the new petro power paradigm - Diplomat Magazine

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Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans to keep the Scots tribes from invading southward, was 120 kilometres in length.
cosmopolitans, humanitarians, and left
activists” who dream of a world without
political borders and the full range of
conservatives who desire both increased
trade as well as walls with filters to keep
human and chemical dangers from slipping
through. “Security today,” she writes,
“requires not just containment, but movement,
flow, openness, and availability to
inspection.”
To paraphrase as briefly as possible,
when the concept of nation-state sovereignty
is weakened, the two concepts
linked by the hyphen move apart from
each other as they decline individually.
The result: more damn walls everywhere.
Dr. Brown sees a single historical phenomenon
at work in the building of all these
walls, notwithstanding the widely varying
purposes to which they’re put and how
they’re constructed. The strongest adhesive
binding them together may be the fact
that they don’t work terribly well in “resolving
or even substantially reducing the
conflicts, hostilities, or traffic.” But they
do prove as a rule that they are far more
expensive than first imagined and almost
invariably become permanent fixtures
though conceived of as only temporary
measures.
To illustrate, Dr. Brown cannot resist
(who could?) retelling the story of the
odd assortment of walls built along the
U.S. border with Mexico. The first section,
erected between 1990 and 1993, extended
inland only 23 kilometres from San Diego
on the Pacific. The material used was
surplus aircraft landing mats from the
Vietnam War. These were found to provide
good traction for illegal immigrants
and drug traffickers. Later initiatives kept
pushing the wall eastward into Arizona,
New Mexico and finally Texas, always one
step behind the enemies’ movements. The
border walls now cover about 1,368 discontinuous
kilometres.
Some stretches are triply reinforced
concrete-and-steel walls 18 metres high.
In other places the defences consist of
concrete posts stuck in the middle of desert
roads. At still others, there are virtual
fences consisting only of cameras, sensors
and the like: drone-walls, one might call
them. So far, 36 state and federal laws
have been circumvented in such construction.
Some portions of these barriers have
cost $21 million a mile ($13 million a
kilometre). Middle-aged white male civilians
have formed armed vigilante groups
to patrol some of the obvious gaps in
coverage. Dr. Brown believes the project
may have lowered illegal immigration
from Mexico but actually increased drug
smuggling. She puts it all down to erosion
of state sovereignty combined with the
“heightened xenophobia and nationalism
increasingly prevalent in Western democracies
today.”
In all the superficial ways, Ralph D.
Sawyer, the author of Ancient Chinese Warfare
(Basic Books/HarperCollins Canada,
$46 cloth), could hardly be more different
from the author of Walled States, Waning
Sovereignty. Mr. Sawyer is an independent
scholar in the fields of China’s military
and its intelligence apparatus, subjects on
which he serves as a consultant to corporations
and defence agencies. He lives in
Boston and is a fellow of the Centre for
Military and Strategic Studies at the University
of Calgary. His book, the second in
a projected series of three on the general
subject, runs to more than 550 pages. Even
the author himself calls its level of detail
“somewhat tedious.” It is, however, of
enormous value in letting us look at some
of Dr. Brown’s points in greater detail, at
long range, and from the perspective an
entirely different culture.
For the few thousand years that we
know about, China was a civilization that
lived hunkered behind walls of one kind
or another, usually because there was no
one central government or at least not a
strong one. City walls became even more
important through the imperial period but
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