Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Got a nice email from Greg Jaffe about his piece. There is no one capturing the profound change wrought upon our military by the Long War better than he. I hope he cranks a book someday. He's the only one who can write it. Still, if he chose not to, he's still the best reporter out there bar none. He teaches me stuff I don't know as a professional in this biz, as opposed to codifying what I already know.

Jaffe really liked the last line in my post, and countered with his own fear that--as a whole--we're closer to the Sovs than the Americans in this Cold War-like Long War--as in, we're moving too slow, we're too cumbersome, etc.

It's a very good point to consider. Yes, our military changes slowly, but we like it that way.

I know, I know, you lose lives and you want everything to change on a dime. But in reality, we like our military slower than our politicians and our politicians slower than our titans of industry. That's how Hamilton and Madison set it up: commerce rules, politics adjust, military protects.

When the politicians are faster than the private sector, you get socialism. And when the military's faster than the politicians, you basically get fascism. We have neither threat to any significant degree in this country, and never will, given our political set-up, which is truly ingenious. Those who fear the onset of either miss the point: the lag in responding to new threats like terror is the price we pay for the freedom engendered by our political set-up. The adjustment takes time--that's our safety valve. And yeah, lives are sacrificed in that manner, and that sucks. But freedom isn't free and that "delaying action" by those who sacrifice give the rest of us time to make the necessary adjustments so that we win through our strengths and not by covering up our weaknesses ("Make politicians more powerful!" "Give the military the lead in everything!"). In truth, we live with inefficient politics and security under the continuing assumption that, in the end, the private sector will come up with the right answers, and in that manner leave us with a government and military that doesn't become too powerful.

I know people don't want to hear that, thus the push for conspiracy theories that explain all this fear away through magical cabals ruling from on high. But the truth is, the answers come from us, the citizens--not the rulers, not the politicians, and not the military.

So when we look for the answers, we find them first in the private sector.

I saw a kinda goofy T-shirt recently that suggested that if the terrorists wanted to come over here, we'd just sic the Sopranos on them. That's infantile, of course, and misses the real point.

A year with Steve and Enterra has exposed me to all this vast array of characters from the investor world who just live to build up new companies that are needed and tear apart old companies past their prime. It's amazingly ruthless, efficient, and completely lacking in the sentimentality arena: nothing personal, Michael, just business.

They're the real Sopranos. They're the hard assess who make America's tough-guy capitalism work. They're why we defeated the Sovs, who had nothing like them on their side. And they're why we're going to defeat the jihadists, who don't have a clue.

Second thought: stop sending all these emails about "Can we trust the Iranians?" It's a stupid question--no offense. It'll never be about trusting the Iranians to be anything but Iranian. That's how you trust everybody in international affairs: you trust them to be exactly who they are. Reagan finessed it with "trust but verify," which is just a poetic way of saying, "I trust you about as far as I can throw you!"

We never trusted the Sovs--to be anything but Sovs. We should never trust the Chinese--to be anything other than Chinese. We won't trust the Iranians to be anything other than hyper-nationalists with a big chip on their shoulder about us.

The point is structuring deals that work around that mistrust on the elite level to allow for trust transactions to build--in multitude--on the mass level. Our elite against their elite IS a fair fight. But our masses against theirs IS NOT. We want an unfair fight. We'll trust their masses. We won't trust their leaders.

So move on to a better straw man, please.

Last thought: few things sexier than watching the missus work out on the Bowflex!