In less than decade, SysAdmin notion goes from radical to routine

FoxNews.com story by way of Chris Ridlon, a military officer.  Poll of US military officers in conjunction with conference held by US Global Leadership Coalition, with Clinton, Gates, Geithner and Shah (USAID) all up on stage together.

The sea-change in thinking on 3D (defense, diplomacy, development) shows it's here to stay.

Nearly 90 percent of active and retired military officers say diplomacy and development are at least partly helpful to achieve U.S. national security objectives as opposed to just a strong military presence, a poll out Monday shows.

The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition also found among the 606 active duty and retired officers surveyed that 83 percent also think humanitarian efforts such as food assistance and health, education and economic development lend to an effective strategy.

Why so strong?  For the same reason why I felt comfortably making the SysAdmin argument by 2001:  we're talking about a generation of officers who've spent darn near their entire careers involved in this stuff (crisis response, humanitarian response, nation-building, counter-insurgency) and the military-heavy approach simply does not cover enough of the gamut.

And it's not just the military saying "more aid please."  Note the realization that interplay is required.

The poll shows mixed opinions among the military about who is better to lead missions relating to non-military action, including providing security for local populations, training police and armed forces, offering assistance to civil institutions, building infrastructure and working with local leaders on development. The first two missions should be the work of military or the military with civilian agencies, the poll showed, while the last three should more likely be civilian or civilian mixed with military coordination, the numbers show.

And that reality is what pushed me to propose the Department of Everything Else in "Blueprint" (2005).  Part of that is realizing that USAID will remain an afterthought if buried inside State, and part is realizing that setting up ad hoc structure each time these elements come together isn't working.  Plus, if it's always left to the military to organize, the military will be left with too much to do.  So you need serious bureaucratic structure that--in effect--represents a meeting ground for the three.  Otherwise you get a mil-heavy operation right up to the point where you hand off to an overwhelmed State (going on now in Iraq).  You need the bridging entity. 

And as I've said all along, the DoEE is more of a command structure with budgetary authority than a department in a classic sense.  When unused (not that likely a situation), it can be the proverbial command-in-waiting with a skeleton staff, to which State, USAID and military personnel/units can be loaned out as required.  But you create a bureaucratic center of gravity that both signals our intent and gives potential allies (including the UN) an element with which they can cooperate that isn't Defense and isn't State but something in between.

Last call . . .

Future cheesehead.  The team needs all the support it can muster right now.  Hell, Abebu may need to suit up for Miami.

We undid Metsu's corn rows (quite the task) and discovered Whitney Houston underneath.  We're experimenting with letting her grow out and play with various clips, etc. But I love it wild like this.  The scrape on her left check:  Metsu tried to match big sister Vonne Mei's jumping off the playset swings and wiped out. What impressed me was that she already seeks to emulate and impress Vonne Mei.

And yes, before I get emails, we do have Disney wear that features the African-American "princess" from "The Princess and the Frog."

You make-a da blog . . . you make-a da too much!

Since I cut down on the blog flow, my monthly readership (unique visitors) went up by a third to north of 50,000.

The number used to stick at around 39-40,000.  Now it's at 53-54,000 and it keeps climbing.

Less is good.

The canon--almost completed

Wanted to organize all my publications by decade (see Canon above in top navigation bar), and pretty much got it done and up to date for now at 376 publications.  I know I'm missing a few, but it was nice to get it all down on one place, especially integrating the stuff that was never public release.

Now just need to work on the video archives, the audio archives, and press pieces.

The "rising near peer" returns the paranoid favor

The NYT reports that the U.S. military is alarmed at the rising anti-American tone and sentiment of younger Chinese military officers.  This is the same U.S. military that assembles multinational war games in China's front yard and sells advanced weaponry to a small island nation off its coast--in addition to anyone else who will buy it in the region (and yes, business is very good right now, as weapons purchases are up 100% over the past half decade).

The U.S. military, which found its network-centric warfare roots in the seminal shell game known as the Taiwan Straits crises of 1995-1996, now takes inspiration from China's response since then (a build-up of anti-access/area denial assets that rely heavily on ballistic missile attacks to keep our carriers at bay) to launch its own AirSea Battle Concept--a new high-tech warfighting doctrine that makes no bones about specifically targeting the Chinese military.

And we wonder why the Chinese military seem to think we're their number one enemy?  Are we honestly that clueless or has our disingenuity broken through to some higher, slightly irrational plane?

Follow me into this brave, alternative world:

• Imagine the Chinese navy holding multinational exercises with the Cubans and Venezuelans and Nicaraguans (a silly sight, I know) in the waters around Cuba, while Beijing warns us subtly that their 1979 Cuba Defense Act will be pursued to the ultimate vigor required, including the sale of advanced attack aircraft to the Cuban air force.  
• Imagine Chinese carriers conducting such operations, sporting aircraft and weaponry that could rain destruction over most of the continental U.S. at a moment's notice.  
• Imagine Chinese spy craft patrolling the edge of our local waters and flying around the rim of our airspace.  
• Imagine the Chinese selling all sorts of missile defense to Venezuela and other allies "scared of rising American militarism."
• Imagine weapons purchases throughout Latin America doubling in five years time, with China supplying most of the goods.  
• Imagine Chinese naval bases and marine barracks doting the Latin American landscape and Caribbean archipelago.
• Imagine a Cuban missile crisis-like event in the mid-1990s, which led the Chinese military to propose a new evolution in their warfare since.  
• Imagine the Chinese military conducting regime toppling events in the Middle East, involving countries upon whom our energy dependency is dramatically and permanently rising, while China actually gets the vast bulk of its oil from non-Persian Gulf sources like Canada, Mexico, Latin America, Africa and itself.  
• Imagine the Chinese government demanding that the Chinese military produce an elaborate report every year detailing the "disturbing" rise of U.S. military power.  
• Imagine the Chinese military announcing their new military doctrine of attack from the sea and air, with their documents chock full of bombing maps of U.S. military installations that are widely dispersed across the entirety of the continental United States, meaning their new war doctrine has--at its core--the complete destruction of U.S. military assets on our territory as the opening bid.
• Imagine the U.S. military stating that this new doctrine of attacking the entirety of the U.S. territory is necessary to maintaining the regional balance of power in the Western hemisphere, because the U.S. Navy has--in an "unprovoked" and "provocative" manner, begun significant patrolling operations in the Caribbean Basin, whose waters constitute a "profound" national interest to the Chinese.
• Imagine this series of developments unfolding over close to two decades, as China, having lost its familiar great-power war foe, the Soviet Union, firmly glommed onto the U.S. as a replacement enemy image.
• Imagine all that, and then imagine how the U.S. military views the Chinese military.  
• Imagine if the Chinese military offered military-to-military ties under such conditions.  

What do you think the U.S. Congress would say to that?  Would it be considered "caving in" to Chinese pressure?

The truth, unexplored in this otherwise fine article, is that the U.S. military needs--and has needed--rising China as an enemy image for more than a decade-and-a-half now, so I don't know how we can expect anything from young Chinese officers other than returning the favor.

I'm on the BBC World Service yesterday with John Mearsheimer of Chicago (go ahead and listen to the guy--see the post directly below for link), who is stunningly open in his claims that America will never allow China to become an influential power in Asia because we are firmly committed to remaining the world's sole superpower and will basically do whatever it takes to stop China's rise, including a containment strategy that marshals the entire region's militaries to box in the Chinese.  He raised the specter (rather fantastic) of a China with a per capita GDP equivalent to our own in the foreseeable future--a prospect he labeled incredible in its fearsomeness.

[Mearsheimer has a tendency to use the word "power" over and over again, like a mantra, and he clearly meaning warfighting and power-projection capacity.  He seems to have drunk mightily at the neocons table and remains hungover in his appreciation that the American government's number one goal is to remain the dominant military power on the planet and prevent anybody's rise that might challenge that.  He is very much in the George Friedman vein of thought.]

This is the state of our discussion:  the world's biggest and by-far strongest military regularly getting up into the grill of the second-biggest economy on the planet and letting it know--in no uncertain terms--that it will not countenance China exercising military power in its own region!  Why?  Despite being intensely overdrawn militarily around the planet and facing military resource shortages in the very same regions where Chinese economic interests are skyrocketing, it's in our best interest to deny China's rise with all our might.  Safely buttressed by the vast security resources of our NATO allies, it's clear that we don't need any new friends and--instead--must do everything possible to deny their emergence, because more Chinese security means less U.S. security; it is a completely zero-sum game.

Brilliant stuff.  I can't imagine why the Chinese look upon us as anything but the best of friends.  I am flabbergasted at our naivete in hoping for something better to emerge.  This is all working out so brilliantly--for the U.S. Navy and Air Force.  If only we can get a sensible Republican back in who can jack the defense budget back . . . I dunno . . . just up!  

Because when I look two decades down the road, it's clear to me that we don't want to have anything to do with China or its military.  While boxing them in--in East Asia, we and we alone will manage the world's security system, using money that arises from our rapid quadrupling of exports . . . to places like China, which will be cowed into accepting our goods by the awesome specter of our military power!

It's really all so easy when you think about it.  Just zero out all the complexity and interdependence created by this globalization of our making, and we'll be able to boss the entire world around militarily--assuming we have the courage and strategic intelligence to devote as much resources as necessary to completely box in the Chinese military and keep them as paranoid as possible.

Happiness is a warm gun, my friends, pointed at "rising" China. That path will get America everything it needs while costing us nothing of strategic importance.

And yes, we should remain shocked . . . shocked! . . . at the rising ant-Americanism in the ranks of the Chinese military.  I cannot imagine where this mindset comes from.

But read the piece, because it's a good and balanced bit of writing (Wines is almost always totally solid in delivery). The quotes from the Chinese academics echo stuff written here many times--especially the bit about the Chinese military officers being a bit inexperienced and retrograde in their PR skills.  David Shambaugh, the U.S. expert on the Chinese military, is cited offering his usual wisdom on the subject.  Unlike the many hyperbolists on this subject, most of whom get paychecks or contracts from the U.S. Navy or Air Force, he remains a very calm and intelligent voice. [Another pair of intelligent voices on the subject are Mike McDevitt and Dave Finkelstein at the Center for Naval Analyses (complete disclosure--I do some on-call work there, though not with those two)].

And Shambaugh is right, this is an unnecessary and unstrategic and wasteful path for both sides to be on.  We are pretending to play Cold War when both of us should be managing the global security environment--in tandem.  I'm not saying our logic doesn't make sense.  Things like the AirSea Battle Concept make eminent sense--if a war over Taiwan is the ordering principle for the U.S. military going forward.  Me?  I just don't buy that as our North Star for the 21st century and globalization's further evolution.  Instead, I see it as a colossal and stupid diversion of resources and attention span.  

Why?  Again, back to my basics:  thinking about war within the context of everything else and not just within the context or myopic logic of war itself. That "everything else," for me, is best encapsulated by the term globalization, because it's the global economy + all those rising connections + all those rising interdependencies + all those overlapping security interests ("security" ain't the same as zero-sum defense--remember) + all those ever-changing dynamics that arise from all this complexity. Compared to all that, the Taiwan scenario is frozen in time. Fine, I guess, for our military to obsess over it, just like the PLA, because it keeps those otherwise unoccupied by the Long War and frontier integration and nation-building occupied with something they naturally are drawn to as ordering principles. But, in the end, it's make-do work, in historical terms; it's shutting the door on the past and not opening the door on the future. It simply does not rank in a US foreign policy that's coherently focused on shaping a future worth creating.

But this is what we end up with when our primary goal in foreign policy is to--as Clinton puts it--keep all the balls in the air. When everything is equally important, there is no strategy whatsoever. It's just chasing your tail and current events and putting everybody--save yourself--in the driver's seat.  

Obama needs to take control of his foreign policy and start paddling faster than the current, because he is--by not taking more control--losing control of his own national security enterprise, and that is not leadership.

NOTE:  Post picked up by Time magazine's "Swampland" (politics and policy) blog.

Going on BBC World Service's "World Have Your Say" radio broadcast today at 1pm EST

Subject is Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo and the West's growing fear of China in general.

Go here to listen live.

The podcast can later be found here.

WPR's The New Rules: Defusing the Global Currency War

After having cooperated to an unprecedented degree -- on stimulus spending and new bank rules, for instance -- to avoid a global meltdown these past two years, the world's major economies now appear ready to turn on one another with truly self-destructive vengeance. Poorly informed Americans are increasingly convinced that free trade pacts -- and not our uniquely high corporate tax rates -- are responsible for sending jobs overseas, and they want to see China punished with tariffs on its imports for its undervalued currency. With China's neighbors intervening heavily to keep their own currencies from rising too high in response, global chatter about the unfolding "currency war" has reached a fever pitch. Is this any way to manage a tenuous global economic recovery?

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

The big-flow blog will return, as part of a larger offering

Right now negotiating with the Israeli start-up Wikistrat (click here to download their brochure) to have them host my blog as part of an exciting new offering we're collectively working on. For now, the outlines of the plan are such that I will continue to offer a free blog version (with a flow not too far off what I'm offering now) and a subscription-based big-flow blog (to include an additional periodic flow of meta-analyses on globalization's trends, turns, etc.).  The larger goal is to create an online offering for individuals and enterprises alike that leverages Wikistrat's platform, meaning the content flow is but one traditional aspect of what we are crafting in terms of online strategic planning tools.  You know my old bit about wanting to replicate my skills in the next generation?  Well, this will be the primary outreach tool: a place where you can come and gain access to a super-scenarioized model of how globalization works and evolves, where you can create your own scenarios and pathways and shocks-to-the-system and explore them to your heart's content, interacting with me and other analysts.  

What excites me about this venture?  This isn't the traditional black-box approach, where you turn over your particulars to a consultancy and they draw upon their expertise back at the shop and then crank you answers that you cannot trace in logic (beyond what is shared).  This will be a place where the very underlying technology will be shared with you, and where your intellectual forays will be pursued in collaboration with strategic thinkers, meaning, at the end of the day, a real transfer of both technology and intellect is obtained. 

I believe that the great outsourcing of strategic planning that corporations pursued in the 1980s, creating the rise of mainline business/strategic consultancies since then, is over and in the process of being reversed (insourced).  I think the globalization landscape is just too complex and every-changing for companies, government agencies, etc., NOT to have that skill set within their organizations.

And I think my collaboration with Wikistrat (an experiment just beginning) will provide the human-capacity-building that a host of companies, educational facilities, public agencies will find compelling--far more so in the rising/emerging markets, where the need is greatest.

And so I am very excited to begin this adventure, putting the blog to more focused use.

Chart of the day: More likely to be India's century than China's?

A compelling analysis from The Economist on how India's freer style of doing business, when combined with a huge and still unfolding demographic divided, could well trump China's current star turn in the global economy.

As I have noted for a while, China's demographic "golden hour" ends right now, as from here on out they add old people to their non-working-age population--despite the continued cut-off pressure applied through the single-child policy (Deng's gift to the world, for which we must be eternally grateful).  

Point being:  China's labor gets more expensive from here on out, but the good news should be, that means China's domestic consumption (higher wages) should become a huge driver in globalization.  It's just that China will no longer have a no-brainer--pun intended--advantage.  From here on out, the extensive growth must yield to intensive growth--as in, brain-fed.  For somebody who believe his work has a lot to do with capacity-building (i.e., raising a generation of strategic thinkers), China looks like a huge market to me already:  they're having outsized impact throughout the world but aren't assuming commensurate responsibility, which I believe the Chinese shudder from out of fear that it'll be draining (yes) and complex (yes) and demand all manner of innovative thought on their part (absolutely).  But the Chinese have no choice; the world simply will demand it all from them.  So developing China's human capacity is magnificently important for the future of the world--as in, we depend on it.  So whenever I hear about China cranking all manner of this or that skill set, I say, bring it on, and--by doing so--elevate your game and ours. Our education is stuck in industrial era mode and must be radically reformed, but we won't do it without the push of serious competition.  

Conversely, China's own internal reforms, I believe, will be increasingly driven by a sense of India coming up on its heels--all good stuff with all the same attendant dangers.  The question always to be asked when great powers compete intensely on the economic landscape is, "What is the state of the military-to-military relationship?"

When I look at China-US, I spot a moribund relationship.  When I spot India-US, it looks promising but still too embryonic.  And when I spot India-China, I spot another extremely weak bond.  

These are the three dominant economies that will have both the will and wallet, over the long haul, to shape the global security landscape.  Europe is taking a pass, primarily for demographic reasons.  Russia is similarly cursed.  China has a solid window, with India's even bigger.  America, a demographic freak of nature, retains it own.

So, from a security standpoint, the most important hearts-and-minds to win are all found within that trio of powers.  Keep the relations open and cooperative, and the economic competition will never spill over into anything truly bad, but keep them weak, and all sorts of bad choices linger out there.

I stick with my tighter logic that says:  go for China and you get India in the bargain, while going for India as a China hedge, if done too vigorously, gets you neither, for China will withdraw from the logic of security cooperation and India, as we all know, hates being played as pawn more than anything.

So the goal must be:  do whatever it takes to work the security cooperation with China, encouraging India to join at every possible junction.  The tiny bit of naval cooperation on Somali pirates is a start, but so much more can be done.  In a world of frontier integration, America needs two friends with million-man armies (with Turkey the next logical spoke in that wheel).  No one but America will retain the warfighting power-projection capacity, but it's clear there are strong limits to what we can do with that and that alone.  My concept of the SysAdmin was always about reorienting our major alliance relationships, and demographics was always the underlying driver.  Why?  The rise of the middle class triggers the resource relationships, and those relationships must be protected.  Same thing that happened with the US in the late 1800s; same thing happening with China, India, Turkey, Brazil, etc. now.  We are in the midst of a huge swapping out of allies, from North/West to East/South, and America is the connection that binds the two eras, because America's system of states-uniting, economies-integrating, networks-expanding, collective security and so on is the underlying template of this era's hugely successful globalization.

On food, Asia can't keep pace with rising middle class demand

WSJ story on how Asia's food demand continues to rise while the amount of land devoted to food production is pretty much capped this decade due to urbanization and planned investments just aren't happening as envisioned (so yield per acre not rising enough to cover the delta in demand).

The plan was to dramatically boost farm investment in Asia's developing countries after the scary price spikes in 2007-08, which may be remembered in the same way as the original OPEC price spikes of the early and late 1970s--a harbinger of a permanently tight market where any de-synching of demand and supply leads to real and perceived crises of the highest order (as in, governments fear for their regime stability).  

Examples of the investment:  opening up land previously considered marginal and improving farm-to-processor infrastructure (mostly roads and storage facilities).  The big hold-up, unsurprisingly, is the financial crisis.  Then there's the usual uncertainty on land ownership and fears of environmental ruin.  

Why things won't get so bad globally this time around:  grain stores are up and the economy is weaker, but these are temporary conditions that do not obviate the strong underlying trends.  As one researcher on rice puts it in the piece, "2008 was not just a blip, this is the way things will be, with repeated shocks."

The financial crisis, in my mind, caught Asia about a decade too early--not enough rules and not enough positive evolution on politics (especially the talent level of leadership) and not enough development of financial markets (in terms of being more fluid and responsive).  Asia in general is still burdened by rules and leadership and mindsets better attuned to extensive growth (throw in more stuff!) and the ag scene calls for intensive-growth answers (much higher yields on same amount of land).  The Philippines, as the piece notes, produced 92% of its rice in 2000, but is already down below 80% today.  That gap will only grow, because most dreams of getting access to unused land won't come true (the urbanization going on is likewise intense) and even if access is had, yields won't be so high without serious investment.

In the end, all the brave talk about food self-sufficiency in Asia is just nonsense; ain't never gonna happen. But Asia certainly could do better, so that the demand doesn't outstrip local supply too intensely too fast.  We've seen more than a few Asian states move into that outsourcing trend of renting or buying up nice farmland overseas (in Africa, for example), but that only buys you a whole new load of responsibilities that I think a lot of these countries--especially China--are ill-prepared to follow through on.

I remember driving from Addis Ababa down to Awassa in southern Ethiopia and seeing huge chunks of the best farmland sort of tarp'd off--as in, covered on all sides and seemingly roofed with simple metal skeletons wrapped in this thin but opaque poly skin (I assumed the topsides where clear enough to let in the bulk of the sunlight).    It was a stunning sight to behold:  all this open, rich farmland still operated in very early 20th century terms and then these huge, fenced off and covered up tracts where--apparently--a whole new level of effort was being made.  Unsurprisingly, I saw labor barracks nearby with a Chinese flag flying out front.

Now, you can say, this all works so long as the local government makes it work, but if a food crisis really comes along and the local population is suffering in a way that's undeniable in terms of global news coverage, then that thin poly cover-up won't be enough to keep that food production secret and safe.  And China will find itself unusually responsible for what comes next in places like Ethiopia.

And that's when the whole "non-interference" things gets revealed as so much empty talk.  There is no way China rises and becomes what it is becoming without have huge interfering effect all over the planet, and people will hold it responsible for all that change--both the good and bad.  

Don't get me wrong:  I think China's impact will be overwhelmingly positive overall, as the sustained demand for resources does plenty to jump start and fuel development in places like Africa in ways that the boom-and-bust cycle previously offered by the West did not.  But with the good will come the bad, and that means China gets dragged into all sorts of uncomfortable dynamics it has previously sought to avoid.  

This is why I argue that serious strategic partnership with the U.S. is hardly just in America's short- and medium-term interest (due to its current straining to meet its global security obligations). Over the long term, it's far more in China's interest. Back in "Blueprint," I said America needed to "lock in China at today's prices," but the obverse is equally true now:  prices will never be lower and China will never find a more pragmatic leader than Obama, because if he loses in 2012, expect the usual "apres moi, le deluge!" reactions to kick in. 

This is another example of why I think the 2010s are a turning-point decade--as in, get it right and globalization's future is secured, but screw it up, and far different global pathways are made possible.  Inside all those dynamics, the US-Chinese relationship is the long pole in the tent:  get it right and nothing can go wrong, but get it wrong and nothing will likely go right. Why?  The rise of the global middle class means there will be so little slack in so many systems, that it'll feel like we're collectively in constant crisis.  This environment yields the "keeping all the balls in the air" mindset currently on display at State with Clinton (who needs to aspire to higher goals than just this).  The same is unfortunately true in Beijing.  All this kicking-the-cans-down-the-road lack-of-ambition serves the world poorly at this moment of great structural change: everybody of note seems to avoid leadership.

But there's no question about China becoming far more of a global leader; it has no choice.  The question is how much of this leadership emerges pro-actively from Beijing, and how much is teeth-pulling from the rest of the world.

China's JFK is yet to emerge, but he was one of the "heroes of the future" I cited at the end of "Blueprint for Action":  the leader who steps up and asks China to think less of what the world owes it (after all those decades of "humiliation" and the long slow climb back up from widespread poverty) and more about what China owes the world.  That moment/leader will be a defining dynamic for the 21st century and how the world evolves.

And food is more likely to drive that process than energy or anything else.

Wal-Mart moves into Africa big time

WSJ and FT pair of stories.  Scanned graphic from latter.

Apparently, Wal-Mart didn't get the "deglobalization" memo.

Wal-Mart bids $4.6B for Massmart Stores chain, a South African company.  The offer, if it goes through, would give Wal-Mart an instant presence of 290 stores in 13 countries.  

The offer is a good one--almost too high for the industry, indicating Wal-Mart's sense of urgency.  As the WSJ piece declares, it's an "aggressive and expensive bid to expand in Africa ahead of its international competitors."

Unlike in booming Brazil, where Wal-Mart has spent plenty and still trails Carrefour in sales share, the company is looking to springboard ahead in Africa.  Carrefour also holds the top international retail spot in China.  Clearly, Africa is a riskier bet/environment than either of those too, but with consumer spending in the trillion dollar range (aggregate), the continent is hard to ignore.  

Emerging/overseas markets now make up one quarter of Wal-Mart's $400B-plus annual revenue, and it is clearly the growth engine in the company.  Wal-Mart is said to be examining Russia and the Middle East as well.  

Places where this strategy of buying a local chain have failed for Wal-Mart tend to be more established markets--to wit, Germany and South Korea.

But when it comes to sub-Saharan Africa, the clear choice is to buy South African chains.  They draw neighboring states' consumers and typically reach back into those same states with satellite stores.

Wal-Mart is paying 13 times pre-tax earnings, which is a nice price for most industries but particularly good for a retail player in developing markets.

As usual, Wal-Mart's entry is expected to shake up the existing grocery oligopoly.

You want an example of how the Gap gets shrunk?  It doesn't much better than this.

China's alleged control of the rare earth materials

From John Batchelor Show

FT story on how "US is scrambling to resume production of raw materials vital for defence equipment and green technology in response to rising fears about Chinese domination of the sector."

The point to be clear on:  China dominates current production of rare earths (95-plus percent) but in no way has a dominant supply/reserve position.  The world has simply allowed China to achieve its dominant production position by abandoning their own mining efforts.  Why?  Very expensive and very environmentally damaging.

Rare earths are a collection of 17 metallic elements with similar chemical make-up.  They present unique magnetic and optical properties that make them highly useful for miniaturization, lasers and energy efficiency. There are considered strategic because of their applications in high-tech industries, to include weaponry.

No one much cared about China's domination of production, until the South China Sea dust-up with Japan led China to allegedly slow exports to Japan (not entirely clear what happen, but impressions were made).  China has also recently signaled that it will cutback on exports to make sure it has enough for its own burgeoning domestic demand.

Now, according to the article, we've got people in Congress dreaming of US self-sufficiency on this score, which will be--like most things in this globalized economy--virtually impossible to achieve.  Long ago, the US was the dominant global producer, but we abandoned the effort due to environmental and cost realities. Article says the last US mine closed in 2002 and is looking for $500m to reopen.  Those guys should send a thank-you letter to Beijing, because I'm betting they'll get their investment soon.

Obviously, if the material is considered strategic, there's good logic for mining at multiple sources.  I would consider this a reasonable space for cooperation with long-time allies so that we're not all doing this in the most expensive manner possible.

WPR's The New Rules: Building Real States to Empower the Bottom Billion

America's top African diplomat recently signaled Washington's desire to establish more official contacts with the autonomous region of Somaliland, which sits within the internationally recognized borders of the failed state known as Somalia. Meanwhile, both our Agency for International Development and the Pentagon's recently established Africa Command worry about Sudan's upcoming vote on formally splitting the country in two. For a country that has sworn off nation-building, it's interesting to see just how hard it is for America to remain on the sidelines while globalization remaps so much of the developing world.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Movie(s) of My Week: "True Blood" (Season 3--2010), HBO On-Demand

I know I'm in danger of going too long on vampires, but this week's home theater slots were totally eaten up by HBO's brilliant vampire series, based on Charlaine Harris's fabulous mystery series.

Problem was, we resigned up for HBO because of the On Demand system now offered by Comcast (Xfinity), which ends up being cheaper than buying series on DVD and you don't have to go through the nearly year-long wait.  I love the system because it means I can peruse whatever Showtime and HBO series I like at the time of my own choosing.

The Sookie Stackhouse series is a way-cool resetting of the vampire story so as to make it a venue to tackling all sorts of social issues, due primarily to the plot device of the Great Revelation--or when vampires finally came out to humans and negotiated a peaceful coexistence--of sorts. So on top of the usual stuff, you've got all these larger political issues (Vampire Rights Amendment, religious reawakening in response, drug abuse scandals based on humans taking vampire blood, biotech advances because vampire blood can basically save humans from deep medical emergencies, and so on).  

Plus, Alan Ball does such a great job, according to my wife, in expanding the show beyond the book series with new characters and plot lines.  Last season got a bit tiresome with the witch and orgies and what not, but this year, with the vampire king of Mississippi dueling the vampire queen of Louisiana, it was stunningly good.  The addition of the werewolves storyline is especially cool, and the wolves here are much better rendered than in the "Twilight" series.  But Ball gets all the visual details down so right as a rule, that you expect nothing less.

This show has too many fascinating character to recount, with Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi being my clear villain favorite this season.  No other vampire series or movies come close to the complete entertainment package here.

Again, to me, On Demand is the way to go, because then you just wait til the series is over and watch the episodes bang-bang-bang one a night.

Sidenote:  at recent mystery writers conference, Vonne spent a couple of hours with Charlaine Harris and really enjoyed peppering her with questions.

Blast from my past: "The Rise of the Global Middle Class" (2009)

The Rise of the Global Middle Class

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Good magazine (Jan/Feb 2009), pp. 90-91.

America has had the biggest demand in the global economy for so long that we can’t remember what it was like when that wasn’t the case. But that’s all about to change.

I’ll let you in on a little secret about globalization: It is demand that determines power, not supply. Consumption is king; everybody else serves at will. So it ain’t about who’s got the biggest military complex but who’s got the biggest middle class. Everybody’s got the dream. What matters is who can pay for it.

For as long as we can remember, that’s been America—the consumer around which the entire global economy revolved. What’s it like to be the global demand center? The world revolves around your needs, your desires, and your ambitions. Your favorite stories become the world’s most popular entertainment. Your fears become the dominant political issues. You are the E. F. Hutton of consumption: When you talk, everybody listens. That was the role the Boomers played for decades in America and—by extension—around the world through their unprecedented purchasing power. But that dominance is nearing an end.

In coming decades, it won’t belong to Americans, but to Asians. So say hello to your new master, corporate America: Mr. and Mrs. M. C. Chindia.

The rise of the Asian middle class, a binary system centered in China and India, alters the very gravity of the global economy. The vast sucking sound you hear is not American jobs going overseas, but damn near every natural resource being drawn into Asia’s yawning maw. Achieving middle-class status means shifting from needs to wants, so Asia’s rise means that Asia’s wants will determine our planet’s future—perhaps its very survival. And as any environmentalist with a calculator knows, it isn’t possible for China and India to replicate the West’s consumption model, so however this plays out, the world must learn to live with their translation of the American dream.

As for the new middle class’s relative size, think bread truck, not breadbasket: Over the next couple of decades, the percent of the world’s population that can be considered middle class, judging by purchasing power, will almost double, from just over a quarter of the population to more like half. The bulk of this increase will occur in China and India, where the percentage shifts will be similar. So if we round off China and India today as having 2.5 billion people, then their middle class will jump in numerical size from being roughly equivalent to the population of North America or the European Union to being their combined total.

The vast sucking sound you hear is not American jobs going overseas, but damn near every natural resource being drawn into Asia’s yawning maw.

No, it won’t be your father’s middle class—not at first. Much of that Asian wave now crests at a household income level that most Americans would associate with the working poor, but it will grow into solid middle-class status over the coming years through urbanization and job migration from manufacturing to services. And for global companies that thrive on selling to the middle class, this is already where all the sales growth is occurring, and it’s only going to get bigger. As far as global business is concerned, there is no sweeter spot than an emerging demand center, because we’re talking about an entire generation in need of branding—more than 500 million teenagers looking to forge consumer identities.

There are also essentially two unknowable wild cards associated with the rise of China’s and India’s middle classes: First, how can they achieve an acceptable standard of living without replicating the West’s resource-wasteful version? And second, what would happen if that middle-class lifestyle was suddenly threatened or even reversed? The planet must have an answer to the first question, even as it hopes to avoid ever addressing the second. Here’s where those two fears may converge: As their income rises, their diets change. Not just taking in more food, but far more resource-intensive food, like dairy and meat. Right now, China imports vast amounts of food and India is just barely self-sufficient in the all-important grains category. Both are likely to suffer losses in agricultural production in coming years and decades, thanks to global warming, just as internal demand balloons with that middle class. Meanwhile, roughly one-third of world’s advanced-lifestyle afflictions—like diabetes or cancer—will be found in China and India by 2030. Toss in the fact that much of the population lives along the low-lying coasts, and our notional middle-class couple could eventually cast the deciding global votes on the issue of whether or not global warming is worth addressing aggressively.

Whoever captures the middle-class flag in coming years will have to possess the soft power necessary to shape globalization’s soul in this century, because humanity’s very survival depends on our generation’s ability to channel today’s rising social anger into a lengthy period of social reform. This era’s global capitalism must first be shamed (populism) and then tamed (progressivism), just as America’s rapacious version was more than a century ago. Today’s global financial crisis simply marks the opening bell in a worldwide fight that is destined to go many rounds.

Ahmadinejad's assault on the mullahs intensifies

Brilliant World Politics Review piece by JAMSHEED K. CHOKSY at Indiana U (go Hoosiers!).  Been waiting a while for someone to really lay this out.

Some bits:

Despite some typically incendiary remarks, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attendance at the U.N. General Assembly's 65th session in New York was marked by a low-key tone noted by many. The change in tone, including a reported willingness to resume talks with the U.S. and its allies, reflects the impact of Iran's domestic politics. For increasingly, Ahmadinejad's real battle is at home, against the mullahs who brought him to power. And in that struggle, Ahmadinejad and his allies are increasingly embracing Iran's venerable 2,500-year-old national heritage to attack its recent three-decade Islamist experiment.

The latest salvo, via a Web site called Mashanews run by Ahmadinejad's chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, didn't mince words. "Iran needs to remove the mullahs from power once for all," it read, "and return to a great civilization without the Arab-style clerics who have tainted and destroyed the country for the past 31 years." The executive branch's current stance on the Shiite clergymen who have shaped Iranian politics since 1979 is summed up as, "din (religion) should be distinct from dowla (state)." Indeed, Ahmadinejad's supporters have begun comparing him to King Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire who kept those two institutions separate.

The shift is based on the political realities in Tehran. Having survived the last election thanks to his allies in the civil bureaucracy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and the Basij paramilitary, Ahmadinejad now has little to fear from the mullahs and their supporters. So he has begun to insist that "the executive is the most important branch of government," thereby challenging oversight by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Islamic political institutions. 

That is the wow(!) analysis I've been looking for.  Really spectacular piece worth reading in full.  The mullahs have fallen from power.  We are only beginning to realize the problems and possibilities that ensue.

Why I don't worry about A2/AD (the PG version)

Pair of FT stories.

First is front-pager on how the U.S. defense industry is cleaning up on sales to PG Sunni states worried about Iran's reach for the bomb, with jets, radar and missile defense orders leading the way. While the short term fear is plain enough:  a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran could trigger Iran's retaliations against whomever and they want to be ready. But longer term, we have dueling anti-access, area-denial strategies, with our local allies buying what we're selling: ways to penetrate Iran's alleged A2/AD capacity (mostly fixated on US naval assets in the Gulf) and ways to set up competing versions of their own.

Point being, I'm not a big believer in A2/AD working as a peacetime influencer.  When the Sovs made that effort with us during the Cold War, it was all about the actual fight, and didn't add anything to Soviet ability to freak anybody out and thus influence them.  The nukes they fielded did plenty of that.

Iran won't be getting to any serious nuke total for a very long time, and they're unlikely to make it very high without suffering some debilitating fight with its regional neighbors, so their version of A2/AD (the short version is to say anything that puts our carriers at serious and doesn't allow us to park off your coast and do sorties to our hearts' content) logically presents more ambition (i.e., they really hope to cover some of their own vulnerabilities here).  But deliver any serious peacetime influence? Ain't going to happen. Too tight a space and too many enemies with money to spend and a big friend to make the sales. Plus, no matter what we put in the Gulf, we can reach out with long-range bombers and pretty much do what we want with Iran, from all sorts of distant and untouchable friendly bases.

So what great lord-it-over-them influence does Iran get with its A2/AD and nuke efforts?  Nothing really.  The regional balancing is natural enough and there's no superpower standing behind Iran ready to bail it out if the fight really does come.  Plus (reference 2), a nakedly assertive Iran (i.e., when it's anti-Israeli, aren't-we-Muslims-in-this-all-together rhetoric is stripped away) only buys its co-religionists throughout the region a lot more persecution.  

So Iran's local influence goes down and ours goes up--A2/AD denied.

And it happens in such a nice way for our defense industry facing lower acquisitions back home.  Honestly, it's made to order--unless you're hoping to use the whole A2/AD to get the Pentagon to buy your gear back here. Because the more we arm up our friends, Nixon Doctrine style (shoe not being on Iran's foot this time), the less assets we need to keep in region and the more likely it is that, if we so choose, we'll rain iron from significant, out-of-touch distances.