New Years in Bishkek, Predictions for 2007

New Years in Bishkek is a pretty big deal. There are costumes, Old Man Winter and a full supporting cast and fireworks. Lots and lots of fireworks. Television showed many a Russian spectacle. Kyrgyz TV rang in the New Year in proper public access fashion. Funding for Kyrgyzstan's television channel must be pretty grim.

For the New Year, I moved into a new place. Living by myself has given me more time to read, study and write as well as more space to move around in. I am sure that eating meals solo will get old before it gets fun but I am enjoying it for now. The one-roomer has a huge main room plus a bathroom and kitchen. Newly remodeled in the southern hub of the city for only $150/mo. I also trimmed my beard.

I am trying to figure out how I will use the skills I have so far tried to accumulate. Assuming I learn some languages, have a good grasp on expedition leadership and a little emergency medicine, where do I go from there? As my time in Bishkek is almost half-way up, I also see my time "experimenting" and trying to "see how I like it" as coming to a close too. That is all subjective (many amazing 30 year olds do not know what they want to do with their lives and have already done so much), but I nevertheless want to have a more well articulated purpose to work towards. Ideas abound but the implications in terms of time, dedication and relationships with friends and family scare me. Everything worth doing seems too terrible and anything where happiness seems assure also appears uninteresting (which would undermine the original happiness). So I will ask anyone over 40 who is reading thin, does all of life seem like a rapid succession of destiny transforming cross-roads or is this mostly a hullucination of the 20-30 year phase?

I wrote a few predictions for the year(s) to come. I have never done it before and I think it will be fun to see how I am doing in a year.

I think 2007 will be a year for moderation of US policy having over-stretched ourselves of late. Because of a necessarily more hesitant US, the rest of the world will have at it. Russia, haveing held itself together and steadily rebuilt some semblence of internal order, will reassert itself as a as a regional hegemon, built upon gas. Russian nationalism, however, will begin to look skeptically at flashy Moscow. The provinces will demand their dues (which the kremlin/oligarchs will be uninterested in providing), stoking the flames of the ancient Moscow-periphery divide.

Things in Somalia will get nasty as Islamists, though removed from power, find more subtle ways of raising money and waging war. Look for a repeat of every other attempt to crush a rebellion whose main grievence is being crushed.

The EU will continue muddling its way towards governance and look inward, rather than outward for direction. A disillusioned Turkey will move towards Islam, but a conflict with the PKK /Northern Iraq in the East will keep the secular nationalist heart beating strong.

In Iraq all hell will break loose, faster and more hellishly than expected. The breakpoint will be Turkey's intervention into Northern Iraq in the Spring. This will discredit the central government's ability to govern to such an extent that all observers and parties will be forced to admit civil war. For anything to become governable to the Sunnis will have to sort out their secularist pan-Arabian/Revolutionary Sunni Islam identity issues. Eventually (certainly not in 2007), some kind of a three entity solution will come forward. As there are geographic consistencies to ethnic distributions, a partician will come out of it. Bagedad will be Shia after a Sarajevo-like phase.

China will face more riots and structural constraints on its harmonious ascent. China's gilded age will be recognized as such as the CCP starts to lose more control over what happens in the country. Barring a huge foreign policy crisis, however, China will continue to grow. Human rights abuses in Xinjiang will become more widely known after the release of Kite Runner's film version (to be filmed in Western China's Xinjiang province).

2007 will be a clutch year for Kyrgyzstan as it tries to sort out all of the implications of the new constitution. There is a contest for power a foot. I think political Islam will become more popular, especially in the South now that a Southern Kyrgyz has been in office and failed to deliver anything but graft. North-South elites will continue to bicker over the government while frustration builds among the people.

In Latin America things will generally get better and better, more and more stable politically. However, the inequity of NAFTA and CAFTA will become more apparent. People will be howling about in year within 5 years the US will be forced to substantially change its stance on farm subsidies or undo the trade regime it built.

Globally, there will be greater consensus and more concerted action on global warming.

I do not know anything about anywhere in Africa and I will not pretend to. (Somalia fits in with the cycle of Islamist revolution from Iran to Algeria of the 20th century).

Through the course of my life-time I think that issues like global trade, global warming and reform at the UN will start to form the proto-type for a regime that regulates the interaction of states in a manner similar to how a state regulates the interactions of actors within a given country. Realism is a fact of life, however, over the long run it is the best interests of the powerful to create a system that stabilizes and justifies the status quo. In order to do so, however discretion and atonomy will be given up. The US will be more keen on this project in a year or so, surveying a messy and expensive result of unilateralism. The appearance of chaos usually underlines the need for order. Order implies restraint, which in turn puts a premium on the freedom of disorder. We will move into an ordering phase by the time another president is sworn in.

Happy 2007!