Amidst the ugly piracy and the just plain bad censorship, there is the sheer good of numbers

FT full-page "analysis" and Economist story.

FT is about rise of microblog sites in China and how the government throws ever more censors at the problem. As always, it's a strange mix of shaping and monitoring public opinion on the government's part, but what always impresses me is the sheer amount of expression going on.

Naturally, the piece leads with the latest example of a netizen mob gone wild over some official's nastiness -- or more specifically, some high official's son's nastiness (the infamous son of Li Gang, who, after hitting a student with his car while drunk, drove off shouting from his car window, "Make a report if you dare, my dad is Li Gang!").  Well, the report was made and Li Gang paid the price.  "My dad is Li Gang" became the Chinese web equivalent of "I'm Spactacus!" symbolizing everything that the public finds wrong about official abuse. 

But as the piece makes clear, the evolution of China's web defies traditional Western expectations.  More and more Chinese log on, and more and more government effort is launched to keep track of it all.  Instead of some glorious montage scene where everybody expresses their clear desire for free elections and then we cut to the movie's uplifting climax, we see a lot of virulent nationalism being expressed.  And instead of hapless government censors throwing up their hands at the insane flow of words, the Party is getting fairly sophisticated at managing the whole mess, even publishing its annual list of Li-Gang-like events.  So, for now, the web just seems like another place where the Party is subtly polling the public, cracking down only in the those rare instances where somebody truly steps out of line.  

We in the West are disappointed with this, but I don't think we should be.  Expecting China to morph into the U.S. overnight is wrong, but so is assuming that the line between Party control and public expression isn't moving, because it is.  It's just that the public is happy enough, for now, exploring a lot of personal and mundane, simply entertaining stuff, not being all that different from anybody else in the West.

And when the political is expressed, it's often frighteningly out of control and over the top -- immature.  That too is not all that different from the West, if you go back to an equivalent time in our political evolution.

And that's the trick.  Rapid modernization can speed up all sorts of evolutions, but a rapid modernization of the political system is something entirely different.  Those sorts of rules, when they change abruptly, can be very destabilizing, and the more you let the connectivity revolutionize everything else in the economy and society, the more you, the leadership and even the public, should fear commensurate possibilities of change in the political sphere. 

We can assume that everything would work out to our liking if the Party just let it all hang out at once, but we'd likely be wrong.  People need time to get used to all that change, and we consistently underestimate the amount of time traveling that the average 50-something Chinese has undergone over the past three decades. We took a couple centuries to travel similar political ground, and we forget the journey, so we say, "All right already, you've had the web now for a while, so why doesn't everything resemble our way of life?"

I say, be patient and give them time to get used to the all the economic and social change before moving on to the political.  And then expect that journey to likewise be entirely Chinese, understanding that how they kept things together over time has never been our way, because our way was to escape all that back home, run here, and build something entirely different. 

Over time, the Party commands less and less of the public's attention, and for this thing to evolve in a more free direction, that's all we need. 

The Economist story makes this point.  Not only is the government's main channel, CCTV, losing viewers to less controlled provincial stations, it's really losing the young to Internet video, most of which is pirated immediately from the West.  Interesting example of a show I know and love: "Prison Break" is huge in China and its star, Wentworth Miller is not only mobbed everywhere he goes in China, he's the frickin' face of GM on TV commercials!

The show has never been aired on any Chinese TV network.

Now, the temptation is to read meaning into Wentworth's original TV subject matter, but go easy on that.  Point is, the young get used to choosing on their own and, over time, that changes things.

So, go easy on the pessimism, I say.  We expect too much out of the original, time-traveling generations here.  Xi Jinping (China's next president and in his late 50s), for example, still remembers vividly being thrown in jail as a kid as a political prisoner on his dad's behalf during the Cultural Revolution.  He's China's leader for the next decade, and his "Sixties' were a bit different from the Boomers.  

Conservatives in the West keep saying, Nixon went to China 40 years ago and look how the Party still rules! They say that because that's all they want to see.  But we need to go back and read our history here.  The Cultural Revolution was a "long national nightmare" that trumps our Vietnam and Watergate by . . .  more than just a bit.  It was a national insanity and the bite it took out of the national psyche was closer to our Civil War than anything we've experienced since

So rather than expecting that much more time traveling by the 50-something crowd, think of this more in terms of post-Cultural Revolution generations.  The first truly post-CR leadership generation comes online in 2022 and China hits the half-century-mark post Deng's reforms another decade after that.  Realistically, this is always where I've been positing this sort of political change -- when the bulk of China's population has had all its formative experiences post the Cultural Revolution, or when their definition of normal truly normalizes, and their willingness to start some of the political time-traveling builds to the point of acting on those impulses. 

For now and for a while, China's population will remain mostly filled up by people for whom all the change to date is more than enough for them.  We can be disappointed in that most human of realities, or we can just be happy for them and all the changes they've been able to enjoy in their collective lives to date.

WPR's The New Rules: Setting the Terms for a U.S.-China Grand Bargain

History tells us that, when a rising great power approaches the standing of the dominant system-shaping great power, conflict is inevitable, either directly or in such regions where their two spheres of influence intersect. The great counterexample is the acceptance by a "rising" America of the late-19th century of Great Britain's implicit offer of a "special relationship," which allowed the latter to punch above its weight throughout the 20th century. That alliance was subsequently forged in opposition to common enemies: first the Kaiser and then Nazi Germany, followed by the Soviet Union. 

China and the United States have no such common enemy of that stature. Lacking an obvious evil to fight, we are left with only an obvious collective good to preserve: globalization. This fortunate reality nonetheless encourages zero-sum thinking: China's inevitable rise is America's inevitable decline. Instead of a world to be shared and shaped, expert voices increasingly warn of a world to be divided and destroyed by wars over resources. 

To present an alternative to such zero-sum thinking, I've spent the past several months working with the Beijing-based Center for America-China Partnership and its chairman, John Milligan-Whyte, drawing up a proposed "China-U.S. Presidential New Grand Strategy Agreement." The document -- which Whyte and his partner, Dai Min, published in People's Daily Online last week -- proposes a diplomatic and economic "grand bargain" between China and the United States, one that breaks through the rising hostility and mutual suspicions that define the world's most important bilateral relationship. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Movie of My Week: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (2010)

From IMDb:

Scott Pilgrim must defeat his new girlfriend's seven evil exes in order to win her heart.

Yet another movie based on a comic book, but it's a good one and the key here is the inventive, winningly comic director who did both "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" (two Simon Pegg classics).  Wonderful use of graphics, and yes, I could stand Michael Cera in one more go-around of that character of his, which - honestly - works better here than in any other movie, save perhaps "Juno."  Plus, his easy style showcases actresses awfully well, and they're all interesting here.

I will withhold judgment on the uber-serious remake of "Tron," but I'm guessing this lighthearted movie actually comes closer in spirit to the movie/life-as-videogame-vibe most people are drawn to--meaning fun and exciting and vicariously dangerous as opposed to the future dystopianism of "I-can't-escape-this-technological-nightmare!"

Watched it twice and laughed throughout.  Wright does whimsy in all genres and does it well.  It's a real style he's got and it's very funny.

A German take on "The Pentagon's New Map" as "critical geopolitics"

Passed along by a German correspondent.  It's a think tank-style critical review of the New Map as an example of spatially expressing a threat (Hamburg U, Institute for Geography, 2005).

A bit much into the symbology for my taste (e.g., the deconstruction of the New Rule Sets Project logo and investing a lot of meaning into Esquire artwork), but a very serious effort at understanding and critiquing what I sought to accomplish by centering my analysis around a world map.

It's found here on the web: http://www.geowiss.uni-hamburg.de/i-geogr/abschluss/arbeiten/diplomarbeit_eggerstedt.pdf.

I also make it downloadable here for posterity's sake.

My German's only so-so at this point, but I caught the gist of the criticism.  At a couple of points it felt a little bit like Susan Faludi doing a number on my psyche, but fair is fair, and again, this is a serious attempt at interpretation.

In general, the New Map is interpreted in Europe as an example of "Neoliberal geopolitics."  For an example, see this Austrian piece.

Chart of the day: From population "pyramid" to "kite"

Economist special report on Japan, mostly about aging.

Japan is merely the first to shuffle into this undiscovered country. In 2050 it's median age will be 56.  It's 45 now.  So a jump of almost a dozen years in 4 decades.  Fast, right?  I mean, that's a year increase every three and a half years.

But consider this:  China sits now at 35 and will be at 47-48 come 2050, or a jump of 12-13 years over the same time period. That's a 35% increase in the median age, compared to just under 25% for Japan. And remember the size differential:  China is ten times the size of Japan.

America now?  Thirty-six.  Which means China will pass the U.S. in yet another category soon.  America in 2050?  Just a grey hair under 40.  A modest rise of 3.9 years, meaning we're aging at one-third the pace of either country, or a total increase of only 11%.

Think about a country being like a man.  I don't know what 56 is like, but I know 48 ain't the same as 39-40. China best enjoy its "century" while it can.

You want to keep it young in Asia, try India and SEA Asia:  24 now and 32 then.  Bit of a change there at 33%.  But it suggests that outside of China, Japan and Korea, the rest of Asia won't hit middle age until near the end of the century.

Blast from my past: "Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture" (2007)

Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Baker Center Journal of Applied Public Policy

Fall, 2007, pp. 34-44.

In this so-called long war against the global jihadist movement, the Bush administration’s greatest failure has been its lack of strategic imagination. It has added the right enemies to our to-do list, but failed to enlist the necessary new allies, giving our people the misperception that it’s America against the world.

This need not be the case. Our natural allies are now located on the frontiers of globalization, or among the three billion-plus new capitalists who joined global markets over the last generation, chiefly among them the Chinese.

The integrating core of globalization—namely the old West plus the emerging markets of the East and South—have effectively outsourced the global policing function to the United States by refusing to balance our immense warfighting and power projection capabilities with their own. Instead, Western Europe focuses on economically integrating the former Soviet bloc, while rising titans like China and India, for reasons of rising energy requirements, focus overwhelmingly on integrating—on relatively narrow terms—resource providers located in those regions least connected to the global economy, or what I call globalization’s non-integrating gap (e.g., the Caribbean rim, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southeast Asian littoral states).

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon’s new map in this long war corresponds greatly to those gap regions, for there we find the preponderance of “moderate” dictators, rogue regimes, and failed states, all of whom either attract the attention of transnational terrorists or support their activities for their own nefarious reasons. Viewed in this light, our victory is logically defined as the successful building out of globalization’s core and the simultaneous shrinking—or successful economic integration—of those gap regions. As we’ve seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is no mean task and one that generates significant labor requirements.

So I say, locate the labor where the problem is.

A New Strategic Value Proposition

America has the wherewithal to wage any conventional wars necessary to defeat traditionally arrayed enemies (i.e., militaries). But in today’s “flat world” competitive landscape, war’s just the first-stage defensive acquisition. Real stability comes only after the second-stage postwar merger that extends globalization’s broadband connectivity to the previously disenfranchised masses and—yes, Virginia—exposes all that cheap labor to “exploitation” by outside capital that typically pays significantly higher wages than the local economy can muster.

Let me give you my definition of the value proposition here and see if it doesn’t make sense.

America’s got a first-half offering without peer: a Leviathan with an unparalleled capacity for war-making and the unspoken power of deciding when other states can make war themselves. What we lack is a credible second-half offering, or what I’ve dubbed a “system administrator” force capable of winning the peace through effective stabilization and reconstruction operations. Ultimately, this force needs to be more civilian than uniformed military, and fueled more by private sector investment than public sector aid. It also can’t be an American-only operation. The Bush administration’s big mistake in Iraq was telling allies, “If you’re not tough enough to show up for the war, don’t show up for the peace, and forget about any contracts!”

Based on our efforts to date in this long war, America currently fields a first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. We lost less than 150 personnel in the Iraq “war” (major combat operations). We’ve lost more than 2,000 in the “peace” (postwar) that hasn’t quite followed.

So yeah, it matters.

Right now, our enemies in this long war field a better, more capable version of the sysadmin force than we do. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t been paying attention to new entrants to the market like Hamas and Hezbollah, two tribe-building enterprises that excel at the second half while not even trying to compete in the first half, as Israel recently discovered in Lebanon and the West Bank to its growing regret.

So if the gap’s new entrants to the postwar market should be sizing our sysadmin force (just like the Soviets once sized our Leviathan force during the Cold War), it seems clear who should be increasingly populating the core’s second-half team today: new entrants to globalization’s “systems integration” market such as China and India.

Think about that for a minute. Stability and reconstruction operations associated with postwar and post-disaster environments require lots of bodies, both in terms of uniformed boots on the ground and relatively cheap labor to lay down all that necessary infrastructure—both hard (physical) and soft (institutional). China and India both have million-man armies, as well as a long-demonstrated willingness to send their best and brightest (along with their most desperate) civilians the world over in search of economic opportunity (e.g., “non-resident Indians” are outnumbered only by the multitude of “overseas Chinese”).

More to the point, the best nation-building brand out there right now is the Chinese model. I know, I know, it doesn’t meet our threshold definitions of democracy and human rights (not to mention coming nowhere near our EPA standards), but it sure as hell beats America’s post-Cold War product line of Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s be honest: China’s leveraged buyouts, as mercantilist as they are, beat our hostile takeovers—hands down.

And that just tells you how bad America’s military intervention “brand” has become. Emerging from World War II, the world believed that an American invasion was a fundamentally good thing, or something that got you tons of aid and propelled you to the top of the pile (e.g., West Germany, Japan, South Korea). Back then there was no shortage of “mice” that wanted to “roar” for our attention, but somewhere along the way, probably thanks to the influence of nuclear weapons on our military strategy, we lost that second-half skill set, probably because it seemed pointless in a world perverted by the looming threat of mutually-assured destruction. So, starting with Vietnam, where we first displayed our sad combination of increasing ineptitude at, and discomfort with, the second-half game, our brand has suffered a precipitous decline.

So why not turn to the original market-maker in the field of “revolutionary war,” otherwise known as the People’s Republic of China? If we face a future of insurgents and what the our military calls “fourth-generation war” (in which our enemies seek to deflate our will rather than defeat our forces), why not ally ourselves with the best counter-insurgency model operating in those gap regions today, one that effectively—and rather preemptively—woos both dictators and failed states alike?

Put another way, you can invade the country and then start up your counter-insurgency/reconstruction ops (the American route), or maybe you might just co-opt the major players pre-conflict with investment offers they can’t refuse (the Chinese route). So maybe it’s not always the case that if you want it bad, you get it bad.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating America continues its whack-a-mole approach to regime-toppling interventions inside the gap, only to turn over the aftermarket opportunities to the Chinese . . . uh . . . actually, I’m coming uncomfortably close to saying just that. I just believe that if we combined our chocolate (military interventions with a moral compass) with China’s peanut butter (economic interventions with a practical mindset), we might actually come up with a whole superpower, or basically a joint offering that finally covers the market—as in, defeats our political enemies while connecting the economically disenfranchised.

I’m asking you to come to the inescapable conclusion that America under the Bush-Cheney management team has become an un-sellable global brand in a market (modern globalization) that we made. That’s just wrong.

It’s wrong because it gets our people needlessly killed and because our interventions end up leaving the targeted state more disconnected from globalization than we found it (or worse, increasing its negative connectivity in the form of criminal and terrorist ties), meaning we’re not making the world a better place and we’re discrediting ourselves in the process.

So I’m asking you to invest in something better, or what I think will truly answer the mail in this long war—a full-service superpower that can wage both war and peace effectively. Combine the United States, a seemingly unprincipled Leviathan willing to invade anywhere inside the gap, with China, a seemingly unprincipled sysadmin willing to invest anywhere inside the gap, and I believe you’re looking at a superpower built whole, a long war legitimately won, and a globalization made truly global.

Now let me take you through the prospectus.

Less Clausewitz, More Sun Tzu

We know full well that America can defeat any traditionally arrayed opponent in major combat operations, known as “phase 3” in Pentagon parlance. But both Afghanistan and Iraq show that we’re simply not up to snuff in “phase 4” operations, otherwise known as the postwar. As we’re not credible in the postwar, our enemies have simply ceased fighting us in the war, knowing that a persistent postwar insurgency can defeat an impatient superpower. If your enemy’s goal is simply to kill 3 or 4 of your personnel a day and he’s willing to throw virtually unlimited labor at that goal, you’re going to lose over the long haul unless you figure out how to deny him ready access to his labor pool. That means jobs are our exit strategy.

Run into this savvy fourth-generation-warfare (4GW) competitor enough times and the American public will inevitably tire of engaging in any major combat operations, sensing a pointlessly ineffective postwar outcome. When that happens, our enemies in this long war have achieved an effective lock out, fencing off the roughly two billion people in these gap regions for their version of fundamentalist isolation.

Get good at phase 4 operations, however, and not only are your war threats made credible, but likewise your up-front offers of—for lack of a better phrase—pre-canned bankruptcies for failing regimes. I mean, why not make a pre-emptive bid instead of launching a pre-emptive war? By doing so, we turn on its head Karl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as “ . . . continuation of politics by other means.”

Inside the Pentagon, strategists describe this goal as getting so adept at phase 4 operations that you can wage them up front, in the pre-crisis period known as “phase 0.” At this point, you’re in Sun Tzu’s preferred venue, and your battles are won long before shots are fired. You’re basically the peacekeeper and infrastructure builder who shows up before the crises boil over, effectively keeping the situation just cool enough to avoid a major military intervention. Think of it as limited-liability nation building.

Imagine the Iraq scenario this way: according to insider accounts, the Arab League convinced Saddam Hussein to agree to go into exile and avert a war months before the U.S.-led invasion occurred. In the end, Arab leaders abandoned the plan because of disputes among themselves over how it would have played out. No imagination required there: the region’s leaders were of many minds regarding the possibility of a real “cake walk” for the Americans. But consider this possibility: what if, at the right moment in that negotiation, a proposal is made for a consortium of Chinese, Indian and Russian elements (both governmental and private-sector) to run the postwar reconstruction? Imagine how the zero-sum sheen is rubbed off the potential American-dominated postwar occupation.

Then consider how the Chinese could have conducted the rebuilding of Iraq’s shattered infrastructure—on time and under budget. And then consider how President Bush’s “big bang” strategy (i.e., making post-Saddam Iraq a shining example of potential reform in the region) might have unfolded differently, primarily because popular expectations—both here and in Iraq—would have shifted from instant democracy to rapid reconnection to the global economy.

Seriously, do you think we’d have the same deprivations and lack of economic activity that fuel sectarian violence in Iraq today if we had picked the Chinese over the Coalition Provisional Authority? Or let me put it this way: could the Chinese have done any worse?

Do you find such a scenario implausible? Then you haven’t been paying attention to Africa recently. Anyone’s who done any business or peacekeeping in Africa in the past decade will tell you that the “China LLC” (with an emphasis on “limited”) is already up and running across most of the continent. For example, China recently became the 13th-largest provider of peacekeeping troops across gap regions, with a concentration in Africa (Congo, Liberia, Sudan) and a nascent portfolio in the Middle East (Lebanon) and the Caribbean (Haiti).

Chinese trade and aid throughout Africa has risen dramatically in recent years, to include a sandals-on-the-ground presence of 80,000 nationals. China’s goods are in every market, its vehicles ply every road (many of which are laid with Chinese funds and laborers), and its logistical and information networks are sprouting up everywhere valuable raw materials are found—especially oil.

Beijing recently hosted an unprecedented summit of 30 African leaders and guess what topped the agenda? It surely wasn’t the Bush administration’s soda straw view of globalization, otherwise known as the “war on terror.” Instead, the summit focused on debt relief, human resource development and training, investment and aid, and reduced trade barriers. Just survey America’s strategic debates concerning Africa today (“Do we intervene in Darfur with troops?” “Go back to Somalia to deal with the Islamists?” “Set up an Africa Command?”), and it seems clear: we’re stuck in a phase-3, Clausewitzian mindset while China’s winning early-stage, phase-0 contracts (and allies) in a way Sun Tzu would readily approve.

Whether we care to admit it or not, China effectively limits America’s strategic liability across Africa already. Sudan is a good example: many in the West want to criticize China’s large-scale investments in the nation’s infrastructure and oil industry. But quite frankly, absent the West’s interest in providing significant numbers of peacekeepers for Darfur, what China does in Sudan with its ongoing investments is limit our potential strategic liability.

In that forest, large branches may fall, but not the entire tree. So long as the latter does not occur, America hears nothing.

Cynical? Hell yes. But if we’re not going to beat ‘em, please don’t deny we’re implicitly joining them in this liability-limiting endeavor. As the world’s sole military superpower, America is the silent partner in every non-intervention the global community launches.

So No Rest For the Weary Leviathan

Let’s be honest about the capabilities at hand for solving Africa’s endemic conflicts (and they are so many). NATO (the Europeans) have basically “been there, done that” decades ago and exhibit little desire to return. Meanwhile, the African Union, the continent’s putative peacekeeping arm, is essentially the UN without the swagger (I know, hard to imagine). When the AU hit the ground in Darfur, for example, they quickly settled into a passive observation role, basically documenting the ongoing atrocities and little else (they shoot photos, don’t they?).

America needs to get real with itself. Africa is not ours and ours alone to ignore strategically, and it’s got to be so much more than just the experimental playground for Bono and the “two Bills” (Gates, Clinton). Tied down as we are militarily in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, because China’s effectively “prepping the battlefield” for us in Africa, and that’s where this fight heads next.

As the U.S. and its Western allies squeeze the balloon of the global jihadist movement currently centered in the Middle East, that balloon can expand in two directions: north into Central Asia and south into sub-Saharan Africa. This fight won’t go north simply because that region is surrounded by interested powers (e.g., Russia, Turkey, India, China) willing to do whatever killing is required to stop the spread of Al Qaeda’s influence—and yes, that includes Shiite Iran, no friend to the exclusively Sunni-derived radical Salafi movement currently fronted by Bin Laden.

So if it can’t go north, this fight’s heading south.

Frankly, it’s the combination of that inevitability plus China’s rising influence on the continent that drives the Pentagon to stand up an Africa Command (already in prototype in European Command’s Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa). But here we risk repeating the Bush Administration’s mistake of adding new enemies but no new allies. Instead of viewing China’s growing presence as a strategic complication, America needs to recognize it as a natural partnering opportunity.

Africa is enjoying an economic upswing, thanks in no small part to China’s rising resource draw. The continent’s business climate is improving dramatically, and about half of the world’s top-20 fastest growing economies can be found here. Hell, when American hedge funds start moving in, you know something’s brewing.

America has the sad tendency for viewing Africa primarily as an aid sinkhole, whereas maturing emerging markets like China view it as a logical target for future expansion. Yes, Beijing’s resource requirements drive everything for now, but think ahead to when China’s “inexhaustible” cheap labor supply dwindles due to higher production costs and a burgeoning middle class more focused on consumerism than savings. To whom does China outsource the low-end jobs while it scrambles up the production ladder? Clearly, Beijing will divert as many jobs as possible to China’s underdeveloped interior, and just enough to its neighbors to keep the regional peace, but eventually a good portion will flow to Africa, in large part to balance the very real imbalances created to date by China’s mercantilist trade profile.

There are plenty of China hawks in the Pentagon who are dead certain we’re headed for some military showdown with Beijing over Taiwan. But more of Wall Street is coming to the conclusion that our real competition with China is all about who makes the most markets in globalization’s gap regions. That makes Africa the logical ground zero in both the long war and this ever “flattening” global competitive landscape.

But you know what, this is exactly the kind of race America needs to be running.

Racing to the Bottom of the Pyramid

China today is not the market it was as recently as five years ago, when basically any foreign company and investment were welcomed with open arms, giving foreign multinationals control over roughly 60 percent of the country’s current exports. Today’s China sits atop a huge pile of domestic savings and approximately one trillion in U.S. reserve currency, giving it a confidence far distant from the fears barely suppressed during the Asian flu of the late 1990s. One way that confidence is expressed is increased developmental aid to trade partners, largely focused on accessing their raw materials.

As China becomes more outgoing in its foreign policy, however, its economic focus turns inward to a host of structural problems: its rickety financial sector, the imbalance between the booming coast and the dreadfully impoverished interior, and the rapidly aging population (no country in human history has ever aged as quickly as China will over the next three decades). Toss in the greatest migration in human history (internally, from rural to urban areas), and we’re talking about hundreds of millions of new consumers rapidly surfacing in China’s burgeoning middle class.

Thus, what was primarily an investment dynamic by which foreign companies rented China’s cheap labor for export creation now rapidly shifts into strategic alliances with rising domestic companies that Beijing not only positions to dominate the growing internal market but likewise plans on growing into successful global brands. This new inside-out growth strategy (i.e., domestic dominance leading to global dominance) is interpreted by many Western investors as a “nationalist backlash,” but as long-time China watcher Harry Hardin argued recently in the Wall Street Journal, this is a “marginal adjustment to, rather than a fundamental repudiation of, Beijing’s broader embrace of globalization.”

In short, China’s just wants to elevate its game.

The car industry is a good example. Western firms jumped into China years ago primarily to access the cheap labor on auto parts. But now, as China’s car market explodes (it’s already roughly the equivalent of the U.S. and European markets and soon to become the world’s largest domestic market), the strategy of such global giants as GM, Ford, Honda, and Volkswagen shifts from accessing labor to accessing customers. As Bill Ford Jr. recently told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re barely scratching the surface in China.”

There’s been a lot of hyperbole recently about how quickly Chinese automobile manufacturers can wedge themselves into the U.S. market as the third coming of Toyota and the second coming of Hyundai. But the real export opportunities in joint ventures with rising Chinese firms (e.g., Geely, Chery, Great Wall, SAIC) will appear first in other emerging markets and developing economies. It is in these lower-end markets that companies tap into what University of Michigan economist C.K. Prahalad dubs “the power at the bottom of the pyramid.”

That dynamic is important to consider as we contemplate the long-term integration of such gap regions as the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and southeast Asia, especially as we retool our approach to postwar and post-disaster stability and reconstruction operations.

The problem is, when the rich, know-it-all Americans show up on the post-whatever scene, our tendency is to cost everything out at Six Sigma prices, when in reality, what’s typically appropriate is something on par with One or Two Sigma outcomes. We go for the grand and complex when the simpler and more robust usually works better in such austere environments. So it’s wireless, not landlines. It’s cell phones, not laptops.

Pricing out Africa’s integration at American prices makes no sense whatsoever. Africa is going to be a knock-off of India and China, which in turn can be considered knock-offs of Singapore and South Korea, which in turn can be considered knock-offs of Japan, Asia’s original knock-off of America. Think of it as a realistic “six degrees of integration.”

So gaining access to markets like China and India isn’t just an end in itself (i.e., cheap labor), even when investments subsequently penetrate the domestic market’s expanding opportunities. In the end, Western foreign direct investment into these new pillars of globalization’s core serves as a gateway to accessing the emerging-markets-after-next, or that next wave of infrastructure development found inside the very gap regions where this long war against radical extremism plays itself out.

Taken as a whole, the infrastructure building opportunities inside emerging markets—both existing and future—over the next three decades is considered by developmental experts as unprecedented in size. Asif Shaikh, CEO of International Resources Group, an international professional services firm specializing in developing markets, estimates that six trillion dollars of infrastructure will be built in the energy sector alone, with an additional four trillion dollars spent on water. Much of this work will occur in the twin pillars of China and India, so expect a roll-up of Western and local firms to create the multinational behemoths capable of handling this enormous flow of construction.

Then imagine what these resulting giants will be capable of accomplishing in postwar and post-disaster reconstruction environments in Africa and other gap regions.

The strategic importance of allying with Chinese and Indian firms is that they re-acquaint us with the twin realities of selling successfully to modest-wealth classes and building markets on globalization’s rough-and-ready frontiers, two skill sets many Western firms have essentially lost as our economies moved far away from such experiences. America’s last frontier, for example, closed over a century ago.

But it’s worth recollecting that market-making, frontier-integrating period known as the “settling of the American West,” because it reminds us of the intensely close relationship that once existed between our military and the private sector, something that was lost during the Cold War period, except in the rather closed club of the military-industrial complex. Now, as we look to postwar experiences in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where new contractors galore have entered the nation-building market, it’s clear that the military-market nexus has once again become the centerpiece of our national security strategy—that is, if we’re serious about winning the long war.

Let me tell you, the Chinese are just as serious on this score as we are. To its credit, the Bush administration has spent a lot of time encouraging Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder.” What the White House hasn’t done effectively is define—in a sufficiently expansive fashion—which stakes America truly shares with China.

An Offer They—and We—Can’t Refuse

Britain was smart enough at the start of the 20th century to hitch itself to the rising star in the West called America. That strategic mentoring role and resulting “special relationship” allowed the Brits to punch above their weight through three world wars (two hot and one cold). America faces a similar decision on China today: do we mentor Beijing into the halls of power or do we succumb to the realists’ predictions that war with the Middle Kingdom is inevitable in this “Pacific century”?

Britain went to war twice with fellow first-tier great power Germany in the first half of the 20th century and both were radically reduced to second-tier powers as a result, so I guess it all depends on how long America wants to remain a first-tier superpower. If the world isn’t big enough for a second one, then we’ve got a real problem. But is the world is ready for a superpower partnership . . . ?

The fact is, China’s already our silent partner in virtually every crisis spot around the globe. Want to fix Sudan? Better involve China. Want to tame Chavez? Better involve China. Want to economically isolate WMD-seeking Iran? Forget about it, because China and India (not to mention far-more-reliant-on-imports-Japan) have already made that call on both oil and gas. But help on taming Tehran? Under the right conditions, better involve China.

Then there’s Kim Jong Il.

It’s no secret that with the tie-down of American forces in Iraq we can’t do much of anything but bomb North Korea into the stone age, which—of course—would instantly trigger that which Beijing fears most: the mass flow of refugees north. So, in so many words (okay, just hearing Bush say the word “diplomacy” is enough), the Bush-Cheney team has let it be known that it would be fine by them if somebody rid them of this horrible man. You know, next time Kim’s train simply comes back empty.

Actually, the Chinese have studied the KGB-engineered fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania, going so far as to interview senior players there, so the concept of forcing Kim out from within is no joke. After all, Lil’ Kim runs a serious kleptocracy, and criminals can be flipped.

Then there’s what would be waiting on the far side of a united Korea: the makings of an East Asian NATO that rules out great power war on the continent. Simply put, it’s the biggest missing link in America’s current long war strategy, trapping—as it does—far too many of our military assets in a Cold War-era strategic posture.

But get an East Asian NATO set up and two things happen: 1) it frees up U.S. troops stationed there; and 2) we’re finally able to seriously tap the region’s trio of great powers (China, Japan, Korea) for military help in places where it’s more needed, like the Middle East and Africa. Finally, it’s important because, historically speaking, it’s not a good idea to have both Japan and China powerful at the same time without some sort of arrangement in place.

So what’s the state of our military-to-military relationship with China under the Bush administration?

In a word, guarded.

The Bush neocons came into power in 2001 obviously gunning for China. Remember the EP-3 spy plane incident off Hainan? Well, if Cheney and Rumsfeld hadn’t been interrupted by 9/11, that preview of the coming distractions would have been amazingly prescient.

Following 9/11, though, China fell off the Pentagon’s radar until . . . that is, when the most recent long-range planning cycle (2005 Quadrennial Defense Review) kicked into gear and many of the defense-industrial complex’s pet weapons systems and hugely expensive platforms were threatened by the ongoing operational costs (re: Iraq) of this long war. At that point, the China hawks went into overdrive and have stayed at that level since, cranking out warning after warning about China’s “huge” military build-up and how it threatens Taiwan and the rest of Asia.

How huge is that build-up? The highest estimates say that in twenty years China might be spending roughly half as much on its military as the U.S. spends on its military today! I don’t know about you, but I think our lead is safe for now. Plus, quite frankly, 85 percent of China’s arms purchases are from the Russians, so seriously, how bad can that be? Or did I miss something about who lost the Cold War?

Ah, but plenty of security experts will reveal—only on background, of course—that “if you only knew what I knew about Chinese attempts to [blank],” then you’d never even consider treating them as anything but globalization’s fifth column, just waiting to spring up and disable our entire economy with their cyber-jujitsu!

I say, it’s finally nice to have somebody surpass the Japanese and French in trying to steal our technology.

Seriously, every rising power in human history has sought to catch up to the leaders by engaging in persistent and pervasive economic espionage. America did it to the Europeans throughout most of the 19th century, begetting large portions of our industrial revolution in the process. Why should the Chinese be any different from the rest? The fact that they engage in such theft more over the Internet than the traditional route of sending their spies into our factories doesn’t make them unique. It makes them up-to-date.

Given all the situations where we’d like China’s help around the planet, the truly sad reality right now is that our military-to-military cooperation with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) remains embryonic at best. For example, just as Kim Jong Il was popping his first nuke last summer, the U.S. Navy held its first-ever ship training exercise with a single Chinese naval vessel off the coast of San Diego. Seventeen years after the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen and that’s all we’ve managed.

Meanwhile, we’d love it if Beijing could somehow make Kim go away on its own, instantly shifting that security risk to China. I mean, talk about wanting to go all the way on the first date!

Outside of Asia, strategic risks are shifting against China, especially in the realm of energy security. Americans like to think we’re dependent on foreign oil drawn from unstable regions, but truth be told, we’re not. Roughly 70 percent of our imported oil comes from the Western hemisphere and Europe/Russia, with only 30 percent drawn from Africa and the Middle East (15 percent each), so that gives us a 70/30 split between stable/unstable sources, and those percentages aren’t predicted to change much in the future.

China, on the other hand, faces a riskier import profile over time. Today, China draws just over 40 percent of its imports from the less stable regions of Africa and the Middle East, but according to our Department of Energy, by 2030 that share will rise inexorably to almost 70 percent, making Beijing’s stability profile the mirror image of our own.

So it was no surprise to hear China’s top official on long-range energy planning recently propose that our two nations should come together to jointly explore, produce and—most importantly—protect energy sources in politically unstable regions.

You want China—as the Bush administration has long declared—to become a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs? Well, Beijing just gave you a clear signal about which stakes matter most to China. Are we paying attention or just jerking knees?

When I go to Beijing and brief government and military long-range planners on these concepts, it’s easy to get a lot of warm smiles in reply. Hell, I’m making it sound like America’s got no choice but to partner with China all over these unstable regions. But you want to know how I quickly wipe smiles off those smug faces?

I tell them this: “For now, people inside the gap tend to equate globalization with Americanization, so we’re the bad guys they take hostage and blow up in the name of Allah and drive out of their lands to achieve their dream of civilizational apartheid. But know this, globalization is increasingly taking on a distinctly Asian flavor, with China firmly in the front, giving it a new face. Faster than you realize, you’ll see Chinese being taken hostage, Chinese being blown up, Chinese held up to the camera and having their heads cut off. And it’ll all happen because the radicals and extremists and jihadists and terrorists will inevitably come to this conclusion: the best way to drive off globalization is to drive off those infidel Chinese!”

Works every time.

Why? It’s one of the Chinese leadership’s greatest fears. That’s fundamentally why they keep such an amazingly low profile inside the gap despite the steep rise in their investments, peacekeeper deployments, and energy dependence. For now, America is the only place where fear of globalization equates to fear of China. But soon, that fear will spread to most of the planet, linking our two nations in the temptation common to all great powers: self-loathing.

Stuck in the Middle With Hu—For Now

The good news is, China’s self-limiting lack of self-confidence is going away as Beijing’s bosses experience a much anticipated generational shift from the so-called fourth generation (e.g., President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao) to the far different fifth generation (the equivalent of our late Boomers, or roughly Barack Obama’s cohort born in early 1960s—like me).

China’s leadership generations go like this: Mao Zedong fronted the first generation of revolutionary giants (1949-1976), while the second (through the 1980s) was led by radical reformer Deng Xiaoping, who sent China down the path of markets and thus did more to shape our current world than any leader of the late 20^th century. The third generation, helmed by Jiang Zemin, ruled China across the 1990s and right through 9/11. Jiang’s was the first generation of leaders trained abroad, overwhelmingly in the Soviet Union—birthplace of socialism. This was crucial, because the technocratic tinge of that formative experience made Jiang’s generation confident enough to extend Deng’s reform movement further, creating the “China Inc.” we know and fear today in global business.

The current leaders, known as the fourth generation, did not travel abroad for their education, trapped as they were in the nationwide insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. The result? A careful bunch of homebodies whose foreign policy consists of the soothing slogans (“peacefully rising China,” recently scaled back to “peacefully developing China” lest it seem too confrontational) and whose economic vision has turned increasingly inward to focus on the left-behind rural poor of the interior provinces.

So it’s not too surprising that America hasn’t gotten very far with Beijing recently in any seriously strategic dialogue: our neocons aren’t asking and their fourth-generation leaders aren’t listening. Toss in ever-paranoid Taiwan as the figurative third monkey holding his hands over his eyes (i.e., unable to see future integration with the mainland), and you’ve basically got the entire dysfunctional matched set.

But real change is just around the corner—and I’m not just talking about the 2008 American presidential election.

Next year the Chinese Communist Party will most likely pick from among the fifth generation pool the leaders who will assume the reins officially in 2012 but whose lengthy succession begins rolling out almost immediately. This generation may be known to many of you already, because whether you realize or not, you went to college with many of them in the late 70s and early 80s. So yeah, this crowd does get America. In fact, these guys get globalization better than our current leaders do, because China is so much closer—historically speaking—to the infrastructure build-out process associated with globalization’s Borg-like integration wave.

What’s so amazing about this next generation is how they look at the world: a Kantian naiveté bordering on Thomas Friedman (“Got McDonald’s? You’re in!”). But beyond that wide-eyed optimism there is a growing and rather steely awareness that, as Spiderman’s uncle famously intoned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Having spent days in deep discussion with this crowd, I will tend you what impresses me most about them is their earnestness. They are perceptively shifting—echoing John F. Kennedy’s generational call—from thinking about what the world owes China to what China owes the world.

There’s not a moment to waste.

When I last sat down with PLA strategists, I told them their biggest challenge over the next decade or so is rebranding their military from “revolutionary warrior” to “globalization’s security guard” in support of China’s role as globalization’s general contractor in the great build-out to come. This repositioning of China’s global security profile must be approached carefully, setting up easy wins that mark the PLA as both competent in its execution and trustworthy in its presence—especially in partnership with U.S. military forces. A joint response to Asia’s 2004 Christmas tsunamis would have been a good opportunity. It worked for the Indian Navy, but China’s military was nowhere to be found.

Over time, the Pentagon and the PLA need to prove out this strategic alliance in a series of early-stage engagements—preferably in Africa—that demonstrate how market economies—both old and new—come together to shrink globalization’s gap. Yes, I realize that many in my country consider the cultural and political gaps between America and China to be insurmountable in any time frame worth mentioning, but in my opinion, that Cold War mindset plays into the strategic goals of the global jihadist movement, which wants nothing more than to pit a rising East against an aging West with radical Islam as the great balancer.

I say we deny Osama that dream—as soon as possible.

Rehabilitating failed states is a labor-intensive process, because postwar and post-disaster environments—our most likely traction points—simply demand it. When you have a body requirement, you go to body shops, locating the labor where the problem is.

In the Cold War, our strategic triad consisted of missiles located on land, at sea and in the air. In the long war, many Pentagon planners have taken to describing America’s new strategic triad as the Army, the Marines,and Special Operations Command.

No argument there.

But what I’m telling you is that, on an international scale, we’re looking at a strategic triad consisting of the United States, China, and India—the three million-man militaries out there today (once North Korea is liquidated). This is the sysadmin’s strategic triad that, when backed up by half the world’s economic power come 2026 (according to The Economist), makes the dream of shrinking globalization’s gap entirely feasible.

But, as always, the way ahead is determined by will as much as by wealth, and here is where America’s current leadership vacuum is so damaging. We’re staring at two years of a badly wounded, lame duck presidency suffering the whims of a protectionist, know-nothing, Democrat-led Congress. So waiting on the politicians is not an option. President Hu Jintao’s recent tour of America demonstrated this in spades: the deep warmth on the west coast segueing to the damp cool in the Bush White House.

That’s why business leaders must play a leading role right now in transcending the lack of strategic imagination currently afflicting Washington, first and foremost by framing the subject of China in the already looming 2008 presidential race.

I know my argument will strike many as naïve, but I don’t believe it’s naïve to trust greed over political ideology, either in America or in China. I trust people to be exactly who they are, and I expect the Chinese to remain Chinese.

I also expect greed to drive much of our debates on China here in the States. On one side, we’ll find protectionists and defense hawks offering all arguments imaginable as to China’s “inevitable” threats and treachery. They will seek to make money off your fear—or, in the case of Lou Dobbs, just pump up his ratings. On the other side, we’ll find corporations and investors offering every opposing argument imaginable as to China’s unlimited” potential and market. They will seek to make money off your hope—and your fondness for Wal-Mart’s low prices.

But rest assured, both sides seek to make money off China’s rise. It’s just a question of who cleans up the most. My immediate goal is to see our Army and Marines get the funding they need to survive the challenges of this long war, and so long as China is held up as the holy grail of the “big war” crowd within the Pentagon, that shift in priorities—from smarter weapons to smarter soldiers—will not come about.

My long-term goal is to harness China’s rise for something beyond the final assembly of our low-cost goods. I believe that something is to become the final assembler of low-cost countries, a market niche that sole military superpower America needs desperately filled right now.

America cannot deal with its strategic future until its leaders finally let go of its Cold War past. History will judge us all very harshly for wasting the strategic opportunity staring us in the face.

Blast from my past: "Look Out, World" (2008)

Look Out, World

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Good magazine, Nov-Dec 2008.

Why Vote? Reason 177

You should vote because John McCain and Barack Obama have very different takes on the global mess they'll be inheriting—and what they'd like to do with it.

Despite all the talkabout our troubled economy, this year’s presidential race will still come down to competing visions of the post-9/11 world, and what America needs to do about it. George W. Bush leaves office stunningly unpopular, due overwhelmingly to his schizophrenic foreign policy (six years Hyde, two Jekyll). Given the strong political impetus for change, this election has always been the Democrats’ to lose.

True to form, the Dems have done their best to make it a close vote by nominating an African-American senator with limited national security credentials. But Barack Obama gave them no choice. By redefining the way campaigns are mounted in this networked age, his candidacy has produced the sort of worldwide electricity that most certainly will get him selected as Time’s “person of the year”—if he wins.

In contrast, John McCain’s candidacy has the consistency of comfort food, the underlying personal message seemingly, “I’ve waited long enough.” He is the default candidate—as in, “If you aren’t willing to risk it all on Obama, think about me.” Unlike Obama or Hillary Clinton, voting for McCain as president offers no history-making opportunity, which makes the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate all the more politically clever.  But even with that move—bold or desperate or both—McCain remains an essentially back-to-the-future choice: a pre-boomer for a public fed up with that generation’s do-nothing politics.

Both nominees offer a strongly “realist” perspective on international affairs, with the differences stemming primarily from their generational backgrounds. McCain’s stark realism stems from the Cold War. Ronald Reagan’s personal mystique was largely a fiction of our imagination, but McCain’s legend—the good and the bad—is based on true stories of personal heroism. He lived them all. If you want someone who can recognize human evil and fight it tooth and nail, McCain’s your man.

Obama’s subtle realism emerged from a far different time: the truly tumultuous 1970s, where we first locate much of today’s globalization—energy and food shocks, Middle East conflicts, environmental awareness, global market swings, and transnational terrorism. Befitting those fractured times, Obama’s journey plays out like an ABC “Movie of the Week”: the biracial child who willed himself from a Jakarta grade school to the pinnacle of Harvard Law, landing next on the South Side of Chicago as a community activist who instinctively countered the prevailing counterculture. If you want someone who can recognize global complexity and manage it with confidence and care, Obama’s your man.

Both McCain and Obama represent quintessentially American stories, with their amazing personal trajectories obscuring the underlying political philosophies each brings to a possible administration. Pundits (and Karl Rove) would have you believe that fear alone will settle this election. But the question every voter must answer is not, “Do you fear?” but rather, “What do you fear more?”

Barack Obama will make America smarter about the outside world, and John McCain will make the world smarter about America. And on that score, there are plenty of ways to divvy up the global landscape. Here are ten criteria you can use to compare the candidates and help you break down the basic choices.

Priorities: Where’s the focus? Early last summer, Fortune asked the candidates to lay out the “gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy.” According to the article, Obama didn’t blink: Our energy policy. McCain paused for several long seconds before answering, “Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence.”

Those answers speak volumes about how each senator approaches international affairs. Obama focuses on upstream, big-picture causality (e.g. fix energy and improve everything that follows from it), while McCain gravitates toward more downstream, immediate tangibles (stop the bad guys from doing bad things). So if you want a terrorism-centric foreign policy, McCain is your guy. If you want something broader, Obama makes more sense. With McCain, you’re less likely to experience a security breakdown, but more likely to see a wider array of ongoing problems exacerbated. With Obama, you’re more likely to see more general improvement on a host of issues, but you stand a greater chance of waking up one morning to some nasty surprise. The basic question is, which spooks you more concerning America’s resilience? The perceived steady decline, or the occasional external shock?

ADVANTAGE: The American voter, because there’s a distinct choice.

Who should America seek out as strategic allies? If you think it's the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database.

Allies: How to pick ’n’ save? Here McCain makes a bold call, but an awful one. His proposed League of Democracies—an international alliance of democratic countries—is as close as anyone has come to mindlessly regurgitating Cold War memes. McCain additionally calls for ousting Russia from the G-8 (to be replaced by India), while leaving rising China out in the cold. Here’s why it won’t work: When you tell off both Russia and China, you kill India’s incentives to bind itself to the West. Why would New Delhi pick that fight with two huge neighbors also on the rise? If the Indians wouldn’t make that call during the Cold War, what’s the additional incentive now? Ditto for Brazil, South Africa, and a host of other rising pillars of the southern hemisphere. They’ll simply view McCain’s proposed forum as yet another arena in which the old West gets to boss them around and demand they toe its preferred line.

Here’s a big clue as to whom America should seek out as strategic allies: rising defense budgets, big standing armies, and a willingness to use them in other peoples’ (failed) states. If you think that’s the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database, because in this century, the countries with the most rapidly expanding global economic networks are the ones most incentivized to play—in the manner of the United States—globalization’s bodyguards.

The far more careful and circumspect Obama wins this round hands down. He’ll clearly bring a non-Eurocentric view to global alliances, speaking as he constantly does about the need to integrate a rising Russia, China, and India into our plans. McCain makes similar noises, but all of that is drowned out by his League of Democracies. As his response to the Russia-Georgia conflict amply demonstrated, given the right prompt, he’ll reflexively knee-jerk us into another Cold War standoff at a point when America needs to be stocking up on allies—as immature as they may be—rather than adding more enemies.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, for the sole reason that he’s smart enough not to let Georgia—on its own—declare war between NATO and Russia.

The vision thing: What to expect? You can tell a lot about each candidate’s modus operandi on foreign affairs by the campaigns they’ve built. Obama’s team of 300-or-so advisors is methodically organized, reflecting a corporate ethos that minimizes ego clashes and maximizes on-message delivery. From the experienced Clinton gang, Obama’s managed to attract the very cream of the crop, so expect a well-run State and Defense. Obama’s decision to pick Joe Biden as his running mate only strengthens that.

You should anticipate a far more conservative first term from Obama on national security than Bush’s previous eight years. Obama will seek to carefully unwind America’s tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration’s freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time. Some bad things will definitely happen in the meantime. The potential upside is substantial on restoring America’s good standing around the world.

McCain, on national security, is truly “what you see is what you get.” Despite the hovering from the neocons, McCain will be his own man and run his own foreign policy. Palin as vice president adds nothing to the senator’s well-credentialed resume. Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies; but always entertaining, and full of sharp turns. If he had won it all in 2000, he would have arrived early enough in the rise of Russia, India, China, and Brazil to perhaps have had a serious opportunity to get them in line, especially on the heels of 9/11. But now, trying to ride herd these rising great powers could easily backfire if pursued angrily (remembering the man’s temper), so the downside on McCain could be profound.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because a more conservative—dare I say, humble—American foreign policy is what the world needs now.

Heal the force:  How to repair the U.S. military after Iraq?Here’s where McCain’s unimpeachable credentials in national security and his history as a rice-bowl-breaking maverick could well serve America’s strategic needs. There will be a huge bureaucratic and political impetus to “heal the force” after Iraq, meaning rest the troops (good idea) and resume buying all the same outdated military platforms and weapons systems (a truly bad idea that will leave us as unprepared for the next Iraq as we were for the last one).

McCain is far more likely—believe it or not—to push the necessary changes through a Democratic-controlled Congress, which, in an inevitable “anything but Bush” post-election fit of pique, could easily trash all the good work so far accomplished by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, and many others. Obama, especially since he’ll bring back all the same security players from the Clinton years (who were too deferential to the military), is more likely to pass on that fight in favor of other early possible legislative victories.

The fly in the ointment? McCain’s bevy of neocon advisors, armed with that League of Democracies notion, might just as easily try to have their cake (Cold War Leviathan force) and eat it too (continue to engage in plenty of post-9/11-style small wars). That would, indeed, look like a third Bush administration.

ADVANTAGE: Definitely the maverick McCain, but only so long as Father Time doesn’t toss the presidency—in the form of Sarah Palin—back to the neocons.

Globalization: America’s new bogeyman, or its logical cause célèbre? Despite the trade-protectionist leanings Obama put on display for the primaries, where his proposal to renegotiate NAFTA was particularly egregious, he has assembled a nice collection of Clintonian economic advisers. Plus, Obama’s more holistic approach to national security is less likely to get America trapped in useless overseas adventures and more likely to make him sensitive to the needs of emerging and developing economies. Obama will never match Clinton’s zeal, but he’s unlikely to screw up globalization’s continued advance.

McCain’s senate record indicates a fierce free-trade stance. And since a Democratic-controlled Congress could easily engage in all manner of trade protectionism, especially vis-à-vis China and recently re-demonized Russia, having a Republican in the White House makes a lot of sense if you don’t like that sort of thing. The problem would be—again—McCain’s penchant to pick unnecessary fights with globalization’s rising economic pillars, too few of which will qualify for his democracies-only club.

Then there’s the larger reality that globalization faces a populist headwind that is likely to pick up dramatically in coming years. A stubborn McCain, as correct as his economic instincts may be, could easily find his politics out of synch with global trends, resulting in stalemated trade negotiations overseas and deadlocked legislation back home.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because he’ll guarantee half-a-loaf outcomes on most issues and could spark the necessary shift to progressivism that globalization desperately needs.

Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies.

Climate change: The end of the world as we know it? Climate change is becoming a dominant global narrative, one that indirectly challenges globalization’s advance by casting doubt on whether developing nations can emerge as the West once did. The brutal truth is they can’t, but not simply due to climate change. There are a host of more immediate reasons (air pollution, supply constraints) that speak to humanity’s need to move beyond oil and any number of self-limiting industrial-age technologies. Because America remains the world’s single biggest national market (meaning we control a lot of demand), we must either lead or eventually get out of China and India’s way.

Both Obama and McCain seem to understand the larger competitive challenge framed by global warming, which isn’t surprising because both are problem-solvers at heart. Given today’s political landscape, both are selling the chimera of national energy independence (a dubious economic goal), linking it to job creation in the high-tech “green” sector. Usually, it’s safer to go with the Republican candidate when it comes to promoting entrepreneurs and innovation, so a slight edge to McCain on that score. But since any response to climate change will entail some serious cooperation with emerging economies on their infrastructure development, and with vulnerable developing economies on the aid-related subjects of food security and disease control, Obama’s “dignity” agenda tops McCain’s focus on demanding democracy.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Let’s stipulate that both candidates will move the ball forward significantly.

Iraq: When do we wrap up? The Iraq “war,” or whatever you want to call it, is clearly a moving target, meaning where Iraq was at the beginning of these campaigns—when positions were initially articulated—and where it is today, are two vastly different things. The criticism now focuses primarily on the high cost involved.

McCain gets credit for advocating the surge and the associated counterinsurgency strategy, two much-needed changes on which the Bush administration wasted many months—and lives—before adopting. Basic lesson? When McCain makes a decision, he follows it through to the end, eagerly seeking out new solutions to persistent problems.

But for those who objected to the war, Obama also gets credit for opposing the invasion from the start. As for opposing the surge, Obama now appears less flexible than McCain in admitting his party’s past mistakes and moving on to better solutions.

In political terms, the problem McCain faces is that improvements in Iraq favor all the positions Obama has long advocated. So again, we see the essential difference emerge. McCain’s approach has the value of concentrated effort, but suffers the dynamic of “one damn thing after another,” meaning: Just after you fix one thing, you’re on to the next. Obama is less likely to suffer big losses in any single situation, but he’s also less likely to score any big wins.

As for wrapping up America’s combat involvement in Iraq, the differences between the two candidates have narrowed dramatically: Obama calls for a withdrawal of combat troops by 2010, while McCain targets 2012. The major difference concerns the pace of withdrawal: Obama says the Iraqi government should decide; McCain says our generals should decide. In reality, it’ll be our generals right up to the point when the Iraqis decide for themselves. This “war” stopped being America’s to “win” or “end” a long time ago—to wit, Iraq’s government wants us gone by 2011.

ADVANTAGE: Obviously McCain, because of his courageous call on the surge.

Afghanistan and Pakistan: How do we ramp up? Obama has made some hawkish statements about taking the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban directly into Pakistan. Much like McCain’s tough talk regarding Iran’s involvement in Iraq, such statements should be taken with a grain of salt. Pakistan, like Iran, is a far bigger and more potent entity than its troubled neighbor, and possesses considerable leverage on its own. With Pervez Musharraf gone from power, expect even more autonomy from an Islamabad intent on showing it’s no U.S. puppet.

When George W. Bush redirected the war on terror in 2003 from Afghanistan to Iraq, that was a radical move. Today’s radical move would involve rapidly re-directing U.S. military efforts back toward Afghanistan, thus accelerating Iraq’s movement toward policing its territory and handling its neighbors largely on its own. In asserting that Iraq will remain the central issue for the next president, McCain actually stakes out the more conservative position here, whereas Obama now advocates a more aggressive line.

Odds are good that Afghanistan will once again become the central front in the war on terror early in the next president’s term, and that some modest troop surge will accompany a revamped counterinsurgency strategy that takes on many of the same characteristics of what worked in Iraq.

Attempts by the competing campaigns to portray either Iraq or Afghanistan as the “good war” are largely rhetorical at this point. Events on the ground appear to be driving this re-direct in operational focus, and both candidates advocate the same basic ramp-up in U.S. capabilities and resources.

ADVANTAGE: McCain, because you have to go with experience on this potential quagmire.

Obama will seek to carefully unwind America's tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration's freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time.

Iran: How far do we go? Here McCain advocates a hard line strikingly evocative of George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq: prevent a regime that sponsors transnational terrorism from achieving weapons of mass destruction. Obama, in contrast, advocates a more direct diplomatic approach aimed at revamping U.S.-Iranian relations as a whole. How you judge the validity of their approaches depends on your perception of the threat.

If you trust the long and varied history of strategic nuclear deterrence, then you’re probably of the opinion that the Shia bomb (Iran) won’t be any more usable than the Jewish (Israel), Sunni (Pakistan), Hindu (Indian), Confucian (Chinese), or Christian (the rest) bombs, especially since Israel very likely possesses at least 200 deliverable nuclear warheads. And if you’re familiar with the history of nuclear proliferation, you’ll know that declared nuclear powers tend to be extremely careful with the technology, whereas undeclared powers (e.g., Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, South Africa) have been known to share. So the real question is, Do you think Tehran is crazy enough to give either Hezbollah or Hamas a nuke? And if there’s even a scintilla of chance there, should America pre-emptively strike, or instead aggressively seek some détente with Iran?  In other words, is it time for Dr. Strangelove to step up, or should “Nixon” finally go to Tehran?

Iran, of course, complicates the matter by in effect saying, “You know we’ve already got the ‘guns’ [i.e. missiles] and are cranking out ‘gunpowder’ [i.e. uranium], but since we’re not manufacturing any ‘bullets’ [i.e. warheads], you can’t actually prove anything—or ever be quite sure how close we’ve come to putting it all together.” Couple that stance with Ahmadinejad’s frequent verbal threats concerning Israel’s right to exist and there are plenty of grounds for both McCain’s calculated threats and Obama’s calculated engagement.

But if a conventional bombing campaign could assuredly take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, chances are the Bush administration would have pulled that trigger by now; and if not the Bush administration, then certainly Israel. If neither could see its way to launching a strike by the end of the Bush administration’s second term, then it’s highly unlikely that such a campaign—absent full-out invasion and occupation—will ever make sense. In short, we’d have to go nuclear to stop Tehran from getting nuclear.

If that strategic logic and historical record ring true to you, then you definitely want Obama in the White House, because McCain could well launch us into a war with Iran. If you consider that pathway inevitable, then McCain’s the better choice, along with a strategic missile defense that—despite all the failures up to now—finally works as promised.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Totally depends on your worldview, unless you’re committed to granting Israel a zero deductible on America’s nuclear umbrella insurance policy.

The war on terror: Remember that? It must seem odd that, seven years into this war on terror, al Qaeda itself seems like such a strategic afterthought. Part of this is due to the Bush administration’s real success in disrupting al Qaeda’s global networks.

But it’s also due to al Qaeda choosing to become less operationally focused and evolving into more of a worldwide anti-American/Western branding mechanism—sort of a Jihadis-R-Us. Sad to say, this is probably as close to “victory” as we’ll come for the foreseeable future because, cynically speaking, transnational terrorists are a useful bogeyman for a networked age.

As somebody who’s worked in national security affairs for close to two decades, I’ll tell you that as far as anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism are concerned, it won’t matter much who gets elected president. The U.S. government possessed such a security community prior to 9/11, and that community got a whole lot bigger after 9/11. Today, that community operates like any sizeable and widely distributed bureaucracy: just well enough not to fail spectacularly, but nowhere near well enough to succeed spectacularly.

So in regards to the candidates, frankly, it’s a coin toss. Obama would present a more conciliatory face, which can invite more aggression or subdue it. McCain would present a less compromising face, which can accomplish the same. Both will promise and likely achieve somewhat more secure borders, and any new management might inject the Department of Homeland Security with more purpose and better execution, but expect the world to continue appearing more dangerous over time (God bless our sensational media) while actually becoming more secure. And if it makes you feel any better, just go on believing that Washington really runs America and that America really runs the world.

ADVANTAGE: Draw. This leaves the final count tied at 3 apiece, with 4 toss-ups. Expect another tantalizingly close vote.

Koreas post at Esquire's The Politics Blog picked up by . . .

Sullivan's Daily Dish and The Week's round-up, where the post was named "best opinion" along with Instapundit and National Journal.  Also Time.com (Swampland's Mark Thompson).

Right to my point about inviting the Chinese to the next naval ex we do with South Korea:  it's announced we're doing one ASAP and sending a carrier.  Meanwhile, everybody moans we have no good options.

So where is the danger in reaching out boldly to China to participate?

Background slides re: grand bargain proposal

Drew these up as a way of putting my head in the right space before we attempted the first drafts of the proposal.

Esquire's Politics Blog: 5 Ways the U.S. Can Fend Off the Next Korean War

Well North Korea seems determined to stay on the front pages this month, having very proudly unveiled to a visiting American scientist a couple of weeks ago the existence of yet another uranium-enrichment facility (yes, it's apparently state-of-the-art and, yes, we already knew about it) and then launching an artillery barrage on Tuesday in self-declared retaliation for an apparently routine South Korea military exercise along the border. While it's tempting to write this off as just the latest shenanigans from Pyongyang designed to keep us on our toes, understand that virtually every all-out war scenario on the peninsula begins with a North Korean artillery barrage, so South Korea's decision to retaliate is no small matter.

Before this thing get out of hand too quickly, here's how the Obama administration can keep our already oversubscribed military away from another Axis of Evil war.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

 

New China-U.S. grand strategy proposal, as published in People's Daily Online

The Center for America China Partnership, Barnett Consulting LLP and leading  Chinese policy experts have been spent the past few weeks preparing a China-US Grand Strategy Proposal that was published on People's Daily Online yesterday, 22 Nov 2010. 

I will be in Beijing participating in meetings with Chinese government decision-makers and business- and thought-leaders regarding the proposal and other issues from December 3-13.

My next WPR column will offer my take on the piece, a bit more backstory, and plumb the same basic trade-offs. 

My point in this exercise: I wanted to explore what a serious and ambitious rebalancing of the U.S.-China relationship would logically entail.  Where would be the compromises?  What would constitute the breakthroughs?  

The full text:

Here is the package of arrangements in a new China-U.S. grand strategy implementing essential bilateral and multilateral breakthroughs, which current policies, proposals and ad hoc arrangements cannot create. 

When agreed upon by the presidents of both nations through an "executive agreement" not subject to U.S. Senate ratification, it will promote U.S. economic recovery, increase U.S. exports to China, create 12 million US jobs, balance China-US trade as well as reduce U.S. government deficits and debt. Furthermore, it will stabilize the U.S. dollar, global currency and bond markets. It will also enable reform of international institutions, cooperative climate change remediation, international trade, global security breakthroughs as well as facilitate the economic progress of developed and developing economies, the stabilization and rebuilding of failed states and security of sea transport. 

The essence of the grand strategy is that the United States and China will balance their bilateral trade and never go to war with each other, and the US will refrain from seeking regime change and interference in China's internal affairs with regard to Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, the Internet, human rights etc. and China will continue its political, legal, economic and human rights reforms.

The Taiwan situation will be demilitarized by an informal U.S. presidential moratorium on arms transfers to Taiwan, China's reduction of strike forces arrayed against it, a reduction of U.S. strike forces arrayed against China and ongoing joint peacekeeping exercises by U.S., Chinese and Taiwan militaries.

The strategic uncertainty surrounding nuclear program in Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) will be de-escalated by the U.S. eschewing DPRK regime change goals and China ensuring that DPRK adopt policies along the lines of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms and terminate its nuclear weapons program. China, U.S., South Korean and other military forces will together ensure maritime safety in the Yellow Sea.

The U.S. and its allies will not attack, invade or seek regime change and eliminate trade restrictions and promote trade with Iran. China will ensure Iran suspends development of nuclear weapons.

China will negotiate the eventual resolution of sovereignty disputes on the basis of the ASEAN Code of Conduct and propose and substantially invest in a new South China Sea Regional Development Corporation in which its neighbors Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam are shareholders.

The United States and China will harmonize and coordinate their roles in Asian Economic and Regional Security and relations with Asian nations to ensure the peaceful coexistence and the economic stability and growth of ASEAN nations in their bilateral and multilateral relations and roles in ASEAN, APEC, etc.

The United States and China will hold regular joint naval exercises in Asian waters, with rotating invitations to other regional navies; have permanent officer-exchange programs and create a joint peacekeeping force and command; establish a joint commission collaborating constantly on U.S. and PRC technology sharing and budget expenditures; and participate in a Peacekeeping Administrative System in which the U.N. Security Council functions like a prosecutor indicting individuals and nations violating the UN Charter, the United States and other U.N. members act as sheriff, and United States, China and other U.N. members provide economic and national security-building resources.

The annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue will become a permanently sitting commission for ongoing senior-level communications and collaboration bilaterally and multilaterally on implementing principles in the Preamble, Article 1, and other articles of the U.N. Charter. It will also focus on the rehabilitation of failing and failed states as well as the coordination of U.S. and Chinese technology and financing to ensure technologies needed for rapid and effective pollution remediation are affordable and to promote the development and financing of sustainable energy and globally needed green and other technologies. 

The strategic dialogues will also center on the procurement of other resources in order to ensure global economic growth and security and will pay close attention to economic and peacekeeping issues, including reform and innovations at the United Nations, climate change negotiations, IMF, World Bank, WTO, G 20, Doha Agreement etc. and joint space exploration with other U.N. members. The Strategic and Economic Dialogue Commission will review all existing tariffs, WTO complaints and other trade and economic disputes and issues. The United States and China will collaborate in the Strategic and Economic Dialogues Commission to ensure full attainment of job creation and employment and regional development goals throughout the United States and China in areas suffering from unemployment or needing special economic growth arrangements.

China will invest up to 1 trillion U.S. dollars at the request of the U.S. President to implement the following package of new economic and business relations. The U.S. will lift export bans on high technology put in place on the assumption of possible military conflict with China. China will purchase sufficient U.S. goods and services to balance trade each year in exchange for providing U.S. American companies access to the Chinese market equal to the access that Chinese companies enjoy on the U.S. market. 

The U.S. and China will encourage global joint ventures between U.S. and Chinese companies. An initial example of this will involve General Motors, which is currently 61 percent owned by the U.S. government. On a case-by-case basis, ownership limits for new investments by Chinese companies in American-owned or controlled corporations will be no more than 45 percent of each company's shares. Another 45 percent will remain with non-Chinese shareholders, and 10 percent will be reserved for U.S., Chinese and other nations' pension funds and other long-term investors. Similarly, the ownership limit for new U.S. companies' investments in China will be 45 percent with 45 percent remaining with Chinese ownership and 10 percent reserved for U.S., Chinese and other nations' pension funds and long-term investors. 

Nothing in this grand strategy constitutes, is intended to nor permits the creation or operation of a "G2," nor creates an alliance between the United States and China, nor does it replace U.S. alliances. Everything in the grand strategy creates an improved framework for collaboration among the US, China and other United Nation members and facilitates the U.S. and China and all other nations' economic and national security being aligned pursuant to the Preamble and Article I and other Articles of the U.N. Charter. The agreement and implementation of this new grand strategy will immediately and sustainably reset the global economy and increase the economic, national security and progress of all nations, which is urgently required to prevent the global financial and resulting plethora of economic and national security crises from continuing to destabilize all nations. 

This grand strategy proposal was created in a collaboration of John Milligan-Whyte and Dai Min, authors of China and America's Leadership in Peaceful Coexistence: China-US Relations in the Obama Administration: Facing Shared Challenges and other seven books in the America China Partnership Book Series, and Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, and Blueprint For Action: A Future Worth Creating and America and The World After Bush, and leading Chinese policy experts.

The articles in this column represent the author's views only. They do not represent opinions of People's Daily or People's Daily Online.

WPR's The New Rules: The End of the U.S. Security Backstop

The global financial crisis was a true system perturbation, revealing the gap between widely perceived risk and actual underlying risk in the world's increasingly integrated financial system. As with any such vertical shock, the resulting horizontal waves continue to be felt long after the initial blow. When gaps in capabilities and rule-sets were subsequently discovered, the world's major economies effected changes, like shifting economic oversight from the G-7 to the expanded G-20 and updating the Basel banking accord. In a world without true global government, these surges of great-power cooperation constitute a critical reassurance function, letting us know that an international commitment, however vague and informal, exists to backstop each nation's individual backstops already in place.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Movie of My Week: "The Ghost Writer" (2010)

From IMDb:

A ghostwriter hired to complete the memoirs of a former British prime minister uncovers secrets that put his own life in jeopardy.

I didn't know anything about this movie beforehand other than Ewan McGregor was in it, along with Pierce Brosnan playing a Tony Blair-like Brit PM just out of power.  Ewan gets hired to ghost his memoirs.  

Oh, and Olivia Williams plays his scheming wife.  I've always had a thing for her because she reminds me so much of Vonne.

Cool cameos by Jim Belushi and Timothy Hutton--both spot on.  Great role with Kim Cattrall doing a great Brit accent.  Wee bit of Eli Wallach to boot, and Tim Wilkinson in a pivotal scene. My goodness, what not to like?

It's a political thriller, of course, but frankly, what really sells this whole movie for me is the scenery!  It takes place on this coolest Mass coast island (Vineyard?) venue with a beach house I would kill for.  

Plus, it's about a writer and all that, and it's got all the requisite tension, thanks to great direction from Roman Polanski (I kept saying to myself while I watched, this is like somebody channeling Polanski and then his name came up on credit!).  Fun for me, because I was actually approached a while back to consider doing this for somebody of that type.

But again, it was the scenery and the house and that whole nasty, dark, windy beach vibe that had me enthralled.  I just wanted to walk onto the screen and live there.  Truly, I would consider it a dream retirement situation.  I love nothing better than walks on the beech along New England's coast during the winter, and I would gladly leave the mainland for an island situation like that, having loved living on Aquidneck Island so much.

I would even write somebody else's life story to make it happen.

Anyway, great movie.  Really top notch and pretty to watch from beginning to end.

AFRICOM swapped in for JFCOM?

In Great Powers, I wrote about making AFRICOM's headquarters in Virginia because I thought it would make sense, given the "3D" goals (the merging of defense, diplomacy and development) being pioneered there, that it shouldn't be overseas but close enough for the home bases of those agencies/departments to be able to reach out to each other more easily.

Well, Jim Webb, Senator from Virginia (or Norfolk in this instance) is now pushing hard to get AFRICOM to settle its new headquarters down there to fill in for the departing Joint Forces Command. 

I had imagined more Northern VA, but I think it's a good idea. Virginia is a big military state and it's on the right U.S. coast as far as Africa is concerned.  As I noted in the book, every US combatant command is now located in the U.S. except for European Command.  AFRICOM has been bunking there because, before its creation, EUCOM owned almost all of Africa, with the Horn going to CENTCOM.  I don't ever see EUCOM coming home because of the NATO bond and the sheer size of Stuttgart Air Force Base Ramstein and other legacy facilities, but I have to support Webb on this one.  Norfolk deserves some relief, it's a good spot for AFRICOM, and AFRICOM really shouldn't (and won't) be located anywhere in Africa.  It's a SOUTHCOM-like, very SysAdmin'y command and should stay that way.

Having said all that, see some excellent countering points (e.g., time zone, air connectivity) below in a comment from a person who works at AFRICOM.  Having flown now to Africa a bunch of time through Germany, I yield somewhat to this guy's practical logic.

But that NVA congressional delegation is powerful when it comes to national security .  .  ..

The Politics Blog: America in Yemen: The Perfect War We've Been Waiting for?

Before the ink could dry, it seemed like the secret war had already begun. Just a couple of toner cartridges haplessly headed for American synagogues, and suddenly the headlines are shouting it: TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT YEMEN and OUR INVOLVEMENT IS GOING TO HAVE TO BE LONG-TERM. I suppose that's what it's come to in this country these days — that, as soon as an obscure Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen claims responsibility for some UPS packages in Chicago, Americans assume we have another all-encompassing, mega-expensive affair on our not-so-bloody hands. Because when it comes to nation-building, the United States doesn't do anything small and beautiful anymore.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Strange Days (follow up)

Good comments below, triggering this follow-up

I don't argue for not having a strong military and I don't argue for pulling out of regions in terms of bases, even as I want them to shrink in size (more ATMs, less branches).  But I think the passive-aggressive hedge (I'm keeping an eye on you, buster, don't think of making a wrong move in your neighborhood, because here I am, ready to lay down my law!  Oh, and by the way, if you're willing to be my junior partner on all things, I might have a spot for you in my posse.) is counterproductive and oddly detached from the larger economic reality.

So I'd use my force to embrace China security-wise as quickly and as broadly as possible.  I lose nothing in doing this--capabilities wise, and gain a ton of transparency on their side.  I don't pretend that cooperating with them gets me everything I want on every security situation on the planet where our interests collide/overlap. I expect to bargain on all of it if I want the Chinese to truly be my ally.  

So I get off my f--king high horse and extend a hand, choosing to accept satisfycing answers more often than I-get-my-way outcomes.  To me, that's realism, while this I'm-going-to-manage-the-entire-security/democracy-world-agenda-on-my-terms-while-expecting-to-bully-people-on-economics-and-pretend-I-get-to-yea-or-nay-on-great-powers-like-China-rising is just nuts.

Our definition of a "responsible stakeholder" is "do everything the way I want it and THEN you can be my friend!"  That's not how you treat an ally; that's how you treat a dog.  If we have FDR today, he'd deal and he'd deal with confidence.  That guy believed in his system, and had no fears dealing with authoritarian regimes. But we don't have any FDRs today.  Reagan and Clinton were the last, it seems:  guys who knew how to cut deals, compromise, move the ball--with confidence in their country and its future.  Now we have such little people with little minds (yeah, Bloomberg said it and I repeat it!).  We bluster and we strut and we're being ignored more and more--a trend I trace back to the beginning of W's 2nd term (Katrina proves we can't nation-build abroad or at home).  

Obama made everybody like us for a bit, but the realization abroad takes hold again relatively quickly, thanks to the global recession:  we are not serious about dealing with our own problems and hence we're not willing to make deals, so we are not to be taken seriously.  Obama on Afghanistan is proof positive (Get the Russians in there! Get China in there!  Get India in there!  Get Turkey in there!  Even get Iran in there!  Cut the deals and stop running to NATO for permission!), so is the goofy nuclear-free-world nonsense.  He keeps trying to recast the problem so it seems like we're being flexible while, foreign policy-wise, he's just as rigid and unimaginative as Bush and the neocons were.  This is not community consensus building here, this is deal-making--real politics.

So yeah, I cut the deals to lock in China at today's prices (higher than in 2005, when I first proposed, but there you have it). And then I'd make other breakthroughs possible on diplomacy and economics, like attracting a good-sized chunk of that money they've accumulated to revitalize myself.

Oooh! You'd say. Taking money from our betters?  We took money, and lots of it from the Brits after two wars with them. We went a long way to making China what it is today by encouraging its return to the world and encouraging and enabling and accepting its export-driven rise (allowing them to do to us what Japan and South Korea did before), so I have zero problems tapping their reserves to rebalance the global economy directly by revitalizing my economy.

Plus, long term I love my country's chances and find China's kinda scary by comparison, so no, I'm not threatened by an even closer economic embrace.  I know exactly what America is capable of, and I trust in our resilience completely. I'm just being uber-realistic here on what "rebalancing" really means, where I think a lot of people are not being realistic whatsoever (just cut taxes and we're home free!).

So when we do this passive-aggressive hedge, we not only threaten our banker, we threaten the key investor source going forward, and that's just not thinking in a grand strategic way (which most dumbass types think means thinking ahead about possible wars and possible opponents and little else), even as it may make sense from national security's narrow perspective.

But again, if you want to think truly strategically, it's thinking about war but only within the context of everything else--which is looming large right now.

Super-empowering effort: finishing the Technology Trends page on the Wikistrat model

Sweet mother of God what an effort!  Worst case on the previous ones (Political, Security, Social-Demographics, Sustainability) were two days (working DEEP into the night), but this one took three days when all said and done. Naturally came in "heaviest" at 5700-words (norm is 5200).  

Why such a challenge?  I'm not a hard scientist nor technologist. My interests lie primarily with how technology can send the planet down this path or that.  So I had to spend a lot more time thinking about my "six packs" (major trends and major forecasts and the 2 risks = 2 opportunities + 2 dependencies).  No attempt to cover the vast universe of technology, just trying to pick out the quarterback, left offensive tackle, number one receiver, strong outside linebacker, cover cornerback and free safety (yes, I have a West Coast bias after all these years)--you know, the key players that determine the team's overall prospects, or the ones you hope are all All-Pro caliber (as Rodgers, Clifton, Jennings, Matthews, Woodson and Collins all are!).  

Then there was this weird challenge of capturing regional trends. How in God's name do you do that? Well, you read a lot of UN reports that track things like R&D spending as percent of GDP, world share in scientific papers, innovation rankings, levels of communications network penetration, patents, and so on.  And what you discover is that educational systems and business risk-tolerance mean all, but connectivity is fast relieving the extreme imbalance (Core is responsible for 95% of all technology/science/innovation, while one-third-of-humanity that is Gap is basically half-Israel and everybody else).  

Then there's the drill down on individual countries, like what's up with technology in Turkey today?  Turns out there's a UN report with a chapter on Turkey.  Here you notice things like Iran could be Turkey overnight if . . . the place wasn't run so badly.

I have to admit, despite the teeth-pulling nature of the effort, it was a lot of fun to investigate and write.  I now feel myself to be superempowered on technology trends, like I just woofed down a Powerbar and a venti Latte!  I know I didn't get every tiny detail/interpretation right, but that's the beauty of the collaborative, online wiki-based venue: corrections and adjustments and expansions will be forthcoming from all the best kind of appropriate thinkers.  

More broadly, the whole point of this exercise is to create an intellectual, collaborative space where people truly interested in thinking systematically about the future are forced/encouraged by the horizontal layout to do so, and not just jump - day-in and day-out - along that one-damn-thing-after-another stream-of-MSM-stories consciousness, where your biases tend to crowd out what should be your analysis because there's too much to wade through and you lack the larger framework for assembling all the pieces.  

Left to your own devices, you're John Nash frantically stringing yarn between stories stapled to your shed wall and babbling to yourself about how it all comes together.

Or you walk yourself out of that shed, log on to Wikistrat, and join the party.

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to think systematically about the world and its future as one big interlocking puzzle.  I mean, I spend TIME!  I can't help it; it's just how my mind thinks - as in, my first thoughts in the morning and my last ones as I drift off to sleep.  I even dream this stuff - and enjoy doing so.

But even here on the blog, with all my central data-system managing efforts, I'm constantly reduced to searching my online brain - frantically - on a regular basis to try and remember what it was that I came across that triggered this inter-connecting thought.  Simply put, the diary doesn't do it.  

But Wikistrat's model strikes me as excitingly close to the ideal: it's like this ultimately scalable space of whiteboards where I can draw out, in infinitely connecting expressions, my host of global/regional/national/sub & transnational scenarios and keep them updated, the sum intellectual effect of which is that I'm constantly prompted to think not just systematically across time but systematically across domains - i.e., not just go long but go wide.  

And I'm finding that a very pleasant sensation, like I'm working out daily and my muscle mass is building.

Yes I know this exclamation is self-serving, but as someone who's into his creativity above all else, this is what lights my engine.

Strange days

Economist cover story on coming wave of Chinese takeovers.

As the chart shows, China's outward stock of FDI (accumulated overseas foreign direct investment) remains low, by historical standards.  But since it's got the money, it's naturally going to rise.

Fascinating really:  you can see the decline of the British empire, then the US stepping in to fund so much of the world post-WWII, and then our own progressive decline as the rest of the West recovered, then Japan rose (and fell), and now China rises.  Naturally, some will wish to make the comparison of the decline of the US "empire" with that of the Brits', but our system was never set up to maintain dominance.  It was set up to encourage the rise of others peacefully, which it's done (65 years of no great power war and counting, the biggest increase in human wealth/income ever seen, billions avoid poverty).  The world simply couldn't handle the rise of great powers--until we came along and forced a system that could. It is, without doubt, the greatest accomplishment of any great power in human history.

But with our success comes adjustment, especially since, in our most recent decades of encouraging globalization's rise, we got addicted to the cheap money mindset afforded us by having the world's reserve currency.  Again, granted, the rise of so many powers simultaneously in Asia is a huge accomplishment, but now we seem intent on turning that wonderful thing into something dangerous--dangerous enough to torpedo the system.

And we're alone in this quest.  NATO's new strategic concept, as summed up beautifully by The Economist, is to expect "fewer dragons, more snakes."  But we seem to reverse that equation, at least in our AirSea Battle power-projection forces (Navy, Air Force).  I realize we've been Leviathan for a long time, but we're setting ourselves up for hedging/containment/struggle with our bankers--truly an awkward choice.  

And we're sending these tough signals at a time when it's clear, if we're going to tap inbound FDI in coming years, we best figure out how to accept it from China, lest we go into a funk that calls into question all manner of met responsibilities around the world.  

China is most definitely cheating its way to the top, just like we did in the 19th century, and more recently in the obviously mercantilist rise of both Japan and South Korea.  We imagine them cheating their way right past us, but, as history has shown, it's one thing to dig stuff out of the ground, make steel and then build buildings and infrastructure, but it's quite another thing to dominant innovation-based industries.

China has its way of taking over Western companies, and the flavoring smells of all sorts of legacy communist mindset (meaning, state in charge), but what is the great success rate here? Not as high as imagined.  They have no secret capabilities, just secret plans they imagine are unique and unfathomable. They are neither.  

The more China reaches out and tries to own, the more it will become subject to global rules, just like any other firm that operates effectively.  If China chooses politics over efficiency, its "reign" will be historically short, and its vast pool of money mostly wasted.  

We can pull for such an outcome--most definitely.  But it's a cutting-off-our-noses-to-spite-our-face logic.  We can benefit from China's money.  Indeed, it seems hard to imagine our recovery without further integration with those to whom we've sent so much money, thanks to our deficit spending.  It will not be an easy path. We'll be working out this clash of cultures mentally in movies, TV and books for years to come, just like we did with the great Japanese "threat" that preceded. The only real difference here is size--as in China's market and wealth and our responsibilities and debts.  

So no, at this time in history and globalization's evolution, I wouldn't be arguing for the U.S. to be planning and preparing openly for war with China (how else do you describe the AirSea Battle Concept?), no matter how carefully I hedged my language. Everybody knows what we're capable of, and that we have the only great-power military in the world with any sort of hardcore recent combat experience (and lots of it). By doing this, we invite uncertainty at unacceptable levels and risk China's long-term effort to shut us out of Asia defensively, because, yeah, a rising power of that size and strength deserves its place in the world--not merely the small space in its own region that we offer it. Did Britain have military bases surrounding the U.S. during it's rise in the late 19th century?  Did it constantly get up into our grill?  No, it was more sensible than that and we should be too.

China's integration into the global economy enters a whole new phase now. We can accept that and seek to shape it--hopefully to our own short-term economic advantage, or we can play long-term blocker, and watch the money and the relationships go elsewhere.  

Europe isn't preparing for war with China, but we are.

China taking big step into the normal world

As someone who spent his youth studying communist systems, this is a big deal that popped out at me yesterday in the FT.  For all the chatter about the PLA getting more bold, etc., this says they just lost out on a major point of internal control.  The winners?  Western businesses that get in, Chinese businesses and wealthy who can now take advantage, and frankly, the Chinese people in general because this says China is becoming that much more like everybody else on a mundane subject that nonetheless has long been a source of huge anxiety/security for the military.

China is opening up its airspace to small commercial and private aircraft:

China plans to open its airspace below 4,000 metres to civilian aircraft, a decision that is likely to open up one of the world’s largest untapped markets for corporate and other private aviation.

The Central Military Commission – the supreme institution governing the People’s Liberation Army – and the state council, China’s cabinet, said in a policy paper that low altitude airspace would be gradually opened to private aircraft, according to people who have seen the document and reports posted on the websites of the defence ministry and the state council.

Helicopters and light aircraft are virtually absent from Chinese skies because of extremely tight military control over all airspace and restrictive regulations that require all private aircraft flights to be approved in advance by military and civil aviation authorities, which can take weeks or longer.

“Right now it is basically impossible to use general aviation aircraft in China and some aircraft owners are already pushing the envelope by flying without permission,” said Jason Liao, chairman and chief executive of China Business Aviation Group, who has been lobbying for the past decade to get Beijing to open China’s lower altitude airspace.

“This is a huge step for China and almost certainly means the country will eventually become the second-largest market in the world for general aviation aircraft like helicopters and turboprop aircraft [after the US].”

At present the PLA has the final say over the use of China’s airspace and often schedules air drills and weapons tests at short notice, severely disrupting commercial aviation operations and exacerbating the country’s chronic flight delays.

According to the policy paper any aircraft flying at 1,000m or lower will be able to take off and fly without any prior approval or paperwork.

And you thought only billionaire Bruce Wayne could fly his planes over China without prior approval!

Really a big deal, of course, for the industry, but - again - a very positive sign of China opening up and trusting its public and its own secure standing in the world a lot more.

And what will be ever cooler to watch is how the Chinese, with their new found wealth, will go after new ideas, like maybe this flying-street-legal car from Terrafugia:

That's a core concept of mine, the old New Core sets the New Rules.  China is still very frontier in a lot of economic ways.  Biases aren't yet established, so the wild-and-wooly that might not fly in the U.S. for this or that reason, could break through that much faster over there, because China's got that brave new world vibe going on.  So I could easily imagine the right rich Chinese industrialist saying to himself, "I've gotta have that flying car!" and booyah!  All of a sudden there's a market that over times doubles back this way, making the idea that much more believable/acceptable in our market. 

We've been THAT market for the world for so long that we'll really be shocked by somebody else stepping in and playing that role more and more.  Japan's been that country for us a little bit in certain technologies, but China is going to play that role big time, if for no other reason that it's undergoing such explosive urbanization, building something like cities for half a billion people in an historical blink of an eye.  When you're doing that much from scratch, you set the new rules, the new standards, the new tastes, the new technologies, the new breakthroughs, the new everything.  

This isn't just an opportunity for Western firms to make money, this is a chance for America to learn something at a point when we need new ideas, new competition in such thinking, and new spurs to our own inestimable ability to reinvent ourselves.

WPR's The New Rules: Globalization's Massive Demographic Bet

By calling the Chinese out explicitly on their currency manipulation in his concluding address to the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama may have torpedoed his relationship with Beijing for the remainder of what China's bosses most certainly now hope is his first and only term. Burdened by a Republican-controlled, Tea Party-infused House, and bathed in hypocrisy thanks to the Fed's own, just-announced currency manipulation (aka, QE2), Obama seems not to recognize either the gravity of his nation's long-term economic situation or the degree to which his own political fate now hinges on his administration's increasingly stormy ties with China. 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.