The New York Times Magazine

California’s Food Banks Go Locavore

Erin Drankoski — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:37:00 -0400

Once a month a tractor-trailer rolls up to the Family Early Learning Center, a one-room preschool in East San Jose, Calif., that doubles as a food pantry for poor families with young kids. On a bright Friday in August, a dozen or so women from the neighborhood gathered for the truck's arrival. Volunteers as well as customers, they had come to help unload the monthly delivery of groceries from the local food bank.

Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:41:00 -0400

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

"The Evolution of God," your new book on the history of religion, strikes me as a welcome antidote to the stream of books by atheists that have become best sellers in recent years. Doesn't it seem as if atheism has become its own form of fundamentalism?

Wanted: A New Home for My Country

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:28:00 -0400

The Saharan Conundrum

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:15:00 -0500

In the months after 9/11, American forces in Afghanistan bombed the Taliban and, in vain, hunted for Osama bin Laden, while in Washington counterterrorism experts worried about "the next Afghanistan," a safe haven where terrorists would train, test their weapons and organize attacks on the United States. These discussions produced a double-barreled national-security strategy that dominated President George W. Bush's tenure. The first element of the strategy was to identify and eliminate terrorist networks that already existed. The

Check Cashers, Redeemed

adminn — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:09:00 -0500

The lobby of the Nix Check Cashing outlet on South Figueroa and West Imperial, in the Watts neighborhood of south Los Angeles, was bright and loose. Twenty or so people, black and Latino, dressed in jeans and T-shirts or sport jerseys or work uniforms, stood in a line that snaked back from a long row of bulletproof cashiers' windows all the way to the front door. The room was loud, in a friendly way; everyone seemed to be talking with everyone else. Every once in a while, all together, the line would erupt into raucous laughter.

"Next customer," said a cashier, Joseph, a young black guy with a sweet, quiet manner. He wore black sneakers, black Dickies and a white polo shirt with a Nix logo -- a retail uniform.

The customer at the window next to Joseph's looked over her shoulder. "Sister!" she yelled. "Next in line!"

It didn't feel like a bank.

Twenty or thirty years ago, traditional financial institutions fled neighborhoods like Watts, and guys like Tom Nix, co-founder of the biggest chain of check cashers and payday lenders in Southern California, rushed into the vacuum. They built a whole new financial subculture, which now includes regional giants like Nix, national brands like Ace Cash Express, Advance America and Check 'n Go and thousands of local chains and anonymous corner stores -- more outlets, in total, than all the McDonald's restaurants in the United States plus all the Starbucks coffee shops. Inside, it's like banking turned upside down. Poor customers are commodities, deposits are irrelevant, bad credit makes for a good loan candidate and recessions can be boom times. Add up all those small transactions and throw in businesses like pawnshops and auto-title lenders, and you've got a big industry -- $100 billion annually and growing. Nix alone pulled in $28 million in fees last year.

"Next customer," Joseph said. A guy slid his paycheck and a Nix ID card under the window. Joseph stamped the check, placed it under a gunmetal contraption called a photoscope, next to the ID card, and pulled a lever, thunk, which snapped a picture of the man, his ID and his check on a single negative. Then he counted out 20s. "Do you want to pay any bills today?" Joseph asked. "You get five free money orders with that."

There are two big problems with businesses like Nix Check Cashing. One is that the fees are high. Most cashers pocket between 2 and 4 percent of each check's value, which a recent Brookings Institution study calculated could add up to $40,000 in fees over a customer's working life. And their version of credit, a two- or four-week cash advance against a postdated check, known as a payday loan, is even pricier -- about 30 times the annualized interest rate of a typical credit card.

The second problem is that cashing your paycheck, instead of depositing it, encourages you to spend all your money rather than saving whatever is left over at the end of the month. (Down the counter, a pair of young black women in tight, bright tops looked around a bit nervously as a cashier counted out thousands in small bills. "It's tax-refund time," the cashier told me as the women walked out.)

But it's also true that traditional banks are far from blameless, especially where low-income customers are concerned, and check cashers and payday lenders do get some important things right. "If they're properly regulated and scrutinized, there's nothing wrong with check cashing as a concept and there's nothing wrong with payday loans as a concept," Robert L. Gnaizda, general counsel for the Greenlining Institute, a California nonprofit focused on financial services and civil rights, told me. "And there's nothing automatically good about free checking accounts if you have multiple fees whenever you make the most minor mistake."

Today's financial crisis has many origins. But here's one cause that is often overlooked: Traditional bankers badly misread the market for financial services in low-to-moderate-income communities. "Banks have been approaching these customers purely from a short-term-gain perspective, and they've missed opportunities," Matt Fellowes, director of the Pew Safe Banking Opportunities Project, told me. Banks declined to offer small, simple lines of credit to poor and blue-collar customers, leaving them to payday lenders, while they pushed high-limit, high-interest credit cards on everyone and acquired hundreds of billions in subprime debt. They undervalued the hundreds of billions a year in modest paychecks that pass through a place like Nix and ended up short on cash. Now that the economy has turned ugly, these poor and blue-collar customers are the hardest-squeezed. Payday loans are up, Nix told me when I spoke to him recently, and check-cashing revenue is down.

Legislators around the country have identified savings as a way to shore up low-income communities and expand the middle class. There are a few significant bills before Congress, and more at the state level, that would help poor and working-class families save money -- like increasing the amount welfare recipients are allowed to sock away before the system cuts off their benefits. But some 28 million Americans still go without a bank account, including more than 20 percent of Latino and African-American households, and more than 50 million have no credit score, which means no access to mainstream credit. These are the people in line at Nix.

A number of city and state governments have announced moratoriums on new check-cashing stores or set a ceiling on their fees. Fifteen states, including New York, have either outlawed payday lending or capped interest rates low enough to make it a money loser. And in 2006, Congress effectively banned payday loans to military personnel anywhere in the country. At the same time, lawmakers have tried to nudge banks toward low-income customers. By the end of the year, in the biggest effort yet, Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggerof California plans to announce the rollout of an initiative called Bank on California -- a concept piloted in 2006 in San Francisco, where the mayor's office persuaded banks to relax their standards, and in some cases their fees, for new account holders in exchange for a free marketing push from the city in poor neighborhoods. Officials from several other states, interested in copying the idea, will visit California for the kickoff, and more than three dozen cities, including Seattle, Los Angeles and Savannah, Ga., are already drawing up their own versions.

But while regulation has curbed some of the worst excesses of the alternative financial-services industry and made mainstream banking more accessible, there remains a big gap between those worlds. As C. K. Prahalad, the economist and author of "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," told me, "We don't think enough about how to migrate from one to the other in a sensible way." Check cashers and payday lenders want to keep their customers, and banks tend to be ambivalent about luring them away or unsure how to do it.

Tom Nix's life, and his work, is the story of how we got here, to a separate and mostly unequal financial industry for the poor. But it may also be the story of a new way out. Last fall, Nix sold his entire chain for $45 million to one of the country's largest credit unions, Kinecta, which turned around and gave him an unlikely assignment: Put a credit-union window in every Nix store and help Kinecta take mainstream banking services to some of L.A.'s poorest neighborhoods -- by thinking less like a bank and more like a check casher.

"They're absolutely blazing a new path," says Jennifer Tescher, director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation, a nonprofit research group affiliated with Chicago's Shore Bank. "They bought the chain wholesale and then kept Tom Nix as an executive, which in many ways is very smart." A few banks and credit unions have tried retail check-cashing start-ups, or arm's-length partnerships with existing check cashers, but they've come at the industry as outsiders. Bankers were always in charge. Or they operated on a comparatively small scale. Nix Check Cashing carries a million customers in its database.

"I've always wanted to vilify check cashers," says Elwood Hopkins, a consultant working with the L.A. mayor's office on the city's version of a Bank on California scheme. "And this is in no way a defense of the fees. But I think financial institutions have a lot to learn from them."

Tom Nix is tall and trim with short gray hair, narrow-set eyes and faintly ruddy skin. He has a 40-foot boat he likes to sail off Catalina Island, and the sticker on the bumper of his new Lexus says that that's what he'd rather be doing. He wears a conservative suit, a banker's suit, even for ambling around Compton and Watts, which he does like a small-town mayor, greeting everyone who passes by. "How you doing?" he said, nodding, as we passed a young black guy in a baggy Sixers jersey that hung down to his knees. Nix is white; most of his customers are not.

Nix got into check cashing by accident. His dad, Tom Nix Sr., managed a fleet of drivers who delivered bread door to door, the way the milkman delivered milk. By the 1960s, delivery was a dying business, but at the warehouse in south L.A. where Nix's drivers loaded their trucks, locals, mostly poor, mostly black, would come around to buy day-old bread. So Nix's father started selling groceries out of the warehouse.

Nix took me to see the old store. Now it's called Pancho Grande. A mural of the Virgin Mary, in bright hues, stands taller than the door. The neighborhood, once almost entirely black, is now mostly Latino, Nix explained, a shift that happened across south L.A. as immigrants came up from Mexico and black families left for the inland suburbs. When the Nix store was here, mom-and-pop grocery stores and liquor places usually cashed checks free. But between bad checks and bounced checks, shopkeepers in the neighborhood lost money, even though they would turn away people who looked risky -- whatever risky looked like to them. So in the early 1970s, Nix Jr., who had become his father's partner, made a photo ID for their customers and ordered his first photoscope, then an arcane new security tool. Soon Nix was cashing checks for anyone who walked in, doing it fast and cutting the family's losses. "People lined up down these stairs," he said, pointing to the store's office at the back. "All the way down the center aisle and out to the sidewalk."

For most of the 20th century, banking was a protected business. If you wanted to open a new bank, you had to go before a board of regulators and prove you wouldn't provide competition that would threaten an existing bank in the neighborhood. In exchange for a captive market, banks had to abide by strict rules. But in the mid 1970s, regulators started to allow more competition. Banks had to pay closer attention to their profits and their losses. Suddenly, Nix's local bank began charging him a fee to deposit checks into his commercial account. Nix realized he either had to stop cashing checks for people or start charging them for the service.

"We charged a dime at first," Nix recalled. "People got mad, they left, but in a couple months, business returned. Then we charged 35 cents. Same thing happened. Then we started to charge 1 percent. We began to realize this might be a business."

In 1978, Nix leased an old gas station in Watts and built it into what looked like a tiny, stripped-down bank. He called it Nix Check Cashing. A year later, he was cashing a million dollars in checks each week. Then in 1980, Congress began to deregulate the banking industry. Branches sprouted in rich neighborhoods, where they battled one another for the wealthiest depositors, and they shut down in poor and working-class neighborhoods. Where they remained, they introduced new fees for customers who kept little in their accounts for the bank to invest. Around the country, the check-cashing business boomed. Nix opened new stores as fast as he could raise capital. Any place the banks neglected, that was the real estate he wanted. By the end of the 1980s, Nix had grown big enough to get name-checked by the Beastie Boys: "I'm charming and dashing/I'm rental-car bashing/Phony-paper passing/At Nix Check Cashing."

"That's name recognition!" Nix told me with a smile.

Times have changed, somewhat. Today more than 90 percent of check cashers and payday lenders sit within a mile of a bank, according to a recent Brookings Institution report. It's no longer primarily geography, in other words, that is keeping banks and poor customers apart. "Banks aren't shying away from low- and moderate-income neighborhoods," says Fellowes, the report's author. But, he added, "they're not going after the opportunity in an informed-enough manner to be very successful."

The first thing you notice when you walk in the door at Nix is a list of products, services and prices, a bit like a fast-food menu. Some of the prices are quite high, but the charges are neither confusing nor deceptive. "They're going to charge you $13, is that O.K.?" a cashier -- young, Latina, long blond hair, long pink nails -- asked as a bulky, middle-aged guy handed over a stack of cash to send via Moneygram.

Even the payday loans are transparent. "Your max is $150, so make it out for $172.50," the cashier Joseph told a stocky black woman in a baseball cap, standing at the counter with an open checkbook. (Unlike check-cashing customers, payday borrowers are by necessity bank customers -- they have to write a postdated check to get a loan.) The woman was paying a lot -- $22.50 to borrow $150 for just two weeks. But there were no surprises, no hidden fees.

Compare that with what a lot of banks do. Bank of America took heat earlier this year for more than doubling the interest rate on some credit-card accounts, even if the cardholder pays every bill on time. Banks, meanwhile, have nearly quadrupled their fee income in the last decade, according to the F.D.I.C., while credit-card late charges and over-limit charges have nearly tripled. Fees imposed on customers for temporarily overdrawing their accounts -- by accident or on purpose -- have been particularly lucrative; banks made $25.3 billion in 2006 on overdraft-related fees, up 48 percent in two years, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. On the Web site of Strunk and Associates, a big seller of overdraft programs, bank and credit-union executives offer glowing testimonials. "Strunk's program has exceeded expectations," one writes. "We have generated a 100 percent increase in overdraft revenue."

Some customers choose Nix over a bank because it is cheaper than paying overdraft fees. For others, it's convenient. Some go to Nix because check cashing is what they know. Others go because they live in communities where nobody takes a check or a card, not even the landlord, and cash machines are scarce. Still others go because they always seem to have a Final Notice in the bill stack, and they can't wait a week or longer for a paycheck to clear -- that includes a lot of people with a bank account somewhere.

But there are less-obvious factors too. Nix hires from the neighborhood and pays well enough that cashiers stick around. Word spreads, and in Watts or Highland Park or Pacoima, that reputation often carries more weight than some bank ad on a bus stop. "It's social marketing 101," says Hopkins, the consultant.

I frequently saw cashiers address customers by name and ask about family or friends in common. One customer asked if the manager could come over, then broke the news that her husband had passed away. "What happened?" the manager gasped. Then, shaking her head: "He always came in with his pennies." And Nix dresses up branches less formally than banks do -- no suits, no office furniture, no carpeting -- so a construction worker can show up straight from his shift, in dirty clothes, and, Nix says, not feel out of place.

Nix's cashiers also try to never say no. Take photo identification. A lot of customers don't have a driver's license. Nix stores have accepted high-school yearbooks. They've been known to cash a McDonald's paycheck if someone comes in wearing a McDonald's uniform. They even have a phone in the lobby, so a cashier can call a customer's job site and then patch the customer in, listen to him talk to his supervisor and decide if they sound like a legitimate boss and employee. Nix says he loses as much as 5 percent of his check-cashing revenue on bad checks, but it's worth it, he says, to be known as a place that says yes.

I met Oscar Enriquez leaving the Nix branch in Highland Park, a working-class area near Pasadena. He was skinny and just shy of middle age, with a quick grin and tattoos down his sunburned forearms. Enriquez worked in the neighborhood as a street cleaner; he picks up trash and scrubs graffiti. The job paid about $425 a week, he told me, a good chunk of which he wired to his wife, who has been living in Mississippi and taking care of her ailing mother. He told me he tries to avoid debt whenever he can. "If I don't have money, I wait until the next payday," he said firmly. "That's it." But he pays a fee to cash his paychecks. Then he pays even more to send a Moneygram to his wife. There's a bank, just down the street, that could do those things free. I asked him why he didn't take his business there.

"Oh, man, I won't work with them no more," Enriquez explained. "They're not truthful."

Two years ago, Enriquez opened his first bank account. "I said I wanted to start a savings account," he said. He thought the account was free, until he got his first statement. "They were charging me for checks!" he said, still upset about it. "I didn't want checks. They're always charging you fees. For a while, I didn't use the bank at all, they charged like $100 in fees." Even studying his monthly statements, he couldn't always figure out why they charged what they charged. Nix is almost certainly more expensive, but it's also more predictable and transparent, and that was a big deal to Enriquez.

Marlo Lopez had no broad gripe with banks, but his experience was similar. He moved to the United States from Peru a couple of years ago (with a visa) and got a job as a mechanic at a food-processing plant. Lopez opened his first bank account last summer. A couple of months later, out for dinner, he overdrew his account by 18 cents and got hit with a $35 penalty. It was his fault, he said; he thought he had more in the account than he did. Still, losing that money all at once unsettled him. He kept the account but returned to cashing his checks at Nix.

In the spring of 2007, Nix was working hard to unload his business. He had actually been trying to sell his chain to a bank for more than a decade, and now he was running out of time. He was about to turn 60, and he thought he owed his family (and his investors) an exit. Nix wanted to sell high to a responsible bank, retire well and be a hero, the guy who took real banking to L.A.'s poorest neighborhoods. But the most likely buyer was another check-cashing chain. Nix was prepared to do the deal, but it was not how he dreamed of going out.

Then Kinecta Federal Credit Union called with its offer. "We were trying to understand why check cashers have been successful in underserved areas where banks haven't," Kinecta's president and C.E.O., Simone Lagomarsino, told me. What they concluded was that most banks simply didn't know low-income neighborhoods or understand them. "We go in with this cookie-cutter approach: This is our branch, this is our way we do business," she says.

As Nix and Lagomarsino negotiated the sale, he encouraged her to make it easier for his customers to open a bank account. At most banks, if you've bounced too many checks, you're banned for five to seven years. Lagomarsino agreed to reduce that limbo period to one year. Next she realized she would need to deal with the most controversial part of Nix's business, the payday loans. At first, she told me, "I assumed we wouldn't do them." Nix actually felt the same way, once. In the late 1980s, when a few check cashers started to accept postdated personal checks and advance cash for a fee, Nix thought it was a sleazy scheme. He thought so even after California legalized the practice in 1997. "I didn't want to be a loan shark," he told me. "But the reality is, customers wanted it."

He told Lagomarsino why. A bounced check, a fee to reconnect a utility, a late-payment fee on your credit card, or an underground loan, any of those things can cost more than a payday loan. And then there are overdraft charges. "Banks, credit unions, we've been doing payday loans, we just call it something different," Lagomarsino says. "When it starts to get used like a payday loan, it's worse."

The payday borrowers I met at Nix were a complex group. There was Johnny Bravo, an ex-marine, now a harried delivery driver. ("I'm not even supposed to be here," he said, rushing back to his truck with a fold of bills.) He told me he gets a payday loan every other Friday, pretty much without fail. Sometimes he needs it for bills. Sometimes it's for gas -- he owns a big, thirsty S.U.V. But mostly he described the loan as cash to enjoy his weekend.

"How much do you think you spend a year on payday loans?" I asked.

"Well, finance is about 45 dollars; add that up . . . ," he said, and paused. "Comes out to a pretty good chunk of change," he admitted. "But I don't think of it that way."

Bravo is exactly the kind of case consumer advocates bring up when they call for a ban on payday loans. But for better or worse, the guy loves Nix. "They treat me with respect, they're really nice," he said. He's especially fond of the manager, Beatriz. She grew up in the neighborhood and has worked at Nix for almost 20 years now.

Then there was Carlos Garcia. He got out of the military, got some credit cards and got in trouble. It took him a few years to pay off his debt. Now he's careful, but money is still tight. He usually works two full-time jobs, and he earns enough for himself. He has a couple of brothers, though, who have been out of work, and he has his mother to help look after. That takes him to Nix a few times a year for a loan. But he's strategic. "I get it because I want to make a payment on time," he said. He does the math, he told me, and borrows only when the fee for a small loan will cost less than the penalty for a late car payment or an overdraft charge.

As different as they are when it comes to money, Garcia and Bravo agreed on one thing: "I don't use credit cards," Bravo said. "I don't want to get into debt." That may sound crazy coming from a guy who spends more than $1,000 a year to borrow a thin stack of 20s over and over, but he had a point. It may be hard, some months, to pay off a $255 payday loan. But credit cards can get you into more serious trouble; credit-card debt can add up fast and linger for years.

Kinecta's executives decided to keep the payday loan and change the terms. Starting with three stores in the spring, and eventually across the entire chain, Nix is increasing the maximum loan from $255 to $400. They are dropping the fee from 18 percent ($45 for a two-week $255 loan) to 15 percent ($60 for a two-week $400 loan). And they will rebate a third more ($20, in the case of a $400 loan) into a savings account, after six months, if you pay your loans back and don't bounce any checks. People get payday loans because they have no savings, Lagomarsino explained. After six months, heavy payday borrowers will accumulate a small balance. Enough, she and Nix say they hope, to convince them they can afford to save more. Later, they say, they intend to drop fees further for borrowers who always pay back on time.

Once Kinecta finishes rolling out its new payday loans, Lagomarsino has promised to open Nix's books to outside researchers and publish data on its profits and losses. In the meantime, Kinecta will be under enormous scrutiny. "Some people said, ‘Why does it have to be so visible?' " Lagomarsino told me, and laughed. "One or two branches wouldn't make a difference. This is the beauty of buying Nix. They were the largest alternative financial-services company in Southern California. If they change their fee structure, everyone has to change."

At the Nix Check Cashing in Highland Park, one of Kinecta's first credit-union windows opened at the end of April. It's a tiny branch, squeezed into a strip mall, a few storefronts down from a slummier-looking check casher and across the parking lot from an Advance America branch. By the door, a hand-drawn whiteboard advertised free checking and savings accounts. Inside, customers had to pass through a gantlet of Kinecta signs ("free," "we're all about convenience") to reach the check-cashing windows. Then, whenever someone slipped a check across the counter (or bought a bus pass, or mobile-phone minutes, or a prepaid debit card), Nix tellers asked if they'd like to open a free savings or checking account with a $5 deposit.

I expected mostly brushoffs. But people had questions. Lots of them, actually. (What's a credit union? Are there fees? What's the minimum balance? Can I deposit my checks at Nix for free?) Often people started in with the questions as soon as they got to the window, before the cashiers got around to a sales pitch. That doesn't mean they all signed up. Most of them didn't. But several did, and very few rejected the idea outright.

When I visited Nix in his new office at Kinecta, he seemed optimistic about the new business. "I've been trying to do this banking thing for more than 15 years," he said. "If we do it, the rest of the industry copies us." But, he said, "it has to be a viable business model."

Nix's definition of "viable" means some public criticism is bound to follow him to Kinecta. Even after knocking more than 30 percent off the fees, Nix's payday loans are still expensive, and Nix says he hopes to issue more of them, not fewer, because Nix stores will be cheaper than the competition. The fees are still astronomical, and more troubling, right now the average borrower at Nix takes out seven loans a year -- with fees than can equal an annualized interest rate of 312 percent. "Any form of credit can be abused," Nix said when I asked him about the problem of repeat customers. "There's the guy who gets five credit cards. For some reason, it's O.K. when it's a mainstream product. There's a double standard."

It's going to take a lot of $20 rebates from Nix before someone with a payday-loan problem would accumulate any real savings. I asked Nix if he would consider advertising to these customers, straight out, that payday loans are bad for them. What about check-cashing customers who, out of habit, resist the idea of signing up for a bank account that would save them money?

"The last thing I want to tell someone who's been my customer for 20 years is, ‘You've been a fool for 20 years, you never should have been coming in,' " Nix said, with a sudden edge in his voice. "I want to create choice."

Selling to the poor is a tricky business. Poor people pay more for just about everything, from fresh groceries to banking; Prahalad, the economist, calls it the "poverty penalty." They pay more for all kinds of reasons, but maybe most of all because mainstream firms decline to compete for their business. Nix has served customers that traditional financial institutions neglected, but he has also profited from that neglect. Whether he profited too much, charging poor communities what the market would bear -- that's a moral question as much as an economic one. And there's no simple answer.

Not everyone is ready to trust Nix's motives just yet, or to embrace him as a champion of the poor, especially consumer advocates who have spent years lobbying to cap check-cashing and payday-loan rates and remember when Nix charged even more than he does today. "It behooves predatory companies like Nix to be seen positively by their communities," says Roberto Barragan, president of the Valley Economic Development Center and a critic of Nix from way back. "But at the end of the day, it's not about the financial well-being of his customers."

For now, most banks remain reluctant to fight with check cashers and payday lenders for low-income customers; they don't believe there's enough in it for them. Just a few years ago, though, wire-transfer companies like Western Union were the only option for immigrants who wanted to send money abroad. Banks thought it was a sketchy business. The transfer companies charged about the same as a payday loan, $15 to send $100 to Latin America. But then a few banks decided to compete with them, even accepting foreign ID cards. And then banks started to compete with one another. And pretty soon, just about every bank wired money overseas. Businesses like Western Union had to slash their fees by nearly two-thirds.

"These communities spend about $11 billion a year on ghettoized financial services, about the same as what Wall Street spends on mergers-and-acquisitions fees," says John Hope Bryant, founder of the nonprofit Operation Hope. "We're not talking about small change. But there's no competition for these dollars." That's the idea behind plans like Bank on California: to convince banks that marketing themselves to poor customers isn't just a charitable act; it's a benefit to the bottom line.

Nix says he hopes his model will do the same thing. "We're going to be a tough competitor," he told me. "We're going to get a lot of business, and that's going to force the rest of the industry to take a look at their prices, to be able to compete." It's not how you expect a banker to the poor to talk. But he might be onto something.

Redemption Politics

Ron Tang — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 11:35:00 -0400

We all know that politics makes strange bedfellows, but how odd it must have been to have sat in on the recent meeting between Barack Obama and evangelical leaders, including Franklin Graham, the conservative minister who once called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” Yet there they were, Obama and the evangelicals in Chicago on June 10, searching for -- and apparently finding -- considerable common ground. In the last few weeks, Obama has announced several outreach projects (including one named after Joshua, who, unlike Moses, was able to lead his people to the promised land). For their part, evangelical leaders, unpersuaded by John McCain’s episodic proclamations of faith, are wise, or perhaps even prophetic, to consider all the options.

Maybe the distance between liberals and evangelicals, each eternal optimists in their way, is much smaller than we realized. In our week of national reflection, it’s worth recognizing that religious enthusiasm in America has as often as not had a reformist or even revolutionary cast to it. Consider the Declaration of Independence. It is not normally seen as an evangelical statement, despite the heroic attempts of the Christian right to claim it as such. God is mentioned four times, but obliquely, and never by name. Even so, the argument against kings derived much of its power from the vigor of Christian thought. The historian Pauline Maier was right to label this bit of parchment our American Scripture.

More than we realize, we descend from a founding moment that was evangelical. In 1776, one minister spoke for many when he likened the struggle against England to the never-ending struggle against “the beast and his image -- over every species of tyranny.” John Adams, who helped edit the declaration, attributed the text to God as well as to Thomas Jefferson and expressed his wish that future Americans would celebrate the great day “by solemn acts of devotion” (along with bonfires, gunfire, the clanging of bells and other raffish pursuits of happiness).

We often forget how close the revolutionaries were to the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s, when revival meetings were held across the colonies and apocalyptic expectation hung heavy in the air. For every Jefferson, cutting out sections of the Bible he deemed superstitious, there were others like Samuel Osgood, the first postmaster general, who wrote a book in 1794 predicting that the Second Coming was imminent, after elaborate calculations linking bits of prophecy in the Bible with recent events. Specifically, he asserted that the period of the “feet and toes” was beginning. (Prophecy and allegory were often linked to the feet -- a podiatrist’s dream. An enemy of John Adams once compared him to “Nebuchadnezzar’s toe,” an insult that probably would not pass the sound-bite test today.)

Strong religious enthusiasms continued to shape public opinion after the war of independence was won. In the 1790s, the French Revolution thrilled not only secularists eager to see the spread of the rights of man but also many devout Protestants who sympathized with its attacks on the Catholic order and believed that it signaled the opening of seals, the sounding of trumpets and the final assault upon the Whore of Babylon (as Rome was exuberantly known). Indeed, throughout the 19th century, nearly every episode in American foreign policy, from the Mexican War to the Spanish-American War, deepened the assumption that a Protestant wind was driving the republic forward.

Today there is much talk of a new evangelical politics -- less stridently conservative, more responsive to the problems of global warming or public health or Darfur. This may in fact be a return to an older pattern. For most of American history, evangelicals were Democrats or their equivalents, profoundly uncomfortable near the temple of the moneychangers. Jefferson attracted huge numbers of voters simply because his running mate, Aaron Burr, was the grandson of the great evangelist Jonathan Edwards. In the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan was lampooned by H. L. Mencken as an ignoramus catching flies in a sweaty courthouse during the Scopes trial, but that snide dismissal overlooked Bryan’s long career as an advocate for progressive causes. F.D.R. consistently enjoyed the support of both traditional evangelicals and neo-Calvinists like Reinhold Niebuhr (enjoying new life as the writer intellectuals most like to quote without reading, after Tocqueville).

It may disconcert both liberals and evangelicals to learn that they have a lost history together. From Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan and onward, Republicans have been conspicuously more comfortable speaking about God than their opponents. Dwight Eisenhower may have started the trend when his 1953 inaugural parade featured “God’s Float,” which a religion writer likened to an oversize molar. No administration ever listened more attentively to evangelical voices than that of George W. Bush, who declared it the official policy of the United States to “rid the world of evil.”

At first blush, Barack Obama may strike evangelicals as an unreconstructed liberal or, in other words, beyond salvation. But he is wise to reach out to them at a moment when the geological sands are shifting beneath our feet. Now and then he speaks in the ancient accents, promising to create “a kingdom right here on earth” or arguing that “our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.” Those phrases slip by, generally unnoticed by his partisans (who are evangelical in their own way). They are worth noting in the months ahead. Not only do they connect us to the richness of a deep American past; they might even point to the better future we’ve been waiting for since, well, forever.

The Man For a New Sudan

Ron Tang — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:46:00 -0400

When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane. Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter “uncle”; others call him “commander.” On this day, angry and anxious, the people of Abyei wanted Winter’s help in averting a return to civil war between the predominantly Arab north and the black south -- a decades-long conflict, claiming more than two million dead, that Winter helped to end with his work on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005.

Winter blinked in the flat light. It was 9 a.m., and the Caravan’s fuselage cast the only shadow. Abyei is 600 miles north of the equator, and this was the height of the dry season. The sun sucked the color from everything; alongside the airstrip a herd of gaunt cows licked at the last remnants of mud. The cows would head back north when the rains returned. The people who tend them, the Arab tribe called Misseriya, would then be gone for the season, and northern forces, guided by the national government in Khartoum, would feel free to swoop down and force the Ngok Dinka farmers farther south. Burning villages, killing young men, raping and abducting women and children: this creates ethnic facts on the ground to justify pushing the border south and increasing the north’s control of a territory rich in oil. From Easter until May was not much time to forestall the attack, and Winter knew it.

For the past quarter century -- as head of a nongovernmental organization called the U.S. Committee for Refugees, as an official at the federal Agency for International Development and, most recently, as a special representative to the State Department for Sudan, a post created for him -- Winter has fought in the back rooms of Washington and in the African bush to bring peace to Sudan. It’s not even-
handedness that makes him effective; it’s his total commitment to the people of south Sudan and a conviction, which has only grown with the years, that the government in Khartoum is, in essence, a brutal cabal. After two decades of fighting for their rights at negotiating tables, he has gained the southerners’ complete trust. “He’s simple and clear,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman in Abyei, told me. “He doesn’t mince words. He’s a great man” who also “has great, great push.”

His stamina is also legendary. Once, during an all-night meeting on the 2005 agreement, a snake bit Winter as he raced through tall grass to present an amended paragraph for the south’s approval. Intent on striking a deal, he thought he had run into a rock until a colleague pointed out fang marks in his leg the next day. Senator Jack Danforth, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan from 2001 to 2004, calls him “a saint,” an “excellent, excellent human being,” whose “soulfulness” inspires trust in those he serves. According to Danforth, Winter’s intense attachment to the southern side was an asset in the context of a larger diplomatic offensive. “The same person,” Danforth notes, “doesn’t have to talk to everybody.” Winter’s bond with the south is such that, since retiring in August 2006, he has worked pro bono as an adviser to the government of southern Sudan, a government he helped to build following the 2005 agreement.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement -- which ended the north-south war but did nothing to stop the conflict to the west in Darfur -- was among the Bush administration’s few major foreign-policy successes. Now it’s coming undone, and the collapse is beginning in Abyei, a hot little village built up into a town by oil companies. The population grew to 30,000 from 5,000 as its residents returned after two decades of war. Around a buzzing market of tin-roofed lean-tos and U.N. food warehouses, people were building huts and hanging up tarps. But on the main road, the armies of north and south were mobilizing T-72 tanks and amassing more soldiers.

Abyei is at the southern edge of arid land and the beginning of sub-Saharan jungle -- even the soil changes from barren sand to rich laterite loam. From the north comes the influence of the Arab world; the south, partly because of the war, has far stronger ties to the West and Christianity. Here, two worlds collide and two governments compete for territory inch by inch; under that ground lies as much as half of Sudan’s estimated five billion barrels of oil. In many ways, Abyei is a microcosm for the entire country. As Winter put it, “The future of Abyei is the future of all Sudan.”

Winter wore black Rockports and brown socks. He carried a nylon briefcase in one hand and a blue plastic shopping bag in the other. Inside it were bug spray, a shaving kit, a change of clothes and “An Army at Dawn,” a history of World War II in Africa. As an architect of the failing peace, Winter came to see what might be done to avert the potential slaughter.

As activists and journalists in recent years focused attention on Darfur, Winter argued, they and the Bush administration have neglected the push for comprehensive peace in the rest of the country. Although both north and south signed the peace accord more than three years ago, little has changed. Without international pressure sufficient to slow the process, both sides were starting to play a very dangerous game of chicken in Abyei.

“I hope you’ve done some homework in the United States,” Chol Changoth, a member of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (S.P.L.M.), which dominates Sudan’s south, said as someone handed Winter a sweating bottle of orange Fanta. “Are the people of the United States taking Abyei into consideration?” He scanned Winter’s face for any flicker of hope.

Although, technically, north and south share a unified government, the National Congress Party of the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement of the south are mostly at odds. Between them, politics become a zero-sum game. The 2005 peace agreement calls for a nationwide census, which, despite flaws, has finally started. The accord also calls for a 2009 national election, which Winter and others say Khartoum may try to delay. Above all, peace means that in 2011, the south is counting on a referendum on whether or not to stay with the north.

The question of Abyei was so contested during negotiations for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that it got its own protocol, one that the United States -- with Winter on the negotiating team -- agreed to in order to save the peace process as a whole. The U.S. drafted the protocol, pushed both sides to sign it and, according to Winter, then walked away. “We did a good thing and a bad thing,” as he explained to the crowd at the airport. “The good thing is the Abyei Protocol. The bad thing is we went home.” Now Winter is watching his old adversary, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, play familiar tricks. “Bashir knows he’s looked the whole international community right in the eyes,” Winter said. “He says yes, yes, yes to the protocol, and then he says no... And what happened? Nothing. So he’s learned a lesson, and you can see the lesson even in Darfur because the United Nations says a hybrid force should come and he says no, and what happens? Nothing. So it’s very, very, very dangerous, this pattern.”

At its core, the fight over Abyei raises the question of whether Sudan will remain a single country and how a fissure might be averted. As Alex de Waal, a longtime observer of Sudanese politics, told me, “Abyei is the cockpit of Sudan where the two parties are testing each other’s readiness to go to war again.”

****

On the surface, two different people, the ethnic Ngok Dinka linked to the south and the Arab Misseriya of the north, vie over who has rights to the land. With the added pressure of desertification, the Arab nomads need the greener pastures of Abyei more than ever to graze and water their cattle. They are also being pushed south by the pressures of commercial farming. “In this belt north of the 10th parallel, land that used to be common access has been leased out to mechanized farming schemes,” Douglas H. Johnson, a member of the Abyei Boundaries Commission, said. To settle the problem, after the 2005 agreement Johnson and an international team drew a shared border along the 10th parallel, but the north rejected their solution and, on the ground, there was only mounting tension. With so much to lose, the Misseriya and Dinka were growing more anxious as May loomed ahead.

And in this standoff President Bashir has done what he always does: endorsed Arab militias who carry out Darfur-style scorched-earth tactics. In the late 1980s, when Bashir was the general in charge of Abyei, the militias chased the Dinka off their land. Just last year, Bashir called on the militias “to open their camps and gather the mujahedeen.” Salva Kiir, the president of south Sudan, said, “The guns the Misseriya are using are military weapons.” According to Kiir, who is also first vice president in the somewhat notional united Sudanese government, the militias are supported by Khartoum.

The similarities between Darfur’s attacks and those around Abyei are no coincidence. They betray war’s grander pattern in Sudan, the largest country in Africa. As Winter says: “You have to connect the dots. You connect the dots, you see a pattern. A pattern means intent.” All of Sudan’s wars involve the handiwork of a small group in the center waging campaigns against those who live at the periphery. To hold onto power and resources, the center fights its own edge. Marginalization, Winter said, meant perpetual warfare. “Unless you really have engaged in Sudan, you don’t get to that point of thinking,” he said.

Winter got to that point of thinking some time ago. His colleague Susan Rice, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs under President Bill Clinton, watched Winter’s views evolve. “I’ve seen him be an advocate when I was a policy maker, and when I was on the outside, he was somebody on the inside we could trust to do the right thing,” she told me. “Roger has been a consistent, passionate, principled advocate at a time when we had reason to doubt that the Bush administration was really engaged in these issues.” On Sudan, she added, “people of all political, religious and racial stripes view Roger as the compass’s true north.” In this case, true south is more apt. For Winter’s part, he has watched many an American offer “carrots,” as he says, to Khartoum. That practice “can be deadly,” he told me. “You go to Khartoum, they treat you very nicely, they’re very presentable, they’re indefatigably hospitable, but their approach to governance is murderous,” he said.

It’s this murderous governance that Winter is determined to end. “I’m not opposed to engagement,” he said. “The problem is the way we’re doing this and the atmosphere which surrounds it.” In Sudan, he argues, “there’s a good guy and a bad guy.” As he sees it, he sides with the good guys. He doesn’t hang out in the middle. “I guess there’s a role for that,” he said. “It’s just not mine.”

Taking sides can be dangerous, Andrew Natsios, who served as U.S. special envoy to Sudan from 2006 to 2007, argues. “We don’t need rallying cries,” he said. “A big advocacy campaign right now could be really destructive to the possibility of peace.”

Winter argues that the Bush administration’s pressure for comprehensive peace in Sudan is flagging, in part because America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have hamstrung its ability to call Khartoum on its myriad abuses against its own people. The U.S. government also seems to be moving toward strengthening relations with Khartoum, which Winter vehemently opposes. But Natsios believes that right now, with the likelihood of a tougher American administration taking over in January, there’s a critical window to engage Khartoum. “The north badly wants to normalize relations with the U.S. during the Bush administration,” he said. Natsios envisions “a grand deal,” including an exchange of oil for land in which the north cedes Abyei to the south (as it already is supposed to do under the Abyei Protocol) in exchange for a percentage of southern oil revenue.

“Quite frankly, to make progress in Sudan, you have to engage all parties,” Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told me. “Our vision has been a unified government, which is something Roger himself worked for, so we can’t not engage the government.” Regime change has not been part of American policy in Sudan, and while the United States has kept Khartoum under sanctions, put pressure on it at the United Nations, acquiesced in the referral by the Security Council of Darfur prosecutions to the International Criminal Court (which the Bush administration otherwise opposes) and led several large-scale diplomatic initiatives to push for peace in the region -- not least the initiatives in which Winter played a key role -- Washington has nonetheless always accepted Khartoum as a partner of sorts. According to Frazer, the United States offered as recently as last December to mediate the north-south conflict over Abyei, but the southern government, led by the S.P.L.M., said it preferred to handle the negotiations with Khartoum itself. “You can’t really criticize us for dealing with President Bashir when the S.P.L.M. themselves are saying that’s their partner and that’s who they want to negotiate on Abyei,” Frazer told me.

Richard Williamson, the American negotiator appointed by President Bush, has come under fire for his talks with Bashir. “Our president’s commitment to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan is deep,” Williamson said. “His support for our efforts is unwavering. He looks at me, and I can’t come up with a key. Some of my critics have criticized me for engaging. But given the level of suffering, it’s worth engaging. It’s not enough to criticize. It may make you feel better, but people are still suffering.” Danforth told me: “Roger is more principled than I am. He definitely sees engagement as more of a moral issue.” But there’s a practical aspect, too, to negotiation. After all, Danforth points out, the north did sign a peace agreement. “It has lasted nearly four years,” he said. “A lot of lives, I think, have been saved.”

****

Winter ducked into a thatched hut in the front-line village of Todaj, a few miles north of Abyei. On the roof were a wooden cross and book-size solar panels, which were charging a satellite phone. Inside, the air was close. Several days earlier, this entire village -- 150 Dinka families -- fled south to the safety of Abyei on foot. Now only a handful of elders and a chief, Nyol Paduot, his salt-and-pepper hair and beard unkempt, his eyes baggy with lack of sleep, had returned to safeguard their land.

Having been run off the land three times -- in 1991, 1997 and 2000 -- the elders knew the lethal pattern by heart. “We know that when they burn our village, they want the land,” Paduot said. “That’s why we come back.”

The elders of Todaj refused to be pushed farther south by Arab militias camping nearby or by the government (northern) soldiers who built barracks at the village’s edge. Under the peace deal, the soldiers of Sudan’s 31st Brigade stationed here were supposed to withdraw from Todaj, but they have not. As Winter drove past the barracks in a silver S.U.V., one shirtless soldier doing laundry stood up and took a long look. The S.U.V. belonged to their rival, the S.P.L.M., for whom Winter was working. Winter passed what looked like a huge white circus tent, which was labeled I.O.M. in U.N. blue, for International Organization for Migration: a way station for displaced people. It stood dusty and empty. The U.N. had judged it too risky to stay in Todaj.

“It’s a long war,” the chief told Winter. “Peace came, and no one helped us implement it, and it’s become a problem.” He went on: “I have a question for you who’ve come from America. In Abyei, we don’t know if it’s war or peace. When will the intervention come? When the fighting has started again?” The hut grew quiet. A fly buzzed; a pair of baby goats bleated in the corner. Cooking pots clanged next door. “All that’s happening in Darfur,” the chief said, “happened here in Abyei.”

The main differences between Darfur and Abyei were religion and oil. Khartoum’s troops hit Todaj because they claimed many people there had left Islam, becoming apostate. They justified their actions as jihad against infidels. But in Darfur, government troops attacked fellow Muslims. “That surprised us,” the chief said. Besides religion and oil -- which Darfur does not have -- there was nothing to separate Abyei from Darfur. “Todaj is very strategic for the 31st Brigade to coordinate all their activities for the oil fields,” Paduot added. “They bring their supplies from the oil fields here, and this is where they come to distribute ammunitions.”

He ran his finger north along the white space of a tattered map. According to the boundaries commission’s recommendation, this land -- up to the line of latitude at 10 degrees 10 minutes -- belonged to the Dinka, although the Misseriya were free to use it for grazing. The global-positioning-
system reading off the satellite phone put Todaj, the last and northernmost Dinka settlement, at 9 degrees 43 minutes, more than 30 miles south inside where the Dinka had the right to be. “This is our land,” the chief said. His own village lay in Block Four of an oil concession operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (G.N.P.O.C.) -- pronounced gin-pock. The oil was right under us, Paduot said, but no Dinka he knew -- or Misseriya for that matter -- worked in the oil fields.

Suddenly, a group of men in ragtag fatigues arrived outside the mud hut. They sat with their backs against the wall, where they could hear everything going on inside. Sure enough, it was the government forces, and it was time to go. Winter clasped the chief’s hand, and then quickly took his leave.

Not all of the Dinka were as lucky as those of Todaj. Days earlier, many who had been working as goatherds at Misseriya cattle camps were forced to leave everything behind for good and flee south to the relative safety of Abyei. Because the large white tents near Todaj were too risky to use, about 400 survivors were camped in Abyei, using water from a nearby swamp.

“We refused to leave without our goats,” Ayii Dut Dut, one of the displaced goatherds, told me. Among the herders in the camp, about half a dozen were abducted years earlier, then taken north to work for the Misseriya. But most were there voluntarily as shepherds and sharecroppers after the 1988 famine sent them searching for work. In recent skirmishes between the Arab militias and the southern forces, many Arabs were killed. As a result, when the militias returned to their cattle camps after fighting, they wanted their Dinka workers to leave -- immediately. But the Dinka said they wouldn’t go without the goats, which represented all their wealth in the world.

So that night, riding camels and horses, Arabs attacked their camp. Most escaped, but not all. After hiding in the nearby bush, Dut said he returned to the deserted camp at dawn to find three children -- ages 5, 5 and 3 -- who had been shot. He buried them and left without his goats, he said as he squatted in the shade of a single acacia tree near 200 other displaced people. If Darfur is a land grab, then Abyei is an oil grab. Last year, an estimated $529 million of oil revenue came from the region, according to the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit political-analysis group. Khartoum has used the south’s oil to build the north’s infrastructure. A combination of war, sanctions and public outcry forced Western companies to abandon Sudan’s oil over the past decade, and China, among others, stepped in.

Without knowing what to look for, the signs of oil excavation around Abyei aren’t so easy to see. You can drive for hours and see nothing but fishermen searching in ponds for Nile perch and mudfish. The roadside is lined with long brown braids of dried fish for sale. “They are some of the poorest people in the world,” Edward Lino, the southern government’s chairman for Abyei, told me as we drove through the wasteland. “They have this rich land that’s being robbed from them, and they don’t know what to do.”

Suddenly, a series of white pipes with red knobs appeared in a clearing along the telltale hummock covering the pipeline itself, which was built in 2003. Beginning in the 1980s, many of the fishermen were forced to resettle in much the same way the people returning to Todaj were being threatened this year. To survive, they depended on a battery of international aid agencies as oil was pumped out from beneath them.

One afternoon, I visited a field office of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company. The company is a consortium in which 40 percent of the investment is Chinese, 30 percent Malaysian, 25 percent Indian and 5 percent Sudanese. International workers in red, green and beige jumpsuits scurried through the waiting room, where a sign read, “Use the waiting time to ask for forgiveness.” Outdoors, Chinese workers in red jumpsuits worked alongside Sudanese. The Great Wall Drilling Company was “rigging up”: preparing to drill in the next few days, a supervisor, Mohamed Idris, said. He sat behind a door that read “Company Man,” while soap operas flickered on flat-screen televisions in the air-conditioned dark. The fishermen living outside the facility have no electricity at all.

****

The relationship between the Ngok Dinka and the Arab Misseriya is more complex than it looks at first glance. They share a way of life in what John Ryle of the Rift Valley Institute calls “an intimate enmity.”

One evening, Winter attended a feast in his honor at the home of the paramount Dinka chief, Kuol Deng Kuol, a towering, soft-spoken man. The large mud greeting room, hung with red-flowered bedsheets, was full of Dinka and Misseriya elders. Winter was eating wild honey and bread when two anxious Misseriya leaders, wearing white turbans, approached him. Each was the head of at least 2,000 Misseriya -- they were the “cornerstone” of the Arabs in Abyei -- and none of them wanted war. Conflict would mean their cows could no longer come south into Dinka land, and they would die. Already under pressure from farming and other nomads to the north, they couldn’t risk being squeezed out of the south too. “About this peace, we don’t want to lose it,” Deng Bilial Bachar, a blustery leader, told Winter. “We’re holding it very tightly and very hard.”

Recently, the two elders told Winter, government-backed militias had gathered at the edge of town. They were going to attack Abyei. “Three days I was talking night and day to make people go back,” Bachar said. Both the Misseriya Arabs and the Dinka were simply pawns in a larger battle playing out between north and south over politics and oil, he said. If north or south wanted to return to war, let them do it somewhere else. “We don’t want war, 100 percent,” he said. “You have to convey this message clearly.”

Next to Bachar, with clear blue eyes and a deeply creased face, was Shogar Muhammad Mahmud, who had come from his cattle camp next to the village of Todaj. “The water on that side,” he said, indicating the north where he’d come from, “has become so few -- little -- like drought. Just allow our cattle to graze and get water because there’s no water in our side. Just allow us to come through.” The Abyei Protocol safeguarded Misseriya migration routes, but Mahmud didn’t know this. Critics like Winter argue that Khartoum manipulates the Misseriya by not explaining that peace protects their rights. “It is too easy for those who wish to undermine the C.P.A. to exploit the fear on the part of the Misseriya that ceding Abyei to the south would cut them off from access to dry-season grazing,” Ryle told me, referring to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. “And the fear of Ngok Dinka in the S.P.L.M. that they might once more be cheated of the chance for self-determination means that they also are in no mood to compromise.”

The north argues that Abyei isn’t simply a matter of maps. Culturally, Abyei has always been part of the Arab north, they say. “Even during World War II, Abyei was supporting the Middle East by sending cows,” the chairman of the National Congress Party in Abyei, Zachariah Atem Payin, said. As a Dinka man who supports Khartoum, Payin exemplifies the complexities of identity in Abyei. He was also among Winter’s many detractors. “I’ve heard he’s very difficult, very hard,” Payin said. “He’s the one who caused all this confusion in Sudan.” By confusion, he meant war. “It’s because of Roger Winter supporting the S.P.L.M. that they won’t listen.”

****

Winter gazed at the sun-bleached photo and the artificial flowers that marked the grave of his friend, Dr. John Garang, in the southern capital, Juba. The leader of the south’s liberation movement, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash three years ago. Many, including Winter, saw his death as an enormous setback to durable peace. Winter and Garang were extremely close. “He loved to tell jokes, he loved to tell stories,” Winter said. Tears gathered on his white eyelashes. “He never lost his focus and basically his focus was a new Sudan, a totally new country, whether it was in one piece or two.”

Later, Winter sat by the Nile drinking a Bell, a Ugandan beer. The moon was heavy and full, bright enough to see the river eddy as it passed. He spied a baby crocodile splash off the bank. “Look!” he said gleefully, seeming much more like a boy adventurer than an elder statesman.

Winter’s new role as an adviser to the southern government set off a political storm in Khartoum. In a cable, the U.S. Embassy took note of what one northern paper said: “Winter’s appointment ‘shows that the S.P.L.M. is a farce... a movement that suckles the breasts of the U.S.’ ” Frazer, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the State Department, insisted that Winter’s advocacy for the south shouldn’t bother people (“It doesn’t me,” she said) because he no longer has any official American role.

His activism began when he was in his 20s in Hartford, where he worked for the Salvation Army. He went on to resettle refugees arriving in America from the world’s worst conflict zones, beginning with Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. But it was his experience working with Tutsis displaced from Rwanda -- before the genocide began -- that made him move on to the conflict zones themselves. Soon he was riding on the front lines in Rwanda in 1994 with the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame. During the genocide, he flew home every few weeks to brief the U.S. government on what he witnessed firsthand. President Clinton’s later statements that he had not been fully aware of what was happening caused Winter, he says, to leave the Democratic Party.

Winter told the people in Abyei: “Honestly, the people that have your interests at heart are you, really only you. The Americans can be O.K. now, but next year they may be not so O.K. But it’s your place, it’s your life, it’s your future.” Now that he’s out of the American government, Winter makes no bones about what he is: an advocate. His job is to shout himself hoarse until someone listens to what he’s saying about the worsening crisis in Abyei and the failure to do enough about it. “That’s what an advocate does,” he said. “No matter how good the government does, you’re always goosing them to do better. Otherwise, why does anybody need you?”

Sometimes neutrality is just not the right answer, and on Sudan, he thinks neutrality is practically and morally bankrupt. “I’m an evangelist,” he said, only half joking. “I preach the gospel of Sudan.”

****

Abyei burned to the ground when the rains began in May. As Winter predicted, once the Misseriya cattle were safely out of the south, the north attacked the town. The violence began with the kind of small skirmish that had been occurring for months: policemen from the south and soldiers from the north got into a fight a few miles from Todaj. There was a shootout, and when a northern soldier died in the hospital, his colleagues shot up the ward. Within hours, the 31st Brigade was firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades into the heart of Abyei. The United Nations evacuated most of its nonessential staff by helicopter. Tens of thousands of Dinka fled south. The Arabs took over the town. The ethnic facts that favored Khartoum now existed on the ground. “Mainly women and children are uprooted again from their houses and are now in open areas under heavy rains with no shelter, food and water,” the south’s president, Salva Kiir, said in a speech late last month. “This human tragedy is caused unfortunately by Sudan Armed Forces Brigade 31 that is illegally present in Abyei town and against the provisions of the C.P.A.”

As usual, Winter was close by. He flew in the next day from Juba. He organized the first convoy into town after the attack. “Some of the buildings and vehicles are still smoking,” he told me by satellite phone. Then he was caught in a sandstorm. “I can’t see squat and I can’t open my eyes,” he said, as he spat sand through his teeth. “The U.N. is buttoned up behind barricades again,” he added. “There are almost no people.” Later, Winter sent me photographs: the market’s stalls were incinerated. Lines of white ash marked where the walls had been. Hospitals and schools were shelled. The U.N. warehouses were destroyed. Terrified people were still streaming south. The U.N. first estimated that 50,000 people were displaced, but Winter, in the road among them, thought the number looked much higher.

“This didn’t have to happen,” Winter shouted over the wind.

Kuol Deng Kuol, the gentle Dinka chief who had held the feast in Winter’s honor six weeks earlier, was now destitute and staying in huts with dozens of family members. “My people are living under trees,” he said by phone from a camp south of town. The American negotiator, Richard Williamson, flew to the town. “I’ve been to Bosnia and Kosovo and I’ve never seen anything like Abyei,” he told me. “At least 95 percent of the homes were destroyed” -- even those 25 feet from the United Nations base. When U.S.-led talks between north and south over Abyei turned to bickering, Williamson walked out. “I’m not going to give any legitimacy of U.S. participation to name-calling,” he said. The next day, amid reports of troops massing at Abyei, the United Nations Security Council met with both sides, who agreed to international arbitration, as they have many, many times before. “We need terms of arbitration -- specifics,” Williamson said. “If 50,000 people who’ve had their lives shattered isn’t enough for you to take responsibility for your own solution, then the U.S. cannot impose one.” Disgusted, he told both sides, “If you think I’m a junkyard dog, wait until January.”

Waving Goodbye to Hegemony

Ron Tang — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It's as if the first decade of the 21st century didn't happen -- and almost as if history itself doesn't happen. But the distribution of power in the world has fundamentally altered over the two presidential terms of George W. Bush, both because of his policies and, more significant, despite them. Maybe the best way to understand how quickly history happens is to look just a bit ahead.

It is 2016, and the Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Barack Obama administration is nearing the end of its second term. America has pulled out of Iraq but has about 20,000 troops in the independent state of Kurdistan, as well as warships anchored at Bahrain and an Air Force presence in Qatar. Afghanistan is stable; Iran is nuclear. China has absorbed Taiwan and is steadily increasing its naval presence around the Pacific Rim and, from the Pakistani port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea. The European Union has expanded to well over 30 members and has secure oil and gas flows from North Africa, Russia and the Caspian Sea, as well as substantial nuclear energy. America's standing in the world remains in steady decline.

Why? Weren't we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity? Indeed, improvements to America's image may or may not occur, but either way, they mean little. Condoleezza Rice has said America has no "permanent enemies," but it has no permanent friends either. Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America's armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and "asymmetric" weapons like suicide bombers. America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war "peace dividend" was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing -- and losing -- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules -- their own rules -- without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

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.

In Europe's capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China. Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German member of the European Parliament, calls it "European patriotism." The Europeans play both sides, and if they do it well, they profit handsomely. It's a trend that will outlast both President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, the self-described "friend of America," and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, regardless of her visiting the Crawford ranch. It may comfort American conservatives to point out that Europe still lacks a common army; the only problem is that it doesn't really need one. Europeans use intelligence and the police to apprehend radical Islamists, social policy to try to integrate restive Muslim populations and economic strength to incorporate the former Soviet Union and gradually subdue Russia. Each year European investment in Turkey grows as well, binding it closer to the E.U. even if it never becomes a member. And each year a new pipeline route opens transporting oil and gas from Libya, Algeria or Azerbaijan to Europe. What other superpower grows by an average of one country per year, with others waiting in line and begging to join?

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury -- carrying a big wallet. The E.U.'s market is the world's largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world's money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in "worthless" dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn't help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world's financial capital for stock listing, it's no surprise that China's new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America's share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

And Europe's influence grows at America's expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe's, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn't educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want -- like the International Monetary Fund -- while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings -- consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas -- let alone when it's not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region's answer to America's Apec.

The East Asian Community is but one example of how China is also too busy restoring its place as the world's "Middle Kingdom" to be distracted by the Middle Eastern disturbances that so preoccupy the United States. In America's own hemisphere, from Canada to Cuba to Chávez's Venezuela, China is cutting massive resource and investment deals. Across the globe, it is deploying tens of thousands of its own engineers, aid workers, dam-builders and covert military personnel. In Africa, China is not only securing energy supplies; it is also making major strategic investments in the financial sector. The whole world is abetting China's spectacular rise as evidenced by the ballooning share of trade in its gross domestic product -- and China is exporting weapons at a rate reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the cold war, pinning America down while filling whatever power vacuums it can find. Every country in the world currently considered a rogue state by the U.S. now enjoys a diplomatic, economic or strategic lifeline from China, Iran being the most prominent example.

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia's rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged. Like Europeans, Asians are insulating themselves from America's economic uncertainties. Under Japanese sponsorship, they plan to launch their own regional monetary fund, while China has slashed tariffs and increased loans to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Trade within the India-Japan-Australia triangle -- of which China sits at the center -- has surpassed trade across the Pacific.

At the same time, a set of Asian security and diplomatic institutions is being built from the inside out, resulting in America's grip on the Pacific Rim being loosened one finger at a time. From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country -- friend of America's or not -- wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance. And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries -- the so-called Stans -- China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the "NATO of the East."

The Big Three are the ultimate "Frenemies." Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell's 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others' terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America's backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe's southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China's growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call "the second world."

The Swing States

There are plenty of statistics that will still tell the story of America's global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I've spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet -- the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America's coalition (as in "coalition of the willing"), Europe's consensus and China's consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just "emerging markets." If you include China, they hold a majority of the world's foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy's most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth -- not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.'s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries' rising importance in corporate finance -- even after you subtract China. When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and infrastructure -- all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time. Second-world states won't be subdued: in the age of network power, they won't settle for being mere export markets. Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence.

While traveling through the second world, I learned to see countries not as unified wholes but rather as having multiple, often disconnected, parts, some of which were on a path to rise into the first world while other, often larger, parts might remain in the third. I wondered whether globalization would accelerate these nations' becoming ever more fragmented, or if governments would step up to establish central control. Each second-world country appeared to have a fissured personality under pressures from both internal forces and neighbors. I realized that to make sense of the second world, it was necessary to assess each country from the inside out.

Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the E.U. or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world's balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.

In exploring just a small sample of the second world, we should start perhaps with the hardest case: Russia. Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so -- spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and you'll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow. The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia's Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were "no disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border," a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.

Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russia's oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of France's. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russia's largest investor. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russia's billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it's just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative -- becoming a petro-vassal of China.

Turkey, too, is a totemic second-world prize advancing through crucial moments of geopolitical truth. During the cold war, NATO was the principal vehicle for relations with Turkey, the West's listening post on the southwestern Soviet border. But with Turkey's bending over backward to avoid outright E.U. rejection, its refusal in 2003 to let the U.S. use Turkish territory as a staging point for invading Iraq marked a turning point -- away from the U.S. "America always says it lobbies the E.U. on our behalf," a Turkish strategic analyst in Ankara told me, "but all that does is make the E.U. more stringent. We don't need that kind of help anymore."

To be sure, Turkish pride contains elements of an aggressive neo-Ottomanism that is in tension with some E.U. standards, but this could ultimately serve as Europe's weapon to project stability into Syria, Iraq and Iran -- all of which Europe effectively borders through Turkey itself. Roads are the pathways to power, as I learned driving across Turkey in a beat-up Volkswagen a couple of summers ago. Turkey's master engineers have been boring tunnels, erecting bridges and flattening roads across the country's massive eastern realm, allowing it to assert itself over the Arab and Persian worlds both militarily and economically as Turkish merchants look as much East as West. Already joint Euro-Turkish projects have led to the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, with a matching rail line and highway planned to buttress European influence all the way to Turkey's fraternal friend Azerbaijan on the oil-rich Caspian Sea.

It takes only one glance at Istanbul's shimmering skyline to realize that even if Turkey never becomes an actual E.U. member, it is becoming ever more Europeanized. Turkey receives more than $20 billion in foreign investment and more than 20 million tourists every year, the vast majority of both from E.U. countries. Ninety percent of the Turkish diaspora lives in Western Europe and sends home another $1 billion per year in remittances and investments. This remitted capital is spreading growth and development eastward in the form of new construction ventures, kilim factories and schools. With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the E.U. a year ago, Turkey now physically borders the E.U. (beyond its narrow frontier with Greece), symbolizing how Turkey is becoming a part of the European superpower.

Western diplomats have a long historical familiarity, however dramatic and tumultuous, with Russia and Turkey. But what about the Stans: landlocked but resource-rich countries run by autocrats? Ever since these nations were flung into independence by the Soviet collapse, China has steadily replaced Russia as their new patron. Trade, oil pipelines and military exercises with China under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization make it the new organizing pole for the region, with the U.S. scrambling to maintain modest military bases in the region. (Currently it is forced to rely far too much on Afghanistan after being booted, at China's and Russia's behest, from the Karshi Khanabad base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) The challenge of getting ahead in the strategically located and energy-rich Stans is the challenge of a bidding contest in which values seem not to matter. While China buys more Kazakh oil and America bids for defense contracts, Europe offers sustained investment and holds off from giving President Nursultan Nazarbayev the high-status recognition he craves. Kazakhstan considers itself a "strategic partner" of just about everyone, but tell that to the Big Three, who bribe government officials to cancel the others' contracts and spy on one another through contract workers -- all in the name of preventing the others from gaining mastery over the fabled heartland of Eurasian power.

Just one example of the lengths to which foreigners will go to stay on good terms with Nazarbayev is the current negotiation between a consortium of Western energy giants, including ENI and Exxon, and Kazakhstan's state-run oil company over the development of the Caspian's massive Kashagan oil field. At present, the consortium is coughing up at least $4 billion as well as a large hand-over of shares to compensate for delayed exploration and production -- and Kazakhstan isn't satisfied yet. The lesson from Kazakhstan, and its equally strategic but far less predictable neighbor Uzbekistan, is how fickle the second world can be, its alignments changing on a whim and causing headaches and ripple effects in all directions. To be distracted elsewhere or to lack sufficient personnel on the ground can make the difference between winning and losing a major round of the new great game.

The Big Three dynamic is not just some distant contest by which America ensures its ability to dictate affairs on the other side of the globe. Globalization has brought the geopolitical marketplace straight to America's backyard, rapidly eroding the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine in the process. In truth, America called the shots in Latin America only when its southern neighbors lacked any vision of their own. Now they have at least two non-American challengers: China and Chávez. It was Simón Bolívar who fought ferociously for South America's independence from Spanish rule, and today it is the newly renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that has inspired an entire continent to bootstrap its way into the global balance of power on its own terms. Hugo Chávez, the country's clownish colonel, may last for decades to come or may die by the gun, but either way, he has called America's bluff and won, changing the rules of North-South relations in the Western hemisphere. He has emboldened and bankrolled leftist leaders across the continent, helped Argentina and others pay back and boot out the I.M.F. and sponsored a continentwide bartering scheme of oil, cattle, wheat and civil servants, reminding even those who despise him that they can stand up to the great Northern power. Chávez stands not only on the ladder of high oil prices. He relies on tacit support from Europe and hardheaded intrusion from China, the former still the country's largest investor and the latter feverishly repairing Venezuela's dilapidated oil rigs while building its own refineries.

But Chávez's challenge to the United States is, in inspiration, ideological, whereas the second-world shift is really structural. Even with Chávez still in power, it is Brazil that is reappearing as South America's natural leader. Alongside India and South Africa, Brazil has led the charge in global trade negotiations, sticking it to the U.S. on its steel tariffs and to Europe on its agricultural subsidies. Geographically, Brazil is nearly as close to Europe as to America and is as keen to build cars and airplanes for Europe as it is to export soy to the U.S. Furthermore, Brazil, although a loyal American ally in the cold war, wasted little time before declaring a "strategic alliance" with China. Their economies are remarkably complementary, with Brazil shipping iron ore, timber, zinc, beef, milk and soybeans to China and China investing in Brazil's hydroelectric dams, steel mills and shoe factories. Both China and Brazil's ambitions may soon alter the very geography of their relations, with Brazil leading an effort to construct a Trans-Oceanic Highway from the Amazon through Peru to the Pacific Coast, facilitating access for Chinese shipping tankers. Latin America has mostly been a geopolitical afterthought over the centuries, but in the 21st century, all resources will be competed for, and none are too far away.

The Middle East -- spanning from Morocco to Iran -- lies between the hubs of influence of the Big Three and has the largest number of second-world swing states. No doubt the thaw with Libya, brokered by America and Britain after Muammar el-Qaddafi declared he would abandon his country's nuclear pursuits in 2003, was partly motivated by growing demand for energy from a close Mediterranean neighbor. But Qaddafi is not selling out. He and his advisers have astutely parceled out production sharing agreements to a balanced assortment of American, European, Chinese and other Asian oil giants. Mindful of the history of Western oil companies' exploitation of Arabia, he -- like Chávez in Venezuela and Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan -- has also cleverly ratcheted up the pressure on foreigners to share more revenue with the regime by tweaking contracts, rounding numbers liberally and threatening expropriation. What I find in virtually every Arab country is not such nationalism, however, but rather a new Arabism aimed at spreading oil wealth within the Arab world rather than depositing it in the United States as in past oil booms. And as Egypt, Syria and other Arab states receive greater investment from the Persian Gulf and start spending more on their own, they, too, become increasingly important second-world players who can thwart the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planet's leading oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up for grabs. For the past several decades, America's share of the foreign direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the country's foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.

For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create discord among the U.S. and E.U. on sanctions; it has also courted China, nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran represents the final square in China's hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for natural gas from Iran's immense North Pars field, another one for construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to extend the Tehran metro -- and it has boosted shipment of ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China (and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of backing from China and from its second-world friends -- without giving any ground to the West.

Interestingly, it is precisely Muslim oil-producing states -- Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (mostly Muslim) Kazakhstan, Malaysia -- that seem the best at spreading their alignments across some combination of the Big Three simultaneously: getting what they want while fending off encroachment from others. America may seek Muslim allies for its image and the "war on terror," but these same countries seem also to be part of what Samuel Huntington called the "Confucian-Islamic connection." What is more, China is pulling off the most difficult of superpower feats: simultaneously maintaining positive ties with the world's crucial pairs of regional rivals: Venezuela and Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan. At this stage, Western diplomats have only mustered the wherewithal to quietly denounce Chinese aid policies and value-neutral alliances, but they are far from being able to do much of anything about them.

This applies most profoundly in China's own backyard, Southeast Asia. Some of the most dynamic countries in the region Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are playing the superpower suitor game with admirable savvy. Chinese migrants have long pulled the strings in the region's economies even while governments sealed defense agreements with the U.S. Today, Malaysia and Thailand still perform joint military exercises with America but also buy weapons from, and have defense treaties with, China, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by which Asian nations have pledged nonaggression against one another. (Indonesia, a crucial American ally during the cold war, has also been forming defense ties with China.) As one senior Malaysian diplomat put it to me, without a hint of jest, "Creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown but not the white." Tellingly, it is Vietnam, because of its violent histories with the U.S. and China, which is most eager to accept American defense contracts (and a new Intel microchip plant) to maintain its strategic balance. Vietnam, like most of the second world, doesn't want to fall into any one superpower's sphere of influence.

The Anti-Imperial Belt

The new multicolor map of influence -- a Venn diagram of overlapping American, Chinese and European influence -- is a very fuzzy read. No more "They're with us" or "He's our S.O.B." Mubarak, Musharraf, Malaysia's Mahathir and a host of other second-world leaders have set a new standard for manipulative prowess: all tell the U.S. they are its friend while busily courting all sides.

What is more, many second-world countries are confident enough to form anti-imperial belts of their own, building trade, technology and diplomatic axes across the (second) world from Brazil to Libya to Iran to Russia. Indeed, Russia has stealthily moved into position to construct Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, putting it firmly in the Chinese camp on the Iran issue, while also offering nuclear reactors to Libya and arms to Venezuela and Indonesia. Second-world countries also increasingly use sovereign-wealth funds (often financed by oil) worth trillions of dollars to throw their weight around, even bullying first-world corporations and markets. The United Arab Emirates (particularly as represented by their capital, Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia and Russia are rapidly climbing the ranks of foreign-exchange holders and are hardly holding back in trying to buy up large shares of Western banks (which have suddenly become bargains) and oil companies. Singapore's sovereign-wealth fund has taken a similar path. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans an international investment fund that will dwarf Abu Dhabi's. From Switzerland to Citigroup, a reaction is forming to limit the shares such nontransparent sovereign-wealth funds can control, showing just how quickly the second world is rising in the global power game.

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.

The Non-American World

Karl Marx and Max Weber both chastised Far Eastern cultures for being despotic, agrarian and feudal, lacking the ingredients for organizational success. Oswald Spengler saw it differently, arguing that mankind both lives and thinks in unique cultural systems, with Western ideals neither transferable nor relevant. Today the Asian landscape still features ancient civilizations but also by far the most people and, by certain measures, the most money of any region in the world. With or without America, Asia is shaping the world's destiny -- and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process.

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity -- pro or anti. As Europe's and China's spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America's spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become "responsible stakeholders," in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium -- that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order -- has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever -- materially or morally. Despite the "mirage of immortality" that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

The web of globalization now has three spiders. What makes America unique in this seemingly value-free contest is not its liberal democratic ideals -- which Europe may now represent better than America does -- but rather its geography. America is isolated, while Europe and China occupy two ends of the great Eurasian landmass that is the perennial center of gravity of geopolitics. When America dominated NATO and led a rigid Pacific alliance system with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Thailand, it successfully managed the Herculean task of running the world from one side of it. Now its very presence in Eurasia is tenuous; it has been shunned by the E.U. and Turkey, is unwelcome in much of the Middle East and has lost much of East Asia's confidence. "Accidental empire" or not, America must quickly accept and adjust to this reality. Maintaining America's empire can only get costlier in both blood and treasure. It isn't worth it, and history promises the effort will fail. It already has.

Would the world not be more stable if America could be reaccepted as its organizing principle and leader? It's very much too late to be asking, because the answer is unfolding before our eyes. Neither China nor the E.U. will replace the U.S. as the world's sole leader; rather all three will constantly struggle to gain influence on their own and balance one another. Europe will promote its supranational integration model as a path to resolving Mideast disputes and organizing Africa, while China will push a Beijing consensus based on respect for sovereignty and mutual economic benefit. America must make itself irresistible to stay in the game.

I believe that a complex, multicultural landscape filled with transnational challenges from terrorism to global warming is completely unmanageable by a single authority, whether the United States or the United Nations. Globalization resists centralization of almost any kind. Instead, what we see gradually happening in climate-change negotiations (as in Bali in December) -- and need to see more of in the areas of preventing nuclear proliferation and rebuilding failed states -- is a far greater sense of a division of labor among the Big Three, a concrete burden-sharing among them by which they are judged not by their rhetoric but the responsibilities they fulfill. The arbitrarily composed Security Council is not the place to hash out such a division of labor. Neither are any of the other multilateral bodies bogged down with weighted voting and cacophonously irrelevant voices. The big issues are for the Big Three to sort out among themselves.

Less Can Be More

So let's play strategy czar. You are a 21st-century Kissinger. Your task is to guide the next American president (and the one after that) from the demise of American hegemony into a world of much more diffuse governance. What do you advise, concretely, to mitigate the effects of the past decade's policies -- those that inspired defiance rather than cooperation -- and to set in motion a virtuous circle of policies that lead to global equilibrium rather than a balance of power against the U.S.?

First, channel your inner J.F.K. You are president, not emperor. You are commander in chief and also diplomat in chief. Your grand strategy is a global strategy, yet you must never use the phrase "American national interest." (It is assumed.) Instead talk about "global interests" and how closely aligned American policies are with those interests. No more "us" versus "them," only "we." That means no more talk of advancing "American values" either. What is worth having is universal first and American second. This applies to "democracy" as well, where timing its implementation is as important as the principle itself. Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world -- including its democracies -- is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

We have learned the hard way that what others want for themselves trumps what we want for them -- always. Neither America nor the world needs more competing ideologies, and moralizing exhortations are only useful if they point toward goals that are actually attainable. This new attitude must be more than an act: to obey this modest, hands-off principle is what would actually make America the exceptional empire it purports to be. It would also be something every other empire in history has failed to do.

Second, Pentagonize the State Department. Adm. William J. Fallon, head of Central Command (Centcom), not Robert Gates, is the man really in charge of the U.S. military's primary operations. Diplomacy, too, requires the equivalent of geographic commands -- with top-notch assistant secretaries of state to manage relations in each key region without worrying about getting on the daily agenda of the secretary of state for menial approvals. Then we'll be ready to coordinate within distant areas. In some regions, our ambassadors to neighboring countries meet only once or twice a year; they need to be having weekly secure video-conferences. Regional institutions are thriving in the second world -- think Mercosur (the South American common market), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Persian Gulf. We need high-level ambassadors at those organizations too. Taken together, this allows us to move beyond, for example, the current Millennium Challenge Account -- which amounts to one-track aid packages to individual countries already going in the right direction -- toward encouraging the kind of regional cooperation that can work in curbing both terrorism and poverty. Only if you think regionally can a success story have a demonstration effect. This approach will be crucial to the future of the Pentagon's new African command. (Until last year, African relations were managed largely by European command, or Eucom, in Germany.) Suspicions of America are running high in Africa, and a country-by-country strategy would make those suspicions worse. Finally, to achieve strategic civilian-military harmonization, we have to first get the maps straight. The State Department puts the Stans in the South and Central Asia bureau, while the Pentagon puts them within the Middle-East-focused Centcom. The Chinese divide up the world the Pentagon's way; so, too, should our own State Department.

Third, deploy the marchmen. Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers -- all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty. There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congress's decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings. In this context, Condoleezza Rice's "transformational diplomacy" is a myth: we don't have enough diplomats for core assignments, let alone solo hardship missions. We need a Peace Corps 10 times its present size, plus student exchanges, English-teaching programs and hands-on job training overseas -- with corporate sponsorship.

That's right. In true American fashion, we must build a diplomatic-industrial complex. Europe and China all but personify business-government collusion, so let State raise money from Wall Street as it puts together regional aid and investment packages. American foreign policy must be substantially more than what the U.S. government directs. After all, the E.U. is already the world's largest aid donor, and China is rising in the aid arena as well. Plus, each has a larger population than the U.S., meaning deeper benches of recruits, and are not political targets in the present political atmosphere the way Americans abroad are. The secret weapon must be the American citizenry itself. American foundations and charities, not least the Gates and Ford Foundations, dwarf European counterparts in their humanitarian giving; if such private groups independently send more and more American volunteers armed with cash, good will and local knowledge to perform "diplomacy of the deed," then the public diplomacy will take care of itself.

Fourth, make the global economy work for us. By resurrecting European economies, the Marshall Plan was a down payment on even greater returns in terms of purchasing American goods. For now, however, as the dollar falls, our manufacturing base declines and Americans lose control of assets to wealthier foreign funds, our scientific education, broadband access, health-care, safety and a host of other standards are all slipping down the global rankings. Given our deficits and political gridlock, the only solution is to channel global, particularly Asian, liquidity into our own public infrastructure, creating jobs and technology platforms that can keep American innovation ahead of the pack. Globalization apologizes to no one; we must stay on top of it or become its victim.

Fifth, convene a G-3 of the Big Three. But don't set the agenda; suggest it. These are the key issues among which to make compromises and trade-offs: climate change, energy security, weapons proliferation and rogue states. Offer more Western clean technology to China in exchange for fewer weapons and lifelines for the Sudanese tyrants and the Burmese junta. And make a joint effort with the Europeans to offer massive, irresistible packages to the people of Iran, Uzbekistan and Venezuela -- incentives for eventual regime change rather than fruitless sanctions. A Western change of tone could make China sweat. Superpowers have to learn to behave, too.

Taken together, all these moves could renew American competitiveness in the geopolitical marketplace -- and maybe even prove our exceptionalism. We need pragmatic incremental steps like the above to deliver tangible gains to people beyond our shores, repair our reputation, maintain harmony among the Big Three, keep the second world stable and neutral and protect our common planet. Let's hope whoever is sworn in as the next American president understands this.

New York Times Magazine Reviews Parag Khanna's 'The Second World'

Communications — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:15:00 -0500

“The first and second worlds are being reunited into something which has no name yet, nor a number,” wrote the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf back in 1990. “Perhaps it will just be the world.” Or perhaps not! The United States, China and the European Union seem to be forming an irritable triplet: no one of them can dominate either of the other two. They may make common cause, but it is just as likely that they will compete for control. And the places where they will compete have been labeled, by the New America Foundation analyst Parag Khanna, the second world.

The second world used to mean the Soviet Union and its dependencies. Khanna has appropriated it (in his coming book of the same name) for countries that have substantial economies but do not belong to the Big Three. Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria, Russia, possibly India and South Africa — it’s the most successful members of the old nonaligned movement, more or less, plus resource barons, and when you add them all up it amounts to a good chunk of the world. The U.S., the E.U. and China court them — even depend on them — for vital resources and… more

George Bush I

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:43:00 -0400

None of us can control our ancestors. Like our children, they have minds of their own and invariably refuse to do our bidding. Presidential ancestors are especially unruly — they are numerous and easily discovered, and they often act in ways unbecoming to the high station of their descendants.

Take George Bush. By whom I mean George Bush (1796-1859), first cousin of the president’s great-great-great-grandfather. It would be hard to find a more unlikely forebear. G.B. No. 1 was not exactly the black sheep of the family, to use a phrase the president likes to apply to himself. In fact, he was extremely distinguished, just not in ways that you might expect. Prof. George Bush was a bona fide New York intellectual: a dabbler in esoteric religions whose opinions were described as, yes, “liberal”; a journalist and an academic who was deeply conversant with the traditions of the Middle East.

There was a time when the W-less George Bush was the most prominent member of the family (he is the only Bush who made it into the mid-20th-century Dictionary of American Biography). A bookish child, he read so much that he frightened his parents. Later he entered the ministry, but his taste for arcane controversy shortened his career, and no church could really contain him. Ultimately, he became a specialist at predicting the Second Coming, an unrewarding profession for most, but he thrived on it.

In 1831 he drifted to New York City, just beginning to earn its reputation as a sinkhole of iniquity, and found a job as professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at what is now New York University. That same year, he published his first book, “The Life of Mohammed.” It was the first American biography of Islam’s founder.

For that reason alone, the book would be noteworthy. But the work is also full of passionate opinions about the prophet and his times. Many of these opinions are negative — as are his comments on all religions. Bush often calls Muhammad “the impostor” and likens him to a successful charlatan who has foisted an “arch delusion” on his fellow believers. But he is no less critical of the “disastrous” state of Christianity in Muhammad’s day. And throughout the book, Bush reveals a passionate knowledge of the Middle East: its geography, its people and its theological intensity, which fit him like a glove. For all his criticism of Muhammad, he returns with fascination to the story of “this remarkable man,” who was “irresistibly attractive,” and the power of his vision.

“The Life of Mohammed” went out of print a century ago, and there it was expected to remain, in perpetuity. But in the early 21st century, it was reissued by a tiny publisher simply because of the historical rhyme that a man with the same name occupied the White House. The first George Bush never witnessed the Second Coming, but now his book was enjoying an unexpected afterlife.

Predictably, it enraged some readers in the Middle East, where rage is an abundant commodity. In 2004, Egyptian censors at Cairo’s Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy denounced the book by President Bush’s “grandfather” as a slander on the prophet, and the State Department was forced to issue a document clarifying the family relationship. That document may have unintentionally fanned the flames when it pointed out that “The Life of Mohammed” never compares Muslims to insects, rats or snakes, though it does, on occasion, liken them to locusts.

The stage was set for conspiracy theories to spread across the Middle East like sandstorms. But then something really strange happened. The same censors read carefully through the book and in 2005 issued an edict that reversed their earlier ruling, admitting that it was O.K. Bush’s theological intensity might kill him with an American audience, but in the Middle East it seems to have allowed him to pass muster. Clearly this passionate religious scholar was no enemy of Islam. You could almost say that he was part of the family.

Perhaps the Egyptians could sense something honorable about this distant life, which dedicated itself to the search for knowledge. After George Bush died, a friend remembered the feeling of walking into his apartment, a third-story walk-up on Nassau Street, “a kind of literary Gibraltar,” where he would find the professor surrounded by his piles of rare and ancient volumes.

It all seems so improbable. George Bush? A bookworm? In a crummy apartment? A mystic might look at this history and find evidence that God is indeed inscrutable. But as the first George Bush knew, religions, like families, contain plentiful contradictions. As the current George Bush has discovered, no place can tease them out like the Holy Land.