Without surprise we got a provisional promise, but we should also fully understand that he was born to make promise which would never be executed.

via Barack Obama’s foreign policy: The quiet American | The Economist.

Barack Obama's foreign policy

The quiet American

Nov 26th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Is Barack Obama’s diplomacy subtle and strategic, or weak and naive? The world is about to find out

AFP

AT LAST Barack Obama seems to be starting to make up his mind. After months of agonising, he is apparently close to announcing that he will after all send a decent number of American reinforcements to Afghanistan (see article). Meanwhile, having barely mentioned climate change since his inauguration, he has now told the world that he is going to the international summit in Copenhagen—and with a provisional promise that the world’s greatest polluter will cut emissions.

Bold stuff. But both Afghanistan and Copenhagen can also be cited as evidence of a weakness that runs through his foreign policy. It looks to many as if he has dithered, not deliberated. On Afghanistan, far from being clever, his faint-hearted attempt to talk round Congress, manage his squabbling officials and twist the arm of Hamid Karzai, the vote-rigging Afghan president, has arguably accomplished little except hand the initiative to the enemy: his generals have an uphill struggle. On climate change, the rush to Copenhagen, with no bill in sight in Congress, has an air of desperation.

This goes to the heart of the debate about Mr Obama’s diplomacy. Which will he be, clever or weak? Does this president have a strategy, backed if necessary by force, to reorder the world? Or is he merely a presidential version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s idealistic, clever Quiet American who wants to change the world, but underestimates how bad the world is—and ends up causing harm?

Short-sighters v long-gamers

The doubters argue that, however decent and articulate, Mr Obama is gaining a reputation as someone who can be pushed around. This month, after the president pandered to China by refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, China pushed for more by banning questions at his Beijing press conference with Hu Jintao, its president. When Mr Obama demanded that Israel stop all work on its settlements in the occupied territories, Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, defied him and still, staggeringly, won praise from Hillary Clinton.

Each time, the doubters say, Mr Obama’s delicate overtures are met with ambiguity or contempt. Since he engaged Iran, it has continued to temporise and dissimulate over its nuclear programme. When Mr Obama abandoned a missile-defence system in Europe, he appeared to extract a pledge from Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, that his country would support sanctions if Iran is recalcitrant—only for Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, repeatedly to say he sees no need. Although America has pledged $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over five years, the army seems reluctant to take on the Taliban who drift from northern Pakistan into Afghanistan—indeed, the conditions riding on the grant were spun by the Pakistani security services into an American “insult” (see article). Yes, Mr Karzai eventually buckled in Kabul, but his readiness to thumb his nose at the world superpower was humiliating.

The “clever” camp retort that diplomacy is not about instant gratification. Mr Obama has pulled off the urgent tasks of starting to withdraw troops from Iraq and resetting America’s dysfunctional relations with Russia. He has boosted the G20 as a new global forum. This week Israel announced a partial settlement freeze. With health-care reform under his belt, he will soon be able to turn to world affairs with his status enhanced. Besides, you could hardly accuse Mr Obama of timidity. In three speeches in Prague, Cairo and Accra, he set out a new foreign policy that rejects the Manichean view of his predecessor. He means to negotiate deep cuts in nuclear weapons, make peace between Arabs and Jews, engage Iran, heal the climate and establish America as the strongest and most upright pole of a multipolar world. Yes, this work lies ahead, but how much can you ask in a year of war and recession?

It is a fair point, but as the months drag on, the “weak” case has been gaining the upper hand. Mr Obama has yet to show he has the staying power to take on a dangerous, stubborn and occasionally bad world. Even allowing for Israel’s shift this week, the president has hardly lived up to his promise to work for Middle East peace “with all the patience and dedication that the task requires”. With one big exception, he has not yet shown that he can back his oratory with a stick—and that was a tariff on Chinese tyres, a weak sop to America’s unions.

Calm and conciliatory pragmatism is welcome after George Bush’s impetuous moral certitude, but it also carries risks. Critics on the American right are wrong to carp at Mr Obama’s bowing to kings and emperors. Simple courtesy will help restore America’s image, not diminish it. The trouble is that the president often seems kinder to America’s rivals than to its friends. His guest this week, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, may well have moaned about Mr Obama’s kid-glove handling of China. Allies in eastern Europe, their soldiers dying in Afghanistan, resent being called mere “partners”, Mr Obama’s term for pretty much anyone (see article). The hapless Gordon Brown has got precious little thanks.

And how exactly will Mr Obama’s quiet multilateral vision, in which each nation does its bit for the good of all, work in practice? He is right that American power is circumscribed. But the European Union is not fit to help him police the world (see article). China, India and Russia are not willing.

“God save us always from the innocent and the good”

That leaves Mr Obama with a burden to shoulder on his own. In the coming weeks he could prove the doubters wrong. He could lead the way towards a brave deal on the climate. He could press Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme before his own end-of-year deadline—or secure Russian backing for sanctions. He could agree to cut nuclear arms with Russia. He could bully the Palestinians and Mr Netanyahu to agree to talk. And he could get Mr Karzai and Pakistan to show that they mean to make Afghanistan governable. Even part of that list would set up Mr Obama as a foreign-policy president. But if there is no progress, then Mr Obama will be cast as starry-eyed and weak. He himself recognised the danger of that in one of those golden speeches: “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

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Jesus, what the hell is going on the moon?

Space exploration: Any drop to drink? | The Economist.

Space exploration

Any drop to drink?

Nov 13th 2009
From Economist.com

There is water—or, at least ice—on the moon

Reuters

THE moon is covered with seas, oceans and bays, the result of astronomers from past centuries whose imaginations out-ran the capabilities of their instruments, and who assumed that the Earth’s nearest neighbour was not that dissimilar to its mother planet. Modern astronomers know different. The moon is airless, waterless, weatherless and lifeless. Or so it would appear. But some have clung to the hope that the waterless bit applies only to liquid water, and that there might be places on the moon which harbour ice.

The places in question would be deep in craters at the moon’s poles—places, in other words, where the sun don’t shine. The ice, the hope went, would have arrived on board comets that crash at random on to the moon’s surface. Calculations suggest that enough of these would have fallen into the perpetual darkness of some of the polar craters, over the billions of years those craters have existed, to build up a reasonable supply of frozen water. And that, inevitably, has got the space cadets who wish to build permanently crewed bases on the moon in a tizzy. Any base would need a water supply. If that water did not have to be shipped from Earth, then the cost of establishing one might be brought down from the totally ridiculous to the merely absurd.

The experiment was carried out on October 9th, when NASA famously “bombed” the moon. The target was a crater called Cabeus, which is 100km from the moon’s south pole. The bombs were, first, the upper-stage booster of a probe called LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and SensingSatellite) and then, five minutes later, the LCROSS probe itself. During that five minutes, the instruments on LCROSS gathered data on the plume of debris thrown up by the booster’s impact and transmitted them hastily back to Earth. The impact of LCROSS was monitored by a second probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.Friday 13th of November, then, has brought good luck to the proponents of lunar bases. The preliminary results of an experiment conducted by NASA, America’s space agency, suggest there is indeed ice on the moon.

In the weeks since the double impact, NASA’s scientists have been analysing these results, and on Friday the scientists announced that the results suggest the presence of water in Cabeus. The telltales are specific “lines” in the spectrum of infra-red light from the plume. These correspond to the frequencies of light given off when water molecules are energetically excited. The investigators, led by Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California, were unable to explain the spectral lines in question by any other combination of plausible chemicals, so are pretty sure that water is what they have found. That finding is reinforced by a second set of lines, in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which indicate the presence in the plume of hydroxyl radicals. Hydroxyl is HO, as opposed to water’s H2O, and it is usually the result of water molecules decomposing.

In truth, the result is not that surprising. There is always excitement when water is discovered anywhere but Earth. Since it is composed of the commonest element in the universe and the third commonest, however, it is actually quite abundant. The LCROSS finding is, nevertheless, a successful confirmation of an intriguing hypothesis. In due course, maybe, the spiritual airs of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott will fulfill the space-cadets’ dream by visiting the moon’s south pole and confirming that there is ice there in person.

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