Great power rivalry has forcefully reappeared. It is a jolt for anyone that follows international governance to watch the Russian actions in the Crimea and to hear the assertions and rationalizations by Russia’s President Putin concerning Russian annexation of the Crimea.
The historiography of World War I and the examination of the events that led to war on August 4, 1914 are enormous. Notwithstanding that very large historical and analytic record, the examination of the approach to World War I is in the process of receiving a new infusion as I suggested recently in The Flood of Remembrance – 100 Years Since the Great War approach the 100th anniversary of the war’s outbreak. Indeed this very article and the others that accompany it are part of this new look at an old issue.
With the recent turn of the calendar to 2014, we find ourselves closing in on August 4, 2014. That date records a civilization-shaking anniversary. On that date 100 years ago the European powers went to war – to be joined by the Ottoman Empire and Japan and then later, the United States. August 4th thus marks the commencement of World War I. Not surprisingly there is a growing flood of historical analyses and reflections on the ‘War to End All Wars’.
On the eve of the first summit between US President Obama and China’s new President Xi Jinping scheduled for the 7th and 8th at Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, California, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered an annual and important statement at the Shangri-La Dialogue. The speech entitled “The US Approach to Regional Security”, is not markedly distinct fromrecent speeches by the new Secretary of Defense or speeches by the National Security Advisor Thomas E Donilon – except maybe the announcement that the USS Ponce would be acquiring a solid-state laser to combat missiles and small speed boats, etc., – but still the imbalance between security and military and broader Asia-Pacific initiatives remains stark.
Now he is the Secretary of Defense giving a speech at a military and intelligence conference but the focus on grand strategy, tactical improvements and the strengthening of US allies and alliances is evident. And it didn’t long at all for the Chinese to respond. In the question and answer Major General Yao Yunzhu, the director of the Center for China – America Defense Relations at the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing took the opportunity to criticize the speech arguing: (1) it was not at all clear to the Chinese that the US wanted a “comprehensive” relationship with China; and (2) that the US rebalancing or pivot amounted to anything other than “containment” of China.
Now the “containment” refrain is a Chinese point of view that you cannot miss when discussing US-China relations with Chinese experts and officials. Indeed at the most recent meeting of the Harvard – Peking University dialogue called “The Challenge and Cooperation” held in Beijing in January 2013, the refrain of containment was persistent from our Chinese colleagues. Now the repeated charge is a bit much – not everything is about China – (indeed as our colleague Joe Nye asserted , “only China can contain China”) but a speech like Chuck Hagel’s certainly might well be interpreted in such a way.
So the speech is strong on alliance renewal and/or development – Japan, Korea and then allies further out in the Asia-Pacific, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and even Burma. It says little about China other than efforts to improve military-to-military contacts – and that is not inconsequential. But the speech is otherwise disappointing.
Secretary of Defense repeats some standard lines that warrant some reaction. First Hagel claims: “The Asia-Pacific rebalance is not a retreat from other regions of the world”. Well it may not be a retreat but it sure seems like an escape from the Middle East. I can’t imagine any US leadership not wishing a respite from the Middle East after Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless unproductive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And with budget constraints, I would think that some form of zero sum game is being played out here. The real dilemma for the US is that it may not be possible to disengage from the Middle East as it would like and the Middle east may require more resources than the US military currently wants to commit.
The second standard line is: “In support of this goal, America is implementing a rebalance – which is primarily a diplomatic, economic and cultural strategy.” Now again this is a strategic speech by the Secretary of Defense but a one paragraph description in an entire speech of what is claimed repeatedly by officials to be a diplomatic, economic and cultural strategy – I got to say doesn’t really cut it. Moreover in that one paragraph the Secretary of Defense raises the Trans Pacific Partnership – a new trade and investment initiative – which most Chinese analysts, in fact not even Chinese analysts will tell you is all about the exclusion of China.
In Asia, Secretary Hagel see a range of persistent and emerging threats, including:
- North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, and its continued provocations;
- Ongoing land and maritime disputes and conflicts over natural resources;
- The continued threat of natural disaster, the curse of poverty and the threat of pandemic disease;
- Environmental degradation;
- Illicit trafficking in people, weapons, drugs, and other dangerous materials – including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;
- And the growing threat of disruptive activities in space and cyberspace.
And these matters are exactly where a comprehensive US-China relationship can be built. If there are rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific and in the China-US relationship, here is the starting point.
But you can’t look to this speech for any guide to a more positive or more comprehensive relationship. Maybe such a relationship will become clearer at the upcoming Presidents’ meeting. Let’s watch!
Image Credit: channelnewsasia.com
I was wandering through the pages of a volume on the approach to war in August 1914. And the reason. We are now closing in on 100 years since the outbreak of World War I.
A significant number of historians and international relations specialists are casting their gaze back to this conflict that opens major war in the 20th century. My particular focus in examining these diplomatic volumes was an effort to cast a critical eye on the diplomacy of the period – or more precisely really the complex great power behavior – what was styled after the War as the ‘old diplomacy’. This diplomatic behavior emerged, so it seems, with Germany’s Bismarck and his diplomatic contemporaries in the early 1870s and continued through the alliances and alignments of this largely European diplomatic period that continued right up to its fateful end in August 1914.
Now I look back and am struck by intricacies and balancing in this classical period of balance of power diplomacy. My old LSE International History mentor James Joll, better than most, captured the complexity of this diplomacy in his co-edited volume with Gordon Martell:
The theory, if that is not too grand a term, by which contemporaries justified the alliance system was that it would maintain the balance of power. This phrase, which had been common in diplomatic language since the eighteenth century, could be interpreted both as an objective assessment of the actual military and economic strength of the powers and as a subjective evaluation by statesmen of where their own national interest lay. The idea was expressed by Sir Eyre Crowe of the British Foreign Office in a famous memorandum of 1907: “the only check on the abuse of political predominance has always consisted in the opposition of an equally formidable rival, or of a combination of several countries forming leagues of defence. The equilibrium established by such groupings of forces is technically known as the balance of power.” … Many statesmen and diplomats believed that the maintenance of the balance of power would itself prevent war by deterring an aggressor, either directly or by providing machinery by which, as Bismarck himself believed, one power could control its allies and stop them doing anything to upset the balance.
Now I am not suggesting that the classic balance of power diplomacy is what is needed today. I am not looking for something equivalent to a twenty-first century balance of power diplomacy, but the current diplomatic void is all too apparent. And I say that in reflecting primarily on US diplomatic leadership, or the absence thereof. So whether I am looking at global summitry, or Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan, or the Asian pivot, I keep looking for US diplomatic leadership but find it largely missing.
Now that might be acceptable if others were stepping up to the plate – whether the large emerging market states, or others but there is faint evidence of that either. US leaders are quick to confirm that there is no substitute for US leadership – but the means and US efforts seem pretty hard to discern unless we are talking about US military actions.
I raise this in the context of having just read President Obama’s National Defense University speech on counterterrorism delivered on May 23, 2013. I also acknowledge what may prove to be rather too optimistic presumptions on my part in early posts (“Determining Who’s on First“) where I mused on the US Asian pivot and in particular then Secretary Clinton’s assertion that this pivot was more about economic diplomacy. At the time I pressed the hope that we were likely to see a “more nuanced and sophisticated foreign policy”. As I said then:
US policy has been so militarized over the last decades and in particular by the initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan that many officials fail to recognize today the critical nature of economic diplomacy.
Whether US leadership does, or can do anything about it, is unclear. The explosion of the national security state following 9/11 may have been slowed by Obama rethinking over counterterrorism strategy, but diplomacy remains the “90 pound weakling” to America’s military muscle-bound leadership.
The President acknowledges the insubstantial provision of just one foreign policy – foreign aid:
Moreover, foreign assistance is a tiny fraction of what we spend fighting wars that our assistance might ultimately prevent. For what we spent in a month in Iraq at the height of the war, we could be training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists. That has to be part of our strategy.
Well Obama is right but what is the likelihood of that? And as for greater diplomatic engagement, here is the sum total of the President’s thinking:
Targeted action against terrorists, effective partnerships, diplomatic engagement and assistance – through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large-scale attacks on the the homeland and mitigate threats to American overseas.
There has been a fair discussion of the diffusion of power away from the United States and the rise of new leadership – creating the conditions for a “G-Zero World” according to Ian Bremmer or “No One’s World” by Charlie Kupchan. But I’d say it’s far less the structural changes but the inordinate US focus on war and counterterrorism that is leaving international politics without leadership.
There is clearly a strategic gap. Let’s see if Obama can shift to a more nimble strategic leadership. The first test may well come when Obama sits down with China’s new President Xi Jinping in California at the Sunnylands Estate on June 7th and 8th. Let’s look closely.
Image Credit: NDU.edu
As a descant to the US-China relations melody, there is a rising debate at least among the cognoscenti over US global leadership. A recent addition to that debate is a piece from International Security brought to you by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth of Dartmouth and John Ikenberry of Princeton. The piece, “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment” appears in the most recent winter edition of the Journal. The examination in the Journal is one of assessing America’s grand strategies – will it be retrenchment or the continuation of US global engagement. The authors somewhat curiously refer to an article that examines US policy in Asia by Harvard’s Joseph Nye when he was away from Harvard and at the time the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (it is curious if only because it is approaching twenty years ago that the piece was written and refers to a largely forgotten Clintonian – Bill not Hillary – report – “United States Security Strategy for the East Asia Pacific Region”). Events and the evolution of countries – especially China – has in my opinion significantly altered the context of the article, though its conclusions may still be valid.
In any case the authors examine US grand strategy first declaring US overlapping core strategy objectives are:
For good measure though the authors recognize that “security commitments are a necessary condition of US leadership, and that leadership is necessary to pursue the strategy’s three core objectives. Without the security commitments, US leverage for leadership on both security and nonsecurity issues declines.” There of course is the heart of the matter that US leadership/hegemony/primacy – call it what you will – remains crucial to achieving the objectives – that is US national objectives, a stable world economic and political order. Here a reference to the 1995 Nye article is indeed helpful:
The United States is committed to lead in the Asia-Pacific region. Our national interests demand deep engagement. For most countries in the region, the United States is the critical variable in the East Asia security equation. The United States is not the world’s policeman, but our forward-deployed forces in Asia ensure broad regional stability, help deter aggression against our allies, and contribute to the tremendous political and economic advances made by the nations of the region.
Now it is evident from the title of their article that three strongly favor “continuation of the globally engaged grand strategy.” The authors in fact declare early on that such an approach is “a wholly reasonable approach to pursuing narrow US interests in security, prosperity, and the preservation of domestic liberty.” The article then takes a long examination of the various arguments for retrenchment (I will take a look selectively at their description and evaluation of retrenchment in a follow on piece) and concludes that the cost/benefit favors continuing US engagement – read that as global leadership. Indeed the authors suggest that critics of deep engagement overstate the costs and understate the security benefits. As the authors conclude:
Advocates of a clean break with the United States’ sixty-year tradition of deep engagement overstate its costs, underestimate its narrow security benefits, and generally ignore its crucial wider security and nonsecurity benefits. Many moreover, conflate the core grand strategy of deep engagement with issues such as as forceful democracy promotion and armed humanitarian intervention – important matters, but optional choices rather than defining features of the grand strategy. … In the end, the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self interested, leading power in the United States’ position to do.
So that ‘point finale’ of their article may indeed be right, but there are nagging concerns that accompany this favorable nod at continuing deep engagement. As pointed out earlier, the changing context in Asia – the rise of China – and the more recent assertive China posture in the region challenge US leadership. While the bilateral security relationships are a vital part of US deep engagement in the region, it is not an answer to how to build a competitive but still non-rivalrous relationship with this rising power. Certainly in Beijing last month most argued for building a collaborative relationship but with a few exceptions (Stephen Walt and Nicholas Burns were exceptions as pointed out in an earlier blog post here “Looking at the ‘World’ with Two Lens“) there are few clues as to how do this.
More broadly there is little in deep engagement that extends beyond the primacy/hegemonic approach. While there is a expressed desire to build the institutional structures especially of the global economy, but also the regional settings, deep engagement remains locked in primacy. There is little that describes a more global governance, multilateral approach. There are various nods to greater multilateralism – but ‘realistically’ for the advocates it remains an exercise about US leadership – or not. So more collective leadership is barely a topic of discussion in deep engagement. It is this aspect of deep engagement that is ‘broken’ – or never attended to – and needs far more intellectual and policy examination.
Image Credit: bostonglobe.com
[Editors Note – Arthur was another expert that joined the Harvard-Beida Conference earlier in the month.]
The disjuncture between economic and military structure is not a new phenomenon. The Cold War, certainly from the early 1960s on, consisted of military bipolarity and economic multipolarity (at a minimum, the end of the Bretton Woods order in the early 1970s signaled the end of US economic hegemony).
The post Cold War has seen military unipolarity and economic multipolarity. In each case, economic multipolarity has meant that there have been powers capable of exerting substantial economic power but not militarily capable of global power projection. In a sense, the current case of China is similar. China is a global economic power, with an economic impact that extends to every continent, but militarily only a regional one.
The critical difference today is the alignment pattern. In the past, the other centers of global economic influence were security allies of the US and dependent on the US for their military security. Now, China is not part of a US security sphere, and the concern is that it will have in its economic orbit states that have security links to the US. This raises a concern that did not exist in earlier periods, that of an economic power (China) that would use its economic leverage to achieve geo-strategic objectives antithetical to the US and its allies. The result could then be economic appeasement on the part of US allies.
One place to look for this consequence is the current financial troubles of the government of Vietnam. Will acceding to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea be the price of a Chinese bailout of Vietnam?
Well I am looking forward with anticipation to a conference here in Beijing that begins this evening. Now I didn’t exactly count on clean air in Beijing – but I didn’t expect the most unbelievable dirty air I’ve ever seen. It is hard to believe that China’s leaders – who live in this sprawling capital – wouldn’t pull out all the stops to work on pollution reduction here and in all the very polluted cities across the nation after this weekend of dirty dangerous air in the nation’s capital.
Anyway back to the conference. This is a Harvard University (The Kennedy School and the Belfer and Ash Centers) and the Institute of China-US People to People Exchange, Peking University. This is the latest in a series of encounters between experts from the US and from China – with one thrown in from Canada – me – concerned with the US-China relationship. The subtitle of the conference tells it all: “How Can Rising China and Adjusting US Manage Their Relations and Deal with Global Challenges?”
In preparation some of my Harvard and Princeton colleagues prepared a series of memorandum on the relationship. A particularly interesting piece was prepared by Charles Maier “Ambiguous Lessons from History”. Charlie’s principal point is that while there is something he, and others call a “Thucydean Model” – where a rising power raises fears in the hegemonic power. The growth of the new power, in this model, makes war inevitable. Charlie acknowledges the hegemonic war thesis but suggests that it is in fact the entangling alliances that leads to the prospect of war between these powers. As Charlie argues:
They were locked into a logic of bipolar rivalry such that implicitly any change in the balance of power or the “corollary of forces” must have appeared a threat to both sides.
It is this structural feature – alliance loss or gain, rather than misperceptions that led to conflict – or as he says “they arose from the geometry of the overall situation.”
What this in turn suggests is a need for analysts to examine the properties of the international/regional context to determine the shift to a form of balance of power and away from the previous hegemony. This is an examination undertaken by, among others, our colleague John Ikenberry from Princeton who urges us in “Source of Order and Great Power Restraint in East Asia” to look at: “What are the sources of great power restraint in a region that is increasingly less defined by America’s hegemonic presence?” Now John raises the possibility of a turn to a balance of power, though he suggests that this is not what has yet occurred. It is instead a “partial balance of power order.”
But a look at the regional and global dynamics of East and Southeast Asia seem to me to suggest something very different. Probably the best short examination is that proposed very recently in the EastAsiaForum by Don Emmerson an Asian specialist from Stanford University who heads the Southeast Asia Forum in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Applying a lens that includes ASEAN and economic relationships puts a rather different spin on the evolution of relationships in the region. In my remarks I will focus on the many FTAs including in particular the EU initiatives in Asia. But more on that soon.
Credit Image: Peking University
So let’s stipulate – I like acting like a US lawyer – that the US grand strategy of the second term seems fixed on Asian rebalancing or a ‘Pivot’, and that we have at least some acknowledgement in the halls of Washington that the new grand strategy is as much about economic diplomacy as political and military actions, as I wrote in the last blog post – ‘Determining Who’s On First‘. Well how does this then line up the US-China relationship in the face of new leadership in Beijing? That requires us to look at both the domestic and foreign policy stance of the new leadership.
On the domestic front are we likely to see significant economic and even political reform? On the foreign policy front are we likely to see a more reflective and restrained Chinese strategy in the Asia Pacific in the light of the need to build or rebuild economic alliances and wider collaborative behavior?
Now a quick examination of likely domestic policy moves. First, let’s dispel the impossible. There was little likelihood, asymptotically approaching zero I’d say that these new leaders – from this generation of leaders – would on their own adopt democratic political reform. As China expert Susan Shirk put it recently in the FT.com in the run up to the new Standing Committee choices:
This is a question of legitimacy and popular support for the party,” says Susan Shirk, a US expert on Chinese politics put it ft.com in “China wrestles with democratic reform (November 7, 2012): “They need to show that they’re moving in the direction of democracy but they are very fearful of losing actual control.
So their might be musings of reform – in fact there were such thoughts expressed by some in the old Standing Committee, but actual reform – not likely. To seemingly underscore this, the two candidates most likely to favor political reform – Li Yuanchao the head of the Organization Department (and an early attendee to Harvard’s Kennedy School) and Wang Yang the Communist Party Chief of Guangdong Province – were both left off the Standing Committee. As Iain Mills, a freelance writer in China saw it:
Also of note was the public reappearance of ex-President Jiang Zemin alongside one of the instrumental figures in the Tiananmen crackdown, ex-Premier Li Peng. Although Jiang had taken on the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and secured China’s accession to the World Trade Organization during his presidency, in terms of social and economic policy, the influence of this generation of leaders would seem to be highly retrograde. Jiang loyalists took senior positions in the Central Military Commission, while conservative factions appear to have blocked the promotion of reform-minded officials such as Wang Yang.
Okay so little likelihood of serious political reform. But what of significant economic reform. Certainly the previous leadership including Premier Wen Jiabao pointed to the need to tackle the growing economic power and corruption of China’s State-owned Enterprises. Now of course The Premier only began to talk about this at the twilight of his career. And it would appear that the collective message, including from the new Chairman Xi Jinping, is a broadly anti-corruption message. Unfortunately this message is conservative and not reformist. The anti-corruption message is an internal Party message to root out bad guys -if they can be found – and not indicative of major structural reform. Again Iain Mills reflections on economic reform seems apt:
It should also be noted that the renewed pre-eminence of conservative elements on both the Standing Committee and the Central Military Commission comes ahead of potential changes of the heads of key civilian institutions including the People’s Bank of China, the state-run power sector and the National Social Security Fund. How these institutions will be aligned and function under the new administration remains unclear. The broader picture, however, seems one of an economic reform agenda that will continue at a gradual pace, while hopes of major political reform have been pushed out to 2017 at the earliest.
Finally, what then of foreign policy action? Now it was positive that the new Chairman took over the the Central Military Commission. It is evident that foreign policy has suffered from a number of voices. China’s behavior in the Asia Pacific has seemingly become more assertive. The pattern has yet to end. A new policy to take effect on January 1st provides that border patrol police will have the right to board and expel foreign ships entered disputed waters in the South China Sea. China has also begun to issue new visas that includes a picture including disputed territory in the South China Sea. Various South China states including the Philippines and Vietnam have publicly objected to the new visas and refused to validate them. Officials seem to be continuing policies that reflect the assertive China strategy in the South China Sea, not to mention the East China Sea. In the face of little moderation, China policy, as described by Mills, appears to continue to be an assertive nationalist approach:
Beijing has often been unable to speak with one voice on major external events and has offered no clear articulation of how it would operate as the largest power in Asia. This vacuum, coupled with still-fervent nationalist sentiment in many quarters, appears to have been filled by those who favor a more forceful approach to enforcing China’s foreign policy objectives.
The assertive China approach has driven a number of ASEAN states to encourage a US return to Asia; it has even enabled Japan to play the military card with a number of Asian players. There is little to hinder the new leadership if it chose to moderate its stance in the Asia Pacific. Let’s watch closely for a more collaborative China approach of the new China leadership.
Image Credit: Reuters
Defining a contemporary grand strategy for the United States that is no longer hegemony but is not mere traditional balance of power, strategists have turned their attention to: “offshore balancing”. Bizarrely this grand strategy has attracted a variety of strategists from across the ideological spectrum – from neo-conservatives through offensive realists and realists all the way to liberals. So what is this grand strategy that has become increasingly offered up for the United States – and why has it become attractive to such a variety of strategists?
One of the longtime proponents of offshore balancing is Christopher Layne currently at Texas A&M. Layne poses this grand strategy (see: “Offshore Balancing Revisited” The Washington Quarterly Vol.25, N0.2 (Spring, 2002) as an alternative to hegemony. As he suggests:
Offshore balancing is predicated on the assumption that attempting to maintain US hegemony is self-defeating … Offshore balancing is a grand strategy based on burden shifting, not burden sharing. It would transfer to others the task of maintaining regional power balances; checking the rise of potential global regional hegemony; stabilizing Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf/Middle East. In other words, other states would have to become responsible for providing their own security and for the security of the regions in which they live (and contiguous ones), rather than looking at the United States to do it for them.
Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast has proposed that offshore balancing emerges “when the money and bravado have run out.” And realist Stephen Walt from Harvard makes the same point:
The bottom line is clear and unavoidable: the United States simply won’t have the resources to devote to international affairs that it had in the past. … The era when the United States could create and lead a political, economic and security order in virtually every part of the world is coming to an end.
So if I can put it indelicately, what offshore balancing is really is, is “hegemony on the cheap”. Thus Walt argues in “The End of the American Era” articles:
Instead of seeking to dominate these regions directly, however, our first recourse should be to have local allies uphold the balance of power, out of their own self-interest. Rather than letting then free ride on us, we should free ride on them as much as we can, intervening with ground and air forces only when a single power threatens to dominate some critical region. For an offshore balancer, the greatest success lies in getting somebody else to handle some pesky problem, not eagerly shouldering that burden oneself.
So whether it is from the right or the left the attraction is there – to maintaining stability but without the US shouldering the burden. The strategy certainly has been advocated for the United States in the Middle East and in East Asia.
Walt has provided a short list of core principles (see “Rethinking US Grand Strategy: The Case for ‘Offshore Balancing'” PowerPoint Lecture August 2009):
So there we are. Now historically we’ve seen offshore balancing employed particularly by the British in Europe – more on this in the near future. But it is evident that strategists are contemplating employing this strategy vìs a vìs especially Rising China in East Asia.
But how realistic is the strategy? On first review this does not seem an advantageous approach notwithstanding the promise of less cost – highly attractive in age of austerity.
First, while shifting the burden to allies may seem attractive, it creates for lack of a better term a principal-agent problem. Simply, it is much more difficult to try and influence others to do the balancing that otherwise you’d be doing yourself. Allies may not do it leading you to have act – possibly catch up. Or allies may prove to be too aggressive raising prematurely the real possibility of conflict that might draw you in, notwithstanding your desire to lower the temperature in the region and avoid conflict.
Secondly, and this is evidently the case in East Asia, your allies may have frictions with each other rendering it extremely difficult to obtain the united push back against the rising power that you’d like. In East Asia the United States has security relations with both Korea and Japan. But we find that the two are at loggerheads over the Liancourt Rocks – the Dokdo’s in Korea and Takeshima in Japanese. In the South China Sea the United States is relying largely on Vietnam and the Philippines. Here there are significant questions around the military capabilities of these “allies” in the contest with China.
So what appears to be beneficial theoretically, may not prove to be in practical diplomacy/security terms. More on this soon.
Image Credit: Clker.com