Wikistrat post @ CNN/GPS: 10 strategic issues with Obama's East Asia "pivot"

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The Obama Administration recently released a military strategic guidance document, which calls for a strategic “pivot” from the Middle East to East Asia. This bold move replaces President George W. Bush’s “long war” against violent Islamic extremism with a new, ongoing effort to shape China’s military rise.

What are the strategic, military trade-offs of this historic shift? Wikistrat, the world’s first massively multiplayer online consultancy, recently tapped its global network of several hundred analysts to ponder this question. This online network offers a uniquely powerful and unprecedented strategic consulting service: the Internet's only central intelligence exchange for strategic analysis and forecasting, delivered - for the first time - in a real-time, interactive platform. Exclusive to GPS, here are Wikistrat’s top ten strategic, military issues to bear in mind as this “pivot” unfolds:

Read the entire post at CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS site.

Time's Battleland: The Perfect Headline on the Silent Sino-American Limited Liability Partnership

Iranian ships on exercise in Gulf

Comes from Bloomberg:

China Gets Cheaper Iran Oil as U.S. Picks Up Tab for Hormuz Straits Patrols

Brilliant huh?

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Appearance on "The Alyona Show" regarding Obama's strategic "pivot" to Asia

Driven by my WPR column.  Did it Tuesday night.

Worrisome to me in the new house: the upload speed on my cable connection was problematic here, as you'll see in the resulting video via Skype.

I would greatly welcome any ideas on how to improve.

Talking to my AV guy, he said make sure everybody in the house (2 other laptops and 2 desktops) were off the web.  That I didn't do.  He said also to shut down everything on my MacBook Pro, go wired to the modem and turn off my wifi.

Speed testing the wifi just now, I'm 24 mps down and 4 up, so there shouldn't have been a problem. But honestly, there could have been 30 web windows open among the 4 other machines, and I didn't exactly clean up my laptop prior.

NEXT TIME: I'll go wired in the living room that doubles as my video production center and I'll have a Wikistrat pattern behind me and I'll be lit from both sides (with screen forming third point). I'll also take all the steps Greg, my AV guy, outlined.

But again, any other ideas welcomed.

Sounds like China moving on DPRK diplomatic front

 Reuters reporting on Yahoo News, with my HT to World Politics Review's media roundup email.

To me, this is a very good sign:

North Korea has held secret talks with Japan in what is believed to be their first contact since the death of long-time leader Kim Jong-il, Japanese media said, as Pyongyang's closest allyChina and South Korea vowed to work closely on denuclearizing the North.

Amid a series of diplomatic contacts over North Korea in China, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak met Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing to discuss ways to preserve stability on the peninsula as the unpredictable North undergoes a delicate transition of power.

Hiroshi Nakai, a former Japanese state minister in charge of the abduction issue, met the North's delegation on Monday for talks on the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 80s, Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted sources as saying.

The two sides are also believed to have discussed terms for restarting intergovernmental negotiations, the Mainichi Daily News reported.

Nakai's office confirmed his trip to China. A government official declined to comment on the trip.

Two logical explanations:

1. China didn't want to push anything until Kim Jong Il passed; and
2. Beijing now wants to capture successor Kim Jong Eun on the diplomatic front before any internal purging process pushes Pyongyang toward displays of aggression toward the West.

How does Beijing do this?  It makes a big show of supporting KJE to put him in a good place, and says these efforts are part and parcel of achieving the same internationally.

If this is not China as a "responsible stakeholder," then I don't know what is.

So, again, a very good sign.

Would be nice if Obama Administration made it own overtures amidst this diplomatic flurry. Could prove decisive and keep us suitably in the mix.  Alas, I think the White House is already too invested in its "strategic pivot" to contain Chinese power in East Asia, which, to me, is a perfect 20th century answer to a 21st century phenomenon.

But I can always hope for common sense to re-emerge post-election . . ..

WPR's The New Rules: Welcome to Obama's Cold War With China

Faced with irreversible long-term fiscal pressures to reduce the U.S. defense budget, late last week the Obama administration began unveiling its supremely focused rationale behind future cuts. The result is an elegantly slim strategic statement (.pdf) that indirectly names its deepest fear in its title: “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” According to the document, over the past decade the U.S. military force structure has been “by necessity” dangerously skewed by “today’s wars.” Now America must start “preparing for future challenges” arising from a frightening and apparently imminent “inflection point” in East Asia’s military balance of power. As such, “we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region.” In sum, not only are these choices being forced upon America, they are the only path we can take if we are to maintain our global leadership.

Read entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: How America Painted Itself Into A Corner on North Korean Succession

Great Washington Post piece on China’s intense desire for stability on Korean peninsula, thus the clear backing of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong Eun. Wrap-up paragraph says it all:

The notion of a democratized Korean Peninsula with U.S. troops positioned directly along the Chinese border — one scenario in a North Korean collapse — is threatening to China because of Washington’s other moves in the region. The Obama administration, describing the United States as a new “Pacific power,” has in recent months strengthened economic ties with the Southeast Asian countries it once neglected; it has also built relationships with some of Beijing’s neighbors, particularly Vietnam and Burma, threatening Chinese influence.

My company, the massively multiplayer online consultancy Wikistrat, recently ran a simulation . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: More Evidence of the Glorious Do-Loop That Is the East Asian Arms Race

WSJ lead story about Chinese developing a ballistic missile designed to fragment - like a cluster bomb - on the deck of a U.S. carrier and wipe out all aircraft and personnel.  Naturally, it's unbelievably provocative to us, because in our world view, U.S. carriers get to come right up to the coast of any nation whenever we please, bringing all that magnificent power projection to bear.

What the Chinese tell us with this development - and so many more - is that the days of the U.S. doing that off China's coast are coming to an end.

Unless we pick up the challenge, of course!

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: The "strategic pivot" to Asia now committed, Pentagon can float allegedly deep cuts

Nice piece in the NYT today previewing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's much-anticipated announcement of almost a half-trillion in defense cuts over the next decade.As Mark Thompson just noted, not a whole lot of details.  We are told that the US military will no longer plan to fight two wars simultaneously - long a preferred fantasy.  Now, it will be able to fight one big war (guess who that is), plus be able to spoil another's attempted dirty deeds (let's say Iran's counter to Israel's attack on its nuclear facilities).

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

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.

WPR's The New Rules: Debunking the Pentagon's Chinese Nationalism Hype

There exists within the Pentagon an unshakeable line of reasoning that says the Chinese military threat to the United States in Asia is profound and growing, that the most likely great-power war conflict will be over Taiwan or the South China Sea, and that the primary trigger will be China's burgeoning -- and uncontrollable -- nationalism. Objectively, China's military capabilities are certainly growing dramatically, but our conventional wisdom tends to break down in the structural plausibility of the scenarios. That's why the firm belief that rampant nationalism will trigger an eventual conflict becomes so crucial, especially when considered in combination with an additional line of speculation that emerged earlier this year, after the Chinese military trotted out a fifth-generation fighter jet the same day that former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Beijing for confidence-building talks: At the time, Gates suggested that maybe the People's Liberation Army was getting too big for its britches, and according to those who emphasize the Chinese threat, when the Chinese Communist Party eventually caves in the face of out-of-control popular nationalism, the PLA will step in and take matters into its own hands.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Time's Battleland: Global arms exports track global economy's double dip

Couldn't afford the upkeep, so it's yours now, kid!

It's interesting to think back to the start of the global economic crisis, when there were a lot of assumptions voiced about how a rising quotient of international tension would inevitably morph into more conflicts and thus more traditionally focused defense spending – i.e., great powers hedging against one another versus, say, non-state actors or state failure. If we were on the verge of the second Great Depression, then certainly we'd find ourselves in a 1930s-like march toward significant great-power struggles, yes? With the Arab Spring providing the tinder for a great-power free-for-all?

So what have we found so far?  

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: Cyberwar fears: disaggregating the threat

Is that China over there, stealing everything?

My man Mark Thompson puts up a cheeky post yesterday that I most heartily approved of. In it he speaks of cyberwar worrywarts and rightly fears that, as the terror war recedes in some priority, new little piggies approach the DoD trough. And as these cyberwar advocates find such a prime target in China, I would note that their efforts merge with those of the big-war crowd that also hopes to regain ascendancy - despite the overall budget crunch.

Now, Mark gets immediately taken to task by none other the great Bruce Sterling over at Wired (HT, Craig Nordin) . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Esquire's Politics Blog: How We Talk War When We Talk With China Now

Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a worried note in his New York Times op-ed on Tuesday on the state of Chinese-American military relations. It was a typically one-sided presentation of the situation: those spying, secretive, bullying, and increasingly well-armed Chinese versus a U.S. that's only trying to keep the regional peace... while selling arms at a record pace to every neighboring state, conducting joint naval exercises right off China's coast, and, you know, openly planning to bomb the breadth and length of the Middle Kingdom.

Details!

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

Time's Battleland: As you approach #1, the catch-up tactics need to cease

NYT story on how the Defense Department suffered a massive loss of data during a hack last March.  Pentagon won't say which country is to blame, which makes it either China or Russia. Why tell us now?  The cleared version of the new US cyber strategy is being released, as Mark just noted.

Read more at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: As China rises militarily, eventually the golden rule should be applied

Wash Times piece on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen's counterpart in China (Chen Bingde) saying that US naval ex's in regional waters with local friends (Vietnam, Philippines, etc.) are "inappropriate." Mullen replies that they're not directed at China, which, of course, is the whitest of lies. The US sells beaucoup arms to all the same players and exercises with them to give them confidence vis-a-vis "rising China."  Fair enough . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: Think outside the defense budget: the real cost of keeping China our enemy

Mark Thompson picks up on Chins's cheeky advice to visiting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen regarding our coupling of world-class defense spending with our world-class national debt/faltering economy.  We can brush it aside, of course, seeing that it's coming from our #1 excuse for defense spending (Mustn't let those Chinese . . . ).

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

The other two charts described in the post:

Time's Battleland: "Coming to a missile silo near you: the end of the strategic triad"

As the Pentagon's "efficiencies review" unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired - namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark Thompson favorite from his Swampland days) is finally going to come to pass - according to my sources in the Building.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

Time's Battleland: "According to new Pentagon cyber strategy, state-of-war conditions now exist between the US and China"

China has been pre-approved for kinetic war strikes from the United States at any time.  Let me explain how.

First off, what the strategy says (according to the same WSJ front-page article Mark cited yesterday):

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

In other words, if you, Country C, take down or just plain attack what we consider a crucial cyber network, we reserve the right to interpret that as an act of war justifying an immediately "equivalent" kinetic response (along with any cyber response, naturally).  If this new strategy frightens you, then you just might be a rational actor.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: Army not lucky, just desperate to avoid Leviathan supremacy over next decade

Picking up on Mark's thread this morning, Galrahn, the eminent blogger at Information Dissemination, likewise sees a fight that's getting nasty, arguing yesterday that the Army was "lucky" (in that, Will-no-one-rid-me-of-that-meddlesome-flag-officer! way) to see two of its great rivals for the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff falter in recent days. Those two are current Vice Chairman and Marine General James Cartwright (recently clearedof decidedly smear-like charges of sexual misconduct with a subordinate officer) and current EUCOM/NATO Admiral James Stavridis (who we're now being told didn't do so well in his interview - something Galrahn finds incredible, as do I).

Read more at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: If issued, Libyan ICC arrest warrants would continue "perfect" Africa record for court

After many weeks of speculation and veiled threats-by-extension from Western government leaders, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced on Monday that he is seeking arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafi, his son Seif al-Islam Qaddafi and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanousi for systematically targeting citizens in Libya's ongoing protests and civil strife. Libya isn't a signatory to the ICC treaty, and prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo declared that the Libyan people should take it upon themselves to make the arrests, if warrants are granted. Moreno-Ocampo said he had enough evidence to go to trial immediately, just another sign that the Qaddafi clan has crossed a line that disallows their staying in power - as far as the West is concerned.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.