This week's column

Iran: the ultimate scapegoat on Iraq

The Bush administration says it does not seek war with Iran but engages in numerous policies and preparations that indicate otherwise. Like Tony Soprano’s suicidal son, A.J., I sense Americans are being systematically prepared for a military campaign against Iran. I also fear these planned strikes constitute this administration’s de facto exit strategy from Iraq.

There was never any doubt that Iran would benefit from America’s decisions to topple both the Taliban and Saddam. What truly amazes me still is that, having removed Tehran’s worst enemies to its east and west, the Bush team somehow managed to get absolutely nothing from Iran in return.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Two for two this year

I know I should be ashamed: Angelina Jolie, wearing what looks like a satin sheet.

"The Americans Have Landed," July issue, arrives in my PO.

Echoing A.J. Jacob's piece about "brutal honesty," let me say the following about the issue:

1) Kind of weak for Esquire to go with that one letter to the editor on my May "State of the World" piece, because the writer's point is misleading and misses my point. I didn't say that populations are not growing, because they are. I said the center of demographic gravity is shifting from young to middle-aged over the next quarter-century. Fertility rates, while still very high in some places, like Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Palestine, are dropping generally over the region (especially in Tunisia, Lebanon and Iran), meaning today's youth bulge becomes--inexorably--tomorrow's middle-aged bulge. The guy's right in that there there will be many youth in coming years, but that wasn't my point. I explained that to Esquire, and they went with that--in my mind--weak letter anyway.

2) Very cool to follow Stephen King's fiction piece.

3) Pisses me off seriously that Esquire doesn't acknowledge anywhere in the piece or in the end-of-issue photo credits that the three pix in the piece were shot by me. Didn't really get paid for them either, despite making them happen and saving the magazine the money to send somebody along or the reality of having to rely on the military itself to provide.

Ah, but that's being brutally honest.

I'd bitch more but I have three possible pieces still with the mag before year's end, so I'll whine here and take it no further.

Again, brutally honest.

Neocons hold onto hope for China

ARTICLE: Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide, by By Jeff Stein, CQ.com, June 1, 2007

Known to many before, known to any who care to listen now.

As I've written and remarked many times, the neocons, coming into power, had China primarily in their sights.

Absent 9/11 (and all conspiracy theories aside), this would have become the main conflict focus for the Transformation crowd and the neocons. Many still prefer it to the long-term reality of the Long War.

And that is a huge problem for us.

Thanks to Bill Millan for sending this.

The plan shapes up, the stack grows

Rough outline sees me reading a stack of books I have determined must be read before attacking my own body of thought (i.e., a massive review of the blog). Vonne has been instrumental in helping me put this list together, as have a number of readers who pointed me in directions I never would have gone.

So June is books, July is blog, and August is first draft of book, even if I don't have any contract in place. August is just too good a month for me to pass up.

Why mention here?

Effort on the blog must necessarily grow more cursive over the next 3-4 months. I think I've gotten better at doing that, in preparation, but a certain volume decrease seems necessary and inevitable.

The China model, the China solution

OP-ED: "Iran Arrests Grandma," by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 30 May 2007,p. A25.

Money quote:

In other words, our only hope of either changing this Iranian regime or its behavior, without fracturing the country, is through a stronger Iranian middle class that demands a freer press, consensual politics and rule of law. That is our China strategy--and it could work even faster with Iran. The greatest periods of political change in modern Iran happened when the country was most intensely engaged with the West, beginning with the constitutional revolution in 1906.

Unfortunately, the Bush strategy--diplomatic/economic isolation plus high oil prices--has only frozen the regime in power and transformed it from mildly repressive to a K.G.B state with a nuclear program. So now we face an Iranian regime that is both powerful and paranoid.

Yes, Mr. President, this is a message some of us have been trying to convey to you for years now.

The question is, Now that it's bubbled up to Friedman's stature and Bush's presidency is winding down, will it be heard?

China's "soft power" only generates "hard dangers" and "soft opposition"

ARTICLE: "Miners' Daunting Task: Digging In Risky Zones; Scarce Copper Deposits Make Congo a Hot Spot; Demand vs. Danger," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2007, p. A1.

ADVERTISEMENT: "Beijing Games, Darfur Genocide: China's Only Publicizing Its Role In One," by SaveDarfur.org, New York Times, 30 May 2007, p. A11.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "U.S. Plays Weak Darfur Hand: Sanctions on Sudan Show Limit to Options; U.S. Is the Next Venue," by Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A9.

Reading the book "Charm Offensive" about China's rising influence across Gap. Pretty good book that I'll review more formally in a column perhaps. It makes a good case but oversells the trajectory.

China's rising profile in the Gap is taking it to many places the Sovs once tread in their own dreamy period of spreading socialism to backward states. China has no such goals, but it will run into all the same problems. A hit-them-where-they-ain't strategy means you're always getting into bed with unstable partners. Once in and committed, you suffer them far more than they suffer you.

In short, China has no idea what it's getting itself into inside the Gap. Yes, money talks, but it does not cure what ails the Gap. That solution-set will often need to be far more comprehensive than either the U.S. or China is typically willing to put forward.

But put forward we must. The soft power blowback already begins on China's presence inside the Gap: NGOs and PVOs want to hold them accountable for things they cannot control and choose not to control. So the choice is being forced: learn how to control and improve these situations or suffer the asymmetrical consequences.

Remember, the more you connect, the more you are subject to code.

Pushing China in this direction benefits U.S. foreign policy greatly. It is clear that much of the Gap remains beyond our willingness to manage. We have weak hands in many places. All of those places, strangely enough, feature the potential for a far stronger China hand--if we so choose to develop it.

That's basically what Keating is after. It's basically what Mia Farrow is after.

It's what I've been after for a long time as well.

We live in a frontier age within which frontier allies must be sought: to kill our common enemies and to fix our common problems and to build our common future.

China grows up, little by little

ARTICLE: "Wal-Mart Sneezes, China Catches Cold: Retailer's Clothing Slump Leaves Factories Scurrying To Find New Customers," by Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 29 May 2007, p. B1.

ARTICLE: "Tax Increase Batter Chinese Stocks, but There's Little Wider Damage," by David Barboza and Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 31 May 2007, p. C4.

ARTICLE: "China Confronts Crisis Over Food Safety," by Nicholas Zamiska, and Jason Leow, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A3.

OPINION: "Yes Logo: China learns why brands matter," by Holman W. Jenkins Jr., Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A18.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "Green' Protests Derail Chinese Chemical Plant," by Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2007, p. A8.

OP-ED: "From Torture to Plaintiff: a Pilgrim's Progress in China," by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 31 May 2007, p. A21.

ARTICLE: "China Aims to Limit Smoking in Public: As Largest Maker Of Cigarettes, Call Will Face Hurdles," by Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A8.

As China connects more and more to the world, and particularly to the U.S. economy, the notion that one can thrive at the other's expense is revealed as illusion. When China hurts, America will hurt, and when America hurts, China will hurt.

That signal function is a whole lot more real than China's still largely-disconnected stock market, which is truly a pure expression of ambition and desire rather than underlying economic reality, making its inevitable crash a more interesting phenomenon--as in, how will people take to having their dreams temporarily crushed?

Done well (meaning we handle it well too), then the answer is obvious: fix the underlying disconnectedness so greater transparency results in truer economic logic. In short, better to know the truth than live on lies--even hope-filled ones.

Better to know the truth is a lesson China is learning over and over again--scandal by scandal, as I recently argued in a column. More watchdogs! More czars! More public executions!

Ooh! We got rid of that last one a while back, keeping it--until quite recently in historical terms--primarily for the repression of African Americans.

But eventually we all grow up, and China continues to do so as well.

It begins to recognize that brands make markets and reputations make brands and quality-control makes reputations. You want markets to justify your regime's legitimacy? Then you better adjust to the transparency and regulatory regimes that get you closer to world standards.

That, my friends, as I wrote in BFA, is the globalization price. And the globalization price tames China far more than the scary China price destabilizes the rest of the world.

What Mann and others like him don't get is that democracy in China is beginning--like everywhere else--from below. It is always a bottom-up process. You cannot build a national democracy on a foundation of sand. It must be built--brick by brick--from below.

One million text messages screaming "We want life, we want health!" shuts down construction of a dangerous chemical plant in China. Frankly, that sort of democracy is far more important right now in China that multiparty elections on top.

The case law for China's future-and-emerging democracy must be written, individual by individual. Yesterday's torture victims become today's plaintiffs become tomorrow's political leaders.

You create Yeltsin-style "democracy" in China today and you'd squelch all that necessary evolution. Go back and read our own history: every democratic advance came when individuals--en masse--rose up and said "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

So yes, pain and not promise will drive this process. Believing in that path for China is not about "loving" it or being "fooled" by it. It's about recognizing the logical pathways by which this growth process will occur: driven by greed and pain and the balance maintained between the two

The solution on climate change will be New Core-driven, with America as swing vote

ARTICLE: "How Bush Shift On Climate Front Alters Dynamics: China, India May Follow If U.S. Cuts Emissions; Regulations More Likely," by John D. McKinnon, Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2007, p. A1.

OPINION: "Capitalism Against Climate Change: If we're going to tackle greenhouse gases, tradable credits are the way to go," by R. Glenn Hubbard, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2007, p. A15.

The great lesson I took from the economic security exercise we ran with Cantor Fitzgerald atop WTC 1 back in June 2001 on the future of environmental damage stemming from Asia's rise (the first two workshops were "motive" [energy] and "opportunity" [FDI] and this one I described as the "crime" [enviro damage with a focus on global warming]).

The focus on global warming was easy enough to locate. Emerging markets all go through the same curve on local pollution: it rises dramatically and then tops off as per capita reaches the point where people want to breath easier more than they want that extra $100 annually (and yeah, they all reach that point, just like we did in the West).

But what also happens is that the production of global pollution continues upward with development, so the fastest way to get a critical mass of players on global pollution is to encourage as many emerging markets as possible to get over the local/regional hump and see the wisdom and logic and self-interest and connected responsibility in dealing with the global pollution problem.

That's why our "Survivor" game, much like the more elaborate one played years later by Bjorn Lomborg in his "Copenhagen Consensus," came to the very same conclusion: until the local pollution gets conquered through sustainable development, the global pollution problem will always come in last in terms of priorities.

As for shaping that global agenda on global climate change, everyone at our workshop had the same opinion that both Clinton and then Bush had on Kyoto: It would never have any real impact because China and India were excused from the process and their rising impact, much like in demographics, would constitute the tipping point in the process--as in, include them and work on their rise to have maximum positive impact, or exclude them and wrap yourself--Mr. West--around your axle and accomplish little while diverting funds better used on water, diseases, etc. Yes, do the smart stuff to make yourself more efficient in the meantime, Mr. West, but have no pretenses that you can fix this problem from within. Either you fix the rising delta in the East or you have virtually no impact worth mentioning.

But of course, New Core India and China won't budge on this until their model of emergence--the U.S.--makes a similar bid. We are the swing vote. Of course the Euros are on board; they've already aged out of the economic growth process. The U.S., in its infinite youthfulness and hypercompetitive economics and open immigration, has not.

So when Bush finally moves, as he was always slated to do, China and India listen.

Back to Larry Summers' point: fix the rising East.

How to do so?

The conclusion we reached atop WTC 1 in June 2001 is the same one everyone reaches for now: market mechanisms to cap and trade. These markets need to be gradually introduced, because the unintended consequences, already seen in Europe, will be huge. Fortunately, Europe tolerates a lot of economic illogic normally, so its experiment serves greatly to inform.

But we cannot expect similar peculiarities to be easily absorbed in India and China. They need a serious partner in this process who approaches questions of competitiveness in a similar fashion, hence--again--the swing-vote role the U.S. so crucially plays in the process.

Read Hubbard's op-ed for the details. My analysis adds nothing to that. Just keep the larger logic in mind: America's "new core-ness" persists and makes us similar enough to India and China's mindsets and problems that our growing alliance with them on this problem, among so many others, is key to fostering global progress.

Dubai's new oil souk signals the east-east reality on energy

ARTICLE: "For Dubai, the Oil Futures Are Now," by Ann Davis, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2007, p. C1.

That Dubai now sports its own oil market pricing benchmark hardly surprises. Trying to judge the world's oil markets from just the perspective of Euro and US sources is pretty weak, so all this development does is reflect the reality that's been there all along: the Gulf is the center of that universe.

More revealing to me is the list on the jump page of this story: top five importers of Middle East crude oil and the percentage of their imports that come from the Middle East:

1) Japan at 89%

2) Taiwan at 84%

3) South Korea at 78%

4) India at 70%

5) China at 46%

The history of the world's oil markets over the next twenty years is driven primarily by India and China's rising percentages (the latter's, in particular, will skyrocket in coming years).

Their oil, our blood.

Time to incentivize, yes?

Time to recognize who our real allies are going to be on this subject of the Long War.

Understand that reality and then spin me the scenario where our carriers are somehow fighting China's carriers in the Mideast to prevent energy from flowing safely to China's industries that are increasingly connected to our markets. Just run me through that one for a bit and tell me where it goes.

Message in a bottle

OP-ED: "'Re-Arming' Europe: The Old World needs an intellectual revolution to meet the challenges ahead," by Pascal Bruckner, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2007, p. A19.

Nice piece. Don't disagree that revitalization urgently needed. All Europe seems to produce now are doomsayers (Walter Laqueur joins that very long list with his new book).

But first the Euros need to catch up with history: they are not the first multinational state or economic union. They did not invent the first unified currency. They were not the first continent to experience insane civil war and thereupon reason their way to a Kantian peace of transparency, free markets, free trade and collective security.

America made that journey in the latter half of the 19th century, thanks to our Civil War and the bloody build-out of the American West (actually, most of the blood spilled long earlier). We got to our emergent point (much like China's today, but along a very different path) around 1890, following a 25-year healing period after the Civil War (China reaches its emergent point around 2000, 25 years of healing after the Cultural Revolution).

Europe had a far longer healing point, reflecting the depths to which it sank in its massive civil wars of 1914-1945. It's main problem is that its healing occurred in a very artificial sort of civilizational separateness, which is no longer tenable due to demographics.

What Europe did to the world (export surplus population) across the 19th century, the world now does in return.

Europe, unaccustomed to anything but always being on top, finds its current and future positions rather . . . uncomfortable.

Let the hand-wringing continue, but it goes nowhere without self-awareness.

America faces a similar growth spurt in self-awareness: We are no longer the up-and-comer of the 20th century, but the subtly-eclipsed developed power of the 21st, who increasingly takes cues from rising Asia as to what comes next.

And what comes next will be cheaper, more robust, necessarily less pollutive and simpler. We will face this adjustment on climate change and so many other things. It will be humbling, but ultimately a very good thing.

I do not expect Europe to do anything but come along for the ride, in this regard. Its days of leadership are gone. All its bets are internally placed. There are no great incentives to "fix" or reshape the world around it. It is settling into its old age, and it will have to get used to the in-laws eventually.

Upgrade to the upgrade

Sean and I have been policing the comments more and more as of late, clearing away the "deadwood."

What is our definition?

If there is no agreement, there is no discussion, just noise. So move along.

One-trick ponies are not welcome. If you have a horse you absolutely need to ride to the exclusion of all else, make your own vertical blog and drill down to your heart's content. But repeating yourself here time and time again is not welcome. You are like a nagging child. Eventually you will be made to shut up so that the adults can talk.

There is no blogging in my blog. If your site isn't attended enough, that's the law of the jungle. It won't be fixed here.

Additive arguments are welcome, as are orthogonal ones. Tear-downs are not. I get all those emails I need. I see no reason to run a website for their distribution. Your own blogs are made available for such things.

Beyond all that, we simply have no problem moving people along. Voices get tired, people lose their utility. We don't look back. They are always new ones.

The comments exist for one reason: to make me smarter while cutting down the emails. Same holds for the blog: if it did not make me smarter I would not do it.

So commenters come in two forms for me: I read them and I feel smarter or I read them and I don't.

Everyone is on and off, including me. We only jettison those who seem off the vast majority of the time. Naturally, they are always flabbergasted by being let go, and we are accused of limiting free speech and dissent and so on.

And to that we always answer: this is Tom's blog and it serves his purposes.

Enjoy it or don't, because that's how we view comments.

Comment upgrade: Tom himself

Tom left this comment on the harsh truth thread:

Geertz is useful in reminding me the strength of old think. He's like a portal in time. Whenever I think I should lighten up because all the dinosaurs are gone, he pops up to remind me that the cardinal sin of the grand strategist comes in declaring victory too early.

You either measure in decades or you stick to journalism.

I refuse to temper the blog.

When I start self-editing, this ends immediately.

You can't write the mature stuff until you wade through the immature.

You can't produce the deep stuff until you burn off the cheap stuff.

I get plenty of space elsewhere to write with more calculation. This is just where I sound off.

Eventually, that will become too hard, not because I change but because perceptions and tolerance change.

Til then, I enjoy myself, for I see no other reason in having the blog.

PNM ebook

Google told me that there's an ebook of PNM. I had no idea. Plus, they have it listed as in the sidebar as the 8th best seller in their History category. Let's see if we can bump that up a little bit, people ;-)

Let the harsh truth be told: holding onto the past kills Americans today and endangers America tomorrow

COLUMN: In the Ring, By Bill Gertz, Washington Times, June 1, 2007

The problem with the anti-mil-mil cooperation argument is that adherents lack credible scenarios for U.S.-on-China war and vice versa.

I've seen all the scenarios and not one holds up to any rational scrutiny. They are fantastic relics of the past, as are those who cling to them.

Spin me out the plausible strategy where China gets away with sinking a U.S. carrier. You can't. You simply can't answer the "and then what?" questions.

There is no Chinese economy without profound and continuous access to U.S. markets. It simply comes to a stop, as does communist rule.

If China were to attack and sink a U.S. carrier, we'd sink their entire navy and decimate their air force to boot. We'd crush the crap out of them in a completely unfair fight. We'd do it out of both anger and the simple desire to signal to them and anybody else: do this and we'll kill you en masse.

Do I think we can push events in such a way as to get this type of lunatic response from the Chinese? Sure.

Do I think history would judge us as complete fools for doing so? Absolutely.

Are they some leaders in China dumb enough to entertain such ideas? Sure, but there are more here, and they worry me more because our advantages over China remain huge militarily.

You jettison the nonsensical Taiwan scenario--wet dream of platform builders across America--and the China hawks don't have a leg to stand on. There are no rational scenarios extended into the Middle East: all of the ones you can name have China facing more dependency and vulnerability than we do (they need that energy, we do not), so the spoiler role--so much more easily achieved--falls into our lap, not China's.

But Geertz is unredeemable--a total pawn of the Big War crowd and the mil-industrial complex, who feed him like the pet he is. People like him need to be escorted off the stage pronto. They hold up our much-needed and much-delayed adjustment to the war we have because they insist on holding on to the war--and the enemy image--they prefer.

Let me be perfectly clear here in a way Keating could never hope to be until he takes off his uniform:

This thinking kills our SOF every day.

This thinking kills our Marines every day.

This thinking kills our Army soldiers every day.

This thinking kills our Reservists every day.

This thinking kills our National Guard every day.

This thinking kills our contractors every day.

This painfully out-of-date non-strategic mindset kills Americans every single day by continuing this inexcusable idiocy of overfeeding the Leviathan and starving the SysAdmin.

And at some point it must be described as implicit collusion with al Qaeda and the radical Salafist movement, because no one can possibly be both that stupid and that cynical.

When you purposefully argue against the necessary adjustment to this Long War--year after year--how do you not eventually equate this position with aiding and abetting the enemies of this country?

When you so consistently argue against the strategic adjustment necessary to tapping the allies required for our victory, how can you pretend you stand with America and its security?

Or does Taiwan and the greed of the military-industrial complex come first?

I won't bother asking Geertz if he has no shame. He's that condition's poster child.

But what can you expect from the Wash Times and its master?

There is nothing particularly hard about maintaining a hedge against China--anymore than there is against the UK. By mentoring their rise as a naval power, we gain access and intelligence. What they get is some catch-up info that hardly turns their navy into ours. Anyone who tells you otherwise just plain doesn't have a clue about our capabilities, nor the complexity of doing what only our military can do.

As I have said many times before, this is not about trusting the Chinese to be anything but Chinese. But it's also not about steering through our rear-view mirror strategically.

To hold onto China as the big rising threat is a fundamental misreading of global economics and globalization's evolution--and willfully so.

China will seek to steal from us. China will confound us where it can and confront us when it has no choice, but it will so asymmetrically because symmetrical challenges would be suicidal. The reason why no carrier's been sunk since WWII is because WWII ended with the invention of nuclear weapons, and nukes kill great power war in all its kinetics. That's why terrorism rises to the top of the heap--duh!

That threat is a function of globalization's spread, just like China's rising income. Pretending you can isolate military threats from that larger economic reality is just plain goofy.

But that ignorance is what keeps America so stupid when it comes to its grand strategy: we rely on columnists and journalists for this vision, and they're feed by military experts with virtually no understanding of economics (witness how slowly we learn in Iraq).

There is no grand strategy that so willfully excludes economic rationality. It's just nonsense and crap.

And doing so in the name of respecting the "irrationality" of conflict is equally bogus. Because it's only in the absence of economic success that such irrationality emerges, so focusing on the yang while denying the yin's power is simply contemplating war solely within the context of war, like contemplating disease without any reference to good health.

Keating's a smart guy who's been around the block. If he sees strategic opportunity in creating dialogue and cooperation with China on their reach for power projection, then maybe--just maybe--he knows more about what he's doing that Geertz back in DC being fed the garbage he so routinely peddles on behalf of his "sources."

I believe in confronting America's threats, both external and internal. Our greatest internal threat are those dinosaurs who want the post-9/11 threat definition to be additive--as in, all the new PLUS all the old.

That--quite simply--is a recipe for exhaustion and defeat. Those who persist in that argument must have their motives questioned, because--deep down--behind all the half-baked rationales, you will find greed--pure and simple.

I forgive the stupidity, but not the greed.

Insert kitty picture here

Mental health day.

Got home last night just before 8pm and watched "Apocalypto" in home theater with family. Not as gory as I had assumed. Really sucked you in and made me think of a lot of things. Absent his DUI and weird associated behavior, I think Mel's film would have been highly celebrated. To me, it's a huge achievement to bring something like that to life, giving you a huge insight into how humans have survived and thrived in harsh elements throughout history. Beyond that, just gorgeous to watch and amazing performances (none of which were recognized).

Today I interview someone over phone for down-the-road employment with Enterra Solutions/Strategies. He's a young guy whose thinking I've observed from afar for a while, and whose raw conceptual skills intrigue me to no end as a possible future replicant (in effect, a protege). Vol. III has me thinking along these lines, as does the huge new influx of work at Enterra, which has now given me one helluva future vision narrative for me and Steve, Enterra as a whole, U.S. national security, and globalization/shrink-the-Gap. The long-term gears are moving, so long-term needs are being assessed.

Other than that, taking the boys golfing. Need to unwind. I can tell I won't be able to travel like this forever. At some point all the excitement morphs into a sense of bewilderment, as I've learned with roller coasters as I age (7 or 8 times in one day now--tops), so you naturally start thinking about how the next generation needs to step up, which means I am perfectly primed to write "How to Become a Grand Strategist."

Waiting on return edit of proposal from agent Jenn Gates. I'm figuring one more iteration and then we try first with Putnam.