Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world's "insatiable appetite" for drones will be exploited by other nations' military-industrial complexes . . .
Many westerners who are rightly incensed at the treatment of dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo or Ai Weiwei probably have a false impression of what modern China feels like. They imagine a uniformly repressive society in which people are afraid to speak out and where the heavy hand of the state reaches into every crevice of life.
This view is not without some truth. But for many middle-class city dwellers, China could not feel more different. For them, today’s China is a fantastic adventure, a lunge into a world of previously unimagined possibilities. Even among the generation that lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, this is widely regarded as the most optimistic time to be alive in China in hundreds of years.
I think that simple notion is very hard for most in the West to understand, especially since our grasp of the Cultural Revolution's depth and historical reach is hard to understand. Take Xi Jinping, who will be the next president and rule through 2022: his bio includes being jailed several times as a teenager by the Red Guard because of his father's ideological sins. Xi is considered a very company man - very careful. And his early years probably account for that.
So here we are: seeing political leadership impact stretch a good half century past the actual events. In the US, comparable experiences would be the Civil War and WWII (think of GHW Bush as the last WWII president leaving office in 1993 - almost 50 years post-WWII). It's that big of an event, and it creates a profound sense of optimism and wariness in its shadow: people remember well how bad it was and value highly how good it's been since the "rise" began.
And you know what? The vast bulk of them don't want to mess with that at all - for now. But a new tipping point looms - I believe - in about 20 more years, because the Xi's of China are replaced by the kids whose first memories are all Deng-and-beyond. For them, Mao's insanities are just stories their parents and grandparents tell. They have known only the "rise" and thus will be far more demanding. They're mostly carefully thinking and acting along these lines today, and as their numbers move into power, and as they face even greater demand - and less historical awareness from below, the change will come.
It can always come a bit earlier or a bit later because of this or that unforeseen event, but the demographics will make it so.
And that's why I don't worry too much about China and democracy - as we misuse the term. The true and comprehensive republic will come; it's been there before. It'll come because the Chinese will demand it.
This is why I can work with the Center for America-China Partnership and still be critical of China.
Economist story (6/18) about the recent wave of high-profile attacks by hacker collectives references "SQL injections," or the technique of penetrating databases of companies, agencies, etc. McAfee, the web security firm, says about half of those it tracked over the first quarter of 2011 were made by Chinese "cyberspies" - a rather imprecise term for the Economist because it implies all are working for the government when, you know, China isn't exactly without criminals or hacktivists.
Pic above if from actual Economist story. Damn those Wachowski bros!
Just rewatched the film (2006) about a month ago. Big fun for fans of Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving - and Stephen Rea. Also a great turn from my big favorite John Hurt (he gets to play Big Brother this time!).
The real continuity goof with the film: the West's fictional descent into fascism begins with a US-led invasion in the Middle East in response to a terror strike. Oh well, guess we have to settle for the Arab Spring instead.
Recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans and Europeans don't want NATO to widen its war against embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. So long as the West's low-and-slow approach to regime change continues to weaken the dictator, there is good reason to stick with President Barack Obama's strategy of limited intervention. Yet as international cameras focus in on Libya, a prospective tipping point for the future of the Middle East becomes all the more visible in Syria, despite that country's ban on international journalists. And although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken an admirably tough line regarding the Baath regime's "continued brutality," the White House still expresses more concern over Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza than over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's increasingly bloody crackdown against protesters there.
Read the entire column, co-authored with Michael S. Smith II, at World Politics Review.
Vonne and I were married on 21 June 1986, so we celebrated our 25th anniversary on Tuesday. Slow day for us, because it was all get-things-done before we flew out very early the next day to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos island chain in the Caribbean. Close family friends offered us their condo down here and we were very excited to come. First time for both of us in the Caribbean. The Caicos chain is just due east of Cuba.
I have no idea why that map says "North Atlantic," but here's a wider angle:
And I guess there's just a tight definition of what constitutes the Caribbean.
Anyway, we've already done the snorkeling, and we'll do the sunset cruise tomorrow and a crab fest at a neighboring island all day Saturday. Also working on some jet skiing in local cave waters.
Providenciales has plenty of great restaurants, and so we're working our way through the NYT's highest recommendations.
Last night, after a great meal on the beach, we walked back to the resort along the long and stunningly pristine beach on the north side of the island, and I pulled out my 25th anniversary "wedding ring" to replace the one Vonne had cut off months ago after she fell chasing Abebu and broke a couple of fingers (Abebu, when she first arrived, had a heart-stopping lack of respect for street traffic). The ring(s) were later lost somewhere in the maelstrom that is our house.
In truth, Vonne hated the rings, which fit-into one another to make one larger ring. I had picked them out from a Cambridge Mass jeweler who designed them himself.
So this time, I designed the ring myself. White gold and wider, it splits in the front to hold one square-cut diamond (me) offset on one tip (so, diamond shaped), and then six other stones (three to the left and three to the right) to represent the kids. The are leaf-like and lean outward from the diamond. Three sapphires on the left for Em, Kev and Jerry. Then one citrene for Vonne Mei and two onyx for Metsu and Abebu. It's a one-of-a-kind ring for a one-in-a-kind family (although, oddly enough, I think it would work for Angelina Jolie as well - if you altered the sequence.)
The jeweler tried to talk me into birth stones, but I told him I didn't need any artificial color scheme - I've already got my rainbow coalition.
The ring turned out very nicely and I picked it up on the 21st, about 12 hours before we flew.
Vonne, fortunately, loves this ring, and it looks as great on her hand as the old ones did not. It has a nice Lord of the Rings vibe to it, says Emily, who helped me describe the design and finalize it with the local jeweler.
One ring to rule them all!
I just couldn't take her on a 25th anniversary trip and have her walk around the entire time without any ring.
We all conspired to fool her and it worked. She was convinced I had found her old rings and had them repaired.
Hailing again from Wikistrat's International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia's long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New York University team (find their national trajectory here). A certain segment of the US national security establishment got all jacked by Russia's short war with tiny Georgia in August 2008, seeing in that raw display of power a “resurging” military superpower. NYU begs to differ.
As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to update everybody on what’s emerged across the second week of the contest. As you may already know, the competition brings together approximately 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks. Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), were challenged in Week 2 to come up with national and regional trajectories in relation to their country-team assignments (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey & US).
As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. In this second week, each team generated those two trajectories to the tune of about 10,000 words each, or close to 300,000 words across all the teams. Naturally, a ton of interesting nuggets emerged, so here’s my hit list of provocative ideas.
1) US turns back toward Western Hemisphere as part of reduced global footprint, need to deal with drug/crime nexus, and desire to balance growing Chinese influence across region (BRAZIL1/Institute of World Politics 2)
Every new US president hits the ground running with the promise to pay more attention to the Western Hemisphere – and then promptly forgets the entire idea. So far, Barack Obama has held to form, and yet the dynamics cited here make for a compelling argument. A US that pulls back from the world and gets it own house in order must certainly look southward for some of its solutions – particularly on the disastrous drug war. Brazil, as the IWP2 team points out, is the key dynamo of the region, so either the US recognizes that and accommodates Brazil’s ambitions, or it may find itself the odd man out throughout South America.
2) The European Union’s primary contribution going forward could be to show the advanced/advancing world how to live within its resource means (EUROPEAN UNION1/NATO’s Atlantic Treaty Association)
The EU1 team established as its primary “national” trajectory goal Europe’s energy independence by 2030. While we can argue about the feasibility, there’s no question that the EU can and should be a leader on the subject. All projections show the region experiencing basically flat energy consumption growth in coming decades, while improving its public transportation infrastructure in a big way. Uncomfortable with relying on energy flows from restive North Africa, the tense Persian Gulf, and bullying Russia – and now freaked out about nuclear power thanks to Japan, the world should see a lot of ambitious brainpower put to this useful task.
3) The EU encouraging immigration from fellow Roman Catholic states/regions (EUROPEAN UNION2/Oxford)
This one elicited a “wow!” from me simply because I’ve never heard the option stated so boldly. If you worry about the Islamic influx and the diminution of Christianity, why not get yourself some truly old-school Catholics from New Core and Gap regions, where the religious flame still burns hot? Afraid of too much religion? Then add a whole lot more. Team Oxford is full of provocative notions like that, which is why they’re in second place after Week 2.
4) The future is all about who’s got the most global cities (EU2/Oxford)
I’m a big believer in this, because if you add up the coastal megacities of the world, you’ve got half the planet’s population and the vast majority of its connectivity and traffic. Get the coastal megacities wired up right, and globalization can’t fail. Team Oxford brought this out in their critique of Europe’s lack of global cities, saying that, besides London, none of the capitals really qualify on the scale of such behemoths as New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Istanbul, etc. EU2’s point: make the investment if you want to stay relevant in the rule setting.
5) India changes when the last generation of “ruled Indians” leaves the political scene (INDIA1/Indian Institute of Technology)
I love passing-of-generations arguments, especially with the supermajors like China and the US, and this is the best one I’ve ever heard on emerging supermajor India. It makes perfect sense: India’s not much more than half-a-century old, so it’s long been ruled by people who remember the before time of British rule. So long as they’re setting agendas, it’s a departure from the past versus a deep embrace of the future. Bottom line: expect a lot more diplomatic innovation out of India, and a much more proactive role in shaping the world and setting rules.
6) India’s sell is “German quality at Chinese prices!” (INDIA2/Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies)
Of course, most everybody cites the democracy thing as India’s differentiating model, and it most certainly is in the political realm, but globalization is driven by economic models – or competing “consensuses,” if you will. Washington had its in the 1990s and China’s captured a lot of imagination in the 2000s, but India is well-poised to capture that ideological flag in the 2010s – the decade of the emergence of the global middle class. That middle class, like any that emerged before on national scales, cares about quality for its money spent. China seeks to meet that expectation, but lacks the political system – for now – to regulate it well. Can India do better? We’re all better off if it does and ups the competition globally. And no, it’s not a fantastic goal. Remember: China loses labor over the next several decades, while India adds a fantastic sum (300 million or so).
7) Iran pins its hopes on China, but China will ultimate choose Saudi Arabia (PAKISTAN1/Claremont Graduate University)
Lots of chatter among the Iranian teams on future economic alliance with China, but Claremont’s Pakistan team made a compelling argument for China picking Saudi Arabia:
In the coming years, Pakistan foresees China making a decision as to whether or not to source its energy from the Saudis or the Iranians. China will side with the Saudi bloc for three reasons. First, given Iran's commitment to its nuclear program, the Iranian-Saudi rivalry favors Pakistan due to Pakistan's nuclear expertise and its close links with the Saudis. China, therefore, will not risk alienating both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to appease Iran and India. Second, the Saudis have larger reserves than the Iranians. As the global leader in proven reserves, the Saudis are able to remain the chief energy provider into the next 80 years, making them a better long-term bet for the Chinese (the Chinese have also transferred strategic missiles to the Saudis – a level of cooperation not seen with the Saudis and Indians). Third, geographical considerations come into play in that Afghanistan's continuing instability closes off its options to act as a reliable pipeline from Iran to China. In that sense, the Saudis offer a more natural supply source to the Chinese in terms of volume and the security of transported oil. If push comes to shove, the Saudis will eschew their energy exports to India if it means obtaining a nuclear deterrent to answer Iran; China also is in a better position to offer more favorable terms owing to its more advanced level of development than India. The redundancy is that their petrol will still have a stable and sizeable market in China. India will initially be reticent to harm its security relationship with Israel, but will do so in the longer term if it has to placate Iran and gain access to its energy. Geographically Pakistan offers a conduit between Saudi energy from the Arabian Peninsula through the Indian Ocean to China.
That is some beautifully argued logic; that PPT slide writes itself.
8) Pakistan goes from globalization “separator” to connector (PAKISTAN2/Yale)
Matching Claremont’s visionary national projection, Yale takes this point even farther in emphasizing how Pakistan must be the global connectivity “answer” before Afghanistan can be stabilized. Both teams emphasized how connecting China to the Persian Gulf will help break Pakistan of its current north-south security paradigm. Yale took the point a bit further to emphasize how stabilizing the security relationship with India could set Pakistan up as the ultimate all-direction energy conduit for South Asia – just like Turkey positions itself in Southwest Asia. The Claremont-Yale duel on this subject pushed me to pen a Time Battleland blog post on the subject. It’s my highest compliment: this stuff is good enough to steal!
9) By sticking with the dream of playing external Leviathan, Russia continues to eschew the much-needed internal System Administrator force, and with its borders so indefensible – and “expanding” with climate change, Moscow is looking at a future of outsourcing its boundary security (RUSSIA2/New York University)
I don’t want to steal my own thunder here. Check out my Time Battleland blog post Thursday morning.
10) Russia as the future waterpower of Eurasia (RUSSIA2/NYU)
This is a staple of my current brief: I show you who’s got more water than people (global percentage share) and then show you who’s able to export grain (water turned into human energy). Naturally, Russia and the other Black Sea powers (Kazakhstan, Ukraine) are big players in this regard. Factor in climate change and the northward movement of agriculture, and Russia becomes a major waterpower of the 21st century. I’m talking Canada BIG!
11) For Turkey to create a regional bandwagoning effect as part of its pursuit of regional leadership, it must pick one of three rivals (Egypt, Iran or Saudi Arabia) and its immediate partner (TURKEY3/Institute of World Politics 1)
It’s so obvious when you’re presented with the logic, and yet to date I haven’t heard anybody put it so well until I came across IWP1 entry this week. All sorts of pundits are wailing about Turkey’s alleged strategic alliance with Iran, as if it means Istanbul has gone crazy Islamist when it has really gone crazy like a fox. I spot a clever Turkey working all three possibilities with substantial vigor, actually providing a far superior US foreign policy than Washington is today.
12) A realistic US plays System Administrator locally (Western Hemisphere) while satisfying itself as Leviathan balancer around the world (UNITED STATES2/Georgetown)
A nicely stated point that wraps up sensibly back around to Brazil1’s opening bid.
In sum, good stuff all around and a totally engaging week for myself as Head Judge. My thanks to all the teams for their fine efforts and best of luck in the final week!
In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat's month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow's best and brightest thinkers. And yeah, full disclosure, I get paid to judge as the firm's chief analyst.
Well, this last week, our participating teams drew up elaborate national trajectories and regional trajectories for their 13 countries (Brazil, China, EU, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and US), and the two entries that really jumped out at me in their immediate dueling were the two Pakistani teams populated with grad students from Claremont Graduate University (CA) and Yale (CT). Let me tell you why.
Compare this piece in WPR to the one Barnett wrote for Time on the same subject three weeks ago. Time readers were literally told they should fear the lowered tripwire for great power war and that "Dr. Strangelove has re-entered the Building", complete with a Guns of August/President Palin scenario in case they didn't get the picture. They were forewarned that "all such concerns will be downplayed by sensible national security types" but the hot war capacity would remain.
Now, WPR readers are told "there's no reason to fear America's decision to fold the cyber realm into this overall deterrence posture..." and, of course, the hot war capacity will remain. I understand the need for using a different tone when writing for different outlets such as Esquire, Time, or WPR. But the Time piece was full of sensational fear-mongering that Barnett rightly criticizes when he sees it in others. This makes me wonder if I should ignore him when he uses his "outside voice."
Suffice it to say, I am always happy when people read my various pieces so carefully!
Here's my answer to the charge:
There are some in the national security community who consistently hype the cyber threat - as in, the amazing damage they can do to us in an instant! I am not one of these types, and nothing in my years in the IT field (first working for the Center for Naval Analyses across most of the 1990s, then the Defense Department in the years leading up to and following 9/11, and since 2005 as an executive in a IT technology firm in the private sector) has convinced me that offensive cyber warfare trumps America's innate resilience as a networked economy/polity/military/society/etc. We can always take one on the chin, but our resilience will prevail.
There is, within that more worried segment of the community, a subset that advocates very aggressive countering responses, believing that any enemy's opening shot should be met with a big-time response. Those thinkers and decision makers may well feel greatly empowered by the new US cyber strategy - depending on how it plays out in the real world in coming years (for now, the strategy is mostly words on pages moving toward realized policy). I believe that those hardcore cyber response types can be considered in the same context as the we-will-inevitably-go-to-war-with-China types, in that both are looking for hunting licenses. Again, depending on how you look at it, the new US cyber strategy may well provide one. I think that's dangerous - as in, Strangelovian dangerous.
That is what I addressed in the Time post. There I focus on the start of what could be any number of types of crises ("Is that a normal blackout or the start of WWIII?") and the dangers of small things spiraling out of control into big things.
There are also many of us in the national security community who believe that any state that will launch a major offensive cyber attack on the US (as opposed to the day-to-day snooping/hacking/thievery - all of which the Chinese do in spades) will do so only as prelude to a full-on attack. Why? Why blow your super-secret wad on anything less, especially if the US might misinterpret and light you up with nukes in response? If a non-state actor does so, then we're on a different track (he can't follow up with a full-on attack and we can't exactly respond in-kind kinetically, can we?).
If you think along these lines, then you're more likely to advocate folding in our cyber deterrence strategy - with regard to state actors like China - into something more like our nuclear version (i.e., we basically tell you, if we think you're going all the way, we'll go all the way right back at you). That threat is mutually assured destruction, and it's meant to be a little crazy and ambiguous. But it's a threshold threat, and that threshold is decidedly high - as in, we really need to believe you're going all the way.
In the WPR column, I wrote about that threshold argument and the desirability of viewing the new US cyber strategy along those lines. I was sounding no alarm on this score, but contextualizing - as I prefer to - the new cyber strategy as being in line with past strategic practice. But not everybody agrees with this logic.
So the two pieces reflect two different ends of the spectrum: in the Time post I warn about those who may take off running with the new strategy, believing it empowers the national security community to spot "war" on a near-continous basis with China. In the WPR column I pull back my lens and go with the threshold of great-power war argument, which I believe must be kept very, very high, and I'd like to see the cyber strategy be interpreted as strengthening and not weakening that threshold.
So to sum up: if you believe that cyber warfare is an entirely new animal and that the new cyber strategy empowers the US national security community to treat it as such, possibly redefining the acceptable pathways to great power war, then I think you should be very much afraid of what may be done with this new approach. If you see cyber deterrence as being in the same ballpark as nuclear deterrence - despite its many obvious differences, then you can view the new strategy with more calm.
Problem is, all sorts of national security "blind men" will be feeling up this "elephant" in the coming months and years, and darn near each will walk away with his or her own impressions. That's why we need to debate this subject from a variety of angles and - yes - use a variety of voices and venues. I don't believe in reducing the threshold of great-power war, but some in the US national security community most decidedly seek to do just that.
Mr. Hancock is correct to point out that I scare in one article and soothe in the other, and that I don't provide obvious linkages between the two rationales. And that's why I'm glad he made the comment so I could respond in this fashion.
It is tempting to view the Obama administration's new cyber strategy as the creation of yet another "conflict domain" to worry about in U.S. national security. Thus, in our enduring habit of piling new fears on top of old ones -- nuclear proliferation, terror, rising powers and failed states, among others -- we imagine yet another vulnerability/threat/enemy to address with buckets of money. In truth, the strategy document is just our government finally acknowledging that, as usual, any fruitful international dialogue on this subject awaits the first move by the system's most advanced military power.
Wife makes several dozen cheesecakes which they sell for $3 a slice (actually a deal given how world-class her cakes are - people come to the fair just to buy her stuff) while daughter and I face paint. When we publish the Emily Updates in the fall, you'll learn that I started face painting when my sister Maggie sent me a book/kit (still got the original book and used it this weekend) in 1994 and I began painting Em's face to divert her attention before going to the Lombardi Cancer Clinic for her chemo rounds. Em was only two but sat very well for the paintings and she loved dressing up to complete the part. Em now outclasses me as a painter by a ways, but it's something to be painting other kids with her 17 years later.
Emily has this Depp thing - bad. I always paint myself as Darth Maul, because it pushes the squirming little kids to Em (I scare them) and it makes the bigger one sit still when I paint them.
Emily did this one on Vonne Mei.
I did both of these on Abebu (left) and Metsu (right).
I did Jerome up big time on Saturday. He was the top parish kid finisher at the 5K in the rain early that morning. I finished about a minute behind him, and was grateful to be that close.
Been on a Chuck Heston tear lately (Greatest Show on Earth, Planet on the Apes - likewise in a gorgeous Blu-Ray version, and The Omega Man). Later in his career, Heston did that fabulous trio of sci-fi movies, all of which featured him in pure early 70's anti-hero cinema mode, which he performed magnificently - and against obvious type.
Soylent Green is such the classic, especially since Heston's good friend Edward G. Robinson was in it with him (think back to Ten Commandments, and realize Robinson was slated to play the head orangutan (Dr. Zaius) in Planet of the Apes, but he couldn't handle the make-up). But Chuck himself is such a sleaze in this movie: stealing stuff left and right, bedding kept women like that's part of the policeman's bill of rights, etc. - all the while being totally virtuous given the larger circumstances.
And it's the larger circumstances which still fascinate me with this movie. Made in 1972 and projecting half a century to 2022, it posited a planet overrun with population (NYC is some ridiculous 40m!) but primarily bedeviled by climate change (Robinson actually cites the greenhouse effect). Yes, too many people, but it's the incessant heat and the inability to grow sufficient food that are the underlying problems.
So, strangely visionary for treating climate change so early, but as usual, the fear-mongering got out of control. As I like to point out in my current brief, you jump ahead to "Children of Men" and it's already positing a future Earth (2027) where we're running out of babies - true science fiction until you visit certain towns in America, or Italy, or Japan, or . . ..
Another thing it gets wrong: climate change doesn't make it harder to grow food; it just changes the geographic pattern - making it much harder in some places but opening up others (the New North).
Still, a great movie and almost a master's class on how to portray the future cheaply while embedding a cop story inside. A lot of follow-on movies owe plenty to this one.
Nice piece in WAPO about Ayman al-Zawahiri taking over al-Qaeda from the recently assassinated Osama bin Laden. Story leads with remembrances from a guy who knew him back in the day:
He was arrogant, angry and extreme in his ideas,” said Azzam, 40, son of a radical Palestinian ideologue who had become bin Laden's mentor. “He fought with everyone, even those who agreed with him.”
Thus, experts are now saying that al-Qaeda will suffer under his leadership:
U.S. intelligence officials, terrorism experts and even the Egyptian's former cohorts say a Zawahiri-led al-Qaeda will be far more discordant, dysfunctional and perhaps disloyal than it was under bin Laden.
Just to cover rear-ends, though, the story's next statement leaves open the question whether or not the group will be more or less effective (terrorism experts must always do this to make sure they can win big when the next strike comes and they told us so!).
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on the budget but likewise hard enough to make sure he got more for the frontline troops. All in all, I can't fault him on anything major. He was just what we needed after Rumsfeld.
Now he does us the final favor of speaking the truth about our European allies and a relationship that has clearly run its historic course. I have been writing about needing to shift from West to East for almost a decade ("Forget Europe: How About These Allies?" 11 April 2004, WAPO; "The Chinese Are Our Friends," November 2005, Esquire), and for years my suggestion that our future strategic partnerships will be with India and China instead of the UK and the rest of NATO were greeted with wide-eyed shock by briefing audiences. But the global financial crisis opened a lot of eyes.
As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways that we’ve already gathered in the first week of the contest. As you may already know, the competition brings together more than 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks. Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), are being challenged to come up with long-term grand strategies in relation to five issues: global energy security, global economic “rebalancing,” Jihadist terrorism, the Sino-American relationship and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
By conducting this strategic planning exercise, Wikistrat seeks to create an instant-but-lasting community of several hundred young strategists from around the world in a sort of Facebook-meets-Wikipedia online environment populated with our unique wiki-based model of globalization. Part of that effort involves creating expectations among participation that their future work will be both collaborative in execution and subject to intense – and peer-based – competitive pressures, but it also includes exposing participants to practical skill sets that they will use as future analysts/authors. To further their avowed career goals, we’re also making the participants’ work available to government agencies and corporate firms interested in recruiting them as new hires.
Across the four-week competition, each team of 5-10 graduate political science students and interns will collaborate on the Wikistrat model to:
Forecast their team’s national trajectory;
Develop scenario pathways and national policy options for specific strategic issues;
Articulate national grand strategies;
Brainstorm future regional security environments (alternate futures); and
Simulate plausible scenarios of geopolitical crises.
As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week. In this first week, teams were tasked with enunciating their country’s national interests across the five international issues cited above. The teams generated roughly 150 wiki pages, whose combined “weight” of almost 200,000 words approximates the size of your average “weighty” policy tome.
Since this is a first-of-a-kind experiment that competitively harnesses the collaborative analytic power of the “millennial” generation, we at Wikistrat are eager to share these initial observations:
“Collaborative competition” actually works
I know what you’re thinking: Of course Wikistrat’s grand strategy competition “proves” collaborative competition. But we were genuinely surprised at how easy it was to track the following: the country-team groups that were the most competitive – and interactive – with each another clearly outperformed those country groups where it was apparent that each team went its own way (meaning their entries were far more idiosyncratic). After all, doesn’t it make sense to hold off revealing your positions until the very last minute – i.e., maintaining secrecy? Because if you don’t, then your best ideas can be copied by your competition, right?
Well, by seeing up-front what your immediate competition is putting out there, you’re challenged to cover that bet and raise the bar even higher – or at least put your countering spin on the issue raised. Point being, you’re forced to defend your ideas more fully and that effort only adds analytic muscle to the product. Yes, the resulting works were more similar in terms of the ground they covered, but that only made the comparative analysis (my grading) all the easier. The same would hold in the real world for a decision-maker. Yes, the truly competing visions emerged in the end; their advocates were just forced to explain their strategies more fully by referencing common touch points. And because the teams were in immediate competition with one another, the usual groupthink dynamics were avoided.
In general, the best predictor of any team’s overall finish was the level of its “internal” competition (e.g., the two other India teams competing with it to be the “best India”). The tougher the in-house opposition, the more comprehensively any team’s ideas were tested before being released into the international “wild.” In the end, a country-team’s success depended less on the “real” competition of other states than its willingness to slug it out preemptively in a collaborative fashion – even if all any team did was “cheat” by looking at the “next student’s test paper.”
Then again, real life doesn’t unfold with all desks turned toward teacher.
The utility of thinking things through before committing to action
Our grad student teams were all so chomping at the bit that we had to remind them constantly that this was not a war-game, but rather a strategic planning competition. The first entries by, and earliest conversations among, participants got to punch lines too quickly – in effect, “Shouldn’t we bomb Country X now?” The whole point of spending this first week thinking through and debating each nation’s interests – before any moves were made – was to encourage everybody to consider what really matters to their country-team. Before you can accurately judge which risks to run and what is to be gained by running them, you need a clear sense of what can be lost in turn. The most sophisticated consequence management involves avoiding negative outcomes in the first place.
The most impressive team entries explored all sorts of consequences (“If X happens, then the up/downside is . . . “), and in doing so they revealed the oft-unmentionable truth that national interests aren’t always as “fixed” as they’re made out to be. That was a lesson we hoped participants might discover on their own during this first week: in this fast-paced and complex world we call globalization, virtually nothing is carved in stone any more. “Survival” comes in many forms, and genuine strategic thinking often begins with the impertinent question, “Well, why should we assume that . . . ?”
The tyranny of interests
Something we noticed: the longer the list of national interests presented, the less creative the strategic thinking. Why? Every declared interest pre-programs the foreign policy response, so the more interests your country accumulates, the more fenced-in you are as a policymaker. One of the pleasant surprises of the first week grading process was how creative the North Korean teams were on certain issues, primarily because they kept things very simple regarding acceptable regime survival.
Now, that can sound counter-productive when you consider the “thinking through” goal cited above, but thinking through what matters most to your country doesn’t necessarily translate into a long list of core interests. More to the point, just citing those core interests doesn’t end the conversation (as in, “China simply doesn’t go there”). In this ever more connected world, trouble comes looking for you – not the other way around. Core interests certainly preface all subsequent policy arguments, but they don’t obviate any.
What you see depends on where you sit
Here we saw some teams play their countries too well: the Japanese teams tended to be a bit too careful, the European teams a bit too focused on defining the best rules, the Israeli teams a bit too dug in, the American teams a bit too self-confident, etc. Where the subject matter touched upon more geographically immediate interests, teams naturally tended to be more creative. But when the subjects seemed more distant (“What does North Korea care about Middle East extremism?”), creativity decidedly suffered.
In many ways, though, the exact opposite should be true. When it comes to diplomacy, that first and final tool of grand strategy, ambitious nations should indulge their creativity most where interests are thinnest, because that’s where they have the most wiggle room. Not having a “dog in the fight” can be a good thing, strategy-wise, so long as you don’t overstep your limited interests. Plus, if you always wait until the problem reaches your shores, you may be out of attractive options at that point.
Look sideways to see deep into the future
Here we might say, “Know your own history – but not too well.” The more teams used past history to explain their national interests, the less strategizing they applied to the subject – the “grievance list” quickly overwhelming any instinct for creative thought. Conversely, the more teams cited issues adjacent to the subject at hand – or what we call “interdependencies,” the better able they were to think through possible scenarios toward desired outcomes.
In a networked world, such interdependencies become the source material for policy workarounds – or the rewiring of strategies. After all, one man’s cul-de-sac is another man’s turnaround. A favorite example: one North Korean team, surveying the course of Asia’s economic integration with the world, decided that its impoverished population actually advantages the country as the last great untapped cheap-labor pool in East Asia!
Point being, orienting oneself is not just a linear historical exercise (what’s behind us and what’s up ahead?). Rather, it’s a networking function of the highest order. “Shallow thinking,” as some might diagnose, isn’t necessarily the great bane of the upcoming generation. You can’t disaggregate complexity until you can aggregate enough touch points to achieve sufficient situational awareness.
When everything connects to everything else (one definition of globalization), the ability to process information laterally becomes increasingly valuable. Indeed, Wikistrat’s raison d’etre is to develop that magnificent skill-set in the next generation of grand strategists.
American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades. [italics mine]
This is described officially as a "strategic partnership," but nobody in their right mind would describe it as such. It's a dependency - pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we'll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we've set about to create is still described as "fragile" - meaning it collapses and disappears the minute we pull out.
As the Pentagon's "efficiencies review" unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired - namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark Thompson favorite from his Swampland days) is finally going to come to pass - according to my sources in the Building.
The Western press is rife with stories about China's growing conservatism, reflected by an ongoing crackdown on free speech by Chinese authorities as well as a Maoist revival in the interior provinces. In our alarm, we imagine the worst of all possible outcomes: an all-powerful Chinese economy lorded over by a political system that somehow reverts to its communist-era politics of open antagonism with the West. While there are powerful structural dynamics that work against this combination, we should nonetheless not fear it. To the extent that China's economic trajectory is threatening to stall out, as it inevitably must at some point, the instinctive retreat of its political system into "redness" has little to do with the outside world. Rather it reflects the yawning chasm between a party of privileged "princelings" and the increasingly stressed-out masses.
NYT story describing how Obama administration is funding all sorts of shadow networks to thwart government censorship overseas. I think this is fine. [Blank] 'em if they can't take the Web - a Defense Department creation, BTW.
In the last 7 days we've had 44,097 actions within the wiki with new information being added at an average rate of once every 10 minutes.
The Week 1 Challenge
Competitors, organized into 38 teams by school or institution, have been assigned either one of 13 possible actors. They were tasked with writing position papers on the following five issues:
Global Energy Security;
Global Economic “Rebalancing” Process;
Salafi Jihadist Terrorism;
"Chimerica" - China-US Relationship; and
Southwest Asia Nuclear Proliferation.
The standard of work has been outstanding and Dr. Barnett and the judging panel are hard at work preparing feedback and scores. We'll announce some of those next time.
Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 12:08PM 
Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world's "insatiable appetite" for drones will be exploited by other nations' military-industrial complexes . . . 
