Connecting Africa's middle to the coast

Nifty WSJ piece from the 21st.

A standard bit in my Wikistrat's "World According to Tom Barnett" brief: the reality that, as globalization penetrates Africa, a certain political fracturing is inevitable (and not necessarily bad if handled well). How it gets handled well: an overarching effort at regional economic integration so that, when such fracturing happens, it doesn't go zero-sum because everyone is sensing the larger economic opportunity.

Historically, African trade goes like a pin-wheel: lines connecting the middle to the coast. But the colonial set-up of so many states (Africa has more states per square mile than any other continent) creates all these interior situations that are not economically sustainable - thus the connection imperative.

Economic communities meet that challenge, although some serious gaps remain: would be nice to see West package extend southward a bit; need something in Horn eventually, and I suspect it's an expanded EAC; and there's nothing really up top, but there the Arab Spring opens up possibilities considerably.

Right now Wikistrat is running an internal training simulation for the younger analysts that puts me in Yoda mode: Hmmm. Good she will be. The analysis is strong with that one.

The simulation is entitled, "China as Africa's De Facto World Bank." We planned it merely as a training tool, plus a way to - as always - build up the GLOMOD (our online Global Model of globalization made up of all these hundreds of scenario pages). Naturally, working out a few new wrinkles in the established simulation methodology, because we always want to be evolving through experimentation on the edge (new twists, new features, new modules, etc.). I honestly didn't have big expectations for the output, but the padawans, as always, surprise me with their inventiveness.  In the end, they may push us to productize the material. At the very least, they have me thinking that my next strategy book should be a crowdsourced effort throught Wikistrat itself (the next step up from thanking a hundred or more bloggers in "Great Powers"), because just like the International Grand Strategy Competition, this China-Africa sim is generating cool ideas that deserve a wider platform.

Chart of the Day: Being Gay in Core v. Gap

NYT story from October about new gay rights in Portugal.

Map caught my eye for obvious reasons.  Quick crude overlay of Core-Gap divide shows you want to be gay in the Core - not the Gap.  

Not true in every single instance, but as a rule . . ..

Wherever you still are cranking babies as a means of survival, you will look down on gays.  Almost all of your survival rules - like religion - will tell you to do so.  But once industrialization and connectivity kick in, then you start to value them for the diversity they bring - especially in key globalized industries (yes, gays tend to concentrate somewhat in certain industries, but so do heterosexual men and women, so there!).

But the more basic point: when you connect you have to go with the acceptance of others, because you value the ties and the business more than your precious identity. Plus, you probably also see more of the world and get over yourself.

WPR's New Rules: U.S.-China Relations Need Leadership, not Anachronisms

It is hard to think of a period in the past five decades in which this country was more painfully bereft of national leadership than it currently finds itself. On one side we have an increasingly isolated president who, as Edward Luce opined recently, “prefers to campaign than govern.” On the other is a House-controlling GOP that, in the words of Thomas Friedman, “has gone nuts.” What’s more, the highly negative campaign that 2012 is shaping up to be will secure no governing mandate for the eventual winner, meaning that things are likely to get far worse.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Emily Updates, Vol. 4, available online

Find the Kindle version here.

Find the Nook version here.

Find the iBook version here.

To remind on the series:

Seventeen years ago, authors Tom and Vonne Barnett were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, the thirty-something couple was living in northern Virginia. 

What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year union: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to several hundred relatives and friends who spontaneously organized themselves into their family’s extended support network. Over time, the couple came to view the updates as something more important: a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become. 

The journey from blog diary to this eBook serial is worth recounting. The original diary ran about 400,000 words, or somewhere in the range of an 800-page book. In the late 1990s, Tom edited the text down to approximately 200,000 words and posted the 45 updates online at a website he created specifically for that purpose. Having received a lot of positive feedback from readers, they sought publication as a regular book, but then fate intervened in the form of a new job for Tom in Rhode Island and the project was – pun intended – shelved. 

But the recent meteoric rise of eBooks has convinced Tom and Vonne that now is the time to give publication another try (Vonne, for example, is a Kindle fanatic!). After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs, so eBooks struck the authors as an entirely appropriate venue for the material, especially since they’re interested in making it easily available and they know - from first-hand experience - how parents and relatives of patients experiencing medical crises typically turn to the Internet to locate sources of information, comfort and inspiration in their time of need. 

What you now have the privilege to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of their second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make-a-Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV. 

The first two chapters presented in this Volume I are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records from that time period. 

The concluding fifth volume in the series is written from today's perspective, to include that of a grown-up Emily - the girl who lived!

The authors haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective. Tom and Vonne now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects that arise in this family memoir, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format. 

If this eBook serial helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.

Fifth and final volume will appear 12 December.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Look for us at the Pack-Lions game!  It'll be Joel Zamel and I and my six kids.

Another prominent crowd sourcing effort: competitive but not collaborative

Chicago Tribune story about prominent economists from around country linking up on one site (U Chicago biz school) to post competing answers to a weekly posted policy question.  Site then polls the other economists and you get an agree/disagree/undecided number.

Another nice example of crowdsourcing, but one that highlights the Wikistrat difference: instead of just holding up the challenge in front of the mob and asking the crowd to yell out its answers, Wikistrat asks the crowd to work together, on the wiki, to strategize pathways, outcomes, options and impacts. It's that nonstop dialogue and debate in real-time that makes us different: not just a concentration of opinions but their collaborative interplay.

Still, another interesting example of thinkers reaching for something similar.

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Must Engage With World Beyond Security Threats

Thanks to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the two wars they spawned, it seemed like the near entirety of President George W. Bush’s two terms in office were characterized by efforts to define, harness and exploit fear. Despite living in the most peaceful, prosperous and predictable period in world history, Americans became convinced that they faced an unending era of war, impoverishment and chaos. That muddled mindset put us painfully out of touch with the rest of the planet.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Gone to Lambeau with sons

Bucs at noon tomorrow.

NPR's All Things Considered: My appearance yesterday on US-China relations

The segment:

Analyst Spells Out U.S. Interests In Pacific Rim

November 17, 2011

President Obama used his trip to the Pacific Rim this week to announce plans for a new American military base in Darwin, Australia. The move changes the stance of U.S. forces in the region — countering the growing strength and presence of China's military. Guy Raz talks with Thomas P. M. Barnett, chief analyst for Wikistrat, a consultancy that provides geopolitical analysis. He's also executive vice president of the Center for America-China Partnership.

Download this: http://thomaspmbarnett.squarespace.com/storage/20111117_atc_15.mp3 or go here to find the NPR/ATC page.

Going on NPR's All Things Considered today

As Chief Analyst, Wikistrat, to talk about the recent deal/decision to put 2,500 US troops in Australia.

I have no landline, and NPR no fan of skype for whatever reason. We talk drive to WFYI downtown, but I don't have a car (son and wife own those rights on our two vehicles), so I couldn't manage studio effort (and frankly would have turned them down at this point).

Enter an iPhone app. NPR, discovering I have an iPhone, says download "Report IT Enterprise Edition." I need to be on wifi (got that at home office) and in airplane mode. You log onto these NPR servers and voila - the desired connection.

Bravo NPR!

Now if we can finish the taping before my son opens the garage door beneath me . . . 

POSTSCRIPT: It happened, but culprit was wife with kids.  Neat thing about taping with NPR, it's no problem. Just stop taping for a bit, and then I abandon office for my master bath (the sanctuary where I do most interviews).

The interview was okay-to-good with Guy Raz, who's always very nice.  I always feel like I underperform while I'm doing it, but then later, when I hear it, I feel much better. You just never get past that initial instinct at self-criticism.

But then the truly interesting techno part: once done taping, I must disconnect via the app from NPR servers. Then I am asked to name the file my iPhone just made locally, recording only my half of the interview. The app does that so you avoid having yourself taped over the wire, so to speak, and instead you get this much higher quality capture that is then uploaded to their servers as a file for their editing.

Clever as hell, huh?

Score again for Steve Jobs and Apple. I get studio quality sound on NPR and I don't have to drive all the way into downtown Indy to do it.

As a result, I head out now to throw some football with son Jerry, who, after years of never understanding football, despite my taking him every year to Lambeau, is suddenly a total leatherhead thanks to Madden 2011. Now we watch games and he bitches about blown coverages, infrequent blitzs and why the Pack doesn't kick onsides more often!

We're going to the Bucs-Pack game on Sunday and then the Pack-Lions game in Detroit on Turkey Day.

Chart of the Day: LATAM doing it right in the Middle

Great and expansive front-page WSJ feature from 15th.

Disappointing to the anti-globalization crowd, but it's been very, very good to LATAM, decreasing its poor and increasing its middle class in a steady fashion since Cold War's end.

A realistic snapshot:

The expanding middle is benefiting from a strong period of economic growth—fueled by high commodity prices in many countries—along with more aggressive social programs with a decided focus on education.

But the advances are still tenuous, and the possibility of a global recession haunts the prospects of los emergentes—the emerging ones—as marketers call the newly minted middle-class members.

Protecting what's gone on there is such a huge - even worldwide - responsibility. Ditto for Africa.

We don't do it out of anything but common sense. Check out the rising demand function:

This is the opportunity we piss away with our insane "war on drugs."

The world is booming and all we see is fear.

Wikistrat's first internal training simulation: China as Africa's de facto World Bank

Wikistrat is a number of things at once.

Wikistrat is a global community of strategic thinkers, and that community needs activities around which to organize itself and mobilize its strengths. Wikistrat is taking on the challenge of sharpening the blades of the world's next generation of grand strategists.

Wikistrat is also a wiki-based model of globalization, in which hundreds and hundreds (soon enough "thousands and thousands") of scenario pages compete to describe its many flows, races, competitions, developments, etc. That monster, called the GLOMOD, must likewise be fed.

These two "base" assets allow us to construct the superstructure that is the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy (captured in our shorthand equation of Facebook + Wikipedia = MMOC).

So as we continue to lock in foundational clients, we simultaneously conduct our first internal training simulation for interns and researchers only. Like everything we do, we make it a competition with prizes, but the primary purpose is to train up our youngest community members so that, over time, we can include them in simulations for clients, alongside more experienced analysts and our growing bevy of truly world-class strategists.

In NFL terms, this internal simulation is training camp: hard work, but if you're into developing skills and you love the game, this is also a lot of fun.

But it's not just about getting everybody ready for "regular season games." The material produced here gets integrated into the GLOMOD, meaning it enriches the general intellectual backdrop for all the simulations to follow.

This last week has seen a cohort of interns and researchers filling out a variety of pages that explore how a host of national, regional and supranational actors are impacted by China's rising economic role across Africa. Naturally, these are contentious issues, so we discouraged attempts to capture consensus and we've encouraged all such tension to be presented on the page, meaning pros and cons are competitively explored.

This is a tricky skill to impart - collaborative competition, because everybody comes with genuine talent, as well as passion for the material and analytic process. The natural tendency is to fight it out in the comments, when what we want is for them to compete it out on the page.  So we nudge, and we encourage, and we get people to start confidently and compassionately editing each other's work. 

I chose the later adverb with great purpose: writing is one skill, editing is a far trickier one. I have great self-respect as a writer, but I have deeper respect for those who edit me. This did not come easily, but it did come early for me. When I got to the University of Wisconsin in 1980, I simply did not know how to write analytically, but I was lucky to have an older journalism-major sister, Cathie, on campus and willing to work with me on everything I wrote - explaining everything she did as she did it. Cathie was my first great editor, and I've made it my professional creed ever since to consider all editors my most important ally in sharpening my messaging skills.

Now, we have supervising Contributing Analysts wrangling the larger "crowd" in this competition. They do a certain amount of cleaning up, editing, formatting, etc., while coaching participants. But in truth, the players here mostly edit each other in a very direct sense: a position is proposed, and then it "suffers" improvement through direct manipulation or through indirect manipulation - i.e., a countering position is added in competition. So it's not just one voice speaking and the rest carping in the comments, otherwise known as too much of the blogosphere to mention. Rather, it's many hands carving the same statue, save for those Michaelangelos who don't feel their "David" will be found in that particular piece of stone and thus take up chisels elsewhere on the same page or on another page in the wiki.

What this produces is something better than the norm: Don't tell me what's "wrong" with my argument. Tell it better or tell me something better.

This is not how we normally hash things out in the professional community. Oh, we may pass our drafts to trusted friends for comments, or vet it up the chain of command for review, but we don't subject them to anything close to this competitive collaboration, because, quite frankly, that's an intimidating dynamic to many - at least of a certain age and/or disposition.

But Wikistrat is looking for both that dynamic and the accelerated processing made possible by so many brains operating in collaboration - especially across a new generation so given to peer-to-peer dialogue. So it's not just the reach and the breadth that we're selling here, but the speed - with all delivered at prices traditional consultancies will never match.

But to accomplish that, we need to build up that mental Leviathan - that colossus of distributed brainpower, and so we conduct internal training simulations like the one I will continue to monitor in the days and weeks ahead.

And no, it's not a chore whatsoever.  Every time anybody does anything page in this particular wiki (actually, anywhere across the GLOMOD), I get an instant email saying who and what, down to the keystroke. And I gotta tell you, it's a fascinating stream of conscious brain-powering to witness: idea upon idea, layer upon layer, analysts one-upping one another and then being one-upped in return. It's like the GLOMOD is tweeting nonstop, and it has quite an intellectually ferocious personality.

We are building an army. 

WPR's The New Rules: How to Stop Worrying and Live with the Iranian Bomb

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear programsurprised no one, even as it created the usual flurry of op-eds championing preventative “next steps.” As I’ve been saying for the past half-decade, there are none. Once the U.S. went into both Iraq and Afghanistan, the question went from being, “How do we prevent Iran from getting the Bomb?” to “How do we handle Iran’s Bomb?” That shift represents neither defeatism nor appeasement. Rather, it reflects a realistic analysis of America’s strategic options. With that in mind, here are 20 reasons why Iran’s successful pursuit of the Bomb is not the system-changing event so many analysts are keen to portray.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Most expansive number on global auto population yet

Plenty of recent talk about reaching 7B people ("crack out yer Soylent Green!"), but here's Bill Ford saying the number of cars in the world - just now reaching 1B - will quadruple to 4B by 2050.

No, there won't be enough oil for all that transpo, or - more truthfully - we won't want to go to that effort.

So the age of post-gas-combustion awaits.  Ultimat driver is oil availability, but proximate driver is local air pollution.

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief: the Brief in full

Can be found in this post and on this permanent page, also linked to from the navigation bar above. Or you can go to the YouTube pages directly, as linked on the left navigation bar below.

No, it's no longer exactly the brief I give now.  I've already made about 50 changes. But that's the nature of the beast: it is always evolving and new versions constantly emerge. 

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" brief

Video segments of September 2011 briefing by Tom to an international military audience in the Washington DC area.

Part 1: The Pentagon's New Map

Part 2: The Flow of People

Part 3: The Flow of Money

Part 4: The Flow of Energy

Part 5: The Flow of Food

Part 6: The Flow of Security

Part 7: (Q&A) The Role of Religion

Part 8: (Q&A) Global Economic Crisis

Part 9 - Final: (Q&A) Postwar Operations & US Allies

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief, Part 9 - Final (Q&A on postwar stabilization operations and America's future allies)

Last segment of my "big brief" presentation to an international military audience in the Washington DC area in September 2011. Final questions involved postwar operations and who should be involved.

Quoted in Reuters piece on Eurozone break-up scenario

 

Intro and my bits to follow:

By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

LONDON | Thu Nov 10, 2011 9:54am EST

(Reuters) - Any euro zone failure would send shock waves around the globe, shifting the balance of geopolitical power and perhaps prompting a fundamental reassessment of what the world's future might look like.

. . .

Suddenly, pundits, policymakers and other observers find themselves questioning one of their most fundamental assumptions -- that an increasingly united Europe would be a key player in a newly multipolar world.

"You already have one of the great pillars of globalization, the United States, entering a period of difficulty and looking inward," said Thomas Barnett, US-based chief strategist of political risk consultancy Wikistrat -- which is being asked by several private clients to urgently model scenarios. "Now one of the other pillars, Europe, looks about to implode."

That, he said, could leave the continent's powers -- who only a handful of years ago made up much of the G7 group of largest economies -- increasingly sidelined as China, India, Brazil and others rose.

. . .

Wikistrat chief strategist Barnett says much depends on what emerges if the Euro falls. If, as many suspect, a rump euro zone around Germany remains whilst Mediterranean states go their own way, the whole geopolitical focus of the continent could shift.

The northern element, he suggests, could focus its attention more to the east, giving priority to what could either become a corporatist or confrontational relationship with Moscow. The southern states, in contrast, might integrate much more closely with North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean -- a region perhaps dominated by a newly assertive Turkey.

The euro itself should still be salvageable, he says, but it may just be that the political will is simply not there.

"It's essentially a common-law marriage that never quite made it to the church and now seems to be moving toward a split," said Barnett. "It shouldn't be necessary, you would have hoped that it could be avoided, but we are living through an age of political immaturity."

. . .

Find the entire article here.

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief, Part 8 (Q&A on global economic crisis)

More Q&A from my presentation of the current Brief to an international military audience in the Washington DC area in September 2011.

Audience question was about the global economic crisis and role of China in global economy.

On RT's "The Alyona Show" last night re: IAEA report on Iran

Did it via Skype from home office. The raccoon eyes tell you we're suffering a weird warm spell here and the resurgence of pollen!

One misspeak, primarily because I was so tired:  when I spoke about Israel being Iran's "whipping boy" and excuse for reaching for the bomb, I accidentally slipped an Iran in there when I meant Israel.

Other than that mistake, and not saying "America's global war on terror" (just said "America's global war") early on, I was happy enough with the interview.

Skype from home certainly beats trudging downtown to a remote office and that whole drill, but the latency is a bit much to deal with.  Still, nice to be able to see yourself on Skype (small window) so you can orient your position onscreen (you can see me self-correction at points, which is tricky because all of your movements need to be "mirrored").

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief, Part 7 (Q&A on religion)

Continuing the segments from my Sept 2011 presentation of the brief to an international military audience in the Washington DC area, first cluster of questions focused on religion, and since I deleted that slide sequence for time reasons in the main presenation, I had it teed up at the end to cover this contingency.

WPR's The New Rules: Obama Must Avoid the 'China Threat' Trap

No credible international affairs specialist would contend that the 2012 presidential election will hinge on U.S. foreign policy, given the state of the U.S. economy and the widespread social anger that one sees bubbling up across the country. What's more, Americans -- if not Beltway partisan pundits -- have achieved a certain sense of consensus on foreign policy under President Barack Obama, whose leadership has displayed a palpable "give them what they want" dynamic that reflects his desire to keep overseas issues on the back burner while he focuses on domestic ones.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.