Finally, some intelligent analysis on the "death" of network-centric warfare

Sean Lawson writing at his ICTs and International Relations blog.

Simply put, the guy sees the flow of history here, instead of presenting the usual simplicity of who's-up-and-who's-down.

Very intelligent piece.

NCW did its thing, made its permanent impressions, and the system moved on--as it always does.  It was neither the great "savior" nor the great "satan"--just another paradigm iteration that shaped things for the better.

All such paradigms are like scientific "truths":  they're the best you've got until something a bit more accurate comes along.

The regular blog returns tomorrow

Blast from my past: "What next?" Rolling Stone (2004)

What Next?

ROLLING STONE convenes a panel of experts to discuss what went wrong in Iraq--and where we can go from here

By AMANDA GRISCOM

Rolling Stone, 8-22 July 2004.

At the end of 2002, as the Bush administration prepared to invade Iraq, Rolling Stone convened a panel of experts to assess the march to war. Things have since gone far worse than most imagined. There is no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction -- the rationale used to justify the invasion. The fighting continues to escalate long after Bush declared "mission accomplished," and the White House tried to ignore the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. As the U.S. prepares to hand over control to an interim Iraqi government, we reconvened key members of our panel, along with some new experts, to examine the current situation in Iraq. What went wrong -- and what should we do now?

Before we look forward, let's look back. What have been our biggest strategic blunders since we invaded Iraq?

Gen. Anthony Zinni: We've had a year of disasters. The strategy going into Iraq was patently ridiculous -- this idea that we'd generate Jeffersonian democracy and plant the seed of freedom in the Middle East. The rationale was even worse: We grossly overstated the threat and cooked the books on the intelligence. Then we put on the ground a half-baked pickup team that has alienated the people and can't connect to viable leadership.

Gen. Wesley Clark: We went in with far too few troops and seat-of-the-pants planning. We've been there for more than a year, and the borders still aren't being controlled -- jihadis and extremists are coming in from Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Fuel convoys are getting routinely attacked; oil facilities and police stations are regularly targeted.

Rand Beers: The precondition to freedom is security. You can't succeed in beating the insurgents unless you can convince the people that they can be protected.

Thomas P.M. Barnett: It was a major mistake for the Bush administration to say to potential allies, "If you're too big a pussy to show up for the war, we're not going to let you in on the peace or rehab process -- and don't expect any contracts." We had such a macho view of war that we completely miscalculated the dangers of peacekeeping.

Fouad Ajami: Now we're a Johnny-come-lately for a U.N. resolution to internationalize the political process. You might call it deathbed multilateralism.

What about the blunders behind the scenes at the White House?

Sen. Joseph Biden: I've been a senator through seven administrations, and this is by far the most divided one I've ever served with. The internal discord is rampant. It's not just Colin Powell, who has differed with Vice President Cheney at every turn. It isn't just Richard Clarke and the others on the intelligence team who have angrily defected. It's General Eric Shinseki, who was fired for telling the truth. It's Lawrence Lindsay, Bush's economic adviser, who was fired for saying the war was going to cost $200 billion. The price tag is even higher now, and still they submit a budget for 2005 without a single penny for Iraq. What in the hell is going on?

Bob Kerrey: Karl Rove's hair is on fire -- he's worrying about what the polls are saying about America's attitude toward Iraq. Voters want out. The greatest risk is that we'll make decisions for political reasons -- that Rove will say we've got to call it quits or we're not going to win in November.

What would happen if we did pull out in a hurry?

Zinni: To pull out now would be a tremendous defeat. It would accelerate the path to civil war and make us and the region extremely vulnerable. The boys aren't coming home anytime soon.

Youssef Ibrahim: We've got to cut our losses -- the sooner the better. Our presence is only aggravating the chances for civil war. The best-case scenario at this point is for the U.S. to declare victory and get the hell out. Iraqi resistance is rising by the day, and the United Nations, NATO and the Europeans are refusing to come in. There is no fig leaf to put on this.

Biden: It would be strategic suicide if America withdrew anytime soon. I meet regularly with a group of seven four-star generals about Iraq; each one says we don't have enough force protection to even withdraw in an orderly fashion. It could be a bloodbath on the way out, and hasten civil war.

Would civil war spill over the borders to create a regional conflict?

Biden: Very likely. If civil war breaks out in Iraq, the Sunni Triangle will become a snake pit and violence will spiral throughout the region. Within five years you'll see the emergence of another strongman in Iraq. Afghanistan will fall and become a new hotbed of terror. Radical Islamists will seize control in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the same thing could occur in Iran, which will become the major power in the region.

Beers: It could spill over the borders -- no question about it -- but would it drag the other states in? More likely, the border states would do everything to contain the conflict to Iraq. Let's be cautious about dreaming up extreme scenarios. The situation in Iraq is still salvageable.

So let's assume we're in it for the long haul. How do we even begin to regain control?

Zinni: Security is the most important issue short-term. I'm talking probably at least a year and twice the number of boots. People won't help build a new Iraq unless they can walk to a police station -- much less a voting booth -- without fear of getting killed.

Barnett: The Bush team needs to eat crow and make the tough deals necessary to internationalize this. They need to call a summit meeting of the major powers, including Russia, China and India, and say, "We have a problem in Iraq. Our loss would be as big a loss for you -- economically and otherwise -- as for us. What will it take to get 10,000 Chinese troops, 10,000 Indian troops, 10,000 Russian troops? What do you want in return?" We know what the deals are. India would probably demand, for example, that we don't declare Pakistan a major ally. Russia wants full membership in NATO. China might ask us to stop planning a missile defense in northeast Asia.

Zinni: The international soldiers have to be there. You have to see the bar scene from Star Wars, where there's a lot of different uniforms, not just all American desert cammies.

Biden: We need to rapidly train an Iraqi army and police force. They need to feel they are fighting for themselves. If I'm president of the United States, my orders to our generals and ambassador are, "If I see you once on Iraqi television, you're fired. I want Iraqi faces on Iraqi television." It should take two to three years to get 35,000 Iraqi troops out there.

Should we even be talking about a June 30th hand-over? Are we prepared?

Clark: That date was picked as a political gambit before there was a real plan for what to do. We're not prepared, but we're not going to be able to renege on that commitment.

Ibrahim: June 30th is the biggest joke around. There will still be 135,000 American soldiers in Iraq. We will pick a new governing council -- a whole bunch of new lackeys. A superambassador -- John Negroponte -- will command an embassy of 3,000 Americans. Every controversial thing that the new government does will look like Negroponte's fault.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: The interim government will be sovereign in the sense that Iraqis will be equal partners in every decision made by America and the international community -- in running the budget, trying Saddam, determining the future of the oil industry. Decisions cannot be executed without their agreement.

Ajami: We have to transfer power. This should have happened long ago. We could have gotten an Iraqi to run the country the way we got Hamid Karzai to run Afghanistan. America would still have had considerable influence behind the scenes, but we should never have had an American out front -- it's why the polls show that eighty-two percent of Iraqis want us to leave immediately.

We keep hearing that the violence will escalate around June 30th and the year-end elections -- that it will only get worse before it gets better.

Chas Freeman: It's not rocket science to figure out that the easiest way for the interim Iraqi authority to establish credibility among its people will be to turn on the U.S. By refusing to give authority, we will create a situation in which they will feel obliged to seize it from us.

Zinni: If you're going to have an election, the first thing you have to do is determine the form of government you're going to have: parliament, a federated system, a confederated system? You need political parties. I don't see that happening. Iraqis don't understand what kind of government they're going to have. They are going to be told how to vote in Friday prayers by some mullah.

Kerrey: Any time you have disorder, any radical who stands on a stump and gives a speech wins the day. So I can get up and say to a religious Shiite in Baghdad, "We didn't have prostitution in the old days, so vote for me, and anyone who is a prostitute will be beaten. If you don't like this disorder, we'll bring order back with a strict interpretation of Islamic law." He'll get a standing ovation.

We went into Iraq thinking it was a secular state, but the political rhetoric among Shiite and Sunni leaders has intensified. Is religion taking the place of politics?

Ajami: I supported the war in part because Iraq had in it the roots of secular culture, which I believed positioned it well to adopt a representative government. What I never imagined was how quickly the Sunni Arabs -- who relied on the secret police to control the country under Saddam -- would fall back on the mosques as their weapon of control. More surprising was that the Shiites -- the oppressed underclass who represent sixty percent of the population -- have also begun to use Islam as a political tool. It connects them, the dispossessed, to the united Muslim world at large.

Greenstock: Iraqis are a proud people, in no small part because hundreds of years ago they ruled the known world from Baghdad. That's embedded in their national psyche.

Is the concern that as the religious tenor among Iraqis intensifies, they will begin to identify their struggle as part of the larger conflict of Islam vs. the West?

Zinni: This is a key point. Everybody I know in this part of the world says you cannot let this become a religious war. You can't let this become Islam vs. the West. I fear that's what it's become. We're viewed as modern crusaders. We have our own mad mullahs in America -- the Jerry Falwells, the Pat Robertsons -- who criticize Islam. They are heard much louder over there than they are here.

Ibrahim: It's worse than that. Bush himself is seen to be a mad mullah. The president has repeatedly asserted that God is on our side in Iraq, that he's consulting with a "higher" father. The zealotry even infects the military. General William Boykin recently said, "My God is much bigger than their Allah" -- this was all over the Arab media. He was never fired or reprimanded for making that statement. Prisoners have given accounts of being forced to thank Jesus and denounce Islam. The perception in the Gulf, where I live, is that this administration is vehemently anti-Muslim. Like it or not, we are in a war with 2.1 billion Muslims.

Beers: Even though the clash between Islam and Christianity during the Crusades took place 1,000 years ago, those terms clearly still have resonance in the Islamic community and Al Qaeda. To invoke religion is to give our opponents ammunition in the larger war on terrorism.

We often hear that the war on terror has supercharged radical Islam and energized the recruitment of terrorists. What evidence do we have to support this?

Freeman: Increasing sophistication in the ambush tactics and improvised explosive devices used to kill American troops indicate growing cooperation between secular Iraqi factions and religious extremists like Al Qaeda. Sunni insurgents in Iraq are being helped by Hamas from the Palestinian occupied territories, and the Shiites are being assisted by Hezbollah from Lebanon. All these forces are cooperating, even though many have historically been mortal enemies. Clearly, the U.S. is a big enough enemy for everyone in the region to put aside their differences.

Beers: We're seeing the development of tactics in Iraq, such as suicide bombing. Insurgents have been driving cars with explosives into hotels and office buildings. The recruitment may be even more prolific outside Iraq. Intelligence shows Al Qaeda recruiting in places as far-flung as Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Kenya, Somalia and Nigeria, as well as in Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Ibrahim: In Saudi Arabia, where Al Qaeda is waging a daily war, at least fifty people have died in the last month alone. They bombed five housing complexes and an American school. In the heart of the industrial sector, four Americans from oil companies were shot and one was dragged by a car for four hours.

Should we view radical Islam as the enemy?

Zinni: Any time we look at an "enemy," we look at it at three levels. At the tactical level, the enemy is the terrorist organizations and the financing they get. The operational level is the enemy's center of gravity -- it's the rationale, which is radical Islam. At the strategic level, it's the continuous flow of young people so desperate and angry that they're willing to believe it. At the tactical level, we could be winning - we could be hurting Al Qaeda and capturing its leadership. But as an ideology, it's strengthening. It is probably stronger now than before September 11th, in terms of recruiting manpower willing to kill themselves.

Surely the Abu Ghraib prison scandal didn't help. Should Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or other Bush officials resign?

Beers: The Navy has a custom -- if a ship runs aground, the captain is relieved regardless of who is responsible. That's how Abu Ghraib should be handled.

Biden: I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the president asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, "Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not." And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, "Mr. Vice President, I wouldn't keep you if it weren't constitutionally required." I turned back to the president and said, "Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they've been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they've given you. That's why I'd get rid of them, Mr. President -- not just Abu Ghraib." They said nothing. Just sat like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me.

Speaking of Cheney, how does this instability affect contractors such as Halliburton?

Zinni: Halliburton is spending staggering sums of money building fortified workplaces. It's killing the American taxpayer, who's footing the bill. There are two bodyguards for every worker. For $100,000 a year, you've got a truck driver from West Virginia. If I'm an Iraqi, I say, "For that cost, you could hire ten of us as drivers. And if I'm getting a paycheck, I'll have a vested interest in that truck getting through." Even the way we do contracting makes no sense.

What about our oil concerns? We often hear that a prime reason we went into Iraq was to get access to its oil as our ties to Saudi Arabia falter.

Greenstock: Oil is not the big bogey we should be worried about. Oil will go on flowing come what may, so long as there is reasonable order in the oil-producing countries. Whatever the character of the regime, it always wants to sell its oil. Look at Iran, Saudi Arabia, even Qaddafi in Libya.

Freeman: Yet the oil system is extremely vulnerable to shock. There's a rule in the Middle East that you don't need these fancy seismic studies to locate oil reserves -- if you find the Shiites, there's usually oil. There are more than 1 million Shiites in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, which is where the oil is. They've suffered persecution by the religious majority in Saudi Arabia, and they're vulnerable to spillover from the anti-American struggle in Iraq. The global nightmare is that there would be terrorist action among Saudi Shiites directed at the oil pipelines, ports and refineries. For Americans, that would mean four or more dollars per gallon of gas.

Ibrahim: The sixty-year relationship we've had with Saudi Arabia is on the verge of collapse. How many times have we asked them to please, please open the spigots so we can bring prices down? There's a new 900-pound gorilla coming called China. In ten years, it's going to be the largest consumer of oil in the world, which means that the people who produce oil are no longer kissing America's ass -- they're beginning to kiss China's ass.

Has the war at least produced a new respect for American military power?

Ibrahim: Hardly. We are no longer loved because of Iraq, and we are also no longer feared because of Iraq. The neoconservative dream of regime change throughout the region -- in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya and Somalia -- is dead. Do you really think any of those countries are afraid of us after watching us bleed in the streets of Iraq?

Biden: The perception of us is that if we don't succeed, we're a paper tiger. We can project power, but we don't have staying power. The Bush administration has seriously damaged the legitimate and necessary role of power in our foreign-policy arsenal. What happens if we have another Milosevic? Will there be support for a U.S. president in taking down a genocidal maniac? No.

What does the future of war look like? Will we face World War III?

Zinni: My son is a Marine captain, and he's going to face a changed battlefield -- messier than Haiti, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq. It's no longer honorable fighting, where you defeat the forces of a nation-state on the battlefield. He's going to face all sorts of violent components -- insurgents, terrorists, warlords -- as well as environmental challenges and humanitarian problems.

Barnett: We're going to end up replicating the struggle again and again. Like spraying the cockroaches in one apartment and scattering them to the next -- we're driving terrorists to the next country over. Sort of like rooting out old Japanese warriors on some isolated Pacific island twenty years after World War II, we're going to be killing off the last of these guys years from now in deepest, darkest Africa.

In the near term, is a change of administrations the best way out of the quagmire?

Ibrahim: I voted for Bush, but I'd sooner die than vote for him again. The neocons are vampires through which we have to drive a wooden stake. Neoconservatism must end as an ideology if you want America to recover its position as leader of the world.

Kerrey: We need a coalition of the pragmatic in the White House, not of the religious or ideological. John Kerry will be much more capable of making the tough deals necessary to bring in the allies and make it work. In an odd way, that's good news for Bush. I predict that in the end, the two of them will celebrate a great bipartisan foreign-policy victory in Iraq, begun by President Bush and finished by President Kerry.

Biden: About six months ago, the president said to me, "Well, at least I make strong decisions, I lead." I said, "Mr. President, look behind you. Leaders have followers. No one's following. Nobody."

WPR's The New Rules: The Changing Food Security Equation

While the world doesn't yet face a food crisis on par with the summer of 2008, it's clear that the drought currently affecting the Black Sea trio of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan -- all big-time global exporters of wheat and barley -- has suddenly made food inflation a primary threat to the somewhat fragile and decidedly uneven global economic recovery. At the very least, it reminds us just how tight global food markets are, due to the contradictory combination of rising middle-class demand and the enduring commitment by brittle governments around the world to keep prices low -- at whatever the cost.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Blast from my past: "The New Magnum Force" (2005)

The New Magnum Force:  What Dirty Harry can teach the new Geneva conventions

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Wired, February 2005, pp. 29-30.

Ass kickers. Rule breakers. Lone riders. The United States may be founded on individual rights and the rule of law, but Americans love Dirty Harry and his literary and cinematic brethren. These hard-nosed heroes dispatch evildoers without remorse, going outside the law when necessary. The Man With No Name doesn't explain, he simply acts. In his first term, President George W. Bush embraced this archetype. "I want justice," he said a few days after 9/11, refering to Osama bin Laden. "There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, Wanted: Dead or Alive."

Flash forward to the present. The US claims the right to topple rogue regimes and assassinate terrorist leaders at will. If Predator drones could talk, you just know they'd ask, "So, do you feel lucky punk?" just before firing off one of those Hellfire missiles that turn the target vehicle into a smoking hulk of retribution.

So many suspects, so little time. No wonder we bend the rules here and there, declaring terrorists unworthy of protection under the Geneva conventions. It might work for a while - until the photos from Abu Ghraib are posted on the Web, and you have to explain to your kids why that sort of stuff is OK when the bad guys are really, really bad. And if you're the president? Well, maybe the doubts creep in when your own White House counsel warns you about possible war crimes charges over Guantanamo.

The Geneva conventions, as it turns out, served a few purposes: They created an international order, separated the civilized nations from the outlaws, and protected Americans. The 1949 convention was designed to prevent a rerun of the atrocities of the last great global war - a struggle between sovereign states. Today, we're waging a new type of war (for us, at least) against a new type of enemy (the Man With No State). Unless we want to spend the rest of this conflict trying to rationalize police brutality and torture, the US needs to acknowledge (1) that it's not above the law; and (2) that it needs a new set of rules for capturing, processing, detaining, and prosecuting such nonstate actors as transnational terrorists. In short, we need Dirty Harry to come clean. Frontier justice must be replaced by a real justice system. And there's nothing wrong with figuring this out as we go along.

Who writes this new set of rules? The good guys. That is, the states whose interdependence defines their shared vulnerability to transnational terrorism. There is a functioning core of the global economy: the nations in North America, Europe, Russia, the rising and established pillars of Asia, and the major economies of South America. These are the connected states, and one of the things that connects them most tightly right now is a shared commitment to combating global terrorism. The new rules need to define how the core countries cooperate to suppress terrorist activity within the core using police methods. And they'll lay out how and under what conditions it's OK for those same states' militaries to go into the unconnected regions of the world - what I call the nonintegrating gap - to snatch or kill suspected terrorists. This is not a job for the UN. In a global legislative body where Libya gets to chair the Human Rights Commission (who's next, Sudan?), some punks really have gotten lucky.

What am I talking about here? A WTO-like entity for global counterterrorism. A body that would set the operating standards for both intracore police networking (like building that fabled terrorist database in the sky) and the rules of engagement (to include prisoner handling, detention, and interrogation) for whenever the member states' militaries venture into the gap looking for bad guys.

Like the World Trade Organization, the World Counterterrorism Organization - call it the WCO - would be invitation-only. So unlike Interpol, you (yes, you, Pakistan!) couldn't just flash a badge on your way into the meeting. Starting this way doesn't make it bad or unacceptably elitist, just realistic. Remember, the WTO was once the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which grew out of Bretton Woods, which resulted from a few developed nations colluding behind closed doors. Let's allow this baby to grow up some before we toss out the dirty bathwater. It won't be pretty. More mistakes will be made, but along the way terrorists will get dead.

Maybe it smacks of paternalism to let big ol' core militaries simply walk into gap states and do what they must. But we're talking about only the most disconnected societies, where feeble or nonexistent governments should be viewed as something akin to minors. In short, a nonintegrated nation can grow up and out of the gap. It will have to pass a fitness exam and, yeah, it'll need one of our stinkin' badges! Until then, the core nations owe the citizens of these states some adult supervision.

The first order of business for the WCO should be to establish legal guidelines and physical infrastructure for the handling and disposition of those who aren't considered legal combatants under the standard rules of war. So it'll need its own Alcatraz - and no, it can't be in a US naval base in Cuba. I'm thinking of a place with lots of secure locations, like a supermax Switzerland. As for the trials? Prisoners should be funneled toward the International Criminal Court, because you've got to make the UN happy at some point in the process.

All this may sound risky, but either we can wait on some UN universal declaration full of noble nouns and awe-inspiring adjectives - or we can let the cops who walk the beat inside the gap get started writing the book that, eventually, some upstanding Perry Mason can throw at the bin Ladens and al-Zarqawis when they stand in the docket at the Hague. Until then, let Dirty Harry do his thing.

Thomas P. M. Barnett (t_p_m_barnett@hotmail.com) is the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century.

Girls are in the house

Short story, as I am not sure I will be posting anything longer:

Vonne and I fly over Thursday, 19 October, on Lufthansa via Frankfurt into Addis.  We meet friends from last trip at Frankfurt and ride in with them to the TDS Guesthouse Friday evening.  We got the "big" suite on top, meaning a good sized hotel room with balcony, bit of a antechamber between that and bathroom, which is big, but very mid-level Addis. We crash and I get up to do some yoga, only to find the floor covered in ants, which me no like.

Later that day I get the staff to work the issue a bit, but I eventually hit a local bodega for my own spray and do the unit up right (former superintendent talking here).  

Saturday we go over to the WACAP Transition Home and meet the girls for the first time in many weeks.  Both are bronchial and wheezing, as is everyone there.  It's the rainy season, but we are mindful that this is how their father passed (something small becoming something big during rainy season).  The girls seem good. Vonne brought all these balloons and I blew them up for the kids.  Then I painted hands and arms with my face paints. That was a lot of fun.  Metsu and Abbie looked good, but both--again--carried a whiff of the coming problems.

We then did some shopping to kill the rest of the afternoon, going back to the area around the post office, where we bought little.  Then we went to a jewelry shop (by general acclaim, the best in Addis) and got gifts for ladies who helped watch our kids over the two trips.  Then an interesting jaunt to a cooperative staffed by former female fuel carriers who now weave these great shawls.  Got one myself as a scarf for winter. Tweeted a shot from there.

For the life of me, I cannot remember what we did for dinner that night.  We had skipped lunch after the breakfast at the guesthouse.  Oh, wait a tick!  We all went out for the usual cultural evening at this fabulous restaurant that had a band, singers, and lots of traditional dancing.  It was a spectacular show, even if my vodka martini turned out to be a snifter of brandy (lost in translation).  I stared longingly at the Belvedere in the distance.

Sunday was the day we took custody of the girls.  Back to the orphanage for time with them, then they ate lunch, and then a bit of ceremony with pictures taken and video shot.  Some docs (past histories) turned over. Then sad farewells and we're in the van heading back over to the guesthouse.  Minutes later we're alone for the first time together--a point I remember well with Vonne Mei in Nanchang, China.  It went well.  Older one, Metsu, is a bit of a Carol Burnett, as in, never seen an audience she didn't like.  Very much the mischief-maker in her threesomeness.  Finds herself hilarious--all the time.  Abebu was a bit off, and we found out soon enough:  discharge (fairly heavy out of right ear).  I happened to be carrying ear drop antibiotics, along with Vonne's pre-planned antibiotics (oral), so we dosed both and tossed the rather not-too-good-looking antibiotic we got from the orphanage, but kept the other drug (for airway congestion) and started using on both.

I race out for take-out--not very good burgers and fries.

Abbie had a terrible night with the ear pain, something I remember all too well from similar times in my life. Nothing was going to work too well first night, but we eventually got a platypus water bottle to work with hot tap water from the shower as an impromptu heating pad for her head.  After she suffered cramps around 3am and I successfully got her to the head on time (another plot line that's common), she finally fell asleep around 4am, only to wake up at 0700 Monday with Metsu.

After breakfast downstairs, we do paperwork with the lawyer from the orphanage in anticipation of our all-important US embassy appointment on Tuesday.  I am fairly blitzed and take a long time filling the forms out in double--for both girls.  After I crash for about 30, I head back over to the orphanage with other parents and relatives and we decorate a nursery and an outdoor alcove with giant stickers the various couples had amassed in anticipation of our trip.  It was fun work and really revived me and it improved the bare walls by a ways.

Back to the room, Vonne was doing okay with the girls, so I headed out for take-away (favorite Italian restaurant run by Indian lady, we get beef stroganoff and spag alfredo--both of which go over big).  Second night we get the girls to crash with much greater ease, after Metsu does her usual and tries on about six pairs of PJs before deciding (a continuing problem).

Tuesday is the all-important visit to the embassy, which culminates in a right-hand-raised oath-swearing before a USG official.  The whole trip, from stem to stern, runs about 4 hours.  This night I start packing up, because I flew out at midnight.  I take everything I can that we're not donating so Vonne has little to work with the girls when she returns three nights later.  Back to same Italian place for pizza, and I'm out the door at nine.

For some reason I get bumped to biz class on flight back to Frankfurt, but I still can't sleep any.  While in Frankfurt airport for six hours, I rework the briefs for upcoming talks, actually getting a ton of work done.  I also do some reading. 

Get into Dulles Wednesday around dinner time, get rental, and head to Mandarin.  I lay down on bed to relax a bit and wake up with call from front-desk (smart on my part) 12 hours later, Thursday morn.  Up and quickly suited up, I get picked up by intern from McNair and am driven to the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, where I've opened the school year now for something like 8 years (two of my talks are CSPAN vids).  Usual great scene and great audience, and after I warmed up a bit, I did nicely.   Went 70 and then 15 Q&A.  Then further Q&A with two State economists.  

Spent afternoon at Center for Naval Analyses with old colleagues, then evening with DeAngelis downtown. Then late night drive to Quantico, checking into Comfort Inn just outside main gate.  Crash.

Up at 0700 Friday, suit up, and then drive onto base.  Cruise down Barnett Avenue on way to US Marine Corps University.  Speak to same "economics of national security" class that I've addressed now for several years (always new students, but same instructors).  The history-of-America chapter (3) from "Great Powers" was the required reading that week.  They ask a lot of questions, right through the brief.  With break, total brief was about 120.  Q&A went 45.

Drove back to DC and just made 1300 meet at Eurasia Group.

Then dash to airport and get home just in time to meet kids (Em off to college in meantime) arriving home from middle-child's cross-country practice.  We eat out, watch something in the home theater, and then crash.

We're up early Saturday morn and drive as family to Ohare (3.5 hours, with oldest son driving most of way) to meet Vonne and girls, who walk out of customs around 1330. Tough ride for Abbie (still ear problems), so we dash back to Indy, and I and my oldest son take the girls to the ER to get checked out.  Perforated eardrum for Abbie and both with infections in ears (actually, mine back now too since I turned over my ear drops to Abbie in Addis).  We get materials to collect other samples (don't ask) and get home late.  Wipe the girls down and they are off to bed.  We use the intercom as monitoring system (cool feature). 

Our first full day together is today. Some errands by me and oldest son, but rest of day is simply Vonne catching up on sleep, me organizing house, and kids playing with Metsu and Abbie all day long.  

We expect many more days of such cocooning before we take them anywhere.  It all goes well--amazing really, with the only tears being Metsu's usual ones when I put her in her PJs (she hates having clothes chosen for her--a lot!).

I type this as I wait for the girls to crash in their room (they sleep with Vonne Mei, our Chinese daughter). Metsu's tears go about 4-5 mins.

All in all, we feel very blessed.  We're figuring the GI trouble is Hep A, which is cropping up among other kids once home.  We're checking for all the usual parasites (internal only), and Metsu walks a bit funny on one side and has a rather common wart on one leg, but other than that and the ears and the residual bronchial stuff, the girls are in great shape, prettier than ever, and wonderfully fun to have around. 

We are really using the dutch doors throughout the first floor, however.  They keep the girls from wandering into inappropriate/dangerous spots and still allow the 3 Siberian cats the ability to go where they want (we keep the top sections open). Never knew we'd use those so much.

Brain dead.  Need to get up to run everybody to school and then begin a very long workday. 

I'm hoping Vonne got all her sleep back . . ..

Now that the girls are home, I don't plan on posting any further pix, just like with Vonne Mei.  But if you're lucky enough to get an Xmas card from us, note that I've already bought two Packer cheerleading outfits for the girls for the group shot.

Plotting the blog's regular return for Wednesday.

[POSTSCRIPT MONDAY MORNING:  Looking back over the day, I remain amazed at how peacefully it unfolded. It was a quiet, calm household throughout, one that allowed me time to fold laundry in the upstairs guest bedroom for about an hour undisturbed.  Yes, many difficulties lie ahead, along with some negative medical surprises, I am sure, but loads to be thankful for.  I ended the evening like I used to with Vonne Mei:  Abbie sleeping on my chest in the home theater.  Again, hard to complain.]

Blast from my past: "Romania Domino Stays Upright" & "Why Ceaucescu Fell" (1989)

Romania Domino Stays Upright

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

COPYRIGHT: The Christian Science Monitor, 1989 (11 December edition, p. 18)

A political earthquake is rumbling through Eastern Europe.

Stalinist leaders are toppled like dominoes, each succumbing to domestic unrest while Moscow looks on.

So far only Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's 71 year-old dictator, has escaped this fate. Why are there no mass protests in Bucharest calling for his downfall? The answer is simple: Mr. Ceausescu has been preparing for this kind of political disaster for over 20 years.

The Romanian dictator realized long ago that a political chain of command existed in the Soviet bloc, and that he would have to establish autonomy from Moscow. This meant defending himself from two dangers: first that the Soviets would try to intervene militarily, and second that the Soviets would disavow socialism and undercut him politically.

The USSR's military channels of influence are restricted. No Red Army troops have been stationed in the Balkan country since 1958. Ceausescu built up his national defenses to such an extent that Romania can offer strong resistance to an invasion from any quarter.

Ceausescu also curtailed Soviet influence by distancing himself from Moscow's schemes to integrate Romania's economy into the Eastern bloc. While the USSR is Romania's biggest trading partner, Moscow's ability to force Ceausescu's regime into economic reforms is very limited.

The Kremlin also doesn't have any friends within the Romanian Communist Party. Ceausescu rooted out any Moscow sympathizers by making Romanian nationalism the litmus test of party loyalty.

Finally, Ceausescu severed the ideological umbilical cord connecting Bucharest and Moscow. Ceausescu realized that every Stalinist regime requires its own Stalinist anchor.

It was too risky to rely on Stalin's legacy alone. The whole edifice could collapse if, at some time, a Soviet leader repudiated Stalinism as Khrushchev had tried to do in 1956.

For now, Ceausescu is prepared to ride out the political shock waves resulting from Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. This is feasible because Ceausescu's despotism is home-grown. His rigid central planning keeps the economy in a straitjacket, while he stocks the leading political posts with relatives and cronies. His extensive police empire keeps the people cowed, and his personality cult rivals Stalin's.

Symbolically, Ceausescu has skillfully exploited Romania's deep nationalism and its historical weakness for paternalistic dictators.

While Mr. Gorbachev's leverage with Bucharest remains limited, the West's ability to encourage change is nonexistent. Ceausescu labored for years to win most-favored-nation trading status from the US in 1975. Yet just last year he was willing to forsake it when the State Department dared to link its renewal to improvement in Romania's abysmal human rights record.

Perhaps the best hope for change in Romania is Ceausescu's advanced age and poor health. While Ceausescu has lined up his wife and son as his political heirs, neither will sit comfortably, or for long, in a throne designed specifically for one man.

In the short run, Ceausescu's grip on power appears firm. Not only was he unanimously reelected at the recent Communist Party congress, but the tyrant vehemently denied the possibility of reforms. Sending a signal to reformist Hungary, Ceausescu even sealed the border with his Warsaw Pact neighbor.

For all his despotism, Nicolae Ceausescu is a shrewd and farsighted politician. Events in Eastern Europe may have caught the West unprepared, but Romania's present stability indicates that Ceausescu has been ready for this upheaval for quite some time.

Why Ceausescu Fell:  His Silent War Against the Romanian People Backfired

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

COPYRIGHT: The Christian Science Monitor, 1989 (28 December edition, p. 19)

The end finally came for Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu.

Literally scared out of office by an angry population that no longer feared his bullets, the fleeing tyrant and his wife were eventually captured, arrested, and executed after a secret trial. Genocide was the first of several charges leveled against the deposed leaders by the military tribunal.

Less than two weeks ago Ceausescu's dictatorship seemed immune to Eastern Europe's political upheaval. Now, new questions arise in light of the widespread violence that accompanied the end of this Stalinist regime.

Why was Ceausescu willing to wage open warfare against his people? And why would Romanians risk death rather than see his rule continue? The answers must be found in the silent war Ceausescu waged against his subjects for the last seven years.

This silent war dates back to 1982, when Ceausescu implemented severe austerity policies designed to retire the nation's foreign debt by 1990. Why so quickly? The Romanian dictator had witnessed Warsaw's near default on its large foreign debt. Poland's subsequent economic collapse convinced Ceausescu that his regime had to avoid this scenario at all costs.

Three elements drove him to this drastic conclusion:

First, a debt crisis would force the self-proclaimed "Genius of the Carpathians" to admit his economic mismanagement.

Second, such a crisis would cause Ceausescu's regime to lose credibility with the already hard-pressed workers. The ever-vigilant dictator could not allow a Romanian version of Solidarity to develop.

Finally, Ceausescu abhorred the idea of Western financial institutions gaining leverage over Romania's economy. The despot had spent years reducing Moscow's influence, and was not about to have it replaced by Western meddling.

Like his brash anti-Sovietism of the late 1960s, Ceausescu again cloaked his policies in the guise of defending Romania's sovereignty. But the cruel and uneven nature of his austerity program meant that ordinary Romanians were paying for the leader's paranoia with their lives.

Bucharest rapidly reduced its foreign debt over the 1980s, but the extreme rationing of food, basic amenities, and energy created virtual wartime conditions. Exiled dissident Mihai Botez estimates that at least 15,000 Romanians died annually from starvation, cold, and shortages.

Romania was rich enough to provide all these basic requirements, but Ceausescu chose not to do so. Instead, the debt was finally retired earlier this year.

Not everyone suffered these shortages equally. Ceausescu's ruling clan continued to live like modern-day Roman emperors, awash in luxury and decadence. The autocrat also kept his dreaded security police well paid so they would be willing to crush dissent wherever it arose.

After overseeing the economic strangulation of the Romanian people for seven years, it was not surprising that Ceausescu ordered the Timisoara massacre. What were another 4,000 dead to a tyrant who had already sacrificed 20 times that amount?

Similarly, when the security troops fought on like desperate gangsters after the regime's collapse, they were well aware of the people's deep anger over their long history of oppression.

It was anger so great, that when faced with their eighth straight winter of this silent war, Romanians were ready to choose death over Ceausescu. The turning point of the popular uprising occurred when military leaders realized that the people could be pushed no further.

With Ceausescu's downfall, Romania faces severe tests in the weeks ahead. The No. 1 task of the newly formed opposition, the National Salvation Front, is to contain the potential for continued violence.

The anger resulting from Ceausescu's silent war must be properly channeled in order to avoid a long and ugly backlash. An orderly and fully disclosed trial for Ceausescu would have gone a long way in releasing some of this pressure.

It is a good sign that the National Salvation Front is led by political figures—such as the interim president, Ion Iliescu—who, because of their past dissent, fell out of Ceausescu's favor many years ago. Their social stature will be instrumental in promoting new government policies which address Romania's present problems rather than dwell on its past.

Ceausescu subjected his people to any sacrifice necessary to maintain his absolute power. The end result was a nation isolated abroad and economically crippled at home. While the isolation has ended, the economic damage remains.

Both East and West have declared their readiness to aid in Romania's economic recovery. But both sides must also continue to be patient with Romania. It is a country coming out of a long and brutal conflict. While open warfare didn't break out until last week, Ceausescu's silent war had been claiming victims for years.

Blast from my past: "The Overly Qualified Critic: Esquire's National-Security Expert on the New Film 'In the Loop'" (2009)

 

The Overly Qualified Critic:  Esquire's National-Security Expert on the New Film In the Loop

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, August 2009, p. 27.

In the Loop, by veteran British satirist and first-time director Armando Iannucci, is a deadpan farce that wickedly echoes the joint Anglo-American sales job on the Iraq invasion. Imagine dueling diplomatic versions of The Officecolliding at the United Nations over a proposed war resolution, with the decisive press leak sheepishly offered up by a two-timing British bureaucrat to his enraged Foreign Ministry girlfriend as evidence that his bedding an American counterpart was nothing more than an "antiwar shag."

The Brits are fronted by a peace-seeking but tongue-tied cabinet minister (Tom Hollander), who says things like "To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict," triggering the prime minister's press flack (Peter Capaldi) to retort, "You sound like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews." The warmongering Americans are captained by a Rummy-esque übercrat (David Rasche) who favors live hand grenades as desktop paperweights and pontificates to baby-faced aides, "In the land of truth... the man with one fact is the king."

The film, which slips in an effortless turn by James Gandolfini (above) as a foulmouthed U. S. general, contains enough fucks to qualify for the Tarantino award at Sundance, where it premiered in January, yet it's the script's many accurate details that earn this former badge-holder's praise, to include: the ubiquitous acronyms whose actual meaning nobody knows, the constant backstabbing among careerists, senior officials who float their resignations with less thought than they give their office decor, and the vigorously hedonistic lifestyle of D. C.'s young single staffers.

Which makes it a hilarious and helpful primer for anyone new to Washington.

Blast from my past: "Sleeper: The Awakening of Robert Gates" (2010)

Sleeper:  The Awakening of Robert Gates

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, "People Who Matter" issue, February 2010

Given Barack Obama's obvious inexperience in national-security affairs, our two wars, our war fatigue, our evolving sense of what war is, our broke federal government, and the fact that we spend about 55 percent of our discretionary federal budget on national defense, the position of secretary of defense looms more prominently now than at any time in American history.

But who is Robert Gates, and what is he doing running the Pentagon?

Three years ago, when looking for Donald Rumsfeld's replacement as secretary of defense, you could not have found a more unlikely champion for the U. S. military's profound evolution from its cold-war, big-war perspective to its new focus on small wars and counterinsurgency than Gates. And then a year ago, with the American people having emphatically changed CEOs, favoring a new president who seemed in most respects to be the opposite of his predecessor, you could not have found a more unlikely man than Gates to be staying put.

Picking over this most careful of Washington careers, one finds no examples whatsoever of a man given to bold visions, controversial stances, or tough calls of any sort. The quintessential company man (Gates is only the third rank-and-file CIA analyst to rise to directorship) prior to becoming secretary of defense, Gates's primary career accomplishment was simply winning confirmation as CIA director in 1991. (He was nominated in 1987 and withdrew under fire for his entanglement in the Iran-contra scandal.) It's presented as the climax of his 1996 quasi-autobiography (From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War), and yet Gates does not even bother to examine his subsequent two-year reign as director, when, presumably, he learned all manner of important intelligence regarding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Who writes an autobiography and leaves out the best part? Bob Gates does, for the simple reason that when the cold war ended, the defining drama of his life and career was over. His only stated memories of that time are of the "false 'peace dividend,' " "our 'holiday from history,' " and "the 'false tranquility.' " Beyond that, it's almost as if Gates himself ceases to exist once that struggle is over.

He ends his book by noting that "I spent more years working [in the White House] than any President but Franklin D. Roosevelt." And yet his insider's story is most revealing in how he explains that which he knew nothing about: 1) the Iran-contra scandal, and 2) "the Agency's greatest counterintelligence failure, and perhaps its greatest operational failure, during the last half of the Cold War" — Aldrich Ames's decade-long run as a Soviet mole in the "heart of the CIA's clandestine service."

Befitting his long career in the shadows, there is no identifiable Gates doctrine, strategy, plan, bumper sticker — nothing. There is really only admirable longevity and profound loyalty to his mentors and bureaucratic masters. (Secretary Gates consistently reminds audiences of how many presidents and Cabinet secretaries he's served under.) Everything in Gates's history-crammed career near the very top of America's national-security establishment testifies to a personal philosophy of accepting no risks, never leading on anything, staying close to one's mentors, waiting on concrete events, husbanding all possible resources, placing no strategic bets, and moving only when the bureaucracy as a whole decides it must. If, after the tumultuous reign of Donald Rumsfeld, you were looking for a perfect caretaker (armed with his countdown clock that just screamed, "I'm temping here!"), then you could find no more trusted instrument for maintaining the status quo than Robert Gates, the cold war's premier non-rocker-of-boats.

So what on earth happened?

Gates's selection was the revenge of Brent Scowcroft against the dreaded neocon cabal of Cheney and Rumsfeld. His master called and Gates, in a distinct nod to the beloved Bush père, answered. That much seems clear and makes sense, given Gates's lifelong proclivities.

As for the rest, most everything that Gates is now doing appears to be in repudiation of everything that came before in his career. And he is doing so by placing three profound — and truly strategic — bets, which I call the Harold Brown Bet, the Hillary Bet, and the Long War Bet. All go against his character, because each discounts current intelligence (which is still overwhelmingly directed against familiar cold war threats), involves a significant reordering of the military's force structure (favoring surveillance assets over firepower), openly pursues a strategy of turning old enemies into future allies (despite their clear military buildups and "uncertain paths"), and embraces the tactics of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan against our own Frankenstein creation — the mujahideen-cum-Taliban.

He has said that he "did not molt from a hawk into a dove on January 20, 2009." Yet he has slashed multi-billion-dollar programs and rails against the defense-industrial complex's "next-war-itis," i.e., the preference for tomorrow's high-cost gadgets over cheap and fast solutions for the wars we've got now.

Short of discovering that Gates was the longtime KGB handler to both Aldrich Ames and Oliver North, no more surprising transformation could be imagined.

The vast chasm between Gates the self-imagined leader and Gates the lifelong follower has been erased — Silent Bob the note-taker replaced by Vocal Bob the rice-bowl breaker, and his display of personal leadership has luminaries from across the political spectrum scrambling to declare Gates the best secretary of defense — ever. A lifer cipher, Gates has suddenly morphed into that most precious of Democratic presidential assets: the SecDef whose pragmatism is unassailable by extremes both Right and Left.

Father, the sleeper has awakened!

The Harold Brown Bet

Gates often quotes Jimmy Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown, on America's strategic arms race with the Soviet Union in the 1970s: "When we build, they build; when we cut, they build." What's interesting here is that Gates doesn't use this quote to justify a continued conventional buildup to counter a rising China — which is definitely in build mode, no matter our choices — but rather to describe the Pentagon's continuing need to adapt itself to the ever-morphing threat of radical Islam. To those in the Pentagon eager to reengage with resurgent Russia or to slot China into that threat box, Gates answers calmly: "One cold war was enough."

Gates has admitted that Washington "would be hard pressed at this time to launch another major ground operation," thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan. And in October, when hosting China's second-ranking military officer, Gates signaled his clear desire to "break the on-again, off-again cycle" in America's military relationship with China. Despite what he once described as "their excruciatingly slow progress toward democratic institutions and the rule of law," Gates now wants to insulate the Sino-American relationship from the vagaries of day-to-day events.

Why take this gamble?

Last spring, defending his proposed cuts of major military platforms designed primarily for great-powers war, Gates said, "It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to overinsure against a remote or diminishing risk — or, in effect, to 'run up the score' in a capability where the United States is already dominant — is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable."

It's just that Gates now feels America is finally getting a true twenty-first-century defense budget, in which wars against transnational terrorism are no longer subsumed within larger plans for major wars but instead run the show.

This of course opens Gates and especially President Obama to a savage attack from the Right, and particularly from the neoconservatives, who you may have assumed by now had been vanquished in the bloody sands of Iraq. Instead, they have launched a vigorous critique of the president's recalibration of relationships with both Russia and China, where a new term, "strategic reassurance," emerged last fall as the State Department's preferred description of the administration's new strategic approach. The term, introduced in a speech by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, quickly generated a lot of diplomatic buzz around the world but especially in Beijing, where, in general, experts found the phrase less offensive than the Bush-era term for China's future role in global affairs as a "responsible stakeholder," primarily because it suggested a two-way contract that admitted each side needed to reassure the other about its strategic intentions: In a nutshell, America needs to reassure China that it won't seek to prevent its rise, and China needs to reassure the world that its rise will not come at the expense of other nations' security or prosperity.

In truth, Washington thinks that it has already done plenty of strategic reassuring, and this new idea consists mostly of us asking China to reassure the world of its intentions. And while it is true that the Obama administration has scratched many of China's persistent itches recently (e.g., showing deference to Chinese leadership at recent G-20 summits, resuming high-level military talks with the PLA, and delaying any meeting with the Dalai Lama until after Obama's November trip to Beijing), the most crucial ones, according to the Chinese themselves — explicitly backing off on Tibet, ending arms sales to Taiwan, and ceasing military surveillance within China's exclusive economic maritime zone — remain unaddressed.

Speaking objectively, none of these issues are worth torching the global economy over, especially in its current fragile state. With China expected to account for roughly 50 percent of global growth through 2011 while picking up the lion's share of America's floated public debt, there are clearly bigger fish to fry, like depegging the yuan from the dollar. Moreover, America cannot essentially change any of these issues, no matter how much we engage in feel-good provocations. So all that will come of pressing such issues (including human rights) in the short run is to limit the scope of possible collaboration with China on larger global issues of common concern.

Of course, Bush and Cheney did nothing of that sort, spending their last years appealing to Beijing to bail them out on a host of rogue-state situations (e.g., North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe), thus demonstrating the extreme nature of America's strategic tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now that these wars belong to Obama and the Democrats, who most clearly do not seek to maintain American primacy through their continued vigorous prosecution and indeed are looking for ways to unwind them responsibly, the neocons are more than happy to demand the White House stand up to all manner of Chinese "aggression" and "perfidy" so as to signal America's long-term resistance to the threat of authoritarian capitalism. Please!

And so Gates has laid the Harold Brown Bet on the table, making him almost completely unrecognizable from his former self. While the United States of America has stopped mindlessly stockpiling a military force destined to fight another great power, China has not and will not anytime soon.

The Hillary Bet

Given what war is now, in the age of transnational terrorism, Gates is firmly committed to beefing up the Defense Department's "soft power" capabilities, meaning those pertaining to stability operations and nation building. Based on my professional interactions with the secretary's point people on this issue, I can report that the military's long-term goal is to migrate most of these capabilities in the direction of either a superempowered State Department or, failing that, a new federal agency positioned somewhere between Defense and State.

But here's the trick: The more the Pentagon embraces small wars and irregular warfare, the more the rest of the government logically fears having its functions "swallowed up by the military," as Gates puts it. Already, major defense contractors are swallowing up traditional State Department and Agency for International Development contractors, Lockheed Martin buying Pacific Architects and Engineers (the State Department's version of Kellogg Brown & Root), and contractor giant L-3 recently purchasing the blue-chip aid contractor International Resources Group.

Gates has formed a strong personal and professional bond with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But can he really expect her to transform State and AID sufficiently to someday soon own this cluster of government capabilities? Enough for military commanders to rely on these agencies versus further expanding those capabilities within their ranks? Given the restoration of basic American diplomacy she is attempting at the same time, it is highly doubtful.

Gates declares asymmetric warfare (i.e., the type of surprising and irregular warfare that terrorists engage in) the "mainstay of the contemporary and future battlefield," and clearly does his business that way, but assuming that the rest of the U. S. government will eventually step to their shared responsibilities — absent some future catastrophic failure — is a major-league bet, and not a safe one.

And that's a wager that may already be approaching settlement in Afghanistan, thanks to the Obama/Gates surge.

The Long War Bet

You can imagine how desperately the hard Right looks for any signs of daylight between Barack Obama and Robert Gates.

And if none can be found, then the secretary himself must be targeted.

Of course, there are small glimmers of difference, as in the slight rhetorical shading on just when that drawdown in Afghanistan will begin, exactly, and there's Gates's use of the word win vis-à-vis that war or, more dramatically, in the way Gates stands firmly behind the need to modernize our nuclear deterrent while the president calls for a nuclear-free world.

But these differences are nothing to finesse for a chameleon such as Robert Gates. For let it be said that Gates's tenure as SecDef marks a victory for the career bureaucrats — the lasting power behind the throne of temporary political arrangements otherwise known as presidential administrations. Gates did not start this revolution in military affairs; the revolt of the generals — over Bush and Cheney's unwillingness to embrace counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq — was merely codified by Rumsfeld's fall. And as it was why he was hired in the first place, Gates simply embraced the COINdinistas already ascendant within the Army and Marine Corps (see "The Monks of War," March 2006, at esquire.com), becoming their fierce champion.

Meanwhile, in 2008 at West Point, he said, "What has been called the Long War is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the long war, but the long war is interested in us."

And despite Obama's shift, it is hard to believe that Gates does not still embrace the larger strategic logic of a persistent global struggle. As he said in a speech last April, "The responsibility of this department first and foremost is to fight and win wars — not just constantly prepare for them."

Clinging to the new, hot-button concept of "hybrid war," Gates defends this historic institutional shift by noting that his new budget breaks down roughly as "10 percent for irregular warfare, about 50 percent for traditional, strategic, and conventional conflict, and about 40 percent dual-purpose capabilities." It's a reasonable opening bet, but a bet nonetheless, because Gates is openly advertising the fact that the United States of America has reached its limits. And he must demonstrate the U. S. military's commitment to counterinsurgency to keep old allies engaged and at the same time dissuade much-needed new allies from their mindless pursuit of big-war capabilities, all while not quite divesting America of its more traditional responsibilities as keeper of the great-powers peace. In each instance, the Pentagon is betting that the Chinese, the rest of the U. S. government, and the rest of the world's great powers will eventually fall in line.

Coming from a retired risk-averse cold warrior who never had reason to believe he'd have this chance, that is one amazing hand. And so to these three strategic bets we should add a fourth, which can best be described as the Career Bet. Forget everything that came before, because Robert Gates is all-in now.

Blast from my past: "Obama's New Map" (2009)

Obama's New Map

As he assumes leadership of this freaked-out world, the success of our new president's foreign policy — and presidency — will depend on the thinking he does inside the box.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, March 2009, pp. 53-54.

For roughly the past quarter century, America has run the world using the following two levers: its massive consumption rate and its willingness to deploy military forces around the planet. Together these two drivers facilitated the rise of many new great powers by enabling their export-fueled growth and obviating any need for them to engage in distracting military buildups or overseas interventions.

That U. S. grand strategy has essentially run its course, having proven both amazingly successful (the death of great-power war in East Asia) and extremely exhausting (our crippling debt overhang).

As President Obama renegotiates America's role in this world that we created, four potential flash-cum-bang points stand out for the year ahead.

Flash Point No. 1

First, and most obviously, is the second global economic summit in April to deal with the world's ongoing financial crisis. With the EU and Japan accompanying us into recession and our economy unlikely to turn any corner until early 2010, China's Keynesian role as globalization's "spend to save" stimulant is of critical importance, meaning that China today plays the same role vis-à-vis America that we played to imperial Great Britain at the end of World War II: The imperial power needs a bailout, and the rising power has the cash. As a rule, the price for such cooperation is steep — to wit, America got to call most of the shots in the resulting Bretton Woods financial order.

So what does China want? It wants to graduate from the kiddie table that is the expanded G20 crew of emerging economies and gain a seat at the more exclusive G8, where actual heads of state meet. If Obama is serious about his "team of rivals" philosophy, he'd do well to acquiesce, even to the point of permanently expanding the G8 to include the adjunct dozen.

But here's the tough compromise that may hold up this much-needed expansion: The EU seems determined to get some sort of global securities-and-exchange commission to regulate intermarket financial flows in the future — in effect, viewing the current global crash as Washington once did Wall Street's 1929 collapse. As far as emerging markets are concerned, that's going to feel suspiciously constraining; having just achieved some wealth, the rising East and South now face the West's desire to regulate crucial investment flows so as to smooth out an inevitable global business cycle. Which is like wanting to go all the way on the first date — that trust simply does not yet exist in the system.

Obama's balancing act here is difficult. No one wants to derail the emergence of a global middle class, the bulk of which will be found overwhelmingly in emerging markets in coming years, but globalization's periodic panics have clearly grown more frequent and more volatile. Obama must ask China to grow up very fast and assume a lot more leadership (read: exposure to monetary risk), meaning his "fair trade" agenda must inevitably yield to Beijing's definition — and, by extension, New Delhi's and Brasília's — of a fair deal for its still-impoverished masses.

Flash Point No. 2

Flash point No. 2 will be the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, which took on more urgency after Pakistani militants tried to trigger a diversionary war with India by launching the frighteningly effective mini-invasion of downtown Mumbai.

Washington's national-security community is wrapping up a comprehensive strategy review, much like it did on Iraq a couple of years ago, and this time the logic of regionalizing the solution damn well better prevail. If the Obama administration displays an inkling of Bush-Cheney's Great Gamesmanship, then say goodbye to the "good war," because the Hindu Kush is where bankrupt empires go for slaughter.

If Obama is smart enough to socialize the problem beyond NATO (because it's truly beyond NATO in every sense of the word), then we're into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's roster of member states and observers. You know that old bit about crazy in your bedroom versus crazy on my front lawn? Well, this is their front lawn.

Besides India's hard-earned seat at the table, China must be included in some high-viz capacity (Britain's PM Gordon Brown recently floated the notion of Chinese peacekeepers joining the fray) and so must nuclear bad-boy Iran (more on that below). Hell, we should also rehabilitate the Russians, if Obama is clever enough to exploit the situation to defuse recent tensions over Moscow's August smackdown of Georgia.

Remember: This insolvent Leviathan needs some immediate credit-default swaps (what we called "burden sharing" in the Before Time) in both the financial and security realms, so don't be surprised to see both great-power dances (the mega-stimulus package and the new military strategy) either succeed or fail in concert. The era of "separate lanes" is over in American grand strategy.

Flash Points No. 3 and 4

The next two potential flash points are equally intertwined: No. 3, the presidential election in Iran, and No. 4, the question of Obama's follow-through on Bush's August deal to deploy missile-defense facilities in Eastern Europe — ostensibly to protect NATO from Iranian missiles. (Feeling out of the loop on ancient Polish-Persian hatred? You're not alone.)

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad manages to win reelection (and yes, Israel's Gaza adventure strengthens his hand), it'll signal that the Supreme Leader isn't looking for any "Nixon goes to China" overtures to rescue its moribund economy with Western investments and technology. Such a dead end would complicate any future U. S. cooperation with India and China on either global finance or Afghani-Pakistan, because both states need long-term access to Iran's energy as their own domestic demand grows. It would also make it near impossible for Obama to finesse the missile-shield issue (i.e., indefinitely delayed until "further testing"), thus further antagonizing Moscow when Putin's already in a pissy mood and looking to test our young leader.

If Ahmadinejad is toppled by either the moderate former president Mohammad Khatami or the technocratic Tehran mayor, Mohammad Qalibaf, then Iran is definitely back in play, giving Obama plenty more wiggle room elsewhere, but only if he and Hillary Clinton can keep a lid on Israel's hard-line factions, which seem intent on taking out Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively. (Such strikes won't succeed, but they would trigger Iran's hard-line retrenchment, no matter which candidate prevails.) To that end, when the Obama camp coolly floats the notion of extending America's nuclear umbrella over Israel and — implicitly — any friendly neighboring Arab state that desires it, the former junior senator from Illinois is breaking out the big-boy voice of the world's sole military superpower.

That's the cluster of strategic issues that either facilitates or foils Obama's first year as leader of the freaked-out world. Everything else waits on this unscrambled Rubik's Cube, unless Kim Jong Il decides that he's so lonely that he wants to pop off another nuke to get back on Washington's radar.

And in the end, everything depends on how many new frenemies Obama is willing to add to his great-power Facebook. If our new president decides that America is still stuck with the same old friends we've always had, then he will quickly find himself as boxed in as George W. Bush was at the end of his second term and as impotent as Jimmy Carter was at the end of his only term.

The worst thing Obama can do coming out of the gate is attempt to demonize any of these rising powers with doofus labels (e.g., axis of evil/diesel, league of autocracies) or to simultaneously "contain" all their regional ambitions. Trust me, if they're not a significant part of the solution, they'll invariably constitute the insoluble heart of the problem.

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a contributing editor and best-selling author whose new book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (G. P. Putnam's Sons), is being published this month. 

Blast from my past: "The Americans Have Landed" (2007)

 

The Americans Have Landed

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Bryan Christie Design

Esquire, July 2007, pp. 113-17 & 134-37.

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country's sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit, needed to land three CH-53 helicopters.

"We had everybody working nonstop," says Navy Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron, commander of Contingency Operating Location Manda Bay, a new American base in Kenya, including a dozen or so on-site KBR contractors. By the next day, every tree had been hauled off and the field graded and packed down using heavy machinery. The pad was completed in thirty-six hours.

Soon after, U.S. special operators flying out of Manda Bay were landing in southernmost Somalia, searching for survivors among the foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives just targeted in a furious bombardment by a U.S. gunship launched from a secret airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.

The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind.

A few weeks later, the president would announce the creation of a new regional command -- Africa Command -- that would commit U.S. military personnel to the continent on a permanent basis. The January operation would be, in effect, the first combat mission of Africa Command, and it would not go as planned.

Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.

In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."

When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

Once boxed in by the sea and the Kenyans, the killing zone was set and America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat "until no more bad guys," as one officer put it.

"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.

It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.

Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.

The first New York Times piece in early January broke the story of the initial AC-130 bombardment, incorrectly identifying a U.S. military base in Djibouti as the launching point. That leak just let the cat out of the bag, tipping off the main target, a senior CIC leader named Aden Hashi Ayro, who, according to Centcom intelligence, had been completely fooled up to that point, thinking the Ethiopians had somehow gotten the jump on him. Ayro survived his injuries, and he's now back in action in Mogadishu and, by all accounts, mad as hell at both the Ethiopians and the Americans.

Six weeks and a second Times story later, the shit really hit the fan in Addis Ababa. Now the intensely proud Ethiopians, who had done all the heavy lifting in the operation, were being portrayed as bit players in their own war -- simpleton proxies of the fiendishly clever Americans. After angry denials were issued (Meles's spokesman called the story a "fabrication"), the Ethiopians decided that if the Americans were so hot to mastermind another intervention in Somalia, they would just wash their hands of this mess as quickly as possible.

The return of the foreign fighters to Mogadishu's nasty mix, along with Ethiopia's fit of pique, quickly sent the situation in Somalia spiraling downward. The transitional Somali government, backed by the United Nations, is faltering, and in scenes reminiscent of America's last misadventures in Mog, both Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers are taking fire from 360 degrees' worth of pissed-off Somali clans determined to -- once again -- drive off the invading infidels. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have written a better ending.

Naturally, it wasn't supposed to happen this way.

America's Central Command set up shop in Djibouti in May 2003, moving ashore a Marine-led Joint Task Force that had been established six months earlier aboard the command ship Mount Whitney to capture and kill Al Qaeda fighters fleeing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The task force did register one immediate big hit in November 2002: A top Al Qaeda leader was taken out in Yemen by a Hellfire air-to-ground missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in a scene right out of Syriana. But other than that, the great rush of rats fleeing the sinking ship has not yet materialized, and so the Marines took up residence in an old French Foreign Legion base located on Djibouti's rocky shore, just outside the capital.

Uncomfortable just sitting around, the Marines quickly refashioned the task force with the blessing of General John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, who envisioned Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) as a sort of strategic inoculant. If the Marines weren't going to get to kill anybody, then they'd train the locals to do it instead.

But CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something so much more: an experiment in combining defense, diplomacy, and development -- the so-called three-D approach so clearly lacking in America's recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn't own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited.

The Horn of Africa was supposed to be Washington's bureaucratic mea culpa for the Green Zone, a proving ground for the next generation of interagency cooperation that fuels America's eventual victory in what Abizaid once dubbed the "long war" against radical Islam. But as its first great test in Somalia demonstrated, the three D's are still a long way from being synchronized, and as the Pentagon sets up its new Africa Command in the summer of 2008, the time for sloppy off-Broadway tryouts is running out. Eventually, Al Qaeda's penetration of Muslim Africa will happen -- witness the stunning recent appearance of suicide bombers in Casablanca -- and either the three D's will answer this challenge, or this road show will close faster than you can say "Black Hawk down."

Djibouti

After being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for us to care about. And the Bush administration's decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed.

There aren't enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special-operations trigger pullers would have sufficed for the foreseeable future.

There's oil here, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it's actually fairly quiet right now.

The Chinese are here en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can't stand or can't stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren't particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire here. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn't warrant Africa Command, either.

America is going to have an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate -- it's a good investment. Too many large, hostile powers surround Central Asia for the radical jihadists to expand there, but Africa? Africa's the strategic backwater of the world. Nobody cares about Africa except Western celebrities.

So as the Middle East middle-ages over the next three decades and Asia's infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you've got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.

The U.S., through its invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, has dramatically sped up globalization's frightening reformatting process in the Middle East, and with Africa on deck, the United States military is engaging in a highly strategic flanking maneuver.

Africa Command promises to be everything Central Command has failed to become. It will be interagency from the ground up. It will be based on interactions with locals first and leaders second. It will engage in preemptive nation-building instead of preemptive regime change. It will "reduce the future battlespace" that America has neither intention nor desire to own.

It'll be Iraq done right.

Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa here in Djibouti is the clear model for what comes next, according to Rear Admiral Bob Moeller, who heads up the Defense Department's transition team planning Africom's structure. It is the franchise that will be replicated across the entire continent.

Camp Lemonier, home to CJTF-Horn of Africa, is one nasty, hot, and oh-so-stanky chunk of rock adjoining the Red Sea, a place where the view of the night sky is routinely blocked by the thick black smoke rising from the capital city's burning garbage pit located just outside the base wire. Take away the port and there's not much reason for anyone to come here, where the bulk of Djibouti's 750,000 citizens live.

Djibouti welcomes the Americans as a counterweight to its neighbors, none of whom have the country's best interests in mind. To the north is Eritrea, which broke off from Ethiopia years back and favors Somalia against their common archrival. Landlocked Ethiopia to the west wants a stable Djibouti primarily for its access to the sea. But as Addis Ababa doesn't mind fomenting trouble in Somalia, to Djibouti's south, the relationship is frequently strained.

Besides being welcoming, Djibouti was a natural place for the United States to plant its first African precinct: It's where Africa meets the Persian Gulf.

Camp Lemonier was just a bunch of tents surrounded by walls filled with sand for the first three years, with the serious settling in beginning when the Navy took over the command from the Marines in early 2006. Until recently, the camp's roughly fifteen hundred sailors, marines, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and civilians were crammed into a very cramped hundred-acre plot, buttressed on one side by the sole runway the task force shares with both the Djibouti International Airport and a French marine base still operating there. Now, thanks to a new five-year lease signed with the Djiboutian government, the camp has expanded to roughly five hundred acres, to include a sprawling suburb called "CLU City," named after the rows and rows of containerized living units, housing two thousand people in all, plopped down in what is certainly one of the world's most brutally utilitarian bedroom communities.

The spartan CLU City (for containerized living unit), built on four hundred acres recently ceded to Camp Lemonier by the Djiboutian government, will eventually house two thousand U.S. troops.

I got a glimpse of CLU City from the guard tower just inside the eastern wall of the base late one Sunday afternoon. The task force's public-affairs officer, Major David Malakoff, was right on my elbow the entire time. Malakoff had walked me around the camp the day before, carefully pointing out the "wire within the wire" that is the special-operations compound. He said no one would be answering questions about them because no one on base knows anything about what they do.

This is a common theme from senior officers at Lemonier. Captain Bob Wright, who heads up strategic communications for the task force, told me that he had "absolutely no access" to the special-ops unit there, despite having "all the right clearances."

As I stood up on the guard tower, snapping photos of CLU City, I looked over toward the Djibouti airport, and my eye was drawn to the sight of men dressed in black scrambling down the side of a nondescript building on the north side of the base.

"What's going on over there?" I asked, pointing.

"Over where?" Malakoff answered slowly. "I don't see anything."

Behind me, the base commander's aide was tensing up.

I pulled my eye back from my camera slowly, looked down off the tower, and calculated the drop in feet to the ground. Better to continue this conversation below.

"Okay, got a nice shot of a plane. I'm done!" I started heading to the ladder. A rapid-fire chorus of "Great!" "Good!" and "All right!" triggered everyone's movement right on my heels.

Back on the ground, Malakoff turned to me and whispered, "You didn't take any shots of those guys on the building, did you?"

"No."

"Good," Malakoff said. "That would have been the end of your camera right there, and maybe more. I'm just trying to look out for you here."

Special-operations enthusiasts, like the journalist Robert Kaplan, love to romanticize the almost limitless utility of the trigger pullers in globalization's dark alleys like the Horn. This makes some sense, as they tend to generate all the "kinetics," or killing, and that's what draws in the international press. But with CJTF-HOA, the regular military is trying to reassume its historical role in the everything else that accompanies the trigger-pulling: the civil-affairs work, the humanitarian stuff, the community projects designed to win hearts and minds. In a pinch, the SOF guys will do these sorts of things as well, but the long war has become one long squeeze on special operators, who are now such rare commodities -- recruitment-wise -- that some are commanding reenlistment bonuses well above $100,000, lest Blackwater USA hire them all.

A scene at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti. While special operations makes most of the news, the task force consists of far more well-diggers, engineers, civili-affairs specialists, and medics.

So the romantic view of special operations encouraged by Kaplan and others, that the SOF guys are all you need for a backwater like Africa, is yielding to a new normal: a strategic view that recognizes there are too few trigger pullers to go around, and with the Marines backfilling Special Operations Command where it can, bases like Lemonier are quickly being taken over, often by reservists who haven't been on an aircraft, ship, or submarine for years.

The U.S. Navy now commands the base, freeing up the Marines for more pressing duty elsewhere in the region, and although CJTF-HOA's C is supposed to signify a "combined" effort involving coalition member states, only a dozen or so officers are actually drawn -- as liaisons -- from ten militaries (five local, five distant) other than our own. Indeed, the French, with their roughly three thousand men next door, along with all their wives and kids living off base, constitute by far the largest foreign contingent in Djibouti. In comparison, the Americans remain somewhat isolated on their base with their 10:00 p.m. curfew, as Lemonier is still considered a "hardship post" that rules out families.

The task force's stated mission -- a profound expansion of, and evolution from, its original capture-and-kill orders -- is to prevent conflict by promoting stability regionally and, in that prophylactic approach, ultimately "prevail over extremism" by never letting its seeds find purchase in local soil. In the Horn of Africa, when you're talking urban, middle-class, educated, commercial, and connected, you're more likely describing Christian populations, and when you're talking rural, impoverished, uneducated, agrarian, and off-grid, you're mostly describing Muslim villages. So it's not enough to interact with the capital's elites. You either go "downrange," as task-force officers like to say, or you might as well stay on base.

In addition to Camp Lemonier, three permanent contingency operating locations are up and running, two in Ethiopia (Bilate and Hurso) and one in Kenya (Manda Bay). A fourth base was established more than a year ago in Gode, Ethiopia, but it was closed as events heated up next door in Somalia. If CJTF-HOA does become the model for Africa Command, the United States could easily be running a couple dozen such military bases on the continent by 2012.

The pattern of our military's expanding presence in Africa seems clear: 1) look where the locals or former colonials set up shop previously; 2) move inside the existing wire first with your special operators for capture/kill missions and military-to-military training with the locals to do the same; and then 3) settle in more formally with new versions of Camp Lemonier. Once set up, the task force storefront can be used to flow trigger pullers onto the scene at a moment's notice -- the precinct that hosts the SWAT team.

To old hands in the State Department and USAID, the Pentagon's growing incursion into long-neglected Africa arouses ancient bureaucratic impulses toward territoriality. They can't help but feel like their turf's being invaded by the gun-toting crowd, hell-bent on opening a new front in a new war.

If Djibouti is a front, then it's a messy one, because the fault lines seem more cultural than tactical. The place is a great example of the tectonic stresses at work here, its battered visage almost exemplifying the numerous civilizations that have crashed into one another here on the streets of this ancient port city.

Djibouti was hopping my last night in town before I flew downrange. Several thousand French sailors were on liberty that Sunday night, fresh off the carrier Charles de Gaulle and the other ships in its task force. Half the port's prostitutes are said to be HIV-positive, and the sailors were taking their lives in their hands.

As the French were landing, I headed out in a Toyota Land Cruiser with Captain Bob Wright and a few of his young officers to find the local Ethiopian restaurant that everyone at Lemonier raves about but no one can ever find. An hour later, we're still not there. Finally, we head into Djibouti's main square, to a restaurant Captain Wright knows well. He jumps out of the Toyota and chats up the owner, who takes the whole hospitality thing so seriously that he sends Bob back to the car with his eldest son as our guide.

We careen through back alleys that squeeze tighter and tighter and finally come upon the Ethiopian Community Club, nestled between a Coptic Orthodox Christian church and a mosque.

The captain pays a couple of kids hanging out in the alley to watch the car, and we head up to the unlighted rooftop restaurant.

Sitting atop the building in the warm night air, we are serenaded from three sides in a mash-up only Tom Friedman could love. The Coptic priest is haranguing his parish in an endless sermon; on the other side, the looming mosque tower is booming its taped call to prayers; and, once our waiter gets around to opening up the makeshift bar on the roof, Eminem joins in about what a whore his mother is from a boom box in the corner. Popping beers and shouting through the din, Captain Wright steers the conversation to the tension between the two halves of HOA's mission, the civil-affairs stuff and what everyone keeps calling "the recent kinetics in Somalia." The whole affair was a nightmare to Wright and his officers, he says, trashing years of patient effort by hundreds of officers to present a new and different face of the U.S. military.

"Strategic communications" means that no one ever sees the men in black rappelling down that building, the same men in black I hadn't seen the day before.

Walking back to the car, Wright says, "Stuff like that makes everyone think that what we're trying to do here at HOA really doesn't count, but it does. You can't make the Horn a better place simply by killing bad guys."

So the question becomes, Is the civil-affairs stuff just a continuing cover for the special operations, or will they eventually yield an Africa that makes American interventions unnecessary? There's a lot of concern here that the establishment of Africa Command may do more harm than good -- the poised hammer that makes everything suddenly look like a nail.

Manda Bay, Kenya

Traveling to HOA's contingency operating location in Manda Bay, along Kenya's eastern coast, is a multiday affair from Djibouti, including a couple of long flights on Kenya's national airline and a two-hour military transport from Nairobi to a makeshift airstrip a few miles' drive from the surrounding Kenyan naval base. On the C-130 flight with the task force's deputy commander, Rear Admiral Tim Moon, we shared the cargo bay with a couple of huge pallets of well-digging machinery and more cases of Red Bull than I could count. The ground crew in Nairobi said we were dangerously overloaded for the short runway, but after being unable to find a forklift big enough to repack the load originally put on board in Djibouti, our Air Force pilots just said, "No worries" (and yes, in Swahili that really is hakuna matata), and we were off in a plane built the year I was born (1962).

We skimmed the landing zone on our first pass to make sure no wild animals were on the strip. From inside the windowless C-130, that experience feels like a last-second aborted landing, which I handled okay because I'd skipped lunch earlier. My seat companion, Major Tesfa Dejene from Ethiopia, laughed when he caught my grimace. "I thought all you Americans like excitement!"

Camp Simba, the Kenyan navy's name for the base, is a struggle against nature. Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron warns you upon entry that the concertina wire strung around the base perimeter is useful only in stopping humans. The animals -- baboons, monkeys, hyenas, deer, and probably more deadly snakes than anywhere else in the world -- "come on through like it's not even there."

"I call it the zoo in reverse," says Eron. "Because they come here to watch us." Something to remember at 3:00 a.m. when you're making that walk to the latrine forty yards from your hut, which is kept incredibly cold with air-conditioning because "keeping it cold keeps those cold-blooded animals out," Eron says.

I make a mental note of where the camp's sole medical corpsman is located.

Manda Bay's origins tell you everything you need to know about why the Americans showed up here. The Kenyan navy built the base in 1992, in response to the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia the year before, right about the time U.S. marines were stepping off their amphibious ships and entering Mogadishu. Kenya's predominantly Muslim northern coastal area is so remote that it was simply easier to send military supplies to its border with Somalia along the coast using naval vessels than to head up inland by vehicles, as the sandy roads are impassable in the rainy season.

Years later, as Somalia began spiraling downward yet again, Central Command sent a special-operations contingent into Manda to begin training the Kenyan navy on antiterrorism tactics using high-speed patrol craft. That effort laid the groundwork for Task Force 88's sudden appearance earlier this year.

Rear Admiral Rich Hunt, who commanded HOA in 2006, likes to brag that "we've never fired a round in anger," which is a little like saying, "HOA doesn't kill people; special operators do."

This is a part of the world where military trucks and helicopters suddenly appearing on the horizon typically set off alarm bells with the locals, because it has usually meant that troops from the capital were coming to round them up and/or kill them, just like our troops were doing to those high-value targets in southern Somalia earlier this year. Here, you're just another scary guy in a uniform until you prove differently.

Jumping out of the tail of the C-130 in Manda Bay's intense March heat, I am surrounded by marines temporarily bivouacked alongside the remote airstrip in a cluster of tents. They're here for a bilateral naval exercise with the Kenyans. The engineering brigade will come ashore soon and help rebuild a school, and Marine doctors will vaccinate the locals and treat all their basic maladies. If this is a cover, it is very convincing.

On posts like this, the rank-and-file American troops tend to fall for the locals. Not in some white-man's-burden sort of way but simply out of the desire not to be sitting around on their asses, marking time across their tours, waiting like firemen for the next blaze.

There's nothing in the traditional military system that demands, recognizes, rewards, or basically gives a flying fuck about making friends with local populations. But still, soldiers like Army Captain Steve McKnight do it.

Team leader of Team B/413th Civil Affairs Battalion, McKnight is an instantly likable fellow. He's a balding bear of a guy whose uniform is a Cubs cap and a bike-messenger bag, and he comes off like a good high school football coach. And he did coach at a school in an unglamorous part of Miami. "Suburban kids didn't need me because they've already got parents," he says.

Unmarried at forty-three, McKnight stumbled into this African posting because of bureaucratic downsizing. "I'm a medical-service-corps officer -- direct commission. I got attached to a reserve combat hospital down in Miami that folded, and there was a civil-affairs unit next to mine, and I walked over there and I was like, 'Hey, I need a home. You guys got a place for me?' "

Civil affairs promised him the most remote locations with the neediest clients. Now sitting across from me at a seedy Internet café located in the sweltering waterfront of Lamu, Kenya, an ancient seafaring port, McKnight downs a huge beer in a single gulp and leans back, flashing his gap-tooth grin like Vince Lombardi. He's been in country for almost six months now and has put in repeated requests to extend his tour of duty, to no avail. "I'll probably get me something deep in South America next," he says.

Army Captain Steve McKnight with Kenyan children at a school recently rehabbed by visiting marines.

McKnight in his element is a superb intelligence gatherer (or what they call in spycraft "human intelligence"). We took a long tour of Lamu's labyrinthine back alleys, where the carved wooden doors mark the homes of some of the world's oldest slave traders, and the open sewers reek. I'm holding my nose while McKnight presses the flesh of every shopkeeper we pass, most of whom warmly yell out his name in greeting. He's like some muzungu running for office on Lamu's south side: exchanging gossip, asking how business has been lately, needling them for details about this or that local issue.

Admiral Moon's visit included a showy meeting with senior Kenyan military officers down on the coast to mark the bilateral military exercise with the Americans. A message had just come down from the embassy, which McKnight relayed to Moon: "The embassy says it wants everybody in civvies today, Admiral, just to play it safe."

"The embassy is concerned about some photojournalist snapping a shot of the admiral standing next to some Ethiopian officer in uniform," McKnight said. "After the recent events in Somalia, that could trigger a lot of negative coverage."

McKnight and I skip the photo op because he's got a civil-affairs project to check on: the rebuild of a local rural school by a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit's engineering battalion. McKnight had done the preliminary scouting work with the Marines weeks earlier, picking out a school that HOA had helped build three years ago but that was already showing some structural problems, in large part because the Americans had relied too much on local contractors, who tend to mix way too much sand in their cement to cut on costs.

"Handing the money over to the contractor, disappearing for the life of the project, and coming back for the dedication? That's a recipe for disaster," says McKnight.

So this time around, the Marine combat engineers not only rehab all the buildings, they erect a significant fence to surround the entire school compound to keep out the wildlife that constantly wanders in, threatening the kids, raiding the pantry, and eating its way through the crops the staff grow to feed themselves and provide meals to the kids.

There's going to be a problem when the Marines fly in the VIPs for the school rededication. Their Chinook helos need such a large landing space that the school's kitchen, made of sticks and mud, is put at risk. Huff and puff and blow your building down. On the spot, the Marines offer to trash the old kitchen and build a new, wood-frame one from scratch.

The headmaster convinces the Marines to build a new food pantry right next door. He is elated. "When you have the food, the kids are so happy, and they come in great numbers, and we keep them in school."

Having worked that scene, McKnight's on to connect his next dot: Sammy Mbugua, deputy director of the local Kenyan National Youth Service facility, a sprawling agriculture camp that experiments with all manner of crops and helps local farmers adopt new practices. It's a run-down collection of buildings, and looking at all the holes that pepper every piece of wood in the place, you quickly come to the conclusion that ants run the place more than anybody else.

McKnight has to reassure Sammy about all those helicopters buzzing by. Mbugua, a slow-moving, middle-aged man whose rheumy eyes say he's no stranger to tropical diseases, is looking for explanations to give all the local villagers who pester him with questions. "Some people are worried, Steve," he says. "Can you hear them go, the aeroplanes?"

McKnight does his best to explain all the activity, emphasizing all the civil-affairs projects being conducted simultaneously alongside military exercises.

"Please tell them there's nothing to be alarmed about," he says. "They're doing exercises. Yeah, that's nothing to worry about."

When the kinetic troop buildup happened on the border earlier this year, it scared everyone. "They were like, 'What's happening? Is there going to be a big battle here or something?' " McKnight says. "The secondary school that does not exist here anymore was taken over by General Morgan, a Somali warlord, in 1992. He destroyed it and they haven't had a secondary school since. The people here remember that."

McKnight confirms with Mbugua that all the youth-service personnel got checked out by the Marine doctors running a medical exercise down the road. "Yes, yes," says Sammy. "They all got their shots."

This is what McKnight calls "housekeeping." And in his work, he has the bearing of a Peace Corps volunteer, not an Army officer. "It's the little things that make the difference," he says. "It's not the big-picture project stuff, it's remembering to bring that fourth grader in Kiunga the English books that we promised her. It's remembering to bring the chief a new stainless-steel coffee thermos. And it's not just the material stuff, it's doing the interaction. It's humanizing the relationship. You know, this business of just giving stuff, it's dehumanized us and it's dehumanized them."

Promising to meet up with Sammy over drinks at a cocktail party hosted by the director of the National Youth Service next week in Nairobi, McKnight is out the door.

Cruising back to Manda Bay, we pass a couple of Kenya Wildlife Service trucks. McKnight has our Kenyan driver pull over, and McKnight exchanges information with the group's leader. "Always got to say hello," McKnight explains. "Those guys are the best security operating in this neck of the woods."

The captain's been in every room along Kenya's border with Somalia that Al Qaeda operatives have been in. He has interacted with every leader they've tried to recruit, telling me that clerics there immediately renounced these guys once their identities became known. While conservative, none of Kenya's Muslims seem, in McKnight's opinion, particularly attracted to radical ideology promoting violent separation from the outside world. Rather, the local mullahs are desperate to have roads improved so that teachers can be attracted from the cities to their remote villages. "Jihadism is a failed concept here," McKnight says. "It's like trying to sell a vegetarian steak."

We'll see.

He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.

The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.

Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.

"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."

Africom

For the Pentagon, the corporation that runs the only military on earth with a global reach, the world is carved into regional commands. Until now, Africa has been nothing but a strategic backwater -- the one place where America clearly had no interests and no bureaucratic structure to manage those nonexistent interests. Africa was divided haphazardly between European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. In a globalized world where bad actors live to exploit unguarded seams, we seemed to be providing Al Qaeda with several to exploit.

The U.S. military's strategic take on Africa has long been "We have no compelling interests there, and we sure as hell don't want anybody else to have any, either!" It was that attitude that got Washington nervous about the Soviet Union's seeming ideological penetration of the continent in the late 1970s, and it's what gets the Pentagon nervous today about China's obvious economic penetration.

But denying other great powers strategic interests in the region does not constitute a strategy of our own, nor does the great hunt for "high-value targets." Which is why America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon. The same can be said for China in the economic realm. To work, a lot of preconceptions about what an American military presence is really good for in underdeveloped countries will have to change. What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa.

Rounding a corner in Lamu's claustrophobic back alleys, Captain Steve McKnight leads a military group through a dirty, cluttered courtyard. It's happy hour, and this multinational force consists of six HOA liaison officers -- a Brit, a South Korean, two Ethiopians, a Djiboutian, and a French colonel -- and Admiral Moon, and the whole group is guarded by two "force protection" infantrymen who hover fore and aft like mother hens. We stick out like sore thumbs, and must conjure the past, when Africa was cynically sized up by visiting military officers for its potential to join what passed for globalization a century ago.

Barefoot, dirty kids, wearing clothes whose logos faded two or three owners ago, kick up the dust as they chase one another around the cracked plastic buckets that serve as their mother's laundry system. She's busy hanging clothes out to dry on lines strung between the buildings, and we're ducking under her wash, trying not to interfere.

The woman's husband sits on what passes for the stoop of their house -- a single slab of rock. He's busy slurping a bowl of soup.

The grizzled old fisherman looks up from his bowl at the parade of military officers in mufti and says in perfect English: "Welcome to another world."

Admiral Moon passes under the clothesline, straightens up, and stops. "Thanks. We feel welcome," he says.

The man dismisses us with his hand, turns away to finish his soup, and a few seconds later we're gone.

Blast from my past: "The Man Between War and Peace" (2008)

 

The Man Between War and Peace

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Photographs by Peter Yang

Esquire, April 2008, pp. 144-53.

As head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William "Fox" Fallon is in charge of American military strategy for the most troubled parts of the world, including the entire Middle East.  As hawks in Congress and at the Pentagon planned for war with China, Fallon instead urged cooperation with the Chinese.  And now, as the White House has been escalating the war of words with Iran, and seeming more determined to strike militarily before the end of this presidency, the admiral has instead urged restraint and diplomacy.  In the end, who will prevail, the president or the admiral?

1.

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. Forty years into a military career that has seen this admiral rule over America's two most important combatant commands, Pacific Command and now United States Central Command, it's impossible to make this guy -- as he likes to say -- "nervous in the service." Past American governments have used saber rattling as a useful tactic to get some bad actor on the world stage to fall in line. This government hasn't mastered that kind of subtlety. When Dick Cheney has rattled his saber, it has generally meant that he intends to use it. And in spite of recent war spasms aimed at Iran from this sclerotic administration, Fallon is in no hurry to pick up any campaign medals for Iran. And therein lies the rub for the hard-liners led by Cheney. Army General David Petraeus, commanding America's forces in Iraq, may say, "You cannot win in Iraq solely in Iraq," but Fox Fallon is Petraeus's boss, and he is the commander of United States Central Command, and Fallon doesn't extend Petraeus's logic to mean war against Iran.

So while Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon -- and apparently Fallon alone -- to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Those are fighting words to your average neocon -- not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to "nuclear holocaust."

How does Fallon get away with so brazenly challenging his commander in chief?

The answer is that he might not get away with it for much longer. President Bush is not accustomed to a subordinate who speaks his mind as freely as Fallon does, and the president may have had enough.

Just as Fallon took over Centcom last spring, the White House was putting itself on a war footing with Iran. Almost instantly, Fallon began to calmly push back against what he saw as an ill-advised action. Over the course of 2007, Fallon's statements in the press grew increasingly dismissive of the possibility of war, creating serious friction with the White House.

Last December, when the National Intelligence Estimate downgraded the immediate nuclear threat from Iran, it seemed as if Fallon's caution was justified. But still, well-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don't want a commander standing in their way.

And so Fallon, the good cop, may soon be unemployed because he's doing what a generation of young officers in the U.S. military are now openly complaining that their leaders didn't do on their behalf in the run-up to the war in Iraq: He's standing up to the commander in chief, whom he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war.

It's not that Fallon is risk averse -- anything but. "When I look at the Middle East," he says late one recent night in Afghanistan, "I'd just as soon double down on the bet."

When Fallon is serious, his voice is feathery and he tends to speak in measured koans that, taken together, say, Have no fear. Let Washington be a tempest. Wherever I am is the calm center of the storm.

And Fallon is in no hurry to call Iran's hand on the nuclear question. He is as patient as the White House is impatient, as methodical as President Bush is mercurial, and simply has, as one aide put it, "other bright ideas about the region." Fallon is even more direct: In a part of the world with "five or six pots boiling over, our nation can't afford to be mesmerized by one problem."

And if it comes to war?

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

2.

It was Rumsfeld's fall that led to Fallon picking up his greatest and, inevitably, final mission. Smart guy that he is, Robert Gates, the incoming secretary of defense, finagled Fallon out of Pacific Command, where he'd been radically making peace with the Chinese, so that he could, among other things, provide a check on the eager-to-please General David Petraeus in Iraq.

As the head of U.S. Central Command, his beat is the desert that stretches from East Africa to the Chinese border -- a fractious little sandbox with Iraq on one edge and Afghanistan on the other and tens of thousands of American boots already on the ground in both. Pakistan's there in one corner, threatening to boil over and spill its nuclear jihadists forth upon the world; in another, the Gaza Strip continues to hum like a bowstring; and up north, the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, the 'Stans, rattle along under dictators who range from the merely authoritarian to the genuinely insane. And right in the middle lies Iran.

Where there's peace in the region, how do you keep it? Where there's war, how do you contain it or end it? Where there are threats, how do you counter them? For starters, you might want to make some friends. Which is what Fallon was doing recently on a tour of his area of responsibility.

It's late November in smoggy, car-infested Cairo, and I'm standing in the front lobby of a rather ornate "infantry officers club" on the outskirts of the old town center. Central Command's just finished its large, biannual regional exercise called Bright Star, and today Egypt's army is hosting a "senior leadership seminar" for all the attending generals. It's the barroom scene from Star Wars, with more national uniforms than I can count.

Judging by Fallon's grimace as his official party passes, I can tell that the cover story in this morning's Egyptian Gazette landed hard on somebody's desk at the White House. U.S. RULES OUT STRIKE AGAINST IRAN, read the banner headline, and the accompanying photo showed Fallon in deep consultation with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Fallon sidles up to me during a morning coffee break. "I'm in hot water again," he says.

"The White House?"

The admiral slowly nods his head.

"They say, 'Why are you even meeting with Mubarak?'" This seems to utterly mystify Fallon.

"Why?" he says, shrugging with palms extending outward. "Because it's my job to deal with this region, and it's all anyone wants to talk about right now. People here hear what I'm saying and understand. I don't want to get them too spun up. Washington interprets this as all aimed at them. Instead, it's aimed at governments and media in this region. I'm not talking about the White House." He points to the ground, getting exercised. "This is my center of gravity. This is my job."

Fallon was quietly opposed to a long-term surge in Iraq, because more of our military assets tied down in Iraq makes it harder to come up with a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East, and he knew how that looked to higher-ups. He also knows that sometimes his statements on Iran strike the same people as running "counter to stated policy." "But look," he says, "yesterday I'm speaking in front of 250 Egyptian businessmen over lunch here in Cairo, and these guys keep holding up newspapers and asking, 'Is this true and can you explain, please?' I need to present the threats and capabilities in the appropriate language. That's one of my duties."

Fallon explains his approach to Iran the same way he explains why he doesn't make Al Qaeda the focus of his regional strategy as Centcom's commander: "What's the best and most effective way to combat Al Qaeda? We tend to make too much or too little a deal about it. I want a more even keel. I come from the school of 'walk softly and carry a big stick.'"

Fallon is the American at the center of every circle in this part of the world. And it is a testament to his skill, and to the failure of American diplomacy, that so much is left for this military man to do himself. He spends very little time at Centcom headquarters in Tampa and is instead constantly "forward," on the move between Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all the 'Stans of Central Asia.

He was with Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf the day before he declared emergency rule last fall. "I'm not the chief diplomat of this country, and certainly not the secretary of state," Fallon says in Kabul's Green Zone the next night. "But I am close to the problems." So, he says, that leaves him no choice but to work these issues, day in and day out.

Late that night, I am sitting with Fallon deep in the compound that encompasses the presidential palace and the International Security Assistance Force. We are alone inside the cramped office of ISAF's chief public-affairs officer.

Fallon had spent several hours with "Mushi" the day before in Islamabad, discussing his impending decision. The press coverage would emphasize how Fallon had sternly warned Musharraf not to impose emergency rule. But on this night, the admiral seems neither alarmed by the move nor resigned to its more negative implications. As he talks, Fallon casually takes off the elastic bands that clamp his camo pants to his regulation tan boots. He's beat after a long day that included meetings with President Karzai and a helicopter trip to Khost, Osama bin Laden's pre-9/11 Afghanistan stronghold. But it was the martial law next door in Pakistan that is the focus of the world. Fallon has been through this before.

"I didn't do any preaching," Fallon says about his talks with Musharraf. "In a previous life here, I had two extra constitutional events: a coup in Thailand, and a head of the military took over in Fiji. So I talked to the president for quite a while yesterday, both with the ambassador and then alone. He walked me through his rationale for what he was going to do and why he was going to do it and why he thought he had to do it. We talked about what planning he'd done for this, the downsides of this, what could happen, and how that could screw up a lot of things. At the end of the day, it's his country and he's the boss of it, and he's going to make his decision."

Before he walked into that room in Islamabad, Fallon had plenty of calls from Washington with instructions to pressure Musharraf down another path.

"I'll talk to him," Fallon replied. "There's an awful lot of china that could break. So I'll do it in a professional manner, because I still have to work with him."

As the admiral recounts the exchange, his voice is flat, his gaze steady. His calculus on this subject is far more complex than anyone else's. He is neither an idealist nor a fantasist. In Pakistan, he has the most volatile combination of forces in the world, yet he is deeply calm. "Did I tell President Musharraf this is not a recommended course of action? Of course. Did I tell him there are very negative effects that this could have? Of course. Is he aware of these? Yes.

"He's made his calculations. He feels very strongly that he's responsible for his country. His alternative is to step down. That would not be the most helpful thing for his country."

Why not?

"It's a very immature democracy. Look at the history of the place. It's rough. Musharraf knows his country. He knows what he's got. Their factions, their tribes. There's that group of folks that wants nothing more than to start war with India, another group that wants to take over the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], another group that wants to take over part of Baluchistan. He's got a tough road. Most guys in his position do."

As for Washington's notion that Benazir Bhutto's return to the country would fix all that, Fallon is pessimistic. He slowly shakes his head. "Better forget that."

Less than two months later, of course, his rueful prophesy will be confirmed when Bhutto is murdered by militants in Rawalpindi.

Meanwhile, Fallon argues that with U.S. plans in the offing to arm Pashtun tribes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the FATA, now would not seem to be the time to be pushing the democracy agenda in Pakistan.

When Fallon asked Musharraf, "How long do you expect to have to do it?" the general answered, "Not long." And twenty-four hours later, Fallon counseled patience. After all, he said, think about how strong America's military relationship is with Egypt despite Hosni Mubarak's twenty-seven-year "emergency rule."

But that doesn't mean the relationship building remains limited to just Musharraf, and so the rest of Fallon's long day in Islamabad was spent networking with General Ashfaq Kayani, former head of Pakistan's much-feared Interservices Intelligence agency and new chief of army staff. If Musharraf were ever to step or be pushed aside, Kayani is a leading contender to replace him.

But more to the point for Fallon, Kayani becomes the operational point man for any increased collaboration between the U.S. military and the Pakistani army to tackle the issues of the FATA, which a Centcom senior intelligence official calls "the huge elephant in the closet."

That's putting it mildly. The tribal region is where, according to our own National Intelligence Estimate last year, Al Qaeda was reconstituting its operational capacity, and was now in its strongest position since 9/11.

As with Pakistan, Fallon keeps his powder dry when he deals with Iran. He doesn't react like Pavlov's dog to inflammatory rhetoric from inflammatory little men. He understands the basic rule of international diplomacy: Everybody gets a move.

"Tehran's feeling pretty cocky right now because they've been able to inflict pain on us in Iraq and Afghanistan." So the trick, in Fallon's mind, is "to try to figure out what it is they really want and then, maybe -- not that we're going to play Santa Claus here or the Good Humor Man -- but the fact is that everyone needs something in this world, and so most countries that are functional and are contributing to the world have found a way to trade off their strengths for other strengths to help them out. These guys are trying to go it alone in this respect, and it's a bad gene pool right now. It's not one with much longevity. So they play that card pretty regularly, and at some point you just kind of run out of games, it seems to me. You've got to play a real card."

And when the real cards finally get played, that's when Fallon will double down. 

3.

The first thing you notice is the face, the second is the voice.

A tall, wiry man with thinning white hair, Fallon comes off like a loner even when he's standing in a crowd.

Despite having an easy smile that he regularly pulls out for his many daily exercises in relationship building, Fallon's consistent game face is a slightly pissed-off glare. It's his default expression. Don't fuck with me, it says. A tough Catholic boy from New Jersey, his favorite compliment is "badass." Fallon's got a fearsome reputation, although no one I ever talk to in the business can quite pin down why. There are the stories of his wilder days as a young officer, not the partying stuff but more the variety of rules bent to the breaking point, and he's been known as anything but a dove in his various commands, which makes his later roles as champion for engagement with both China and Iran all the more strange.

In keeping with the naval-officer tradition of emasculating bluntness, Fallon can without remorse cut the nuts off peers and subordinates alike. But it is more the intimation of his ferocity than its exercise that has the greatest effect. And Fallon has recently discovered that his reputation can leave him open to stories that might sound true but are not. Last fall, it was reported in the press that Fallon had called General Petraeus an "ass-kissing little chickenshit" for being so willing to serve as the administration's political frontman on the Iraq surge. The old man had told reporters that it hadn't happened like that -- that that's not the way he operates, and, in fact, any time he talks with Petraeus, there are only two men in the room -- the admiral and the general -- and their exchanges remain private. And when they're not in the same room, "We e-mail each other constantly and talk by phone just about every day." Just the two of them, he says. No outsiders observing. The press sources had an overactive imagination, Fallon said. Now when the subject comes up, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand.

"Absolute bullshit," Fallon tells me.

Fallon and his executive assistant, Captain Craig Faller, say that they both suspect "staff agitation" to be behind the story. Interservice rivalry is mighty strong, and Admiral Fallon is the first navy man to be head of Centcom, so it's not hard for them to imagine somebody from the Army stirring the pot.

Fallon says the tip-off that the story was bogus was the word chickenshit. "My kids called me up laughing about that one, saying they knew the story wasn't true because I never use that word."

So put Fallon down as a "bullshit" and not a "chickenshit" kind of guy.

And in truth, Fallon's not a screamer. Indeed, by my long observation and the accounts of a dozen people, he doesn't raise his voice whatsoever, except when he laughs. Instead, the more serious he becomes, the quieter he gets, and his whispers sound positively menacing. Other guys can jaw-jaw all they want about the need for war-war with...whomever is today's target among D.C.'s many armchair warriors. Not Fallon. Let the president pop off. Fallon won't. No bravado here, nor sound-bite-sized threats, but rather a calm, leathery presence. Fallon is comfortable risking peace because he's comfortable waging war. And when he conveys messages to the enemies of the United States, he does it not in the provocative cowboy style that has prevailed in Washington so far this century, but with the opposite -- a studied quiet that makes it seem as if he is trying to bend them to his will with nothing but the sound of his voice.

So when, during a press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, Fallon whispers, "The public behavior of Iran has been unhelpful to the region," with his pissed-off glare and his slightly hoarse delivery, he is saying, I'm not making you an offer; I'm telling you what your options are right now.

"Iran should be playing a constructive role," he continues. "I hear this from every country in the region."

Translation: I've got you surrounded.

He'd rather not do it, but if he has to go to war, there won't be any anguish. Whatever qualms Fallon had about using force were exorcised long ago in the skies over Vietnam.

"I try to be reasonably predictable to my own people and very unpredictable to potential adversaries," he tells me.

No wonder Fallon sticks out like a sore thumb with the neocons, who have the unfortunate tendency to come off as unpredictable to their allies and predictable to their enemies. Which is the opposite of strategy. He knows this stuff cold, because he's had his hand on the stick for a very long time. The oldest of nine kids, Fallon's old man was a mailman in Merchantville, New Jersey, following his World War II stint in the Army Air Corps. As a boy, Fallon delivered newspapers, bagged groceries, worked in the local Campbell's Soup plant, and would become the first in his family to attend college. His dad's military experiences, along with those of several of his mom's brothers, naturally pushed him in the direction of West Point.

But his local congressman screwed up his application, and so Fallon chose the naval ROTC program at nearby Villanova, a Catholic haven that has produced three Centcom commanders. More than thirteen hundred carrier landings later, Fallon began his long climb through various combat command experiences -- including Desert Storm and Bosnia -- to the pinnacle of his profession: four four-star assignments that include vice chief of Naval Operations, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, and then boss of Pacific Command and Central Command in rapid succession.

Sitting in his Tampa headquarters office last fall, I asked Fallon if he considered the Centcom assignment to be the same career-capping job that it'd been for his predecessors. He just laughed and said, "Career capping? How about career detonating?"

At the time, I took that comment to be mere self-effacement. I have since come to think that Fallon was deadly serious.

Weeks later, back in that hotel lounge in Kazakhstan, after a brutal eighteen-hour day of wall-to-wall summits and meetings, Fallon is in a more pensive mood, admitting that he never expected to stay this long in the service. At sixty-three, he's one of the oldest flag officers in uniform, and if you count his ROTC time, he's been in for a whopping forty-five years total. And at this cookie-cutter chain hotel deep in the 'Stans, Fallon wears an expression that is equal parts fatigue and bewilderment. "I expected to be running a start-up company by now," he says.

But something else came up.

4.

When the admiral took charge of Pacific Command in 2005, he immediately set about a military-to-military outreach to the Chinese armed forces, something that had plenty of people freaking out at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The Chinese, after all, were scheduled to be our next war. What the hell was Fallon doing?

Contrary to some reports, though, Fallon says he initially had no trouble with then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld on the subject. "Early on, I talked to him. I said, Here's what I think. And I talked to the president, too."

It was only after the Pentagon and Congress started realizing that their favorite "programs of record" (i.e., weapons systems and major vehicle platforms) were threatened by such talks that the shit hit the fan. "I blew my stack," Fallon says. "I told Rumsfeld, Just look at this shit. I go up to the Hill and I get three or four guys grabbing me and jerking me out of the aisle, all because somebody came up and told them that the sky was going to cave in."

But Fallon stood down the China hawks, because as much as military leaders have to plan for war, Fallon seems to understand better than most the role they also have to play in everything else beyond war. And like a good cop, Fallon doesn't want to fire his gun unless he absolutely has to. "I wouldn't have done what I did if I didn't think it was the right thing to do, which I still do. China is our most important relationship for the future, given the realities of people, economics, and location. We've got to work hard and make sure we do our best to get it right."

For Fallon, that meant an emphasis on opening new lines of communication and reducing the capacity for misunderstanding during times of crisis. But beyond that, it meant telling the Chinese, "If you want to be treated as a big boy and a major player, you've got to act like it."

If you want recognition of your power, then you have to accept the responsibility that comes with such power. That's the essential message Fallon delivered to the Chinese, and if that meant he was out of line with the Pentagon's take on rising China, then so be it. If it seemed as though Fallon was downplaying the threat of North Korea's missiles, it was because he preferred pushing a regional response that signaled a united front but still left the door open for North Korea to come in from the cold.

Fallon now brings the same approach to Iran in Central Command: "I want to go through something positive rather than a negative like Iran, which is a real problem." To that end, and right on the heels of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's meetings with Middle Eastern ministers of defense, Fallon held a similar summit of Persian Gulf chiefs of defense in Tampa earlier this year, something Centcom has never attempted before.

Could Iran be a participant in something like this down the road?

"Oh, absolutely, eventually. It's like the Chinese," he says. "It would be great if Iran turned into a team that decided to play ball in the end."

So how does something like this happen?

How do you turn Iran into a responsible regional player? How can the United States even approach Iran when the regime seems populated by only hard-liners and ultraconservatives?

You start down low, says one of Fallon's senior intelligence officials. For example, there's the shared interest in stemming the flow of narcotics from Afghanistan to Iran. "Iran has a huge drug problem," so that's "a potential cooperative area." More recently, the Iranians promised to stop the flow of munitions into Iraq, arguably contributing to the dramatic decrease in U. S. casualties from roadside bombs. After three sets of talks with the Iranians last summer that went nowhere, another round is being teed up. To Fallon, this sort of engagement is crucial, given America's overall lack of experience in dealing with Iran.

"I don't know as much as I'd like about Iran," he says. "You've got to go elsewhere, to people in other countries. There aren't many Americans who've had extensive experience with these guys. So that puts us both at a disadvantage. Plus they're secretive -- intentionally so -- about us. It makes it more of a challenge."

Early in his tenure at Pacific Command, Fallon let it be known that he was interested in visiting the city of Harbin in the highly controlled and isolated Heilongjiang Military District on China's northern border with Russia. The Chinese were flabbergasted at the request, but when Fallon's command plane took off one afternoon from Mongolia, heading for Harbin without permission, Beijing relented.

The local Chinese commander was beside himself. It was the first time in his life he had ever met an American military officer, and here he was at the bottom of a jet ramp waiting for the all-powerful head of the United States Pacific Command to descend. Then, to his horror, he realized that Fallon had brought his wife, Mary, along for the trip. Scrambling to arrange the evening banquet, the Chinese commander brought his own wife out in public for the first time ever. 

When the time came for dinner toasts, after the Chinese commander thanked Mrs. Fallon for coming, the admiral returned the favor by thanking the commander's wife for her many years of service as a military spouse. The commander's wife broke down in tears, saying it was the first time in her entire marriage that she had been publicly recognized for her many sacrifices.

And there was peace in our time.

5.

Fallon is what is called a "four-star action officer," meaning he tries to do too many things himself. He spends no more than a week each month in Tampa, Centcom's headquarters. Captain Faller jokes that if it weren't for federal holidays, Fallon's staff wouldn't know what a day off even was.

Fallon travels at least three weeks out of each month, spending, on average, two weeks in theater, meaning the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia. He travels to Iraq and Afghanistan every month like clockwork.

It's an unseasonably warm early-winter morning in Kabul, and Fallon is out in the field, walking his beat. And short of the president of the United States himself, this convoy is the richest and most opportune terrorist target in the world at present. So everybody wears the heavy armor. Weighed down by a helmet that feels like twenty pounds -- applied directly to my forehead -- and a desert-camo flak jacket that's decidedly heavier, I climb into the back of an armored Suburban that'll play third-on-a-match in Fallon's three-vehicle convoy. We are told to expect a bumpy ride, as ours is the vehicle that will routinely swerve from side to side to position itself to ram any vehicle that might approach the command vehicle from the side.

It's like riding in a car with the biggest asshole in the world behind the wheel. We almost pass Fallon's vehicle -- time after time -- only to slam on the brakes, slip back behind, lurch over to the other side, and do the same thing. A word of advice: Don't do this on a heavy breakfast. Fallon's personal enlisted aide, strapped in next to us, says our driver is actually being fairly mellow, on the admiral's orders. That's good to hear, as the streets are full of women and children on foot.

Thirty minutes after we've left the maze of barricades that line every entrance into the Green Zone, giving the place a sort of Maxwell Smart sense of never-ending doors, we arrive at a military airport where two Black Hawk UH-60's await. I ride with Fallon's senior aides in the second one. I am strapped into a four-part harness, the body armor keeping me well cocooned. Minutes after takeoff, as is the universal custom among military personnel, everyone but the personal-security-detail soldiers is asleep.

I scan the moonscape that is the mountains west of Kabul.

Traveling at high speed, we've been dipping ever so gently around the mountains as we travel to Bamiyan Province, ancient home to the giant Buddhas that are no more -- parting shots from the once and future Taliban. I can spot Fallon's Black Hawk out the window, framed from above by the sky and below by the barrel of a large machine gun sticking out of our helicopter's side. It's manned by a rather short fellow whose face is almost completely obscured by his Star Wars blast shield.

The view is amazing and reminds me why banditry and smuggling remain dominant industries here. Every road seems to lie at the bottom of a narrow, meandering ravine, and every walled compound looks like a fort out of America's Wild West days. Most of the time, the only things moving across this barren landscape are the shadows from our helos.

We alight from the Black Hawks after touching down on a strip of asphalt located in the center of the wide, flat plain that is Bamiyan Valley. Immediately your eyes are drawn to the dominant geological feature: cliff walls as high as skyscrapers that run along the valley's northern edge as far as the eye can see. Carved into the stunning vertical cliff are two empty frames, each running fifteen or so meters deep into the rock. Here stood the gigantic stone Buddhas carved hundreds of years ago by monks who lived in a warren of caves connecting the statues.

We're met at the landing zone by the Kiwi colonel, Brendon Fraher, who leads a small unit of New Zealand's finest civil-affairs specialists operating out of a small fort a few clicks away. The camp is home to a Provincial Reconstruction Team manned by the Kiwis, who work hand in glove with U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and ISAF personnel in coordinating coalition reconstruction aid to this province.

As we head to a convoy of armored Ford F-350 pickups, Fallon says that Fraher reports two enemy rockets landed nearby yesterday, but other than that, all's quiet. We speed off to meet the only female provincial governor in Afghanistan. Pulling up to the local government building, we pile out of the pickups and file into a large receiving room blanketed by modest Persian rugs and surrounded by even more modest couches. Just inside, we strip off the helmets and vests and heap them into a pile of fabric-covered metal and ceramic in the corner, all of it too heavy to hang on any coatrack.

Fallon -- who's done this sort of thing so often, he seems to glide through the protocol -- zeroes in on Governor Habiba Sarabi, a middle-aged woman of average height who's dressed in a reform sort of way -- head covered but face exposed. Despite all our accompanying security, you've got to believe she's the biggest Taliban target in the room.

Tea is served and formal greetings are exchanged with no need for translation, as the governor speaks English with calculated fluency, a skill she demonstrates a half hour into the meeting, when Fallon makes clear that he wants to hear her complaints.

It's a tricky moment for Sarabi, because she's basically critiquing Western aid and the military agencies represented by the officials surrounding her now. It's like bitching about your parents in front of Child Protective Services: Strike the right note and you might suddenly find yourself free of them for good.

Speaking about a road long-promised by Kabul and the coalition that would connect this isolated valley to Afghanistan's central circular artery, the Ring Road, she suddenly blurts out, "This is three years that the Bamiyan people have been waiting for this road!"

Fallon aggressively queries the assembled officials in order, running from the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy to the USAID leader to the ISAF officers and, finally, the local Kiwi PRT commander. Each offers a typically complex, bureaucratic response in turn. Glancing at the governor, I can almost feel her anger rising.

With obvious passion, Sarabi interrupts the proceedings with a stream of complaints about the length and complexity of USAID's planning process. This is where her fluency in English suddenly falters, as Sarabi's sentences start trailing off, leading the assembled officials to fill in the blanks.

"It is very... "

"Long?" chimes in the USAID official.

"And there is such a lack of...ahh." Sarabi raises a finger to her chin, scanning the far wall as if the word lingers there.

"Coordination?" offers the deputy chief of mission.

"It all makes me so incredibly...how do you say?"

"Mad?" one officer suggests.

"Depressed?"

"Angry?"

It's almost like an auction now as the bids keep rising. I'm just about ready to toss in my personal favorite, "pissed off," when Fallon weighs in with "frustrated" -- no question mark.

Sarabi turns toward the admiral, a sly smile passes across her face.

Fallon starts probing yet again, this time cutting off officials, as their answers obscure rather than illuminate.

Emboldened, the governor piles on with a new complaint: Every winter, a local river becomes impassable for a local migratory tribe that is then stranded outside the valley.

Fallon asks the deputy chief of mission, "Are you aware of this?"

The DCM replies, "No, I wasn't, and I promise to look into that."

Fallon's on a roll now, and the governor is beaming, but his efforts soon head into a bureaucratic cul-de-sac that no one in the room can fix. Kabul's central government simply does not prioritize this heartland province. Fallon asks the senior American ISAF officer if the coalition could arrange a Bailey pontoon bridge just for the winter months. In return, he gets a complex answer about past surveys.

Fallon cuts him off and turns to the governor. "I tell you what, I'm not getting a satisfactory answer here. I'll be honest. I don't think we can do anything for you this winter. However, I will try to get, from many miles away, a screwdriver big enough to push this process for next year."

The governor immediately thanks Fallon for his promise.

Fallon doesn't forget details like that. Six months earlier, he noticed that the American flag flying outside the Hyatt hotel in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was frayed. He had told one of the defense attachés at the U.S. embassy to get it replaced. The beaten-up flag was still there when we arrived. It's late on the fifth straight day of nonstop travel that has taken Fallon's entourage from Florida to Qatar to Pakistan to Afghanistan and now to Kyrgyzstan. Tomorrow, Tajikistan, where he'll have to put up with the Putin clone who is president. So at the moment, maybe the flag is not all that's frayed. His gaze fixed on it, Fallon quietly repeats his order, his voice so low and so quiet that you can almost hear somebody's next promotion getting axed. 

6.

Unlike his Arabic-speaking predecessor, Army General John Abizaid, Fox Fallon wasn't selected to lead U.S. Central Command for his regional knowledge or cultural sensitivity, but because he is, says Secretary of Defense Gates, "one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today."

If anything has been sorely missing to date in America's choices in the Middle East and Central Asia, it has been a strategic mind-set that consistently keeps its eyes on the real prize: connecting these isolated regions in a far more broadband fashion to the global economy. Instead of effectively countering the efforts of others (e.g., the radical Salafis, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabists, Russia's security services, China's energy sector) who would fashion such connectivity to their selfish ends, Washington has wasted precious time focusing excessively on transforming the political systems of Iraq and Afghanistan, as though governments somehow birth functioning societies and economies instead of the other way around.

Waiting on perfect security or perfect politics to forge economic relationships is a fool's errand. By the time those fantastic conditions are met in this dangerous, unstable part of the world, somebody less idealistic will be running the place -- the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, Iranians, Saudis. That's why Fallon has been aggressively hawking his southern strategy of encouraging a north-south "energy corridor" between the Central Asian republics and the energy-starved-but-booming Asian subcontinent (read: Islamabad down through Bangalore and then east to Kolkata), with both Afghanistan and Pakistan as crucial conduits.

On this trip, he's been shepherding a new bridge that links isolated Tajikistan with Afghanistan. The potential here is huge: Tajikistan is 95 percent mountainous and extremely food dependent. Its main asset is its untapped hydroelectric capacity. Afghanistan presents just the opposite picture -- food to export but most of the country lacks an effective electric grid.

So what should America be pushing first in both states? Free-and-clear elections for massively impoverished populations, or whatever it takes to get Tajikistan's resource with Afghanistan's resource? Which path, do you think, would scare the Taliban and Al Qaeda more? To Fallon, there isn't even a question to answer.

But this part of the world is defined by its fortresses, and is not known for willingly connecting to the outside world. Tajikistan's powerful security chief, Khayriddin Abdurahimov, had been doing his best to gum up the works on the just-finished bridge, which he allowed to open for business only four hours a day. Having just achieved control of the country's border-security agency, Abdurahimov believed the bridge made the country vulnerable to Afghanistan's dangerous drugs and nothing more.

On the eve of Fallon's arrival, President Emomali Rahmon intervened and extended the bridge's operating schedule to eight hours a day, admitting to Fallon in their first summit that he needs to do more to champion the economic potential.

But Fallon doesn't stop there. Immediately following his meeting with Rahmon, he meets face-to-face with the highly secretive Abdurahimov, who almost never meets with foreign officials.

Just as with Musharraf, Fallon does not preach. He suggests, he encourages, he cajoles, he offers, and he debates, but he does not preach -- save the gospel of economic connectivity. Even there, he is not eager to appear competitive with any regional power. "I don't want to create the impression that we're just replacing the Russians," he says.

He just wants a damn bridge.

Fallon gets his bridge. 

7.

Fallon's got a spread in a little town in Montana. The streams of this town seem to be full of eighteen-inch fish that he says he'd like to take a crack at someday soon. But the fish of Fallon's town are safe for the moment.

While Condoleezza Rice and the State Department manage a vague endgame on the two-state solution in Palestine, Gates and Fallon have begun the regional-security dialogue that's truly regional in scope.

The rollback of Al Qaeda seems to be both real and continuing, save for the border region of Pakistan. And to gain greater flexibility to plan for the region, Fallon says that he is determined to draw down in Iraq. One of the reasons Fallon says he banished the term "long war" from Centcom's vocabulary is that he believes real victory in this struggle will be defined in economic terms first, and so the emphasis on war struck him as "too narrow." But the term also signaled a long haul that Fallon simply finds unacceptable. He wants troop levels in Iraq down now, and he wants the Afghan National Army running the show throughout most of Afghanistan by the end of this year. Fallon says he wants to move the pile dramatically in the time he's got remaining, however long that may be. And he gets frustrated. "I grind my teeth at the pace of change."

Freeing the United States from being tied down in Iraq means a stronger effort in Afghanistan, more focus on Pakistan, and more time spent creating networks of relationships in Central Asia. With Syria and Lebanon recently added to Centcom's area of responsibility, look to see Fallon popping up in Beirut and Damascus regularly. And he says he is more than willing to take on Israel and Palestine to boot, which for now remains a bastard stepchild of European Command.

The Persian Gulf right now is booming economically, and Fallon wants to harness that power to connect the failed states that pockmark the landscape to the outside world. In this choice, he sees no alternative.

"What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They're like sewers, and they begin to fester. It's bad for business. And when it's bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we're back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you're moving backward."

Fallon has no illusion about solving the Middle East or Central Asia during his tenure, but he's also acutely conscious that with globalization's rapid advance into these regions he may well be the last Centcom commander of his kind. Already Fallon sees the inevitability and utility of having a Chinese military partnership at Centcom, and he'd like to manage that inevitably from the start rather than have to repair damage down the line.

"I'd like to continue to do things that will be useful to the world and its inhabitants," he says. "I've seen a lot of good things, and I've seen a lot of stupid things."

And then there is Iran. No sooner had the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei signaled a willingness to deal with any American but George W. Bush, and no sooner had Fallon signaled America's willingness to refrain from bombing Tehran, than a little international incident occurred.

Just the kind of incident that doughy neocons dream sweetly about. Right after the new year, three American ships were passing through the Strait of Hormuz, exchanging normal greetings with Gulf State navies, checking them out as they passed. The same with the Iranian navy. And then, suddenly, small Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps boats started speeding toward the American ships, showing, the admiral says, "very stupid behavior, showboating, and provocative taunts. Given that it was a small boat that did in the USS Cole, this was very dangerous behavior."

The Iranians dropped boxes in the water, simulating mines.

"Remember," he says, "my first day on this job, I was greeted by the IRGC snatching the British sailors, and so it was a sense of here we go again. You wonder, Are they really acting on their own, because the pattern seems clear."

Fallon's eyes narrow and his voice becomes that whisper: "This is not how a country that wants to be a big boy in the neighborhood behaves. How are we supposed to take these guys seriously as players in the region? You'd like to deal with them as big-league players, but when they do this, it's very tough."

As before, there is the text and the subtext. Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.

And time will tell whether being reasonable will cost Admiral William Fallon his command.

Blast from my past: "The State of the World"--with commentary track (2007)

 

The State of the World

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Illustration by Joe McKendry

Esquire, May 2007, pp. 108-15 & 136.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

In this exclusive post, writer Thomas P.M. Barnett reassesses and updates his overview of the global geopolitical situation. [DATED: 30 April 2007]

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire asked me to write a blog post on "The State of the World" in order to extend or update it a bit. So... This behemoth weighs in at roughly 6,500 words -- 500 longer than the actual piece. Oh well, Marty Scorsese always out-blabs his own movies when he does commentary, but that’s the whole idea, is it not?

What most people don’t realize is that, if an article appears in the May issue, it comes out in early April, which means it goes to the printers in early March, which means you edited it in February and probably wrote it in late January or early February, meaning you researched or reported it back in December. Now, when it’s a set piece (e.g., you interview somebody), the timeline’s not so crucial, but when you’re presenting the “State of the World,” you’re trapped somewhat in dealing with current events (duh!), so you’re not only dealing with some hedging language here and there, you risk some great intervening event ruining your whole party.

I had my share of fear in that regard on this piece, in large part because it seemed like Bush was launching a number of diplomatic initiatives around the dial as the piece was “shipping out” (meaning, going to the printers in early March). So factoring in all those possibilities was crucial, and yet, I had high expectations that no serious breakthroughs would be achieved, in keeping with the tone of the piece (Bush’s post-presidency). I’m unhappy to say I wasn’t disappointed by the administration, which just confirms my judgment rendered long ago that Bush’s post-presidency basically began with Katrina (can’t get it done in Iraq, can’t get it done at home), hence the general trend of rising backtalk from the world (and the Dems), less cooperation from major allies, and more powers taking matters into their own hands (including Nancy Pelosi), seems to proceed apace.

What I’m going to do in this post is this:

1. Deconstruct the thinking behind each segment, providing director’s commentary, so to speak. 
2. Extend each segment by rendering a judgment as to how it’s held up over the past few weeks. 
3. Give you a sense of where my thinking is going now on each segment.

So, I’ll give you a sort of a past-present-future troika for each segment.

I’ll be as blabby as I g -- damn wanna be, because that’s how I blog, so don’t wade through all this unless you’re naturally a “Disc 2” kind of DVD watcher and love this sort of backstory detail (like most egomaniacs, I love to deconstruct my own thinking most of all).

Let me start with the extended title page and intro.

The State of the--

No, screw that. Let me start with the cover!

The May 2007 Cover 

Deconstruction: I totally approve of Halle Berry on the cover.

How it holds up: Like most men my age, I’ve never quite gotten over Monster’s Ball and like to be reminded of that fact as frequently as possible. 

Looking further ahead: I may try to link up with fellow Hoosier Tom Chiarella on the subject. Halle “interviewed” him for the piece.

As I’ve over said about working for Esquire, it’s not like I was the guy who shot Britney Spears when she wasn’t wearing any pants. But I have met the people who did...

Okay, back to the original plan. 

Now that the Bush presidency is over, it's time those of us left behind assess the damage and seize the opportunities. There's plenty of both. But there's no time to waste, so let's get started: the good news, the bad news, and the news that could change everything.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This was the title of the piece from basically the moment Mark proposed it to me in early December. As soon as he planted that seed, I started setting aside articles from my blog collection that I thought were appropriate. Easy to do at the end of the year, because everyone’s writing that sort of stuff.

I was excited to try the piece and wasn’t particularly intimidated by the scope, because it’s the sort of world-survey stuff I grew up on during my early years of doing strategic planning for the Navy at the Center for Naval Analyses. Seriously, we’d just sit around cranking this sort of stuff like we were doing daily warm-up exercises or something -- you know, sharpening-the-blade kind of activity.

About two weeks before I started brainstorming on the structure of the piece at the beginning of Feb, I interviewed my old mentor at CNA, Hank Gaffney, who’s famous for generating this sort of material in his sleep. I simply talked him through a tour of the world’s major regions and major relationship and major crises, and we calibrated our sense of what was going on. It was an up-front sanity check for me to make sure I wasn’t going off on any benders. I later had Hank read the piece for any boners that stuck out, because when you write at this level, you naturally step on toes and transgress reality now and then, because you’re compositing a lot of trends and material and bold statements like that can be poorly rendered if you’re not careful. Hank caught a few, gave me several parentheticals to insert, and generally validated the piece (no, he doesn’t agree with every take I offer here, but I don’t expect that from anyone).

Now, the big question for me on this piece was structure. How to do the tour without being highly repetitive (I mean, everything feeds into everything else) and highly contradictory (when you’re whipping through things, it’s always appropriately ass-covering to say, “on the other hand” every other sentence)? Plus, it’s just the nature of the time we’re in now that it’s both pregnant with possibility and dulled by a sense of interregnum: you can see so much potential right on the horizon, you just know that most of it will wait until Bush is out of office. On the other hand … (see how easy that is!), I know from other end-of-term times that a lot of below-the-radar stuff does actually get accomplished in the waning months of a presidency, often by the most anonymous of people, so you don’t want to shut any doors on stuff.

To that end, I kept finding myself struggling to define the governing structure of the piece. Would I just run Bush out of town on a rail? Would I give you the half-glass-full wherever possible and leave open the notion of the great foreign policy correction designed to secure the legacy?

Then I thought: I’ve already given Bush the two “Mr. President” pieces, and since he had his chances (as all presidents do), now was the time to take stock in that early-post-presidency sense (my argument on the blog for months now), while simultaneously setting up the conversation for what comes next, since the election’s preliminaries are already overshadowing this presidency. So I was tempted to offer some grading scheme, although that always seems so prosaic. I thought about thumbs-up or thumbs-down (so very Rome). I even toyed with glass-half-full or empty. None were rocking my boat.

I knew there was a host of issues I wanted to cover, so I spent the entire Friday (about ten hours straight) before the Super Bowl just sitting in my home office above the garage writing list after list on my white board, seeing what would stick. I kept struggling with a sequence for the issues, but each time I tried to craft one, I realized I was setting myself up for a particular line of argument, and I didn’t want to commit to any one line of reasoning. I wanted to go bang-bang through the subjects, saying what I felt was going well, where I was scared, and where I thought the next possibilities were.

Now, when I’m trying to dissect the world like that, I often build a big matrix full of questions to organize and deconflict the material (so you don’t repeat too much). I tried a variety of approaches, but kept coming back to “the good,” “the bad,” and “the wildcard” (or basically, the optimistic view, the pessimistic view, and what could change either). I’m just anal enough to like a round number (ten, dozen, “sweet sixteen,” etc.), so I kept dicking around with the number of issues to cover, mentally deconflicting the implied components.

Once I had the list down, I started to fill in the blanks on good-bad-wildcards, but I kept thinking, “This is going to be a waste of time because I won’t structure the piece like this.” I kept hoping that giving it this sort of structure would reveal an obvious narrative logic, but it didn’t.

Finally, it dawned on me: just forget the narrative logic and make the piece modular. That way I didn’t have to choose whether I’d go overboard on Bush either way. Instead, I’d give both arguments plus the look-ahead segue. Plus, if I kept it super-modular, I could avoid a lot of bridging language that would force me to shorthand a lot of material (when you write in the essay structure, you constantly have to write yourself into and out of paragraphs, and so you spend a lot of words making all those transitions happen). So doing entries meant I could keep it bang-bang but likewise dense, plus I could go both ways on the judgment and intrigue you with the wildcards as provocative projections.

Once I started thinking this way, the piece seemed a lot easier. Plus, it felt like I was -- in many ways -- going back to the “map” article and coming full circle on the Bush administration: here I would just repeat the tight briefing style of delivery that Mark had talked me into on the hotspot survey we added to the ’03 map.

Having settled all that (and clearing it with Mark by phone), I quickly ginned out my matrix on the 16 subjects, and decided I would write them without thinking about sequence, so they’d need to stand alone, material-wise. I planned each segment to be about op-ed column size, or about 700-750 words, which gave me about 300 for good and 300 for bad and maybe a quick 150 for the wildcard. Pretty tight quarters.

I wrote half of the entries over the next day (Saturday) and the other half on Sunday, finishing just before the kickoff of the Super Bowl. As I penned them, they felt great, so I felt pretty relaxed about how the edit would go with Mark.

How it holds up: Mark wrote the expanded sub-title himself, and once I saw it, I felt a bit shocked about committing myself to the post-presidency idea. But when I thought about it more, I realized this was just Mark recognizing a major theme from my blog over the past year, and either I believed in that analysis or I didn’t. I did, so I got comfortable with the opening and remain so to this day.

As I noted above, Bush and Co. (specifically Rice) gave me a bit of a scare in late February and early March when it seemed like he was finally getting around to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation to start engaging the region as a whole in serious diplomacy (especially coming on the heels of the announced freeze deal with Kim Jong Il), but as we’ve seen since, all of that’s gone basically nowhere, in large part, I would argue, because everyone’s discounting this presidency pretty heavily, meaning they’re balancing the utility of any deal now versus waiting on possible bargains down the road in the administration’s last days or the successor administration’s first days.

So when I read the title and intro today, I’m still very cool with it. We’re giving you the state of the world, so do with it what you will, America.

Looking further ahead: I keep coming back to this prediction I made when I first started writing about the emerging Bush post-presidency: everyone in the world is going to reduce prices by about half whenever the new president arrives in Jan ’09. By that I mean it’ll be 50 percent off the top of any implied price for renewed cooperation for America. Everyone will give the new president a massive discount because everyone will be so happy to have America-the-Normal back. Frankly, they miss us when we’re gone.

The only guy I think who might not get that discount would be McCain, because of his stand on Iraq. Everyone else seems so clearly solutions-based in their thinking -- as in, how does America get what it wants out of the Middle East as soon as possible? -- that I don’t see their elevation to the presidency signaling anything but the notion that everything (and everyone) is on the table for negotiation come Jan ’09.

No, that doesn’t mean any “selling down the river” stuff to any ridiculous degree. It just means flexibility and pragmatism and deal-making will be the order of the day. I think everyone around the world will welcome that new tone and that it’ll pay off, because -- again -- the world misses America when we go off on a bender like Bush on Iraq.

 

001 Iran: The Coming Distraction

Good News: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered a worse midterm election than George Bush, with his political allies losing metro elections all over the country and his mullah mentors failing to grab seats in the crucial Assembly of Experts, a college-of-cardinals body that'll pick Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's successor. With the supreme leader on a Francisco Franco-like deathwatch, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani's stunning resurrection (crushed by Ahmadinejad in the '05 presidential election, now he's the Assembly's deputy mullah) suggests our latest Muslim "Hitler" is nothing more than a Persian Newt Gingrich. And over the next two years, we're looking at a potential wholesale swap-out of the senior leadership, and if the result isn't more pragmatism, expect supremely pissed-off college students to do more than just chant "Death to the dictator," like they did recently during an Ahmadinejad speech. Iran is crumbling from within, economically and socially, much like the late-Brezhnevian Soviet Union. In any post-Khamenei scenario, Rafsanjani could easily play Andropov (patron) to the rise of some would-be reformer (like the currently ascending mayor of Tehran) who'd likely try to restructure (perestroika, anyone?) the failed revolutionary system as a going concern in the global economy. Bush's recent full-court press -- UN sanctions, moving a carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, arresting Iranian operatives in Iraq -- has put the mullahs on the defensive and might end up being very clever. But the president's got to be careful. The minute he gets violent, Beijing and Moscow are outta here, not to mention the American public.

Bad News: Iran is successfully spreading its influence throughout the region, with significant regime-bonding investment strategies unfolding in southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But since that's intimately tied to the price of oil, Iran's strategy is subject to Saudi containment. Tehran's mullahs may put a muzzle on Ahmadinejad now and dump him in two years, but they still want the bomb (and no, that's not an irrational desire after we toppled regimes to their east and west). As far as they're concerned, America's wars to date have left Iran the regional kingpin, and they're right. So Tehran might as well start acting like it while taking the necessary precautions against an inevitable downstream military confrontation with Washington. (Did I mention that the Persians gave us chess?) Iran's shown itself to be a crafty asymmetrical warrior, using proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to demonstrate that it can conflate the region's conflicts at will, so it is not to be underestimated. The mullahs get deterrence all right, as well as preemptive war. If you're unconvinced, talk to Israel as it continues to lick its wounds from last summer.

Wild Card: As Tehran nears the bomb, Israel may well strike first, convinced the second Holocaust is imminent due to Ahmadinejad's skill at turning phrases. A signal of the end times to many believers, it may well be Dick Cheney's plan all along. The problem is, Israel's not up for much more than a token strike (unless it goes preemptively nuclear, at which point all bets are off), so having Israel try and fail conventionally may be a necessary precursor for Bush's -- and the Saudis' -- final solution. But don't expect Iran's pragmatic mullahs to sit on their hands in the meantime. They recognize a losing hand when they see one and may well trade off on Lebanon and Shiite Iraq if Israel's push comes to Bush's shove. At that point, everyone will recognize that Riyadh -- and not Tehran -- really won the Iraq war.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: To me, this was always the most animating aspect of the list: the sense that Bush is gearing up for another war. As I’ve written in my blog extensively, I believe Bush and Cheney were clearly setting Iran up for a major military strike/war before the end of their second term. You could just see it in the whole re-running of the WMD drama. No surprise, but Tehran didn’t sit on its ass waiting for the blow, using their proxies in the region to launch a pre-emptive asymmetrical strike against our proxies in the region (i.e., Hamas and Hezbollah target Israel), striking with great purpose before the midterm elections rolled around over here. By doing this, Tehran’s basically said, “You think I can’t conflate this mother-f -- ker anytime I want? Then you don’t get this whole Shiia thing, do you?”

And no, Bush doesn’t get it.

How it holds up: The vaunted F2F opportunity at the regional peace conference on Iraq came and went without so much as a whimper (seriously, read any press on it?). Bush continues the press on Iran with targeted sanctions and the plus-up in naval activity arrives on schedule, but since Bush is not really offering any out here, or even a serious venue to discuss such an exit for Iran, nothing seems to be happening.

Everyone got excited when the Russians seemed to yank Tehran’s chain on back-payments for the nuke work, but that’s just a contractor bitching, because Moscow really does want to protect Tehran’s back on this, not because of any ideological solidarity. This is strictly business, nothing personal.

China continues to play along and why the hell not? If it works (the squeeze), then Iran’s not a hotspot anymore and China can access its oil and gas in peace. If it goes badly and the West tries to shut down Iranian oil exports, then China will just step in and steal Japan’s share (something Tokyo freaks about silently on the sidelines).

The EU and its companies will string this out as long as possible. No one wants to lose access to Iran, because once lost, companies find it extremely hard to get back in again down the road. Frankly, it’s better for us if such companies don’t lose access, because eventually our solution set becomes reconnecting Iran to the world through business.

As for the recent British hostages deal, as far as I was concerned, that was just another asymmetrical strike against our proxies in the region. We slap on some harder sanctions and start snatching Iranian operatives in Iraq, so Tehran fights back by grabbing some Brits: all designed to signal without triggering direct conflict with the U.S. What’s the signal? Tehran wants to deal.

Hardliners on our side keep saying, “But we’ve offered Iran plenty in the past and it keeps saying no.” That’s bullshit. We’ve never offered Iran anything of value that it really wants. Basically, Tehran wants some sense of regime security and its place in the sun and Bush doesn’t want to offer either, so Iran keeps fighting back the best it can and we keep taking the pain, hoping we can drive up Iran’s pain in a nastier way that will bring them to the table on our terms. That won’t happen because Iran won’t roll over on the nuclear question so long as the U.S. threatens regime change.

As I wrote in Esquire back in early 2004, I’d temporize on the nukes (Iranian nukes will change nothing) and cut what deals are necessary to get us relief on Iraq, setting up the mullahs for the soft-kill through expanded economic connectivity. I’d send Nixon to China (read Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant book, “Nixon and Mao” for all the fascinating parallels here) and finesse Iran over the longer haul. But since the Bush crowd is so impatient and so godawfully Manichean in its mindset, there’s just no chance that’ll start before Jan ’09, when we’ll still be trying to figure out how to find a place for Iran in the Middle East. So Bush punts on that one.

Looking further ahead: It does worry me how so many in Congress and so many of the prez candidates are mouthing hot-and-heavy on Iran, like it’s time to check who’s gone limp on this litmus test, because it’s all just so Rovian to fall into that trap. Sometimes when you watch lips moving you hear the House of Saud talking, sometimes you hear AIPAC, and sometimes it’s just the usual end-of-times crap that’s so popular nowadays (“Iran gets the bomb and our Savior returns to protect the Holy Land!”).

The overwhelming presumption of Iranian irrationality just doesn’t impress me. We’re just not being very rational ourselves, just because both the Saudis and the Israelis are working overtime to get us hot and bothered enough to do their dirty work for them. It’s bad enough that we swallow our enemies’ propaganda so willingly, but when our “allies” do it, we should know better. No one should expect the Saudis or the Israelis to look out for anybody but themselves.

Our interests on Iran seem clear: we have to find a place for it in the Middle East. The revolution has failed and the society is sinking fast. It feels empowered in the region because of the Shiia revival, but that’s got a short half-life. The mullahs know their long-term situation is not bright, and the smart ones realize that their bargaining position will never be better than it is now (e.g., America hurting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re close to the bomb, Shiia revival, Bush’s post-presidency), so the time for deal-making is at hand. Would we get a fair shake from Tehran? Hell no. They’d try and take us for everything they could, given our difficulties in Iraq, but here is where our silly need for clear “victories” does us in. They are plenty of ways to skin this cat, but Bush seems intent on just rerunning the whole Iraq approach again on Iran, and that’s not going to solve Iran prior to the end of the term, and that means Iran will continue to screw us as much as possible on the subject of Iraq in the meantime.

And that really sucks if you have any loved ones in Iraq right now.

002 The Middle East: The Big Bang Theory

Good News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Cynically expressed, the Big Bang strategy was always about speeding the killing necessary to trigger systemic change, so the worse Iraq becomes, the more the process picks up speed. I mean, you can't get to the punch line any faster than by forcing the House of Saud to deal directly with an Al Qaeda hornet's nest right next door in the Sunni Triangle (the Saudis' first choice was a security fence on the border -- go figure!) while simultaneously triggering Riyadh's proxy war with Tehran in Baghdad. Toss in some Israeli nukes and finally the neocons have really got this party started, because those are the three knockdown fights they believe need to unfold before any serious restructuring of the region's power relationships can occur. A lesser variant has Washington prying Damascus away from Tehran, holding down the fort in Baghdad, and getting Riyadh's tacit approval for Israel's preemptive war on Iran in exchange for a supported solution on Palestine, but that almost seems boring in comparison.

Bad News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Bush and the neocons never had a clue about what was naturally coming on the heels of Saddam's fall (i.e., the Shiite revival) any more than they had a plan about Iraq's postwar occupation. Their in-progress Iranification of the Long War against the global jihadist movement makes even less sense than Bush's poorly planned decision to invade Saddam's secularized Iraq. The Salafist jihad spearheaded by Al Qaeda is exclusively Sunni derived, so why add into the mix their hated enemies, the Shiites? Bush is like the barroom brawler who enters the joint and declares, "I'm taking all of you bastards on" -- read: axis of evil -- "right here and now!" His administration has committed the fatal mistake that Clinton deftly avoided in the Balkans: They've let the conflicts accumulate instead of tackling them sequentially. The White House's unfolding Iran strategy is nothing more than an ass-covering exercise on Iraq and Afghanistan -- a third splendid little war to divert attention from the two previous failures.

Wild Card: If there was ever a time for Al Qaeda to cripple Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, now is it. Delivered with the right fingerprints, Al Qaeda might be able to get just enough unity among the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for a full-blown war with Iran. Nothing would set China on a more aggressive course regarding its long-term access to energy in the region, and therein lies Osama bin Laden's best hope for setting "rising Asia" against an aging West in the Persian Gulf.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Of all the segments, this one drove me to the good-bad-wildcard approach the most, because I’m so clearly of two minds on the subject. Yes, it would have been better if we had done Iraq right from the start, but since we didn’t and we’re stuck with Bush through Jan ’09, there’s almost the sense that the worst Iraq gets, the more it is likely to foster desperate and dangerous change in the region, and since any change beats the status quo, you have almost this perverse, pro-Bush desire to hope that Bush continues to screw up Iraq so that the follow-on regional dynamics are as profoundly upsetting as possible.

Then you start getting paranoid and wondering if Bush and Cheney do that on purpose, and thus you get the tone of this segment.

How it holds up: Because this is meta-analysis of region-wide possibilities, this one was going to get screwed up by current events only if Rice pulled off some magic at the regional peace conference on Iraq, which she didn’t even seem to try. I know it seems like Sy Hersh is going overboard on the Iran war scenario, but I honestly think it’s very important to sound that alarm early and often on Bush and Cheney because -- again -- left to their own devices, I do think they were targeting Iran for the end of the second term. Given the macho factor in DC on the Iran issue, I do worry that the right trolley car coming down the street will suddenly become enough for Bush to sell his next war on his way out the door, bequeathing to the next president a serious lemon just like his old man did to Clinton on Somalia (“Have a nice presidency, asshole!”).

Looking further ahead: The more I think about the Middle East in grand historical terms, the more I believe that its capacity for self-destruction will do itself in. Yes, everyone will continue to buy its oil and gas, but no one will be planning to keep the region in its future requirements and everyone will slowly but deeply discount their connectivity to the place. To the extent that happens and alternative energy dependencies are pursued, the Middle East can be effectively firewalled from globalization’s future, making Africa’s future bright by default (the last great untapped labor pool).

The bright spot? The smallest Gulf states seem to be pursuing the most innovative and intelligent economic connectivity with the outside world. If they can have a Singapore-like demonstration effect and pull the others along, then there’s reason for optimism. Again, the scarier we make Iraq look, the more these countries are incentivized to imagine a different future -- sad to say.

Then again, fear is a great motivator toward change.

003 Globalization: Life During Wartime

Good News: The world has never enjoyed a bigger and more dynamic global economy than the one we're riding high on right now, with unprecedented amounts of poverty reduction concentrated in China and India alone. Advanced economies are expanding steadily in the 2 to 3 percent range, while emerging markets dash along in the 7 to 8 percent range, giving us a stunning -- and steady -- global growth rate of roughly 5 percent. Rising Asia will add upwards of a billion new consumers (i.e., people with disposable income) in the coming years, providing the biggest single impulse the global economy has ever experienced. Financial flows in 2005 hit $6 trillion, more than double the total in 2002. If terrorists are running the world, nobody has told the global financial markets.

Bad News: There's plenty to be nervous about, especially if you're a white-collar worker who's always assumed your job can't be outsourced. (Hint: If your graduate degree involved tons of memorizing facts, you're in the crosshairs.) But with financial panics becoming far less frequent and damaging (e.g., a recent scare in Thailand passed without turning contagious), the biggest dangers now are political. Trade protectionism is on the rise (keep an eye on our Democratic Congress), and the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Round is going nowhere because the West refuses to reduce agricultural subsidies. But neither trend surprises, as a rising tide lifts everybody's demands when it comes to trade deals.

Wild Card: A supply shock in the maxed-out oil industry, which faces a persistently rising long-term global demand due overwhelmingly to skyrocketing requirements in emerging markets led by China and India. "Peak oil" predictions are overblown, focusing exclusively on easily extracted, known conventional reserves. If prices remain high, then the shift to exploiting unconventional reserves and alternative energy sources will grow exponentially. But timing is everything, so a shock to the system could have the lasting effect of moving us down the hydrocarbon chain faster toward hydrogen, nuclear, and renewables. When that happens, it won't be just Al Gore sticking out his chest in pride -- we'll all be able to breathe more easily.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: First is simply to note the title of one of my all-time favorite Talking Heads songs.

I wrote this segment first and meant it to headline the piece, because to me, it’s stunning to realize that despite all this terrorism and Middle East bullshit, the world has never been more at peace or thriving economically as it is today. And the future’s so bright for globalization that I gotta wear shades to look ahead.

Most of the time I think it’s just me and my buddy Larry Kudlow sounding this non-alarm, because the fear mongering on CNN and Fox is just so frickin’ out of control at this point in history, as one uses it to condemn Bush’s failures (CNN) while the other uses that to excuse them (Fox).

How it holds up: Better than ever, I must say. Doha continues to go nowhere, but bilateral trade agreements are continuing to be cut (we’ve just finished our proposed free-trade pact with South Korea and Bush sends it soon to the Hill), and the Middle East continues to slowly but surely connect itself more and more to the outside world during this oil boom (unlike last boom).

Yes, I expect the Dems to do a certain amount of stupid stuff on trade in Congress, and I expect Bush to stand up for free trade and fight them tooth and nail (Bush has actually been wonderfully sensible on foreign trade throughout his time). Lou Dobbs and his ilk notwithstanding, I expect cooler heads to prevail, with the best news being that, other than Edwards, none of the prez candidates are talking much protectionism.

Looking further ahead: I’m hoping the Korean-U.S. deal, once it goes through Congress, will accelerate the movement toward a free trade agreement for Asia proper that integrates America nicely into the mix. The big fear of recent years was that the U.S. would eventually get shut out of any ASEAN-plus enlargement process, but if the Korean-U.S. deal serves as template for others to cut similar deals with us, then we might just negotiate ourselves right into some larger Pac-rim package, and that would be great.

004 Al Qaeda: The Global Brand

Good News: We have killed or captured a good portion of Al Qaeda's senior brain trust, meaning the generational cohort of leaders who built up the transnational network to the operational peak represented by the 9/11 strikes. As a result, Al Qaeda's network is a lot more diffuse and dispersed, with the surviving leadership's role trimmed back largely to inspirational guidance from above on strategy and tactics. Yes, Al Qaeda now takes credit for virtually every terrorist act across the globe, but the truth is that its operational center of gravity remains southwest Asia -- specifically Iraq's Sunni Triangle and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. As worldwide revolutionary movements go, this one is relatively contained and successful only in terms of generating local stalemates against intervening external powers, meaning we get to pick the fight and keep it consistently an "away game." As the Middle East "middle-ages" -- demographically speaking -- over the next quarter century, time is definitely on our side, since jihadism, like all revolutionary movements, is a young man's game.

Bad News: Al Qaeda's operational reach may now be effectively limited to the same territory (southwest Asia and extending to adjacent areas) as were the classic Middle Eastern terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, but that just means America's efforts to date have made us safer at the expense of allies in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In short, we've turned back the clock but made no strategic headway, plus we've created a dual cause célèbre in Iraq and Afghanistan that will stoke Al Qaeda's recruitment efforts for the long haul. Neither winning nor losing, the Bush administration has merely engineered a back-to-the-future operational stalemate at an unsustainably high cost in blood and treasure, effectively isolating America from the world in the process. Strategically speaking, we've reached a dead end.

Wild Card: Al Qaeda's pursuit of a weapon of mass destruction (think biological, not nuclear) is unrelenting, meaning eventually we will face this threat, and ultimately one side in this Long War will need to break out of the strategic stalemate. The key question, then, is, Which side is more energized and which is more exhausted? With the majority of Gulf oil now flowing to Asia and that trend only increasing with time, won't the American public eventually revolt at the notion that it's their oil and our blood? Osama sure hopes that one more strategic bitch-slap does the job.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: To me, this is both the most depressing and the most over-hyped segment, meaning you can feel bad about it but you really shouldn’t. By sinking our teeth into Afghanistan and Sunni Iraq (where the insurgency’s based), we give Al Qaeda a lot of definition and structure where there wouldn’t otherwise be, meaning we attract them to these battlegrounds of our choosing and let our professionals duke it out with their version of professionals. All said and done, our casualties have been low and slow in coming for a “global war,” and the fight’s over there instead of over here.

How it holds up: Just fine. I mean, you may hang on Peter Bergen’s every word about the whereabouts of Osama and Mullah Omar and so on and so forth, but as somebody who looks at this whole package as holistically as possible, it doesn’t strike me that terrorists are running anything in this world save for the tribal areas in NW Pakistan and Sunni Iraq -- and Allah bless ‘em -- they can have them both.

Looking further ahead: Yes, Virginia, there will be another 9/11. But keeping things in perspective, I don’t think al Qaeda will ever measure up to the hype nor justify the expenses we incur. I’m not saying the preparations we make, the security measures we take, or the money we spend is wasted. I think all that stuff is good and necessary and important for the sheer reason that globalization is complex and demands all such efforts.

I just don’t think that -- over time -- transnational terrorism will routinely be able to rise above the white noise level of day-to-day disruptions and disasters and snafus arising from globalization’s continued expansion.

005 Iraq: The Quagmire

Good News: The Kurdish areas are secure and thriving economically. Then again, they've been in the nation-building business ever since America started that no-fly zone in the early 1990s. The insurgency is still centered primarily in the Sunni Triangle, so many parts of the Shiite-controlled southeast are surviving okay, thanks in part to significant Iranian investment. Though the central government remains weak, it has forged some important compromises, like a deal to share oil revenue. Following our last best effort on the "surge," the inevitable U. S. drawdown -- and "drawback" from combat roles -- will look like Vietnam in reverse: We shift from direct action to advising locals. With any luck, Iraq's not much more of a fake state than Pakistan or Lebanon is, and America's military presence can retreat behind the wire of permanent bases in the Kurdish areas or Kuwait, where we currently keep about twenty-five thousand troops. By increasing our naval presence in the region, America can return somewhat to its historic role as offshore balancer in the region. And by participating in the regional peace conference on Iraq, it seems Bush may have finally discovered diplomacy in the Middle East. About time.

Bad News: Baghdad itself is an unmitigated disaster, and the Sunni Triangle has become a no-go zone for all but the most heavily armed outsiders. The horrific social toll of constant violence and massive unemployment is measured in dog years, meaning Bush's surge strategy is far too little and way too late. There is no "Iraq" any more than there was a "Yugoslavia," so America will have to accept this Humpty Dumpty outcome for what it is: a Balkans done backward. The Iraq Study Group rejected partitioning, saying it would be impossible to divide up major cities. Too bad the locals didn't get the word, because that low-grade "ethnic cleansing" proceeds rather vigorously -- neighborhood by neighborhood -- fueled by rising sectarian violence that outside interested parties (Iran, Saudi Arabia) clearly feed. America cannot stem this tide; only a combined effort by the neighbors can.

Wild Card: The right wrong move by embryonic Kurdistan could trigger a military intervention from anxious Turkey, especially after the highly contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk votes to join "free Kurdistan." Also looming is a Saudi-Iranian proxy war within Iraq itself, just as the persecution and targeting of restive Shiite minorities by entrenched Sunni regimes hits an inflection point regionwide -- nudge-nudge, wink-wink from the White House. For now, the Saudis seem content to 1) limit Iran's oil revenue by ramping up their production and 2) curb Iran's influence in Lebanon by funding Hezbollah's opponents. The regional peace conference on Iraq puts everyone at the same table, but if Sy Hersh is correct that Bush has already "redirected" on Iran, that parley might just be for show.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This was the trickiest one to write, given all the competing perspectives on the subject. I mean, you could spend 10k words on definitional issues alone (Civil war or not? Winning or losing? What do any of these words mean anyway?).

How it holds up: The whole McCain deal on walking through a market struck me as odd (why does he choose stands like that?), although his basic take on our predicament remains sound (from America’s perspective, “victory” or “progress” is all about reducing U.S. casualties). I just wonder why talking about what comes next is such a third rail for so many politicians (“Give the surge a chance!”), when everyone should know that the surge will logically succeed over the short haul but get untenable over the longer haul (opponents will lay lower and simply wait us out, knowing our troops strains will grow almost exponentially).

Given that Bush isn’t really trying any serious regional diplomacy, I can’t escape the feeling that the surge was never designed to succeed in the first place, but just to give Bush the excuse to broaden the conflict to include Iran down the road (again, the animating aspect to this entire piece) because then he can say, “I tried, but Iran screwed us over and now it’s payback!”

Looking further ahead: This segment is obviously the most frustrating to contemplate, in large part because Bush continues to make our military fight under the worst possible strategic circumstances.

As I look to the next prez, only Giuliani makes me think he’s got the go-your-own-way courage to cut the deals necessary to extricate our combat troops from harm’s way in a reasonable amount of time while making that transition seem less like a “loss” and more just plain common sense. I mean, you take what you can get after a while, and what we’ve got is a free and safe Kurdistan, and relatively stable and safe and recovering Shiite Iraq, and that hell-hole called Sunni-land.

The notion that we somehow “lose Iraq” unless we fight it out in Sunni-land until all the bitter-enders have all met their bitter end is just goofy.

Since Bush seems unable to define anything short of that mythical desired outcome as “victory,” we’re in desperate need of somebody who can. Hell, the Balkans were a piecemeal victory/stalemate/loss that slowly but surely turned into something we’re all relatively proud of, so why do we think we’re ever going to reach some magical moment where everything’s perfect in Iraq as a whole so we can pull out with our pride somehow completely restored?

Simply put, Rudy’s the most Nixonian of the bunch, and we need a plain-talking hardass to make this work. He’s got just enough gravitas and just enough arrogance to pull it off -- unless the cast of “Law & Order” runs as a full-slate.

006 The Long War: The Theater-After-Next

Good News: As we squeeze the Persian Gulf-centric radical Salafi jihadist movement, that balloon can expand in two directions over the near term: north into Central Asia or south into Africa. For now, Central Asia is relatively quiet, and local authoritarian regimes -- with the consent and support of all interested outside parties -- aim to keep it that way. Simply put, there are just too many untapped energy reserves in that region for neighboring great powers (e.g., Russia, Turkey, India, China, and even Shiite Iran) to let radical Sunni terror networks establish significant beachheads. Remember, China and Russia set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization way before 9/11, so calling our recent arrival (now down to just one military base in Kyrgyzstan) the resumption of the "great game" is a bit much. The Chinese and Russians are basically watching our backs on this one, and we should continue to let them do so because...

Bad News: ...This fight's headed south into sub-Saharan Africa over the long haul. The recent rise and fall of the Islamic courts in Somalia was but a preview of coming attractions. Don't believe? Then check out similar north-versus-south (i.e., Muslim versus Christian) fights simmering across a wide swath of middle Africa (basically where the desert meets the grasslands and forests), because it might not surprise you to find out that the cowboy and the farmer still can't be friends. Al Qaeda, according to our Defense Intelligence Agency, recently brokered an alliance with the Algerian Group for Salafist Preaching and Combat and has famously issued threats regarding any potential Western intervention in Sudan's Darfur region to stem the genocidal war being waged by the invasive Arab janjaweed against indigenous black Africans. Success in the Long War will not be marked by less violence or less resistance but by a shift in the geographic center of gravity out of the Gulf region and into Africa. Egypt, with its looming succession from Mubarak father to son (Hosni to Gamal), will continue to either fulfill or fail in its role as continental bulwark, much the way secular (and poorly appreciated) Turkey holds the line for Europe. But in the end, Africa simply offers too many attractive traction points for the Salafi jihadists not to engage as the Middle East middle-ages.

Wild Card: Bush has already announced and will sign into existence sometime between now and the end of his administration a new regional U. S. combatant command: AFRICOM, or African Command. The placeholder, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, now sits in a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti. It was originally set up as a picket line to trap Al Qaeda operatives as they exited the Gulf for the dark continent. These are the guys who recently helped engineer Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia, and their command represents a serious experiment in combining the "Three D's": diplomacy, development, and defense. AFRICOM will be the future of the fight and the fight of the future.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This is really based off the slide in my briefing that deconstructs our efforts to lay a Big Bang on the region. The assumption is, eventually we succeed (time is simply on our side, so it’s all about not screwing up in the meantime). When we do, where does the fight go next? Logic says the radical Salafis will retreat to the northern half of Africa, so then the next question becomes, How do we make that continent as unattractive as possible to radical Islam over the coming years and decades?

How it holds up: This is basically the subject of my next piece for Esquire, which I’m structuring right now as I finish up interviews back here in the States, so I’m passing on this one.

Looking further ahead: Look no further than the July issue.

007 Defense Department: The New Coin of the Realm

Good News: The Army and Marine Corps continue to calibrate their forces and doctrine to adapt to the long-term challenges of counterinsurgency and a return to the frontier-taming functions last witnessed when our Army of the West really was just our Army in our West. With General George Casey coming back from Iraq to become Army chief of staff and General David Petraeus, chief architect of the U. S. military's new counterinsurgency manual, slotting in behind him in Baghdad, that much needed trend can only accelerate. Two other solid moves by Bush: 1) selecting former CIA chief Robert Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense (at this point in the fight, it's better that insider agency types run the Pentagon than the outsider neocons) and 2) sliding Admiral "Fox" Fallon over from Pacific Command to Central Command, bringing along his substantial diplomatic experience and stubbornly strategic vision. (He led a PACOM effort to bolster military-to-military ties with China despite disapproval from Rumsfeld's Pentagon.) With AFRICOM standing up in 2008, we're seeing some serious lessons being learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Failure is a great teacher.

Bad News: The acquisition overhang from Rumsfeld's transformation initiative remains large, meaning we've still got way too many absurdly complex and expensive weapon systems and platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft) in the pipeline. As ongoing, largely ground operations increasingly exhaust the Army and Marine Corps (and their respective reserve components) both in personnel and equipment, many tough funding cuts loom on the horizon. Rumsfeld never confronted those hard choices, preferring in the end to send his generals to the Hill to beg for more money and let defense contractors stuff emergency supplemental bills with their pet programs. Hopefully, intel-savvy Gates will recognize that a substantial resource shift must ensue, in effect curtailing the Pentagon's obsession with smart weapons and boosting its ability to crank out smarter soldiers. But much depends on how Gates and the Bush administration continue to interpret China's rise in military terms. If you keep hearing the word hedge, then expect the Pentagon to keep overstuffing the war-fighting force while starving the nation-building one, and that nasty habit matters plenty if it's your loved ones over in southwest Asia today.

Wild Card: A winner would be Congress somehow stepping up and delivering "Goldwater-Nichols II," or an omnibus restructuring legislation that fixes the broken interagency process (the real cause of our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan) just as the original fixed the dysfunctional interservice rivalries that plagued our military in the post-Vietnam era. Of course, the really bold step would be to create some Cabinet-level department that focuses on transition or failed states. We basically know how to deal with countries in war (Defense) and peace (State). What we lack, though, is a bureaucratic center of gravity that specializes in getting weak states from war to peace. Presidential candidates and a blue-ribbon commission or two are already raising this proposal, so it's out there, waiting for our next massive fuckup to bring it into being.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one is pretty straightforward analysis of institutional change, very much in line historically with the “Monks of War” piece from March of last year.

In general, I’m very optimistic about the scope and rate of change in the military’s adaptation to the Long War. Clearly, Iraq’s the great strain, but nobody’s talking about packing it all in after we wrap up Iraq, so there’s a clear consensus growing that the military needs to adapt itself comprehensively to this new security environment.

As recently as last Quadrennial Defense Review (2005), you were seeing a lot of idiotic articles claiming the Middle East is “just a blip” and the real long-term fight is with China, but the continuing crushing reality of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rising sense of Africa’s importance seems to have squelched that talk -- and that’s both realistic and good.

How it holds up: Both Fallon and Petraeus are such straight-talking, stand-up guys that no matter how the surge goes (and I expect it to go better at first but then become unsustainable over time), there won’t be any silly stab-in-the-back mentality among the military. Guys like Petraeus cut their teeth in the Balkans, and they’re simply too smart for that intellectual dodge, so again, I’m very confident that the learning curve flattens but we keep climbing it vigorously across the defense community.

Looking further ahead: The question of how Africa Command turns out is a big indicator of the military’s further strategic adjustment in this Long War. Again, I beg off of that one until the July issue.

Other than that, expect to hear a lot of very legitimate “train wreck” tales about personnel and some very hyperbolic ones on long-term force structure acquisition (most of the high-end stuff we’re buying today we could purchase in smaller future numbers and still easily remain the world’s strongest military without any loss in our ability to hedge on China).

In industry, watch how Lockheed Martin uses its new purchase, Pacific Architects & Engineering, to move into the “second half” or postwar/post-disaster world. PAE is the KBR of the State Department. Lock-Mart bought it to position itself better for the future, and when the world’s largest defense contractor makes a move like that, you pay attention.

008 War on Terror: The Legal Underpinnings

Good News: The International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 2002 as a permanent version of the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. As an international court of last resort, it's designed to put war criminals on trial for crimes against humanity. With 104 signatory states, the ICC possesses a well-credentialed system for adjudicating and imprisoning such bad actors. What it's missing is a mechanism for bringing them to justice. Oddly enough, the United States possesses a military force with global reach that routinely snatches these guys, only to hide them in secret prisons and put them on secret trial with secret evidence. The U. S. has kept the court at arm's length, fearing its power enough to negotiate bilateral immunity treaties with roughly a hundred states around the world where we anticipate the possibility of future military interventions (since we fear our soldiers and officials will be subject to war-crime accusations). These arrangements will retard the development of global case law. Eventually, Washington will come to its senses.

Bad News: The Bush administration's continuing Dirty Harry take on the Geneva Conventions destroys America's international reputation for the rule of law, providing us with a host of highly questionable practices in the name of "global war," such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the holding of ghost detainees who disappear into the paperwork, the ordering of "extraordinary renditions," by which suspects are deposited with allies who have long histories of torture, and the extraction of confessions by methods right out of the Salem witch trials. If our own Supreme Court can't stomach much of this, how can we expect to win any hearts and minds abroad by mimicking the human-rights abuses of the very same authoritarian regimes (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Egypt) targeted by our lawless enemies, the Salafi jihadists?

Wild Card: Abu Ghraib didn't do it. Gitmo hasn't done it. Short of killing fields being dug up, it's hard to imagine what would dramatically alter the playing field as seen by the Bush-Cheney team. Bush the Decider, after all, basically blew off both the November election and the Iraq Study Group, so it would seem he's not one to be swayed by much when his famous gut tells him otherwise. Our best hope would seem to be for our Supreme Court to step up more aggressively over time -- maybe even before Oslo starts handing out Nobel prizes to the whistle-blowers.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one is my favorite segment, very much an extension of the “Dirty Harry” piece I wrote for Wired way back when (Oops! Shouldn’t have mentioned that!). It’s such an obvious and clear-headed point that you’d think it wouldn’t need to be stated in print, and yet it’s so great to do just that and make clear that America needs to rejoin the world on this contentious subject.

How it holds up: No problems here. We’re never going to be able to talk ourselves out of this pathway of realigning our rule set on terror with some larger, globally-accepted rule set like that being forged by the International Criminal Court, because all the secret trials and stuff will continue to embarrass ourselves no matter how they turn out.

Looking further ahead: This one is such a no-brainer for a new president, that I assume almost any of the front-runners could handle it (aren’t they all lawyers?).

No big whoop for anybody who doesn’t gag on the word “multilateral.”

 

009 Afghanipakistan: The Ungovernable

Good News: The Karzai regime muddles along, keeping the bulk of Afghanistan reasonably stable while enabling legitimate economic growth in those pockets not controlled by the druggies. The Musharraf regime does one better in Pakistan, which is growing at a solid clip and finally starting to attract foreign direct investment that underscores its strategic location as connector between the energy-rich southwest-central Asia and the energy-hungry south and east Asia. When you're talking about the parts of both countries that are effectively governed by the center, either situation is arguably described as a slowly modernizing "success story" in the Long War. Hey, when Iraq defines the floor, these two mark -- by comparison -- the ceiling.

Bad News: The problem is, of course, that neither capital effectively controls the hinterlands, which overlap precipitously along their shared, mountainous border. There the poppy trade booms, prestate tribalism rules, and the Taliban are back in the business of state-sponsored terror, thanks in no small part to a de facto peace treaty with Musharraf's regime. The Pashtun tribes of northwest Pakistan have been ungovernable for as long as history records. While outsiders can effectively ally with them against perceived common enemies, as America did against the Soviets in Afghanistan, none have effectively conquered them. And yet the Taliban are carving out a ministate within these lands, employing their usual brutal techniques. The result is, once again, a secure sanctuary for Al Qaeda's global leadership (to include Osama bin Laden) and a training ground for motivated jihadists.

Wild Card: The next 9/11-like attack on American soil -- especially if WMD are involved -- could well trigger the gravest consequences for the Taliban's state-within-a-state. Americans might just countenance a limited nuclear strike in an eye-for-an-eye moment of unleashed fury and frustration. Unthinkable? We did it to Japan under far cooler circumstances but for similar reasons -- namely, a full-scale invasion seemed prohibitively costly in human life. Is nuking Afghanistan advisable? No, nuking is always a bad idea. But rubble, as they say, makes no trouble, and bombing them back to the Stone Age would be a very short trip.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one also leverages itself off a previous piece I wrote for my syndicated weekly column, although I expanded the logic considerably with recent intelligence reports.

This segment was hard to keep balanced in that the good news ain’t so good and the bad news could get awfully bad if the right lucky strike gets pulled off.

How it holds up: Everything on this one tracks nicely.

Looking further ahead: This one scares me the most for all the obvious reasons.

 

010 China: The Slated Near-Peer

Good News: China's torrid growth continues, despite all predictions that it must soon end lest it tear the country apart through some combination of the horrific environmental disasters just unfolding, a financial panic caused by a still-rickety banking system, or -- Mao forbid! -- political unrest among the masses of rural peasants left behind in abject poverty. So long as the foreign direct investment flows (China's the number-one target in the world outside the West) and export volume rises, the Chinese Communist Party, which has staked its regime legitimacy almost entirely on raising income levels, continues to pull off the seemingly impossible: creating a world-class domestic market while whittling down the world's largest state sector. How hard is that? Bill Clinton created more than twenty million new jobs in America across his eight years as president. China's leaders need to generate almost the same number of new jobs every year to keep this juggernaut moving forward.

Bad News: China's military buildup is real, although America's slated to outspend it by roughly $10 trillion over the next two decades, so our lead seems pretty safe. What's so scary right now about China's strategic relationship with the United States, or lack thereof, is that our economic interdependence is very real and rapidly expanding while our security ties remain embryonic at best and highly suspicious at worst. Even if we get past North Korea, the Taiwan situation still divides us strategically, and as China increasingly penetrates the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America with its rather unprincipled investment strategies, opportunities for conflict with U. S. security interests will abound. Given the right breakdown of cooperation over Iran (or failure to get any in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela -- you name it), wecould be looking at a resumption of cold-war binary thinking by which Washington hawks calculate every international loss (or even slight) as China's zero-sum gain. Factor in a Democratic-led Congress eager to take on the threat of "cheap Chinese labor" and their underappreciated currency, and what should be globalization's strongest bilateral relationship could easily turn into its worst -- even the cause for its demise.

Wild Card: You'll get the same answer from Wall Street CEOs and White House staffers: Nobody wants to see a financial meltdown triggered inside China, because nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has any idea how bad that could get for the global economy as a whole. Eventually, something has to give in China's still-white-hot economy, so the question really isn't Can a financial panic happen in China? but rather How will America handle it when it does?

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: If you read my blog, you know I write about China constantly, so this one was easy to pen. It reads like a greatest-hits list of statements from my current brief on global affairs, so it’s very much my mainstream thinking.

How it holds up: Bush continues to be very reasonable and moderate on China, and for that I thank him. Unlike Clinton, Bush has plenty of China hawks to parry, and he’s remained vigilant on that subject -- probably his greatest foreign policy achievement.

Looking further ahead: The big thing on China that I always mention is the swap-out of their leadership from the 4th to 5th generations, a shift that will dramatically increase our potential cooperation with China.

Actually, I have a piece sitting with Esquire right now on this subject, so I’m hoping to have another major-league swing at this later in the year.

011 North Korea: the Persistent Outlier

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in maintaining a fairly coherent unity of effort with Russia, Japan, China, and South Korea, in that we're all still talking and cooperating and worrying about the same things. Admittedly, we've not accomplished much vis-a-vis Kim Jong Il's regime (the recent deal smells of a Clinton-like "freeze," with the truly hard details -- like the actual bombs -- left to the future), but the dialogue itself is laying the groundwork for a post-Kim effort to construct an East Asia NATO-like security architecture that cements China's role as the Germany of Asia and ends fears of emerging security rivalries with offshore Japan. (Asia's never enjoyed a stable peace when both China and Japan were powerful.) While Kim's successfully blackmailed us in the past on nukes, his kleptocratic regime's reliance on self-financing through criminal activities does leave it vulnerable to the sort of stringent financial sanctions recently imposed by the U. S. That tactic begins to work when Chinese banks, more interested in maintaining their international credit ratings, start choosing transparency over illicit dealings with Pyongyang. Talk Tokyo and Beijing into a naval blockade and we may set an endgame in motion.

Bad News: The recent Bush deal is a bad deal that should give no one comfort, as it is unlikely to force Kim into giving up his nukes (not when the blackmailing still works for aid), and then there's the unacknowledged second nuclear program that Pyongyang bought from Pakistan years back. We haven't even begun the negotiations on that one yet. Unlike the years-in-the-making danger of a nuclear Iran, Kim's got the necessary missile technology in hand, and he tested his first crude nuke last October. Remembering East Germany's fate, Kim confronts the high likelihood of not just near-term attempts at regime change but the inevitable liquidation of his entire nation as the wrong half of the last divided-state situation to linger beyond the cold war. Despite Ahmadinejad's fiery threats, Iran's mullahs have plenty to live for, while Kim's got everything to lose, making his long-demonstrated siege mentality and willingness to sacrifice millions of his own people to preserve his rule two crucial indicators of his undeterrability. The problem with the slow squeeze we're pursuing is that eventually it'll trigger some reckless act from Kim, which in turn sets in motion the following scary scenario: South Korean and U. S. forces pouring in from the south and sea, Chinese forces entering from the north to prevent refugee flows, and somewhere in that small chaotic space, the world's fourth-largest military armed with some unknown number of nuclear devices and a Gotterdämmerung-inducing ideology of racial superiority. No wonder Beijing's not so psyched to get it on.

Wild Card: Beijing's clearly in the driver's seat on this one, which makes the government's not-so-quiet examination of Ceausescu's rapid fall in Romania in late 1989 (hint: Moscow's KGB gave him a push) all the more telling. China's leaders are definitely exploring an exit strategy on this one, the timing of which couldn't be more crucial for the future of Sino-American relations.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one’s based largely on conversations I’ve had with the Chinese during two trips last year to Beijing. I remain consistent on the subject: I don’t think Beijing’s leaders can turn Kim into a “mini-me Deng Xiaoping,” so either they get rid of him or they risk a far riskier conflict scenario that puts them at great danger of miscalculation with the U.S.

How it holds up: Chris Hill is one of those career diplomats who often rise up to become second-tier superstars at the end of an administration -- you know, when all the principles get bored with the details of foreign policy. He’s done a magnificent job of simply keeping the whole thing moving, even as the current envisioned outcome is totally Clintonian.

Looking further ahead: In my observation, both South Korea and China are preparing fairly realistically in military terms for North Korea’s collapse, so I’m optimistic that when the times comes it’ll go okay.

012 The White House: The Bush Imperative

Good News: There's about twenty months left in W.'s presidency and his heart's one helluva lot stronger than Cheney's. The Iraq tie-down pretty much means Bush can't start any more wars anywhere else, despite all the tough talk. Much like Jimmy Carter near the end, Bush seems wholly engulfed by the Gulf, but since nobody other than that pesky Hugo Chávez seems intent on pressing our disadvantage, that's probably a good thing. Although this administration has been willfully oblivious to its gargantuan federal deficits up to now (what is it about Republican administrations?), Bush has somewhat cynically found religion on the subject recently, declaring his new goal of eliminating those deficits somewhere around the end of his successor's first term. Talk about passing the buck! Then again, if Bush's surge strategy in Iraq creates even the slightest semblance of job-not-too-horrendously-done and allows for our troops' effective withdrawal from combat duty there by January 2009, I doubt we'd hear any complaints from the new resident at 1600.

Bad News: Condoleezza Rice is proving to be an even weaker secretary of state than Colin Powell, although at least she talks out of only one side of her mouth. Then again, since Rice's diplomacy consists solely of delivering White House talking points the world over, that is a mean trick. All dissing aside, the real problem with American diplomacy under Bush (if you can call it diplomacy) is that Dick Cheney has been in charge of it all along, and now that ¸ber-ally Don Rumsfeld is gone at Defense, we won't even see its muscular version (the Bush Doctrine) employed anymore, leaving us with basically no foreign policy whatsoever. The big problem with this state of affairs is that Bush's postpresidency has started earlier in his second term than any leader since Richard Nixon, leaving America's global leadership adrift at a rather fluid moment in history. I'm not just talking the Long War but the other 95 percent of reality that actually makes the world go round. With Tony Blair leaving office in the UK, there's virtually no adult supervision left anywhere, which is sad because, with a global economy humming as nice as this one is, the world could really take advantage of some visionary leadership right now to tackle a host of compelling global challenges like AIDS, global warming, childhood diseases -- you know, the whole Two Bills/Bono agenda!

Wild Card: Bush has said repeatedly that he's on a personal mission to deny Iran nuclear weapons, and Cheney wants nothing more than to go down in history as the man who restored power to the American presidency. Put those two scary dynamics together and you've got the mother of all October surprises come 2008. Washington is naturally all abuzz with this prospect, causing Bush to deny publicly any plans for war. But as we've learned with this administration, it's Deny, deny, deny, and then strike! If and when Bush pulls that trigger, watch the Democratic Congress start impeachment proceedings. That'll make it two-for-two with Boomer presidents, but that only makes sense for a generation who came of age with Watergate.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Clearly, I tee off on Rice here, but I honestly think she deserves it. She is the classic example of the Peter Principle whereby people get promoted beyond their skills. As the consummate protégé, she’s just not genetically cut out to be a serious leader and Bush’s second term suffers dramatically as a result (though not Cheney’s ...).

Mark set this one up as the “great ending” prior to the jump page. It’s the climax of the piece, in many ways.

How it holds up: Well, since this one lays out the fear that’s animated my thinking on Bush and Cheney for quite some time now (the planned inevitable strike on Iran somewhere near the end off the second term), there was never any danger of it being up-staged in the meantime, unless you believe those rumors that the Bush White House offered a variety of strike packages to Blair WRT the hostage mini-crisis.

Looking further ahead: I do honestly feel that if people who care about this subject don’t continue to attack this notion, we seriously risk its unfolding. Bush may get nostalgic near the end, but Cheney will not.

013 The Rising East: The Degree of Compliance

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in drawing both Russia and China into multilateral security discussions on Iran and North Korea, and even when both nations routinely water down our proposed responses, they're staying in the conversation, offering their own helpful ideas (like Moscow's proposal to outsource Iran's uranium enrichment) and generally becoming more comfortable coordinating security policies with the West's great powers on issues of shared concern. It may not sound like much, but such routine is what builds up relationships over the long haul. As Washington's relatively successful courtship of rising India has shown, it's the small gestures that matter most, like the United States finally acknowledging New Delhi's standing as a nuclear power. With India and China, we're looking at two big body shops -- as in, million-man-plus armies -- that logically should someday soon be enlisted for long-term cooperative peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Africa, where both nations currently deploy tens of thousands of nationals in market-making commercial and developmental activities. You want to do stuff on the cheap? Well, you better find cheap labor.

Bad News: Each of the big players suffers from strategic myopia, meaning none are currently capable of punching their weight internationally at America's side. With Russia, it's their obsession with their so-called near abroad (the Caucasus and Central Asia) and Putin's aggressive push to renationalize the commanding heights of Russia's new economy -- namely, the energy sector. The Chinese, despite their ballooning reliance on distant foreign energy sources, still act as though their entire strategic environment boils down to the Taiwan Strait. Ditto for India and Kashmir. South Korea's ready to climb on Oprah's couch over its queer embrace of its long-lost sibling to the north, but don't expect it to climb out of any foxholes anytime soon on our behalf. Toss in glass-jaw Japan and there's not really anybody in the East we can count on in a tight spot.

Wild Card: The truly intriguing wild cards are local disasters that provide the U. S. military the pretext for drawing out these rising states' militaries in cooperative humanitarian responses, the way the 2004 Christmas tsunamis helped the Pentagon reestablish military-to-military ties with Indonesia (as well as triggering the internal solution of Indonesia's Aceh secessionist movement). If there's going to be a global-warming tipping-point disaster, it'll probably unfold in the East Asian littoral.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Pretty basic stuff. Just couldn’t do a tour of the world and not address India and Russia on some strategic level.

How it holds up: The “bad news” stuff is my most depressing take on the subject, because -- of course -- I advocate aggressive partnering with these nations. But the truth is, there will be a lot of hand-holding and strategic mentoring between here and getting these new pillars to the altar on such alliances. Each day we see plenty of evidence that all of these players are punching below their weight internationally on military affairs, and yet each sees their global economic profile continue to blossom.

Looking further ahead: We desperately need a visionary on this subject in the White House in 2009. I’d rule out McCain and Edwards and Thompson, but Clinton, Obama, Giuliani and Romney could all make it happen. We have simply got to abandon this Bush habit of casually adding new enemies while adding no new allies.

014 The Aging West: The State of Alliance

Good News: Recent elections and those looming on the horizon are not producing a crop of anti-American leaders among our traditional allies, which is extraordinarily generous on their part given the unprecedented anti-Americanism that's pervaded the vast majority of the world across the Bush administration. With France and the UK in transition, Germany's Angela Merkel has emerged as Europe's most powerful female leader since Margaret Thatcher, to whom the "iron Frau" is most commonly compared. Most important for America, Merkel is intent on keeping the transatlantic relationship strong and bolstering the role of NATO as its preeminent security structure. With Shinzo Abe taking the reins in economically resurgent Japan and pushing for expanded ties with NATO, we're seeing the old West as a whole assume a more forward-leaning security posture. Given the UN's enduring weakness, NATO's imprimatur is as close as America can get to approval by the international community for most overseas military interventions, with our Balkan missions serving as the best model to date.

Bad News: Though NATO is in Afghanistan, the many operational limitations imposed by individual members make its employment consistently suboptimal, and it has done little to bolster U. S. troop efforts to tame the Taliban's growing influence in the south. As for Iraq, the Middle East, much like all of Africa, simply remains a bridge too far for this collection of former colonial powers who aren't much interested in any lengthy return engagements (although the French occasionally pop up in Africa now and then). Other than the Brits (who've already opted out of Bush's surge strategy in Iraq), it is hard to imagine NATO countries taking serious numbers of casualties anywhere outside of Europe (okay, the French and Italian effort in south Lebanon has some merit), not with the EU's growing unease over its "absorption capacity" of new eastern members and popular fears of the invasive species known as Homo Islamicus. In a Long War with a high body requirement, it's unrealistic for America to assume that its traditional military allies, all of whom are demographically moribund, will suffice for the quagmire-like interventions that lie ahead.

Wild Card: The globalization wormhole that connects the United Kingdom to Pakistan features substantial two-way traffic whose upshot is a steady stream of radicalized expats landing in British working-class neighborhoods on a daily basis. The West's "stargate" on this, Britain's world-class internal security service, MI5, cannot possibly uncover every plot, so if that lucky strike hits the right target at the right time, our European friends could suddenly veer into a Children of Men-like extreme-lockdown scenario.

COMMENTARY TRACK: 

Deconstruction: My ode to Mark Steyn, God forgive him. 

How it holds up: Since I ask nothing of the Europeans, they cannot disappoint me, now can they?

Still, it’s sad to contemplate less utility over time in this alliance, because so many of these officers are really quite exceptional and can teach us a lot. But maybe that’s the way to look at it: not many bodies but plenty of good mentors.

Looking further ahead: Actually, I take back what I said on Afghanipakistan, because this scenario is the one I truly think is inevitable, despite the new James Bond. 

015 All the Rest: Other Complications

Good News: Despite all the ominous news, the developing world is not awash in civil strife. Africa, for example, was suffering from sixteen major civil or cross-border conflicts half a decade ago but endures only a half dozen today. Thanks to the commodities boom, infrastructure development there has shifted from being a supply-push aid effort led by the West to a demand-pull construction effort led by the East. In Latin America, the only serious insurgency still operating is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the dozen recent elections there produced far more market-friendly leaders than Chávez-like populists. East Asia's relatively quiet, with nasty flare-ups in Sri Lanka and East Timor, and the dominant economic trends there continue to be rapid marketization and long-term integration with China, globalization's premier final assembler of manufactured goods. Best of all, the current oil boom has triggered voluminous "east-east" capital flows, whereby Arab energy producers direct their surplus capital to Asia's infrastructure build-out while Asia's high savings rates are beginning to flow into the Gulf's emerging financial hubs, in addition to its energy sector. 

Bad News: The West's stubborn holdout on its agricultural subsidies keeps the WTO's Doha Round from doing what it should to jump-start agricultural markets in developing economies. While China's doing plenty to create infrastructure in many resource-rich states, it's also replicating the profile that European colonial powers once employed: trading low-cost manufactures for even lower-end commodities. Net result? Local producers and small manufacturers tend to be crowded out by China's Wal-Mart-like impact. No wonder rising economic nationalism in Latin America, for example, is increasingly directed at China instead of just the usual culprits in the West.

Wild Card: Anything that torpedoes China's economic juggernaut would have a huge impact throughout the developing world, so probably the nastiest wild card to cue up would be the SARS/avian-flu-after-next that both derails Asian economies while overwhelming the meager public-health capacities of developing economies.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Of all the titles, this one I regret the most, because, truth be told, there are very few complications out there.

Actually, come to think of it, this is the one title Warren changed! The original was, “the complicating variance” (to rhyme with “alliance” and “compliance”).

Of all the segments, this is the one I owe the most to Hank in terms of his inputs and guidance.

How it holds up: Just fine. Again, the world’s much quieter and far more peaceful than people realize. In historical terms, we’ve never had it so good. 

Looking further ahead: It’s the most inevitable scenario (something bad this way comes to China’s financial markets), but after the stock bubble burst in the Middle East and Thailand’s currency scare passed with no real after-effect, I’m getting much more optimistic on this score.

016 The Wildest Card: 2008

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Let me submit that we're living through the final months of the hedgehog presidency of one George W. Bush, whose greatest failure has been his lack of strategic imagination.

Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign gears up, let me presume to offer this: avoid hedgehogs. Don't listen to candidates who tell you this whole election boils down to one thing and one thing alone. We need a president with more than one answer to every question, one whose tool kit is as diverse as his -- or her -- ideology is flexible. We need a deal maker, a compromiser, a closer. We need someone able to finish what others cannot and start that which others dare not.

We need a leader who knows many things, because we've had quite enough of those who know only one big thing.

COMMENTARY TRACK: 

Deconstruction: Sharp readers will recognize this as a lift from a column I wrote on Bush months ago. No worries, as I retain copyright. 

Honestly, I threw in these paras to end the piece because I couldn’t think of any better way to terminate the first draft and the Super Bowl kickoff was just minutes away and I figured Mark would toss it and make me write something new.

How it holds up: Mark didn’t toss it because it remains three of the coolest paras I’ve ever written in terms of soaring political prose.

Looking further ahead: So far I’ve mixed it up with representatives/operatives of two Dem candidates (Clinton distantly, Obama once-removed) and two GOP guys (Brownback F2F twice on Iran and a credible candidate to be named later -- after I sit down with him this Friday and give him the full-up brief). This last possibility intrigues me most, because word is, he really loved Pentagon’s New Map.

My wife, as always, worries I’m turning Republican. I keep telling her the Dems won’t have me!

But on some level, I say, “F -- k ‘em all!’ I can’t wait on these people to get elected. With the Bush post-presidency so moribund, I decided to pursue my own personal foreign policy a while back and it’s going great so far.

I suggest you do the same...

Blast from my past: "The 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century" (2008)

 

The 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century

Deng Xiaoping: Chinese Communist leader, creator of modern China, dead

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, October 2008, p. 146. 

The 21st century will not belong to one region, much less one superpower. It will belong to the entire planet — a world made interdependent for the first time in human history. What drives all that connectivity is demand for a better life, and the one man most responsible for unleashing all that desire was Deng Xiaoping. You want to know why the price of just about everything in your world seems set by China? He is the guy to blame.

Five simple words said to have been spoken by Deng in 1979 got this party started: "To get rich is glorious." America might have gotten a big head start — 11 score and 12 years ago — with its unbridled "pursuit of happiness," but Deng's legendary formulation is how the rest of humanity will actually catch up. Between these two historic phrases, the world spent untold blood and treasure trying to come up with the magic formula for national economic success. But when China cast its vote for wealth creation through individual empowerment, all such history — as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote — essentially ended.

Because of Deng, globalization is no longer a choice, but a condition. Mikhail Gorbachev, celebrated for ending the cold war, closed the door on the 20th century through his miscalculations. By pursuing political reform before economic reform, he inadvertently dissolved the Soviet empire. Deng chose wisely, pursuing economic reform before political liberalization, and, in the farthest-reaching act of the 20th century, catapulted America's most precious gift to humanity — our American system-cum-globalization — into worldwide majority status.

None of this was preordained.

Deng Xiaoping survived the Long March, World War II, China's civil war, and multiple attempts by Mao Tse-tung himself to destroy him during the Cultural Revolution.

But when he survived Mao and achieved power in the early 1980s, Deng did the unthinkable: He dismantled Mao's dysfunctional socialist model, repudiating Marx without having to say so.

And now, the more Deng's system evolves, the more his legacy resembles that of Alexander Hamilton, a quintessentially 18th-century man whose greatest influence was felt in the 19th century with America's stunning rise.

Of course, to some, Deng Xiaoping will always remain the butcher of Tiananmen, but frankly, that's giving in to the fallacy that political freedom comes before economic freedom, when history says otherwise. By setting China on its long march up Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Deng transformed America's liberal trade order into a truly global phenomenon, making him the closest thing the world has to a "father of globalization."

Hassan Nasrallah:  Leader of Hezbollah, 48 * Lebanon

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, October 2008, p. 130. 

Most terrorist movements go one of two ways: They either fall apart after the top leaders are captured or killed, or they are successfully drawn into the political process and ultimately assimilated by the ruling political forces. Hezbollah's rise within Lebanon increasingly looks like the latter, except it is Lebanon's splintered political system that is being assimilated into Hezbollah's radical Islamic agenda rather than the other way around. Now in control of close to a dozen ministries and capable of forcing the installation of its preferred president (a feat Hezbollah pulled off this summer), this Shiite militia -- backed extensively by Iran -- has become Lebanon's de facto ruling party.

Forty-eight-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's charismatic secretary-general since 1992, is part Yasir Arafat (he earned his stripes as a guerrilla commander fighting Israel's occupation in the 1980s) and part Ayatollah Khomeini (then spent years abroad burnishing his meager religious street cred and honing his skill for mob-igniting fiery sermons). And, oh, part Huey Long, because he has proved that he can deliver services to a desperate people that the government couldn't or wouldn't. Israel long ago decided that it can't live with him (attempting to assassinate him just like his predecessor) but eventually may come to the conclusion -- along with Washington -- that it can't live without him.

Nasrallah, who currently holds no public office, wants to rule Lebanon openly, but with Shiites constituting roughly a third of the population, his only route to Supreme Leadership replicates Iran's long-standing strategy of emphasizing a staunchly anti-Israeli/U. S. front. In this quest, Nasrallah has succeeded brilliantly, presiding over both Israel's embarrassing withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and its failed military effort to reduce Hezbollah's southern state-within-a-state in the summer of 2006, yielding a 34-day war that shell-shocked Beirut's fragile ruling coalition, not to mention the world.

With Israel staring at two unthinkable long-term scenarios (South African-style apartheid rule over a soon-to-be majority Muslim population in Palestine and a nuclear Iran), the diplomatic race may soon be on to capture Nasrallah's support for the mythical two-state solution in exchange for Western acceptance of Hezbollah's achievement of clear rule in Lebanon. In effect, banking on the notion that Nasrallah is more a power-hungry nationalist than he is Tehran's ideological puppet.

The United States helped turbocharge the Middle East's ongoing Shiite revival by clumsily creating the first modern Arab Shiite-dominated state in post-Saddam Iraq. In a "one man, one vote" world, that means learning to live with the likes -- and dislikes -- of Hassan Nasrallah.

Meghan O'Sullivan:  Former national-security advisor; foreign-policy realist, 39 * Cambridge, Massachusetts

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, October 2008, p. 146. 

She has--by the ripe old age of 39--racked up more history-making national-security policy stints than anyone under 40 you can name. Now safely ensconced at Harvard after surviving genuine dangers early on in Baghdad (the "mistakes were made," tragically incompetent first year) and then braving Washington's hostile political climate during George Bush's worst years in this long war (she co-led the White House review that birthed the surge strategy), she is both celebrated and vilified, but clearly credentialed.

Neither ideologue nor naive, O'Sullivan is that most annoying of D. C. creatures--the pragmatic centrist, whose biggest handicaps seem to be her good looks (she once modeled) and her insistence on taking the long-term view. Oh, and she's nuanced, arguing for things like engaging Iran and avoiding official labels like "rogue regimes," two views that still render her suspect among the neocons.

Not surprisingly, both O'Sullivan's admirers and detractors can only see her moving up the food chain in coming years. Good indicator? General David Petraeus asked the White House to send her back to Baghdad in the summer of 2007. The question "going forward" (which is her pet phrase, revealing a durable optimism that endeared her to Bush) isn't, Was she there for the screwups? Because she was there for the screwups. The question history will ask is, Was she there for the repair? Because that's when her leadership potential began to emerge. "Bush-bot" to some, O'Sullivan can only rise in stature as Iraq heads into the late innings, continuing to stabilize.

Blast from my past: "Old Man in a Hurry" (2005)

Old Man in a Hurry

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, "10 Men" issue (July 2005)

The inside story of how Donald H. Rumsfeld transformed the Pentagon, in which we learn about wire-brushing, deep diving, and a secret society called the Slurg

The secretary of defense's suite of offices in the Pentagon is on the third deck, outermost, or E-ring of the five-sided building, in the wedge between corridors eight and nine. It's one of the older wedges, on the far side of where the new ones are to be found or are being renovated, and on the opposite side of the building, one thousand feet away, from the section that was destroyed on September 11, 2001.

Room 3-E-880 overlooks the Potomac in the direction of the White House and Capitol, but the famous skyline is hard to recognize on a rainy afternoon through the queer greenish tinting that covers all the windows here. You're tempted to adjust the picture on your screen, but this special coating repels electronic surveillance and denies enemy spies a view inside the Building.

The secretary's inner sanctum is a threshold so secure that you have to surrender your cell phone and BlackBerry to cross over. SecDef's office is classified a SCIF, meaning a sensitive compartmented information facility, or what people in the business call a "vault." Being inside a SCIF means you can engage in the most classified of conversations without fear, and when you leave, the Maxwell Smart doors close heavily behind you.

It is from this suite of rooms that Rumsfeld has become one of the most loathed and revered men in the world. The man is too impatient, too damned arrogant, too beyond politics, and just too stubborn for his own good. He is the famously combative, two-time SecDef (both youngest and oldest ever) who chews up and spits out experienced reporters in what are easily the most skillfully performed press conferences since John Kennedy walked the earth. He has brilliantly executed a couple of wars, and badly botched a peace. Let us stipulate all these truths just to move the conversation along.

But something else has been going on in this office, and it's nothing short of the most profound transformation of the U. S. military since World War II--a historic process that will, paradoxically, yield a force Americans haven't seen since our frontier days. The United States had one Defense Department on January 20, 2001, and it will have a very different one by January 20, 2009. Donald H. Rumsfeld, thirteenth and twenty-first secretary of defense, is the reason why.

He is known to his personal aides and longtime colleagues as a "deep diver." Confront him with a tough new bureaucratic nut to crack and he goes deep--waaaay down--on the subject until he feels he gets it sufficiently to assemble the right smart people to handle the job. It doesn't matter how much time he appears to be wasting on the process; he simply doesn't move ahead until he's got the picture in his head of what "this thing"--whatever it is--is really all about. He will keep the U. S. military's most powerful men sitting around a table for however long it takes for that to happen.

Rumsfeld's first deep dive of his second tour as secretary of defense started on the Sunday after the Saturday he was sworn in, January 21, 2001, at a meeting he called of his most trusted advisors, all of whom he had known for years, some since he was a congressman from Chicago in the 1960s, one from college fifty years before. The meeting took place in room 3-E-880, and for several participants, it was the first time they'd been together again in that vaunted space since January 1977, in the last days of the Ford administration.

Rumsfeld had been reassembling his kitchen cabinet since the day the president called him at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in late December and offered him the job. He said, Thank you, Mr. President-Elect, and immediately called Marty Hoffman, who had been his secretary of the Army the first time around and who also has a place in Taos. Marty was a classmate at Princeton and is one of Rumsfeld's best friends. "Can you bring together some of the people who helped and worked with me the first time around?" he asked Hoffman.

"Defense transformation" was the train already leaving the station by the time Rumsfeld was sworn in on January 20, 2001. Trapped in cold-war thinking and armed with contingency plans that had not been reviewed for years, sometimes decades, the Pentagon spent the 1990s scrambling from one overseas crisis intervention to another, in the process piling up mountains of "supplementals," or ad hoc requests for additional funding from Congress to cover unexpected operations. As one of Rumsfeld's senior aides, Pete Geren, told me in 2002, "When your 'crisis response' lasts several thousand days, it stops being a crisis and starts being a feature of your strategic landscape."

So transformation was a "mature debate," as they say in the Building, but for Rumsfeld it was too far tilted in the direction of high-tech weaponry rather than changes in "tactics, techniques, and procedures," which is a favorite military phrase of his. Because Rumsfeld was identified with space and missile defense from the time in the 1990s he spent chairing congressional commissions, everyone thought his definition of transformation would be tech heavy, but it hasn't turned out that way.

To change the culture of the Pentagon, he'd start with people, not technology. He knew that achieving any kind of meaningful transformation was going to be damn near impossible without new people, given the entrenched interests in the Building and the old ways of thinking. For new thinking, Rumsfeld sought out old friends.

In addition to Marty Hoffman, there was Tom Korologos, the grand old man of Washington politics, who had managed his confirmation in 1975 and would do the same this time, too; Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue in the room, who would come on as his deputy; Steve Cambone from National Defense University, who was the new boy, having met Rumsfeld in the 1990s while working on the Rumsfeld-led Space Commission and Missile Defense Commission; Bill Schneider, Rumsfeld's favorite gray eminence, who would later become chairman of the Defense Science Board; and Ray DuBois, who had met young Congressman Rumsfeld in 1967 when he was working as an intern to Chuck Percy, the senator from Illinois, and then went with him to the Pentagon. He would become "mayor" of the Pentagon this time around.

"I was all of twenty-one when we met," says DuBois, "and I told friends at the time that I had met this guy named Rumsfeld who had been captain of the wrestling team at Princeton. I said, 'He's a young man in a hurry.' So I worked for a young man in a hurry when he was forty-three years old and became secretary of defense, and now I'm working for an old man in a hurry. Same guy, different age, same impatience, still in a hurry."

There was great excitement around the table. "Can you believe it? Can you believe we're all back?" was the feeling. And there was a growing sense of the enormous task that lay ahead.

Rumsfeld, at the head of the long table, ran the meeting himself, but in his typically indirect way; clearly he had an agenda, but he did not reveal it, instead wanting to tease ideas out of the assembled brains. Immediately clear was that this was not a meeting about imminent threats or weapons systems but rather a wholesale reform of the "business side" of the Pentagon. By this time, Rumsfeld had spent two decades as a CEO, at G. D. Searle & Co., General Instrument Corporation, and Gilead Sciences, and he had become a corporate technician, a philosopher of that kind of stuff, and if he had an abiding ideology it was efficiency.

Rumsfeld tossed out a series of strategic questions, trying to define the job ahead. "What should be the main transformation initiatives in my tenure?" he asked. Once they agreed on what those changes would be, Rumsfeld was intent on generating an immediate sense of momentum and inevitability. He continued. "Do we have the right projects in the pipeline? Do we have the right number of troops? I've read the reports, so I know that we have too much infrastructure. Do we need to shut down bases?" He turned to Wolfowitz. "What issues in the world do we want to address and shape from the start?"

The first goal would be reshaping Rumsfeld's massive office (the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or OSD) and recasting its "civil-military" relationship with the Joint Staff and all four military departments, something that had been impossible during the cold war but was imperative now to adapt the Pentagon to the changed world. The U. S. military has been struggling to build a single integrated force out of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines ever since the Berlin Wall came down. Why make the effort? Why change the winning hand? Because these forces were constructed to meet old threats, not new ones, and the United States no longer needed and could no longer afford four militaries, and the world couldn't afford an America that was not prepared to fight future wars effectively. The main impediments to this idea would be the services themselves, dominated as each was by senior officers who had risen to the top by protecting their branch's slice of the pie from the "sister services" and, by doing so, had perpetuated such belt-and-suspender traditions as each service sporting its own particular brands of aircraft. Why? Apparently, a single plane wouldn't do--even for the "joint force," in which all services allegedly fought side by side in a seamless fashion.

To achieve integration, Rumsfeld announced that they would push for another BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure Commission), arguing that they must succeed where secretaries William Perry and Bill Cohen had failed under Clinton.

The underlying assumption to all at the table was that the dimensions of the job were such that there was simply no way that full implementation could be reached before a second term. One day after a new president had been sworn in, coming into office with the shakiest of mandates, Rumsfeld was talking about an eight-year plan.

And transformation was born.

Just as quickly, it almost died.

Rumsfeld pops out of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand with a big, welcoming smile on his face, employing the enthusiastic, familiar tone one associates with longtime acquaintances. "Hey, how are ya? Nice to see ya!" I'm surprised by how short he is, as I can look right over his head.

In advance of this meeting, I have talked to three joint chiefs (Navy, Air Force, Army), two undersecretaries (policy and intel), Rumsfeld's chief of staff, Larry Di Rita, aka "Heavy D," who is also SecDef's press secretary, and others close to Rumsfeld, including Ray DuBois, the mayor of the Pentagon. It is a testament to his penchant for preparation that Rumsfeld reviewed the transcripts of all these interviews beforehand.

With the blinds drawn, I can't tell if it's day or night as I enter an office that could pass for a small ballroom. Like the man, the room has a definite old-school feel about it--a massive wooden desk smack-dab in the middle, lots of rugged Remington-style bronze statues of Indians and buffalo, a bronze bust of Winston Churchill. This is a room you smoke cigars in and decide the fate of the free world.

We sit down at a long table on the far side of the room. He's wearing a zippered fleece vest over his shirt and tie, Mr. Rogers style, and he is very at ease. He asks several questions that he already knows the answers to, testing and probing, as is his way. When he speaks, his hands are in constant motion, tearing apart and rearranging invisible things, physically grappling with the subject at hand. There's a lot to grapple with these days.

Rumsfeld is warming to the topic of how a transformed military looks and feels on the battlefield.

"One of our folks made a comment the other day, and I called him on it and said, 'You said you have 20 percent of something you need,' and he said, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'You have 100 percent of what you have, and you've decided you need something else.' And he said, 'That's right.' And I said, 'Well, when did you decide that?' and he said, 'Last week.' And I said, 'Well, what you need to do is not say that you have 20 percent of what you need. What you need to do is adapt your tactics, techniques, and procedures to fit what you have, because that's what you asked for. And you now have it. That's what you wanted, and now you've got it. And now you've got to go do what you do with what you have and make sure that you're protecting lives and achieving goals by designing tactics, techniques, and procedures to fit it.' There's nothing wrong with saying you want more of something or something different. But you're against a thinking enemy; the enemy's going to change. If you are successful and you get a body armor that will stop a certain size slug, he's going to come at a different angle or he's going to get armor-piercing slugs. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. If you get a jammer to take these frequencies out, they're going to go to these frequencies or they're going to roam or they're going to do something different. That is the nature of it.

"And you will never have the ability to defend against every location and every conceivable technique at every moment of the day or night with stuff. We would sink a country with that stuff! So that's what the commander's gotta do. He's gotta use his head."

This sounds dangerously close to the kind of talk that got Rumsfeld in hot water late last year, when a soldier complained to him about a lack of armored vehicles on the ground in Iraq, and he replied, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." It struck many as grossly insensitive and had congressmen calling for Rumsfeld's head. So if nothing else, he is an unrepentant cuss.

Moreover, the treatment he subjected the poor 20 percent bastard to is known in Rumsfeld's Pentagon as wire-brushing. This particular officer got off pretty easy, actually, because you really don't want Donald Rumsfeld after you with a wire brush. But the wire brush is an integral tool Rumsfeld uses in his deep dives.

Giving someone the wire brush means chewing them out, typically in a public way that's demeaning to their stature. It's pinning their ears back, throwing out question after question you know they can't answer correctly and then attacking every single syllable they toss up from their defensive crouch. It's verbal bullying at its best, and when you're a ranking civilian and we're talking some military officer, you can certainly get your rocks off doing it because--hey--they have to take it from you, what with civilian control and all. Plus, there's a certain brand of military officer who really keeps it in--really tight inside. Those guys you can play like a fiddle.

Rumsfeld has created enemies in the ranks with this tactic, and during the Afghanistan campaign, he wire-brushed someone big right out of the service. Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold held the all-important position of J-3 on the Joint Staff during that war, meaning he was the flag officer overseeing combat operations from the Pentagon. In that role he routinely briefed the press on the progress of the war. One day, he announced that the Taliban had been "eviscerated." Immediately signaling Rumsfeld's displeasure at this potentially explosive choice of words, General Richard Myers, who had recently been named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We were surprised that a marine even knew what eviscerated meant."

Newbold knew he was in for it. Soon after, he was jerked back from press briefings and replaced by a more savvy Navy admiral. Subjected to some intense wire-brushing, Newbold chose to end his military career by requesting early retirement. Later asked about Rumsfeld's "abusive" ways, Newbold cited an even bigger concern: that Rumsfeld's tough style intimidated some generals from doing their jobs right. As he put it, "If the environment's intimidating and suppressive, if it demeans, people tend to clam up."

There are ways to parry the old man's wire-brushing, of course, and most serious military leaders have that sort of right-back-up-yours-sir! kind of patter down. Take, for instance, a three-star general who's briefed Rumsfeld a half dozen times. This guy's led men into battle, so the old man has nothing on him. Well, one day they're going back and forth and the general just stops him dead. He says, "Sir, I don't know why it is we get along so well. I've got a big family and you've got a little one. I'm an army ground-pounder and you were a stinkin' navy pilot. I like to use little words and you like to use big ones."

This guy's wire-brushing back. He's giving the old man some guff. He's saying, I'm not afraid of you. Rumsfeld responds to this, he respects it.

Then the general clinches the deal. "So I've finally figured out why we get along so well," he says. "We've both run with the bulls at Pamplona!"

Rumsfeld shrieks in delight and then launches into a fifteen-minute reverie about the time he ran with the bulls. And for fifteen glorious minutes, he put away the goddamn wire brush.

Having been told by the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000 that "help is on the way," people in the military expected a nice fat budget amendment for 2002, a pile of money they could use to begin to make up for all the "procurement holidays" taken by the soft-on-defense Clinton crowd. But Rumsfeld delivered only $18.4 billion--peanuts given the demand. Many in the defense community in the Pentagon and on the Hill started whispering about how the old man had lost his first bureaucratic battle, and badly. The "experienced hand" just looked old and lost all of a sudden, and his never-ending Friday-afternoon bull sessions about the meaning of transformation just seemed goofy.

But in Rumsfeld's view, he was preparing the bureaucratic battlefield in a way no other SecDef had before him. People thought Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" had come in with an agenda for change under Kennedy, but their ambition was nothing compared with Rumsfeld's. He wanted to change it all: breaking up and reassembling every cold-war process for planning there was and making it lighter, faster, simpler, leaner.

Rumsfeld's first Quadrennial Defense Review in spring 2001 highlighted the concept of "deter forward," reflecting his belief that just having the force was one thing but being able to use it rapidly and decisively was another. Rumsfeld didn't want to deter America's enemies with the stuff we had over here but with the threat of what we could do with it over there--before the enemy had a chance to act.

Today, we call that concept by the far more direct term of preemption. A preemptive force can't take weeks to amass its personnel, much less months to send over all the tons of stuff that force might use. One thing that really sticks in Rumsfeld's craw is that the Pentagon was forced to bring back to the U. S. roughly 90 percent of what it had shipped over to the Persian Gulf to fight the first Iraq war with Saddam back in 1991. ("We would sink a country with that stuff!") That's how huge and sluggish the pipeline was: By the time the war had ended, we had enough stuff over there to fight nine more wars. And they brought it all back! Dammit, there was your Exhibit A in why we couldn't go on like that anymore.

The one question Rumsfeld purposefully avoided in all of his early mind-melds with staffers and generals was "To what end?" Believing that future enemies and future wars are too hard to predict, and that he was a businessman who would leave the war to the warriors, he made little effort to dive deep on that question. So the Pentagon planning process defaulted on that score to the neocons, Wolfowitz and his undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, who, at that point, had China in their crosshairs and a distinct aversion to Bill Clinton's sloppy attempts at nation building, à la Somalia and Haiti.

But so alien and unpopular were Rumsfeld's ideas, so out of sync was he on Capitol Hill, and so loathed was he by the flags and the generals that by Labor Day 2001 The Washington Post had all but announced a write-in contest for his successor, so certain were the cognoscenti that the old man would be the first Bush Cabinet member jettisoned. Gone by Christmas was the word.

But the terrorist attacks of September 11 would change all that, providing Rumsfeld's means with a very definitive end--the global war on terrorism. This war would become the proving ground, the laboratory, for Rumsfeld's transformation. Absent 9/11, transformation would have remained nothing more than a bureaucratic slogan. Absent 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld would be back on his ranch right now, rearranging the deck chairs on his back patio.

And since 9/11, no one in Pentagon history has used people like Rumsfeld has, and he's broken more rules and requirements than anyone thought possible.

When the president wanted the Taliban dislodged in Afghanistan as quickly as possible after 9/11, Rumsfeld backed General Tommy Franks's quick-and-dirty plan using an unprecedented mix of Special Forces, precision bombing, and CIA paramilitaries to exploit the on-the-ground capabilities of the anti-Taliban Afghani warlords and their forces. That experiment proved to be an eye-opener for Rumsfeld regarding the potential of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and he quickly anointed the Tampa-based command as the lead Combatant Command in the global war on terrorism, taking what had always been a bastard-stepchild command that supported other commands and instantly turning it into one that now receives support from others. In the Pentagon, this was profound, like the rich father designating his chauffeur's son as his new heir.

By doing so, Rumsfeld not only transformed the role of SOCOM, he designated it as a cannibalizing agent within the U. S. military, saying to the rest of the armed forces: Go be more like them!

In the summer of 2003, Rumsfeld skipped over an entire generation of army senior generals to bring a four-star "snake eater" out of retirement to serve as his army chief of staff. Plucking General Pete Schoomaker from his retirement ranch nearly three years after he left the service as the boss of Special Operations Command was a serious kick in the pants to a hidebound Army that was struggling to transform itself under General Eric Shinseki, who, despite coining the term transformation, had fallen out of favor with Rumsfeld for, as one senior aide put it, becoming too fixated on improving the Army's efficiency in combat without questioning the relevance of the capabilities he was developing, as in, Great force, wrong war.

Schoomaker was down in Texas meeting with one of his ranching partners (everybody in this crowd, it seems, has a ranch) when he got a call on his cell phone. At first he thought it was a joke. "You've got to be kidding," he told Rumsfeld. "I'm not interested."

"That's not a good enough answer," Rumsfeld replied. "You've at least got to come talk."

So Schoomaker drove twenty-one hours straight back to his home in Tampa and then immediately flew up to Washington and spent the weekend with Rumsfeld. "By the time we got through talking . . . you get to a point where it's your duty to do things," says Schoomaker. "It's totally illogical. My wife, she thinks it's nuts."

Now Schoomaker is redesigning the Army's century-old division structure (fifteen to twenty thousand troops each) into something far more flexible and modular, or what he calls "brigade units of action" (thirty-five hundred to four thousand troops each). That's eighteen divisions, a cold-war structure, a structure for fighting the Russians, morphing into almost eighty brigades to face new enemies, brigades that are interchangeable among the active-duty force, the Army Reserves, and the National Guard. This is nothing less than returning the Army to its frontier days of cavalry-sized field units and leaving behind the division-driven history of two World Wars and the entire cold war. In a generation, the divisions will remain only as ceremonial vestiges of a type of war that no longer

exists. That's the idea anyway.

In return, Schoomaker made Rumsfeld promise that there'd be no divisions cut (so the manpower pool wouldn't change) and that he'd buy the general some "head room" with thirty thousand extra active-duty troops. Rumsfeld agreed, even as he knew he'd catch hell from Congress for having to admit the Army needed more men as the insurgency heated up in Iraq in the summer of 2003. After all, Eric Shinseki's parting shot to Rumsfeld had been to testify that the Pentagon had vastly underestimated the number of ground forces needed to secure postwar Iraq. Schoomaker told me that Rumsfeld went to the president directly on that one.

And to emphasize the importance of getting the people right before talking about the weapons, Schoomaker got Rumsfeld's promise to push back the production of the Army's superexpensive, all-encompassing Future Combat Systems to the latter years of the second administration to give the general additional time to boot up the new brigade structure. Rumsfeld agreed without question.

In the Building, this is providing what they call "top cover." Get past the wire-brushing, bond with the guy, and he'll go to the mattresses for you.

In room 3-E-880, Rumsfeld is talking about the brief that let him know what a mess there was to clean up. It was about a month after he was sworn in, and he had demanded to get a presentation on, "Where are the levers in the building? Not just where are they, but who pulls them? And what are they connected to?" What he saw that day is now called the Levers Brief.

Walking into his conference room, participants remember the walls being covered with giant charts full of boxes and arrows and lines and flow diagrams galore. Conveyor belts like crazy, like something out of I Love Lucy. "I looked at all these conveyor belts that seemed like they were loaded six, eight years ago," Rumsfeld says, "and they were just chugging along, and you could reach in and take something off, or put something on, but you couldn't connect the different conveyor belts. Each process had a life of its own and drivers that were disconnected from the others, and it was really just stark for me to see it that way, having been in a company where you could make things happen."

That day taught him that he had to change the entire culture of long-range planning throughout the Building, not just within his office. Once he had the right people on both sides of the process--both military and civilian--he had to create a new venue for these two sides to fight out budgetary and policy decisions in an integrated way. Because there are lots of brawls to get out of the way. Otherwise, you still end up buying for four different forces and then trying to operate them in the field as though they're an integrated whole when they're not. The result is that you always end up with a force that's driven more by budgetary considerations than it is by policy goals, when in the rest of the known universe, strategic thinkers will tell you that it makes much more sense for policy to drive budgetary choices, as in, "I want to do this, so I buy that." What the Pentagon has had for decades is the complete opposite, as in: "I want to buy that, so I can only do this."

As they say, when all you have is a hammer, the entire world starts to look like nails.

Thus, Rumsfeld's fight club was born. It's a secret society, and it's called the Slurg.

The Senior Level Review Group consists of eighteen top-drawer members: The secretary, the deputy secretary, the three service secretaries, the five undersecretaries, the six joint chiefs, the general counsel, and the assistant secretary for public affairs. What's so magical about eighteen? That's how many fit around the table in Rumsfeld's conference room. Six more members sit against the wall. It's not written down or anything; they just know to sit against the wall. The additional six are the assistant secretary for legislative affairs, the director of administration and management (the "mayor"), the assistant secretary for networks and information integration (the computer geek in chief), the director of program analysis and evaluation, SecDef's senior military assistant, and his senior special assistant. That's the two dozen regulars. Additional senior players drop in now and then as required.

Of course, it wouldn't be a Rumsfeld invention if it didn't have a bunch of rules attached to it, as Rumsfeld is famous for his rules.

The first rule of the Slurg is: You do not talk about the Slurg.

This secrecy is crucial. Top leaders, both military and civilian, need to be able to speak freely without creating, as Rumsfeld told me, "chatter about, Gee, this guy said something dumb and he proposed this." Those kinds of leaks can set off a lot of useless bureaucratic skirmishes down below. As one participant put it, "Because people were meant to speak their minds, you have to have someplace where they can be passionate on an issue." Or, as Rumsfeld puts it, "You have to have a process where people are confident they can talk, they can take risks, they can speculate on things and raise questions."

The second rule of the Slurg is: You DO NOT talk about the Slurg!

During the Clinton administration, the biggest and most important discussions occurred in the Tank, or the conference room where the six joint chiefs regularly meet. Under Rumsfeld, you never hear about the Tank anymore. It still meets. It's just not where the biggest decisions are made.

And that's crucial. Because the Tank is military territory, a space the secretary enters now and then but where he cannot run the show, because by tradition the Tank is where the chairman rules. Early in the first Bush term, Rumsfeld participated in a Tank session where some strong words were spoken, and the next day those words appeared in the media. To this day, one of the only two chiefs still serving from that time, Admiral Vern Clark, swears that it wasn't one of his colleagues who talked out of turn but one of the "straphangers," a military term for the personal aides who sit along the wall. After that, meaningful Tank sessions involving Rumsfeld became far less frequent.

No straphangers are allowed in the Slurg.

The third rule of the Slurg is: If you don't show up, you don't get to fight.

If the principal doesn't show up, then his seat at the table is forfeited for that session. You can't send a note taker to report back, and only a few key players are allowed substitutions under duress, meaning a vice-chief of staff can sub for the chief, but nobody lower than that.

The fourth rule of the Slurg is: No SecDef, no Slurg.

Rumsfeld once let Wolfowitz chair a Slurg in his absence, and when he got the debrief on it, he quickly decided that that would be the last Slurg to occur without his being present to steer things. The old man has a very distinct definition of what constitutes being "on topic."

The fifth rule of the Slurg is: One fight at a time, and fights will go on as long as they have to.

Rumsfeld decides the Slurg's agenda in advance of each meeting, but once things open up, he often just sits back and lets people go at it in front of him, intervening little in the process. Participants know to keep it civil and that personal rivalries are supposed to be checked at the door. But it's pretty freewheeling, and the meetings routinely drag on for more than two hours. Decisions are hammered out only in the roughest sense, as the ultimate calls reside with Rumsfeld himself, who often makes up his mind afterward and transmits his decision in one of his "snowflake" memos, so named because they fly off his desk in a flurry.

The sixth rule of the Slurg is: When the war fighter's involved, the war fighter's invited.

When the agenda touches upon subjects with big implications for the combatant commanders, or the four-star admirals and generals who command the forces in the major regional commands, then they're invited to a special, expanded version of the Slurg called the SPC, or the Strategic Planning Council.

Those are the basic rules, and there are no others. That is also a rule.

The Slurg has become the birthing room for something called the Joint Capability Integration and Development System. In plain English, the Slurg is the venue in which senior civilian officials and military officers have begun to engage in up-front comparisons of each service's acquisition strategies. That means head-to-head competition between programs in a rigorous environment that focuses on capabilities, not service shares. The Slurg makes the JCIDS (jay-sids) possible by getting all the necessary players around the table and forcing a truly "joint" discussion: joint among the services, joint between the civilian and military sides of the house, and joint between the force provider (Pentagon) and the force consumer (Combatant Commands).

This is the Holy Grail of jointness, or the historical process of operational integration among the services that stretches back to 1986, when Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act in response to--among other things--the embarrassment of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a comedy of interservice errors that could have resulted in the Bay of Pigs if there had been any competent enemies on the scene. Goldwater-Nichols sought to force greater integration and cooperation among the four services by diminishing the power of the service secretaries and increasing the power of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the various regional battle commanders. To a certain extent it's succeeded, as the four services now "fight joint" even if they don't "buy joint."

JCIDS, then, is the quest to create future weapons systems and platforms that are joint from the start, not service-specific capabilities that are later forced to adapt to one another, probably once a war is already underway. If jointness were a religion, then the concept of being "born joint" would be the equivalent of the Immaculate Conception--an article of pure faith.

The very secret Slurg is the Round Table of jointness. It is the altar of transformation. It is a very exclusive room. It will go down as the single biggest organizational legacy of Rumsfeld's reign.

Rumsfeld is leaning forward, almost standing up out of his chair, and he's talking about the ongoing experiment of Iraq. "We've got people out there who are so good, and they've got the guts to call audibles, and they do," he says. "And I think it's admirable. I mean, the idea that the president of the United States, the secretary of defense, or the combatant commander in Tampa could tell our people in Iraq or Afghanistan what they're supposed to do when they get up in the morning just isn't realistic. These soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen are so good, and their leadership is so good, that they are doing an enormously complex task the way it should be done. It's different in every part of that country. If [Commanding General] George Casey designed a template and dropped it down and said, 'Here's what each division should do . . . each brigade,' it wouldn't work! Because the situation is different in the north, in the south, in Baghdad. . . . We've got rural problems out west. So what he has to do is get very good people, give them the right kind of leadership, encourage them to be bold and to take risks, and to communicate back what they need, what they're doing, get ideas from others--and go out and do their best, and that's what they do."

So Donald Rumsfeld is not at war. In fact, a postwar feeling pervades Rumsfeld's office, and his focus has returned full-time to leaving a much different Pentagon in his wake. He has told those who need to know that he intends to stay until the end of the second Bush administration, and he's aiming to lock in the big changes he's setting in motion. If he had been around just one term, anyone could have reversed all of this with a few strokes of a pen. Now, well, it will take another Rumsfeld to un-Rumsfeld this Pentagon when he's done and out the door in January 2009.

"Change takes time," he says. "Any CEO in a corporation, you ask him what the rough amount of time to do it, and it's eight or ten years."

Now Rumsfeld is working the "gearbox" issues, as he likes to call them. He's gotten way down into the guts of the Pentagon's machinery, making changes that will redefine how things are planned, how people are employed, how resources are acquired, and how America fights and wins both the wars that lie ahead and the inevitable nation building that must follow. And he aims to make those changes permanent, because "you can get backsliding, but if you go down deep enough in this institution, where nobody notices and nobody sees it and nobody understands it and it's hard to figure out, and you get those things going right, they're going to go on for a long time. Once they're ingrained, they'll go on that way until somebody spends enough time, enough effort, to go in and readjust them down there. But you can't do it superficially along the top. It just doesn't happen."

To go along with all the other ongoing transformation, this gearbox approach of Rumsfeld's is producing two huge philosophical sea changes in the Pentagon that have implications for the entire United States government that will reach across the decades to come.

First, the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, to be released in the fall, will shift China from "near-peer competitor" to a rising power whose emergence we need to guide. It also will enshrine the notion that nation building is something the military does, finally reversing the long-standing Powell Doctrine to conform with what's happening in the real world, because dealing with failed states is a fact of life in a global war on terrorism, especially when terrorists seek sanctuary in them.

But perhaps most stunning are Rumsfeld's plans for something he calls the National Security Personnel System, which will radically redefine civilian and military service in the Defense Department, changing from a longevity-based system to a performance-based system. Already, radical new features of this plan have been field-tested in the Navy, where, in the past, so-called detailers told sailors where they were going on their next assignment--with little warning and like it or not. Eager to break that boneheaded tradition, the Navy is experimenting with an eBay-like online auction system in which individual servicemen and -women bid against one another for desired postings. As Admiral Vern Clark told me, "I've learned you can get away with murder if you call it a pilot program."

So Clark is pioneering a system by which, instead of sending people to places they don't want to go on a schedule that plays havoc with their home life, "they're going to negotiate on the Web for jobs. The decision's going to be made by the ship and the guy or gal. You know, we're going to create a whole new world here."

The plan is designed to save the services money and effort by reducing early departures from the ranks by people who just can't take it anymore. The Navy's so-called "slamming" rate, meaning the percentage of job transfers against a person's will, has hovered at 30 to 35 percent in recent years. That means the Navy has been pissing off one third of its personnel on a regular basis. Now, under this program, the slamming rate is down to less than one percent.

More profoundly, Clark's pilot program has already spread to the other services, and in turn could well change the very nature of civil service throughout the United States government.

After considerable time with the top-ranking civilian and military leaders of the Pentagon, a new picture of Donald Rumsfeld has emerged for me, and I now believe something that I would have thought preposterous before: There are no "Rumsfeld wars." Of course, he's integral to how the Pentagon has conducted these operations, and he deserves all the credit and blame any defense secretary naturally receives as a result. But they're not his wars, and they never were. And in that, critics of the war might have something. The rationales behind the Iraq war belonged to the departing neocons Wolfowitz and Feith (who took pains in an interview to lecture me on the correct usage of the word neocon). And of course the president.

Rumsfeld does not seek those badges of war because he does not understand why any SecDef would claim them. He is a technician, not a warrior; a businessman, not an ideologue. He sees his main job as taking care of every single move made up to the first shots being fired. He wants it lighter, faster, simpler, leaner. And he wants that whether or not you give him wars to wage. It just so happens that in his time there have been wars to wage.

The war decisions are somebody else's business. But once you give him those wars to wage, he will use them at will as his proving grounds, sending one force over, bringing another one back. Four armed services existed at the outset of the Rumsfeld era, but only one military force will remain when he's gone.

As the admiral said, if it's a pilot program, you can get away with murder. And the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been an astonishing proving ground for Rumsfeld's idea of a transformed Pentagon.

Someone told me this story about Donald Rumsfeld.

Before becoming a public man, Rumsfeld grew up in Illinois, and fifty years ago, he married his high school sweetheart, Joyce. Recently, he told his wife, "I'm concerned that because I've been written about so much, our grandchildren will know all they need to know about me, but they won't know their grandma in the same way." So he decided to write his wife's life story himself in his spare time. So when he has spare time, that's what he does.

The man who told me this was a four-star admiral who got misty-eyed as he sat there talking in his Pentagon office. As a rule, four-star admirals do not get misty-eyed.

But to me, this story says less about the vast unexplored emotional landscape of Donald Rumsfeld and more about a man who simply wants to do things that last.

Back in room 3-E-880, the old man's got a grip-and-grin with a visiting dignitary to see to and has to be on his way. Before he does, though, Rumsfeld emphatically shrugs off the notion that, despite popular perception, he ever gets frustrated. He is, he says, not the frustratable sort. But he does get surprised.

"And the surprise for me is that, I guess the surprise is, in an institution this big--and it is enormous--you can interact with only so many people. And you can provide the energy and the urgency to that universe. If you drop a pebble in a pond, the ripples go out. And the ripples go out from those people. And the test is, how big a stone can you throw in the pond? And how big are the ripples? And how many of them can you do?

"Every once in a while, I find a dead spot that missed the ripples, and I'm amazed! You think, My gosh, you get up at five in the morning, you're in here at six, six-thirty or something, and you're here in the evening, and you work at home, and you're going. . . . All these people are just working their heads off, everyone around me is working their heads off, doing a great job, and then you find a dead spot, and you think, They don't get it! They didn't hear! The ripple never got there! It's a still! It's just a little eddy going around in a circle over there! And you think, Isn't that amazing!? How could they not hear!? What's going on!? And, you know, people want to do the right thing. It isn't that people are resistant to it. Most people want to feel useful; they want to feel they're accomplishing something. So it always surprises me. And then I think to myself, Well, what can we do? How many more of those dead areas are there? The stills, the eddies, where nothing's happening? It's just going around in a circle? And we have to find them. And get after them."

Blast from my past: "The Monks Of War" (2006)

The Monks of War

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, March 2006, 214-19 & 234-37.

Of all the lessons he's learned in this war, the most important one to Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis is this: Winning this war is mostly about not losing friends along the way. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, General Mattis was charged with setting up an air base in Pakistan to make the movement of marines into the theater possible. To clear the way for the airstrip, he flew to Islamabad and sat down with the Pakistani joint headquarters staff, a meeting that was mostly taken up with a litany of offenses the Americans had committed against the Pakistanis. "It started with the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers, who flew out of Peshawar, and goes on about how many times our country has screwed theirs," says Mattis.

"Finally, after three hours, I said, 'I surrender. I am going to Afghanistan. Now, are you going to help me or not?'

"I said, 'I want to bring the ships in next to the beach. I want to land stuff across the beach. I have an airstrip nearby where I can fly stuff in and out. I want an intermediate support base where I can put some fuel. And by the way, here is H-hour, D day, and my objective.' The Pakistanis knew it all three weeks in advance and never revealed one word."

But in Pakistan at the time, Osama bin Laden was polling much better than George W. Bush, and the Pakistanis had problems with Mattis's plan.

"They said, 'No, you don't get that place, but we will give you this one. If you can get ten miles over the sand dunes, you can use this civilian airstrip. You can hide your gear in the daytime. We will put troops around it and guard it.' They could not admit publicly that they were doing this. If we can't go in and not create repercussions, if we can't be sensitive to that, if we cannot tread lightly on our friends to reassure them, then there would have been secondary explosions."

So the operation would have to be to tally invisible, operating by moonlight. By day, a normal beach and a dinky desert airstrip. By night, the landing of a major invasion force and the beginning of Washington's global war on terrorism. Mattis's boss at the time, Navy Admiral William Moore, took the highly unusual step of giving the marine officer command of a naval task force--that is, a bunch of navy ships--and Mattis went to work: "We bring the ships in after dark. We land across the beaches, and when the sun came up, there was just the waves washing some tire tracks away. [The Pakistani government] even brought newsmen down who said they were helping us. They said, 'Look, there are no Americans on the beach.'

"At night I brought the ships back in, and night after night we hid the stuff in the sand dunes. And in would come KC-130's, Air Force C-17's, to pick us up and fly into Afghanistan. We just kept moving against the enemy, and it worked like a champ. You know, the Chinese say that if you drink the water, you ought to thank the guy who dug the well. . . . If we had gone in there and screwed Pakistan, then we lose."

Presidents and secretaries of defense call the big shots, but it's the generals who turn the cranks--and suffer the consequences. If in this global war on terrorism the White House has been slow to learn lessons, reluctant to admit mistakes, and incompetent at adapting to changing realities, those prosecuting the war, those living and dying it, have no such luxury.

Now three years in Iraq, the commanders whose job it is to actually fight the "thinking enemy," ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated, have had to adapt on the ground to survive. What, exactly, have they learned?

Two very important lessons from which all other lessons flow, it seems. First, that the strategic concepts that have kept America safe no longer apply in this new war. In the cold war, the United States had a strategic triad of nuclear missiles that could be delivered from the air, the ground, and the sea, and that threat to devastate the Soviet Union was how we deterred the East from ever launching war against the West.

But that security is gone in a global war on terrorism. What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week? This profound realization meant that strategy for the basic defense of the country had to be reconceived.

Second, this is going to be a long war. In the two dozen interviews conducted with top American military officials for this article, the overwhelming consensus is that the boys are not coming home, that these conflicts will not be ending anytime soon. In fact, the generals have taken to calling Washington's war on terrorism the Long War.

This vision has huge implications for the U. S. military as a whole, but especially for the Army, which has long viewed war as an episodic, high-intensity event followed by a lengthy period of peace, during which the force can recover and regenerate its strength for the next fight. The Long War features no such downtime, nor opponents who array themselves as our Army has for the past century: frontline troops at the ready and reserve units at significantly lower states of readiness--especially in terms of equipment.

In the Long War, then, the Army faces a dramatically new requirement not unlike that long managed by the U. S. Navy--the ability to keep a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously (as opposed to simply garrisoned in places like South Korea or Germany).

So when the Army chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, put his service on the path of this Long War, it meant he suddenly had to bring the entire Army up to frontline status, addressing what were suddenly huge shortfalls in equipment. It also meant that he had to completely reconceive of the Army as a fighting force.

The Army's ten active-duty divisions have for a century been structured like mini-armies unto themselves, full of all sorts of particular combat and support brigades. The only way to send over competently arrayed troops was to deploy entire divisions at a time, and that simply won't work in a Long War.

So Schoomaker made a decision immediately after becoming Army chief of staff in the summer of 2003. Just as the invasion of Iraq was completed and the American occupation was beginning, he decided to reformat the entire U. S. Army and its reserve components over the next several years, turning divisions into mere command units and "modularizing" the entire force so that each brigade will soon be largely interchangeable with all others, allowing divisions to deploy overseas with mix-and-match brigades, all of which are self-sustaining combat teams containing all the same supporting units that previously were aggregated only at the division level.

And as the war became the occupation, Schoomaker and others realized something else: The military processed its lessons learned from combat experience at an excessively leisurely pace, given the new global security environment. "Lessons learned" commands would become a top priority, and three generals, one Marine and two Army, would be brought back from Iraq to teach soldiers what they need to know to fight wars of the future. In the past, such lessons would prove valuable only to soldiers of the next war; this time, in this Long War, casualties could be great, so it would be the goal of these generals to learn these lessons and have them reflected in the training almost on a daily basis.

Each had already learned his own hard lessons in Iraq. William Wallace conquered Baghdad but likewise oversaw its disastrous looting. David Petraeus worked the sheikhs well enough but let a horrifically efficient insurgency build on his watch. James Mattis didn't lose a sailor or marine during his nation-building stint in the south, only to send a host of marines to their death in Falluja.

So all of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.

In 1983, American ground forces invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, with pitiful results. The services of our mighty military machine didn't have the foggiest idea how to fight alongside one another, and if the Grenadans had offered any greater resistance than a few Cuban soldiers and the island's constabulary force, we might have lost. This embarrassment triggered the progressive integration of the four services' combat operations, or the concept now known as jointness.

The war in Iraq has been and will continue to be a similar cause for self-examination by the American military. As General Mattis says, "Success is a poor teacher."

Commander on the "Thunder Run" to Baghdad, Gen. Williamk Wallace, along with Petraeus and Mattis, will soon publish the field manual that will define the American counterinsurgency in what the generals now call the Long War.

The Teacher 

In his office at Training and Doctrine Command along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, General William "Scotty" Wallace looks like a figure in a historical diorama, his walls covered with large canvases depicting the history of the U. S. Cavalry. Wallace likes to describe himself as just an "old, dumb cavalry guy." But Wallace isn't dumb, and he doesn't ride a horse. Instead, he is famous within the ranks for two twenty-first-century accomplishments: commanding the first Army infantry division to go fully digital (the 4th ID), and then commanding that division in its first war as V Corps commander in Iraq, leading the "Thunder Run" to Baghdad early in the war. Just returned from Iraq in summer 2003, Wallace was placed in command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he initiated widespread changes to how the battlefield experience directly influenced training, only to be elevated in 2005 from that three-star post to the top schoolhouse job in the Army, the four-star commander of Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Wallace, fifty-nine, is a big guy who fills out his digitally designed desert camouflage, and he speaks slowly, like a field officer developing the situation upon contact with the enemy, describing carefully his view of a commander-centric Army that takes advantage of information networks while not becoming captive to them: "I think that for those of us that have been in the fight, we recognize that the technical solutions only enable the individual soldier and small unit to do his business a little bit better. But there aren't any precision-guided squads.

"The business we're doing--the really complex stuff that's going on on the battlefield today--requires the kid on the ground to know what his boss is thinking; it requires the boss to know what the kid is seeing; it requires those who have seen the same sort of situation in different parts of the world to share it with those who might be seeing it for the first time. And it requires that those who are being presented with it for the first time are presented with it at our training centers, as opposed to in contact with the enemy."

During the cold war, the Army did not have operational experiences of the sort that could inform its preparation for major combat with the Soviet bloc, so the live-fire exercises at places like Fort Irwin, California, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, served as the major source for what you might reasonably describe as "hypothetical" lessons learned from battles that were never waged against an enemy that today no longer exists.

While at Leavenworth, within days of his return from Baghdad, Wallace set himself to a significant restructuring of the Combined Arms Center to systematize the process of feeding the Army's lessons learned from ongoing combat operations into its worldwide collection of training centers.

The Army's decision to reform its lessons-learned operations meant that the combat-training centers would immediately switch from war-gaming against a Soviet-style, tank-heavy "world-class opposition force" to something far more complex, or what the officers now call the Complex Operating Environment. Wallace wanted his training simulations to account for the local populations soldiers would encounter. Role players were added to the training centers by the hundreds. Now when you run a live-fire exercise at Fort Irwin, you have Iraqis yelling at you, you'll hear the call to prayer from mosques five times a day, you'll need to work your translators more than your trigger fingers. You'll face IEDs, not artillery, technicals, not tanks, massed crowds instead of massed troops, and you will be graded on it all, mister.

While commanding at Leavenworth, Wallace seized the available technology, married it to the wealth of information that was streaming in from the battlefield, and had his Combat Studies Institute create virtual battle theaters called Virtual Staff Rides, in which computer simulations allow students a you-are-there perspective of Iraq's many combat experiences.

It has long been the tradition of the Army to take young commanders out to historic battlefields like Shiloh or Gettysburg, narrate the battle, point out the movements of men and matériel, giving the students a chance to view the very terrain upon which the battles occurred and examine the decision-making of the commanders involved. These outings are called staff rides, and compared with Wallace's virtual staff rides, they are literally a walk in the park.

You'd expect the virtual staff ride recounting Wallace's thunder run to Baghdad. But Wallace also demanded a VSR that recounts the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. And the mistaken shooting of the Italian journalist's car as it approached a U. S. military checkpoint. And the Sadr City uprising. None of these offer the same grandeur of a lecture at Little Round Top in Gettysburg, but commanders need to learn from that entire "complex operating environment," not just the battles they'd prefer to remember. In this training, Wallace wants the Army to confront its ugliest recent failures, making it that much harder to repeat them.

The virtual staff ride that Wallace ordered up re-creating the push to Baghdad and the early occupation features twenty-four "stands," or terrain set pieces, that computer-simulation developers sought to capture in every possible detail, right down to how tall that tree was just to the left of the highway overpass or how much garbage was piled up along the road. One modeler bragged that his team had spent days getting the trash to look just right in one scene.

Once the Army's modelers achieve that sort of fidelity to the scene, students in a classroom setting can apply a God's-eye view to the entire proceedings, navigating around the virtual space much like any stick jockey moves around in a video game. It's the kind of rich, high-bandwidth simulation that younger officers will naturally expect, having been raised on a generation of elaborate and immersive games.

At Leavenworth, the experimental virtual-staff-ride course on Iraq is taught over ten weeks, and it's been described by students as one of the best predeployment tools offered there. The postwar phase is the one for which the Army has historically trained its commanders least, leaving far too many in the dark for what comes after the "kinetics" stop. A virtual staff ride on the horrible mistakes of Abu Ghraib helps your average commander to, in Wallace's words, "look beyond the end of the rifle."

Lt. Gen. David Petraeus is now commander of the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth. With tours in Bosnia and Iraq, he has experience in nation building that is without peer in the U.S. military.

The Nation Builder 

Wallace's replacement at Leavenworth is arguably the Army general whose star is rising most rapidly on the basis of his performance in Iraq, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division in northern and central Iraq during the first difficult postwar year and then assumed leadership of the coalition effort to rebuild Iraq's security forces. With his Princeton Ph.D. in international relations, Petraeus is the closest thing the Army has to its own Lawrence of Arabia, a comparison he does little to discourage, as he seems to identify with the British colonel's experiences in the region during the First World War and the enduring wisdom of his advice to those military officers caught in similarly trying circumstances (Lawrence's legendary book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom), which Petraeus appears to know by heart.

David Petraeus is sitting hunched over on a long leather couch directly beneath a towering portrait of Douglas MacArthur, military overlord of post-World War II Japan, and he's telling his one-thing-leads-to-another story of how he ended up being in charge of an astonishing amount of the postwar rebuilding of Iraq.

One of the first challenges Petraeus faced while occupying much of northern and central Iraq--including the huge Al Anbar province--with the 101st Airborne in the spring of 2003 was the small matter of there being no government there whatsoever. Sudden, unanticipated problem, usually not the preserve of generals: How to get the local government to continue paying its workers. The acting governor of Al Anbar pointed Petraeus in the direction of a central bank manager, who, it just so happened, had set aside a substantial sum of Iraqi currency for just such a post-invasion occasion. Problem was, this banker felt he had no authority in a post-Saddam environment, because his entire career he hadn't sneezed without first asking permission from Baghdad. So he said to Petraeus, "You have the authority." Petraeus thought about that and said, "You're right, I do!"

"So I pull out a piece of two-star stationery--generic government--and he said, `Give me an order.' And I said, `Okay, I will.' To the bank manager: `You are to pay the salaries of government workers in the Al Anbar province.' I signed it and gave it to him, and he said, `Okay, I got it.' And then he said, `But no stamp.' But we had a notary seal because my lawyer was with me, and the next day the aide went out and he got this wonderful stamp with lots of stars and stuff, and we stamped everything."

But a problem solved on day one only generates a new problem for day two: "That night, in the middle of the night, I wake up. Oh, man! Economics 101: If you dump more money on a fixed amount of goods in a marketplace, all you do is produce inflation! So how do we get more goods into the marketplace?"

So back to the governor's office. Petraeus said, "Governor, you've got a problem." But the governor was smart enough to answer back, "General, we've got a problem." So Petraeus said, "Okay, good, let's work on it together."

So the two of them pulled out a map, "and we look at all the different trade routes, if you will. There's one from Turkey, but I know that crossing is jam-packed. Iran--the crossings are very rugged. So the eyes are on Syria."

The general worked with his lawyers, investigated the various UN sanctions, Googled this and that overnight, and by the next morning he had instructions ready to give the battalion commander who was working the border with Syria. This poor guy had to set up border guards, produce agreements with local leaders, whatever surviving government officials he could find, the head of this tribe, the sheikh of that region. Oh, and he had to hire a bunch of everybody's people to keep them all happy. Petraeus then gave his battalion commander a deadline for wrapping this whole package: three days. "Three days from then, I was going to fly out with the governor, and we were going to have a big feast and were going to sign this thing and reopen the border, so we had to deliver the bacon," he says.

Was it written down in any Phase IV plan that the 101st would get in the business of running government payroll or playing customs agent? Not exactly. But if you're an Army officer who's going to pass through Dave Petraeus's Command and General Staff College in the coming years, you will learn how to do all that and more. You will step into nation building like a twenty-first-century Douglas MacArthur.

Petraeus doesn't resemble MacArthur in the slightest. In fact, he looks more like the real Colonel T. E. Lawrence, not the too-beautiful version played by Peter O'Toole in the movies. Like Lawrence, Petraeus is a little bit on the plain side, and he's short like Lawrence, with the slightly stooped posture of a hardcore long-distance runner who simply can't give it up despite his fifty-three years.

With a tour in Bosnia and then two and a half years in Iraq, the general has experience in nation building and post-conflict stabilization operations that is without peer in the U. S. military.

A Washington Post article in November 2005 described Petraeus's recall from Iraq as akin to Jefferson Davis deciding to pull General Robert E. Lee from the field of battle early in the Civil War, lest he suffer burnout. Senator John McCain was quoted in the article as calling the rotation of senior officers back from Iraq "deeply unwise." As he declared in a speech, "If these were the best men for the task, they should still be on the job."

But Petraeus thought his stateside reassignment made sense, and he now sees it as his job to replicate himself for the Long War. People burn out if you leave them out there too long. And, more important to realize, two to three years straight overseas on deployment is going to kill your officer corps. In World War II, very few American officers actually put in that length of time, except in the Pacific. And that was when the country was totally at war. Try that with an all-volunteer force and you'll start seeing some of your best officers retire before putting their families through that, something that Petraeus has already seen happen: "I was only home six or eight months during my son's four years of high school because I did a year in Bosnia prior to Iraq. I am not whining or anything--I got a wife who's an army brat. Her dad went off to Vietnam for two years. She's used to it, she can handle it, but you can't do this institutionally, because I don't think there are that many families who will stand for it. There are cases already, I think, of even senior leaders who are being told they're going back or being offered to go back, and they decide they don't want to do it. It's a combination of wife, little kids--it's a variety of things."

With Petraeus talking about families and little kids, it's possible to forget that he's also the commander who killed Uday and Qusay Hussein. And that here at Leavenworth, he presides over the Jedi Knights, which is the nickname given to the students of the college's elite School of Advanced Military Studies--sort of the Army's version of Top Gun. These are the guys whom the generals turn to when they want to take down some Death Star. It was the Jedi Knights who helped draw up General Norman Schwarzkopf's famous "left hook" into Iraq. In fact, the Jedi fraternity has had a planning cell in every major overseas operation since then.

But Petraeus's eyes burn brightest when he talks about building a new kind of commander, a man or woman who can handle the stresses and strains of Iraq and still have the presence of mind to find solutions other than the trigger.

One of the training tools Petraeus is most proud of is his Combat Leader Environment, basically a PC-based version of a pop-up shooting-gallery drill in which commanders are presented with complex decision points in a postwar-stabilization operation, and they're forced to make impossible choices, which are then broken down for them by a senior officer who acts as mentor during the drill. The purpose, as Petraeus describes it, "is to get his blood pressure up and do it repeatedly--get those high-pressure moments so you get used to it, doing nonkinetic stuff, talking it out, working with the sheikhs, with political leaders, with Iraqi security forces, Afghan forces, and so on."

Petraeus is realistic about how hard it is to teach these sorts of command skills inside the Army. More than once in Iraq, he was confronted by subordinate officers who thought their job was "leading every raid every night, then sleeping until two, lifting weights, then doing it again." So Petraeus had to make it clear to these guys that if they wanted their careers to go anywhere, they needed to start producing broader results. "It's the hard work of drinking tea with the locals, delivering air conditioners to the mosques, meeting with the neighborhood clerics, getting to know the imams, and all the rest of that," he says. "You gotta build institutions, not just units."

And so Petraeus also has his own version of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which in his case number thirteen. It's a simple PowerPoint package of thirteen slides of lessons learned in the war. Number one is, Lawrence had it right. By this he means: It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them. Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh would readily recognize Petraeus's other pillars as eternal truths: Armies of liberation have half-lives. Money is ammunition. Intelligence is the key. Cultural awareness is a force multiplier. Success depends on local leaders.

That last one seems to be the most important to Petraeus. So when the Iraqi leaders of Mosul came to him as commander of the 101st Airborne in the first months of the postwar occupation asking for his help in getting the city's university back up and running, Petraeus didn't hesitate. He had helicopter assault troops available, so Petraeus told them, "Hey, you won the lottery. You're going to rebuild Mosul University." The place had been completely looted and was a shambles, but a month or so later, a Big Ten-sized university was holding classes in Mosul, finishing out the school year a little late, with American helo pilots filling in as college administrators.

That follows with the main lesson General Petraeus has learned from Iraq: "Everyone does nation building."

Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who returned from Iraq in 2004, is known as an impatient commander. "We're all very vigorous," he says. "Oh, we're vigorous as hell. But our next original thought, in many cases, will be our first."

The Quick Thinker 

Another disciple of Lawrence's is the articulate and casually profane Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis, combat commander in both Afghanistan and Iraq and arguably the only Marine general whose length and breadth of service in Southwest Asia rivals that of Petraeus. Mattis, who suffers the usual marine trait of speaking candidly in public settings, once confessed at a defense conference that "it's fun to shoot some people," referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he is far more famous within the ranks as a warrior monk who assiduously studies both war and peace in all of their complexities and demands no less from his subordinates.

Mattis, fifty-five, returned from Iraq in the summer of 2004 to take over the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia, making him the Corps's point man in collaborating with Wallace and Petraeus in processing lessons learned from the global war on terrorism.

Mattis is an impatient man. Stuck in a classic desk job, he tackles it with gusto, poring over reports and reading every damn book that comes across his table. Still, he can't stand the routine: "All we do is read hundreds of e-mails every fucking day, and we go to meetings and spend six hours making no decisions, and we talk about jointness as if it's some church we must bow to, and then we walk out of there and we've done nothing."

It's not that Mattis doesn't value downtime, because he does, noting that T. E. Lawrence did his best thinking when he was incapacitated with illness. "We're all very vigorous," he says. "Oh, we're vigorous as hell. But our next original thought, in many cases, will be our first."

When Mattis got to Quantico in August 2004, he was unhappy with what he saw: "I went to the entry-level training of the Marine Corps, and I was not satisfied that a couple of years into this war we were adapting fast enough."

For Mattis, adapting faster includes de-briefing anyone who's seen action, sometimes catching them sucking air through a tube in an intensive-care unit. He pushed his lessons-learned guys to aggressively interview grievously wounded marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital, figuring they'd certainly not be shy about pointing out tactical failures that might have gotten them hurt.

One wounded officer quickly pointed out that the Marines needed to redesign their crowd-control training so that it focused more on letting Iraqi personnel engage in the usual "troop and stomp" tactics--i.e., lining up soldiers in various wedge formations and having them slowly "stomp" their way into unruly crowds--while the marines needed to hold back and provide tank support. Mattis, who controls Marine training, responded swiftly, directing the change at the Twentynine Palms combat-training center in California. "So based upon a lesson learned, in twenty-four hours the training was changed out there. We took the time and did more tank and infantry training. I want that kind of agility."

Quantico did have a center for lessons learned before Mattis arrived, but all the data flowed in and not much flowed out. Mattis wanted it flowing out like a river during flood season. If the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned learned it, the general wanted it on the unclassified, password-accessed Web site within hours. Now 85 percent of what the MCCLL reports out appears on the unclassified Web.

Mattis isn't interested in running some worldwide chat room for marines to trade war stories. Everything is moderated, cataloged, searchable. By starting relatively late down this pathway, the Marines have been able to cherry-pick from the other services' online knowledge systems, and it's clear that the Marines owe a lot to the Army Knowledge Online system that Wallace greatly expanded during his time at Leavenworth.

Mattis served with Wallace, and he's had multiple career overlaps with Dave Petraeus, both in the Pentagon and in Iraq. These guys trade best practices and new technologies like next-door neighbors who've known one another for years, setting in motion a level of Army-Marine cooperation that is unprecedented, such as the upcoming publication of the Counterinsurgency Operations field manual that Leavenworth and Quantico will "dual-designate" as official for both services. The document draws the battle lines for the Long War, which it describes as "a protracted politico-military struggle" in which "political power is the central issue," not territorial conquest. Army and Marine officers will take pains to tell you that most of this fight is "nonkinetic," meaning that the new doctrine calls for a battle waged mostly by other means, such as political and economic development efforts designed to weaken the insurgency's claim that the government is illegitimate. In this view, the way to beat an insurgency is ultimately by creating "stakeholders" among the populace. The Counterinsurgency field manual is a Wallace-Mattis-Petraeus special that bonds the Army and Marines with Tampa's Special Operations Command in what General Pete Schoomaker calls America's twenty-first-century strategic triad.

This level of close cooperation is cats-and-dogs-living-together weird. And it's only going to get weirder, because the soldiers and marines serving from here on out will have grown up entirely in a Web-based world, where no stone goes un-Googled. You provide them open-source environments to network their thinking or they'll create their own chat rooms, something plenty of young marines and Army officers did in Iraq, Companycommand.com and s3-xonet.army.mil being the most famous.

So what are the Army and Marines to do with this Nintendo generation? Mattis invites those electronic forums inside the wire, so to speak. He legitimizes them. And then he lets the students teach the instructors on counterinsurgency, because right now that's where the bulk of the experience lies--with the operating force. As Colonel Monte Dunard, director of the MCCLL, says, "We don't want to be making changes fifteen years down the road. We got guys dying today. We want them to be trained better--how do we get this information faster, quicker, more relevant?"

The Marines are doing this on a daily basis: deciding on which semiautomatic sniper rifle works best, figuring out better ways to attach fuel hoses during dust storms, the latest tricks for dealing with IEDs and convoy attacks--an issue of greatest priority. When the Marines went into Iraq, no one foresaw that years into an occupation, so many ground troops would still be dying in insurgency attacks against convoys in what troops call "Injun Country." So convoy personnel are now trained in how to call in air support while on the move, how to shoot back while on the move, how to do a medical evacuation on the move, and how to handle a roadside bomb on the move. The MCCLL's software tracks all of this, zeroing in on the phrases "we need" and "the Marine Corps should" whenever and wherever they're uttered.

The Army and Marines can't be in the business right now of deducing from distant, abstract, future war scenarios what their troops need today in terms of equipment, training, or doctrine. They need to calculate those requirements from today's complex operating environment, and the flash-to-bang time needs to be as short as possible. Let the Navy and Air Force fantasize about war with the Chinese. "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese," Mattis says. " `Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.' That's so embarrassing."

Instead, Mattis's staff is full of officers just back from Iraq, and they're all eager to make the Marines the shortest flash-to-bang learning organization there is. "All I have to do is create the expectation that it will happen," he says. "It's commander's intent. They understand my intent is we don't sit here and admire this and say, `Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now.' Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours."

So that's the intellectual struggle Mattis is now waging from his desk at Quantico, institutionalizing his flash-to-bang mentality, with this as his mantra: Anything our enemies can dream up, we can counter faster.

To wit: While doing stability operations in the Shiite-heavy south immediately following Saddam's fall, Mattis was confronted with fiery Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's rapid trajectory toward insurgency kingpin. One day when al-Sadr was trying to pull together a mass meeting of his followers for another of his stem-winders, the kind that eventually launched his bloody uprising, Mattis cut him off at the pass, or, more specifically, at the bus station. Knowing that the cleric would use buses to bring followers into his urban stronghold from outside, Mattis hired as many buses in the region as he could get his hands on. "So when he went to contract his buses, they were gone," Mattis says. "Didn't have to shoot a single person. We sent the buses out for a trip--empty there, empty back. A waste of money? It was the best money I ever spent."

Blast from my past: "The Chinese Are Our Friends" (2005)

 

The Chinese Are Our Friends

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, November 2005, pp. 92-102 & 214.

... despite everything you hear from the fearmongers at the Pentagon. Don't listen to them. The Sino-American partnership will define the twenty-first century.

The greatest threat to America's success in its war on terrorism sits inside the Pentagon. The proponents of Big War (that cold-war gift that keeps on giving), found overwhelmingly in the Air Force and Navy, will go to any length to demonize China in their quest to justify high-tech weaponry (space wars for the flyboys) and super-expensive platforms (submarines and ships for the admirals, and bomber jets for both) in the budget struggles triggered by our costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

With China cast as America's inevitable enemy in war, the Air Force and Navy will hold off the surging demands of the Army and Marines for their labor-intensive efforts in Southwest Asia, keeping a slew of established defense contractors ecstatic in the process. How much money are we talking about? Adding up various reports of the Government Accountability Office, we're talking about $1.3 trillion that the Pentagon is locked into spending on close to a hundred major programs. So if China can't be sold to Congress and the American people as the next Red menace, then we're looking at a lot of expensive military systems being cut in favor of giving our troops on the ground the simple and relatively cheap gear they so desperately need not only to stay alive but also to win these ongoing conflicts.

You'd think the great search for the replacement for the Soviet threat would have finally ended after 9/11, but sadly that's not the case. Too many profits on the line. Army generals are fed up with being told that the global war on terrorism is the Pentagon's number-one priority, because if it were, they and their Marine Corps brethren would be getting a bigger slice of the pie instead of so much being set aside for some distant, abstract threat.

It's bodies versus bucks, folks, and that's a presidential call if ever there was one. So it's time for George W. Bush to make up his mind whether or not he's committed to transforming the Middle East and spreading liberty to those Third World hellholes where terrorists now breed in abundance. If he is, the president will put an end to this rising tide of Pentagon propaganda on the Chinese "threat" and tell Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in no uncertain terms that our trigger pullers on the ground today deserve everything they need to conduct the counterinsurgency operations and nation building that will secure America's lasting victory in his self-declared global war on terrorism. If not, then Bush should just admit that the defense-industrial complex--or maybe just Dick Cheney--is in charge of determining who America's "real enemies" are.

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars. Today's wars are conducted by America's combatant commanders, those four-star admirals and generals who sit atop the regional commands such as Central Command, which watches over the Middle East and Central Asia, and Pacific Command, which manages our security interests in Asia from its perch in Honolulu.

Central Command has gotten all the attention since the Soviets went away, and as a result of all those boots being on the ground in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the Tampa-based command is clearly dominated by a ground-forces mentality. Ask CENTCOM about the military's future needs and you'll get a long laundry list of requirements focused on the warfighter who's forced to walk the beat in some of the world's scariest neighborhoods, playing bad cop in nightly shoot-outs with insurgents and good cop by day as he oversees sewer-line repairs or doles out aid to the locals.

Nothing fancy here, as most of these unconventional operations are decidedly low-tech and cheap. It's what the Marines like to call Fourth Generation Warfare, or counterinsurgency operations designed to win over civilians while slowly strangling stubborn insurgencies. Completely unsexy, 4GW typically drags on for decades, generating real-time operational costs that inevitably pinch long-term acquisition programs--and therein lies the rub for the Pentagon's Big War clientele.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

When the Soviets went away, the Pentagon's strategists started fishing around for a replacement, deciding on "rising China" in the mid-1990s, thanks to a showy standoff between Pacific Command and China's military over Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwan Strait scenario has served as the standard of the Pentagon's Big War planning and, by extension, fueled all budgetary justifications for big-ticket weapons systems and delivery platforms--everything from space-based infrared surveillance systems to the next generation of superexpensive strike fighter aircraft.

A key but rather anonymous player in this strategic debate has been Andrew Marshall, legendary Yoda of the superinfluential Office of Net Assessment, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. Marshall's main claim to fame was convincing the Pentagon in the 1980s that the Soviet Union's Red army was hell-bent on pursuing a revolution in military affairs that would--unless countered--send it leapfrogging ahead of us in high-tech weaponry. It never happened, but never mind, because as the neocons brag, it was Ronald Reagan's massive military buildup that bankrupted the Soviets. Now, apparently, we need to do the same thing to "communist" China because its rapid rise as a freewheeling capitalist economy will inevitably close the gap between their military and ours.

Do the Chinese have a trillion-plus dollars locked up in huge acquisition programs like we do? Are you kidding? We spend more to buy new stuff each year than the Chinese spend in total on their entire military. In fact, we spend more on operations in the Middle East each year than China spends on its entire military.

Prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes, the China threat was being successfully employed to win congressional support for all manner of Big War toys that logically had no real application in the 4GW scenarios that U. S. ground forces routinely found themselves in in the post-cold-war world. (Think dirt-poor Haiti or Black Hawk Down Somalia.) But 9/11 changed all that, and the Bush administration's global war on terrorism and resulting Big Bang strategy of transforming the Middle East inadvertently shifted the budgetary argument from the capital-intensive Navy and Air Force to the labor-intensive Army and Marines.

And when did that worm really turn? When Army and Marine officers began their second tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Program Budget Decision 753, signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the end of 2004, was the budgetary shot across the bow to the Big War crowd, as it announced a substantial shift of more than $25 billion to the Army's coffers. That "war tax," as it became known within the Defense Department, swept through the defense community like the Christmas tsunami, as basically every budget program was forced to give it up to the ground-pounders.

This shift was long overdue. During the cold war, the American military used to engage in nation building every decade or so, but since then it's more like once every two years, with a clear concentration on backward Muslim states. All these operations cost money, and as most drag on for years, either the Pentagon forgoes some of its Big War systems in budget battles, or soldiers and marines on the ground inevitably get shortchanged.

Star Wars, say hello to hillbilly armor.

Want to know why it's taken so unbearably long for our loved ones currently serving in Iraq to receive the body armor and armored Humvees they so desperately need? Because budget battle after budget battle, year in and year out, the Big War crowd inside the Pentagon has consistently defeated the Small War constituency found in the Army and Marines. And China has been the hammer the Big War strategists of the Navy and Air Force have used to beat back the Fourth Generation Warfare arguments of the ground-pounders, going all the way back to General Tony Zinni's complaints about all the things his CENTCOM troops were lacking in Somalia in the mid-1990s.

But Zinni's advice was routinely ignored by the Pentagon in the years that ensued, yielding the U. S. military that we have today: a first-half team that plays in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. And of course this all culminated last December when Donald Rumsfeld was asked by an Army specialist on his way to Iraq why the soldiers there had to scrounge up scrap armor in garbage dumps to fortify their thin-skinned Humvees, and he responded that "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."

Well, the Army that the Pentagon's Big War machine has been wanting for the past ten years is one that's not properly equipped for such second-half efforts as peacekeeping or nation building. None of that mattered so long as the Powell Doctrine reigned supreme and America couldn't give a rat's ass about what came after the wars it waged (because our troops were already home by then, celebrating their "decisive" victory). But the war on terrorism gives the lie to the notion that drive-by regime change has any lasting impact other than making countries safe for terrorist networks. And so now the Defense Department is faced with a new rule set: Don't plan to win the war unless you plan to win the peace.

The Pentagon's own Defense Science Board noted this profound shortcoming in its recent seminal report on postconflict nation-building efforts in the post-cold-war era, "Transition To and From Hostilities," recommending Rumsfeld "direct the services to reshape and rebalance their forces to provide a stabilization and reconstruction capability," one that will require "substantially more resources" if America is going to become more successful in our overseas military interventions.

How so? Doesn't the fact that America fields the most awesome war-fighting force on the planet ensure that we'll win any wars we wage? Wars yes, but not the peace that must inevitably follow. As the DSB report noted, our enemies in this global war on terrorism have already cracked our operational code: Don't fight the Americans in the first-half war; simply wait until the second-half "peace" and then go on the offensive--insurgency-style--against a follow-on U. S. force that's poorly equipped and poorly trained for the job of securing the original victory.

How many $2 billion attack subs did it recently take to recapture Fallujah--yet again!--from the Iraqi insurgents? None, which is not enough as far as the Big War crowd is concerned--not nearly enough.

But how many of our soldiers and marines give up their lives each and every time our ground forces are forced to engage in such desperate urban warfare because the neocons screwed up the Iraq occupation?

Ouch. Let's not go there, because if we do, the Pentagon's Big War propaganda machinery might be exposed for what it really is: an unprincipled scheme to put the long-term profitability of major defense contractors ahead of the equally long-term needs of our troops in the field.

So tell me, which scenario do you think is more likely in the future? More inescapable? That our sons and daughters will get stuck patrolling urban shooting galleries in Africa and the Middle East, or that America will fight some fabulous high-tech war with Wal-Mart's main subsidiary, China, Inc.? And which scenario do you think has more relevance to a global war on terrorism? Met any good Chinese terrorists lately?

Atlantic Monthly writer Robert Kaplan is probably more identified with Fourth Generation Warfare thinking than any other journalist working today. His steady stream of articles and books on the Mad Max battlefields of failed states, where drug-crazed teenage mercenaries rule the day, have done more to popularize the 4GW arguments of Army and Marine strategists than anything else. And boy, do the ground-pounders love him for it.

Which makes his recent conversion to the China hawks' camp all the more stunning. Writing in the June issue of The Atlantic, the widely respected journalist performed the equivalent of a strategic lap dance for Pacific Command by outlining "how we would fight China," which is the title of the article. Not why, mind you, just how.

Kaplan takes such an indirect route because the "why" argument on China frankly sucks. I mean, we're going to fight China to prevent it from becoming our biggest trade partner? To punish it for generating such a huge trade deficit, already our largest with any country in the world? To stop Beijing from funneling all those trade dollars back into U.S. Treasury bonds and secondary mortgage markets, thus keeping our interest rates low? Because China's cheap labor exerts deflationary pressure on global prices? Because China's rapid embrace of globalization has lifted hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty in the last twenty years?

No, Kaplan avoids all such arguments for just that reason--they defy logic. Instead, he simply flips the Taiwan card on the table and then he's off to the races, or, should I say, the many wars--both hot and cold--that he imagines America must inevitably wage against China in the coming decades.

Why? Let Kaplan tell you himself in what constitutes the stunning thesis of his argument: "Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium."

Got that?

China's "pulsing" with "consumer energy," which apparently means those "literate peasants" want to buy stuff left and right, and since consumerism and literacy go hand in hand with "martial" tendencies (what the Chinese can't buy, they'll wage war to acquire, yes?), obviously America must go to war with them. I mean, a billion-plus Chinese consumers must represent a threat to our "liberal imperium," right?

Having spent a long afternoon in a Wal-Mart in the Chinese city of Nanchang last year, I can personally attest to the horror that is the Chinese consumer: Pushy, demanding, and downright aggressive in their price haggling, these people are not to be trusted under any circumstances. And don't even get me started on their line jumping at the checkout!

But the Chinese threat, we are told, is almost always masterfully indirect, so Beijing's growing economic ties around the planet portend a clear diminution of American military power. Check out how our new Sinophobe cleverly ties "rising China" with the global war on terrorism: "While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones."

Notice that subtle linkage? China and Al Qaeda are basically two sides of the same coin! If there's a vacuum to be found (meaning any place not firmly under America's "liberal imperium," one imagines), we're looking at one of two outcomes: Either Al Qaeda or the Chinese will eventually take over. The former may be committed to killing Americans on sight the world over, but the latter--with their "literate consumerism"--most assuredly want to...I dunno...sell us low-priced furniture and cars?

Don't get me wrong. I do worry about China's yuan being still overly pegged to the U. S. dollar (despite the recent micro-revaluation), and no American shareholder in his right mind doesn't fear the amount of intellectual piracy currently occurring in China ("One for a dolla!" being the martial cry of Chinese street vendors hawking Hollywood DVDs the very day those movies open in theaters back home). And when pressed to describe what I consider to be the biggest threat to international security in the near term, I always cite the threat of a financial panic brewing inside China's far too rickety banking sector.

But how the Pentagon solves any of these economic "conflicts" with China is really beyond me. Our strategic exposure here is financial, not force-on-force war. And outside of the pure Taiwan scenario, upon which China's military buildup is clearly focused, it's not clear to me that U. S. and Chinese interests necessarily clash whatsoever.

Here's another good example of this queer logic: The Wall Street Journal recently ran a front-page story that laid out--in rather breathless detail--China's "broad push into Africa." The Chinese are accused of courting African dictatorships to gain access to strategic resources, including--God forbid!--oil.

Good thing America could never be accused of similar motivations and tactics.

But the Chinese aren't waging war in Africa, nor are they establishing military outposts like we are. No, China's "indirectness" comes in the form of building dams and laying roads and "cultivating desperately poor nations to serve as markets for its products decades down the road."

My, that is scary, reflecting, as the Journal story points out, "Beijing's policy of actively encouraging its companies and citizens to set up shop in Africa at a record pace."

Hmmm. China's investing and creating business and market opportunities in Africa, a continent long ravaged by civil wars and AIDS and America's complete indifference to a Holocaust's worth of preventable deaths in the last decade. And that's considered bad?

To listen to some fire-breathing congressmen, it sure as hell is, because China will secure long-term access to strategic raw materials, leaving our economy high and dry in the "resource wars" that must inevitably ensue.

This is zero-sum thinking at its worst, reflecting a strategic mind-set that declares a rise in any country's commercial influence around the world as necessarily signaling a decline in American power. If you had proposed in 1980 that the biggest threat to America's "liberal imperium" in 2005 was going to be a China whose rapacious style of capitalism surpassed even our own, you would have been drunk.

Donald Rumsfeld recently did some heavy lifting himself for the Big War crowd, signaling just how powerful it remains in the Bush administration. While in Asia in June for an annual regional security conference, he issued a "sharp rebuke," according to The New York Times, to China for its rising military spending. "Since no nation threatens China," Rumsfeld wondered out loud, "why this growing investment?"

Interesting question. Since no "nation" threatens the United States, but merely a transnational terrorist movement, perhaps the Chinese are wondering about America's skyrocketing defense budget of the last four years. Baseline defense spending is up 35 percent since 2001, not including the couple hundred billion extra in supplementals to pay for the wars. The U. S. routinely spends as much on research and development alone as China, according to the highest estimates, spends on its entire defense budget (approximately $70 billion). Meanwhile, the Rand Corporation's estimates of Chinese defense-spending increases, while routinely registering double-digit annual percentage growth, place China's military spending as a percentage of GDP at far less than that of America's defense burden--roughly 2.5 percent to America's almost 4 percent.

Using George Orwell's "newspeak" from 1984, I guess you could call our defense hike doubleplusgood to China's merely plusgood. But who's counting?

The Pentagon is. Its latest annual projection of Chinese defense spending, titled "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China," suggests that in two decades' time, China could, according to our highest estimates, be spending roughly half (as much as $250 billion) of what America's total defense bill was for 2005 (roughly $500 billion)--sort of a doublehalfbad prediction, if I may be so bold.

Do such wild projections matter? You bet. They will play heavily into the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review debate, which in recent months, according to a recent article by Greg Jaffe in The Wall Street Journal, has "intensified divisions among policy makers over how to approach China." Which means, of course, that the immediate tasks of the Army and Marines--fighting terrorists and insurgents in Iraq--will be balanced against the hypothetical threat of China, the "driver of U. S. military modernization," according to the Navy and Air Force.

With Rumsfeld--who has seemed committed to transforming the Pentagon from its leaden cold-war thinking--himself sounding the China hawks' alarm, you have to wonder just how committed the Bush administration remains to fighting this global war on terrorism. Prior to 9/11, the Republican neocons were firmly fixated on "rising China." With Saddam gone, has the Pentagon's preferred analysis of China simply resurfaced, suggesting that the war on terrorism was nothing more than an excuse to target Iraq?

Trust me, Mr. President, you don't ever want to have that conversation with Cindy Sheehan.

If Rumsfeld's comments in Singapore were designed to test the waters for a redemonization of China, they failed dramatically with our allies there, who told the secretary in no uncertain terms that such fearmongering wasn't welcome. Somewhat chastened, Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon and, according to department insiders, instructed that the Pentagon's annual assessment of China's military capabilities be rewritten to tone down the hype. The final draft that emerged weeks later certainly couldn't have satisfied the neocons or the Pacific Command's hawks, citing as it did only the long-term possibility that "if current trends persist, [the People's Liberation Army's] capabilities could prove a credible threat to other modern militaries operating in the region." Hardly the red meat the Big War crowd requires, and that alone may give the Army and Marines just enough bureaucratic breathing space to prevail in the QDR debates, which will be fought out--PowerPoint slide by PowerPoint slide--in Pentagon conference rooms throughout the fall and right up to the final report's unveiling to Congress in February 2006.

But don't harbor any illusions that anyone will give up the fight anytime soon. With Chinese companies buying up America's industrial-age crown jewels, like IBM's PC-production unit, and planning to build almost thirty nuclear power plants in coming years with the help of global giants like Westinghouse, rest assured that plenty of old men with military-industrial ties will be keeping a close watch on Beijing's so-called communists, hoping to spot some "disruptive" technology that justifies that trillion-and-a-half pipeline of Big War products. Check out the new "China caucus" in Congress and count the number of members who likewise sit on the House Armed Services Committee.

This game ain't over by a long shot.

The winning strategic construct that's likely to emerge in the Quadrennial Defense Review is described by Pentagon insiders as the "one-one-one" strategy of organizing our military's force structure around three main pillars, all seemingly equal: 1) homeland defense; 2) the war on terrorism (and all the nation-building efforts it inevitably triggers); and 3) deterrence, an old term now recast to mean, "China, we've got our eyes on you, so don't try anything ...you know ...disruptive!"

But let's be honest here. Homeland defense doesn't generate any force requirements beyond having enough National Guard to save lives in natural disasters and to baby-sit nuclear power plants on Code Red days. As the response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, homeland security requires an emphasis on the very same kind of low-tech, labor-intensive forces we've long neglected. No big programs are won or lost on that "pillar." And we know that the global war on terrorism tends to generate lots of Small War equipment needs, largely for the Army and Marines. That leaves "deterrence" as the long pole in the tent, and that means the Penta-gon needs China like Red Sox fans need the Yankees.

Business executives who've worked China's increasingly open market over the past decade or so will tell you flat out: If possible, avoid working with older Chinese businesspeople, because that first generation of capitalists is simply too tainted by its socialist upbringing to get anything done according to what we would consider to be normal business standards and practices. Frankly, that crowd you bribe--a lot.

No, if you're smart, you deal with the generation of capitalists that followed, which puts almost all of them under age fifty. This crew came of age after Chairman Mao departed the scene, during the long-running economic boom that began with Deng Xiaoping's "four modernizations" campaign in the early 1980s. Moreover, an amazing number of them got some training or education in the U.S., so they get us--and our style of capitalism--in ways we tend to underestimate.

I got a good description of this dynamic when I sat down recently for dinner with a couple of big American distributors of high-end consumer products. This pair of old-school guys told me of their recent attempts to forge a strategic alliance with a Chinese company to import a large volume of Chinese-produced big-ticket goods. Their initial attempts at negotiations were complicated by a lot of previously proposed deals that reflected early Chinese capitalist sensibilities, meaning those deals set up by the original Marco Polos who raced into China in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, few of those deals have gotten off the ground, mired as they are in the usual back-scratching arrangements.

The American executives I spoke to were not willing to grease anyone's palms, and they won't be conned into any questionable investments. But they discovered that when they dealt with younger Chinese managers at the factory level, the attitude was entirely focused on "What do you need" to make a deal work in the American market. Chinese capitalism has matured to the point that the government is starting to back off and say, "Don't talk to us, talk to the factory."

And it is the simple fact that American businessmen will be making billions of dollars either in China or partnered with Chinese businesses that leads us to a new twenty-first-century rule: If you're better off not trusting anyone over fifty in China on a business deal, you're also better off not listening to anyone over fifty in Washington on the "threat of rising China." The Cold Warrior crowd received its ideological imprinting on China decades ago, and no matter how smoothly they may talk about global affairs today (think Condi Rice), they are none of them to be trusted on China. Here's an easy way to spot them: If they ever quote Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski, tune them out completely. If they think Ronald Reagan defeated communism single-handedly, watch your wallet, but if they've ever worked under, or anywhere near, Dick Cheney, then watch your back.

It is no secret that in a generation's time China's influence over the global economy will rival America's, so it requires no great leap of logic for any strategist shy of fifty to realize that China and America are destined to enjoy a deep strategic partnership if globalization is to continue its historic expansion across the twenty-first century. This is probably the biggest strategic choice we've ever faced as a nation, because if we avoid this path, we'll most certainly prevent a future in which all of humanity can benefit from globalization's promise.

Few historic ends will ever come close to justifying such a wide array of means as the strategic alliance of the United States and China in coming decades. In this century, this partnership will define global stability just as much as the U. S.-British "special relationship" of the twentieth century did. It will be that important in its execution, that precious in its bond, that profound in its reach. The blueprint for global peace will be a joint Sino-American document. There is no alternative.

Too big of a paradigm shift for you? Check that birth certificate. If it's dated earlier than 1955, you're excused for the century, and here's why: Cold-war babies can't escape the logic that says, "If you resemble America politically, then you must be our friend." That was fine and dandy for the late-twentieth-century version of globalization, limited as it was to the narrowly defined West. But that's not the globalization we face today--much less tomorrow. No, that process is far more defined by the emergence of such new pillars as China, India, Brazil, and Russia than it is by that old-boys' club of North America, Western Europe, and industrialized Asia.

In the future, America will have more in common with China than with Japan, with India than with the UK, with Brazil than with Canada, and with Russia than either France or Germany. In general, if you're more like us economically, then you're logically America's strongest allies--despite whatever political differences appear to divide us. That's realism in the age of globalization--love it or leave it.

If you're an aging Boomer, take a seat, but if you're an Echo Boomer, the largest American age cohort in history (currently aged ten to twenty-five), then please stand up and be counted--now--because your future is on the line in this debate.

And if you're one of those Echo Boomers, like my two nephews, wearing a uniform in Iraq today, your life is on the line in this debate.

Today, more than ever, the question of U.S.-Chinese security relations depends on how the president of the United States chooses to define the global future worth creating. And China's continued emergence as a stable pillar of the global economy is crucial to that vision, whether the Pentagon's advocates of Big War planning realize it or not.

America will expend blood and treasure in coming years no matter which strategic path we take. But a whole lot less of each will be wasted if our leadership in Washington displays the moral courage and the strategic vision to realize that China is our natural strategic partner in any global war on terrorism, and not a strategic excuse to lowball that effort and--by doing so--needlessly sacrifice American lives in the process.

Americans need to demand more from our political leaders than an unimaginative strategy of just waiting around for the next "near-peer competitor" to arise--in effect, keeping our powder dry while the blood of our loved ones is spilled in Southwest Asia. America can't embrace its globalized future until it lets go of its cold-war past.

Get moving, Mr. President.

Blast from my past: "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Your Second Term . . . " (2005)

Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Your Second Term, Secure Your Legacy, And, Oh Yeah, Create a Future Worth Living

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, February 2005, pp. 90-93-128-29.

So you say you have no concern for your legacy. That some historian eighty years from now will figure out if you were a good president or not. Fair enough, but let's review so far. Your big-bang strategy to reform the Middle East took down Saddam, which was good; you've completely screwed up the Iraq occupation, which is bad; and now you don't seem to know exactly where you're going, which is not so great. This brings me to the bad news. The two players with the greatest potential for hog-tying your second term and derailing your big-bang strategy don't even live in the Middle East. Instead, they're located on little islands of unreality much like Washington, D. C.: Taiwan and North Korea. When either Taipei or Pyongyang decide to sneeze, it's gonna be your legacy that catches a cold, and here's why: Either country can effectively pull all your attention away from the Middle East while simultaneously torpedoing the most important strategic relationship America has right now. Yeah, I'm talking about China, a country your old man knows a thing or two about (hint, hint), even if the neocons don't have a clue. Your posse rode into town four years ago convinced that China was the rising military threat to America, only to be proven wrong by bin Laden on 9/11. Enough said.

3 SIMPLE STEPS: Iran, you can have the bomb, but you must recognize Israel. Next, China. Let's be partners. Sorry, Taiwan, the defense guarantee's got to go. We've got bigger fish to fry. Namely, Kim Jong Il.

What I'm here to tell you is this: You can achieve the fabled Middle East peace, but only if you lay down an effective fire wall between that region and the two potential flash points that can still ignite East Asia and send this whole global economy up in flames in a heartbeat. China is the baby you can't throw out with the bathwater you've dubbed the "global war on terrorism." You lose China, you might just kill globalization, and if that happens, it won't be just a matter of what historians write eighty years from now; you'll spend the rest of your days wondering why the world thinks you personally destroyed the planet's best hope for ending war as we know it.

So here's the package you need to pursue: Co-opt Iran, lock in China, and take down North Korea. Let's get started, shall we?

Nixon Goes to Tehran

WORK WITH ME ON THIS ONE. Iran getting the bomb could be the best thing that's ever happened to the Middle East peace process.

Whoa! Don't put down the magazine before I've had a chance to explain.

Iran is the one country standing between you and peace in the Middle East. You can't solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without its say-so, because the mullahs are the biggest potential spoilers in the region. They fund the terrorist groups that can effectively veto peace efforts in both Jerusalem and Baghdad. Iran is the one regional power that can still menace the Gulf militarily. Everyone else there operates in Tehran's shadow.

You and I both know Nixon would have inevitably headed to Tehran by now, absent 9/11 and your subsequent Axis of Evil speech. The Shiite revolution is a spent force in that country, whose sullen majority pretends to obey the mullahs while they pretend to rule over a very young population that's frighteningly ambitious for a better life. We're looking at a very late-Brezhnev-type situation here, with the Gorby already on the scene in the person of reformist president Mohammad Khatami. His version of perestroika took one step forward and then ten steps back once we lumped him in with Saddam and Kim, but even though his preferred course of treatment is on hiatus, the political diagnosis remains the same for Iran.

I know, I know. If the mullahs are so weak and scared, then why do they reach so obviously for the bomb?

Look at it from their perspective, Mr. President. Those scary neocons just toppled regimes to Iran's right (Afghanistan) and left (Iraq), and our military pulled off both takedowns with ease. Moreover, your administration has demonstrated beyond all doubt that you don't fear leaving behind a god-awful mess in your war machine's wake. Frankly, you're as scary as Nixon was in his spookiest White House moments on Vietnam. All I'm saying is now's the time to cash in on that reputation with Iran.

And don't tell me we can't do that rapprochement thing with a hostile regime that supports international terrorism. If we could do it with the Evil Empire back in 1973, we can do it with the Axis of Evil's number two today.

Our offer should be both simple and bold. I would send James Baker, our last good secretary of state, to Tehran as your special envoy with the following message: "We know you're getting the bomb, and we know there isn't much we can do about it right now unless we're willing to go up-tempo right up the gut. But frankly, there's other fish we want to fry, so here's the deal: You can have the bomb, and we'll take you off the Axis of Evil list, plus we'll re-establish diplomatic ties and open up trade. But in exchange, not only will you bail us out on Iraq first and foremost by ending your support of the insurgency, you'll also cut off your sponsorship of Hezbollah and other anti-Israeli terrorist groups, help us bully Syria out of Lebanon, finally recognize Israel, and join us in guaranteeing the deal on a permanent Palestinian state. You want to be recognized as the regional player of note. We're prepared to do that. But that's the price tag. Pay it now or get ready to rumble."

This is a win-win for everybody. The ruling mullahs desire survival most of all, and once Iran opens up economically, its people will stop blaming them for all that's wrong with the country because they'll be too busy taking advantage of all that opportunity. Israel wins because Tel Aviv finally gets someone on the Muslim side who is big enough and scary enough to sit down with the "Little Devil" as a real nuclear equal but still willing to guarantee Israel's existence. I know, it might seem insane to Israel (especially the Likud party), but mutually assured destruction really works and, frankly, Mr. President, now's the time to use some of that political capital you've built up with Ariel Sharon.

No doubt some neocons will try to sell you on a military option in Iran, but don't pull that thread under any circumstances, because if you do, you'll find yourself having to go medieval across an "arc of crisis" stretching from Riyadh to Islamabad, and nobody's got cojones that big. Trust me, Afghanistan and Iraq alone are enough to tap Central Command and Special Operations Command.

I'm also aware that there are plenty of regional experts who'll tell you we've got to do this or that with Egypt or Saudi Arabia, but, frankly, neither of those regimes has shown the ability to do squat when it comes to forging a lasting Middle East peace. Iran's the key. Squeeze it now while it's scared--and while Arafat's still dead. America has played bad cop long enough with Iran. For crying out loud, Iranians are the only people in the Middle East who actually like us!

What's more, Iran is the gateway for bringing both India and China into the mix. Both countries have recently cut huge oil and gas deals with Tehran. You know you want India and China to feel secure about their energy flow, and you know Iran's simply too big a player on both counts for either country to pass up. Plus, India considers itself both a major Gulf security player and Iran's natural mentor, while China's emerging alliance with Tehran (not to mention its ties with Pakistan) should be exploited for all it's worth. New Dehli and Beijing want to stabilize the Islamic arc of crisis as much as you do.

If detente with Iran secures Iraq to the south, then it's clear whomwe need to romance in the north on the issue of the Kurds--Tur-key. Yes, the role of the Kurds in Turkey is a long and complex tale, but who the hell else is going to step up to the plate on that one?

The price tag is not hard to dream up. You twist some arms in the European Union until they either fall off or Turkey's admission gets fast-tracked. If NATO won't come to our rescue in the Sunni triangle, it's the least Old Europe can do.

Speaking of the triangle, that stinker's going to remain ours for the long term, but with Israel and Palestine off the table and real cooperation from both Iran and Syria in clamping down on all those jihadists with a one-way ticket to paradise, we'll extinguish the dream of the Saddam Baathists who are still fighting hard by effectively killing Iraq as a unitary state. Eventually, Iraq's Sunni population will realize that it can either become the recognized master of the triangle and nothing else (the same narrowing solution we forced on the Serbs in the Balkans), or it can choose to live in the region's new West Bank, surviving on intifada for the rest of its days.

Lock in China at Today's Prices

TO UNDERSTAND CHINA TODAY, you have to remember what it was like for the United States back in the early years of the twentieth century. Here we were, this burgeoning economic powerhouse with a rising yet still relatively small military package, and all the old-school powers worried about us as an up-and-coming threat. While the European form of globalization predominated at that time, our upstart version ("We don't need no stinkin' empire!") would come to dominate the landscape by the century's midpoint, primarily because Europe decided to self-destruct all its empires via two "world" wars that in retrospect look like the European Union's versions of the American Civil War.

China is the United States of the early twenty-first century: rising like crazy, but not really a threat to anyone except small island nations off its coast. (God, I miss T. R. and the Rough Riders.) Hu Jintao, China's current president and party boss of the country's fourth generation of leaders, has tried to calm global fears by proposing his theory of Peacefully Rising China, a tune that, frankly, none of the Pentagon's hardcore neocons can carry.

Why? The far Right is still gunning for China, and precious Taiwan is its San Juan Hill. Nixon burned Taiwan's ass back in the early seventies when he effectively switched official recognition from Taipei to the mainland, so the price it demanded was the continued "defense guarantee" that said we'd always arm Taiwan to the teeth and rush to its rescue whenever China unleashed its million-man swim of an invasion.

That promise is still on the books, like some blue law from a bygone era. Does anyone seriously think we'd sacrifice tens of thousands of American troops to stop China from reabsorbing Taiwan?

I know, I know. China's still "communist" (like I still have a full head of hair if the lighting's just so), whereas Taiwan is a lonely bastion of democracy in an otherwise . . . uh . . . increasingly democratic Asia. So even though the rest of Asia, including Japan, is being rapidly sucked into China's economic undertow (as "running dogs of capitalism" go, China's a greyhound), somehow the sacredness of Taiwan's self-perceived "independence" from China is worth torching the global economy over? Does that strike anybody as slightly nuts?

Here's the weirdest part: China's been clearly signaling for years that it's perfectly willing to accept the status quo, basically guaranteeing Taiwan's continued existence, so long as Taipei's government maintains the appearance of remaining open to the possibility of rejoining the mainland someday.

Now I know people say you don't read books, Mr. President, but being a Southerner, you know something about the Civil War. Imagine if Jefferson Davis and the leftovers of the Confederacy had slipped away to Cuba in 1865 to set up their alternative, nose-thumbing version of America on that island. Then fast-forward to, say, 1905 and imagine how much the U. S. would have tolerated some distant, imperial power like England telling us what we could or could not do vis-a-vis this loser sitting just off our shore. Imagine where old Teddy Roosevelt would have told the Brits they could shove their defense guarantee.

My point is this: In a generation's time, China will dominate the global economy just as much as the United States does today. (Don't worry, we'll be co-dominatrices.) The only way to stop that is to kill this era's version of globalization--something I worry about those neocons actually being stupid enough to do as part of their fanciful pursuit of global "hegemony." That nasty, far poorer future is not the one I want to leave behind for my kids, and I expect you feel the same about yours. China won't go down alone; it'll take most of the advanced global economy with it. So on this one, let's go with those vaunted American interests I keep hearing about and look out for number one.

This may seem a back-burner issue, but there's credible talk of Taipei doing something provocative like adding the word Taiwan in parentheses behind its official name, the Republic of China. That may not seem like much to us, but Beijing's reluctant hand may be forced by this act. Seems crazy, doesn't it?

Again, how much of the global economy--how many American lives--are you prepared to sacrifice on your watch just so Taiwan can rejoice in this moment of self-actualization?

I vote for zero. Zip. Nada.

Take America's defense guarantee to Taiwan off the table and do it now, before some irrational politician in Taipei decides he's ready to start a war between two nuclear powers. Trust me, you'd be doing Taiwan a favor, because it's my guess that our defense guarantee would evaporate the moment any Taiwan Straits crisis actually boiled over, leaving Taipei severely embarrassed and Beijing feeling excessively emboldened.

Let's lock in a strategic alliance with rising China at today's prices, because it's got nowhere to go but up over the coming years. Buying into this relationship now is like stealing Alaska from the czars for pennies on the dollar; it'll never be this cheap again.

More to the point, preemptively declaring a permanent truce in the Taiwan Straits is the quid we offer for Beijing's quo in the solution set that really matters in East Asia today: the reunification of Korea following Kim Jong Il's removal from power.

Kill Kim: Volumes 1, 2 & 3

NOW WE GET TO THE GOOD PART. The Koreas issue is the tailbone of the cold war: completely useless, but it can still plunge you into a world of pain if middle-aged Asia slips and falls on it. North Korea is the evil twin, separated at birth, and yet, because it's still joined at the hip with its sibling, its better half grows ever more irrationally distraught as time passes, contemplating the inevitable invasive surgery that lies ahead.

So while it might seem at first glance like a job for Team America: World Police, you'll want something less South Park in its comic simplicity and a little more

Tarantinoesque in its B-movie grandeur. That's right, we need a Deadly Viper Assassination Squad to make Kim an offer he can't refuse.

Kim Jong Il's checked all the boxes: He'll sell or buy any weapons of mass destruction he can get his hands on, he's engaged in bizarre acts of terrorism against South Korea, and he maintains his amazingly cruel regime through the wholesale export of both narcotics and counterfeit American currency. Is he crazy? He once kidnapped two of South Korea's biggest movie stars and held them hostage in his own personal DreamWorks studio. But if that doesn't do it for you, then try this one on for size: The Kim-induced famine of the late 1990s killed as many as two million North Koreans. If that doesn't get you a war-crimes trial in this day and age, then what the hell will?

Here's the squad we need to assemble: China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, plus Russia.

You just shook hands with China over Taiwan. Japan's there because both China and America are on the team and because it's got the most cash to finance the reconstruction. The Aussies and Kiwis are invited out of respect for their longtime security role in Asia, and the Russians are in because they might just run a pipeline to Japan through the Korean peninsula when it's all said and done. As for the wobbly South Koreans, just smack 'em upside the head and tell them it's strictly business--nothing personal.

Those are the Seven Samurai that walk into Kim Jong Il's palace and offer him three possible endings to this thriller: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Version #1 (Good) is the Baby Doc Duvalier package. Keep your money, keep your women, keep your entourage, keep it all . . . just somewhere else. China can offer Kim a fabulous forbidden city somewhere in Inner Mongolia. Hell, promise this Cecil B. Demented a five-picture deal and tell him Steven Spielberg wants to do lunch.

If he doesn't bite on that one, then show Kim Version #2 (Bad). He goes on trial in the Hague for years on end, paraded around like the freak job he is, and once he's thoroughly stripped of what passes for his "majesty," we'll let him rot in a jail cell for the rest of his days.

Version #3 (Ugly) is delivered sotto voce. Just have Paul Wolfowitz show Kim the "six-month reconstruction plan" the Pentagon neocons drew up for the postwar occupation. If he thinks you're bluffing, then instruct Wolfie to slip him some of those morgue shots of Uday and Qusay looking all stitched up like a pair of Frankensteins. Kim'll get the hint. Your administration has proven that you're willing to wage war with almost no concern for the resulting VIP body count, the subsequently incompetent occupation, or the inevitable political uproar back home. I say when you've got it, flaunt it.

If it comes to trigger-pulling, can we pull it off? You know we can, and even here we've got a choice between the stripped-down package (i.e., just kill Kim) and the tricked-up models (e.g., smash-and-grab WMD, decapitating command-and-control, pounding ground forces). North Korea's military will prove less brittle than Saddam's Republican Guard but hardly invulnerable. Plus, on this one the local players will provide plenty of boots on the ground (South Korea, China) and humanitarian aid (Japan) just to prevent refugees from flooding across their borders. Moreover, Kim's slim power base sits atop a Mafia-like criminal empire that features the usual "honor" among thieves, so bribing his fellow kleptocrats with golden parachutes is quite feasible. Finally, the postconflict investment flow will be heavy on this one, because there will be no insurgency, no jihad, no nothing, just a gulag's worth of political prisoners to set free.

But the truth is, it probably won't come to that simply because both you and the neocons have such a scary reputation that you can likely stare down Lil' Kim, so long as you've got China glaring at him disapprovingly over your shoulder. You know China would just as soon jettison Kim because he's a genuine nut and he's terrible for property values. So what you really need to offer the Chinese on the far side is something truly useful, and that something is an Asian NATO. That's right: Kim's tombstone should mark the spot where a NATO-like security alliance for East Asia is born.

If you terminate Taiwan's defense guarantee in order to bring Beijing to Kim's table, then you offer to kill all your plans for missile defense to get the Chinese to pull the chair out from under him. Star Wars has been the single worst boondoggle in the history of the Pentagon--nearly $100 billion wasted and not even Tang to show for it. By securing America's military alliance with China, Japan, and Korea, you not only kill the concept of great-power war in Asia for good, you've just ended Osama bin Laden's bid to pit East against West.

That's it. And you've got about ten months to get it all rolling, with maybe another twenty months to wrap most of it up. By the summer of 2007, your presidency and all the power you wield right now will begin to be severely discounted by politicians both at home and abroad.

Mr. President, I know you're committed to following through on what you've set in motion in the Middle East, and I know you're hell-bent to prove all the eggheads wrong about the possibility of democracy taking root there--and I like your certitude on both points. You're the just-do-it president. You react from your gut more than either your heart or your brains, and you know what? You're as big a gift from history as 9/11's wake-up call turned out to be--and almost equally hard for many Americans to swallow.

You believe that America will defeat global terrorism only if it is willing to transform the Middle East in the process, and I agree. But just as we had to make peace with the Soviets before we could "tear down that wall," your administration will have to make peace with Iran's mullahs before we can begin dismantling the many walls that still isolate that insular region from the global economy and the mutually assured dependence that defines its long-term stability and peace. The road to lasting security in both Jerusalem and Baghdad starts in Tehran, and ultimately it must run through Beijing as well.

You lock down Asia by putting a leash on Taiwan, inviting China into the copilot seat and shoving Kim underground, and you'll not only free up America's military resources for more-urgent tasks in the Middle East, you'll create a sense of strategic despair in the minds of bin Laden and Zarqawi that they'll never be able to overcome. Their dream is to split up the advancing core of globalization and stop its creeping embrace of their idealized Islamic world, which they know will be forever altered by that integration process. Their best strategic hope in this conflict is that some hostile great power will rise in the East to challenge the American-led West. You lock in China today, Mr. President, and you will corner and kill transnational terrorism tomorrow.

And not that you care, Mr. President, but there's your legacy.

Blast from my past: "The Pentagon's New Map" (2003)

The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, March 2003, pp. 174-79 & 227-28.

IT EXPLAINS WHY WE'RE GOING TO WAR. AND WHY WE'LL KEEP GOING TO WAR. BY THOMAS P. M. BARNETT, U. S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE [MAPS BY WILLIAM MCNULTY]

Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world--and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Penta-gon and in the intelligence community. Now he gives it to you.

LET ME TELL YOU why military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point--the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with what I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and--most important--the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization's "ozone hole" may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U. S. military's next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

 DISCONNECTEDNESS DEFINES DANGER: Problem areas requiring American attention (outlined) are, in the author's analysis, called the Gap. Shrinking the Gap is possible only by stopping the ability of terrorist networks to access the Core via the "seam states" that lie along the Gap's bloody boundaries. In this war on terrorism, the U.S. will place a special emphasis on coopertion with these states. What are the classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia.

FOR MOST COUNTRIES, accommodating the emerging global rule set of democracy, transparency, and free trade is no mean feat, which is something most Americans find hard to understand. We tend to forget just how hard it has been to keep the United States together all these years, harmonizing our own, competing internal rule sets along the way--through a Civil War, a Great Depression, and the long struggles for racial and sexual equality that continue to this day. As far as most states are concerned, we are quite unrealistic in our expectation that they should adapt themselves quickly to globalization's very American-looking rule set.

But you have to be careful with that Darwinian pessimism, because it is a short jump from apologizing for globalization-as-forced-Americanization to insinuating--along racial or civilization lines--that "those people will simply never be like us." Just ten years ago, most experts were willing to write off poor Russia, declaring Slavs, in effect, genetically unfit for democracy and capitalism. Similar arguments resonated in most China-bashing during the 1990s, and you hear them today in the debates about the feasibility of imposing democracy on a post-Saddam Iraq--a sort of Muslims-are-from-Mars argument.

So how do we distinguish between who is really making it in globalization's Core and who remains trapped in the Gap? And how permanent is this dividing line?

Understanding that the line between the Core and Gap is constantly shifting, let me suggest that the direction of change is more critical than the degree. So, yes, Beijing is still ruled by a "Communist party" whose ideological formula is 30 percent Marxist-Leninist and 70 percent Sopranos, but China just signed on to the World Trade Organization, and over the long run, that is far more important in securing the country's permanent Core status. Why? Because it forces China to harmonize its internal rule set with that of globalization--banking, tariffs, copyright protection, environmental standards. Of course, working to adjust your internal rule sets to globalization's evolving rule set offers no guarantee of success. As Argentina and Brazil have recently found out, following the rules (in Argentina's case, sort of following) does not mean you are panicproof, or bubbleproof, or even recessionproof. Trying to adapt to globalization does not mean bad things will never happen to you. Nor does it mean all your poor will immediately morph into a stable middle class. It just means your standard of living gets better over time.

In sum, it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you are lucky, so will American troops.

MAPPING AMERICA'S WAR ON TERRORISM: AN AGGRESSIVE NEW STRATEGY The maps on these pages show all United States military responses to global crises from 1990 to 2002. Notice that a pattern emerges. Any time American troops show up--be it combat, a battle group pulling up off the coast as a reminder, or a peacekeeping mission--it tends to be in a place that is relatively disconnected from the world, where globalization hasn't taken root because of a repressive regime, abject poverty, or the lack of a robust legal system. It's these places that incubate global terrorism. Draw a line around these military engagements and you've got what I call the Non-Integrating Gap. Everything else is the Functioning Core. The goal of this new strategy is simple: Shrink the Gap. Don't contain it, shrink it. -- THOMAS P. M. BARNETT

SO WHAT PARTS OF THE WORLD can be considered functioning right now? North America, much of South America, the European Union, Putin's Russia, Japan and Asia's emerging economies (most notably China and India), Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, which accounts for roughly four billion out of a global population of six billion.

Whom does that leave in the Gap? It would be easy to say "everyone else," but I want to offer you more proof than that and, by doing so, argue why I think the Gap is a long-term threat to more than just your pocketbook or conscience.

If we map out U. S. military responses since the end of the cold war (see the following pages), we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of the world that are excluded from globalization's growing Core--namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. That is roughly the remaining two billion of the world's population. Most have demographics skewed very young, and most are labeled "low income" or "low middle income" by the World Bank (i.e., less than $3,000 annual per capita).

If we draw a line around the majority of those military interventions, we have basically mapped the Non-Integrating Gap. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as an Israel isolated in the Gap, a North Korea adrift within the Core, or a Philippines straddling the line. But looking at the data, it is hard to deny the essential logic of the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U. S. will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order or eradicate threats.

Now, that may seem like a tautology--in effect defining any place that has not attracted U. S. military intervention in the last decade or so as "functioning within globalization" (and vice versa). But think about this larger point: Ever since the end of World War II, this country has assumed that the real threats to its security resided in countries of roughly similar size, development, and wealth--in other words, other great powers like ourselves. During the cold war, that other great power was the Soviet Union. When the big Red machine evaporated in the early 1990s, we flirted with concerns about a united Europe, a powerhouse Japan, and--most recently--a rising China.

What was interesting about all those scenarios is the assumption that only an advanced state

can truly threaten us. The rest of the world? Those less-developed parts of the world have long been referred to in military plans as the "Lesser Includeds," meaning that if we built a military capable of handling a great power's military threat, it would always be sufficient for any minor scenarios we might have to engage in the less-advanced world.

That assumption was shattered by September 11. After all, we were not attacked by a nation or even an army but by a group of--in Thomas Friedman's vernacular--Super-Empowered Individuals willing to die for their cause. September 11 triggered a system perturbation that continues to reshape our government (the new Department of Homeland Security), our economy (the de facto security tax we all pay), and even our society (Wave to the camera!). Moreover, it launched the global war on terrorism, the prism through which our government now views every bilateral security relationship we have across the world.

In many ways, the September 11 attacks did the U. S. national-security establishment a huge favor by pulling us back from the abstract planning of future high-tech wars against "near peers" into the here-and-now threats to global order. By doing so, the dividing lines between Core and Gap were highlighted, and, more important, the nature of the threat environment was thrown into stark relief.

Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap--in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take "off line" from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia).

If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country's potential to warrant a U. S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. There is a good reason why Al Qaeda was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan: These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world. Look at the other places U. S. Special Operations Forces have recently zeroed in on: northwestern Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We are talking about the ends of the earth as far as globalization is concerned.

But just as important as "getting them where they live" is stopping the ability of these terrorist networks to access the Core via the "seam states" that lie along the Gap's bloody boundaries. It is along this seam that the Core will seek to suppress bad things coming out of the Gap. Which are some of these classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia come readily to mind. But the U. S. will not be the only Core state working this issue. For example, Russia has its own war on terrorism in the Caucasus, China is working its western border with more vigor, and Australia was recently energized (or was it cowed?) by the Bali bombing.

If we step back for a minute and consider the broader implications of this new global map, then U. S. national-security strategy would seem to be: 1) Increase the Core's immune-system capabilities for responding to September 11--like system perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap's worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, 3) Shrink the Gap. Notice I did not just say Mind the Gap. The knee-jerk reaction of many Americans to September 11 is to say, "Let's get off our dependency on foreign oil, and then we won't have to deal with those people." The most naïve assumption underlying that dream is that reducing what little connectivity the Gap has with the Core will render it less dangerous to us over the long haul. Turning the Middle East into Central Africa will not build a better world for my kids. We cannot simply will those people away.

The Middle East is the perfect place to start. Diplomacy cannot work in a region where the biggest sources of insecurity lie not between states but within them. What is most wrong about the Middle East is the lack of personal freedom and how that translates into dead-end lives for most of the population--especially for the young. Some states like Qatar and Jordan are ripe for perestroika-like leaps into better political futures, thanks to younger leaders who see the inevitability of such change. Iran is likewise waiting for the right Gorbachev to come along--if he has not already.

What stands in the path of this change? Fear. Fear of tradition unraveling. Fear of the mullahs' disapproval. Fear of being labeled a "bad" or "traitorous" Muslim state. Fear of becoming a target of radical groups and terrorist networks. But most of all, fear of being attacked from all sides for being different--the fear of becoming Israel.

The Middle East has long been a neighborhood of bullies eager to pick on the weak. Israel is still around because it has become--sadly--one of the toughest bullies on the block. The only thing that will change that nasty environment and open the floodgates for change is if some external power steps in and plays Leviathan full-time. Taking down Saddam, the region's bully-in-chief, will force the U. S. into playing that role far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East--a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect.

But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can. Freedom cannot blossom in the Middle East without security, and security is this country's most influential public-sector export. By that I do not mean arms exports, but basically the attention paid by our military forces to any region's potential for mass violence. We are the only nation on earth capable of exporting security in a sustained fashion, and we have a very good track record of doing it.

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U. S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U. S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the two strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

This country has successfully exported security to globalization's Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle East have been inconsistent--in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

Naturally, it will take a whole lot more than the U. S. exporting security to shrink the Gap. Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core's public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict.

Making this effort means reshaping our military establishment to mirror-image the challenge we face. Think about it. Global war is not in the offing, primarily because our huge nuclear stockpile renders such war unthinkable--for anyone. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state wars are becoming fairly rare. So if the United States is in the process of "transforming" its military to meet the threats of tomorrow, what should it end up looking like? In my mind, we fight fire with fire. If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, we field a military of Super-Empowered Individuals.

This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military, but that is the wrong way of looking at it, for what we are dealing with here are problems of success--not failure. It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn. I know most Americans do not want to hear this, but the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there. If gated communities and rent-a-cops were enough, September 11 never would have happened.

History is full of turning points like that terrible day, but no turning-back points. We ignore the Gap's existence at our own peril, because it will not go away until we as a nation respond to the challenge of making globalization truly global.

 

HANDICAPPING THE GAP

My list of real trouble for the world in the 1990s, today, and tomorrow, starting in our own backyard:

1) HAITI Efforts to build a nation in 1990s were disappointing. · We have been going into Haiti for about a century, and we will go back when boat people start flowing in during the next crisis--without fail.

2) COLOMBIA Country is broken into several lawless chunks, with private armies, rebels, narcos, and legit government all working the place over. · Drugs still flow. · Ties between drug cartels and rebels grew over decade, and now we know of links to international terror, too. · We get involved, keep promising more, and keep getting nowhere. Piecemeal, incremental approach is clearly not working.

3) BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA Both on the bubble between the Gap and the Functioning Core. Both played the globalization game to hilt in the nineties and both feel abused now. The danger of falling off the wagon and going self-destructively leftist or rightist is very real. · No military threats to speak of, except against their own democracies (the return of the generals). · South American alliance MERCOSUR tries to carve out its own reality while Washington pushes Free Trade of Americas, but we may have to settle for agreements with Chile or for pulling only Chile into bigger NAFTA. Will Brazil and Argentina force themselves to be left out and then resent it? · Amazon a large ungovernable area for Brazil, plus all that environmental damage continues to pile up. Will the world eventually care enough to step in?

4) FORMER YUGOSLAVIA For most of the past decade, served as shorthand for Europe's inability to get its act together even in its own backyard. · Will be long-term baby-sitting job for the West.

5) CONGO AND RWANDA/BURUNDI Two to three million dead in central Africa from all the fighting across the decade. How much worse can it get before we try to do something, anything? Three million more dead? · Congo is a carrion state--not quite dead or alive, and everyone is feeding off it. · And then there's AIDS.

6) ANGOLA Never really has solved its ongoing civil war (1.5 million dead in past quarter century). · Basically at conflict with self since mid-seventies, when Portuguese "empire" fell. · Life expectancy right now is under forty!

7) SOUTH AFRICA The only functioning Core country in Africa, but it's on the bubble. Lots of concerns that South Africa is a gateway country for terror networks trying to access Core through back door. · Endemic crime is biggest security threat. · And then there's AIDS.

8) ISRAEL-PALESTINE Terror will not abate--there is no next generation in the West Bank that wants anything but more violence. · Wall going up right now will be the Berlin Wall of twenty-first century. Eventually, outside powers will end up providing security to keep the two sides apart (this divorce is going to be very painful). · There is always the chance of somebody (Saddam in desperation?) trying to light up Israel with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and triggering the counterpunch we all fear Israel is capable of.

9) SAUDI ARABIA The let-them-eat-cake mentality of royal mafia will eventually trigger violent instability from within. · Paying terrorists protection money to stay away will likewise eventually fail, so danger will come from outside, too. · Huge young population with little prospects for future, and a ruling elite whose main source of income is a declining long-term asset. And yet the oil will matter to enough of the world far enough into the future that the United States will never let this place really tank, no matter what it takes.

10) IRAQ Question of when and how, not if. · Then there's the huge rehab job. We will have to build a security regime for the whole region.

11) SOMALIA Chronic lack of governance. · Chronic food problems. · Chronic problem of terrorist-network infiltration. · We went in with Marines and Special Forces and left disillusioned--a poor man's Vietnam for the 1990s. Will be hard-pressed not to return.

12) IRAN Counterrevolution has already begun: This time the students want to throw the mullahs out. · Iran wants to be friends with U. S., but resurgence of fundamentalists may be the price we pay to invade Iraq. · The mullahs support terror, and their push for WMD is real: Does this make them inevitable target once Iraq and North Korea are settled?

13) AFGHANISTAN Lawless, violent place even before the Taliban stepped onstage and started pulling it back toward seventh century (short trip). · Government sold to Al Qaeda for pennies on the dollar. · Big source of narcotics (heroin). · Now U. S. stuck there for long haul, rooting out hardcore terrorists/rebels who've chosen to stay.

14) PAKISTAN There is always the real danger of their having the bomb and using it out of weakness in conflict with India (very close call with December 13, 2001, New Delhi bombing). · Out of fear that Pakistan may fall to radical Muslims, we end up backing hard-line military types we don't really trust. · Clearly infested with Al Qaeda. · Was on its way to being declared a rogue state by U. S. until September 11 forced us to cooperate again. Simply put, Pakistan doesn't seem to control much of its own territory.

15) NORTH KOREA Marching toward WMD. · Bizarre recent behavior of Pyongyang (admitting kidnappings, breaking promises on nukes, shipping weapons to places we disapprove of and getting caught, signing agreements with Japan that seem to signal new era, talking up new economic zone next to China) suggests it is intent (like some mental patient) on provoking crises. · We live in fear of Kim's Götterdämmerung scenario (he is nuts). · Population deteriorating--how much more can they stand? · After Iraq, may be next.

16) INDONESIA Usual fears about breakup and "world's largest Muslim population." · Casualty of Asian economic crisis (really got wiped out). · Hot spot for terror networks, as we have discovered.

New/integrating members of Core I worry may be lost in coming years:

17) CHINA Running lots of races against itself in terms of reducing the unprofitable state-run enterprises while not triggering too much unemployment, plus dealing with all that growth in energy demand and accompanying pollution, plus coming pension crisis as population ages. · New generation of leaders looks suspiciously like unimaginative technocrats--big question if they are up to task. · If none of those macro pressures trigger internal instability, there is always the fear that the Communist party won't go quietly into the night in terms of allowing more political freedoms and that at some point, economic freedom won't be enough for the masses. Right now the CCP is very corrupt and mostly a parasite on the country, but it still calls the big shots in Beijing. · Army seems to be getting more disassociated from society and reality, focusing ever more myopically on countering U. S. threat to their ability to threaten Taiwan, which remains the one flash point that could matter. · And then there's AIDS.

18) RUSSIA Putin has long way to go in his dictatorship of the law; the mafia and robber barons still have too much power. · Chechnya and the near-abroad in general will drag Moscow into violence, but it will be kept within the federation by and large. · U. S. moving into Central Asia is a testy thing--a relationship that can sour if not handled just right. · Russia has so many internal problems (financial weakness, environmental damage, et cetera) and depends too much on energy exports to feel safe (does bringing Iraq back online after invasion kill their golden goose?). · And then there's AIDS.

19) INDIA First, there's always the danger of nuking it out with Pakistan. · Short of that, Kashmir pulls them into conflict with Pak, and that involves U. S. now in way it never did before due to war on terror. · India is microcosm of globalization: the high tech, the massive poverty, the islands of development, the tensions between cultures/civilizations/religions/et cetera. It is too big to succeed, and too big to let fail. · Wants to be big responsible military player in region, wants to be strong friend of U. S., and also wants desperately to catch up with China in development (the self-imposed pressure to succeed is enormous). · And then there's AIDS.

Blast from my past: "Global Transaction Strategy" (2003)

 

Global Transaction Strategy

Operation Iraqi Freedom could be a first step toward a larger goal: true globalization.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney Jr.

Military Officer, May 2003, pp. 68-77.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is on temporary assignment from the Naval War College as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Henry H. Gaffney Jr. is a team leader with the Center for Strategic Studies, The CNA Corp., Alexandria, Va.

The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attack of Sept. 11 was both swift (the global war on terrorism) and profound (the Department of Homeland Security). With last year's publication of the National Security Strategy, the White House went even further and described - rather boldly - a global future worth creating. By doing so, the Bush administration embraced the notion recently put forth by many experts: that Washington now stands at a historical "creation point" much like the immediate post-World War II years.

When the United States finally went to war again in the Persian Gulf, it was not about settling old scores or simply enforcing U.N.-mandated disarmament of illegal weapons or a distraction in the war on terror. Instead, the Bush administration's first application of its controversial preemption strategy marked a historical tipping point - the moment when Washington took real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

This is why the public debate about the war has been so important: It has forced Americans to come to terms with what [the authors] believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age: Disconnectedness defines danger.

Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence. Understanding this distinction is crucial for our understanding of the tasks that lie ahead as the United States not only wages war against global terrorism but also seeks to make globalization truly global.

As globalization deepens and spreads, two groups of states are essentially pitted against one another: one, countries seeking to align themselves internally to the emerging global rule set (e.g., advanced Western democracies, Vladimir Putin's Russia, Asia's emerging economies); the other, countries that refuse such internal realignment - and thus remain largely "disconnected" from globalization - due to either political/cultural rigidity (the Middle East) or continuing abject poverty (most of Central Asia, Africa, and Central America). [The authors] dub the former the "Functioning Core" of globalization and the latter countries the "Non-Integrating Gap."

Although the United States is recognized as both economic and political-military leader of the Core, our foreign policy did not reflect much unity of vision regarding globalization until the Sept. 11 attack triggered the ongoing war on terrorism. Rather, globalization was treated as a largely economic affair that the U.S. government left to private business, with the government promoting the tariff cuts and regulations that support free trade both at home and abroad. The U.S. security community worried about globalization only to the extent that it fostered the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the actions of certain nefarious transnational actors.

The perturbations of the global system triggered by Sept. 11 have done much to highlight both the limits and risks of globalization, as well as this country's current and future role as "system administrator" to this historical process. For example, the vast majority (almost 95 percent) of U.S. military interventions over the past two decades have occurred within the Non-Integrating Gap. That is, we tend to "export" security to precisely those parts of the world that have a hard time coping with globalization or are otherwise not benefiting from it.

Fulfilling this kind of leadership role will require a new understanding on our part as to the Functioning Core's essential transactions with the Gap, which is - unsurprisingly - the source of virtually all the global terrorism we seek to eradicate. 

Living large

Although the United States represents only one-twentieth of the global population, its environmental footprint is dramatically larger. This country consumes roughly a quarter of the world's energy while producing approximately a quarter of the pollution and garbage. Economists will point out that we also produce roughly a quarter of the world's wealth, but frankly, a lot of that stays home, while we tend to import our energy and "export" our pollution. Simply put, we live well beyond our environmental means.

Our economic footprint is equally skewed. As our consistently huge trade deficit indicates, we also tend to live well beyond our economic means. Basically, we count on the rest of the world to finance our sovereign debt, which most countries - like Japan - are willing to do because the U.S. government is such a good credit risk, and the dollar is the closest thing there is to a global reserve currency. There is not a whole lot we should complain about in this deal - basically trading pieces of paper for actual goods. Put these two transactions together and it is easy to see why the United States has benefited from the rise of a global economy.

So what has the United States provided the world in return? Clearly we are a leader in technology and cultural exports, but these are fundamentally private-sector transactions that any advanced economy can provide.

The one U.S. public-sector export that has only increased its global market share with time is security. We account for nearly half the global public spending on security, and unlike any other state, we actually can export it to other regions on a substantial and continuous basis. And that is our fundamental transaction with the global economy: We import consumption and export security.

Sharing our surplus of security with the world is what makes us unique. Any advanced industrial state can sell arms, but only the United States can export stability. Yes, it does engender plenty of anger from some quarters, but from far more it elicits real gratitude - and allowance for our "living large." 

 

Beyond containment

During the Cold War, our policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Bloc was one of containment. The Globalization Era presents a different challenge: The Non-Integrating Gap does not just need to be contained, it needs to be shrunk. Doing so will take decades, however, and in the meantime we need to "firewall" off the Core from the Gap's worst exports: terrorism, narcotics, disease, genocide, and other violent disruptions.

The good news is we already have plenty of experience working the Gap - in fact, it has been the major focus of U.S. military crisis response for the past generation. Four key events in the 1970s marked our fundamental shift from Cold War containment to Gap firewall management:

• détente in Europe;
• OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil shocks of the early 1970s;
• the end of the Vietnam War; and
• the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Prior to this quartet of events, the patterns of the U.S. military's permanent forward deployments and crisis responses were largely in sync - clustered in the Cold War foci of Europe and Northeast Asia. But by the early 1980s, we were clearly out of balance. Most of European Command's response activity had shifted to the Eastern Mediterranean, while most of Pacific Command's responses had slid toward the Persian Gulf.

Logically, the United States created the Central Command at that point, signaling the effective shift of our focus from Cold War containment to Gap firewalling. According to the Center for Strategic Studies (css), in the 1980s the Middle East already accounted for just over half of the four services' combined situation response days (9,288 of 16,795, or 55 percent).

Turning to the css' response data since 1990 gives us an even clearer outline of the Non-Integrating Gap. The maps on this page and the next display U.S. military responses in the post-Cold War era (1990-2002). When a line is drawn around roughly 95 percent of those responses (isolating responses involving Taiwan and North Korea in an otherwise stable northeast Asia), it captures those portions of the world that are either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows connected with its advance.

Looking at this experience, a simple logic emerges: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the United States will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order or eradicate threats. 

Flowing globalization

Four major flows must proceed over the next several decades if globalization is to continue its advance and the Gap is to be shrunk. The U.S. government and its allies in the Core must enable and balance all four of these flows, for the disruption of one will damage the others, leaving the global economy and security environment vulnerable to the sort of system perturbations witnessed in connection with Sept. 11.

Flow of people from Gap to Core. According to the United Nations, by 2050 our global population should peak somewhere around 9 billion people and decline thereafter. This will be a huge turning point for humanity in more ways than one. Take graying: By 2050, the global 60-and-over cohort will match the 15-and-under group at roughly 2 billion each. From that point on, the old will progressively outnumber the young on this planet.

In theory, the aging of the global population spells good news regarding humanity's tendency to wage war, either on a local level or state-on-state. Today, the vast bulk of violence lies within the Gap, where, on average, less than 10 percent of the population is over 60 years of age. In contrast, Core states average 10 percent to 25 percent of their population over age 60. Simply put, older societies are associated with lower levels of conflict because these older societies are emerging out of the success of globalization, with prosperity and fewer children per family. 

The big hitch is this: Current U.N. projections say that by 2050, the potential support ratio (psr, or people aged 15-to-64 per one person 65-and-older) in the advanced economies will have dropped from 5-to-1 to 2-to-1, while in the least developed regions the psr still will stand at roughly 10-to-1. That means that worker-to-retiree ratios in the Core will plummet just as the retirement burden there skyrockets - unless the Gap's "youth bulges" flow toward the older Core states. Japan will require more than half a million immigrants per year to maintain its current workforce size, while the European Union will need to increase its current immigrant flow roughly fivefold - but both have great difficulty acceding to that need.

In effect, emigration from the Gap to the Core is globalization's release valve. With it, the prosperity of the Core can be maintained and more of the world's people can participate. Without it, overpopulation and under-performing economies in the Gap can lead to explosive situations that spill over to the Core. One hopeful sign of the future: The Philippines has demonstrated that such flows can be achieved on a temporary deployment or "global commuting" basis without resorting to permanent emigration or generating increased xenophobia in host nations.

Flow of security from Core to Gap. For now, the war on terrorism and our long-term commitment to rehabilitate Iraq have superseded previous Bush administration talk about an East Asian security strategy. These continuing interventions underline the reality that the U.S. military remains in the business of working the bloody seam between the Gap and the Core. In the 1990s, that seam ran from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, but today it also extends into Central Asia, where we have built a number of "temporary" military bases in former Soviet states to support our operations in Afghanistan - with Russian acquiescence - in a remarkable turn of history.

The reality is that the United States will end up exporting security (e.g., bases, naval presence, crisis response activity, military training) into Central and Southwest Asia for some time to come. For the first half of the 21st century, the primary cluster of security threats will lie in these areas - which also happen to be the supply center of the global energy market (we identify them as a cluster because the ultimate resolutions of individual conflict situations there are highly interrelated): 

While the United States already is pursuing an ambitious plan to rebuild much of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, there is little doubt among regional experts that the world is really looking at a lengthy rehabilitation period similar to post-World War II Germany or Japan. The United States might well establish permanent military bases in Iraq, moving them from Saudi Arabia to relieve the political situation there.

The Israeli-Palestinian issue is heading toward a Berlin Wall-like separation. It may eventually involve a United States-led demilitarized zone occupation force. Then we simply would have to wait out a couple of generations of Palestinian anger as that society ultimately is bought off through substantial Core economic aid and the Palestinians reduce their family size as they achieve some economic viability.

Saudi Arabia's dramatic slide in per capita income during the past 20 years signals a downward spiral that will trigger radical political reform and/or substantial internal strife. Forestalling this may require a lot more prodding by the United States if institutional reforms are to occur and the Core is to avoid organizing yet another peacekeeping force. The course of events in Iraq will bear strongly on this evolution.

Assuming the United States remains deeply involved in the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, Iran's mullahs will fear Tehran is next and likely step up their anti-Americanism - if that is possible. The United States therefore will continue its long-term containment strategy until the restive Iranian public prevails in its desire to join globalization. 

The combination of prosperity stemming from globalization and the export of U.S. surplus military power has taken "great power war" off the table in region after region. As the 21st century begins, such warfare is essentially unthinkable in the Western Hemisphere, in Europe (where nato members and Russia have joined in a common effort), or for that matter anywhere on the high seas. We hope that in a couple of decades, the same combination of efforts - a mix of economic and security cooperation - makes war unthinkable throughout developing Asia. But for the foreseeable future, it is the export of U.S. security into the Islamic regions of Southwest and Central Asia that remains our most serious international security task. We are witnessing the beginning of a long-term integration effort there, one that will ultimately rival our Cold War effort in Europe in its strategic centrality.

Flow of energy from Gap to Core. Sometime in the next 20 years, Asia will replace North America as the global energy market's demand center. That is because U.S. energy demand will increase rather slowly in the coming decades while Asia's will double. Asia has sufficient coal but will import the vast majority of both natural gas and oil as demand skyrockets. 

The great source for all that Asian demand will be Central and Southwest Asia plus Russia. A codependent relationship is already in the making: Energy-strapped Asia increasingly depends on political-military stability in the Middle East, while the no-longer cash-rich Middle East increasingly depends on economic growth in Asia. According to Department of Energy projections, by 2020 Asia will buy just under two-thirds of all the oil shipped out of the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf will account for roughly four-fifths of Asia's oil imports.

Disrupt the flow of Middle East oil, and Asia's full integration into the Core is put at risk as its economies falter. India or China could feel the need to play "great power" in the Gulf if the United States drops that ball. That could create an awkward competition among the Core countries, putting us all at the mercy of the Gap's chronic conflicts.

The United States must enable the smooth flow of energy from the Middle East to Asia because the latter is such an important partner in our global transactions. China and Japan are the two greatest sources of our trade deficit, and Japan long has been a leading buyer of our sovereign debt. China's domestic market may become our greatest export opportunity as it opens up under the World Trade Organization's guidelines. India, meanwhile, supplies half the world's software. In the end, it may not be our oil supply but it most certainly will be our prosperity that we protect when we export security to the Middle East.

Flow of investments from Old Core to New Core. Unprecedented flows of foreign direct investment are required for Asia's energy and other infrastructure requirements, approaching $2 trillion by 2020. Asians themselves will shoulder much of the burden, but plenty more long-term money will have to come from private investors in the United States and Europe, which in combination control roughly two-thirds of the annual global flow of approximately $1 trillion. So not only is Asia (the "New Core") dependent on the Gap for energy, but it is also dependent on the "Old Core" countries (the United States, European Union) for the financing. Put these two realities together, and you begin to understand that China's "rising" is far more about integration with the global economy than Beijing seeking some illusory power or hegemony.

The major problems with Asia's energy demands and investment climate are threefold: Asian governments, especially in China, still play far too large a decision-making role, delaying the rise of private-sector markets; national legal systems are still too arbitrary, meaning the rules are not applied equally to all players; and there are still too many chronic security flash points.

Continuing U.S. military presence in Asia helps deter the "vertical scenarios" of war (e.g., China-Taiwan, India-Pakistan, the Koreas), while enabling markets to emerge and tackle the harder, long-term "horizontal scenarios," such as meeting the region's ballooning energy demands while mitigating the already profound environmental costs. So long as markets can deflate buildup of pressure associated with all this development, none of these horizontal scenarios should segue into vertical shocks, i.e., conflicts. In effect, our military forces occupy both a physical and fiscal space in the region, encouraging Asian states to spend less on defense and more on development - the ultimate security.

Transaction Strategy

The "Transaction Strategy" is nothing more than a U.S. national security vision that recognizes the primacy of these four global flows. That means the U.S. government cannot pursue any national policy - such as the war on terrorism, the preemption strategy, missile defense, or exemptions from the International Criminal Court - in such a way as to weaken this fragile, interdependent balancing act across the globe as a whole. Instead, all security initiatives must be framed in such a way as to encourage and strengthen these system-level bonds. We will accomplish this best by being explicit with both friends and foes alike that U.S. national security policy will necessarily differentiate between the role we need to play within the Core's ever-strengthening security community (i.e., more assurance/deterrence-oriented) and the one we must assume whenever we enter the Gap (more dissuasion/preemption-oriented).

If that is the overarching principle of the Transaction Strategy, then its macro rule set on security can be summarized as follows:

• Do everything feasible to nurture security relations across the Functioning Core by maintaining and expanding our historical alliances.
• Discretely firewall off the Core from the Gap's most destabilizing exports - namely, terrorism, drugs, and pandemic diseases - while working the immigration rule set to provide opportunities to those who can contribute.
• Progressively shrink the Gap by continuing to export security to its greatest trouble spots while integrating any countries that are economic success stories as quickly as possible.

Is this a strategy for a Second American Century? Yes and no. Yes, because it acknowledges that the United States is the de facto model for globalization - the first multinational state and economic union. And yes, because it asserts that U.S. leadership is crucial to globalization's advance. But no, in that it reflects the basic principles of "collective goods" theory, meaning the United States should expect to put in the lion's share of the security effort to support globalization's advance because we enjoy its benefits disproportionately - hence this is a practical transaction in its own right.