28 September 2009

Q&A with Parag Khanna: Redrawing the map for a safe, secure world

Last week, Parag Khanna sat with the TED Blog to discuss no less than the political future of the world we live in. He works in the expansive field of geopolitics, and his TEDTalk discusses the history and future of some of the world’s most troubled states and the possibilities of a borderless world. In this interview, he expanded on his theories, delving into the causes of terrorism, the impact of the G20, a solution for Sudan and more.

Can you explain exactly what it is that you do? Your title is Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, and I’m not sure that we all know precisely what that means.

It’s essentially designed to be misleading so that no one will ever actually know what I truly do. (Laughter) And most of the ambiguity rests in the fact that what people struggle to grasp is that at think tanks a lot of people, like me, actually get paid to do whatever we want. So that explains it, partially.

But let me start at the top level -- the New America Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, and it’s one of the youngest and definitely the hottest think tank in Washington. And it has, as in other places, a mix of domestic and foreign policy experts, and it’s run by Steve Coll, the former Washington Post editor, and the chairman of the board is Eric Schmidt of Google, and it’s a very dynamic and lively place.

The American Strategy Program is the foreign-policy wing of the think tank, and it has people like Peter Bergen from CNN and myself and others. And the Global Governance Initiative is my particular program, in which I’m exploring the future of diplomacy, not just from the perspective of what happens to intergovernmental relations and the United Nations and standing institutions like the World Bank, but rather how do all of the important actors in the world today, like News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, Bill Clinton and the Clinton Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the US government -- all of these players exist in a very complicated diplomatic knit. And my project is intended to clarify what the new patterns of diplomacy are among them: How are they cooperating? What issues are they cooperating on? What’s their purpose? Diplomacy is the future of understanding how we run the world, basically.

That’s a very interesting position to be in. Have you seen any of your work creating any influence or ripples in the world around you?

Should I speak for myself or New America Foundation as a whole?

Both, if you can.

Well, what I do is I tend to go to countries and interview the leaders, but I don’t interview them like a journalist. I talk to their leaders as someone who’s developed a certain knowledge or expertise on emerging markets or rising powers. And I don’t so much interview people as I debate with them, and I argue with them, and I get them to say what they really believe, not what they want to see in the newspaper tomorrow. And that’s how I gathered the material for my book, in addition to reading a hell of a lot and traveling around countries and talking to all sorts of people.

I can’t take responsibility for the policies that other countries develop, but I’ve built up a substantial network of young and current leaders in a lot of countries and I have regular interactions with them on important issues. With the US government, I’ve worked with the Department of Defense advising on the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t actually talk about the specific things that went on there. As with many people who’ve been involved in the conflicts over there, I’ve tried to assert a certain way in which things should go, but influence is a very complicated landscape. We keep on pushing and pushing on certain issues, in the hope of seeing some kind of change.

New America Foundation has had a lot of success in areas like education policy, tax policy, climate policy as well -- it’s a very progressive place. But the question of influence is very interesting, and I think people should ask themselves more seriously -- whether they’re journalists or think tank people or academics -- “What’s the measure of my influence?” Is someone influential because millions of people read his column, or does anything actually ever change according to what he suggested or recommended? We tend to conflate the two measurements of visibility versus a change. I, for one, I like to set the bar very high and say, “Did something change?”

That’s very inspiring. I’d like to delve some more into application and talk about relatively current events. Obama’s been in office for a little over half a year, and when he was elected the global attitude toward him was much friendlier. Do you think that this friendlier global climate really will prove advantageous to the United States in diplomacy and foreign relations?

I think when people are struggling to understand public opinion toward the United States between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, there’s a very simple explanation that I never hear people give, which is that when Obama was running for President, he didn’t represent America, he represented the anti-Bush and a different America. But now that he’s President and represents America, he’s conflated again, so that Obama equals America. If American policy is still bad, now Obama takes the blame rather than Bush taking the blame. So if you want to explain the fall-off or drop-off in popularity or approval for Obama, that is how you’d explain it. Because people want or expect change instantaneously, and obviously they’re not going to get that because the power of inertia is so great.

Not only is the power of inertia great, in the case of the war in Iraq -- where in fact he’s been very fast, he’s been pulling troops out -- but it still takes time. In Afghanistan, his very controversial decision is that he’s trying to increase the number of troops there. In many people’s eyes that means deepening an occupation, digging in deeper, and that obviously also isn’t necessarily popular.

Now, I do believe he was quite revolutionary in his early diplomacy. He reached out within the first 100 days to the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and a whole host of countries that the Bush administration considered rogue states. And he said, “Look, it’s time to start anew, it’s time to work on pragmatic interests.” He canceled this whole missile defense plan that had no strategic defense whatsoever and that had been hampering American relations with Russia for years and years. And overnight, he just changed it. So I think he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for quickstarting a process in the first 100 days. And, of course, people will be disappointed if they don’t see reciprocal results right away. But they’re just not going to. That’s not the way it works. I still have a lot of faith in the process that he has initiated.

READ MORE: Parag Khanna discusses the G20, a solution for Sudan, terrorism and borders, explains who's really going to address climate change and how we may yet come to live in a borderless world.

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25 October 2007

Building an economic market in Ethiopia: Eleni Gabre-Madhin on TED.com

Economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin outlines her ambitious vision to found the first commodities market in Ethiopia. Her plan would create wealth, minimize risk for farmers and turn the world's largest recipient of food aid into a regional food basket. "There is no place in the world and no time in history that small farmers have had to bear the burden of risk that African farmers bear today," she says. "But I'm not here to lament or wring my hands. I'm here to tell you that change is in the air." (Recorded June 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. Duration: 20:46.)

Watch Eleni Gabre-Madhin's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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05 October 2007

"Rock star" Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala named to World Bank

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (watch her TEDTalks from TED2007 and TEDGlobal07), the crusading economist and former Finance Minister of Nigeria, has been appointed a Managing Director of the World Bank.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala will oversee the World Bank’s work in Africa, South Asia, and Europe and Central Asia. "Her commitment to the developing world is unparalleled," said Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. She's been working with the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) initiative to help poor countries reclaim assets lost to corruption, and with Bono's DATA organization on historic debt-relief programs. Bono said of her last week, "She's the kind of leader we all want to work for." (And as Portfolio.com commented, she's as much a rock star as that Irish gentleman.)

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16 August 2007

Emily Oster: Cable television is good for women in India

University of Chicago economist Emily Oster went on stage at TED2007 to say that most of what we know about AIDS in Africa is wrong -- and proceeded to show data and graphs to make her case (watch the video of her speech -- or read the summary). Now she's applied her atypical lens to the effect of the introduction of cable television on gender attitudes in rural India, coming up again with surprising results.

In a recent draft paper (full text in PDF) that she wrote with Robert Jensen of Brown University after a three-year study, she argues that "the introduction of cable television is associated with improvements in women's status" and finds "significant increases in reported autonomy, decreases in the reported acceptability of beating and decreases in reported son preferences", this last point being about sex-selective abortions (rural families prefer boys). They also found "increases in female school enrollment and decreases in fertility (primarily via increased birth spacing)."

The effects are large, the two researchers argue, "equivalent in some cases to about five years of education" within the surveyed population.

These changes are "accomplished despite there being little or no direct targeted appeals" such as public-service announcements. Which brings Oster and Jensen to speculate that "it may be that cable television, with programming that features lifestyle both in urban areas and in other countries, is an effective form of persuasion, because people emulate what they perceive to be desirable behavior and attitudes".

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14 August 2007

A freak blog migrates into an institution

After over two years at freakonomics.com, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner -- co-authors of the 3-million-copies "Freakonomics" -- last week moved their blog under a bigger and more institutional brand, that of the Opinion section of the New York Times' website.

Levitt spoke at TED2004 offering a preview of a chapter of "Freakonomics" titled "Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?" (watch the video) and exposing his very unconventional approach to economic analysis.

The migration of the blog wouldn't be a remarkable event (even though the blog is very interesting and highly interactive, attracting hundreds of readers' comments) were it not for two facts. The move, in a way, closes a circle: "Freakonomics" was born from a profile that Dubner wrote about Levitt for the New York Times Magazine in 2003, "The Economist of Odd Questions". It also underscores a nascent trend, that of well-known bloggers moving into newspapers' and magazines' websites, creating synergies and pooling readerships -- another step towards the hybridization of the media. The NYT is not the first to try this strategy: France's Le Monde, for example, has been doing so for a while.

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01 August 2007

Premiere: George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos

This grab-you-by-the-throat talk by Ghanaian economist George Ayittey unleashes an almost breathtaking torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders -- the "Hippos" (lazy, slow, ornery, greedy) who have ruined postcolonial Africa, he says. Why, then, does he remain optimistic? Because of the young, agile "Cheetah Generation," a "new breed of Africans" taking their futures into their own hands. (Recorded June 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. Duration: 18:00.)

Watch George Ayittey's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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12 July 2007

Everything we know about AIDS in Africa is wrong: Emily Oster on TED.com

Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa -- and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care -- but we also need to factor in, say, the price of coffee, and the routes of long-haul truckers. In short, she says, there is a lot we don't know; and our assumptions about what we do know may keep us from finding the best way to stop the disease. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 15:45.)

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26 June 2007

Hans Rosling's jaw-dropping demo, on TED.com

In a follow-up to his now-legendary TED2006 presentation, Hans Rosling demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software -- which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Just days after this talk, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 19:09) Read more about Hans Rosling on TED.com.

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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