04 October 2009

Iran's nuclear program: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicts no nuclear weapons will be built

Only on the TED Blog: In The TED Lens, each Sunday a TED speaker offers a new look at the week's big news stories. This week, political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita explains the negotiations currently taking place between the US, the UN and Iran, as Iran's nuclear program is being called into question.

This week, Iran stated that they refuse to discuss their “nuclear rights” at the UN Security Council. What are the ramifications of making a statement like that? Politically, what does that mean for them and what does that mean for their interactions with the rest of the world?

Good question. Let me put their statement into a bit of context. Let me start with what I said at TED, back in February, which is that they will develop enough weapons-grade fuel so that the world will know that they know how to make a bomb, but they won’t go ahead and make a bomb, and relate that to the New York Times front page Iran story on September 9th -- the lead international relations story in the Times that day -- the first paragraph of which says that the intelligence community has informed the White House that Iran has made a spring towards the nuclear bomb but has deliberately stopped short of making one. And they explicitly used the word "deliberately." That is, they didn’t run into a stumbling block or something; they chose to stop, which is exactly the outcome that was predicted at TED.

Let me push that forward to their current statement. I have not actually seen this statement in print, but I’m going to assume that you’ve stated it precisely, because what you said had very important meaning the way you said it. Their rights, under the non-proliferation treaty -- and President Obama has acknowledged that this is their right -- is to develop nuclear energy for civilian uses. This is a right for all signatories under the NPT. So, if what they said is that they will not be discussing their rights, that’s just the right to make civilian nuclear energy. It does not include, inherently, all discussion with regard to enrichment. Enrichment is beyond what is necessary for nuclear energy and beyond their rights under the treaty they have signed. So, I think they made a very carefully phrased statement. This does not rule out discussing other aspects of their nuclear program. However, there’s a great deal of evidence that they’ve gone beyond civilian nuclear energy. You don’t need to enrich uranium for civilian energy. There are other ways to make civilian nuclear energy -- you can do it by enriching, but they seem to have gone beyond that. They do not seem, by this statement, to have precluded discussion of that.

I expect that this dance over how to resolve the issue is not going to be settled in one conversation. But, I’m hearing in that statement that they’ve left the door open and I imagine that the people at the State Department who have looked at this statement and understand exactly what their rights are under the non-proliferation treaty will see just the way I have expressed it. Not to say that they will say that publicly.

Now, I’ll address the terms of public standing within Iran. The civilian nuclear energy aspect of the program is very popular in Iran. But, the aspects of the program that seemingly go beyond civilian nuclear energy are very unpopular because the Iranian people see this as harming their economy and putting them at risk, neither of which they’re keen on. And the Iranian leaders surely understand that, because they went through the wrenching experience in June, when, for the first time since the revolution, the supreme leader was publicly challenged -- not only by mass demonstrations, but also by the khoum clerics, and by very prominent politicians such as (Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi) Rafsanjani and (Seyed Mohammad) Khatami and so forth.

I think it’ll take another year or two to play out, but in the next year or two we will see a shift away from a strict theocratic government to something much closer to what (Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi) Khomeini had in mind originally, which was a government where politics and theocrats -- the religious leaders -- were more separated -- a government that basically evolves into a little bit of a petty military dictatorship that is heavily influenced by a group called the Bonyads, who control a lot of the money in Iran, and who, because they are concerned about making money and so forth, are likely to move Iran in a more pragmatic direction. That won’t be a nice government necessarily, but will be a government, at least, that people can live better in.

President Obama has also made reference to sanctions as a possible response to Iran developing their nuclear program further. How effective do you think US sanctions would be in this situation?

I’m going to try to answer this very precisely, because there’s a very important distinction to be made between the threat of sanctions and the enactment of sanctions. The threat of sanctions can be very effective if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the concessions being asked for is smaller for them than the cost that sanctions will impose, and to avoid sanctions they will make concessions in negotiation. And so, threatening sanctions is a very good thing to do at this stage as negotiations get going. On the other hand, if the Iranian leaders calculate that the cost of the threatened sanctions when imposed is smaller than the benefits that they gain when maintaining the policy that we’re trying to change, then they’ll maintain the policy and the sanctions won’t work. And so, generally, except for calculation error, the threat of sanctions can be effective. Once sanctions are implemented, that’s a pretty good indicator that the target of the sanctions has made the calculation that they can bear the cost of the sanctions better than they can bear the consequences of making the concessions, and they won’t work. That’s a subtle distinction, but an important distinction.

It’s also important to distinguish between sanctions that are aimed at the general economy of Iran and sanctions that are leader-specific, that are aimed specifically, for example, at tying up the leadership’s access by the leadership to their money or their funds. Sanctions of the latter type, leader-specific, are more likely to get them to decide up front to make concessions, rather than pay that price. Sanctions of the other type, aimed at the general country, are more likely to either form an opposition to the regime which, if they anticipate, will produce concessions beforehand, or to consolidate support for the regime, sympathy for the regime internally, in which case they would backfire. I’ve not analyzed what the likely consequences are along those lines, but those are the questions from a strategic perspective that one would have to work out. The threat is, in any event, a good thing because the threat forces the Iranians to make these calculations and therefore to reveal, through the negotiations, whether they have concluded that the sanctions really would be costly to them or not.

Sanctions at our end are typically more or less cheap talk because they don’t really cost the United States a lot. It doesn’t cost us a lot not to buy oil from Iran since we currently don’t buy oil from Iran. So, we’re not really giving up much. And tying up their bank accounts doesn’t really cost us much. It costs a little credibility to our banks, but that’s about it. Sanctions are also more effective if they are politically costly to the people imposing the sanctions, because then it’s an announcement that they view the issues as so important that they are willing to pay a price. So far, we have not shown that.

There are also the negotiations around the three Americans who are being held by Iran at the moment …

They’re a bargaining piece on the Iranian side. They’re something that the Iranians can give up to make themselves look nice, thoughtful, considerate. And presumably they are going to try to extract something of value. It’s actually quite funny -- Ann Curry of NBC interviewed (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, a week or so ago, and brought up these three alleged hikers, and he indicated that Iran was open to releasing them when the United States released several diplomats that we were holding in Iran and Iraq. She informed him that we had released those diplomats in July. He obviously didn’t know that, so he found himself in this awkward position. So now, he’s got to presumably look for something else to get.

That anecdote has an important element to it. The American media spend much too much time paying attention to Ahmadinejad. He is not a big power in Iran. Khomeini and the Supreme Council and the Guardian Council -- these people are important. They’re the ones who run the show. He can’t wander very far form what they want and get away with it. Look at after he was installed, and attempted to appoint a cabinet that Khomeini didn’t like. Khomeini just said, "No." So Ahmadinejad got a cabinet that he doesn’t like, instead. Ahmadinejad just doesn’t have that big a say.

Watch Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's TEDTalk from February 2009, where he makes predictions about Iran's nuclear future:

Read more TED Blog Q&As on current events:
+ Jonathan Haidt on the US healthcare debate
+ Clay Shirky on Twitter, social media and the Iran election protests
+ Laurie Garrett on H1N1 swine flu and our preparedness for pandemic
+ Nathan Wolfe on H1N1 swine flu and the "perfect storm" for viruses

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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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03 April 2009

Pakistan, Afghanistan and Battlestar Galactica: An exclusive interview with P.W. Singer on the future of war

On Friday, March 27, just as a surge of new deployments was being announced for Afghanistan, the TED Blog talked with military analyst P.W. Singer. Posted today, his TEDTalk discusses the use of robots in modern combat zones.

In this interview, he applies his intensive knowledge of robotics and war to the situations the U.S. military faces in months ahead. Singer clarifies the questions we should all be asking, as these weapons of the future find their place in our conflicts at present. Interestingly, many are questions that science fiction has been addressing for some time.

Here's an excerpt:

"When new technologies are developed, we can’t know the broader ripple effect that they will have. When the Internet first appeared, we couldn’t know that this thing was going to cause mothers in Pennsylvania to worry about predators in Seattle that might prey on their children. Now we know that the Internet can allow an extremist Mullah in Pakistan to inspire a young man in Birmingham, England, to blow himself up."

For the full interview, read after the jump >>

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19 February 2009

Thomas Barnett on the post-Bush world

It's no secret that the world is on the alert for plans toward political and economic solvency. Strategic planner Thomas Barnett has released Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to address many of our most significant global crises.

In a recent interview with Dan Hare, Barnett elaborated on the book, saying the US must admit that it no longer has control over globalization -- or the global economy. Here's a quote:

As we're demonstrating now through the overhang we've created financially, I want readers to realize that we're the one country that can truly destroy globalization. That's why I think it's absolutely essential -- and why I wrote the book -- to make Americans aware that this globalization is a many-decades-long project that began with how we started this country and ultimately with how we seek to run this complex world -- with rules but not a ruler.

Also check out Barnett's 2005 talk on rethinking the US Military.

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04 February 2009

Twitter Snapshot: P.W. Singer on robots of war

Chris Anderson managed to sum up the mood at TED2009, and on Twitter, when he described P.W. Singer's presentation on robots and war as "a bit frightening."

Here are some of your thoughts, as tweeted in recent minutes:

Scary presentation. Democratization of technologies of warfare will be accessible to all, fallacy to think only nation states will play -- glanceteel

PW Singer's lead off TED talk on military technology depressing, chilling and numbing. -- trib

PW Singer - There is serious competition between the US, other nations and private players for dominance. Think AlQaeda/Unibomber. TED2009 -- wanyama

Other tweets proved that TEDsters can see humor in all things:

Just realised that a robot is about to replace me ted --
joedawson

Thank you P.W. Singer for the nightmare of all those at home following along in their cubicles taking revenge on us TED folks -- faketed

Keep checking in for the latest Twitter roundups from TED2009.

Photo: TED / Asa Mathat

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28 August 2007

Dean Kamen previews an extraordinary new prosthetic arm, on TED.com

Inventor Dean Kamen gives a 5-minute talk about the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the US Department of Defense, to help the 1,600 "kids" who've come back from Iraq without an arm (and the two dozen who’ve lost both arms). Kamen's commitment to using technology to solve problems, and his respect for the human spirit, have never been more clear than in this deeply moving clip. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 05:41.)

Watch Dean Kamen's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances, including Kamen's 2002 talk on inventing and giving.

Read more about Dean Kamen on TED.com.

NEW: Read the transcript >>

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14 June 2007

Thomas Barnett's bracing talk on the future of war, on TED.com

Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett has advised US leaders on national security since the end of the Cold War. In this bracingly honest -- and very funny -- talk, Barnett outlines a solution for the foundering US military: Break it in two. One half makes war, and the other half builds the peace that follows. Spontaneous applause and a standing ovation underscore what Barnett said on his blog: "Probably the best 20 minutes of speaking I have ever done." (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 23:53) Read Thomas Barnett's profile 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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