End the Prohibition Era approach on drugs

I like Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the WSJ, because she is the rare prominent columnist who works the Western Hemisphere with such diligence.  She's also unstinting in a lot of good ways, so when she writes approvingly of a recent blue-ribbon commission (George Shultz, Paul Volcker, Javier Solana, etc) issuing yet another call to end the war on drugs, I listen.

She talks about how John D. Rockefeller came out in 1932 and admitted that the whole conservative experiment had been a complete disaster, largely because it destroyed respect for the law.  Rockefeller had been a huge supporter of Prohibition going in, committing resources.

What have we gotten with the drug war?  Unbelievable incarceration rates, drugs still plentiful and easily accessed by those who want them (according to my HSer and college kid), and the militarization of our relationship with Latin America - opening the door to China.

We simply cannot secure a border when our own money constantly destabilizes it:  we are fighting money with money, burning up resources in the process and punishing our neighbors unduly.

The madness needs to stop.  Decriminalization isn't legalization.  It just means you don't judicialize/criminalize all your tools.

Great piece.

Time's Battleland: "Kissinger on the sad strategic reality of US engagement in Afghanistan"

Henry Kissinger had a sobering op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday that laid out the reality of the US position in Afghanistan.

First, the fundamental conundrum of "nation building" in a fake state:

But nation-building ran up against the irony that the Afghan nation comes into being primarily in opposition to occupying forces. When foreign forces are withdrawn, Afghan politics revert to a contest over territory and population by various essentially tribal groups.

He then goes on to say he supported the surge engineered by President Obama, an effort that had the unfortunate effect of giving lie to the notion that insufficient resources was the primary reason why nation-building has failed. That effort, he states, has "reached its limit."

So the essential question becomes, according to Kissinger, How to create an regional security structure to oversee that "contest" cited above?

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Chart of the Day: South-south trade defines Africa's rise

WSJ story on US companies seeking to "catch up" in Africa.  As the chart indicates, US trade with the region has remained steady in the high teens (percentage), while it's Europe that has lost ground to emerging south-south trade (emerging and developing markets trading with each other).  That share was about one-third at Cold War's end, but now it's up to more than half.

Old Core demand for African commodities has long been an up and down affair (boom and bust according to its business cycle), but with rising New Core economies creating plenty more demand, Africa enters into a supercycle of demand that floods the local economies with money and cheap consumer goods in reply.  In combination, Old and New Core demand create a lift-off moment for the continent, the likes of which it has never seen before.

Many good things will come of this, but so will a host of painful transitions, the trick being that the primary integrating agent right now on the continent is the one country famous for not caring about its local impact whatsoever.  This is touted as a virtue by many (Beijing consensus), but it comes with a price - this indifference.

Time's Battleland: "The future of Fifth Generation Warfare: Follow the food!"

Everybody thinks that the future is going to see fights over energy, when it's far more likely to be primarily over food. Think about it: The 19th century is the century of chemistry and that gets us chemical weapons in World War I. The 20th century is the century of physics and that gets us nuclear weapons in World War II. But the 21st century? That's the century of biology, and that gets us biological weaponry and biological terror. My point: obsessing over nuclear terrorism is steering by our rearview mirror.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Chart of the Day: chocolate consumption (advanced v emerging)

From FT analysis of Kraft buying Cadbury (beating out Hershey) and how controversial that's been in the UK (flagship company and all), but this is no worse that InBev buying Budweiser - heh?

But in both instances, it's the future growth of the Gap countries that drives the purchases (InBev doing well there, Kraft hoping to take advantage of Cadbury's ability to market in India).  So far Kraft doing okay ($29 share price before, $35 since).

The chart on the left explains why:  Core populations can only eat so much more chocolate (few more bodies over time), while Gap and New Core are "discovering" chocolate in a big way (4X the growth because of sheer numbers entering middle-class status).

Same will hold true for food after food and beverage after beverage.

As I've said, it ain't about hearts and minds but bellies and wallets.

WPR's The New Rules: "For U.S., the Long War Shifts Back to the Persian Gulf"

As the United States debates just how much more effort it wants to put into the Afghanistan-Pakistan sinkhole, evidence mounts of the need to pursue a strategic pivot back toward the Middle East, where the Arab Spring is increasingly threatened by a Persian winter of revolutionary discontent. For some time now, Iran has been showing signs of mounting internal divisions between competing hardline factions led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But it has also become more desperate about asserting its alleged leadership of the region's ongoing wave of uprisings, including a far more active sponsorship of al-Qaida's Persian Gulf franchise. All this suggests that, if America is truly serious about continuing the fight against the post-Osama bin Laden al-Qaida, then Washington needs to admit that the center of gravity in that "persistent struggle" has shifted out of northwest Pakistan and into the Persian Gulf.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Kronos report to Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus on Iran-AQ Nexus

Download here.

Made available here as part of tomorrow's WPR column.

Wrapping up the spring speech tour

Gave a speech to a big conference of Navy supply corps reservists, the second such time I've done their huge, every-other-year event (I did one in Baltimore in 07, if I remember correctly).  Big audience of close to one thousand crammed into a wide ballroom.  Three huge screens, though, with great projectors.  Sound was also great (nothing like a great lapel mike to put me at ease).  The speech was broadcast globally throughout the Navy's supply corps community.  

Simplified the brief a bit by making the "map" sequence" less cluttered, and got through the 29 slides in about 65 mins. Answered questions for about 5 mins, and then held court outside for about 30 more, where I met a lot of great people.  It was a very lively audience that got a great performance out of me (the audience gets what it gives, as always). I came off the stage decidedly buzzed, despite the allergies (this place is blooming). Having now spoken in Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, I consider my post-Super Bowl speaking tour complete.

The hidden benefit of reservist conferences:  all have civilian jobs and a surprising number are in all sorts of industries that like to have me in for speeches, so it's a double-win. 

Off now til the fall schedule kicks in - come September, and that's looking good, with big speeches already lined up to a financial group in Chicago, a bankers group in Pensacola, and some big strategy gathering at Disney World (Grand Floridian) in early December.

Big treat on this trip was getting to spend a lot of face time with my long-time manager, Jennifer Posda, who is a close friend of our family.  One intriguing topic was how to exploit the Emily Updates' eBooks to launch an orthogonal speaking career on that subject.  Goal there would be to tap the wide medical market, motivational, etc.  I just know there would be a great brief coming out of the Updates, and it would definitely be the one I'd try in Keynote, since I'd be building from scratch and looking to use a lot of photos, video, etc.  More fun is considering the possibility of getting either my spouse Vonne or daughter Emily involved in certain venues.

But first, of course, we've got to get the eBook series out (4 volumes) and write the from-today's-perspective fifth volume before Em heads back to college.  On that front, the edited four volumes of Emily Updates (each about 50,000 words) now sit with my literary agency, which is using the project to launch a new eBook service within the agency.  First they take the Word docs and create special eBook-friendly PDFs, and then a German company is brought in to crank the eBook versions in the various formats desired by the iBookstore (iPad), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook, I believe).  All in all, the schedule suggest we get out Vol I in Sept or Oct and then release the subsequent volumes in sequence (maybe one a month).  Then we just need to get enough word out to trigger the first speaking engagement, and boom!  The new "brief" will be born.

I can't wait.

Transcript from Morning Edition appearance (1 June 2011)

Originally here.

In full for my records:

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Osama bin Laden's death has put more pressure on the U.S.'s strategic partnership with Pakistan and its ongoing commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Our next guest believes those relationships aren't worth all the effort.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst of Wikistrat, an online community for global strategists. He recently wrote in World Politics Review that the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan - and I'm quoting the article here - encourages enmities far more important than that of al-Qaida and denies us partnerships far more important than that of Pakistan. And he joined us to talk about that.

Good morning.

Mr. THOMAS BARNETT (Wikistrat): Good morning.

MONTAGNE: When you speak about missing out on partnerships, what precise partnerships is the U.S. missing out on there?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, the United States' pursuit of success in Afghanistan has been by my definition amazingly unilateralist. And we really haven't gone the path of encouraging regional neighbors to step in and become the great nation builders in this effort. We want to somehow make Afghanistan work, somehow integrate it with the global economy, while not letting the Iranians in on the process at all, while not letting the Indians in on the process at all, and while really trying to hedge against rising Russian or Chinese influence in the region. And that's just highly unrealistic. In geostrategic terms, it doesn't really get any dumber than that.

MONTAGNE: Well, though, you argue in your writing that Afghanistan's neighbors are highly, as you put it, highly incentivized to see Afghanistan stabilized. But in recent history, to accomplish that stability Afghanistan's neighbors have invaded - in the case of the Soviets - or backed a repressive government -as Pakistan did with the Taliban. I mean, that does not seem a very desirable outcome.

Mr. BARNETT: You have a huge market in India and a huge market in China. They want access northward and westward through Afghanistan to energy sources. Then you have major players on the other side of that equation - Russia, Turkey, Iran, so on, that want access to that major markets. And in the middle you have this dead zone called Afghanistan.

So it's a natural situation for network building. It hasn't been up to now, primarily because it's next door neighbor, Pakistan, using a rather antiquated mode of thinking looks at Afghanistan as its strategic depth in a conventional or even nuclear conflict with India to its south. For Pakistan to consider itself safe, it has to keep Afghanistan basically under its thumb.

And it's odd that America comes in, tries to do nation building, has all these incentivized local players that are interested in coming in and making things happen, and we pick out of that constellation of players the one player that's interested in keeping Afghanistan disconnected from the world, which is Pakistan.

MONTAGNE: China looms large in your thinking here. What does China stand to gain in the region both from Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, China has already made the largest foreign direct investment in Afghanistan's history - about $3 billion to $4 billion it's pursuing in terms of a copper mine there. So if you look at Afghanistan's mineral riches, there's the Chinese motivation to lock in access to resources.

With Pakistan, there's not so much the resource equation but the access to water equation, their logic being if they can make railroads happen down to the Port of Gwadar, which is a small kind of underutilized situation not that far from Karachi, the Chinese will have access to the waterways that connect them to their resources, their energy resources coming increasingly out of the Persian Gulf.

MONTAGNE: Where should, in your opinion, the U.S. focus its attention?

Mr. BARNETT: Well, if you project 10, 15, 20 years into the future and ask where are our resources going to be best employed in the near term to have the maximum impact, I think the argument is the Arab Spring presents more of a strategic opportunity - much more than the resources being employed today and potentially down the road in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which logically falls into the Chinese orbit and is more logically pawned off to the Chinese as a burden that they should naturally assume.

MONTAGNE: Thomas Barnett writes a weekly column for World Politics Review, an online service for foreign policy professionals.

Thanks very much.

Mr. BARNETT: Thank you.

Going to the Red Planet - seriously

Having done a lot of reading recently on the Apollo program, I found this WSJ op-ed to be a seriously plausible description of how we get to Mars:

1) one rocket sends unmanned capsule to Mars orbit with enough fuel for trip home (this is the lunar equivalent of the command module that did not go to the surface);

2) second rocket delivers to Martian surface a payload of chemicals that would use local materials to build up sufficient rocket power strength to ascend off the surface at Mars mission's end;

3) third rocket sends two astronauts to Mars, they land near ascent vehicle, spend 18 (!) months on surface, then ascend up to command module, dock, and fly that home.

Basic point of piece:  enough of the near-Earth stuff!  Let's get NASA back in the business of exploration and let the private sector work the near-space commercial.

Couldn't agree more, and like the logic of the mission plan.

Chart of the Day: why everyone loves shale gas

From FT story.  Simply answer:  because of its weirdly even spread.  Unassociated gas, meaning gas not associated with oil, is the future.  We always just found gas alongside oil and assumed its distro geographically was similar.  It's not.  Unassociated gas is everywhere, and this chart doesn't even include methane hydrates (unassociated gas frozen solid in sea beds).

You may think that gas is only so-so exciting compared to oil, but electricity generation is crucial, and avoiding coal is crucial to reduce pollution/CO2.  You go mostly gas on electricity to crowd out coal, and then go modular nukes to supplement that (especially where infrastructure is "hostile" in its enviro layout:  remoteness is big example), and you use the modulars to make water potable and crack it for hydrogen, and that's how you make transpo happen increasingly (hybrid electricals shifting to hydrogen, with ultralights providing a lot of the energy savings along the way).  

Oil has had its time.  Gas is the next big node going down the hydrocarbon chain.

The big hold-up/uncertainty on gas remains the enviro impact of fracking.  This is why I continue to think that methane hydrates will ultimately be more the answer.  But someone please disabuse me of that assumption.

Audio from Morning Edition appearance (1 June 2011)

From the NPR Morning Edition site:

June 1, 2011

Osama bin Laden's death has put more pressure on the United States' strategic partnership with Pakistan, and its ongoing commitment to the war in Afghanistan. Thomas Barnett, chief analyst of Wikistrat, an online community for global strategists, explains to Renee Montagne why the relationships with Pakistan and Afghanistan aren't worth the effort.

Listen to the almost five-minute segment here.

Time's Battleland: "According to new Pentagon cyber strategy, state-of-war conditions now exist between the US and China"

China has been pre-approved for kinetic war strikes from the United States at any time.  Let me explain how.

First off, what the strategy says (according to the same WSJ front-page article Mark cited yesterday):

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

In other words, if you, Country C, take down or just plain attack what we consider a crucial cyber network, we reserve the right to interpret that as an act of war justifying an immediately "equivalent" kinetic response (along with any cyber response, naturally).  If this new strategy frightens you, then you just might be a rational actor.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.