Iran, Egypt biggest of multiple challenges for 2012
The one certainty is that 2012 will be a year of multiple uncertainties, and these uncertainties will be compounded by the domestic preoccupations of the major powers, with Europe transfixed by the ongoing struggle to save the euro and with four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council either facing presidential elections (Russia on 4 March, France on 22 April and 6 May, and the United States on 6 November) or, as in China’s case, a planned leadership change scheduled for the 18th National Party Congress in October/November 2012. The following are some guiding thoughts on what will continue to be our three main areas of focus during 2012, namely the Middle East, China, and Russia.
The Middle East
We have little doubt that the Middle East will be the primary focus of our attention during 2012. It is there that by far the most serious developments continue to unfold, including the challenge of preventing Iran going nuclear, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, maintaining stability in Jordan and the Gulf states, and Israel’s response to its sharply deteriorating strategic position.
Our views on the Iranian nuclear threat are well known. The lesson of history is that nuclear weapons are unusable against anyone who can retaliate in kind (or has an ally who will do so on its behalf). It is for this reason that Russia is relatively untroubled by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and why even the US seems to be prepared to live with a nuclear Iran rather than risk the huge dislocation to the world economy that would flow from a preventative military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities and the subsequent disruption to world oil supplies. The problem, as we have said many times, is that Israel’s secret strategic plan envisages that in certain circumstances its survival could depend on the freedom to use its own nuclear deterrent to defeat an overwhelming conventional attack by its Arab neighbours. That freedom would no longer be open to it (other than in the form of the mutually self-destructive Samson Option) if Iran were to have nuclear weapons with which it could retaliate. For this reason our sources say that Israel will do literally anything to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power. If all else fails, it will strike.
Some argue, including within Israel itself, that Israel no longer has to fear an Arab conventional attack provided it greets the Arab Spring with a decisive move towards a compromise peace with the Palestinians. Despite the contacts in Amman this week with the Palestinians, more than a year after talks were broken off, the Netanyahu government takes the opposite view, and its views will continue to harden given the developments in Egypt.
The final round of voting in the Egyptian general election began on 4 January with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) leading and the more-extreme Salafi Al-Nour party in second place. The FJP gained 36.6% of the vote in the first round, Al-Nour 24.4%, and the centrist Islamist party Wasat 4.3%, to give the Islamist tendency 65% of the vote.
After the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ascendancy in Egypt is Israel’s biggest worry. It has faced no military threat from the south since the Camp David accords of 1979. Now Israel is faced with the difficult decision of whether, or rather when, to begin deploying for such a threat. The problem is that any reorientation of Israel’s deployments could be self-fulfilling as Egypt would see the need for reciprocal preparations. In any event, there are realistic fears that Egypt could deploy troops to the Sinai for training purposes or as a demonstration of Arab solidarity in response to a future Israeli war with Hezbollah or Syria.
According to sources in Jerusalem, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Planning Directorate has recommended to the cabinet that an election victory by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is now assured, should be the trigger for beginning the re-establishment of significant military units tasked with defending against an Egyptian attack.
The IDF’s case can only have been strengthened by remarks made by MB deputy chairman Rashad al-Bayumi on 2 January. Speaking to the Italian newspaper L’Unita he said: “The Muslim Brotherhood...claim[s] the right to revise, wholly or in part, treaties such as the one with Israel. One thing is for certain: Parliament will have the last say, and, if necessary there will be a popular referendum.” He added: “Our priority is to halt the Zionist policies which are against the whole Palestinian people.” He also denied that the MB had given assurances to the US about the Camp David accords. He said: “I firmly deny that...The United States knows that we are not willing to sacrifice the Palestinian cause on behalf of a ‘good neighbourly policy’ with Israel.”
To Israel’s concerns over Egypt can be added the ongoing Islamist agitation in Jordan, the growing influence of Iran in Iraq (possibly matched by a return of al-Qaeda in the Sunni areas following the US withdrawal), the hostility of former ally Turkey, and the fact that while the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria would loosen Iran’s links to Hezbollah in Lebanon it would also bring a wholly unwelcome further advance for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then there is the Palestinian Hamas movement, which rules in Gaza and which has been strengthened by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and strong support from Turkey. Hamas is in talks with the Fateh-dominated Palestinian Authority and is hoping to form a unity government ahead of elections in May 2012. Yet Hamas’s response to the re-opening of exploratory talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has been entirely negative. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “We in the Hamas movement demand that the Palestinian Authority stop and boycott all these kinds of meetings which are politically dangerous.”
China
The speed with which Beijing moved to endorse the succession of Kim Jong-un to the leadership of North Korea on the death of his father Kim Jong-il is a clear indicator of the extreme risk-aversion of the Chinese leadership going into 2012. In a year of leadership transition, Beijing’s fears include the possibility of a collapse in property prices (JP Morgan is predicting a 20% fall in prices in major cities in the next 18 months) and growing problems with local-government debt on which much of China’s growth has been based. Then, as political analyst Wang Honggang put it in China’s Guangzhou Ribao newspaper, there is the fear that “the global chain of unrest symbolized by the ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Europe Summer’, ‘Wall St Autumn’, and ‘Moscow Winter’ will continue to brew and trigger a series of follow-up effects”.
The scale and uniformity of the coverage given by China’s state-controlled media to the North Korean succession spoke volumes about China’s overwhelming desire to avoid any encroachment from the democratic contagion. China Central Television (CCTV) gave blanket coverage to Kim’s funeral and memorial service while the state-controlled China Daily carried a front-page banner proclaiming “A friend’s departure”. Looking ahead, the People’s Daily asserted that “continuing the relationship [with Kim’s son Kim Jong-un] is critical to maintaining the stability of China’s neighbouring environment and increasing China’s strategic initiative in northeast Asia.”
One South Korean China expert, Professor Kim Heung-kyu, made the point that “unlike previous occasions in which it responded cautiously and slowly to an emergency situation, China’s responses after the announcement of Kim’s death felt swift and even bold.”
The same aversion to uncontrolled or sudden change could be seen in the Chinese coverage of the 20th anniversary of the 25 December 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. For instance, a 24 December commentary by Li Shenming, vice-president of the official think-tank the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Global Times, described the fall of the Soviet Union as a “huge disaster”. He argued that the fall of Russian communism had led to economic turmoil, a widening income gap, ethnic violence, and a rise in serious crime. The Cold War may have ended, Li argued, but “the world did not enter into a golden age of peace”, with the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in the former Soviet Union and the Mideast being orchestrated by the West. In another Global Times commentary, Li wrote: “The death of the Soviet Communist Party was the outcome of...shifting gradually away from and ultimately betraying Marxism.”
Also in the Global Times, Russia expert Xia Yishan, from the Chinese Institute of International Studies, argued that Gorbachev’s key mistake was “to push economic reform by carrying out political reform and promoting democratization and Glasnost”. Although perhaps not completely uniform, the overwhelming view propagated in official channels in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary, as exemplified by Zhang Shuhua from CASS in the official People’s Daily, is that to avoid the USSR’s fate it is crucial for China to control the direction of reform and to prevent it getting out of control. Zhang also warned against the machinations of the West, saying: “The West could not tolerate a strong Soviet Union, nor can it tolerate a strong China.”
The catchphrase for 2012, reiterated by the official Xinhua news agency throughout its 31 December 2011 commentary on the coming year, is “to make progress while maintaining stability”.
But if China is entering 2012 gripped by a fear of uncontrolled change, it does also see opportunities in the economic crisis that is gripping the Western powers. On 2 January, Xinhua published a commentary contrasting the economic vibrancy of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) with the Western powers and arguing for a bigger voice for these countries in global economic decision making. More significantly it argued that the BRICs shouldn’t just bail out the West by purchasing more European and US government bonds but that the West should scrap “protectionist measures” and begin exporting more advanced technologies to the BRICs. In other words, Chinese help for the euro and the indebted Western economies will come with a hi-technology price tag.
But Zhang Shuhua’s warning that “the West could not tolerate a strong Soviet Union, nor can it tolerate a strong China” is not without foundation, and during 2012 we expect to see a continuation of the ‘contain-China’ moves by the US, Japan, Australia and others that we reported on throughout 2011. It was interesting, for instance, that while the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il revealed anew China’s fear of change, it had a contrasting effect on Japan, pushing it towards closer collaboration with South Korea. Diplomatic sources in Tokyo say that the renewed uncertainty over North Korea’s future can be used to foster closer ties with Seoul not just for the purposes of preparing for a crisis with Pyongyang but equally for the purposes of formulating a regional response to the rise of China.
Russia
The big event for Russia in 2012 is, of course, the 4 March presidential election in which Vladimir Putin is expected to be re-elected president after his one-term sabbatical as prime minister – yet what seemed to be a certain procession now seems less certain following the popular outrage at the rigging of the 4 December legislative elections.
Nevertheless, the Kremlin is being a bit more subtle in its reaction to the popular dissatisfaction than might have been expected, and the point is well-illustrated by an analysis of media treatment of the elections. In our 21 December issue, we noted how Russia’s three main television channels - NTV, Rossiya 1, and Channel One – had to one degree or another changed their universally pro-government coverage of the 4 December elections after the 10 December Bolotnaya Square demonstrations. All three channels reported the protest, with NTV taking a surprisingly open line. On 11 December, NTV followed this up with a current affairs programme showing banners calling for Putin’s resignation and broadcasting several of the anti-regime speeches. It even showed a former NTV anchor, Leonid Parenov, ridiculing Putin’s claim that the demonstrations were being orchestrated by the United States.
Then, on 18 December, NTV aired a report about Putin’s 15 December televised phone-in which was far from flattering and included footage of Putin being barracked at a martial arts contest during the election campaign. Another NTV show broadcast the view that there was widespread ballot-rigging in the election. And NTV’s talk show Poslenyee Slovo (Last Word) gave airtime to an outspoken and charismatic Kremlin critic, the rock star Yuriy Shevchuk, who told the audience that Russia now has “a new generation that is not afraid and wants to live in freedom”. The other main TV channels, Rossiya 1 and Channel One, were not as open as NTV, but Rossiya 1’s anchor for Putin’s 15 December telethon was noticeably less deferential than in previous years, and he clearly irritated Putin by returning again and again to the post-election protests.
In the weeks since, the change in tone has continued. One NTV show, for instance, has run a series of reports presenting the ‘fair elections’ movement in a very positive light and criticizing the authorities. It also gave detailed and positive coverage to the 24 December demonstrations.
However, media sources say that despite this apparent openness, NTV has continued to censor certain journalists and to pull programmes that are critical of the Kremlin, including a 25-minute documentary on the protest movement that was due to be broadcast on 24 December. On the same day, NTV announced that it was taking the Last Word talk show off air. Critical reports on the luxurious lifestyle of Kremlin insider Vasiliy Yakemenko and on police abuses in Chechnya have been spiked.
There has also been an interesting contrast in the treatment of former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and anti-Kremlin blogger Aleksey Navalnyy. For several years, Kasparov has been blacklisted by the main TV channels, but Channel One featured him on the main news on 24 December speaking at the ‘fair elections’ rally. By contrast, neither Channel One nor Rossiya 1 showed Navalnyy’s speech at the 24 December rally. The reason is that while both are outspoken critics of the Kremlin, Kasparov lacks the mass popular following of Navalnyy and is less of a threat.
This more subtle approach is likely, ultimately, to work in the Kremlin’s favour. In the face of the public outrage at the rigged 4 December elections, it has made a tactical, not a strategic retreat. We do not expect 2012 to provide a mortal challenge to the Putin ascendancy. JdeC.