While still working out the arrangements with my literary agency (Zachary Shuster Harmsworth) since this is a proof-of-concept effort for them, I did manage to land my publicist from "The New Map" series, Steve Oppenheim (Oppenheim Communications, based in Manhattan). It will be a first-time process for Steve too, doing a straight eBook with no hard-copy version, but both of us agree that we like the non-rush of trying to make all the PR happen in a two-week period.
Steve is a great guy and I deeply enjoyed working with him on the three previous books, plus we feel honored he likes the material enough - and believes in it enough - to go down this new path with Vonne, Emily and I.
Other positive news: looks like Esquire will give us a nice plug in the magazine.
Vonne, Emily and I, having all three spent the last couple of weeks taking notes on the first four volumes, held a production meeting today in my office to pitch our ideas to each other concerning the fifth volume retrospective. Emily is working about 15 themes, while Vonne has 18 in hand. Me? I have 26 pages of notes. Between us I am certain we have the 50,000 words for the volume. No doubts about my ability to write on demand, and Vonne is highly incentivized to finish before she starts a Masters in Social Work program at IUPUI (Indiana U/Purdue U @ Indianapolis - home to the oldest MSW program in the country). Em, of course, must finish up before heading back to IU in Bloomington for her sophomore year. Vonne has been writing for a bit now, and Em I know can crank, since she routinely generates fan fiction pieces in the tens-of-thousands range.
The goal is to have the first draft done in 2-3 weeks and a final draft by the end of August or mid-September at the latest. We then get the four volumes back from Ebook Architects (in their various file formats) NLT mid-September to make the 9/19 publication of the first volume on the major sites (Amazon, B&N, iBookstore). I'm hoping to have the fifth volume polished by Labor Day so I can spend the rest of my free time in September blowing up the Emily Updates site-within-this-site (photos, videos, etc.)
All an experiment for me, but a fun one.
On the subtitle: just enough pushback from the agency on linking "three-year-old" with "cancer" that I rethought the approach. "The Girl Who Lived" has been a theme of ours for years, as Emily has long identified with the Harry Potter character's backstory (near-death experience as toddler, the telltale scars, the questions, and the weird fame within our circles for something she barely remembers . . . oh, and the ever-present fear of the return of the disease that no one likes to mention! Is it still inside her on some hidden level?). I wanted to keep "One Year in the Life" bit because of my years of working Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's many books, and we thought the two riffs went well together. The Emily Updates are full of fan-fictiony-like references to books and films; it's just who we are - a family of fanboys and fangirls.
So it stays "The Emily Updates" because that's what I called all the weekly summary emails I sent out (numbering them as well), and we say "One Year in the Life" because we're not asking you to read the life story of a 19-year-old, just about this one amazing year (actually about 14 months but basically her third year of life), and we wanted to put out there in the title that she is "The Girl Who Lived" so as to not scare people off too much. This was a crucible experience but one that our family, our marriage and our child patient survived. We figure the three themes (The Emily Updates seems to be a diary, One Year in the Life says this was some extraordinary period, and The Girl Who Lived dispels any cliffhanger fears while insinuating that, like Harry Potter, Emily survived a very deadly set of circumstances/events) and the picture will convey the right mix of themes.
The covers as I've put them together now:
Why the black and red motif? You can't tell from the black and white photo, but she was wearing a red shirt over her Spandage vest (which is why her neck looks kinda fuzzy), plus her hat was blood red with black trim. So when I see that picture (we just refound the black-and-white negative in the memorabilia box we unpacked and perused today), I see red and black - simple as that.
Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a worried note in his New York Times op-ed on Tuesday on the state of Chinese-American military relations. It was a typically one-sided presentation of the situation: those spying, secretive, bullying, and increasingly well-armed Chinese versus a U.S. that's only trying to keep the regional peace... while selling arms at a record pace to every neighboring state, conducting joint naval exercises right off China's coast, and, you know, openly planning to bomb the breadth and length of the Middle Kingdom.
As we grow our community of strategic thinkers, Wikistrat is now accepting applications from candidate analysts. If you are an established or emerging geopolitical expert, policy advisor or risk consultant, you may be qualified for a position within our community.
The Wikistrat community is composed of different ranks - Experts, Senior Analysts, Contributing Analysts and Researchers. Members of the community get access to the Wikistrat private wiki and exclusive network, and will participate in exciting geopolitical simulations. Analysts are able to build their names and receive royalties and other financial rewards based on their contributions.
Wikistrat Interns undergo an unpaid training program and upon completion qualify for a position as researcher within Wikistrat’s online analytic community. Researchers are able to earn financial rewards at Wikistrat, and be promoted to Contributing Analyst rank.
Interns play an active role within the Wikistrat community: interacting with top analysts, helping to write concise reports and analysis on topics of their expertise, contributing to the theoretical knowledge base of Wikistrat , and integrating their work across a unique Web 2.0 platform. Work from home in your own time. All Wikistrat work is conducted online.
Wikistrat is happy to launch the new design for its website - with exciting offerings for analysts, clients, interns and partners. Feel free to browse the pages and get a glimpse of what we see as the future of geopolitical analysis - a strategic community of analysts working collaboratively to analyze and forecast globalization and the impact of geopolitics on global markets.
With hundreds of analysts collaborating and competing for prestige, intellectual and financial rewards, we expect this community to yield strategic insights and ideas you will not be able to find anywhere else. By providing governments and corporations with real time analysis, Wikistrat is able to provide clear-cut answers to the complexities of today's geopolitical challenges.
In the upcoming days we will add new sections to the website, including a space with free geopolitical analysis, providing insights into the various simulations conducted in our wiki-based community.
With Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition now complete, I wanted to take this opportunity to sum up what I think unfolded over the month-long contest. As head judge, I am uniquely suited for the task, because I’m fairly certain that I’m the one person who perused every line of every entry of every team every week. To give you some sense of that effort: roughly 30 teams cranked, on average, 7,500-8,000 words per week. That’s close to a million words in all!
We're not going to pretend that every word entered was golden. The purpose of the competition was to elicit ideas in aggregate - not to collectively produce the one "perfect" document (i.e., the bureaucratic approach). In mass harvesting exercises such as these - no matter the level of expertise involved - there is a certain amount of chaff. By design, participants are put through a variety of methodological paces that force them to winnow their ideas down to their essentials. So while the journey matters plenty, it's the destination that we collectively seek: those nuggets of strategic insight that arise from the focused and repetitive interplay of so many minds tackling the same subjects from a variety of angles. For it is amidst that maelstrom of intellectual activity that a variety of competing perspectives are collaboratively blended into foreign policy visions worthy of the label "grand strategy."
We achieved that goal in spades, meaning there was than enough “wheat” to be found throughout the entries, which got better and better with each passing week. Besides telling us that collaborative competition works, the continuous uptick in performance also proved the validity of the “massively multiplayer consultancy” model, which is what we believe Wikistrat can offer as a result of its ongoing efforts to build an online community of strategists from across the globe – the Facebook-meets-Wikipedia dynamic.
If, for example, you’re a client interested in having dozens/hundreds/thousands of strategic thinkers chase down a problem, query or brainstorm for you, then Wikistrat can mobilize them en masse for a X-week-long collaborative competition not all that unlike what we just did in this contest. We’d simply tailor the parameters and the participants. But the key thing is, your desired effort would now involve a true “wisdom of the crowd” dynamic, with the crowd in this instance being a vetted group of strategic thinkers collaboratively competing to come up with the best answer.
Why we think that’s a better route: In today’s complex world, we’re certain that companies and governments will benefit deeply from such intellectual exposure. No, we don’t think this completely replaces in-house studies or working with contractors, because they’ll always be those needed deep dives on specific issues. Plus you simply can’t outsource your strategic thought processes in every instance. But there will also increasingly be the need to tap into far wider pools of thinking, or ones that explore issues more “horizontally” (i.e., plumbing the cross-domain connections) than “vertically” – especially when you’re talking strategic planning on an international scale. In a black-swan world, you can never ask too many “what if” questions, or have too many bright minds coming up with possible answers.
We also think the competition proved itself as a useful method for attracting and identifying talent within our burgeoning online community of strategists. There are literally thousands upon thousands of professional, apprentice (like our grad students) and avocational strategists out there on the Web generating useful analysis, and, in a disconnected sense, you could say they’re all collaboratively competing for our attention with their blogs, sites, etc.
But when Wikistrat pulls them into an online venue explicitly designed to foster that collaborative competition – directly, then we turbo-charge the dynamic by concentrating it to an unprecedented degree. The International Grand Strategy Competition was a brilliant demonstration of that potential: no established “stars” among the 200-plus individual team members, and yet collectively they pushed each other to generate a constant flow of innovative strategic ideas. And the longer the competition went on, the higher the flow and quality of those ideas – innovation feeding off innovation.
Frankly, it got hard to grade it all, because on an individual basis, everything started trending up toward “A’s.” But just as designed and encouraged in this competition, the collective grading came down to a rank ordering, meaning there could be only one #1, one #2, etc. with regard to every assigned task. And no, the same few teams didn’t win each ranking, as ten different teams each scored one of the sixteen #1 rankings – with only three teams scoring multiple wins.
But the best part was this: whenever the top effort was so identified, you could readily see its impact on the next week’s play, as other teams started copying the techniques, reach of vision, etc., that earned that one team such high recognition previously. That meant the “bar” rose rapidly throughout the competition, with the most ambitious teams clearly seeking to out-innovate the established leaders, which is why there was so much movement in the overall rankings week by week. You can see the proof on the team entries: the longer the competition went on, the more the most innovative teams had their ideas cited by others, because to not do so risked being left behind in the expanding dialogue.
To say that it was exciting to witness is an understatement, and let me tell you why: I taught an experimental course at the Naval War College in 2003, while I was writing The Pentagon’s New Map. In the elective, which attracted an unusual percentage of that class’s top students, I taught the officers how to generate competing scenarios using an X-Y axis approach (two questions yielding four boxes). To be honest, going into the class I had no idea if you could develop the skill, even as I knew it was easy to teach the procedure. But we kept at it, week after week, just repeating the effort on new subjects, levels of analysis and regions. At first, the generated scenarios were just awful, and I spent a lot of time offering constructive criticism, but over time they got better and once they did, the confidence level of the students rose and – sure enough – in the last few weeks of class they performed most of the critiques themselves in a peer-to-peer fashion, while I merely pushed them toward more elaborately scaled efforts.
Well, I witnessed the same dynamic unfolding in the competition, and it was a thing of beauty: the more teams and analysts became aware of each other’s work, the more they effectively critiqued it – in a peer-to-peer fashion – by co-opting some aspect and expanding it further in their own efforts. And with the expanding complexity built into the competition’s design, I – the head judge – found myself “stealing” what I could for Time Battleland posts and my World Politics Review column.
As they say, talent imitates but genius steals! ;<)
The teams themselves can track their own progress by the numbers of eye-popping interjections I left in my grading notes (later distributed to the competitors). Simply put, the “wow’s” began piling up exponentially with each passing week, and – just like in my experimental War College class – my initial feelings of despair (“Maybe you just can’t teach this stuff?”) invariably gave way to serious respect for what the next generation has to offer.
It is my sincere hope that those competitors who were energized by the competition will seek to maintain an affiliation with Wikistrat, because as we move forward with our massively multiplayer consultancy, we think we’ll be able to offer them the kick-ass combination of an online community where they can “sharpen the blade” while simultaneously selling their best ideas – collaboratively and competitively – to a host of global corporations and government agencies eager to explore globalization, in all its current and future complexity, for strategic planning purposes.
There is no faster route to second-tier great power status than for an actual or aspiring superpower to fight a crippling conflict with another country from those same ranks. Moreover, if history is any guide, the glass ceiling that results is a permanent one: This was the fate of imperial Britain, imperial Japan and Germany -- both imperial and Nazi -- in the first half of the 20th century, and the same was true for Soviet Russia in the second half of the century, despite Moscow's conflict with the West being a cold one. The lesson is an important one for Washington, Beijing and New Delhi to keep in mind in the years ahead, given that the two most likely dyads for major war in the 21st century are America-China and China-India.
Wanted to lay down my marker on The Emily Updates eBook serial, so I set up a page on the site. Have started registering myself and Vonne as authors on various selling sites (Amazon, B&N, etc.) in anticipation of getting the eBook files back from the US company that is currently architecting them in all of the major formats (this is being arranged by my literary agency Zachary Shuster Harmsworth in a first-ever move by the firm).
For now, it seems like I can't reserve a space at Amazon for pre-orders, because you can't formalize the page until you upload the book file. I'm expecting to get the files back mid-September, so we target 19 Sept for the first volume, with the other four coming in a sequence of three-week intervals, finishing in mid-December. Emily, Vonne and I are writing the retrospective Vol. V this summer. It's a family affair.
So for now, we just have this starter page that I will expand over the coming weeks.
by THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, with VONNE M. MEUSSLING-BARNETT
A five-volume eBook serial to be published in all major venues (Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Apple's iBookstore, etc.) starting in late September 2011.
Tentative publishing schedule (subject to change):
19 September 2011 (Vol. I: 52,000 words)
10 October 2011 (Vol. II: 57,000)
31 October 2011 (Vol. III; 48,000)
21 November 2011 (Vol. IV: 50,000)
12 December 2011 (Vol. V: estimated 50,000).
All books will be priced @ $2.99.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:
Seventeen years ago, authors Tom and Vonne Barnett were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, the thirtysomething couple were living in northern Virginia.
What followed was the defining crisis of their union: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to several hundred relatives and friends who spontaneously organized themselves into their family’s extended support network. Over time, the couple came to view the updates as something more important: a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become.
The journey from blog diary to this eBook serial is worth recounting. The original diary ran about 400,000 words, or somewhere in the range of an 800-page book. In the late 1990s, Tom edited the text down to approximately 200,000 words and posted the 45 updates online at a website he created specifically for that purpose. Having received a lot of positive feedback from readers, they sought publication as a regular book, but then fate intervened in the form of a new job for Tom in Rhode Island and the project was – pun intended – shelved.
But the recent meteoric rise of eBooks has convinced Tom and Vonne that now is the time to give publication another try (Vonne, for example, is a Kindle fanatic!). After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs, so eBooks struck the authors as an entirely appropriate venue for the material, especially since they’re interested in making it easily available and they know - from first-hand experience - how parents and relatives of patients experiencing medical crises typically turn to the Internet to locate sources of information, comfort and inspiration in their time of need.
What you now have the privilege to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of their second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make-a-Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV.
The first two chapters presented in this Volume I are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records from that time period.
The authors haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective. Tom and Vonne now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects that arise in this family memoir, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.
The concluding fifth volume in the series is written from today's perspective, to include that of a grown-up Emily - the girl who lived!
If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.
The 30+ teams in Wikistrat's Grand Strategy Competition were divided so they represent a total of 13 countries: The United States, China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, the European Union, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Japan, Turkey and North Korea.
In this format, each team competed both against the teams representing the same country (US Team 1 vs. US Team 2 and 3), and then in a crossways comparison against teams from other countries (determining, for example, how well does the Chinese strategy match the country's objectives compared to the way the Indian strategy matched the Indian objectives).
3 countries stood out as the best played countries:
Japan (played by the following Teams)
University of Kentucky Team
European Union
Oxford University Team
Atlantic Treaty Association (NATO) Team
India
Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) Team
Ohio State University Team
Indian Institute of Technology Team
Best Region Played
Of the five regions played, Wikistrat judges determined that South-Asia region was the best played region in the competition.
South Asia region was composed of the following teams:
Yale University Team
Claremont Graduate University Team
Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) Team
In this post we wish to recognize some of the best teams which participated at Wikistrat's Grand Strategy Competition that took place throughout June. In a very close race with winning-team Claremont Graduate University was the Oxford Team, which finished in the 2nd and highly respected place.
In addition to finishing at the second place, Oxford students won the "Most Resilient Grand Strategy Award" for their impressive Grand Strategy, playing the European Union. Their work was noted by Thomas PM Barnett is his WPR Column, and by the Atlantic Sentinel here and here.
With 4 overall #1 ranking (across 16 tasks), Oxford team has made a tremendous effort and deserve every recognition. Well done!
Top 5 Teams
The third most prestigious prize - Creative Strategic Thinkers Team - was awarded to the School of Oriental and African Studies (CISD), playing China.
The full top 5 finalists are:
Claremont Graduate University Team
Oxford University Team
The School of Oriental and African Studies Team
Cambridge (CISA) Team
Ohio State University Team
Individual Awards
In the competition we have witnessed dozens of proactive strategic thinkers, eager to collaborate, research and contribute. If we could, we would mention many of them here as they truly are promising emerging strategic thinkers.
We would like to pay special recognition to the winners of the Most Active Participants awards. These individuals were the most active, collaborative and wiki-savvy participants:
Heloise Crowther (Sussex Team)
Roman Muzalevsky (Yale Team)
Teale Phelps Bondaroff (Cambridge Team)
Congratulations to all winning teams and individuals!
With the Grand Strategy Competition coming to an end, it is time to announce the Winning Team. Of the 30+ participating teams from all around the world, we are happy to announce theClaremont Graduate University Team as the winner of Wikistrat's 2011 Grand Strategy Competition!
CGU's PhD-students demonstrated impressive analytic capabilities and continued to propose creative and provocative ideas throughout the competition, making a collaborative effort and effective use of the wiki. Using unique methodologies, CGU members constantly fed other competitors with new ways to look at geopolitical challenges, and instigated further discussions.
Playing the role of Pakistan, CGU's PhD-students were able to beat some of the world's best institutions, and won special recognition in a Time Battland post by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett. To get a glimpse of their work, check out their assessment of Pakistan's National Trajectory.
In addition to winning the $10,000 prize and the prestige that comes with it, the CGU team has gained important hands-on experience in strategic planning and collaborative analysis. We hope these skills, knowledge and relationships created during the competition will continue to benefit all participants in the future, as the Wikistrat community of strategic thinkers grows.
Well, the Wikistrat International Grand Strategy Competition finished July 3rd, and in that last week our roughly 30 teams had their grand strategies (crafted in Week 3) subjected to a quartet of global shocks (crippling terror strike in Saudi Arabia, an Arab Spring 2.0 in Central Asia, a massive tsunami disaster along China’s coast, and a worldwide downing of the Internet during a technology upgrade). The teams’ assignments were to analyze the impact of the crises on their countries’ strategic interests and then evaluate their national grand strategies’ resilience in the face of these upheavals. Continuing in my role as head judge, I wanted to cite the most provocative takeaways from this last week in the competition.
1) What a game-changer the Great Game could become (Brazil 1/Institute of World Politics 2 & South Africa 1/The Interdisciplinary Center )
Think about it: the radical Salafist impulse currently struggles to remain relevant amidst the Arab Spring and the demographics in the Middle East don’t favor it over the long haul, meaning it logically migrates either southwest into Africa or northeast into Central Asia – two regions full of colonial-era fake states ripe for the sort of disintegrating civil strife that the movement feeds on. With Africa booming economically while Central Asia lags behind, odds favor the latter scenario. If and when such a wave of political instability happens (either positively or negatively), three of the five BRICS (Russia, India, China) will inevitably be sucked into the maelstrom, diverting their strategic attention and sucking up resources. So who looks stable and even more attractive (e.g., energy, minerals, agriculture) by comparison? Brazil and South Africa.
2) Does the War on Terror invariably get replaced by a War on iTerror? (China 3/School of Oriental and African Studies-U of London & United States 2/Georgetown University)
With the growth of all things Web/digital/geolocational, the world is clearly headed toward a long string of escalating crises as we work our way through all the weaknesses/vulnerabilities/dangers of the attendant networks. Likewise, as nations gear up their governmental cyber warfare capabilities, it’s natural for the long war against violent extremism to migrate more to that realm. Whatever the trigger, it’s not hard to imagine the next big conflict paradigm being a “war on iTerror,” where all the usual non-state actor and government interests/activities become as blurred as they’ve long been in the more kinetic realm. Even more so than in traditional terrorism, any efforts made to bolster a nation’s cyber security can be justified by all manner of traditional economic competitiveness reasons (not to mention the usual authoritarian desires regarding control over the domestic political landscape). Plus, it’s cheaper than nation-building in failed states and fits the West’s growing impulse to pull back and heal itself while acknowledging that some parts of the world are just destined to “burn.”
3) And when the right worldwide cyber crisis comes, does it make everybody want to work together (Y2K-after-next) or does it accelerate the balkanization of the Web? (India 3/Ohio State University, European Union 2/Oxford & United States 3/Johns Hopkins University)
When that long predicted “cyber Pearl Harbor” or “digital 9/11” finally hits (or something close enough simply earns the label), it could be a great turning point in modern globalization’s history. Do we get the big multilateral cooperation response (OSU’s WEBretton Woods System)? Or just enough great-power cooperation to set in motion similar efforts in other “global commons” (Oxford)? Or do we witness a worldwide competition among states to see which can lock down their “national Internets” more securely (Johns Hopkins)? As with the many predictive models created in anticipation of the Y2K event, much would seem to depend on how homogenous and widespread the suffering: Are we drawn together as nations or does the differential send each scrambling down its own, beggar-their-neighbor’s-network path?
4) In a world of persistent and pervasive revolutions, Iran’s stagnant version actually has a reasonably bright future, assuming the regime can keep a grip on its own people (Iran 1 / JHU @ Bologna & Iran 2/University of Cambridge)
Both Iran teams’ grand strategies were rather unabashedly aggressive regarding the nation’s quest for regional hegemony, and when subjected to the various shocks, both of them came through rather swimmingly. Yes, there is a lot wrong with Iran, and there’s plenty of reason to expect China to pick Riyadh over Tehran, leaving the latter to quasi-alliance with India over the long run. But with India seeming the safer “rising” bet – again, over the long haul, and key China-Saudi conduit Pakistan looking so fragile right now (and don’t forget the Arab Spring lapping up on Saudi peninsula), there’s plenty of reason to expect the Iranians to constitute a powerful force in all directions (e.g., Persian Gulf, Caspian, Central Asia) in the decades ahead – especially when their nuclear capability is finally locked in and recognized internationally as such.
5) Why a similarly stubborn – but far more withdrawn – North Korea might similarly hold on, despite many predictions regarding its demise. (North Korea 1/UK Defence Forum & North Korea 2/University of Sussex)
Think about it, say our two NorKo teams: so long as Pyongyang doesn’t cross Beijing’s red line, the more powerful China becomes, the less likely it feels compelled to “fix” the DPRK on the West’s timetable. Conversely, if China suffers some big, back-tracking disaster (like the one posited in Week 4), then it’s even less likely to want to acquiesce to the West’s desires – for fear of looking weak. Either way, North Korea and its $6T of mineral reserves is sitting . . . ugly all right – but stable when it comes to its primary patron.
6) An “Arab Spring 2.0” for Central Asia isn’t all that bold a prediction. After all, Central Asia is the last remaining region that’s uniformly authoritarian, soof coursethe next great wave of democratization happens there – eventually (Pakistan 1/Claremont Graduate University)
And oddly enough, for the Claremont team, if it comes suitably far enough down the road for Pakistan’s own stabilization process to have unfolded (i.e., a decade or more from now), then it represents a serious opportunity for the nation – especially if a joint Chinese-Pakistani effort to stabilize Afghanistan in the wake of the Western pullout succeeds. Under such scenarios, Pakistan would be well positioned to become China’s preferred model of development for the region (i.e., moderate and sustainable Islamic identity, strong military role, just democratic enough to avoid brittleness, and a deep appreciation of China’s benevolent patronage).
7) With Russia’s long southern exposure, it makes sense for Moscow to strengthen its connections to the West – er, North! (Russia 2/New York University)
It was interesting to note that all four of the vertical shocks seemed to re-emphasize the utility of Moscow’s recent – and renewed – westward turn under Dmitry Medvedev. Whether or not this shift survives the return of Vladimir Putin, over the long haul, it simply makes sense for a Russia with so many rising powers along its southern rim. If its long-time effort to recast NATO or expand it with a Eurasia-wide replacement doesn’t work, then the opening of the Arctic is probably Moscow’s best opportunity to forge a new and positive identity – the northern brand.
8) With the demography-equals-destiny dynamics well underway, and China unlikely to forever avoid an economic crisis, will that crisis’s primary historical purpose be to declare the onset of the “rising India” era? (Turkey 3/Institute of World Politics 1 & India 1/ Indian Institute of Technology)
It’s not just a parlor game notion, for that moment will eventually arrive. The better question is, How ready for it will India be? And if it’s uncomfortable with going it alone, how far should it pursue strategic alliance with fellow democracies Brazil and South Africa in anticipation of that opportunity? As a follow on, one could likewise wonder how China handles that moment – i.e., when it realizes that the Chinese Century isn’t as long as promised?
9) If the future is all about resilience and handling black-swan events, then reports of a post-American world may be greatly exaggerated. (United States 1/American Military University, United States 2/Georgetown University & United States 3/Johns Hopkins University)
There is the persistent myth that democracies respond weakly to crises while authoritarian regimes handle them with strength. Yes, more horizontal polities tend to obsess over vertical shocks (witness America’s stubborn search for the next “Pearl Harbor”), but the truth is, they handle better well as truly distributed systems. Simply put, there is no head to cut off. While vertical polities (authoritarian systems) are well equipped to run to ground the low-and-slow horizontal scenarios (e.g., hunting down every prominent member of political movement X), it’s the vertical shocks that often expose their brittleness, because how can a bunch of guys sitting around a table possibly prepare for every contingency? It’s a familiar point: democracies love to advertize their weaknesses while authoritarian regimes are great at hiding theirs – until the right crisis comes along and reveals that – yet again – the vaunted emperor has no clothes. As globalization spreads and consolidates, it still pays to bet on the distributed systems.
Americans today are enjoying the most peaceful period, on a per capita basis, in human history, with virtually all of the remaining mass violence in the system occurring not between organized militaries, but rather sub- and transnationally -- that is, within nation-states and across their borders. The frequency, length and lethality of conflicts are all down from Cold War highs, despite the growth in both numbers of countries and world population. Nonetheless, most Americans continue to have extremely misdirected fears and impressions regarding the global security landscape. We see a world of wars and believe them all to be of our creating, when in fact it is globalization's initially destabilizing advance that creates the vast bulk of the civil strife into which our military forces are drawn -- to the tune of well more than 150 crisis responses since Cold War's end.
Listened to it in the car with the kids on this vacation trip, probably making that about 25 times for me.
And I never get tired of it. To me, this is right up there with the Ramis-Murray "Groundhog Day" opus, with the added bonus of a great turn by Christopher Walken in a supporting role.
Yes, some usual gross Adam Sandler humor (excellent, really), but some classic life lessons - especially for anybody like myself who, both professionally and personally, lives a life of great anticipation. Just jumping to the good parts ruins all that.
Case in point: it is fascinating for me to look at Metsu and Abebu and Vonne Mei and Jerry on this trip and wonder what they'll all be like as adults. But what's the rush? The real enjoyment in that future world must be based on knowing them all along the way - putting in the hours, days, weeks, months and years as parents. There is no genuine payoff without putting in the effort.
All you have in this world is time and the opportunity to help others. The rest is all transitory and illusory.
Per the piece I wrote for WPR a while back, leveraging some work by Michael Smith of Kronos, this AP story in USA Today (HT to Mike) lays out a very similar analysis:
Since 2001, Iran has appeared a somewhat reluctant host for senior al-Qaeda operatives who fled there after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, keeping them under tight restrictions. Now, though Iran remains on the edge of al-Qaeda's orbit, it seems to be a more comfortable haven for those operatives.
The turning point was the negotiations for the release last year of a senior Iranian diplomat held by the Taliban. As I noted in the WPR piece, top AQ strategist Saif al-Adel, allegedly held under arrest in Iran, has started to travel with Iran's blessing to Pakistan. As the USA Today article further notes:
Despite his travel to Pakistan, al-Adel has so far chosen to remain based in Iran with his wife and family, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
This suggests that al-Adel and perhaps lower-level al-Qaeda figures now consider Iran a viable outpost, with fewer restrictions and the added security that a U.S. commando raid or drone strike on Iranian soil is unlikely. Al-Adel, an Egyptian who allegedly helped mastermind the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, is among the FBI's most-wanted terrorists and the U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for his capture.
"There are a number of reasons an al-Qaeda leader would feel comfortable these days in Iran," said Theodore Karasik, a regional affairs expert at the Dubai-based Institute forNear East and Gulf Military Analysis. "Chief among them is a mutual enemy: America."
The life of the al-Qaeda-linked exiles in Iran is still very much a blind spot to Western intelligence agencies. Very few firm details have emerged, such as how much Iran limits their movements and contacts.
Iran has made no public comments on bin Laden's family members believed to be on its soil, nor about al-Adel and others in the al-Qaeda braintrust believed to have spent time in the country and may still be there. They include Atiyah Abdul-Rahman, a Libyan high in the al-Qaeda hierarchy; Abu Mohammed al-Masri, a top figure in the al-Qaeda's "Military Committee," which al-Adel is believed to head; and Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a senior spiritual adviser in the terror network.
"The story of al-Qaeda and Iran is one that often is hard to figure out," said Karasik. "But there is a sense that Iran is not just a bystander. Links to top figures like al-Adel gives Iran channels to al-Qaeda's inner workings if they want to go on that path."
With al-Zawahri leading the al-Qaeda, al-Adel is likely to remain a behind-the-scenes organizer and planner of possible new attacks.
NYT story on how the Defense Department suffered a massive loss of data during a hack last March. Pentagon won't say which country is to blame, which makes it either China or Russia. Why tell us now? The cleared version of the new US cyber strategy is being released, as Mark just noted.
Cool NYT story on the US military's use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the same technology here in the States, along with the usual fears of loss of privacy. Trust me, along with drones, these frontier-settling technologies will most definitely infiltrate our society in coming years, just like the military's Internet and GPS did before.
Fabulous op-ed in WSJ on 6 July by Liu Junning, an "independent scholar in Beijing."
You should read it all. Here are my favorite bits:
First, Liu speaks to the infatuation in the West for the alleged "Beijing consensus":
This view fundamentally misunderstands the country's growth progress. China has indeed made great strides since 1978's "Reform and Opening" in alleviating poverty, opening up to the world, and making slow steps down the road of legal reform. Yet on closer inspection, the most significant transformations from the perspective of boosting prosperity have involved loosening of control over the people, not some alchemy of power and Marxism.
This becomes clear in comparing China's economic performance during periods when Beijing has been more closely versus less closely following the Beijing Model. According to MIT economist Yasheng Huang, "[W]hen measured by factors that directly track the living standards of the average Chinese person, China has performed the best when it pursued liberalizing, market-oriented economic reforms, as well as conducted modest political reform, and moved away from statist policies."
I have read such analyses too many times to count, and yet it still amazes me how many don't get it: China does best when it moves in the direction of the allegedly discredited Washington consensus and does significantly less well when it goes more statist. But the mythology (like Reagan "reducing the size of government") lives on.
Liu also dismisses the notion that defenders of Chinese authoritarianism make: that the Chinese naturally abhor Western-style rights:
This too is at odds with current experience. Simply talk to those peasants who have had their land arbitrarily taken, and we see that property rights are implicitly cherished by all, regardless of race or ethnicity. Despite Beijing's crackdown, lawyers and activists continue to press for Western-style rights.
The rest of the piece is a tour of Chinese history that shows that the ideas and practices of liberalism have flowered throughout. Again, Mao gets credit for reunification but also for perverting the system profoundly. China has always been far more capitalistic than realized. It was Mao's 30-year rule that was the historical aberration, as was his erratic authoritarianism.
Then the solid finish:
To say that the narrative of liberty vs. power is uniquely "Western" is to turn a blind eye to the struggles of those who have gone before us. Individual rights are not a Western development any more than paper and gunpowder are inventions that are uniquely Chinese. Is Marxism "German"? Is Buddhism "Indian"? Of course not. When ideas are born, they take flight into the world to be used, improved or discarded by all of humanity. Constraints on political power and the protection of individual rights belong to all.
The tragedy is that we Chinese don't have full access to these protections. That increasingly will hold us back instead of propelling us forward as proponents of a Beijing consensus believe. Real success for China in the 21st century will depend not on the Communist Party itself, but on the establishment of the rule of law, limited government, and further economic liberalization that opens China's market to the world.
Fundamental to this is the right to speak freely. China will truly prosper only when individuals such as Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei and the many other Chinese patriots who speak for reform are safe in the knowledge that they can do so without a late-night knock on the door from the government.
I continue to believe that the Chinese need a certain historical distance from the Cultural Revolution, plus time to get used to their new-found wealth/development before democracy arises naturally from within - meaning the popular push gets so strong that the Communist Party is forced to birth two or more successor parties in order for the system to survive.
I will readily admit that, until that tumultuous process unfolds, there will be plenty in the West who buy into the Beijing-sold notion that somehow the Chinese are "unique" in their history and developmental trajectory. I personally think that's nonsense.
I also think that the real genius of the American System projected onto a global stage these past seven decades as an international liberal trade order-cum-the West-cum-globalization is that it enables countries like China to start the developmental jump and continue it with enough force - via a package that remains far closer to the Washington consensus than any other I've seen - to trigger the pluralization process that best fits the society in question (aka, what we call "democracy" but really mean as a republic or a government based on law). The timing is variable but inevitable if economic success is had (show me the large rich country that is both politically mature and not a democracy). Yes, in the era following the Cold War's end, we must suffer waiting out a host of countries and their evolutions, but as the Arab Spring shows, the people themselves will keep on trying - no matter the costs and frustrations.
To imagine democracy is on the wane in this era is, in my opinion, simply wrong-headed and stubbornly so. Ditto for free markets, understanding that we don't live in a world of pure or absolute anything and that these things ebb and wane with events.
But the march of history is beyond clear, as is America's supremely positive impact on it these past seven decades. Most of everything we consider to be good in this world has come about in the last seven or so decades. Go back before them - before America's ascension to global power - and you find everything much worse and on the path of self-immolation. Instead, we now have unprecedented peace, wealth, development and freedom - especially for women. These are not accidental events; the timing is incontrovertibly linked to America's role.
Which is why maintaining that role in a sustainable fashion is so crucial. "Post-American" is a self-defeating lie - a cancer within our ability to think in grand strategic terms. There is most definitely a "pre-American" world. There will never be a "post-American" one - nor should there be in a world that will be ruled by the middle - again, thanks to the system we created, nurtured and defended all these years.
Wash Times piece on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen's counterpart in China (Chen Bingde) saying that US naval ex's in regional waters with local friends (Vietnam, Philippines, etc.) are "inappropriate." Mullen replies that they're not directed at China, which, of course, is the whitest of lies. The US sells beaucoup arms to all the same players and exercises with them to give them confidence vis-a-vis "rising China." Fair enough . . .
The sense of ideological triumphalism with which China recently celebrated the 90th anniversary of Communist Party rule echoed a flood of recent books and analyses in the West that have readily embraced that same sentiment. Nevertheless, there is a growing mountain of evidence that suggests China's "unprecedented" economic accomplishments are far less impressive than popularly imagined. And with the region's "demographic dividend" already shifting from China to both India and Southeast Asia, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Beijing -- and the world -- is just one financial crisis away from finding the "superiority" of state capitalism revealed as a fraudulent myth.
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 11:06PM 
While still working out the arrangements with my literary agency (Zachary Shuster Harmsworth) since this is a proof-of-concept effort for them, I did manage to land my publicist from "The New Map" series, Steve Oppenheim (Oppenheim Communications, based in Manhattan). It will be a first-time process for Steve too, doing a straight eBook with no hard-copy version, but both of us agree that we like the non-rush of trying to make all the PR happen in a two-week period.
Why the black and red motif? You can't tell from the black and white photo, but she was wearing a red shirt over her Spandage vest (which is why her neck looks kinda fuzzy), plus her hat was blood red with black trim. So when I see that picture (we just refound the black-and-white negative in the memorabilia box we unpacked and perused today), I see red and black - simple as that.
