First openly gay US flag officer - a big move for all involved

Obviously a calculated gesture that had to have been cleared with a lot of people beforehand, but a very nice move by the US Army, Defense Department and the Obama Administration.  My hat off to all of them - especially the flag officer (newly promoted to BGEN) and her spouse.

An Army officer being promoted to brigadier general openly acknowledged her homosexuality on Friday by having her wife pin her star to her uniform, thus becoming the first openly gay officer of flag rank in the United States military.

Everyone knows we've had gays and lesbians in the military forever.  The only question left hanging all these years was: would we allow them their identity - openly - in exchange for their service?  Too much to ask?  Hardly.

It's a tough job and a hard life, and everybody deserves to be able to acknowledge their fundamental sexual identity while serving their country.

I can tell you exactly when the whole subject jumped the shark for me:  There was this study done sometime (I believe) in the 1990s.  An inside job where some trusted Pentagon contractor went back over the personnel records of the entire force throughout the entire Cold War, looking for instances in which homosexuality led to somebody being successfully blackmailed by the enemy.  Their finding?  Not a single case.  

Despite all those Allen Drury novels saying otherwise, nobody gay (uniform or civilian) ever had their secret used successfully against them in a security-breach manner.

It was at that point that I knew it was just a matter of time - and the right administration.

So my thanks to Obama on that score.

I have to admit that when I saw the headline in the NYT, I thought it was a gag.  I mean, I don't think there are any publicly acknowledged enlisted personnel, so how did somebody get all the way up to being a general, I thought (rather stupidly, I realize).  But then it struck me: the DoD wanted somebody prominent as the first to step forward in this manner, and somebody going from officer to flag is the perfect tipping point in a career to hold up as an example.  

Very smart.

A complication that displays the interdependency between the Chinese and US economies

Great WAPO piece on how China's economic slowdown can complicate relations with the US.

Some bits:

Chinese leaders are under pressure to take steps to help the economy as a rare change in power looms. This fall, the Communist Party will choose a new general secretary and officials through the government.

“They cannot afford, during a period of political transition and political turmoil, to suggest any loss of economic control,” [Eswar] Prasad said.

China and the United States are the twin engines of global growth, and both need each other to take steps to keep economic activity going.

China has a number of tools at its disposal to stimulate economic growth — some harmful to the United States, others potentially neutral or helpful. China routinely subsidizes companies that locate there, reducing the competitiveness of U.S. businesses. More favorable programs include China’s effort to boost government spending and lower interest rates to increase lending . . .

It’s also possible the United States might take steps that could aggravate relations with China.

When the Federal Reserve embarked on another aggressive campaign to lower interest rates in late 2010, China howled, saying it would devalue the dollar and help U.S. exports. And indeed, the dollar did come down some, and exports boomed.

But the dollar has since rebounded, likely as investors have sought security in U.S. Treasury bonds.

China might signal similar concern this September, if the Fed launches a round of so-called quantitative easing to jolt growth.

Point being, we are locked in a symbiotic relationship with China.  There is no good global economy without us and there is no good global economy without them.

This is what gets me when Pentagon strategists casually consider war with China, to include direct attacks on the Chinese homeland.  What happens to the global economy when the two intertwinned biggest national economies decide to start blowing each other's citizens up?  The global economy would tank at a speed that would stun everybody.  There wouldn't be any days or weeks of bombing campaigns.  We'd have global economic turmoil of a stunning nature well before that, as the markets would freak out.

But I advise people to read the CSBA scenarios as they pertain to war with China, because they are downright hallucinatory.  From my China Security piece of a while back:

Reading through CSBA’s full-up exploration of ASBC, the resulting war between China and the United States strains credulity beyond all reason.[3] Three maps in particular depict what are logically lengthy strike campaigns against China’s radar/space facilities, ballistic missile facilities and submarine bases. In total, they suggest a China-wide bombing campaign by the United States of such tremendous volume that, as CSBA’s authors note, America would be required to dramatically ramp up short-term production of precision-guided munitions. Toward that end, one supposes, America should preemptively terminate all trade with China; trade that would financially underwrite the production lines of such weapon systems—again, to service a theoretical protection of “the free movement of goods around the world.”

Beyond that fantastic scenario extension lies CSBA’s plans to basically destroy the entire Chinese air force and submarine fleet, plus institute a “distant blockade” that would see us interdict and search—and here the irony balloons—China’s seaborne trade, which ought to be fairly simple since so much of it involves the US economy.  And because it’s not easy to stop committed large ships (don’t tell Somalia’s pirates), CSBA broaches the notion of using Air Force bombers to “provide ‘on-call’ maritime strike.” One can only imagine how many thousands of Wal-Mart containers the US military could send to the bottom of the Pacific before the White House would hear some complaints from the US business community. But why let that reality intrude?

Sounds crazy enough, right? 

Nice critique of the sheer - and reckless - overkill that is ASBC

Written by an Aussie strategist for The Diplomat.

Here is the best chunk.  I italicize the parts I found most compelling.

By denying China’s capacity for anti-access, the United States intends to preserve its options for sea-control and power projection, reinforcing its primacy and role as the region’s guarantor of free navigation. This decision, in turn, reflects a deeper, more quixotic judgement that such an objective is both vital to the United States and attainable at a level of cost and risk commensurate with US interests in the region.

On both counts, though, there are reasons to be sceptical. First, the cost of AirSea Battle is likely to be prohibitive. Though it remains a largely notional concept, AirSea Battle will depend on an expansive set of upgraded capabilities: a hardened and more dispersed network of bases and C4ISR systems; more and better submarine, anti-submarine and mine-warfare capabilities; and new, long range conventional strike systems, including bombers and anti-satellite weapons. Then, of course, there are the aircraft carriers and other major surface combatants, strike-fighter aircraft, and possibly even amphibious ships.

This strategy is no panacea for the region’s problems, of course. It wouldn’t be cheap or easy and it would involve Washington making some hard capability trade-offs as well as accepting greater limits on its capacity for intervention in the Western Pacific. But there are benefits as well. In particular, maritime denial would allow the US to continue to play a strong role in the region. It would enable Washington to fulfil its defensive commitments to regional allies, prevent Chinese dominance and, at the same time, by reducing its visible military footprint, give Beijing more political breathing room. To that end, a US maritime denial strategy would also help avoid the worst aspects of crisis instability that AirSea Battle would provoke. And all without breaking the bank.

Needless to say, these are expensive capabilities. Many are disproportionately costly (and vulnerable) relative to the platforms against which they’re being fielded. And in some cases, particularly anti-submarine warfare and ballistic missile defence, their prospective cost greatly exceeds the operational effect they can be expected to produce. All of this would be exacting for the United States in peak economic condition. In a new era of fiscal stringency, with US debt expanding and the Pentagon looking to save hundreds of billions over the next decade, expecting the US military to do more with less is at best unlikely, and at worst wholly untenable.

It also risks failing to learn from history. Strategic competition in the Western Pacific is beginning to echo the Cold War, only this time the United States is at risk of reprising the role of the Soviet Union. Washington has already repeated Moscow’s mistakes in Afghanistan. With AirSea Battle, Washington is trying to do too much with too little. It’s facing off against an opponent in better economic shape whose smarter, more asymmetric strategy will impose a disproportionate military burden. For Washington, adopting such a maximalist doctrine risks playing into China’s hands and, like the Soviet Union, spending itself into penury.

But cost factors are only part of the danger. An arms race is already underway in Asia. AirSea Battle will accelerate this process, with serious implications for regional stability and crisis management. First, by creating the need for a continued visible presence and more intrusive forms of surveillance in the Western Pacific, AirSea Battle will greatly increase the range of circumstances for maritime brinkmanship and dangerous naval incidents.

Second, AirSea Battle’s emphasis on pre-empting China by striking early against the PLA will continue to compress the time available to decision-makers in a crisis. As military plans become increasingly dependent on speed and escalation, and diplomacy fails to keep up, a dangerous ‘use it or lose it’ mentality is likely to take hold in the minds of military commanders. This risks building an automatic escalator to war into each crisis before diplomatic efforts at defusing the situation can get underway.

And finally, AirSea Battle calls for deep strikes on the Chinese mainland to blind and suppress PLA surveillance systems and degrade its long-range strike capabilities. Such an attack, even if it relied solely on conventional systems, could easily be misconstrued in Beijing as an attempt at pre-emptively destroying China’s retaliatory nuclear options. Under intense pressure, it would be hard to limit a dramatic escalation of such a conflict – including, in the worst case, up to and beyond the nuclear threshold.  

Taken together, the costs and risks associated with AirSea Battle spell trouble for US primacy in Asia, and for the sea control and power projection capabilities on which it relies. Yet while Washington’s comfortable hegemonic habits will be hard to kick – especially after so many peaceful, prosperous decades – it’s not all doom and gloom. Primacy, after all, is only a means to an end, a way of preventing China from attaining regional dominance. There are other, more cost effective ways of doing that, including by playing China at its own game. That would involve developing a maritime denial strategy, focused mainly on the use of submarines, designed to inhibit China’s use of the sea for its own power projection. Indeed, the same capabilities that imperil US power projection in the Western Pacific would have an equally profound effect on China’s own fledgling efforts.

A very smart analysis of the dangers and costs.  And the "out" provided by focusing more on subs would make even me a serious believer of increasing our capacity there versus CSBA's somewhat insane notion of bombing the breadth and length of China and somehow not triggering a nuclear escalation.

People are going to construe being against the CSBA's notion of AirSea Battle as capitulating to Chinese domination of East Asia.  That is, of course, complete nonsense.

Proponents of ASBC will also toss in the if-you-only-know-the-secret-stuff-I-know-you'd-buy-into-ASBC card. That secrecy argument is the equivalent of patriotism-as-the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels temptation - as in, when you can't win the argument on cost and feasibility and dangers and operational success, then simply hide behind the "ominous" signs that only you and yours are privy to.

There are, as this article points out, cheaper and more sensible alternatives.  To those provided here, I would simply add selling plenty of military capabilities to the rest of East Asia (which we're already doing).

As I said before, ASBC suffers greatly from aspiring to be an Air Force-Navy Full Deployment Act.  Like any force structure wish list, it must ramp up the storylines - hence the fantastic war-gaming of CSBA that is intellectually fradulent to the point of being laughable.

There is no strategic logic that says the US should get in an absurdly expensive spending war with China over a scenario that happens just outside China's front door.  There is also no logic in promising a hair-trigger standoff where we pre-emptively bomb the length and breadth of China just to get them to back off from some aggressive shenanigans in their neighborhood.  For America, already deeply intertwinned with China on trade and investment and debt, to adopt such a posture is simply ludicrous.  These notions remain the fantasy of strategists who live "inside baseball" lives and have little to no clue about how this larger world works.  "Strangelovian" is not too strong a term.  In fact, it's right on the mark, because it implies a closeted world of strategists with no sense of proportion or connection to the wider dynamics of power in this era.  This is dinosaur thinking at its worst, and it needs to be opposed whenever and wherever possible.

Keeping China from doing something truly stupid in East Asia is not hard.  We need to undermine their asymmetrical approach by - as this article argue - creating our own, and NOT by setting ourselves up for a rapidly escalating great-power war.  Bombing the length and breadth of China in the opening hours of some crisis is just plain stupid and reckless and painfully unimaginative.  This is a massive retaliation response that pretends China isn't a nuclear power capable of significant retaliation.  

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who hasn't taken the crazy pill on this one:  YOU DON'T CONDUCT WIDESPREAD BOMBING CAMPAIGNS AGAINST THE HOMELANDS OF NUCLEAR POWERS!  

There is no clever way to spin ASBC's logic.  It promises a sheer - and therefore reckless - overkill that defies any sensible strategic logic.

This is not a "revolution in military affairs."  This is Cold War thinking at its most rigid - somehow surviving within our ranks.  It pretends, in the classic domino thinking approach, that if China pulls off anything in East Asia, we will have lost the entire competition!

Again, can you get any more narrow in your reading of the entirety of our world or our capacity to lead globally versus that of China's?  That's were ASBC truly sucks:  it reduces all our enduring strengths to one specific threat and then asks us to roll the dice on nuclear war over that one scenario.  Why?  BECAUSE IF WE DON'T ALL WILL BE LOST AND CHINA WILL RULE THE WORLD!

Honestly, doesn't that logic strike you as cartoonishly bad?  Remember when the Commies won everything by grabbing South Vietnam?  Or does it seem strange that we're now allying with Vietnam against China?

The "primacy" impulse dies hard within our ranks, especially among those who imagine that it resides solely with our military means to wage war.  The naive simplicity of this argument is almost beneath serious debate for anyone not trapped in the Pentagon's self-serving notions of "power!" (meaning 99.9% of the world as we know it).

But this is, sad to say, all part and parcel of the politics of protecting one's budget, so get used to hearing all sorts of bad strategic logic tossed in your faces.  In virtually every instance, the goal will be the same: to scare you into accepting the mis-allocation of resources within the US defense budget.

We live in a world of small wars.  That is the reality of the world America spent the last seven decades creating and defending.

But we are still far too dominated and influenced by an elite that sees the world only in big-war terms, because those capabilities are what that elite believes will continue to provide for American primacy.

Simply put, we created a world in which numerous great powers could rise, but some of us continue to freak out over that achievement.

I will readily confess: the more time I spend in international business, the less I find I have in common with the national security community in the United States. That whole mess strikes me today as being more divorced from reality than at any previous time in my career.

From the CSBA report on ASBC: the section entitled "Executing a Missile Suppression Campaign."

From the CSBA report on the ASBC: the section entitled "Blind PLA ISR Systems."

These two maps detail the places where CSBA advocates that the ASBC campaign should target in the opening salvos of any war with China. 

Again, imagine the Chinese bombing on similar terms across the length and breadth of the continental US and then consider what our strategic response might be.

China comes back to even in its trade with the world!?!

Economist story: "for the first time since 1998 more money leaves China than enters it."

On the surface, you say, "balanced trade!" when what you should really say is "balanced investment!"  But even there you'd be missing the subtext, so sayeth The Economist:

MAINLAND China can now boast over 1m wealthy citizens (qianwan fuweng) each with over 10m yuan ($1.6m), says the latest edition of the “Hurun Report”, which keeps track of China’s capitalist high-roaders. But the mainland seems to be having trouble keeping them. According to the report, published on July 31st, more than 16% of China’s rich have already emigrated, or handed in immigration papers for another country, while 44% intend to do so soon. Over 85% are planning to send their children abroad for their education, and one-third own assets overseas.

The affluent 1m have profited handsomely from China’s economic boom. But only 28% of those asked expressed great confidence in the prospects over the next two years, down from 54% in last year’s report.

Them's some stunning numbers:  60% of the rich plan to emmigrate and 85% are sending their kids abroad - thus perpetuating the attraction of leaving the Mainland.

Frankly, those are numbers and dynamics one associates with post-Cold War Russia or Africa of the past several decades.  There is a looting quality to this circumstance, driven primarily by the sense that China is becoming a dangerous place to have wealth.

Now, we can all get jacked with the dominant populist vibe (check out the "Dark Knight Rises"), but it's a very negative sign when your rising economy's rich people don't want to stick around.  For China it says, we don't trust the - now longstanding - reforms will stay in place.  It also says, we want to go where our wealth translates into genuine political power (rich people are like that).

True political pluralism usually arises when the rich realize that the only way they can keep their wealth is to open up the system for a stabilizing middle class to take the reins of political power. No, they don't enjoy the process, but it beats the alternative - revolution typically from the lower classes.

This dynamic is presenting itself across much of the developing world right now: we see the rise of a truly global middle class and - big surprise - amidst all that wealth creation a super-rich emerges (happens every time), thus the richest-to-poorest delta is fantastically large.  That's when you get nasty populism that, by and large, can either be deflated nicely by a long progressive period of cleaning up the system, environment, politics, etc., or can explode into something far more destructive.  

Europe got that initial middle class about the same time America did, and Europe came up with two scary alternatives:  Bolshevism to prevent that dastardly bourgeoisie from emerging, and fascism, which pretended to protect those "shopkeepers" from radicalized workers but really was about keeping the rich safe and everybody else wound up by freakish nationalism and militarism.

America split the difference brilliantly, plowed through a lengthy progressive era, and centered its political system - along with its economy - on a stable middle class.

We are rerunning that Western experiment now on a global scale, with the biggest democratization process to come being - obviously - China, which faces the daunting task of democratizing amidst a progressivist dynamic (like virtually everything China does, it's a combination that's unusual in its "cramming it in" ambition, but there you have it).  Meanwhile, the West is coming to grips with two stunning problems:  it no longer can manage a blue-collar middle class status and hasn't adjusted its educational system from its industrial era origins, and it's facing a demographic aging wave (less so the US) that forces it to revamp its industrial age pension and healthcare systems rather drastically.

The progressive age that must inevitably unfold globally so as to tame globalization's natural excesses (in this period of rapid expansion) is the most important challenge humanity faces in the next several decades.  Truth be told, global warming will by and large have to await that process before being truly addressed on a systematic level (even as much progress should occur thanks to the fracking revolution and its triggering of widescale movement "down" the hydrocarbon chain).

But back to the point of the piece:  China's movement toward accepting a progressive era is crucial to initiating this process on a global scale, because a China that moves down this path will be less frightening to an America that is currently using the excuse of "scary" China to delay its own internal reforms (the AirSea Battle Concept being just one telling symptom of a general political escapism).

And this is where I go back and forth in my fears and hopes for China.  Whenever I'm there I meet so many in the elite who are acutely aware of all this and realize the global responsibility China's internal development represents.  But then I also meet plenty who can't rise above their own fears for their own status.  So no, this battle is not decisively waged in either direction, even as I take great solace in the whole Bo Xilai Affair and its diminishment of the brain-dead Red revivalism in the interior.

Interesting times ...

Time's Battleland: NATIONAL SECURITY AirSea Battle: The Military-Industrial Complex’s Self-Serving Fantasy

China's Great Wall: an ancient AirLand Battle plan

NOTE: My post from Saturday, expanded a bit and reposted at Time's Battleland at that blog's request.

Nice Washington Post piece (by Greg Jaffe, of course) on the great COIN counterattack that is the Pentagon’s AirSea Battle.

As scenario work goes, what the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis has done in its war-games has to rank right up there with the most egregiously implausible efforts ever made to justify arms build-ups.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Why the special relationship (US-Israel) isn't going anywhere

Fascinating factoid:  80 percent of the world's Jews live in US and Israel (roughly an equal split in numbers).

Then look at the lower right-hand bar charts and realize - Holocaust or no - that the 20th century was the best century the Jews ever had, because of the location of, and population concentration within, the two great safe places in the global system: the Jewish homeland of Israel and the next best thing called America.  The Economist (where the chart is drawn from) notes that the Jewish faith is now stronger and more "alive" than it's been for a very long time.  Naturally, Judaism experiences the same crises of all religious identities in this modernizing world (absolutely nothing "special" about the Jews in that regard, even as they consider themselves "chosen" like every other faith on the planet - the Lake Woebegon effect that all religions suffer ("I get it!  You don't!")), but there's no question it's a powerful and well-placed faith in a world experiencing religious awakening (everywhere but Europe's non-Muslims).

Expats and coreligionists driving US foreign policy constitutes a long and storied tradition in America.  It - for example - essentially defines our special relationships with the Brits and Europe in general.  Is it weird or "unfair" with regard to Israel?  Hardly.  People want to see conspiracies and what not.  But it's the simple - and beautiful -business of money talking.

America is a supremely fair place when it comes to minorities - save African Americans for obvious historical reasons.  But, in general, if you're an immigrant group or otherwise minority, you can make yourself heard and somewhat obeyed in our political system simply by organizing yourself and applying your collective wealth to the system of influence that is our political system.  Many people find this process slimy, but I love that the only color that matters in this country is green, because that's eminently more fair than skin tone. (And yes, the fact that our first African-American president is a genius at raising money in small amounts is highly indicative of this process - thank God!).

Simply put, NOBODY in this country gets what they want until they organize and start donating money (or spending in the market corollary) - i.e., start making their market heft known.  We've seen it with ethnic group after ethnic group over the decades, and we're watching now with Hispanics and Asians - and Indians in particular (who are becoming amazingly adept at it at a rather fast pace).  We likewise watch it now with the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender).

Again, cry all you want, but I like a process where money beats prejudice.  If you want to deny the party in question, then you mount a bigger effort. But, fortunately, people operating on the basis of love for something win out - time and again throughout history - over people operating on the basis of hatred (my personal fave being the early Christians v. Roman empire).  This is why I don't argue over things like gay marriage or America's continued support to Israel:  the connectors always win out over the disconnectors.  May take some time, but it always happens.  

You just can't bet against people wanting to connect. 

Strategy-wise, you just doom yourself to failure.

Pulling back the lens, this is why I don't - in the end - worry about globalization's future.  The fear-meisters will have their days (and revel in them), but history is stunningly clear on the subject - once America rose up and started running the show.

There is a reason why this is the greatest country in the world.  It's not that we're the best at doing this (personally, I would choose Canada or the Netherlands or Sweden or Norway - all very Wisconsin-ish, so it wouldn't be a big change for me), it's that we're right up there with the best AND we have the capacity and will to spread our system across the planet.  Notice how world history improves incredibly over the past several decades?  It's no accident. It's America doing on a global scale what minorities do on a national scale within our country.

Again, money talks . . . and wins over prejudice and tradition and intolerance and hatred and violence and . . ..

Syria: When US inaction accelerates a radicalizing dynamic

Nice op-ed by Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Lindsey Graham in WAPO.

The core argument:

We are hopeful the rebels will ultimately prevail, but it remains a deeply unfair and brutal fight, and the speed and manner by which it is won matter enormously. All evidence suggests that, rather than peacefully surrendering power, Assad and his allies will fight to the bitter end, tearing apart the country in the process.

America’s disengagement from this conflict carries growing costs — for the Syrian people and for U.S. interests.

Because we have refused to provide the rebels the assistance that would tip the military balance decisively against Assad, the United States is increasingly seen across the Middle East as acquiescing to the continued slaughter of Arab and Muslim civilians. This reluctance to lead will, we fear — like our failure to stop the slaughter of the Kurds and Shiites under Saddam Hussein in Iraq or of the Tutsis in Rwanda — haunt our nation for years to come.

Our lack of active involvement on the ground in Syria also means that, when the Assad regime finally does fall, the Syrian people are likely to feel little goodwill toward the United States — in contrast to Libya, where profound gratitude for America’s help in the war against Moammar Gaddafi has laid the foundation for a bright new chapter in relations between our two countries.

We are being left behind by events.  When Al-Qaida makes this a bigger cause celebre than America does, we lose by definition - by our abscence.

We keep trying to wind ourselves up over the chem weapons depots, but we should be more concerned with registering the anti-Iranian win in a way that benefits Israel - if we're serious about wanting to avoid war with Iran.  That's the bigger fish here, not the lowest common threat inflator of chemical arms.

There are plenty of ways to ramp up our involvement without boots on the ground.  WAPO ran an editorial recently calling for the always handy no-fly-zone.

We have entered the R2P space (right to protect), and what we need to protect most here is our credibility and the region from outcomes that make it less stable over the Arab Spring's continued unfolding.

I have, in the past, noted that the Arab Spring has been kind enough to us to offer the one-damn-thing-after-another dynamic.  Well, now's the time when we seriously deal with the one damn thing called Syria.

The Syrian PM just defected.  What are we waiting for?

The self-serving Military Industrial Complex fantasy that is AirSea Battle

This post was removed in deference to its reposting at Time's Battleland blog on 7 August 2012.

More evidence that KJE is embracing Dengist reforms

The first line is key, because let's remember that this is a state that has - knowingly and systematically - starved its own rural population for many years, triggering what is arguably the most reprehensible experiment in mass malnutrition the world has seen since Mao murdered tens of millions with his Great Leap Forward:

To fend off starvation, North Korea will introduce bold agrarian reforms that will allow farmers to dispose of part of their harvests as they see fit.

The initiative was authorized by new leader Kim Jong Un, North Korean government and military sources said.

The planned reforms, the first in roughly 10 years, are intended to enhance yields and help mitigate chronic food shortages that plague the country.

The nation's ability to feed itself has fallen short by about 1 million tons a year.

But this year, a major drought has exacerbated the problem.

Under North Korea's system of collective labor in farming villages, harvests are collected by the state and redistributed to households according to their size.

The new system will allow farmers to do what they want with their harvests after they have handed over statutory amounts to the state.

This means they can consume the produce or sell it in markets, the sources said.

China introduced a similar "responsible production system" under its reform and door-opening policy that started in the late 1970s, whereupon yields increased rapidly.

North Korea has tried to follow China's model since the 1990s, but none of the reforms has taken root.

This is very good news, because it continues to suggest that Kim Jong Il's death has allowed a reformer son to emerge and finally manage what the crazy old man never could.  HT to Chris Ridlon.

A DPRK set on the path of Dengist reforms will lower the temp in the region a bit, although its capacity for exciting anybody has now been completely surpassed by China's aggressive actions over its seabed claims.

Chart of the Day: North Korean mobiles

Kim Jong-Eun is presenting himself in the guise of his grandfather, discounting the military and presenting a "great father of the natio" motif.

Now, with one million-plus phones, and all those portable cameras, the place opens up considerably.

My projection:  KJE is going to try and reform the place in the Chinese way and thinks he can handle the process.

My hope: it spirals out of control in a Gorby manner.

Whatever the mid-term outcome, nice signs and good progress in all of this. I honestly believe that DPRK is off the danger radar in five years.

That way, we can all get jacked about arresting fishermen in the South China Sea, pretending it serves as prelude to a high-tech war with China.

Impact of the drought is multivariable

First, the good news: the "margin squeeze" due to rising corn prices/futures is killing corn ethanol - still the stupidest idea on the planet (outside of Washington-subsidized Iowa).

Then the worse news: Russia/Black Sea region is undergoing another bad drought, raising the specter of another export ban. US is biggest exporter of wheat but the Black Sea trio (Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine) account for one-quarter of global exports and are traditionally key suppliers to north Africa and the Middle East.

Just how late-Brezhevian Iran really is

It's the little things that matter (from LAT piece):

Amid soaring prices, sweltering temperatures and escalating international tensions, a Ramadan of discontent is unfolding in the Islamic Republic.

Protests have been brief and contained, nothing like the mass demonstrations that followed the disputed presidential election in 2009. But they are still noteworthy in a nation where the government endeavors to project an image of contentment and defiance to the outside world.

Fast-rising prices, probably fueled in part by new international sanctions tied to Iran'scontroversial nuclear program, have tested the patience of people facing an eroding quality of life. Complaints are muttered at bus stops and cafes. The prices of figs and dates, two items often consumed once the dawn-to-dusk fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan has ended, have risen at least 20% in just a few days, said a fruit hawker in north Tehran.

Perhaps no issue has been so contentious as the cost of chicken, long a relatively inexpensive staple popular during Ramadan. In the last two months, prices have more than doubled, outraging many consumers.

Then we get the word from USA Today (HT to Craid Nordin) that the gov is doing its best to encourage women to start having babies again.  Reason cited is rapid demographic aging, but more upstream, the point is that Iran is suffering a stunning birth dearth.  Women simply don't want to have babies in Iran.

What that says is that Iranians are losing their faith in a better future - in droves.  Birth dearths of this sort represent a populace in depression, because having babies is ultimately an act of supreme optimism, which is in very short supply in Iran.

I lived a summer in the USSR in 1985, and I remember being so depressed by the Russians I met and hung around with that I became a classic crying drunk.  I would drink deep into the night with these people and they were always so sad about their past, their present and their future that, upon getting back to my own place, I would typically burst out crying.  I could only take in so much depression in one night that I'd figuratively "throw it up" like so much excess alcohol.

When I got back to the States, I had one idea firmly fixed in my head:  that place is totally screwed and is going down.  Didn't know when or how.  Just knew it had zero future.

Iran seems very similar.

Q&A Session at Wikistrat's Blog

Ask Wikistrat’s Chief Analyst Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett

Editor’s Note: Every week, Wikistrat’s Facebook followers engage in a 24-hour exclusive Q&A drill with one of Wikistrat’s Senior Analysts via Facebook. This week we featured Wikistrat’s Chief Analyst Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett.

Q: Timothy Kelly-  Dr. Barnett, how do you think nuclear proliferation will play out in the Middle East?

A: I think the Obama Administration’s oil-focused sanctions will put immense pressure on the Iranian regime to cave in on the nuke question, possibly to the point of striking out in some manner that Israel – and perhaps the U.S. – can use as a pretext for launching substantial strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.  But if I had to bet, I would lay money on Israel striking first for its own reasons versus Tehran providing the excuse.  Iran has always struck me as incredibly aware of which line-crossing activities will elicit direct military responses, and, much in the vein of WS’s recent simulation on this subject, I think Tehran knows well that it needs to avoid any genuine threat to global oil markets – lest it trigger an “all-in” military response from the United States . . . 

Read the entire post at Wikistrat's Blog.

Great "Bottom of the Pyramid" logic

WSJ story on multinationals finding steady profit in marketing to the poor, who offer a "relatively stable demand":

Analysts have long argued that companies selling products and services to people earning less than $4 a day can outperform in tough times.  This is because consumers still must buy food, soap and other basic goods when the economy is bad, even as middle-class buyers cut back on discretionary items like fashion or gadgets.  Companies selling everything from cheese to diapers to frozen fish ahve discovered in Indonesia that they can turbocharge growth and add more stability to sales during slowdowns by offering small package sizes that are more affordable for the poor who have limited spending money on any given day.

One nit:  "Analysts have [not] long argued ..."

That was C.K. Prahalad's Bottom of the Pyramid logic that was first opposed, then ridiculed and now gets passed off as the conventional wisdom of the analysts.

Simplistic point, but smart people can make a lot of money off such simple stuff.

Iran gearing up for naval fight in PG versus US

We've seen the reports of the US bulking up its naval presence, and now we get Iran claiming (via WAPO) more capabilities to strike USN ships.

What to keep in mind: Iran can do damage to US ships, while US ships can do far more damage to Iran, but none of this says Iran can close Straits, which would be a monumentally more complex drill than is commonly portrayed.

But more immediate point:  war of nerves heating up.

US obviously expects iran to lash out at some point as the West's oil-sales-ban comes into effect over coming months, so we're gearing up for the flashpoint all right, which means shooting could easily come.

Does that qualify as war?  It can qualify itself very quickly. That's for damn sure.

The CNOOC bid for Nexen: the inevitable next step in the NorthAm-East Asia energy evolution

Cnooc's bid is the first super-big buy into NorthAm energy (three times the Syncrude buy in 2010).  It follows similar buys into Australia (Rio Tinto), Iraq-KRG (Addax) and Latam (Repsol Brazil).

Cnooc, by all accounts, learned from the failed Unocal bid and built all manner of business and personal networks before launching this bid.  Lotsa regulatory hurdles on this one, but I'm betting Canada ultimately says yes, especially since Nexen's board backs it. Ottawa can't close itself off to China's resource demand and opening itself up to that flow requires some buy-back transactions like this.

(WPR Feature) Skipping Out on the Bill: Obama's Cost-Free Drone Wars

Thanks to the Obama administration’s aggressive use of classified leaks to the press, we are encouraged to believe that President Barack Obama has engineered a revolutionary shift in both America’s geopolitical priorities and our military means of pursuing those ends. As re-election sales jobs go, it presses lukewarm-button issues, but it does so ably. But since foreign policy has never been the president’s focus, we should in turn recognize these maneuvers for what they truly are: an accommodation with inescapable domestic realities, one that at best postpones and at worst sabotages America’s needed geostrategic adjustment to a world co-managed with China and India.

Read the entire article at World Politics Review.

The only solution to our immigration "crisis" that matters

In the 1950s, there was a scare (mostly in NYC) about the seemingly endless influx of Puerto Ricans (you remember "West Side Story" and Leonard Bernstein's attempt to dance the problem away?), but the stream thinned out dramatically when the local GDP per capita reached somewhere in the region of 40% of the US's number.  When it got to that point, all things being equal, PRs preferred staying in PR.

This dynamic is well know and has been pointed out many times before in print.

Point of these charts from WAPO story about how returning migrant workers are bolstering Mexico's middle class is that we are reaching that point on Mexico, where - commensurately and with no surprise - the birth rate falls dramatically.

No, it doesn't end the flow of immigrants from LATAM writ large, but the point is made:  as long as a huge opportunity disaparity exists, they will come.  If you want a more manageable flow, you need to whittle down that delta along the lines I just described.

From the story:

 For a generation, the men of this town have headed north to the land of the mighty dollar, breaking U.S. immigration laws to dig swimming pools in Memphis and grind meat in Chicago.

In the United States, they were illegal aliens. Back home, they are new entrepreneurs using the billions of dollars earned “on the other side” to create a Mexican middle class.

The migrants “did something bad to do something good,” said Mexican economist Luis de la Calle.

Where remittances from El Norte were once mostly used to help hungry families back home simply survive, surveys now reveal that the longer a migrant stays up north, the more likely the cash transfers will be used to start new businesses or to pay for homes, farm equipment and school tuitions.

From Santa Maria del Refugio, a once rural, now almost suburban, community of 2,500 in central Mexico’s Guanajuato state, young men have gone to the United States seeking the social mobility they could not find at home.

Their money, and many of the workers themselves, have since returned, as the U.S. economy slowed in the global recession. For the first time in 40 years, net migration is effectively zero. About the same number of Mexicans left the United States last year as arrived. Migration experts expect the northward flow to pick up again as the U.S. economy improves. It is also possible that as Mexico provides more opportunity for upward mobility, some potential migrants will stay home.

In Santa Maria, dollars scrimped and saved in the United States have transformed a poor pueblo into a town of curbed sidewalks, Internet cafes and rows of two-story homes rising on a hillside where scrawny cattle once grazed.

“Look at this place — it’s practically a city now,” said Roberto Mandujano, 50, who moved back to his home town and opened a hardware store five years ago. “There was nothing here when I left.”

Mandujano is a member of a new demographic in Mexico, the anxious, tenacious, growing middle class who own homes and cars and take vacations. They see the United States more as a model than an exploiter.

Another argument for the US focusing more on amping up growth across LATAM: If we want to grow long-term above what history says we should be restricted to as a mature economy, then the best way to achieve that is for countries in our neighborhood to be experiencing rapid growth. [NOTE: this is ultimately why China will need to cool it on seabed territoriality disputes, but no, this logic does not rule out Beijing's stupid behavior in the meantime - as humans have an unlimited potential for letting idiocy trump logic.]

The resurrection of cheap energy in the US is the lure we should use in such an integration effort, and yes, we should most definitely be thinking about adding more stars to our flag.

You either get busy growing or you get busy shrinking in this globalized world.

Advice sought and delivered

Got a request from somebody who's a protegee of someone Linked In to me.  We subsequently linked to each other.

This fellow then asks me for career advice in the following vein:

The purpose of my message is to learn about your ascent to being a world renowned analyst. 

Often times, analysts are perceived to be indispensable because of their technical ability to first access data and then render it in easy-to-understand graphs and charts. After the completion of this time consuming task, analysts are then expected to explain data trends and irregularities in "plain English". By this time, my eyes are so glazed from normalizing data, my write up - while good - is lackluster at best. 

As I read "The Pentagon's New Map", I see the book's content as a balanced amalgamation of data, research and insights. You are exactly what I want to be what I grow up.I would love to be that analyst who makes a difference in the way business and political decisions are made.

How do you recommend I get to that point in my career?

My reply:

Never turn down a chance to do public speaking.  In fact, seek them out at every opportunity. Even if you do a lot of public speaking, it will take the usual 10,000 hours before you get really good.

Study as many foreign languages as you can fit in.  Studying several languages is more important than mastering one.  Good storytelling is ultimately translation, and the best-communicating experts are experts at talking to other experts from fields other than their own.

Write every day.  If you don't get enough opportunities, then start you own blog or join a group blog.  

Prepare to view good writing as a lifetime pursuit.  It will take nonstop writing for about a decade before you really get good.

Whenever possible, seek out and work with professional editors on everything you write.

Read authors whose style you admire and work their tendencies into your own material.

Listen to what people say you do best and then do that as much as possible, getting others to do things for you that you do poorly.  So if mentors you trust tell you're not a good writer and not a good speaker, then spending your life trying to overcome your weaknesses is probably not a great idea.  You'd be better off sticking to what you're best at and trying to make those skills world class.

Nobody is good at everything.  Life involves choices.

I have learned - over time - to keep my advice general like that, versus trying to plot out career paths for others, because, when you do, you inevitably advise them to either: 1) retrace your "brilliant" journey; or (worse) 2) do the opposite of what's made you such a bitter fuck about your life and career.  It's like when you go around asking profs for advice on your PhD topic (which I did all over greater Boston): they either have you updating their own diss or tilting at some windmill they now wish they'd taken on instead.

In truth, I don't advocate anyone pursue a long and steady career, which is why I'm not partial to dispensing wisdom about following my "brilliant" path, nor am I one to suffer bitterness over the choices I've made. Every choice I made, I made because I felt it was time to move on and I was more fearful of creative stagnation than career stagnation. Simply put, I feel good when I feel creative, and when I don't, I go with no regrets.

Peinvention, as scary as it is, beats stagnation every time. The only thing you can be assured of in this world - in this era - is that your "beloved" or "hated" career will likely terminate much faster than you expect, forcing you into a new one (this one feels like my 5th).

Personally, I love that about this world.  To me, the scariest thing in this world is the person who works the one track for 35 years and then retires - a disappearing notion.  To me, that would hell on earth.  I have always been distinctly aware that I only get one at-bat, so I plan on swinging at everything before I go.

Everybody needs a Plan B.

I am always plotting my escape from my current career, because the minute something become un-negotiable, you might as well cash it in.  Because that's when your career starts owning you instead of you owning your life.

Reasons to be optimistic regarding the global economy's response to global warming

US experiencing warmest year on record and 13 hottest years (going back to 1880) for the planet have all occurred since 1998.

David Leonhardt (whom I like a lot and always read) writing in NYT speaks of a non-punitive vector that seems to be emerging among the big players:

Behind the scenes [of the disappearing public debate on global warming], however, a somewhat different story is starting to emerge — one that offers reason for optimism to anyone worried about the planet. The world’s largest economies may now be in the process of creating a climate-change response that does not depend on the politically painful process of raising the price of dirty energy. The response is not guaranteed to work, given the scale of the problem. But the early successes have been notable.

Over the last several years, the governments of the United States, Europe and China have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on clean-energy research and deployment. And despite some high-profile flops, like ethanol and Solyndra, the investments seem to be succeeding more than they are failing.

The price of solar and wind power have both fallen sharply in the last few years. This country’s largest wind farm, sprawling across eastern Oregon, is scheduled to open next month. Already, the world uses vastly more alternative energy than experts predicted only a decade ago.

Even natural gas, a hotly debated topic among climate experts, helps make the point. Thanks in part to earlier government investments, energy companies have been able to extract much more natural gas than once seemed possible. The use of natural gas to generate electricity — far from perfectly clean but less carbon-intensive than coal use — has jumped 25 percent since 2008, while prices have fallen more than 80 percent. Natural gas now generates as much electricity as coal in the United States, which would have been unthinkable not long ago.

The successes make it possible at least to fathom a transition to clean energy that does not involve putting a price on carbon — either through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program that requires licenses for emissions. It was exactly such a program, supported by both Barack Obama and John McCain in the 2008 campaign, that died in Congress in 2010 and is now opposed by almost all Congressional Republicans and some coal-state and oil-state Democrats.

The real goal, according to one scientist, is the emergence of disruptive technologies that push the planet "down" the hydrocarbon chain (wood-->coal-->oil-->gas-->renewables & hydrogen).

The more we shift from threatening fines to promising record profits, the migration will occur as it should.

Fascinating for me to watch a dozen years after I ran that global warming-focused "economic security exercise" with Cantor Fitzgerald atop World Trade Center One.

NOTE: the falling USG support for renewable energy research is why the influx of China investment is so important.