China's car market: The global race to the middle

Beijing Auto Show photo found here

WSJ story on how, up to now, the foreign car companies operating inside China have focused on the upscale end of the market while the domestic firms have focused on the lower-end market.  As China's middle class emerges, a new middle-ground battlespace opens up, with both sides--foreign and domestic--increasingly bumping into one another, chasing the same customers.

This is intense competition.  Just like in politics, where the first vote in college tends to stamp the voter for life in terms of Dem versus GOP, when it comes to car buying, the first choice usually leads to a lifetime of brand devotion.  Good example:  I've bought 9 Hondas over the last two decades.  Started with a VW Fox and hated it, and then went to a Honda Civic and loved it.  One Audi GT Coupe in there, provided by my mother-in-law, but once I settled on Honda, it's been Hondas ever since in terms of purchases.

Well, imagine all those first-time buyers in China.

So look for the foreign companies to move aggressively downmarket and the domestics to move aggressively upmarket, which is why a Geely buys Volvo--for example.

Brazil and the bomb

Der Spiegel op-ed by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

The question asked by Hans Ruhle:  Is Brazil maneuvering itself toward an acceptable pursuit of a nuclear weapon capacity?

Brazil had three nuclear weapons programs going in the 1980s--one for each military service.  After the Cold War ended, Brazil moved toward ending all that and declaring itself only for peaceful uses.

But now Brazil is building nuclear submarines.  Why?  America's got 'em, and if that's what great powers have, then Brazil must have some too.

So we have a country that's already mastered the enrichment cycle building nuclear submarines and all of a sudden--in historical terms--it's awfully close-mouthed about its enrichment cycle and doesn't care to have the IAEA snooping around.

Oh, and it's also brokering international deals WRT Iran's controversial enrichment program--alongside another rising great power (Turkey) that logically harbors nuclear ambitions as well.

For now, Brazil's constitution says no to nukes, but as everybody knows, Latin American constitutions are very changeable documents.  And with regional rival Venezuela (yes, they're rivals, no matter how much Lula sweet talks Hugo) cooperating with Iran, you just know the Brazilian military is thinking, "Why should we be the only BRIC without nukes?"

This is why, quite frankly, Obama's push for a "world without nuclear weapons" is about as wrongly timed as it gets:  we've got all these rising great powers, all looking for respect, and everything we do to prevent that path just screams at them, "get nukes and you're in!"  I mean, just look at the way we treat India on this score (as we should), in addition to Pakistan (as we shouldn't).  

We keep looking at this dynamic in Cold War terms, when we need to understand it in globalization terms. In addition to all that frontier integration, largely conducted by rising New Core pillars, we've got this crew of great powers looking for admittance into the "made men" club.  None of them can really hope to generate a conventional balance to the U.S. military, but the shortcut? 

Man, that's just too good to pass up. Honestly, we are reduced to preaching abstinence to a bunch of very horny young men.  It will not work.

We can spend all our time and energy trying to stop that dynamic, or we can focus our attention on processing their applications.

But they will all be great powers, one way or the other.

You may think it's all about America + NATO holding the line, but I think that world is dead and buried.

And I've been saying that for close to a decade in public and in print since 2004.

We can choose to have allies who cower behind their bombs to cover their declining capabilities--and age, or we can choose to work this world with allies who have plenty of babies, rising defense budgets, and growing nuclear arsenals.

Which option do you will work and which will be left behind by history as globalization continues to expand and consolidate?

Lenin (and all those BS neo-Marxists) turned upside down

Ah, but we know that capitalism and free markets are thoroughly discredited now that our global quarter-century boom came to an end.  If it could not last forever, it all had to be revealed as false--right?

And, of course, the crisis revealed that the have/have-not gap was globalization's greatest legacy, despite the unprecedented rise of a global middle class that occupies the middle 60%.  

So what is the way forward, besides all of us living under "superior" Chinese rule?

Well, it seems that the only way forward for globalization's Old Core West is to get better at selling to the bottom of the pyramid.

CANYOUBELIEVETHAT?  The ONLY way the Old Core can stay rich is by shrinking the Gap!

So it turns out Lenin and all the neo-Marxists had it right--just completely backwards once the American model of globalization truly surpassed the colonial legacies and Cold War divisions.

Whew!  What a relief!  

Here I thought my whole vision was just a regurgitation of the 1970s neo-Marxists, when it turns out to be their complete ideological opposite!

Thank God I finally saw the light.

This rant was inspired by a Samuelson column in Newsweek--a very good one.  He quotes Arvind Subramanian (a current favorite, for good reason) on the need to cross the "Hobbesian threshold."

In Pentagon's New Map, I said much the same back in 2004:  the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance ideological journey was from Hobbes to Locke to Kant--as in, security to good laws to peace-enhancing connectivity.

He's a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land

I pretty much tune Fouad Ajami out when he talks anything having to do with Obama, because on that score, he's about as reliable as Karl Rove in his one-sidedness.

But when he writes directly about what's wrong with the Middle East and Arab culture, he's often quite powerful in his observations--to wit, the subtitle of this WSJ op-ed:  "Millions like Faisal Shahzad are unsettled by a modern world they can neither master nor reject."

That is a microcosm of the Arab world in general:  globalization has embraced it--thinly, and it is both amazed and repulsed by the possibility/inevitability of deeper integration.

But it is an especially good capture of expats who never quite connect in their adopted Western countries--hence the susceptibility to the chimera of dropping out and tuning in to jihad. It is the perfect, Calgon-take-me-away Deus ex machina. You hit the rough patch and booyah! You've got this noble out that suddenly makes your life historic and genuine and not such a failure. We're talking the ultimate Plan B--a concept most of us known well after the last tough year and a half.

More:

The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, army, America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal Shahzad.

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

We can succumb to the tempting notion that it's all about "empire," hence it's always we who are the ultimate target, followed by the Brits in a residual sense. But that's our version of escapism. The globalization we began has escaped our grasp. This dynamic won't end by our quitting the contest.

We will be killing the un-redeemables and the irrationals until they stop being born.  Globalization, in the form of that massive (as in, now close to 60% of the world's population) global middle class, will simply keep paying somebody to make them go away. Might be us, for as long as we want it to be, but it will definitely be somebody with a gun.

US-Afghanistan: trying to hold the US-Afghan endgame together

WAPO, FT and Economist stories.

As in Iraq, I don't see the Obama administration doing much of anything to regionalize what comes next.  This remains completely a US/NATO show, as improved as it may be.  And so we are reduced to emphasizing publicly to the world how strong our bond is with the Karzai government--a sure sign that it is weak.

Karzai remains committed to a personality-based rule, because it's what he knows and he knows it's more popular than the Americans.  The Americans remain committed to building up institutions, because it's what we know works best, and yet, as in Iraq, there is this sense of having our eye on the door.

And so we are left with our great faith in the Kandahar campaign and the notion that, as one American general put it, the Afghans will "shura their way to success."

I personally would put more faith in a regionalization scheme that engaged the Iranians, Turks, Russians, Indians and Chinese far more explicitly and deeply.  Instead, we seem intent on relying on the kindness of the Pakistanis going forward--or maybe it's backward.

The requirement to "fight through" a cyberattack = reasonable planning

Keith Alexander is confirmed as the first head of U.S. Cyber Command, a sub-unified command under Strategic Command.

What caught my eye was his previous sensible testimony (see the other WAPO story) on the subject of war during conditions of cyber attack:

In his written responses, Alexander said that clandestine, offensive actions in cyberspace -- such as dismantling a Web site used by jihadists overseas -- are "traditional military activities" and should not be considered covert operations.

In the event of a cyber attack, the military must still be able to carry out conventional operations.

"Even with the clear understanding that we could experience damage to our infrastructure, we must be prepared to 'fight through' in the worst case scenario," he said.

I know, I know.  The right virus and everything goes back to the Dark Ages and we're all completely helpless.

But indulging in nightmare scenarios isn't planning, it's escapism. As always, the military has to plan on functioning even as comms are degraded.  There's nothing new in that.

Economic isolation is no choice, says Taiwan's Ma

NYT and WAPO, plus the Japan Times via WPR's Media Roundup.

Taiwan's President Ma is pushing hard for the FTA framework agreement with China, his culminating dream of deep economic integration with China.  

Per the NYT story:

“We can handle diplomatic isolation,” Mr. Ma said last month, “but economic isolation is fatal.”

The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, the Ma administration says, would be a prelude to similar deals with Malaysia, Singapore and, eventually, Japan or the United States. “Once E.C.F.A. is signed, we want to sign other free trade agreements and try to use mainland China to link with international markets,” a trade official involved in the negotiations, Hsu Chun-fang, said.

In recent years, Taiwan has watched as rivals like South Korea have signed free-trade deals throughout Asia, becoming more competitive in industries like machinery making and pushing their per capita gross domestic product ahead of the island’s.

Taiwan has been hampered in negotiating similar agreements because Beijing views the island as a part of China and objects to other countries’ signing formal treaties that could strengthen Taiwan’s claims to independence. The island has trade deals only with five Latin American countries, which buy a tiny slice of its exports.

The economies of Taiwan and China are already connected. Taiwan has invested $150 billion in China since the early 1990s, according to a Taiwan government estimate. About 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports already go to China, where they face average tariffs of 9 percent. Half of those exports are semifinished goods that are shipped to factories for assembly and other value-added services and then re-exported, according to Mr. Ma.

Yet many of the details remain vague, and that has fueled economic as well as political worries.

For example, Taiwanese business leaders fear a lot of small manufacturing industries, like the show industry, will get wiped out by Chinese competition.

Given his low approval ratings (20s-30s), Ma has felt the need to engage in televised political debate with his primary opponent, as if he were still running for president, according to the Japan Times story.  A lot of experts predict he may be a one-term president whose primary achievement is all his economic accords with China (12 in total) , with the framework agreement hanging in the balance.

My sense:  Ma's fears are well-grounded.  The Asian economic integration process is well underway and only gaining steam. Taiwan can either get in early or be left behind.

What happens to any Obama energy policy after the Gulf blowout/spill?

The Economist worries less about Obama's political standing post-disaster (hard to see how minds will be changed about him) than that of any prospective energy policy.  Before the disaster, "America was inching fitfully towards a coherent energy policy." Obama was in a giving mood: renewable energy subsidies, offshore drilling and more nukes. Now everything sees at risk or certainly on hold, and with the elections getting closer, the window for serious efforts may be gone in a matter of weeks.  

Now, Obama's energy policy seems boiled down to reforming the oil regulatory structure within the USG.  The big innovation? Splitting it in two so the guys who collect government royalties aren't the same guys enforcing safety.

In the end, the Deepwater Horizon may serve as a similar turning point as Katrina did for Bush--the divider between when Bush seemed to get his way on most things and when all that stopped suddenly.

Of course, the resulting hypocrisy on this will be magnificent: people will complain about waging wars in the Gulf (Persian, that is) because we're "addicted to oil" (a truly goofy description, if ever there was one) but likewise condemn any offshore drilling. But that's only par for the course.

Six of the world's 10 largest oil discoveries in the last couple of years have been in deep water, so the challenge isn't going away. Deepwater accounts for half our offshore production and one-quarter of our total oil production.

We will either pursue it or not, but others certainly will.

New Core Turkey, Brazil engineer nuclear fuel enrichment deal with Iran

This is both quite impressive in terms of non-superpower nuclear diplomacy but likewise self-serving--especially to Turkey.

What New Core powers like Turkey and Brazil say with this deal:  We ourselves can and will decide, under what circumstances we'll collectively self-engineer ourselves--and other rising regional powers like us--into nuclear status.

In other words, the Old Core, old-boy nuclear powers club no longer decides.

Bold, slick moves by both Lula and Erdogan that will provide Ahmadinejad just enough cover to claim victory--and keep us guessing--while effectively killing any movement toward tougher sanctions.  The Chinese have to like it, as will Moscow--I imagine.

Have to give it up to Iran on this one, as well as Turkey and Brazil.  This deal constitutes a real rule-set reset when it comes to issues of proliferation--both real and stealthy.  The West simply no longer dictates on this issue.

End of the world to some, but just another aspect of rising great powers incorporating themselves into the venues of international power and influence instead of waiting for the established powers to invite them in--on the West's preferred terms.

Whether or not Iran will truly be satisfied with a Japan-like outcome (obviously capable and close to weaponization but not taking the final step) is yet to be seen, but this deal is an effective short-term defusing of any logic of attack.  Now, Israel is pre-approved to be widely condemned for any kinetics by the bulk of the world's rising great powers.

Assuming it holds, it looks like the latest "check" to me, meaning a move that keeps Tehran close to its endgame win and essentially determining our next, checkmate-avoiding move.  Iran's declaration that it will continue to enrich some fuel on its own?  That's just an in-your-face reminder.

Will it be enough for the West?  Absolutely not.  But it gives China and India the out they need.

The big point:  Iran keeps coming up with these clever ways to buy time, and in doing so, it's attracting a lot of implicit support from rising New Core powers who aren't exactly in favor of Iran's nuclear status but will defend its right to do so--however quietly and cleverly.

Cybersecurity: Be afraid! But how much afraid?

Evgeny Morozov piece in the weekend WSJ a bit back, and recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek story on Richard Clarke's latest tome.  Morozov rails against the "cyber warmongers," in whose ranks one must definitely include Clarke, for reasoning both valid and hyperbolic.

I like Morozov in general:  he is snarky in a good way, solid in his reasoning, and he likes to poke holes in the usual conventional wisdom.  Here, let's say, Morozov is less than impressed with the usual "wargames" that prove, as they are designed to, that the US is COMPLETELY naked and unprepared for an electronic Pearl Harbor.  

It's one of those inescapable predictions that must inevitably someday be right--right?  The question is, How bad will it be? Will it constitute a whole new monster or just another degree of failure/collapse that's marginally bigger than the usual stuff we inflict upon ourselves with great regularity due to accidents, poor practices and bad design?

Morozov targets Clarke right off, who claims in his new book that "the cyberwar has already begun."  That's a prediction you have to love, because no matter what happens, the man has got to be proven right by events, because, what the hell!  By his logic, there's no such thing as a cyberpeace.  So McConnell (former NSA head) says we'll automatically lose any cyberwar that happens (Really?  Then who automatically wins?  Oh, THEY do, of course.) and Panetta (CIA) goes bravely on the record to say that the next Pearl Harbor will be a cyber Pearl Harbor (of course it will, because we said so and we get to determine these things in advance--just like 9/11!).

Morozov says spending on cybersecurity is higher than ever ($55B between now and 2015), but so is our angst.  He wonders out loud if the biggest scare-mongers on the subject tend to benefit from it, by selling books, and winning cybersecurity contracts from the USG (like McConnell's new employer, Booz Allen, or Clarke's new firm, Good Harbor Consulting).  

This is why I don't make enough money consulting, let me tell you.  I really need to focus on scaring people more.

Clarke defends his record by saying that the U.S. has created a very large and very expensive cybersecurity command, so that proves it's a huge problem that the government is trying to take seriously.  Both his firm and Booz denies any connections between what their poster boys say and what the company earns, but you know the visibility and the connections and the message and the product all go together.

As Morozov says, we don't want "to hold our policy-making hostage to the rhetorical ploys of better-informed government contractors."

Best-bit award goes to Obama's current cybersec czar, Howard Schmidt, who said that "there is no cyberwar," and that the term is "a terrible metaphor" and a "terrible concept."  I think he's right, but I think those can easily become words to regret.  

The web, Morozov points out, is a wild place still--a real frontier will few lawmen. We've democratized the connectivity and so too the criminality and malicious behavior--big surprise.  

Here's where Morozov gets to the logic I usually employ in Q&A when I get this question:  "Why don't you emphasize cyberwar more in your brief?":

Why have such tactics—known in military parlance as "computer network attacks"—not been used more widely? As revolutionary as it is, the Internet does not make centuries-old laws of war obsolete or irrelevant. Military conventions, for example, require that attacks distinguish between civilian and military targets. In decentralized and interconnected cyberspace, this requirement is not so easy to satisfy: A cyberattack on a cellphone tower used by the adversary may affect civilian targets along with military ones. When in 2008 the U.S. military decided to dismantle a Saudi Internet forum—initially set up by the CIA to glean intelligence but increasingly used by the jihadists to plan on attacks in Iraq—it inadvertently caused disruption to more than 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas. A weapon of surgical precision the Internet certainly isn't, and damage to civilians is hard to avoid. Military commanders do not want to be tried for war crimes, even if those crimes are committed online.

I also tend to add: even if you, the weaker guy, shut down my nets for a bit and get some surprise attack accomplished, at the end of the day, I will still be there with my superior conventional military force, and I am likely to be able to make clear my unhappiness regarding whatever trick you just pulled.  Fait accompli or no, you will now have me as a more committed enemy, and when I decide to strike back, the cybertricks won't be enough to protect you.

So Morozov says, quite sensibly:  "We probably want very strong protection against cyberterror, moderate protection against cybercrime, and little to no protection against juvenile cyber-hooliganism."  

Why?  Perfect security would come with huge social, political and economic costs--all of which, I would add, would eventually translate to military weakness.

Best point:  "Recasting basic government problems in terms of a global cyber struggle won't make us any more secure."

So no, Mr. President, please don't turn cyberattacks into "weapons of mass disruption" because you'll be "diverting national attention from more burning problems while promoting extremely costly solutions."

Better to focus on promoting Internet freedom, Morozov says.  He has a book coming out on the Internet and democracy, so he's hawking too, but in a non-hypeish way I instinctively admire.

And yet, Clarke's four big fixes aren't so bad either:

1. Get serious about industrial espionage
2. Create information quarantines (if it's super-secret, keep it totally disconnected from the Web!)
3. Build, don't buy, security (if your security needs are unique, so too should be your solutions) and 
4. get started on cyber-arms control treaties (like one on nobody attacks each other's banks).

Pretty decent, actually.

My take remains the same: nets always race ahead of security, and since we're still--despite the Great Global Recession!--in a period of globalization's stunningly rapid expansion (what else do you call Asian investment everywhere across the Gap while the West's money pours into Asia?), it'll be that way for a long time to come. So, expect a lot of cyber stuff to happen.  Get used to it.  It'll be a natural part of our world.

But yeah, we'll get smarter and more resilient over time.  Just because the criminals and baddies are able to exploit these new techs and nets faster and better than the rest of us right now doesn't signal their supremacy for all time--nor their omnipotence now.  Frontiers get settled, rules catch up, life goes on.

So cybersecurity is real and important and we need to spend on it.  It just ain't the sum total of our existence or even of the fights and conflicts that define our age.  It's like the Web, part of damn near everything but hardly the hard core of anything--except pornography.

Roubini: the crash was a "white swan"

Roubini has become quite the brand name, thanks to his great 2006 prediction of a global recession.  His web site goes way beyond the usual blog and book-hawking to providing "a uniquely tailored look at the logic of the global economy, applying the methodology of its renowned founder, NYU economist Nouriel Roubini"--replete with all sorts of analytical pieces by his employees.

What drew me to this interview:

What have we learned from these crises of capitalism?

The first lesson is that crises are not "black swan" events, using the terminology of my friend Nassim Taleb. They're not just random outcomes. They are the result of a buildup of financial and policy vulnerability and mistakes—excessive risk-taking, leverage, debt, and so on. The first chapter of my book is called "The White Swan" because these events are predictable. But generation after generation, we seem to forget the past. When there's a bubble, there's euphoria. There's irrational exuberance. Consumers can use their homes like ATM machines. Governments and policymakers are happy because they get reelected. Wall Street makes billions of dollars of profits. Everybody's delusional.

It was an old staple of mine in the NewRuleSets.Project brief to talk about rule-set resets happening every 7-10 years on Wall Street, primarily because it was a young man's game and once you got some distance from the last crash, all the new people, being somewhat ignorant of the causes, began to imagine they had invented some new way of perfecting their gaming of the market.  Over time, in their mounting hubris, they unwittingly or wittingly broke old taboos, saying it was different this time.  As those abuses accumulated and the self-delusion grew, the crash was inevitably triggered, and many--but not all--of the "new" rules were found not to have surpassed the old ones, even as the old ones now needed to be updated to account for the new behaviors engendered in the latest round of going just a bit too far.

I got this entire logic from my people at Cantor Fitzgerald.  They said it was as regular as a clock.

So, 2008, about 7-8 past the last financial meltdown known as the dot.com crash, was a pretty decent bet or prediction to make.  Don't be surprised when another one happens sometime in the middle of this decade.

Then again, it's different now, because now we have more than just the NYC-London financial axis in play. Now we've a number of significant markets, all of whom are going through their own learning-curve cycles with predictable crashes and reboots--or rule-set rests, as I call them.

So yeah, more white swan than black.

The NIEO is a' coming!

Samuelson in WAPO by way of David Emery.

NIEO refers to the notion, championed by the South in the early 1970s, of a more equitable global economy (New International Economic Order).

Well, guess who made it happen?  Not the Sovs, and not the South, but the New Deal for the World-cum-post WWII order-cum-the West-cum- the global economy-cum-globalization, dreamt up by the United States (TR), launched by the US (FDR), defended and expanded by a series of presidents (Nixon getting the most credit, in my mind, because he opens up China and caps the Sov threat), and finally now rebalanced by our own success--and excess--in that quest.

The two biggest players in triggering this latest rapid expansion of globalization:  China and India, with Brazil, Turkey, South Africa moving up fast.

According to Subramanian (often in FT) by way of Samuelson, another take on the journey from the Gap to the Core: 

This is classic economic catch-up, as poor countries adopt the products and technologies of rich countries. It's a two-step process, says economist Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute. "First, countries have to cross the Hobbesian threshold" -- that's after philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who declared that life without strong government is "nasty, brutish, and short." Governments must provide basic security and sanitation, create some rule of law and establish protections for property, says Subramanian. Otherwise, the stability doesn't exist to pursue Step Two: allowing markets to work; practicing standard economic virtues (taming inflation, disciplining government budgets).

Parts of Africa and Latin America still haven't crossed the Hobbesian threshold, says Subramanian. But elsewhere, many countries have reaped the rewards of moving to Step Two. China and India are the most spectacular cases. Only in recent decades have they relaxed pervasive state regulation and ownership and trade restrictions for more market-based policies.

Now Samuelson's judgment on what must come next: 

So is rebalancing going according to script? Well, not necessarily. It's true that the massive trade imbalances have dropped sharply. The U.S. trade deficit fell from $760 billion in 2006 to $379 billion in 2009; China's trade surplus also dropped. But these changes mostly reflect the Great Recession. The worsening slump caused people and companies to stop spending. Global trade contracted sharply -- and with it the size of imbalances. But as the recovery has strengthened, trade and imbalances are growing again. American imports are increasing faster than exports; this surge could be temporary, suggests economist Richard Berner of Morgan Stanley, as companies replenish depleted inventories.

Still, what's missing is a sizable revaluation of China's currency, the renminbi. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute thinks the renminbi may be 40 percent undervalued against the dollar. This gives China's exports a huge advantage and underpins its trade surpluses. Other Asian countries fear altering their currencies if China doesn't change first. "They'll lose ground to China," notes Hensley. The European Union, Brazil and India all feel threatened by the renminbi. President Obama wants U.S. exports to double in five years. That's probably unrealistic, but it's impossible if the renminbi isn't revalued.

The next best problem to have, no doubt, and I agree with those that say "paid in renminbi" will be the slow route by which China converts its currency (letting more and more of its importers use the yuan, swapped out by China via currency trades).  But as this process matures, it will represent a brave new world for the Chinese as much--or more--than for the US and its dollar.

In short, the catch-up strategy stuff ends and the competition gets a whole lot more real.

The sub-divisioning of AFRICOM proceeds logically according to regional economic schemes

Harkening back to my "The Americans Have Landed" piece for Esquire in 2007, this piece (via WPR's Media RoundUp) revisits the five geographic sub-divisions pursued by AFRICOM, a staple concept I used in the brief for a couple of years following my reporting. It was the source of my prediction in the piece that the US could one day have two dozen little forts around the vast continent like the one I visited, and reported on, along Kenya's coastline.  Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, the star of the piece, is the model for four other sub-regional units (north, south, west and central.  At the time I visited, HOA had Djibouti as the sub-regional command site, plus "contingency operating locations" in Ethiopia (3, with one just closed in connection with Ethiopia's intervention into Somalia) and Kenya (1).  That's one mini-HQ and 4 COLs for a total of 5 facilities. Replicate that four times and you've got roughly two-dozen little forts, albeit spread across a landscape roughly triple the size of the United States.  HOA's HQ was 2k, and the COLs were more like 50 a pop, so let's say 2,200 total.  Replicate that four more times and you're talking a whopping total of 10,11-000 personnel (with lots being civilian contractors).  As presence goes, this is a tiny force for such a huge continent, so it can only be about leveraging local capacity.

To compare, we sent 10k personnel to Haiti for the earthquake.  Think about that:  Haiti versus Africa!

And let's just say, we didn't exactly control Haiti on the basis of 10,000 personnel.

Anyway, here's what this piece in the Geopolitical Monitor says:

The month before AFRICOM began its one-year incubation under U.S. European Command in 2007, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Ryan Henry said, “Rather than three different commanders who have Africa as a third or fourth priority, there will be one commander that has it as a top priority.” [2]

The Pentagon official also revealed that Africa Command “would involve one small headquarters plus five ‘regional integration teams’ scattered around the continent” and that “AFRICOM would work closely with the European Union and NATO,” particularly France, a member of both, which was “interested in developing the Africa standby force”. [3]

The Defense Department official identified all the key components of Africa Command’s role and adumbrated what has transpired in the almost three-year interim: By subsuming nations formerly in the areas of responsibility of three Pentagon commands under a unified one, the U.S. will divide the world’s second most populous continent into five military districts, each with a multinational African Standby Force trained by military forces from the United States, NATO and the European Union.

Later the same month, the Pentagon confirmed its earlier disclosure that AFRICOM would deploy regional integration teams “to the northern, eastern, southern, central and western portions of the continent, mirroring the African Union’s five regional economic communities….”

The Defense News website detailed the geographic division described in Defense Department briefing documents issued in that month:

“One team will have responsibility for a northern strip from Mauritania to Libya; another will operate in a block of east African nations – Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania; and a third will carry out activities in a large southern block that includes South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola….

“A fourth team would concentrate on a group of central African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad and Congo [Brazzaville]; the fifth regional team would focus on a western block that would cover Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Niger and Western Sahara, according to the briefing documents.” [4]

The five areas correspond to Africa’s main Regional Economic Communities, starting in the north of the continent:

• Arab Maghreb Union: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.
• East African Community (EAC): Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
• Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
• Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS): Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa), Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe.
• Southern Africa Development Community: Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

The piece, with snippets of snarky editorializing here and there ("Pentagon Builds Surrogate Armies To Control Africa Region By Region"  Oh really!  That's all it takes?  My, that was easy!), lays out a lot of references and gets the facts basically correct (although I think it misidentifies HOA as--in effect--a sixth separate effort, as it basically correction to the EAC layout + Ethiopia).  It also explores my colleague Harry Ulrich's similar networking effort in the naval realm (something I also wrote on for Esquire:  "Sea-Traffic Control").

But like I say in the post headline, a fairly natural breakdown by geography:  a local precinct effort by the US to encourage regional integration in the security realm that buttresses that which is already unfolding in the economic realm.  Every neighborhood gets its community cop (locally-derived peacekeeping units) with an attendant mentor (AFRICOM sub-regionals).

Naturally nefarious to some, but who else is making the effort?  Especially when our economic interests are marginal beyond oil, and the oil will flow no matter how many brushfires were to happen anyway.

Nonetheless, the piece ends on this note, however unsubstantiated it is by the actual text:

The U.S. is not dragging almost every nation in Africa into its military network because of altruism or concerns for the security of the continent’s people. AFRICOM’s function is that of every predatory military power: The threat and use of armed violence to gain economic and geopolitical advantages.

Yes, yes. Making Africa safe for Chinese mercantilism.  So selfish of us!

Worth reading for the facts, just understand that the editorializing is both hyperbolic and unsupported.

We will be played for fools by Pakistan--and by China by extension

From a WAPO article: 

A man who guided Shahzad from Karachi to the country's northwest, Pakistani officials say, was arrested this week at the mosque, which is affiliated with Jaish-i-Muhammad. The al-Qaeda-linked group is one in a mosaic of domestic jihadist organizations that were created or cultivated by Pakistan's intelligence services to antagonize Indian troops in the disputed region of Kashmir but have gone increasingly rogue.

U.S. officials say they are worried about these militant groups based in Punjab province, many of which are banned but still operate freely. The most prominent among them is Lashkar-i-Taiba, suspected in a deadly 2008 siege in Mumbai. The group has changed its legal name, but its leaders remain free.

Some elements in Pakistan's security establishment continue to view such groups as assets against India, and Punjabi politicians court them for political support. It is uncertain whether Pakistan would take aggressive action against the organizations, even if they are found to be definitively connected to the Times Square bombing attempt.

We are being held hostage to this fight.

And given the choices, why note choose India and force China to step up more and deal with Af-Pakistan?  Or should we fund all the security (or lack thereof) and let China build the ports and dig the mines?

The BP disaster in perspective

NASA image by way of ABC News.  Nansen Saleir op-ed in WSJ.  Saleri is president and CEO of Quantum Reservoir Impact in Houston, so an oil man.

Why didn't the oil industry anticipate such a big disaster, asks Saleri.  

The answer may partially lie in the extraordinary safety record of offshore U.S. drilling over the last four decades. The last significant mishap in U.S. waters dates back to 1969, the year of the first lunar landing. A blowout on Union Oil's Platform A, six miles offshore from Santa Barbara, Calif., spilled an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil over a period of 10 days. This resulted in considerable environmental damage and loss of wildlife, including 10,000 birds. The ensuing chain of technical and procedural improvements in safety practices worked pretty well. The end result was an infinitesimal spill rate over several decades which in turn led many, including BP, to consider a blowout an inconceivable event.

His solution-process going forward strikes me as solid:

So what now? What is needed is a scientific, thorough and apolitical investigation headed possibly by the National Academy of Sciences and drawing in experts from the oil and gas industry as well as the government agencies involved. The investigation must also evaluate the entire post-accident response effort led by BP in cooperation with local, state and federal agencies.

Some questions that must be diligently probed by investigators are:

1) Why did the blowout preventers—the massive valve assemblies designed to stop an uncontrolled flow—fail? And what are their reliability statistics?

2) Were the redundant safety systems truly redundant? It seems obvious they weren't, but this has to be verified.

3) How well trained was the crew?

4) Were the safety systems and contingency plans in place commensurate with the immense values of the total assets at risk—human, material and environmental?

5) Did operational and cost-cutting practices compromise safety?

What escalated the April 20 incident from a tragic accident to a catastrophe was not the blowout itself but the ensuing inferno that sunk the $650 million BP platform. Without the fire, the oil well leak could have probably been brought under control within a week. Thus it is critical to determine what future designs could best enhance survivability of giant offshore structures even under blowout conditions. Are there lessons to be learned from the airline industry, which has engineered significant reductions in post-crash fires during the last decade?

So treat it like the Challenger disaster, which Saleri notes didn't end the US space program.

The Gulf provides about 1/3rd of US domestic production.

A classic evolution: American-invented becomes globally-owned--and locally adapted

BBC News online story by way of brother Andy.

"Historic" line comes from old friend Rod Beckstrom, now head of ICANN.

To me, this is one of America's most profound success stories in spreading globalization.  

As for the Balkanization fears, that's way overblown.  The future is machine translation.

Cultures have to be able to format the web in their own languages, plain and simple.  Enough language destruction will happen anyway, but the biggies like Mandarin and Arabic will thrive, and we will all learn them all, on some level, with our big advantage being American English's uncanny willingness to absorb new words from other languages.

Mining OPEC for Africa?

Inevitable development and proper channeling of what will be substantial blowback inside Africa (maybe not on top but definitely from below) regarding Asia's (and particularly China's) ramping up of demand for the continent's mineral resources.  

It's misleading and premature to cast China's "penetration" as a colonial-style grab for power.  What is happening is the development of a huge co-dependency relationship that lack counterparty capacity (it takes two to tango fairly on any deal) on the part of African nations.  In short, China's got its state capitalism shtick in line but African nations lack a cohesive counter, creating uneven transactions (i.e., Africa can always do better) that so far generate a lot of investment and activity and jobs (all great); it's just not clear how evenly that new wealth is being distributed locally in a sustainable fashion.

Gist of piece:  time to call the companies' bluff about being able to go elsewhere if they're not treated right by the Africans.  With China's heavy entry, that bluff starts looking a lot weaker because finding such volume elsewhere is a whole lot less feasible with each passing year of "sticky" investment.

Obama: any grand vision for Asian security architecture? None yet detected.

Former Indian ambassador to Pakistan writing in WSJ (via WPR's Media Roundup).

Gist:  Obama seems eager to make any sort of relationship happen with China.  I could add:  Ditto on Pakistan.

The loser in these foci?  India, of course.

India has tried to prod the Obama administration into a more active role. New Delhi has recently had a detailed exchange of views on the Asia-Pacific region with the State Department's highest-ranking Asia official, Kurt Campbell, but much more needs to be done. While New Delhi welcomes cooperative and constructive relations between the U.S. and China, concerns in India are inevitable when the Sino-U.S. relationship is marked either by confrontation or collusion which undermines Indian interests.

Many Indians wonder if the Obama administration has any grand vision at all in shaping the emerging architecture for security and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region. No one doubts that relations with the U.S. will remain a key feature of Indian foreign policy. But in the absence of mutual trust which characterized the relationship in the recent past, existing misgivings will not be put to rest merely by grand state banquets or glib talk about democracies being "natural partners."

I have advocated prioritizing China over India, but likewise India over Pakistan.  From India's perspective, Obama's performance to date must seem entirely opportunistic and reactive--the unwinding of crises with little sense of the structure to emerge.

I would not contest that characterization.

Marine Corps Gazette: The Gap as "Arc of Instability"

Story from May issue, scanned and sent to me.  Crude image, but the shape is familiar.

Not the first time the Core-Gap map was redubbed:

That's how US News & World Report did it, but there I got credit from Mark Mazetti ("Pax Americana," 6 October 2003):

Ultimately, what is envisioned is a fundamentally new role for the U.S. service member around the globe--at once soldier, diplomat, international negotiator, and guardian of economic security. The military's mission thus becomes far more nuanced and more difficult: bringing regions like the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East into what U.S. Naval War College professor and Rumsfeld adviser Thomas Barnett calls the "functioning core" of globalized nations. At the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, Admiral Cebrowski has even discarded the term "warriors" when referring to U.S. troops. He prefers instead "enforcers," with a mission nothing short of "enforcing the norms of international behavior" in the world's most dangerous places.

Readers will remember I had an entire section in Pentagon's New Map called "Why I Hate the Arc of Instability."

A fundamental difference between Chinese and US education

Lovely bit:

Zheng Yue, a young woman from China who is teaching her native language to students in this town on the Oklahoma grasslands, was explaining a vocabulary quiz on a recent morning. Then a student interrupted.

“Sorry, I was zoning out,” said the girl, a junior wearing black eye makeup. “What are we supposed to be doing?”

Ms. Zheng seemed taken aback but patiently repeated the instructions.

“In China,” she said after class, “if you teach the students and they don’t get it, that’s their problem. Here if they don’t get it, you teach it again.”

China, we are told, wants to teach the world Mandarin, so it's sending several hundred teachers here to teach in US schools, subsidized by the Chinese government.  US school administrators visit Chinese schools in reply.

I think this is inevitable and good, strengthening bold sides and increasing understanding.  It is hard to imagine a global culture a generation hence that isn't as infiltrated by Chinese and today's is by Japanese--the exporters of cool.  Nothing quite makes a culture feel secure in its own accomplishments than to have their ways incorporated by other cultures.