Some serious heavyweights join Wikistrat's global lineup of strategists

I've spent much of August now making pitches to analysts/thinkers/strategists I deeply respect, asking them to join Wikistrat's community of strategists.

And I've got to tell you, we've got some real stars coming our way:  Dmitri Trenin from Carnegie Moscow, Daniel Pipes from the Middle East Forum, Robert Kaplan from the Center for a New American Security, and Michael Scheuer of "Imperial Hubris" fame. From the blogging world we've attracted Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz, Mr. "Anglosphere" James Bennett, James Joyner from Outside the Beltway and this blog's "neighbor" ZenPundit. We're also signing up a number of World Politics Review writers like Frida Ghitis and editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein.

The invites keep going out and the acceptances keep rolling in. If you think joining up is for you, please contact me and let's discuss.

Wikistrat is offering various levels of belonging. Most of the heavyweights will be employed primarily on simulations for clients - the crowdsouring effect. The more junior ones will spend much of their time building up the GLOMOD, or Global Model that undergirds the simulations, but also getting in on those when it makes sense.

Exciting stuff!

As I tell these people, we know we're carving out some new territory here, but anybody who looks ahead realizes that analysis in the 21st century won't be done solely in a BOGGSAT (bunch of guys and gals sitting around a table) manner. With a world increasingly tackling its entertainment in a distributed, massively multiplayer online way, some portion of analysis naturally gravitates in the same direction - already embodied in the blogosphere itself. 

So our point is, why not harness all that effort into something larger and more coherent. Instead of you, the client, visiting 40 blogs of China experts, why not have those 40 come together in TEAP mode (throw everyone at the problem) and work your China issue for you. And don't just have them discuss and then mush together their competing perspectives in the summary report. Instead, have those ideas compete on the Wiki in the form of scenarios - ones that illuminate the "black swans" you've never considered, etc.

I really think this is going to be an historic capability here, and I can't tell you how excited we are to attract such serious talent.

Media & web mentions/coverage of recent Wikistrat International Grand Strategy Competition

Rounding up for the record the various sorts of coverage Wikistrat enjoyed over the course of the competition, I wanted to highlight the following:

Brian Hasbrouck over at Political Risk Explored wrote up his impressions of the first week, when - unsurprising to me as Head Judge - he cited the eventual winner Claremont Graduate University's entries as being the most impressive and eye-popping.  CGU played Pakistan 1.

One participant, Timothy Nunan, wrote a nice bit about how the game play allowed a bigger input role for those players with a more historical bent: 

While I’m normally not so big of a fan of “strategic studies” and much of the direction of the discipline of international relations, I find the collaborative aspect of the Wiki tremendously useful, and it’s certainly more interactive and a richer learning experience to have content up online instantly, rather than the turnaround time associated with sending out drafts of papers. Moreover, I feel that policy planning exercises tend to demand a deeper knowledge of history and national trajectories than what you’ll usually find in political science departments, with their quant-heavy focus, today. Certainly, your overall level of analysis can be more superficial than you might like it, but I find it a fun exercise to collaborate with others (something that takes place less frequently than it should in the academy), to try to show that historians, or more precisely people with a historical training, can have really intelligent stuff to add to foreign policy conversations . . .

Denise Magill at the Virtual Roundtable (a site that devotes a lot of attention to wikis), asked a question right out of my wrap-up analysis: "Would you pay $10,000 for your company's next big idea?" In effect, the grand strategy competition was an advertisement to governments about the validity of crowdsourcing new thinking on national policies, but the same holds true for corporations, and I'm not just talking about fishing for big new ideas.  Say you've got this initiative you're considering for emerging market X or developing region Y, but you need somebody to spin out all the possible permutations so you can iron out as many uncertainties in your approach as possible before committing resources.  Why not take $10k of what you're spending on traditional consulting and tap a truly wide network of experts with varying degrees of geographic and intellectual connectivity to the subject matter? Yes, you go to the deep subject matter experts for the guts of your thinking, but how to game out the surprises and the "inconceivables" that invariably pop up? On that score, you gain real safety in numbers - the wiki way.

Dave Algoso, a veteran international developmental aid professional, wrote a nice post that explored the whole vertical-versus-horizontal scenarios distinction. As a rule, professionals tend to obsess over the vertical "shocks," because such black swan events are so analytically sexy, but most of the resulting change actually comes in the low-and-slow horizontal ripples that emanate from such system perturbations.  Algoso sees Wikistrat's approach ably tapping into that more integrated perspective:

Wikistrat is attempting to operationalize this analytical framework. The knowledge and skills necessary to explore the effects are spread across disciplines throughout an organization. Attempts to bring interdisciplincary teams together can be effective, but are susceptible to inefficiencies. We also know that contextual knowledge is vitally important in development. A platform like Wikistrat may enable strategic planners to bring all this knowledge together in an effective way. If it does that, we may see much more effective interventions and better strategy coordination in the future.

Frankly, as Head Judge I saw that this was the hardest thing to get across to most participants: encouraging them to think about downstream consequences that arise from some catalytic event. Often it's not the direct linkage that is fruitfully explored, but rather the seemingly disconnected bit that suddenly looms with new strength as a result of the shock's impact on competing issues.  

Great example from the competition: when the "big one" (however defined) hits China and reorders a lot of the world's assumptions about that growth trajectory, arguably the most compelling shift will be the default rise of India to the top of the global ascendancy narrative. In that dynamic, the more disconnected India is from the triggering problem, the better.

Another eye-opener I cited from the competition: when big shocks to traditional oil-producing regions suddenly catapult the Arctic into the world's consciousness as the next great frontier on energy. Yes, it's been there in the background for years now, but eventually something comes along that gives it global urgency. That's an "inconceivable" (Arctic top Persian Gulf in focus?) that you can count on, the question being, What event triggers that shift in perception and who's best positioned to take advantage?

Institute of World Politics' competition participants

The Institute of World Politics issued a nice press release highlighting their two teams' efforts (as Turkey and Brazil). What was really great to hear was that the competition mirrored simulations run in several of the Institute's courses (Public Diplomacy and Political Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and National Security Policy Process). Participating students felt they were well prepared - and they were. Both teams finished in the Top 12 overall. Some nifty quotes:

The IWP teams are working hard, and gaining valuable experience through their extracurricular efforts.  Vilen Khlgatyan, an IWP student who has been working on articles about Turkey's regional future, has found that, "This competition has helped me further ingrain the idea that all facets of statecraft should be considered, as well as the many possible outcomes" . . . 

And recent graduate Gabriella Gervasio observes, "The Wikistrat exercise is truly the perfect ending to my education here at IWP.  It requires knowledge, expertise, and proper use of the elements of statecraft." 

This is exactly the sort of experience we sought to create: a leveraging of the most exciting and collaborative stuff going on in universities - just blown up to a far larger scale.  I mean, why shouldn't these institutions compete in the strategic realm just like they do in sports?

An Israeli newswire account on the competition had a similarly gratifying pair of participant quotes:

"The entire competition has been one of the most exciting intellectual exercises for me in a long time," said Roman Muzalevsky, the leader of the team from Yale, when reflecting on his experience over the course of the Competition. "I am certain I have learned more from this experience than the vast majority of classrooms I have ever been in," added Andrew Eccleston, a member of the team from the American Military University. While the prize was a strong incentive, most participants felt the experience of applying their theoretical knowledge and using Wikistrat’s innovative model was the real reward. 

I think the real excitement came in the act of competing. It's one thing to crank a paper and get a good grade, and I made that effort by giving each team's sixteen entries an initial grade where, quite frankly, I judged them strictly on how many boxes they checked and how well they checked them - relative to other teams from that country (when applicable). At first, like in any course, the grades were lower because the content was weaker, and I struggled a bit not to grade too harshly. But the longer the competition went and the vast majority figured out "the ropes," it got a lot harder for me not to give everybody solid initial grades. Near the end, I was searching for ways to nick points here and there: that's how consistently solid everyone was becoming.

But if all we had done was that, we wouldn't have elevated the play - or excitement.  It would have been collaborative, yes, but not truly competitive. So the first straight-up grade was like your initial pool grade: it determined which tier of competition you'd ultimately be ranked within. All the super top grades went into the same bin, for example, and then it became the top China entry versus the top Pakistan entry versus . . .. So yeah, you might get an initial grade of 95, but then the question became, could that grade hold up when rank-ordered against the other 95s?  In the end, then, your overall grade reflected your team's consistent effort to outwork, out-think and out-strategize everybody else - just like in the real world. And I think it was that definitive outcome that really fired the competitive juices.

Find a nice bit here from the University of Sussex celebrating how well their fielded team played North Korea - which they did.  I was surprised by how imaginative the team was with a country that seemingly has so little wiggle room.  But that is one of the joys of a strategic planning exercise like this.  As one Sussex player put it: 

North Korea is a Cold War legacy in the 21st century, and it was stimulating imagining the future of this isolated country in a globalising world.

Naturally, top bragging rights went to the overall winner, Claremont Graduate University, and the university was justifiably proud about its winning team:

Comprising CGU's team were: Benjamin Acosta, PhD student in comparative politics and cultural studies; Steven Childs, PhD candidate in world and comparative politics; Sean Gera, PhD student in world politics; Byron Ramirez, PhD student in political science and economics; and Piotr Zagorowski, PhD student in world politics.

The team bested rivals from the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Georgetown University, Ohio State University, Yale University, New York University and other top schools.

Childs said the CGU team's victory is a testament to the university's emphasis on transdisciplinary education and the political methods courses found in SPE’s [School of Politics and Economics] curriculum.  Rather than examine the issues in isolation, the CGU team tackled the challenges of the contest with a broad range of thought and academic expertise.

"This emphasizes the strength in CGU's approach to education," Childs said. "I'm really proud of our team."

Here's another nice press piece on Ramirez alone.

It was a joy to grade CGU's work, but what really won it for them was their innate ability to follow the directions to the letter. They really plumbed the depths of each assignment, whether it was figuring out Pakistan's national interests, or casting a regional trajectory, or running down the horizontal scenarios from a series of vertical shocks. They really explored each analytic assignment to the fullest and stayed on topic throughout - an extraordinary display of discipline that was reflected in their high-content/low-fat output.

And that's a great take-away from the competition: it's easy to assume that the interdisciplinary approach necessarily results in tons of excess and unhelpful verbiage, because it so often does - when not properly channeled. But what the CGU did was simply wonderful: clear and concise cross-linking of subject areas that won the team the top ranking in "use of the wiki," which I thought was highly emblematic of their overall win.

On a side note, I thought it was cool of U. Kentucky's Robert Farley (fellow - and well respected - World Politics Review columnist) to note how well Wikistrat's platform played on Apple's iPad, which the U.of K. team used in its performance as Japan 1 team.  Being so on-top-of-things ("research, remaining connected with the rest of the team, and monitoring the competition") was crucial for the Patterson School of Diplomacy crew, because the other Japan team (played by actual Japanese) had to drop out due to a real-world political crisis back home. That left the Patterson team somewhat "orphaned," meaning they needed to compare themselves more vigorously with other country teams to make sure they were pushing the envelope sufficiently. Based on that sort of extra effort, I awarded the Kentucky team the prize for being the best "single."

Like I've noted previously, the competition was a great source of new ideas. Nick Ottens over at Atlantic Sentinel generated a trio of posts concerning three of the best:

• Europe as Third Pole in Sino-American Relations
  
• Is India Rooting for Pakistan's Disintegration? and
• The Central Asian Battlefield 2027.

And, of course, I myself pillaged what I could for two Time Battleland posts ("Why US Withdrawal from Afghanistan Would Stabilize Pakistan" and "Russia Will Someday Be Forced to Outsource its Security"). I also bagged a World Politics Review column out of the highly innovative (and #2 finisher overall) Oxford team that played European Union 2 ("A Post-NATO Europe Should Look East").  History Guy Tom Wade did similarly with his post on Global Cities, and this site's original webmaster Critt Jarvis posited an even bolder extrapolation to planning "model cities" in Honduras using the Wikistrat many-brains-tackling-the-problem approach.

All good stuff that I thought was worth recompiling here, but what really sticks in my mind coming out of the competition was how so many of the student-participants - even the ones that didn't necessarily win anything - walked away with such a nice impression of Wikistrat as a place to ply their craft.  As one relatively experienced participant put it in a follow-up debrief: 

Wikistrat, its strengths and flaws notwithstanding, is the most realistic depiction of strategic analysis in the intelligence community.

As someone who has evaluated big command post exercises in various military commands (PACOM, SOUTHCOM, etc.), that's a great compliment to receive, so I take my hat off to everyone who participated and especially to the Wikistrat team that managed the competition throughout.  As proof-of-concept experiments go, this was fantastically gratifying.

My thoughts on the new Wikistrat model

First off, one thing you have to understand with start-ups is that they morph.  Counting two other firms I'm currently involved in, Wikistrat is the eighth start-up that I either worked for or started myself.  And I'm proud to say that all of them are still running - save for the NewRuleSets.Project that was bought up by Enterra Solutions.  So change is inevitable.

When I first linked up with Joel Zamel, he and his compadres were mostly about selling the technology platform, which was cool enough, but the work didn't meet their personal ambitions. So we link up and I'm brought in primarily to start populating the global model (I pen almost a book's worth of material and, on that basis, radically revamp my current speech/brief) and write a biweekly globalization review (CoreGap Bulletin) designed to pull readers into becoming subscribers/authors in the Wikistrat universe.  I liked doing both, but I liked working the global model a whole lot better, because I learned big stuff - big time, and I greatly enjoyed the discipline the system forced upon me (evidenced in the all the new material for the brief).  So, on that score, I was sold and said so many times here in the blog.

Regarding the CoreGap Bulletin, it was fun to write and I enjoyed getting up to speed on the production of digital video shorts, but it seemed like a lot of effort compared to the payoff I/we got from my working on the model, and it wasn't generating the draw for analysts that we wanted.  The first small simulations did better, but we still weren't getting a critical mass participation we were looking for - nor the proof-of-concept on large-scale play.  Looming over all this frustration was the sense that we weren't sufficiently exploiting our best stuff: the analysis that came from expanding the global model and the simulations themselves. So why go on processing global news when we had the means to generate truly differentiated analysis within the Wikistrat universe itself?

So I went back and forth with Joel and the guys and eventually they hatched the idea of the grand strategy competition. The notion was simple: the global model was mature enough to constitute a serious backdrop for a massive play stretched over weeks.  Instead of small numbers of hand-selected types, we'd go for creating a critical mass number whose very size would generate the group dynamics we kept aiming for.  Plus, the game itself would become its own recruitment tool, so we get the double-whammy of proving out the "massively multiplayer consultancy" model while stocking up (in effect, interviewing-by-play) on solid young bloods.

So here we are now with the new package:  rather than the smaller network that expertly works the wiki environment, we go for a much larger network that learns with and grows the global model as we pursue simulations on behalf of interested clients.  Instead of staying lean and mean and trying to grow in that tightly organic sense, we stock up on bodies, ideas, material and price everything out - in all directions - on a discrete basis, thereby avoiding the classic start-up conundrum of "do I get the work first and scramble for bodies or stockpile bodies and then scramble for work?"

So here's my personal thumbnail versions of the rationales that we've settled on in this next iteration of the company:

We run the show like one of those big aggregating sites that pool all the photos shot by professionals (Getty, Reuters, etc.) and then spool them out to buyers: the more you put in, and the more that stuff gets picked up, the more you earn.  You don't try to go for paying people by the "job" so much as by the ideas, which get competitively marketed to buyers.  This way you don't build up unsustainable labor costs but if anybody strikes gold (brings in the right client, produces the right material that attracts the same, etc.), they're immediately tied into direct compensation.  Everybody is directly incentivized. Nobody is ripping off anybody else, and worst case in the meantime, we're still building a great global community of strategists who - at the very least - educate each other and network.

From the perspective of the analyst, we say: you like to do this sort of thing anyway, and many of you already give it away on blogs, so why not pool all the nuggets and market them collectively, and let your bits and pieces earn you bucks here and there.  It's the same effort you're already making; just make some money and network more explicity in the process.  Plus, we've given you - the independent operator working for yourself - a place to bring this or that piece of work you might not be able to handle on your own (so you can't take advantage of the opportunity or connection).

Thinking back over my career, I've always welcomed that sort of stuff when it has - from time to time - popped up.  I consider it sharpening-the-blade activity and I love to share just about everything I generate.  Frankly, this is the same logic I'm applying to "The Emily Updates":  why bother with the big book route when I can sell discretely and directly myself over the web?

Beyond the earning potential, there's the simple reality of more formally and fruitfully connecting up with those of your own kind.  Most of us strategic planners and thinkers live in a professional world of "others," where, quite frankly, we're the odd lot. This model allows us to connect to one another and interact however much we see fit to pursue.  Again, blade-sharpening and useful and . . . fun, when it comes down to it.  Dogs like to play with other dogs - plain and simple.

Exercises fit into the blade-sharpening notion as well. Hell, that's why the military does them. Most professionals don't get that much chance to pursue this sort of thing, buried as they constantly are in producing the plan/report/review/etc.  The simulations simply organize the building up of the global model (GloMod, as I call it), which is the intellectual backdrop for the overall interaction - the Wikipedia-meets-Facebook dynamic.

When all the previous aspects come together in an actual opportunity to advise, via the massively multiplayer consultancy, then so much the better, because the more gigs means the more eyes, and the more eyes means more money for the analysts' whose material attracts those eyes.  

All in all, it strikes me as a wonderfully virtuous circle: stuff I want to do anyway, in a cool environment, with people I want to interact with professionally.  We organize our activities in exciting ways (simulations) that are either bespoke efforts done directly for clients or are used to generate material that clients can explore and exploit on their own.  Worst case: the effort builds up the model that much more, and the blade-sharpening aspects are only that much more heightened as a result.

Again, at the end of the day, it's all stuff I want to do anyway for professional standing. I can do it all by my lonesome in a blog, or even group blog and compete on that level, or I can replace those efforts (or even just compliment them) with something that's more collectively focused so as to generate side income-generating opportunities.  As an analyst, my risk is minimal - as in, you only get what you give, while the upsides are solid and potentially quite empowering.

Most of us analysts fall into this category: we've got all sorts of things going at any one time.  We don't need any single one of them to be THE thing, but we like having several be money-making, career-enhancing in that ramping-up manner (starting small and building).  I think the new Wikistrat model falls into that category: cool association, good skills build-up/maintenance, great networking, solid learning, fun environment, and - through the power of the collective - great opportunities to do big things for big customers, operating at a large scale level of interaction that we typically only get in short bursts in our careers but individually crave on an ongoing basis.

Wikistrat becomes that ongoing basis - the professional association that pays it backward to the members themselves.

Middle East Monitor, July 2011

We're excited to announce the launch of Wikistrat's Middle East Monitor for July 2011, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

Summary

The uprising in Syria remained the crisis of the most strategic importance this month. The number of protesters is higher than ever, despite the widespread use of violence by the regime to crush the demonstrations. Significantly, the protests continue to grow despite Iranian assistance to the Assad regime, which includes electronic monitoring equipment that was used to undermine Iran’s Green Revolution.

The methods successfully employed by the Iranian regime in 2009 have failed in Syria today, which is a testament to the strength of the uprising. If the Assad regime has employed all of the advice offered by Iran, then it is out of options to use against the demonstrators. Its strategy will be to hope that severe repression and sieges of hotspots will stamp out the revolution over time. Preventing a serious split within the military ranks, particularly among the Allawite officers and generals, will be critical to the success of this strategy.

In Libya, the rebels are making advances in the mountainous area in the western part of the country, and have encircled the oil-rich city of Brega in the east. There is talk of allowing Qaddafi to stay in Libya if he gives up power, but representatives of his regime discount this possibility. He is intent on fighting the rebels to a stalemate that allows him to control an enclave and declare victory, and until impending defeat becomes apparent to him, this will not change. The murder of rebel commander Abdel Fattah Younes and the subsequent vows of retribution by his tribe is a serious blow to the rebel cause, as it threatens to undermine Western confidence in the rebels. It is critical that the rebels present a united front, and clashes between rival factions and tribes do not erupt.

Overall, talk of the Arab Spring’s demise is very premature. The rebels are making concrete advances in Libya, the revolution in Syria is strengthening, Yemeni President Saleh has yet to return to his country, and Morocco’s successful referendum on constitutional changes show the movement represents a dynamic shift. The Arab Spring is not a short-lived period of instability, and serious changes to the region’s power structures are underway.

Wikistrat Bottom Lines

Opportunities

• The decline of protests in Morocco after the referendum on modifications to the constitution enables the West to point to a government that successfully responded to the Arab Spring. This will help persuade pro-Western, undemocratic regimes that reforms will improve their stability.
• The positive reception in Hama, Syria to the visit by the U.S. and French ambassadors shows that the protest movements are eager for Western support.
• The delay of the elections in Tunisia and Egypt until October is a recognition that the non-Islamist parties need more time to organize. It is very questionable whether this still permits enough time to allow the non-Islamists to effectively compete, but the problem is understood and being addressed.

Risks

• Turkey’s decision to recognize the Libyan rebels as the official government of that country and threats to intervene in Syria benefit the West in the short-term, but Turkey remains governed by an Islamist party. The increasingly assertive role of Turkey in the region may not always be in the best interests of the West.
• Western support for protesters could result in an expectation of strong intervention on their side. If assistance does not follow and the protesters are victimized on a large scale, it could result in disillusionment with the West and play into the hands of the Islamists.
• Setbacks in Libya, such as the assassination of the top rebel commander, will undermine Western support for the intervention; support that is already dwindling. The rebels are making advances, but are still heavily dependent upon outside support.

Dependencies

• The potential continuing of mass protests in Morocco. The opposition says that the constitutional amendments do not go far enough, but the number of protests has sharply declined since the referendum. If massive protests erupt again and the opposition cannot be appeased, other governments will be less likely to implement reforms to try to satisfy their opponents.
• The strength of the public’s desire for quick elections vs. the strength of the public’s fear of an Islamist electoral victory.

Becoming a Wikistrat Analyst

As we grow our community of strategic thinkers, Wikistrat is now accepting applications from candidate analysts. If you are an established or emerging geopolitical expert, policy advisor or risk consultant, you may be qualified for a position within our community.

The Wikistrat community is composed of different ranks - Experts, Senior Analysts, Contributing Analysts and Researchers. Members of the community get access to the Wikistrat private wiki and exclusive network, and will participate in exciting geopolitical simulations. Analysts are able to build their names and receive royalties and other financial rewards based on their contributions.

Find out more and apply at www.wikistrat.com/analysts/

Internship Opportunities at Wikistrat

Wikistrat is recruiting new Interns!

Wikistrat Interns undergo an unpaid training program and upon completion qualify for a position as researcher within Wikistrat’s online analytic community. Researchers are able to earn financial rewards at Wikistrat, and be promoted to Contributing Analyst rank.

Interns play an active role within the Wikistrat community:  interacting with top analysts, helping to write concise reports and analysis on topics of their expertise, contributing to the theoretical knowledge base of Wikistrat , and integrating their work across a unique Web 2.0 platform. Work from home in your own time.  All Wikistrat work is conducted online.

For more information visit our website or download our Internship Program PDF.

Internship Rewards

1. Points determine how highly an analyst is ranked in the community based on their contributions and may result in potential prize earnings.
2. Learn alongside the world’s best analysts.
3. Analyst Training Program: become a Wikistrat Researcher at the end of the internship.
4. Access to Wikistrat’s subscription service.
5. Promotion opportunities to become a contributing analyst and earn royalties.

A Global Marketplace of Geopolitical Analysis and Forecasting

Wikistrat is happy to launch the new design for its website - with exciting offerings for analysts, clients, interns and partners. Feel free to browse the pages and get a glimpse of what we see as the future of geopolitical analysis - a strategic community of analysts working collaboratively to analyze and forecast globalization and the impact of geopolitics on global markets.

With hundreds of analysts collaborating and competing for prestige, intellectual and financial rewards, we expect this community to yield strategic insights and ideas you will not be able to find anywhere else. By providing governments and corporations with real time analysis, Wikistrat is able to provide clear-cut answers to the complexities of today's geopolitical challenges.

In the upcoming days we will add new sections to the website, including a space with free geopolitical analysis, providing insights into the various simulations conducted in our wiki-based community.

Click here to enter the new website.

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition - Summary and Conclusions

With Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition now complete, I wanted to take this opportunity to sum up what I think unfolded over the month-long contest.  As head judge, I am uniquely suited for the task, because I’m fairly certain that I’m the one person who perused every line of every entry of every team every week.  To give you some sense of that effort:  roughly 30 teams cranked, on average, 7,500-8,000 words per week.  That’s close to a million words in all!

We're not going to pretend that every word entered was golden.  The purpose of the competition was to elicit ideas in aggregate - not to collectively produce the one "perfect" document (i.e., the bureaucratic approach).  In mass harvesting exercises such as these - no matter the level of expertise involved - there is a certain amount of chaff.  By design, participants are put through a variety of methodological paces that force them to winnow their ideas down to their essentials.  So while the journey matters plenty, it's the destination that we collectively seek: those nuggets of strategic insight that arise from the focused and repetitive interplay of so many minds tackling the same subjects from a variety of angles.  For it is amidst that maelstrom of intellectual activity that a variety of competing perspectives are collaboratively blended into foreign policy visions worthy of the label "grand strategy."

We achieved that goal in spades, meaning there was than enough “wheat” to be found throughout the entries, which got better and better with each passing week.  Besides telling us that collaborative competition works, the continuous uptick in performance also proved the validity of the “massively multiplayer consultancy” model, which is what we believe Wikistrat can offer as a result of its ongoing efforts to build an online community of strategists from across the globe – the Facebook-meets-Wikipedia dynamic.

If, for example, you’re a client interested in having dozens/hundreds/thousands of strategic thinkers chase down a problem, query or brainstorm for you, then Wikistrat can mobilize them en masse for a X-week-long collaborative competition not all that unlike what we just did in this contest.  We’d simply tailor the parameters and the participants.  But the key thing is, your desired effort would now involve a true “wisdom of the crowd” dynamic, with the crowd in this instance being a vetted group of strategic thinkers collaboratively competing to come up with the best answer.

Why we think that’s a better route:  In today’s complex world, we’re certain that companies and governments will benefit deeply from such intellectual exposure.  No, we don’t think this completely replaces in-house studies or working with contractors, because they’ll always be those needed deep dives on specific issues.  Plus you simply can’t outsource your strategic thought processes in every instance.  But there will also increasingly be the need to tap into far wider pools of thinking, or ones that explore issues more “horizontally” (i.e., plumbing the cross-domain connections) than “vertically” – especially when you’re talking strategic planning on an international scale.  In a black-swan world, you can never ask too many “what if” questions, or have too many bright minds coming up with possible answers.

We also think the competition proved itself as a useful method for attracting and identifying talent within our burgeoning online community of strategists.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of professional, apprentice (like our grad students) and avocational strategists out there on the Web generating useful analysis, and, in a disconnected sense, you could say they’re all collaboratively competing for our attention with their blogs, sites, etc. 

But when Wikistrat pulls them into an online venue explicitly designed to foster that collaborative competition – directly, then we turbo-charge the dynamic by concentrating it to an unprecedented degree.  The International Grand Strategy Competition was a brilliant demonstration of that potential: no established “stars” among the 200-plus individual team members, and yet collectively they pushed each other to generate a constant flow of innovative strategic ideas.  And the longer the competition went on, the higher the flow and quality of those ideas – innovation feeding off innovation.

Frankly, it got hard to grade it all, because on an individual basis, everything started trending up toward “A’s.”  But just as designed and encouraged in this competition, the collective grading came down to a rank ordering, meaning there could be only one #1, one #2, etc. with regard to every assigned task.  And no, the same few teams didn’t win each ranking, as ten different teams each scored one of the sixteen #1 rankings – with only three teams scoring multiple wins. 

But the best part was this: whenever the top effort was so identified, you could readily see its impact on the next week’s play, as other teams started copying the techniques, reach of vision, etc., that earned that one team such high recognition previously.  That meant the “bar” rose rapidly throughout the competition, with the most ambitious teams clearly seeking to out-innovate the established leaders, which is why there was so much movement in the overall rankings week by week.  You can see the proof on the team entries: the longer the competition went on, the more the most innovative teams had their ideas cited by others, because to not do so risked being left behind in the expanding dialogue.

To say that it was exciting to witness is an understatement, and let me tell you why: I taught an experimental course at the Naval War College in 2003, while I was writing The Pentagon’s New Map.  In the elective, which attracted an unusual percentage of that class’s top students, I taught the officers how to generate competing scenarios using an X-Y axis approach (two questions yielding four boxes).  To be honest, going into the class I had no idea if you could develop the skill, even as I knew it was easy to teach the procedure. But we kept at it, week after week, just repeating the effort on new subjects, levels of analysis and regions.  At first, the generated scenarios were just awful, and I spent a lot of time offering constructive criticism, but over time they got better and once they did, the confidence level of the students rose and – sure enough – in the last few weeks of class they performed most of the critiques themselves in a peer-to-peer fashion, while I merely pushed them toward more elaborately scaled efforts.

Well, I witnessed the same dynamic unfolding in the competition, and it was a thing of beauty: the more teams and analysts became aware of each other’s work, the more they effectively critiqued it – in a peer-to-peer fashion – by co-opting some aspect and expanding it further in their own efforts.   And with the expanding complexity built into the competition’s design, I – the head judge – found myself “stealing” what I could for Time Battleland posts and my World Politics Review column.

As they say, talent imitates but genius steals!  ;<)

The teams themselves can track their own progress by the numbers of eye-popping interjections I left in my grading notes (later distributed to the competitors).  Simply put, the “wow’s” began piling up exponentially with each passing week, and – just like in my experimental War College class – my initial feelings of despair (“Maybe you just can’t teach this stuff?”) invariably gave way to serious respect for what the next generation has to offer.

It is my sincere hope that those competitors who were energized by the competition will seek to maintain an affiliation with Wikistrat, because as we move forward with our massively multiplayer consultancy, we think we’ll be able to offer them the kick-ass combination of an online community where they can “sharpen the blade” while simultaneously selling their best ideas – collaboratively and competitively – to a host of global corporations and government agencies eager to explore globalization, in all its current and future complexity, for strategic planning purposes.

Looking forward,

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Best Countries and Region Played - Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition

Best Countries Played

The 30+ teams in Wikistrat's Grand Strategy Competition were divided so they represent a total of 13 countries: The United States, China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, the European Union, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Japan, Turkey and North Korea.

In this format, each team competed both against the teams representing the same country (US Team 1 vs. US Team 2 and 3), and then in a crossways comparison against teams from other countries (determining, for example, how well does the Chinese strategy match the country's objectives compared to the way the Indian strategy matched the Indian objectives).

3 countries stood out as the best played countries:

Japan (played by the following Teams)

• University of Kentucky Team

European Union

• Oxford University Team
• Atlantic Treaty Association (NATO) Team

India

• Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) Team
• Ohio State University Team
• Indian Institute of Technology Team

Best Region Played

Of the five regions played, Wikistrat judges determined that South-Asia region was the best played region in the competition.

South Asia region was composed of the following teams:

• Yale University Team
• Claremont Graduate University Team
• Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) Team
• Ohio State University Team
• Indian Institute of Technology Team

Congratulations to all participants!

Top 5 Finalists in Wikistrat's Grand Strategy Competition

Most Resilient Grand Strategy Award Winner

In this post we wish to recognize some of the best teams which participated at Wikistrat's Grand Strategy Competition that took place throughout June. In a very close race with winning-team Claremont Graduate University was the Oxford Team, which finished in the 2nd and highly respected place.

In addition to finishing at the second place, Oxford students won the "Most Resilient Grand Strategy Award" for their impressive Grand Strategy, playing the European Union. Their work was noted by Thomas PM Barnett is his WPR Column, and by the Atlantic Sentinel here and here.

With 4 overall #1 ranking (across 16 tasks), Oxford team has made a tremendous effort and deserve every recognition. Well done!

Top 5 Teams

The third most prestigious prize - Creative Strategic Thinkers Team - was awarded to the School of Oriental and African Studies (CISD), playing China.

The full top 5 finalists are:

1. Claremont Graduate University Team
2. Oxford University Team
3. The School of Oriental and African Studies Team
4. Cambridge (CISA) Team
5. Ohio State University Team

Individual Awards

In the competition we have witnessed dozens of proactive strategic thinkers, eager to collaborate, research and contribute. If we could, we would mention many of them here as they truly are promising emerging strategic thinkers.

We would like to pay special recognition to the winners of the Most Active Participants awards. These individuals were the most active, collaborative and wiki-savvy participants:

• Heloise Crowther (Sussex Team)
• Roman Muzalevsky (Yale Team)
• Teale Phelps Bondaroff (Cambridge Team)

Congratulations to all winning teams and individuals!

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition - Announcing the Winning Team

With the Grand Strategy Competition coming to an end, it is time to announce the Winning Team. Of the 30+ participating teams from all around the world, we are happy to announce the Claremont Graduate University Team as the winner of Wikistrat's 2011 Grand Strategy Competition!

CGU's PhD-students demonstrated impressive analytic capabilities and continued to propose creative and provocative ideas throughout the competition, making a collaborative effort and effective use of the wiki. Using unique methodologies, CGU members constantly fed other competitors with new ways to look at geopolitical challenges, and instigated further discussions.

Playing the role of Pakistan, CGU's PhD-students were able to beat some of the world's best institutions, and won special recognition in a Time Battland post by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett. To get a glimpse of their work, check out their assessment of Pakistan's National Trajectory.

In addition to winning the $10,000 prize and the prestige that comes with it, the CGU team has gained important hands-on experience in strategic planning and collaborative analysis. We hope these skills, knowledge and relationships created during the competition will continue to benefit all participants in the future, as the Wikistrat community of strategic thinkers grows.

Congratulations Claremont Team!

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition - Week 4 Greatest Hits

Well, the Wikistrat International Grand Strategy Competition finished July 3rd, and in that last week our roughly 30 teams had their grand strategies (crafted in Week 3) subjected to a quartet of global shocks (crippling terror strike in Saudi Arabia, an Arab Spring 2.0 in Central Asia, a massive tsunami disaster along China’s coast, and a worldwide downing of the Internet during a technology upgrade).  The teams’ assignments were to analyze the impact of the crises on their countries’ strategic interests and then evaluate their national grand strategies’ resilience in the face of these upheavals.  Continuing in my role as head judge, I wanted to cite the most provocative takeaways from this last week in the competition.

1) What a game-changer the Great Game could become (Brazil 1/Institute of World Politics 2 & South Africa 1/The Interdisciplinary Center )

Think about it: the radical Salafist impulse currently struggles to remain relevant amidst the Arab Spring and the demographics in the Middle East don’t favor it over the long haul, meaning it logically migrates either southwest into Africa or northeast into Central Asia – two regions full of colonial-era fake states ripe for the sort of disintegrating civil strife that the movement feeds on. With Africa booming economically while Central Asia lags behind, odds favor the latter scenario. If and when such a wave of political instability happens (either positively or negatively), three of the five BRICS (Russia, India, China) will inevitably be sucked into the maelstrom, diverting their strategic attention and sucking up resources.  So who looks stable and even more attractive (e.g., energy, minerals, agriculture) by comparison?  Brazil and South Africa.

2) Does the War on Terror invariably get replaced by a War on iTerror? (China 3/School of Oriental and African Studies-U of London & United States 2/Georgetown University)

With the growth of all things Web/digital/geolocational, the world is clearly headed toward a long string of escalating crises as we work our way through all the weaknesses/vulnerabilities/dangers of the attendant networks.  Likewise, as nations gear up their governmental cyber warfare capabilities, it’s natural for the long war against violent extremism to migrate more to that realm.  Whatever the trigger, it’s not hard to imagine the next big conflict paradigm being a “war on iTerror,” where all the usual non-state actor and government interests/activities become as blurred as they’ve long been in the more kinetic realm.  Even more so than in traditional terrorism, any efforts made to bolster a nation’s cyber security can be justified by all manner of traditional economic competitiveness reasons (not to mention the usual authoritarian desires regarding control over the domestic political landscape). Plus, it’s cheaper than nation-building in failed states and fits the West’s growing impulse to pull back and heal itself while acknowledging that some parts of the world are just destined to “burn.”

3) And when the right worldwide cyber crisis comes, does it make everybody want to work together (Y2K-after-next) or does it accelerate the balkanization of the Web? (India 3/Ohio State University, European Union 2/Oxford & United States 3/Johns Hopkins University)

When that long predicted “cyber Pearl Harbor” or “digital 9/11” finally hits (or something close enough simply earns the label), it could be a great turning point in modern globalization’s history.  Do we get the big multilateral cooperation response (OSU’s WEBretton Woods System)?  Or just enough great-power cooperation to set in motion similar efforts in other “global commons” (Oxford)?  Or do we witness a worldwide competition among states to see which can lock down their “national Internets” more securely (Johns Hopkins)?  As with the many predictive models created in anticipation of the Y2K event, much would seem to depend on how homogenous and widespread the suffering: Are we drawn together as nations or does the differential send each scrambling down its own, beggar-their-neighbor’s-network path?

4) In a world of persistent and pervasive revolutions, Iran’s stagnant version actually has a reasonably bright future, assuming the regime can keep a grip on its own people (Iran 1 / JHU @ Bologna & Iran 2/University of Cambridge)

Both Iran teams’ grand strategies were rather unabashedly aggressive regarding the nation’s quest for regional hegemony, and when subjected to the various shocks, both of them came through rather swimmingly.  Yes, there is a lot wrong with Iran, and there’s plenty of reason to expect China to pick Riyadh over Tehran, leaving the latter to quasi-alliance with India over the long run.  But with India seeming the safer “rising” bet – again, over the long haul, and key China-Saudi conduit Pakistan looking so fragile right now (and don’t forget the Arab Spring lapping up on Saudi peninsula), there’s plenty of reason to expect the Iranians to constitute a powerful force in all directions (e.g., Persian Gulf, Caspian, Central Asia) in the decades ahead – especially when their nuclear capability is finally locked in and recognized internationally as such.

5) Why a similarly stubborn – but far more withdrawn – North Korea might similarly hold on, despite many predictions regarding its demise. (North Korea 1/UK Defence Forum & North Korea 2/University of Sussex)

Think about it, say our two NorKo teams:  so long as Pyongyang doesn’t cross Beijing’s red line, the more powerful China becomes, the less likely it feels compelled to “fix” the DPRK on the West’s timetable.  Conversely, if China suffers some big, back-tracking disaster (like the one posited in Week 4), then it’s even less likely to want to acquiesce to the West’s desires – for fear of looking weak.  Either way, North Korea and its $6T of mineral reserves is sitting . . . ugly all right – but stable when it comes to its primary patron. 

6) An “Arab Spring 2.0” for Central Asia isn’t all that bold a prediction.  After all, Central Asia is the last remaining region that’s uniformly authoritarian, so of course the next great wave of democratization happens there – eventually (Pakistan 1/Claremont Graduate University)

And oddly enough, for the Claremont team, if it comes suitably far enough down the road for Pakistan’s own stabilization process to have unfolded (i.e., a decade or more from now), then it represents a serious opportunity for the nation – especially if a joint Chinese-Pakistani effort to stabilize Afghanistan in the wake of the Western pullout succeeds.  Under such scenarios, Pakistan would be well positioned to become China’s preferred model of development for the region (i.e., moderate and sustainable Islamic identity, strong military role, just democratic enough to avoid brittleness, and a deep appreciation of China’s benevolent patronage). 

7) With Russia’s long southern exposure, it makes sense for Moscow to strengthen its connections to the West – er, North! (Russia 2/New York University)

It was interesting to note that all four of the vertical shocks seemed to re-emphasize the utility of Moscow’s recent – and renewed – westward turn under Dmitry Medvedev.  Whether or not this shift survives the return of Vladimir Putin, over the long haul, it simply makes sense for a Russia with so many rising powers along its southern rim.  If its long-time effort to recast NATO or expand it with a Eurasia-wide replacement doesn’t work, then the opening of the Arctic is probably Moscow’s best opportunity to forge a new and positive identity – the northern brand.

8) With the demography-equals-destiny dynamics well underway, and China unlikely to forever avoid an economic crisis, will that crisis’s primary historical purpose be to declare the onset of the “rising India” era? (Turkey 3/Institute of World Politics 1 & India 1/ Indian Institute of Technology)

It’s not just a parlor game notion, for that moment will eventually arrive.  The better question is, How ready for it will India be?  And if it’s uncomfortable with going it alone, how far should it pursue strategic alliance with fellow democracies Brazil and South Africa in anticipation of that opportunity?  As a follow on, one could likewise wonder how China handles that moment – i.e., when it realizes that the Chinese Century isn’t as long as promised?

9) If the future is all about resilience and handling black-swan events, then reports of a post-American world may be greatly exaggerated. (United States 1/American Military University, United States 2/Georgetown University & United States 3/Johns Hopkins University)

There is the persistent myth that democracies respond weakly to crises while authoritarian regimes handle them with strength.  Yes, more horizontal polities tend to obsess over vertical shocks (witness America’s stubborn search for the next “Pearl Harbor”), but the truth is, they handle better well as truly distributed systems.  Simply put, there is no head to cut off.  While vertical polities (authoritarian systems) are well equipped to run to ground the low-and-slow horizontal scenarios (e.g., hunting down every prominent member of political movement X), it’s the vertical shocks that often expose their brittleness, because how can a bunch of guys sitting around a table possibly prepare for every contingency?  It’s a familiar point: democracies love to advertize their weaknesses while authoritarian regimes are great at hiding theirs – until the right crisis comes along and reveals that – yet again – the vaunted emperor has no clothes.  As globalization spreads and consolidates, it still pays to bet on the distributed systems.

Wikistrat's Grand Strategic Exercise - Innovative Strategic Planning

Having already offered a methodological take on what transpired in the grand strategy portion (Week 3) of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to offer this additional “greatest hits” compilation from the week’s entries.  Here are the top 12 nuggets:

1) A “zero problems in Eurasia” foreign policy that allows the European Union to competitively market its junior partner services to Leviathans other than the US (EU2/Oxford).  This is such a bold repositioning of Europe that I chose to write it up as my next-Monday World Politics Review column.  If you really believe you’re in a multi-polar world but can’t compete for one of the superpower slots, this is where visionary realism takes you.

2) In a multi-polar system, the US needs to position itself as the “keystone” (US3/Johns Hopkins University).  Best use of a definition, pulling from Merriam-Webster:
Keystone : the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place; something on which associated things depend for support; a species of plant or animal that produces a major impact (as by predation) on its ecosystem and is considered essential to maintaining optimum ecosystem function or structure.
The imagery is fabulous: the US as the piece that “locks the other pieces in place,” the source of “support” (biggest provider of aid) and the policing/“predation” role that maintains (when done well, mind you) “optimum ecosystem function or structure.”  This would serve as a brilliant opening slide in PPT presentation, because its bit rate on vision transmission is so high.

3) Better for Turkey to be a big fish in a small pond (EU-like entity it builds in Mideast) than a small unwanted fish in a bigger pond (Turkey3/Institute for World Politics 1).  The supporting logic was just as solid: Turkey is well positioned to “win” the Arab Spring, in part because its leadership offering is more palatable to more players than that of Iran’s or Saudi Arabia’s. So why not take advantage of the overall US withdrawal and avoid the anti-Muslim backlash in Europe?

4) If you don’t like your current storyline, change it (Russia2/New York University).  One of the very best articulated Objectives:
Russia suffers from an antiquated global ideology that reached the zenith of soft power attraction in the 1950s and has since steadily and rapidly declined. Both domestically and internationally, the image of Russia as a pessimistic nation that lost the major ideological struggle of the 20th century impedes its potential to hold and grow great power status in the future. As a whole, the modified Russian great power narrative should fall under the motto, ‘Strong Russia, Strong World.’ In other words, Russia needs to reposition itself as a critical part of global stability in the 21st century.
The press can only use what you give it.

5) If you’re falling behind the race, considering tripping the competition (Pakistan1/Claremont Graduate University). 
Covert Sub-Strategy: Pakistan will utilize its diplomatic and covert resources to forestall the development of alternative Central Asian pipelines. This involves isolating Iran and using Afghanistan to do it.
Covert should be all about nasty, and this qualifies. You also have to marvel at the bit-rate transmission here: concise clear language that conveys a lot of strategic logic.

6) Nukes are for having, and being respected for having (North Korea2/Sussex).  Yes, the first order of business is regime survival, but once you’ve shut down the easy regime-change option, you want to get your money’s worth. Having nukes means you’re in the big-boys’ club, but only if you’re accepted as such. So once the vertical proliferation is completed, it’s time to go for the horizontal recognition.

7) Japan as globalization’s high-tech answer man (Japan1/University of Kentucky).  Because Japan is a resource-dependent island nation, it had to turn toward globalization a long time ago to facilitate its rise. It has learned plenty along the way but does not get credit for that wisdom, in part because it sells itself weakly abroad and because it has recently suffered a number of image-crunching disasters. Time to turn that world-class resilience into a marketable strategic good.

8) If the current roster of great powers isn’t making regional stability happen, socialize the problem further (Israel3/Tel Aviv University).   The Middle East’s current connectivity with outside great powers (i.e., the West) just isn’t doing it. Israel is a super-globalized economy, so why not put that connectivity to strategic use by encouraging as many rising great powers into the region as possible? More entrants = more strategic interests = bigger collective outside push by great powers for regional stability.  Suffer the details and inevitable setbacks, yes, but the strategic logic is sound. As a grand strategy, it doesn’t get any more concise.

9) If China is to be THE global superpower of mid-century, it has to project norms and values of universal appeal (China3/University of London). Simultaneously good advice and sharp analysis: China’s global rise as a single-party state is self-limiting, unless it can evolve.  Notice how nobody talks about the “Beijing Consensus” since the Arab Spring began?

10) If Africa is ground zero of globalization’s current integration process, then providing the best model for those countries is a strategic competition worth winning (Brazil1/Institute for World Politics 2).  With its multicultural background and ability to mix raw material exports with high-tech goods and agricultural production, Brazil is the best model for Africa as it moves up economically – not India or China.

11) There’s nothing wrong about playing for second place (European Union2/Oxford & India2/Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies).  Why exhaust yourself in the coming Sino-American duel when there are plenty of good niches to exploit (EU) or if you’re betting on your long-term demographic dividend to vault you into first place later in the century (India)?

12) Seeking regional hegemony as a defensive posture (Iran2/University of Cambridge).  An eye-opening analysis of Iran’s #1 Objective:
The main driver behind this goal is Iran’s perception of its own isolation and its feeling of encirclement within the region. Iran does not seek power as an end per se, but it views regional hegemony as the only true guarantee of its long-term security, and all its other policy objectives can be regarded as instrumental to this. Iran’s bid for hegemony should also not be confused with a form of revisionist expansionism. In fact, it is perhaps best viewed through the lenses of defensive realism.
For those of us who like to spot in Iran’s revolutionary failures/stagnation a loose rerun of the Soviet decline, this perspective adds plenty.

Wikistrat Middle East Monitor, June 2011

We're excited to announce the launch of Wikistrat's Middle East Monitor for June 2011, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

Summary

The biggest strategic development in June was the change in relations between Turkey and Syria, and therefore, Iran. The increasingly strong relationship between Turkey, Iran and Syria was of great concern to the West and especially, Israel. The Turkish government is now condemning the violence of the Syrian regime towards its people, with officials even talking of creating a “buffer zone” along the border to protect refugees. The Turkish demands for the creation of a multiparty democracy in Syria will never be accepted by President Bashar Assad, and therefore, it is difficult to see how relations can soon be repaired. This deterioration in relations is a very significant change in alignment of power in the region and works to the advantage of the West.

On June 30, the U.N. Special Tribunal on Lebanon indicted four Hezbollah officials in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Only one, Mustafa Badreddine, had a senior position. This is a development long feared by Hezbollah and its state sponsors, who have attribute the assassination to Israel. Fear over the tribunal was the biggest reason for Hezbollah’s collapse of, and subsequent takeover of, the Lebanese government. Moving into July, Lebanon enters a major political crisis with regional ramifications. Syria and Iran are also under increasing international pressure for their human rights abuses and nuclear programs.

Another important development was the departure of Yemeni President Saleh to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment following a dramatic assassination attempt that also wounded several other top officials. The protest movement is determined to prevent his return. Government officials have insisted that he would soon return, but this has not happened. Recently, the Yemeni Vice President said it was possible that his injuries would prevent his return.

In Libya, the rebels have finally gained an edge over forces loyal to the Qaddafi regime. The war has not yet decisively shifted in their favor, but they are now gaining ground in the western mountains. France has also delivered arms to the rebels, marking an important escalation of foreign involvement. The stalemate has been broken, but there is no sign that the pro-Qaddafi forces are on the verge of collapse, allowing a quick end to the war. Once it appears to these forces that defeat is inevitable, that could quickly change.

Wikistrat Bottom Lines

Opportunities

• The indictments of Hezbollah officials in the Hariri assassination strikes at the terrorist group's legitimacy. Its assassination of a political opponent exposes it as a foreign proxy and a terrorist group not strictly concerned with defending Lebanon against Israel. The indictments, along with Hezbollah's continued backing of the Syrian President despite his regime's gross human rights abuses, threaten to do serious harm to the group's popular support.
• President Saleh’s stay in Saudi Arabia for medical treatment puts him in an extraordinarily vulnerable position. He can be forced to keep out of Yemen, and is now acutely aware of the threat posed to his life.
• Turkey’s confrontation with Syria dramatically increases the pressure on the Assad regime, and presents an opening for the West to cooperate with Turkey in challenging enemies in the region.
• The Libyan rebels are making progress in their war against the Qaddafi regime, yet remain extremely dependent upon Western support. This dependency can be utilized to influence the composition and behavior of the rebel forces and address concerns about the Islamist forces among them.

Risks

• Prime Minister Erdogan and his political party are Islamists, and Turkish-Israeli relations have sharply deteriorated under his leadership. It is very possible that the Turkish government will support the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood over other secular opposition elements.
• Al-Qaeda is benefiting from the instability in Yemen, and is battling Yemeni forces as the terrorist group tries to expand its control of territory. The power vacuum that currently exists benefits Islamist elements such as Al-Qaeda, the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels, and the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, Islah, which is the dominant opposition party.
• The Syrian and Iranian regimes often engage in provocations against Israel in times of domestic troubles, with the Nakba Day incidents being the latest example. Their proxies, especially Hezbollah, will likely seek to confront Israel as the regimes seek to cope with rising domestic and international pressure.

Dependencies

• The degree to which Turkey seeks to promote certain factions within the Syrian opposition. An effort to boost the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood will strain relations with the West, and reduce Western support for a policy of regime change in Syria.
• The insistence of Yemeni President Saleh to return home despite his injuries. The willingness of the Saudis to forcibly keep him in their country is also a key factor, as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the U.S. have been working to convince him to give up power.
• The amount of pressure it will take for Qaddafi’s forces to feel they are engaged in a losing fight, and whether they believe a post-Qaddafi Libya will be welcoming towards them.

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition Update (Week 3)

As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to update everybody on what has unfolded across the third week of the contest. As you may already know, the competition brings together approximately 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks. Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), were challenged in Week 3 to come up with grand strategies in relation to their country-team assignments (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey & US).

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. Coming off this crucial third week (after all, we’re all about grand strategy at Wikistrat), I wanted to highlight some of the lessons that I think the participants should take away from this collaborative competition when it comes to crafting and selling strategic visions.

1) Survival is never enough

Every regime wants to survive, and that’s always objective #1, but it cannot take up significant space in a strategic vision, because the more it centers the strategy, the less wiggle room ensues. Remember: strategy is more about keeping choices available than shutting them down. Worse, a fixation on sheer survival tends to obviate exploration of motive, and rationales matter plenty. For example, if I were to ask you where you want to be as a person in 2020, you wouldn’t answer that you want your heart, lungs and brain to still be working, because those baseline goals are taken for granted. And even if your response started with your health, the real purpose of that statement is to mark off possibilities that you want to keep in play (“I want to be healthy enough to . . .”). So no matter how bad a situation is for any country, their leaders are always thinking beyond just getting by, because some vision of progress is required to maintain morale among the “troops,” who, if they sense no purpose or way forward, will turn on leadership that seeks only personal survival.

2) Recognize internal pain but speak to external possibilities

The best grand strategies acknowledge what is wrong with their nations but don’t get stuck on that point – or let their strategies become overwhelmingly “internalized” on that basis (e.g., “Only after we comprehensively fix our country can we hope to address this complex world.”). Whatever reforms or internal “housecleaning” is required are but a stepping-stone to expanding and exploiting external opportunities, thus the grand strategy’s (hopefully) compelling logic is added to whatever domestic impetus exists for necessary change. Plus, external opportunities are often the cure for what ails internally, or at least a crucial part of the overall solution. This is the basic logic of comparative advantage and effective grand strategies are all about maximizing that exchange for the nation as a whole. In their best forms, the twin efforts at reshaping the internal and external environments are conducted in a co-evolutionary fashion that recognizes valuable interdependencies, with neither strategy holding strict superiority over the other.

3) The sale needs to be both internal and external

Grand strategies need to be so organic to the nation’s ethos that they are less “sold” than virally spread (they just feel right – right now), with the key being to tap into the society’s natural tendency toward this or that vision of its place in the world. Every nation has its capacities for “depressive” isolationism and “manic” evangelicalism, and depending on the desired course correction, hot-button memes are typically employed to fire-up the faithful. The best grand strategies recognize this deep-connection requirement at home, but likewise understand that it’s just as important to market the desirability of the vision to the outside world (or as much of it as will be immediately affected). Hegemony is a mixture of fear (hard power) and attraction (soft power), so the external sale cannot be neglected. In today’s interconnected world, influence resembles respect: it cannot be imposed but must be earned.  

4) Modeling yourself on a pathway that worked

Grand strategies are stories at heart – national narratives. Experts say there are only so many stories in this world (boy meets girls, the quest, etc.), and the same can be said of grand strategies. The most coherent entries this week all evoked some past power’s rise and choices they made along the way. One China team’s grand strategy, for example, read an awful lot like Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 vision of future American power. Yes, Hamilton was most definitely interested in the survival of the United States, but he also aimed to replace Britain as the global power by the mid-19th century and used that grand measuring stick in every major decision he pursued. Of course, not every nation can aim that high all the time, and America itself, in its turn-of-the-20th-century rising phase, often took to arguing the rules of the system (see the arbitrationism of Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root) as a means of covering its hard power deficiencies and – later with Woodrow Wilson – expressing its sheer idealism. We see some of the same impulses in today’s India and Brazil, and good entries from those teams ably captured that mindset.

5) Choices must be made

The best grand strategies presented last week made clear choices versus simply enunciating broad goals. They all passed the “as opposed to . . .” quip/test (“You say your nation’s number one goal is to expand its influence regionally, as opposed to . . . diminishing its regional influence?”). They offered just enough specificity to make clear that alternatives were considered and passed over. For example, the absolute survival of the North Korean regime is one thing, but North Korea achieving international acceptance of its status as a nuclear power is quite another, because the latter involves a number of real choices while the former appears to accept none. And yet clearly the two goals can be cast in co-evolutionary terms.

6) Stick with the big picture

The best grand strategies aren’t just about justifying the here-and-now but about shaping the there-and-then. They are a roadmap to a future region/world you want your country to inhabit at a particular perch, and that perch must be better than the one you occupy today, because unless you’re aiming for better, you’re not likely to keep what you’ve got in this increasingly competitive landscape. But because any future comes replete with uncertainties, tactics will invariably change over time. As much as every government seeks to bring “all elements of national power to bear” on this or that goal, you don’t want the tactics to overwhelm the strategic logic – the means determining the ends. The best entries last week left the tactics for Week 4’s stress-testing exercise and stuck with the high road of elucidating the essential choices made.

7) Some boldness is required

Good grand strategy is not simply waiting for events to fall your way, but neither is it trying to shape everything. The former replaces choice with expectation while the latter represents no choice at all. The best entries last week struck a balance between realism and idealism, typically without mentioning either because their logic was plainly apparent.

8) Fidelity versus flights of fancy

The most trapped teams last week were those deeply committed to representing their nations as honestly as possible, meaning they erred on the side of “fidelity” – a war-gaming term for realistic portrayal (“Is this like it would happen in the real world?”). Clearly, every team needed to keep its vision grounded in reality (i.e., you have to be able to get there from here), but the highest performing ones consistently leaned forward into likely events, key trends, etc., sensing maximum flexibility in the earliest phases rather than endgames. They persistently sought opening-move opportunities, and when they chose caution over boldness, it wasn’t because they were uninformed about the choice.

9) The necessity of a happy ending

Like General David Petraeus entering Iraq in 2003 (“Tell me how this ends.”), I as judge perused last-week’s entries for some semblance of what I like to call a “happy ending.” As I wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map, “Everybody needs that happy ending, that sense of hope in the future, otherwise you are simply trying to sell people diminished expectations – not a great motivator.” The best grand strategies presented compelling roadmaps to futures worth creating, sometimes for the larger world but always for the society in question. They were worth sacrificing for; they created a sense of something better that could be left to future generations. They were – in a word – simply grand.

10) Locating the essence of strategic opportunity

The top entries last week all portrayed once-in-a-lifetime regional/global dynamics that required bold responses (and yes, they are locatable for any country portrayed in this competition). Those teams made compelling arguments for action over caution on this basis, essentially flipping those arguments on their heads: by deeply grounding their strategies in keen analyses of future trends, they spotted unique openings that must be exploited because not to do so would cost too much over the long run. This is the essence of good grand strategy: spotting tomorrow’s inevitabilities and translating them into today’s proper tactical guidance, however “inconceivable” it may seem when judged by yesterday’s comfortable bias.

Time's Battleland: Future grand strategists: Russia will someday be forced to outsource its security

Hailing again from Wikistrat's International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia's long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New York University team (find their national trajectory here). A certain segment of the US national security establishment got all jacked by Russia's short war with tiny Georgia in August 2008, seeing in that raw display of power a “resurging” military superpower. NYU begs to differ.

Read more: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/06/23/future-grand-strategists-russia-will-someday-be-forced-to-outsource-its-security/#ixzz1Q2DZOHGO

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Grand Strategic Competition Update (Week 2)

As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to update everybody on what’s emerged across the second week of the contest.  As you may already know, the competition brings together approximately 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks.  Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), were challenged in Week 2 to come up with national and regional trajectories in relation to their country-team assignments (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey & US).

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week.  In this second week, each team generated those two trajectories to the tune of about 10,000 words each, or close to 300,000 words across all the teams.  Naturally, a ton of interesting nuggets emerged, so here’s my hit list of provocative ideas.

1) US turns back toward Western Hemisphere as part of reduced global footprint, need to deal with drug/crime nexus, and desire to balance growing Chinese influence across region (BRAZIL1/Institute of World Politics 2)

Every new US president hits the ground running with the promise to pay more attention to the Western Hemisphere – and then promptly forgets the entire idea.  So far, Barack Obama has held to form, and yet the dynamics cited here make for a compelling argument.  A US that pulls back from the world and gets it own house in order must certainly look southward for some of its solutions – particularly on the disastrous drug war.  Brazil, as the IWP2 team points out, is the key dynamo of the region, so either the US recognizes that and accommodates Brazil’s ambitions, or it may find itself the odd man out throughout South America.

2) The European Union’s primary contribution going forward could be to show the advanced/advancing world how to live within its resource means (EUROPEAN UNION1/NATO’s Atlantic Treaty Association)

The EU1 team established as its primary “national” trajectory goal Europe’s energy independence by 2030.  While we can argue about the feasibility, there’s no question that the EU can and should be a leader on the subject.  All projections show the region experiencing basically flat energy consumption growth in coming decades, while improving its public transportation infrastructure in a big way.  Uncomfortable with relying on energy flows from restive North Africa, the tense Persian Gulf, and bullying Russia – and now freaked out about nuclear power thanks to Japan, the world should see a lot of ambitious brainpower put to this useful task.

3) The EU encouraging immigration from fellow Roman Catholic states/regions (EUROPEAN UNION2/Oxford)

This one elicited a “wow!” from me simply because I’ve never heard the option stated so boldly.  If you worry about the Islamic influx and the diminution of Christianity, why not get yourself some truly old-school Catholics from New Core and Gap regions, where the religious flame still burns hot?  Afraid of too much religion?  Then add a whole lot more.  Team Oxford is full of provocative notions like that, which is why they’re in second place after Week 2.

4) The future is all about who’s got the most global cities (EU2/Oxford)

I’m a big believer in this, because if you add up the coastal megacities of the world, you’ve got half the planet’s population and the vast majority of its connectivity and traffic.  Get the coastal megacities wired up right, and globalization can’t fail.  Team Oxford brought this out in their critique of Europe’s lack of global cities, saying that, besides London, none of the capitals really qualify on the scale of such behemoths as New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Istanbul, etc.  EU2’s point:  make the investment if you want to stay relevant in the rule setting.

5) India changes when the last generation of “ruled Indians” leaves the political scene (INDIA1/Indian Institute of Technology)

I love passing-of-generations arguments, especially with the supermajors like China and the US, and this is the best one I’ve ever heard on emerging supermajor India.  It makes perfect sense:  India’s not much more than half-a-century old, so it’s long been ruled by people who remember the before time of British rule.  So long as they’re setting agendas, it’s a departure from the past versus a deep embrace of the future.  Bottom line:  expect a lot more diplomatic innovation out of India, and a much more proactive role in shaping the world and setting rules.

6) India’s sell is “German quality at Chinese prices!” (INDIA2/Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies)

Of course, most everybody cites the democracy thing as India’s differentiating model, and it most certainly is in the political realm, but globalization is driven by economic models – or competing “consensuses,” if you will.  Washington had its in the 1990s and China’s captured a lot of imagination in the 2000s, but India is well-poised to capture that ideological flag in the 2010s – the decade of the emergence of the global middle class.  That middle class, like any that emerged before on national scales, cares about quality for its money spent.  China seeks to meet that expectation, but lacks the political system – for now – to regulate it well.  Can India do better?  We’re all better off if it does and ups the competition globally.  And no, it’s not a fantastic goal.  Remember:  China loses labor over the next several decades, while India adds a fantastic sum (300 million or so).

7) Iran pins its hopes on China, but China will ultimate choose Saudi Arabia (PAKISTAN1/Claremont Graduate University)

Lots of chatter among the Iranian teams on future economic alliance with China, but Claremont’s Pakistan team made a compelling argument for China picking Saudi Arabia:

In the coming years, Pakistan foresees China making a decision as to whether or not to source its energy from the Saudis or the Iranians.  China will side with the Saudi bloc for three reasons.  First, given Iran's commitment to its nuclear program, the Iranian-Saudi rivalry favors Pakistan due to Pakistan's nuclear expertise and its close links with the Saudis.  China, therefore, will not risk alienating both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to appease Iran and India.  Second, the Saudis have larger reserves than the Iranians.  As the global leader in proven reserves, the Saudis are able to remain the chief energy provider into the next 80 years, making them a better long-term bet for the Chinese (the Chinese have also transferred strategic missiles to the Saudis – a level of cooperation not seen with the Saudis and Indians).  Third, geographical considerations come into play in that Afghanistan's continuing instability closes off its options to act as a reliable pipeline from Iran to China.  In that sense, the Saudis offer a more natural supply source to the Chinese in terms of volume and the security of transported oil.  If push comes to shove, the Saudis will eschew their energy exports to India if it means obtaining a nuclear deterrent to answer Iran; China also is in a better position to offer more favorable terms owing to its more advanced level of development than India.  The redundancy is that their petrol will still have a stable and sizeable market in China.  India will initially be reticent to harm its security relationship with Israel, but will do so in the longer term if it has to placate Iran and gain access to its energy.  Geographically Pakistan offers a conduit between Saudi energy from the Arabian Peninsula through the Indian Ocean to China. 

That is some beautifully argued logic; that PPT slide writes itself.

8) Pakistan goes from globalization “separator” to connector (PAKISTAN2/Yale)

Matching Claremont’s visionary national projection, Yale takes this point even farther in emphasizing how Pakistan must be the global connectivity “answer” before Afghanistan can be stabilized.    Both teams emphasized how connecting China to the Persian Gulf will help break Pakistan of its current north-south security paradigm. Yale took the point a bit further to emphasize how stabilizing the security relationship with India could set Pakistan up as the ultimate all-direction energy conduit for South Asia – just like Turkey positions itself in Southwest Asia.  The Claremont-Yale duel on this subject pushed me to pen a Time Battleland blog post on the subject.  It’s my highest compliment:  this stuff is good enough to steal!

9) By sticking with the dream of playing external Leviathan, Russia continues to eschew the much-needed internal System Administrator force, and with its borders so indefensible – and “expanding” with climate change, Moscow is looking at a future of outsourcing its boundary security (RUSSIA2/New York University)

I don’t want to steal my own thunder here.  Check out my Time Battleland blog post Thursday morning.

10)  Russia as the future waterpower of Eurasia (RUSSIA2/NYU)

This is a staple of my current brief:  I show you who’s got more water than people (global percentage share) and then show you who’s able to export grain (water turned into human energy).  Naturally, Russia and the other Black Sea powers (Kazakhstan, Ukraine) are big players in this regard.  Factor in climate change and the northward movement of agriculture, and Russia becomes a major waterpower of the 21st century.  I’m talking Canada BIG!

11) For Turkey to create a regional bandwagoning effect as part of its pursuit of regional leadership, it must pick one of three rivals (Egypt, Iran or Saudi Arabia) and its immediate partner (TURKEY3/Institute of World Politics 1)

It’s so obvious when you’re presented with the logic, and yet to date I haven’t heard anybody put it so well until I came across IWP1 entry this week.  All sorts of pundits are wailing about Turkey’s alleged strategic alliance with Iran, as if it means Istanbul has gone crazy Islamist when it has really gone crazy like a fox.  I spot a clever Turkey working all three possibilities with substantial vigor, actually providing a far superior US foreign policy than Washington is today. 

12) A realistic US plays System Administrator locally (Western Hemisphere) while satisfying itself as Leviathan balancer around the world (UNITED STATES2/Georgetown)

A nicely stated point that wraps up sensibly back around to Brazil1’s opening bid.

In sum, good stuff all around and a totally engaging week for myself as Head Judge.  My thanks to all the teams for their fine efforts and best of luck in the final week!

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

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

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

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: "Does al-Qaeda go the way of AIDS?"

Nice piece in WAPO about Ayman al-Zawahiri taking over al-Qaeda from the recently assassinated Osama bin Laden. Story leads with remembrances from a guy who knew him back in the day:

He was arrogant, angry and extreme in his ideas,” said Azzam, 40, son of a radical Palestinian ideologue who had become bin Laden's mentor. “He fought with everyone, even those who agreed with him.”

Thus, experts are now saying that al-Qaeda will suffer under his leadership:

U.S. intelligence officials, terrorism experts and even the Egyptian's former cohorts say a Zawahiri-led al-Qaeda will be far more discordant, dysfunctional and perhaps disloyal than it was under bin Laden.

Just to cover rear-ends, though, the story's next statement leaves open the question whether or not the group will be more or less effective (terrorism experts must always do this to make sure they can win big when the next strike comes and they told us so!).

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Grand Strategy Competition Update

As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways that we’ve already gathered in the first week of the contest.  As you may already know, the competition brings together more than 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks.  Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), are being challenged to come up with long-term grand strategies in relation to five issues:  global energy security, global economic “rebalancing,” Jihadist terrorism, the Sino-American relationship and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

By conducting this strategic planning exercise, Wikistrat seeks to create an instant-but-lasting community of several hundred young strategists from around the world in a sort of Facebook-meets-Wikipedia online environment populated with our unique wiki-based model of globalization.  Part of that effort involves creating expectations among participation that their future work will be both collaborative in execution and subject to intense – and peer-based – competitive pressures, but it also includes exposing participants to practical skill sets that they will use as future analysts/authors.  To further their avowed career goals, we’re also making the participants’ work available to government agencies and corporate firms interested in recruiting them as new hires.

Across the four-week competition, each team of 5-10 graduate political science students and interns will collaborate on the Wikistrat model to:

• Forecast their team’s national trajectory;
• Develop scenario pathways and national policy options for specific strategic issues;
• Articulate national grand strategies;
• Brainstorm future regional security environments (alternate futures); and
• Simulate plausible scenarios of geopolitical crises.

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week.  In this first week, teams were tasked with enunciating their country’s national interests across the five international issues cited above.  The teams generated roughly 150 wiki pages, whose combined “weight” of almost 200,000 words approximates the size of your average “weighty” policy tome.

Since this is a first-of-a-kind experiment that competitively harnesses the collaborative analytic power of the “millennial” generation, we at Wikistrat are eager to share these initial observations: 

“Collaborative competition” actually works

I know what you’re thinking:  Of course Wikistrat’s grand strategy competition “proves” collaborative competition.  But we were genuinely surprised at how easy it was to track the following:  the country-team groups that were the most competitive – and interactive – with each another clearly outperformed those country groups where it was apparent that each team went its own way (meaning their entries were far more idiosyncratic).   After all, doesn’t it make sense to hold off revealing your positions until the very last minute – i.e., maintaining secrecy?  Because if you don’t, then your best ideas can be copied by your competition, right?

Well, by seeing up-front what your immediate competition is putting out there, you’re challenged to cover that bet and raise the bar even higher – or at least put your countering spin on the issue raised.  Point being, you’re forced to defend your ideas more fully and that effort only adds analytic muscle to the product.  Yes, the resulting works were more similar in terms of the ground they covered, but that only made the comparative analysis (my grading) all the easier.  The same would hold in the real world for a decision-maker.  Yes, the truly competing visions emerged in the end; their advocates were just forced to explain their strategies more fully by referencing common touch points.  And because the teams were in immediate competition with one another, the usual groupthink dynamics were avoided.

In general, the best predictor of any team’s overall finish was the level of its “internal” competition (e.g., the two other India teams competing with it to be the “best India”).  The tougher the in-house opposition, the more comprehensively any team’s ideas were tested before being released into the international “wild.”  In the end, a country-team’s success depended less on the “real” competition of other states than its willingness to slug it out preemptively in a collaborative fashion – even if all any team did was “cheat” by looking at the “next student’s test paper.”

Then again, real life doesn’t unfold with all desks turned toward teacher.

The utility of thinking things through before committing to action

Our grad student teams were all so chomping at the bit that we had to remind them constantly that this was not a war-game, but rather a strategic planning competition. The first entries by, and earliest conversations among, participants got to punch lines too quickly – in effect, “Shouldn’t we bomb Country X now?”  The whole point of spending this first week thinking through and debating each nation’s interests – before any moves were made – was to encourage everybody to consider what really matters to their country-team.  Before you can accurately judge which risks to run and what is to be gained by running them, you need a clear sense of what can be lost in turn. The most sophisticated consequence management involves avoiding negative outcomes in the first place. 

The most impressive team entries explored all sorts of consequences (“If X happens, then the up/downside is . . . “), and in doing so they revealed the oft-unmentionable truth that national interests aren’t always as “fixed” as they’re made out to be.  That was a lesson we hoped participants might discover on their own during this first week:  in this fast-paced and complex world we call globalization, virtually nothing is carved in stone any more. “Survival” comes in many forms, and genuine strategic thinking often begins with the impertinent question, “Well, why should we assume that . . . ?”

The tyranny of interests

Something we noticed:  the longer the list of national interests presented, the less creative the strategic thinking.  Why?  Every declared interest pre-programs the foreign policy response, so the more interests your country accumulates, the more fenced-in you are as a policymaker.  One of the pleasant surprises of the first week grading process was how creative the North Korean teams were on certain issues, primarily because they kept things very simple regarding acceptable regime survival.

Now, that can sound counter-productive when you consider the “thinking through” goal cited above, but thinking through what matters most to your country doesn’t necessarily translate into a long list of core interests.  More to the point, just citing those core interests doesn’t end the conversation (as in, “China simply doesn’t go there”).  In this ever more connected world, trouble comes looking for you – not the other way around.  Core interests certainly preface all subsequent policy arguments, but they don’t obviate any.

What you see depends on where you sit

Here we saw some teams play their countries too well:  the Japanese teams tended to be a bit too careful, the European teams a bit too focused on defining the best rules, the Israeli teams a bit too dug in, the American teams a bit too self-confident, etc.  Where the subject matter touched upon more geographically immediate interests, teams naturally tended to be more creative.  But when the subjects seemed more distant (“What does North Korea care about Middle East extremism?”), creativity decidedly suffered.

In many ways, though, the exact opposite should be true.  When it comes to diplomacy, that first and final tool of grand strategy, ambitious nations should indulge their creativity most where interests are thinnest, because that’s where they have the most wiggle room.  Not having a “dog in the fight” can be a good thing, strategy-wise, so long as you don’t overstep your limited interests.  Plus, if you always wait until the problem reaches your shores, you may be out of attractive options at that point.

Look sideways to see deep into the future

Here we might say, “Know your own history – but not too well.”  The more teams used past history to explain their national interests, the less strategizing they applied to the subject – the “grievance list” quickly overwhelming any instinct for creative thought.  Conversely, the more teams cited issues adjacent to the subject at hand – or what we call “interdependencies,” the better able they were to think through possible scenarios toward desired outcomes. 

In a networked world, such interdependencies become the source material for policy workarounds – or the rewiring of strategies.  After all, one man’s cul-de-sac is another man’s turnaround.  A favorite example: one North Korean team, surveying the course of Asia’s economic integration with the world, decided that its impoverished population actually advantages the country as the last great untapped cheap-labor pool in East Asia! 

Point being, orienting oneself is not just a linear historical exercise (what’s behind us and what’s up ahead?).  Rather, it’s a networking function of the highest order.  “Shallow thinking,” as some might diagnose, isn’t necessarily the great bane of the upcoming generation.  You can’t disaggregate complexity until you can aggregate enough touch points to achieve sufficient situational awareness. 

When everything connects to everything else (one definition of globalization), the ability to process information laterally becomes increasingly valuable.  Indeed, Wikistrat’s raison d’etre is to develop that magnificent skill-set in the next generation of grand strategists.