Or maybe not. A recent Goldman Sachs commodities report notes that growing populations and wealth in the developing world, and to a lesser extent rising biofuel production, is moving some money back to farm powers like the United States. “Food exports won’t offset our oil bill, but they will help,” says Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. Agricultural exports are a key reason the U.S. trade deficit decreased about 6 percent last year. —Rana Foroohar
Geopolitics And Arms Deals: In The Courtship Of India And America, India Gains An Edge After the end of the cold war, it looked as though America had clearly won South Asia. India began distancing itself from its old comrades in Moscow, and embracing the United States as a counterbalance to China. The alliance hit a milestone in 2006, when President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a deal by which America would give India a historic coup: acceptance into the elite club of nuclear-weapons states, and access to U.S. nuclear technology and fuel.
Now look what’s happened. Communists in Parliament, who think Washington will use nuclear sales to lord it over India, have blocked the deal. Meanwhile, Parliament has declared 2008 “The Year of Russia,” and the Russians are moving ahead on construction of four nuclear power plants in Tamil Nadu. In February 2006, France signed a tentative deal to assist India with nuclear-energy projects, and the two countries are expected to finalize negotiations this year. What the Singh government wants is a free market to meet its vast demands for nuclear energy, but what the communists are willing to allow is a market open to non-Americans.
This is a roadblock for the alliance of the world’s two largest democracies. In the nuclear market, the communist card gives an advantage to Russia and France going forward. So the battle for influence is back on. On a visit to India last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Indian officials that the “clock is ticking” on the nuclear deal, but the truth is that it’s ticking for the Bush administration, now in its last year. Singh can take his time to sort this out.
There are other ways to cement the alliance. India plans to spend $100 billion on arms over the next five years, and while 70 percent of its current arsenal is Russian or old Soviet, most of the new spending will go upgrade its fleet of Russian MiG fighter jets, most likely with American F-16s and F-18s—purchases over which the communists will have no say. Though the stalled nuclear deal “has put a brake” on strategic relations between India and the United States, there are signs the two “are trying to compensate” by boosting defense relations, says Deba Ranjan Mohanty, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. The United States is so eager to seal these deals, it may need to make big concessions, like easing restrictions on technology transfer to rival loose Russian standards.
The irony: the communists may be a thorn in Singh’s side, but they are also giving India the upper hand in deals with the United States. —Jason Overdorf
Regional Warfare: Turkey ’ s New Line Last week, a turkish raid on the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) in northern Iraq left nearly 250 militants dead. Under international pressure—particularly from Baghdad and the U.S.—Turkey withdrew its troops for the time being. But the Turkish Army has already achieved one major goal: setting a precedent for massive incursions into autonomous Iraqi Kurdish territory.
Small cross-border Turkish moves are nothing new. In the name of self-defense, Turkey has maintained bases in the Iraqi towns of Bamarni and Bakoufa since 1997, for monitoring the PKK. But this mission pushed farther than ever: troops set up checkpoints on main roads and bombed bridges on the Greater Zab River, preventing the PKK from moving into fortified positions for summer attacks.
Insisting the raids don’t violate Iraqi sovereignty, Ahmet Davutoglu, foreign-policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says they do “the opposite” by cleaning up terror cells that Iraq seems unable to control on its own. Iraq’s powerful peshmerga—Kurdish security forces—are unlikely to agree. While they’ve distanced themselves from the PKK, the peshmerga may retaliate if Turkey continues to target Kurdish villages. And with the PKK likely to attempt a show of defiance—for instance, more terror attacks inside Turkey—this raid won’t be Turkey’s last foray into its neighbor’s land. —Owen Matthews
A new United Nations report finds that 6.4 billion people will live in cities by 2050, up from 3.4 billion today. The rise will happen fastest in Asia, with China leading the pack. A look at the future of world urbanization:
50: Percentage of world population living in cities today. Megacities hold nine out of every 100 urban dwellers.
70: Projected percentage of world population living in cities, 2050. Midlevel and small cities will grow more quickly.
86: Projected percentage rise in number of urban dwellers, 2050, when seven out of 10 Chinese will live in cities.
18: Projected percentage decrease in number of rural dwellers, 2050. The decline will ease land-use demands.
Cutting Carbon: It ’ s Not Easy Being Green If not quite holier-than-thou, many Europeans like to think of themselves as at least holier-than-Americans when it comes to the environment. Three years ago, Europe embraced the Kyoto Protocol, which Washington refuses to sign, and recently set the stage for post-Kyoto talks by pledging to slash greenhouse-gas emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The European Commission has become a factory of green regulation—proposing pollution caps for cars, emissions credits for aviation, you name it. But just how well is Europe doing? So far, only three countries—Germany, Sweden and the U.K.—are on track to meet their 2012 Kyoto goals, according to a Friends of the Earth analysis. Furthest behind are Austria, Italy and Spain, and emissions are actually projected to rise in some Eastern European states, including Lithuania and Slovenia. Only by taking drastic measures—and by buying themselves free through an emissions-credit trade scheme—can they hope to meet their obligations. The upshot is that nearly half of the 27 EU nations are lagging behind their Kyoto goals, with more to follow unless they ramp up fast. Fortunately, they’ve got motivation: not just the threat of climate change but their own greenish self-regard. —Karin Rives
Books In Review: Adrift In America In the first half of the 20th century, as Europe succumbed to war and fascism, the continent’s top talents fled to the U.S. This forced emigration brought Old World musicians, actors, choreographers and cameramen into contact with the puzzle of America, where egalitarianism and celebrity were worshiped in equal degree. Some of the transplants— George Balanchine, Kurt Weill—thrived in the new environment and readily adapted to Hollywood and Broadway. Others (almost all of Germany’s elite composers) suffered badly in a country they saw driven by dollars and “childlike” audiences.
The various fates of these cultural giants are the subject of “Artists in Exile,” a new book by former New York Times music critic Joseph Horowitz. The author’s exhaustive research, plus a talent for sizing up character, make for a comprehensive view of some formidable personalities.
Emigrés who achieved the most tended to be irreverent magpies, blending Old World plots with American innovation to create entirely new artistic forms. But the most fascinating figures in Horowitz’s story are the artists who never quite left the Old World behind. Stravinsky, Dietrich, Schönberg—all continued to pine for the motherland. Their denatured art suffered over time. In this age of Internet—when “home” is just a click away—their stories are poignant reminders of the delicate symbiosis between creativity and cultural identity. —Katie Baker
End Of Days: Preserving Life As We Know It The Svalbard Global Seed Vault—which can hold up to 1.5 million crop samples as a fail-safe against global catastrophe—opens this week on Norway’s remotest island. It’s the latest in a growing number of projects aimed at saving animals, plants and even human languages from extinction or disaster.
Britain and Australia are creating “Frozen Arks” to chill and conserve genetic material from thousands of endangered fauna—starting with the black rhino.
With half of the Earth’s 7,000 languages slated to disappear this century, the National Geographic Society is recording dying tongues from Yawuru to Yuchi Coral ‘banks’ are conserving the sensitive marine organisms—which grow more slowly than forest trees—in hopes of one day re-starting ocean reefs.
The Alliance to Rescue Civilization and the European Space Agency have envisioned a lunar colony where scientists would stash human DNA to revive the species.
