WPR's The New Rules: The New World Order-After-Next

There is no faster route to second-tier great power status than for an actual or aspiring superpower to fight a crippling conflict with another country from those same ranks. Moreover, if history is any guide, the glass ceiling that results is a permanent one: This was the fate of imperial Britain, imperial Japan and Germany -- both imperial and Nazi -- in the first half of the 20th century, and the same was true for Soviet Russia in the second half of the century, despite Moscow's conflict with the West being a cold one. The lesson is an important one for Washington, Beijing and New Delhi to keep in mind in the years ahead, given that the two most likely dyads for major war in the 21st century are America-China and China-India. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: After Iraq and Afghanistan, Time to End the War on Drugs

Americans today are enjoying the most peaceful period, on a per capita basis, in human history, with virtually all of the remaining mass violence in the system occurring not between organized militaries, but rather sub- and transnationally -- that is, within nation-states and across their borders. The frequency, length and lethality of conflicts are all down from Cold War highs, despite the growth in both numbers of countries and world population. Nonetheless, most Americans continue to have extremely misdirected fears and impressions regarding the global security landscape. We see a world of wars and believe them all to be of our creating, when in fact it is globalization's initially destabilizing advance that creates the vast bulk of the civil strife into which our military forces are drawn -- to the tune of well more than 150 crisis responses since Cold War's end.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

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

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

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

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

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

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: Making Syria's Assad Next Domino to Fall

Recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans and Europeans don't want NATO to widen its war against embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. So long as the West's low-and-slow approach to regime change continues to weaken the dictator, there is good reason to stick with President Barack Obama's strategy of limited intervention. Yet as international cameras focus in on Libya, a prospective tipping point for the future of the Middle East becomes all the more visible in Syria, despite that country's ban on international journalists. And although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken an admirably tough line regarding the Baath regime's "continued brutality," the White House still expresses more concern over Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza than over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's increasingly bloody crackdown against protesters there. 

Read the entire column, co-authored with Michael S. Smith II, at World Politics Review.

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

 

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

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

Mr. Hancock comments at my Globlogization site that:

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

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

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

Here's my answer to the charge:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

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

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

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: "For U.S., the Long War Shifts Back to the Persian Gulf"

As the United States debates just how much more effort it wants to put into the Afghanistan-Pakistan sinkhole, evidence mounts of the need to pursue a strategic pivot back toward the Middle East, where the Arab Spring is increasingly threatened by a Persian winter of revolutionary discontent. For some time now, Iran has been showing signs of mounting internal divisions between competing hardline factions led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But it has also become more desperate about asserting its alleged leadership of the region's ongoing wave of uprisings, including a far more active sponsorship of al-Qaida's Persian Gulf franchise. All this suggests that, if America is truly serious about continuing the fight against the post-Osama bin Laden al-Qaida, then Washington needs to admit that the center of gravity in that "persistent struggle" has shifted out of northwest Pakistan and into the Persian Gulf.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Kronos report to Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus on Iran-AQ Nexus

Download here.

Made available here as part of tomorrow's WPR column.

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

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

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

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

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

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

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

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

WPR's The New Rules: Obama's Israel-Palestine Red Herring

Much of the reaction to President Barack Obama's speech on U.S. Middle East policy last Thursday focused on his reference to Israel's pre-1967 borders as the basis for a future two-state solution with Palestine. But Obama's speech was far more focused on long-term realities, suggesting that he is not really willing to push for some historic Israeli-Palestinian peace plan against the background of the Arab Spring. In fact, it's fair to wonder why he chose to expend any of his political capital on this deadlocked issue, especially since he had to know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would reject the 1967 boundaries proposal as a starting point for negotiations, as Netanyahu had already protested that point's inclusion in the speech prior to its delivery.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: Four Options for Redefining the Long War

There is a profound sense of completion to be found in America's elimination of Osama bin Laden, and the circumstances surrounding his death certainly fit this frontier nation's historical habit of mounting major military operations to capture or kill super-empowered bad actors. Operation Geronimo, like most notable U.S. overseas interventions of the past quarter-century, boiled down to eliminating the one man we absolutely felt we needed to get to declare victory. Now we have the opportunity to redefine this "long war" to America's most immediate advantage. I spot four basic options, each with their own attractions and distractions.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: For U.S., Abandoning the Middle East not a Solution

America's successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, long overdue, naturally renews talk across the country about ending the nation's military involvement in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Coupled with the ongoing tumult unleashed by the Arab Spring, Washington is once again being encouraged to reconsider its strategic relationship with the troubled Middle East. The underlying current to this debate has always been the widely held perception that America's "oil addiction" tethers it to the unstable region. Achieve "energy independence," we are told, and America would free itself of this terrible burden.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: Glass Half Full on Obama's New National Security Team

President Barack Obama reshuffled his national security team last week, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The White House proclaimed that this was the "strongest possible team," leaving unanswered the question, "Toward what end?" Obama's choices represent the continued reduction of the role of security as an administration priority. That fits into his determined strategy to reduce America's overseas military commitments amid the country's ongoing fiscal distress. Obama foresees a smaller, increasingly background role for U.S. security in the world, and these selections feed that pattern.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: Long-Term U.S. Presence in Afghanistan a Mistake

The Obama administration has begun talks with Afghanistan designed to quell the Karzai government's fears about being abandoned by the West come 2014. Those talks are said to involve negotiations for long-term basing of U.S. troops involved in training Afghan security forces and supporting future counterterrorism operations. This can be seen as a realistic course of action, given our continuing lack of success in nation-building there, as well as our inability -- although perhaps unwillingness is a better term -- to erect some regional security architecture that might replace our presence. But there are good reasons to question this course.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: Strategic Balancing vs. Global Development

The World Bank's 2011 World Development Report is out, and this year's version highlights the interplay between "conflict, security, and development." That's a welcome theme to someone who's spent the last decade describing how globalization's spreading connectivity and rules have rendered certain regions stable, while their absence has condemned others to perpetual strife. But although the growing international awareness of these crosscutting issues is long overdue, the report ultimately disappoints by focusing only on the available tools with which great powers might collaborate on these stubborn problems, while ignoring the motivations that prevent them from doing so. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Global Role Depends on Hard Fiscal Choices

Much of the global perception of America's long-term decline as the world's sole surviving superpower is in fact driven by our fiscal decline. That's why I was disturbed to hear Democrats so quickly dismiss GOP Sen. Paul Ryan's bold, if flawed, federal budget proposal on the grounds that it would "end Medicare as we know it."  Frankly, arresting our decline means ending a lot of things "as we know them." That's simply what being on an unsustainable path forces you to do.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR's The New Rules: The State Strikes Back

The rampant globalization meme of the 1990s was that the state would wither away, leaving nonstate actors to rule -- or ruin -- the world. The terror attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to confirm this notion, triggering all manner of academic fantasies that a proliferation of super-empowered individuals would overwhelm the world's declining and failing states. But when globalization's alleged coup de grâce arrived in the form of the 2008 global financial crisis, not only did the world not slide into widespread conflict, as so many anti-globalization hysterics predicted, but the state made quite the comeback.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

WPR Feature: Managing Global Supply Chains a Key U.S. Advantage

co-authored with Stephen F. DeAngelis

While many in the West fret over the challenge of "rebalancing" the global economy after the recent global financial crisis, several trends suggest that the field of supply chain management could offer a key advantage for an America eager to double its exports by 2014. On the surface, supply chain management might not sound too sexy, but understand this: In today's globalization, neither companies nor countries compete -- supply chains do. Companies like Wal-Mart have known this for some time. Thus, positioning America to be the world's pre-eminent provider of secure, transparent and efficient supply chains will ensure that our economy masters globalization's competitive landscape in the fullest sense. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

See also Steve's broader post on transforming global supply chains.