WPR's The New Rules: A Positive Narrative for U.S. Foreign Policy

Where is the positive vision for U.S. foreign policy in this election? President Barack Obama and on-again, off-again “presumptive” GOP nominee Mitt Romney now duel over who is more anti-declinist when it comes to America’s power trajectory, with both slyly attaching their candidacies to the notion that “the worst” is now behind us. On that score, Obama implicitly tags predecessor George W. Bush, while Romney promises a swift end to all things Obama. 

Halftime in America? Indeed.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Lost in thought

Interesting client, desiring deep look ahead, meaning hundreds of years into the future. Fate of humanity, movement into galaxy, etc.

In a word - fun.

But making me a bit less interested in the blog or writing beyond the weekly column and GPS effort.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: What happens to the eurozone after the second Greek bailout?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The great Troika of the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has engineered a second bailout of Greece, once again saving Western Civilization as we know it. But as anyone following this long-running melo-drachma may attest, it ain’t over ‘til Chancellor Merkel says so. This week’s Wikistrat drill looks at possible future pathways for the eurozone.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Had lunch with old classmate today in NYC

Easily my most famous old Harvard classmate - Fareed Zakaria

Beautiful restaurant (A Voce) at Time Warner blding overlooking Columbus Circle (I want to say I'm certain of that, but I'm not).

Was nice to see him again after a few years.  We started our PhDs in Harvard's Government department in the same year - 1986, along with Minxin Pei, Debra Spar, Andrew Sullivan and Allison Stanger.  Quite a year that was, and it's always been very cool to link up with individuals since (getting Allison to join Wikistrat's community of analysts today as well!).

Also spent good chunk of morning with Amar Bakshi, editor of his GPS site. It was very nice to finally meet him in person after working the GPS posts with him these past few weeks.  Always good to put face with voice.

Main topic of both meets was naturally Wikistrat.  Secondary topic was our planned crowdsourced book, which CEO Joel Zamel and I spent a lot of time discussing this morning with my - and now Wikistrat's - lit agent.

Carried out from Virgil's at Times Square tonight.  A personal tradition.

We head down to DC on train tomorrow morning for two days of meetings. Gonna have to pen GPS post on train. It will be on EZ after second Greece bailout. Not my favorite subject, but WS community did nice job with it, with our Euro contigent sounding off very robustly!

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Needs Chinese Partners in Asian Century

While America has begun an economic recovery of uncertain strength and staying power, we Americans nonetheless face a far longer-term and more substantial national rebuilding project. This daunting task has placed us in a contemplative space, in which we nervously toggle between bouts of renewed self-confidence and crippling self-doubt. But the same thread runs through both cycles of this national bipolar disorder: the assumption that we must bear this burden alone.

Read the entire column at World Poliics Review.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Ten Roads to Israel-Iran War

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

Either Israel and the United States are engaged in a brilliant psychological operations campaign against Iran or the two long-time allies really are talking past each other on the subject of Tehran’s reach for a nuclear bomb. Either way, all this Bibi Netanyahu said, Leon Panetta said chatter is producing some truly jangled nerves over in Iran on the subject of Israel’s allegedly imminent attack on that country’s nuclear program facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps publicly implying that his nation can’t wait on Iranian events for as long as the Obama administration – with its looming embargo of Iranian oil sales to the West – would like. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta keeps tripping over his own tongue, saying one day that America is doing its best to keep Israel’s attack jets grounded and the next offhandedly remarking to reporters that Tel Aviv is inevitably going to pull that trigger sometime this spring.

Again, as psyop campaigns go, this is brilliant, because it not only keeps the Iranians nervous and guessing, it forces them out into the diplomatic open with all manner of implausible counter-threats that reveal their increasing desperation.

Stipulating all this brinkmanship - coordinated or not - this week’s Wikistrat crowd-sourced analysis exercise involves imagining the range of possible pathways to an Israel-Iran war.  We don’t offer odds here. We just try to cover a wide array of possible vectors toward the trigger-pulling point.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Nice PR for Wikistrat's North American Energy Export Boom simulation

Nice write up of master narratives that I, as chief analyst, constructed from the roughly two-dozen scenarios ginned up by Wikistrat analysts during the first week of the sim. Author is WS analyst himself, writing at the Foreign Policy Association's blog site.

That then gets picked up by the Natural Gas Americas website (find the permanent entry here).

Here's what it looked like on their front page for a while:

Got energy on the brain this week.  Yesterday I keynoted to about 800 directors of rural electrical co-ops from around the US.  Big conference was as Universal @ Orlando theme park.  After my talk I got in a quick quidditch match at the Harry Potter park.  Kicked some wizard ass, although I found out later it was just a bunch of retired California firemen attending a local conference.

Follow-on comment to my WPR piece on war with Iran

Per Maduka's comment that he was shocked to see this analysis from me (presumably he knows something of my years [roughly 8] of writing to different effect on this subject), I penned the following comment that I felt was important enough of a statement to post in full:

I was somewhat shocked to write the piece myself, but I found myself talking to people on the phone regarding this and I kept coming back to this sense of determinism, when all the dynamics are considered.

In the end, I do think the logic is very compelling for Israel - given the Arab Spring. Then we turn next to Obama, and given his drone use and desire to appear strong (hell, after all these years, let's just say the guy is strong on defense and leave it at that). Then we turn to the Pentagon, and I see a group of AirSea Battle Concept advocates who would love to test it out on Iran (limited scope) and, by doing so, signal VERY STRONGLY to China.

What I don't spot on any of these lines is a countervailing pressure of great strength.

Don't be confused, and I think I made this point decidedly in the piece (and you need to read it all to know this, so if all you scan is the opening . . . then please beg off further comment): this will be an air/SOF-only strike/war. This will be a "reducing" war, or what the Israelies call "mowing the grass." There is little sense of getting the job done with one effort.  

All you can hold out hope for is triggering the conditions for regime change (least likely from below; much more likely as result of regime infighting).  But that's at best a nice-to-get. You don't do it for that, even as I argue in the piece that you might as well - given the larger logic - target to encourage that (why not if you've making the effort already?).

And I think that's the macro lesson the US seems to be learning from the "war on terror," and it's making us more like Israel over time: we simply mow the grass now, and eschew the follow-on work.

WPR's The New Rules: The Coming War With Iran

While the debate over whether Israel will strike Iran ebbs and flows on an almost weekly basis now, a larger collision-course trajectory is undeniably emerging. To put it most succinctly, Iran won't back down, while Israel won't back off, and America will back up its two regional allies -- Israel and Saudi Arabia -- when the shooting finally starts. There are no other credible paths in sight: There will be no diplomatic miracles, and Iran will not be permitted to achieve a genuine nuclear deterrence. But let us also be clear about what this coming war will ultimately target: regime change in Tehran, because that is the only plausible solution.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Ben Shobert on Wikistrat's look at China-->Africa FDI dynamic

Find the post at Cross the Rubicon.

The bit I found interesting:

Dr. Barnett several years ago made a prediction that I imagine some rolled their eyes at, if for no other reason than it seemed outlandish at the time.  He suggested that as China’s presence in Africa grew, they would be greeted as a new colonial power, admittedly different in form and context, but none-the-less viewed as an outside power interested only in extracting resources from lowly Africa.  This would ultimately, as he saw it, create situations where African extremists would target Chinese operations in Africa, kidnap workers, etc.  It is worth noting this is precisely what has been happening, with a handful of other people asking the question, as Stan Abrams did earlier this week, what the world would think if China were to drop its equivalent of a Navy SEAL Team into Africa to get its people out.

If you want to participate in this business and do it well, your work will constantly be on the edge of outlandishness, otherwise you'll be trailing the pack and just picking up the conventional wisdom (like the increasingly regurgitated debate on state-capitalism-ruling-all versus America-in-decline-or-not?) as it's beaten to death.  

Spending my time, as I have for nearly a decade now, exploring the future reality of Chinese and US co-management of the world, puts me on the edge of most people's plausibility. After all, we got that "Chimerica" definition from Ferguson just as the global financial crisis killed the long-running model he was describing, so OF COURSE we now shift into a long-term rivalry between types of capitalism (strategic pivot et. al) and the "resumption of history" and so on.

But, of course, none of the larger structural dynamics in the world system have changed. We're just seeing the elite's perceptions begin to catch up, and when they do, they naturally package the undeniable reality into old boxes - like containment and superpower rivalry and AirSea Battle Concept (a painfully unimaginative retread from the 1980s with the Sovs).

However, for those of us who stick to their stories (scenarios), tomorrow's superpower interdependence will have less to do with the promise of shared death (MAD) than the promise of shared wealth - and the commensurate challenges of a world ruled from the middle for the first time in history.  That world, dominated by the C-I-A troika of China, India and America, is the subject of my next book, which I'll simultaneously crowd-source within the Wikistrat community over the next several months.

Obama says US wants Chinese FDI, but East Asia needs AirSea Battle Concept too!

What's wrong with this picture?  It comes from a WAPO article that says China is still wary of putting FDI in US, even though Obama claims he wants it for job creation.

Hmmmm.

Where to begin?

AirSea Battle Concept?

New national security strategic guidance that says US military force-sizing should be toward high-end warfare requirement in East Asia - namely China specifically?

Gosh, you wonder where the Chinese feel like we let national security fears trump economic opportunities.

I mean, shouldn't we be able to take their money AND target them for great-power war down the road?  What's so weird about that?  According to Kagan, everything you need to know about China and America is told in the fable about the frog and the scorpion.

This is not the world America made; these are merely the fears we prefer over change - and it's fairly pathetic.

Wikistrat post @ CNN/GPS: What Comes After Chavez?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

This Sunday, the historically disorganized Venezuelan opposition movement is holding its first-ever presidential primary to decide upon a single candidate to challenge long-time strongman Hugo Chavez. With regional governor Henrique Capriles expected to prevail, the aging Chavez faces a younger version of himself: namely, a dynamic rising star promising to transform the political landscape. This time, however, the figure is moving it away from the heavy-handed populism initiated by Chavez after he swept into office in 1998.

Over the course of his tenure, Chavez’s pursuit of “21^st century socialism” in Venezuela has propelled him to self-declared “president for life” status. Among his accomplishments are the systematic and brutal persecution of political opponents and critical journalists, the stacking of parliament with his supporters, various cash-payment programs to the voting poor to ensure his popularity, and - in a related dynamic - the general undermining (aka, looting) of the country’s primary economic engine, the national oil company known as PDVSA. Chavez has also turned Venezuela into one of the most crime-ridden nations in the world with the annual inflation averaging close to 30 percent.

Still, El Comandante has inspired copycat Chavista leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, and has reinvigorated Cuba’s communist dictatorship - all the best friends that money can buy.

But with the de facto dictator mysteriously seeking cancer care in Havana last year, widespread talk has surfaced that this election may well be Chavez’s last. Taking that hypothetical as our starting point, this week’s Wikistrat crowd-sourced analysis looks at what just might lie ahead for a post-Chavez Venezuela.  Here are five pathways to consider.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Last week's Wikistrat collaborative article featured in CNN coverage on Syria

We're in the sidebar that CNN runs listing its "complete coverage" on the deadly events there.

Find it here on their site.

Looks like this:

We're the "how it will end" bit on the bottom of this screen snapshot, more like halfway down on the actual nav bar.

Bhagwati on Obama on trade: "shame on you . . . for pandering"

Jagdish Bhagwati is a Columbia econ prof whose writings on globalization (particularly his book, In Defense of Globalization) I consider on par with Martin Wolf.

A tour of his recent FT op-ed:

President Barack Obama infamously killed the multilateral Doha Round last December by instructing his representative at the World Trade Organisation to be a "rejectionist" negotiator.  He compounded the folly by instead floating the trans-Pacific Trade Initiative that is conceived in a spirit of confronting China rather than promoting trade, and is also a cynical surrender to self-seeking Washington lobbies that would have have made John Kenneth Galbraith blush. Not content with these body blows to the world trading system, which his predecessors had built up over decades of US leadership, Mr Obama has pulled off the remarkable feat of making things yet worse with his State of the Union address . . .

Outsourcing is a bogeyman. The deception that Mr Obama buys into goes back to the populist commentator Lou Dobbs . . .

The two wrongs Obama promotes on outsourcing, according to Bhagwati: It's incorrect to cite only the jobs sent abroad. You have to factor in the jobs saved by reducing cost in a "fiercely competitive world."  Also, there is evidence of significant insourcing occurring in parallel - the "near sourcing" on certain services and supplies that makes competitive sense.

Bhagwati then goes on to attack Obama's "fetish on manufacturing."

• the notion that, unless you can "drop a product on one's foot" then it is not worth making;
• the reality that as specializaton grows in manufacturing, services naturally splinter off - a process that has nothing to do with outsourcing;
• the current dislike of the financial sector results in manufacturing lobbies arguing that manufacturing deserves support instead of the services sector, but it is in those services sector that the US will find genuine competitive advantage more often, because cheap labor there doesn't translate in the same way as it does in manufacturing; and
• the manufacturing sector in the US is already heavily subsidized.

The close:

So the campaign for more manufacturing is a boondooggle.  Jeff Immelt of General Electric, a splendid businessman and confidant of Mr Obama, has succumbed: who would look a freebie in the eye? Clyde Prestowitz, a Republican who earned Bill Clinton's plaudits in the 1992 campaign, is now celebrating on his blog that Mr Obama is his new convert. Mr Clinton regained his sanity in a year. This time it is likely to be a long slog.

I do feel like Obama lacks a core sense of who he is as a putative policymaker and thus what he believes in as a leader.

We see him lugging around Fareed Zakaria's Post-American World as a candidate, but now he's alleged to have drunk deeply Robert Kagan's anti-declinist book, The World America Made.  Yes, I understand that a sophisticated reading of both can be had, one that allows for seeing the bridges between the two arguments.  My point is, the declinist argument was more popular in 2008, so he gloms onto it, and now the anti-declinist argument is more politically palatable, so now he gloms onto it.

Same thing seems to happen with Obama on geopolitics: I have no idea where he got this "strategic pivot" on China bit (except to say it's a cyncial retreat from dealing with the Middle East), but when it dovetails with this anti-trade mindset, I have little sense that he realizes exactly what kind of world America has spent the last seven decades creating.

In the end, I get this sick sense that there is "no there - there" with the man, other than he wants the "success" of two terms - the sort of success that the self-perceived smartest guy in the room naturally assumes he has coming.

In Esquire Magazine (Feb): "Turkey: Also the Man" (No. 42 of the "79 Things We Can All Agree On.") LINK FIXED

This is my 22nd piece in the magazine since 2003.

It appears in the February issue as one of the "79 things we can all agree on."

The beginning . . . 

Turkey: Also the man.

The world is of many minds about Turkey — almost as many as Turkey is about the world. We in the West worry that Ankara has turned away, when in truth it was Europe that turned Turkey out years ago, signaling, in no uncertain terms, that the "Christian club" wasn't interested in having all those Muslims inside the union.

Now, it does seem clear that Ankara has decided that enough is enough. In this geopolitical rom-com, our plucky heroine has come to the conclusion that after transforming herself into her suitor's acceptable mate, she can do better on her own. Under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Turkey is aiming higher: genuine leadership across the greater Middle East . . .

Read the entire list starting here.  See the entire Turkey entry here (link fixed, I hope).

From a Wikistrat crowd-sourced simulation: North American Energy Export Boom meta-scenarios

These are the four master narratives that got fleshed out in the first week of the Wikistrat simulation looking at an unfolding/future North American Energy Export Boom.

We went into the exercise with the four implied "bins" of the X-Y:

1. The lose-lose of North America getting the revolution "wrong" by getting the rule-set wrong (too restrictive out of environmental fears or too loose out of greed) and the Rest of the World either contributing to that outcome or exploiting it for their own equally short-term mindset.
2. The lose-win of NorthAm getting it "wrong" and the ROW drilling ahead anyway, "winning" on terms they find acceptable enough, even if NorthAm might define them as a loss.
3. The win-lose of NorthAm getting it "right" but doing so in such a way as to set off a destructive global competition toward that end; and 
4. The win-win of North-Am getting it "right" and triggering a virtuous QWERTY effect where the world benefits similarly.

The Wikistrat crowd came up with about two dozen scenarios, each filled out to the tune of several hundred words spread across about ten fields that explored their up- and down-sides, uncertainties, risks, etc. At the end of that first week, I thereupon read through everything (after commenting all the way during the week) and binned the two dozen into plausible pathways (roughly the order portrayed above in the bullets per bin). Then, taking all those precursing, in-situ and downstream scenarios in hand, I rethought the original notional master narratives, naming them thusly:

• The lose-lose lower-left scenario becomes What the Frack??#*!, suggesting a rude surprise and significant disappointments and a sense of having one's dream destroyed by circumstances beyond one's control. As a stream, it involves a Euro crash delaying investment flow, thus delaying development and allowing negative environmental evidence (water contamination and seismic activity chief among them) to mount. Then you get the environmental counterattack, as the Not In My Backyard Types declare their opposition (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). The "Erin Brockovitch" fights thus begun, foreign competitors swoop in to both steal the technology and complicate its local application through "lawfare" campaigns designed to keep the fracking revolution bogged down in courts for years. By the time all the legal dust settles, what the energy industry can actually exploit in terms of resources is far less than originally imagined, yielding a "red queen" sort of outcome (running in place) where the additional supply tapped is quickly swallowed up by growing domestic demand and the fabled export boom never quite occurs.
• The lose-win master narrative is dubbed, The Gas is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence, suggesting that, no matter how if unfolds in NorthAm, it seems to go better elsewhere in the world. In NorthAm, a compromise emerges between industry and enviros: short-term regulations allow for a fairly permissive situation but mid-term data collection ensures a legal/regulatory showdown down the road. This situation creates an overall market uncertainty that allows a certain amount of macro-questioning to unfold: Are we trading gains in CO2 emissions (coal to gas on electricity) that are just ruined by releasing more greenhouse gases instead? The NorthAm effort diverges as Canada, less fussy and more greedy in its mindset, moves aggressively to connect its unconventional reserves to Asia and NorthAm industry players decide it's easier to experiment more aggressively abroad, leading to a quick global spread of the technologies. Over time, we witness more desperate Europe (fearing Russian dependence) and Asia (fearing dependence on EVERYONE!) actually moving ahead more successfully with the revolution, with the latter suffering exacerbated water difficulties as a result. In the end, the US, desperate at the lost lead, moves toward national energy companies (public-private partnerships) to try and catch up.
• The win-lose scenario is called, Fits of Peaks, suggesting both more great-power contentiousness (fits of pique) and destabilizing shifts in global energy profiles (akin to the imagined "peak oil" in supply, but here in terms of demand). In this narrative, the US is especially creative in setting up enclaved experiments (the example of letting Native American reservations do things that states cannot) that get around the usual environmental rule-sets. Here, Mexico becomes its own big NAFTA experiment, as the political system there, desperate over PEMEX's decline in oil, sets up a sister national energy company to pursue the fracking revolution and that entity becomes a magnet for investment and aggressive experimentation. Sensing a way to push the Free Trade of the Americas idea, the US uses the lure of cheap energy cooperation to reach out to Latin America in a geostrategically defensive move (good-bye Carter Doctrine focus on the Persian Gulf, and welcome back Monroe Doctrine's historical ambitions regarding the Western Hemisphere's economic and political integration). Yes, OPEC tries to fight back by keeping oil prices low, but the fracking revolution's main impulse (natural gas) still takes off magnificently, giving America a newfound geostrategic confidence that allows it to press China all the more on the negative aspects of its rise in East Asia. The Middle Kingdom, in turn, sensing that America is aggressively organizing the Western Hemisphere to its long-term economic advantage, attempts the same in East Asia. Thus, in an attempt to stave off one sort of strategic vulnerability, the US amplifies another, making this the "be careful what you wish for" scenario.
• The win-win scenario is called, Now We're Cooking with Gas!, which is actually the old marketing catch phrase used in late-19th century America when pushing natural gas stoves as an ungrade to old wood-burning ones. More generally, the phrase has come to refer to a process that has experienced a significant increase in efficiency. Here we talk about the US and Canada coming together to finesse the environmental challenges in a responsible manner, allowing their companies to promote the technology worldwide to their own market advantage. As a result of the long-term boom in incredibly cheap natural gas, King Coal is dealt a death blow first in NorthAm and thereupon globally, as there's now no economic reason for not building gas-fired electricity generation plants almost exclusively (raising the question of what happens to nukes?). Over time, natural gas becomes so plentiful and cheap globally, that a portion of shale gas is siphoned off to gasoline production, so that even the gas-combustion half of hybrid cars are sourced by natural gas - in addition to the electricity part. This development proves a boon for the swapping out of pure gas-combustion automobiles with hybrids and natural-gas fired mass transportation vehicles. Over time, the explosion of cheap energy redefines the North American economic scene, leading to an industrial renaissance and a rebuilding of America's manufacturing industrial base. It also boosts NorthAm's competitive advantage in agriculture, befitting an increasingly voracious global middle class as global climate change stresses crop production in many of the world's emerging economic regions. In the end, all that academic speculation about looming "resource wars" proves to be just that, and the fracking revolution, well-played by North America, is the primary reason why.

Now, with the first week's scenario drill completed, the community moves on to brainstorming and competing their ideas regarding how this range of master narratives could impact the strategic interests of our six main characters: US (NorthAm), EU, China, India, Russia and Brazil.  Naturally, the fate of OPEC will loom throughout the proceedings.

The simulation thereupon unfolds over a third week that focuses on generating strategic options for the six pack of players.

WPR's The New Rules: Slouching Toward Great-Power War

Arguably the greatest strategic gift offered by America to the world over the past several decades has been our consistent willingness to maintain a high and hugely expensive entry barrier to the “market” that is great-power war: first by deterring outright war with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and then by maintaining a lopsided and unipolar military superiority in the post-Cold War period. However, a case can be made that in recent years, the greatest threat to this enduring component of global stability arises from within the United States itself -- namely, a national security establishment intent on pressing the boundaries of this heretofore rather sacrosanct responsibility.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Wikistrat's chief analyst quoted in Reuters piece on cyber struggle landscape

Disagreements on cyber risk East-West "Cold War"

By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

Fri Feb 3, 2012 11:32pm IST

LONDON - With worries growing over computer hacking, data theft and the risk of digital attacks destroying essential systems, western states and their allies are co-operating closer than ever on cyber security . . . 

But many Western security specialists say the evidence against both nations -- particularly China -- has become increasingly compelling.

"China is currently engaged in a maximal industrial espionage effort that it justifies internally in terms of a catch up strategy (with the West)," says Thomas Barnett, chief analyst at political risk consultancy Wikistrat and a former strategist for the U.S. Navy. "The key question here is: can China assume the mantle of intellectual property rights respect fast enough to avoid triggering economic warfare of the West... If it can't, then this is likely to get ugly."

Read the entire column at Reuters.

Wikistrat post @ CNN/GPS: How Will It End in Syria?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

It’s hard to gauge just how strong the Free Syrian Army really is.  It’s clearly growing in size and in its ability to control ever-widening swaths of territory.  But at the same time, Russian and Iranian guns pour into Bashar al-Assad’s government.  And Bashar al-Assad has a steely will to power.

Given the mounting tension, it’s worth thinking through exactly how regime change may unfold and what it’s consequences would mean for the region.

Wikistrat, the world’s first massively multiplayer online consultancy ran an online simulation on what could go down in Syria. Here are the results:

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Unfolding Wikistrat simulation on North American energy boom

After the success of the "China as Africa's de facto World Bank" simulation, we start moving expressedly into a series of sims aimed to flesh out the logic of the world's first crowd-sourced strategy book, the proposal for which we're now circulating in NYC. It was about time for me to gin up another, and I was really looking to do something different because I feel like I got my "vision" out in the trilogy.  Plus, I wanted to do something long-term in its thinking.  More details later as things unfold.

For now, we tee up the first of about a half-dozen major sims that will explore the drivers of a particular future world order that I became intrigued with as a result of last summer's Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition. To me, how the NorthAm energy boom (question mark suggests nothing in this world is a given) unfolds is one of the major global uncertainties.  North America can get it right or wrong on a host of levels, and since we're the inventors of these fracking revolution, the QWERTY effect would be huge, triggering a host of possible future pathways from fabulous to self-desructively nasty in terms of the environment and/or whether or not this great gift becomes an excuse for bad geostrategic choices by the U.S., China, Europe, Brazil, India, Russia - the big six we're focusing on here.  You can say, it's a simple projection: it works or it doesn't.  But the secondary and tertiary pathways that are revealed in this two stage process (NorthAm leads, others follow or ignore) are varied and immense in their capacity to make global stability better or worse.

So, naturally, I'm pretty pysched about the sim.  One thing to go and read a bunch of books and try to get smart enough to cover this in a book, but another to turn loose dozens-to-hundreds of virtual co-authors in a competitive space to brainstorm all the possibilities.

Especially exciting for this sim: we now have senior experts stepping in and providing big-time ideas.  Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter, just out from the Kennan job at State (Policy Planning) under Obama, joined Wikistrat weeks back and she brings not just a wealth of experience and keen insight, she's also a not-too-closeted enthusiast for this sort of social networking as a tool to drive new thinking and change old thinking. She's already made a huge contribution to the sim that lays out, in a very clever way grounded in real-world vehicles, how a positive path in NorthAm could go global (as a fellow optimist, my attraction to her scenario was immediate, not because it was rosy per se, but because she elucidated why, given the parameters, this was the best forward-moving deal for the universe of public and private-sector actors working this policy space now in the U.S.).

Other senior experts piping in with their own scenarios include: Gary Hunt, president of Tech and Creative Labs, a tech mash-up that moves software solutions into the energy vertical market; and Chris Cox from Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK), Germany's oldest consumer research org (Chris comes with an energy focus on the fmr USSR realm).

But, as always, the coolest outlier ideas come from the Wikistrat rank and file, and that's the way we love it: "big firm"/senior experts with the go-to-market pillar concepts that structure the sim, and our "sea of entrepreneurs"/younger analysts with all the just-on-the-edge-of-plausibility stuff that most of us seniors have had beaten out of us by experience and bad bosses.  Already there's been a nice cluster of jaw-dropping ideas out of this bunch, many of which see major players gaming the process very cleverly (both in a nice and nasty way).

I've been chiming in throughout on the scenarios ginned up to date (about two dozen).  Each results in a wiki page that gets fleshed out across a dozen or more fields, to make sure we're collectively thinking out the scenario to the degree of robustness. I had given the pool of analysts my notional master narratives (simple frameworks for putting all these scenarios into "bins") and they've responded nicely by distorting the implied framework with all sorts of surprises I hadn't anticipated.  At the end of the week I'll array and string together all these scenarios and rejigger the master narratives to cover enough of them for the next phase of the sim to unfold: brainstorming competiting notions of how these master narratives impact the strategic interests of our six-pack of great powers.

My only fear?  How to stuff all these ideas into one book?  But this is a good problem to have.