A BOOK REC FROM TOM

Tom Barnett pointed out this tome to me in the comment section of his blog:



As I have not read a new economics book since Freakonomics came out, I'll grab this the next time I run over to Border's ( despite Col. Frans Osinga's Science, Strategy and War, sent courtesy of Shane, sitting there, staring me in the face, taunting me). Idoru needs to be finished too and...

So many books. So little time.

Labels: barnett, book, economics, reading, shane deichman, william gibson

  ¶ 6:33 PM 2 comments

  RECOMMENDED VIEWING

A little change of pace.



Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett at TED (TED videos are usually outstanding - someday I'll have to finagle an invite to TED). Tom's presentation skills have really been honed in the sense of taking insider mil-issues and getting the concepts across to a lay audience, slick and fast, on their level, without oversimplifying. It's an artful trick that takes considerable practice to master, much less make look easy.



Conversations With History, featuring Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens is always an erudite interview, this is no exception.



On a lighthearted note, some pedagogy from the masters of slapstick. ;o)

Labels: barnett, conversations with history, hitchens, recommended viewing, TED, Three Stooges, youtube

  ¶ 7:30 PM 2 comments

  ENTERRANS AMONG THE KURDS

Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has journeyed to the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq a second time on Enterra business. He's had several posts reflecting on his experiences working in " the other Iraq" or about the Mideast in general.

Probing the Edges of Globalization

Lessons from the Edge of Globalization: Part 2, Day 1

Labor Reform in the Middle East ( Dubai focus)

Islamic Finance

Kurdistan's clan-based rulers and Peshmerga leaders have been exceptionally deft players in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, managing to have excellent relations with the United States, Iran and ( allegedly on the quiet) Israel. Quite a neat trifecta. Only Turkey remains a serious problem, deeply fearful of Kurdish revanchism, PKK terrorism and having assumed the role of protector of the Turcoman minority in Iraq ( ironically, reprising the posture that imperial Russia once assumed toward Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire that the Sublime Porte found so offensive).

To be a state or not to be a state, a choice the Kurds must make. One of the few things most countries can agree on is that international borders are no longer up for grabs via the use of force - Europe's peace was built on the permanence of German borders and the Europeans are not going to reopen that topic, even in principle. The road to sovereignty, independence and NATO membership for Kurdistan runs only through Ankara but it requires strategic choices not seen in Mesopotamia since 1919.

Labels: barnett, deangelis, enterra, international law, iraq, kurdistan, mideast, turkey

  ¶ 8:29 PM 0 comments

  THE STRATEGIC THOUGHT DEFICIT

Dr. Barnett, opining yesterday on the recent NYT op-ed on Kennan:

"The dearth of strategic thinking reaches a new low, or maybe this is just a Kennan scholar pre-hawking his new book.

Now we get the out-of-time argument that containment is the answer on radical Islam.

It's not much of an argument, but rather a decent rehashing of Kennan's thinking on the Sovs. The problem here, of course, is that al-Qaida doesn't translate well to an authoritarian empire already in existence.

Another problem, which I flayed at length in PNM, is that global historical forces are moving in a direction very different from that of the late 1940s and early 1950s. We're not in some bilat standoff of camps with little dynamic interchange between them. We're watching a consolidation period unfold following a massive expansion of globalization, one that's simultaneously accompanied by its further expansion thanks to the huge resource draw from rising Asia. "

We have a severe shortage of Kennans these days. While of course, there was only one Kennan writing the Long Telegram there were also the Stimsons, Marshalls, Achesons, Nitzes, Forrestals, Vandenbergs, Lovetts, Dulles', McCloys, Wohlstetters, Kahns and many others who came before and after Kennan who made their own contributions to the development of the Containment strategy. Our diplomatic and national security bench was deep in those days and often, these statesmen brought real experience in international finance, logistics and linguistics to the table ( Wohlstetter and Kahn were the cutting edge of the academic -strategist wave that replaced the Wall Street and Railroad company lawyer generation).

Today, we see most of our big picture and thinkers outside of government and often academia as well, writing books, giving speeches or building private sector companies. Tellingly, the most innovative policy of Bush's second term was developed not by a White House aide or a Cabinet secretary but by General David Petraeus - and his counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq was only accepted by the powers that be out of political and military desperation. The Democrats are no better, having had essentially no new policy ideas in almost two generations and a deep desire to ignore the existence of foreign policy altogether.

In part, this is a generational problem. Not only are the Boomers an amazingly self-centered lot, endlessly obsessing on ( and trying to re-live) the political traumas of their now distant youth, but the statesmen among them cut their teeth on the Cold War, bipolar, pre-Globalization, rigidly hierarchical world and are, for the most part, unwilling to revisit their anachronistic assumptions. There are exceptions but these people are usually outliers in some way, personally or professionally.

We may need to construct our defenses for the 21st century by retooling civil society to become more resilient, adaptive and dynamic - for the short term, our governing class may be a lost cause.

Labels: 20th century, 21st century, barnett, diplomacy, foreign policy, george kennan, history, national security, society, strategy

  ¶ 7:18 PM 11 comments

  BOOKS ARE SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD OF LIFE



"I cannot live without books"
- Thomas Jefferson

First, I'd like to thank Dr. Barnett and Dan of tdaxp for the kind remarks and links the past few days. Both men have often provoked me to new thoughts or reconsidered views and it is nice to know that I can return the favor on occasion.

Tom had a post Sunday entitled " Why the grand strategist/visionary needs the discipline of books" that echoed something I've long believed. Something Lexington Green, in his enviably book-lined home, probably would agree with,

a) First, there's really no substitute for a good "hard" book.

b) Fiction becomes a guilty pleasure.

Perhaps, the physicists and mathematicians among us ( Von, Shane, Wiggins) will put a word in for the elegance of the mathematical equation, but for me, the supremacy of the book reigns without a rival. As I reflect on the evolution of my thinking as a teen and an adult, inevitably there are many books and a handful of people who leap to mind. Many, many, books and very, very, few people.

As much as I love history, the best reading I have done, in terms of determined, sustained, thought, involved philosophy and economics - Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Keynes, Galbraith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Machiaveli, Kuhn -because it trained my mind to accept the discipline of formal logic. Logic is invaluable for a rational mind but wisdom is discerning logic's limitations of functioning within paradigms and that the paradigms themselves are tools for the mind to understand a part of reality; and not one of these paradigms is sufficient to encompass the whole. You have to synthesize, learn, adapt - there is no point at which you " rest" or become complacent with your expertise.

The joy is in the journey and not in the destination.

Labels: barnett, book, cognition, economics, education, horizontal thinking, personal, philosophy, recommended reading, tdaxp

  ¶ 9:27 PM 7 comments

  BREZHNEVIAN IRAN


The Soviet Khameini ?

Dr. Barnett has often used the analogy of the Soviet Union under the long rule of Leonid Brezhnev to describe the current Iranian regime:

"This article aptly captures what I saw similarly in the USSR in the summer of 1985: most people simply opt out. They've figured out how to make their private lives decent through a thriving black market and off-line alternative lifestyle and in their public lives they pretend to obey so the mullahs can pretend to rule.

This is the dropped-out mentality Gorby ran into in the USSR with his perestroika: basically everyone told him to go shove it cause they weren't in the mood and there was nothing he could offer them. Thus, the Sovs' sad decline pushed that train right off the tracks.

Watch Ahmadinejad's hard-liner-approved reformist successor try to revitalize the masses through such tactics after Ahmadinejad's crackdown tactics achieve nothing but more opting out in the face of the accelerating economic collapse.

Then watch the real change begin."

I'm not up to date on the details of the Iranian economy, which is ( at a minimum) riven by underemployment, a youth demographic bulge, systemic corruption and underinvestment in critical sectors. Chances are, the Iranian economy, despite it's problems and governmental mismanagement, have not reached the craptacular proportions of decreptitude that prevailed prior to the Soviet implosion. Nevertheless, some of the Soviet-Iranian parallels are striking:

Highly factionalized, undemocratic, leadership
Trend toward gerontocratic ruling class
Opaque decision-making process for strategic problems
Power is both centralized in government hands yet diffused at top levels, creating paralysis
Increasing reliance upon (and expansion of) paramilitary security forces to secure rule
Tightening of political censorship and "public morals" campaigns to appease ideological hardliners
Public alienation from and cynicism toward official state ideology
Rising nationalism separate from state ideology that both supports and undermines the regime
Rampant corruption at all levels of society
Diplomatic isolation
Dual centers of power in foreign affairs
Ideological hardliners in key positions to control security services rather than pragmatists
Critical economic questions are repeatedly ignored in favor of factional interests or ideological concerns
Increasing reliance on raw material commodity exports for government revenue

I'd be interested to know how Iranian towns and cities in the interior compare to Teheran in terms of services, material goods, poverty and like indicators.

Labels: analogy, barnett, iran, soviet union

  ¶ 1:55 PM 2 comments

  GLOBALIZATION'S SUPEREMPOWERED SOCIETIES

Tom brought an excellent post by Curtis Gale Weeks at 5GW to my attention and then offered his own commentary. Here are the posts:

"On the Barnettian 5GW" by Curtis Gale Weeks

"Nice post by Curtis on 5GW" by Dr. Barnett

I have to agree with Tom and Shane that Curtis really hit his stride with that post. I have a few comments of my own on their 5GW exchange.

Curtis wrote:

"—There is a term used variously and vaguely in these discussions; I myself conflated two interpretations of the term. The Robbian view seems to depend on unequal distribution of “-powerment”, in which some individuals or groups become more powerful than the general human population; whereas, at heart Thomas Barnett’s Core/Gap paradigm and strategy seem to depend upon an eventual equalization, or a relative equalization (which is a type of oxymoronic phrase), of individual empowerment across the globe"

I don't think Curtis' use of " relative equalization of individual empowerment" is actually as oxymoronic as it seems. This is an astute normative economic observation on Week's part. Instead, it illustrates the aggregate effect of Schumpeter's creative destruction rippling across the globe as the spread of economic connectivity and information technology proceeds apace. The spread, of say, cell phone-based wifi internet access to states with sketchy (at best) landline telephone service, is a quantum leap forward for equalization of empowerment on the macro- scale even as certain small networks or individuals of those states on the micro- scale, possess the ability to leverage still greater levels of empowerment to become "more equal than others".

This seeming dichotomy are flip sides of the same coin in any true market action and is always ongoing to some degree, provided the market is permitted to function. Unless the comparative advantage is artificially locked in by force ( this is what tyrants of disconnectivity, like Mugabe and Kim Jong-Il, do - force everyone else to remain still in order to retain their own local "super empowerment"), any individual or entity's "super empowerment" is apt to be a fleeting condition unless constantly maintained by adaptive improvements.

Much later, Curtis opined:

"Many people seek saviors of one sort or another; many are happy to delegate responsibility for the things they themselves cannot touch or do not have the time or motivation to fix themselves — or do not understand, themselves. The crux of the Barnettian paradox involves the manner and method of assigning these delegations so that the general man-on-the-street can rest easily knowing his prosperous future is assured. Even within the Core, much doubt about this process of delegation exists; various superempowerments within and without the Core threaten to upset faith in the systems of the Core. "

Visible super empowerment within a society is a condition representing both change as well as inequality; two phenomena against which it is nearly always possible to rally anger, envy, fear and political opposition.

Tom Barnett wrote:

" Instead of trying to be all things to all individuals in Vol. III, I'll explore the one thing I know well. I do that because I feel the knowledge is important in its own right, addressing a serious gap in our tool kit vis-a-vis other, rising societies of SEIs (especially China and India).

....The book on SEIs remaking the world in their vision--positively--is a book I could see writing with Steve a few years down the road."

The accent on positively remaking the world by Dr. Barnett is a noteworthy point to keep in mind. Numerically speaking, most highly intelligent, energetic, creative and task persistent individuals who function as change agents are overwhelmingly positive actors. Maslow wrote of a stage of self-actualization and in a certain sense, exceeding oneself by changing society in a positive direction may be an expression of both self-actualization as well as super empowerment The Ted Kaczynskis and Osama Bin Ladens are perverse and statistically rare anomalies; exceptions that prove the rule, in a sense.

Unfortunately, the exceptionally negative super empowered individuals do and will exist and have the potential to inflict system perturbations, at least on a one-shot, " black swan", basis. Deep uncertainty regarding the nature of such future superempowered individuals' actions has to be dealt with in terms of proactively engineering systemic resilience to cope with these malicious one-hit wonders. Steve's Development-in-a Box paradigm at Enterra is one effort to begin comprehensively addressing these deficits. Tom's Sys Admin is another. Building new, highly decentralized, "Wikinomic" mass-collaborative platforms from scratch, may be yet a third.

Labels: 5GW, barnett, deangelis, dreaming 5gw, superempowered individuals, wikinomics

  ¶ 2:22 PM 3 comments

  THE COMING OF AFRICOM: THE DEPARTMENT OF EVERYTHING ELSE VS. EMBRACING DEFEAT*



* image and title shamelessly "liberated" from the multidisciplinarily creative Dan of tdaxp who previously posted an excellent series by the same name.

Two articles with diametrically opposed worldviews of American intervention overseas.The path to error lies in the simplification of both approaches:

"Africa Command: The Americans Have Landed" in Esquire by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett
(This article is currently only available in dead tree format)

"Rethinking Insurgency" (PDF) at Strategic Studies Institute by Dr. Steven Metz (hat tip to Danger Room)

Tom Barnett's Esquire article on the newly created AFRICOM is one of his best pieces in "journalist" mode and it demonstrated the dire need for establishing true ( and not primarily "kinetic") "operational jointness" in interagency cooperation in Africa. This means accepting the inherent complexity of the Gap and answering with synergistic connectivity to globalization in order to engage in societal-building and state-building .

AFRICOM



Dr. Metz also accepts the complexity and interconnectivy of globalization but prescribes defusing conflicts by disengagement, accepting the co-option of aggrieved insurgencies into the national power structure even when they are resolutely hostile to American interests. A graceful retreat does less damage, in Metz's view, than would sustained conflict fueled by American aid enhancing the power of states to resist insurgencies.

Unsurprisingly, I am in favor of Barnett's approach but recognize that it is best employed judiciously, with an economy of force and minimalist platforms where aid gives the biggest bang for the buck. Likewise, while I see the Metz approach, if raised to a general rule, as a prescription for strategic erosion of American primacy and the decline of globalization, used with discretion, it is a useful "means-test" for evaluating the strategic importance of failing states and avoiding of the waste of American blood and treasure.

Malawi is not as important as Pakistan, even if al Qaida can be found in both countries. That doesn't mean ignoring Malawi but that we engage it differently than we do Pakistan.

ADDENDUM:

Steve DeAngelis is also discussing AFRICOM at ERMB

Labels: 4GW, barnett, COIN, counterinsurgency, insurgency, national security, PNM, resilience, SSI, state building, state failure, steven metz, strategy, system administration, tdaxp, theory, war

  ¶ 7:56 PM 0 comments

  BARNETT ON EURO-AMERICAN -SINO COMPARATIVE HISTORY

Dr. Barnett had a post that used an WSJ op-ed as a launching pad for some big picture historical analysis:

"Message in a bottle"

In turn, I want to use Tom's post in much the same manner. Here are a couple of quotes and my kibbutzing:

"But first the Euros need to catch up with history: they are not the first multinational state or economic union. They did not invent the first unified currency. They were not the first continent to experience insane civil war and thereupon reason their way to a Kantian peace of transparency, free markets, free trade and collective security. "

Very true. Tom is pointing to America here but Europe itself experienced much the same process during the late Roman Republic. Roman citizenship was once so tightly guarded that it was denied even to the traditional Italian allies of Rome ( who played a role in the Republican empire of akin to that of the Scots in Britain's first great expansion during the 18th century - businessmen, colonial soldiers, in rare instances, minor officials) until after the Social Wars and the civil wars of Julius and then Augustus Caesar. After that, one could find Roman citizens who were Gauls, Iberians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, Arabs and peoples more obscure. The empire in many ways proved to be more a meritocratic, " open system" than did the insular city-state republic beloved by Cato.

China too went through not one but many periods of unification and renewal. Had the Ming dynasty and their Q'ing successors not turned toward resolutely inward, we might be talking today about the legacy of Chinese colonization of the Mideast, Africa and the Pacific rim of the Americas ( disconnection imposes heavy costs).

"America made that journey in the latter half of the 19th century, thanks to our Civil War and the bloody build-out of the American West (actually, most of the blood spilled long earlier). We got to our emergent point (much like China's today, but along a very different path) around 1890, following a 25-year healing period after the Civil War (China reaches its emergent point around 2000, 25 years of healing after the Cultural Revolution)."

There's a great number of historical tangents buried in this paragraph. One can draw a comparison between American dollars flowing to China today and the postbellum surge of British and Dutch investment in American railroads and corporations. Or you can look at America as the Not Quite United States from 1787-1865; not unlike China from 1911 - 1989. Or you can compare the administrations of McKinley-Roosevelt with Jiang Zemin-Hu Jintao. Are there modern Chinese intellectual equivalents to the influential role played by Frederick Jackson Turner, Brooks Adams and Alfred T. Mahan ?

"Europe had a far longer healing point, reflecting the depths to which it sank in its massive civil wars of 1914-1945. It's main problem is that its healing occurred in a very artificial sort of civilizational separateness, which is no longer tenable due to demographics"

Underneath its culture and civilization, Europe remains atavistic. While France has a different and more open tradition because of the French Revolution, many Europeans view their national citizenship primarily in terms of " blood and soil". Third generation Arab and North African citizens are still considered to be "immigrants" as are Turkish descended "gast arbeiters" in Germany.

Historically, China has taken a similar ethnocentric view of citizenship ( it is rare though not impossible, for a foreigner not of Chinese ancestry to become a citizen of China); Beijing's ability to change this and welcome Indians, Americans, Japanese, Koreans and Latins as future "Chinese" will in part, determine China's future role in world affairs.

Labels: 19th century, 21st century, America, barnett, china, europe, history, PNM

  ¶ 8:39 PM 0 comments

  MIL THEORY GOES MAINSTREAM

It's rather nice to see the esoteric theory topics I kick around here in conjunction with sites like The Small Wars Council, DNI, Tom Barnett and John Robb's blogs and the circle of related bloggers, are penetrating the mainstream press. Some recent examples:

William Lind in UPI

Max Boot citing the Small Wars Journal

"War without limits" by Christopher Shea in the Boston Globe (hat tip to Dr.Ralph Luker)

Thomas Barnett's frequent appearances in columns by David Ignatius going back several years

This is a good thing. While there is a healthy tendency in our online alternative defense thinking community to disagree, at times caustically, there is a shared consensus that the current structure, strategy and appropriations process for America's armed forces are ill-suited to the challenges facing the United States.

Change is required and change will only come when the ideas that we have been batting around on blogs, discussion boards and ( in a few instances ) books, penetrates the mass media and gets into the minds of the political class and the voting public. Maximizing attention on the ideas, rather than being distracted by infighting or loose cannon comments, is the route we need to go.

Labels: barnett, dni, john robb, max boot, media, military, military reform, small wars council, small wars journal, strategy, war, william lind

  ¶ 9:10 AM 2 comments

  EN FUEGO

The shadowy bloggers of Kent's Imperative have been busy of late.

"The money quotes, in our opinion, for understanding the future of the disconnect between talent and management: “Heh,” I joked. “I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.” and But the best punch line was that … he didn’t find out when it was on the front-page of his website – he found out when I posted that fact to my blog! "

Hey Tom ! Isn't that what happened to you at NWC ???

UPDATE:

Yes, it did!

"How did Watman know I was conducting my secret negotiations?
My dean followed it obsessively on my blog after numerous professors told him they were fans of it and he became concerned I was growing beyond his control.
When I was confronted by charges of this conspiracy, I replied, "Yes, we were all in it together, me and my tens of thousands of readers." Clearly, I would have made a terrible spy."

Hat tip to the master of webmasters, Sean.

Labels: barnett, blogging, kent's imperative, sean meade

  ¶ 7:45 PM 3 comments

  IT'S A RARE AUTHOR OF MIL BOOKS WHO CAN BRING THOMAS BARNETT AND WILLIAM LIND TOGETHER

John succeeded though, garnering thoughtful reviews of Brave New War from Dr. Barnett and " The Father of Fourth Generation Warfare", William Lind, both of whom lauded Robb's work ( albeit from starkly different perspectives).

ADDENDUM:

Chet Richards has his review posted now too.

Labels: barnett, book, brave new war, john robb, lind, military, theory, war

  ¶ 7:31 PM 0 comments

  THE NIXONIAN CENTURY = CAPITALISM WITH A CHINESE FACE!


President Carter, Fmr. President Nixon and Chinese General-Secretary Deng Xiaoping at a State reception for Deng at the White House.

"Barnett: Nixon and Deng: architects of our globalized world " by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett .

As someone who did extensive - verging on the tedious - research in grad school into the heart of darkness called the Nixon administration, I really enjoyed this piece; Tom wraps up some excellent historical analysis in the very limited (in terms of word count) format of a newspaper column. An excerpt:

"Nixon's reaching out to both the Soviet Union and China in the early 1970s could not have been more surprising, given his pre-presidential history as a vicious anti-communist. But, by doing so, Nixon effectively ended the Cold War by the start of his second, deeply troubled term in 1973.

In forging a detente with the Soviets that included limitations on strategic arms, Nixon basically killed the worldwide socialist revolution. For once, Moscow - that movement's leader - entered into such agreements with its capitalist archrival, it admitted to both itself and its empire of imprisoned satellite states that its model of socialist development suffered limited appeal.

...In short, Nixon revealed this emperor had no clothes

...By some definitions, China will possess the world's largest national economy within a quarter-century's time, and the man who set that all in motion was Deng.

Rarely in history has one dictator held in his hands such discretionary power to choose between further enslavement of his subjects and their rapid empowerment through economic liberation.

In disassembling Maoism, Deng chose the latter route, validating both Nixon's previous strategy and discrediting Gorbachev's later decision to pursue political glasnost before economic perestroika in the now-defunct Soviet Union."

The story of Deng Xiapoing's political career is far less well-known to Americans than is Richard Nixon's, obscured as it is by partisan feelings stretching all the way back to the Hiss Case. Like Nixon, Deng was highly placed in politics for a half century ( more actually as Deng was a veteran of the Long March) and like Nixon, Deng suffered political disgrace and manuvered his way back to the apex of power. Unlike Nixon, the stakes for Deng were much higher; he could have easily met his death at the fickle hand of Mao as did numerous top leaders of the CCP. In the struggle to succeed Mao, the sinister Gang of Four certainly sought Deng's death and Hua Goufeng his permanent retirement (or worse) from politics.

Another parallel with Nixon would be Deng's pragmatic, if brutal, realism which expressed itself both in Deng's relative indifference to Marxist dogma and a willingness to use force to preserve national "face" ( Nixon would have said " credibility"). Deng's punishment campaign against Vietnam in 1979 and his crushing of incipient Chinese democracy in 1989 flowed from the same line of reasoning. Moreover, unlike the Soviet Communist Party leadership where the Red Army was separate and subordinate to the Party, China's Maoist guerilla legacy meant that for the first two generations of leaders that the Party was the Army and the Army the Party. Deng was a famous military leader and commanded the moral authority within the CCP to act as a "commander-in-chief" figure in a way only a few other aging seniors could match.

Naturally, the parallels are less significant than the differences between the two men. Richard Nixon was a master politician who loved power and had an enemies list but Nixon operated in a democratic system and an open society. Deng did not need to make any lists and his relatively benevolent treatment of fallen party rivals in his later years should not ( as with Nikita Khrushchev's career under Stalin) be allowed to erase the bloody history of his service to the CCP under Mao ZeDong.

That being said, I believe Dr. Barnett has weighed both men on the scales of history with rough justice; Nixon and Deng had a global impact that was more to the good than to the bad.

Labels: barnett, china, deng xiaoping, history, nixon

  ¶ 8:17 PM 2 comments

  JUST GRAZING

The new grazr in the sidebar ( which Sean and Tom should appreciate) was made possible by Critt, which I casually "liberated" to replace my old, deceased, version. I may throw in new sidebar grazrs as Critt appears to be a grazr machine and grazr is posting new ones by users kind of like youtube or slideshare does.

Here's Critt's PNM handiwork:

Peace in The Pentagon's New Map

Labels: barnett, critt jarvis, grazr, PNM, sean meade

  ¶ 9:07 PM 0 comments

  FOR COMPUTER GEEKS AND FANS OF TOM BARNETT

Critt Jarvis has set up some new examples of the evolving grazr app using PNM as a touchstone.

Perhaps someday I'll understand OPML.

Labels: barnett, blogging, critt jarvis, grazr, opml

  ¶ 7:08 PM 2 comments

  SOME NEUROCOGNITIVE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATION-BUILDING

Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.

On Monday, the Eides posted "The Thinking Spot" which adds to the existing mountain of evidence regarding the role of the maturing prefrontal cortex in developing the capacity for higher order thinking that does not quite come to fruition until the early to mid-twenties but may begin as early as preadolescence. The Eides write, regarding the PDF studies cited:

"Rule-based learning has a developmental course (no big surprise), but what is a little surprising is the degree to which 12 year olds lag young adults in tests requiring them to make new rules."

Consider that U.S. or Western intervention in Gap states, or alternatively, internal political reform movements like the " Color Revolutions", are essentially political efforts in forcing a " Rule-set reset" on a dysfunctional society or failed state. If one prefers classic Lockean descriptors, rewriting the social contract to "create a more perfect union".

Most, though not all, of the nations in which state failure threatens are also demographically undergoing a " youth bulge". In Iran for example, 66-70 % of the population is under 30 years of age with the "fattest" part of the population curve being aged between 10 and 20. Indeed, it is the poorest nations that tend to be the youngest. To quote a UN report:

"-- Countries where fertility remains high and has declined only moderately will experience the slowest population ageing. By 2050, about 1 in 5 countries is still projected to have a median age under 30 years. The youngest populations
will be found in least developed countries, 11 of which are projected to have median ages at or below 23 years in 2050, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda."

What I infer from this data and the Neurolearning Blog post is that the most favorable time for any effort, external or indigenous, to engage in a positive restructuring of a nation's societal rule-sets may be when a given country's youth bulge hits their early twenties. A narrow window of time when the most physically vigorous and largest section of the population has reached mental maturity in terms of accepting, comprehending and processing abstractions yet are most open to new ideas and desirous of a productive future for themselves.

This is of course a two edged sword. Youthful populations that feel alienated and stymied tend to be restive, even revolutionary. 1968 was not just a year that saw tumultuous baby boomers in American streets but also the chaos of Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris, the rise of Marxist terrorism in Latin America, Germany and Italy and barely preceded an upsurge in PLO terrorism. Today, while Europe and China are rapidly graying and the U.S. is holding relatively steady, much of the world is very young

I suggest that we are not long for an era of great opportunities and great upheavals.

Cross posted to Chicago Boyz

Labels: barnett, cognition, eide, futurism, geopolitics, history, revolution, rule-sets

  ¶ 7:53 PM 2 comments

  BARNETT ON GRAND STRATEGISTS

Dr. Barnett had one of his more freewheeling, "thinking out loud" posts up today, "What grand strategy is to me" that I recommend. It's not short but Tom hits many points of interest from horizontal thinking to cultivating the mindset of a grand strategist for the need to shift persons but not the position of grand strategist from American life. Some excerpts:

"Systematic thinking about the future means you're not "for" or "against" issues like peak oil or global warming, you just accept the dynamics implied and rank them accordingly. As such, you will always disappoint the single-issue-trumps-all crowd, because you do not subvert your entire logic to their presumed hierarchy.

....When government's role in grand strategy is explored, its primary function is that of enabler of overriding era trends, thus grand strategy is contextualized at all times. This is crucial for someone who approaches grand strategy from the perspective of national security, because the military's tendency--especially in the United States--is to view war strictly within the context of war (our penchant for annihilation). Thus, one great purpose of grand strategy for me is help the military come back to society

....A fundamental characteristic of grand strategy is adaptive planning according to fundamental rule sets enunciated in said strategy. Strategy is neither confirmed nor denied by events, for it is not an objective reality but a desired end state (think "Groundhog Day").

....It is a good and worthy profession. It needs serious exploration for the purposes of rule-setting. It is too often tied to individual personalities when it needs to be a skill set that is repeatably applied as a strategic planning solution. It should not be outsourced to columnists and talking heads, but should remain organic to the field of national security. It is a skill we lost across the Cold War, primarily because of the success of the "wise men" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But that vision no longer holds sway."

It is a highly useful exercise, in my view, to go back and plumb the memoirs and papers of men like Churchill, Stimson, Acheson, Marshall, Nitze, Forrestal, Kennan, Dulles, Byrnes and others who were " present at the creation". Not all of them were, technically speaking, grand strategists and quite a few were wrong on points large and small. Some of them schemed and others curried favor, while holding their democratically elected superiors in contempt. But these were insightful, well educated, men who took the responsibility of statesmanship seriously and for whom country came before party. At least most of the time.

At times, their prose is even a pleasure to read. Acheson on the Coal and Steel community that healed 80 years of Franco-German rancor or Stimson on the art of the possible in Eastern Europe after Yalta, is a level of understanding of foreign affairs often absent in Washington today.

Labels: barnett, foreign policy, history, horizontal thinking, strategy

  ¶ 6:47 PM 6 comments

  NORTH KOREAN NUKE DEAL

Hard to say that the Bush administration's recently negotiated deal with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program isn't a positive step. Cautious optimism and use of the agreement as a platform on which to build toward removing nuclear materials and technology from North Korea is about the best we can hope for, short of launching a major war for regime change ( which we are not placed to do and no one would support, short of some reckless military action by Pyongyang). A few seeds placed in the working groups section of the agreement from which a larger, regional, security structure, perhaps an " East Asian NATO", can grow.

A good round-up of links by CKR of Whirledview and sensible commentary by Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye. Nice pre-deal analysis by Dr. Barnett.

Labels: asia, barnett, bush, diplomacy, east asian nato, foreign policy, glittering eye, new york times, north korea, nuclear, washington post, whirledview

  ¶ 9:17 AM 1 comments

  STATE FAILURE 2.0

(Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz)

One of the sharpest points of contention between Thoms P.M. Barnett and John Robb is over the feasibility of Tom's System Administration concept. This issue has been the topic of numerous posts and the occasional rhetorical jab between the two strategic theorists. This pattern repeats itself, in my view, for a number of reasons. First, even friendly professional rivalry causes a natural bumping of heads; secondly, Robb looks at a system and thinks how it can be made to fall apart while Barnett looks at the same system and imagines how the pieces can be reintegrated. Third, no one really has all the answers yet on why some states fail relatively easily while others prove resilient in the face of horrific stress.

Robb contends that Global Guerillas can potentially keep a state in permanent failure, despite the best efforts of System Administration intervention to the contrary. A new level of systemic collapse, call it State Failure 2.0, where failure constitutes a self-sustaining dynamic. Broadly defined, you would chalk up " wins" for Robb's point of view in Somalia, Iraq and the Congo. In Dr. Barnett's column you would find Germany, Japan, Cambodia, East Timor and Sierra Leone in evidence for the efficacy of Sys Admin work. Lebanon and Afghanistan perhaps could be described as a nation-building draw at this point in time.

Why permanent failure in some cases but not others ? This is something that long puzzled me. Then today, I read an intriguing pair of posts at Paul Hartzog's blog - " Ernesto Laclau and the Persistence of Panarchy" and " Complexity and Collapse". An excerpt from the first post:

"Ernesto Laclau was here @ UMich and gave a delightful talk that gave me some key insights into the long-term stability of panarchy.

...However, with the new heterogeneity of global social movements, Laclau makes the point that as the state-system declines, there is no possibility of the emergence of a new state-like form because the diverse multitude possesses no single criterion of difference around which a new state could crystallize.

Thus, there is no possibility of a state which could satisfy the heterogenous values of the diverse multitude. What is significant here is that according to this logic, once panarchy arrives, it can never coalesce into some new stable unified entity.

In other words, panarchy is autopoietic as is. As new criteria of difference emerge and vanish, the complex un-whole that is panarchy will never rigidify into something that can be opposed, i.e. it will never become a new hegemony. "

While I think Paul is incorrect on the ultimate conclusion - that panarchy is a steady-state system for society - I think he has accurately described why a state may remain " stuck" in failure for a considerable period of time as we reckon it. Moreover, it was a familiar scenario to me, being reminiscient of the permanent failure experienced by the global economy during the Great Depression. Yet some states pulled themselves out of the Depression, locally and temporarily, with extreme state intervention while the system itself did not recover until after WWII with the opposite policy - steady liberalization of international trade and de-regulation of markets that became globalization.

The lesson from that economic analogy might be that reviving completely failed states might first require a " clearing of the board" of local opposition - defeated Germany and Japan, Cambodia, Sierra Leone and East Timor were completely devastated countries that had to begin societal reconstruction at only slightly better than ground zero. Somalia, Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, and Lebanon all contain robust subnational networks that create high levels of friction that work against System Administration. At times, international aid simply helps sustain the dysfunctional actors in their resistance.

System Administration as a cure for helping connect Gap states might be akin to government fiscal and monetary policy intervention in the economy; it may work best with the easiest and worst-off cases where there is either a functional and legitimate local government to act as a partner or where there is no government to get in the way and the warring factions are exhausted.

The dangerous middle ground of partially failed states is the real sticking point.

Labels: analogy, barnett, complexity, globalguerillas, hartzog, natiuon-building, networks, panarchy, robb, state building, state failure, system administration, theory

  ¶ 9:19 PM 10 comments