Keeping ethnic Russians Russian

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Russia has slammed a bureaucratic door on foreign-based adoption agencies. The article posits anti-Americanism as a reason. However, they hint at an underlying rationale.

For US adoptive parents, Russia ranks third (after China and Guatemala) as the country of origin for the most orphans adopted. American families adopted 3,706 Russian children in 2006, down from 4,594 and 5,865 in the past two years...
A year ago, there were 89 accredited foreign-based adoption agencies; this week, the last of them saw their accreditation expire...
Kremlin-sponsored efforts to increase adoptions by Russian families are beginning to work, some experts say. For the past two years the numbers of domestic adoptions have exceeded foreign ones, though both combined remain a tiny sliver of the total number of Russian orphans.

Nationalists could not be sponsoring Kremlin-backed action against foreign-based adoption agencies to embarrass Putin, as Kremlin backing implies that consent on the part of Putin, given his successful concentration of power. Instead, the more like rationale is Putin is acting to stem the population decline in ethnic Russians, as he promised last year.

Russia's postcommunist demographic woes ... have become such a hot topic of late that President Vladimir Putin made it his highest priority during his May 10 state-of-the-nation address...
Fears over potential consequences are wide-ranging -- that the country won't be able to generate enough young men to fill the ranks of its military, that the economy will not be able to sustain itself, and that immigration could drastically alter the country's ethnic and religious makeup...
... Putin prioritized the steps the state must take to rectify the problem.
"First a lower death rate; second, and efficient migration policy; and third, a higher birthrate," Putin told the nation during his address.

Therefore, keeping Russian children out of the hands of American adoptive families is surely being framed as a matter of national security. Blocking foreign adoptions dovetails right into "migration policy".

Wal-Mart as 4GW actor

Recently, some news came out regarding Wal-Mart's intelligence program.

A former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker said he was part of a large surveillance operation that included snooping on employees, stockholders and others, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday.
Security worker Bruce Gabbard was fired last month after 19 years with the company for intercepting a reporter's phone calls, the paper said...
Gabbard said that as part of the surveillance, the retailer infiltrated an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting last year and deployed monitoring systems to record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network.

It's clear that the nation-state no longer has a monopoly on intelligence and security operations. It's not impossible that Wal-Mart or similarly capable organization may in the future gain the direct capacity to engage in fourth generation warfare. The example of Chiquita may serve as a warning of what multinationals risk if they do not acquire such capability: having to pay protection to regional 4GW actors.

... federal prosecutors said the Cincinnati-based company and several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the [AUC].
The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia’s civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country’s cocaine exports. The U.S. government designated the right-wing militia a terrorist organization in September 2001.
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the [ELN], and the leftist [FARC], as control of the company’s banana-growing area shifted.

Iranian nationalism as a defensive tactic

It's been claimed that nationalism drives national policies in Northeast Asia.

One common characteristic of nationalism in Northeast Asian countries is that it serves to soothe the inferiority complex of people in the region, a South Korean scholar at a Chinese university claimed on Tuesday...
Korean nationalism is a unique combination of an inferiority complex and national chauvinism, according to Park.
``Korean nationalism is conservative and self-defensive due to its past experience of being invaded and suppressed by other nations,'' he said.
``But on the other side, Korean people are also proud of their long history including its heritage from the three kingdoms period, and the fact that it was the only ancient tribe of Northeast Asia not to be integrated by the Chinese,'' Park said. He added its economic success since the 1960s has intensified that pride.

By extension, it's worth observing how much Iran's apparent inferiority complex is driving their current foreign policy.

The Foreign Office is said to be considering offering Iran a way out without losing face over the crisis...
Attempts have backfired in recent days to "shame" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime into admitting it was in the wrong after the Ministry of Defence released co-ordinates of where the UK team were picked up...
Mr Ahmadinejad, the Iran president, said on Saturday that Britain had not reacted in a "logical or legal" way. "The British government, instead of apologising and expressing regret over the action taken, started to claim that we are in their debt," he said...
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, MP, the former foreign secretary, called for pressure on the Iranians, but said the threat of sanctions should have been put "privately" first, "because otherwise the Iranians are pushed into a humiliating climbdown".

Nationalism seems to be key to maintaining support for the current Iranian presidency despite the weak employment conditions and the burgeoning economic growth demands of a population boom entering early adulthood.

A report commissioned by the Management and Planing Organization (MPO) and Iran Youth Organization (IYO) released on Sunday predicted that if the annual unemployment rate of 13.2 percent holds up then the jobless rate among 15-29 age group will reach 52 percent within two years [i.e., by 2006].

The US administration should not have been surprised by the effectiveness of their economic offensive.

More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September...
The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran's ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports...
Iranian importers are particularly feeling the pinch, with many having to pay for commodities in advance when a year ago they could rely on a revolving line of credit, said Patrick Clawson, a former World Bank official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The scope of Iran's vulnerability has been a surprise to U.S. officials, he added.

My current prediction is that the U.S. administration will take advantage of the current crisis to intensify the economic offensive against Iran in the hope that disaffected Iranian youth will set effect regime change. It's less clear how nationalism will complicate that, aside from the usual risk of any opposition being identified with the U.S.