The Art of International Negotiations

The methodology of engaging international relations seems to be breaking down. Two issues that come to mind are the US attitude to the International Criminal Court, and Brexit.

Regarding the ICC, on September 10, John Bolton, the US National Security Advisor, announced that Washington would “use any means necessary” to push back against the influence of the ICC. The ICC was established in 2002, and has succeeded in convicting a number of war criminals from Africa and former Yugoslavia, although one can question exactly the nature of the sovereignty of the broken laws. Thus a senior military man could be prosecuted for the actions actually carried out by more junior soldiers, even in the absence of clear evidence of such orders. Obviously, people carrying out, or even worse, ordering murder, torture, etc, need punishing, but there also needs to be some sort of sovereignty, the reason being that, in my mind anyway, justice needs to be blind to the origin or nature of the perpetrators. If it is only the losing side that gets prosecuted, it is essentially victor’s justice, which is usually little better than revenge. Given that the US, Israel, China and Saudi Arabia have refused to ratify the founding document, on the basis that it had unacceptable consequences to national sovereignty, the concept of “international” is clearly questionable.

Now, as far as I know, no US citizen has ever been indicted, probably because it would be futile, but apparently there has been agitation regarding US soldiers in Afghanistan, particularly regarding alleged torture of detainees. Now, the argument then is, if the crime took place in Afghanistan, the fact that the US has not ratified the court is irrelevant, and any perpetrator of a crime against a ratified member can be prosecuted, irrespective of the nationality, or at least that is the view of the ICC. Of course, arresting such a person is another matter. Here, however, there is a further issue. Some of what is alleged, e.g. waterboarding and indefinite detention without due process, apparently occurred with the permission of very senior US officials and politicians, and apparently the President. This raises the question, exactly how does such an organization decide whether the President of the United States has ordered or permitted something that is illegal? But if the United States is exempt, why are lesser countries susceptible to prosecution? Is it a case of might makes right?

In any case, Bolton’s statement that the US would ban any such members of the ICC from entering the US, and it would sanction their funds and prevent them from using the US financial system is certainly a shot across the bow. The question then is, is this the way of going about negotiations? Or does the US feel there is no alternative? It is certainly acting as if the rest of the world is some sort of unfortunate added extra. In terms of international relations, the United States, through President Trump’s recent speech at the UN, has effectively declared it feels it wishes to separate its interests from those of the rest of the world. America first! I for one agree that all is not right with the UN, but I do not believe that attitude helps.

The Brexit negotiations are more confusing. The EU rules meant that when Britain elected to leave, there was a two-year period to sort out all the consequences, but at least the last six months of that appeared to be required to put the agreement in place, which left 18 months to reach the agreement. That has almost expired. The EU has decided that the UK has been “dawdling”, and trying to present the EU with a deal that would have to be agreed at the last minute, or no deal. The problem with that approach is that “no deal” works both ways, and the assumption that the other side is desperate to have a deal may be misguided. However, there are issues on which the EU is quite obstinate. One is that if the UK wants access to the EU markets, Britain must accept the free movement of citizens, and stopping that is one of the reasons Britain elected to leave the EU. There are other demands by the EU: manufactured goods must be by the EU rulebook; the European Court of Justice will have overall jurisdiction; the UK must retain European labour and environmental laws. Now it is reasonable to require such things for goods that are shipped to the EU, but the EU should have no say on goods that do not touch the EU as it is none of their business.

Some seem to predict a total disaster for the UK if they leave with no deal, however we should note that the UK buys £318 billion from the EU, and exports £235.8 billion. So, if all trade stopped, the EU would suffer an extra £82 billion. But the situation is worse than that because Britain’s exports of manufactured goods to Europe include an extensive array of parts, etc. These days, large complicated objects are not made by one company, but rather they are assembled from parts supplied by a large number of different manufacturers. So trade will not stop, and it is in both sides’ interests to keep it going with as few hold-ups as possible.

The other major problem is the Northern Ireland border. Theresa May offered a tolerably straightforward solution, which would allow smooth crossing of the border provided certain “paperwork” (essentially electronic in this case) was properly completed. The EU have responded by saying Northern Ireland must remain fully within the customs union, which effectively means that Northern Ireland would become part of Eire in all but name. No UK prime minister could accept that. As a negotiating stance, President Macron of France has stated the British plan is unacceptable because “it does not respect the integrity of the single market.” Effectively that is saying, either be in the EU or do not trade with it. That is a fairly tough stance. President Macron went further and called some of the Brexiteers liars. Not exactly diplomatic.

There is fairly clear evidence the attitude towards the UK from Brussels has hardened, and they seem to be forcing Britain to opt for “no deal”. Mrs May, being pushed into a corner, has responded by saying that it was unacceptable for the EU to reject her plan and offer nothing in return except “no Brexit”. To succeed in negotiations, both sides need something, and in this case, both sides need trade to continue. Neither side does well out of a failure. But both sides also need reasonably good will, and a desire to reach an agreement. Not a lot of promise there. It is hard to get rid of entrenched pig-headedness.

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Space and the Military

One of the more distressing pieces of news recently is that President Trump wants to create a “Space Force” as a branch of the US armed forces. According to Vice President Pence: “Other nations increasingly possess the capability to operate in space, not all of them, however, share our commitment to freedom, to private property, and the rule of law. So as we continue to carry American leadership in space, so also will we carry America’s commitment to freedom in this new frontier.” And, “Our adversaries have transformed space into a warfighting domain already. . . history has proven that peace only comes through strength. And in the realm of outer space, the United States Space Force will be that strength in the years ahead.” There are two reasons I find this troublesome. The obvious one is we do not need war in space, although, of course, if someone else is taking their military to space, it is reasonable to respond. That leaves open the question, is anybody else taking their military to space? The second one is there is a UN convention that says space will be reserved for peaceful purposes, and in the absence of clear evidence of some other violation it appears that the current administration is going to ignore this convention, which has the deeper problem that if the US is not going to honour its agreements, what is the point of anyone else negotiating? So why? It appears what is becoming an only too familiar excuse: the Russians have done it.

Done what? The case made by Yleem Poblete (State Department, and fuller text at https://www.state.gov/t/avc/rls/285128.htm ) was that Russia has a satellite that has been behaving oddly, and very suspiciously. The first problem here is the “suspicious satellite” was not identified. The point of concern for Poblete was that Russia has deployed a satellite they claim to be an inspector satellite in October, 2017, and the US thinks it is doing something that is contrary to that claim. So what is it doing? Apparently its orbital behaviour was considered inconsistent with what the US considered an inspector satellite would have done. That raises the question, what did it do and what was it expected to do? Poblete goes on to say the only certainty is that it is in orbit. The rest of its behaviour is unexpected and unclear to purpose.

Russia did not launch anything that could be so described in October, 2017, but it did deploy a subsatellite (Cosmos 2523) which separated from a major satellite then. Apparently Russia launched Cosmos 2519 in June 2017, and in August a subsatellite Cosmos 2521 separated from it. In October, Cosmos 2523 separated from one of these two. These subsatellites then carried out various manoeuvres and as an example, 2521 may have returned and docked with 2519. They all changed their orbits to have different characteristics. None of these manoeuvres were illegal or threatening and while we don’t know what they were for and I suppose we don’t know everything about them, it seems strange to get overly concerned about this. In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that the Russians were practising controlled orbital manoeuvres, possibly under automated control, which, of course, would be highly desirable in any space exploration program.

It is true Poblete raised a very legitimate point: how do you verify what a satellite is actually doing? The same thing goes the other way, of course. One point of concern for me, though, is that this is certainly not a reason to launch a military response. The other question is, is this a straw man accusation, something to politically justify this space force concept?

There is the implied claim that Russia is developing and deploying anti-satellite weapons. Let us leave aside the obvious question as to what evidence is there, and ask instead, why would they do that? The most obvious reason is that the US uses military satellites to carry out surveillance on ground activities (and if some sources are to be believed, with extreme accuracy) and also many US guided weapons depend on satellite positioning to steer them. Therefore the accusation is probably true, but it is rather understandable, and I would be surprised if the US military is not doing the same thing to counter Russian satellites. The point I am making here is that the militaries of the world have already taken notice that space exists.

So, is there anything more that a satellite could do, other than carry out surveillance, aid navigation and carry messages? Could it be a weapon? At this stage, I feel it is unlikely, the reason being that any “ammunition” has to be taken up there. It is reasonably easy, although very expensive, to take up electronics, etc, but something that will do damage to something else on the ground is another matter. One might think that taking a hydrogen bomb would allow it a faster attack, but that is not true. Something in orbit has orbital velocity, and re-entering the atmosphere at that speed leads to intense heat generation, and if you use the atmosphere to reduce the speed, it actually takes longer to arrive than a slower missile launch. There is a case for shooting down other satellites, but it is still probably easier to do that from Earth. You will hear postulates of lasers, etc, but to get a laser powerful enough to do real damage, the power demands involve a huge beast. There are much easier ways to damage a satellite, and the probability that there are satellites up there that will seriously damage any given country is probably fairly remote.

One thing that has become a problem is that more than one country has tested anti-satellite weapons by destroying one of their own defunct satellites. The problem then is, what does “destroy” actually mean? Usually it seems to mean, blow the thing up into many pieces, which then go onto erratic orbits, with velocities probably in the order of 7,500 m/s. Now if the orbit were circular, that would be fairly harmless to anything on a corresponding circular orbit because they would never meet, but the fragments of an explosion will have a variety of eccentric orbits on different planes, and while the collisions will not have that relative velocity, the relative velocity could still be in the few thousand meter per second range, and that is a distinctly dangerous velocity. A moderate-sized piece of metal would make a cannonball seem modest.

As it is right now, orbital space around Earth is starting to get cluttered. I have heard people argue that NASA should investigate asteroid mining. As of now, I am not sure why, because asteroids, apart from a possible iron/nickel core, will have the composition of space dust, and hence have some similarities to basalt on Earth. Nobody wants to mine that. On the other hand, this space junk is made of already refined metals. I rather fancy that collecting that space junk and recycling it would make more sense.

In the meantime, it would also be helpful if the nations could behave in a way that did not lead to weaponizing space.

Have you got what it takes to form a scientific theory?

Making a scientific theory is actually more difficult than you might think. The first step involves surveying what knowledge is already available. That comes in two subsets: the actual observational data and the interpretation of what everyone thinks that set of data means. I happen to think that set theory is a great start here. A set is a collection of data with something in common, together with the rule that suggests it should be put into one set, as opposed to several. That rule must arise naturally from any theory, so as you form a rule, you are well on your way to forming a theory. The next part is probably the hardest: you have to decide what interpretation that is allegedly established is in fact wrong. It is not that easy to say that the authority is wrong, and your idea is right, but you have to do that, and at the same time know that your version is in accord with all observational data and takes you somewhere else. Why I am going on about this now is I have written two novels that set a problem: how could you prove the Earth goes around the sun if you were an ancient Roman? This is a challenge if you want to test yourself as a theoretician. If you don’t. I like to think there is still an interesting story there.

From September 13 – 20, my novel Athene’s Prophecy will be discounted in the US and UK, and this blog will give some background information to make the reading easier as regards the actual story not regarding this problem. In this, my fictional character, Gaius Claudius Scaevola is on a quest, but he must also survive the imperium of a certain Gaius Julius Caesar, aka Caligulae, who suffered from “fake news”, and a bad subsequent press. First the nickname: no Roman would call him Caligula because even his worst enemies would recognize he had two feet, and his father could easily afford two bootlets. Romans had a number of names, but they tended to be similar. Take Gaius Julius Caesar. There were many of them, including the father, grandfather, great grandfather etc. of the one you recognize. Caligulae was also Gaius Julius Caesar. Gaius is a praenomen, like John. Unfortunately, there were not a lot of such names so there are many called Gaius. Julius is the ancient family name, but it is more like a clan, and eventually there needed to be more, so most of the popular clans had a cognomen. This tended to be anything but grandiose. Thus for Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero means chickpea. Scaevola means “lefty”. It is less clear what Caesar means because in Latin the “ar” ending is somewhat unusual. Gaius Plinius Secundus interpreted it as coming from caesaries, which means “hairy”. Ironically, the most famous Julius Caesar was bald. Incidentally, in pronunciation, the latin “C” is the equivalent of the Greek gamma, so it is pronounced as a “G” or “K” – the difference is small and we have now way of knowing. “ae” is pronounced as in “pie”. So Caesar is pronounced something like the German Kaiser.

Caligulae is widely regarded as a tyrant of the worst kind, but during his imperium he was only personally responsible for thirteen executions, and he had three failed coup attempts on his life, the leaders of which contributed to that thirteen. That does not sound excessively tyrannical. However, he did have the bad habit of making outrageous comments (this is prior to a certain President tweeting, but there are strange similarities). He made his horse a senator. That was not mad; it was a clear insult to the senators.

He is accused of making a fatuous invasion of Germany. Actually, the evidence is he got two rebellious legions to build bridges over the Rhine, go over, set up camp, dig lots of earthworks, march around and return. This is actually a text-book account of imposing discipline and carrying out an exercise, following the methods of his brother-in-law Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo, one of the stronger Roman Generals on discipline. He then took these same two legions and ordered them to invade Britain. The men refused to board what are sometimes called decrepit ships. Whatever, Caligulae gave them the choices between “conquering Neptune” and collecting a mass of sea shells, invading Britain, or face decimation. They collected sea shells. The exercise was not madness: it was a total humiliation for the two legions to have to carry these through Rome in the form of a “triumph”. This rather odd behaviour ended legionary rebellion, but it did not stop the coups. The odd behaviour and the fact he despised many senators inevitably led to bad press because it was the senatorial class that wrote histories, but like a certain president, he seemed to go out of his way to encourage the bad press. However, he was not seen as a tyrant by the masses. When he died the masses gave a genuine outpouring of anger at those who killed him. Like the more famous Gaius Julius Caesar, Caligulae had great support from the masses, but not from the senators. I have collected many of his most notorious acts, and one of the most bizarre political incidents I have heard of is quoted in the novel more or less as reported by Philo of Alexandria, with only minor changes for style consistency, and, of course, to report it in English.

As for showing how scientific theory can be developed, in TV shows you find scientists sitting down doing very difficult mathematics, and while that may be needed when theory is applied, all major theories start with relatively simple concepts. If we take quantum mechanics as an example of a reasonably difficult piece of theoretical physics, thus to get to the famous Schrödinger equation, start with the Hamilton-Jacobi equation from classical physics. Now the mathematician Hamilton had already shown you can manipulated that into a wave-like equation, but that went nowhere useful. However, the French physicist de Broglie had argued that there was real wave-like behaviour, and he came up with an equation in which the classical action (momentum times distance in this case) for a wave length was constant, specifically in units of h (Planck’s quantum of action). All that Schrödinger had to do was to manipulate Hamilton’s waves and ensure that the action came in units of h per wavelength. That may seem easy, but everything was present for some time before Schrödinger put that together. Coming up with an original concept is not at all easy.

Anyway, in the novel, Scaevola has to prove the Earth goes around the sun, with what was available then. (No telescopes that helped Galileo.) The novel gives you the material avaiable, including the theory and measurements of Aristarchus. See if you can do it. You, at least, have the advantage you know it does. (And no, you do not have to invent calculus or Newtonian mechanics.)

The above is, of course, merely the background. The main part of the story involves life in Egypt, the aanti-Jewish riots in Egypt, then the religious problems of Judea as Christianty starts.

Memories from Fifty Years Ago: Invasion of Czechoslovakia 3.

I returned to the kiosk at five, as requested, and was surprised to be invited by the woman in the kiosk to stay the night at their apartment. So I drove her home, and she must have been a bit surprised at the car, particularly now that before setting off I refilled the clutch hydraulic oil. The leak was now getting rather bad, and there were only so many clutch usages before a refill, and the number was getting smaller. Anyway, we made it to her apartment, where I met the husband. The Heitlegnerov (I apologise if I got the spelling wrong from memory) apartment was compact, but it seemed to have everything I would expect in a modern western apartment. The previous year I had been in Calgary, so I knew what a modern North American apartment looked like, and the Czech one was much better than where I was in England.

This family had a rather bad history. First, they were Jews, and had spent most of WW II hiding in the forests, living in huts with dirt floors. The husband had been part of a resistance to the Germans, and when the war was over, he had actually helped get the communists into government, only to find the communists in Czechoslovakia were also anti-Jewish. Back to mud floor accommodation for a while. Gradually things got better, and when Dubcek came to power, they got up in the world sufficiently to get this apartment. Now they saw it all coming down around their ears. However, by accident, their daughter, Alenka, was in England on a short stay to help her learn English. The parents had discussed this, and they wanted to send a message for her to stay in England, and would I take some family heirlooms and some of her property? Of course I would, with volume restrictions on obviously women’s things.

The following morning it was announced that the road to Linz was open at the border, so I set off early. Somehow, the day seemed grim, and very quiet. For a major city, nothing was happening. The day did not get better, and when I drove through České Budějovice the continued absence of activity maintained the depressing feeling. It was just as I was leaving České Budějovice that I noticed two young Czechs hitch-hiking. Since I had not seen any cars for a long time, their prospects were poor, so I stopped. They first wanted me to smuggle them out, but I pointed out that was impossible. Any cursory search would find them, but I would take them to the border, let them out before it and they would be on their own. I would wait on the other side for a while, in case they made it. Then they wanted me to smuggle something else: a petition to the United Nations, signed by (according to them) half a million identified signatures. I agreed. I had a tall cardboard box in the boot, and for my trip behind the iron curtain I had taken emergency food: canned food, drink, fruit and rye bread. I had kept the waste, including opened cans because I could not find anywhere to dump rubbish. The petition was wrapped in pastic bags and went to the bottom, a piece of a different cardboard box went on top, just in case although that was probably worthless as a deception, the cans went on top, then rotting fruit, then some mouldy bread, then some fruit that was technically still edible, then the remains of the rye bread, then can openers, cutlery, etc.

When I got to the border, the guards were Czech, but they still did a search. When they came to the box, they asked what was that? I pointed out I was just being tidy and tried to look as iunconcerned as I could. They started ferretting but it got increasingly distasteful and they gave up. The barrier went up, and I was in “no-man’s land”. When I got to the Austrian guards, there were the two Czechs, beaming with triumph. They had got throough before me, while I was being searched, and had told the Austrian guards about the petition. They thought this was mission accomplished. I had no option but to hand the petition over, and while the expressions on the faces of the Czech guards was worth seeing, I was thoroughly depressed. I had taken a huge risk, and for what? The Austrian guards would at best destroy the petition; at worst hand it back to the Czech authorities. Austria was never going to annoy Russia. As I headed to Linz I was stopped by a journalist who wanted the story and a picture of me and my beatup Anglia carrying a Czech flag. I have no idea whether it ever got published.

When I got back to England on the first Saturday I went up to London and to the address where Alenka was staying. It was a grey day with light rain, and the family, being orthodox Jews, left me there standing in the rain. Alenka came to the door, I handed over her valuables, and tried to give as cheerful account as I could of her parents and their feelings. I asked her what she wanted to do. Apparently there were a few scholarships being made available to Czechs who could find a place in a University, and I promised to do what I could at Southampton for her. As it happened, I found a Post-doc was treated as staff, and on my recommendation she could go there, but as it happened, somewhere else was found for her (I think East Anglia). However, that did not last, and eventually she got homesick and returned to Czechoslovakia, where things were seemingly improving a little. It would not be helpful for someone in a communist country then to be corresponding with the West so I never heard from her or her parents again. I am naturally curious as to where her life took her, but I guess I shall never know.