The correct priority

ARTICLE: "North Korea Helped Syria Build Reactor, U. S. To Allege," by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 23 April 2008, p. A1.

WSJ changing by day. This edition scraps the usual two front page, above crease features with "dimpled" head shots. My cover story from 04 is looking more anachronistic by the day.

On the story: my line on the entire second Bush administration still holds: focus on DPRK for takedown/collapse and end that scenario in Asia, cementing something better with Beijing in the process. DPRK already has the nukes and is sharing.

But this administration has failed consistently on sequencing: announcing its "axis of evil" up front, well before it had the means to deal with all three but sending advance notice of intent to do harm (always smart to telegraph your punch).

Too bad. More could have been done, and with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs now acting as chief saber rattler on Iran, I suspect this administration will continue to get its priorities confused.

Terrorism in a vacuum

Tom got this email:

On behalf of Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, we would like to invite you to participate in the Terrorism Index, a survey of terrorism and national security experts from across the ideological spectrum.

The index, which last appeared in the September/October 2007 issue of Foreign Policy, is widely considered a benchmark assessment of U.S. national security and the fight against international terrorism. It has helped shape the policy debate and received substantial media coverage, both in America and abroad. Its findings have been reported in such media outlets as CNN, ABC News, Fox News, the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and NPR. This attention is a testament to how hungry the world is for information that helps distill the complex foreign policy issues we face today. At the core of the survey's success are experts such as yourself.

Tom writes after taking the survey:

My take: "Somewhat interesting, but a bit narrow in focus. Terrorism in a vacuum is how it felt. Weren't any questions that related to economics per se, although in many lists, you could choose "more aid,"

For biggest U.S. threat, I put "our own trade protectionism."

For biggest U.S. policy goal, I put "expand global economy."

I had to write both of those in, but they had nothing like that.

Alarmist on Iran, except...

ARTICLE: U.S. Weighing Readiness for Military Action Against Iran, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, April 26, 2008; Page A07

So, yes, I guess my piece in Esquire was as alarmist as some claimed, except:

-> I said Fallon could be fired and he was.

-> I said someone more pliable would be found, and he was.

-> I said Fallon's firing could signal the ramp up on Iran and we get both Petraeus and Crocker saying that enemy #1 in Iraq is Iran.

-> And as soon as Petraeus is named, we get the obviously released story about the preparations for military strikes.

We are told by Gates and others that "this is all passed" and that the only ones who argue it isn't are people who unduly alarm the public.

But the more open this latest ramp-up becomes, the harder it gets to deny. Those who simply mouth the Bush line will tell us again that this is all silly.

But the underlying truths remain: Bush has made his promises to friends in the region and Cheney believes it must be done on his watch.

Not exactly king of that universe, is he?

ARTICLE: 'Death to Ahmadinejad,' Iranian crowds cry, UPI, March 19 2008

Tested in Tucson

Flew out Sunday, early evening, through Phoenix. Lengthy cab ride to resort north of town, near some beautiful mountains. All-day affair with the Monitor Group, participating in a scenario-building workshop for a client (major division of major corporation). I served as expert in one group as we rotated through future world scenarios and then gave an unrehearsed address at the dinner to wrap things up. Went off of notes I took during day. Lotsa X-Ys, so familiar turf and plenty of fun. Also fun, though a bit nervy, to dream up impromtu 45-minute presentation on the spot, but a fun, retro, low-key challenge, as I drew everything as a I spoke on butcher block paper.

Went over well, and the subsequent Scotch was Dalwhinnie.

Monitor Group, best known for Michael Porter and a sub (Global Business Network under famed futurist Peter Schwartz) is a very impressive bunch. Ran a great show, and the quality of the people was uniformly awesome, including a Milwaukee-born with a PhD in Econ from MIT. It was fun to run with these big dogs for the day.

Evolve our forces

Tom got this email:

I was wondering if you were going to be speaking in the DC area time soon. I read a brief of yours and was impressed. I just returned from Iraq for the second time and we've (the Junior Officers) been pushing to evolve our forces into something similar you desribed. I would enjoy hearing more about it in person. Thanks for your time.

Regards,

former Marine Infantry 1st Lt

In China, the walled-garden Internet already under heavy attack from hacktivists

COVER STORY: "In China, a battle over Web censorship: As Beijing restricts what Internet users can see, 'hacktivists' try to crack 'Great Firewall,'" by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 23 April 2008, p. 1A.

Invariably, the younger ones figure out the Matrix and demand their release from its artificiality.

As natural as the day is long.

That's why you focus on the connectivity and let the attempts at "mouse arrest" unfold in the near term. You simply know our way of thinking will win out in the end.

My favorite bit is the hacktivist Bill Xia, based in NC, who offers Chinese Web surfers his version of the "red pill."

Yes, China will seek to keep the bottlenecks going on traffic for as long as possible. Don't worry. Success and ambition will win out.

Absolutely, there will be plenty of ugliness in the meantime. The more we see, the fiercer the struggle, so it's a good sign.

Connectivity traded for content control: perfectly fine in the near term

ARTICLE: "Afghan Ministry Bans the Broadcast of 5 Foreign Soap Operas," by Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall, New York Times, 22 April 2008, p. A6.

Would I like no censorship at all? Actually no. Even I, living in the decadent West, want some controls, especially when kids are involved.

So no surprise, after four years in which boundaries are tested by foreign shows, Afghan conservatives strike back and demand more control—just too much for "Afghan religion and culture."

Afghan version of "American Idol"? Okay and hugely popular.

But the Indian soap where the heroine tries to convince her husband that she is not having an affair with a tycoon? Apparently, a bit much for now.

And I emphasize the "for now." We didn't jump from 1920s sensibilities to modern crassness over night, so why expect anybody else to do the same.

Better to focus on the connectivity and allow the content control. The former does its long-term magic, and inevitably, the latter comes under assault by the next generation uninterested in living in the walled garden.

Workers getting uppity? Where have I seen this before?

ARTICLE: "Workers Get Power, Bosses Get Worried: A new Chinese labor law could prove costly for businesses," by Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 21-27 April 2008, p. 18.

China wants to move up the production ladder and wants its labor to make more money to cover the aging demographics, but timing is everything.

Turns out workers are working on their own definition of a proper trajectory. The beginning of the end of China as the world's factory floor?

Of course. This is the hope of interior China and the rest of the Gap: China will export the low-end stuff. The abuse of cheap labor will go some place where it's more welcomed by the local workforce—for a while that is ...

Brazil to catch the "oil curse"?

EDITORIAL: "An economic superpower, and now oil too: Oil could transform Brazil's economy. But not necessarily for the better," The Economist, 19 April 2008, p. 16.

The commodities boom favors Brazil right now, but the key thing is the rising economic connectivity: local firms going global and FDI flowing in at record rates ($35B last year).

Cyclical?

… some economists argue that Brazil is the beneficiary of a structural shift, in which the industrialization of Asia and the rise of a new middle class in the developing world will keep commodity prices high.

Count this amateur among them.

The fear is that the oil wealth will spoil the party. A bad tax system and labor code make firms unwilling to hire as much as they should, so 40% of the workforce stays informal. As past blog posts have noted, bottlenecks on infrastructure are a big problem left unaddressed. Then there is the usual temptation of pork barrel spending.

Something to keep an eye on.

Tom around the web

Links to History will condemn us if...
+ I, Hans
+ gmgDesign
+ Gregory Scoblete

+ Fraters Libertas linked How I would welcome a McCain presidency.
+ Fear and Loathing in Georgetown embedded the YouTube video.
+ 1 Raindrop linked Globalization is boring.
+ Worth the Fee to Read It referenced Tom on winning the war but losing the peace.
+ Cal Poly MBA Trip linked the GOOD article.
+ One Cosmos referred to the Core and Gap.
+ ESDELADEA reprinted Recent books read (2 of 7): Glenny's "McMafia".
+ PurpleSlog linked We can out-guerilla them.
+ The Interpreter linked the YouTube video.
+ HG's WORLD linked all seven of Tom's recent book reviews.
+ SWJ Blog linked We also need connectivity with foreign militaries
+ So did ZenPundit.

Tempering China's chauvinism

ARTICLE: China Changes Course, Advocating Tempered Response to Its Critics, By Jill Drew, Washington Post, April 23, 2008; Page A14

Good example of the limits of nationalism for the Chinese Communist Party: a bit is okay, but too much and pretty soon you're threatening the economic connectivity that justifies their rule.

The Olympics were going to be a major readjustment of their nationalism one way or the other. I see it working out quite nicely, as in, the Chinese grow up a lot in this process and the immature chauvinism gets tempered with something more weighty.

Remember the bit in Esquire about "if your grad degree involved a lot of memorization"?

GLOBAL BUSINESS: "Call My Lawyer … in India: Call-center jobs were first; now U.S. companies are looking to offshore for their legal work too," by Suzanne Barlyn, Time, 14 April 2008. p. G1.

We're looking at 29k legal jobs shipped abroad by the end of 2008 and maybe 80k by 2015. India is simply moving up the service ladder, just like China does on the manufacturing ladder. You go from call centers (lower-value business process outsourcing) to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). Engineering and medicine comes under assault too, as these KPOs act more and more like "branch offices of U.S. companies."

India's advantages are clear: English speakers and a common law background.

Speaking of growing food dependency …

WORLD NEWS: "Japan's Changing Tastes Lead to Import Dependence," by Hiroko Tabuchi, Wall Street Journal, 9 April 2008, p. A10.

A generation ago breakfast in Japan is rice, fish and home-grown veggies. Now it's toast from imported wheat, ham from pigs that eat imported grain and ditto for the eggs.

Japan now grows only 39% of its food needs, down from 70% in the 1960s. Body fat rises and heart disease is now the number one killer.

Yes, yes, they're so different and will never change.

The food interdependency that we're just now seeing will only grow with ag production shifting due to global warming. In a quarter century's time, we'll view global food nets as far more economically important, strategically vulnerable, and politically sensitive than energy nets are today.

Urbanization will trigger rural land sale rights in China

ARTICLE: "On the Move: Chinese officials want more farmers to migrate to the city. But they are also aware that migration brings problems," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 12-13 April 2008, p. R5.

The biggest peacetime migration in human history, inside one country.

Forty-four % of Chinese live in cities now. When Deng kicked this whole thing off in 1980, 80 percent lived on the farm. By 2050, China's looking at 1B in cities and only 400m on the farm, or about half of the rural population it had in 2080.

All of this in response to the opportunities afforded by connectivity to the global economy.

After so many years of trying to keep farmers down on the farm, now China encourages the migration, because it needs the supply of cheap labor to continue for as long as possible while shifting more and more of the population to higher-paying jobs as the demographics tilt dramatically older.

So the old household-registration system, called hukou, is being dramatically relaxed, meaning people are more able to choose where they want to live. As it is, more than 100m Chinese simply "float" right now, living in urban areas while retaining—officially—farms back in the village.

Here's where it links then:

Indeed, the most pressing issue raised by China's urban transformation may not be migrants' entrance into cities but their exit from the farm. Those who migrate permanently to cities and obtain urban hukou have to give up their rights to farmland. Not everyone is willing to take that chance, since farming is something to fall back on if the job doesn't work out.

But here's the additional dynamic: China needs to mechanize its ag production a lot more, meaning fewer bigger farms, otherwise the population's growing demand for more and better food will trigger even more dependency on foreign sources (which is inevitable, but why not meet as much of that demand as possible at home?).

My point? Once you open up to globalization, the secondary and tertiary effects never end. You simply have to feed the beast.

Our leadership is needed now more than ever

ARTICLE: 'The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest', By Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

A good exegesis on why the new "declinists" are hyping our "fall" quite a bit, but still, at the end, this summary of Zakaria's book suggests he pushes for internal improvements and active integration of rising powers. I will wait to read book to see what else he says, but the gist here seems to be: balance is coming, but slower than you think: we can self-improve to deal with this loss of power but the loss is inevitable.

Compare this to Khanna (balance is already here and there is nothing America can do to stop it) and Kagan (renewed bipolar Cold War of democracies vs authoritarian states) and it's clearly more sanguine.

My book aims to surpass this baseline diagnostic approach to argue for a grand strategy rethink and redesign for the next iteration. Yes, China's model says this is how nations catch-up economically, and the EU replicates our "states uniting" model of developed countries' integration, but neither constitutes a grand strategic vision for future global order. As today's rising great powers within our liberal int'l trade order signal the unprecedented global success of our American System-cum-globalization, we need to step up to the next grand strategic iteration and define the global integration to come. My book, Great Powers fills in that blank, not just stopping at the diagnosis and saying either accept it (Khanna, Zakaria) or fight it (Kagan), but argues that America needs to keep leading and keep shaping and defining what must come next. The current interdependency of globalization is rapidly being superseded by a new hyper- connectivity, -transparency, and -interdependency (we just begin to see this on food). Since we're the furthest along in this multinationalism experiment, our leadership is needed now more than ever.

(Thanks: William R. Cumming)

Have to consider this one of the last "dominos" to fall

ARTICLE: Nepal Maoists to embrace capitalism, Times of India, 24 Apr 2008

Kind of funny, because the Asian Maoists have been the most recalcitrant ideology to move out of the past.

(Thanks: jarrod myrick)

Rock and a hard place

ARTICLE: China calls for help on climate change, By TINI TRAN, AP, Apr 24

Elizabeth Economy's book, The River Runs Black, says China can be made to move on enviro issues so long as the international community, vice any one bullying power, makes the pitch and access to new tech is part of the package. China fears being held to industrial standards we never held ourselves to during our rise, believing they may be used to torpedo that rise and thus foment civil unrest.

China's problem, though, is that, left unaddressed, enviro issues will do the same for sure.

Tom in Defense AT&L

ARTICLE: Diversity and Freaks (pdf), Capt. Gabe Mounce, USAF, Defense AT&L, May-June 2008

Here's the part about Tom:

Here’s another case in point. The military analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett, in The Pentagon’s New Map, advocates a military structure that is divided into two forces: the Leviathan force and the Sys Admin force. The Leviathan force would be what we currently think of as a military. It goes in fast, strikes hard, then gets out. The Sys Admin force, on the other hand, would be the force that operates by doing what the United States is currently trying to do in Iraq—win the peace. This force would be made up of social scientists, computer geeks, cultural experts, and linguists, all working to stabilize and build up a country. The Army recently began using such units, known as human terrain teams, to great effect in Iraq.

Consequences of losing a postwar

ARTICLE: Pentagon chief challenges Air Force to contribute more to war effort, push innovation, By ROBERT BURNS, Associated Press, April 21, 2008

Win a war and nothing changes.

Lose a postwar long enough and everything is forced to change.

Pretty strong words from your own SECDEF, but the "one-off" crowd is asking for it.