The shift in--demand--power

BUSINESS: "Porsche Introduces a Sedan in China, the Biggest Auto Market," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 20 April 2009.

The opening para says all:

Porsche unveiled its entry into the luxury sedan market here on Sunday night, the eve of the Shanghai auto show. It was the latest confirmation of the importance of the Chinese auto market and the first time that Porsche has entered a new market segment at an auto show outside Europe or North America.

Remember: in the global economy, power stems from demand, not supply.

Sleep with one eye open

ARTICLE: Fidel Castro: Obama 'misinterpreted' Raul, AP, April 22, 2009

This "misinterpretation" gives you a sense of the difference we'll discover once the elder brother is dead.

(Thanks: Jeff Jennings)

Run for president, screw your state, and don't be surprised when you don't carry

U.S. NEWS: "Stimulus Stance Isolates Sanford: Conservative Governor's Base Questions His Willingness to Forgo Some Federal Aid," by Alex Roth and Valerie Bauerlein, Wall Street Journal, 2 April 2009.

Notice how the GOP governors making this "principled" stand tend to be those one associates with national-level political ambitions: Sanford (SC), Palin (AK), Barbour (MS), Jindal (LA).

It's grandstanding like this that means you end up not carrying your home state down the road in some national election. People remember how you used them.

For whom the ICC bell tolls not

INTERNATIONAL: "Setting Aside Divisions, Arab Leaders Rally Behind Sudan's President at a Meeting," by Michael Slackman and Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 31 March 2009.

Big surprise: Arab leaders can't agree on anything important right now--save for supporting Sudan's leader against his ICC indictment.

Why?

Simple: they fear what the ICC represents in terms of globally sanctioned accountability for what they do in office. If they don't answer to their people at home, why the hell would they answer to the global community?

Russian oil: won't join any cartel that would have it as a member

WORLD NEWS: "Russia Warns on Low Oil Prices," by Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 31 March 2009.

Cute bit from Russia's energy czar: we can't join an OPEC because Russia's government can't be bossing around private-sector energy players in our country!

But the larger truth is, Russia has never wanted to join OPEC and will never join it because it refuses to follow anybody else's lead on production quotas.

More on Afghanistan from my favorite combat reporter

FRONT PAGE: "A Blast, an Ambush and a Sprint to Escape a Taliban Kill Zone: Briefly Pinned Down, G.I.'s Fight Back, Then Grieve," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 20 April 2009.

No comment. Just a great read.

Chivers is simply the best, in my opinion.

Beijing pix

Wikipedia: as trust-worthy as your average big city

IDEAS & TRENDS: "Have Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here," by Noam Cohen, New York Times, 29 March 2009.

Call-out text says it all:

Wikipedia mimics the basic civility, trust and self-organizing of a city.

Wikipedia is the closest online dynamic to the rise of a real-world city, full of "neighborhoods" and winding streets, etc. Cities are natural meeting places; that's how they form and grow in the first place. Their utility in this function goes hand in hand with their resilience: if the latter fails, then the former disappears, but in general the growth of cities reflects their desirability in this regard (i.e., good results come from getting together there and intermingling). It's the neutral point of view that defines Wikipedia and any good city: accepting all comers with a view to cross-pollinating possibilities.

Like cities, the entries with the highest foot traffic are the safest, while the dead-end streets and back allies (obscure entries) are more likely to be rife with whatever.

Best part:

And just as the world had had plenty of creationists, temperance societies and ruralists, there is a professional class of Wikipedia skeptics. They, too, have some seriously depraved behavior to expose: Wikipedia represents a world without experts! A world without commercial news outlets! A world lacking in the distinction between the trivial and the profound! A world overrun with facts but lacking in wisdom!

It's all reminiscent of the longstanding accusations made against cities: They don't produce anything! All they do is gossip! They think they are so superior! They wouldn't last a week if we farmers stopped shipping our food! They don't know the meaning of real work!

Fascinating stuff, indicating that we consistently overestimate the change factor with technology.

Can Gates really push it through?

ARTICLE: Gates defuses the Defense budget battle, By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2009

An upbeat take on the unfolding budget battle to date.

But clearly a Gates battle, as Obama is almost never mentioned.

IMF's changing role

ARTICLE: Finance Chiefs Back a Bolder IMF, Bigger Role for Emerging Nations, By Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, April 26, 2009

More good signs that the IMF is opportunistic in its continuing evolution.

Bad signs in Pakistan

ARTICLE: Petraeus Calls On Pakistan To Redirect Military Focus, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, Saturday, April 25, 2009

A sign of how bad it's getting in Pakistan (where their Badlands are as close as West Virginia is to DC): Petraeus delivering in public the sort of message normally delivered in private--even F2F.

Af-Pak quickly becomes Pak-Af.

One can only hope our lines of communication are solid with the Indian Army, because this "crazy" is getting awfully close to India's front lawn.

China's biggest unfunded man-date

WORLD: "Chinese seniors say they're under siege: Retirement spent in turmoil, fear," by Calum McLeod, USA Today, 31 March 2009.

Oh, China's got a man date coming all right.

Best bit in this story is old people in one complex battling against their ultimate landlord. Turns out it's the Chinese Air Force. Impressive.

Right now China has 160 million over 60, or about 12%. That cohort will be one-out-of-every-four Chinese come 2050.

Unlike the still-young and slowly aging U.S., China will get old before it gets rich, and it won't be pretty.

That's why the notion of China running the world on its own is a stretch. I don't see the mindset in the leadership before 2020 and then there'll be about a twenty-year window before the aging gets scary hard. Not much time to master running the world on your own.

Just like with Japan previously, all the vaunted talk about Asian culture respecting elders will go out the window as this trend grows. Already, respect for the elderly in China is dropping.

A good rule change, just like in the NFL

MANAGING: "Chairman-CEO Split Gains Allies: Corporate Leaders Push for Firms to Improve Oversight by Separating Roles," by Joann S. Lublin, Wall Street Journal, 30 March 2009.

I never believed in combining the head coach and general manager positions. Similarly, I always distrusted mixing the chairman of the board and the chief exec officer positions. You have to disaggregate the short term needs from the long term responsibilities. Pretending to integrate them doesn't really work. It's natural for them to compete and different people should represent the opposing approaches rather than pretending one guy can do it all in his head.

There is nothing more dead than a dying language

SCIENCE LAB: "Not Just Words: Preserving languages gains new importance after UNESCO lists more than 2,400 at risk," by Kari Lydersen, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 23-29 March 2009.

America is a major source of dying languages, virtually all being Native American tongues disappearing. We have lost, by the UN's count, 115 languages over the past 500 years (assuming we don't take the blame on those first 250 years).

Why are languages lost? Languages have been dying for 10,000 years, going back to the dawn of the agricultural era. When everybody's roaming, languages are highly specific to tribe, but once people start settling down and trading a bit, common tongues prevail and the isolated ones are extinguished by time. Anything that encourages connectivity and aggregation of people kills languages, so guess what? Globalization will be the ultimate language killer. Half of the world's remaining 2100 languages will be gone by 2100.

Why the world would still want to be conversing in a thousand languages in 2100 is completely beyond me in terms of communication utility, even as I understand the innate desire for identity retention.

But the real killer here is simply the desire of humans to connect. The more they connect, they more they abandon languages that divide or isolate.

Pic Mon morn from hotel room Beijing.

Tom around the web

+ New Atlanticist and Outside the Beltway linked The Obama "doctrine"--sort of.
+ The Moderate Voice linked How to dull the strategic brain.
+ Information Dissemination mentioned Tom's HASC testimony from last month.
+ HG's WORLD mentioned generations in Tom's thought.
+ Super Punch linked Grand strategy is not about curing the world by the next national election.
+ And linked The good and the bad.
+ g m g D e s i g n . c o m linked Fly-over states are more conservative; they're also--surprisingly--more tolerant.
+ Future Scanner linked Possible IMF trajectory.

+ TurcoPundit linked 4 reviews of GP.
+ Global Guerrillas linked When the attack finally comes, the evidence trail leading up to it will be vast.
+ Chet Richards quoted that post.
+ Adam Elkus (at his Huffington Post gig), linked Inside the War Against Robert Gates.
+ AFCEA sent out a press release for the 3rd annual Joint Warfighting Conference Tom is speaking at.
+ SpendMatters mentioned PNM.
+ Real Clear World linked Why Iran Won't Stop Loving the Bomb.
+ GrogNews is running Tom's feed through their site.
+ 1 Raindrop mentioned Tom's treatment of Fukuyama in GP.

+ zenpundit started tournament of home offices. So far Tom appears to be in the lead: Finished Batman lego cave w Jer.
+ Wizards of Oz posted a pic of him (Shane) and Tom in Tom's office.

+ ScienceStage.com embedded the TED video.

Reasonable torture response

ARTICLE: In Obama's Inner Circle, Debate Over Memos' Release Was Intense, By R. Jeffrey Smith, Michael D. Shear and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 24, 2009

Personally, I like the idea of making the memos public. The charge that we're releasing info to al Qaeda is a bit much, because it's hard to believe this isn't all already well known to them (give them some credit).

For Obama, I see the memos' release as a way to obviate the truth commission route (full disclosure up front, and a decision not to prosecute ex post facto), which I do see as overkill.

So, to me, this is an inoculation strategy. Obama is done with torture, done with black sites, done with Gitmo and has clarified the rendition process somewhat while keeping it operative (we are going to want to send certain suspects back to their home countries; the big question will be whether or not it's done with a clear mind to performing torture by proxy, something Obama indicates will not be the case, but there's clear wiggle room there). He has also indicated a desire to get America back in line with the International Criminal Court. I judge the sum total of these changes as reasonable and warranted and sufficient at this time.

Why not be influenced by other nations?

ARTICLE: Obama nominee touches a nerve in conservatives, By Joseph Williams, Boston Globe, April 21, 2009

I know this bit really offends the constitutional purists, but I like a guy (both for State and possibly the Supreme Court) who says American law should be willing to take influences from other nations' law and international law. To me, that's an essential harmonization issue that cannot always be slated unidirectionally.

Of course, even the purists would have to admit that we got our original laws largely from other nations, with big influences being Britain and the Dutch, John Locke, etc., so arguing for a firewall now strikes me as ahistoric.

FWIW, I made this argument in Great Powers too.

(Thanks: j ryan)

A new regular column online at Esquire.com

The experiment of filling in for John Richardson's Tuesday column the last two weeks was a success, as far as Esquire.com's chief editor was concerned.

So we talked about next steps yesterday and decided I will now write a weekly column online for Esquire.com. The first one will appear next Thursday, and I plan to make it about this trip to China.

Iranian political cipher

ARTICLE: Principlist clergy fail to endorse Ahmadinejad, (Iranian) Press TV, 23 Apr 2009

One is not so sure how to interpret this.

Clearly, Ahmadinejad has weakened his prospects by running such a bad economy. What this says is that his conservative backers fear he cannot win and so want to go in another direction in order to avoid having a "moderate" win.

But since Ahmadinejad has significantly strengthened the presidency, it's hard to say how "independent" his run would be--as in, does he need the Principlists' backing and machinery or can he muster something big on his own?

Still, a good sign that he's pretty weak. If the Supreme Leader signals any wavering, this could spell the end for him, and yet, Khamenei has done anything but up to now.

So, as usual, Iranian politics are opaque and uncertain.

(Thanks: Mike Smith)