Video: Interview with Cleo Paskal for Adelphi and German Federal Foreign Office

Cleo Paskal discusses a range of environmental change and security issues, including the difference between Indian and Chinese approaches to environmental change and foreign policy.

Huff Po: Cleo interviews MD Nalapat on "West Helping Wahabbi Winter Spread to Syria"

Original is here.

The United States, Britain, France, and others, have just recognized a rebel coalition as being Syria's legitimate representatives. However, serious questions are being raised about the coalition, including by Canada, which isrefusing to recognize it until it rejects extremism and pledges to protect minorities -- something it is unwilling to do.

One person watching the situation very closely is Prof. M D Nalapat, UNESCO Peace Chair, and Director of the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal University. Prof. Nalapat has an unusually spot-on record in predicting trends in the region. He was in New York City on September 11, 2001, having just warned that the U.S. was likely to be targeted. At the start of the Arab Spring, he was already predicting a 'Wahabbi Winter'. And he foresaw the current catastrophic situation in Libya from the early days of the conflict. This is what he has to say about Syria.

Who are the people who have just been recognized by the U.S.?

Nalapat: The U.S. and the EU are essentially recognizing people whose influence disappears outside the borders of NATO member states. On the ground, the groups that President Obama has recognized as the "legitimate representatives of the Syrian people" have no say whatsoever, and not even a pretense of having, the allegiance of any segment of the Syrian public, nor any influence among any of the groups now battling the Assad regime.

Does the U.S. realize this?

Nalapat: Clearly the U.S., as with other NATO powers, has equipment and a few personnel which enable them to understand the situation. However, they are misreading the dynamic in Syria, and believe that formal recognition will somehow enable these ruthless groups to establish influence, if not control, over key elements of the groups militarily fighting Assad. The reality is that the core ideology of almost all these groups is anti-Western, so such a recognition will only distance the so-called Syrian Opposition Coalition from the fighters on the field, who would see them -- correctly -- as agents of the West.

One problem facing the NATO powers is their reliance on the intelligence agencies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other allied Arab states. Many of these have become infested with Wahabbis, who are expert at conveying a distorted version of ground realities upward to their superiors. In particular, these Wahabbi nests within the Saudi, Qatari and other NATO-allied intelligence services sponsor individuals whom they know to be hostile to the core security interests of the West, but for whom they seek backing. Just as in Afghanistan and Libya, the West is funding elements that will very soon work against them.

Unfortunately, the Saudi, and especially the Qatari royal families, are assisting their own destruction by helping Wahabbi groups within their societies, and outside, to gain traction. Ultimately, such groups will seek to do away with the ruling families and at best - from the point of view of the West - establish a Muslim Brotherhood-style soft-authoritarian religious state within Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In such a task -- now that the Brotherhood has succeeded in taking over the reigns of office in Egypt -- the Wahabbi elements of the Egyptian diaspora within the GCC countries are working overtime to convince local populations to eventually follow the same route to state power through street protests. 

What does this mean for the future of Syria and for U.S. security?

Nalapat: Syria represents a battle between the Shia and the Sunni. The opposition to Bashar Assad is grounded in hatred for his Alawite faith. Wahabbis believe the Alawites to be apostates, just as they regard all Shia to be non-Muslim, and indeed apostate. The punishment for apostasy in Islam is death. Hence the current targeting of Alawites in Syria by so-called "freedom fighters", who may be expected to launch a full-scale bloodbath once they assume power in Damascus. Already, in locations now controlled by the "freedom fighters", Alawite, Christian and Druze women are being captured as trophies of war, without any coverage in the Western media.

It is extraordinary that the West is so viscerally against the Alawites. They are the group in Syrian society that is the most Western in their attire and lifestyles. Women within the Alawite community seldom resort to the veil, while other aspects of the lifestyle too are much closer to those followed by Europeans than to those followed by observers of Wahabbi doctrine. It's hard to understand why a Nicolas Sarkozy would ban the veil in France and yet support those who insist on the veil in the Middle East. Civilizationally, possibly because of the close links between the GCC monarchies and the West, the West has taken the side of the Sunni against the Shia. They are targeting Shia groups in Lebanon. And they are ignoring oppression against Shia in Saudi Arabia, as well as the suppression of the Shia majority in Bahrain.

The U.S. insisted that the new Iraqi government devolve a substantial proportion of oil revenue on the Sunni regions of Iraq, although these form a minority within the country. The silence of the U.S. and the EU on the equally justified need to ensure that the Shia regions of Saudi Arabia, and the Shia in particular, get a significant share of Saudi oil revenue indicates, to local minds, a bias.

In 1980-82, Israel committed a strategic blunder by backing the Gemayal-led Maronite Christian groups in Lebanon in their assault on the Shia. The consequence is that Israel is the only country in the world facing Shia terrorism -- in contrast to the wide swathes of the globe confronting Wahabbi terror. Should the West continue to assist the Wahabbi project of marginalizing the Shia throughout the Middle East, the danger is that the whole of the West will become the target of a new breed of Shia terrorist. The West should be neutral in the current sectarian Wahabbi-Shia conflict sweeping across the Arab world. At present it is clearly on the side of the Wahabbis. Getting involved will make no friends in the long run but will create immediate enemies.

Video: Interview for Urania, FES and Adelphi on the 3 Geos (filmed in Berlin, December 2012)

Cleo writes on risks to global financial centers for The World Today

From The World Today. Read the whole article here.

Superstorm Sandy brought devastation to New York and the city is still cleaning up the mess. When disasters hit big cities, the media naturally focus on human tragedies. In the heart-rending chaos, large, systemic failures get brief mention. 

However, as patterns develop over time, it is becoming clear that those systemic failures are occurring more often. One increasingly glaring problem is that many global trade and financial centres, including Shanghai, Mumbai, Bangkok, London as well as New York, are in vulnerable locations. Each city is projected to be increasingly subject to extreme weather, throwing periodic wrenches into the global economy. Such disruptions can weaken economic systems, and have unexpected cascading effects, from shutting down trading floors, to rupturing critical supply chains.

Extreme weather is just one factor, however. Most financial centres grew up around ports which placed these cities on the coast – New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, Bangkok – or, like London, on a large river. Population booms then led to haphazard zoning and development.

The result is overstretched infrastructure papering over the cracks in an increasingly unstable environment. Buildings start subsiding, airports go up on floodplains, saltwater infiltrates underground wiring and transport systems. And the city – a critical hub in a global economy – becomes a disaster waiting to happen. In future there will be more Sandys hitting more global centres more often. And they will affect you. Here we look at five cities and the threat they face from just one disruption, flooding.

More here.

German book is now an app!

Spielball Erde. Machtkämpfe im Klimawandel is now an app available on iTunes. 

Cleo interviewed on Voice of Russia about Kyoto

VoR’s Tim Ecott spoke to Cleo and asked her what was actually achieved at Kyoto. You can hear the interview here.

German book is bestseller

German book has been on Der Spiegel's bestseller's list for three weeks.

Cleo releases new book, in German, and co-authored with TV anchorman Claus Kleber

A book co-authored by Cleo and German TV anchor Claus Kleber, Spielball Erde: Machtkämpfe im Klimawandel (Random House, Germany, 2012), is on the German bestseller's list.  It is loosely related to the sort of topics covered in Global Warring. And no, Cleo doesn't speak German. Google translate is a wonderful thing.

Quoted in ASP's 'Military Basing and Climate Change' report

Cleo was quoted in the American Security Project's Military Basing and Climate Change report -- one of an important and timely series of reports on climate security released by ASP at nearly the same time Sandy hit the US. You can find the Military Basing report here.

Interview: Cleo on Background Briefing talking about Sandy

Cleo was interviewed by Ian Masters on his LA-based radio show Background Briefing about Sandy in a larger geopolitical and geoeconomic context. You can hear the interview here.

Video: Cleo in the NATO Review on energy security

Featuring Chad Briggs and other people smarter than Cleo. The original is here. Filmed in Brussels, September 2012.

Quoted in China Dialogue

Cleo was quoted in Olivia Boyd's interesting article on environmental change and the implications for Shanghai. A sample:

Cleo Paskal is associate fellow at London-based think-tank Chatham House and author of Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises will Redraw the World Map. She points to enduring corruption, poor transparency and a “King Cnut” emphasis on heavy engineering as an environmental fix-all as reasons to be worried. [...]

But for Paskal, this is a sign China is not prepared to admit that its richest – and perhaps most prestigious – mainland city, home to glittering skyscrapers and the Maglev bullet train, is at risk of catastrophe as climate change rewrites the rules of the game. It is “very hard to imagine” that a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina won’t happen at some point here, she said, pointing out that Shanghai shares many similarities with New Orleans: aside from rising sea-levels, both cities sit in typhoon pathways and on sinking river deltas – Shanghai has dropped by more than 1.8 metres since 1921. Meanwhile, chemical plants strung along the coast and interspersed with high-rise apartment blocks – built thanks to malleable zoning laws and pally relations between local officials and developers – mean a “Fukushima-type” scenario could also be on the cards, she said. 

“If China wants true stable development that will show real security to its population it needs to be honest about what areas are going to stable and what areas aren’t. They can’t continue to band-aid a place like Shanghai, because it will get hit and when it gets hit the implications are humanitarian but they’re also economic and political.”

For more, click here.

Quoted in The Telegraph (UK)

Cleo was quoted in Colin Freeman's The Telegraph story on the Arctic: 

Yet the fact Beijing has no realistic territorial claim there may not stop it seeing the Arctic as its own backyard, according to Ms Paskal. What Moscow wants to rename as the "Russian Ocean", Beijing may opt to term the "northern Pacific".

"China is an expanding maritime power, and has already shown a 'might is right' policy in the South China Sea," she said, referring to recent military stand-offs with Vietnam over the Spratly Islands. "Potential for conflict in the Arctic is probably limited, but it may lead to a fundamental shift in world geostrategy. For centuries, northern Russia has been seen as a wall. Now it's going to be a highway, which opens up all kinds of new threats."

For more, click here.