The Analysis of Social Networks ... Caution Advised

Kovas Boguta has written a posting on work in progress in trying to evaluate the masses of data emerging from social networks like Twitter. It is not a clear read for non-specialists but it gives some sense of what is currently going on to manage flows of information arising out of social networks.

This is evidently going to be a central area for future governmental soft power and security investment. A new industry is already tentatively emerging that hopes to creates the mathematical and analytical tools needed to draw useful conclusions from raw data.

We are both impressed and sceptical. Impressed because the sheer intellectual force being applied to problems of assessing how populations and political movements react to events (and consumers to new products and services or crises) will certainly increase the bounds of knowledge.

As with all other major technological innovations, these analyses are going to change how we think of ourselves. They will rewrite our past histories and place new pressures on our governments and administrators. They may undercut a generation of 'experts' and create new business opportunities.

But we are sceptical because there is a real danger that a mathematical or computational approach to politics and society will result in an over-enthusiasm amongst amateurs and promoters that contains the same potential for disaster as mathematical model-making has done within our economic system.

The same major errors are likely - a failure to understand that no system can contain all necessary information for all moments of time to make it reliable and the same delegation of judgement and decision-making to experts whose understanding is more limited than anyone will dare admit.

If you add the propensity of the 'few' (those in the know on the technicals) to bamboozle without intending harm those who do not even know how to ask the right questions but who have responsibility for making decisions affecting all our lives, then we should be a little worried about where this may go.

An extension of 'science', mathematics and quantification into politics and social management looks as if it could be the intellectual fashion for the next decade or so. Politicians are already under intellectual siege. There are no easy solutions and there may be a tendency to grasp at straws.

There is also a very thin line between scientific analysis and technological innovation. The leap from the theory of physics to the nuclear bomb happened very quickly. Many of the more intellectually-driven scientists soon became horrified at what had grown out of their blue skies thinking.

Something similar is threatened us by the massive re-direction of government security investment from hardware designed to exercise physical force to software designed to analyse insurgency. It is a small step from this to actively creating social and political change through intervention.

This could be as scary as Robert McNamara's 'brilliant' attempts to use intellectual analysis to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam or Herman Kahn's cold analyses of survivability in a nuclear holocaust. Only this time, we are talking about the potential social or economic meltdown of whole societies.

The urge to intervene on the basis of 'insights' developed from a new scientific engagement with political and consumer decision-making could result in successes but also hubris. Stored up resentments at manipulation may explode in a political crisis analogous to the recent collapse in credit.

As one anarchist friend told me with glee, every move made by the system can be countered by the people at large in what might amount to a socio-political arms race in which Baudrillard's apparently daft claim, that the Gulf did not actually take place but was a simulacrum on our TV screens, becomes true.

Each attempt at manipulation by social scientists, who must themselves be manipulated into believing that their actions are 'progressive' or 'patriotic', depending on the culture, can be countered by a public determination to react with a possibly justifiable paranoia, a conscious irrationality or just plain defiance.

Like the bureaucrat who thinks that writing something is doing something, the progressive or security activist might mistake 100% support by all persons engaged within his system as 100% of all minds with a stake in a situation. We think the Western media certainly made this error in assessing events in Iran.

The interplay between authority and its subjects is never simple. Not only can the subjects of authority hide information and even themselves (in effect becoming a 'black society' with a 'black economy') but they can supply their own false information - such as lying on censuses and tax forms.

The State, of course, is constantly engaged, on its side of the arms race in gathering information - this is one of the primary drivers for the introduction of identity cards in the UK - but few really believe that its knowledge covers everyone or is timely.

Eventually people will smell a rat - is all this data gathering designed to protect or control them? It comes down to trust and trust in authority is in increasingly short supply. Ideologies of resistance may thus wax and wane to the degree that manipulation is perceived and resented.

Indeed, Boguta's own posting exposes this very air of public distrust. The first comment from dallasm12 asks: "Hmm ... could twitter be abused in the future to falsely imply a social uprising that isn't really there?" Very good question!

The conspiracy theory is a tool of resistance that irritates authority intensely. More dangerous still is the ideology of 'leaderless resistance'. An attack either never comes in a decisive way (the attacker is a lone nutter) or it comes everywhere at once because widespread anger reaches a tipping point.

This is definitely not an argument against research but it is an argument for an early political scepticism of any analyses that are delivered as 'expert' and a strategy of engaging decision-makers directly with their populations rather than using such tools to extend the compass of more manipulative strategies.

If new analytical tools are to be used as substitutes for direct commitment to community democracy, the result must be expensive failure, A major crisis for the existing political system will then come out of the blue much as the credit crisis has done. You read it here first.

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The Re-Setting Of American Foreign Policy

The next stage in the resetting of American foreign policy is taking place. It involves recalibrating relations with those states which will be most affected by actual (Russia) and potential (Iran) dialogue with old enemies.

It is dialogue designed to agree the boundaries of new spheres of influence and to reverse the dominant role of WMD as a tool in international affairs, whether as deterrent and as prestige purchase.

The Aims of US Foreign Policy

In the case of Russia, the issues are ones of cutting existing massive over-armament, increasing diplomatic dialogue and stopping the clash between Western values and Russian security concerns from escalating into the trigger for some horrific conflagration in the decades to come.

Both the US and Russia are also engaged in a process of military and security reform that emphasises the restoration of each country’s authority within its spheres of influence and the crushing of insurgencies and radical ideologies.

Russian military reform, involving a major reduction in its Soviet era use of massive numbers of troops and tanks and of a WMD deterrent, moves it closer to a model that is more professional and makes better use of modern technology.

The US is also unraveling its excessive dependence on very expensive high technology in favour of increased soft power and a new military sophistication in the war against insurgency. Both strategies pre-suppose that global conflict between major powers is much less likely.

As an indication of the US Administration's determination to defy the pork-barrel vote, Obama (backed by McCain) secured a victory in getting the Lockheed F-22 programme curtailed as a ‘waste of money’ in a 58-40 Senate vote. $1.75bn is no longer available for the purchase of an additional seven F-22s.

Defense Secretary Gates was aggressive in his determination to get funds shifted away from big ticket, technologically brilliant but ultimately useless hardware. Obama even threatened a presidential veto if the Senate passed the appropriation.

Meanwhile, intercontinental disarmament is intended to send a signal to mid-level states (to which the UK and France are rapidly being relegated), who either have, or wish to have, nuclear weaponry, that the tide of history is against them. The UK is getting the message on the Trident upgrade.

The pressure is now on to contain Israel, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea – two allies and two rogues. India, which has created its capability independent of outside powers (see below), is also being integrated into the global system as an equal partner with Russia and China.

This massive recalibration of foreign policy contains continuities with the past. The commitment to universal values and free markets is unchanged as is the determination to contain WMDs and suppress armed revolt against established authority.

However, instead of playing the role of an over-extended global policeman, the US is engaging in partnership with the key regional players, seeking a long term role as primus inter pares in return for conceding a policy of respect and non-interference in its partners’ internal affairs.

Eurasia

Each group of front line states faced by a nuclear rival requires a slightly different approach. For the East Asians, US support is not in doubt but the issue is complicated by the presence of China as an equal to the US within the region.

For the Gulf, the issue is reassurance that the US will act as an adequate deterrent to Iran  if things go very badly wrong with Iran. But the most problematic zone is the borderland between Russia and Europe from the Caucasus to Belarus.

The problem is that the last US Administration, with its forward policy against Russia, stoked up the level of aggression against Russia to the point where a reaction was inevitable. That reaction was the Russian War against Georgia.

To be blunt, right was on the Russian side in terms of the self-determination of communities under siege. After years of fruitless resistance to Western claims that human rights trumped normal diplomatic protocol, the Russians had decided to teach the West a lesson. And it was a good lesson.

It reminded everyone that the European Union is a cipher in international affairs until the Lisbon Treaty is signed and that it is not a good idea to give carte blanche to authoritarian showman and disorganised states when small crises can start great wars.

It also reminded us again that there are some limits to Western power and that you do not tweak a potential partners’ nose too often if you want co-operation on strategic and security matters.

As Hillary Clinton came back from India after a successful visit integrating New Delhi into the US new constellation of alliances, Vice-President Biden was visiting Georgia and Ukraine. His approach has been to give love and reassurance but also to give these two naughty boys a good ticking off.

Ukraine has been told off for political disorganisation and incompetence during a major economic crisis and President Sakashvili of Georgia for his authoritarian tendencies and brinkmanship with the biggest boy on the block.

It is like the local copper ticking off one of the lads for getting drunk and disorderly and not getting a proper job and another for provoking a fight with the local bully, warning him that the law’s protection can only go so far.

Biden’s message is that US support is as strong as its clients’ support for democracy and human rights and for peace. Both countries will get US protection but not for seizures of power or attempts to reverse past mistakes by force. Love is not unconditional as it was from Dick Cheney.

The Gulf

The Gulf States are not in the same position, their noses are being more tweaked by Iran than they tweak any noses themselves, but democracy and human rights are on the agenda if only because of Congressional criticism in the context of civil nuclear support for the UAE.

Supporting Iranian democratic activists and yet turning a blind eye to alleged abuses in, say, the UAE or Saudi Arabia seems illogical to say the least. Saudi Arabia is too big to insult but the smaller Gulf states may have to make judgements on the price that they will pay for strategic protection.

Hillary Clinton, on her way back from a successful trip to India via Thailand, has reassured the Gulf that the US would extend a full guarantee for its security against Iran in the event of the Iranians acquiring WMD – an important consideration in the context of a possible Israeli unilateral strike against Tehran.

The assurance is not really necessary – Iran has no nuclear capability – but it allows the Gulf states to feel that, if it did, the US would not just walk away but would place its greater arsenal at the defensive disposal of the Gulf.

The problem for the Gulf States is what happens if dialogue with Iran is successful – an entente with Iran will require the same recalibration towards a more conditional level of support that we are seeing in the Eurasian borderlands.

India

This brings us to India where the problem for the US Administration was how to transfer the good will of the Bush era into the Obama era. India is pro-Western but very independent-minded. It is not expansionist but it is nobody’s fool.

There was one slip. India refused to sign up to a flagship statement on cuts in carbon emissions. It established a rather important point – that India cannot be relied upon to line up with the US in the way that Japan and Germany can. Even China appears more amenable on climate change policy.

Nevertheless, India remains strongly attached to the Western alliance with an important agreement on the sale of defence technology to India, something on civil nuclear co-operation and another agreement on US-Indian space co-operation resulting from Secretary of State Clinton’s five-day visit.

In effect, the US has recognised India’s full claim to be another global power alongside China (and certainly as a counterweight to China). It is now hard to conceive of India not taking a UN-SC permanent seat if the UN was ever to be reformed.

India is now seen as the US’ global partner with a specific peace mission aimed at regional de-nuclearisation. Prime Minister Singh was even offered the first US State Visit in November. India is also being asked to collaborate in unraveling Pakistan’s paranoia.

The US' commitment to West Asia is centred on buttressing civilian rule against nationalist sentiment in Pakistan and encouraging a pro-Western India to bite its tongue under provocation. The US wants India to see Pakistani civilians as co-fighters in the war on terrorism and insurgency

WMDs

Halting nuclear proliferation has been a central concern of the US for well over a decade. There seems to be an intensification of that concern under Obama.

This is partly a genuine moral concern about the devastation that might be caused by nuclear weaponry but it also represents an awareness that the Cold War permitted all sides to let sub-proxies develop regional weaponry that they thought might merely be extension of their own deterrence.

This was not quite a case of security sub-contracting because no power (except possibly the British in the case of Israel and the Chinese in the case of Pakistan) actively promoted such proliferation but they tolerated muddying of the waters.

Proliferation only became a central concern of policymakers as the Soviet Union began to unravel in the early 1990s. The US-Russian nuclear disarmament treaty is the centre-piece of current efforts but its purpose is not just to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations. 

A US-Russian treaty will set the tone for a wider programme of global WMD control. The context is that with the end of the Cold War, the Americans were faced with the prospect of countries like Israel and Pakistan dangerously ploughing their own furrow.

Unless restrained, these countries could become agents of proliferation in their own right. Indeed, Pakistan has been responsible for proliferation in the past and Israel, though indulged in until very recently, similarly.

Neither Israel nor India will now be a cause of proliferation but the West can see a situation where, just as Eurasia is preparing to reduce its nuclear capability, two key dissident nations (Iran and North Korea) could create a regional arms race in West, Southern and East Asia.

Iran’s nuclear militarisation (though still by no means proven as an actual planned intent) might create a nuclear zone from Pyongyang through Beijing, New Delhi and Islamabad (and north to Moscow) that would go to the very edge of the massive energy resource on which the West depends.

It would be hard for Saudi Arabia, then Egypt and even Turkey to avoid considering investment in a deterrent. From there, it would not be long before Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria and Australia would want to be in the Club.

East Asia

What is different between the Bush and Obama administrations is only their approach, the ultimate aims are the same – a hegemony of values. But even the approaches are not so different once we move out of the Middle Eastern theatre.

The Bush Administration adopted a surprisingly moderate tone with North Korea, maintaining sanctions but keeping its rhetoric moderate and attempting dialogue at every reasonable opportunity. The Obama Administration has merely attempted to transfer this approach to Iran.

North Korea represents a different case from Iran because the question in Western minds is the degree to which it is under the advice and influence of Beijing. The fear is that the answer may be, not as much as everyone would like.

North Korea was, like Cuba, a Soviet protectorate and has an extremely guarded approach to its immediate Northern neighbor. Now the US is claiming that the North Koreans may be offering their expertise to the Burmese junta.

The issue for Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan, just as with the Gulf States, is the credibility of the US strategic umbrella. As one Gulf diplomat told us privately, there is no point knowing that you will ultimately win any nuclear exchange if your mini-State is a smouldering ruin.

Japan fears one or two Japanese cities in a worse state than Hiroshima and Nagasaki well before North Korea is turned into an irradiated wasteland by US ICBMs.

There is also the issue of American will to engage in a nuclear strike. Its population has turned inwards and may not have the stomach for any use of WMDs even in retaliation for a rogue act, let alone as a pre-emptive threat.

The legitimacy of Western Governments no longer seems to include the right to engage in mass slaughter willy-nilly. The Asian tigers are also aware that the US might be deterred itself by even a hint that China might act militarily or economically in response to sabre-rattling and threats.

As with blow-back from the use of insurgents against the Soviet Union, the current nuclear pickle is largely of the superpower’s own making. Although no power appears to have armed any other as a matter of policy, nuclear weaponry was seen as a grey area until the 1990s.

Barriers were certainly placed against proliferation yet little was done about local work-arounds when it seemed to suit the balance of power between the major players. The reversal of US policy is to be welcomed, even if its tactics have left much to be desired in the past.

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The Nabucco Pipeline

The negotiations on the EU’s Nabucco pipeline project have been completed. A deal is expected to be signed on 13 July in Ankara. The Financial Times has a useful analysis of the pipeline and its potential difficulties today.

The pipeline will go from the gas fields of Azerbaijan and Iran (in itself providing an interesting foreign policy complication), potentially back into Central Asia, through Turkey and thence into Italy via Greece/Albania and into Central Europe through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria.

The Heads of Agreement

In one eventual swoop, Nabucco is supposed to siphon off a chunk of Central Asian gas from monopoly control by Russia and ensure that South-Eastern Europe loses its current near-total dependency on Russian gas.

The importance of Iran is clear in terms of its natural proven gas reserves but Turkmenistan is probably of equal importance in practical terms. The full pipeline will comprise 3,300km of new route.

Turkey has been demanding 15% of the gas as its price for transit and a compromise has been necessary to ensure that the intergovernmental agreement could be signed. The next problem is for the governments on the consumption side to ensure that their utilities back the project.

This may raise some very interesting questions about free market choice – this is a geo-strategic security-driven investment with not a great deal of short term commercial sense behind it on paper.

In addition to the engineering, there will have to be an environmental impact assessment which will certainly add to costs, given the somewhat precious approach of European electorates to green issues.

Two key customers of the pipeline (Austria and Germany) have just removed export credit guarantees from the Ilusu Dam Project in South-Eastern Turkey under severe environmentalist and human rights pressure. Central Europeans will push hard for the highest standards of environmental protection.

Supply Contracts & Funding

Deals with supplying countries will have to be agreed. Iran might be ignored for a while yet (though it is hard to see the point of doing so) and Azerbaijan and Iraq are moderately clean nowadays on the human rights front, but the pipeline does not work without more supply from further to the East.

This will raise some fascinating human rights policy issues in regard to Turkmenistan if Iran is still not acceptable or even talking to the Europeans. And then the thing has to be paid for …

The European Commission is handing over Euro200m or so to get it started but that is a fraction of the estimated requirement of Euro8bn, placing it very much in the super-league of strategic security projects alongside mid-sized state nuclear weapons programmes.

The European Investment Bank will finance up to 25% of the project but this leaves nearly three quarters to come from somewhere else with the probability, as in every project, of cost over-runs.

The general view is that once the supply contracts are fixed, commercial funding will be secured because gas transit fees are fairly reliable.

The negotiating boots are thus very much on the feet of the four smaller gas players (Turkmenistan, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan), especially as long as the Iranians are inclined to follow the Russian lead in placing their own pressure on Europeans telling them how to run their affairs.

Interesting Geo-Politics

This is where it gets interesting in geo-political terms. Suppliers are generally (most of all Turkmenistan) going to be concerned to do commercial deals without political strings attached, yet Europeans electorates may turn their attention to the style of governments with which they do business.

There is a classic internal contradiction here between popular sentiment and harsh industrial reality, between soft power and hard power. To pre-empt this, European diplomats will be spending yet further funds trying to get these suppliers into line as essential strategic partners.

European resistance to Russian domination will drive EU policy while the Russians will be encouraging these same suppliers to work with them in cartelising gas in order to increase their revenues (thereby increasing Russian dominance in many ways, not just in control of gas supply).

This sucks Europe into the northern Middle East and raises questions about its treatment of Turkey, Turkey owes the Europeans no favours at this time and presents the same transit scenario as Ukraine to the north.

European industrial survival (a German interest) now seems to depend on two unstable but modernising states, with volatile populations and an ambiguous relationship with the West, acting as intermediaries with supply nations who have little to do with Western values other than the one about making money.

In the short term, things should go smoothly. If the gas can be secured by the end of the year or early next year, then the Europeans can commit to the pipeline in early 2010 and start construction. In the long term, it could be an expensive way of reducing the Russian stranglehold on Europe.

The pipeline is likely to pay its way but it also pulls the European ‘empire’ further to the East along paths last anticipated in the 1940s and well into territories contested by the US, China and Russia.

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