Tag Archives: Congress

Syria, United States

John McCain is the Jimmy Carter of the right: a free radical running his own shadow diplomacy

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If you thought the idea of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in The New York Times was insufferable, don’t worry, comrades — US senator John McCain of Arizona is coming soon to a Pravda newsstand near you.freesyria Syria Flag IconUSflag

Typically, US foreign policy is conducted at a very concentrated level among a top coterie of constitutional officers and White House staffers.  The 535-member US Congress likes to get in on the act too, from time to time, just as it did when US president Barack Obama called for a congressional vote on potential military action against Bashar al-Assad in punishment for his regime’s use of chemical warfare on August 21.

But sometimes, there are free agents who, by benefit of their success in public life, can conduct a virtual shadow foreign policy.  For over three decades, the most exceptional example has been former president Jimmy Carter, whose post-presidential diplomacy has caused fits for many of his successors in the Oval Office, including Democrats like Obama and Bill Clinton as well as Republicans like George W. Bush.

But even before his failed 2008 presidential run, McCain has increasingly become another Jimmy Carter — in his willingness to engage in shadow diplomacy, often to the dismay of both the Bush and Obama administrations.  Except Carter is liberal and dovish and McCain is conservative and hawkish.

Carter honed his approach as a mercenary-for-peace in the 1990s, when he attempted to use his special status as a former US president to broker peace everywhere from Haiti to Sudan.  He visited Cuban president Fidel Castro in 2002, despite the fact that US-Cuban relations have been strained since the 1959 Cuban revolution and the 1963 missile crisis, and he endorsed the electoral process in Venezuela’s 2004 recall election that kept Hugo Chávez, another anti-American leader, in office.  Carter spoke out early and often against the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq in 2003 to a rare degree among former US presidents, and he remained a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy throughout the 2000s.  Carter, most recently, has criticized the Obama administration for the use of unmanned drones in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, and for keeping the Guantánamo Bay prison open for detainees suspected of terrorism.

You might think that Carter’s approach is a brilliant way to nudge US foreign policy toward more peaceful outcomes — he won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize largely on the basis of his post-presidential work.  But you might also think that Carter’s approach complicates often delicate situations by introducing another (unwelcome) cook to the kitchen, and Carter’s diplomacy typically causes more frustration than enthusiasm from within the White House.

Likewise, the Obama administration won’t welcome McCain’s latest move, which will raise the decibel level with what’s certainly likely to be a provocative Pravda piece.  It comes two days after McCain saw the need to release his own statement about Moscow’s mayoral elections.  (Isn’t that the U.S. state department’s job rather than the ranking member of the US Senate’s armed services committee?)

Neither Carter nor McCain would exactly welcome the comparison — Carter said during the 2008 election campaign that McCain was ‘milking every possible drop of advantage’ from his military record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and McCain a year later called Carter the worst president of the 20th century.  Continue reading John McCain is the Jimmy Carter of the right: a free radical running his own shadow diplomacy →

Russia, Syria, United States

Putin’s Syria deal shows how US threat of force (instead of use of force) can achieve success

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While US president Barack Obama works to convince a skeptical American public and a hesitant US Congress to support military strikes against Syria over a chemical weapons attack last month, Russian president Vladimir Putin showed exactly why he remains such an important world player.Russia Flag IconUSflagSyria Flag Icon freesyria

That’s because Putin has apparently convinced Syria to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad may agree to open his chemical weapons stocks to international supervisors. It’s not a sure thing — Putin wants a commitment from the United States to pull back from the brink of a military strike against Assad within the next week, and US policymakers want a resolution in the United Nations Security Council to demonstrate Moscow’s good faith in resolving the standoff over Syria.

Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem announced Tuesday that the Syrian regime was willing to open its storage sites and provide access to its chemical weapons:

“We fully support Russia’s initiative concerning chemical weapons in Syria, and we are ready to cooperate. As a part of the plan, we intend to join the Chemical Weapons Convention,” Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said in an interview with Lebanon-based Al-Maydeen TV.

“We are ready to fulfill our obligations in compliance with this treaty, including through the provision of information about our chemical weapons. We will open our storage sites, and cease production. We are ready to open these facilities to Russia, other countries and the United Nations.”

He added: “We intend to give up chemical weapons altogether.”

It’s a staggering turn of events, and it is likely to slow potential US military action over Syria just a day after US secretary of state John Kerry gave Assad one week to hand over ‘every single bit’ of Syria’s chemical weapons in order to avoid a US-led strike against him in retribution for up to 1,400 deaths in Ghouta and eastern Damascus from what the United States and its allies believe to be a sarin-based chemical attack perpetrated by the Assad regime.

Even if there’s some zero-sum world where Putin ‘wins’ and Obama ‘loses,’ the end result is still a net win for the United States.  That’s because, if the Putin deal holds, it’s a result of the Obama administration’s strength — a casebook example where a US president uses the threat of force, not the actual use of force, to bring Russia and Syria to negotiate the terms of a political solution.

The threat of force is perhaps the most effective tool that the United States holds in international affairs because it can accomplish almost all of the goals (or more) of actual use of force while eliminating all of the negative, messy  consequences of military force — the cost, the destruction, the risk of civilian deaths, the risk of engendering wider mayhem in the Middle East, the risk of alienating Iran at a time of possible rapprochement under Iran’s new moderate president Hassan Rowhani.  Although there’s also a risk that sometimes the United States will have to use actual force in order to make its threat of future force realistic, US governments in the past haven’t exactly shied away from quickly deploying force.

But if the deal holds, and Syria complies with the terms of the international community, presumably through a Security Council resolution (where Russia and the United States, as well as China, France and the United Kingdom hold a veto), it will be a huge win for the effort to reduce the proliferation of chemical weapons in the Middle East — and it will be a more satisfactory result for the Obama administration’s stated goal of strengthening the international norm against chemical weapons.  If Assad relinquishes the chemical stocks, it will not only prevent Assad from using them in the future, but also any regime that follows Assad.  A glance as the disparate groups that comprise the anti-Assad opposition is enough to tell you that no US administration would be incredibly keen having al-Qaeda sympathizers like the Syrian Islamic Front or the Jabhat al-Nusra, both of which are comprised of radical Sunni Islamists and Salafists, having access to sarin gas, either.

Obama is still scheduled to address the American public tonight on Syria, though the congressional vote is likely to be postponed.  The turn comes after Putin and Obama met face-to-face in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week to discuss the Syria crisis.  Although the general view late last week was that Obama failed to convince many of his G20 colleagues to support a military strike against Assad, Obama and Putin actually discussed the possibility of an international weapons handover, establishing the conditions for this week’s potential diplomatic solution.

The deal’s terms also come after Charlie Rose conducted an English-language interview with Assad yesterday, during which Assad warned the United States against an attack (and threatened potential consequences to US interests in the Middle East), demanded that the United States provide evidence of Assad’s culpability and refused to accept responsibility for the attack, all while making some fairly nuanced arguments himself against US intervention:

Though US policymakers are right to be initially skeptical of the Putin deal (and it will require a lot of access for UN inspectors to determine that Assad really has relinquished all of his weapons), you can expect hawks like US senator John McCain and other armchair generals to jeer the deal and characterize it as the result of the Obama administration’s weakness.  The top story trending at US news website Politico is a vapid piece entitled ‘The United States of weakness’ that purports to designate the US institutions that have ‘lost influence and lost face,’ as if the international crisis in Syria is some mid-semester grade card:

Barack Obama’s unsteady handling of the Syria crisis has been an avert-your-gaze moment in the history of the modern presidency — highlighting his unsettled views and unattractive options in a way that has caused his enemies to cackle and supporters to cringe.

But the spotlight on Obama’s so-far flaccid performance has obscured a larger reality; the Syria episode has revealed the weakness of multiple institutions and would-be leaders in American life.

If Obama and Putin pull of a deal over Syria, though, Obama will have accomplished his long-standing goal of holding the perpetrators of chemical warfare accountable, stabilized Syria no matter the outcome of its two-year-long civil war, demonstrated the will of the US government to use force to stop chemical warfare — all without firing a single missile.

It’s pretty doubtful that the Obama administration had this exact outcome in mind all along — maybe it’s just as likely that he could have set off a chain of events that catalyzes even more Middle Eastern violence.  We’ll never know if the Obama administration’s plan from the outset was to rattle the sabers until Putin and Assad agreed to a political settlement, but if so, it’s an incredible job well done — and it answers one of the more baffling questions of the US rush to jump immediately to a military strike against Assad.

I’m still not convinced that the United States even has solid intelligence that Assad is culpable for the attack, especially after reading the US government’s flimsy 1,434-word ‘government assessment’ 10 days ago.  While it seems very likely that his regime is responsible, there’s nothing to indicate that Assad ordered the attack or that it wasn’t a rogue element within the pro-Assad ranks. (After all, it bears repeating that Assad had no incentive to use chemical weapons — he was gaining ground in the civil war before August 21 and UN chemical weapons experts were actually in Damascus during the tragedy, hardly the best time to carry off a sarin attack).

While they’re at it, Obama and Putin should join ranks to convince the remaining six countries that aren’t yet signatories to sign up to the Chemical Weapons Convention (or have not yet ratified the convention) — the list includes top US ally Israel, an emergent Burma/Myanmar, Chinese client state North Korea, Angola, Egypt and the newly independent South Sudan.

Syria, United States

Ten questions the United States Congress should be asking about Syria

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The US Senate, the upper chamber of the US Congress, held hearings Tuesday that included testimony from US secretary of state John Kerry and US defense secretary Chuck Hagel in support of the use of force to punish Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for the use of chemical weapons in Syria two weeks ago.freesyriaSyria Flag IconUSflag

But even though US president Barack Obama announced over the weekend that he will not launch any military strike against Syria without congressional support — a potentially historic concession from the executive branch of the US government to the legislative branch — there are still more questions than answers from the Obama administration as it now enlists Congress in its mission against Assad.

The US Congress can — and should — push Obama, Kerry, Hagel and others for answers to two general sets of issues, especially with a second round of classified hearings set to take place Wednesday.

The first issue involves discovering the hard facts of what actually happened on in Ghouta and on the eastern outskirts of Damascus on August 21.  The second issue is what the United States can (and should) do that will most effectively deter the use of chemical weapons in the future.  Even though the dominant narrative is now the congressional vote on US military action in Syria in particular, confirming answers to the first set of issues is a threshold requirement for exploring the second set of issues.

Even as House speaker John Boehner, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and other top leaders in both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party move to close ranks around the Obama administration, and as hawks like US senator John McCain of Arizona push for an even stronger response that embraces the goal of regime change in Syria, it’s even more important to push for answers.

Here are 10 questions that rank-and-file congressional members, the media and the US public should be asking between now and next week’s vote:

Continue reading Ten questions the United States Congress should be asking about Syria →

Iran, Syria, United States

The big news on Syria this weekend? Iran’s surprisingly mellow reactions to US military plans

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As the administration of US president Barack Obama begins to close ranks to secure the support of both houses of the US Congress, today’s big news on the escalating international crisis over Syria’s civil war didn’t come from the United States — it came from Iran.freesyria Syria Flag IconIran Flag IconUSflag

That’s because former president Hashemi Rafsanjani all but admitted that the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (pictured above left, with Rafsanjani, right) was responsible for unleashing a chemical attack on his own people.

Even as US secretary of state John Kerry took to Sunday’s television news shows to announce that the United States had determined from hair and blood samples the presence of sarin gas in the chemical attack 10 days ago on the eastern outskirts of Damascus, a conclusion that United Nations weapons inspectors seem likely to confirm early this week, Rafsanjani’s admission (even if inadvertent) goes a long way in confirming that the Assad regime is indeed culpable.

As originally reported by the Iranian Labour News Agency, Rafsanjani all but indicated that blame lies with Assad and the current Syrian government in remarks that otherwise sympathized with the plight of Syrians after over two years of increasingly sectarian fighting and civil war:

‘The people have been the target of a chemical attack by their own government and now they must also wait for an attack by foreigners.’

‘Right now America, the Western world along with some of the Arab countries are nearly issuing a clarion call for war in Syria – may God have mercy on the people of Syria,’ he said. ‘The people of Syria have seen much damage in these two years, the prisons are overflowing and they’ve converted stadiums into prisons, more than 100,000 people killed and millions displaced,” he added.

A later version of the story slightly revised Rafsanjani’s quote, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Rafsanjani was conceding Assad’s culpability.

Iran remains one of Syria’s top allies, both regionally and globally, largely because the Assad family are Alawite (a small mystical sect of Shi’a Islam) and have since the 1970s prevented the rise of a Sunni Arab state on Iran’s Western border, instead providing a reliable ally to Iran’s predominantly Shiite Islamic Republic.  Even as Obama pushes for support within Congress, he is also likely to look for additional support from other Middle Eastern nations — Turkey’s patience with Assad ran out long ago, and the predominantly Sunni Arab kingdom of Saudi Arabia also backs a US military strike.

Rafsanjani, who served as Iran’s president from 1989 to 1997, is a relatively moderate voice in Iranian politics.  Although Iran’s powerful Guardian Council disqualified him from running again in the recent July presidential election, Rafsanjani is very close to Iran’s newly inaugurated president Hassan Rowhani, who is also an Iranian moderate and has urged reconciliation with the United States and other Western countries.

While there’s no doubt that Iran, like Russia, will continue to support Syria, Rowhani’s remarks about potential US military action in Syria have been relatively tame.  That’s great news for the Obama administration, given that Rowhani’s election two months ago provided the United States its best opportunity since 2002 (when former president George W. Bush included Iran in his ‘axis of evil’) to improve a tortured relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Although Iran has become a pariah state in recent years over its nuclear energy program (and the corresponding US and European fear that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapons program as well), many Iranians were the victims of the last major chemical weapons attack in the Middle East when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein deployed mustard gas and sarin against Iran during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s — with the knowledge and acquiescence of the United States, which wholeheartedly supported Iraq in the 1980s.

Rowhani made clear through his presidential Twitter feed this week that he condemned the use of chemical weapons, in Syria or elsewhere:

Iran gives notice to international community to use all its might to prevent use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world, esp. in #Syria

Javad Zarif, Iran’s new foreign minister, went even further in an English-language Facebook post (!) yesterday condemning the use of chemical weapons as well, while also pleading for the United States and its allies to work through the channels of international diplomacy and the United Nations: Continue reading The big news on Syria this weekend? Iran’s surprisingly mellow reactions to US military plans →

Libya, Syria, United States

How to distinguish Obama’s congressional vote on Syria from Libya example

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With a surprise twist on a holiday weekend in the United States, president Barack Obama announced that he would seek a vote in the U.S. Congress prior to launching a missile strike on Syria in retribution for last Wednesday’s chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus.USflagSyria Flag Icon freesyriaLibya_Flag_Icon

Coming in the wake British prime minister David Cameron’s humiliating defeat over a resolution in the House of Commons authorizing the possibility of British force late last week, Obama argued that, while he has already made a decision to punish Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for the chemical attacks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, he has also decided to seek authorization for use of force from Congress:

Having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I’m also mindful that I’m the President of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.  I’ve long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Obama’s surprise announcement postpones any US action until at least the week of September 9 — well after chemical weapons inspectors from the United Nations will report back next week about the nature of the attack and well after next week’s G20 meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, where president Vladimir Putin, an Assad ally, has repeatedly blocked action against Assad (a Russian ally) by the UN Security Council and earlier today, called the possibility of US and Western punitive strikes ‘utter nonsense.’

While Obama’s decision will hearten critics on both the American left and right who have called for a greater legislative role on the Syria question, it’s unlikely to satisfy hawkish critics like U.S. senator John McCain of Arizona who has pushed Obama toward supporting regime change in Syria, and it’s also unlikely to satisfy dovish critics who believe there’s no U.S. national interest in launching military strikes on the Assad regime.  It will also leave multilateralist critics dissatisfied, given that Obama stated clearly that he was willing to act without the backing of what he called a ‘paralyzed’ Security Council.

But it’s also an unexpected position for an administration that pushed the boundaries of the 1973 War Powers Resolution just two years ago when it ordered military action in Libya.  At first glance, Obama’s 2011 decision to support the UN-authorized, NATO-enforced effort to establish a no-fly zone and to arm rebels fighting against Libya’s late strongman Muammar Gaddafi without congressional authorization arguably violated his constitutional obligation to Congress, while a limited military strike on Syria lasting just a few days to a few weeks would not require congressional approval under any view of the War Powers Resolution.

So what gives?  How can the Obama administration reconcile its position on Libya with its newfound enthusiasm for Congress on the Syrian question?  The answer could transform the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the ability of the U.S. president to act decisively in the future. Continue reading How to distinguish Obama’s congressional vote on Syria from Libya example →

United States

Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her

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Financial reporter David Wessel provides a hilarious anecdote about Ben Bernanke, currently the chair of the Federal Reserve, from his days on the Bush administration’s economic team in his 2009 book, In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, that captures in capsule form one of the reasons why Bernanke has made such a great Fed chair: USflag

One day, Bernanke showed up for a monthly Oval Office meeting wearing a dark blue suit and light tan socks.

Bush notices. ‘Ben,’ the president said, according to one participant, ‘where did you get those socks?’

‘Gap,’ replied Bernanke. ‘Three pair for seven dollars.’

The president wouldn’t let it go, mentioning Bernanke’s light tan socks repeatedly during the forty-five-minute meeting.

At the next month’s meeting, Bernanke had convinced nearly the entire staff, as well as U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, to wear tan socks, getting the last laugh on Bush.  Beyond the innocent prank, the implication is clear enough — Bernanke, always a bit of an outsider in Washington, was wearing tan socks in a city of black socks.  That’s perhaps appropriate for a Jewish economist who grew up in South Carolina.

That distance has been one of the understated keys to Bernanke’s success as Fed chair since 2006 — he’s a rare Fed chair who has enough distance from official Washington to be a credibly independent central banker but also sufficient experience to navigate Washington’s politics.  Despite his eight-month stint as chair of the Bush administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, Bernanke had also chaired Princeton University’s economics department for six years and served as a member of the Fed’s seven-person Board of Governors from 2002 to 2005.  He’s not the kind of Washington fixture that Alan Greenspan had increasingly become in his 19 years as Fed chair, nor is Bernanke’s wife a consummate political insider like NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Greenspan’s wife.

As Felix Salmon writes today at Reuters, the Fed chair is one of the two most important officers in the United States.  Bernanke’s successor, who will take office in February 2014, will be even more important to world politics, in at least an indirect capacity for his role in global markets, than U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew or U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel.

Right now, there are two frontrunners:

  • Lawrence Summers, treasury secretary in the Clinton administration from 1999 to 2001, Harvard University president from 2001 to 2006 and the hard-charging director of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010; and
  • Janet Yellen, vice chair of the Federal Reserve since 2010, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, and the chair of the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.

The conventional wisdom is that Summers has an edge, because Obama knows him so well, and trusts him, on the basis of his role earlier in the administration.  So Obama therefore prefers to appoint Summers, as do all of the top economic policymakers close to Obama, such as Lew, former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC director Gene Sperling.

The conventional wisdom is also that while Summers is a exceedingly brilliant and talented economist, he is not someone who values collaboration, a key trait for someone whose goal is to lead the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee that is comprised of the seven members of the Board of Governors and a rotating slate of five of the 12 regional Federal Bank presidents.  The substantive knocks on Summers are even greater.  He supported deregulation within the financial industry during the Clinton administration that allowed for the proliferation of new financial derivatives markets, and he opposed the ‘Volcker Rule’ in the 2010 Dodd-Frank package of financial reforms that restricts banks from using deposits in riskier trading.  That’s not counting his controversial turn at Harvard, when he was forced to resign over comments suggesting that men have a greater natural aptitude for the sciences nor does it take into account the conflicts of his post-government employment with private-sector Wall Street firms like Citigroup and hedge fund D.E. Shaw or his lack of actual experience within the Federal Reserve system.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution argues that Summers is preferable to Yellen because Summers has more ‘right-wing street cred,’ and therefore might work more easily with the current Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and a potential future Republican presidential administration, both because he’s taken more criticism from the left than Yellen and because of Yellen’s background at Berkeley.

But Salmon argues that Yellen would be a better chair on the day-to-day matters that are crucial to stabilizing the U.S. and global economy (noting that any Fed chair would respond to a financial crisis guns-a-blazin’).  Ezra Klein, at The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, argues that we don’t know which candidate would be stronger on financial regulation, another key Fed role.  Paul Krugman argues that Yellen’s detractors are motivated by rampant sexism:

Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.

In the grand scheme of things, both Yellen and Summers are likely to pursue similar policies.  Even though Yellen has been labeled an inflation ‘dove,’ there’s no indication that either Yellen or Summers will abandon Bernanke’s January 2012 decision to set an explicit 2% inflation rate target for the first time in Fed history.  But the next Fed chair will most certainly wind down the Fed’s extraordinary ‘quantitative easing’ actions of the past five years whereby the Fed has purchased assets, bonds and other securities at an unprecedented rate, thereby boosting liquidity in the global financial system.

The reason to appoint Yellen is not because she is a woman, because she’s an inflationary ‘dove,’ because we think she might be a stronger advocate of financial regulation or even because she has more experience within the Fed.  It’s because she will be seen to have more independence  at a time when central bank independence will be crucial to the Fed’s success — that makes Yellen the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair, and it’s the key reason why Yellen’s nomination should be a slam-dunk case for Obama. Continue reading Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her →

India

BJP’s Modi begins Indian election campaign in an incredibly strong position

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It’s nearly a year before Indians will go to the polls in the world’s most populous election, but Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi looks ever more like the man with the easiest path to become India’s next prime minister.India Flag Icon

Eleven months is a long time in the politics of any country, so there’s no guarantee, and even if Modi winds up as prime minister, it will be after a long-fought slog.  But the decision last week of the conservative Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) to anoint Modi as the leader of its 2014 parliamentary campaign makes Modi the indisputable, if unofficial, leader of the BJP efforts to regain power after what will be a decade-long hiatus in opposition.

Modi faces plenty of obstacles, too, within his own party and the wider National Democratic Alliance coalition, of which the BJP is the largest participant.

But the fundamental fact is that Modi is now the BJP and NDA standard-bearer and he’ll playing offense against the governing Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस).  A tired prime minister Manmohan Singh will likely leave office in 2014 after a decade of missed opportunities, above all having presided over an underperforming economy.  Moreover, the likely Congress standard-bearer, Rahul Gandhi, seems a hesitant and reluctant leader, even as the party moves more fully toward consolidating under his leadership.  Whereas Modi, after a decade in regional government, personifies a triumphant hunger to gain power and jumpstart India’s economy, Gandhi personifies the listlessness of a fourth-generation scion of a political dynasty that’s been intermittently in power since India’s independence in 1947.

That doesn’t mean that the residual power of the Gandhi family brand of the rougher edges or internal strife within the BJP and the NDA won’t scuttle Modi’s chances — polls show that Congress remains relatively unpopular and that, Indian voters aren’t quite completely sold on the BJP, the ‘saffron party’ nonetheless remains in a very good position to benefit from Congress’s expense.

The 2014 election will determine the membership of the Lok Sabha ( लोक सभा), the 552-member lower chamber of the Indian parliament.  The governing United Progressive Alliance holds 226 seats, of which Congress itself holds 203 seats; the NDA holds 136 seats, of which the BJP itself holds 115 seats.  The Third Front, a coalition of communist and other leftist third parties, holds 77 seats, and the so-called Fourth Front, which is dominated by the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) based in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, holds 25 seats.   Continue reading BJP’s Modi begins Indian election campaign in an incredibly strong position →

India, Karnataka

As expected, BJP loses Karnataka state elections to surging Congress

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rahulkarnataka

Votes from Sunday’s elections in the Indian state of Karnataka were counted today and, as polls suggested, the troubled government of the conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) has overwhelmingly lost.India Flag Iconkarnataka flag

The Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) has won 121 seats — an absolute majority — among the 223 seats up for election in the Karnataka legislative assembly, the Vidhan Sabha (विधान सभा).  In contrast, the BJP lost 72 seats and now holds just 40.

karnataka

So what do the results mean for Indian national politics?  As with most special elections and regional and local elections, it’s hard to extrapolate trends from a local election for national significance.  But given that India’s national leaders, including very likely its next prime minister, all campaigned in Karnataka, there are some points worth noting, with India’s own national elections set to take place before May 2014.

First, critics of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, both inside and outside the BJP, will have an argument that Modi’s brand of campaign magic isn’t transferable outside his own state.  Modi campaigned vigorously in the final days of the campaign, and he’s widely seen as the frontrunner to lead the BJP in next year’s general election and even a slight frontrunner to become India’s next prime minister.  But the BJP in Karnataka was always facing an uphill battle, so Modi’s failure to change the dynamic is no more or less indicative of his national appeal than Rahul Gandhi’s inability to help Congress win last year’s elections in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

Second, the Karnataka election was the first state election since Rahul (pictured above) became the vice president of Congress, so a loss or a closer-than-expected race might have demonstrated that Congress’s brand — and the Gandhi brand — is wearing thin nationally.  That didn’t happen, so from Rahul’s perspective, the election is a success.

Perhaps the most important lesson is the anti-incumbent mood, and it wouldn’t be surprising if many of Karnataka’s voters, who just ejected a BJP government this week, will be equally keen to eject the national Congress-led government next year — a government that’s been in office nearly a decade and has received much criticism, even abroad, for a drop in India’s economic growth and its relative lack of energy in pursuing economic reforms.

Back in Karnataka, however, attention will now turn to the next chief minister of a state that remains a technology-fueled economic star within India.   Continue reading As expected, BJP loses Karnataka state elections to surging Congress →

India, Karnataka

Karnataka, India’s high-growth power state, votes in shadow of 2014 national campaign

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mysore

In 2004, when the national government of the center-right, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) sought reelection, it did so with the slogan of ‘India Shining,’ a catchphrase that it hoped would capture the progress India was making in catching up to the economic development that for so long eluded it.  That campaign failed, and the slogan itself largely backfired, but make no mistake — no city was shining brighter than Bangalore, the capital of the state of Karnataka.karnataka flagIndia Flag Icon

Bangalore, in the 1990s and the 2000s, rapidly developed into the so-called ‘Silicon Valley’ of India, with a rapid, increasingly technology-fueled growth wave that made the city a favorite among multinational corporations and that made Karnataka one of the fastest-growing regions in the world.  Bangalore’s population went from 5.1 million to 8.4 million from 2001 to 2011 alone.

Karnataka itself has a population of nearly 62 million people — although it ranks as only the ninth-most populous state within India, it nonetheless has a slightly larger population than Italy and a population twice as large as Malaysia, though I’m sure you’ve heard much more about the recent Italian elections and the Malaysian parliamentary elections scheduled for the same day as Karnataka’s state elections on May 5.  But given the rising economic, cultural, demographic and political importance of India, and the central role than Bangalore and its economic hinterland has played in India’s 2000s economic boom, there’s really no reason why Italian politics should necessarily be any more important than Karnataka state politics.

Its importance comes especially into relief when you view the Karnataka campaign in the context of India’s highly anticipated 2014 national election showdown between the BJP, which will likely (though not certainly) be led by Gujarati chief minister Narendra Modi and the current governing party, the Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस), which will almost certainly be led by Rahul Gandhi, the son of current Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and both Rahul and Modi have recently visited Karnataka state to campaign for their parties and to take swipes at one another.

So what do you need to know about the politics of Karnataka? Continue reading Karnataka, India’s high-growth power state, votes in shadow of 2014 national campaign →

Mexico, United States

How U.S. immigration reform might affect México

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The last time the United States seriously contemplated immigration reform, it was also immediately after the inauguration of a new Mexican president — Vicente Fox, a business-friendly conservative whose Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) came to power for the first time in 69 years, ousting the long-governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).Mexico Flag IconUSflag

That was 12 years ago, and this time, the PRI has returned to Los Pinos with a new president — Enrique Peña Nieto.

While Peña Nieto’s administration moves forward with tax reform and business-friendly reforms of the Mexican labor and energy markets — all of which the PAN will likely support — his approach to pending U.S. immigration reform couldn’t be more different from Fox’s.

Fox came to office alongside U.S. president George W. Bush, and both had high hopes for U.S.-Mexican relations — after all, both were conservative reformers and former governors (Fox in Guanajuato in the industrial north of México and Bush in Texas along the Mexican border) with larger-than-life personalities and cowboy boots to match.  So observers on both sides of the border believed their personal chemistry and simpatico views would actually bring about a new era in bilateral good feeling.

Fox’s major address before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, marking a turning point in Mexican-American relations, in fact, came on September 6, 2001.

What happened five days later would turn the Bush administration’s attention far from México, except for security concerns with respect to potential terrorists crossing into the United States, despite Fox’s vigorous and active campaign throughout the rest of his six-year term, and thereafter, for the United States to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

This time around, net migration from México has slowed from a burst of migration activity to net zero migration, according to Pew Research’s Hispanic Center, ending or even reversing a decades-long trend:

The U.S. today has more immigrants from México alone—12.0 million—than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world.  Some 30% of all current U.S. immigrants were born in México. The next largest sending country—China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan)—accounts for just 5% of the nation’s current stock of about 40 million immigrants.

The relatively bleaker economic conditions over the past four years in the United States have much to do with the sharp decline, but there are other reasons, too — optimism over a Mexican economy that’s growing so rapidly that it is set to overtake Brazil’s economy as the largest in Latin America in the 2020s, and a half-century of declining Mexican birth rates.

Given that Fox’s approach fell flat, and in light of the relatively fewer gains for Mexican migrants north of the border a decade later, Peña Nieto’s approach has been decidedly less hands-on:

In a joint appearance, Peña Nieto told Obama that Mexicans “fully support” the idea of immigration reform but said, “More than demanding what you should do or shouldn’t do, we do want to tell you that we want to contribute. We really want to participate with you.”

Like his predecessor, the PAN-backed Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto appears to be more interested in working with the United States on security matters, especially at a time when drug-related violence is on the decline in México, and at a crucial time for a new administration that hopes to bring a less confrontational approach to security, focused on reducing violence rather than declaring full-out war against Mexican drug cartels.

The release last week of a ‘bipartisan framework’ from a group of U.S. senators, however, makes U.S. reform more likely now than at any time during the Bush administration, meaning that the issue of immigration reform will necessarily take up more space on Peña Nieto’s agenda this year. Continue reading How U.S. immigration reform might affect México →

Gujarat, India

Modi’s Gujarat victory sets platform for national ambitions in 2014

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Votes were counted yesterday from two regional state elections in India — in Gujarat, on the west-center coast of India, with 60 million people, and in the much smaller Himachal Pradesh, a much smaller Himalayan state that borders Tibet, with just six million people.India Flag Icon

But in some ways, December 20 was the first day of campaigning for the national election — likely to be held in 2014 — to control India’s Lok Sabha ( लोक सभा), the 552-member lower chamber of the Indian parliament.

The upshot of the elections is that Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi (pictured above) has been reelected for a third consecutive term, and his victory has invariably made him the frontrunner to be the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist and conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) in 2014, when the BJP hopes to national power for the first time since its stunning 2004 election loss.

Modi had done nothing to dispel the notion that he wants to become prime minister during the campaign, in which Modi, quite novelly in Indian politics (and to my knowledge, world politics), appeared simultaneously at rallies throughout the state using a hologram version of himself.

Even in his victory speech, when he addressed supporters not in the local language, Gujarati, but the more nationally recognized Hindi language, he seemed to indicate that he was turning his eyes toward a national audience.

Modi, if he does lead the BJP in 2014, will not face the current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, but likely Rahul Gandhi — the son of the Sonia Gandhi, the president of Singh’s Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) and of the late former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and also the grandson of the late former prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Although some other BJP chief ministers appear ready to back Modi, he still faces obstacles — 2014 is far away, and the BJP chief minister of Madhya Pradesh since 2005, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, who has also been a member of the Lok Sabha since 1991, will be seeking his third consecutive term next year.  Madhya Pradesh lies in the heart of central India, with an even larger population (75 million) than Gujarat and which also has an economy better than India’s average.

Furthermore, Raman Singh, who has been the BJP chief minister of the less-populous (25 million) but industrially vital east-central state of Chhatisgarh since 2003, will also seek his third consecutive term in 2013.

At the national level, the chief minister of Bihar state, Nitish Kumar, remains decidedly cold about running with Modi in 2014.  Kumar leads the Janata Dal (United) party (JDU), which holds just 20 seats in the Lok Sabha, but is the second-largest member, after the BJP, of the National Democratic Alliance in the Lok Sabha that stands as the united opposition to Congress.  The JDU lies more to the political left of the BJP, and it’s been strongest in Bihar and Jharkhand in the far east of India.  Kumar, whose party is also more secular than the Hindu-based BJP, has worked to appeal to Muslims, which comprise 16.5% of the population in Bihar.  He has threatened to pull the JDU out of the alliance with the BJP if it nominates Modi as its prime ministerial candidate.

But for now, let’s take a closer look at the results, announced yesterday, in Gujarat:

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Going into the election, the BJP controlled 117 of the 182 seats in the Gujarati regional parliament.  Modi held onto most of those seats, despite a nationalized campaign that brought Singh and both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi to campaign against him, and despite rumblings from elements within Gujarat to Modi’s right and Keshubhai Patel, who preceded Modi, serving in 1995 and from 1998 to 2001.  Patel formed a new party, the Gujarat Parivartan Party (GPP), which won two seats, and likely stole away enough votes from Modi’s BJP to allow Congress to win a few more seats in the election.

Although Modi would probably have liked a wider victory — expectations spun wildly out of hand that he could win 130 to 150 seats, although that was never incredibly likely — it’s nonetheless a very strong win after more than a decade of incumbency for Modi personally and two decades of incumbency for the BJP, especially in a country that isn’t incredibly kind, electorally speaking, to incumbents (as the BJP learned yesterday in Himachal Pradesh).  Continue reading Modi’s Gujarat victory sets platform for national ambitions in 2014 →

Gujarat, India

Gujarati voters consider third decade of BJP rule as Modi looks to prime minister race in 2014

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In Gujarat, the state where Mahatma Gandhi — India’s spiritual and intellectual founding father — was born, voters will go to the polls in two rounds on December 13 and 17 to elect a new regional government. 

Since 2001, however, Gujarat’s government has been headed by Narendra Modi (pictured above), the regional leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी), which currently holds 117 out of 182 in the state’s unicameral Legislative Assembly (Vidhan Sabha, ગુજરાત વિધાન સભા). In the previous 2007 elections, Modi’s BJP defeated the Indian National Congress (Congress, or भारतीय राष्ट्रीय कांग्रेस) by an 11% margin — Congress currently holds 59 seats.

Politics in Gujarat is largely a straightforward contest between India’s two largest national political parties and, as one of India’s most conservative states, it’s long been a for the BJP, which has held a majority in the Legislative Assembly since 1995.

Modi is a longtime veteran of Indian politics, and he is widely thought to harbor national political ambitions, though he’s a relatively polarizing figure within India, and opponents have dismissed him as more hype than substance.

He will be looking to poll at least as well as he did in the previous 2007 elections, when the BJP won 49% of the vote and nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Legislative Assembly, as a springboard into the 2014 national elections.  Although that contest is still a long ways off,  Modi remains the favorite to run as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister in 2014, though he may face intraparty rivals, including former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani.  Congress is expected to run under the candidacy of Rahul Gandhi — the son of Congress’s president Sonia Gandhi and the late former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and the grandson of the late former prime minister Indira Gandhi.

Although the state’s officials won’t start counting votes until December 20, barring a political earthquake, it’s a safe bet that Modi will emerge with a mandate for a fourth consecutive term in office.

In one of the world’s most novel twists on campaigning, he has turned heads by using a three-dimensional hologram avatar of himself to address multiple rallies in Gujarat simultaneously. Continue reading Gujarati voters consider third decade of BJP rule as Modi looks to prime minister race in 2014 →

Puerto Rico, United States

Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state?

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In addition to the defeat of Puerto Rico’s budget-cutting governor Luis Fortuño in yesterday’s gubernatorial election, Puerto Ricans have also voted in a two-question referendum in opposition to its current commonwealth status, marking the worst result for the status quo in four such referenda in half a century. 

That doesn’t mean Puerto Rico is exactly on the fast track to become the 51st state of the United States.

There are reasons to believe that the path to statehood would encounter obstacles both from U.S. legislators in Washington, D.C. as well as difficulties in San Juan — not least of which due to the fact that Puerto Rico’s newly elected governor, Alejandro García Padilla, opposes Puerto Rican statehood and is likely to prioritize creating jobs and reducing crime over constitutional status issues.

The island is currently a U.S. territory, and since 1952, its constitutional status has been as a ‘commonwealth’ of the United States.  More on that below.

Tuesday’s referendum

First, let’s examine the actual referendum and the result.

The referendum itself was a complex two-question vote.  Puerto Ricans were first asked whether the commonwealth should continue to have its present form of territorial status.  Puerto Ricans were also asked which non-territorial option they prefer among three options: becoming a U.S. state, becoming independent, or becoming a ‘free associated state’ — think of the latter option as ‘independence light‘ akin to the relationship that Palau and the Marshall Islands have to the United States or like the relationship the Cook Islands have with New Zealand.

See the second prong of the ballot question:

Puerto Ricans could vote on the second question regardless of their position on the first question, so voters who support the current commonwealth status could nonetheless vote for their preferred non-commonwealth status as well.

Around 1.82 million voters participated in the referendum.  On the first question, 53.99% of voters voted that Puerto Rico should not continue to have its present form of territorial status, and 46.01% supported the current status.  In four referenda since 1967, that’s clearly the strongest vote against Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status.

On the second question, though, the headline statistic that most U.S. media are reporting is that 61.15% of Puerto Rican voters supported statehood (with 33.31% supporting a ‘free associated state’ and just 5.53% supporting full independence).

But that overstates the case, because over 486,000 voters cast either invalid or blank votes on the second question.  When you take those into consideration, statehood won just 44.62% of total votes, blank and invalid votes ‘won’ 27.04%, the ‘free associated state’ option won 24.31%, and full independence won 4.04%.

So while statehood seems to be the preferred alternative, not even a majority of the voters who took part in the referendum actually cast a vote for statehood.  Furthermore, we don’t know how ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters actually voted on the second question, so there’s no way to know, what the anti-commonwealth voters, as a group, actually prefer.

Accordingly, the result isn’t a clear victory for much of anything, let alone statehood.  That may be fine — it’s just a non-binding referendum anyway.  As noted above, García Padilla and his Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico) is opposed to statehood, so it seems less likely that Puerto Rico will aggressively pursue statehood than if the incumbent, Luis Fortuño of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) had won reelection.

Notably, however, Puerto Rico’s ‘resident commissioner,’ its non-voting representative to the U.S. House of Representatives, has the chief responsibility of introducing legislation to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state. Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi — who was only narrowly reelected on Tuesday with a 1% margin — belongs to the pro-statehood PNP.  Pierluisi, indeed, has indicated that he favors introducing such legislation.  We’ll find out, I guess.

Proponents of statehood chafe at the idea that Puerto Rico is somehow less equal, that it’s a colonial remnant from the imperial era.  Other supporters believe that full statehood would help lift Puerto Rico’s economic status by creating more links to the mainstream U.S. economy — the island’s GDP per capita of just $24,000 is almost half of GDP per capita on the mainland, the island has been stuck in a recession for the past six years and poverty, crime and unemployment are much higher there than on the mainland.

Opponents argue that statehood would not deliver many more benefits than Puerto Ricans currently enjoy, while subjecting it to less autonomy and more responsibility for U.S. federal taxes.  Furthermore, opponents worry that statehood could endanger the unique ‘boricua’ culture of the predominantly Spanish-speaking territory.  Needless to say, if you’ve ever been to San Juan, you realize quickly that it’s a world away from even heavily Latino U.S. cities like Miami, Los Angeles or New York. Nonetheless, Puerto Ricans are already well assimilated into U.S. culture and life — indeed, there are more mainland citizens of Puerto Rican descent in United States than on the island, and Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland share a rich cultural heritage, especially within the ‘Nuyorican’ diaspora that emerged in New York in the 20th century.

Since 1952, independence has remained a fairly unpopular option, although if Puerto Rico were a sovereign nation, it would be the Caribbean’s fourth most-populous country, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  Its $96.26 billion economy would become the largest economy in the Caribbean, dwarfing not just the Cuban ($60.8 billion) or Dominican ($55.6 billion) economies, but also Central American ones, such as Panamá’s ($30.7 billion) and Costa Rica’s ($41.0 billion).

Puerto Rico’s status in context

Tuesday’s vote was the just the most recent of four increasingly complex referenda on Puerto Rico’s status since becoming a commonwealth in 1952.  Continue reading Could Puerto Rico really become the 51st U.S. state? →

China, United States

Two systems, two transitions: China, U.S. face leadership crossroads simultaneously

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Next week, arguably the two most important countries in the world will kick off two very different leadership transitions.

On Tuesday, November 6, the United States of America will hold a general election.  For the 57th time since 1790, Americans will vote for U.S. president, at once the country’s head of state and head of government.  The winner will most certainly be one of two men: the Democratic Party incumbent, former Illinois senator Barack Obama (pictured above, right) or the Republican Party challenger, former Massachusetts governor Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney.  Americans will also determine who will control the both the lower and upper houses of the U.S. legislature.‡  The new Congress will be sworn in early in January 2013 and the president will be inaugurated (or reinaugurated) on January 20.

On Thursday, November 8, the People’s Republic of China will watch as the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (中国共产党) gets underway in Beijing, where all but two of the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s foremost governing body, will step down and new members will be appointed in a once-a-decade leadership transition.  China’s ‘paramount leader’ Hu Jintao (pictured above, left), the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and PRC president since 2002, is expected to be replaced by Xi Jinping as general secretary, with the other state offices to follow through early 2013.  China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, is expected to be replaced by Li Keqiang.  Otherwise, the Politburo Standing Committee is expected to be reduced from nine to seven members and will include Xi, Li and five new faces — generally known as the ‘fifth generation’ of China’s leadership.

Despite their vastly different political systems, it’s fitting that the two transitions will coincide so neatly for the two most powerful countries in the world, both so alien culturally and interlinked economically — and there are parallels for both the superpower of the 20th century and a rising superpower of the 21st.  For every ‘5,000 years of history,’ there’s a corresponding ‘shining city on a hill.’  The United States has George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and 1776; China has Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and 1949.

The United States is the world’s third-most populous country with 315 million people, the third-largest country by land area, and the world’s largest economy with a GDP last year of over $15 trillion.  China, meanwhile, is the world’s most populous country with 1.347 billion people, the second-largest country by land area, and the world’s second-largest economy with a GDP last year of $11.3 trillion.

In 2012, if we don’t quite live in a bipolar world, we certainly live in a multipolar world where the United States and China are first among equals, and the U.S.-Chinese relationship will, of course, be a major focus of both governments over the next four years and beyond.

Indeed, Chinese relations have been an issue throughout the U.S. presidential election.

China emerged, if not unscathed, certainly more economically powerful than ever before following the 2008-09 global financial crisis, and China may well have the world’s largest economy within the next decade.  But the juggernaut of its double-digit economic growth, which has been fairly consistent throughout the past 20 years, is showing signs of sputtering, and a Chinese slowdown (or even a recession) would have a major impact upon the global economy.

Romney has vociferously attacked China for manipulating its currency, the renminbi, to keep the cost of its exports low, and Obama’s treasury secretary Timothy Geithner has made similar, if more gentle, criticisms.  Notably, however, the renminbi has appreciated about 8.5% since Obama took office in January 2009, chiefly because the Chinese government has hoped to cool inflationary pressure.

The level of U.S. debt held by the Chinese government has also become an important issue, especially with the U.S. budget deficit at its highest level (as a percentage of GDP) since World War II.  China, however, holds only about $1.132 trillion out of a total of around $15 trillion in U.S. debt, which is down from its high of around $1.17 trillion in 2011 — meanwhile, Japan has accelerated its acquisition of U.S. debt and may soon hold more than China.  The outsourcing of jobs previously filled in the United States has long been an issue across the ideological spectrum of U.S. domestic politics, with respect to China and other Asian countries.

In reality, however, other issues are just as likely to dominate the next generation of Chinese and American leadership.  With both militaries looking to dominate the Pacific (note the growing U.S. naval presence in the Philippines and throughout the Pacific), geopolitical stability throughout the region will be more important than ever — not just the perennial issue of Taiwan, but growing concerns about North Korea’s autarkic regime, tensions between China and Japan over territorial claims or other future hotspots could all spur wider crises.

As China’s middle class grows in size and purchasing power, and as the United States continues to boost its exports, China will become an increasingly important market for U.S. technology, entertainment and energy in the next two decades.  China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its increasing role as a trading partner with the United States mean that trade-related issues — such as the case that the United States brought against China in the WTO last month on cars and auto parts — will only become more important.

But while the U.S. federalist constitutional structure — with its tripartite separation of powers — has been set in place since the adoption of its Constitution in 1787, the Chinese structure is a more recent creation.  The Chinese Communist Party holds a National Congress every five years, with a handover of power every ten years, vesting power in a collaborative Politburo Standing Committee that makes all key policy-making decisions, a process that came into being only really with the passing of Deng Xiaoping in the 1990s.

After Deng, Jiang Zemin and the so-called ‘third generation’ of China’s political leadership essentially regularized the current process, and the ‘fourth generation’ led by Hu and Wen that assumed leadership in 2002 and 2003 is now set to pass leadership on to the ‘fifth generation’ under Xi and Li.

China’s party-state essentially has a dual structure: the state institutions of government (the National People’s Congress and the State Council) and the structure of the Chinese Communist Party are essentially parallel — the same people control both.  So from a wide base of over 2,000 delegates to the National Party Congress, around 200 will form the Party’s Central Committee, just 25 the more important Politburo and, after next week’s transition, merely seven will form the Politburo Standing Committee.  Those seven will also hold the key offices of state — as noted, Li is expected to become China’s premier, the head of the PRC government and Xi, as general secretary of the  Party, will serve as the president of the PRC and the chair of the Central Military Commission, the entity that directs the People’s Liberation Army, China’s main armed forces. Continue reading Two systems, two transitions: China, U.S. face leadership crossroads simultaneously →