Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Got this email today:

Dr Barnett

I was amused to hear that you are considered a "raving maniac" at the
National War College. You are certainly not considered that by most of the
officers I've encountered in a variety of less prestigious circles, and
mostly here in Canada. Your work was introduced to me a year ago by Col
(now retired) Appleton who had recently returned from a posting in the USA
(and Iraq) during a briefing to his headquarters on the operational planning
process in Iraq. I started reading your articles, thought "SysAdmin -
that's what we've been trying to do for years," then noticed your ideas
cropping up in various other briefings. In July I also got to watch a
National Guard Colonel, during an after action review of a Partnership for
Peace style exercise in the Ukraine, hold up your Pentagon's New Map to the
assembled officers representing 19 nations and tell everyone in the room to
read it as it outlined how coalition operations would be done in the future.
Consider this more anecdotal evidence that you are getting through to the
next generation of decision makers.

Actually, I'm sure the opinion is not that uniform (pardon the pun). Got an email on Friday from a student at Naval War College and he assured me that "not everyone" on staff there that he's interacted with considers me nuts.

More seriously, the more positive response from foreign officers is something I describe in BFA, and it comes out exactly as it did from this guy: "Hey, we've been doing this for years!"

What's so important about that response? It says to America, we'd have plenty of friends for doing SysAdmin if only we'd move more in the direction of fielding a force of our own that's clearly more optimized for the job. It says, shrinking the Gap won't bankrupt the Defense Department because it won't be the only national defense ministry involved--if it rethinks/reimagines/revamps a bit on operations, how it recruits and handles personnel, etc.

My point: When we redefine the problem/solution set in this manner, we're no longer the lonely superpower. Plenty of countries and militaries want to help. People don't hate us, they're just very disappointed in a lot of choices since 9/11.

But in the end, they want us to succeed because we're all in this together.

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Signposts is a weekly digest of major op-ed and feature analyses from the blog of Thomas P.M. Barnett -- www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog -- and is distributed via email in html format.

Posted by Josette at 12:24 PM | Permalink

He told me so himself. Called me on the phone just now, he did. . .

Dateline: Sunday morning, September 25, 2005, Lambeau Field

An hour or so ago, Tom shook hands with one of the Packer all-time greats--Jerry Kramer. Tom's son, Kevin, spotted him coming out of a control booth at Lambeau.

Good catch, Kevin.

Posted by Josette at 11:30 AM | Permalink

Dateline: In the Shire, Indy, 24 September 2005

Get up tomorrow and help my son's school host a cross-country meet (got my metal fence stakes for the chute, and a small sledge at the ready). After Kev runs, we drive to Milwaukee and catch the Brewers against the Cardinals. Then we bunk at a local hotel, then we get up and drive to Green Bay for the game.

Then, back home on a long drive that night so Kev misses no school. My Leinie's will be few and front-loaded, so no crying in my beer if they lose three in a row to start the season!

I have no plans for newsletter essay this week (I know, I abdicate two weeks now), But I will begin my director's commentary series of blogs on BFA on Monday to make up for it. Newsletter will come out this week (I am assuming), with usual highlights, letters, and perhaps a guest essay (or just lotsa letters, cause I've been answering more than a few lately).

Sorry to skip out, but Packer weekends rule!

Posted by at 1:13 AM | Permalink

Here's the opening paras:

September 23, 2005 The Danger Next Door By SETH G. JONES

THE Sept. 18 elections for Parliament and provincial councils were an important step in Afghanistan's march toward democracy. But now that progress is threatened by an increasingly violent insurgency that uses Pakistan as a staging area for attacks. Unless the United States and Pakistan take steps to eliminate this sanctuary, the security situation in Afghanistan will continue to deteriorate and undermine the country's fragile democracy.

This year has been the most violent in Afghanistan since the United States helped overthrow the Taliban government in 2001. The number of Americans killed so far in 2005 (74) is a 570 percent increase from 2001 and a 50 percent increase from 2004. In addition, the number of insurgent attacks against Afghan civilians has steadily increased each year since 2001.

Unlike the violence in Iraq, the fighting in Afghanistan is not the result of a local population deeply hostile to American forces. A 2004 opinion poll by the Asia Foundation showed that 65 percent of Afghans had a favorable view of the United States government, and 67 percent had a favorable view of the American military - findings supported by my own observations and data from trips to the region during the last three years.

Nor is the fighting in Afghanistan the result of a failing American political and military strategy. American conventional and Special Forces have conducted effective strike operations and civic action programs that have undermined Taliban, Qaeda and Hezb-i-Islami insurgents and their local support network in Afghanistan.

Instead, a complex support network in Pakistan is the key to the Afghan insurgency's survival. Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan get supplies and help in Pakistani provinces like North-West Frontier and Baluchistan. Numerous captured Taliban prisoners have said they received training in Pakistani areas like the Mansehra district. Even more troubling, evidence suggests that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has helped Taliban insurgents . . .

Jones then goes on to list how we can work the Pakistan border issue. Good piece, found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/opinion/23jones.html

Posted by at 12:27 AM | Permalink

Kaplan's better judgments are on display here ("Classic Imperialism," WSJ, 23 Sept, p. A16), though, in trying to push his new book he oversells the material here by saying small mil-to-mil training missions deep in the Gap are the real essence of imperialism, not the overextended nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Frankly, it's a wasted argument better used to sell books than impart understanding. Because Kaplan believes the Gap really can't be shrunk, just kept down by "imperial grunts" and the local warriorts they co-opt through training, walking in their combat boots, eating each other's food, etc., he contents himself by wallowing in the glow of this very admirable activity and then elevating it beyond all strategic reason.

All fine and good to celebrate, but all Kaplan captures here is the low-end SysAdmin work that prepares the battlefield for struggles ahead or--if we're lucky--secures them without later Leviathan efforts because the private-sector development kicks in and the connectivity comes via trade, not military aid.

But since Kaplan pretty much doesn't see any of that good stuff happening, he constantly paints this picture of neverending "imperialsm" that merely extends the "keep the fight over there" mentality that drove a lot of strategic rationales for crisis response activities in the early 1990s after the Sovs disappeared and the services needed to justify themselves as relevant to the seemingly "flatter" security environment (if I may be so bold to borrow Friedman's term). Here, "flatter" would mean no peaks formed by great powers bent on military adventurism, so only small stuff is left.

Between reading this op-ed, his Atlantic Monthly article (also basically an excerpt), and scanning his book at an airport bookstore recently), I continue to admire his reporting on the low-end SysAdmin work (now done overwhelmingly by Special Ops guys spread out way too thin, increasingly needing to be done more and more by Marines and regular Army--one of my many judgments that gets me called a "raving maniac" by some), but likewise find tiresome his mistake of extrapolating a universe from his very narrow reporting perspective.

Simply put, Kaplan's soda-straw view (which I find to be, quite frankly, much like Michael Moore's--just from another angle), no matter how many SOF guys he hangs with on how many continents, is still a guide to nothing beyond tactics. That his work passes for strategic thought speaks to the very sad state of affairs in national security circles.

I have said it before and I used to teach it at a War College in every brief I gave: when the defense crowd abdicates strategic thought to journalists, we are totally screwed and deserve what we get. We don't just need good descriptions of how we're going to manage the world as we find it. We need good narratives for how we're going to make this world better. You can manage the former arguing so narrowly from a military perspective and get away with it. But to argue the latter you need a perspective of war within the context of everything else, not one that merely elevates the military perspective to "imperial" universality. Please! Leave that nonsense where it belongs--in the past.

Kaplan delivers the former, avoid him on the latter. And do not take his inabillity to move beyond his tactical view as evidence that any grand strategy is doomed to fail.

If Kaplan just sold himself as a great journalist, I would agree with those who praise him to the hilt within the U.S. military, but his tendency to extrapolate to the strategic from his exceedingly myopic tactical view ruins his material for me. In the end, I see his work doing more harm than good, and so I do not advise people to read it.

Too bad, say I, but chalk it up to the need for all journalists to be celebrities nowadays.

Posted by at 12:01 AM | Permalink

First one ("In China,That Ivy League Degree Isn't Gold: Some Venture Firms Seeking Talent Favor Homegrown Entrepreneurs,", by Rebecca Buckman, p. A1) speaks to trend that VCs (venture capitalists) looking for investment opportunities are increasingly favoring young-and-tough local capitalists over the returnees from the States, armed with their top school degrees.

I will admit, when I saw the headline, I feared I would read some piece that contradicted what I wrote about Chinese business generations in my China piece for the November issue of Esquire. There I basically said that Western businessmen tend to favor younger Chinese capitalists (second generation, so to speak) over the first generation unleashed by Deng's reforms, the older generation being too tainted by their socialist upbringing.

Rather than subverting my point, this piece only emphasizes it more, by saying that this second generation of younger, more pure Chinese capitalists is considered by the VCs as being superior to even their Western-educated contemporaries.

That means China has already become so capitalist generally that local knowledge trumps education--all other capitalist instincts being equal. Impressive, say I. China keeps surprising: stuff you figured you wouldn't be able to say for decades you end up being able to say in years--sometimes even months!

Second article tackles the question quite literally: "China's Private Sector Can Be a Boast--If It Has One," by Andrew Browne, p. C4). The first-ever Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on China's economy says the prviate-sector's share of GDP rose from 50% fin 1998 to 59% in 2003, suggesting an historic tipping point that makes a real turning point in the history of globalization.

Financial analysts from various firms pick numbers to the north and south of that total, going as high as 70% or as low as 30%. Naturally, much depends on definitions. There is the tendency of many true private-sector firms to "wear a red hat" for protection, thus calling themselves state-owned and taking on the appearances of one when really they're not.

Why this debate matters? Question is, Who owns the business cycle in China? State or companies?

One thing no one doubts: the private sector share is growing dramatically with time.

One scary factoid: Chinese passenger car factories are currently operating at just over 50% capacity. God help Detroit when those first Chinese-made cars start showing up.

Posted by at 11:36 PM | Permalink

From TM Lutas, who keeps me honest, in an email to me:

I haven't read the article you talked about here on the PRC's barefoot docs. I thus can't entirely be sure whether I'm misreading things or perhaps you are. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics is one of the biggest international public health threats we've got going, far outweighing the danger of SARS or even H5N1 which has got me scared to death already. The problem is that tossing out antibiotics when inappropriate is like providing combat training classes to gang members. It's just a very bad idea that's going to come back in spades to haunt us all.

In other words, if the doctors aren't trained sufficiently to know when *not* to give antibiotics, their actions will likely pick up the pace of new disease plagues in future, possibly beyond our ability to discover new antibiotics to replace the old ones. That's Gap enhancing, not Core enhancing behavior.

I do wonder if there's a meta-category for reforms that you think are going to help you get into the Core but really pull you further away from it. . .

Posted by at 7:59 PM | Permalink

This link (http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/2005/c15442.htm) was provided to me by a Central Command officer who reads the blog. The site provides the Iraq Weekly Status Report. He said it is a "good document covering what is working and what is not."

It is an interesting PPT brief to peruse. Worth a look.

Posted by at 2:59 PM | Permalink

Having just signed up to give a "distinguished lecture" at National Defense University, it's good to know my ideas haven't lost their capacity to spook people. I wouldn't want to become too accepted.

Got an email from a fellow author today who's a 20-year-plus USAF officer (retired, now in industry). After encouraging me to read about Col. John Boyd and stating his hope that I use his ideas in BFA (I do), he ended the piece by noting that he'd recently spoken with someone at the National War College (part of NDU) and asked him if he was familiar with my work. The response? "Everyone around here thinks he's a raving maniac."

My old hand then went on to say: "That tells me two things: a) You're incontrovertibly on the right track, otherwise they wouldn't be so worried about you, and b) If "everybody" thinks that way, then there's a helluva lot of group-think happening on the National War College faculty. You've struck a nerve---keep sticking it!"

You have to love emails like that!

I only hope I get a chance to sign that faculty member's book. . .

On a related note, got a nice thank you from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (not The Man, but one of the men in the office) for coming in to brief the new Secretary of the Navy nominee (whom I was impressed with) a couple of weeks back. The hand-written P.S. on the bottom read "I note the discussion made your blog."

No "cut it out" or "why I outta . . .!" Just "noted."

Me, I'm just glad they read the blog . . .

Neat constellation of opinions huh? Read by some, scorned by others. Brought in to brief senior PNT officials, couldn't keep my job at the Naval War College. NDU invites me as distinguished lecturer despite many (I'll assume not all) staff considering me a raving maniac. Some retired military officers think I'm dead on, others send me letters (more than once) offering to kick my ass--personally.

Striking nerves all right. Real "bringer of pain and delight," as they said on Star Trek.

Posted by at 2:48 PM | Permalink

Dateline: United flight from Denver to Indy, 22 September 2005

I will say, I have never encountered an executive teaching organization as slick or as professional as this one here in Denver. Good pay, good coordination, good accommodations and travel, great site, great students, great food and AV support, and I got to finally visit Denver for at least a few hours on a nice day.

I only wish all my speaking gigs went this smoothly.

Actually trotted out a bunch of "enterprise resilience management" stuff today at the end of the brief, in a final section entitled "getting down to business." It worked pretty well, giving me yet another chance to learn by speaking on the subject.

Signed some books after the event, then had a nice meal with the Executive Forum staff before heading back to the stunning airport, where I snapped that photo of Jack Swiggert, the Apollo 13 astronaut played by Kevin Bacon in the popular movie by Ron Howard.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Wanted for nation-building: actual nations, not pretend ones

■ Barbie meets her Middle Eastern match!

■ The kidnap industry reflects the individualization of insecurity-just like warfare

■ The return of China's barefoot doctor: a flu-driven stop-gap measure

■ The magnificent FCS looks awfully Leviathan-like

■ Wolfowitz: either low-key mastermind of change or academic out of his depth

■ Brazil matures to the point where scandals don't much matter anymore

■ Why U.S. tertiary education still leads the world

Posted by at 10:45 PM | Permalink

■"The Afghan Difference," editorial, New York Times, 22 September 2005, p. A30.

The NYT editorial wonders aloud why Afghan the nation-building experiment goes reasonably well while only "the most die hard Bush administration spinners pretend to see any significant and lasting gains in Iraq."

"One reason," we are told, is that Afghanistan actually has a "long and continuous history as a single nation," meaning not one invented by colonial masters to cover their tracks as they left the scene, like Yugoslavia or Iraq.

Still, Yugoslavia emerges from its wars of the 1990s with a number of viable functioning states. Still residual ethnic hatreds and economic development proceeds slowly enough, but functioning all right, and moving toward the Core more and more.

So Afghanistan does all right as a nation because it's actually a coherent nation, and Yugoslavia does okay when it breaks back down to its constituent parts, but Iraq is a full-blown failure because we couldn't keep that pretend state together, instead seeing it fall into three parts: 1) a Kurdistan that's been a wonderfully functioning state for years now, thanks to the no-fly-zone the U.S. provided across the 1990s; 2) a Shiite region that's moving toward constitutional agreement with Kurdistan for a federated Iraq and which has, so far, resisted the impulse for war against Sunnis who have targeted them unceasingly in terrorist violence; and 3) the basket case that is the Sunni portions.

If Iraq the unitary state was the goal, then yes, we have failed, but that was a stupid and unrealistic goal from the start, and why anyone wants to compare it to Afghanistan on that basis instead of the now defunct and broken-up Yugoslavia is beyond me.

Iraq is not the failure it is made out to be. Sunni land is a complete failure, but Shiite land and Kurdistan are not.

Posted by at 10:44 PM | Permalink

■"This Doll Has an Accessory Barbie Lacks: A Prayer Mat," by Katherine Zoepf, New York Times, 22 September 2005, p. A4.

I told my Barbie story a lot when I first gave the big brief in the Building and elsewhere in late 2001 and through 2003. The story got old eventually, even as it was given new life by Saudi Arabia repeating the same ban on Barbie that Iran had implemented earlier (its preferred hijab-clad Sara doll never kept pace on store shelves).

Now, the big craze among young Arab girls in Syria, Egypt and Qatar are the Fulla dolls that look just like Barbie but come with "Muslim values." Same body shape, but dressed with a black abaya and head scarf. Oh, and the prayer rug. Other than the doll's clothes, the bigger line of girl-oriented merchandise favors pink almost exclusively.

Why does this doll finally top Barbie? Advertising like you would associate with your average George Lucas "Star Wars" film: "On the children's satellite channels popular in the Arab world, Fulla advertising is incessant."

Fine and dandy, as are plans to intro Teacher Fulla and Doctor Fulla. Remember, everyone gets content at their own pace. Prayer mats are good, so long as the message is conveyed that careers are possible and good.

And don't worry, Barbie has stared down many a fad in her day . . .

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink

■"Dutch Court Fight Lays Bare Reality Of Kidnap Industry," by Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A1.

A subject plagued by weak data, but best guesses say the practice is booming from Iraq to Chechnya to inland China-all Gap or Gap-like situations. Lotsa money involved, enough to fuel insurgencies, criminal gangs and terrorists nets.

Rough global figures say maybe 6k cases in 2001, racing up to almost 15k by 2004.

To me, this is analogous to the warfare-against-individuals phenomenon we've seen in U.S. military interventions over the past decade and a half, a subject I run through (the downshifting of violence and danger) in BFA.

Posted by at 10:42 PM | Permalink

■"Barefoot Doctors Make a Comeback In Rural China: Trained as a Nurse, Ms. Li Treats Datan Village; Delivering a Baby for $4," by Peter Wonacott, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A1.

Mao created an army of "barefoot doctors" in the 1960s and 1970s as a low-cost way to extend medical networks into rural regions beset by pervasive poverty. They did a lot of good along the way, reducing infant mortality and curbing contagious diseases.

But when China shifted to market economics under Deng, the communes fell apart in the countryside and health care stopped being subsidized with things like the barefoot docs. Rural incomes did not keep pace with urban ones, so good healthcare became very hard to find in remote agricultural regions.

Now, the 4th Generation leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao have shown a real focus on dealing with the needs of the rural poor, speaking to my theory that The Train's Engine Can Travel No Faster Than Its Caboose, a phrase that popped out of my mouth during my presentations in China last August and now recounted in an entire chapter section in Blueprint for Action.

So Wen and Hu push to revive the program, yet some critics say it's a waste of time, as these lightly trained medics mostly just hand out antibiotics indiscriminating. Hell, we have highly-trained and highly-paid doctors in America who can do that!

Still, I think it's good that Wen and Hu continue to emphasize the needs of the rural populations left behind by the fast moving train that is China's globalizing economy. In BFA, I call this "caboose braking."

It matters, because when you don't pay attention to such things, you end up with things like SARS, Avian Flu, or New Orleans after Katrina.

Posted by at 10:41 PM | Permalink

■"Army Display Woos Project's Foes," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A6.

Army trots out some Future Combat System gear and does some demos for congressional leaders and staff who seem intent on stripping the program of some of its $125 billion price tag, believing it's chock-full of immature technologies that-even if they did work-wouldn't exactly be useful in the sort of counter-insurgency Fourth Generation Warfare that Army's likely to be focused on in coming years and decades.

Rumsfeld's been promising the Army that if they switched from a century of big division structure (stretching back to the First World War) to these new, smaller brigade units of action, that the FCS would be its reward. Historically, I think this will go down as a bait and switch: the reformatting of the divisions will occur, but FCS will prove to be a fairly small carrot in the end. Too complex, too expensive, and not relevant enough to the likely battlefields of tomorrow.

Posted by at 10:40 PM | Permalink

■"A Kinder, Gentler Wolfowitz at World Bank? New Head's Low-Key Approach Masks Subtle Shift Toward Agriculture and Infrastructure," by Greg Hitt, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A4.

Wolfie keeps the low profile at the WB. Just floats ideas for change here and there, but no big plans. Speaks of redirecting the bank toward ag and infrastructure with a big focus on Africa. Sounds about right to me, but one can take the low-profile thing too far. Opportunities for significant reform get lower the further you go in someone's tenure. Is this Wolfie playing it smooth or just revealing himself as the policy wonk academic he has long been accused of being?

When I did the interviews for the July Rumsfeld piece in Esquire, I got the distinct impression time and time again that Rummy was his own SECDEF and DEPSECDEF, or both Defense Secretary and Deputy Defense Secretary, with Wolfowitz basically a glorified Under for Policy and Doug Feith a glorified Deputy Under. I'm not just making that up. I heard it time and time again.

People in the Building always said Wolfowitz was too ideological for SECDEF but not cut out to be the business guy who led the building (DEPSECDEF). Question now is, Can he be a visionary at the WB or does the job actually take somebody who might have some skill in managing a bureaucracy?

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink

■"Brazil Weathers Scandal Well: Threat to Da Silva Doesn't Becloud Markets, Currency or Growth," by Matt Moffett, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A15.

For a while now, Brazil's been suffering through the sort of senior political corruption scandal that's routinely torpedoed Latin American governments (along with their economies) in the past.

But not this time in Brazil, which is growing well, exporting better than ever (the "breadbasket" phenom I describe as the basis for Brazil's emerging agricultural superpower state in BFA), and attracting foreign direct investment just fine. Currency's also trading at 40-month high.

What gives? The article asks.

Ag exports and global liquidity help, but the biggest deal is a series of rule-set resets in the public and private sectors (opening economy to imports, privatizing state industries, limits on government spending).

Simply put, good rules, good credit, even when politics sours. A real Core country can withstand bad politics because politics in general become fairly irrelevant.

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink

■"Secrets of success: America's system of higher education is the best in the world. That is because there is no system," by Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist, 10 September 2005, p. 6.

Interesting survey of global education by one of my favorite Economist writers celebrates that which Tom Friedman seem to dismiss a bit too casually in his "World is Flat" book.

Wooldridge says three reasons account for this: 1) the Fed plays a limited role, unlike in a France or Germany; 2) schools compete for everything, including students and teachers; and 3) our universities are anything but ivory towers, instead being quite focused on practical stuff (Great line: "Bertrand Russell once expressed astonishment at the worldly concerns he encountered at the University of Wisconsin: 'When any farmer's turnip go wrong, they send a professor to investigate the failure scientifically,'" So true, as anyone who's grown up in Wisconsin farmland can attest.)

Two interesting data points: listing of top global universities features 1 from Japan, two from UK and 17 from U.S. Wisconsin, my alma mater is 18 (ahead of Michigan!) and Harvard is number 1.

Also interesting: Of the students who travel abroad, 30 percent come to America. Britain is next at 12%, then Germany, then Australia, then France and Japan. After Australia it's all single digits.

I guess America isn't exactly out of the source code business, at least in the most important software package known to man.

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink

John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr.

Posted by Josette at 5:44 PM | Permalink

September 22, 2005
Economic Globalization (pdf)
The Pentagon's New Map: A Cutting-Edge Approach to Globalization

Tom will be presentiing the full brief, including 10 Enterra Solutions' slides for the business audience.

Posted by Josette at 10:39 AM | Permalink

Here's what the Charlotte Observer has to say:

Author will speak on global conflict

New York Times best-selling author Thomas P.M. Barnett will present a program on global terrorism, international peacemakers and economic stability in foreign markets at 8 p.m. Oct. 5 in the Student Commons at Belmont Abbey College.Admission is free; reservations are required.

Barnett's program is part of the Father Cuthbert Allen Visiting Speakers Program. He will look at the forecast of global conflict and share his thoughts on the history and strategy of the U.S. military, outlining the unique role that America could and should play in establishing international stability. His presentation will be based on his new best-selling book, "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century."

To make a reservation, call (704) 825-6728.

Here's the link to the page (a bit of a scroll down): http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/states/north_carolina/counties/gaston/12699842.htm

Posted by at 12:50 AM | Permalink

Just looking over the post below on AFEI's new blog and its coverage of Geoff Davis's remarks, I have to say the guy really impresses for a first time congressman.

Then again, he had a serious military career (Ranger and time in 82nd). Sweet man in person, though. He had me in his Hill office a while back and he impressed me there one on one. Public speaking is a very different thing, though, so now I am doubly impressed.

Posted by at 12:40 AM | Permalink

Dateline: Frontier Airlines flight to Denver, 21 September 2005

Funny to have the Post link back to my weblog as a result of my blogging one of their stories. Now I feel like I'm working for the WP for free, just like all my readers!

Fret not. Real business opportunities come to me regularly through blog readers, demonstrated yet again at Monday's Enterra-sponsored conference in Manhattan. I will get paid, my friends, and quite nicely. The blog is a mechanism of intellectual connectivity, but business naturally follows it, because it's an idea-driven world, even if it's still divided between the Lexus-obsessed Core and the Olive tree-obsessed Gap (see, I still love Friedman-just the "early Friedman," you know, like the "early Woody").

Got caught up on a bunch of stuff today before heading out to run Kevin's grade school cross-country team practice. Head coach can't be there on Wednesdays, so I step in and keep it disciplined.

I forgot to share that Kev did even better in his second meet last Saturday than in his first, although he placed lower and did not score a ribbon this time (off by only 4 seconds). In his first meet of a week earlier he ran 5th out of 21 boys in just under 15 minutes for 3k. Last Saturday in a much bigger meet of 8 teams (with some big schools fielding large teams and our little school having just Kev and his older-grade teammate) Kev finished 12 of 40 and took 73 seconds off his previous best (the first meet). I was very proud and I'm dead certain no one younger than he finished before him.

Today it's a long slow run with Kevin and I running with the senior kids. As the youngest by a year and a half (though not the shortest), K-man struggles a bit on the jaunt, complaining of back tension, but he guts it out and I give me a major-league massage on the grass before we end practice with our "strides" (stretching runs of about 100 meters). Spouse and youngest Vonne Mei show up at end of practice, and the Mei Mei (as I am wont to call her) does a decent job of imitating our contortions.

Then I bug out and drive to the airport for a non-stop on Frontier to Denver. Perfect ride where we can watch 24 TV channels the whole way (if you pay; me, I just watch other people's screens without the sound, which works just fine), so I get to watch that JetBlue's fire-filled landing at LAX live while I'm flying at 38k. Neato! Especially since the pilot warned us of a bumpy landing here in Denver due to high winds.

Actually a pretty nice landing during which I was reading the pure China section of Chapter 3 in Blueprint for Action-pound for pound my favorite writing in the piece (which reminds me that I still haven't heard from Beijing U Press about our negotiations on the Chinese-language version of PNM and which words could remain in; guess I better ping my agency on that one).

There is nothing quite like reading your final book in the weeks running up to its publication. It is the sweetest sort of anticipation there is for a writer. The magazine equivalent just doesn't compare (neat, just not as profound because it's not "for the ages" in the same way). I'm hoping Warren feels the same way, but I doubt he has the luxury of perusing it much.

I have to keep reading it, so when Enterra colleague Bradd Hayes sends me his 100-plus slide package on BFA, I'm ready to dive into it on animation. Gotta have all the stories and lines in your head because my briefs are never written down-except in transcription.

And ready I will be for the new brief's big unveiling at National Defense University on 19 October in the late morning in front of the entire invited student body, in the same hall where CSPAN first filmed the original three-hour brief that it showed over Labor Day 2004.

And the goal is the same here: get CSPAN to tape it and show it soon after. They asked for such an opportunity through Putnam, and I've got one for it now that I've taken up NDU's longstanding offer to give a distinguished lecture. Paul Davis, a prof and big supporter of mine there, told me that all the students at ICAF (Industrial College of the Armed Forces) got hardcover of PNM and read it through early in the school year, so they will be the perfect audience for the unveiled Vol. II brief.

Get it taped on the 19th and the book comes out on the 20th. So long as CSPAN doesn't sit on it for months like it did last time, we should be in business.

Reading the book makes me realize something, though. I am moving more and more in the direction of my agent Jennifer's original advice that the near-term effort with Steve DeAngelis might be better served as a serious business-focused volume published by an established biz school press, keeping the Putnam-type bestselling volume as the more distant goal. I think we need a year or two to build up the success stories and create a host of shared ones between us, Steve and I, and yet, I don't want to hold up his desire to lay down some serious intellectual markers with his content material on Enterprise Resilience Management, his trademarked concept. Not sure if I co-author that first book, as the original idea was that I would just write the foreword, but no matter what the decision ultimately is, Steve's thought leadership should not be held back. We have to get it out fast somehow. He's got enough content for that biz book, we just need more narrative stories for the popular bestseller I hope someday to write with him.

Finally, today I got 20 volumes from Putnam, my author's free take of books (I can buy more at great discount), but these are the true freebies written into my contract.

Here's how they shook out in the mass mailing already accomplished this afternoon:

First, I have six siblings, so there goes books 1-6.

Then there's my Mom, #7.

Then there's my mother-in-law and father-in-law, #s 8 and 9.

Then there are two brother-in-laws that cannot be denied, #s 10 and 11.

Then there are my four kids and my wife, #s 12-16.

Then there's the potential second adopted daughter from China, or the child to be named at a later date (and yes, I saved an original PNM hardcover for her too, just in case!). That's #17.

So the family takes the first 17 of 20, leaving a precious three to distribute.

Number 18 goes to mentor Hank Gaffney, and 19 goes to other great mentor Art Cebrowski.

Number 20 is a fairly easy final call: my new boss Steve DeAngelis, whom I thank twice in the acknowledgments (once in a sentence where Putnam screwed up his name as "DiAngelis" [and yes, I still have the notes to prove I gave them the correct spelling] and a second time in a listing of "thank you" names where Putnam gets his last name right--thus proving they knew the right version all along!).

Landing at Denver is pretty cool. Way modern and spacious and efficient airport.

Nice limo driver waiting for me (I type these final sentences en route to what I assume will be a pretty nice hotel-and it's everything of the sort, to include the neat view of the clock tower in downtown Denver).

Tomorrow I am up for a three-hour version of the PNM brief, which I will backfill with some of the shared Barnett-DeAngelis brief that we debuted in Manhattan on Monday, at the request of my sponsors, who asked me to bring it all down at the end to terms that would grab the assembled business execs at their throats.

And enterprise resiliency does just that: keeping your business going when disaster strikes, keeping your CEOs out of jail, keeping your firm competitive and safe, and triggering the society-wide resilience that ultimately keeps America likewise strong and someday shrinks the Gap. So yeah, the big book will definitely come at some point, but only when it can be supported by the right narrative. Steve and I have yet to live that narrative, but we will.

Here's the daily catch:

■ China's many rule-set resets: you need a scorecard to keep up with it all ■ The amazing self-delusion on North Korea

■ The "Shiite strategy" was always the default strategy

■ In Globalization IV, you fight pirates with attaches

■ Europe gets closer, closer, closer to actually starting membership talks with Turkey

■ Old rules, old roots

■ Extend the re-insurance safety net for God's sake!

Posted by at 12:32 AM | Permalink

■"English 101 Becomes a Booming Business," by Jason Dean, Wall Street Journal, 19 September 2005, p. A15.

■"Bridging China's M.B.A. Gap: U.S. Universities Forge Alliances to Help Groom Managers," by Charlotte Li, Wall Street Journal, 20 September 2005, p. A15.

■"Deep Flaws, and Little Justice, in China's Court System," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 21 September 2005, p. A1.

China's massive globalization reset (you think China changes the world, you ain't seen nothing yet on how globalization changes China) is amazing to watch unfold.

Three stories here on progress, shortages, and serious stubborn deficits.

The teaching of English in China is taking off like a rocket. Give Chinese families a taste of globalization and put some money in their pockets and they will spend it on getting their kids ahead. In the minds of most parents, English gets their kids ahead like nobody's business.

Here's a sign that you're either in the Core already or heading that way quickly: when your young people see English as a competitive advantage. Show me a Seam or Gap government pushing English, and I'll show you a future member of the Core.

Then there are U.S. biz schools stepping into China big time to help it deal with a huge looming shortage of senior managers, which is a key reason why Chinese companies are so eager to buy American ones: they want the managers as much as the assets.

At the end of the Cold War, there were 9 universities in China that granted MBAs. Now there are almost 100, and they cranked 12,000 a year. Still, this is tiny given the rising demand, so watch U.S. schools augment that domestic effort greatly and--by doing so--export rule sets like crazy.

This can only help in the most dangerous rule set deficit in China today: effective rule of law. We can't expect China to generate that absent a smart, informed demand rising from the business sector. That won't happen without smart, informed managers and lotsa transactions to fuel that learning curve. The drive for economic efficiency will drive the process of legal reform as much or more than the Party's growing fears that unless they push for it there will continue to be rising social unrest.

Posted by at 12:24 AM | Permalink

■"Northern Exposure: Seoul's food aid only helps Kim Jong Il," op-ed by Jason Lim, New York Times, 21 September 2005, p. A27.

■"A Skeptical View: North Korea gets its way-yet again," op-ed by Nicholas Eberstadt, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2005, p. 26.

■"U.S. Says North Korean Demand for Reactor Won't Derail Accord," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 21 September 2005, p. A6.

Great op-ed by Lim on how Seoul's turn-a-blind-eye on Kim only keeps a population living in inexcusable misery for the long haul. All because the South fears the price tag of the country's rebuilding. With relatives like these, who needs enemies?

Kim is worth taking down solely for the 1-2 million he's killed by starvation and malnutrition over the past decade.

The White House and State Department might be happy to stick with their Beijing Declaration, but that's all it is--a declaration. It's like Al Capone promising to pay his taxes all of a sudden, even as his nefarious and brutal criminal empire keeps humming along ("Well, if you'll pay taxes on it all, then fine!"). So we get another false promise from Kim on WMD. Getting him to pay his "WMD taxes" while a generation of kids is stunted, kept in the closet that is disconnected North Korea, is a truly false victory, something only Neville Chamberlain in his prime could celebrate.

And yet watch the major papers celebrate this "breakthrough" in their editorials. Oh yes, the great "diplomatic victory" signifying nothing but ending some sound and fury over the "unilateral" Bush Administration.

Read the great op-ed by Nick Eberstadt. We are deluding ourselves on this deal:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which holds the North Korean state to be an unremittingly hostile "negotiating partner," history actually demonstrates that Pyongyang can be a highly obliging interlocutor under certain very specific conditions. All that is necessary to "get to yes" with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is to concede every important point demanded by the North Korea side while sacrificing vital interests of one's own.

You tell 'em, Nick.

Enthusiasts contend that the North Korean regime, after two years of tough talks with five other countries united in the desire to force it to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, has at last agreed to a step-by-step process that will eventually resolve the crisis. In reality, nothing of the sort has taken place. A careful reading of the Sept. 19 joint statement suggests instead that North Korean negotiators have just achieved a stunning advance in their government's quest to "normalize" its nuclear weapons program. There's also been equally momentous progress in Pyongyang's longstanding campaign to sunder the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. Wittingly or otherwise, the U.S. negotiating team has executed an apparent cave-in-embracing precepts crucial to North Korean objectives but inimical to Washington's own.

Simply put, we're written into an agreement wording that legitimizes North Korea having nuclear power and set ourselves up for a "denuclearized Korean peninsula" that will never be. The U.S. has no nukes in South Korea and South Korea has no nukes, so it's unclear how one "denuclearizes" the peninsula unless it involves getting the U.S. forces, with their nuclear guarantee, off the peninsula.

The only diplomatic triumph here belongs to Kim Jong Il, in a victory only the creators of "South Park" and the puppet movie "Team America" (in which Kim "starred") can truly appreciate.

Bottom line: North Korea was just punted to the next administration.

Posted by at 12:23 AM | Permalink

■"U.S. Shiite Strategy Faces More Clouds: Fresh Iraq Violence in Basra Raises Doubts on Free Rein For Militias Linked to Iran," by Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2005, p. A12.

U.S. forces in Iraq, because we didn't attract enough allied boots-on-the-ground and screwed up the initial rebuild period during which we had 90% of the Iraqi people on our side and failed to keep them there, has been forced into a devil's bargain: letting the Shiites grow some serious militias to keep themselves safe from the insurgency. Amazingly, so far those militias haven't given into the temptation for all-out civil war, which to me signals that the Shiite region of Iraq is already achieving a functioning political system of sorts (yes, highly Islamist, but expecting anything else was silly, like expecting the young U.S. to be anything but highly Christian in orientation).

A largely autonomous Kurdistan was in the works for a good decade prior to the Saddam takedown. Our most successful nation-building effort to date in the post-Cold War period was the one in which we did nothing but the overarching security (no fly zone in the north) and let the people get their own act together (see, it doesn't have to be rocket science if the party in question is really incentivized--as the Kurds were).

Now we have a fairly successful nation-building story emerging in the Shiite portions of Iraq, with some of the credit going--quite frankly--to an Iran that wants to see a historical enemy kept divided and weak and to gain a significant ally in the region.

One wonders if this outcome wasn't always in the cards, no matter how good our SysAdmin effort. But clearly, absent one this outcome became the path of least resistance and--given the alternatives--not a bad one at all so long as we can reach some modus vivendi with Iran like we did with a Soviet Union back in the early 1970s.

And our biggest friends in this process will not be the EU, but India, Russia and China. You will hear this ad nauseum from me in the future: the New Core sets the new rules.

Posted by at 12:22 AM | Permalink

■"U.S. Plans Deployment of Antipiracy Attaches," by Greg Hitt, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2005, p. A5.

■"Worry Over Trade Pacts Roils Washington: Lawmakers of Both Parties May Be Vulnerable to Voter Backlash Over Job Losses," by Greg Hitt, Wall Street Journal, 20 September 2005, p. A4.

Commerce is making ready a team of intellectual property (IP) specialists to deploy to nations giving us fits on piracy. Sort of a WTO-enforcing SWAT team.

The lead experience here is China, and that is all fine and good. This is where our "conflict" with China should really be centered: in economics and in rules.

Other countries targeted are all either New Core (Russia, India, Brazil) like China, or key Seam States (Thailand) or places where we're making a special trade effort to shrink the Gap (Big Bang-land Middle East).

Good move, I say. One the White House can point to in upcoming trade pact battled with Congress, which, in its infinite wisdom, is moving more and more toward protections as a catch-all answer for America's economic woes. Bad, stupid, ahistorical choice, but there it is.

Posted by at 12:21 AM | Permalink

■"Europe Is Closer to Talks With Turkey," by International Herald Tribune staff, New York Times, 21 September 2005, p. A8.

One of my headlines for "Blogging the Future" is about Turkey's surprisingly rapid entry into the EU, generating a serious civilization rapprochment between that body and Islam.

I know, I know, it seems crazy from the perspective of right now, with Europe seemingly so spooked on terrorism and ghettoized radicals in its midst, but that just means the solution set draws near. Remember, it always gets nasty just before the political will is reached for serious reform.

So bring on the nasty, I say.

Posted by at 12:19 AM | Permalink

■"Germany's Political Crisis Has U.S. Roots: State Governors Wield Veto Power in Post-World War II System to Prevent Rise of Dictator," by Marcus Walker and David Crawford, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2005, p. A10.

■"A New Look At Nukes: Energy firms push to build reactos as natural gas prices soar," by James M. Pethokoukis, U.S. News & World Report, 26 September 2005, p. 52.

Fascinating WSJ story on how the American approach to setting up West Germany's political system after WWII is the prime cause behind the current political paralysis (e.g., weird afterlude to election, several recent attempts at political and economic reform stymied by regional governments). Basic truth is that we made the regional governments very strong in West Germany to prevent another Hitler, or another World War. This was never a big problem so long as it was West v. East, but now that the unifying dangers are all gone, it gets problematic, keeping Germany sclerotic and rather neurotic. America had this problem to a very real degree prior to the Civil War and the huge rise in Federal power that it triggered. That's when we stopped being these United States and became the United States.

Obviously, the Nazi period was seminal for Germany, but as it's several generations removed now and even its top leadership is post-WWII in its formative years (0-10), it's time for Germany to move on.

Yet look at something like the history of nuclear power in America and you see that early traumatic experiences can scar a society for "life," or until the memory ages out of the political system. We chose unwisely in terms of the original generation of nuclear power plants in this country (thank you Hyman Rickover!) and the poor performance and safety record of those plants gives nukes a very bad name here for the longest time.

Elsewhere in the world, the technology has moved on, and the fear factor never quite developed to the degree it did here. Now, we look fairly backwards in our attitudes on nuclear power: an old social and political rule set that's desperately outmoded given the changes in technology, the progressive de-carbonization of our energy profile (short course: wood to coal to oil to gas to nukes/hydrogen), and the rising prices for oil and gas thanks to the rising Asian economies.

People tend to think energy is all about oil and cars, but that's about 40% of our usage. Electricity is the King Kong of our b-t-u-sage. American energy companies have been building mostly gas-powered turbines for electricity generation over the past 20 years, and now gas prices are rising just like oil prices (Guess what? Electricity is tripling in Asia over the next twenty years!), so nukes are looking more and more real as a significant answer over the coming years and decades.

Get used to the idea.

Posted by at 12:18 AM | Permalink

■"Expand the Terror Insurance Safety Net," by William R. Berkley, Wall Street Journal, 20 September 2005, p. B2.

Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) in 2002 in response to 9/11, in effect clearing up the whole "who insures the 're-insurers'?" question.

What question is that, you ask?

Insurance companies need insurance too, and they turned to far larger insurance brokers known as "reinsurers" who basically offer them insurance against high-end losses. It's like the back-up plan for the insurance industry.

Well, 9/11 spooked the reinsurance industry, which said, in effect, "We won't offer insurance to insurance companies over catastrophic terrorism or other, similar beyond-imagination disasters."

In turn, insurance companies were limiting the amount of property insurance they'd offer companies, which got to be a scary concept for big companies in big cities like NY and LA.

Thus, Congress stepped in and passed the TRIA in 2002, saying in effect, "We'll pick up anything beyond the fantastic figure of $30 billion paid out by the insurance industry." At that point the Fed is responsible for 90% of damages up to 100 billion.

Needed or not?

I say needed, for psych value alone. Of course, if anything went over $30 billion, you know the government would be picking up the rest of the bill. That's what it's for--the common weal and what not. Just making it explicit chilled the reinsurance industry and that chilled the insurance industry and that's something worthwhile all in itself. It also says to the rest of the world--meaning terrorists--that we have our shit together on this subject: You dream of financial meltdown? Well, we have some plans to counter your schemes.

The law runs out at the end of 2008. Congress is debating whether or not to deal with it. It should extend it, not for property damage per se, but for business continuity losses first and foremost. Keeping business up and running is everything. It's what Congress should be focusing on for America. It's what the White House should be focusing on for our economic ties with the outside world. And it's what all advanced nations and their national security establishments should be thinking about and planning for with regard to the global economy as a whole.

In a connected world, business continuity is everything. Look at New Orleans and ask yourself what will be the biggest horizontal scenarios coming out of that disaster: loss of business continuity will lead the pack in several industries. Resiliency, my friends, is the best defense. Congress should be promoting it by extending TRIA.

Posted by at 12:18 AM | Permalink

An interesting rewrite of my blog. This guy could pen novels he does so well with so little!

Here is his rather interesting post: http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/18/1234383.html.

For comparison, see my original posting: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002292.html

Posted by at 4:42 PM | Permalink

Here is the page where they do it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091601983_3.html.

Actually, it only makes me wish I had written more on the piece. The key would seem to be the hot link back to the Post I'm pretty sure that's how they track you.

Think I've just found another task for my webmaster. . .

Posted by at 4:33 PM | Permalink

Dave Chesebrough, President of The Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI), is now blogging at the net-centric dialog:

http://netcentricity.typepad.com

"Congressman Geoff Davis (D-KY) spoke about changing rules sets, and the need for this country, in both its security and economy, to understand these and to adapt. He cautioned the audience to continually evaluate their own rules sets and to not fall victim to a false set of assumptions. As an example he pointed out the discrepancy between how well we thought we were prepared for an emergency, and the response to the aftermath of Katrina. As Senator McCain said this week, everything has changed. He spoke of two kinds of rules: those that are immutable, and those that are adaptable. For this country we have two immutable rules.

The first: all people have dignity, value and worth.

The second: we are a people accountable to higher authority, the rule of law.

The future, he said, is all about sticking with these rules while also challenging our assumptions about our adaptable public and private rule sets. . ."

Subcribe to their feed.

Posted by Josette at 10:48 AM | Permalink

If you would like to continue participating in Tom's work--Senior Managing Director--at Enterra Solutions, please add yourself to the Enterra Solutions mailing list:

subscribe@enterrasolutions.com

Posted by Josette at 8:36 PM | Permalink

Fallon is the new head of Pacific Command. Despite all the war-posturing and tough talk on China coming out of that command, he's calling for more mil-mil cooperation with China.

Here's a snippet from a recent WP article:

"Do we have to have conflict because of the rise of China? I don't believe so," said Adm. William J. Fallon, who heads the Hawaii-based Pacific Command from an office with a sweeping view of Pearl Harbor and the vast ocean beyond.

"As they grow, there's going to be an inevitable push as they take advantage of their economic ability to improve their military capabilities," he said of the Chinese. "We ought to recognize that as a reality. This is not a zero-sum game.

"I do not buy the program," he said, referring to the presumption that conflict cannot be avoided. "I just don't buy it."

Fallon said he had received a clear mandate in this regard from Washington, despite widely noticed remarks in June from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld questioning China's motives in modernizing its military forces. In addition, Fallon said in an interview, this approach means China's cultivation of stronger diplomatic and military ties with other Asian nations does not have to compete with U.S. changes in the Pacific.

"A rising China that is actively engaged in helping the countries of the region maintain security and stability can be a very good thing," he explained.

Fallon is a bright guy and a bright star. One can only wish him well. While you might expect him to tout the highly anti-China line coming out of too much of the Navy, he's done the right thing by thinking of how best he can make his mark in the region during his time. War over Taiwan is unlikely, so if he's going to get credit for anything, it might as well be for improving relations between the U.S. and Chinese militaries. Lotsa Combatant Commanders go all "SysAdmin-y" (meaning they focus more on administering to the regional system of security than posturing for war) when they reach that post. Why? It's just the natural inclination when you sit in the top spot and say to yourself: What can I do to make this region better than I found it?

Full story at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091601983.html.

Thanks to Manuel Sandoval for reminding me that I need to get a paper subscription to the WP.

Posted by at 11:26 AM | Permalink

Same basic package as last time with same publisher. I give the okay today to my agency.

Posted by at 10:24 AM | Permalink

Citation is:

N. Korea, U.S. Gave Ground to Make Deal Long Process Looms On Nuclear Accord

By Glenn Kessler and Edward Cody
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; A01

Find the full text at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091900565.html

It's one of those weird, papering-over-the-differences agreements where everybody seems to read the document as they see fit.

North Korea signs a document that says--in effect--it's willing to negotiate its nuclear arms program away. There is no agreement, just that statement of willingness to negotiate one. All this means is that, for now, North Korea has abandoned its pledge never to give up its program. That's it.

North Korea still wants a light nuclear reactor, and we've given up our demand that they give up that demand. If a deal is struck, North Korea agrees to abandon its programs and allow inspections, and rejoin the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But that's if a deal is struck. All sides say any deal would require lengthy negotiations, during which I'm not seeing any pledge by North Korea to abandon anything.

As far as I can see, Pyongyang and Beijing have successfully taken the issue of America's unhappiness with North Korea's pursuit of WMD off the table by getting North Korea to sign a piece of paper saying that someday--under the right conditions--they might sign a piece of paper promising the Americans what they want.

In my mind, this is the Bush Administration saying, "We're tied down in the Middle East and cannot try anything beyond temporizing the situation in North Korea." In effect, they punted on the issue for the rest of the term.

In an immediate demonstration of the difficulty ahead, the official North Korean news agency early today quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman as asserting that Pyongyang would not give up its weapons program until it received nuclear reactors from the United States. A State Department official shrugged off the statement, saying the focus would remain on the Beijing declaration . . .

Several key issues were deferred or avoided through diplomatic sleight of hand, such as the Bush administration's demand that North Korea admit the existence of the uranium project. The agreement contained no clear timeline for when the North would give up its nuclear programs, or how . . .

For the Bush administration, analysts said, the agreement was welcome at a time when the war in Iraq has lost support at home and negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programs have sputtered. In addition, the president's approval ratings are low in the wake of his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina . . .

An expert on North Korean military matters is quoted in the piece as saying:

"It's an all-front crisis for the Bush administration . . . I think they thought, hey, North Korea is a small country and maybe we can handle it if we put it to the side for a while."

But in the end, this arms expert said she didn't expect North Korea to give up the arms program--ever. She called it "its platinum trump card."

What are we seeing in this agreement? It's not just the rest of the world that's already begun discounting the remainder of the Bush Administration. Now, the State Department is doing it as well. This process will only pick up momentum in coming months, as the world plans increasingly for what comes after Bush.

Listen to how the NYT describes the dynamics of the deal-making (September 20, 2005, "U.S.-Korean Deal on Arms Leaves Key Points Open," By JOSEPH KAHN and DAVID E. SANGER):

All day Monday, Washington time, the Bush administration said the only appropriate time would be well after North Korea dismantled all its nuclear facilities and allowed highly intrusive inspections of the country. On Monday evening, less than 24 hours after the deal was signed, North Korea declared that the United States "should not even dream" that it would dismantle its nuclear weapons before it receives a new nuclear plant.

As described by senior Bush administration officials and Asian participants in the talks, Mr. Bush agreed to eventual discussions on providing a nuclear plant only after China turned over a draft of an agreement and told the Americans they had hours to decide whether to take it or leave it.

The North Koreans, dependent on China for food and oil, were unhappy but ready to sign. "They said, 'Here's the text, and we're not going to change it, and we suggest you don't walk away,' " said one senior American official at the center of the debate.

Several officials, who would not allow their names to be used because they did not want to publicly discuss Mr. Bush's political challenges, noted that Mr. Bush is tied down in Iraq, consumed by Hurricane Katrina, and headed into another standoff over Iran's nuclear program. The agreement, they said, provides him with a way to forestall, at least for now, a confrontation with another member of what he once famously termed "the axis of evil."

So after two days of debates that reached from Mr. Bush's cabin in Camp David to Condoleezza Rice's suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to Tokyo, Moscow and Seoul, Mr. Bush gave the go-ahead on Sunday evening, once he had returned to the White House, to signing a preliminary accord with Kim Jong Il, a leader he has said he detests.

Had he decided to let the deal fall through, participants in the talks from several countries said, China was prepared to blame the United States for missing a chance to bring a diplomatic end to the confrontation.

The debate over signing the agreement reflected the fact that the North Koreans drove a tough bargain.

Hear that? The North Koreans drove a tough bargain. That's what screwing up the Iraq occupation has gotten this White House: now it's Pyongyang that drives tough bargains.

You may ask, Does this change my thinking on North Korea or "locking in China at today's prices"? Not at all. The WMD issue was never at the center of that discussion for me, just as it never was for Saddam. We still need an East Asian NATO. We still need strategic alliance with China. We still need Kim gone and North Korea reabsorbed.

This agreement simply says the Bush Administration is passing on these goals in the second administration, and everybody in Asia is more than willing to go along with it on this, because over time all of their situations improve while our strategic position deteriorates.

This is yet another example of how our poor SysAdmin effort in Iraq haunts the entirety of our foreign policy. Building the SysAdmin function is how we avoid such pathways and limitations in the future.

And don't think that Katrina wasn't a serious tipping point here, because it was. Bush has already begun his post-presidency.

Posted by at 9:42 AM | Permalink

Interesting. Happened over the weekend and found at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/17/174339/498.

I have heard a lot about Kos in the past, and I've started reading him based on references from readers. His site is very sharp looking. He obviously puts in a lot of effort.

I guess I assume he's not a she? I feel like I've read about this person in the Post or something.

Interesting, but I found this ego-surfing MSN Search in the "News" category. Is the Kos that established as a blogger that he gets listed as "news." If so, pretty interesting elevation of the A-list bloggers.

Why ego surf? Mac.com down for maintenance so I can't check email and I haven't done so since Saturday night (withdrawal), so here I sit looking for fun with my laptop, still too keyed from the rocky landy at Indy tonight to go to sleep.

Posted by at 12:39 AM | Permalink

Dateline: SWA flights from LaGuardia through Midway to Indy, 19 September 2005

Stayed up way too late last night dicking with the brief (almost 3am), when I had to get up at 0700 and get over to the St. Regis for the event in time to show Steve DeAngelis how I had animated his half of the brief.

The day went well, though. First, it was cool to meet Congressman Harold Ford, who comes off as impressively as any Representative or Senator I've yet encountered. Pretty slick speaker too (although I swear to God I caught him checking his Blackberry behind the lecturn while one questioner went on and on in his query-let me check the tape in slow-motion and get back to you on that one later). Ford was very kind in his comments regarding my book, told me he was halfway through the second (and demonstrated that in his words), and gave me some good background on my upcoming appearances in Memphis (yes, I scratch his back too, as I know how hard it is to get a Congressman at your breakfast keynote).

My presentation with Steve went well, as the brief merged nicely and we both made a lot of cross-references to one another. Good feedback from audience members, plus the best question of "How many times have you two given that brief together?"

This was the first time.

I later spoke over lunch, previewing BFA (I am now deep into Chapter 2 in my first read of the final text-and loving it, to my great relief), and that went even better (I was more relaxed and so was the audience). Steve and Enterra CIO Doug Todd also had a good demo of our system of automated rule sets. Good conversations and networking all around, plus a nice scotch with a venture capitalist to end the day before the cab ride to LaGuardia (I change clothes in the cab, as is my custom) and the two flights home.

Long day after the four hours of sleep, but glad I put in the effort.

Here's the daily catch stretching back over a few days:

■ Diplomacy without connectivity is an exercise in frustration

■ FEMA: we don't budget for disasters

■ China's tentacles of connectivity just keep growing

■ Back to the future: the return of Prohibition-era border control effort levels

■ Nothing has changed in North Korea's efforts to deny foreign aid to desperately needy citizens

■ When is meddling in democracy okay?

■ The Gap within the Core that is Brazil's Amazon

■ The SysAdmin may go virtual/enclaved, but it will never leave the Middle East

Posted by at 12:26 AM | Permalink

■"A Frustrating Week at the U.N. for the White House Team," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 17 September 2005, p. A3.

■"Why Haven't We Mined Iraq's Borders?" op-ed by Melik Raylan, Wall Street Journal, 17-18 September 2005, p. A14.

■"Don't Push Syria Away: The U.S. should have welcomed Assad," op-ed by Joshua Landis, New York Times, 17 September 2005, p. A27.

■"Why OPEC's Over a Barrel," by Michael Williams, Wall Street Journal, 17-18 September 2005, p. A2.

The White House comes out of its intense week of diplomating around the United Nations with almost nothing to show for it: nothing on North Korea, nothing on Iran, nothing new or substantial on Iraq-nothing even to show on UN reform proposals (not that the Bush people tried too hard on that last one). Having burned many bridges over the run-up to the war in Iraq and our poor effort at quelling violence there in the Sunni Triangle since, the Bush Administration now finds itself a new world order of one on many issues. You push away enough allies and refuse to run with the playing field (dealing on Syria and Iran) once you've tossed all the game pieces in the air by toppling Saddam, and lo and behold, you're pretty much out of answers and options.

I mean, if talking about mining Iraq's borders is considered a legitimate topic for discussion, we're talking an intellectual dead-end.

Me, I look at Syria and Iran and see two rancid authoritarian regimes ripe for killing with connectivity, and Damascus even already has a potential Gorby in power, something Tehran now misses with the change in administrations.

Why harp on this? Especially the notion of flipping Iran from "axis of evil" to potential strategic partner down the road?

Global oil demand will continue to grow significantly in coming years. Saudi Arabia will be able to ramp up only so much production. The only other two major-league reserve countries operating significantly below capacity (unless you consider all that oil sands in Canada . . . ) are Iraq and Iran. Iraq won't ramp up for lack of both security and foreign investments, while Iran won't until it too opens itself up successfully to FDI and foreign technology. Iran gets you Iraq.

Kill the mullahocracy with connectivity, I say. Do it for the global economy. Do it for New Core pillars India and China (and get their thanks for it). And do it to keep the Big Bang rolling in the region.

We need to play the board as it's laid out now after Saddam's fall. We need some imagination. We need Rice to step up.

Posted by at 12:24 AM | Permalink

■"FEMA, Slow to Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort: Officials and Evacuees Tell of Frustration With Poorly Coordinated Recovery," by Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton, New York Times, 17 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Life in the Shelters: Isolated and Perilous," by Motoko Rich, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A18.

■"The Five Stages of Crisis-Management: After Katrina-and a hurricane of debate-a well-worn pattern emerges," op-ed by Jack Welch, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. A20.

■"Even in Iraqi City Cited as Model, Rebuilding Efforts Are Hobbled," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A1.

Weird, but not surprising when you think of the same issue that exists with the Defense Department, but FEMA basically has no budget for dealing with disasters. As one senior FEMA official put it, it's "an agency with limited federal money that must quickly expand its operational capacity only after a major disaster strikes." Why? "It has not won a large chunk of the new federal homeland security dollars, that have been dedicated to terrorism."

In that sense, FEMA is like DoD, which also has no effective budget for real-world ops, just an open invite to beg Congress for "supplementals"

Katrina may end up helping FEMA and other domestic SysAdmin-like agencies steal back money that was taken after 9/11 and funneled so intensely in the direction of the Global War on Terrorism. Good or bad?

Largely good, I would say, because getting America up to snuff in its own self-maintaining SysAdmin function makes us far more likely to be willing to engage in such stuff overseas, presuming the White House does a better job in enlisting allies for any future rogue regime takedowns. After all, it was Bush himself in his N.O. speech that promised "the military would play a new role in federal disaster relief."

And evidence abounds that FEMA reform is desperately needed. Despite the best and most energetic intentions of the FEMA personnel on the ground, the reality is that most civilians and businesses who try to help the situation there find that it's basically impossible to get a "yes" out of the FEMA bureaucracy in anything less than several days. Apparently, no one on the ground is much empowered to do anything but send messages up the food chain.

Get the military more involved? Absolutely. If the military knows anything, it's how to empower its lowest non-commissioned officers to take the initiative in operations. In fact, it's a big calling card of our forces, where your average sergeant has more operational and tactical pull on resources in theater than most countries average one-star generals. I know it's counter-intuitive, but the U.S. military pushes down decision-making authority in operations far more than most people realize.

Sounds like FEMA needs to do the same or get out of the business. I mean, when 1,500 Floridians are still living in a "FEMA village" of mobile homes in some isolated strip along the shore more than a year after Charley hit, you have to wonder if FEMA's in the business of re-connecting or disconnecting.

According to Jack Welch, FEMA's response to Katrina was classic bad management of a disaster: denial, containment, shame-mongering, the blood-on-the-floor of heads rolling, and then actually getting around to fixing the problem. Sounds pretty apt to me.

But then you read seemingly all the same criticisms of our efforts in Iraq, some of these problems continuing unchecked to this day, and you realize: this SysAdmin thing is neither "home game" nor "away game," it's THE GAME.

Posted by at 12:23 AM | Permalink

■"How Mr. Kong Helped Turn China Into a Film Power: Producer Weds Low-Cost, High-Quality Projects With U.S. Distribution," by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Karen Mazurkewich, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Chinese Firms to Pay $1.42 Billion For EnCana Oil Assets in Ecuador," by Ben Dummett, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. A3.

■"Citigroup Sets Chinese ATM Deal," by James T. Areddy, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. D5.

I said it several times at several points today in various conversations with people at the Enterprise Resilience Management conference in Manhattan: politicians and military leaders in both China and the U.S. basically have no idea how intertwined are our two countries economic fates-already.

You'll see it in content, where Chinese studios will eventually attract a Hollywood that's always looking to cut costs. You'll see it in energy, where China will continue to buy assets in Latin America and North America, thus impinging in two regions upon which America truly is dependent for foreign oil. You'll see it in the banking and financial sectors, as American companies, eager to access that high savings rates, will increasingly buy weak Chinese financial institutions as entry fees for penetrating that vast market (hell, just $1 charges on ATMs is enough for Citigroup to come en masse).

Some may plan for high-tech war in the Pentagon, but the facts on the ground are being established in the economic realm far faster than any established in the security realm. Same old, same old. Economics races ahead of politics, technology and networks race ahead of security. Don't look for intell from Washington on China, look to Wall Street.

Posted by at 12:22 AM | Permalink

■"House Passes Prohibition: Law and Order Assured," advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2005, p. A5.

A rather cryptic full-page ad in the Times that shows that headline from a "Chicago Register" newspaper dated 1919. It just shows this paper with no other reference, so I'm not exactly sure what the sponsor is trying to say with the ad. Never a good thing.

What it reminded me of is that Department of Homeland Security officials, with whom Steve DeAngelis and I had spoken with at the Custom and Border Protection division of DHS, had commented that their efforts along the coast of Canada had reached levels not seen since the era of Prohibition.

Was making that connection the point of the ad? Beats me. Still, it's amazing to think DHS officials can say that about Canada-Canada for God's sake!

Posted by at 12:22 AM | Permalink

■"North Korea Poses Aid Puzzle: Donated Food Is Going Astray, but Government Resists Oversight," by Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2005, p. A12.

Where does a great deal of the food donated by foreign governments end up in North Korea? Government and Party rackets sell it for profit. As one North Korean merchant who's since fled to South Korea stated, "They'll do anything to make money."

These are the people we'll negotiated with over WMD? Fat chance, say I.

In this story they say the likely death toll of the preventable famine that Kim oversaw in the late 1990s was probably around 1 million, not the higher figures some cite at 2 to 3 million, but also not the low-ball numbers (low six figures) that other research organizations cite either. Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass about the true number, not when roughly 4 out of all 10 kids in the country are considered malnourished, for no good reason other than-as one aid official puts it-"In North Korea, you have a ruthless government that is holding its own people hostage."

If that's not a politically bankrupt state that the Core should be interested in processing right out of existence, I don't know what one would ever be.

Here's hoping Beijing is listening to DepSecState Bob Zoellick's offer to think about a regional security alliance on the far side of a reunited Korean peninsula.

Posted by at 12:21 AM | Permalink

■"Russia Hounds Human Rights Group That Gets U.S. Help," by Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A13.

Word that Putin's government is targeting a pro-democracy group for harassment, one that receives U.S. government aid. Sounds friendly enough: the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. Hell, it sounds like something the old Sovs would gin up.

Putin is pissed on two levels: 1) he doesn't like foreign funding (fair enough, as the U.S. usually has a hissy fit whenever we've found foreign governments trying the same here; and 2) the group highlights civil rights abuses by Russian forces in Chechnya.

On the latter one, there you have to go with the group, although it would be better if money didn't come directly from the USG.

Again, it looks like Putin is getting all his ducks lined up in a row as he looks ahead to the 2008 election.

There's no doubt that Putin aims to make Russia a de facto single-party state, keeping him in line with most of Asia and with most of the former Soviet republics.

How much can we do to prevent it? Not much. No one in the West really wants to own any security issues inside Russia, and America is frankly happy enough that Putin acquiesces to our military bases in Russia's "near abroad." Getting Russia to give up Chechnya is extremely unlikely, simply because Russia considers the region part of Russia proper. You can say, "Hey! Russia's only been there for about 150 years!" To which the Kremlin might rightfully reply, "And how long have you been in some of your Western states?" Or, "How about giving Alaska back which you bought from us when we were weak?"

You know, it's funny, but between the Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska Purchase, we actually ended up buying a major portion of our country. I mean, which other country can claim they acquired that much of the their territory in real estate deals?

Anyway, expect Russia to hold firm like China holds firm on Taiwan. I wouldn't ever expect to negotiate anything on either score, anymore than we'll be offering Florida back to the Spanish.

Posted by at 12:21 AM | Permalink

■"To Many in the Amazon, Government Comes on a Boat," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A4.

Interesting story about how local government comes to many in isolated Brazilian sections of the Amazon by boat. In some remote locations, where waterway river traffic is the only way to get around, it can take up to 17 days to reach Brazilia, which frankly is like 1800s California making its way back to DC.

The two big things the boat tends to bring: opportunities to have documents processed (identity, land-owning, etc.) and the chance to see doctors for chronic problems. Brazil is a lot like China in this way: surprisingly Core along the coast and still amazingly Gap in the interior.

Still, connectivity is everything in keeping a sense of political rule and social order. Lose that, lose it all.

Posted by at 12:20 AM | Permalink

■"Pentagon Construction Boom Beefs Up Mideast Air Bases: The military says it is not planning to have a permanent presence," by Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 18 September 2005, p. A8.

The Pentagon is spending $1.2 billion to spruce up air bases in the Middle East. Troops will inevitably be reduced, but the SysAdmin will leave behind a footprint that's substantial for the long haul. I say SysAdmin more than Leviathan because-quite frankly-the Leviathan can reach the Middle East from Kansas if it so chooses. So who needs the bases? Apparently, U-2 spy planes (awfully long range), Global Hawk UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles also for surveillance), and the big KC-135 refueling planes (which fuel up bombers for the return flight back to the States).

Uzbekistan told the Air Force to leave, but other Kyrgyzstan picks up the slack just like a Singapore picking up where the Philippines left off years ago. Qatar, Bahrain and U.A.E. are also putting money against the problems the Air Force faces in trying to retain sufficient command and control facilities in the region. Qatar and U.A.E. sport the two most permanent bases, the rest being more on the Spartan side.

Of course, this is all described as "temporary" and "not permanent," but I'm sticking to my prediction of years ago (recounted in PNM) that bases in the region will someday rival Ramstein for their familiarity among U.S. military personnel.

Posted by at 12:20 AM | Permalink

Dateline: Michaelangelo Hotel, Manhattan,18 September 2005

Yesterday lost to fun family stuff, like Kevin finishing 12th out of 40 boys in his grade-school cross-country meet (I do love watching/coaching him while he runs) and probably our last time in Nona's pool for the summer.

Today is lost to getting merged brief together with Steve DeAngelis for our conference tomorrow here in Manhattan.

One cool thing over the weekend: Neil Nyren of Putnam sent me my first copy of Blueprint for Action in final hardcover. All the changes I had feared would not be made seem to be in there,with the only easily spotted typos in the Acknowledgements (two misspelled names--one my fault and one Putnam's). But if you have to screw up, best to do it there. Reading the book for 4th time on way here and I'm more thrilled than ever that I got all this down in print.

Up too late futzing with the brief, as is my custom. Have plentyof stories clipped. Will have to get to them tomorrow, following my two talks.

I wouldn't expect a newsletter this week, since everyone is here for the conference with me and we value face time when we get it.

Posted by at 2:21 AM | Permalink

Signposts is a weekly digest of major op-ed and feature analyses from the blog of Thomas P.M. Barnett -- www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog -- and is distributed via email in html format.

Posted by Josette at 12:19 AM | Permalink

Dateline: in the Shire, Indy, 16 September 2005

Long but very fruitful morning at Oak Ridge National Lab, where Steve and I finalize deal for my senior-level consulting there starting in October. Also talk over some largely possibilities which are very exciting. I finally feel like Johnny Appleseed armed with some real seeds.

Long pair of flights home via Atlanta.

What awaits me at home is cool (besides wife and kids): final hardcover copy of Blueprint for Action.

Mighty fine!

Posted by at 10:18 PM | Permalink

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Posted by Josette at 11:08 AM | Permalink

Apparently this organization is created in 1952 under a different name, now known as the World Customs Organization (probably changed to be more like WTO), so whatever treaty Customs and Border Protection is talking about must have been a rule-set reset to this organization, not the founding document as I had assumed. This reset is probably analogous to how the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs mutated into the WTO.

If I weren't running around so much, I think I would have thought of that myself, because when you think of it, you just knew it was one of those international organizations generated after WWII.

So the question for me now in future interactions with CBP is, how is the WCO revamped (apparently, the name change was recent) by this rule-set reset?

Posted by at 6:56 AM | Permalink

Dateline: Hamilton Inn, Oak Ridge TN, 15 September 2005

Another triple of a day.

Got up and jumped in limo the previous night's client had arranged for long haul in DC from hotel way out past Dulles. Had my four newspapers (WP, USA, WSJ, NYT) in hand, and read them in hour-long drive. See results below.

Arriving at Mandarin Oriental, I immediately spot two celebrities: Minnie Driver looking pretty fine despite the huge, pitch-black sunglasses and Bishop Desmond Tutu, who also looked fine with all his obligatory garb.. In both instances I thought at first I must be imagining things. Then I realized, hey! It's DC's only five-star hotel. So I chalk it up to the weird perks that come with traveling with Steve.

Once into the hotel I spend hour with Patricia Smith and Barbara Marx Hubbard of women's global peace-focused networking group and world futures study firm (respectively), basically giving a taped interview to Smith and then doing Q&A with Howard. It was a very interesting exchange, all about the central role of women in the journey from the Cap to the Core (I have a section in BFA entitled, "You Can Tell Everything You Need to Know About a State By How It Treats Its Women."). Promises of future interactions with groups from their side of the aisle, but I won't hold my breath. Honestly, it's hard to get that conversation started from their end, as opinions tend to be just too strong about the military.

After that I meet up with Steve DeAngelis and have fascinating discussion with Dick O'Neil of the Highlands Group, which runs the Highlands Forum for the Office of the Secretary of Defense's chief IT people (I've attend three over the years (starting with the one on Y2K) and had PNM featured in two of them (global futures and post-conflict stabilization ops) in the past year)). Dick's group does a lot of amazing work, including some dabbling with Hollywood as script doctors on futuristic films. He tells more intriguing stories about people and places than just about anyone I know, and he's been a good friend and supporter to me and a lot of other out-of-the-box thinkers in the Defense Department realm over the years. Man is a connector extraordinaire, and just a really wonderful man to boot. It was great to see him looking healthy and happy and as fired up as ever (this man is a happy warrior in the world of grand ideas), for as I get older, too many friends have a harder time managing the former and that leaves us all unhappy.

Then I catch a cab over to Meridian House, which sits a couple of blocks north of Dupont Circle. It's an old, dusty mansion of a place, with no AC and open windows galore. Perfect for 92 degrees, high humidity and pollen to beat the band. I'm there for the State Department conference on non-standard threats, to give a presentation alongside Michael Mandelbaum (he of many fine books) of Johns Hopkins. I also get to hear David Rothkopf, who's very sardonic but a brilliant guy who can talk all day about the most complex things and never say anything stupid (a feat I will never master). My presentation goes well, and Mandelbaum's on his new book (early 2006, The Case for Goliath) is really intriguing. I find myself nodding in agreement with almost everything he says. He has a truly original mind. We do Q&A in a very complimentary (and complimenting) fashion. I was amazingly mature-almost grown up, really.

Then to National for a nice dinner at California Pizza Kitchen. Then a USAIR flight to Knoxville, during which I spill a Sprite into my Mac's keyboard (seemingly no issue following my heroic efforts to dry out). Then my third hotel in three nights.

Tomorrow is a quick morning of brainstorming at Oak Ridge National Lab with Steve and the locals. A strong finish, no doubt, to a strong trip

Here's the daily catch:

■ White House pushing its case on Iran, and getting nowhere with allies-either old or future

■ The only country more revolutionary than the U.S. in the 21st Century will be China

■ Does the drawdown begin in Afghanistan or not? And what does that tell us about the GWOT?

■ Canada looks a lot bigger at $70 a barrel

■ The Latinization of the American farm

Posted by at 6:42 AM | Permalink

■"U.S. Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran," by Dafna Linzer, Washington Post, 14 September 2005, p. A7.

■"India Balks at Confronting Iran, Straining Its Friendship With U.S.," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 15 September 2005, p. A11.

The U.S. is pushing a secret PowerPoint briefing to allies on Iran, trying to convince them that the WMD question is drawing to a head there.

Guess how far we get with India, which is planning a huge natural gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan? Not very far. We can try to tempt India with nuke technology, but we can't get them to choose between gas and nukes. India will need both in spades.

Bush got nowhere yesterday with Hu Jintao either. China recently signed a huge oil and gas deal with Tehran.

The U.S. never gets a peep out of Tokyo either. Care to guess how dependent Japan is on Iran's energy?

The White House keeps saying Iran doesn't need nukes cause it has all those hydrocarbons.

Funny how it never asks itself why Iran wants nukes, and yet pursues them in such a slow-mo fashion. Strategic listeners we are not.

Posted by at 6:41 AM | Permalink

■"Revolutionary China, Complacent America," op-ed by Charlene Barshevsky and Edward Gresser, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005, p. A20.

■"Bush Puts Iraq, China and Iran on Agenda: Nuclear issues, trade and Taiwan dominate talks in New York with China's leader," by David E. Sanger, New York Times, 14 September 2005, p. A6.

Charlene Barshevsky, former Clinton Trade Representative, writes the most amazing op-eds. Her one on the Middle East's poor trade connectivity two years ago that I ended up using in PNM was-pound for pound-one of the two best op-eds I have ever read (the other was one years ago by military historian Trevor DuPuy on the decreasing salience of war in the international environment).

This is another one that lands her (and her co-writer this time) in my all-time top ten-it's that clear and crisp and just plain smart.

First, she points out what China is doing right: 1) drawing most of its foreign direct investment (two-thirds) from fellow Asians, effectively creating an Asian Union centered on China; 2) building up its human capital like crazy (as we saw in The New Map Game, China's "flow of people" assets are its biggest source of power); and 3) saving like crazy.

In contrast, the U.S. needs to: 1) start saving more; 2) build up its competitiveness; 3) make sure it does not get shut out of Asia economically (which is why I argue for strategic military alliance with China now more than ever); and 4) America must restructure its economic relationship with China (intensified engagement) and help China restructure its entire relationship with the world (a theme of mine in BFA; for example, the authors say China should be added as a permanent member to the G-8 (as #9 alone with #10 South Korea).

Great piece. Not an ounce of fat in it.

Bush should have had it on his lap as reading notes when he sat down with Hu yesterday at the UN.

Biggest point Charlene and her co-author make is that China is generating new rules throughout the global economy. This is my favorite theme of BFA: the New Core sets the New Rules.

Posted by at 6:40 AM | Permalink

■"U.S. May Start Pulling Out of Afghanistan Next Spring," by Eric Schmitt and David S. Cloud, New York Times, 14 September 2005, p. A3.

■"Nato must combat Afghan terrorists, urges Rumsfeld," by Demetri Sevastopulo and Peter Spiegel, Financial Times, 14 September 2005, p. 2.

■"Women embrace new freedom in Bamiyan: Afghan province has female governor, and there are 16 women on Sunday's ballot," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 15 September 2005, p. 7A.

I know, I know. We're "losing" the GWOT. We've "lost" Iraq. We've "lost" Afghanistan.

Except it's the Middle East that's in the turmoil of civil strife and political change.

Except we have been quite successful in nation-building in both Shiite Iraq and Kurdistan (two out of three is not only not bad, it's awfully good).

Except we're likely to be pulling troops out of both Iraq (as Iraqi forces continue to step up) and Afghanistan (NATO back-fill-still to be negotiated but looking okay) over the course of next year.

Rest assured this will all be described by some as "defeat," "failure," "retreat," and so on.

Except Saddam is gone.

Except the Taliban won't be coming back to power.

Except women are experiencing unprecedented freedom in Afghanistan.

Except Pakistan is moving toward peace and economic integration with India.

Except Saudi Arabia has a new king promising reform after the first local elections in seven decades.

Except Syria's army is out of Lebanon.

Except Israel is out of Gaza and getting out of the West Bank.

Except Egypt's new PM is radically reforming their economy.

Except Turkey is learning to live with Kurdistan.

Except the Iraqi Shiites have deferred from civil war with the Sunnis-for now.

Except moderate regimes in the region have never been more stable.

Except oil flows without interruption (which is good, given the constant demand pressure from rising Asia).

Except foreign direct investment into the region has roughly doubled from its pre-Iraq war levels.

Except Al Qaeda has managed no direct attacks against the homeland, being restricted to the geographic reach pattern of Middle East terrorists from the 1970s and 1980s (blow up stuff at home, reach into Europe).

Rest assured, this will all be judged by many as meaningless "incidentals."

Rest assured, we are told terrorist acts are up globally (Except that's primarily a function of counting all insurgency acts in Iraq as terrorism. Which is it? A war (when we're "losing")? An insurgency (when we're "playing on their terms")? Just terrorism (when Al Qaeda is described as "growing")? Whichever one makes you feel worst.)

All of America's wars have sucked in the present tense. Go back and read the accounts on any of them.

Also go back and read how our opponents in each fought more vociferously as time went on.

That was then, this is now.

History can be a funny thing, though.

Harry Truman was one pathetic loser in his time: totally a product of a corrupt political machine, failed businessman, squeaking by in his only election, managed only a "tie" in his one war, sacked America's "best" general, belittled from all sides for his lack of style and vision and intellect, got America trapped in a long Cold War with an obviously "superior" foe, certainly one of our weakest presidents . . .

That was then, this is now.

Two big issues remain in the Middle East, of course: Sunni Iraq with its insurgency (part Baathist, part Al Qaeda/foreign fighters), and our obsession with Iran's quest for the bomb.

They are intimately connected. Iran is a spoiling factor in Iraq. Remove that spoil, weaken the insurgency, keep the ball rolling on the Big Bang.

We have got to get more imaginative on Iran.

I know, I know. I should give up on Bush. I should spend every blog from here to 20 January 2009 lambasting the man for every failing. I've voted Democrat my entire life and I'm proud of that.

But I just can't give up on the man, nor our military, nor our government, nor the next three years. They all matter too much.

Never gave up when working with Bush the Elder's crowd. Not with Clinton's people through all eight years-even during the impeachment trials and tribulations. Won't do so now with George.

It all simply matters too much.

And when it stops mattering that much, I will quite writing, because I will quite being useful.

Posted by at 6:39 AM | Permalink

■"A Black-Gold Rush in Alberta: With Price of Crude Staying High, Tapping Into Canadian Oil Sands Look Increasingly Profitable," by Tamsin Carlisle, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2005, p. C1.

Alberta's looking like the new King Kong of the global oil industry. Recently, when the Department of Energy calculated all the non-conventional sources (like shale, sands), Canada jumped to number 2 in the world, after Saudi Arabia. But when DoE published its annual world projection report, such rankings were relegated to a special shaded box in the text in a sort of "on the other hand" way.

Katrina, on top of the sustain oil price pressure generated by rising demand in Asia, makes it clear someone will make plenty of money in the "vast oil sands of this western Canadian province."

How much? 174 billion barrels. And that alone jumps Canada to second behind the House of Saud and controller of the world's future oil supplies. Eighty billion in projects are planned or underway. This train is officially leaving the station: "the wave of development engulfing the forest oil-sands region has gathered so much momentum that some say it is unstoppable."

End of oil?

Hmm. Not just yet.

And shame on Esquire for that weak, misleading article on "The end of oil" in its just-out October issue (paging Dr. Yergin!), though bid kudos for any photos of Keira Knightley-especially the cover shot (What would Mr. Darcy say?). Me, I can't wait for the latest version of "Pride and Prejudice," since it's from the same people who brought us "Love Actually," which is one of my all-time favorite movies (I admit it, I'm a sucker for British babes).

Whoops! Lost my serious train of thought: Bad Esquire! Bad!

Posted by at 6:39 AM | Permalink

■"The Changing Face of Farm Labor: Frederick Dairy Reflects Growing Importance of Latino Immigrants," by Frederick Kunkle, Washington Post, 15 September 2005, p. B1.

Interesting piece on how a growing percentage of farm laborers (the hired hands who tend to work more in high-tempo seasons, meaning they're let go in winters) in the U.S. are Hispanics. It fits as a classic "3-D" job (dirty, dangerous, difficult). We tend to romanticize laboring on farms, but having done it in my youth, it's anything but (I'll never forget the black dust I would find in my hankerchief at day's end, occupationally very hazardous [show me an old farmer and I'll show you a guy missing several digits on his fingers], and bone tiring). Talking to friends back home in WI recently, I hear the same thing time and time again: parents can't talk their kids into following them in the farm life. So the only people buying farms around my hometown of Boscobel right now are: 1) urban upper-class looking for second homes and 2) Amish.

Those who survive often do so with non-family hired hands, and those hands are increasingly brown.

Ironic yes? You want to save the family farm, you better let in some farmers.

Posted by at 6:38 AM | Permalink

Dateline: Westfields Marriott, Chantilly VA, 14 September 2005

The end of a long day, and a long day to come tomorrow.

Up early and over to the Pentagon by 0730. Colonel meets me in reserved parking and we check through the Metro entrance. Then to Office of Secretary of Defense transition suite where future Secretary of the Navy is taking briefs as part of his "schooling up" for confirmation process. I give a 2-hour version thanks to all the dialogue from this very lively mind (just an audience of two--the nominee and a military officer attending). Don't know much about the guy prior but came away impressed. He has a big job ahead of him dealing with a Navy that sees itself increasingly as a Leviathan trapped in a SysAdmin world. I was pretty blunt with him, as always, though I thought it was kinda cute that the colonel bothered to tell them that my remarks in this room where off the record. "I blog," I replied, "so there is no such thing as off-the-record for me."

Out in parking lot I hit the AC and dial up Warren to pass along my final proposed edits to the article I have in the November issue of Esquire entitled, "The Chinese Are Our Friends." Mark is very happy with the piece and so am I. Designed to break come crockery, it is.

Then a drive to Ronald Reagan (building, not the airport) where I park in the garage and I'm met by my host, a public affairs senior in the DHS universe who works in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection branch. He escorts me to the Department of Homeland Security's press briefing room in the bowels of RR (no, I did not use the lecturn). He introduces me to the real string-puller who brought me in, the Chief of Staff, former Navy guy. We chat for a bit and then the people file in and I do impromptu all verbal version of brief using white board to an audience of about 25. Lengthy Q&A where Steve DeAngelis, who came with me, chimes in. Fascinating story from the CBP people about a new global treaty establishing a World Customs Organization. Very SysAdmin. Very fascinating story. Want to learn more and want to help it grow. This is what DHS should be about: raising security practices the world over and not just at home.

Later, Steve and I have long lunch with our host and learn plenty about how the world works from the perspective of DHS. Again, fascinating stuff.

Then I drop off my car at Dulles and catch shuttle to this hotel, where client, the biggest renter of commercial property to the U.S. national security community here in MD and VA, has me to speak at their annual board meeting. Good meal, interesting conversation from a perspective I know little of. Then I speak about an hour and the day is done.

I've hit the Leviathan, the SysAdmin and the Businessman all in one day. Three on a match.

As always, I come away admiring the efforts of so many people to make the world a better place. Ain't easy. Won't happen tomorrow. So much to do despite the politicians. But the system is the strength, not the leadership of any one person or group or party--and thank God for that.

Posted by at 10:46 PM | Permalink

will be at conference co-hosted with National Intelligence Council and entitled "Conference on Redefining Collective Security: Breaking Down the Barriers Between Old and New Threats."

I'm in the last session:

Where are the Gaps?

What kind of capacities does the U.S. require in order to better balance the tactical (e.g., going after terrorists or drug dealers) with the strategic (tracking the conditions that contribute to an environment in which terrorists or drug dealers run free)? How can a more multi-disciplinary approach regarding threats to national security be fostered?

Moderator: Erica Barks-Ruggles, U.S. Department of State
Thomas P.M. Barnett, Barnett Consulting
Michael Mandelbaum, The Johns Hopkins University SAIS

Should be interesting. Don't feel I've ever met Mandelbaum.

Posted by at 5:51 PM | Permalink

I am told by Putnam today that I will be in DC for roughly three days and NYC for three days. No Boston this time.

Last time I went four days early on a pre-release tour-let in DC, plus 10 days of running around (okay, I had the weekend mostly off, so it was more like 8 days).

Little disappointed to see a shorter tour scheduled, but also a bit relieved. Wife and kids not looking forward to that, and frankly, I did more media after the tour on the book than I did during the tour, so the squeeze up front is a bit artificial.

Still, you're most likely to land on a bestseller list in opening week, thus the big media push.

I would expect Putnam to spin the shorter tour by saying that I'm much better known this time so they can do more with less time, etc., and I buy that, because last tour did have its share of dead zones amidst the racing around.

Then again, I must be realistic. I was very lucky to get the deal I got with Putnam for what most in the business would consider a sequel. I call it Vol. II with good reason, but most in the business will think "sequel" and assume smaller sales, like any Part Deux.

I myself like always beating expectations, and will try to do so again this time. You know, last time I got NYT BSL in about the 6th week thanks to Brian Lamb.

Hmmm. Might be time to start blogging heavily on how much I respect and value Mr. Lamb and CSPAN . . .

Posted by at 11:54 PM | Permalink

When I was calling people yesterday on the Enterra-hosted conference in NY next Monday, several people I spoke with went out of their way to express their thanks for the time and effort I put in on the blog.

Those thank-yous matter a lot. When I pulled into this hotel tonight, dead tired and facing one long day tomorrow, I wanted nothing more than to watch some TV and chill.

Instead I typed away, feeling a responsibility.

Funny, because I don't get paid for any of this, and yet I know it does me a lot of good in many business/career ways, so I won't pretend it's all out of the goodness of my heart.

Still, if all I wanted to do was make money, I wouldn't be wasting my time on this, so again, I thank you for the thank you's. They do matter.

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink

■"U.S.-Chinese trade relations get trickier: Security concerns put pressure on already-testy relationship," by David J. Lynch, USA Today, 13 September 2005, p. 1B.

■"Japan's Rivalry With China Roils A Crowded Sea," by Norimitsu Onishi and Howard W. French, New York Times, 11 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Mexico Builds Trade Ties With China: Hu Furthers Quest For Latin Resources," by James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times, 13 September 2005, p. A3.

■"China's State Secrets Agency Will Guard One Less: Death Tolls," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 13 September 2005, p. A3.

■"China Promotes 'Peaceful Rise' to Quell U.S. Fears," by Charles Hutzler, Wall Street Journal, 13 September 2005, p. A15.

USA has obligatory story on rising China and rising tensions to mark Hu's visit to U.S. (very small summit--just a handshake with Bush off-line at UN session). Good overview, really. Scariest line is from Bonnie Glaser, a China hand at CSIS: "Bush is really in danger of losing control over policy toward China in the economic realm." There's Congress getting all jacked up. There's the Commerce Department with new rules on what can and cannot be sold to China, lest military advantanges accrue.

On that last one, nasty signals are being sent: Sell to China and risk being called a traitor to national security. One DC-based trade lawyer says, "It sends a message to American investors to stay the hell out of the Chinese market."

Too bad with all those T-bills the Chinese buy, keeping our mortgage rates low. Too bad that two out of every three American companies polled say their business in China is as good or better than their business prospects globally, so most (75%) plan on doing more business there in coming years.

Still, as my old Harvard buddy and top China scholar Minxin Pei says, "The post 9/11 honeymoon is definitely over . . . People are much more vocal about China."

Vocal is good. Complaining is good. Forcing new rules is good.

But casting China as our inevitably warring enemy is not good.

Japan's Right is hot to do this, as is their military. Too many of our own defense establishment is hot for this (the main subject of my piece in the November issue of Esquire that I'm in final edits on right now with Warren). And Taiwan is everyone's favorite pawn in this process: China's, America's, Japan's. Taiwan itself is almost an afterthought. It's all about managing China's "rise."

Of course, not everyone seeks to manage that. Some, like virtually every ally we have (to include Japan) are trying to make money off that like crazy. Japan's Right may want to fight China over sea lanes (Christ! Doesn't the U.S. Navy do anything in the region? Like keep everyone cool on sea lanes and energy flows? Isn't it at least good for that? And if it is, then why the rhetorical heat and shows of force by China and Japan on this subject? Is Pacific Command doing its job or not?), but it's business community just wants to make money and use China more and more as its manufacturing floor. Rising China lifts Japan's boat more than most.

But it will lift boats in NAFTA too: U.S. companies, Canadien and Mexican raw materials and energy industries. Pretty soon it'll just be a few Pentagon hawks who aren't making any money on China's rise, and then where will Western civilization be?

Making too much money I guess.

China works hard to become more transparent over time, but it ain't easy. Long history of authoritarianism. But there are some real visionaries on their side, like Zheng Bijian, my host for a talk last year in Beijing at the China Reform Forum. Great profile of him in the WSJ today. He's the man behind the whole "peacefully rising China" theory, he and a bunch of his scholars and thinkers at his little, Central Committee-supported think tank China Reform Forum. Connected guy. Connected little think tank. Important guy. It was a real privilege and an historical opportunity of note for me to connect up with the China Reform Forum. I hope to do so again.

If the peacemakers don't prevail on China and the U.S., then globalization's future is put at risk. Millions upon millions upon millions upon millions will suffer premature deaths in that pathway. More than we'd ever be able to count. None of us should forget that military-market nexus. It all connects. It all matters.

And in the future, it'll all be a Sino-American alliance.

Posted by at 10:58 PM | Permalink

■"Iraqis Take Lead in a Battle For a Key Rebel Stronghold: Attack Came at Request of Local Leaders," by Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 11 September 2005, p. A10.

■"American Envoy Says Syria Assists Training of Terrorists: Claiming that insurgents find a haven west of Iraq," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 13 September 2005, p. A6.

■"Army Expects To Miss Goals For Recruiting," by AP, New York Times, 13 September 2005, p. A24.

Expect to see the Iraqi Army taking the lead more and more as the Sunni Triangle gets squeezed in coming months.

Defense Minister and Sunni Sadoun Dulaimi says, "We tell our people everywhere, Ramadi, Samarra, Rawa and Qaim, that we are coming."

As the Iraqi forces start this broad push to clean up the Triangle in coming months, augmented by U.S. airpower and troops, watch for the U.S. to put increasing heat on Syria to close down that Cambodia-like sanctuary it's providing.

Of course, none of this will stop Washington wags from joking, "The war is over and Iran won." Of course, after WWII these same weiners said, "The war is over and the Russians won." And after Korea they said, "The war is over and China won." And after Vietnam they said, "The war is over and North Vietnam won (they were right about that one)." And after the Cold War they said, "The war is over and Japan won." And after the next war rest assured these same smart-asses will claim we lost.

And you know why we "lose" all these wars? Because we're a good and kind country that tries to do its best for all involved and on that basis we always seem to "lose" for winning.

I like belonging to that country. I've seen the alternative.

Anyway, the prominence of the Iraqi military and security forces can't come a moment too soon. We are breaking the Army and Reserve Component with this rotation.

Next time, we need to lock in some major Core cooperation on the SysAdmin stuff beforehand. Trust me, the military will be ready. The only question is whether the White House and whoever lives there will be ready--and willing.

Posted by at 10:53 PM | Permalink

■"Congress Delays Plans to Extend Bush's Tax Cuts: Republicans See High Costs, Political Risk after Katrina; Limited Window for Action," by Brody Mullins, Wall Street Journal, 13 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Mexico's 'Historic' Aid Mission: After Katrina, Disaster-Relief Experts Head North," by Jose de Cordoba, Wall Street Journal, 13 September 2005, p. A15.

■"Tax Base Shattered, Gulf Region Faces Debt Crisis: A city with few surviving businesses and little taxable property seeks federal help," by Leslie Wayne, New York Times, 13 September 2005, p. C1.

■"Governors handle crisis in own ways: Barbour of Miss. could gain from 'authoritative' response. Blanco is grapping with a 'desperate situation' in La.," by Jill Lawrence, USA Today, 13 September 2005, p. 5A.

GOP on Hill will hold off extending Bush's controversial cap gains tax relief for now. It doesn't run out for a while but it was on the legislative agenda.

That agenda is changed with Katrina. No one wants to be pushing tax relief when Gulf states are accepting humanitarian aid from the Mexican Army, which is, BTW, pretty damn good at this. These guys have traveled the world over doing this, in large part because Mexico's laws have it that the army is the lead agency for such responses domestically. Very SysAdmin, and no shame in accepting the help. Just don't want to be cutting taxes at same time.

Especially when we're talking states whose tax bases have been shattered, putting all their finances (bonds) in dicier straits. Makes you realize why governments are so weak in the Gap, even the corrupt ones. No biz, no taxes. No property rights, no taxes. No taxes, no government. DeSoto is right: what separates us from the Gap is mostly property rights. Can't really have a strong, functioning government without them. And when disaster strikes and wipes out your base, the only thing separating your state from the Gap is the mutual-aid society called the United States. Good club to belong to. Never leave home without your card.

Interesting how Mississippi, which just like LA has high African-American population, seems to do so much better on all fronts. Less bad stuff, more and faster good stuff. People will claim race, and I don't doubt some truth to it. But I watched FLA handle three hurricans last year, and I don't remember cries of racism or neglect or corruption there. Pretty amazing response really (been down there many times in last 12 months). I mean, the more you read on this, the more the problem seems to be LA and the Big Easy itself. Yes, a lot of African-Americans live there and they bore the worst, but their fatal mistake doesn't seem to be their skin color, just the choice of the home state.

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink

Dateline: Crowne Plaza Hamilton, Washington DC, 13 September 2005

Office of Secretary of Defense flew me in tonight, saving tomorrow night's client some travel money, so I can be in the Pentagon NLT 0730. Got a parking spot and a colonel and everything.

Lucky to have a room. DeAngelis is here tonight in his usual stomping grounds, but even he who sleeps in hotels a couple hundred times a year had trouble getting his tonight. Something about DC right now. No room at the inn.

After The Building tomorrow, me and Steve will be meeting with some people (quite a few actually) at the Department of Homeland Security, where, given my many jokes at their expense, I must truly be a beloved figure. Or maybe they're just as SysAdmin'y as I've always suspected they were . . ..

We shall see.

Day just begins after that. Gotta sing for my supper.

Such ambition for tomorrow, and me, I think I forgot to pack any Claritin. I can see it on my bedstand at home right now. As such I need some sleep tonight. Firing off some posts before I hit the hay.

Posted by at 10:19 PM | Permalink

[Freely pass to people you know. Thanks.]

The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett - Monday, September 12, 2005

Feature: More Sun Tzu, Less Clausewitz

Download The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett - 12 September 2005 in PDF or Word document:

thomaspmbarnett.com/journals/barnett_12sep2005.pdf

thomaspmbarnett.com/journals/barnett_12sep2005.doc

Posted by Josette at 8:40 AM | Permalink

Dateline: in the Shire, Indy, 12 September 2005

Woke up this morning feeling so bad from the allergies I was scarfing Claritin with my morning coffee. Day was consumed by two things: 1) stuff for kids (various meets with educators and one helluva fast-speed workout with Kevin's cross-country team) and 2) phone calls to New Map Game participants and NRSP newsletter subscribers in a last-ditch effort to leave no stone unturned in awareness of the 19 September conference Enterra Solutions is co-hosting in NYC with the Association for Electronic Integration on Enterprise Resilience Management in the financial sector.

I don't know which was more exhausting: the ten 200-meter runs for speed in the 85-degree heat or the almost 60 phone calls. On the latter I left messages whenever I couldn't get people, which is certainly easier timewise, and yet it was awfully fun to actually get people on the line and chat for a bit because it allowed me to connect aqain with various New Map Game participants and to speak briefly with newsletter readers.

Frankly it all beat regular work, which for me today would have been concentrated effort on the joint Barnett-DeAngelis brief for the 19 September event. I have a bad habit of putting off such stuff to the last minute, but I want to be better this time. I just need to get back on the road, frankly, as it's enormously hard to get anything done when I'm home. I either feel too oppressed by the apartment or I just feel compelled to "waste" time on the kids in various formats. There's just no escape here.

Speaking of escape, I spent an hour this morning wandering around the house as the workers were putting up last joists on the roof (covering to come quite soon). After Vonne and I saw how huge the attic space was, we reconsidered having this one back room in the basement be a storage space. Instead, we're now moving toward a home theater room because we're all such movie freaks and we really value having a space like that for together time. So that meant I needed to talk it over with builder Kent, who, as always, is amazingly accomodating whenever we feel a need to change course. It's just that it's so hard to imagine everything until you see the beast in the flesh, meaning it's important to visit the site as often as possible, which we've been trying to do.

I have no stories I want to blog today. I will admit: reading the Post and Times online just doesn't work for me. I need the paper. I've contracted for the Journal to start every day, either delivered or same-day mail. Since our Indy Star comes in a WSJ wrapper, I'm thinking it should show up on our doorstep. Amazingly, the NYT can do neither for now in our zip (we are fringers in the Indianapolis universe), but I am getting to the point where I will take both the WP and NYT one or more days late in paper. The delay's not a big deal for me, since I'm a slow-motion current events sort of guy, preferring to let events play themselves out more anyway. And if the story is right now, there's always the online to tap, so I think I'll go that way and see if that makes it easier for me to bundle up my time better on blogging stories.

Tomorrow I'll have some air time, so I'll manage something then.

Back and forth with Warren today on the China piece. Fact checkers working the piece. Mark insists it's not that late for the November issue because the issue itself is running late as a whole. Makes no difference to me; I expect to always be the last guy out the door to the printers. Curious, I must say, on the art work. Gotta talk to Warren about making sure the book gets mentioned somewhere. Putnam will want that.

Putnam is asking about a DC venue for a CSPAN taping, and that gets me both excited and scared. That brief has to be heavy on the new stuff, meaning truncated up-front on PNM (map, split force) and then heavy on BFA (A to Z, China alliance, Iran and NK strategies, etc). Idea of having that brief taped is a bit scary because it can't possibly be the same polished bit that the old PNM brief was. Still, eager to move on. I have outstanding invite from National Defense University to participate in their distinguished lecturers program. May be time to play that card, assuming it hasn't been rescinded. Got the invite in July from NDU president promising call from scheduler that never happened, but since it wass date 14 July (day before move), I'm hoping it was just a casualty of the tumult that was our big shift to Indy. Now incentivized with images of CSPAN tapings dancing in my head, I better put in some calls to get that ball rolling.

Got a nice email from brother Andy, who currently has one son in Iraq (convoying with the WI national guard) and whose first son (and my godson) will soon be leading a platoon thereabouts (assuming he's not trapped in Katrina relief forever as I suspect he might have been since he was training up in Biloxi just as it hit): he reported that one middleman book distributer seemed to be placing good-sized orders on BFA (Andy, the reference librarian, has ways, as we like to say in my business). He thought that was a good sign given the minimal buzz on the volume to date in terms of early reviews (just a couple; usual split verdict).

News like that, plus the CSPAN possibility, plus the Esquire article--it all starts to get the blood pumping. I can feel the pregancy coming to an end: this baby is coming out whether I'm ready or not!

Scariest part: it's all a done deal. Book is printed and advance copies are moving out in a couple of days. When Warren and I sent off our huge 50-page list of changes back on 4 July, that was our last impact on the text. Rest has been all Putnam proofers and copy-editers. Neither Mark nor I pushed Putnam for a look at later unbound manuscript versions, so Putnam didn't give us one (not their practice anyway). Last time we pushed hard for this, but this time both of us were so caught up in other career/family stuff that by the time the end of August rolled around, it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't getting another look until it was too late.

Not that scary on some levels, since this is second go-around, but still, it's a lot of trust to a system I have no control over. To wit: in the bound galley that some people now possess, Putnam somehow screwed up the Russian poetry from Pushkin that serves as dedication to my kids, repeating the first line of the two backasswards as the second line (and apparently losing the second line completely). That's a whopper, in my mind, which I corrected in our master list of corrections in July, but I never got a chance to see that mistake corrected in print. I just have to trust that it will be okay when I get the final hard copy in a few days (probably by this weekend). Then there's a couple of factual errors where I was betting on an event actually unfolding and it didn't turn out that way (remember, I'm writing in Jan and Feb and we're now into September, so there are always a couple of events or processes where you need to fudge your language carefully in the book to accomodate a range of outcomes if that event or process is going to come to fruition by the time of publication). Again, I made the necessary corrections for the final hard-copy. I just didn't have a chance to see those corrections in print before the books were produced.

I know, I know. Mistakes will always be made in a text this big and under this production schedule. Hell, I never worked on a think tank or government report of far smaller length (and frankly, far slower production sked) that didn't have a slew of tiny mistakes no matter how many times we went over the manuscript. It just happens, no matter how hard you try.

Still, the build-up, the sense of a new brief, the looming book tour, the anxiety of the final hardcover version: you add it all up and it gives me a profound sense of fatalism right now that makes it hard for me to crank it up on demand with this new role in Enterra Solutions (another new brief, working a new book idea). And yet someone we seem to be muddling through with a lot of success: the ideas are jelling, and our initial joint efforts with new clients are moving in very exciting directions.

Still, part of me just wishes I could go slow right now and do one or the other--or the other--or the other--or the other. Maybe just focus on building a new house and having a new life in Indy. Maybe just focus on the kids and all the changes going on in four lives all at very different points of development. Maybe just be the blogger and Esquire writer. Maybe just focus on the talks with Leigh Bureau and the new brief. Maybe just focus on Enterra and all the exciting things brewing there. Maybe just sit back and enjoy the ride to the new book.

I mean, what shocked people most today when I rang them up was that I actually had time to make phone calls! Frankly, I didn't have the time; it was just today's overriding priority that pushed the rest of the pile back.

Just one of these venues (blogger, articles, book, speeches, senior managing director) would be enough, really. I love to be able to move very methodically and carefully on things, enjoying all the details along the way (hell, I could tour the house constuction site every day; hell, I could just watch the framers do the roof joists all day long [really fascinating]). Hell, I could just be a Packer fan 24/7 (although, as yesterday's crappy peformance indicates, that could be really tough duty this year--I listened to the radio broadcast over the web yesterday at my mother-in-law's house and almost wanted to jump into the pool and never come up for air . . .).

But the reality is that all these things fit together quite intimately: each makes everything else possible right now--or desired right now . . . --or something something right now.

And the high allergies right now (everyone seems to be suffering mightily these days) just puts such a nice spin on everything: making complete sentences such an accomplishment!

Whah-whah!

Enough bitching for today . . .

It'll all get done. It always does. I've surrounded myself in each and every venue with the best talent I can find. I'm healthy. I believe in God. My wife is still the sun and the moon. My kids are all that I want them to be. I will see Favre play again in person. BFA will be great. My Dad would be proud of me. Life is good. I want to throw up.

There's some Glenfiddich above the stove . . .

Posted by at 10:15 PM | Permalink

Dateline: In the Shire, Indiana, 10 September 2005

Running various errands with kids. Gearing up for the creative expression that will be the new joint Barnett-DeAngelis brief that starts merging our analysis of the way the world works and how the private sector's role in a future worth creating will be not just large, but leading (gotta preserve the resilient Core to grow it).

Still hotter than Hades here. I foresee my pool time in my immediate future and a hard copy of the Sunday Times on Nona's backyard deck tomorrow.

[And indeed, this is what happened, delaying this post series til Sunday.]

Here's the daily catch:

■ A description of China reaching out to the U.S.

■ Mubarek's "mandate" is really just a breathing space; watch the economy instead

■ Koziumi is the Gorbachev of Japan

■ U.S. believes it can isolate Iran with New Core powers; it is wrong

■ Bush gets around to sort-of-almost-but-not-quite-dumping Brown at FEMA

■ China idol-izes America

■ The SysAdmin isn't a posse, nor just the rancher's hired hands

Posted by at 9:24 AM | Permalink

■"China's Search for Stability with America," by Wang Jisi, Foreign Affairs, September-October 2005.

The full article can be found at: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050901faessay84504/wang-jisi/china-s-search-for-stability-with-america.html.

Great piece that speaks for itself. Makes a lot of our analysis of China seem crude by comparison. My thanks to Mike Downing for alerting me to it.

My favorite bits:

The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its "hegemonism" -- a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance -- many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation's security and domestic stability …

Fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the United States' interests -- especially since the attacks of September 11, 2001 …

At least for the next several years, Washington will not regard Beijing as its main security threat, and China will avoid antagonizing the United States.

THE LONELY SUPERPOWER

To understand the forces that govern U.S.-Chinese relations, it helps first to understand U.S. power and Washington's current global strategy. Here is a Chinese view: in the long term, the decline of U.S. primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable; but in the short term, Washington's power is unlikely to decline, and its position in world affairs is unlikely to change.

Consider that the United States continues to lead other developed countries in economic growth, technological innovation, productivity, research and development, and the ability to cultivate human talent …

Many other indexes of U.S. "hard power" are also on the rise. The U.S. defense budget, for example, has increased considerably in recent years …

Further bolstering U.S. primacy is the fact that many of the country's potential competitors, such as the European Union, Russia, and Japan, face internal problems that will make it difficult for them to overtake the United States anytime soon …

From a Chinese perspective, the United States' geopolitical superiority was strengthened in 2001 by Washington's victory in the Afghan war. The United States has now established political, military, and economic footholds in Central Asia and strengthened its military presence in Southeast Asia, in the Persian Gulf, and on the Arabian Peninsula …

NOT INVULNERABLE

Despite its many advantages, the United States is not invincible. The war in Iraq, for example, resulted in international isolation of a sort that Washington had not faced since the beginning of the Cold War. The invasion was strongly condemned by people all over the world and explicitly opposed by the great majority of nations. Washington split with many of its traditional allies, such as Paris and Berlin, which refused to take part in the operation. And tensions with Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, increased dramatically.

Since then, the extent of armed resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has exceeded the Bush administration's expectations …

The United States also faces serious competition and disagreement from Europe, Japan, and Russia on many economic and development-related issues, and there have been disputes on arms control, regional policies, and the role of the United Nations and other international organizations …

Nonetheless, the points in common between these powers and the United States in terms of ideology and strategic interests outweigh the differences …To be sure, some of the differences between the United States and the EU, Japan, Russia, and others will deepen, and Washington will at times face coordinated French, German, and Russian opposition, as it did during the war in Iraq. But no lasting united front aimed at confronting Washington is likely to emerge …

All of the changes described above have provided China with new, albeit limited, opportunities for maneuver. So long as the United States' image remains tainted, China will have greater leverage in multilateral settings. It would be foolhardy, however, for Beijing to challenge directly the international order and the institutions favored by the Western world -- and, indeed, such a challenge is unlikely.

EYE ON ASIA

In sharp contrast, Tokyo's ties to Beijing have cooled significantly …

Rather than play a helpful role, the United States has pushed China and Japan further apart. Beijing fears that the consolidation of the U.S.-Japanese alliance is coming at its expense and that the growing closeness is motivated by the allies' common concern about the increase of China's power. As the "China threat" theory gains followers in Japan, right-wing forces there are becoming more assertive by the day and turning increasingly toward the United States as their protector. Japan has also used the United States to exchange military intelligence with Taiwan; indeed, Japanese right-wing forces no longer shrink from offending Beijing by making overtures to pro-separation forces in Taipei …

In the field of international security, the primary focal point in Chinese-U.S. relations is the North Korean nuclear issue …

If, on the other hand, the six-party talks are resumed, tensions between the United States and North Korea may ease, and China's role will then be more favorably recognized. Should that occur, the countries involved in the process might even consider expanding the six-party mechanism into a permanent Northeast Asian security arrangement, a development that would serve the interests of all the countries concerned and one that China should favor. Under the current circumstances, however, such a possibility is slim. The more likely outcome is that tensions between Washington and Pyongyang will persist, although without an actual war breaking out ….

War between China and the United States over Taiwan would be a nightmare, and both sides will try hard to avoid it. Despite their differences, there is no reason the two sides should have to resort to force to resolve the matter. Yet some people in Taiwan, looking out for their own interests and supported by outsiders -- notably parts of the U.S. defense establishment and certain members of the U.S. Congress -- continue stubbornly to push for independence, ignoring the will of most Taiwanese. It is a mistake for Americans to support such separatists. If a clash occurs, these parties will be responsible.

China views the status of Taiwan as an internal matter. But only by coordinating its U.S. policy with its policy toward Taiwan can Beijing curb the separatist forces on the island …

LONG-TERM INTERESTS

The Chinese-U.S. relationship remains beset by more profound differences than any other bilateral relationship between major powers in the world today. It is an extremely complex and highly paradoxical unity of opposites. It is not a relationship of confrontation and rivalry for primacy, as the U.S.-Soviet relationship was during the Cold War, but it does contain some of the same characteristics. In its pattern of interactions, it is a relationship between equals. But the tremendous gap between the two countries in national power and international status and the fundamental differences between their political systems and ideology have prevented the United States from viewing China as a peer. China's political, economic, social, and diplomatic influences on the United States are far smaller than the United States' influences on China. It is thus only natural that in their exchanges, the United States should take the offensive role and China the defensive one.

As this complex dynamic suggests, trying to view the Chinese-U.S. relationship in traditional zero-sum terms is a mistake and will not guide policy well; indeed, such a simplistic view may threaten both countries' national interests. Black-and-white analyses inevitably fail to capture the nuances of the situation. If, for instance, the United States really aimed to hamper China's economic modernization -- as the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer has argued should be done -- China would not be the only one to suffer. Many U.S. enterprises in China would lose the returns on their investments, and the American people would no longer be able to buy inexpensive high-quality Chinese products. On the other hand, although Americans' motives for developing economic and trade ties with China may be to help themselves, these ties have also helped China, spurring its economic prosperity and technological advancement.

This prosperity and advancement will naturally strengthen China's military power -- something that worries the United States. Indeed, this issue represents a paradox at the heart of Washington's long-term strategy toward Beijing. Unless China's economy collapses, its defense spending will continue to rise. Washington should recognize, however, that the important question is not how much China spends on its national defense but where it aims its military machine, which is still only a fraction of the size of the United States' own forces. The best way to reduce tensions is through candid and comprehensive strategic conversations; for this reason, military-to-military exchanges should be resumed.

China faces a similar paradox: only a U.S. economic decline would reduce Washington's strength (including its military muscle) and ease the strategic pressure on Beijing. Such a slide, however, would also harm China's economy. In addition, the increased U.S. sense of insecurity that might result could have other consequences that would not necessarily benefit China. If, for example, Washington's influence in the Middle East diminished, this could lead to instability there that might threaten China's oil supplies. Similarly, increased religious fundamentalism and terrorism in Central and South Asia could threaten China's own security, especially along its western borders, where ethnic relations have become tense and separatist tendencies remain a danger …

History has already proved that the United States is not China's permanent enemy. Nor does China want the United States to see it as a foe. Deng Xiaoping's prediction that "things will be all right when Sino-U.S. relations eventually improve" was a cool judgment based on China's long-term interests. To be sure, aspirations cannot replace reality. The improvement of Chinese-U.S. relations will be slow, tortuous, limited, and conditional, and could even be reversed in the case of certain provocations (such as a Taiwanese declaration of independence). It is precisely for this reason that the thorny problems in the bilateral relationship must be handled delicately, and a stable new framework established to prevent troubles from disrupting an international environment favorable for building prosperous societies. China's leadership is set on achieving such prosperity by the middle of the twenty-first century; with Washington's cooperation, there is little to stand in its way.

Is it "panda hugging" to see the serious realism in this analysis that is so fundamentally lacking from the "realists" on our side who argue for containment of China?

Again, most of our analysis of China and the world seems awfully crude when compared to something as sophisticated and accurate as this. We will encounter this level of strategic thinking talent more and more from China-and we better get used to it.

Posted by at 9:22 AM | Permalink

■"Mubarek Wins Easily, But Vote Fails to Engage Egypt," by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 10 September 2005, p. A18.

Mubarek wins almost 90 percent of the vote, but that equates to a whopping 20% of the potential electorate, meaning 80 percent of the adult public chose not to bother vindicating his rule.

"After 50 years without democracy, a three-week campaign is not enough to persuade Egyptians to come out and vote, much less come out and vote for a change from a known face," said Maye Kassem, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo.

Some vote of confidence.

Mubarek is kidding himself if he thinks this buys him much time. What have we seen in recent months in Egypt?

The result ends a tumultuous phase in Egypt's politics, one characterized by maneuvering and unprecedented outspokenness. For a year, in the face of repeated crackdowns, opposition activists organized demonstrations to demand Mubarak's ouster. Judges futilely resisted the government's determination to handpick observers at the polling stations. Workers began to strike for better pay and safety on the job. Human rights groups pressed loudly for release of political prisoners. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic-based grass-roots organization that is banned from politics, joined in calling for democratization.

The Bush White House chooses to see this glass as half full, and given the recent systematic push toward economic reform by the Prime Minister, triggering new levels of financial connectivity with the Core's major markets, I think this approach is defensible given everything else going on in the region. We make the Big Bang work best in Egypt by continuing to engender a sense of inevitability for economic reform. But to keep that rolling we need to stop Iraq from roiling.

And for that we need Iran.

Posted by at 9:21 AM | Permalink

■"Japan's Koizumi Breaks the Mold: In a Nation Geared to Consensus, Premier Banks on Personal Charisma to Win New Mandate," by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, 10 September 2005, p. A18.

The Liberal Democrat Party now headed by PM Koziumi has led Japan for the past half century, losing power only once, which places it second to China, whose ruling party has yet to lose power in it's half century or so (then again, you could say it did lose power under Mao's insane Cultural Revolution-so I'm tempted to call them even).

I don't mean that facetiously. The opposition Democratic party in Japan can do little to really reform Japan. If the ruling party can't manage it on its own, it can't be done. So what Koziumi is doing in Japan right now is not unlike Gorbachev trying to right that other socialist state, the USSR, from within a generation ago. Also like Gorby, Koziumi must inevitably win by losing: he needs to push through very difficult reforms that will likely cost his party its power base and send the country down the path toward something much closer to a competitive party system instead of the single-party state it has truly been for its entire postwar history.

That, my folks is serious leadership and serious vision. You look at him and Blair and their big visions for the future and you wonder what you would describe as Bush's.

I mean that seriously. What is Bush's vision other than the GWOT? I'm beginning to think David Ignatius is right: Bush the hedgehog has one idea and one idea only. Nice when the crises match up to the vision, but when they don't, you start missing the fox-like Clinton and his ability to juggle.

Posted by at 9:20 AM | Permalink

■"Wider U.S. Net Seeks Allies Against Iran's Nuclear Plan," by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 10 September 2005, p. A1.

We're going to work Russia, India, China and Brazil on isolating Iran diplomatically by forcing a showdown in the UN. We've got old Core Europe to go along with our desire to work the Security Council angle, but the New Core is saying no.

"We need leadership on this," Ms. Rice said at a State Department news conference, citing Russia, China and India as vital potential partners in telling Iranian leaders to "live up to their international obligations" to suspend uranium conversion and enrichment.

Yes, we need leadership all right, but hectoring Russia, China and India on Iran is not leadership. That trio has already chosen on this question, and they know why: energy relationships and shared regional security concerns. We're not accessing either of those two issue areas with our fixation on Iranian nukes. We offer Iran really nothing it wants in return. Meanwhile, they subtly veto our efforts at locking in our Big Bang gains in the Persian Gulf. Russia, India and China see Iran's hand getting stronger and ours getting weaker without self-awareness as to this trend. Frankly, I wouldn't side with us on Iran right now. I'd wait out the Bush administration, which I would view as fundamentally consumed by its past bad choices/performances.

The discounting on this presidency has begun internationally. Bush can counteract it, but only by some truly imaginative approaches. None are in the offing, save for State's floating to China of something good on the far side of a North Korea endgame-like a new regional security alliance (they said I was crazy when I penned it in Esquire!).

No such imaginative ideas are floating on Iran right now. Instead, it's the long diplomatic slog in the UNSC. With our recent record on Iraq and WMD, expect this to go nowhere. To the extent this administration leads with that, they're telling the world they have no serious intention of doing anything regarding Iran on their watch.

The world will start noting these signals-and start discounting. We are a bit over a year from the midterm elections. After that, the discounting will skyrocket. We're talking months here to move some big piles overseas, and how much of that coming year will be lost to Katrina?

That's how important Katrina can be globally.

Posted by at 9:20 AM | Permalink

■"Casualty of Firestorm: Outrage, Bush and FEMA Chief," by Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 10 September 2005, pulled from web.

Bush hates to fire people, a weakness that seriously undermines his CEO approach (BTW, this is something I like about Steve DeAngelis: very sweet man who cares a lot about his people, but in the gut-check moments on personnel, he's completely unsentimental).

The chain on this one made the firing a necessity: Bush sits in the White House on Thursday of last week and an aide brings in a news report from N.O. about people dying at the Superdome. Bush had been briefed by DHS boss Chertoff that morning and heard nothing on this. Why? Brown at FEMA hadn't told Chertoff about this.

CANYOUBELIEVEIT?

In my mind, a serious CEO fires Brown on the spot that morning. Me, I would have been spitting mad to have been left so obviously in the dark on such a politically-charged issue. I mean, think about it: you're the one guy in the world with the real power to stop things like this if you so choose. Maybe you piss off a world of political opponents in the process and maybe you wreck a bit of your presidency on it, but how do you sleep at night with that sort of failure?

Me, I just wouldn't. Heads would roll and I'd want better pronto. I think most people are like this.

And I think that's Bush's main problem right now: his administration's initial response just don't pass the bullshit test. You hear the explanation, but once you get the facts unvarnished and straight, you just want to blurt out, "Bullshit!"

Of course, Bush doesn't really fire Brown. Instead he's jerked back to DC and a Coastie 3-star with serious credentials is put in charge down there. But frankly, that's like the team owner yanking the coach off the bench at halftime. Brown is done, and not making that a clean break is a real mistake on the part of the White House.

But this is a problem with this administration: it hates to ever admit mistakes, and that unwillingness to say "sorry" actually ends up costing them far more than the original mistake.

And that is not good CEO-ing.

Posted by at 9:19 AM | Permalink

■"No 'Idol' Threat: Chinese fear skein spreads pop culture," by Clifford Coonan, Variety, 10 September 2005, p. 20.

"Skein," in Variety-speak, means genre of show, so what's spooking the Chinese media mandarins is the spread of "American Idol"-like reality contest shows.

China just witnessed the phenom called "Super Girl," a fever that swept the nation like nobody's business, "becoming the TV event of the year."

The finale on Friday "pulled in more eyeballs than giant state broadcaster CCTV's annual Spring Festival Eve gala, a politically correct variety show that regularly tops the ratings with an incredible 400 million viewers."

Our "Idol," by contrast, pulled in a whopping 48 million, or roughly 1 out of every 6 Americans. 400 million in China is more like 1 out of every three.

What seems to spook the Chinese leadership most is the voting process by which millions of young girls across the country paid 2 cents a piece to vote by cell phone text messages.

The full name of the show is the "Mongolian Cow Yogurt Super Girl Contest," which makes one suspect that Mongolian Cow Yogurt is the main sponsor (sounds like American TV in the 1950s, no?).

Finalists bounced between Avril Lavigne-style misery to punky Cranberries numbers to schmaltzy ballads. Costumes ran from sexy schoolgirl to ballerina babe.

The winner was noted more for her transgender appeal than her singing voice.

CCTV can kill a "third edish" (again with the Variety-speak!). The problem is that the commercials that ran on the show pulled in more bucks than nets in China typically get (upwards of $15,000 per 15-second ad).

Natch, a "Super Girl" concert tour follows.

I wonder if Michael Pillsbury reads Variety. I mean that seriously. It's one thing to note with amazement that aging Chinese military officers seem to think differently than we do, because they've lived amazingly isolated lives (reminding me of when the first Sov generals came to America in the late 1980s and were simply stunned into silence by things like a drive on our interstate system-they couldn't believe we were so advanced in our infrastructure and just seeing it made them realize how pointless their military competition with us had been). But look at the youth and tell me Chinese and Americans will be thinking differently a generation from now.

I know, I know, you'll tell me about all those peasants inland. Let me tell you, I've spent some time inland with those peasants and they're not any different-just more deprived.

Grand strategy is about anticipating, not driving by looking out your rear-view mirror (which is what you do when you read military writings, frankly). The China hawks throughout DC need to read more widely, need to travel more widely, need to frickin' open their eyes, talk to their kids, get to the West Coast more often (where the Asian influence in America is boat-loads above that found on the East Coast).

When I sat with House Armed Services Committee staff members after my talk on Thursday, I said their time and effort would be best spent by substantial CODELs (congressional delegation trips) throughout China. Our politicians need to catch up with the growing economic interdependency between China and the U.S., as do our military thinkers. The gap between their rhetoric and the emerging reality is huge.

And that's no "idol" statement.

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink

■"Security Contractors in Iraq Under Scrutiny After Shootings," by Jonathan Finer, Washington Post, 10 September 2005, p. A1.

Scary article by a fine reporter detailing the loose ways of far too many PSCs, or private security companies, of which there are a good three dozen in Iraq, almost all American and British.

Here's the gist of the problem: these guys are not subject to any law, thanks to a screwy provision inserted in Iraq's constitution. They run around "clearing by fire" (when in doubt, shoot, or hell, just shoot all the time to be sure), pissing off the locals, and our troops catch the flak, suffer the honor killing payback attacks, etc.

I say contractors, yes, but doing everything short of carrying guns, and if they do, no special immunity. That is just plain nuts. If they're not subject to Iraqi law, then make them subject to the SysAdmin's law-here the coalition forces.

Private security companies pervade Iraq's dusty highways, their distinctive sport-utility vehicles packed with men waving rifles to clear traffic in their path. Theirs are among the most dangerous jobs in the country: escorting convoys, guarding dignitaries and protecting infrastructure from insurgent attacks. But their activities have drawn scrutiny both here and in Washington after allegations of indiscriminate shootings and other recklessness have given rise to charges of inadequate oversight.

"These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force," said Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is responsible for security in and around Baghdad. "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place."

This is letting the private sector shoot America in the foot.

Employees of private security firms are immune from prosecution in Iraq, under an order adopted into law last year by Iraq's interim government. The most severe punishment that can be applied to them is revocation of their license and dismissal from their job, U.S. officials said. Their heavy presence stems in large part from the Pentagon's attempts to keep troop numbers down by privatizing jobs that would once have been performed by American forces.

Think about that: we low-ball the SysAdmin uniform count, that gets us lotsa private security, that creates a lot of violent blowback, that makes it just that much harder to keep the peace. Vicious circle, screwy logic.

There are now at least 36 foreign security companies -- most from the United States and Britain -- and 16 Iraqi firms registered to operate here, according to the Interior Ministry, and as many as 50 more are believed to have set up shop illegally. Their total workforce is estimated at 25,000; many are military veterans, though levels of experience vary. As of December, contracts to provide security for U.S. government agencies and reconstruction firms in Iraq had surpassed $766 million, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

Sounds like a lot, but it's peanuts, thus the push for it. But we have to ask ourselves what we're getting in this "bargain." You want it bad, you get it bad, and we're getting it bad in Iraq.

And it's just another sign of how half-assed our SysAdmin command and control is:

While many security companies perform military-style tasks, often on behalf of the U.S. government, they are not under the armed services' command. In response to a congressional request for more information on oversight of security contractors, the Pentagon said the military's relationship with them was "one of coordination, not control."

So the PSCs do some nonsense and our guys get attacked in reply. These guys are SysAdmin, whether we like it or not. There is not "outsourcing" of security in terms of popular image:

Asadi, the Interior Ministry official, said Iraqi civilians nevertheless think private security guards are American soldiers. "They have the same bodies, the same looks," he said. "The only difference is the Humvees," vehicles used by the military but not by private firms.

As one U.S. Army officer puts it: "Our philosophy is 'make no new enemies,' and that's what I tried to impress upon these guys. They don't have to think about the consequences of what they do, but we do."

Contractors aren't going to go away, and neither is the SysAdmin work. The only question is, Do we want to rationalize this system and make it work, or continue to suffer the results of our sloppy approach?

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink

Signposts is a weekly digest of major op-ed and feature analyses from the blog of Thomas P.M. Barnett -- www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog -- and is distributed via email in html format.

Posted by Josette at 8:47 AM | Permalink

Dateline: In the Shire, Indiana, 9 September 2005

Hard to get ahead in this game. Stuff to get done, but when I get a day home, I have to spend it working travel like nobody's business, buying airfare and splitting up future trips in my mind (Who pay's what? What town am I in that night? Do I get the hotel? Is anyone picking me up at the airport?).

Between now and the end of the year I have two big Navy audiences, one Air Force, associations from each, a trip to Central Command and then, today, a request today from the Office of the Secretary of Defense for a very short fuse response. I'm on the phone with lotsa officers today, making me feel like I never left the DoD.

So my trip to DC next week starts a day early, and what was originally supposed to be a single brief day now has morphed into a triple-brief day.

I swear, I cancel more flights in a year than most people fly in their lifetimes. CONUS is my commute.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Katrina: the meta-analysis begins

■ China's charm offensive begins

Posted by at 1:25 AM | Permalink

■"Political Issues Snarled Plans for Military Help After Hurricane," by Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, New York Times, 9 September 2005, pulled from the web.

■"Leaders Lacking Disaster Experience: 'Brain Drain' At Agency Cited," by Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post, 9 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Some Urge Greater Use of Troops in Major Disasters," by Bradley Graham, Washington Post, 9 September 2005, p. A15.

The sad story here is that Bush's biggest mistake was being too politically sensitive.

Federal disaster planning always assumes the Feds' help will come on top of those efforts already under way locally and by state authorities. Here that assumption betrayed us. The locals were wiped out, and the President had a choice: send in the military by invoking the Insurrection Act. Why go that far?

The military can respond to straight humanitarian relief within the U.S. without invoking the act, but Feds knew the forces would face serious law and order issues, hence the hesitancy.

And this is where the politics comes into play: invoking the Insurrection Act meant Bush would be basically removing a female governor of the opposing party from effective control of her own National Guard. Big deal to any state. Bigger deal to a southern state. Bigger still if the governor is a Dem-and then add the female angle on top of that.

Sensitive, sensitive.

And so the response was slow. LA got the National Guard as they could flow in, but Army officers say the 82nd Airborne was ready to rock and roll the day before Katrina hit.

Weird, huh? A Dem like Clinton could have ordered this with less concern. But the Republican, Mr. Defer to the States-he's hesitant.

The system is the system, but it's still run by people, people with political concerns, which this time may have proven deadly in ways that did not need to be.

Not an over-the-top criticism. If Bush had been the caricature that so many make him out to be, he might have done better here. He trusted, and he was punished for it, in large part because Louisiana is a third world government masquerading as a U.S. state.

But also because his CEO-like faith in delegated authority wore out its welcome. Notice how the CEO presidencies do well for the first term, with the A Team hot off the election, and then they start sucking as the B Team starts rising to the top posts? In some places, like Defense, the talent pool is deep enough (especially for the Republicans), but elsewhere . . . and FEMA is just so elsewhere.

So when Katrina hits, five of the top 8 officials had virtually no prior relevant experience before assuming their posts. Meanwhile, the real talent had left, as so often happens as the second term unfolds.

The upshot of all this? Plenty of seemingly radical calls for the military to assume a SysAdmin role from the get-go the next time around.

Like I have long stated in the brief: Leviathan respects Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of force inside the United States; the SysAdmin obliterates that distinction.

Sound radical enough?

It's just admitting the nonsense of the "home game", "away game" distinction. The SysAdmin serves the System, of which the U.S. is the center of graviy. As such, the SysAdmin will serve us first and foremost.

And when that service is rendered, and our confidence level matches our natural resilience, we won't have a Department of Homeland Security but a Department of Global Security.

Posted by at 1:23 AM | Permalink

■"China Plans To Honor A Reformer," by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 9 September 2005, p. A1.

Guess who's coming to America?

President Hu Jintao of China, at a point where the anti-Chinese hysteria inside the Beltway has reached some serious proportions.

China remains the default position for the hawks ready to abandon the Global War on Terrorism. It's threat imagery is the strategic rear for the realists who wish to pull away from this messy world and occupy their minds with grand theories of great power balancing and billiard balls knocking around a strategic landscape.

But the Chinese won't be their silent partners in this return to the manic bipolarism of the past. Bit too clever. Bit too smooth

Hu knows he comes to America at a tough time, needing to repair images upon images. So we see the careful rehabilitation of Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 set off the democratic push that became the showdown at Tiananmen Square.

Hu Jintao is known as the most careful of bureaucrats, and on the surface, rehabbing Hu Yaobang carries some dangers, for it will surely be received by many as a signal.

At the same time, Premier Wen Jiabao let loose the notion that free elections previously limited to villages could expand to larger townships. Now, you have to understand, China's definition of a village is most people's definition of small American city, so a township starts to get up there.

In neither instance are these risky moves. Anything but. They are carefully considered gives, designed to lighten the load, soften the tone, take the edge off.

The hard-cores will deride all this, of course, saying it's those clever Chinese killing us softly with Hu's song: The Theory of Peacefully Rising China.

And they'll be both right and completely irrelevant in this judgment.

China is signaling all right. It is signaling the future it considers worth risking.

Some are ready on our side to take this risk, others pull back.

All must choose.

I do in the November issue of Esquire, which is the micro to BFA's macro, the j'accuse! to the je propose!, the yang to the yin.

Hi and low is the way to go.

Posted by at 1:23 AM | Permalink

Or so my webmaster says.

Got this from my host on the Hill on Thursday:

Thanks so much for briefing the key HASC staffers, who will be supporting Members in their Committee Defense Review efforts. Your presentation definitely provided a lot of food-for-thought – resulting in an afternoon full of heated discussions about the probability of state-on-state hostilities, DOD’s role in exporting security, and the future of DHS. Just keeping that many non-“policy wonk” staffers in the room for 2.5 hours was impressive. The fact that they continue to talk about the international security environment and not/not their particular programmatic interests is amazing!

Posted by at 7:08 PM | Permalink

Dateline: In the Shire, Indiana, 8 September 2005

Yesterday saw Steve DeAngelis and I pay visits to the world of intell in Northern VA and the world of Joint Forces Command down in Norfolk. Lotsa driving, two nice meals, two nice conversations.

Got up this morning and strolled over to Rayburn where I briefed about 20 House Armed Services Committee staff members. Gave them the full show.

Then the Metro to Reagan National, arriving at around 2pm for my 4pm flight. Buy a new fanny pack, sign books in bookstores, eat a nice meal, and then see that my flight is delayed.

Here's the kicker: whole reason I flew into and out of Reagan was to catch this 3:55pm flight back to Indy so I could see Kevin run in his first grade school cross-country meet. With time shift, I would land around 4:40 with USAir and about 5:00 with Northwest, even though both left Reagan at same time. Weird huh?

So I chose USAir.

Guess which flight left on time (exactly) and which left 2 hours late?

So I'm pulling up to the school after Kev's race has just ended. He does very well, finishing 5th among about 30 boys, so a nice ribbon.

But I'm pissed with USAir for having missed it. My bad.

Still, very proud of his race. I knew he'd do well. Just have a natural racer's instinct. His teammate, grade above him, won the race. The school's two girls in that age range also got ribbons. As assistant coach in charge of the younger kids: I feel good about the outcome, but was very sorry to miss the event.

Doing good stuff for my country by spending time with Hill staffers, but doing well by Kevin is important too. All of the other meets are on Saturdays, so this will be only tough one for me to make.

I am beat. Allergies brutal today in steamy heat. But brief went well. Expect some follow-up. Told them I want no jobs, no contracts, no money. Important work, happy to help, get other people to pay me.

Congress, of course, is notorious for never having money for anything. You're always expected to just show up on your own dime and your own time. But I believe in the work, so I put in the hours.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Sturm und Drang on Katrina is a bipartisan affair

■ Katrina's perturbation hits it stride

■ On China, Pillsbury well read, but Zoellick well versed

■ The Russian election scenario is already being gamed by Putin

■ The Iraq-Vietnam analogy explored

■ The SysAdmin suffers no POWs, just hostages

■ The 92nd Street Y

Posted by at 11:31 PM | Permalink

■"Clinton Draws Heat in Role Of a Conspicuous Critic: GOP Sees Political Motives as She Assails Disaster Response," by Dan Balz, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A12.

■"After Katrina, Anger Within the GOP: Slow Response and a Politically Tone-Deaf Administration Worry Lawmakers," op-ed by Robert D. Novak, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A29.

■"A CEO's Weaknesses," op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 7 September 2005, p. A25.

■"We Stand Ready for Our Next Disaster," editorial cartoon by Tom Toles, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A28.

I told you the 2008 presidential campaign began with Katrina, and my harsh words for Bush brought out the usual Republican cries that I abandoned my "analysis" for "rants."

Well, let me rant some more: it's perfectly fine for Hillary to castigate the administration for their poor performance. Calling it "political" is just plain goofy. Of course it's political. She's a frickin' politician-just like Bush and Cheney!

Here's her offending words:

"They [Bush administration] do believe that people should rely on state and local response and private charities. I think that is a recipe for disaster . . . There was nobody willing to take responsibility to work with state and local officials to make sure they were prepared."

Sounds pretty accurate to me. That's basically the Bush bias: go local, go private. Okay for problems that aren't too big and can be dealt with incrementally. But that's not a disaster. There, if you wait for the locals to get tapped out, it can quickly become too late to prevent real tragedy from unfolding.

In a connected world, incremental responses to exponential problems are a disaster.

But the bigger charge here is one of too much delegation and trust extended to locals, assuming they would get their stuff together on their own. Might work in some places, but doomed to disaster-it would seem-in other places, especially if they're impoverished or full of corrupt/inept officials.

Anyway, plenty of GOP politicians are ticked-off as well (Bush is surrounding himself with too many lawyers, and in certain jobs like FEMA or DHS, maybe they're not the best leaders), and they should be. The only way the GOP can lose the South is to screw up things like Katrina, so let's be honest here: Bush's ramped-up effort is good leadership and good politicking-something this White House has never been shy about with Rove (Mr. Non-stop Campaign).

Bush's bigger weakness here is that Katrina shows the danger of the distant CEO as president approach, as Ignatius points out in his balanced piece: Bush the strong leader, but Bush administration not strong on follow-through. Bold ideas, bold decisions, but not good execution or even-as with Iraq-solid explanation.

This analysis dovetails with my own previous blogging on Katrina and the Bush administration: strong leader, but not surrounded by solid people-thus the weak follow-through.

That's basically the gist of the Toles cartoon: The DHS leader stands in front of the white board with his helmut one, saying "We stand ready for our next disaster." On the board behind him is the statement, "We don't thing anybody could have predicted ___________."

Bold statement, not a good feeling on follow-through.

With System Perturbations of any magnitude, my rule is, "No sense in trying to predict vertical shocks, just get good at running down the horizontal scenarios."

Posted by at 11:30 PM | Permalink

■"Reckoning Katrina's Wide Reach: Markets Around the World May Be Touched if Squeeze Is Put to Consumer in U.S.," by Michael R. Sesit, Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. C14.

■"Exposed by Katrina, FEMA's flaws were years in making: Our view: Political appointments, loss of focus crippled disaster relief agency," editorial, USA Today, 8 September 2005, p. 12A.

■"Katrina's Silver Lining: A chance to take on the cycle of poverty," op-ed by David Brooks, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. A29.

■"Football's Saints Ponder Whether To Relocate," by Stefan Fatsis, Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. B1.

Another fascinating graphic on how other countries need oil for economic growth far more than America does (people think we're wasteful, but in relative terms, the more advanced your economy, the more efficient it is-go figure!). The U.S. uses 1.75 thousands of barrels of oil consumed per day, per billion dollars of GDP (2004 dollars), but then there's Canada at 2.22, Argentina at 2.69. Korea at 3.35, China at 4.05, and Thailand at a whopping 5.56.

So if Katrina perturbs global energy markets, the effects will be felt far more overseas than in rather resilient America.

Still, no question it's a System Perturbation. New rule sets coming on FEMA and Northern Command and the Department of Homeland Security as a result of Katrina.

Pundits are already getting expansive on the new possibilities. David Brooks waxes philosophic in his op-ed about a "post-Katrina world" (if it's "post-" anything, we're probably talking a System Perturbation) in which we approach urban poverty differently ("This is the post-Katrina moment. Let's not blow it."). Nice. Good start. Keep it coming.

Then again, things are looking awfully bleak for New Orleans itself. Katrina may rob the city of the NFL Saints, and there are few things that would sting like that, few things that would send such a strong signal that New Orleans will never be the same. Oh yes, when the Saints go marchin' out . . .

And so the horizontal scenarios continue to unfold with significant speed …

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink

■"Inside Pentagon, A Scholar Shapes Views of China: Beijing, Mr. Pillsbury Says, Sees U.S. as Military Foe; An Optimist Turns Gloomy; His Direct Line to Top Aides," by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Zoellick Details Discussions With China on Future of the Korean Peninsula," by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A22.

■"A Trial Run Finds Hong Kong Disneyland Much Too Popular for Its Modest Size," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. C1.

■"A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet," by Howard D. French, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. A3.

The WSJ front-pager on Michael Pillsbury is long overdue. Outing this obscure but influential China hawk gets his connections out in the open. Pillsbury is a major stalking horse for Andy Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and he clearly has the ear of both Rummy and his trusted intell chief Steve Cambone.

Pillsbury is a free-lancer on nobody's payroll. Rich (guess how), he's spent decades perusing Chinese military writing, which he finds-gasp!-fixated on U.S. military power. Can you believe it? I would have picked Argentina myself, but I guess that goes with being the world's sole superpower.

Here's Pillsbury's great contribution to understanding China:

"Mike's core insight has been to plumb the subterranean anti-American feelings within China's military," says Daniel Blumenthal, a China specialist at the Defense Department …

Wow! Chinese military leaders are strongly anti-American! I am stunned. And they write about it. And they write about their dreams of future high-tech war against us. And we read those documents, and we take their statements of aspiration and treat it as gospel truth.

Guess where we did this before, swallowing propaganda lock, stock and barrel?

You guessed it! We swallowed it all from the Red Army for years, believing all their aspirational bullshit, trumping them up into 10-foot-monsters they never were, and overestimating their defense budgets and power projection capabilities consistently.

We are repeating, to the extent Pillsbury is taken seriously inside the Pentagon, this systematic analytic mistake all over again.

What do Mr. Pillsbury's critics say?

Mr. Pillsbury's numerous critics call him a charming but combative China hawk whose work has overblown the thoughts and writings of a small cadre of Chinese military officials.

But make no mistake, as best boy to both Marshall and Cambone, Pillsbury is a man to be reckoned with, even as his take on China is so absurdly limited to just reading military writings (God help anyone trying to figure out the United States or the world through American military writing).

Me, I think China's a bit more complex than that, spanning a lot of different time periods from our own past, like experiencing a sexual revolution right now, along with a burgeoning gay rights movement, that places them somewhere in our late 1960s/early 1970s.

I know, I know. Mr. Pillsbury wants us to know that the Chinese military simply think differently than our military does. My answer: complete bullshit. The Chinese mirror image us like you wouldn't believe (matched only by hard-liners on our side mirror-imaging them ("Look, they dream of high-tech wars against high-tech opponents---just like us!"). Spare me the "inscrutability" and the "ancient Chinese secrets." If their big scary plan is to lie low for 40 to 50 years and then somehow break out the can of whupass, then I'm less than impressed

Give then 40 or 50 years, and we'll see a China amazingly addicted to a middle-class lifestyle, with Disney vacations and all.

Rather than focus on scary bad cops in the Pentagon, which I remind you is not in charge of determining who our enemies are (that job belongs to the president and us, frankly), take a peek at how Robert Zoellick, Dep Sec of State is prepping the Chinese to consider life after Kim by emphasizing that the status quo is untenable. Then check this bit out:

Zoellick also suggested that the United States was interested in using the six-nation talks-which also include South Korea, Russia and Japan-as a springboard for creating a multilateral security framework for northern Asia that would mirror organizations in the southeastern part of the continent.

Zoellick said he urged the Chinese to consider scenarios for the Korean Peninsula that "would be benign to us and which would be benign to them."

I've said it before and I say it again: Zoellick is by far the smartest man in the Bush Administration. Honest to God, I'd name him president tomorrow. Pretty decent crew around both him and Rice as well.

I say keep an eye on this pair, Pillsbury and Zoellick. Much rides on which vision of China holds sway with Bush. I'm betting on the Rice conduit to Bush with Zoellick more than the Pillsbury via Cambone and Marshall through Rummy to Cheney.

You know, Dr. Rice may yet prove the historical difference in the second term.

From my lips to God's ears.

Posted by at 11:25 PM | Permalink

■"Russia's Radicals Feel Heat: Kremlin, Fearing Ukraine Rerun, Is Accused of Repressing Rivals," by Alan Collison, Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. A16.

One of my headlines from the future in my Afterward called "Blogging the Future" is about the 2008 presidential election in Russia. There's no doubt that Putin will try-at the very least-to install his own man and retain much power in a Lee Kuan Yew-sort of way. My guess is that it will be harder than the Kremlin thinks.

Right now Russia is enjoying an economic boomlet of sorts, thanks to oil, and in three years, given that this is likely to continue, the restiveness against Putin's heavy hand won't be limited just to the young. Russian society will grow more confident in its growing economic success, and the paternalistic leadership approach will begin to chaff.

What America should be doing in the meantime is working Russia on this issue, making it clear that we're watching.

Can we do more? Not really. But by emphasizing that the Kremlin needs to get out of the business of intimidating rising business leaders with political aspirations (or even just former chess champions like Kasparov), otherwise it energy investment climate will ultimately limit its ability to exploit its reserves fully with influxes of Western technology, we'll remind Putin that his imitation of Hugo Chavez will ultimately isolate the regime both diplomatically and financially.

Posted by at 11:24 PM | Permalink

■"A Bad Analogy: The war in Iraq is not another 'Vietnam,'" op-ed by Peter R. Kann, Wall Street Journal, 8 September 2005, p. A18.

Sort of interesting op-ed that says Vietnam is a bad analogy for Iraq (and a horrible platform for Chuck Hagel to try and win the Republican nod in '08), and yet explores the similarities.

First, his quick dismissal of the analogy, to which I agree:

The differences include the fact that America pursued the struggle in Vietnam for more than a decade against a regular North Vietnamese army backed by the Soviet Union and China, and lost more than 58,000 American soldiers, many of them draftees, before we decided to toss in the towel. By comparison, America, now the world's sole superpower, has been fighting a collection of terrorists in Iraq for less than two years and has lost fewer than 2,000 troops-and these from a fully professional and volunteer military.

Okay, how about the similarities.

First, public support is much higher far longer than the critics of the war want to recognize. Kann cites an AP poll this summer with 60 percent expressing continuing support.

Second, this war is being fought as much or more over here than in Iraq, meaning this is a classic Fourth Generation Warfare model where our opponents work to beat down our morale back home through an endless "bloody nose" strategy.

His third big similarity is the fear of wider repercussions if we pull out. In SE Asia it was the domino effect of socialism. Here I would say it's really the opposite: the failure of the Big Bang means continued authoritarianism, not Islamic revolution.

Here's the biggest difference to me: Iraq is tripartite in ethnic make-up and two of the three groups clearly want self-rule with a modicum of federalism. There was nothing like this in Vietnam, and that alone makes it a bad analogy overall.

Posted by at 11:23 PM | Permalink

■"U.S. Forces Free American Hostage in Iraq: Tip Leads Troops to Military Catering Contractor Abducted in November," by Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post, 8 September 2005, p. A25.

One of the few outstanding Western hostages in Iraq was freed by American forces yesterday. He had been abducted while working for a Saudi catering company serving the Iraqi army.

If this guy is peeling potatoes while in uniform and he's taken by a conventional enemy, he's a prisoner of war. But the SysAdmin force doesn't fight conventional foes, and many of the SysAdmin's personnel are civilian government or civilian contractors, and when they're "captured," it's called hostage-taking.

When these people are freed, if they're lucky, they don't get heroes's welcomes typically, nor any special government status for having gone over and performed jobs that, in other situations in other times, might have earned them a chest-full of medals for their trouble.

One of my "Heroes Yet Discovered" at the end of Blueprint for Action is the first SysAdmin civilian personnel to be captured by an enemy and recognized as a real POW and not just a hostage.

You know that old saying, "There outta be a law!"

Well, someday, there outta be a civilian SysAdmin medal.

Posted by at 11:23 PM | Permalink

■"92nd: Lectures & Conversations," advertisement, New York Times, 8 September 2005, p. B6.

I was approached by Manhattan's 92nd Street Y for their speakers' series a while back, and I steered the date to fall during my book tour (Sunday, 23 October).

I have a form from the Y that I keep meaning to fill out regarding the event. I will try to get it done tomorrow. Not sure if I'm being interviewed or what, but for some reason I feel like I'm giving a short PowerPoint presentation. If so, that event will constitute the debut of my new brief on Blueprint for Action.

I've found neither the time nor the inspiration to start up this brief. A few abortive attempts on my own and I gave up a while back, instead sub-contracting the effort to my old alter ego Bradd Hayes, whom I recently managed to lure away from the Naval War College to join us at Enterra Solutions. Bradd's perusing the book and coming up with a host of new slides for me, which I'll start manipulating into the shapes I want.

Does it seem odd for the PowerPoint maestro to outsource the initial drafting of slides? Not really. In fact, Bradd has created plenty of original slides for me in the past, including the entire Leviathan-SysAdmin sequence at the end. Typically, I end up altering his slides a lot (his color schemes and graphic choices tend toward the more colorful), adding layers upon layers. But it really helps to have him start the process for me, because he's a gifted storyteller with an eye for which details in the text can be brought to life.

I am very excited to see the package he eventually puts together for me.

It's pretty cool to be asked to speak at the 92nd Street Y. You wouldn't think it, but it's a significant NYC milestone. It was set up and underwritten by some patron there, who remains nameless to me for now, but that's apparently how these things get done there.

The entry for me in the ad reads:

Sun, Oct 23 WAR, PEACE & THE PENTAGON Thomas P.M. Barnett

I'm followed that week by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jerry Lewis. My wife will be impressed by that, as she's a big fan of both.

Me, I enjoy living on the shadowy margins of fame. While waiting today for my USAIR flight to take off (two hours late, natch) from Reagan National, I wandered into two bookstores there. At Olsson's, I signed 2 hard copies (the first I've seen in a very long while) and four paperbacks. Then at Border's I signed six paperbacks, only to have someone recognize me as I was penning my name and scoop it up. He explained that he had seen me on CSPAN and really enjoyed the brief.

To me, that's a nice level of fame, and about where I'd keep it for now if possible.

Then again, I'll be a full-time bookseller in 42 days.

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink

... sees fit to give me regular reading assignments. Many others try this. For some reason, I accept his more than not (e.g., Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts" excerpt in the Atlantic Monthly, which I will review for my newsletter this week).

In this post, he analyzes Mr. Lee's Der Spiegel interview himself, referencing my thinking: http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/003470.html.

Mr. Green's regular bouts of dark vision worry me some, but he's so reasonable the rest of the time. My problem with his characterization of my thinking is that he seems to suggest a Pollyannish wait-and-hope-it-will-all-work-out on my part, when in reality I argue in BFA for a very aggressive partnering with China. I realize the potential for dark turns there, and I trust the Chinese (and especially the Party) to be exactly what they are--Chinese.

I just believe that--and this will be hard for anyone over 50 (no assumptions on Mr. Green) to believe--unlike the 20th century, where, if you were like us politically then we could trust you as our friends, in the 21st century I think it will be the opposite, as in, if you are like us economically then we can trust you.

Here's my scary emerging truth on China: we have more in common with them economically than we realize, and that commonality will overshadow our increasing distance from the rest of the Old Core (Japan and Europe) over diverging economic philosophies (despite the apparent political similarities).

My view on future alliance with China is not based on optimism, but economic determinism, and yes, I know that marks me as having an blindspot on irrationality. But my plan for the irrationals (aka transnational terrorists and occasional nutcase leader) is simple: hunt them down one by one and kill them, because they do not belong to our shared global future. I don't see irrationals running China. Much like the Sovs, I see very careful, far too unimaginative men who need to be brought into larger networks of relationships that--from our perspective--will serve us better than any other singular ally we would be able to come up with across the 21st century.

This isn't about idealism. Grand strategy is about getting what you want--as efficiently as possible. I want globalization to be truly global because that serves America's interest. China is just the straight line between two points.

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink

Dateline: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Washington DC, 7 September 2005

The upcoming conference in Manhattan (Enterprise Resilience Management for the Financial Sector) that Enterra is putting on with the Association for Enterprise Integration is, in many ways, an attempt to restart the sort of Wall Street-Pentagon dialogue on the military-market nexus that I had pursued with Cantor Fitzgerald back before 9/11. The defense community is pushing this dialogue through AFEI, a defense industry association, because it senses the need to build up a lot more understanding between itself and the money guys. My guess is that defense people are hoping to learn what they can from the dialogue, feeling that the financial services sector can teach them a thing or two about how the GIG ("global information grid" that will run future high-tech warfare ops while resting-precariously-atop commercial backbone otherwise known as the Internet) can be made more resilient with time.

I think defense people are correct in this assumption. I saw how far ahead Wall Street was in understanding Y2K years ago, viewing it as both a danger and a new and unprecedented opportunity to get its shit together and make itself not just resilient but more competitive in the global marketplace in the process. After 9/11 and a few years of the Global War on Terrorism, I think the Pentagon is beginning to see the rise of the GIG as not just something to defend, secure, and harden, but rather a key domain through which to raise the U.S. military's competitive stature in both war (Leviathan) and peace (SysAdmin). More than that, determining who logs onto this GIG (or "SkyNet" or "Matrix" or whatever other movie reference you care to name) and under what conditions and what they access and so on will be precedent-setting far and beyond the domains of conflict and post-conflict recovery. It's likely to set the standards, in many ways, for systemic responses to disasters like Katrina. It's likely to set standards for how governments share information and how citizens access government networks-for encryption in general. In short, it's likely to set the gold standard for a lot of venues.

DoD has set these standards before: for the interstate highways (okay, we borrowed those from the German autobahn), for satellites, for the Internet, for GPS, for UAVs, and so on and so forth. So influencing these debates is a must for those who want connectivity to future definitions of war and peace.

I'm very excited about the conference and I encourage like-minded thinkers and players (we all think but not all of us play-me, I've avoided it my entire career!) to sign up. It ain't cheap, but it isn't a moneymaker for Enterra, just our effort to push the dialogue along with the help of AFEI. The network itself is the function here. People are always asking me for heads up for opportunities like this and here is one. Not just face time but serious head time with a lot of big minds doing important work. Stuff like this, I honestly believe, is about making history in real-time.

We build the SysAdmin one node at a time. Come help us build some more connectivity in Manhattan on the 19th. I promise a real education, which, quite frankly, is how I get talked into these things myself!

Here's the daily catch:

■ Katrina: cue up the happy stories, cue up the celebrities

■ Katrina goes international

■ Katrina's lessons learned include the usual calls for better blended SysAdmin force

■ Egypt's election is one small step for Mubarek, no giant leap for Egyptians

■ Iran will reach for the bomb when it's damn well ready!

■ Japan's caboose faces cut

Posted by at 10:44 PM | Permalink

■"In Katrina's wake, generosity: For survivors, San Antonio's response exemplifies America at its finest," by Marco R. della Cava, USA Today, 7 September 2005, p. 1A.

■"Businesses step up to the plate in a big way: Technology: Free phones, buses, Web assistance; Retailers: Donate money, merchandise; Airlines: Fly out thousands of evacuees for free," by Michelle Kessler, Lorrie Grant and Roger Yu respectively, USA Today, 7 September 2005, p. 3B.

■"Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. A1.

■"Storm giving outpaces that of 9/11, tsunami," by Wendy Koch, USA Today, 7 September 2005, p. 11A.

■"In Hurricane's Aftermath, Winfrey Calls for Apology," by Edward Wyatt, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. B3.

We're seeing the usual disaster-donation nexus kick in: huge disaster triggers huge overflow of donated resources. Much will go wasted, and you will read many investigatory stories in coming months about swindles and diversions and embezzling and fraud. It is the typical American overreaction: beggar the infrastructure year after year, and then flood the place with disaster aid when it all comes tumbling down. We see this in overseas events all the time: America is short of official developmental aid year-in and year-out, but a clear leader in disaster relief (especially in throwing military assets at the problem).

Don't get me wrong: a lot of good stuff is being pursued. Hell, I sit here next to Steve DeAngelis and he's working his cell phone while we driving to Norfolk, seeing how Enterra might provide jobs to dislocated IT workers from the Gulf coast-affected areas. Americans have heart, no doubt about it, and business leads the way in innovation, as it should, but we have to adjust our thinking on the role of government: it shouldn't be thought of as merely the "last resort," resort resource-wise, but the first resort-temporally speaking-in those critical SysAdmin roles that the private sector simply cannot manage on its own. "Preventive diplomacy" is a chimera where resources are lacking. It works in the Core, not in the Gap-nor in New Orleans it would appear. You can't negotiate resiliency, you have to build it brick by brick. Where the private sector can't or won't out of fear for its security, there the SysAdmin must tread-24/7 and not just after the balloon has gone up.

Don't worry, we'll learn plenty about our innate resources for resiliency, like in managing all those displaced school kids. Won't be pretty, but we'll learn.

And now that we have the celebrities on the scene, we'll keep the media cameras rolling for that much longer. Here's hoping Oprah uses her pulpit to push some broader change, as well as some broader understanding, of how we need to change our approach to post-trauma stabilization and reconstruction-both at home and overseas. She can always play fairy godmother to distressed viewers and that's cool for her ego (and ratings), but imagine if she pushed for a new national debate on such SysAdmin issues, not only making us stronger at home in the process but changing the way we approached-say-Africa.

With Bono and Sachs on one side, you've half the equation, maybe with Oprah and Barnett on the other side, we'd actually have a quorum for lasting change.

Hmm. Hearst owns Esquire and Oprah!. Mark Warren's edited both Sachs and I. DeAngelis dreams of getting Bono to write the forward to our joint book. It's all coming together!.

Posted by at 10:40 PM | Permalink

■"Ad-Libbing Many Routes, Ships Return To the River," by Jeff Bailey, Alexei Barrionuevo and Charles V. Bagli, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. B1.

■"Economic Impact Is Being Felt Around the Globe: Likely Slowing of Growth, Employment in U.S. Is Seen Pressuring Other Economies," by Patrick Barta, Marcus Walker and Jon E. Hilsenrath, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2005, p. A8.

■"Gas Prices At Pumps Show Signs of Easing: Calls for inquiries into what some see as profiteering," by Vikas Bajaj and Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. B1.

■"In Asia, Low Fuel Prices And Subsidies Lose Ground," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. C5.

■"Toyota Hopes to Push Its Hybrids Beyond the Niche," by James Brooke, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. B1.

America's transportation system is recovering through its innate genius for workarounds. As the most comprehensively horizontal economy in the world, this is who we are.

And yet the ripples of even this relatively short slow-down in flow is being felt around the planet-meaning the rest of the Core (the Gap not being connected enough to feel pain yet).

Of course, the country that would suffer the steepest and most immediate decline in any U.S. collapse would be . . . China, so sayeth famous Morgan Stanley bear Stephen Roach ("China would be on the leading edge.").

How's this for a weird twist: China's government forces oil companies there to sell at fixed prices domestically, so when something like Katrina sends prices higher, these Chinese companies will divert supplies abroad to make a bigger killing, thus leading to gas shortages at home.

Oh yeah, the Chinese Communist Party is running that economy all right.

If anything, all these sustained high prices are pushing governments throughout Asia to rethink and start abandoning their long-term subsidies for energy consumption there, a policy that's left many Asian economies several-fold less efficient than Old Core economies. China, according to the Asian Development Bank, uses five times as much energy as Japan in creating the same amount of GDP.

So guess where Toyota's gonna strike it rich with hybrids and later hydrogen cars? Think it'll occur in America first, where we've successfully insulated our economy from rising energy prices to the point where Katrina is a storm easily weathered? Not likely, as we're already too efficient for our own good-compared to New Core pillars on the upswing. I mean, if China's choice is conquer the Middle East or get a whole lot more efficient, guess which sounds smarter and more profitable over the long haul?

Mark my words, the first H-car I buy will be a Honda (my preferred Asian brand) built in China.

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink

■"Katrina, Iraq Aid Efforts Hit Same Hurdles: Military Officials Say Crises Highlight Poor Coordination Between Federal Departments," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2005, p. A4.

■"Remembering Help Received After Sept. 11, New York Sends 303 Officers to Louisiana: Lending aid to a force battered by stress and resignations," by Al Baker, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. A18.

■"Navy Pilots Who Rescued Victims Are Reprimanded: A commander criticizes an effort that saved 110 people," by David S. Cloud, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. A21.

The comparisons of Katrina to Baghdad are in full swing, with the same basic judgment being offered: DoD is great when it gets going, but the overall coordination of federal agencies remains missing in action. FEMA isn't up for it domestically any more than State is up for it overseas (neither has enough pull when so many of the physical assets of response belong to the Pentagon), and NSC is basically a creature of the White House, not of the federal bureaucracy (although just wait for the blue-ribbon reports declaring NSC the logical "coordinating lead" on such domestic events just like so many have WRT to the next "Iraq").

Better step is the interim one of establishing permanent joint task force command elements that combine numerous federal agencies in a pre-packaged command structure. We need a standing JTF capacity for SysAdmin abroad and for at home, and the difference between the two would really be negligible, because the functions are so similar (stabilizing and reconstructing after a tumultuously destructive event). There is no real sense in reinventing the wheel for "home" versus "away" games (the stupidest strategic concept we have ever invented). We should pursue a big enough capacity, with sufficient global networking, so that we can handle a Katrina at the same time we're doing Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (and so we could accept help from fellow Core states without it seeming weird-like fire departments sharing resources as required).

I mean, there's no embarrassment for New Orleans when NYC sends some cops, and the NYPD is smart enough to send those with military experience. They know SysAdmin work when they see it, and the security element isn't routine. By internationalizing our SysAdmin force/function, we take the zero-sum element out of the equation, making clear to all that market access on the far side is not only desired, but encouraged.

Or, we can sit around bitching about China's "infiltration" of Africa, like that's a strategic crime or something.

Solutions stare us in the face, as do resource requirements. In a world of Baghdads and Katrinas, we need less Leviathan platforms and more SysAdmin ones, so we don't find ourselves making Sophie's choices between moving potable water and picking up American citizens stranded in their own country (!) by floodwaters. What's tragically stupid about forcing U.S. Navy helicopter pilots to make those choices is that we created that crisis ourselves by systematically under investing in SysAdmin force structure (lotsa helos, for example) over time by over investing in Leviathan force structure. Not enough cops, not enough helos, not enough SysAdmin in general.

Some naval helo pilots involved in Katrina are so angry about being told not to divert to rescue ops as they see fit that they've stopped wearing their SAR (search and rescue) patches that say, "So others may live."

Remember that when someone tells you that we'll never get people to join the military to do SysAdmin ops.

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink

■"For first time, Egypt has more than 1 presidential candidate," by Charles Levinson, USA Today, 7 September 2005, p. 17A.

■"Egypt Vote Gets Mixed Reviews: Mubarek Opens the Field but Draws Protests Over Restrictions," by Karby Leggett and Yasmine El-Rashidi, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2005, p. A14.

■"Lethal Fire Heightens Egyptians' Anger at Government: Another reason for ignoring a chance for expanded democracy," by Michael Slackman, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. A3.

Mubarek was spooked enough by Iraq's elections and the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon to promise a competitive election, but true to his strongman form he's subsequently gone out of his way to turn it into a competition not unlike the Harlem Globetrotters taking on the Washington Generals (decent show, outcome never in doubt).

If so many average Egyptians are fed up with his rancid authoritarianism (the opposition movement's name is "kafiya" (which here means "enough already!"), then why is Mubarek getting away with it with such relative ease? The economy has long been beset with double-digit inflation and unemployment, but the new PM has been pushing a serious agenda of reform focused largely on reducing the state role in the economy, thus making Egypt seem more open for business and investment. Mubarek, in my mind, wants to re-legitimize his rule for one more six-year term on the hope that he can engineer a stable transition to someone else (the preferred vessel being the son, in a sort of Assad-like shift) the next time around, winning enough kudos from the public in the meantime for the government's economic reforms. In short, he can't afford a truly free election this time, but he wants enough of the appearance of one so as not to curtail the global business community's rising opinion of his economy.

The people's anger is real and profound, and the right spark can light it. Mubarek needs to buy himself some political slack with Washington with this pseudo-free election and his economy some time to let the reform process work. His long-term goal, like any strongman, is to extend his rule-here, virtually since he's so old.

A Middle East that's opening up progressively to the world in economics because it's security situation is improving works to Mubarek's plan-and frankly, our own because we can't hope for much better any faster in Egypt.

This is yet another reason why settling Iraq is crucial, and we need Iran's compliance to achieve that.

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink

■"Nuclear Weapon Is Years Off For Iran, Research Panel Says," by Alan Cowell, New York Times, 7 September 2005, p. A11.

Iran, if it really wanted to throw caution to the wind, says a group of international experts, could have a nuclear weapon by 2010, otherwise it would take much longer. Of course, since we know so little of what goes on in Iran on this subject, this estimate could be off by a ways.

So let's just say Iran is within negotiating range of being a nuclear power and that it's measured pace reflects a leadership that knows nukes are for having, not using. Because, after all, if they really wanted a nuke bad so they could use it pronto, they'd probably have it by now. But just buying a hot nuke isn't the same as being recognized as a nuclear power (the capacity to build your own), which means being recognized as a major security player, which is really Iran's goal in all of this (plus, obviously, taking them off the "to do" list in the Pentagon).

It has been said that Gorbachev chose political reform before economic reform in the old USSR, whereas Deng chose economic reform before political reform in China. This is why the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is still ruling in China and the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) is defunct in a technical sense (although a weak successor party lives on in Russia). What the mullahs are doing in Iran, in my estimation, is this: they want to "re-form" the country's security profile before engaging in any serious economic change, so fearful are they that any economic liberalization will put the ruling elite at risk both politically at home and externally in terms of security. They hope that if they can lock in their rule from the possibility of foreign military intervention (meaning us), they should be able to balance some economic liberalization without sacrificing too much in their political control. In effect, the mullahs want a security guarantee up front on no regime change, and they believe nukes will get it for them.

You know what? Given the size of the population and the regime's growing energy ties to China and India, nukes will most definitely put them over the top. This is something we need to understand: we will not negotiate this capability away, the mullahs simply want it too much. If we want to get to the economic opening-up part, we need to help Iran "reform" its security profile first. Since that effort should logically get us what we need from Iran (quid pro quo) in Baghdad, Beirut and Jerusalem, we should send "Nixon" to Tehran sooner than later. Because, after a while, Iran will get far enough along in that process that the hard-liners will increasingly begin defining that sense of sufficient security in terms of what the East (China, India, Asia in general) can offer them, not the West (U.S.-dominated NATO, from which Tehran would logically assume it could break off the Europeans-or at least Germany and France).

My point is this: all these calculations regarding nuclear end games really speaks to the cessation of our diplomatic freedom as much or more than Tehran's. In other words, their situation improves over time, ours does not, and they are in control of the progression, we are not.

Our intransigence on this is very odd to me, because it effectively kills the ability of the Bush Administration to both lock in existing gains from the Big Bang and to propel its advance. Move on Iran diplomatically now and the Big Bang lives. Dig in your heels solely over nukes and the Middle East will look largely unchanged 20 years from now.

I know, I know, many would look at my argument and say that, if pursued, we'd be making a mockery of the sacrifices already rendered in Iraq. But my argument is the exact opposite: do this now so as to make those sacrifices worthwhile. Otherwise, we're simply pissing them away slowly over time.

The Middle East isn't our Petri dish alone to mess with. Asia won't stand still over the next twenty years. Either we connect the Middle East to the world or the regimes there will cut their separate deal with Asia, and Osama's dream of civilizational apartheid will be achieved.

Posted by at 10:37 PM | Permalink

■"As Japan Votes, Aid to Countryside Hangs in Balance: Mr. Koziumi Aims to Remove Crutches for Rural Areas; An Airport With 4 Flights," by Sebastian Moffett and Ginny Parker Woods, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2005, p. A1.

The vote on privatizing Japan's huge financial giant and social welfare funnel postal system occurs on Sunday, and what this article highlights is that Japan's government (or more to the point, the long-time single-party system known as the Liberal Democrat Party) has long used this entity as a way to make sure it's caboose (least advanced, least rich, typically most rural citizens) don't get left too far behind in the country's ever-upward economic advance. The postal system is thus a giant, nation-wide Tennessee Valley Authority-like funnel for infrastructural investment, so any messing with it is akin to the mother-of-all base closure proposals in the U.S. Plus, given its huge asset pool of personal savings, you're not just talking the break-up of Ma Bell (Koziumi wants to break it up into four big chunks), you're suggesting the privatizing of Social Security.

You sense the reaching for analogies here: it's almost impossible to capture the breadth and depth of this change for Japan. It's like the Party giving up control of the military in China, that's how identified the LDP is with the postal system: it's a fundamental basis for regime legitimacy and control. Neither party in the U.S. has anything like it, which is why we're legitimately described as that most rare of beast: a functioning two-party state where neither side is locked into power thanks to its profound control of state assets. It would be like the Democrats "owning" DHHS or the Republicans "owning" Defense-and I mean never giving up control even if administrations changed.

So when Koziumi says the government needs to privatize the post office banking system, he's doing more than what's necessary to make Japan a far more competitive economy, he's really altering the political trajectory of the country in a big, big way. And why it's so controversial is because he's threatening the existence of a quasi-governmental entity that's long played the key role in keeping Japan from becoming too much of a have-have not society despite its meteoric economic climb. For the EU to try and do something similar, we'd be talking a serious dismantling of their workers' social welfare rights.

By doing this, Japan would become a lot more like America-with all the attendant risks. But I think the real driver here is the sense of competition from China over the long run.

And that's what's interesting to me about this push by Koziumi: it's the flip side of China's efforts and the related fears of its Fourth Generation of leadership (Hu, Wen, etc.). Japan is saying, "we've got to lengthen the train a bit in order to get competitive," whereas China's leadership is saying, "we've got to shorten our snaking train a bit or we'll end up with unmanageable political unrest in the interior provinces."

My point with the whole "The Train's Engine Can Travel No Faster Than the Caboose" theory in Blueprint for Action is that there's an optimal speed level associated with successful integration with the global economy. The earlier you are in the process-historically speaking-the more you'll want to let your caboose "brake" your pace (lest you suffer social unrest), but the more mature you become, the more you'll going to have to allow a certain amount of income equality in order to remain competitive and efficient (i.e., you're going to have to let the market move your labor for you). Otherwise, you find yourself funding ghost towns that correspond to no economic logic, making your economy as a whole more uncompetitive.

No magic standard for all countries, as the sense of sequencing trumps all calculations. Development is a lot like aging: to shrink the Gap is to age it upward demographically, along with all that entails economically and politically and-best of all-militarily.

Posted by at 10:37 PM | Permalink

Dateline: in the Shire in Indy, 6 September 2005

As Dan Balz points out in the Post yesterday ("For Bush, Next Moves Are Key to Rest of Term"), the President is walking a mighty fine line right now. Cindy Sheehan and Iraq had him down prior to Katrina, and then New Orleans knocked him for a real loop in public esteem, only to have his base reenergized by the sudden death of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. August may have slipped in rather sleepily, but September's rip-roaring in politically. Bush can get things right or very wrong in coming weeks. Both levees and reputations need to be repaired.

Of course, scape goats will have to be offered up (Spencer S. Hsu and Susan B. Glasser, "FEMA Director Singled Out by Response Critics," Washington Post, 6 September). Fair to blame one man, one agency? Well, when the National Hurricane Center tells you 32 hours in advance that Katrina's landfall will likely break levees in its path, yeah, that's more than fair. And since the guy in question doesn't have the background one usually expects from a leader like this (basically a friend of a friend pick), Bush might want to rethink his penchant for loyalty on this one.

Beyond fingering someone low-enough to play fall-guy, you have to reassure the markets (Ben White, "Wall Street Sees Limited Storm Impact," New York Times, 6 September), but that would seem a fairly easy trick for now, as most market analysts are talking about growth delayed, not growth denied. What we don't see across the rest of 2005 is predicted to appear in early 2006, as the Great Rebuild begins down South. Much will depend on the popular perceptions of gas prices, but work arounds abound (Simon Romero, "Houston Finds Business Boon After Katrina," New York Times, 5 September) and here is the real resiliency of horizontally networked America, as what goes up gets spread around.

Speaking of spreading it around (Lolita C. Baker, "Halliburton Subsidiary Taps Contrract for Repairs, Washington Post, 5 September), no one should be surprised to see SysAdmin conttractor supremo Kellogg, Brown & Root at the forefront of the recovery efforts with Katrina. Last July it won a big Navy contract vehicle to be the company that comes in after big natural disasters and do clean-up. SysAdmin away, SysAdmin home. Seems pretty natural because it's basically the same all over. So don't expect KB&R to go away any time soon, no matter how stinky its past associations with Cheney might seem. It simply fills too big of a niche. On the contrary, expect more KB&Rs in the future, not less, and they will all seem cozy with the government because they'll always be picking up the 3D (dirty, dangerous, difficult) jobs that the Fed wants to outsource--both at home and in the Gap.

Over the longer run, take solace in this realization: the big disasters rarely live up to their initial billing. Chernobyl, we were told way back when, would end up killing tens of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians. Now, when it's all added up years later, a team of global scientists say its more like 4,000 deaths (Elisabeth Rosenthal, International Herald Tribune, 6 September), with 100,000 to 200,000 suffering some level of measurable physical impact. Of course, that doesn't stop 7 million citizens around Chernobyl from taking payments long-term from the government. (Hey buddy! It's called socialism!)

Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. Just means we tend to be more resilient than we realize--even under the worst of conditions.

Posted by at 11:21 PM | Permalink

I've had about a dozen people send me this, saying how we seem to think alike. I must admit, I have read much about Mr. Lee but never an interview before. I now know why he comes off as so impressive. I really wish I had his command of economics.

Find the interview here: It's Stupid to Be Afraid Really worth reading on China and India alone.

This was basically going to be my message to the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, but the hearing is now cancelled. Too many Members down in NOLAland (New Orleans, LouisianA), so session called with no rain date. The sked just moves on.

I spent three hours today writing up testimony, which I will table for now. It's too much a pastiche of past testimony, Blueprint for Action and the November piece in Esquire (tentatively titled, "The Chinese are our friends").

But I must admit, I like "It's Stupid to Be Afraid" better. So give it up to Lee and expand your understanding of a sharp Asian outlook on the global economy.

In consolation, the HASC staffers asked if I could just stop by in the same 10-1 timeframe on Thursday. I said I would (what the hell), so it looks like I'll give the brief instead and have a chat.

Posted by at 7:03 PM | Permalink

[Freely pass to people you know. Thanks.]

Feature: When disconnectedness defines danger

Download The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett - 5 September 2005 in PDF or Word document:

thomaspmbarnett.com/journals/barnett_5sep2005.pdf

thomaspmbarnett.com/journals/barnett_5sep2005.doc

Posted by Josette at 11:08 PM | Permalink

Dateline: In the Shire, Indy, 5 September 2005

There's the scene in "The Guns of Navarone" where the British special ops boss explains his choice of one senior officer to lead the dangerous mission by explaining that once Napoleon was brought a young general along with the assurance that he was a capable officer: "Yes, yes I know he's brilliant," replies Napoleon (as this Brit paraphrases), "but is he lucky?

Rehnquist's sudden but hardly unexpected death arrives at a very good time for Bush, reminding his base why they want him in power and distracting us all--just a little bit--from down South.

My Mom called it the minute she heard about it (she the retired lawyer), by saying Bush's best move would be to elevate the Roberts' nomination immediately, rather than fight three fights at once. Now, Bush really has only one fight (the O'Connor swing seat, not Rehnquist's predictable vote already now locked with the careful Roberts' pick)--and for most of the marbles. That tension alone will work mightily to Bush's political advantage in coming days and weeks.

Here I thought I'd be testifying on Thursday (moved back a day) to the House Armed Services Committee on the biggest issue of the day (national security), but frankly that's running a close third after Katrina and now this.

Why? People have been waiting for this sort of shift possibility on the court for decades.

Yes, yes, better lucky than good.

On that count, I picked up my Dad's old golf clubs today when I left my Mom's place. Nothing special and everything special--all at once.

I won't be good, but I will feel lucky.

Posted by at 10:25 PM | Permalink

(Freely pass to people you know. Thanks.]

Signposts - Monday, September 5, 2005.

August 28, 2005 - September 3, 2005

Signposts is a weekly digest of major op-ed and feature analyses from the blog of Thomas P.M. Barnett -- www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog -- and is distributed via email in html format.

To receive the current issue send an email to get.signposts@thomaspmbarnett.com. Auto-response delivers the current issue to your Inbox.

Thanks.

Posted by Josette at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Dateline: my Mom's in Boscobel WI, 4 September 2005

Saw my childhood home yesterday. The front porch is still missing and now the owner is adding a godawful gazebo bit on the side. This is an historic home, one of the three Blaine homes in Bosocobel that's easily 130 years old. Blaine was the most famous resident of Boscobel's origins in 1875, eventually going on to become governor of Wisconsin.

It's sad to see that home get progressively weirded out, although we did our own share with an addition off the back in the 1970s.

So I guess I'm not pretending to be the historical purist here, just the sentimental fool.

Vonne and I talk about the second vacation home somewhere that doubles as our think-ahead toward a retirement home--long range planners we. Yesterday, she just tossed out the notion of buying place here in Boscobel (my Mom had pushed us to buy the famous old Ruka house on Wisconsin Avenue (1872), a huge expanse of a place that ran in the 160s (houses not exactly expensive in this backwater). It was just a dream for us now to own a second house (my God, we have kids heading toward college!), but frankly, you should always be dreaming 15-20 years down the road (we'd be in our early 60s)--just like I do in Blueprint for Action. No dreams is the perfect recipe for inaction, I say.

Anyway, the dream would be for me to buy our old place on Superior Street so that when my Mom eventually leaves town, there is still a Barnett (we were the town's first mayor) owning property here. We'd try to fix it up to its original grandeur, including the cupola on top, and it would become a private bed-and-breakfast for our collective family to use for mini-getaways. Sounds crazy, some distant Green Bay cousins of mine did the same thing on a farm around here not long ago for their big brood of siblings and associated families. Imagine a collective family gathering in the old house to open presents on Christmas Eve, and then the block-plus walk to Immaculate Conception Church for midnight mass!

A nice dream, yes. How likely, I have no idea, but I don't want the only place I visit years from now being the graves of my parents, my two brothers, and my paternal grandparents and Great Aunt Catty. I want some other reason for coming here than just death.

So I dream this little dream.

And it's good to have such dreams.

A lot of readers want me to get wrapped around the axle on various current events--to make them the immediate and broadband fixation of my work. But to crusade on Iraq or China or Katrina alone isn't really what I do, nor is it what I want to do. I want to stay the grand strategist, meaning most of my battlefields will remain in the future.

So instead of always bemoaning today's failures, like Katrina, I like to focus on tomorrow's victories, like Porter Goss opening up the CIA ("Opening Up the CIA," by Timothy L. Burger, Time, a recent one (I pulled the page out of one of my Mom's issues last night and now I can't find where she put them away and for some reason the sheet has no date!)).

Instead of crusading on today's fault-lines, I like to highlight and get behind tomorrow's new capacities, and Goss is doing just that, tossing $100 million at an open-source unit. That's what I and others have been saying for a while: make the CIA more what it was originally supposed to be--not the puzzle palace but the actual central respository for intell that all could contribute to and all could use (both public and private).

You know, I think Google's got 'em scared at Langley . . .

This doesn't mean the occasional broadside won't emanate from my lips, and that is exactly what we have teed up in the November issue of Esquire on China. But no one such rant will overwhelm the raves, because the raves are future pointers and not just finger pointing, which always has a past-oriented flavor (who didn't do what when).

In sum, this is how I maintain my optimism and it's how my influence can truly be expressed. The SysAdmin force is coming into being, in a big way and all around the dial. It will be created not by the political leaders so much as the mid-level bureaucrats who you never hear about and who never leave. And it will be created by a generational wave of military officers.

The temptation now is to crap on everything, to bundle up Katrina and Baghdad and say this'll never work and let's go back to what we know and love (big war with a big opponent to justify our big contracts and our big bases that keep so many jobs and votes and congressmen in their seats). And while some of that is completely right, and for some people, a good call as a full-time calling, it's isn't what I'm all about--nor will it ever be.

Nor will I be putting one party or leader (like Bush today) off to the side WRT to critical remarks. I have to tell you, whenever I get that email saying what a smart fellow I am virtually all the time except for that one comment about Bush, the simplest reply to self-professed vision adherents is that they have both the wrong guy and the wrong vision. I don't generate long-range strategic vision that works for only one party because that concept is so anathema to my logic as to defy everything save some useless angry sputtering in print.

In short, if that is what you need to stick around, then it's time to move on. I don't have that blind spot and I never will. I criticize all and I work with all. In my business, the Dem-Repub divide really doesn't mean a whole helluva lot--and I like it that way.

That's the price of the long view, as my friend Peter Schwartz would say.

Posted by at 10:40 AM | Permalink

This is why it's so cool to post stuff, a point I keep making to Esquire

Here's an email I get from a reporter:

Just read it -- feels v . accurate to me, and I've been covering the guy daily for 5 years. A little clarity on the Joyce Rumsfeld life story book anecdote: Rummy put together a picture book of Joyce's activities in the wake of 9/11 and gave it to her for Valentines Day in 2003 (I think -- they had a dinner for pentagon reporters right before the war). The book was on the coffee table and she told us he said upon presenting it, everyone knows what I did after 9/11, but no one (or our grandchildren?) knows what you did, or something to that effect. The story has been told a lot, like telephone. . .but I think that's the accurate version -- the book, which I flipped through, really is lovely. It might have been an anniversary gift, but Valentines Day sticks in my head for some reason.

At any rate, good work. I learned things from you!

As Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story!

Posted by at 1:06 PM | Permalink

I used to have an office next to Mike's at the Center for Naval Analyses in the mid-1990s. Mike is too clever for his business. He should really write science fiction because I think he'd produce some amazing stuff.

I don't agree with much of what Mike says--he's that annoyingly clever. But as someone who tries to think out-of-the-box, he's someone I regularly turn to for exactly that, and I can count those people on one hand.

Here's an interesting review he wrote of a book. As always, it makes you think uncomfortable thoughts, like a good Twilight Zone episode.

Find it at: news.monstersandcritics.com

Posted by at 1:00 PM | Permalink

Dateline: U.S. 39 rolling north through central Illinois, 2 September 2005 So much blame to go around.

New Orleans is revealed, to no one's surprise, as a woefully loose-ruled environment barely managed by a corrupt, incompetent government.

Support networks in the poor, rural coastal areas are revealed as meager and painfully brittle.

State governments are revealed as low-ballers on a host of long-term investments in infrastructure and network resiliency, only to be superceded by the federal government's enduring penchant for unfunded mandates.

Federal relief agencies are revealed as surprisingly incoherent in their "coordinated response," begging the question, How many 9/11-like shocks must there be before Washington gets its lines of authority straight?

The military, which has gone to untold lengths to brag every chance it can since 9/11 that homeland security is job #1, still seems to be under the impression that it requires an engraved invitation from a Constitutional Congress to get off its collective ass and respond rapidly to a domestic emergency.

And perhaps most damaging of all, the Bush Administration is revealed—yet again—as strangely incapable of grabbing the bull by the horn when disaster strikes, as though such leadership is only to be summoned once it becomes a public relations damage-control function.

Sad to say, the best-working aspect of the emergency response to date has been the media—the MEDIA for crying out loud!

A lot of long-held biases are likewise revealed.

The Fed's tendency to wait until local and state resources are depleted or overwhelmed is revealed as hopelessly antiquated in this connected age. By then, too much damage is irreversible and a long-term recovery is locked-in. This is a national emergency, not some bureaucratic means test. The "I'm-with-stupid" approach to chain of command just doesn't cut it when disaster strikes

The military's strong bias against involving itself with civilian situations reveals itself as a weird sort of inability to take charge in situations that naturally demand it. For a culture that prizes decisiveness in challenging, austere environments, the military tends to tip-toe around whenever it's called into action domestically—talking a big game but never leading. I mean, where's the cigar-chomping general who couldn't give a rat's ass about pissing off the locals because he's got a job to do and he doesn't take no for an answer. Because wherever he is, he's missing his best chance to jump-start a presidential run in 2008.

[Then I wake up this morning (3 Sept) in my hotel room to find: a) a small, strangely cuddly Chinese female in my bed; and b) a cigarette-smoking, casually "Goddam'ing" African-American Lt. Gen with a Cajun-sounding name (Honore) doing a Patton-like tirade on a street-corner (can anyone say, "Answer Man"?), screaming at soldiers to put their weapons down and ordering trucks around like he's really pissed off, which is good, because we need a public face for "pissed off" instead of the happy-glad stuff from Laura and Bush uttering "adequate" over and over and over again. Because, you know what? Babies dying from dehydration and old women slumped dead in their wheelchairs isn't "adequate."]

The usual bias of the two political parties is revealed all too predictably: the Republicans look incapable of caring and the Democrats look incapable of leading—except in correctly pointing out their opponents' odd detachment from a sense of personal responsibility. Good God, the Bush people look almost startled that the country expects them to lead!

The Bush Administration may well be fatally wounded by this crisis. With its legacy of tax cuts, budget cuts everywhere save the military and national security (and look what that's gotten us to date in this response!), unprecedented budget deficits, and—most damaging of all right now—its tendency to alienate our allies even as it ambitiously seeks to reshape the world, the Bush White House seems dangerously out of step with history's demand that we face globalization's rising complexity with our own increasing ingenuity. Instead, we seemed plagued by leaders who have outsourced vision to God knows where. This is what "Who's next?" "Bring it on!" and "Let's roll!" takes you: absolutely nowhere you're prepared to go.

And so New Orleans looks like Port-au-Prince overnight, right down to the infantile behavior of its lowest residents, who never seem to notice the cameras rolling as they descend into acts most of us wouldn't put up with from a well-trained dog. Where have these people been living up to now to think that all bets were off once the lights went down?

I mean, I understand the caged–animal mindset of Iraqis living for decades under a brutal dictatorship, but how to excuse the criminally feral behavior of that many people at the drop of a hat? All of us have experienced shocks in our lives, but not all of us are instantly plunged into a primitiveness that seems to revel in its inhumanity to others in clear pain. Communities—real communities—aren't atomized overnight. Someone let New Orleans reach this latent state of brutality a long time ago. And in that process, virtually everyone is too blame: parents, churches, politicians, companies, schools—everyone. We are watching the Gap's seering pain revealed right here in America in a manner that should humble us all, because there's a whole lot more broken in the Big Easy than the levee. The physical disconnectedness on display here is nothing compared to the social and even spiritual disconnectedness—and that runs from the lowest looter right up to the mayor who couldn't bother to stay with his city.

Finger-pointing is all directions has already begun, with the vast majority of these heat-seeking missiles naturally coming round to President Bush himself, who remains white-hot from the emotional scorching put on him recently by Cindy Sheehan, in what can only be described as the revenge of Michael Moore (don't tell me you don't see the similarities between her quest and Moore's breakthrough documentary "Roger and Me"). You'd think his handlers would have learned from "Fahrenheit 9/11" that silence is deadly when it comes from leaders who hesitate to lead at moments of obvious crisis.

Honestly, that crew makes Jon Stewart's job such a frickin' cakewalk that the man should send his Peabody's to the White House as a thank-you.

The presidential election of 2008 began on Tuesday—for all of you who didn't pick up on that. Bush's second term ("Oh why does America ever bet on sequels!" the self-righteous blogger types furiously as his "vol. II" is being printed in vast numbers this very day) is now cast irretrievably as a two-and-a-half-year effort to live down its past mistakes: the systematic alienation of allies from day one, the tax cuts, the lack of peace in Iraq (and—sadly but not justifiably—the war in Iraq by extension), and now this. We are witnessing the earliest onset of post-presidency ever.

And that's more than bad, it's tragic. Bush's instinct for action and leadership is his best quality, but he seems often to put it on the shelf in a strange sort of blind trust in the people he picks for positions of leadership around him. Frankly, other than Rummy and a few of his direct managers, I don't think I'd pick any of the rest of this administration's senior people for my team. They're just plain mediocre, despite all the past job titles. There simply isn't much imagination with this crowd: they know what to cut but not what to add. I don't anticipate any initiatives worth mentioning from this bunch absent Rummy's continued push to revamp the Pentagon. The rest, including Rice, just seem to be treading water. Rove seems lost now that he's won Bush's re-election. The ambition just isn't there any more (Remember the big push on Social Security? Won't that be a great Trivial Pursuit question years from now?). Instead, Bush looks increasingly uncomfortable, like the dog that caught the car. He has his second term, besting the old man, but all that seems to have gotten him is the resurrection of the ambivalent, rather aimless politician he was so often accused of being in the past.

I mean, what exactly did we reelect him to do—other than not be a Democrat?

It's weird, but six months before the election I remember writing here that it was Rumsfeld that was the biggest burnout of the crew, and the one most needing jettisoning. Now, he remains the one figure in the crowd likely to enjoy a big legacy: the reshaping of the force from its Cold War mindset to the beginnings of the SysAdmin's profound emergence.

With a Bush White House on its heels, expect the midlevel bureaucrats who really run Washington to be largely in control through the remainder of the term, and here the System Perturbation that is Katrina will likely prove Chernobyl-like in its impact: spurring the system toward a profound rethinking of what security really is in this increasingly interconnected world (the loss of the node that is N.O. being the biggest horizontal scenario for the long haul, revealing as it does critical infrastructural weaknesses in our economy). Rebuilding the devastated coast will be a lot like shrinking the Gap, because to create real resiliency there we'll end up creating lots of new infrastructure where we now realize there was none—or at least not nearly enough.

This will not be a rebuilding, but a re-imagining—just like we need to do in the Gap. And here I think the country will end up regretting giving Bush four more years because—again—this crowd lacks imagination.

Still, it's not just the military's turn toward the SysAdmin function that's likely to be accelerated, we're likely to see a new empathetic resonance across previously firewalled sectors, like urban renewal and foreign aid, overseas crisis response and homeland security, and public versus private responsibilities for ensuring social resilience.

And in this process, I really believe we'll get stronger, get smarter, and move this pile. In getting a real dose of what the Gap feels like within our borders, we should start noticing the larger picture, the larger challenges, and the larger opportunities.

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink

Find the article here: RealClearPolitics.

Michael Barone gave it a good plug in his blog yesterday. Here's what he said:

9/1/05

Must reading

I don't normally look to Esquire for information about important changes in public policies and institutions. But the July Esquire has at least one such article, by Thomas P. M. Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map) on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Barnett is one of the most interesting strategic thinkers around, and his article told me a lot I didn't know. Money quote: "Four armed services existed at the outset of the Rumsfeld era, but only one military force will remain when he's gone." The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, one of the most important laws Congress has passed in the last half-century, imposed jointness in military operations: Each of the regional commands draws on forces from all the services and makes its battle plans separate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the services have tended to go their own way in what seems to be their major work, acquisition of military equipment. Rumsfeld, Barnett argues, is changing that, and in ways that he hopes will long survive his tenure. Fascinating.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Posted by at 1:54 PM | Permalink

In the Shire, Indy, 1 September 2005

The sheer collapse of New Orleans is shaping up to be a significant System Perturbation all its own.

Time to pull out the six lenses we used to employ in my studies at the Naval War College:

First, there is the social scenario of seeing an American city so desperately humbled. We can say N.O. was a freak of man-made invention with the levee and the notion that you could keep a city that large below sea level, but still, this is one desperate scene. By definition, this will be a recovery of great length and with strong differentiation--meaning some will recover with reasonable speed while others with great delay or perhaps never. In general, America tends not to accept such humbling well, preferring to answer the challenge with a "never again" sort of resignation that can be expressed in a variety of explosive ways. And explosiveness is what defines the System Perturbation: a change so abrupt that incremental responses are abandoned in favor of radically new approaches.

If there are parts of N.O. that are written off as simply too hard to resurrect, then the environmental scenario may well become predominate, with a lot of finger-pointing regarding how America has overdeveloped coastal areas and run a boat-load of risks in a world featuring a warming global climate and rising sea levels. When you get a humbling of this magnitude, many will reach for biblical analogies and once you cross that line, the sense of transgressing God and Mother Nature may lead to a strong response not just in Louisiana but elsewhere across the nation.

The economic scenario is already playing out: the Big Easy was a hugely important transit point on trade, the movement of raw materials, and especially energy. The 3-dollar-plus gallon of gas is here already, and we may see a lot higher before recovery kicks in--if it does. Remember the underlying demand pressure from Asia. None of that goes away. So if this System Perturbation pushes markets to consider a rule-set reset, or a radically new discounting of risk regarding energy, new pathways may be explored that accelerate moves to new paradigms.

The political scenario stems in large part from the economic one. This one feels off the usual scales, and that means the government is stuck with the perception of needing not just to make good with the victims (thus letting the market do the rest), but to resurrect that which was lost. And if that cannot be done in what is perceived to be a timely manner, then the Big Flood can be perceived as yet another example of the Bush Administration being unable to handle big complex problems, along with Iraq and the slow pace of reforms/change associated with 9/11 (e.g., a clumsy Department of Homeland Security and the general sense of a pointless "Osama tax" on so much of our day-to-day lives). Thus N.O. becomes a straw that breaks the camel's back--if the Bush Administration ends up looking like it screwed things up yet again.

That gets us to the lens of security. The perception may balloon that America's troops are being stretched abroad and thus the homeland is left that much more bare of these assets. But whether that happens will depend much on the performance of the U.S. military. Whom do we associate with such disaster responses? Naturally, the National Guard and the Army Reserves. What happens if it is perceived that we're light-handed back home thanks to a Global War on Terrorism that feels bogged down right now in Iraq? Good question, not easily answered.

These are all the natural downsides.

The upsides, of course, tend to arise from the notion that "that which does not kill us makes us stronger"--and more clever. Here we're into the last lens of technology. In short, we innovate our way out of perceived dead-ends. Specific examples of resiliency reborn may signal new understandings of how you bring back the disconnected to the world of connectivity--not so much repairing the old but creating new forms of connectivity. And I'm not just talking in a physical, networked sense, but in a social-economic sense: how do you make sure the rural and urban poor aren't permanently disconnected from the future by this tragedy? Does the shock allow us to solve old, seemingly intractable situations such as these, or does it simply exacerbate them?

Positive lessons in this regard can give us a renewed sense of confidence that this nut is not necessarily that hard to crack--not just at home but elsewhere.

And we may become more empathetic with that elsewhere.

One thing is clear: our system has been perturbed.

When that happens, new rules tend to come in waves, just like Katrina did.

Time to pull out the old Y2K report. Time to anticipate the political backlash, the rise of the "answer man" and the search for scapegoats.

The horizontal scenarios are just beginning. . .

+++ Technorati tag: katrina perturbation +++

Posted by at 2:55 AM | Permalink