There are two issues at play here. One is the question of austerity versus stimulus as the best response to a protracted recession such as Europe has experienced. Paul Krugman has been making a good case that much more stimulus was needed (a Keynesian approach). Imposing austerity on countries like Greece and Spain that are already economically depressed only worsens their economies and thus leaves them even less able to pay debts.

The more interesting issue is the structure of the euro currency itself. The edition of my International Relations textbook that came out in 2000 before the euro came into effect put it this way: “The creation of a European currency is arguably the largest financial overhaul ever attempted in history, so nobody knows how it will really work in practice.” The problem was that “in participating states, fundamental economic and financial conditions must be equalized.” The solution was to restrict membership to those countries who could meet standards of financial stability. With newfound fiscal discipline, 12 nations qualified, including Italy, Spain, and Portugal near the end and Greece at the last minute. Later it turned out that Greece had cooked its national books to appear to meet euro requirements (debt-to-GDP and such). But then it turned out that others, even France, had fudged their data a bit, so everyone moved on.

The euro currency creates the same problem, actually, as Argentina and China each did at one time by pegging their currencies to the U.S. dollar. The peg, like the common European currency, takes away monetary policy from national leaders but leaves them in control of taxing and spending. When two countries diverge — as China and the United States did over years of rapid Chinese growth — the currencies couldn’t adjust to reflect these changes. Both China and Argentina eventually dropped the dollar peg.

Argentina suffered four years of recession in the late 1990s during the dollar peg period, and racked up $100 billion in debt. The IMF demanded an austerity program as the solution — again the opposite of Keynesian advice during a prolonged recession. In 2001 Argentina’s economy collapsed and in 2003 it defaulted on billions of dollars in debt, eventually giving foreign investors pennies on the dollar. Since then, Argentina seems to have gotten back on track economically. Perhaps Greece will end up on a similar path if it leaves the euro zone. But for now, whatever path Greece takes is going to be a painful one.

Greece is too small to sink the euro, but Spain or Italy might. Still, I am betting that the Europeans stumble through again and that the euro will be OK, with or without Greece.

The world’s biggest war is the fight of regular state armies against armed Islamist militant groups in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. This biggest war is far smaller than Vietnam was, and also considerably smaller than the recent Iraq War in terms of both military and civilian casualties. The war is winding down for the United States over the next year and a half, but the overall prospects in both Afghanistan and western Pakistan are unclear. We can hope that President Obama is right that a new day is dawning for the Afghans. The poor country has been at war more or less continuously since the Soviet invasion 33 years ago. Yet the problem of armed Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all its complexities and shifting alliances, seems no closer to solution overall than it was years ago.

Somalia is the second place in the world where fighting is taking place on a daily basis between armed forces that each control territory. After decades of civil war, with most of the country controlled by the Islamist militant group al Shabab, the official government with military clout from the African Union has finally extended its reach from a few blocks of the capital to encompass all of the capital, Mogadishu. Kenya’s armed forces entered Somalia from the south, and Ethiopia’s from the west, to push Shabab out of Somali territory. The capital is currently enjoying a resurgence. In the north, however, two autonomous regions, Somaliland and Puntland, add to Somalia’s unresolved problems (but are not at war).

In southern Sudan, the Sudanese government has for months been fighting rebels in South Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces who sided with the South Sudan side during the long civil war. The government appears to be committing war crimes against the populations there. Recently the regular armies of Sudan and South Sudan have been skirmishing along the border, though this has died down somewhat in the last week. Sporadic fighting still takes place in Darfur in the west of Sudan, where earlier war crimes led to an indictment of Sudan’s current president by the International Criminal Court. So Sudan has been seeing persistent armed conflict, though at the moment the fighting is small-scale and intermittent. There is a big danger of a big war between regular state armies, and the Security Council has told both sides to knock it off.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently a sizable militia that had theoretically integrated into the national army has recently split off and is fighting against the national army in the Wild East of the country, near Rwanda and Uganda. The leader of that militia is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. That conflict has escalated to active fighting, but it hasn’t gone on for long yet. Outbreaks like this have been taking place in eastern Congo (where elements of the genocide perpetrators from Rwanda still are holed up) for the past decade as the rest of the country has maintained a fragile but durable peace. Like Sudan, the fighting is low-level but persistent.

Syria is the fifth serious armed conflict at the moment. As the Free Syrian Army (FSA) gains strength and holds neighborhoods, the situation more and more resembles a civil war, though it’s still unclear what direction the country will go in. Most of the deaths to date appear to be from government violence against civilians, though the number attributable to fighting between the government and FSA is growing.

So these are the five places where sizable armed forces are actively fighting each other on a daily basis — Afghanistan/Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, eastern Congo, and Syria.

In a number of other countries, lower-level fighting takes places, at smaller scale and not as regularly. I count the following small but somewhat consequential armed conflicts on my “wars in progress” list:

Iraq (including Sunni-Shi’ite conflicts internally and Turkey’s battles with Kurdish guerrillas based in northern Iraq)

Yemen (Islamist militants hold territory in the south, plus a different conflict in the north)

India (government vs. Maoists, though one major group is now in a cease fire)

Colombia (long guerrilla war running out of steam),

Burma (or Myanmar, where one long-running ethnic conflict has a cease-fire but others continue)

Philippines (occasional fighting on remote islands to track down terrorists)

Thailand (some fighting with Islamist rebels in far south).

Nigeria (fighting sporadic in delta oil region but becoming more regular with Islamists in north)

Israel-Palestine (world’s longest-running armed conflict; low-level but persistent violence)

The Uppsala/PRIO data maintained in Sweden and Norway define wars and armed conflicts somewhat differently than I do, going down to lower levels of violence. They include both Russia (occasional terrorist attacks in the Islamic south near Chechnya) and Algeria (remnants of a nasty civil war with Islamists a decade ago). The Uppsala/PRIO data also include “global al Qaeda” as a war. The data also count conflicts with fewer than 100 battle deaths in a year, which generally do not make my list. They include the hunt for Joseph Kony in central Africa, and conflicts in Tajikistan, Iran, Mauritania, Ethiopia, and Peru. (Uppsala peace researchers writing in SIPRI Yearbook 2011 listed 15 “major armed conflicts” in 2010, close to my total “wars in progress” but not entirely overlapping.)

In addition, I had Libya on the list last year but have since dropped it, although fighting among town-based militias still occurs from time to time. To me it’s not organized enough to call a war, but you can argue it. There was also a war in Mali earlier this year where armed rebels who had fought for Gaddafi in Libya took over the north part of the country. It seems likely that fighting will start up again when the government recovers from an ill-advised coup and gets an African Union force together, but meanwhile there is a stable cease-fire and it’s not a war in progress in my view.

So that’s the world of armed conflict today:  Five small wars, nine smaller and more sporadic armed conflicts, several other borderline cases where intergroup violence bubbles up on occasion, and several more with casualty levels below 100 deaths/year.

I’ve been keeping a list of wars in my textbook International Relations for 20 years. The first edition showed 26 wars in progress worldwide in 1992, including some especially large and brutal ones such as in Angola, the former Yugoslavia, and Sri Lanka. The latest edition had 13 wars as of January 2012, and I’ve since added Syria for 14 total.

I’ve been pretty consistent in defining wars over time, and the decline in number by half does accurately reflect the peaceful trend of the past twenty years. Also the geographical shrinkage of the world’s war zone is evident in the changing map of wars in progress. Wars 20 years ago were dispersed, with 3 in Latin America, 2 in Europe, 2 in the former Soviet republics, 3 in the Middle East, 8 in Africa, 4 in South Asia, and 4 in Southeast Asia. Today’s map shows one war in Latin America (Colombia, quickly dwindling), none in Europe or the former Soviet republics, and all the rest packed along a single arc from Democratic Congo to Iraq and Afghanistan to Burma (and thinning out into small conflicts in Thailand and the Philippines). Warfare is literally shrinking across the face of the earth.

Sometimes the tone of political discourse implies that the world is awash in wars, violence is out of control across the world and getting worse and worse. If you look at the reality of wars today, as this post has, the picture is quite the opposite. The number of wars of the size and intensity known for most of history is now zero. Only a handful with ongoing serious fighting are taking place, and the list of even smaller armed conflicts barely makes it into double digits. Of the world’s 7 billion people, the number living in war zones is on the order of 100 million. You can quibble with the details, but clearly something like 98 percent of human beings are living in regions of peace today.

My reaction is not dictated by complacence about nuclear proliferation, which I consider about the most serious problem there is in the field of war and peace. North Korea’s ability to master nuclear weapons technology and share it with others for a price is a serious danger. Also, I worry about the North Korean regime in general since it is unpredictable, bellicose, and prone to acts of aggression — like sinking a South Korean warship two years ago, killing 46.

But let’s put a third nuclear test in perspective. First of all, it’s anomalous and just marks North Korea as a rogue, outlier state (as if we needed further evidence). That’s because the north’s two (about to be three?) nuclear tests are the only nuclear explosions set off in the current century, 11+ years. Even though the USA hasn’t ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the treaty might as well be in effect in terms of behavior. Nobody is testing anymore. Except North Korea.

The first nuclear test in 2006 did not surprise me. North Korea had operated a nuclear reactor and extracted plutonium, reportedly enough for something like 8-10 bombs. But would the bomb design work? One thing about dictators is that they’re somewhat paranoid about the people who work for them, so I can imagine Kim Jong Il wanting to know if the thing worked. They tested one and it fizzled. So the second test in 2009 was also not a surprise. They had to see if they’d corrected whatever was wrong. They had, and the explosion had a force about equivalent to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Since then, since North Korea had destroyed its reactor during one of the peace deals, it’s plutonium supply has been quite limited, and western governments would be happy to see it used up in tests, leaving a smaller arsenal each time.

Then it turned out North Korea had a separate program to enrich uranium for a bomb. They showed it off to a U.S. scientist in 2010, and he was impressed. But here’s the thing: Getting plutonium is easy but making a plutonium bomb is quite difficult, whereas getting enriched uranium is hard but making it into a bomb is easy. So having mastered a plutonium bomb, the North Koreans hardly need to test a uranium bomb to know it will work, if they have the uranium. As a matter of fact, when the United States invented atomic bombs in 1945, it tested the first plutonium bomb in New Mexico and dropped the second one on Nagasaki. U.S. leaders dropped the first uranium bomb on Hiroshima  without testing it. They knew it would work.

And North Korea knows their uranium bomb will work. So either they test it just for show, or they test another plutonium bomb while reducing their plutonium stockpile (albeit developing a smaller weapon more ready to mount on missiles). Either way, who cares?  It’s sabre-rattling.

As for long-range missiles, North Korea definitely broke agreements including UN Security Council resolutions when it test-fired one recently. But the test failed, as have previous ones. It still moves their program forward to test a missile and have it crash (lessons learned), but it’s not exactly a clear and present danger to the USA.

North Korea’s real threat is not its nuclear or missile programs but its artillery massed within range of Seoul. In the first hours of a new Korean War, the south’s capital would be flattened. However, in the next few days the north would be overwhelmed, invaded, and its regime overthrown. The new young leader Kim Jong Un would probably be dead. Dictators don’t like that. So it just seems very improbable that the north would go beyond smallish provocations and slip into a real war.

The international community should not freak out about the north’s behavior, especially if there is a nuclear test soon. Nobody will die in that test, it won’t lead to a war, and it’s irrelevant to the real problem of proliferation. Six-party talks on resolving the North Korean nuclear problem are still the best hope, and we should be probing whether, beneath the bluster, the new leader may want to play Let’s Make a Deal.

In recent days South Sudanese forces have either withdrawn, or been forced out of, the Heglig oil fields just north of the border. That is good, as the UN Security Council had demanded such a pullout. Despite South Sudan’s claims to the territory, the Permanent Court of Arbitration has ruled it on Sudan’s side and the international community supports that border. The international community also wants the south to halt military aid to rebels allied to the south but living north of the border. It wants the north to stop air and ground attacks against the south. The north has also waged a brutal campaign against those rebels, reminiscent at times of the genocide in Darfur in western Sudan, for which Sudan’s president remains under indictment by the International Criminal Court.

Last week I speculated that South Sudan might just want to destroy the Heglig fields so that Sudan couldn’t enjoy the oil revenue that South Sudan can’t have (the pipeline from the South through Sudan being shut down in a dispute about pricing). Now, satellite photos show significant damage to the Heglig fields following the South’s visit.

The north meanwhile has bombed a market in a border town in the South, the latest of a string of northern air attacks on the south.  One can only assume the South will get its hands on some of the thousands and thousands of portable anti-air missiles looted from Colonel Gaddafi’s stockpiles in Libya last year. That could somewhat restrain the north’s air dominance.

Most worrisome is the massing of ground forces against each other along the border. The tit-for-tat raids and skirmishes — at heart a bloody dispute over oil transit fees — could at any moment tip over into all-out war fueled by religious divisions (north Muslim, south Christian and animist) and by the fresh wounds of decades of civil war before last year’s independence.

The rhetoric out of the Sudanese government in recent days has gone red-hot, with the president calling the southerners “insects” and vowing regime change there by force, while a spokeperson said that it was a mistake to allow the south to become independent. This rhetoric aside, the fact is that the north did not manage to suppress the south by force over several decades of civil war, and will be even less able to do so now that the south is an independent member of the UN. (No member of the UN since its founding has ever been overrun and annexed by a neighbor.)

Folks, this is a terrible war that does not need to happen. The international community needs all hands on deck — the Chinese leaning on the north and the Americans on the south — to get both sides to comply with the recent UN Security Council mandate for a pullback 5 km from the border on each side. There is already a UN mission in South Sudan, but it is relatively small and weak in the circumstances. We should be rushing in more peacekeepers, equipment, and money to get stability back along the border. We should also be setting up a process including arbitration and financial monitoring to support the two sides in reopening the oil pipelines and sharing the revenue. The shared oil infrastructure gives the two countries a strong interest in cooperation, and we can only hope that with international support cooler heads will prevail and both countries can address their desperate poverty and not their threatening neighbor.

The need right now is to get the UN observers in as strongly and quickly as possible. Cease-fires are extremely fragile around the world, and in the past the UN has acted too slowly and war has reignited. That happened in Sierra Leone in 1997 when a cease-fire agreement ended a very brutal civil war. The UN was slow getting to the scene, months dragged on, and the agreement broke down as rebels attacked and army officers staged a coup. It was four years later before a stable peace arrived in Sierra Leone, backed up by a very successful peacekeeping mission.

In 1960, Ralph Bunche was able to assemble 3,500 peacekeepers and have them on the ground in the Congo in four days after a Security Council decision. He felt that speed of arrival was more important than quality or size of the force. The UN’s presence in Syria signals all Syrians that the Annan Plan is the legitimate blueprint for what should happen. The odds are stacked in some ways against the plan’s success, given the Assad regime’s past behavior, but the United States needs to throw its weight fully into using the UN in Syria and thus working with, not against, Russia in solving the Syria problem. A cease-fire is the most important first step, so maintaining and improving it is the top priority. Russia must press Syria hard to stop its use of violence.

The second place to worry about right now is South Sudan. Here the Americans, UN, and international community have been very involved for years in trying to bring about a peaceful separation of South Sudan from Sudan. The effort came to fruition with South Sudan’s indepence last year, but then relations between the two countries took a turn for the worse and have gone further downhill this year.

The first big conflict was about armed opponents of the Sudanese government, who sided with the south in the long civil war but whose communities ended up on the north side of the border in the peace agreement. Sudan harshly suppressed these rebellious areas and the UN was not large or strong enough to do anything. Some cross-border skirmishing resulted. Next South Sudan said that Sudan hadn’t paid for oil from the south that transits the north to get to an export port. The south shut off its oil production, depriving both itself and the north of desperately needed revenue. Meanwhile there is a border town whose status was not quite nailed down in the peace agreement, and where Ethiopian UN peacekeepers are now trying to keep a calm. And on top of that, the area is prone to large-scale cattle raiding among rival tribes, now involving automatic rifles and occasional massacres of hundreds of civilians.

Recently the two regular armies, north and south, have begun fighting directly. The south occupied an oil field just over the border, perhaps just to complete the shutdown of oil through Sudan. The north bombed a strategic bridge in the south. So while the level of fighting is still restricted to skirmishing, it is in imminent danger of escalating to all-out fighting.

On Friday the UN Security Council issued a statement demanding that South Sudan withdraw from the oil town it occupies in the north, and that both sides pull back military forces 5 km from the border. The president of South Sudan says he refused the “order” of the UN secretary-general to withdraw, responding that “I’m not under your command. … I’m head of a state, an independent state…”

Precedent is a cause for worry. After Eritrea split off peacefully from Ethiopia in 1993 (after 32 years of fighting), the two fell into conflict again and ended up fighting a years-long war that killed 50,000. It was artillery-duelling trench warfare over an insignificant disputed piece of territory in the middle of nowhere.

It was also the last time two regular state armies fought a sustained war in that way. In 2003 the U.S. and Iraqi armies fought for a few weeks, and in 2008 the Russian and Georgian armies fought for five days. Since then, the only fighting between regular state armies has consisted of short skirmishes that do not escalate. North Korea sank a South Korean ship, and later shelled civilians on an island. Thailand shelled Cambodian troops near a disputed spot on the border, with sporadic fighting between the two sides lasting for months (now abated after an unusual intervention by the World Court). Israel and the Lebanese army exchanged lethal fire on a very small scale not long ago. But on the great majority of days in recent years, no fighting took place anywhere in the world between the regular armies of the world’s states — a remarkable change from most of history.

Currently the fighting between the north and south in Sudan is ongoing, though still sporadic. Will it deescalate like Thailand and Cambodia, or escalate like Ethiopia and Eritrea? The UN is in South Sudan trying to support the peace agreement, but could use a lot more support. The United States should work to mobilize that support from the international community.

Note: Kofi Annan’s brilliant career at the UN is described in a chapter of my book Winning the War on War. And remember, pronounce it Annan to rhyme with cannon.

Start with the progress.

In Burma (Myanmar), the government, as part of a general move toward (some) democracy and liberalization, has vowed to reach cease-fires in its ethnic wars, which have dragged on for decades along the borders. The most important, the Karen (Karin) ethnic group, signed a cease-fire with the government in January and, after some further fighting, a stronger cease-fire agreement last Friday (photo above). However, another ethnic group, the Kachin, has been fighting the government since a 17-year cease-fire broke down last June. China has backed the Burmese government and bought a lot of wood, minerals, and other natural resources there. China’s interests are in secure trade through quiet border regions, which cease-fires promote. (China does worry that Burma’s reforms are drawing it toward the west; Britain’s prime minister will visit Burma this week.)

In India, some similar little armed conflicts have also dragged on for decades. India’s government periodically battles several secessionists in the northeast, several Maoist groups in the southeast, and Islamist militants in Kashmir in the west. A few weeks ago the government and one Maoist group began observing a cease-fire and the Maoists named three negotiators to talk with the government. The Kashmir conflict used to cause skirmishing between India and Pakistan’s regular armies, but that has become rare. Today Pakistan’s president even visited India for brief talks, the first such visit in seven years.

In both Colombia and Peru recently, the government side has killed the rebel leader and greatly reduced the potency of the insurgency. What remains in each country is a drug trafficking gang with a thin veneer of political ideology. Peru’s war essentially ended many years ago, with unimportant remnants left, but Colombia suffered for decades with serious armed conflict until the recent years of lower violence. A cease-fire in Colombia could be within sight this year.

Less hopefully, there is a cease-fire at the moment in Mali. Ethnic Tuareg rebels have come home heavily armed from Libya, where they fought for Gaddafi, and seized the northern part of Mali, which they have declared independent. The government, trying to recovered from what seems likely to be a short-lived coup, has not mobilized to take back the territory with the help of the armies of ECOWAS countries (the West African regional organization). When it does, the war presumably will resume. The Tuareg rebels, with their Gaddafi connection and some al Qaeda fighters in their midst, are trying to violate the top principle of African countries since independence — no secessions by force. If the rebels are smart, they will try immediately for negotiations to retract their independence idea and work for autonomy, with local authorities and the central government sharing revenue. Since I’m not sure the rebels are that smart, the war will probably resume as ECOWAS takes back northern Mali for the restored civilian government of Mali.

In Somalia, there is definitely not a cease-fire, but the capital has enjoyed a resurgence since the government pushed out al Shabab rebels (fundamentalist Islamists affiliated with al Qaeda) last August with military force provided by the African Union. The government/AU offensive intensified in January. Ethiopian forces pushed back Somalia’s rebels on their side of the country, while Kenya pushed into Somalia on their side. The war continues, but the progress is welcome after so many years. The famine in southern Somalia has ended, although famine risk remains.

In Syria, there was supposed to be a cease-fire tomorrow, but the Assad regime is worming out of it as many expected. Now they say they won’t stop the killing until the opposition signs a pledge to stop violence and foreign countries promise not to send arms and support to the Syrian rebels. The opposition Free Syrian Army should have called the government’s bluff and signed off to stop violence when the government does, but instead they refused to sign.  So that conflict grinds on, as do the diplomatic efforts of the UN/Arab League envoy Kofi Annan to solve it.

In Gaza, the militant group Islamic Jihad, which had been fighting with Israel recently, declared a cease-fire on Friday. The larger group Hamas, which controls Gaza, was already in a cease-fire with Israel and did not participate in the recent fighting (airstrikes on Gaza and rocket attacks on Israel).

In Libya, last week a cease-fire ended ethnic fighting that had killed about 150 people in a southern city. The war in Libya is over but violence still breaks out as militias from different towns jockey for control.

In Afghanistan, as far as is publicly known, peace talks never really got off the ground, and there is no prospect for a cease-fire in sight. Pakistan is similarly far from a cease-fire. Other, lower-scale conflicts grind along, as in southern Sudan, northern Nigeria, and (still) Iraq. But the world continues to inch toward peace as the 21st century unfolds.

In Senegal, meanwhile, a long drama of democracy ended six days ago when the incumbent president Abdoulaye Wade picked up the phone to call his challenger on election night and conceded defeat. This simple act, taken for granted in mature democracies, was anything but certain until the end. Wade had been in power for two terms, twelve years, and was running for a controversial third term. (The constitution limited him to two, but since that provision was passed after he first took office he said it did not apply, and the Constitutional Council led by his appointee agreed.)

Wade is officially 85 years old — many believe he is actually older — and seemed to be grooming his son to succeed him. All of this rubbed Senegalese the wrong way, and young people took to the streets in violent clashes with security forces before the election. In the end, Senegal’s traditions of democracy and non-dynastic succession carried the day. Wade has received great praise for accepting defeat graciously, and everyone hopes this will be a model for other long-term leaders who might prefer to cling to power.

Another long-standing African democracy, Mali, suffered a setback recently when young soldiers staged a coup — oddly, just before a presidential election was scheduled anyway. They claimed the government was not doing enough to combat a secessionist insurgency in the remote north of the country, where Tuareg ethnic rebels who had worked for Libya’s Gaddafi returned to Mali with their weapons after Gaddafi’s overthrow.

The results of the coup show democracy’s resilience these days. First, it was widely condemned by everyone from Mali’s neighbors to the great powers. Sanctions were to begin shortly if the coup leaders persisted. The presidents of nearby African countries tried to fly into the country to talk to the young coupsters, but couldn’t land after coup supporters blocked the runway. Meanwhile the coup had the opposite of the desired effect on the war in the north, since the Tuareg rebels took advantage of the chaos to go on the offensive and capture more territory and towns than ever. Currently they are attacking the ancient city of Timbuktu.

And today, under these pressures, the coup leaders backed down and declared that they would restore the constitution and return power to civilians. This process could still go astray, but what choice to they have really? The coup d’etat is so 20th century, and seems out of place in today’s world. Democracy will likely return soon to Mali. Dealing with the rebellion in the north will be much harder though — a reminder that wars that end in one country can pop up in another one, like Rwanda’s genocide triggering fighting in Democratic Congo, or Uganda’s “Lord’s Resistance Army” of Joseph Kony bringing murder and mayhem to Central African Republic and South Sudan.

So, although wars have not died out yet, democracy continues to strengthen worldwide. Three steps forward should be celebrated, even as we keep working to oppose murderous dictatorships in Syria and elsewere. Let’s give our moral and practical support to today’s democracy proponents, who have their work cut out for them — Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Senegal’s new president Macky Sall, and the civilians who will take back power in Mali.

Perhaps because of continuing ambivalence from Russia and China, the UN Security Council adopted its new position in a “Presidential Statement” agreed unanimously by the UNSC members but simply read as a statement by the UNSC president. It is weaker than a regular, numbered resolution, partly because it is not binding the way resolutions are. However, it does still show the parameters on which the great powers agree. As such, it is an overdue step in the right direction (and indeed just what I called for last week, although a regular resolution would have been better). Today UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon emphasized the Security Council’s unity and strong backing of the Annan plan.

Russia came around to supporting this position, watered down from earlier proposals that would have explicitly called for Syrian president Assad to step down, after the head of the international Red Cross went to Moscow to ask for help with the worsening humanitarian situation in Syria. Russia came out first in support of a daily two-hour cease-fire to allow for provision of humanitarian aid in areas of fighting. Later Russia expanded its support to include a cease-fire initiated by the government and followed by the opposition, instead of insisting on all sides’ ceasing simultaneously. The Security Council statement also calls for a transition to a more democratic government in Syria, which Russia also agreed to after it was made clear that military intervention or forced regime change were not on the international community’s agenda.

However, the actual path forward to such a transition is extremely challenging. It is widely assumed that a relaxation of violent repression by the Assad government would lead to an upsurge in opposition protests, and probably violent opposition as well. The situation also became more complex as three recent bombings (two in Damascus) appear to have been the work of al-Qaeda type Islamic militants, perhaps from next-door Iraq.

Notwithstanding all the problems, the UNSC statement represents a significant step forward. It “fully supports” a six-point Annan plan:

In recent months, the western powers have seriously misplayed their hand and set back the effort to find a solution. They pushed a resolution at the UN Security Council that called for President Assad’s ouster from power, bringing a Russian and Chinese veto (which Hillary Clinton then called “despicable”). That only emboldened Assad to ramp up more violence against his armed and unarmed opponents, shelling the city of Homs for a month. Russia was pushed into actually supporting Assad more closely, and a new irritant in U.S.-Chinese relations was created. The overwhelming support for a similar resolution in the UN General Assembly highlighted the isolation of the Russia-China-Iran-Syria group, but did nothing to help the Syrian people. In recent days the Syrian government has blasted the opposition out of Idlib in the north, and has turned to blasting Dara’a in the south, where the uprising began a year ago.

The United States and its friends — led by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states — have been considering arming the Syrian opposition, and there have been calls for a Libya-style military intervention by the west. Trouble is, none of these options are at all practical. Arming up Syria’s fragmented, sectarian, underpowered armed opposition would only lead to a long bloody civil war that probably would not dislodge the Assad regime in the end.

While Clinton and other western officials have ramped up their rhetoric and pledged their undying support for the Syrian people in their just cause, etc., the only effect has been to make the Syrian opposition think, wrongly, that someone is going to give them arms or airstrikes to hold off their government’s brutality. When it doesn’t happen, they rightly feel a bit betrayed.

The underlying problem here is a familiar one for the international community when dealing with governments that do wrong — do you work to change the government (Iraq, Libya, Cuba) or do you work to change its behavior (North Korea, Burma). Western powers have been repeating lately that Assad must go, but as long as Russia backs him and China opposes forced regime change, the west has no way to make that happen. A strategy to try to force or induce Assad to change his behavior, on the other hand, has a chance to unite the international community and might begin moving things in the desired direction. Even Russia says that Syria’s government must stop using violence on its people.

The right path forward, the only path, is through the United Nations. The UN has been working to put very modest measures in place, such as humanitarian aid and monitoring missions. A humanitarian assessment mission is to visit this weekend. Meanwhile the most respected, experienced diplomat in the world, former secretary-general Kofi Annan, has been negotiating with all sides to try to find a solution. He is to brief the Security Council tomorrow.

Ban Ki Moon on Tuesday said, “First end the violence, all the violence; second engage in an inclusive dialogue for a political solution; and thirdly, establish an access for humanitarian assistance.” He asked the Security Council to pass a resolution that (quoting Colum Lynch’s summary) “would call on Syrians to immediately halt the violence there, permit the delivery of humanitarian assistance to besieged communities, and endorse the efforts of his envoy, Kofi Annan, to start political talks between the government and opposition over the future of the country.” These are the right steps. Indeed, what else do we have that could work?

The key first step, as in quite a few other violent political conflicts around the world, is to achieve a cease-fire. The western powers should focus on getting Russia and China to press Assad to agree to one. Since all the great powers agree on the need for a cease-fire, especially by the Syrian government which is doing most of the firing, it is perfectly feasible to get the international community back together, pass a resolution aimed at behavior change rather than regime change, and get the United Nations united. Tomorrow’s Security Council meeting to hear Annan’s report is a chance to move forward.

As 200 international aid and human rights groups from 27 countries said in a statement today demanding a Security Council resolution against Syria’s violence, torture, and detention, “the international community must unite and help Syrians bring an end to the horror.”  Yes we can!

The first datapoint is a new report from the World Bank about the number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty, defined as less that $1.25 per day (in today’s dollars). In 27 years from 1981 to 2008, the ranks of the extreme poor fell from more than half the world population to less than a quarter. The lion’s share of this dramatic progress has come in China, where economic growth of about 10 percent annually has been sustained over these three decades, with the result that extreme poverty fell from 84 percent to 13 percent. Meanwhile in the world’s poorest region, sub-Saharan Africa, the rate had increased in the 1990s but fell from 56 to 48 percent just in 2002-2008.

In the past few years of economic turmoil and recession in the global North, the big countries of the South (China, India, Brazil) have kept growing robustly. This has kept commodity prices relatively high, unlike most past recessions in which lower demand forces prices down. The higher commodity prices favor exporting countries throughout the global South (as well as Russia, notably). Despite the recession in the North, and high food prices that have hurt the poor in the past few years, the World Bank preliminary data show the decline in extreme poverty continuing unabated through 2010. Charles Kenny argues that the World Bank data are actually too pessimistic — things are getting better even faster than reported. And the spread of technology like cell phones into poor countries is accelerating the progress.

Ten years ago the UN adopted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to assess progress in economic development and the provision of basic human needs in the global South. The first of the eight goals is to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 relative to 1990 levels. I figured it was an ambitious goal that we’d get halfway to, and that was probably good enough. Instead the world has met the goal in full, five years early. As I said, “amazing.”

Another MDG is to cut in half the number of people worldwide without access to safe drinking water, relative to 1990s when one quarter of humanity lacked that access. A new report by UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the 2010 number at 11 percent of the world — again meeting the MDG five years ahead of schedule, and again amazing. It translates to billions of people getting safer water over the past twenty years.

The third datapoint is a series of reports and findings in recent months that add up to tremendous progress in improving health in poor countries. For years UNICEF has promoted low-cost methods of saving children from preventable deaths, especially from disease. UNICEF says it is “off track” in meeting the MDG to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, and other MDGs such as sanitation also lag behind schedule (African leaders meet today to review progress on the MDGs). But sub-Saharan Africa’s under-five mortality rate still dropped by almost a quarter from 1990 to 2008. Maternal mortality has also made progress, though mostly outside Africa, in the past two decades.

Vaccination campaigns (boosted by the Gates Foundation’s efforts) have made relentless progress against measles, polio, and TB. “Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide,” reports the WHO. Polio is just being eradicated entirely from India, with tangible (if still a bit elusive) prospects of eliminating the disease worldwide, following the smallpox model. Rates of tuberculosis are falling, though slowly, and the terrible setback in global health from the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been reversed, with new infections now on the decline although years of pain are still ahead with tens of millions infected globally. Finally, malaria mortality rates have fallen by a quarter worldwide in the past decade, with mosquito netting and other programs reaching more and more people.

This is more than a humanitarian success. The economic growth in the global South that underlies much of this progress, and has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty in China alone in recent decades, is reshaping the world political economy. The list of biggest economies — total GDP measured at purchasing-power parity — now reads:  USA, China, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Brazil (which, at $2.3 trillion, has just passed the UK, France, and Italy which occupy spots 8-10 on the list). In other words, the global South now accounts for two of the top three, and three of the top seven, economies in the world. Small wonder that the old G7 (with four from Europe, two from North America, and Japan) has all but retired in favor of the G20 with representatives of the South.

Good news never seems to get as much attention as violence and disaster, so perhaps we should not be surprised that the monumental progress in reducing poverty made it only to the bottom of p.4 in today’s New York Times. As for the great report on safe drinking water, well there it is in the last paragraph of that story on p.4 about the World Bank poverty report. And the progress in public health worldwide does not seem to be newsworthy at all. But it really is.