China still with a lot of political growing up to do

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "In China, Politics Is Still Big Secret: Key Moves to Be Made at Congress, but Few Know When It Will Occur," by Jason Leow, Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2007, p. A4.

ONLINE: "China's iClone: Cellphones, microchips, cars, even iPhones—there's virtually no high-tech Western product that China's cloners can't copy. Pretty soon, you might even prefer their work," by Dan Koeppel, Popular Science, August 2007.

China's well on its way to replicating the steal-copy-clone-improve trajectory previously pursued by other emerging markets throughout history--to include that thieving United States in the latter decades of the 19th century. It's catching-up strategy may offend (and it surely should bring our proper, legal-ruleset-enhancing responses), but it beats the hell out of the "great leap forward" and other such craziness of the Mao-rate-of-nongrowth.

But politically, China remains immature relative to its rapidly maturating economic models. China increasingly deals with the world economically in a highly sophisticated fashion and yet presents a leadership/ruling model that seems almost perfectly designed to prevent effective discounting of risk by outsiders--not to mention, by its own people right up to its highest bureaucrats.

Can you imagine having something so crucial as the party congress that will pick your next generation of leaders being so secretive and iffy that no one in power can give you a firm date as to when it will happen?

I do believe this is the last party congress that will be conducted in this technocratically-secretive manner. We've seen China steadily progress through the "great man" phase to the reformer phase (Deng) to the codifier phase (Jiang) to the hard-science technocratic phase with Hu and Wen (mirroring Gorby's generation and its rise), with all of this happening in about a quarter-century (the Soviet journey was somewhat longer at about one-third-of-a-century in the making, although far less steadily so and enduring the typical zig-zagging of Russian history), and now we've got the Fifth Generation teed up with their law-economics-politics educational backgrounds.

Give the Fifths a good five years to get ready to rule and I think we'll see a significantly different public face to the party congress in 2012, primarily because this crew will be more confident in managing such expectations and public relations.

Thanks to Jean Rogers for the PopSci article.

The military's return to society

TASTE: "Professors on the Battlefield," by Evan R. Goldstein, Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2007, p. W11.

"The shift is the zeitgeist is embodied by Gen. David H. Petraeus," we are rightly told, and a seminal turning point is how he used academics (especially anthropologists) to vet his new counter-insurgency strategy (I was fortunate enough to get my own interaction on the subject in Leavenworth in December 2005 when I spoke to the student body and interviewed Petraeus for the "Monks of War" piece in Esquire and came away duly impressed with the vision as it was shaping up). Petraeus's "unprecedented collaboration" with Sarah Sewall of Harvard resulted in a "conference that brought together journalists, human-rights activists, academics and members of the armed forces to exchange ideas about how to make the doctrine more effective and more humane."

Sewall's positive influence was such that Petraeus asked her to write one of the resulting manual's opening essays. Very cool.

Naturally, a lot of academics see a Vietnam-in-the-remaking, but again, recasting everything we're learning (much of it--again) as simply leading us to the same outcome is such an intellectual cop-out. It's not the early 1970s. It's not a bipolar world. Globalization is moving into a completely different phase. Back then we came to see the futility of proxy wars against the Sovs, and now some want to see us recognize the futility of rapidly instituting democracy in a society not ready for it ("Sold!" say I).

But even if we trip lightly to that unremarkable conclusion, there still exists the problems of failed states and rogue regimes and the inescapable reality of the Long War against radical extremism.

The bipolar struggle with the Sovs was an elective, but the Long War is a requirement. We were in charge of the Cold War, along with the Sovs. But nobody's in charge of globalization's rapid expansion around the planet, and it's the main driver of this conflict. We can respond to that driver or ignore it, but we can't just wish it away, and waiting out the Gap will not get us a "victory" of any sorts, just more pain coming our way.

What saddens me most about the left and right nowadays is that the extremes fail to recognize the marvelous impetus created by globalization's scarily rapid advance: now we're forced to do something about the disconnected, the bottom billion, the left behind, and so on. We're forced not out of charity but out of sheer self-interest: this thing is going down and we can make it better or we can make it worse, but it's going down.

To me, that sort of inevitability--of our own making!--marks this era as probably the most important one to date in human history. We manage the journey from 6.5 to 9 billion over the next quarter-century or so, and do so in a fashion that makes globalization truly global, and we've made a huge turning point in human history happen.

Roddenberry and the rest of the optimistic/pessimistic sci-fiers always projected WWIII with nukes as the ultimate turning-point test and we are lucky enough to have this instead (all residual fantasies about nuclear war aside--and no, nuclear terrorism, as real as that threat may be--is not the same). Instead of just avoiding a terrible end, we're faced with the challenge of the future worth creating.

That's an amazing gift from history, but one that will require efforts from all quarters to make happen.

And in that regard, watching the military come back to society as a result of Iraq is a very good thing--all Vietnam flashbacks aside.

Great Japanese movie "Afterlife"

By an acclaimed director that Vonne researched recently, since she's trying to build up a bit of a DVD library of Japanese films for eldest daughter's enjoyment as she pursues language studies.

It's a very Japanese film that, on its face, could easily be summed up as their version of Albert Brooks' "Defending Your Life" (although that seems to trivialize it quite a bit). Also got a bit of "Ghost" in its subtle romanticism.

Here's the trick: a crew of bureaucrats work an afterlife stint where they process a couple dozen newly dead each week at a sort of rundown sanitorium. Their goal? Get each person to pick a single moment from their life for the crew to make a short film about. Once they view the resulting film and find that moment of closure/peace, they move along.

So the question was, What is that one moment or memory you'd want to contemplate for all eternity--i.e., your definition of heaven based on your life?

Neat parlor game.

Vonne came up with this: walking over to the metal fence at Paisan's, the Italian restaurant where we both worked (me as cook, she as waitress), at the end of her afternoon shift on a Friday to say hi to me as I unlocked my Sears 10-speed Free Spirit (yes, I was that cool). We had had our first real conversation at my sister's b-day party the previous weekend, and she had asked me to walk her back to Paisan's that night to get her bike (I decided on the walk that I would marry her--quite possibly--but kept that completely to myself).

Her take on that moment: She thought I was a nice guy but always found that nice guys weren't interested in following up with her, so approaching me felt like a big risk.

Me? I had just let slip a chance to ask another waitress out that my sister was encouraging me to date. I let it slip primarily because I felt it was a bad match, but still, I was humiliated at my lack of action.

So I walk out to my bike, feeling a bit the loser, and Vonne walks over. I am stunned by this development, figuring someone as cool and interesting and beautiful as she would--in mirror-imaging fashion--naturally turn out to be uninterested in a guy like me (I was--and still am--two years her junior).

So when she walks over and says hi, I just asked her out on a date--right then and there. It's the only time in my entire life I ever just plained asked a girl out--straight up.

She said yes to "Blade Runner," and 25 years later here we are.

My moment was different. About a year after that we had plateaued in our relationship somewhat. We were having conversations of the deeper sort, truly revelatory, where you're making commitments with your intimacy.

One night, about 2am, after hours of discussion, Vonne basically drives me out of her apartment, telling me it's over, this won't and can't possibly work, etc. It was a rather brutal dismissal.

I remember walking--again to my locked Free Spirit--pulling out my key, and fumbling with the lock. But I stop, feel a lot of certainty well up inside me, and reject the free-and-easy break-off of our relationship. I remember physically shaking with this . . . I dunno what. It was like my entire life was shifting on this one fulcrum. I had this sense of: 1) go away and it's all over for good, or 2) go back in and it all continues forever. It felt like the biggest choice of my life, one that would determine everything. I will never forget that shaking, like the universe was collapsing in on me.

So I slipped the lock back on, put my keys in my pocket, picked up my backpack from the ground, and walked back across the street to Vonne's apartment house. I knocked on the door and she appeared rather quickly. And then, right there and continuing on through the rest of the night, I made the pitch of my life--the ultimate F2F briefing. I laid it all out, and made the sale. Vonne has never really tried to dump me ever again, although rhetorically (or what I like to call "rhetorically") she's made a few pointed threats over the years (but always reasonably connected to my behavior).

So I guess if we ended up in the afterlife together, as I assume we would based on these dueling memory points, my Free Spirit bike would be standing between us.

Strassel on the Dems, Part Duh!

OPINION: "Democrats and Cannibals," by Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal 17 August 2007, p. A12.

Just another good summary of the self-destructive influence of the far left on the Dems' chances to both keep the House and Senate and regain the White House. Here Strassel takes a tour of recent Netroots efforts to unseat moderate Dems, a trend I expect to continue in 2008.

And that disturbs me, because no moderate Dems, no majority, and I like my politics more to the middle. So if the Dems blow this moment there's little incentive for the GOP to mirror-image.

If I was Clinton, I would plan to get a grip on all this sentiment for the general election, because in a Hillary-Rudy match, that far left sentiment could prove very bad for her. Naturally, Rudy would face his own problems on the far right, but they'd be more easily--and energetically--mobilized versus Hillary than I expect the far left would be against Giuliani's liberal authoritarianism (a phrase I do not use in jest nor in condemnation, as I see a liberal authoritarian as a nice mix right now, as people want safe but not intrusive--a better normal, as it were, than Bush has signaled or created). Remember this: the Dems' only two presidential victories since 1980 came with sub-majority totals, where the left turned out very heavy and the right was muted and split. That means a Mrs. Clinton victory requires a big good on her side and a couple of bads on the GOP side (her side must commit, her opponents largely omit). That's always a tricky thing, in my mind.

Yes, there are many assumptions about the inevitable Dem win next year, but I've got this thing about such conventional wisdom. Call it my "doubting Thomas" mentality, or maybe it's just the pessimistic Irish in me: when I see a victory that's yours to lose, I pretty much expect you to screw it up.

Why do I have such a queasiness on the Kos people and the Netroots in general?

Going to Wisconsin in the early 1980s, even with my Mao poster up in the dorm room and my deep, earnest immersion in all things socialist (I figured, know the target from the inside or don't know them at all, plus I just loved being radical as a youth--it just felt so natural for that age), I would really get irked whenever the left on campus would basically shout down anybody who didn't agree with them (the classic was when students wouldn't let Kirkpatrick speak, which embarrassed me to no end, despite my great dislike for her). To me, that was the whole point of going to college: trying on ideologies, and working out your logic in debate.

Even my wife, uber-liberal Vonne, found herself so turned off by that vibe that she became the editor of the more conservative "Badger Herald."

Plus, just studying the left in power in socialist regimes made me realize that shutting down the opposition from either side was just plain wrong, and likely to lead to a lot of killing.

I don't have such worries here in the U.S. The Boomers in general elevate politics to a silly degree of zero-sumness: "If they win, I tell you, it's the end of everything!" And that's a sad mirror-imaging of the very phenomenon we seek to temper in places like the Middle East: the winner-takes-all political mindset.

I know, I know, the adversarial mindset is built into our political and legal systems, and there's much to admire in both. I just wish we'd turn off the neverending campaign mentality when given the chance to rule so lawmakers would do what's right more often than obsessing over how to keep or regain majority status.

The tragedy of the common

ARTICLE: WHO Backs Free, Treated Mosquito Nets to Prevent Malaria, By Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post, August 17, 2007; Page A15

Easterly makes a great point in "White Man's Burden": when netting is given away for free, people often misuse it for fishing, wedding veils, etc. When a small fee is charged for it, people use it for what it's designed for far more often. The lesson? When you treat something as cost-free, people see it as worthless and thus employable in any fashion they damn well please. Put a small cost on something, and people want their money's worth.

Assimilation is not instant, therefore diversity is dead! (updated with comment from Putnam and my reply)

NOTE: I made an original, quick post on Henninger's article after briefly skimming the Putnam lecture {found here--WARNING: it is not an easy read}. Below find my original post (with any updating in [brackets]), then Putnam's comment, then my reply to his comment (which I admit is lame in terms of engaging him on the methodology of his study, which--quite frankly--I really hate doing, which is why I never became an academic).

ORIGINAL POST

OP-ED: "The Death of Diversity: People in ethnically diverse settings don't care about each other," by Daniel Henninger

Henninger is pretty good, but he likes to cherry pick and then declare victory prematurely in adjacent issues.

Bob Putnam, from whom I took comparative politics way back when, is a great researcher, and an even better marketer ["bowling alone" was one way cool metaphor]. Naturally, he casts his current work on "social capital" in terms of the great diversity issue of our day: immigration.

So Putnam does a lot of interviews of communities in America and finds the most diverse ones, meaning ones typically with lots of immigrants [although he's basically testing across four groups {whites, blacks, asians, latinos} and not for immigrant populations per se {as far as I could tell from the text}, though the relationship is fairly obvious--as in, more diverse, more immigrants on average], have low social capital. As Henninger neatly summarizes: "People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other."

This is presented as a surprising conclusion [by Henninger, less so by Putnam who compares and contrasts the "conflict" versus "contact" models--see his text for details], because of the mythology of the "melting pot," when, of course, American history is crammed with anti-immigrant periods, and tons of evidence that when we go through a large immigration wave, we go through an extended period of heightened fragmentation.

[Here, I leave Putnam behind and start unconsciously laying into Henninger's take and his noting how Pat Buchanan is making hay out of all this WRT immigration.]

So none of this is new, in my mind. Go back to ethnic neighborhoods in NYC at the turn of the previous century: completely enclaved and amazingly suspicious of outsiders. In fact, it was a lot of social concern about all that atomization, coupled with the rise of industrialization, that led to the rise of community groups in America. Putnam would like to trigger something similar today for similar reasons [he founded an institute for this purpose], but there is this gross assumption that this time around should look fundamentally like last time [I am admittedly transferring here from my dislike of Buchanan [hey, it's just a blog, I get to slop around a bit!}, but then again, you read Putnam and you're confronted with churches and the military as the positive examples, and that does give one the sense of a gross assumption that traditional models are the way to go--yes? I mean, it's not like he counters with Second Life].

I just don't see that happening with the Facebook and MySpace generation, which shows a higher tolerance for diversity than any previous generation (documented at length) and yet may be no more likely to organize itself in terms of housing or community selection to reflect that greater tolerance than any generation prior.

Putnam's citation of a possible assimilation model is equally unsurprising: mega-churches that bundle up life and living like a religious version of Disneyworld. Sure, when faced with lotsa complexity and diversity, many will choose AOL-like "walled gardens" to play within, and that's fine, but such enclaving is hardly a model for assimilation. [At least not one that most individuals want, because both churches and militaries win cohesion by breaking you down and reforming you according to their ideologies, and--by my count--most people today want some level of belonging without the being told how-to-think stuff--admittedly an unscientific, not-subject-to-multivariate-analysis statement.]

Beyond that, I'm simply suspicious of the perceived requirement for assimilation, which I believe--especially in Putnam's case--is based on his own life-view shaped by growing up in 1950s America--a truly odd and unique period in our national and shared global history [Putnam, like me, likes to brag about his smalltown Midwestern upbringing]. The emphasis on social conformity and "joining" and "belonging to" socially-acceptable groups was huge in that time frame, reflecting the dominant struggle motif of the age: we had to provide a conformist, solid front lest those devious Sovs conquer us and force us into a frighteningly conformist, monotone social structure. To me, that's just the natural mirror-imaging that we always engage in when confronted by perceived outside dangers.

So now we face a retraditionalizing threat (radical Islam) and so we too seek retraditionalizing answers. We want an America that seems ultra-American, and so we pull up images from the past and worry over how little our current circumstances mirror those previous times, instead of simply accepting the reality that we maintain our pathfinder status in this continuing evolution we've unleashed upon the world--this globalization largely modeled on our wide-open, few-holds-barred system.

Why a system built on the freedom to pursue individual happiness should feel so threatened by an increasingly fractured definition of happiness is odd, but there you have it. We fear the "Muslim hordes" threat, or the "Latino hordes" threat, and we assume the shared definitions of the past will be overwhelmed by foreign ones we cannot access, much less understand.

Unprecedented to some, the same-old same-old to others.

This is not to say that I don't approve of Putnam's research, which I think is good. And if it pushes us all toward new efforts at assimilation and communitarianism, that's fine too. These things ebb and wane, typically in response to lengthy periods of heightened immigration. For America to forge a new definition of that requirement right now would be a serious gift to a world facing these dynamics all over the dial. It would be America fulfilling its pathfinder status as it has in the past.

My caution is simply this: don't assume tomorrow's communitarianism must look like last century's. I mean, I live in Indiana for very specific reasons, but nonetheless remain highly connected to a host of communities on a daily basis. Do I manage the same local community involvement as my old man? Definitely not. Is my community worse for it? It's definitely different, but I don't see it as worse (having lived in both worlds/eras). The scale of community and connectivity is simpler far greater now, much like with globalization as a whole. The communitarianism we seek at home is desired from America as a whole by the global community, which sees us as increasingly enclaved.

PUTNAM COMMENT:

Tom, I'm most interested to see your thoughts on my work, most of which I agree with. Can I modestly suggest, however, that it might be good actually to read what I have written, rather than relying on second-hand politicized accounts of my work, before you opine on my views and biases? See http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x

Bob Putnam

MY REPLY (expanded from an initial counter-comment relayed to Sean over the phone)

Actually, I read the report as presented in a prize lecture, and listened to an interview he gave on the study. Also read "Bowling" way back when.

I should have linked both rather than just cite Henninger. My bad.

But Putnam's right to call me out. I got too focused on Henninger's interpretation that I didn't bother using Putnam's own words to counter Henninger's take (e.g., Putnam's longer-term observations are far more optimistic, showing more networking creativity among young, plus citing the military model with some admiration).

In short, I got Putnam with too much friendly fire in my putdown of Henninger, and that was lazy on my part.

But having gone over the lecture text again, I'll stick with the original post rather than attempt navigating through the language and statistics of multivariate analysis. I've always had a lot of distrust for this kind of stuff, because polling--even very scientifically analyzed--still strikes me as infinitely malleable.

They tried to teach me this stuff at Harvard (when Putnam was department head) and it left me cold beyond belief. I found that by tweaking the data here and there I could come up with all sorts of interpretations, so that when you try to present your stuff as honestly as possible (and Putnam is very good at this), you end up writing in this profoundly convoluted manner that--quite frankly--makes my head hurt to read.

Henninger's main take (what I scanned for in my first read of Putnam's lecture/article) on Putnam is accurate: Putnam comes up with the unsurprising validation of the "conflict" model of diversity (when people are mixed, things get nasty) in his surveys. What he offers in the text is a lot of additional logic and historical citations and some survey data that suggests there's hope for higher social trust levels down the road based on certain integration policies/practices/models, with a special nod to churches and the military (the source of one great example of where the "contact" model worked in the Second World War).

So, in the end, I guess I don't have much more to add on Putnam's work than what I said in the original post. As I'm not one to debate the intricacies of multivariate analyses, I'll stick to how the findings get presented, and here I remain uncomfortable with how Putnam markets these findings WRT immigration, and how those findings are so easily used for very negative arguments by guys like Henninger and Patrick Buchanan.

Basically, Putnam has his data on diverse communities and his particular polling on the question of social trust, and his findings propose a certain association (more diverse equals less social trust), which can easily come off like one of those cancer studies (more hot dogs equals more cancer), and he readily admits he's just got a finding for now (unless he gives us a lot more compelling data or analysis in his subsequent presentations) and that the ultimate causality is probably infinitely more complex than this one variable he tracks (no matter how much you control for other factors, any one such variable is but a tiny fraction of reality captured in numbers on paper). And yet, despite this humble beginning, and despite not really contextualizing what comes next in some larger understanding of the vast complexity of the immigrant experience (other than to say, "some of our best Americans turn out to be ..."), Putnam makes the bold logic leap to raising some serious questions on immigration. He didn't need to make this link so explicit, in my mind, because his data to date doesn't exactly rock my boat on that subject, and yet he does, so Putnam can hardly be surprised anti-immigration types use his findings in a "politicized" manner.

To tell my truth, I don't think Henninger and Buchanan and others misuse Putnam's report whatsoever. I think he positioned his rather specific findings very cleverly within this larger, hot-button social topic, and I think he did it with great marketing purpose.

And again, that made me queasy when I read his lecture. It confirmed my queasiness when I saw what Henninger and Buchanan readily make of it, and so I sense some profound biases at work here--from all parties (including me, in rejectionist, post-Boomer mode).

So I guess I "blinked," and got it right.

China's product safety takes me back to my youth

ARTICLE: "More Ripples From Chinese Product Troubles: Some Baby Bibs Said to Contain Levels of Lead," by Eric Lipton, New York Times, 15 August 2007, p. C1.

You go to China and smell the exhaust fumes from cars and you remember why it was you so often got car-sick as a kid: the leaded fuel.

So no surprise China's similarly trapped in our collective past on toys. We got rid of all that stuff in paint, toys, materials, our gas ... when I was just a young kid.

China's getting a rapid tutorial on the subject now. Their choice? Get it correct right away or risk long-term loss of market. Product reputation becomes a major source of international regime legitimacy--or the lack thereof--for the Chinese Communist Party.

Remember all the wailing over the "China price" and what it imposed on the world? Well, the blowback is just as strong.

Here's what I said in BFA:

For every sliver of economic connectivity with the outside world, China is forced to accept more externally imposed rule sets, and over time this process significantly limits what the Party controls while expanding that which the Party only wishes it could control. If China wants to gain “market status” in the WTO because its current nonmarket status means it keeps losing rulings there, then it has to allow a host of profound changes, such as letting global retailers such as Wal-Mart and direct marketers like Avon enter its marketplace. If China wants help in reducing its roughly half a trillion dollars of nonperforming bank loans, then it has to let foreign players enter its market and purchase ownership in local financial institutions (something Goldman Sachs just did). And if China wants to continue enjoying a large trade deficit with the United States, then once it has filled up its currency reserves and flooded both the U.S. Treasury market and the U.S. secondary mortgage market with the excess flow, it invariably needs to start purchasing U.S. companies. This acquisition strategy, in turn, vastly benefits a Chinese private sector that faces a shortfall of seventy-five thousand capable senior executives over the next ten to fifteen years, because what China really needs, almost as much as the companies’ material assets, is their senior managerial talent. And so America needs to ask itself, when Chinese companies, abetted by their government, seek to acquire such U.S. icons as Maytag and UNOCAL, whether or not we achieve more security vis-à-vis China by encouraging this flow of human capital or by blocking these attempts and, by doing so, triggering a protectionist response from China at this point in its rapid embrace of both capitalism and globalization. So while not everyone is ready to call China a market economy, it’s getting awfully hard to find anyone who will call it a Communist one, and that’s the globalization price.

Not magic, just systematically thinking about the future--a skill that can be taught.

Clear sign of moving into Core? Teaching critical thought.

MEMO FROM NEW DELHI: "Politics Is the New Star of India's Classroom," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 15 August 2007, p. A4.

Until recently, political science in India's educational system was all science, no politics. Why? Considered too "risky."

India clearly grows up in this way.

Big surprise! Chavez wants to be president-for-life

ARTICLE: "Chavez Expected to Propose Removing His Term Limits," by Simon Romero, New York Times, 15 August 2007, p. A6.

Socialism gets you dictatorship the vast majority of the time.

New words, same old crap from a caudillo whose main accomplishment is spending down his nation's oil wealth rapidly.

Send more seniors!

ARTICLE: Seniors head south to Mexican nursing homes, By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY, August 15, 2007

You know the old model of expanding America? You send your nationals en masse, let them settle in, then you must "rescue" them through political integration when the going gets tougher.

So if you want to end all this immigration/illegals stuff and simply annex Mexico, I say, send more seniors!

Thanks to Robert Garian for sending this.

"Enemies of the State," beware!

ARTICLE: 'Domestic Use of Spy Satellites To Widen: Law Enforcement Getting New Access To Secret Imagery,' By Joby Warrick, Washington Post, August 16, 2007; Page A01

Compare the spy satellites story to my recent post on China pursuing face-recognition technology in major cities.

Sincerely impressed by Giuliani's "Foreign Affairs" piece

Find it here.

First off, you have to remember this is a campaign piece, so truly tough choices are put off and Rudy's going to be for more things than he can possibly support.

But, taking that caveat in stride, this is a great piece.

The description of the era is good, and the proposals seem solid. He suitably distances himself from the realists. He sounds all the proper noises on Israel and our complex relationships with China and Russia while saying that no great power should be considered our "inherent enemy." He wants a bigger military in terms of bodies (agree) but likewise wants to buy all the familiar toys--to include that toy-without-peer (or any record of success) known as missile defense (not realistic, but every candidate will promise it, I guarantee you, along with some more subs and other hugely expensive platforms that will have virtually no role in any future conflicts--save the all-important "covert insertion of SOF forces," who, hilariously enough, can often just fly by commercial air--Duh! Their whole job is to blend in!). He says he's open to talking with Iran, but only from a position of strength (as opposed to today's weakness?), and so on and so on.

Sure it's chock full of orthodoxies (which makes "Foreign Affairs" a perfect venue). But also no mistakes, plenty of nice notes sounded, and one truly bold proposal (actually, the only specific one in the whole piece):

Economic investment and cultural influence work best where civil society already exists. But sometimes America will be compelled to act in those parts of the world where few institutions function properly -- those zones that lack not only good governance but any governance -- and in states teetering on the edge of conflict or recovering from it. Faced with a choice between leaving a troubled zone to anarchy or helping build functioning civil societies with accountable governments that can serve as bulwarks against barbarism, the American people will choose the latter.

To assist these missions, the next U.S. president should restructure and coordinate all the agencies involved in that process. A hybrid military-civilian organization -- a Stabilization and Reconstruction Corps staffed by specially trained military and civilian reservists -- must be developed. The agency would undertake tasks such as building roads, sewers, and schools; advising on legal reform; and restoring local currencies. The United States did similar work, and with great success, in Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II. But even with the rich civic traditions in these nations, the process took a number of years. We must learn from our past if we want to win the peace as well as the war.

Naturally, I approve of that.

So let the China hawks have their subs and the Israeli supporters their missile defense. Those two were largely in the bag to begin with, on the GOP side. But the blended post-conflict/disaster force? That one was a genuine sell that a lot of us have been pushing for quite some time. I know of my influence on the subject only from the one F2F with Giuliani and the fact he's read both PNM and BFA (the latter is reflected, methinks, in his focus on strengthening the international system and being open to thinking about revamping its main institutions).

The term "stabilization and reconstruction" is a safe one (Bush created a do-nothing office named that in State) and citing civilian reserves clearly builds on Bush's likewise go-nowhere proposal for a Civilian Reserve Corps. What sets this proposal apart is the "hybrid military-civilian" notion (which puts it squarely in my ballpark of "SysAdmin" with "specially-trained military"). Also Giuliani clearly suggests a new bureaucratic center of gravity, for he says "the next U.S. president should restructure and coordinate all the agencies involved in that process" and that the end result would be an "agency."

All in all, a stellar effort, and compared to the recent ones by Obama and Romney, especially clear-headed.

Nothing here to counter my assertion that the right sort of change needed for our military is most likely achieved under a moderate Republican.

Of course, that's only one calculation to consider, and my bias towards it is duly admitted.

A partition within a partition within a partition

OP-ED: "The U.N.'s Flawed Kosovo Plan," by Alan J. Kuperman, Wall Street Journal, 16 August 2007,p. A11.

The saga of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia continues, largely hidden from global view.

Kosovo was the last great chapter, but it's one that refuses conclusion. Serbia wants to keep Kosovo in some political association, even as it seeks EU membership and knows this stance threatens that process. The U.S. and most others support some clear sense of Kosovo's independence. Naturally, there's an enclave inside Kosovo, to the north, full of Serbs, who want their independence inside Kosovo. Give it enough time and we'll find a tiny enclave of Albanians, inside the Serbian enclave, who want protection from the new, proposed Serbian protectorate.

In short, the drawing of the appropriately "squiggly" line continues, with the threat of mass violence always looming in the background. A new crisis to some, the continuing resolution of an old one to others.

So ethnic enclaves prefer not to have much to do with one another, when given the opportunity to separate. Where have I seen this before?

Well, I guess I see it everywhere. When globalization gives you the chance to seek your individual happiness, you more likely than not will seek to define that happiness in its first instance as focusing on your "given family." Expecting people to quickly move on to the more mature "chosen family" mindset is unrealistic. Indeed, their definition of happiness may prevent it for any foreseeable future.

So don't expect fundamentalists, whether they're Salafi or Amish, to disappear any time soon. Instead, expect them to proliferate in direct correlation to globalization's advance. Many will naturally interpret this as a "failure" of globalization, or it's nation-state-level expression (immigration), but frankly, that's an unsophisticated analysis of a very complex dynamic.

Remember my admonition not to confuse friction (nationalism/fundamentalism) with the force (globalization). Read Roy on "Globalized Islam" for this analysis.

The enduring reality on our efforts to isolate Iran

ARTICLE: "Can U.S. Force Iran's hand Despite a Lack of Support?" by Neil King Jr. and Glenn Simpson, Wall Street Journal, 16 August 2007, p. A5.

As I said recently, I have no problem with America designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. Call a spade a spade.

The problem, as this piece points out, is that the Guards basically have no commercial contact with the U.S., so sanctions here will have little impact. The Guards basically reflect the larger reality once bemoaned by Bush himself: by isolating Iran so much over the years, we don't have much leverage with them.

The countries that do have leverage are China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and India. None are particularly incentivized to follow our suit. They lack our myopic focus on WMD (they find it baffling when we pardon such sins from our friends like India and Israel and Pakistan and reward authoritarian regimes throughout the Persian Gulf with lotsa arms deals whenever we damn well please) and they don't see us offering strategic offsets they believe might temper the situation sufficiently (like our non-effort on a regional security dialogue that must include Iran; after all, we had an OSCE that included all sorts of states that sponsored terrorism, to include the USSR, East Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, etc--all of whom fostered all sorts of nefarious behavior throughout the world with their security programs across the Cold War).

So we continue teaching ourselves new lessons in the non-efficacy of isolating enemies in an increasingly connected world. If the enemies in question cut themselves off on their own, like a North Korea, that's a different subject. But Iran's been smart enough not to do that, hence our sense of futility.

We need China 'good cop'

POST: Breakthrough on Korean Hostage Issue in Afghanistan? China Role called Crucial

Very interesting indeed, reminding us why China created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in the first place.

A good experience for China (assuming it comes off), one we should encourage. Somebody besides Europe needs to play "good cop," especially in that neighborhood.

Thanks to Matt Harrington for sending this.

Aid tail wagging the dog

ARTICLE: Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps, By Celia W. Dugger, International Herald Tribune, August 14, 2007

A real shot across the bow, in my mind. CARE is very big. This move is a political statement all right about what one calls "the tail wagging the dog" (the current practice of letting charities convert food into cash for funding).

Steve on the recent border attacks against the Kurdish Regional Government

POST: Tragedy Knocks on Kurdistan's Door

Signs of the coming fight for Kurdistan, something we've been expecting for a while, hence the KRG's urgency in getting its act together as much as possible, hence their great receptivity on Development-in-a-Box(tm).

PNM gets a nice Amazon boost from "Marketplace" summer-read plug

BEACH READS: The Pentagon's New Map, Bill Hammack, Marketplace, August 14, 2007

Excerpt:

Thomas Barnett's book, "The Pentagon's New Map," is a perfect confection of bite-sized ideas about our new global economy to nibble between dips. As I read this book, I rarely looked up for a second.

See, this book gives you the blueprint for who determines our new world order. And it features the tribulations of a classic hero, Barnett himself — a Naval War College professor bent on having American officials listen to his radical ideas.

I mean, who could resist a chapter that opens with a mock ad reading: "Enemy Wanted: Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms-racing . . ." Or an explanation of Marxism and Capitalism featuring the hamburger-eating Wimpy from Popeye?

Barnett's new world order boils down to states that form the core of the global economy on the one hand, and on the other, those that fall outside it, into the "gap."

Core states and their free people get to partake of the modern world economy. Gap states breed terrorism, because without the benefit of a global economy, life for their people is "nasty, brutish and short." So our number one mission is to bring gap countries into the world economy.

Forget fighting wars the old way, tank for tank and missile for missile. No, we must respond now with accountants!

Take the Treasury Department. It's the warrior doing battle more and more by blacklisting banks and countries involved in terrorism. In Barnett's brave new world, we use a double-fisted military force: a few marines to fight the wars, and lots of new masters of the global economy — lawyers, bankers, customs agents and MBAs to wage the peace.

You might quibble with how well the world will accept America as "rule-enforcer." But this racy, frothy read is right in its key theme. Understanding the military-market link is not just good business, its good national security strategy, too.

I would say this guy got the book exactly as it was intended.

[Ed. And, as of right now, this piece is the second-most-listened-to item on Marketplace.]

Thanks to Keir Lauritzen and Randy Fullhart for sending this.

Roy's got a new book on Islam

Secularism Confronts Islam is the title.

I ask Vonne to buy it immediately, as I am a huge fan of Olivier Roy's work, having used it extensively in BFA.

Globalization's raw deal for the Gap on health

GLOBALISATION AND HEALTH: "The maladies of affluence: The poor world is getting the rich world's diseases," The Economist, 11 August 2007,p. 49.

The raw deal is this: far longer lives but not a commensurate capacity to deal with chronic disease.

A great graph charts this: Low income economies feature more deaths by percentage from infections (almost 50%) than chronic (just over 40%). But already by low-middle (my New Core low-end) income, it's chronic (75%) way over infectious (just over 15%). That skew only gets heavier as you grow in income.

The problem is natural enough: I get some money for disposable income and I like my cigs, my liquor and my fattier foods. For example, 300m Chinese men smoke today, which pretty much guarantees you'll have a huge cancer industry right on the heels of its emergence. Nowadays, one-fifth of Chinese kids are overweight, the unsurprising affliction of all those "little emperors" (or one-child boys).

A big problem with emerging economies in this regard: they still focus so heavily on infections that they truly short themselves on assets for dealing with chronic problems.