International Organizations

Its detractors should note: the L'Aquila conference did move vital climate change legislation forward.

By Andrew Light

If you believe recent media reports, the two international climate change meetings held last week in L'Aquila, Italy, at best failed to do anything and at worst signal that no serious progress will be made on a global climate agreement this year.

If true, this is bad news. According to the byzantine rules of the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, a successor to that treaty must be decided this December at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The good news is that many of the assessments of these meetings are incomplete, if not inaccurate. A New York Times editorial on Friday, for instance, based its argument in language from a draft of a declaration -- not from the document itself. The Times described the recognition by the world's major carbon emitters that temperatures should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as an "aspirational" goal. They concluded that "with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won't carry things very far." But this weakened, "aspirational" language was struck in the final version of the document, rendering this claim obsolete.

All in all, the twin declarations emerging from the G-8 and the Major Economies Forum (MEF) indicate that progress has been made on the road to Copenhagen. So why the rush to publish such dour reports from Italy, whether accurate or not? It's simple: Invested parties had unrealistic expectations of meetings, which have no binding impact on the upcoming U.N. summit.

There were, of course, disappointments. Developed countries in the G-8 failed to agree on the medium-term goal of reducing reductions targets by 2020. Developing nations, especially China and India, refused to embrace the long-term goal of halving global emissions by 2050, a cap most of the world's leading scientists believe is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

But if we only focus on what did not happen, we miss seeing the achievements made in a very short amount of time. When the United States rejoined the global discussion on a new climate treaty in January, it triggered an 11-month countdown to solve the most complicated problem humanity has ever faced. For the 16 countries responsible for 80 percent of carbon emissions to recognize even one marker of failure -- a rise in temperature over 2 degrees Celcius -- is fantastically impressive. A week before the Italy meetings, negotiators doubted that this language would make the final cut.

Some will argue that it's easy to agree on an abstract target like limiting planetary warming. But the G-8 struck an appropriate balance in creating objectives that are both ambitious and achievable. Industrialized countries finally determined their fair share of long-term emissions cuts: 80 percent by 2050. Plus, U.S. President Barack Obama prudently hedged on setting a 2020 emissions target. The Markey-Waxman climate change bill, which includes emissions cuts, is working its way through Congress. While it does, the president should not signal that he will preempt or undercut the legislature.

What about China and India's apparent intransigence to halving emissions by 2050? The fact is that the United States cannot criticize their behavior. If a Chinese leader had promised to join the world eight years ago in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and then reversed course -- as former President George W. Bush did in 2001 -- the United States would hardly agree to his demands now. So it is with China and India. It will take incentives, diplomacy, and, most of all, time to bring about world-saving targets from them.

Ultimately, the most promising parts of last week's agreements received only marginal coverage. The MEF announced that developed countries will double clean-energy funding for developing nations -- putting pressure on those countries to commit to emissions reductions in exchange, as agreed upon at the Bali summit in 2007. Additionally, the participating countries agreed to determine how they will finance their plans by the G-20 meeting in September.

The countries assembled last week didn't get everything settled on the first go around. But in light of their accomplishments, we should hold off on our rush to proclaim failure.

Andrew Light is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University.

Photo: Flickr user AmiCalmant

How the U.S. economic meltdown helped create a crisis in Honduras.

By Fernando Carrera Castro

The coup d'état in Honduras has received due international attention for its political implications -- and its potential to erode democracy across Latin America. Unfortunately, that's only half the story. Equally important are the economic factors that both catalyzed discontent and could now exacerbate the country's internal crisis.

Honduras is the most open economy of Central America and the one that most depends on its relationship with the United States. Exports to the United States accounted for almost a quarter of Honduras's GDP in 2007 (the second highest in Central America, after Nicaragua), according to figures collected by the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies. Remittances from migrants amounted to 21 percent of GDP in 2008 and are expected to remain about the same this year. Meanwhile, U.S. direct investment in Honduras is among the highest in Central America. All told, Honduras's links to the U.S. economy represented close to 60 percent of the country's GDP in 2007.

Such a remarkable dependence was a blessing from 2003 to early 2008, while markets were booming and U.S. consumption was at an all-time high. But it turned out to be a major problem with the first signs of economic downturn, and since the last quarter of 2008, the situation has become a nightmare. The impact on exports, foreign direct investment, and tourism has resonated across Honduras. Businesses have gone belly up, consumer expenditure is down, unemployment and poverty are rising, and the government's coffers are running dry.

The downturn might have played well for ousted President Manuel Zelaya's increasingly populist rhetoric. But it also presented Zelaya with an awkward reality: Despite his nationalist rhetoric, Honduras would desperately need help from the United States and the international community to keep his government afloat. Calculations made in the early months of 2009 indicated that a fifth of the fiscal budget was expected to be financed with international loans and donations. By June, with the worsening economic situation and fallen fiscal revenue, this figure might have reached 35 percent. It is clear, then, that the government was not going to be able to pay its employees' salaries this year without external financial support. And this was the situation before the coup.

The current political crisis can only make matters worse (if such a situation is even possible). Any Honduran government will depend on the international community's financial support to survive in the coming year. The poorest citizens in Honduras, with one of the highest malnutrition and infant mortality rates in Latin America, might even need international humanitarian assistance if things continue on their current path.

Given this daunting situation, it is rather impressive that anyone wants to be president of Honduras at all. But if you are not poor, and your future is not threatened by the current economic crisis, you might find the presidency a very attractive job. One could ask Manuel Zelaya and Roberto Micheletti about that.

Fernando Carrera Castro is executive director of the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales).

Photo: ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images

It doesn't work.

By Jason McLure

As Islamist militants tighten their grip over southern Somalia, the international community is searching in vain for ways to keep the country's weak, U.N.-backed government from collapsing. The latest plan: sanctions for nearby Eritrea, which has channeled weapons to Somalia's Shabab and other Islamist militias. At the recent African Union summit in Libya, the continent's leaders reiterated their call for the U.N. Security Council to take action; condemnation of Eritrea has resonated from every corner of the globe.

There's no doubt that Eritrea has an awful government (Human Rights Watch recently labeled the country a "giant prison"). As gratifying as it may be to punish bad behavior, however, the question here is different: Would sanctions actually change this tiny dictatorial state or its delinquent behavior? It's a quandary that has plagued policymakers for decades -- from Cuba to North Korea to Burma. And despite sanctions' status as a go-to foreign-policy gadget, the answer is often no. When used on already-isolated regimes, sanctions may even be counterproductive. The Eritrean example shows us why.

Sanctions are made to cut countries off from vital international exchange. The trouble is, Eritrea already trades less with the outside world than any country in Africa and places 210th out of all 226 countries and islands for global commerce. The country's president, Isaias Afewerki, isn't interested in being a globe-trotting statesman. He regularly skips African Union summits and meetings of East African leaders. And anyway, sanctions won't deter his few, less savory allies in Libya, Sudan, and Iran who provide Eritrea with aid and diplomatic support. Sanctions will only drive the Eritrean government further into the arms of its dubious allies.

Nor will sanctioning Eritrea choke off the flow of arms and money heading toward Somalia's militants. There has been an arms embargo on Somalia for more than a decade, and it has been about as effective as a chastity belt on Silvio Berlusconi. The country has a 3,000-km coastline that the world has struggled to patrol for pirates -- let alone under-the-radar arms shipments. On land, Mogadishu is home to a dizzying array of traditional money-transfer services that keep Somalia's economy from further collapse -- and its Islamists propped up with foreign funds. Besides, as the United Nations has pointed out, both African Union peacekeepers and Ethiopian troops have apparently sold arms and equipment in Mogadishu to their ostensible enemies.

Aside from being ineffective, sanctions on Eritrea could carry a rather debilitating liability for the international community. Sanctioning Eritrea would dangerously border on taking sides in Eritrea's frozen conflict with Ethiopia, one that has stretched on in one form or another for nearly a decade. Following the two countries' border 1998-2000 war, Ethiopia refused to give back land that a U.N.-backed border commission awarded to Eritrea. So both sides took their struggle to Somalia, where Eritrea backs Islamist militias and Ethiopia props up a flailing government. Eritrea has behaved badly, true, but both countries have been arming Somali militias in a proxy war for years. The United Nations and the United States would do better to mediate the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict rather than taking sides.

These lessons apply to sanctions on dictators more broadly. How do you punish North Korea with sanctions when its trading partners are already limited to a handful of countries -- none of which are likely to pay heed to a harsher set of rules? How do you choke Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe when his strongest rationale for staying in power is to save his country from the hands of countries who would (and do) impose sanctions? Perhaps it's no wonder that such countries' leaders not only survive sanctions, but use them to justify bad behavior.

After 18 years of civil war, it's possible there's nothing outsiders can do to fix Somalia. Certainly, sanctions on Eritrea are not the answer. Trying to get Ethiopia and Eritrea to stop using the country as a proxy battleground would be worth a shot.

Jason McLure is a journalist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His reporting has appeared in Newsweek, The Economist, and Bloomberg News.

Photo: ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images

Governments across Europe are about to slash their defense budgets -- but they need to ensure they cut correctly.

By Tomas Valasek

The economic crisis has wracked government budgets across Europe, as revenues have fallen and spending on stimulus and bailouts has soared. Already, there are signs that defense spending across the continent will suffer. Finance ministers will be looking for ways to reduce deficit and debt, and military budgets are a tempting target.

Such budget cuts will have some salutary effects: Defense establishments, with their resistance to civilian oversight and emphasis on continuity, tend to get bloated in times of relative plenty. It often takes a crisis to force meaningful reforms. But cuts also threaten to sap the effectiveness of European fighting forces and leave parts of the world exposed to insecurity.

The easiest portion of the budget to cut is operations. But it's also the most important portion. Withdrawing soldiers from faraway places plays well at home and requires no layoffs, but it means fewer troops in some of the world's most imperiled regions. Poland announced in April that it would withdraw from all U.N. peacekeeping operations. While the Poles may be no less safe, fragile countries such as Chad and Lebanon still need foreign troops to keep the peace.

Rather than withdrawing from conflict zones, European countries and agencies should stop sending overlapping missions to the same trouble spots. Both the EU and NATO sent missions to Sudan in 2007, and three different forces are currently fighting piracy off the coast of Somalia. Better to roll those operations into one; the current duplication wastes taxpayer money.

As defense ministries slash their budgets, their instinct will be to cut multinational weapons programs and make any purchases domestically so as to protect jobs at home. But that carries risks. Many truly necessary systems, such as transport airplanes, are so expensive and complex that they are best funded and shared between countries.

Granted, many past collaborative programs have been disastrous, such as the seven-nation plan to develop the A400M military transport aircraft. A modern-day Spruce Goose, the plane cannot fly because its engines, made by a four-nation European consortium, lack the proper certification; the plane is also said to be too heavy.

But the trouble with the A400M lies not in the collaborative nature of the program. The plane is a failure because its designers have been more concerned with securing production jobs than with obtaining a good product. In return for investing in the aircraft, they have demanded that a commensurate number of production jobs go to their country. As a result, bits of the plane are being built all over Europe -- and not necessarily in the countries most qualified to do the job.

European governments must be smarter. They should accept that it makes more sense to order the needed parts from the plant with the most relevant technical expertise. The governments also need to be more ready to buy off-the-shelf components, rather than try to generate jobs by manufacturing parts from scratch.

The impact of the budget cuts -- particularly the reductions in personnel and equipment -- also threaten to turn some European militaries into showcase forces, incapable of deploying abroad and thus irrelevant to most EU and NATO operations. It makes little sense, for example, for all but very few allies to keep tanks unless they are upgraded to be able to operate in faraway places such as Afghanistan and unless the governments have access to aircraft big enough to transport the tanks. As an excellent new study commissioned by the Nordic governments concluded, "small and medium-sized countries lose their ability to maintain a credible defence" when certain units shrink too much.

There are two ways to avoid such outcomes while cutting budgets. Some of the key equipment that makes modern warfare possible -- such as planes providing air-to-ground surveillance or military transport -- needs to be jointly owned. NATO operates a common fleet of aircraft that coordinates air traffic, and the alliance plans to buy transport airplanes for its members to use. This arrangement allows militaries of smaller and poorer European states, like the new allies in Eastern Europe, to take part in complex operations in distant places.

But that alone will not generate enough savings. Indeed, the time has come for European governments to consider abandoning parts of their national forces and infrastructure and to form joint units with their neighbors. Modern militaries do virtually all their fighting abroad and in coalition with others. If they lack the money to equip and deploy their soldiers overseas, they need to consider radical cost-saving measures. More governments should do as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg did -- they merged parts of their air forces -- or emulate the Nordic countries, which are considering joining their amphibious units.

Most European governments have, in the past, found it too difficult to part with the cherished symbol of national sovereignty that is a proper army or an air force. But the practical value of such military services in Europe is often negligible. As the recession deepens, defense ministers across Europe should see the crisis as an opportunity to combine certain units and programs across countries. This will save money, which could be put to use properly training and equipping forces for EU and NATO operations.

Tomas Valasek is director of foreign policy and defense at the Centre for European Reform in London. A version of this article first appeared as a post on the Centre for European Reform blog.

Photo: Flickr user Jerome K

As violence escalates again in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world must recognize the need for sustained attention and intervention.

By Colin Thomas-Jensen and Rebecca Feeley

This winter, the militaries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda -- much to our surprise, given their historical antipathy -- joined forces in an offensive against a rebel group based in eastern Congo: the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or the FDLR. Led by the architects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the FDLR has terrorized Congolese civilians for nearly 15 years. The group's presence has also served as a pretext for Rwandan intervention that has frequently worsened an already grim humanitarian situation in eastern Congo.

We and many other observers predicted at the time that the joint offensive would lead FDLR rebels to conduct reprisal attacks upon civilians. So, we weren't surprised to hear that atrocities against civilians have escalated dramatically in recent weeks. In one instance, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Congo, MONUC, reported that the FDLR had massacred more than 60 people in the village of Busurungi. Local officials tell us that the FDLR killed nearly twice that number, after clashes with the notoriously inept Congolese Army.

While human rights groups catalog atrocities and advocacy groups sound the alarm, U.N. officials tell us that the situation in eastern Congo is "tense but under control." The gap between the rosy assessments we frequently hear from MONUC and the grim accounts we hear from Congolese affected by the conflict is outrageous and infuriating. And as the Congolese government launches a new offensive this summer, we think the worst is ahead.

Doing research and advocacy to help end the crisis in the Great Lakes region around Congo can feel like screaming into an empty room. The region has been so violent for so long that the United Nations, donor governments, and the press have become numb. But there is a cure to even the worst cases of "conflict fatigue": an understanding that solutions are within reach if we just have the will to pursue them -- solutions that can prevent thousands of senseless deaths.

With greater operational capacity, firmer direction from the U.N. Security Council, and decisive leadership on the ground, MONUC could provide greater protection for civilians.

With high-level multilateral diplomacy led by the United States and the European Union, the Congolese and Rwandan governments could go beyond their current uneasy military cooperation and achieve lasting political solutions to the regional conflict. With bigger incentives for disarming, an emphasis on civilian protection, and tactical support from Western militaries, a regional counterinsurgency strategy could succeed against the FDLR.

With greater coordination among donors, conditioned support to the Congolese government could begin to end impunity, professionalize the Army, and improve governance. And with corporate due diligence in the mining sector, the Congolese could begin to benefit from their country's immense natural resources while drying up the trade in conflict minerals that remain a lifeblood for predatory militias.

That's a laundry list of "coulds," but in a place like Congo -- a desperately poor country where nearly 6 million people have died from 13 years of chronic conflict -- the world has a lot of work to do. Anyone advocating for an end to the conflict must be content with slow and steady progress and not expect a quick fix. In fact, this is true of most conflicts. Conflict fatigue only takes root when we forget that.

Colin Thomas-Jensen is policy advisor to Enough, the Center for American Progress's project to end genocide and crimes against humanity. Rebecca Feeley is Enough's former field researcher based in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.  

UN Photo/Marie Frechon

The International Monetary Fund now has $750 billion to lend to needy nations during the Great Recession. But will the additional capacity hurt the IMF's mission? 

By Martin Edwards

Two years ago, global economic consensus held that the International Monetary Fund -- the lender of last resort for ill-managed countries with a desperate, immediate need to borrow -- was dying or dead. Its bungling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 harmed its reputation; the availability of foreign capital made it obsolete.

But global economic consensus now holds that the IMF will play an integral part in alleviating today's crisis. The "Great Recession" has created a strong demand for its lending, and the G-20 countries tripled its resources to $750 billion at their latest conference. Once a black sheep, the IMF overnight became the world's economic shepherd.

Yet the reforms undertaken to expand the IMF dramatically alter its modus operandi and fundamental purpose. They might even make the fund less effective over time.

At the latest G-20 conference, the IMF announced two major changes in response to the global economic crisis: It eased the conditions on its standard loans and created a new lending facility for approved countries. Standard IMF loans now have negotiable installment schedules and easier conditional restrictions. Countries were once required to make big changes -- rewriting their tax codes, for instance -- in order to receive loans. Now, the fund is much less aggressive in cleaning up governments' acts. Second, the IMF created the "Flexible Credit Line" (FCL) program to provide loans to countries with strong macroeconomic fundamentals. FCL loans have essentially no conditions whatsoever -- and Poland, Mexico, and Colombia have already received them.

Thus, the IMF has greatly expanded and turned itself into a provider of loans to prevent crises, not just alleviate them. The amount pledged to fund borrowers is now twice as much as was committed at the height of both the Asian crisis in 1998 and the Latin American crisis in 2002. That is all well and good for the Polands and Colombias of the world. Their IMF loans will surely help them avoid economic catastrophe. But it isn't necessarily good for either the developing countries that may be worst hit by the crisis, or for the IMF itself.

Indeed, with its much-heralded unveiling of the FCL, the IMF placated G-20 countries unwilling to provide loans to struggling countries themselves. Industrialized countries, such as the United States, pledged to lend directly to the fund to meet the $750 billion goal. But middle-income emerging countries, like Brazil, Russia, India, and China, proposed to provide resources in the form of purchases of IMF-issued bonds, rather than permanent lines of credit. These new resources will help the fund better meet the challenges of the economic crisis in the short term. In the long term, however, they mean that Brazil, Russia, India, and China will have a greater procedural voice within the fund. The golden days of the IMF being autonomous and distant from the desires of developing countries has surely reached an end.

Second, the fund's easing of conditionalities stemmed from a perceived need to reduce the stigma associated with seeking a loan from the IMF. But many countries value these conditions and tolerate the stigma. In a weak state, politicians might not want to take vital steps that will be electorally costly, such as cutting government spending or raising taxes. The fund plays a valuable role as a scapegoat, providing political cover for policymakers and ensuring changes are made. Making conditionality "cheaper" by reducing the stigma, then, may net the IMF more loans as states with weak commitment seek fund programs, but it is not likely to produce the reforms many of these countries urgently need.

These developments should temper our enthusiasm about the reemergence of the IMF. A more responsive fund is not necessarily a better one. Having a degree of autonomy from member states allows international organizations to be influential. The conditionality reforms, combined with the likely exchange of bond purchases for more voting power, by diminishing this autonomy, may make the fund's new prominence brief indeed.

Martin Edwards is assistant professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and the author most recently of "The International Monetary Fund, Conditionality, and the World Economic Crisis: New Beginning or False Dawn?" (pdf).

Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images

As the Brazilian president makes good-sense demands at the G-20,  rich countries would do well to listen.

By Paulo Sotero

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last week blamed "white people with blue eyes" for the global economic meltdown, it was an odd gaffe for a leader known and respected around the world for his pragmatism.

"Lula had a Chávez day," wrote the São Paulo daily Estadao, discounting the unfortunate utterance made in Brasilia at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Facing domestic criticism for the remark, the Brazilian president clarified what he meant the next day when he joined other world leaders for the Progressive Governance Conference in Viña del Mar, Chile, ahead of the G-20 summit. Addressing Brown, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, and Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Lula said that rich countries were "more responsible" for the crisis now afflicting all countries, but especially the poorer ones, and warned his fellow world leaders against failure at this week's meeting in London. "We cannot run the risk of postponing profound structural solutions," Lula said.

Do not expect the Brazilian leader to tone down his rhetoric at the G-20. He will remind his colleagues of the commitment against protectionism that they all made during their first gathering in Washington, last November, and immediately abandoned. The political difficulties of moving ahead with the stalled Doha round of global trade talks will not prevent Lula from reminding the leaders, especially those from rich countries, of their obligation to practice what their countries have always preached to the developing world about the virtues of freer trade and resist the temptation to build fences that could turn the current world recession into a full-blown depression.

Lula will also raise issues that are difficult for Brazil. He is likely to use his country's strengths in energy (its leadership in production of carbon-reducing ethanol, its expanding capacity in oil and gas) and challenges in environmental preservation (the urgent need to stop deforestation of the Amazon) to highlight the importance of putting climate change on the leaders' reform agenda. It is a controversial subject in his own government. An ambitious climate-change plan launched by the Ministry of the Environment last December still needs to be reconciled with the more defensive stance of the Ministry of Foreign Relations on climate negotiations. It is also, as Lula recognizes, an opportunity. Brazil can exercise global leadership by mediating between traditional polluters among rich countries and major new polluters from the developing world, and open the way for a sensible and effective agreement at the U.N. climate change conference this December in Copenhagen.

Expect the Brazilian leader to challenge his colleagues on the institutions of global governance, starting with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is difficult to understand and accept that both bodies should keep their current voting structure and continue to be managed exclusively by Americans and Europeans in a world where the United States and Europe represent a decreasing share of the world's economy. Brazil brings more than demands to this topic. It has thinkers and doers who could certainly add to the credibility of both institutions if called to service -- leaders such as former Central Bank President Arminio Fraga and former Finance Ministers Pedro Malan and Rubens Ricupero, the latter a senior diplomat who led the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development for two terms.

Last but not least, hard lessons learned in the long fight to stabilize Brazil's economy in the 1990s have equipped the giant of South America with expertise and proven experience in financial regulation. It is an asset that warrants giving Brazil a seat at the table as leading countries start the difficult work of rebuilding better national and global financial structures.

Paulo Sotero is director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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