The limits of the "disconnection vision" with Chavez

ARTICLE: “Seeking United Latin America, Venezuela’s Chavez Is a Divider: Some Neighbors Resent His Style as Meddlesome,” by Juan Forero, New York Times, 20 May 2006, p. A1.

Great story on how Chavez’s antics are working largely in the Gapish Andean but not finding good purchase among the emerging New Core players in the southern cone.

Chavez’s offer is one of continental disconnectedness: South American countries should come together to disconnect from the imperial United States. “You either have one or the other. Either we’re a united community or we’re not.” So either join up to Chavez’s tired sort of oil-fueled socialist welfare or submit to the devils of free trade to the north.

Chavez is just shrill enough on this point to even piss off the Andean Community of Nations, because Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are seeking a free trade accord with the U.S. No, he insists they follow the shining example of Cuba or the resurrected Daniel Ortega (another brilliant economic track record in Nicaragua).

Take away Chavez’s oil money and he has nothing to show for his reign. His is a classic patronage model, and we’re already seeing the limits of his appeal in the region.

North Korea given a pass for rest of this administration

ARTICLE: “U.S. Said To Weigh A New Approach On North Korea: Bush Approval Expected; Plan for Discussing Formal Peace Treaty as Nuclear Talks Continue,” by David E. Sanger, New York Times, 18 May 2006, p. A1.

This policy change is being touted as an innovative new step from the Rice crowd at State, but to me, it comes off as a strange reward for Kim and North Korea, especially given our stance with Iran, which frankly has offered to help us out on the equivalent of a peace treaty in Iraq.

But admin officials say they push this peace treaty approach so as not to give Iran the wrong signals--i.e., that North Korea is getting away with it. How offering a peace treaty that effectively signals that we won’t seek regime change in Pyongyang should act to dissuade Iran, which desperately seeks such an assurance through acquisition of the bomb, is beyond me. Doesn’t it say the exact opposite? Get the bomb and we’ll promise not to invade?

This new approach does not say, “give up the bomb and THEN we’ll give you the peace treaty.” Instead, it proposes two tracks of negotiation. Why that is such a mental breakthrough on totalitarian North Korea while being impossible to consider with authoritarian (and tired, at that) Iran is really weird.

It’s hard to see how Kim will give up the bomb for the treaty when it’s clear we’re offering the treaty because he has the bomb.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but to me, this is a bad sign of how little Rice’s State Department will take advantage of the freedom of action provided by a Bush post-presidency already begun.

Abdullah’s sense of urgency

ARTICLE: “Drip, drip, dripping: Life in Saudi Arabia may look the same as it always was, but it’s not,” The Economist, 6 May 2006, p. 48.

WIRE REPORT: “Saudi king calls for halt to women’s photos,” by Paul Leavitt, USA Today, 17 May 2006, p. 4A.

Great story from Economist on the below-the-surface changes being brought about by new King Abdullah (brother to previous king who ruled from his coma bed for years, so go figure--it was a time of non-action!).

The story starts with a vignette from a supermarket that is exactly like any other in the West/Core, except for one aisle full of DVDs, CDs and cassettes that features a barrier complete with bearded guard, the sign reading, “Dear customer, females are not allowed to enter this area.”

Think all this hubbub about globalization isn’t really all about sex and gender, in the end? (I was just going to write “about sex” but then felt I needed to add “gender” to avoid the double entendre, not that it wouldn’t apply--or that there’s anything wrong with that!).

So if that’s the lead image, what has changed?

First, Abdullah’s on the record for saying, “We cannot stand still while the world around us changes.” So clearly no call for enduring and endemic disconnectedness.

Second, Abdullah’s made some good moves: releasing this or that dissident and promising a pathway--albeit generational, meaning he won’t be around to see it or suffer it--toward constitutional monarchy, and including some women in his official delegation on a recent Asian trip.

Still, the man moves slowly and carefully. It’s good to be the king, but that only goes so far in Saudi Arabia, where staunch conservatives rule across the dial.

And yet, “conservatives also feel themselves to be under pressure.” And why not? Only the most self-deluded think that time or the forces of globalization are on the side of the social conservatives. Sure, their growing resistance signals to some that globalization fractures more than integrates, but ask yourself, doesn’t all that friction signal a philosophy under assault? Globalization mobilizes these responses, but it simultaneously assaults them from every angle--through connectivity. For once connected, the average person no longer needs the authoritative intermediary to tell them what’s right and wrong. It’s a social reformation of the most destabilizing form--rapid liberalization from the bottom up.

And yes, America is identified with all of it, because we epitomize it, because we’ve pioneered it, and because we just plain love it so--and make no effort to hide it.

So here’s the description from the Saudi front lines:

From the airwaves to the internet to fiction-writing, to public places such as markets and restaurants, ordinary Saudis are pushing the bounds of what is permissible. Female presenters, once rare, are now ubiquitous, on Saudi television. The cover-all abaya that women must wear in public, once strictly black and baggy, is increasingly shapely, and often sports brightly coloured sleeves.

Advertisers no longer fear to picture the human form, though in a gesture to religious scruples, the faces smiling out of billboards are still deliberately blurred, or partially obscured by sunglasses.

I know, it sounds awfully creepy by comparison. But remember that serious social change often starts with really small, symbolic things.

The best signs have to do with education, where some serious revamping in the direction of Western-style education is being pushed--from above.

But as with all such things: expect two steps forward and then--at least--one step back. So Abdullah will push and retreat, push and retreat, and this will be the best we can hope for, given the steep trajectory of the needed change. Like climbing a mountain, the more vertical you go, the slower you go.

The Gap is more than attractive enough for Wall Street--thanks to demographics on both ends

ARTICLE: “The Fever for Exotic Stocks: Unfazed by Risk, Investors Pour Money Into Faraway Markets,” by Landon Thomas, Jr., New York Times, 18 May 2006, p. C1.

This story starts with some hedge fund trying to convince an investor that Zambian T bills are the next great thing. If that doesn’t say bubble, few things do.

And yet, in many ways, as the article points out, this zeal for higher returns leading funds to wade deeper inside the Gap is a reflection of the fact that the New Core pillars (the so-called BRIC of Brazil, Russia, India and China) have all sort of tapped out for a while as markets that will provide the sort of high-scale yields these funds live for. So when the benchmarks seemed exhausted, investing funds turn to more exotic emerging markets, giving us a brief glimpse of how willing all that aging Old Core money will eventually find its way into the Gap.

I got this question at a recent talk I gave in DC: “Why do you think all us aging Boomers will be willing to invest in these more dangerous Gap countries, especially postconflict or postdisaster?”

My reply was basically that greed would drive the process: Boomers won’t be interested in accepting lower standards of living in retirement, so they will--in aggregate--be willing to accept high levels of risk far later in their investing careers. Plus, as I and others have noted, the New Core pillars are hardly the inexhaustible pool of cheap labor, so once their labor rates rise, the most risk-accepting money will move on, eventually reaching the deep Gap en masse.

So is the world going to hell in a handbasket, with terrorists ruling all? If so, then why is the government bond interest rate spread between Old Core pillars and New Core and Seam States like Turkey and Pakistan smaller than it’s ever been?

As one expert analyst, Marc Faber notes, “For the first time in modern history, poor countries are financing the rich. I would not rule out one day that Brazil will have a better credit rating than the U.S.”

What America can do in the meantime is work with other Core powers to deal with the worst security situations there, connecting up these economies whenever and wherever possible to the larger global commercial nets that will act as the conduits for these investment flows. In short, the U.S. military is increasingly in the business of enabling globalization’s advance. That is, pure and simple, the military-market nexus.

So yeah, call it cowboys and Indians if you want, but remember that the spread of networks favors our side over the long run. Was that way in the Wild West way back when, and ultimately it will be that way throughout the Gap.

And it’ll be driven by our greed, not charity. And that greed will be a function of demographics: our old money chasing young labor.

A head trip back in time

DATELINE: Riley Children’s Hospital, Indy, 24 May 2006

Hanging with daughter Em while she goes through annual diagnostics and check-up with pediatric oncology dept. It’s our annual summer ritual that reminds us of that fateful hot July morning (3 July 1994) when I felt a lump on her abdomen while changing a diaper (I saw something move under her skin as she arched her back). It’s a weird sort of backward temporal connectivity, this annual pilgrimage, which we first made at Georgetown’s Lombardi Clinic, then Hasbro Children’s in Providence for seven years, and now our first year at Riley.

Riley, so far, has impressed me much. We went through some diagnostic drills with Kevin, my eldest son, whose surgery next month will see me spending a week here, so today’s visit is sort of a prelude. Like our prelim visit with Kevin, it’s an assuring experience. I have never seen a facility that’s more efficient and--on that basis--pretty kind to the patient and family.

For example, Riley today not only gets us in to see the peds onc doc, but packs in the pulmonary function test and EKG/echo all in the same 2-3 hour block. Frankly, that was always a series of trips in VA and RI, totalling about 10 hours of effort. With travel, this whole deal will wrap up in less than five.

Em is now a 12-year cancer survivor, which is a strange claim for someone only 14, but there it is. If things go according to plan (and Mark Warren and I do plan), then we’ll shoot to generate a “vol III” next year to round off the presumed PNM trilogy (either with Putnam or others who’ve expressed interest), and then we’d tackle the 200k manuscript (already edited down from about 500k) still tentatively titled “The Emily Updates” (referencing the fact that it sprang from a series of long weekly emails I sent to a list of about 250 people back in 1995-96. The updates kept family and friends in the loop on the final twelve months of her chemo regime, plus provided a reconstruction of the diagnosis and first six months of therapy.

The goal of that original writing was to provide Em with a diary of that experience, something we figured she’d want and something Vonne and I assumed would be hard knowledge to keep (not just the facts, but the knowledge) because--of course--it’s human nature to try and block it all out over time (who wants to remember nightmares?).

What it becomes with Mark’s help is yet unclear. So far he’s only said that we’d have to find a way to capture Vonne’s voice in the text, because Mark, upon reading the manuscript, quickly came to the conclusion that it was a highly self-censored affair--in effect, a brave and polite front put up by me in full, damn-the-injections-and-full-speed-ahead mode (I was insanely optimistic throughout as a sort of emotional self-defense mechanism, determined as I was to be the father of the single best performance of a Stage-IV/DD-protocol-armf-by-a-child-with-a-favorable-Wilm’s-Tumor-histology known to medical science). How we capture the underlying tension both within the marriage and without (relations with both relatives and friends were put to the test--and don’t even get started on strangers …) is the challenge of completing the manuscript’s implied potential to be about so much more than the story at hand. Because ultimately the crisis dynamic is simply a way to explore marriage, love, parenting, and--most importantly--strategic planning under conditions of great stress, and therein lies the universal story.

Sitting here years later, I am still energized by the tale. It’s just such a huge part of my life--probably the best and worst months I’ve known to date. I would go back there in a heartbeat, but likewise would give just about anything to avoid going through something like that again. The memory, now distant, is mostly about remembering the incredible immediacy, and the sense that every decision cast an enormous shadow over all our lives.

As Mark likes to point out, it’s where my character of the grand strategist really was born. Prior to that I did great work sometimes, and good work nearly all the time, but nothing really visionary because--quite frankly--I had no vision. That capacity had to be drawn out of me. I had to be melted down in the crucible and found not just wanting--but having. That path of discovery just about ruined my personality permanently, came close to killing my marriage, came even closer to wrecking my career, and yet somehow made me the thinker I am today. It was THE System Perturbation for the horizontal scenario that has been my life, marriage, and career since.

So, strangely, enough, as tense as these annual sojourns are (Who in hell wants to discuss “late effects” and “secondary carcinomas”? Especially with a young teenager?), they are a huge touchstone for me personally. Children’s hospitals are like my secular cathedrals. I worship everything they represent in terms of effort, spirit, and function. They form my family’s connection to the past and the crucial link that’s allowed us all to both survive and thrive in the aftermath of that strange adventure--now more than a decade past.

And I say none of this with self-assurance. I know for a fact that my life would have been very different if Emily had perished from her advanced metastasized cancer. I know full well what the gift is, and that brush with a child’s death (not ours, thankfully, but so many around us in that bizarre enclave) informs the way I think, the visions I pursue, and the sense of responsibility I have in my work toward not just my kids but anybody’s (because they’re all somebody’s kids).

Actually, the experience is much like the inner peace I gain from church, as strange as that sounds, because both on the surface and deep within the two experiences have almost nothing in common--except that sense of vigil which I’ve always loved about religious ceremony (the sense of expectation of the profound).

Then again, who am I kidding? That sort of hazy, gauzy look back is so indicative of why I had to write the updates in the first place. In reality, the entire experience was incredibly trying from start to finish. Hell, I had migraines sometimes 4 times a week! And there’s nothing quite like extended stays in children’s hospitals that make you feel like your permanent zip code is located in Loser Village. The burn-out look in the eyes marks those lives “lived in quiet desperation.” Why quiet? No one wants to hear about your f--ked up kid, trust me. People can’t stand hearing about illness in general (who can blame them?), but kids fall at the bottom on that not-to-hear list.

Amazing how you blot that out and recast all the unpleasantness as ennobling and triumphant. Makes me realize why Mel Gibson wanted to make that movie the way he did. Reality sucks, memories (assuming survival) are so much better.

Anyway. It’s enough now just to brush by other anguished parents putting in their own time. That’s all the refresher course I care to take, knowing that eventually, we all come back to these places--with parents, with siblings, with spouses, with kids.

Which reminds me: after this conference I need to fill out our annual report to the Wilms’ Tumor Study Group--our analytic connection to those that follow and a small repayment to those who made the effort all those years before we showed up.

Across this pokey day of sitting in lobby chairs of various sorts (I fly to DC tonight to spend some time with CIA mid-level types and a conference of defense sector CEOs tomorrow), I catch up on old stories I’ve been carrying with me since the last trip (ah, but the garage is finally organized and shop vac’d!). Yes, they are WSJ heavy, and I aim to correct that soon enough, as I’ll explore having other major pubs sent directly to the new house (something I’ve avoided doing so long as we were imprisoned in the apartment).

Still, if you only have one pub to live on in your forties, the WSJ is hard to beat.

AIDS and the New Core

A reader sent in the link to Nicholas Ederstadt's The Future of AIDS. Tom's comment:

Eberstadt is the alpha dog of demographers, the Daniel Yergin equivalent. This was a huge report when it came out, much like the one my old bud Dave Gordon (then Nat Intell Officer for Econ and Globalization, now Vice Chairman) of the Nat Intell Council produced in roughly the same time frame. This is why I ended the three country entries (Russia, India, China) in the original Esquire PNM article with the sentence, "And then there's AIDS" (mimicking the old sitcom tag, "And then there's Maude," truth be told).

Worth revisiting this piece (the NIC piece too, also online). The Old Core has rendered AIDS almost a chronic disease, but it remains a plague in the less resilient Gap and potentially an economic showstopper in the New Core.

As I argue consistently, the New Core sets the new rules primarily because: a) their rising trajectory gives them the most play to try new things and b) they face some amazing challenges (like pollution, disease/healthcare, etc) that they either surmount or they simply can't move ahead. So lacking for motivation and a sense of urgency--they are not. Question is, What new rules do they establish? We've seen Brazil do some interesting things in pushing for generics and patent relief (India too), so this evolution bears close watching. The 3-Sigma solutions they develop will tell us much as to how the world will ultimately handle AIDS in the Gap.

Chuck Logan apparently watches C-SPAN

Got a copy of Homefront from my Mom for my upcoming birthday, and quickly scanned through the last hundred pages or so, missing the entry that involves me. So I next started from the beginning, sort of scanning/reading.

It's a good book, which uses the global war on terrorism as sort of a big, distant backdrop. The characters, Broker and Nina, have a past--as they say. As the cover description says, no one in their small MN town knows about how, months earlier, they played crucial roles iin averting an act of terrorism--or how it changed them.

The dynamic of the book is that current events in this small town "set off an avalanche," and it all starts with a grade-school bully.

In form, it is reminsicent of a really great David Cronenberg movie, "A History of Violence."

The writing seems very sharp, especially if you like dialogue.

Anyway, I'm working through the first hundred pages, and see references to TV personalities and a brief discourse on the differences between various news networks and . . . C-SPAN. Hmm. I see that and I'm sort of believing this is a book where I might be mentioned.

Then into the second hundred pages, and there's a reference to how Nina has mastered getting inside her enemy's OODA loop, with a quick mention of Boyd.

Then I got nervous. Davison said the reference to me was on the same page as the Boyd mention. I mean, how many Boyd OODA references would a thriller have?

So I keep scanning/reading, and finally find it on page 245:

Broker studied Griffen's face as he said that, always the lilt of the road not taken in his voice. "It's all changed, Griffin; you wouldn't recognize special ops anymore. The people are different, the gear, the thinking. Hell, they even have a different map of the world."

"Yeah," Griffen said wistfully, slouching back, drawing his neck into his shoulders as a gust of cool breeze blew over them. "I saw that snappy consultant guy, Barnett, give his briefing on C-SPAN. There's the globally connected core. In the middle you got Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, all the ragheads in the nonintegrated gap."

"Face it, man. We're dinosaurs," Broker said.

The second OODA reference is on the bottom of the page, referring to Nina's as an MP in Bosnia and later training with Delta.

Logan's book has a number of such grounding, near-pop culture references, and it was kinda cool to see the Core-Gap thing used in that manner, signalling that it's really embedded in the minds of a significant number of people that he felt confident enough to use it in a book with minimal explanation. If you're in the vision business, you have to like that.

Spent the last couple of fog-filled days making lotsa calls and emails (the usual), working some stuff for Oak Ridge National Lab (the delayed seminar with scientists on Development-in-a-Box), and catching up on my paperwork.

On the house front: basketball hoop is up. It's a huge one, like everybody's else's in Indiana, nice enough to sit in a high school gym. Got the garage totally ship-shape, and tested the emergency generator. Now down to just my office and the larger yard. Tire mulch goes around playset today, along with trimming hedge. Once grass seeded, flag pole goes up and we're pretty much done. Feeling very nice to be settling in so.

The Sunday column on the Bush "post-presidency"

I am reticent to write those kinds of articles because: 1) it can come off as piling on right now with Bush; and 2) whenever you offer some criticism you usually get feedback that says--in effect--"You didn't go far enough!"

The latter was definitely true with this one, and that tells me a lot about the depth of dislike for Bush right now (thus solidifying the column's point all the more). I didn't get any GOP emails saying, "How dare you?!" Instead I got plenty of Left, Center and even Right feedback that castigated me primarily over one line (That Bush goes down as a "great one-term president" who unfortunately won a second term). The tone of each email was startingly the same: "How dare you even consider Bush to be successful in his first term!"

Seriously, I remain stunned at how Bush has managed to alienate so many and energize the opposing base to a degree even beyond the profound Clinton hatred by the Right that I saw in the 1990s. He has simply surpassed Clinton and is legitimately described, as I did in the column, as approaching Nixonian "heights" (or perhaps "depths" is the better phrase).

One is tempted to say that '06 and '08 are the Democrats' to lose, but given past results, that ain't saying much.

Feeling almost human today with 24 hours of antibiotics in me. But glad I didn't do the planned four small jet flights today. Fear my ear drums wouldn't have survived, and they already bear the scar tissue of too many surgical repairs.

The dangers of the blogosphere dialogue

I like blogging. It's an online diary of your thinking that you share with others. That's an old-fashioned definition nowadays, because blogging has gotten so professional and so competitive--as in, "I can't just be different to be good, you have to be wrong for me to be right."

I understand the desire to be competitive. Few of us are ever have the chance to do more formal pubs, like article and books, because the competiton there gets even harder and for most of us, entry into those venues constitutes years of career effort.

So the blogosphere is a short cut. You don't have to play baseball for years on end to make it to the major league game: you just scream loud enough from the stands and pretend it's all the same.

Now, that's a cruel comparison, but it speaks to the point of investment. I've spent a life investing in my vision, so naturally I defend it. The blogosphere demands you defend against all comers, no matter the credentials. Whoever gets the pack moving that minute is the top dog, which is both good and bad. It's good in that ideas alone can drive the process and it's bad in that it encourages a mob mentality.

The mob mentality is accentuated by the web's incredible speed and sense of impatience. Everyone wants everything decided so fast. Long-term discussion in the blogosphere extends typically hours or days, and some of that speed is good, reflecting the democracy of the debate, but a lot of it is just plain bad--the instinctive rush to judgment.

Imagine Eisenhower trying to run Normady in the age of the Internet. Imagine how hard it would be to execute the grand strategy of that X-year war versus the reality of being a John Abizaid or a Pete Schoomaker trying to execute an X-decade Long War. These guys have to take the long view, not jump through their assholes over every data point.

But that is just what the blogosphere is best at: jumping through its collective asshole over every data point--the second it appears ("Did you just see that...!").

At its worst, the blogosphere is just a huge, asynchronous game of "telephone" where the message gets more confused the longer it's passed around.

I find that the vast majority of the debate of my ideas in the blogosphere is conducted by people who've never seen my brief or read my books, and yet, if I eschew any efforts in their direction I'm considered to be running away from the fight.

Then you have to deal with the people who have read or seen your more formal stuff (you know, the stuff you actually spent a lot of time putting together vice the quick stuff you post on the web), and most of the time, they want to reduce your thinking down to something they can shoot down in a post. My favorite current example is to interpret everything I say through Iraq and Iraq alone. You know, I didn't write "War and Iraq in the 21st Century," but rather "War and Peace." Iraq is definitely an example of war, but just one of the past few years and war itself is but a very small subset (and increasingly smaller subset in general) of peace, which is more widespread now around the planet that at any point in human history. So yeah, doing Iraq badly shows how connectivity can be badly achieved, but that example hardly invalidates all the New Core powers emerging positively through such connectivity, which, when done well, is naturally about 95% private-sector driven and only about 5% public-sector.

Did I write all of that sort of bigger-than-just-war stuff in my books? Yes. Is that stuff explored in most of this critical posts? Absolutely not. Instead, everything is reduced to Iraq just like containment was reduced to Vietnam. But guess what? Containment was right and it was originally envisioned as being overwhelmingly economic (which it ended up being), so saying Kennan got it wrong in Vietnam simply misses the point that grand stratgegy isn't about getting every damn step right, but keeping your steps and your momentum all moving in roughly the right direction over the long haul. So yes, we push connectivity as a rule, and no, it will not work wonders by itself in all things. But that's true about most things we follow as a general rule in our lives.

But I understand that the blogosphere, despite its pretensions, is by and large uninterested in that sort of dialogue. It's all about hits--despite the claim of "alternative media," the dynamics are pretty much the same as the standard venues. Fine and dandy. It's a free world and all. And you're certainly free yourself to engage them on these direct points. It's just that I find that when I do, the subject gets farther and farther away from useful conversation the longer I pursue it. Pretty soon, I'm reading comments and cross-posts that are so off from the original concept that I wonder what the hell I'm doing engaging in this destructive conversation with strangers (most of whom won't use their real names and I ask you, Would you accept that from someone you engaged in conversation over beers at a party?).

And frankly, that's how I look at the blogosphere, which--again--is probably old-fashioned and not respective enough of its growing heft. To me, it's just a big party with lotsa conversations about three beers in. Fun as hell. Often very profound. But the vast majority of it leaves your brain by the next morning.

I will confess: I didn't like high school. I thought it was all really artificial and fake and queer as the day was long. It was this warped universe of unreality, where "So-and-so said you're a real two-face" is the sort of social dynamic that ruled your day.

The blogosphere is frighteningly like high school: some cool people who are always nice to you, a few that seem strangely intent on persecuting you, and an undifferentiated mass that seems to move from fight to fight (always so happy to chant, "fight! fight! fight!).

I wish I took it all more seriously, but I can't. I have loads of opportunity in my various day jobs to have seriously deep and exploratory conversations and interaction with a host of dedicated practitioners in my chosen field. I find those interactions eminently satifisfying and validating. Not in any "I'm always right" sense, because I'm not, but rather in a sort of "you're onto something and I want to help" sense.

Yes, there is some of that in the blogosphere, and I benefit from it more than most in the efforts of people like Mark Safranski and Dan Abbott. But Dan's a good point to explore, because I found my dynamic with him to be very familiar, meaning one I've participated in from both sides countless times in my career, and a description would be instructive I think.

Here's the generic description: One guy wants to engage another guy he looks up to. To get his attention, he makes a startling, cheeky criticism. They go back and forth, and it gets testy. Then the "elder" guy says something nice about the "younger" guy and the younger guy is thrilled. The ice is broken, and then the conversation really begins.

Ask yourself, how many times you've been through this dynamic with people, both where you're the younger or you're the older. You make a small connection, and all of a sudden the walls come down. The younger person feels acceptance, the older person feels less threatened, and dialogue takes off.

That is essentially what happened with Dan and me, but frankly, that's also what's happened with me and a host of "elders," to include people like Tom Friedman, whom obviously I admire and model myself after and at whom I've occasionally take inappropriate pot shots (like my review of "World is Flat") because--damn it!--I'd like him to notice me and take me more seriously. Well, Friedman sent me a couple of emails a while back, breaking the ice, and I naturally settled down. Yes, there was a Sally Field-like moment there for a minute, but that passed too.

Same thing happened with me and Dan. It's just human nature.

My point is this: that essential transaction is hard to do in the asynchronous, one-upmanship world of the blogosphere, where the faceless crowd is constantly egging you on with "fight! fight! fight!"

And that's why I regulary declare myself off the "bottle" of such web confrontations: they just seem so pointlesss and counterproductive, producing more light than heat.

But you keep getting these emails from the well-intentioned: "So-and-So just slammed you and I was wondering if you were going to slam him back!"

See what I mean? You're right back in high school and some kid just ran the length of the hall to tell you that So-and-So just called you a pussy and this guy wants to know what you're going to do about it.

The reality is, and I find this again and again because--you know what? I often appear on panels with people over time--is that once you actually meet the person and you get a chance to talk about something other than the 'debate," you invariably like them a lot, quickly discover you both believe in many of the same things, and that your differences are tiny. I have found this true in my life so many times I take it as axiomatic nowadays. Best example: Andrew Krepenevich. For years I was told by others how much he disliked my work and then we finally met and he said otherwise. I was thrilled because I looked up to him over the years, and in our subsequent interactions, I quickly realized how much we have in common in our thinking. Inconceviable to some, pretty standard to me.

Sure, occasionally there's the person you just can't stand, but frankly, that's pretty rare.

Again, my point is this: the blogosphere tends to accentuate the silliest forms of debate and engagement while denying you the ice-breakers, which always come--absent F2F--via emails, not posts or comments or third-party emails.

So all I'm saying is--relax on me and this current back and forth with Robb. I like John's stuff a lot. I like arguing with him through the blogosphere. I don't feel threatened by any of it, otherwise I wouldn't have a blog. To me, it's always three-beers in and everyone is smiling, despite the jabs (and yeah, that's fun shit when kept in context). I'm sure I'd like John a lot if I had the chance to meet him, and I'm sure I will someday soon and find that to be the case.

And I'm sure that all the angst caused in this recent exchange can easily be erased by a smile from one of my kids--or completely driven through the roof by the cat peeing on a bed.

As a personal side note: I finally had my double-wide sinus/ear infection diagnosed today. I find that whenever I get myself into some issue with somebody on the web, I'm typically sick or heading that way. Then I get a little antibiotics, wonder what the fuss was about, and move on.

I say (speaking as a former cornerback), it's good to have a short memory.

Unpacking the connectivity straw man (II)

Here is the most absurd reductionism: "If we fail in Iraq, then that proves disconnectedness is not the problem, and that all attempts to cure that through connecting failed or rogue regimes will trigger greater threat."

That's like saying, if this course of chemo doesn't work, the cancer isn't real.

I have a diagnosis and a prescribed cure. The latter has yet to be adequately explored, but that failure to date doesn't negate the diagnosis. It just means the research continues.

The difference between my vision and Robb's is that I can live with both failure and success. Robb needs bad things to happen, or he has neither diagnosis nor cure.

I could have structured my vision so. I just eschew that angle as inevitable fear mongering. Plus, I chose not to spend my life hoping that bad things will happen. Just not my chosen shtick.

That's not to unduly criticize Robb (I don't remember making any "John is ..." statements, which is what constitutes ad hominen). He's has a lot of good thinking, and being in the business I'm in, I'll never argue against exploring the dark side. I just argue for realizing that's exactly what you're doing when you're doing it. You are not exploring the totality of things. You are not seeing both yin and yang. And the danger comes when people start interpreting your work as comprehensive when it is not. That's basically my problem with Robert Kaplan and (sometimes) Ralph Peters: great stuff, but too often lacking context. If you're going to spot a weakness, you have to be able to spot the corresponding strength. The duality is always there.

I came to this conclusion early in my career and it was vastly re-enforced with Y2K: you can't strategize futures where you put all your marbles is having only bad things happen. If you catch yourself secretly delighted whenever there's something bad happening, you're not seeing the whole picture, and you're contaminating your vision. You have to have enough scope so that both good and bad can be taken with equanimity. Inevitabily, that means coming up with a long-term vision of sustained improvement on today's reality, because that's the history of mankind. If your vision is about how the world is "entering the new phase" of this or that disastrous reality, then you're basically short-terming the future, like some gold-hawker on cable TV. Deep down, those people know they're always wrong, but they spend a lot of time working to convince themselves and you that they're not.

To me, that's living on the churn. Fine for making money, just like on Wall Street. And if that's all I wanted to do, I'd make shitloads without really trying.

But I like really trying. I like trying as hard as possible for the best possible outcomes. When things go well, I'm happy as hell. And when go bad, I'm more determined than ever to find the way ahead. I find this mindset goes well with the vast majority of the military--saving the intell types. Not surprisingly, the darkest visions of the future typically arise fromt that community. Why? There again, they are tasked only to look at the downside. Do that enough, and you become intellectually stunted by that pursuit, like the diagnostician who only sees autistic kids so she sees autism everywhere she looks (just went through that one with Vonne Mei).

Grand strategy is for general practitioners--by design.

By all means, enjoy the dark side philosophers. I do myself. I just always try to remember their limitations, and to put their criticisms of my vision into some larger context.

Iraq proves a lot of things: that pretend states, once tapped, tend to fall into their constituent parts; and that some of those parts will do better than others (Kurds versus Sunnis, for example). It also proves that states cannot be created out of thin air, as some believe, but that they need to be grown. Growing states almost solely out of fear (security) is awfully hard, and typically pretty ugly. When states grow successfully, it's almost always overwhelming a private-sector driven economic function, as in, the more transactions, the more we need a good government/state to regulate them to the benefit of all. Frankly, that's how America grew up, despite our myths.

Iraq has not been allowed to develop any sort of economic critical mass. There is just too much bad blood to be explored by too many of the population, plus there are outsiders more than happy to push that agenda--for now. If we fail enough and the enemy succeeds enough, you can have yourself a nice little Lebanon that drags on for decades. But even Lebanon came back, now didn't it? And the way it came back was driven by positive connectivity with the outside world.

To say Iraq proves anything beyond Iraq is to miss a huge historical example staring us in the face: Dayton ten years later. Where are the huge losses there? Where is the out-of-control destructiveness of increased connectivity?

Was it perfect? No. But ten years later, how we handled the Balkans looks awfully good in comparison to the failures of this administration to effectively socialize not just the threat of Iraq but its ultimate solution set.

And all that proves is that Bush is better at dividing than uniting--plain and simple.

I say, run with that judgment all you want (I did in my last column), but don't pretend it speaks volumes to the future.

ZenPundit the diplomat

Mark Safranski writes on the debate between Tom and John Robb. He calls his post The Barnett and Robb Show, but the analysis is more sober than that tongue-in-cheek title suggests. At any rate, if you're been following the debate, you should check out Mark's post.

Tom.com!

Finally, as I finish my search for references to the Washington Observer's Chinese interview with Tom, we come to the so-happily-appropriate: Tom.com! Man, if only we'd gotten that URL! ;-)

Tom.com is a little... sexier than the other sites I've been searching in this series. I don't know why.

But here, finally, my search is rewarded. I don't find a link to the Chinese interview, but I do find a page that quotes Tom from back in 2004 [VERY ROUGH translation courtesy of Google].

Chinese weblogs

In searching for an English site for news.net.cn, looking for references to the Washington Observer's Chinese interview with Tom, I found http://gyedu.news.net.cn/, which looks to be the same as http://myblog.com.cn.

I also found, interestingly, but somewhat unrelatedly, that these posts are picked up on Rebecca Mackinnon's NewsILike page. And, to bring this query full-circle, Rebecca reports most often on freedom of speech in China.

Tom's KnoxNews column today

Post-presidency for Bush already here

The Bush post-presidency began earlier than any other leader since Richard Nixon, whose second term was curtailed by impeachment hearings.

No, George Bush won't be leaving office early, and he won't even be subjected to the same political humiliations as Bill Clinton on his way out.



But make no mistake, Bush's lame-duck period has arrived with a vengeance - at least internationally. [keep reading]

Unpacking the connectivity straw man

It's been a while, so worth doing.

And yes, Robb's recent weird take on the subject prompts me to do so, and for that I am grateful, because his thinking--both good and weak--often pushes mine (as I hope I return the favor on days both good and bad).

First off, think in terms of both degree and kind when considering differences in connectivity.

Degree can be expressed in both sheer volume and sequencing/maturity. In general, states with very high levels of connectivity are those with the highest rates of regulation, social welfare, and governments with great reach but limited power (invoking Fukuyama). They also feature strong rule sets as a rule, meaning lotsa transparency and trust.

This is why the most globalized states are those that are the most developed and typically advanced democracies. These mature, well-connected states simply don't go to war with one another, but they do, under the right conditions, come together to enforce collective rules against bad actors because they see the collective good in such actions. They also tend to be incredibly resilient to all forms of disruptive threats, because all that connectivity tends to trigger lotsa horizontal structures (pol, security, econ, social).

Likewise, as a rule, states with low levels of connectivity tend to feature the opposite of all those characteristics.

When expressed as a global geographic reality that recognizes critical mass (neighborhoods good and bad), there you basically have my argument for Core and Gap.

When a disconnected state purposefully ramps up its connectivity under conditions of state control, the destabilizing elements of such increased connectivity can be somewhat controlled, although never totally erased. You cannot expose previously closed societies to outside elements and not trigger a reaction. That's simply human nature. So as I said in BFA, any rapid uptick in connectivity naturally engenders a counter-reaction, typically expressed as nationalism, usually strongest among the youngest. With time, it moderates. But if done too much too fast, the result can be something on the order of the Iranian Revolution. So speed is everything (The Train's Engine Can Travel No Faster Than Its Caboose), especially WRT reasonable expectations on pluralism, meaning, as I often state, you've got to be realistic about how most states will end up seeking to manage a steep trajectory of growing connectivity--i.e., single-party states tend to be the norm.

Is it better to pursue such a path as a democracy? Sure, assuming you're not deluded by election-driven polities that cleverly mask their genuine single-party statehood (like Japan, South Korea and Mexico did for decades).

Is such masked single-party statehood a bad thing? Well, here we get to the sequencing/maturity argument.

Moving from Gap to Core, as I wrote in BFA, is akin to moving from youth (infantilized socities suffering too little government and thus chaotic, lawless existences or similarly immature societies suffering the oppposite, or authoritarianism) to young adulthood (New Core-ish in uneven development of the rule sets associated with the highest levels of connectivity) to mature adulthood (serious market states with mature democracies). When a mature state has a plus-up in connectivity (i.e., lotsa immigration) or suffers some negative feedback from it or disruption (like 9/11), the chances for organized violence are low (then again, it's good if such harmed states can come together in the aftermath of such shocks to improve their systemic responses in terms of new rules established or responsible parties targeted for justice). These states simply possess the necessary resilience across the board to handle such challenges. So here Kant is exactly right.

Immature states facing a similar challenge are far more likely to succumb to such organized (or disorganized) violence. History says Kant is right there too.

But it's the transitioning states that naturally face the most challenges because they face more rapid and more comprehensive change. In that flux, they face the greatest dangers of heightened violence/instability. It's like they're going through the puberty of connectivity: they feel so much more than they can understand or manage. This is why the Old Core's strategy of integrating the New Core is so crucial--as in, what England did for us way back when, we need to so for China today.

So Kant is wrong as far as the journey goes (i.e., the tendency for young, fragile democracies to war), thus again my preference for pushing connectivity more economically while being patient on democracy.

So how you connect is virtually as important as that you connect.

Here we get to the issue of kind; obviously, not all connectivity is good.

I have sex with my wife and that's good connectivity. I have sex with your wife and that's bad connectivity. I have lotsa sex with lotsa your wives and that's not just bad, it can be hugely disruptive and deadly.

Now, if you want to be obtuse, here is where you ask, "Well, which is it Barnett? Is sex good or bad?"

Obviously, it depends. Within the right rule set, it creates a lot of resiliency and stability and trust. But when mass rape is employed for purposes of racial strife, then it's amazingly destructive--and that's just patently obvious to any decent human being.

When states/societies are immature--connectivity-wise--any rapid ramping of connectivity is likely to be bad, as in, bad people will take advantage of the weak rule sets to do bad things (just like criminals historically take advantage of emerging technologies until the legal system catches up). So a failed state, for example, tends to feature plenty of bad connectivity--as in crime and terror and smuggling and mafias and the like. You can look at this and say, "This proves connectivity is bad!" Or, you can simply recognize bad connectivity can flourish under bad conditions.

This feels like enough of a rundown. I consider all this stuff self-evident, meaning stuff we all just pick up from life, but then I remember how binary we Americans tend to be, so for too many of us, globalization MUST be a choice between COMPLETE INTEGRATION (and thus "universal peace") or COMPLETE DISINTEGRATION (and thus "perpetual global war"), when of course it's a yin-yang relationship (as globalization spreads, it creates tumult and violence in many traditional socities it seeks to reformat, but if survived/managed well, susequent integration drives potential violence and threats from system-level to state-level and ultimately isolates them but never quite eliminates them at the individual level).

"So which is it Barnett? Is more connectivity good or bad? Is more globalization good or bad?"

Well, it depends on whether you're in the Gap or the Core or trying to rapidly make the journey from the former to the latter.

None of this is rocket science, just common sense--as such, always worth repeating.

Tom around the web this week

+ Chris Dierkes takes many of his cues from Tom and credits him in Dr. Persianlove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb.

+ StrategyUnit quotes Tom on the lame(duck)ness of the Bush Administration.

+ Shawn Beilfuss of Asian Logistics Wrap has another significant post on

The Quest for Resilience.

Searching for connectivity on china.org.cn

As I search for the Washington Observer's Chinese interview with Tom and report what I find, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the headline on all China news sites, the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. I'll link the story from china.org.cn.

I also find it interesting that there's a version of china.org.cn in Esperanto. I wonder what kind of traffic that site gets. Does Esperanto help connect people across languages, as it was hoped?

Access to technology becomes the political issue and globalization imperative of the day--thanks to health threats

ARTICLE: “Ruling on right to medicines gets to the heart of American culture,” by Christopher Bowe, Financial Times, 17 May 2006, p. 4.

ANALYSIS: “Incubating a crisis: why the fight against bird flu could be won--or lost--in Indonesia,” by Andrew Jack, Financial Times, 17 May 2006, p. 11.

Interesting pair of articles. Recent ruling by U.S. appellate court says terminal patients have the right to access unapproved drugs. So the question is raised: if you grant them access to unapproved drugs by claiming constitutional protection, do you likewise grant them access to drugs that they would otherwise not afford?

And once that right gets established, does it go global, driven by the fear of pandemics?

Spying, spying, everywhere

ARTICLE: “China broadens espionage operations,” by John Diamond, USA Today, 18 May 2006, p. 9A.

ARTICLE: C.I.A. Making Rapid Strides for Regrowth,” by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, 17 May 2006, p. A1.

China, we are told, is ramping up its global spying, trying to beg, borrow or just plain steal technology across the planet, but especially from U.S.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ramps up its spy networks globally as well, but we’re mostly obsessed with stopping the spread of dangerous technology.

Too bad we’re also the world’s biggest exporter of arms.

Ah well, full employment for spies everywhere.

Hard and soft-kill options aren’t the big differential on North Korea and Iran

Got a good email from someone arguing that events are making it seem more and more like the hard-kill option is inevitable with Iran and that the soft-kill is looking better on North Korea (China and South Korea slowly infiltrating economically).

Now, while I like the soft/hard distinction generally, relying on that phrasing leads us down a path of thinking that I believe is less productive than remembering this more basic point: the process of integration for Iran still leaves you with an Iran that’s a regional great power with strong interests, probably something short of what we’d recognize as a western democracy, and still very Shiite (meaning there will be mullahs and they will have social influence, just less economic and political pull).

With North Korea, however, the process of integration leave you with no more North Korea.

Now, by definition, the death or absorption of any regime sounds pretty “hard,” does it not? But as I’ve argued all along, I think the buy-out of North Korea and its reunification with the South can and should be effected with little to no serious warfare, meaning the collapse is pressured by ourselves and China, and that if there is a component of “revolution” to it, it’ll look more like the collapses we saw in Eastern Europe than some rerun of Saddam’s fall. In effect, we pull the plug on Kim with the help of the Chinese. We make the offer he can’t refuse, as I said in the magazine piece.

The more the Chinese and South Korea push the slo-mo buy-out of the economy, the closer both come to getting comfortable with the final mile--so to speak. That’s because the perception of unleashed chaos and streaming refugees gets diminished. So yeah, good stuff to the extent that China and South Korea push that process, but in the end, I think Kim will need a hard shove--however achieved. Again, I say that because, in the end, this process ends the entire concept of North Korea.

With Iran, applying kinetic solutions will always be an option, because Ahmadinejad is a serious button-pusher and faced with his own political demise in a future election, he may well try to paint the mullahs into a corner that solidifies his rule through crisis. But even if we go that route, the full hard-kill option of regime change via invasion simply isn’t feasible, so sure, we may lob some, but in the end, the process is going to be one of negotiating the preferred outcome and killing the mullahs’ political and economic grip by tapping the population directly through broadband connectivity, not unlike our underground approach to the Sovs via détente (admittedly a poorly understood process that pales to the “genius” of Star Wars in most western minds--through history written by Russians gets that process quite nicely).

So I guess I’m saying, let’s not get too wrapped up in hard and soft as euphemisms for Iraq II or détente. Life is rarely so neat. Elements of both are likely to occur in both processes, with the key difference being--again--that Iran remains on the far side while North Korea does not.