THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM: "Al-Qaeda seeks to make Yemen its safe haven: A Saudi crackdown has shifted the threat to its lawless neighbour," by Andrew England and Matthew Green, Financial Times, 5 January 2010.
The essential dynamics of my spray-for-roaches-in-one-apartment-and-they-simply-pop-up-in-the-next-apartment-over problem:
The growth of the al-Qaeda movement in Yemen is a prime example of the dilemma governments face in confronting global Islamic extremism: one country's crack down can drive the militants next door.
So, not unlike how Israel feels it'll never be safe until state-sponsored terrorism in the region is completely rooted out, Saudi Arabia and Egypt (the two prime targets of AQ) can never and will never feel secure so long as there are nearby failed states to which extremists can flee whenever they institute crackdowns (e.g., Yemen, Somalia and the Horn in general). This is simply the Saudis bumping into the same logic that I adhere to regarding the Gap as a whole: containment (by making oneself super-secure and fencing one's population/economy/etc. off from the bad neighborhoods) will not work, nor will focusing strictly on demonstration cases (even as that's certainly a step in the right direction) like Iraq in the Gulf or Afghanistan in South Asia. Ultimately, your grand strategy must revolve around the goal of fixing the entire system.
Can that be done using Iraq-level efforts? Obviously not. A pol-mil/aid-heavy approach is inherently self-limiting on cost (not to mention sustainable impact WRT official developmental aid), so even in the demonstration/"crucial" struggle points, your process needs to move the situation along--as quickly as possible--toward private-sector opportunities versus the typical public-sector dependencies. [And yes, if your next point is that all the local country will end up with is simply private-sector dependencies/ "enslavement" in the capitalist world scheme/etc., then our conversation can go no further.]
If you want to fix the entire system, then you need to harness the major (and profound) forces of penetration and integration found in globalization's advance. [Again, an ideological stopping-point for a certain class of thinkers whose emotionalism and backward thinking on this subject is not all that different from the local extremists seeking civilizational apartheid as the long-term answer.]
On the surface, this can be caricatured as "our blood for their oil"--a line I have used for shock value. Your shock can thereupon drive your logic in one of two directions:
1. Step away from the initial pol-mil challenge (the classic way my point gets abused by the far Left and Right to justify an isolationist/who-are-we-to-impose-upon-the-world? argument) or
2. Seek to augment your efforts there and elsewhere by reorienting your alliance structures away from those suffering your same limitations and toward those most highly incentivized right now to link up their backend networking/commercialization efforts with your front-end pol-mil-aid responses (which naturally dead-end unless they attract business elements--unless you want to pretend that aid workers and military officers are enough on their own to build up national economies).
The only way such logic appeals (meaning, can be sustained over the long haul) is when you appreciate the underlying grand strategic logic--namely, that America has actively sought to replicate its states-uniting model for decades now (since WWII), has been enormously successful to date, but in that success we have created the reality that any further expansion of globalization's reach and any further extension of its stabilizing rule sets requires that we recognize our limitations to drive/control the process on its own and admit that the West no longer constitutes a sufficient quorum. The accompanying New-Core-sets-the-new-rules logic means that our success going forward needs to be translated into their success in leading globalization's networking function.
Once you accept that, you should be able to accept the logic that says a certain amount of division of labor is good (America more the Leviathan [Why? See anybody else coming up with one any time soon?], other great powers more the SysAdmin) but that, unless we make our Leviathan efforts more subject to the collective will of the relevant great powers, they're simply not going to snap to attention on the backend effort every time we decide some country needs the front-end pol-mil effort. If it's unsustainable for Washington to write checks with its own Leviathan force that its own SysAdmin assets cannot hope to cash all by their lonesome, then the same logic applies to other great powers (i.e., we can't expect them to automatically own every backend/post-intervention effort we care to make).
This is the fundamental realization that led me to construct and propose the A-to-Z system for processing politically-bankrupt states in Blueprint for Action. Naturally, both the primacists and the isolationists on our side recoil from that logic: the primacists are repelled by the notion that America should ever submit such decisions to the approval of the collective, and the serious Lefties are repulsed by the concept that military power should EVER be applied to the promotion of globalization's ends (because they consider it simply a larger version of the inherent "evil" that is capitalism/markets in general).
The middle approach requires that you simultaneously accept that:
1. America will be working with non-democracies (offensive to both extremes) for quite some time (my notion of the usual half-life of single-party states)
2. Our interactions with other great powers will involve the modification of our desired rule sets (compromise!) regarding the change we trigger inside nations when we intervene or simply promote globalization's peaceful advance
3. At the end of the day (meaning, for the foreseeable future), our grand strategic approach must be happy enough with triggering the socio-economic change and being patient on the political end-goals (ultimate democratization)
4. In the foreseeable future, that means we accept that globalization's spread will trigger sufficiently revolutionary socio-economic change that the local populations will feel a certain amount of abuse and that a certain subset will find those changes (esp. WRT women) so reprehensible that they'll fight it tooth and nail--ultimately causing us to, in many instances, simply resort to hunting them down and killing them (the dirty work that nobody wants to do themselves and likewise resent and fear America for doing when it locates sufficient cause [like 9/11] to take up the effort itself), and
5. Over the long haul, our efforts are all about making the world safe enough for capitalism to work its magic (economic liberty) and create the underlying conditions for political liberty to emerge (an eminently bearable burden so long as the New Core's assets and drive are added to that of the Old Core and not set in opposition).
Hardest of all for many Americans to accept: the more successful we are in this grand strategic quest (and yes, we've been IMMENSELY successful to date), the more the world will perceive that success to constitute a diminution of our "power."
Is it crazy for us to allow such defeatist logic to cripple our motivation right now, at this historical moment when our American System-cum-international liberal trade order-cum-globalization is reaching its worldwide apogee? Of course it is.
And when neocons like Krauthammer somehow pretend that we can have our way globally and still hope to hold onto a preponderance of global power, they're being as disastrously self-limiting in their logic as the far Left is in their instinctive hatred of the military-market nexus (which is hardly evil, as it's yielded the glorious national union and--by extension--the vastly improved world we currently inhabit).
The reason why I've spent so much of my life these past several years promoting the concept of grand strategy (at least the expansive way I define it--as in system shaping vice merely winning the struggle in question) is that it's really hard stuff to wrap your mind around. It requires immense patience and the ability to accept sub-optimal outcomes (e.g., markets now, but democracies later) in the near term. It requires your ability to deeply embrace America's role as global leader while working purposefully toward diminishing it (OMG! You expect me to hold both thoughts in my head at the same time!). And it requires a mature appreciation of the military-market nexus (i.e., the warrior exists solely to facilitate the merchant and the merchant cannot survive without the world of security that the warriors create) that eschews the usual ideological nonsense on both political extremes (for the Right, being patient on democracy is too hard; for the Left, admitting that the military is a force for the good otherwise known as markets).
Personally, I have found it impossible to promote this vision from inside the government. That's why I moved to the private sector, where I honestly believe--naïve waif that I am--most of the power in the system is found (and always will be).
A lengthy rant, I know. But one I needed to indulge this morning.
Everybody wants progress by next week and successful conclusion by the end of the year (or certainly by the next election). I don't have that need, cognizant as I am of the fantastic success this vision has already enjoyed (not strictly my vision [puh-leaze!], because I track this thinking all the way back to Hamilton and forward through Clay, Lincoln-Seward, TR and his wise men, Wilson, FDR and his wise men, Nixon and Kissinger, Reagan and Baker and right through the various and sundry globalists found across the Clinton-Bush-Obama administrations) and confident as I am of its looming successes as this emerging global middle class stands up in coming years and decades.
I am most definitely the happy warrior, happiest most in picking my points of career intervention and realizing I've found a tremendous set of partners in DeAngelis (biz partner), Enterra (my workaday home), Warren (my great writing mentor), Posda (the vision-spreading mentor), Gates (the publishing mentor) and Meade (the blog enabler). Toss in the best possible life partner in Vonne (who wisely counsels me along all these lines, plus engineers my personal happiness and that of my family), and I've got no reason to be anything but supremely optimistic.
Would I like my country as a whole to feel similarly? Sure. But let's be realistic there, as our current series of realignments are inherently painful and therefore confidence-sapping.
But back to the triggering article: accepting this dynamic doesn't mean wallowing in some myopic understanding of the tactical, whack-a-mole nature of the day-to-day struggle. On Walt's level of the individual (or the subnational level), that's the inescapable truth. But being reminded of that should only make us more confident to move toward accepting the commensurate logical leaps on the level of states (the reorientation of alliances) and the system level (making globalization truly global by shrinking the Gap). Again, our record of success is our biggest current burden (creating the seemingly high workload), and everything animating globalization today favors our goals and fuels the process, so feeling discouraged is not only unwarranted, it's self-defeating because it blinds us to the simple-but-not-easy (in generational terms) steps we need to take.
Is Obama doing enough in this regard? No. There's too much on his plate and too little in his intellectual cupboard (both personally and across his team). But he's not taking us backward and he is pursuing things that will strengthen us over time.
Beyond that, the system's evolution will--in combination--both take care of the rest and suitably incentivize us toward additional necessary tasks as history unfolds. Ditto for China and the rest of the great powers.
So don't worry, but gear up if you can help in any way. And then enjoy knowing that your work has real meaning.
And . . . I'm . . . spent [he says, casually flinging his laptop to the backseat of Steve's car as we rocket around the Beltway on a sunny, Thursday morning, day four of a five-day East Coast trip that began as an alleged same-day round trip to NYC on Monday].
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:23PM 
