And the whole wide world reacts

Reactions to Obama's election from around the world, collected by the Financial Times.

A global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

[...]

To understand the second world, you have to start to think like a second-world country. What I have seen in these and dozens of other countries is that globalization is not synonymous with Americanization; in fact, nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries’ state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world’s first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.

Waving Goodbye To Hegemony (New York Times Magazine, Parag Khanna, 27 Jan 2008)

Supporting tyranny for fun and profit

US lawmakers accused Yahoo of giving false information to Congress and asked that chief executive Jerry Yang appear before a committee to explain the internet search company’s role in the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident.

Tom Lantos, the Democratic chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, said a congressional probe had established that Yahoo provided “false information” to Congress during a hearing last year in which the group said it knew nothing about the nature of an investigation into an activist when it gave Chinese authorities information about his e-mail account and contents of his e-mails. Shi Tao, the activist, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment after Yahoo divulged the identifying material.

Financial Times: Yahoo accused over Chinese dissident

Al gets his Nobel

Just moved over the wires at a little past 5 Eastern time (yes, I'm an early riser these days):

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Hey, the guys at the Financial Times are awake:

Mr Gore has given the hour-long lecture which gave rise to the film to thousands of audiences around the world, from students to heads of state. His performances are occasionally free but more often he charges up to £50,000 a time.

Mr Gore is also a prominent investor in environmental technology, chiefly through Generation Investment Management, a fund management company he helped to set up in 2004 with David Blood, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

The choice of Mr Gore will give rise to concerns - for US conservatives at least - about the perceived politicisation of the prize, previously awarded to Jimmy Carter and Mohamed ElBaradei. It raises questions about the broadening of the prize’s criteria beyond the traditional understanding of peacemaking.

The prize also added to speculation that Mr Gore would be persuaded to have another attempt at the US presidency.

World Freedom Atlas

The World Freedom Atlas is a geovisualization tool for world statistics.

Friends like these

As George Bush prepares to send more troops to Iraq, his critics all over the Western world are bringing more protesters onto the streets—and the range of people who are angry enough to fill the icy air with chants of rage seems broader, and in some ways stranger, than ever.

On February 24th, for example, gallery-goers and pigeon-feeders should probably avoid London's Trafalgar Square, on which tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of people will converge from all over Britain, and farther afield, to demand the withdrawal of Western troops from Iraq—and while they are at it, oppose the renewal of Britain's nuclear arsenal. Tourists who do venture near the square will notice the odd sociology of the anti-war movement: the unkempt beards and unisex denims of old-time street fighters rubbing shoulders with the well-trimmed Islamic beards and headscarved ladies.

This leftist-Muslim partnership exists not just on the streets, but in the protest movement's heart. Britain's Stop the War coalition, which has organised more than 15 nationwide protests and hundreds of smaller events, was largely forged by two small, intensely committed bodies—the far-left Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Muslim Association of Britain, which is close to the international Muslim Brotherhood. These tiny groups have co-ordinated street protests by up to 1m people.

Muslims and socialists: With friends like these (Economist, Feb 8, 2007)

Half-price

Grand-strategist Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett:

...[T]he price for renegotiated cooperation/alliance with the U.S. is reduced by half the minute anybody but Bush-Cheney sit in the White House. I think, much like the Carter-to-Reagan shift, there will be such relief abroad in seeing the isolated, much-despised president leave office that it'll be 50 percent off the top on everything. Why? Everyone will want a reasonable, deal-making America back.

To that end, the only candidates who worry me are Edwards and McCain. The former because his pandering in all directions will constrain him too much if elected (my guess, if he were to look good, Gore would pre-empt), the latter because he too confuses being stubborn with being resolute and because his view of potential allies is hopelessly stuck in the past.

The downside opinion on fostering sectarian (read: anti-Iranian) violence (Thomas P.M. Barnett weblog)

He wasn't kidding

Looks like Hugo Chávez wasn't kidding when he promised to move Venezuela further to the left after the recent elections: he's just announced plans to nationalize telecoms and the electric utilities, pushing his poor country even further down the road to socialism.

Mr. Chávez, who will be sworn in Wednesday to another six-year term, announced his plans at the swearing-in of his new cabinet to a cheering crowd of supporters, sending a chilling message to foreign investors.

American corporations, including Verizon Communications, have large stakes in Venezuela’s largest telecommunications company, CANTV, and its biggest publicly traded electricity company, Electricidad de Caracas.

“Let it be nationalized,” Mr. Chávez said of CANTV. “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized.”

Financial markets appeared to be caught off-guard by Mr. Chávez’s announcement, as speculators reacted with a sell-off of assets that would be affected by the decision. Shares in CANTV plunged 14 percent in New York trading. Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, fell as much as 20 percent in black market trading here on Monday, traders said.

(Chávez Moves to Nationalize Two Industries, New York Times, January 9, 2007.)

Ordinarily, these kinds of economic policies act like neutron bombs on developing (or, for that matter, developed) economies.

Given Venezuela's massive oil reserves, however, the cashflow from foreign energy trade can likely prop up a considerable amount of boneheadedness for quite some time.

Global investors and especially the bond and currency markets are not thrilled with Chávismo, and given Hugo's habit of cozying up to foreign leaders spanning a moral spectrum from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, political observers are concerned as well.

At least (for now) few people in America are buying his rhetoric, despite his propaganda programs and enlistment of useful idiots like Joe Kennedy II to push his agenda.