What is eternal and ephemeral about China - and this modern world system we call globalization

Fabulous op-ed in WSJ on 6 July by Liu Junning, an "independent scholar in Beijing."

You should read it all.  Here are my favorite bits:

First, Liu speaks to the infatuation in the West for the alleged "Beijing consensus":

This view fundamentally misunderstands the country's growth progress. China has indeed made great strides since 1978's "Reform and Opening" in alleviating poverty, opening up to the world, and making slow steps down the road of legal reform. Yet on closer inspection, the most significant transformations from the perspective of boosting prosperity have involved loosening of control over the people, not some alchemy of power and Marxism.

This becomes clear in comparing China's economic performance during periods when Beijing has been more closely versus less closely following the Beijing Model. According to MIT economist Yasheng Huang, "[W]hen measured by factors that directly track the living standards of the average Chinese person, China has performed the best when it pursued liberalizing, market-oriented economic reforms, as well as conducted modest political reform, and moved away from statist policies."

I have read such analyses too many times to count, and yet it still amazes me how many don't get it: China does best when it moves in the direction of the allegedly discredited Washington consensus and does significantly less well when it goes more statist.  But the mythology (like Reagan "reducing the size of government") lives on.

Liu also dismisses the notion that defenders of Chinese authoritarianism make: that the Chinese naturally abhor Western-style rights:

This too is at odds with current experience. Simply talk to those peasants who have had their land arbitrarily taken, and we see that property rights are implicitly cherished by all, regardless of race or ethnicity. Despite Beijing's crackdown, lawyers and activists continue to press for Western-style rights.

The rest of the piece is a tour of Chinese history that shows that the ideas and practices of liberalism have flowered throughout. Again, Mao gets credit for reunification but also for perverting the system profoundly. China has always been far more capitalistic than realized. It was Mao's 30-year rule that was the historical aberration, as was his erratic authoritarianism.

Then the solid finish:

To say that the narrative of liberty vs. power is uniquely "Western" is to turn a blind eye to the struggles of those who have gone before us. Individual rights are not a Western development any more than paper and gunpowder are inventions that are uniquely Chinese. Is Marxism "German"? Is Buddhism "Indian"? Of course not. When ideas are born, they take flight into the world to be used, improved or discarded by all of humanity. Constraints on political power and the protection of individual rights belong to all.

The tragedy is that we Chinese don't have full access to these protections. That increasingly will hold us back instead of propelling us forward as proponents of a Beijing consensus believe. Real success for China in the 21st century will depend not on the Communist Party itself, but on the establishment of the rule of law, limited government, and further economic liberalization that opens China's market to the world.

Fundamental to this is the right to speak freely. China will truly prosper only when individuals such as Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei and the many other Chinese patriots who speak for reform are safe in the knowledge that they can do so without a late-night knock on the door from the government.

I continue to believe that the Chinese need a certain historical distance from the Cultural Revolution, plus time to get used to their new-found wealth/development before democracy arises naturally from within - meaning the popular push gets so strong that the Communist Party is forced to birth two or more successor parties in order for the system to survive.

I will readily admit that, until that tumultuous process unfolds, there will be plenty in the West who buy into the Beijing-sold notion that somehow the Chinese are "unique" in their history and developmental trajectory. I personally think that's nonsense.

I also think that the real genius of the American System projected onto a global stage these past seven decades as an international liberal trade order-cum-the West-cum-globalization is that it enables countries like China to start the developmental jump and continue it with enough force - via a package that remains far closer to the Washington consensus than any other I've seen - to trigger the pluralization process that best fits the society in question (aka, what we call "democracy" but really mean as a republic or a government based on law). The timing is variable but inevitable if economic success is had (show me the large rich country that is both politically mature and not a democracy).  Yes, in the era following the Cold War's end, we must suffer waiting out a host of countries and their evolutions, but as the Arab Spring shows, the people themselves will keep on trying - no matter the costs and frustrations.

To imagine democracy is on the wane in this era is, in my opinion, simply wrong-headed and stubbornly so. Ditto for free markets, understanding that we don't live in a world of pure or absolute anything and that these things ebb and wane with events.  

But the march of history is beyond clear, as is America's supremely positive impact on it these past seven decades.  Most of everything we consider to be good in this world has come about in the last seven or so decades.  Go back before them - before America's ascension to global power - and you find everything much worse and on the path of self-immolation. Instead, we now have unprecedented peace, wealth, development and freedom - especially for women. These are not accidental events; the timing is incontrovertibly linked to America's role.

Which is why maintaining that role in a sustainable fashion is so crucial. "Post-American" is a self-defeating lie - a cancer within our ability to think in grand strategic terms. There is most definitely a "pre-American" world. There will never be a "post-American" one - nor should there be in a world that will be ruled by the middle - again, thanks to the system we created, nurtured and defended all these years.

Time's Battleland: As China rises militarily, eventually the golden rule should be applied

Wash Times piece on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen's counterpart in China (Chen Bingde) saying that US naval ex's in regional waters with local friends (Vietnam, Philippines, etc.) are "inappropriate." Mullen replies that they're not directed at China, which, of course, is the whitest of lies. The US sells beaucoup arms to all the same players and exercises with them to give them confidence vis-a-vis "rising China."  Fair enough . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

WPR's The New Rules: Resilience the Big Question in China's Rise

The sense of ideological triumphalism with which China recently celebrated the 90th anniversary of Communist Party rule echoed a flood of recent books and analyses in the West that have readily embraced that same sentiment. Nevertheless, there is a growing mountain of evidence that suggests China's "unprecedented" economic accomplishments are far less impressive than popularly imagined. And with the region's "demographic dividend" already shifting from China to both India and Southeast Asia, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Beijing -- and the world -- is just one financial crisis away from finding the "superiority" of state capitalism revealed as a fraudulent myth.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: Think outside the defense budget: the real cost of keeping China our enemy

Mark Thompson picks up on Chins's cheeky advice to visiting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen regarding our coupling of world-class defense spending with our world-class national debt/faltering economy.  We can brush it aside, of course, seeing that it's coming from our #1 excuse for defense spending (Mustn't let those Chinese . . . ).

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

The other two charts described in the post:

WPR's The New Rules: A Post-NATO Europe Should Look East

Among the mutual recriminations ringing out between the U.S. and Europe regarding NATO's already stressed-out intervention in Libya, we have seen the usual raft of analyses regarding that military alliance's utility -- or lack thereof. As someone who has argued for close to a decade now that America will inevitably find that China, India and other rising powers make better and more appropriate allies for managing this world, I don't find such arguments surprising. You don't have to be a genius to do the math: Our primary allies aren't having enough babies and have chosen to shrink their defense budgets, while rising powers build up their forces and increasingly flex their muscles. In terms of future superpowers, beyond the "CIA" trio -- China, India and America -- nobody else is worth mentioning.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Understanding where China's head is at

FT book review of "Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China" by Jianying Zha. I just really liked the opening bit by reviewer David Pilling, an FT journalist/columnist whose beat is currently China:

Many westerners who are rightly incensed at the treatment of dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo or Ai Weiwei probably have a false impression of what modern China feels like. They imagine a uniformly repressive society in which people are afraid to speak out and where the heavy hand of the state reaches into every crevice of life.

This view is not without some truth. But for many middle-class city dwellers, China could not feel more different. For them, today’s China is a fantastic adventure, a lunge into a world of previously unimagined possibilities. Even among the generation that lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, this is widely regarded as the most optimistic time to be alive in China in hundreds of years.

I think that simple notion is very hard for most in the West to understand, especially since our grasp of the Cultural Revolution's depth and historical reach is hard to understand. Take Xi Jinping, who will be the next president and rule through 2022: his bio includes being jailed several times as a teenager by the Red Guard because of his father's ideological sins. Xi is considered a very company man - very careful. And his early years probably account for that.  

So here we are: seeing political leadership impact stretch a good half century past the actual events. In the US, comparable experiences would be the Civil War and WWII (think of GHW Bush as the last WWII president leaving office in 1993 - almost 50 years post-WWII). It's that big of an event, and it creates a profound sense of optimism and wariness in its shadow: people remember well how bad it was and value highly how good it's been since the "rise" began.

And you know what? The vast bulk of them don't want to mess with that at all - for now. But a new tipping point looms - I believe - in about 20 more years, because the Xi's of China are replaced by the kids whose first memories are all Deng-and-beyond. For them, Mao's insanities are just stories their parents and grandparents tell. They have known only the "rise" and thus will be far more demanding. They're mostly carefully thinking and acting along these lines today, and as their numbers move into power, and as  they face even greater demand - and less historical awareness from below, the change will come. 

It can always come a bit earlier or a bit later because of this or that unforeseen event, but the demographics will make it so.

And that's why I don't worry too much about China and democracy - as we misuse the term. The true and comprehensive republic will come; it's been there before. It'll come because the Chinese will demand it.

This is why I can work with the Center for America-China Partnership and still be critical of China.

Time's Battleland: Cyber-espionage: We're #2! We're #2!

V is for Vendetta

Economist story (6/18) about the recent wave of high-profile attacks by hacker collectives references "SQL injections," or the technique of penetrating databases of companies, agencies, etc. McAfee, the web security firm, says about half of those it tracked over the first quarter of 2011 were made by Chinese "cyberspies" - a rather imprecise term for the Economist because it implies all are working for the government when, you know, China isn't exactly without criminals or hacktivists.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Pic above if from actual Economist story.  Damn those Wachowski bros!

Just rewatched the film (2006) about a month ago.  Big fun for fans of Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving - and Stephen Rea.  Also a great turn from my big favorite John Hurt (he gets to play Big Brother this time!).

The real continuity goof with the film: the West's fictional descent into fascism begins with a US-led invasion in the Middle East in response to a terror strike. Oh well, guess we have to settle for the Arab Spring instead.

Dang!

Time's Battleland: Future grand strategists speak: Why US withdrawal from Afghanistan would stabilize Pakistan

In my continuing role as Head Judge  for the online strategy community Wikistrat's month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow's best and brightest thinkers.  And yeah, full disclosure, I get paid to judge as the firm's chief analyst.

Well, this last week, our participating teams drew up elaborate national trajectories and regional trajectories for their 13 countries (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and US), and the two entries that really jumped out at me in their immediate dueling were the two Pakistani teams populated with grad students from Claremont Graduate University (CA) and Yale (CT).  Let me tell you why.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: Comparing my Time Battleland post on the new US cyber strategy with my World Politics Review column on the same subject

 

NOTE: BECAUSE THE COMMENT OCCURRED HERE BUT INVOLVE THE TIME BATTLELAND BLOG, I CROSS-POST THIS EXCHANGE ON BOTH SITES.

Reader Brad Hancock jumps at the chance to compare my recent Time Battleland post on the new US cyber strategy with my just-published World Politics Review column.

Mr. Hancock comments at my Globlogization site that:

Compare this piece in WPR to the one Barnett wrote for Time on the same subject three weeks ago. Time readers were literally told they should fear the lowered tripwire for great power war and that "Dr. Strangelove has re-entered the Building", complete with a Guns of August/President Palin scenario in case they didn't get the picture. They were forewarned that "all such concerns will be downplayed by sensible national security types" but the hot war capacity would remain.

Now, WPR readers are told "there's no reason to fear America's decision to fold the cyber realm into this overall deterrence posture..." and, of course, the hot war capacity will remain. I understand the need for using a different tone when writing for different outlets such as Esquire, Time, or WPR. But the Time piece was full of sensational fear-mongering that Barnett rightly criticizes when he sees it in others. This makes me wonder if I should ignore him when he uses his "outside voice."

Suffice it to say, I am always happy when people read my various pieces so carefully!

Here's my answer to the charge:

There are some in the national security community who consistently hype the cyber threat - as in, the amazing damage they can do to us in an instant!  I am not one of these types, and nothing in my years in the IT field (first working for the Center for Naval Analyses across most of the 1990s, then the Defense Department in the years leading up to and following 9/11, and since 2005 as an executive in a IT technology firm in the private sector) has convinced me that offensive cyber warfare trumps America's innate resilience as a networked economy/polity/military/society/etc.  We can always take one on the chin, but our resilience will prevail.

There is, within that more worried segment of the community, a subset that advocates very aggressive countering responses, believing that any enemy's opening shot should be met with a big-time response. Those thinkers and decision makers may well feel greatly empowered by the new US cyber strategy - depending on how it plays out in the real world in coming years (for now, the strategy is mostly words on pages moving toward realized policy).  I believe that those hardcore cyber response types can be considered in the same context as the we-will-inevitably-go-to-war-with-China types, in that both are looking for hunting licenses. Again, depending on how you look at it, the new US cyber strategy may well provide one.  I think that's dangerous - as in, Strangelovian dangerous.

That is what I addressed in the Time post.  There I focus on the start of what could be any number of types of crises ("Is that a normal blackout or the start of WWIII?") and the dangers of small things spiraling out of control into big things.

There are also many of us in the national security community who believe that any state that will launch a major offensive cyber attack on the US (as opposed to the day-to-day snooping/hacking/thievery - all of which the Chinese do in spades) will do so only as prelude to a full-on attack.  Why?  Why blow your super-secret wad on anything less, especially if the US might misinterpret and light you up with nukes in response?  If a non-state actor does so, then we're on a different track (he can't follow up with a full-on attack and we can't exactly respond in-kind kinetically, can we?).

If you think along these lines, then you're more likely to advocate folding in our cyber deterrence strategy - with regard to state actors like China - into something more like our nuclear version (i.e., we basically tell you, if we think you're going all the way, we'll go all the way right back at you).  That threat is mutually assured destruction, and it's meant to be a little crazy and ambiguous.  But it's a threshold threat, and that threshold is decidedly high - as in, we really need to believe you're going all the way.

In the WPR column, I wrote about that threshold argument and the desirability of viewing the new US cyber strategy along those lines.  I was sounding no alarm on this score, but contextualizing - as I prefer to - the new cyber strategy as being in line with past strategic practice.  But not everybody agrees with this logic. 

So the two pieces reflect two different ends of the spectrum:  in the Time post I warn about those who may take off running with the new strategy, believing it empowers the national security community to spot "war" on a near-continous basis with China.  In the WPR column I pull back my lens and go with the threshold of great-power war argument, which I believe must be kept very, very high, and I'd like to see the cyber strategy be interpreted as strengthening and not weakening that threshold.

So to sum up: if you believe that cyber warfare is an entirely new animal and that the new cyber strategy empowers the US national security community to treat it as such, possibly redefining the acceptable pathways to great power war, then I think you should be very much afraid of what may be done with this new approach. If you see cyber deterrence as being in the same ballpark as nuclear deterrence - despite its many obvious differences, then you can view the new strategy with more calm.

Problem is, all sorts of national security "blind men" will be feeling up this "elephant" in the coming months and years, and darn near each will walk away with his or her own impressions.  That's why we need to debate this subject from a variety of angles and - yes - use a variety of voices and venues. I don't believe in reducing the threshold of great-power war, but some in the US national security community most decidedly seek to do just that.

Mr. Hancock is correct to point out that I scare in one article and soothe in the other, and that I don't provide obvious linkages between the two rationales.  And that's why I'm glad he made the comment so I could respond in this fashion.

And yes, I had fun picking out the graphic ;<)

WPR's The New Rules: Don't Fear U.S. Cyber Deterrence

It is tempting to view the Obama administration's new cyber strategy as the creation of yet another "conflict domain" to worry about in U.S. national security. Thus, in our enduring habit of piling new fears on top of old ones -- nuclear proliferation, terror, rising powers and failed states, among others -- we imagine yet another vulnerability/threat/enemy to address with buckets of money. In truth, the strategy document is just our government finally acknowledging that, as usual, any fruitful international dialogue on this subject awaits the first move by the system's most advanced military power.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: "The CIA-After-Next: Who's Gonna Run This World"

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure:  he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on the budget but likewise hard enough to make sure he got more for the frontline troops.  All in all, I can't fault him on anything major. He was just what we needed after Rumsfeld.

Now he does us the final favor of speaking the truth about our European allies and a relationship that has clearly run its historic course.  I have been writing about needing to shift from West to East for almost a decade ("Forget Europe:  How About These Allies?" 11 April 2004, WAPO; "The Chinese Are Our Friends," November 2005, Esquire), and for years my suggestion that our future strategic partnerships will be with India and China instead of the UK and the rest of NATO were greeted with wide-eyed shock by briefing audiences.  But the global financial crisis opened a lot of eyes.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: "US bases in Afghanistan for decades?"

Waiting on the Obama speech explaining this one.

Guardian piece Monday predicts that current US-Afghan talks will cement a very long-term deal on presence [hat tip to World Politics Review Media Roundup].

American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades. [italics mine]

This is described officially as a "strategic partnership," but nobody in their right mind would describe it as such. It's a dependency - pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we'll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we've set about to create is still described as "fragile" - meaning it collapses and disappears the minute we pull out.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

WPR's The New Rules: "China's 'Great Leap Backward' No Cause for Alarm"

The Western press is rife with stories about China's growing conservatism, reflected by an ongoing crackdown on free speech by Chinese authorities as well as a Maoist revival in the interior provinces. In our alarm, we imagine the worst of all possible outcomes: an all-powerful Chinese economy lorded over by a political system that somehow reverts to its communist-era politics of open antagonism with the West. While there are powerful structural dynamics that work against this combination, we should nonetheless not fear it. To the extent that China's economic trajectory is threatening to stall out, as it inevitably must at some point, the instinctive retreat of its political system into "redness" has little to do with the outside world. Rather it reflects the yawning chasm between a party of privileged "princelings" and the increasingly stressed-out masses. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: "Kissinger on the sad strategic reality of US engagement in Afghanistan"

Henry Kissinger had a sobering op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday that laid out the reality of the US position in Afghanistan.

First, the fundamental conundrum of "nation building" in a fake state:

But nation-building ran up against the irony that the Afghan nation comes into being primarily in opposition to occupying forces. When foreign forces are withdrawn, Afghan politics revert to a contest over territory and population by various essentially tribal groups.

He then goes on to say he supported the surge engineered by President Obama, an effort that had the unfortunate effect of giving lie to the notion that insufficient resources was the primary reason why nation-building has failed. That effort, he states, has "reached its limit."

So the essential question becomes, according to Kissinger, How to create an regional security structure to oversee that "contest" cited above?

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Transcript from Morning Edition appearance (1 June 2011)

Originally here.

In full for my records:

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Osama bin Laden's death has put more pressure on the U.S.'s strategic partnership with Pakistan and its ongoing commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Our next guest believes those relationships aren't worth all the effort.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst of Wikistrat, an online community for global strategists. He recently wrote in World Politics Review that the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan - and I'm quoting the article here - encourages enmities far more important than that of al-Qaida and denies us partnerships far more important than that of Pakistan. And he joined us to talk about that.

Good morning.

Mr. THOMAS BARNETT (Wikistrat): Good morning.

MONTAGNE: When you speak about missing out on partnerships, what precise partnerships is the U.S. missing out on there?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, the United States' pursuit of success in Afghanistan has been by my definition amazingly unilateralist. And we really haven't gone the path of encouraging regional neighbors to step in and become the great nation builders in this effort. We want to somehow make Afghanistan work, somehow integrate it with the global economy, while not letting the Iranians in on the process at all, while not letting the Indians in on the process at all, and while really trying to hedge against rising Russian or Chinese influence in the region. And that's just highly unrealistic. In geostrategic terms, it doesn't really get any dumber than that.

MONTAGNE: Well, though, you argue in your writing that Afghanistan's neighbors are highly, as you put it, highly incentivized to see Afghanistan stabilized. But in recent history, to accomplish that stability Afghanistan's neighbors have invaded - in the case of the Soviets - or backed a repressive government -as Pakistan did with the Taliban. I mean, that does not seem a very desirable outcome.

Mr. BARNETT: You have a huge market in India and a huge market in China. They want access northward and westward through Afghanistan to energy sources. Then you have major players on the other side of that equation - Russia, Turkey, Iran, so on, that want access to that major markets. And in the middle you have this dead zone called Afghanistan.

So it's a natural situation for network building. It hasn't been up to now, primarily because it's next door neighbor, Pakistan, using a rather antiquated mode of thinking looks at Afghanistan as its strategic depth in a conventional or even nuclear conflict with India to its south. For Pakistan to consider itself safe, it has to keep Afghanistan basically under its thumb.

And it's odd that America comes in, tries to do nation building, has all these incentivized local players that are interested in coming in and making things happen, and we pick out of that constellation of players the one player that's interested in keeping Afghanistan disconnected from the world, which is Pakistan.

MONTAGNE: China looms large in your thinking here. What does China stand to gain in the region both from Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, China has already made the largest foreign direct investment in Afghanistan's history - about $3 billion to $4 billion it's pursuing in terms of a copper mine there. So if you look at Afghanistan's mineral riches, there's the Chinese motivation to lock in access to resources.

With Pakistan, there's not so much the resource equation but the access to water equation, their logic being if they can make railroads happen down to the Port of Gwadar, which is a small kind of underutilized situation not that far from Karachi, the Chinese will have access to the waterways that connect them to their resources, their energy resources coming increasingly out of the Persian Gulf.

MONTAGNE: Where should, in your opinion, the U.S. focus its attention?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, if you project 10, 15, 20 years into the future and ask where are our resources going to be best employed in the near term to have the maximum impact, I think the argument is the Arab Spring presents more of a strategic opportunity - much more than the resources being employed today and potentially down the road in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which logically falls into the Chinese orbit and is more logically pawned off to the Chinese as a burden that they should naturally assume.

MONTAGNE: Thomas Barnett writes a weekly column for World Politics Review, an online service for foreign policy professionals.

Thanks very much.

Mr. BARNETT: Thank you.

Audio from Morning Edition appearance (1 June 2011)

From the NPR Morning Edition site:

June 1, 2011

Osama bin Laden's death has put more pressure on the United States' strategic partnership with Pakistan, and its ongoing commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Thomas Barnett, chief analyst of Wikistrat, an online community for global strategists, explains to Renee Montagne why the relationships with Pakistan and Afghanistan aren't worth the effort.

Listen to the almost five-minute segment here.

Time's Battleland: "According to new Pentagon cyber strategy, state-of-war conditions now exist between the US and China"

China has been pre-approved for kinetic war strikes from the United States at any time.  Let me explain how.

First off, what the strategy says (according to the same WSJ front-page article Mark cited yesterday):

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

In other words, if you, Country C, take down or just plain attack what we consider a crucial cyber network, we reserve the right to interpret that as an act of war justifying an immediately "equivalent" kinetic response (along with any cyber response, naturally).  If this new strategy frightens you, then you just might be a rational actor.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

On NPR's Morning Edition with Renee Montagne 1 June

Taped remotely this morning at WFYI here in Indy.

She said it would run near front of program, so EST at about 5:10-15, then 7:10-15, then again at 9:10-15.

Even hours on the West Coast.  All very confusing, but you know what I mean.

Subject is Af-Pak and America's choices.

Spoke for close to half-hour, but they will edit down to best bits, which should make my pollen-addled brain sound smarter.

WPR's The New Rules: "Why the U.S. Should 'Give' Af-Pak to China"

Nuclear Pakistan, we are often told, is the Islamic-state equivalent of a Wall Street firm: In geostrategic terms, it is too big to fail. That explains why, even as the Obama administration begins preparing for modest troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this July, it dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad last week to smooth over bilateral relations with Pakistan's paranoid regime, which were strained even before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Clinton's trip and the Obama administration's instinctive embrace of Islamabad is a fool's errand, doomed by history, geography and globalization itself.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

COMMENT:  This piece fleshes out the most provocative scenario from the "4 options" column I penned two weeks earlier.  That column lands me a taping tomorrow on NPR's All Things Considered, and I wanted to state the most logical case more fully prior to going on.

One of the key things I think a genuine grand strategist is supposed to do is to remind decision makers of the logical consequences of their strategic choices.  We have made choices on Afghanistan, most importantly our unwillingness to regionalize the solution, because we're committed to "winning" in a very particular way.  We've also made some choices on China, as the Chinese have made some about us.  India and Pakistan intersect among those choices, and I believe we make a very bad choice by picking Pakistan amidst all those intersections.

Also, while I remain certain that China and the US are slated for high levels of strategic cooperation in the future for all manner of structural reasons, I think there are all manner of routes to that cooperative space, including some that involve serious learning for us both along the way.

But my definitions of good grand strategy require plenty of flexibility and adaptability along with the core principles.  I don't believe in fixing every state - just the ones that really matter.  I continue to think that Iraq was worth it - despite our fundamentally unilateralist pursuit of the outcome.  I think Afghanistan is worth it - if you accept the logic of a regional solution set.  But I have yet to be convinced that Pakistan, given its set of unique circumstances is worth it - or even salvageable.  

I see opportunity at this moment for President Obama, but only one option being provided.

Chart of the Day: Good governments come with good income

WSJ story on academic study.  Gist of story is that China cannot really move into high-income without dramatically improving its government, but the converse logic also holds:  we shouldn't expect too much from governments until their society's per-capita income level gets up there.  Yes, there are exceptions in each (rich-enough Russia, rich-enough emirates), but the basic pattern is clear enough.

Why the lag?  It takes a demanding citizenry to get good governments, and citizens get more demanding, the more money they have.  It's really that simple.

At the end of the day, all things being equal, there's no question that democracies outperform autocracies. But the "all things being equal" part doesn't include the catch-up phase, like the one China is going through now. 

When does that "catch-up" end and the democratization kick in?  The people decide that, usually between $5,000-$10,000 per capita income.

Note that the numbers above are PPP, so high.  China measured less relativistically sits at about $4400.