Friday, July 31, 2009 at 7:26AM The state of the secretary of state, contrary to popular belief, is strong. And don't think she's not still eyeing the presidency.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 2:11AM ARTICLE: House Seems To Be Set on Pork-Padded Defense Bill, By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, July 30, 2009
Obama should veto the defense bill. It is a horrible example of Dem. leadership in Congress: they simply aren't herding the cats well.
Pork barreling at its best: robbing the taxpayer AND the warfighter (who will see resources gobbled up by huge platforms he does not need).
Plenty of shame to go around...
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 1:16AM ARTICLE: Ahmadinejad Seen as Increasingly Vulnerable Since Re-election, By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI, New York Times, July 26, 2009
More signs of Ahmadinejad's emerging lame-duckness:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran dismissed his intelligence minister on Sunday and his culture minister resigned, the latest fallout of a bitter dispute among conservatives that has exposed Mr. Ahmadinejad's vulnerability in the aftermath of last month's disputed election.
Dismiss enough cabinet members, no matter who's doing it, and you can trigger parliament's no/yes confidence vote.
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:33AM ARTICLE: Military Weighs Private Security on Front Lines, By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, July 26, 2009
Once again, we see that frontier-integrating ops will continue to provide contract opportunities for private security firms.
Although the U.S. military has contracted out security services to protect individuals, military bases and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, this contract would award a commercial company unusually broad "theater-wide" authority to protect forward operating bases in a war zone.
"The contractor shall be responsible for providing security services, developing, implementing, adequately staffing, and managing a security program," the notice said, adding that the contractor would have to be available "24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Pinkertons, prepare your proposals!
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:29AM ARTICLE: Six Reasons Insurgencies Lose: A Contrarian View,
by Dr. Donald Stoker, Small Wars Journal, July 4, 2009
Very good and worth a detailed read.
Americans have the unfortunate tendency to think our opponents always have all the advantages. It is never true.
Mostly we play a waiting-out game, because our real strengths are not military but the seductive quality of our economic models (yes, yes, I know I should self-flagellate now, given the crisis, but excuse me if I don't get lost in that moment).
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:23AM REVIEW: The World Finance Crisis & the American Mission, By Robert Skidelsky, The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 12 · July 16, 2009
reviewing:
Fixing Global Finance
Martin Wolf, Johns Hopkins University Press, 230 pp., $24.95
Based on my quick read, Skidelsky (noted biographer of Keynes) obviously doesn't care to choose between the savings/cheap money theses regarding the recent financial crisis. One assumes he sees some interconnectedness, although he doesn't exactly say.
I do as well. The savings glut came as a result of our poorly trumpeted grand strategy to encourage Asia's peaceful rise. And it got out of hand (cheap money glut) because it was so seductive to our economic well-being, and because the basic package worked well enough to fuel a 27-year global economic boom (not bad, but let's point fingers anyway).
Wolf, like Greenspan, likes to focus on the savings glut, and apparently--to Skidelsky's way of thinking--doesn't blame America and its famous economic stewards on this point. In effect, Wolf seems to find enough causality in the savings glut thesis alone to account for and explain the structural imbalance that currently plagues the global economy.
But from the Asian point of view (or the world's, for that matter), the issue of the dollar as the reserve currency of note and that situation's tendency to allow American consumption and now debt-spending go unchecked means that just citing the savings glut thesis isn't enough.
It takes two to tango, as I noted about a decade ago when I first started talking about a "global transaction strategy" by which the U.S. encouraged the non-defense-heavy rise of great powers by importation so long as those powers kept our money cheap and thus kept the Leviathan feasible as a burden. I will not pretend to have had any foreknowledge of the economic implications of this structural imbalance. My economic knowledge doesn't go that deep. I simply knew that it worked for a very long time (the bulk of my life) and that this transaction meant the U.S. was providing its Leviathan activities as an implicit service (my basic point). As I always said, If the world doesn't care for how we deliver this service, they will cease to pay for it (put their savings elsewhere) and that will be the end of our capacity to provide it. To the extent that my presentations elicited questions about the sustainability of taking on such debt, my answer was always the same: it seemed hard to expect America to shoulder this burden forever, so movement needed to occur in the direction of picking up new strategic allies from those rising powers of the age (not Europe, but Asia--specifically China and India) because it was clear that, while the world seemed content to leave us with the Leviathan capacity, it was generating follow-on work (SysAdmin) that was beyond our means--especially in labor.
But as I argue in Great Powers, while this grand strategy was eminently successful, it has run its historical course: creating both the ends (frontier-integration of globalization's great expanse) and the means (new allies incentivized to help us) for a new grand strategy mix.
That's why I don't really care about how the economists frame the sheer economics of the debate here: savings versus cheap money. It's clear the imbalance is there and it's huge. It's clear the U.S. needs help on not being the sole great source of consumer demand in the system. It's clear rising Asia and Brazil should logically make their emerging middle classes happy (smart politics) and seek further balancing against the dollar as the global reserve currency (I'd like a third pole based on the East, as I've said many times). It's clear that there will be plenty of frontier-integration to go around and that America is too stretched now to handle on its own--and realizes that. It's also clear that rising China and India are interested in moving in the direction of being more assertive globally with their growing militaries, which makes sense given their trajectories.
In sum, all the pieces are there for a correction that includes bigger consumption in the New Core to balance the global economy's dependence on the Old Core, moves of all sorts to force fiscal and financial discipline on the U.S., and new levels of military cooperation between the U.S. and rising powers, none of which are dumb enough--in terms of their political leadership--to think that they can do it on their own or that they can afford some idiotic rerun of late 19th century balance-of-power BS (even as their militaries are full of such thinkers, and we've got a bit too many ourselves--thankfully, none of the relevant militaries are in charge of anything other than their wasteful and misapplied acquisition strategies).
(Thanks: Joe Canepa)
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:20AM ARTICLE: U.S.-China trade tensions starting to boil, AP, June 23, 2009
The push comes to shove?
Here's the important bit:
Some trade experts suggested China might settle the dispute rather than endure a prolonged hearing process before the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, the arbiter of global trade rules.
With the U.S. and EU already lined up against it, China will likely switch than fight.
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:14AM ARTICLE: The legend of good ol' 'Brent' Favre lives on in T-shirt, By TOM ALESIA, Wisconsin State Journal, JUN 25, 2009
Can you feel the love . . . slipping away?
(Thanks: NeoTrad Librarian)
Friday, July 31, 2009 at 12:12AM ARTICLE: Opposition Rattles a Governing Coalition in Iraqi Kurds' Vote, By SAM DAGHER, New York Times, July 26, 2009
This is the best way for this to happen: the dominant duopoly party is scared by a break-off splinter group that does well in the elections (25%) and is calling for more transparency in government.
Better it scares this time and elicits some change, which probably won't be enough over the long haul to prevent the rise of a second competitive party, which--again--is both inevitable and good.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 11:29AM Se San Diego is a luxury hotel that features a stunningly low (below $150) government rate, so I spent the last three days eating very well, getting outside maybe a solid 20 minutes, and talking "resilient communities" with Pacific Command's Center of Excellence on Humanitarian Disasters and Humanitarian Relief. Actually, the Center belongs to OSD Policy, but sits in Hawaii (good to have friends in Hawaii, especially in winter). I may have to twist some arms . . ..
Fascinating--and wide--array of characters amassed. Reminded me plenty of my old Naval War College exercises, especially since Bradd Hayes was here with me.
Outside of the 11-hour days, I mostly watched the first season of Sopranos on DVD (the mega set) and enjoyed my Levaquin.
Happy to be flying home tonight (Thursday), amazingly enough leaving SD at 1620, which means I hit Indy at 0-dark-30, as they say.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 2:03AM A Conversation On China With Thomas P.M. Barnett
The lead question:
You wrote recently that Africa is China's and India's economic frontier but you also talked about some obvious economic asymmetries. Why shouldn't we view the Chindian presence in Africa as the latest face of colonialism?
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 1:22AM ARTICLE: In Iran, President's Deputy Is Stepping Down, By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI, July 24, 2009
The first of many political set-backs for Ahmadinejad. He should get used to them. The guy is starting out as a lame duck.
And yeah, that resistance now comes from both sides of the political spectrum.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 1:20AM ARTICLE: Gates, in Visit to Israel, Will Find Iran Looming, By ELISABETH BUMILLER, New York Times, July 25, 2009
The USG is of many opinions on who should do what on Iran:
The Obama administration has sent mixed messages on its views of an Israeli strike.
Top Pentagon officials, including Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have said repeatedly that an Israeli strike on Iran would be destabilizing to the region.
But this month, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the United States "cannot dictate" Israel's decision on military action.
Two days later, Mr. Obama told CNN that the United States was "absolutely not" giving Israel its approval for a strike.
Both Israel and the United States estimate that Iran is within one to three years of developing a nuclear-weapons ability.
Naturally, the Iranians are promising a solid counter-strike on all of Israel's nuke sites--the unsurprisingly 2-sided dynamic coming into familiar focus.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:43AM ARTICLE: Abu Muqawama on Afghanistan: An Interview with Andrew Exum, By Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review, 29 Jul 2009
Andrew Exum is a great analytic source on the prospects for the new COIN approach in Afghanistan--a serious insider.
This is worth reading for quality-control on everything else you read on the subject.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:39AM POST: The Three Layers of Obama's Foreign Policy, By Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review Blog, 29 Jul 2009
I have a thing for three-layered analyses. This one is cool.
It puts one of my recent WPR columns in better context, which I always appreciate.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:30AM WEBLOG: Cultivating Afghanistan, By Douglas Wissing, NewsMatters.org
POST: Sysadmin Tales: Cultivating Afganistan, By Arherring, Red Herrings, June 15, 2009
Interesting real-time capture of a truly SysAdmin effort previously noted here.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:28AM ARTICLE: It's Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado, By KIRK JOHNSON, New York Times, June 28, 2009
Interesting sign of growing water stress in the American West.
All climate change predictions say this will get much worse. The politics of water get a lot more important, naturally.
Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 12:25AM POST: China's Dependency Ratio: As Good As It Gets, By Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed, June 28, 2009
A nice chart from The Economist spelling out the long-predicted rise in China's dependency ratio, or what I called in one of my books (BFA, methinks) the 4-2-1 problem--as in, 4 grandparents, two parents, and one child to rue them all!
The shift is amazing, though. It's the primary reason why all this talk about China's overtaking the U.S. as THE global power is just nonsense. That is not the demographic profile of a country that fights wars. Add that to 5,000 years of never leaving the mainland to any lasting degree, plus not having fought a war in half a century now, and it's just not in the cards.
(Thanks: Steve Epstein)
[Note: I am suitably corrected by Lex Green on China's "bloody nose" campaign into northern Vietnam in 1979. I have never considered that a war (less than 30 days), but the Chinese lost so many (25k) that the scale deserves the title from today's perspective. China launched the attack to dissuade Vietnam from going into Cambodia against their boy Pol Pot. It didn't work.]
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 at 2:54AM Main question:
What trends should we watch as the global middle class emerges? What milestones will mark key events along the progression?
Main question:
In addition, assuming you're correct on China, we have a reasonably good idea where this well worn path leads, but where might India's Jeffersonian path lead?
