulf” on the tournament’s official logo and medals.

It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Read it all.

This is a lovely piece which I caught when it first aired but it well worth the time if you have not seen it–KSH.

Well, on balance the sad news is that [foreign aid] hasn’t worked. It hasn’t achieved the objectives that we had for the foreign aid program. The number one objective, of course, was to promote economic growth out of poverty for the aid receiving countries, and there we see a clear failure. The most aid-intensive countries have actually stagnated over the last fifty years. They’ve failed to see a rise in their living standards. That includes especially sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorer Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

It’s been wasted both in actual corruption of aid money being stolen, because a lot of aid does go to very corrupt governments, and it’s also just been wasted bureaucratically by the ineffectual bureaucracies and the aid organizations themselves and in the ineffectual bureaucracies of the governments that receive the aid money.

Most of the success stories did not get a lot of aid, and most of the countries that did get a lot of aid are not success stories. We always have something in statistics we call confirmation bias, that if you strongly believe a given idea like aid works then you select a couple examples that fit the story. But when we look at the whole range of experience of success and failure, I’m afraid there is no reason to believe that aid has contributed to success.

Read it all.

Haji Abdul Manaf, the district governor for this region of Helmand province, was incensed.

An employee from the agricultural ministry of the provincial government refuses to come to Nawa unless he is assured a desk and a telephone at the district headquarters, where those items are in short supply.

Improving crop yields and persuading farmers to plant wheat rather than the poppies that produce heroin are key points in the U.S.- NATO coalition’s plans to upgrade the standard of living in this farm belt in southern Afghanistan.

But for months, Manaf has been unable to get the support he wants from the provincial government.

Read it all.

China’s recent disputes with the United States ”” over climate change, Iran, cyberattacks, currency values, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama ”” involve just about every agency of the U.S. administration.

But just one, the Pentagon, has been singled out for punishment.

It’s a familiar pattern.

“When relations have been good between the U.S. and China, the military relationship has been the last to come along,” notes David Finkelstein, a China expert at the Center for Naval Analyses. “When relations have been bad, it’s been the first to be thrown overboard.”

In the latest example, the Chinese government announced it was suspending contacts between the U.S. and Chinese militaries to protest the Obama administration’s announcement last month of new arms sales to Taiwan, which China regards as a province.

Read or listen to it all.

The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan in a major victory against the insurgents as U.S. troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s No. 2 leader behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, two Pakistani intelligence officers and a senior U.S. official said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release such sensitive information.

One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and “was talking” to his interrogators.

Read it all.