Volume 3 of "Emily Updates" now available for purchase

Find the Kindle edition here.

Find the iBook edition here.

Find the Nook edition here.

Esquire's endorsement for "The Emily Updates"

November Issue, p. 34, just under the masthead where I'm listed as Contributing Editor:

THIS MONTH IN CONTRIBUTOR BOOKS

Over the next couple of months, one of Esquire's smartest contributing editors, Thomas P.M. Barnett, is releasing a serialized eBook, The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived. It's an eloquent and moving journal of the struggles Barnett's family faced when his first child was diagnosed with aggressively metastasized cancer. The five volumes (each about 50,000 words, released every three weeks) are $2.99 each and can be purchased through Amazon.com, the iTunes bookstore, and Barnes & Noble.

The Emily Updates, Volume 2, hits the eBook stores

Find the Amazon edition here.

Find the Barnes and Noble edition here.

Find the Apple iBookstore version here.

Getting better on Amazon Kindle

And we really haven't had much publicity yet (working on that).

Steady as she goes . . ..

Blast from my past: "Look Out, World" (2008)

Look Out, World

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Good magazine, Nov-Dec 2008.

Why Vote? Reason 177

You should vote because John McCain and Barack Obama have very different takes on the global mess they'll be inheriting—and what they'd like to do with it.

Despite all the talkabout our troubled economy, this year’s presidential race will still come down to competing visions of the post-9/11 world, and what America needs to do about it. George W. Bush leaves office stunningly unpopular, due overwhelmingly to his schizophrenic foreign policy (six years Hyde, two Jekyll). Given the strong political impetus for change, this election has always been the Democrats’ to lose.

True to form, the Dems have done their best to make it a close vote by nominating an African-American senator with limited national security credentials. But Barack Obama gave them no choice. By redefining the way campaigns are mounted in this networked age, his candidacy has produced the sort of worldwide electricity that most certainly will get him selected as Time’s “person of the year”—if he wins.

In contrast, John McCain’s candidacy has the consistency of comfort food, the underlying personal message seemingly, “I’ve waited long enough.” He is the default candidate—as in, “If you aren’t willing to risk it all on Obama, think about me.” Unlike Obama or Hillary Clinton, voting for McCain as president offers no history-making opportunity, which makes the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate all the more politically clever.  But even with that move—bold or desperate or both—McCain remains an essentially back-to-the-future choice: a pre-boomer for a public fed up with that generation’s do-nothing politics.

Both nominees offer a strongly “realist” perspective on international affairs, with the differences stemming primarily from their generational backgrounds. McCain’s stark realism stems from the Cold War. Ronald Reagan’s personal mystique was largely a fiction of our imagination, but McCain’s legend—the good and the bad—is based on true stories of personal heroism. He lived them all. If you want someone who can recognize human evil and fight it tooth and nail, McCain’s your man.

Obama’s subtle realism emerged from a far different time: the truly tumultuous 1970s, where we first locate much of today’s globalization—energy and food shocks, Middle East conflicts, environmental awareness, global market swings, and transnational terrorism. Befitting those fractured times, Obama’s journey plays out like an ABC “Movie of the Week”: the biracial child who willed himself from a Jakarta grade school to the pinnacle of Harvard Law, landing next on the South Side of Chicago as a community activist who instinctively countered the prevailing counterculture. If you want someone who can recognize global complexity and manage it with confidence and care, Obama’s your man.

Both McCain and Obama represent quintessentially American stories, with their amazing personal trajectories obscuring the underlying political philosophies each brings to a possible administration. Pundits (and Karl Rove) would have you believe that fear alone will settle this election. But the question every voter must answer is not, “Do you fear?” but rather, “What do you fear more?”

Barack Obama will make America smarter about the outside world, and John McCain will make the world smarter about America. And on that score, there are plenty of ways to divvy up the global landscape. Here are ten criteria you can use to compare the candidates and help you break down the basic choices.

Priorities: Where’s the focus? Early last summer, Fortune asked the candidates to lay out the “gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy.” According to the article, Obama didn’t blink: Our energy policy. McCain paused for several long seconds before answering, “Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence.”

Those answers speak volumes about how each senator approaches international affairs. Obama focuses on upstream, big-picture causality (e.g. fix energy and improve everything that follows from it), while McCain gravitates toward more downstream, immediate tangibles (stop the bad guys from doing bad things). So if you want a terrorism-centric foreign policy, McCain is your guy. If you want something broader, Obama makes more sense. With McCain, you’re less likely to experience a security breakdown, but more likely to see a wider array of ongoing problems exacerbated. With Obama, you’re more likely to see more general improvement on a host of issues, but you stand a greater chance of waking up one morning to some nasty surprise. The basic question is, which spooks you more concerning America’s resilience? The perceived steady decline, or the occasional external shock?

ADVANTAGE: The American voter, because there’s a distinct choice.

Who should America seek out as strategic allies? If you think it's the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database.

Allies: How to pick ’n’ save? Here McCain makes a bold call, but an awful one. His proposed League of Democracies—an international alliance of democratic countries—is as close as anyone has come to mindlessly regurgitating Cold War memes. McCain additionally calls for ousting Russia from the G-8 (to be replaced by India), while leaving rising China out in the cold. Here’s why it won’t work: When you tell off both Russia and China, you kill India’s incentives to bind itself to the West. Why would New Delhi pick that fight with two huge neighbors also on the rise? If the Indians wouldn’t make that call during the Cold War, what’s the additional incentive now? Ditto for Brazil, South Africa, and a host of other rising pillars of the southern hemisphere. They’ll simply view McCain’s proposed forum as yet another arena in which the old West gets to boss them around and demand they toe its preferred line.

Here’s a big clue as to whom America should seek out as strategic allies: rising defense budgets, big standing armies, and a willingness to use them in other peoples’ (failed) states. If you think that’s the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database, because in this century, the countries with the most rapidly expanding global economic networks are the ones most incentivized to play—in the manner of the United States—globalization’s bodyguards.

The far more careful and circumspect Obama wins this round hands down. He’ll clearly bring a non-Eurocentric view to global alliances, speaking as he constantly does about the need to integrate a rising Russia, China, and India into our plans. McCain makes similar noises, but all of that is drowned out by his League of Democracies. As his response to the Russia-Georgia conflict amply demonstrated, given the right prompt, he’ll reflexively knee-jerk us into another Cold War standoff at a point when America needs to be stocking up on allies—as immature as they may be—rather than adding more enemies.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, for the sole reason that he’s smart enough not to let Georgia—on its own—declare war between NATO and Russia.

The vision thing: What to expect? You can tell a lot about each candidate’s modus operandi on foreign affairs by the campaigns they’ve built. Obama’s team of 300-or-so advisors is methodically organized, reflecting a corporate ethos that minimizes ego clashes and maximizes on-message delivery. From the experienced Clinton gang, Obama’s managed to attract the very cream of the crop, so expect a well-run State and Defense. Obama’s decision to pick Joe Biden as his running mate only strengthens that.

You should anticipate a far more conservative first term from Obama on national security than Bush’s previous eight years. Obama will seek to carefully unwind America’s tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration’s freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time. Some bad things will definitely happen in the meantime. The potential upside is substantial on restoring America’s good standing around the world.

McCain, on national security, is truly “what you see is what you get.” Despite the hovering from the neocons, McCain will be his own man and run his own foreign policy. Palin as vice president adds nothing to the senator’s well-credentialed resume. Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies; but always entertaining, and full of sharp turns. If he had won it all in 2000, he would have arrived early enough in the rise of Russia, India, China, and Brazil to perhaps have had a serious opportunity to get them in line, especially on the heels of 9/11. But now, trying to ride herd these rising great powers could easily backfire if pursued angrily (remembering the man’s temper), so the downside on McCain could be profound.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because a more conservative—dare I say, humble—American foreign policy is what the world needs now.

Heal the force:  How to repair the U.S. military after Iraq?Here’s where McCain’s unimpeachable credentials in national security and his history as a rice-bowl-breaking maverick could well serve America’s strategic needs. There will be a huge bureaucratic and political impetus to “heal the force” after Iraq, meaning rest the troops (good idea) and resume buying all the same outdated military platforms and weapons systems (a truly bad idea that will leave us as unprepared for the next Iraq as we were for the last one).

McCain is far more likely—believe it or not—to push the necessary changes through a Democratic-controlled Congress, which, in an inevitable “anything but Bush” post-election fit of pique, could easily trash all the good work so far accomplished by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, and many others. Obama, especially since he’ll bring back all the same security players from the Clinton years (who were too deferential to the military), is more likely to pass on that fight in favor of other early possible legislative victories.

The fly in the ointment? McCain’s bevy of neocon advisors, armed with that League of Democracies notion, might just as easily try to have their cake (Cold War Leviathan force) and eat it too (continue to engage in plenty of post-9/11-style small wars). That would, indeed, look like a third Bush administration.

ADVANTAGE: Definitely the maverick McCain, but only so long as Father Time doesn’t toss the presidency—in the form of Sarah Palin—back to the neocons.

Globalization: America’s new bogeyman, or its logical cause célèbre? Despite the trade-protectionist leanings Obama put on display for the primaries, where his proposal to renegotiate NAFTA was particularly egregious, he has assembled a nice collection of Clintonian economic advisers. Plus, Obama’s more holistic approach to national security is less likely to get America trapped in useless overseas adventures and more likely to make him sensitive to the needs of emerging and developing economies. Obama will never match Clinton’s zeal, but he’s unlikely to screw up globalization’s continued advance.

McCain’s senate record indicates a fierce free-trade stance. And since a Democratic-controlled Congress could easily engage in all manner of trade protectionism, especially vis-à-vis China and recently re-demonized Russia, having a Republican in the White House makes a lot of sense if you don’t like that sort of thing. The problem would be—again—McCain’s penchant to pick unnecessary fights with globalization’s rising economic pillars, too few of which will qualify for his democracies-only club.

Then there’s the larger reality that globalization faces a populist headwind that is likely to pick up dramatically in coming years. A stubborn McCain, as correct as his economic instincts may be, could easily find his politics out of synch with global trends, resulting in stalemated trade negotiations overseas and deadlocked legislation back home.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because he’ll guarantee half-a-loaf outcomes on most issues and could spark the necessary shift to progressivism that globalization desperately needs.

Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies.

Climate change: The end of the world as we know it? Climate change is becoming a dominant global narrative, one that indirectly challenges globalization’s advance by casting doubt on whether developing nations can emerge as the West once did. The brutal truth is they can’t, but not simply due to climate change. There are a host of more immediate reasons (air pollution, supply constraints) that speak to humanity’s need to move beyond oil and any number of self-limiting industrial-age technologies. Because America remains the world’s single biggest national market (meaning we control a lot of demand), we must either lead or eventually get out of China and India’s way.

Both Obama and McCain seem to understand the larger competitive challenge framed by global warming, which isn’t surprising because both are problem-solvers at heart. Given today’s political landscape, both are selling the chimera of national energy independence (a dubious economic goal), linking it to job creation in the high-tech “green” sector. Usually, it’s safer to go with the Republican candidate when it comes to promoting entrepreneurs and innovation, so a slight edge to McCain on that score. But since any response to climate change will entail some serious cooperation with emerging economies on their infrastructure development, and with vulnerable developing economies on the aid-related subjects of food security and disease control, Obama’s “dignity” agenda tops McCain’s focus on demanding democracy.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Let’s stipulate that both candidates will move the ball forward significantly.

Iraq: When do we wrap up? The Iraq “war,” or whatever you want to call it, is clearly a moving target, meaning where Iraq was at the beginning of these campaigns—when positions were initially articulated—and where it is today, are two vastly different things. The criticism now focuses primarily on the high cost involved.

McCain gets credit for advocating the surge and the associated counterinsurgency strategy, two much-needed changes on which the Bush administration wasted many months—and lives—before adopting. Basic lesson? When McCain makes a decision, he follows it through to the end, eagerly seeking out new solutions to persistent problems.

But for those who objected to the war, Obama also gets credit for opposing the invasion from the start. As for opposing the surge, Obama now appears less flexible than McCain in admitting his party’s past mistakes and moving on to better solutions.

In political terms, the problem McCain faces is that improvements in Iraq favor all the positions Obama has long advocated. So again, we see the essential difference emerge. McCain’s approach has the value of concentrated effort, but suffers the dynamic of “one damn thing after another,” meaning: Just after you fix one thing, you’re on to the next. Obama is less likely to suffer big losses in any single situation, but he’s also less likely to score any big wins.

As for wrapping up America’s combat involvement in Iraq, the differences between the two candidates have narrowed dramatically: Obama calls for a withdrawal of combat troops by 2010, while McCain targets 2012. The major difference concerns the pace of withdrawal: Obama says the Iraqi government should decide; McCain says our generals should decide. In reality, it’ll be our generals right up to the point when the Iraqis decide for themselves. This “war” stopped being America’s to “win” or “end” a long time ago—to wit, Iraq’s government wants us gone by 2011.

ADVANTAGE: Obviously McCain, because of his courageous call on the surge.

Afghanistan and Pakistan: How do we ramp up? Obama has made some hawkish statements about taking the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban directly into Pakistan. Much like McCain’s tough talk regarding Iran’s involvement in Iraq, such statements should be taken with a grain of salt. Pakistan, like Iran, is a far bigger and more potent entity than its troubled neighbor, and possesses considerable leverage on its own. With Pervez Musharraf gone from power, expect even more autonomy from an Islamabad intent on showing it’s no U.S. puppet.

When George W. Bush redirected the war on terror in 2003 from Afghanistan to Iraq, that was a radical move. Today’s radical move would involve rapidly re-directing U.S. military efforts back toward Afghanistan, thus accelerating Iraq’s movement toward policing its territory and handling its neighbors largely on its own. In asserting that Iraq will remain the central issue for the next president, McCain actually stakes out the more conservative position here, whereas Obama now advocates a more aggressive line.

Odds are good that Afghanistan will once again become the central front in the war on terror early in the next president’s term, and that some modest troop surge will accompany a revamped counterinsurgency strategy that takes on many of the same characteristics of what worked in Iraq.

Attempts by the competing campaigns to portray either Iraq or Afghanistan as the “good war” are largely rhetorical at this point. Events on the ground appear to be driving this re-direct in operational focus, and both candidates advocate the same basic ramp-up in U.S. capabilities and resources.

ADVANTAGE: McCain, because you have to go with experience on this potential quagmire.

Obama will seek to carefully unwind America's tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration's freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time.

Iran: How far do we go? Here McCain advocates a hard line strikingly evocative of George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq: prevent a regime that sponsors transnational terrorism from achieving weapons of mass destruction. Obama, in contrast, advocates a more direct diplomatic approach aimed at revamping U.S.-Iranian relations as a whole. How you judge the validity of their approaches depends on your perception of the threat.

If you trust the long and varied history of strategic nuclear deterrence, then you’re probably of the opinion that the Shia bomb (Iran) won’t be any more usable than the Jewish (Israel), Sunni (Pakistan), Hindu (Indian), Confucian (Chinese), or Christian (the rest) bombs, especially since Israel very likely possesses at least 200 deliverable nuclear warheads. And if you’re familiar with the history of nuclear proliferation, you’ll know that declared nuclear powers tend to be extremely careful with the technology, whereas undeclared powers (e.g., Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, South Africa) have been known to share. So the real question is, Do you think Tehran is crazy enough to give either Hezbollah or Hamas a nuke? And if there’s even a scintilla of chance there, should America pre-emptively strike, or instead aggressively seek some détente with Iran?  In other words, is it time for Dr. Strangelove to step up, or should “Nixon” finally go to Tehran?

Iran, of course, complicates the matter by in effect saying, “You know we’ve already got the ‘guns’ [i.e. missiles] and are cranking out ‘gunpowder’ [i.e. uranium], but since we’re not manufacturing any ‘bullets’ [i.e. warheads], you can’t actually prove anything—or ever be quite sure how close we’ve come to putting it all together.” Couple that stance with Ahmadinejad’s frequent verbal threats concerning Israel’s right to exist and there are plenty of grounds for both McCain’s calculated threats and Obama’s calculated engagement.

But if a conventional bombing campaign could assuredly take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, chances are the Bush administration would have pulled that trigger by now; and if not the Bush administration, then certainly Israel. If neither could see its way to launching a strike by the end of the Bush administration’s second term, then it’s highly unlikely that such a campaign—absent full-out invasion and occupation—will ever make sense. In short, we’d have to go nuclear to stop Tehran from getting nuclear.

If that strategic logic and historical record ring true to you, then you definitely want Obama in the White House, because McCain could well launch us into a war with Iran. If you consider that pathway inevitable, then McCain’s the better choice, along with a strategic missile defense that—despite all the failures up to now—finally works as promised.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Totally depends on your worldview, unless you’re committed to granting Israel a zero deductible on America’s nuclear umbrella insurance policy.

The war on terror: Remember that? It must seem odd that, seven years into this war on terror, al Qaeda itself seems like such a strategic afterthought. Part of this is due to the Bush administration’s real success in disrupting al Qaeda’s global networks.

But it’s also due to al Qaeda choosing to become less operationally focused and evolving into more of a worldwide anti-American/Western branding mechanism—sort of a Jihadis-R-Us. Sad to say, this is probably as close to “victory” as we’ll come for the foreseeable future because, cynically speaking, transnational terrorists are a useful bogeyman for a networked age.

As somebody who’s worked in national security affairs for close to two decades, I’ll tell you that as far as anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism are concerned, it won’t matter much who gets elected president. The U.S. government possessed such a security community prior to 9/11, and that community got a whole lot bigger after 9/11. Today, that community operates like any sizeable and widely distributed bureaucracy: just well enough not to fail spectacularly, but nowhere near well enough to succeed spectacularly.

So in regards to the candidates, frankly, it’s a coin toss. Obama would present a more conciliatory face, which can invite more aggression or subdue it. McCain would present a less compromising face, which can accomplish the same. Both will promise and likely achieve somewhat more secure borders, and any new management might inject the Department of Homeland Security with more purpose and better execution, but expect the world to continue appearing more dangerous over time (God bless our sensational media) while actually becoming more secure. And if it makes you feel any better, just go on believing that Washington really runs America and that America really runs the world.

ADVANTAGE: Draw. This leaves the final count tied at 3 apiece, with 4 toss-ups. Expect another tantalizingly close vote.

Koreas post at Esquire's The Politics Blog picked up by . . .

Sullivan's Daily Dish and The Week's round-up, where the post was named "best opinion" along with Instapundit and National Journal.  Also Time.com (Swampland's Mark Thompson).

Right to my point about inviting the Chinese to the next naval ex we do with South Korea:  it's announced we're doing one ASAP and sending a carrier.  Meanwhile, everybody moans we have no good options.

So where is the danger in reaching out boldly to China to participate?

Blast from my past: "Managing China's Ascent" (2007)

Managing China's Ascent

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

6 August 2007

Realists insist the U.S. and China are slated for military conflict in the decades ahead. America cannot peacefully accommodate China's rise because it subverts our role as the world's lone superpower.

Let me offer a different vision.

Over the past two decades, global capitalism has expanded dramatically from its previously narrow western base (America, Japan, the EU) to include five sixths of the planet with a "bottom billion" still trapped in crushing poverty. But that expansion triggered a vociferous ideological backlash centered in those less-connected regions, particularly the Middle East, currently penetrated by "infidel" markets, networks, and ideas.

Countering that fundamentalist backlash requires lengthy, labor-intensive efforts by outside powers to build both nations and markets, because this long war is less about winning hearts and minds than creating jobs and opportunities for idle hands otherwise seduced by radical ideologies. Traditional western allies are only modestly helpful in this struggle. Post-colonial Europe, having been there, done that, now dreads all those Muslims wanting in. No, if we want serious allies, we should look to nations currently engaged in economic integration both at home and abroad.

Natural ally. China is just such a country. Loaded with excess bodies willing to scour the world for economic opportunity, China is America's natural ally in extending globalization's reach and absorbing those off-grid regions where rogue regimes, failed states, and transnational terrorism thrive.

A smart America co-opts China's rise just as Britain shaped ours a century ago. Instead of containing China, we should steer its rise to suit our strategic purposes. And what China must do is what America did back then: build its military and rebrand it as a force for global stability.

A good place to start is Africa. The Pentagon has recently established a dedicated Africa Command to thwart radical Islam's penetration of the continent. That military unit should work hand-in-glove with China, which has already flooded Africa with 80,000 nationals engaged in pre-emptive nation building. In this alliance, America focuses on governance and security while China focuses on infrastructure and markets to accelerate Africa's integration into the global economy.

Why would China help?

With its rapidly aging population, China must scale the global production chain faster than any country has done before. That means China, along with Asia in general, must replicate its own success story by developing markets elsewhere and eventually exporting its less-advanced industries.

This is what Europe did to North America in the 1800s, and—in turn—what America achieved in East Asia in the last half-century. Now it's Asia's turn to engineer globalization's spread, and Africa, with its natural resources and cheap labor, is the next logical target.

It's time to shelve antiquated balance-of-power strategies and end China's free riding on our global security system. Our nations' strategic goals coincide: globalization's preservation and continued expansion in the face of radical extremist challenges.

All we lack—on both sides—is the next generation of visionary leaders to make this strategic alliance happen. Until then, both capitals remain trapped in myopic arguments about Taiwan, tainted products, and trade deficits.

Thomas P. M. Barnett, senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a former Pentagon adviser, is author of The Pentagon's New Map (2004) and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005).

Got the "firsts" on my next piece in Esquire magazine

Just remembering some of my covers over the years. 

My favorites are obviously those where my name got on the cover (Scarlett and Halle).

The "firsts" just mean the first draft of a full-up version, totally laid out with all graphics and the break laid out to any jump pages (those not connected to the first pages or stuck near the back of the "book"). 

The piece will come out in the January 2011 issue, meaning out in early December on news stands, when, coincidentally given the subject, I'll be in China.

It's actually still got my original main title and original sub-sub title, which I think is a first for me.

Started, as almost all of my pieces with Mark Warren, executive editor of the print magazine, with an extended riff of mine during a marathon, catching-up phone call (Mark and I typically talk like family for an hour or so before getting down to business) in mid-August.  He was intrigued by my rant on the rising American hyperbole regarding China, I could tell.  Days later he sends me an email asking me to write it up.

So I crank it out over a couple of weekend days, starting with a favorite movie image that, the minute I saw it, I knew I'd someday use it in a piece.  It gave me the excuse of exploring the subject in five chunks.  That opening stayed largely as is, just a lot tighter.

Now I just have to fight, later in the piece, for a very subtle nod to "Blade Runner" - a phrase I misquoted, I now realize after watching it again with my son recently.  

Also working on a slight graphic alteration of the title that would involve some wordplay.  

Crossing my fingers on that one.

I've unwittingly stumbled into writing another book - online - about the world and its future paths

The big clue?  My whole eating and sleeping and day-jobs working habits fell into that same pattern I subconsciously adopt whenever I write a book.  Finally I just turned to Vonne and said, "I feel like I'm writing an entirely new book online for Wikistrat."  

To which she replied, "Duh! I picked up on that a couple of weeks ago."

Just finished the Social-Demographic "global trends" page in the Wikistrat Global Model that I'm building with Joel Zamel and his team.  It clocked in at about 5200 words in all (summary, quick one-liners on top-dozen world powers, then six major trends, then six regions and their trends, then six major forecasts, and a wrap-up of opportunities, risks and dependencies).  This is the third of six global trend pages that I'm populating.  Done Political and Security, teeing up Sustainability, Technology and Economics. When all said and done, these six base pages will come to about 35,000 words, or the equivalent of my biggest book chapters (the Core-Gap chapter in PNM or the American Trajectory chapter in GP).

Many more base pages (the ones you visit most frequently to start your journey through the model) to go after that in preparation of launching the first iteration - or "lite" - model in early January.

I have to tell you, it really is like crunching down all my thinking from the trilogy of books but then writing it all in a new synthesis.  

Actually, that's misleading because I'm stunned at how much new material I'm writing (like basically all of it and none of it at the same time).  It's like I've slipped into this back-office alternative-universe of my work where I'm drilling downways and sideways and backways and upways [he typed, in his best imitation of Gene Wilder doing Willy Wonka] and it's feels like I'm creating something at once more concentrated and a lot more expansive - original but familiar.

It's hard to explain but it signals my creative juices are flowing.  

It's not a book, but it's not just a lot of words either.  It's these dense-matter concepts linked nodally to one another, the idea being that if you get enough linkages, it starts to take on its own thinking function.

My favorite-but-hard-to-deliver brief was my first in "The Brief" series that I use to this day (literally about 1000 slides later, a number I can verify because I sent that many on to Joel and Wikistrat for various embedding throughout the model--something I'm hugely excited to share in this fashion):  a scenario-based exploration of alternative global futures that drilled down by regions and domain trends (same ones we're using at Wikistrat) and Waltzian levels (system, states, societies/leaders/individuals).  In many ways, I'm recreating and updating that monster of a package but doing this time in a wiki structure, for which it is eminently more suited than that one-damn-thing-after-another (Tufte's criticism) manner of presentation that I employed in the original brief (long abandoned by me as a presentation approach--in part in response to attending Tufte's class).

So it's like I'm rewriting everything I've ever known/written/briefed/analyzed and - as writing goes - it is exhausting  . . . just like a book but worse in the sense that it is the intellectually-hyperlinked, super-packed text style of that "State of the World" piece or the sidebar list from "The Pentagon's New Map" original article. Sort of like an encyclopedia entry but more dense--like my baker-supreme spouse's cheese cake, but filled with analysis instead of cheese (you can only eat so much at one sitting).  

[Hmm.  Must have been the Green Bay sojourn with Vonne Mei to Lambeau last Sunday.  My inner cheesehead is melting from all this writing.  Which gives me this other weird image:  what would Hannibal Lecter do to a cheesehead?  Would it be like that scene with actor Ray Liotta in that creepy sequel but more like a fondue?]

And I think that's fitting-- and fun for the reader.  It'll be a place to visit again and again and sort of interact on your own with a virtual version of--initially--my strategic "brain" and later those of other analysts we bring on. [I'll be like some original code that slowly fades under the weight of new iterations--not unlike a parent with too many kids!]

It's an amazing intellectual challenge and before we turn it loose to the public, I will definitely take a snapshot and hide it away in some file cabinet, because it'll be the closest thing - for now - of a virtual version of me in all my intellectual glory (just plain gory to some, but glory to me).  It almost feels like I'm transferring my mind to the web, so I get that same immortality tingling that I experience when I'm penning a book--this sense of intellectual completion.

But unlike a book, this thing will live and breathe online, interacting with, and changing in response to, readers and premium-readers-turned-contributors and content-generating clients. The scenarios will come in all forms, on all sorts of subjects, generating in all sorts of dynamics both mass and elite. Eventually, my initial populating of the model will recede, like some early lizard brain as this monster evolves upward, but it'll always be there--its strategic DNA.

Most importantly, it's delivering exactly what the Civil Affairs officer at Monterey was asking for:  an online universe of my strategic thought that anybody can access and explore and absorb and - best of all - manipulate and make their own (he kept repeating, "I just can't help but think it would be great if there was this place . . . online . . . where all your thinking was crystalized and we could send officers there to get it down in their heads.")

Anyway, I just completed a bit and the whole emotion reminded me of putting a first draft of a chapter to bed, so I felt writing that down here, just like I do when I write a book.

Plus I'm putting off writing my weekly WPR column, which I think will be on Yemen.

Big-War Thinking in a Small-War Era: The Rise of the AirSea Battle Concept @ China Security journal

Big-War Thinking in a Small-War Era:  The Rise of the AirSea Battle Concept 

Amidst increasing US-China tensions in East Asia, America has upped the ante with the introduction a new war doctrine. The AirSea Battle Concept is a call for cooperation between the Air Force and Navy to overcome the capabilities of potential enemies. But the end result may be an escalation of hostilities that will lock the United States into an unwarranted Cold War-style arms competition with China.

Read the entire article at China Security.

Blast from my past: "The Inevitable Alliance" (2008)

Debating China's Future

with 

Li Cheng, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Harry Harding, Cui Liru, John J. Mearsheimer, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Rob Gifford, Mao Yushi, Bates Gill, Tang Shiping, Zhao Tingyang, Robert J. Barnett, David Shambaugh, June Teufel Dreyer, Pan Zhenqiang, Dan Blumenthal, Shi Yinhong, Robert S. Ross, Kenneth Lieberthal, Zha Daojiong, John Hamre and Xiang Lanxin

CHINA SECURITY, VOL. 4, NO. 2, SPRING 2008

Thomas P.M. Barnett

The Inevitable Alliance

China’s main strategic vulnerability right now is that it possesses economic and network connectivity with the outside world that is unmatched by its political-military capacity to defend. This forces Beijing to “free ride” on Washington’s provision of global security services, a situation that makes China’s leaders uncomfortable today – as it should. American blood for Chinese oil is an untenable strategic transaction.

The United States faced a similar situation in its “rise” in the late 1800s and set about “rebranding” its military force over a several-decade period that culminated with a successful entry into World War I. Since World War II, the United States has maintained a primarily expeditionary force that is able to access international crises, and since the end of the Cold War has done so with unprecedented frequency. This too is an untenable strategic burden.

America needs to encourage China’s effective re-branding as an accepted worldwide provider of stability operations. The problem today is two-fold: 1) major portions of America’s military require China to remain in the enemy image to justify existing and new weapons and platforms; and 2) the Chinese military is hopelessly fixated on “access denial” strategies surrounding Taiwan, meaning it buys the wrong military for the strategic tasks that inevitably lie ahead.

So long as both nations insist on such mirror-imaging, their respective militaries will continue to buy one military while operating (or, in China’s case, needing to operate) another force that remains under-developed. Such strategic myopia serves neither great power’s long-term interests, which are clearly complimentary throughout the developing world.

The good news is that both China and the United States are within a decade’s time of seeing new generations emerge among their respective political and military leaderships. These future leaders view the potential for Sino-American strategic alliance far differently than do the current leadership generation. If Washington and Beijing can navigate the next dozen or so years without damaging current ties, I fully expect to see a Sino-American strategic alliance emerge.

I do not present this as a theoretical possibility, but as my professional judgment based on years of extensive contacts through both nations’ national security establishments.

Grand strategy often involves getting leaders to understand certain future inevitabilities. The global primacy of the Sino-American strategic alliance in the 21st century is one such future inevitability.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions, and author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004).

The canon--almost completed

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

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

Blast from my past: "Ten Reasons Why China Matters to You" (2008)

 

Ten Reasons Why China Matters to You

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

GOOD magazine, May/June 2008, pp. 58-65

Don’t be scared of China—the country is perfectly positioned to be our most powerful ally (lack of democracy notwithstanding, of course). But if there is anything to worry about, it’s not China’s massive military; it’s the economy, stupid.

Why China Matters To You:

10.

Because Nixon went to China and your world was born.

When President Richard Nixon reopened diplomatic ties with Mao Zedong's communist China in 1972, he enabled the most profound global economic dynamic of the last half century: China's historic reemergence as a worldwide market force. Nothing shapes your world today more than China's rise, and nothing will shape our planet's future more--for good or ill--than China's ongoing trajectory.

After centuries of relative isolation, China’s rapid reintegration into the global economy transformed globalization from its narrow Cold War-era base (the West) to its current “majority” status, whereby two-thirds of humanity now enjoys deep and growing connectivity with international markets and the remaining third works toward it. China’s decision to rejoin the world was globalization’s tipping point, meaning—absent global war—there’s no turning back now, only adaptation.

If Nixon opened the door, then Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping led the Chinese people through it. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng chose wisely: By tackling economic freedom before political liberalization, Deng kept China stable during its tenuous first years of market reform. Although Deng is correctly labeled an autocrat (he ordered the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989), he is also correctly identified as a modernizer who unleashed a generation’s immense creativity.

Many from that generation will tell you that, before Tiananmen, they felt freedom was “90 percent political and 10 percent economic,” but after Deng’s crackdown, they concluded—somewhat harshly—that real freedom was “90 percent economic and 10 percent political.” In other words, they decided that markets were the first, best instruments for generating positive change in China.

A grand bargain was struck: Deng won military support for further market reforms so long as a lid was kept on political change, and the army was afforded enough of a budget to modernize. The Party would remain supreme, but state involvement in the economy would shrink and private business would be encouraged along with investment from, and trade with, the outside world.

China has experienced incredible economic growth ever since, increasing its gross domestic product annually by almost 10 percent—as fast as you dare expand. But China is also nowhere near becoming a democracy, and its achievement scares nations around the world—and excites others—because it suggests that you can rapidly embrace globalization, achieve great income growth, and remain a single-party state by following the so-called China model.

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9.

Because China may be an ancient civilization, but it's a young society that's growing up very quickly--and unevenly.

China's modernization strategy included slowing population growth through the “one-child policy.” Yet China remains huge: 1.3 billion souls crammed into a country no larger than our own. So if you think we’ve added quite a few Hispanics in the last couple of decades, imagine inviting everyone in the Western Hemisphere and half of Africa to come live inside the United States, because that would give us China’s crowded mix of rich and poor.

Given China’s traditions, the one-child policy favors males over females; the latter are too often aborted or offered up for international adoption. (Disclosure: My fourth child originally hailed from Jiangxi province.) The build-up of males has led some Western demographers to worry that over time, China will inevitably become militarily aggressive—how else to distract all those frustrated young men? But this fear is overblown, as is evidenced by trends in the rest of Asia, where, for example, similarly frustrated South Korean males simply go abroad and, you know, marry a broad in places like Vietnam or Thailand. Bottom line? Desire wins out.

The more profound legacy of the one-child policy is that China will grow very old, very fast. Right now the country enjoys a demographic sweet spot: plenty of workers supporting relatively few children or elders. But once you restrict the baby supply, the population as a whole moves up collectively in age, meaning that China will rapidly progress toward the “Florida mark” (20 percent of the population above age 65) in just two decades. The United States will hit Florida around the same time. If America, in all its wealth, is struggling with that profound shift, how much harder do you think it will be for China, weighed down by hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants?

Here’s one thing to remember when anyone tries to sell you on China running the world someday soon: that China will get very old before it gets truly rich, something the world has never witnessed before. What history tells us is this: Aging populations are not aggressive populations.

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8.

Because China's transformation echoes much of America's past: not only the good, but plenty of the bad, and the ugly too.

Impossible, you say. Ruled by communists, China’s civilization bears no resemblance to our own.

But China’s true “communist” period was just three decades out of a 5,000-year history, the rest of which featured a social bent toward markets in general (the Chinese are inveterate gamblers, for example) and past periods of serious global trade connectivity (recall the Silk Road of yore). Add in the strong focus on family ties and a deep spiritual history that has long featured free competition among various faiths and we’re not exactly talking about some brother from another planet.

So forget trying to figure out today’s China through its own history, an endless cycle of disintegrating peace and integrating war. Think about it this way: Right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of “rising America” circa 1880—absent democracy, of course. Once you realize that, then depending on where you go around China, you can locate yourself somewhere in the last 125 years of America’s own ascendancy.

Some examples: Foreign policy-wise, you’re looking at a mild-mannered Teddy Roosevelt: China’s military stick is getting bigger, but it still prefers to speak softly, mostly threatening small island nations (read: Taiwan) off its coast.

The nation is likewise undergoing a construction and investment boom that’s right out of 1920s America, and frankly, that should give pause to anyone concerned with global economic stability. China’s banking and financial industries are about as regulated as ours were prior to the Great Crash of 1929. But there’s no sign of a slowdown. Shanghai already has 4,000 skyscrapers—twice as many as New York—and plans another thousand.

Check out China’s space program, which just put its first man in orbit. Beijing now speaks openly of repeating our 1960s quest for the moon. Groovy! Let me just raise my glass of Tang in salute and wonder why Americans aren’t on Mars yet. Speaking of which, there’s also a sexual revolution brewing, with China’s urban youth taking one great leap forward from Father Knows Best to Sex and the City. This revolution won’t be televised, but it’s being compulsively blogged.

Corruption-wise, Beijing remains stuck somewhere prior to the Progressive Era of late-19th-century America, and that’s no good. China’s political system needs to be able to process all this social and economic pressure with more flexibility. Citizens are simply growing angrier and more demanding with each passing year. China’s legal system also needs to clean up its act, because the more China’s economy opens up, the more the global business community is going to demand greater transparency and better avenues for legal redress. Corruption already consumes upwards of 5 percent of China’s gross domestic product. In a “flat world” of economic hypercompetitiveness, such inefficiency eventually costs too much.

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7.

Because China's rapid and deep integration into manufacturing means that Chinese products permeate your life--at some risk.

Globalization tends to integrate trade by disintegrating global supply chains. By breaking up these chains, globalization spreads various segments of production and assembly across those economies that offer the cheapest labor for each particular stage. China has deftly inserted itself into a long list of these chains, becoming the final assembler of note in toys, cell phones, CD players, computers, and auto parts, to name but a few. By doing so, China has consolidated much of Asia’s previous trade surpluses with America into its own burgeoning bilateral trade with the United States. So when you hear about America’s huge trade deficit with China, bear in mind that it’s the same huge trade deficit we’ve long had with Asia as a whole.

Also be aware that this figure hides a lot of complexity. Foreign corporations control the majority (approximately two-thirds) of this production for export. American companies in particular dominate China’s U.S.-export sector, meaning it’s basically our companies renting Chinese labor and keeping much of the profit. The Chinese export that sells for hundreds of dollars in America nets only tens of dollars for the Chinese economy. That’s how Wal-Mart, the single biggest source for Chinese exports in the world, keeps its prices so low. So if you think Western companies are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, then understand that you’re a prime beneficiary.

Naturally, China’s deep penetration of the U.S. market has raised product-safety issues. Any economy that is growing as fast as China’s cuts plenty of corners. But realize that China learns by scandals just as America did over the past century. Frankly, the best crises are the ones you actually hear about, because that means the international press got ahold of them, and those already affected or at risk will get the information they need to protect themselves. Once tracked back to China, Beijing is put on public notice that whatever laxness exists simply cannot be tolerated anymore, with threats of quarantine, bans on exports, cessation of investment flows, and so on.

A generation ago, such threats would elicit yawns from China’s ruling elite, but now, with the Communist Party’s legitimacy riding on economic expansion, they’re taken with the utmost seriousness. In short, China’s government is starting to act more like a business which recognizes that its reputation is often its most important asset, because fierce competition means that today’s mistake allows somebody else to steal your customers by the start of business tomorrow.

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6.

Because China's demand for resources is altering global markets in ways both profound and perverse.

China’s explosive economic growth forces it to suck in resources from all over the world. As James Kynge, a longtime China-watcher, notes in his recent book China Shakes the World, “China’s endowments are deeply lopsided.” Blessed with too many people, China is short on just about everything else: arable land, water, energy, and raw materials of all sorts. Thus, the only way China manages to serve as globalization’s “manufacturing floor” is to become a leading global importer of virtually any commodity you can name, from cement and copper to oil and gas.

While there’s hardly anything wrong about that, China’s insatiable demand for resources likewise drives Beijing to actively court pariah states and “rogue regimes” while the West tries to isolate the same regimes with economic sanctions. Take China’s relationship with Iran: While American diplomats work night and day to level even harsher sanctions to slow down Tehran’s reach for the bomb, China quietly edges out Japan as Iran’s major energy investor, sweetening the deal by reselling it some of that fabulous high-tech military hardware the Chinese military imports from Israel—hardware which then turns up in southern Lebanon in the hands of Hezbollah.

On the face of it, that constitutes obstructionism on China’s part, as if it’s trying to prevent the global community from cracking down on bad behavior. But the inescapable truth is that China’s scramble to find resources means it has to cut deals with anybody, no matter their disreputable record. So while Sudan’s government engages in what many Western states consider to be “ethnic cleansing” or genocide in its Darfur region, China is more than happy to invest heavily in Sudan’s oil industry while supplying the Sudanese government with weapons. Do that long enough and you’ll have Hollywood stars galore decrying your hoped-for coming-out party as the “genocide Olympics.”

But the longer-term danger is this: China is getting awfully dependent on a lot of unstable countries without having the global military footprint of a great power—you know, like somebody building a very large house made of straw, nowhere near a fire station. When bad things happen—like, say, that one afternoon nine Chinese oil-rig workers were killed by rebels in eastern Ethiopia—China can’t respond like a military power you should fear, because it needs that oil. Once that reality sinks in with local bad actors, expect them to start squeezing Beijing for their own slice of protection money. You know that Thomas Friedman bit about America funding both sides of the “war on terror”? Well, this is how that sort of thing starts.

Today, China might get by simply by buying off every dictator it can. But that won’t work in a future world defined by hyperconnectivity, where everyone can witness the human implications of China’s deal-making. Nor will it work in a future world defined by hyperinterdependency, a world China is creating—whether it realizes it or not.

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5.

Because the panda "huggers" versus "sluggers" debate is a lot of hot air--until Washington scares Beijing into raising your mortgage interest rate five points overnight.

I’m considered a “panda hugger,” someone who rationalizes China’s current lack of democracy and argues that, despite all its selfish behavior, China should be considered by America more as a potential ally than a downstream threat. Being an economic determinist (I taught Marxism at Harvard in another life), I believe economics shapes politics more than the other way around. Thus, I tend to be patient when I see an autocratic regime marketizing its economy, especially when the economy opens up to globalization’s networks.

So when I draw up a list of regimes I’d like to see forcibly changed by the global community, China’s nowhere near the “to do” range. That doesn’t mean I want Washington to forgo pushing Beijing’s leaders in the direction of increasing political freedom and transparency, it just means that I have more faith in the transformative power of markets than others do, so I don’t argue for picking fights with China on that score when I think there are so many other, more urgent situations around the planet today that we could collectively address.

“Panda sluggers” refers to those politicians, writers, and activists who make just the opposite argument: China has had plenty of time to change politically in a manner commensurate with its embrace of markets and globalization. If Beijing’s ruling elite has managed to keep such a firm grip on political power, then maybe it’s really cracked the code on “authoritarian capitalism,” meaning we’re looking at an inherently antagonistic model of development. If so, America had better wake up to that reality and start combating China’s “soft power” influence-peddling around the world.

This view dovetails with trade protectionists who say that Washington must confront Beijing over its unfair trade practices and defense hawks who say similar things over China’s rising military spending. My counterargument? When America was a rising power around the beginning of the last century, we were highly protectionist. Now that we’re advanced, we’d like everybody else to follow our example. Fair? All things being equal, yes. But all things aren’t equal when you’re trying to catch up, the way China is today. I say, if you talk them into becoming capitalists, then you have to live with the consequences and be patient.

What concerns me most about this ongoing debate is the potential for the perfect triggering crisis to come along and decisively shift public opinion in favor of the “slugger” position, launching America down some path of economic retaliation against and/or military confrontation with China. Obvious security situations spring to mind, such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Iran’s nuclear program, or some significant U.S. military intervention in Pakistan—a longtime strategic ally of China.

But a more likely trigger is an extended economic downturn in the United States, or a financial panic in China following the bursting of some stock market bubble. If seriously threatened, might China decide to divest itself of U.S. currency—China currently holds $1.4 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves—sending the value of the dollar into a tailspin? No one knows for sure, but intelligent observers realize that, as former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has put it, there basically exists a financial “balance of terror” between our two economies, meaning that when either of us pulls the economic trigger, we may well both end up with fatal wounds.

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4.

Because as China builds out its infrastructure, it can set a good or a bad example to developing economies struggling to deal with fragile environments.

American businesses face a key decision: dive into China’s dynamic markets or risk missing out on their coming wave of innovation. Nowhere is this more true than in infrastructure development, which is expanding like gangbusters in China right now and will continue to do so for the next couple of decades. Good example: China is building freeways like crazy. In about 20 years, it’ll have roughly 50,000 miles of them—the equivalent of our interstate system.

In that time, the world will spend $10 trillion for infrastructure development in energy ($6 trillion) and water ($4 trillion). Most will happen inside China and India at a pace not witnessed on this planet since America spread its network westward following our Civil War. Naturally, environmentalists are worried. If China replicates our resource-intensive style of growth throughout its economy, there will be no end to its pollution and carbon emissions. If you’ve spent any time in China, you know what I’m talking about: acrid-tasting air that the U.N. estimates is responsible for the premature death of 400,000 Chinese a year. Now add in the four times as many cars and trucks that will be on Chinese roads in 20 years’ time, along with far more urbanization and industrialization, and tell me if that sounds sustainable.

But guess what? The Chinese themselves aren’t exactly clueless on the subject. After all, they live there. So I’m betting—and I admit this is a bet—that the Chinese, along with the Indians and emerging markets elsewhere, will be smarter than that. Not because they want to be, but because they’re forced to be. These rising economies will have to zig where we zagged, and how they zig will be important, not just for the “advanced” West, but for all those emerging markets to come in places like Africa.

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3.

Because China is globalization's general contractor: always happy to take the job and your money, but hard to get on the phone once you discover problems.

Globalization now impinges on the most traditional, off-the-grid societies in the world. Not surprisingly, there’s going to be plenty of cultural blowback triggered by that process, and some of it is going to come our way in the form of transnational terrorism—just as it did on 9/11.

For America to win a long war against radical extremism, we need to make globalization truly global by integrating the one-third of humanity whose noses remain pressed to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in to the party. That’s labor-intensive, and American workers price out far too high. Yes, we must be significantly involved, but it’s not going to be Americans—much less Europeans—who do the heavy lifting. No, it’s going to be those longtime frontier laborers of the global economy—the Chinese and other Asians. The highly networked Chinese have shown up like clockwork at every frontier globalization has ever created. Currently, more than a million Chinese nationals have turned up in Africa alone, engaging in what I call preemptive nation-building. It’s great that China has triggered a commodities boom over much of Africa. God knows those economies can use all the help they can get. But the longer it looks like China is just there for the raw materials, the more Africans are going to catch on to the fact that—for now—the Chinese aren’t doing any more for the continent’s long-term development than the European colonial powers did decades ago.

But China needs our help, too. As the Chinese become increasingly dependent on resources drawn from unstable regions—by 2020, roughly 70 percent of China’s oil imports will be from the Middle East—the country must continue leveraging U.S. military power. Otherwise, it’ll be left unduly subsidizing weak or corrupt regimes, with China’s economic connectivity put at risk by local warlords, chronic insurgencies, and radical extremists bent on driving out globalization’s networks. If America can’t afford to maintain global security on its own, and China can’t afford to replace our effort on its own, then a strategic alliance makes eminent sense.

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2.

Because China will not be our biggest future enemy but our most important ally.

A significant portion of our national-security establishment wants desperately to cast China as an inevitable long-term threat. Why? Part of it is simply habit, as most who argue this line spent the bulk of their professional lives in the Cold War and just can’t imagine a world that doesn’t feature a superpower rivalry. For those who need to fill that hole, China is the best show in town, because its military buildup allows these hawks to argue that America must buy and maintain a huge, high-tech military force for potential large-scale war with the Chinese.

My counter is this: China’s military buildup is not historically odd. America did the same as it became a global economic power in the late decades of the 19th century. Remember Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet? It’s the same logic we see with China today.

But won't events put China and the United States at odds—say, over the strategic issues of fostering stability in the Persian Gulf? Hardly. Right now the United States imports only about one-tenth of the Persian Gulf’s oil exports, with the vast bulk heading east to Asia. Frankly, there’s no sense in the strategic equation “American blood (spilled) for Chinese oil (imports secured).” As China’s oil imports skyrocket in coming years, unlike ours, do you think that’s a politically sustainable situation?

My larger, more long-term fear is that by keeping China our preferred threat, we deny ourselves access to its significant military manpower and growing budget. With Europe and Japan both aging dramatically and China’s strategic interests ballooning in unstable regions, this makes no sense. Better to lock in China as soon as possible as the land-power anchor of an East-Asian version of NATO. The sooner we achieve that, along with Korea’s reunification, the sooner we can draw down our military in the region and better employ it in hotter spots around the world, eventually with Chinese (and Indian) troops helping out.

What would a strategic alliance with China look like? It won’t come as some “grand bargain” achieved in a single summit, but rather a long-term buildup of trust through coalition operations. Asia is an obvious focal point for such cooperation, but a complex one. Far better in the short run would be to create a strategic dialogue between the Pentagon’s nascent Africa Command and the Chinese military regarding joint peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Africa. By focusing on that relatively clean slate, America and China could come together to explore what our military alliance could ultimately entail.

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1.

Because we're less than five years from a new generation of Chinese leaders with whom a far stronger relationship may well be built.

China is on the verge of a generational leadership change that will profoundly shape its emergence as a global power over the next decade. America should take advantage of this new group’s eagerness to play an actively constructive role in international affairs.

To make clear how this would work, here’s a quick primer on the generations of Chinese leaders since 1949: Mao personified the first generation, Deng the second. Deng was followed by a third generation fronted by Jiang Zemin, China’s president and party boss across the 1990s. What’s important to note about the third generation is that this cohort was largely educated in the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The technocratic flavor of that formative experience emboldened these leaders to extend Deng’s economic reforms far deeper into Chinese society, even as the leaders steadfastly refused political liberalization.

That brings us to the current, or fourth, generation of leaders, represented by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, a risk-avoiding pair who have been quietly at the helm of “peacefully rising” China since 2002. Internally, their focus has been on harmonizing the huge imbalance between the booming coastal provinces and the left-behind rural poor of the interior.

Since 9/11, China has been almost invisible in international security affairs, essentially free riding on America’s vigorous prosecution of both radical Islam’s global insurgency and the so-called Axis of Evil, despite being a potentially key player. After all, China has long stood as North Korea’s patron and now emerges as a dynamic investor for energy and raw-materials providers throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But understand this: China’s fourth-generation leaders did not travel abroad in the 1960s for their college education, trapped as they were by the Cultural Revolution. So it’s hardly a surprise that these homebodies have proven reticent to step out internationally. But that’s changing as China’s fifth-generation leaders-in-waiting step into senior positions of power. Starting in the late 1970s, many of them were educated right here in the United States—the birthplace of today’s market-driven globalization. All but penciled in for future top slots last fall at the Communist Party’s supreme gathering, this group has already begun its years-long transition to rule, slated to begin officially in 2012. Increasingly, China’s next leadership generation speaks openly of the nation’s achievement of great power status.

How America engages China’s emerging elite in coming years could well determine—for good or ill—the lasting contours of the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. The scariest aspect to this relationship right now is that America’s economic interdependency with China vastly outweighs the two nations’ political and, more important, military connectivity. Bind America and China together, and globalization cannot be derailed. But set them persistently at odds, and that’s a recipe for unacceptable danger.

Blast from my past: "The New Magnum Force" (2005)

The New Magnum Force:  What Dirty Harry can teach the new Geneva conventions

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Wired, February 2005, pp. 29-30.

Ass kickers. Rule breakers. Lone riders. The United States may be founded on individual rights and the rule of law, but Americans love Dirty Harry and his literary and cinematic brethren. These hard-nosed heroes dispatch evildoers without remorse, going outside the law when necessary. The Man With No Name doesn't explain, he simply acts. In his first term, President George W. Bush embraced this archetype. "I want justice," he said a few days after 9/11, refering to Osama bin Laden. "There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, Wanted: Dead or Alive."

Flash forward to the present. The US claims the right to topple rogue regimes and assassinate terrorist leaders at will. If Predator drones could talk, you just know they'd ask, "So, do you feel lucky punk?" just before firing off one of those Hellfire missiles that turn the target vehicle into a smoking hulk of retribution.

So many suspects, so little time. No wonder we bend the rules here and there, declaring terrorists unworthy of protection under the Geneva conventions. It might work for a while - until the photos from Abu Ghraib are posted on the Web, and you have to explain to your kids why that sort of stuff is OK when the bad guys are really, really bad. And if you're the president? Well, maybe the doubts creep in when your own White House counsel warns you about possible war crimes charges over Guantanamo.

The Geneva conventions, as it turns out, served a few purposes: They created an international order, separated the civilized nations from the outlaws, and protected Americans. The 1949 convention was designed to prevent a rerun of the atrocities of the last great global war - a struggle between sovereign states. Today, we're waging a new type of war (for us, at least) against a new type of enemy (the Man With No State). Unless we want to spend the rest of this conflict trying to rationalize police brutality and torture, the US needs to acknowledge (1) that it's not above the law; and (2) that it needs a new set of rules for capturing, processing, detaining, and prosecuting such nonstate actors as transnational terrorists. In short, we need Dirty Harry to come clean. Frontier justice must be replaced by a real justice system. And there's nothing wrong with figuring this out as we go along.

Who writes this new set of rules? The good guys. That is, the states whose interdependence defines their shared vulnerability to transnational terrorism. There is a functioning core of the global economy: the nations in North America, Europe, Russia, the rising and established pillars of Asia, and the major economies of South America. These are the connected states, and one of the things that connects them most tightly right now is a shared commitment to combating global terrorism. The new rules need to define how the core countries cooperate to suppress terrorist activity within the core using police methods. And they'll lay out how and under what conditions it's OK for those same states' militaries to go into the unconnected regions of the world - what I call the nonintegrating gap - to snatch or kill suspected terrorists. This is not a job for the UN. In a global legislative body where Libya gets to chair the Human Rights Commission (who's next, Sudan?), some punks really have gotten lucky.

What am I talking about here? A WTO-like entity for global counterterrorism. A body that would set the operating standards for both intracore police networking (like building that fabled terrorist database in the sky) and the rules of engagement (to include prisoner handling, detention, and interrogation) for whenever the member states' militaries venture into the gap looking for bad guys.

Like the World Trade Organization, the World Counterterrorism Organization - call it the WCO - would be invitation-only. So unlike Interpol, you (yes, you, Pakistan!) couldn't just flash a badge on your way into the meeting. Starting this way doesn't make it bad or unacceptably elitist, just realistic. Remember, the WTO was once the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which grew out of Bretton Woods, which resulted from a few developed nations colluding behind closed doors. Let's allow this baby to grow up some before we toss out the dirty bathwater. It won't be pretty. More mistakes will be made, but along the way terrorists will get dead.

Maybe it smacks of paternalism to let big ol' core militaries simply walk into gap states and do what they must. But we're talking about only the most disconnected societies, where feeble or nonexistent governments should be viewed as something akin to minors. In short, a nonintegrated nation can grow up and out of the gap. It will have to pass a fitness exam and, yeah, it'll need one of our stinkin' badges! Until then, the core nations owe the citizens of these states some adult supervision.

The first order of business for the WCO should be to establish legal guidelines and physical infrastructure for the handling and disposition of those who aren't considered legal combatants under the standard rules of war. So it'll need its own Alcatraz - and no, it can't be in a US naval base in Cuba. I'm thinking of a place with lots of secure locations, like a supermax Switzerland. As for the trials? Prisoners should be funneled toward the International Criminal Court, because you've got to make the UN happy at some point in the process.

All this may sound risky, but either we can wait on some UN universal declaration full of noble nouns and awe-inspiring adjectives - or we can let the cops who walk the beat inside the gap get started writing the book that, eventually, some upstanding Perry Mason can throw at the bin Ladens and al-Zarqawis when they stand in the docket at the Hague. Until then, let Dirty Harry do his thing.

Thomas P. M. Barnett (t_p_m_barnett@hotmail.com) is the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century.

Blast from my past: "Romania Domino Stays Upright" & "Why Ceaucescu Fell" (1989)

Romania Domino Stays Upright

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

COPYRIGHT: The Christian Science Monitor, 1989 (11 December edition, p. 18)

A political earthquake is rumbling through Eastern Europe.

Stalinist leaders are toppled like dominoes, each succumbing to domestic unrest while Moscow looks on.

So far only Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's 71 year-old dictator, has escaped this fate. Why are there no mass protests in Bucharest calling for his downfall? The answer is simple: Mr. Ceausescu has been preparing for this kind of political disaster for over 20 years.

The Romanian dictator realized long ago that a political chain of command existed in the Soviet bloc, and that he would have to establish autonomy from Moscow. This meant defending himself from two dangers: first that the Soviets would try to intervene militarily, and second that the Soviets would disavow socialism and undercut him politically.

The USSR's military channels of influence are restricted. No Red Army troops have been stationed in the Balkan country since 1958. Ceausescu built up his national defenses to such an extent that Romania can offer strong resistance to an invasion from any quarter.

Ceausescu also curtailed Soviet influence by distancing himself from Moscow's schemes to integrate Romania's economy into the Eastern bloc. While the USSR is Romania's biggest trading partner, Moscow's ability to force Ceausescu's regime into economic reforms is very limited.

The Kremlin also doesn't have any friends within the Romanian Communist Party. Ceausescu rooted out any Moscow sympathizers by making Romanian nationalism the litmus test of party loyalty.

Finally, Ceausescu severed the ideological umbilical cord connecting Bucharest and Moscow. Ceausescu realized that every Stalinist regime requires its own Stalinist anchor.

It was too risky to rely on Stalin's legacy alone. The whole edifice could collapse if, at some time, a Soviet leader repudiated Stalinism as Khrushchev had tried to do in 1956.

For now, Ceausescu is prepared to ride out the political shock waves resulting from Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. This is feasible because Ceausescu's despotism is home-grown. His rigid central planning keeps the economy in a straitjacket, while he stocks the leading political posts with relatives and cronies. His extensive police empire keeps the people cowed, and his personality cult rivals Stalin's.

Symbolically, Ceausescu has skillfully exploited Romania's deep nationalism and its historical weakness for paternalistic dictators.

While Mr. Gorbachev's leverage with Bucharest remains limited, the West's ability to encourage change is nonexistent. Ceausescu labored for years to win most-favored-nation trading status from the US in 1975. Yet just last year he was willing to forsake it when the State Department dared to link its renewal to improvement in Romania's abysmal human rights record.

Perhaps the best hope for change in Romania is Ceausescu's advanced age and poor health. While Ceausescu has lined up his wife and son as his political heirs, neither will sit comfortably, or for long, in a throne designed specifically for one man.

In the short run, Ceausescu's grip on power appears firm. Not only was he unanimously reelected at the recent Communist Party congress, but the tyrant vehemently denied the possibility of reforms. Sending a signal to reformist Hungary, Ceausescu even sealed the border with his Warsaw Pact neighbor.

For all his despotism, Nicolae Ceausescu is a shrewd and farsighted politician. Events in Eastern Europe may have caught the West unprepared, but Romania's present stability indicates that Ceausescu has been ready for this upheaval for quite some time.

Why Ceausescu Fell:  His Silent War Against the Romanian People Backfired

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

COPYRIGHT: The Christian Science Monitor, 1989 (28 December edition, p. 19)

The end finally came for Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu.

Literally scared out of office by an angry population that no longer feared his bullets, the fleeing tyrant and his wife were eventually captured, arrested, and executed after a secret trial. Genocide was the first of several charges leveled against the deposed leaders by the military tribunal.

Less than two weeks ago Ceausescu's dictatorship seemed immune to Eastern Europe's political upheaval. Now, new questions arise in light of the widespread violence that accompanied the end of this Stalinist regime.

Why was Ceausescu willing to wage open warfare against his people? And why would Romanians risk death rather than see his rule continue? The answers must be found in the silent war Ceausescu waged against his subjects for the last seven years.

This silent war dates back to 1982, when Ceausescu implemented severe austerity policies designed to retire the nation's foreign debt by 1990. Why so quickly? The Romanian dictator had witnessed Warsaw's near default on its large foreign debt. Poland's subsequent economic collapse convinced Ceausescu that his regime had to avoid this scenario at all costs.

Three elements drove him to this drastic conclusion:

First, a debt crisis would force the self-proclaimed "Genius of the Carpathians" to admit his economic mismanagement.

Second, such a crisis would cause Ceausescu's regime to lose credibility with the already hard-pressed workers. The ever-vigilant dictator could not allow a Romanian version of Solidarity to develop.

Finally, Ceausescu abhorred the idea of Western financial institutions gaining leverage over Romania's economy. The despot had spent years reducing Moscow's influence, and was not about to have it replaced by Western meddling.

Like his brash anti-Sovietism of the late 1960s, Ceausescu again cloaked his policies in the guise of defending Romania's sovereignty. But the cruel and uneven nature of his austerity program meant that ordinary Romanians were paying for the leader's paranoia with their lives.

Bucharest rapidly reduced its foreign debt over the 1980s, but the extreme rationing of food, basic amenities, and energy created virtual wartime conditions. Exiled dissident Mihai Botez estimates that at least 15,000 Romanians died annually from starvation, cold, and shortages.

Romania was rich enough to provide all these basic requirements, but Ceausescu chose not to do so. Instead, the debt was finally retired earlier this year.

Not everyone suffered these shortages equally. Ceausescu's ruling clan continued to live like modern-day Roman emperors, awash in luxury and decadence. The autocrat also kept his dreaded security police well paid so they would be willing to crush dissent wherever it arose.

After overseeing the economic strangulation of the Romanian people for seven years, it was not surprising that Ceausescu ordered the Timisoara massacre. What were another 4,000 dead to a tyrant who had already sacrificed 20 times that amount?

Similarly, when the security troops fought on like desperate gangsters after the regime's collapse, they were well aware of the people's deep anger over their long history of oppression.

It was anger so great, that when faced with their eighth straight winter of this silent war, Romanians were ready to choose death over Ceausescu. The turning point of the popular uprising occurred when military leaders realized that the people could be pushed no further.

With Ceausescu's downfall, Romania faces severe tests in the weeks ahead. The No. 1 task of the newly formed opposition, the National Salvation Front, is to contain the potential for continued violence.

The anger resulting from Ceausescu's silent war must be properly channeled in order to avoid a long and ugly backlash. An orderly and fully disclosed trial for Ceausescu would have gone a long way in releasing some of this pressure.

It is a good sign that the National Salvation Front is led by political figures—such as the interim president, Ion Iliescu—who, because of their past dissent, fell out of Ceausescu's favor many years ago. Their social stature will be instrumental in promoting new government policies which address Romania's present problems rather than dwell on its past.

Ceausescu subjected his people to any sacrifice necessary to maintain his absolute power. The end result was a nation isolated abroad and economically crippled at home. While the isolation has ended, the economic damage remains.

Both East and West have declared their readiness to aid in Romania's economic recovery. But both sides must also continue to be patient with Romania. It is a country coming out of a long and brutal conflict. While open warfare didn't break out until last week, Ceausescu's silent war had been claiming victims for years.

Blast from my past: "The Overly Qualified Critic: Esquire's National-Security Expert on the New Film 'In the Loop'" (2009)

 

The Overly Qualified Critic:  Esquire's National-Security Expert on the New Film In the Loop

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, August 2009, p. 27.

In the Loop, by veteran British satirist and first-time director Armando Iannucci, is a deadpan farce that wickedly echoes the joint Anglo-American sales job on the Iraq invasion. Imagine dueling diplomatic versions of The Officecolliding at the United Nations over a proposed war resolution, with the decisive press leak sheepishly offered up by a two-timing British bureaucrat to his enraged Foreign Ministry girlfriend as evidence that his bedding an American counterpart was nothing more than an "antiwar shag."

The Brits are fronted by a peace-seeking but tongue-tied cabinet minister (Tom Hollander), who says things like "To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict," triggering the prime minister's press flack (Peter Capaldi) to retort, "You sound like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews." The warmongering Americans are captained by a Rummy-esque übercrat (David Rasche) who favors live hand grenades as desktop paperweights and pontificates to baby-faced aides, "In the land of truth... the man with one fact is the king."

The film, which slips in an effortless turn by James Gandolfini (above) as a foulmouthed U. S. general, contains enough fucks to qualify for the Tarantino award at Sundance, where it premiered in January, yet it's the script's many accurate details that earn this former badge-holder's praise, to include: the ubiquitous acronyms whose actual meaning nobody knows, the constant backstabbing among careerists, senior officials who float their resignations with less thought than they give their office decor, and the vigorously hedonistic lifestyle of D. C.'s young single staffers.

Which makes it a hilarious and helpful primer for anyone new to Washington.

Blast from my past: "Obama's New Map" (2009)

Obama's New Map

As he assumes leadership of this freaked-out world, the success of our new president's foreign policy — and presidency — will depend on the thinking he does inside the box.

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Esquire, March 2009, pp. 53-54.

For roughly the past quarter century, America has run the world using the following two levers: its massive consumption rate and its willingness to deploy military forces around the planet. Together these two drivers facilitated the rise of many new great powers by enabling their export-fueled growth and obviating any need for them to engage in distracting military buildups or overseas interventions.

That U. S. grand strategy has essentially run its course, having proven both amazingly successful (the death of great-power war in East Asia) and extremely exhausting (our crippling debt overhang).

As President Obama renegotiates America's role in this world that we created, four potential flash-cum-bang points stand out for the year ahead.

Flash Point No. 1

First, and most obviously, is the second global economic summit in April to deal with the world's ongoing financial crisis. With the EU and Japan accompanying us into recession and our economy unlikely to turn any corner until early 2010, China's Keynesian role as globalization's "spend to save" stimulant is of critical importance, meaning that China today plays the same role vis-à-vis America that we played to imperial Great Britain at the end of World War II: The imperial power needs a bailout, and the rising power has the cash. As a rule, the price for such cooperation is steep — to wit, America got to call most of the shots in the resulting Bretton Woods financial order.

So what does China want? It wants to graduate from the kiddie table that is the expanded G20 crew of emerging economies and gain a seat at the more exclusive G8, where actual heads of state meet. If Obama is serious about his "team of rivals" philosophy, he'd do well to acquiesce, even to the point of permanently expanding the G8 to include the adjunct dozen.

But here's the tough compromise that may hold up this much-needed expansion: The EU seems determined to get some sort of global securities-and-exchange commission to regulate intermarket financial flows in the future — in effect, viewing the current global crash as Washington once did Wall Street's 1929 collapse. As far as emerging markets are concerned, that's going to feel suspiciously constraining; having just achieved some wealth, the rising East and South now face the West's desire to regulate crucial investment flows so as to smooth out an inevitable global business cycle. Which is like wanting to go all the way on the first date — that trust simply does not yet exist in the system.

Obama's balancing act here is difficult. No one wants to derail the emergence of a global middle class, the bulk of which will be found overwhelmingly in emerging markets in coming years, but globalization's periodic panics have clearly grown more frequent and more volatile. Obama must ask China to grow up very fast and assume a lot more leadership (read: exposure to monetary risk), meaning his "fair trade" agenda must inevitably yield to Beijing's definition — and, by extension, New Delhi's and Brasília's — of a fair deal for its still-impoverished masses.

Flash Point No. 2

Flash point No. 2 will be the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, which took on more urgency after Pakistani militants tried to trigger a diversionary war with India by launching the frighteningly effective mini-invasion of downtown Mumbai.

Washington's national-security community is wrapping up a comprehensive strategy review, much like it did on Iraq a couple of years ago, and this time the logic of regionalizing the solution damn well better prevail. If the Obama administration displays an inkling of Bush-Cheney's Great Gamesmanship, then say goodbye to the "good war," because the Hindu Kush is where bankrupt empires go for slaughter.

If Obama is smart enough to socialize the problem beyond NATO (because it's truly beyond NATO in every sense of the word), then we're into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's roster of member states and observers. You know that old bit about crazy in your bedroom versus crazy on my front lawn? Well, this is their front lawn.

Besides India's hard-earned seat at the table, China must be included in some high-viz capacity (Britain's PM Gordon Brown recently floated the notion of Chinese peacekeepers joining the fray) and so must nuclear bad-boy Iran (more on that below). Hell, we should also rehabilitate the Russians, if Obama is clever enough to exploit the situation to defuse recent tensions over Moscow's August smackdown of Georgia.

Remember: This insolvent Leviathan needs some immediate credit-default swaps (what we called "burden sharing" in the Before Time) in both the financial and security realms, so don't be surprised to see both great-power dances (the mega-stimulus package and the new military strategy) either succeed or fail in concert. The era of "separate lanes" is over in American grand strategy.

Flash Points No. 3 and 4

The next two potential flash points are equally intertwined: No. 3, the presidential election in Iran, and No. 4, the question of Obama's follow-through on Bush's August deal to deploy missile-defense facilities in Eastern Europe — ostensibly to protect NATO from Iranian missiles. (Feeling out of the loop on ancient Polish-Persian hatred? You're not alone.)

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad manages to win reelection (and yes, Israel's Gaza adventure strengthens his hand), it'll signal that the Supreme Leader isn't looking for any "Nixon goes to China" overtures to rescue its moribund economy with Western investments and technology. Such a dead end would complicate any future U. S. cooperation with India and China on either global finance or Afghani-Pakistan, because both states need long-term access to Iran's energy as their own domestic demand grows. It would also make it near impossible for Obama to finesse the missile-shield issue (i.e., indefinitely delayed until "further testing"), thus further antagonizing Moscow when Putin's already in a pissy mood and looking to test our young leader.

If Ahmadinejad is toppled by either the moderate former president Mohammad Khatami or the technocratic Tehran mayor, Mohammad Qalibaf, then Iran is definitely back in play, giving Obama plenty more wiggle room elsewhere, but only if he and Hillary Clinton can keep a lid on Israel's hard-line factions, which seem intent on taking out Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively. (Such strikes won't succeed, but they would trigger Iran's hard-line retrenchment, no matter which candidate prevails.) To that end, when the Obama camp coolly floats the notion of extending America's nuclear umbrella over Israel and — implicitly — any friendly neighboring Arab state that desires it, the former junior senator from Illinois is breaking out the big-boy voice of the world's sole military superpower.

That's the cluster of strategic issues that either facilitates or foils Obama's first year as leader of the freaked-out world. Everything else waits on this unscrambled Rubik's Cube, unless Kim Jong Il decides that he's so lonely that he wants to pop off another nuke to get back on Washington's radar.

And in the end, everything depends on how many new frenemies Obama is willing to add to his great-power Facebook. If our new president decides that America is still stuck with the same old friends we've always had, then he will quickly find himself as boxed in as George W. Bush was at the end of his second term and as impotent as Jimmy Carter was at the end of his only term.

The worst thing Obama can do coming out of the gate is attempt to demonize any of these rising powers with doofus labels (e.g., axis of evil/diesel, league of autocracies) or to simultaneously "contain" all their regional ambitions. Trust me, if they're not a significant part of the solution, they'll invariably constitute the insoluble heart of the problem.

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a contributing editor and best-selling author whose new book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (G. P. Putnam's Sons), is being published this month. 

Blast from my past: "The Americans Have Landed" (2007)

 

The Americans Have Landed

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Bryan Christie Design

Esquire, July 2007, pp. 113-17 & 134-37.

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country's sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit, needed to land three CH-53 helicopters.

"We had everybody working nonstop," says Navy Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron, commander of Contingency Operating Location Manda Bay, a new American base in Kenya, including a dozen or so on-site KBR contractors. By the next day, every tree had been hauled off and the field graded and packed down using heavy machinery. The pad was completed in thirty-six hours.

Soon after, U.S. special operators flying out of Manda Bay were landing in southernmost Somalia, searching for survivors among the foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives just targeted in a furious bombardment by a U.S. gunship launched from a secret airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.

The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind.

A few weeks later, the president would announce the creation of a new regional command -- Africa Command -- that would commit U.S. military personnel to the continent on a permanent basis. The January operation would be, in effect, the first combat mission of Africa Command, and it would not go as planned.

Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.

In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."

When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

Once boxed in by the sea and the Kenyans, the killing zone was set and America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat "until no more bad guys," as one officer put it.

"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.

It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.

Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.

The first New York Times piece in early January broke the story of the initial AC-130 bombardment, incorrectly identifying a U.S. military base in Djibouti as the launching point. That leak just let the cat out of the bag, tipping off the main target, a senior CIC leader named Aden Hashi Ayro, who, according to Centcom intelligence, had been completely fooled up to that point, thinking the Ethiopians had somehow gotten the jump on him. Ayro survived his injuries, and he's now back in action in Mogadishu and, by all accounts, mad as hell at both the Ethiopians and the Americans.

Six weeks and a second Times story later, the shit really hit the fan in Addis Ababa. Now the intensely proud Ethiopians, who had done all the heavy lifting in the operation, were being portrayed as bit players in their own war -- simpleton proxies of the fiendishly clever Americans. After angry denials were issued (Meles's spokesman called the story a "fabrication"), the Ethiopians decided that if the Americans were so hot to mastermind another intervention in Somalia, they would just wash their hands of this mess as quickly as possible.

The return of the foreign fighters to Mogadishu's nasty mix, along with Ethiopia's fit of pique, quickly sent the situation in Somalia spiraling downward. The transitional Somali government, backed by the United Nations, is faltering, and in scenes reminiscent of America's last misadventures in Mog, both Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers are taking fire from 360 degrees' worth of pissed-off Somali clans determined to -- once again -- drive off the invading infidels. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have written a better ending.

Naturally, it wasn't supposed to happen this way.

America's Central Command set up shop in Djibouti in May 2003, moving ashore a Marine-led Joint Task Force that had been established six months earlier aboard the command ship Mount Whitney to capture and kill Al Qaeda fighters fleeing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The task force did register one immediate big hit in November 2002: A top Al Qaeda leader was taken out in Yemen by a Hellfire air-to-ground missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in a scene right out of Syriana. But other than that, the great rush of rats fleeing the sinking ship has not yet materialized, and so the Marines took up residence in an old French Foreign Legion base located on Djibouti's rocky shore, just outside the capital.

Uncomfortable just sitting around, the Marines quickly refashioned the task force with the blessing of General John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, who envisioned Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) as a sort of strategic inoculant. If the Marines weren't going to get to kill anybody, then they'd train the locals to do it instead.

But CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something so much more: an experiment in combining defense, diplomacy, and development -- the so-called three-D approach so clearly lacking in America's recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn't own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited.

The Horn of Africa was supposed to be Washington's bureaucratic mea culpa for the Green Zone, a proving ground for the next generation of interagency cooperation that fuels America's eventual victory in what Abizaid once dubbed the "long war" against radical Islam. But as its first great test in Somalia demonstrated, the three D's are still a long way from being synchronized, and as the Pentagon sets up its new Africa Command in the summer of 2008, the time for sloppy off-Broadway tryouts is running out. Eventually, Al Qaeda's penetration of Muslim Africa will happen -- witness the stunning recent appearance of suicide bombers in Casablanca -- and either the three D's will answer this challenge, or this road show will close faster than you can say "Black Hawk down."

Djibouti

After being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for us to care about. And the Bush administration's decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed.

There aren't enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special-operations trigger pullers would have sufficed for the foreseeable future.

There's oil here, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it's actually fairly quiet right now.

The Chinese are here en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can't stand or can't stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren't particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire here. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn't warrant Africa Command, either.

America is going to have an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate -- it's a good investment. Too many large, hostile powers surround Central Asia for the radical jihadists to expand there, but Africa? Africa's the strategic backwater of the world. Nobody cares about Africa except Western celebrities.

So as the Middle East middle-ages over the next three decades and Asia's infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you've got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.

The U.S., through its invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, has dramatically sped up globalization's frightening reformatting process in the Middle East, and with Africa on deck, the United States military is engaging in a highly strategic flanking maneuver.

Africa Command promises to be everything Central Command has failed to become. It will be interagency from the ground up. It will be based on interactions with locals first and leaders second. It will engage in preemptive nation-building instead of preemptive regime change. It will "reduce the future battlespace" that America has neither intention nor desire to own.

It'll be Iraq done right.

Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa here in Djibouti is the clear model for what comes next, according to Rear Admiral Bob Moeller, who heads up the Defense Department's transition team planning Africom's structure. It is the franchise that will be replicated across the entire continent.

Camp Lemonier, home to CJTF-Horn of Africa, is one nasty, hot, and oh-so-stanky chunk of rock adjoining the Red Sea, a place where the view of the night sky is routinely blocked by the thick black smoke rising from the capital city's burning garbage pit located just outside the base wire. Take away the port and there's not much reason for anyone to come here, where the bulk of Djibouti's 750,000 citizens live.

Djibouti welcomes the Americans as a counterweight to its neighbors, none of whom have the country's best interests in mind. To the north is Eritrea, which broke off from Ethiopia years back and favors Somalia against their common archrival. Landlocked Ethiopia to the west wants a stable Djibouti primarily for its access to the sea. But as Addis Ababa doesn't mind fomenting trouble in Somalia, to Djibouti's south, the relationship is frequently strained.

Besides being welcoming, Djibouti was a natural place for the United States to plant its first African precinct: It's where Africa meets the Persian Gulf.

Camp Lemonier was just a bunch of tents surrounded by walls filled with sand for the first three years, with the serious settling in beginning when the Navy took over the command from the Marines in early 2006. Until recently, the camp's roughly fifteen hundred sailors, marines, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and civilians were crammed into a very cramped hundred-acre plot, buttressed on one side by the sole runway the task force shares with both the Djibouti International Airport and a French marine base still operating there. Now, thanks to a new five-year lease signed with the Djiboutian government, the camp has expanded to roughly five hundred acres, to include a sprawling suburb called "CLU City," named after the rows and rows of containerized living units, housing two thousand people in all, plopped down in what is certainly one of the world's most brutally utilitarian bedroom communities.

The spartan CLU City (for containerized living unit), built on four hundred acres recently ceded to Camp Lemonier by the Djiboutian government, will eventually house two thousand U.S. troops.

I got a glimpse of CLU City from the guard tower just inside the eastern wall of the base late one Sunday afternoon. The task force's public-affairs officer, Major David Malakoff, was right on my elbow the entire time. Malakoff had walked me around the camp the day before, carefully pointing out the "wire within the wire" that is the special-operations compound. He said no one would be answering questions about them because no one on base knows anything about what they do.

This is a common theme from senior officers at Lemonier. Captain Bob Wright, who heads up strategic communications for the task force, told me that he had "absolutely no access" to the special-ops unit there, despite having "all the right clearances."

As I stood up on the guard tower, snapping photos of CLU City, I looked over toward the Djibouti airport, and my eye was drawn to the sight of men dressed in black scrambling down the side of a nondescript building on the north side of the base.

"What's going on over there?" I asked, pointing.

"Over where?" Malakoff answered slowly. "I don't see anything."

Behind me, the base commander's aide was tensing up.

I pulled my eye back from my camera slowly, looked down off the tower, and calculated the drop in feet to the ground. Better to continue this conversation below.

"Okay, got a nice shot of a plane. I'm done!" I started heading to the ladder. A rapid-fire chorus of "Great!" "Good!" and "All right!" triggered everyone's movement right on my heels.

Back on the ground, Malakoff turned to me and whispered, "You didn't take any shots of those guys on the building, did you?"

"No."

"Good," Malakoff said. "That would have been the end of your camera right there, and maybe more. I'm just trying to look out for you here."

Special-operations enthusiasts, like the journalist Robert Kaplan, love to romanticize the almost limitless utility of the trigger pullers in globalization's dark alleys like the Horn. This makes some sense, as they tend to generate all the "kinetics," or killing, and that's what draws in the international press. But with CJTF-HOA, the regular military is trying to reassume its historical role in the everything else that accompanies the trigger-pulling: the civil-affairs work, the humanitarian stuff, the community projects designed to win hearts and minds. In a pinch, the SOF guys will do these sorts of things as well, but the long war has become one long squeeze on special operators, who are now such rare commodities -- recruitment-wise -- that some are commanding reenlistment bonuses well above $100,000, lest Blackwater USA hire them all.

A scene at Camp Lemonier, Djibouti. While special operations makes most of the news, the task force consists of far more well-diggers, engineers, civili-affairs specialists, and medics.

So the romantic view of special operations encouraged by Kaplan and others, that the SOF guys are all you need for a backwater like Africa, is yielding to a new normal: a strategic view that recognizes there are too few trigger pullers to go around, and with the Marines backfilling Special Operations Command where it can, bases like Lemonier are quickly being taken over, often by reservists who haven't been on an aircraft, ship, or submarine for years.

The U.S. Navy now commands the base, freeing up the Marines for more pressing duty elsewhere in the region, and although CJTF-HOA's C is supposed to signify a "combined" effort involving coalition member states, only a dozen or so officers are actually drawn -- as liaisons -- from ten militaries (five local, five distant) other than our own. Indeed, the French, with their roughly three thousand men next door, along with all their wives and kids living off base, constitute by far the largest foreign contingent in Djibouti. In comparison, the Americans remain somewhat isolated on their base with their 10:00 p.m. curfew, as Lemonier is still considered a "hardship post" that rules out families.

The task force's stated mission -- a profound expansion of, and evolution from, its original capture-and-kill orders -- is to prevent conflict by promoting stability regionally and, in that prophylactic approach, ultimately "prevail over extremism" by never letting its seeds find purchase in local soil. In the Horn of Africa, when you're talking urban, middle-class, educated, commercial, and connected, you're more likely describing Christian populations, and when you're talking rural, impoverished, uneducated, agrarian, and off-grid, you're mostly describing Muslim villages. So it's not enough to interact with the capital's elites. You either go "downrange," as task-force officers like to say, or you might as well stay on base.

In addition to Camp Lemonier, three permanent contingency operating locations are up and running, two in Ethiopia (Bilate and Hurso) and one in Kenya (Manda Bay). A fourth base was established more than a year ago in Gode, Ethiopia, but it was closed as events heated up next door in Somalia. If CJTF-HOA does become the model for Africa Command, the United States could easily be running a couple dozen such military bases on the continent by 2012.

The pattern of our military's expanding presence in Africa seems clear: 1) look where the locals or former colonials set up shop previously; 2) move inside the existing wire first with your special operators for capture/kill missions and military-to-military training with the locals to do the same; and then 3) settle in more formally with new versions of Camp Lemonier. Once set up, the task force storefront can be used to flow trigger pullers onto the scene at a moment's notice -- the precinct that hosts the SWAT team.

To old hands in the State Department and USAID, the Pentagon's growing incursion into long-neglected Africa arouses ancient bureaucratic impulses toward territoriality. They can't help but feel like their turf's being invaded by the gun-toting crowd, hell-bent on opening a new front in a new war.

If Djibouti is a front, then it's a messy one, because the fault lines seem more cultural than tactical. The place is a great example of the tectonic stresses at work here, its battered visage almost exemplifying the numerous civilizations that have crashed into one another here on the streets of this ancient port city.

Djibouti was hopping my last night in town before I flew downrange. Several thousand French sailors were on liberty that Sunday night, fresh off the carrier Charles de Gaulle and the other ships in its task force. Half the port's prostitutes are said to be HIV-positive, and the sailors were taking their lives in their hands.

As the French were landing, I headed out in a Toyota Land Cruiser with Captain Bob Wright and a few of his young officers to find the local Ethiopian restaurant that everyone at Lemonier raves about but no one can ever find. An hour later, we're still not there. Finally, we head into Djibouti's main square, to a restaurant Captain Wright knows well. He jumps out of the Toyota and chats up the owner, who takes the whole hospitality thing so seriously that he sends Bob back to the car with his eldest son as our guide.

We careen through back alleys that squeeze tighter and tighter and finally come upon the Ethiopian Community Club, nestled between a Coptic Orthodox Christian church and a mosque.

The captain pays a couple of kids hanging out in the alley to watch the car, and we head up to the unlighted rooftop restaurant.

Sitting atop the building in the warm night air, we are serenaded from three sides in a mash-up only Tom Friedman could love. The Coptic priest is haranguing his parish in an endless sermon; on the other side, the looming mosque tower is booming its taped call to prayers; and, once our waiter gets around to opening up the makeshift bar on the roof, Eminem joins in about what a whore his mother is from a boom box in the corner. Popping beers and shouting through the din, Captain Wright steers the conversation to the tension between the two halves of HOA's mission, the civil-affairs stuff and what everyone keeps calling "the recent kinetics in Somalia." The whole affair was a nightmare to Wright and his officers, he says, trashing years of patient effort by hundreds of officers to present a new and different face of the U.S. military.

"Strategic communications" means that no one ever sees the men in black rappelling down that building, the same men in black I hadn't seen the day before.

Walking back to the car, Wright says, "Stuff like that makes everyone think that what we're trying to do here at HOA really doesn't count, but it does. You can't make the Horn a better place simply by killing bad guys."

So the question becomes, Is the civil-affairs stuff just a continuing cover for the special operations, or will they eventually yield an Africa that makes American interventions unnecessary? There's a lot of concern here that the establishment of Africa Command may do more harm than good -- the poised hammer that makes everything suddenly look like a nail.

Manda Bay, Kenya

Traveling to HOA's contingency operating location in Manda Bay, along Kenya's eastern coast, is a multiday affair from Djibouti, including a couple of long flights on Kenya's national airline and a two-hour military transport from Nairobi to a makeshift airstrip a few miles' drive from the surrounding Kenyan naval base. On the C-130 flight with the task force's deputy commander, Rear Admiral Tim Moon, we shared the cargo bay with a couple of huge pallets of well-digging machinery and more cases of Red Bull than I could count. The ground crew in Nairobi said we were dangerously overloaded for the short runway, but after being unable to find a forklift big enough to repack the load originally put on board in Djibouti, our Air Force pilots just said, "No worries" (and yes, in Swahili that really is hakuna matata), and we were off in a plane built the year I was born (1962).

We skimmed the landing zone on our first pass to make sure no wild animals were on the strip. From inside the windowless C-130, that experience feels like a last-second aborted landing, which I handled okay because I'd skipped lunch earlier. My seat companion, Major Tesfa Dejene from Ethiopia, laughed when he caught my grimace. "I thought all you Americans like excitement!"

Camp Simba, the Kenyan navy's name for the base, is a struggle against nature. Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron warns you upon entry that the concertina wire strung around the base perimeter is useful only in stopping humans. The animals -- baboons, monkeys, hyenas, deer, and probably more deadly snakes than anywhere else in the world -- "come on through like it's not even there."

"I call it the zoo in reverse," says Eron. "Because they come here to watch us." Something to remember at 3:00 a.m. when you're making that walk to the latrine forty yards from your hut, which is kept incredibly cold with air-conditioning because "keeping it cold keeps those cold-blooded animals out," Eron says.

I make a mental note of where the camp's sole medical corpsman is located.

Manda Bay's origins tell you everything you need to know about why the Americans showed up here. The Kenyan navy built the base in 1992, in response to the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia the year before, right about the time U.S. marines were stepping off their amphibious ships and entering Mogadishu. Kenya's predominantly Muslim northern coastal area is so remote that it was simply easier to send military supplies to its border with Somalia along the coast using naval vessels than to head up inland by vehicles, as the sandy roads are impassable in the rainy season.

Years later, as Somalia began spiraling downward yet again, Central Command sent a special-operations contingent into Manda to begin training the Kenyan navy on antiterrorism tactics using high-speed patrol craft. That effort laid the groundwork for Task Force 88's sudden appearance earlier this year.

Rear Admiral Rich Hunt, who commanded HOA in 2006, likes to brag that "we've never fired a round in anger," which is a little like saying, "HOA doesn't kill people; special operators do."

This is a part of the world where military trucks and helicopters suddenly appearing on the horizon typically set off alarm bells with the locals, because it has usually meant that troops from the capital were coming to round them up and/or kill them, just like our troops were doing to those high-value targets in southern Somalia earlier this year. Here, you're just another scary guy in a uniform until you prove differently.

Jumping out of the tail of the C-130 in Manda Bay's intense March heat, I am surrounded by marines temporarily bivouacked alongside the remote airstrip in a cluster of tents. They're here for a bilateral naval exercise with the Kenyans. The engineering brigade will come ashore soon and help rebuild a school, and Marine doctors will vaccinate the locals and treat all their basic maladies. If this is a cover, it is very convincing.

On posts like this, the rank-and-file American troops tend to fall for the locals. Not in some white-man's-burden sort of way but simply out of the desire not to be sitting around on their asses, marking time across their tours, waiting like firemen for the next blaze.

There's nothing in the traditional military system that demands, recognizes, rewards, or basically gives a flying fuck about making friends with local populations. But still, soldiers like Army Captain Steve McKnight do it.

Team leader of Team B/413th Civil Affairs Battalion, McKnight is an instantly likable fellow. He's a balding bear of a guy whose uniform is a Cubs cap and a bike-messenger bag, and he comes off like a good high school football coach. And he did coach at a school in an unglamorous part of Miami. "Suburban kids didn't need me because they've already got parents," he says.

Unmarried at forty-three, McKnight stumbled into this African posting because of bureaucratic downsizing. "I'm a medical-service-corps officer -- direct commission. I got attached to a reserve combat hospital down in Miami that folded, and there was a civil-affairs unit next to mine, and I walked over there and I was like, 'Hey, I need a home. You guys got a place for me?' "

Civil affairs promised him the most remote locations with the neediest clients. Now sitting across from me at a seedy Internet café located in the sweltering waterfront of Lamu, Kenya, an ancient seafaring port, McKnight downs a huge beer in a single gulp and leans back, flashing his gap-tooth grin like Vince Lombardi. He's been in country for almost six months now and has put in repeated requests to extend his tour of duty, to no avail. "I'll probably get me something deep in South America next," he says.

Army Captain Steve McKnight with Kenyan children at a school recently rehabbed by visiting marines.

McKnight in his element is a superb intelligence gatherer (or what they call in spycraft "human intelligence"). We took a long tour of Lamu's labyrinthine back alleys, where the carved wooden doors mark the homes of some of the world's oldest slave traders, and the open sewers reek. I'm holding my nose while McKnight presses the flesh of every shopkeeper we pass, most of whom warmly yell out his name in greeting. He's like some muzungu running for office on Lamu's south side: exchanging gossip, asking how business has been lately, needling them for details about this or that local issue.

Admiral Moon's visit included a showy meeting with senior Kenyan military officers down on the coast to mark the bilateral military exercise with the Americans. A message had just come down from the embassy, which McKnight relayed to Moon: "The embassy says it wants everybody in civvies today, Admiral, just to play it safe."

"The embassy is concerned about some photojournalist snapping a shot of the admiral standing next to some Ethiopian officer in uniform," McKnight said. "After the recent events in Somalia, that could trigger a lot of negative coverage."

McKnight and I skip the photo op because he's got a civil-affairs project to check on: the rebuild of a local rural school by a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit's engineering battalion. McKnight had done the preliminary scouting work with the Marines weeks earlier, picking out a school that HOA had helped build three years ago but that was already showing some structural problems, in large part because the Americans had relied too much on local contractors, who tend to mix way too much sand in their cement to cut on costs.

"Handing the money over to the contractor, disappearing for the life of the project, and coming back for the dedication? That's a recipe for disaster," says McKnight.

So this time around, the Marine combat engineers not only rehab all the buildings, they erect a significant fence to surround the entire school compound to keep out the wildlife that constantly wanders in, threatening the kids, raiding the pantry, and eating its way through the crops the staff grow to feed themselves and provide meals to the kids.

There's going to be a problem when the Marines fly in the VIPs for the school rededication. Their Chinook helos need such a large landing space that the school's kitchen, made of sticks and mud, is put at risk. Huff and puff and blow your building down. On the spot, the Marines offer to trash the old kitchen and build a new, wood-frame one from scratch.

The headmaster convinces the Marines to build a new food pantry right next door. He is elated. "When you have the food, the kids are so happy, and they come in great numbers, and we keep them in school."

Having worked that scene, McKnight's on to connect his next dot: Sammy Mbugua, deputy director of the local Kenyan National Youth Service facility, a sprawling agriculture camp that experiments with all manner of crops and helps local farmers adopt new practices. It's a run-down collection of buildings, and looking at all the holes that pepper every piece of wood in the place, you quickly come to the conclusion that ants run the place more than anybody else.

McKnight has to reassure Sammy about all those helicopters buzzing by. Mbugua, a slow-moving, middle-aged man whose rheumy eyes say he's no stranger to tropical diseases, is looking for explanations to give all the local villagers who pester him with questions. "Some people are worried, Steve," he says. "Can you hear them go, the aeroplanes?"

McKnight does his best to explain all the activity, emphasizing all the civil-affairs projects being conducted simultaneously alongside military exercises.

"Please tell them there's nothing to be alarmed about," he says. "They're doing exercises. Yeah, that's nothing to worry about."

When the kinetic troop buildup happened on the border earlier this year, it scared everyone. "They were like, 'What's happening? Is there going to be a big battle here or something?' " McKnight says. "The secondary school that does not exist here anymore was taken over by General Morgan, a Somali warlord, in 1992. He destroyed it and they haven't had a secondary school since. The people here remember that."

McKnight confirms with Mbugua that all the youth-service personnel got checked out by the Marine doctors running a medical exercise down the road. "Yes, yes," says Sammy. "They all got their shots."

This is what McKnight calls "housekeeping." And in his work, he has the bearing of a Peace Corps volunteer, not an Army officer. "It's the little things that make the difference," he says. "It's not the big-picture project stuff, it's remembering to bring that fourth grader in Kiunga the English books that we promised her. It's remembering to bring the chief a new stainless-steel coffee thermos. And it's not just the material stuff, it's doing the interaction. It's humanizing the relationship. You know, this business of just giving stuff, it's dehumanized us and it's dehumanized them."

Promising to meet up with Sammy over drinks at a cocktail party hosted by the director of the National Youth Service next week in Nairobi, McKnight is out the door.

Cruising back to Manda Bay, we pass a couple of Kenya Wildlife Service trucks. McKnight has our Kenyan driver pull over, and McKnight exchanges information with the group's leader. "Always got to say hello," McKnight explains. "Those guys are the best security operating in this neck of the woods."

The captain's been in every room along Kenya's border with Somalia that Al Qaeda operatives have been in. He has interacted with every leader they've tried to recruit, telling me that clerics there immediately renounced these guys once their identities became known. While conservative, none of Kenya's Muslims seem, in McKnight's opinion, particularly attracted to radical ideology promoting violent separation from the outside world. Rather, the local mullahs are desperate to have roads improved so that teachers can be attracted from the cities to their remote villages. "Jihadism is a failed concept here," McKnight says. "It's like trying to sell a vegetarian steak."

We'll see.

He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.

The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.

Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.

"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."

Africom

For the Pentagon, the corporation that runs the only military on earth with a global reach, the world is carved into regional commands. Until now, Africa has been nothing but a strategic backwater -- the one place where America clearly had no interests and no bureaucratic structure to manage those nonexistent interests. Africa was divided haphazardly between European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. In a globalized world where bad actors live to exploit unguarded seams, we seemed to be providing Al Qaeda with several to exploit.

The U.S. military's strategic take on Africa has long been "We have no compelling interests there, and we sure as hell don't want anybody else to have any, either!" It was that attitude that got Washington nervous about the Soviet Union's seeming ideological penetration of the continent in the late 1970s, and it's what gets the Pentagon nervous today about China's obvious economic penetration.

But denying other great powers strategic interests in the region does not constitute a strategy of our own, nor does the great hunt for "high-value targets." Which is why America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon. The same can be said for China in the economic realm. To work, a lot of preconceptions about what an American military presence is really good for in underdeveloped countries will have to change. What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa.

Rounding a corner in Lamu's claustrophobic back alleys, Captain Steve McKnight leads a military group through a dirty, cluttered courtyard. It's happy hour, and this multinational force consists of six HOA liaison officers -- a Brit, a South Korean, two Ethiopians, a Djiboutian, and a French colonel -- and Admiral Moon, and the whole group is guarded by two "force protection" infantrymen who hover fore and aft like mother hens. We stick out like sore thumbs, and must conjure the past, when Africa was cynically sized up by visiting military officers for its potential to join what passed for globalization a century ago.

Barefoot, dirty kids, wearing clothes whose logos faded two or three owners ago, kick up the dust as they chase one another around the cracked plastic buckets that serve as their mother's laundry system. She's busy hanging clothes out to dry on lines strung between the buildings, and we're ducking under her wash, trying not to interfere.

The woman's husband sits on what passes for the stoop of their house -- a single slab of rock. He's busy slurping a bowl of soup.

The grizzled old fisherman looks up from his bowl at the parade of military officers in mufti and says in perfect English: "Welcome to another world."

Admiral Moon passes under the clothesline, straightens up, and stops. "Thanks. We feel welcome," he says.

The man dismisses us with his hand, turns away to finish his soup, and a few seconds later we're gone.

Blast from my past: "The Man Between War and Peace" (2008)

 

The Man Between War and Peace

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Photographs by Peter Yang

Esquire, April 2008, pp. 144-53.

As head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William "Fox" Fallon is in charge of American military strategy for the most troubled parts of the world, including the entire Middle East.  As hawks in Congress and at the Pentagon planned for war with China, Fallon instead urged cooperation with the Chinese.  And now, as the White House has been escalating the war of words with Iran, and seeming more determined to strike militarily before the end of this presidency, the admiral has instead urged restraint and diplomacy.  In the end, who will prevail, the president or the admiral?

1.

If, in the dying light of the Bush administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance. His name is William Fallon, although all of his friends call him "Fox," which was his fighter-pilot call sign decades ago. Forty years into a military career that has seen this admiral rule over America's two most important combatant commands, Pacific Command and now United States Central Command, it's impossible to make this guy -- as he likes to say -- "nervous in the service." Past American governments have used saber rattling as a useful tactic to get some bad actor on the world stage to fall in line. This government hasn't mastered that kind of subtlety. When Dick Cheney has rattled his saber, it has generally meant that he intends to use it. And in spite of recent war spasms aimed at Iran from this sclerotic administration, Fallon is in no hurry to pick up any campaign medals for Iran. And therein lies the rub for the hard-liners led by Cheney. Army General David Petraeus, commanding America's forces in Iraq, may say, "You cannot win in Iraq solely in Iraq," but Fox Fallon is Petraeus's boss, and he is the commander of United States Central Command, and Fallon doesn't extend Petraeus's logic to mean war against Iran.

So while Admiral Fallon's boss, President George W. Bush, regularly trash-talks his way to World War III and his administration casually casts Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as this century's Hitler (a crown it has awarded once before, to deadly effect), it's left to Fallon -- and apparently Fallon alone -- to argue that, as he told Al Jazeera last fall: "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful. I expect that there will be no war, and that is what we ought to be working for. We ought to try to do our utmost to create different conditions."

What America needs, Fallon says, is a "combination of strength and willingness to engage."

Those are fighting words to your average neocon -- not to mention your average supporter of Israel, a good many of whom in Washington seem never to have served a minute in uniform. But utter those words for print and you can easily find yourself defending your indifference to "nuclear holocaust."

How does Fallon get away with so brazenly challenging his commander in chief?

The answer is that he might not get away with it for much longer. President Bush is not accustomed to a subordinate who speaks his mind as freely as Fallon does, and the president may have had enough.

Just as Fallon took over Centcom last spring, the White House was putting itself on a war footing with Iran. Almost instantly, Fallon began to calmly push back against what he saw as an ill-advised action. Over the course of 2007, Fallon's statements in the press grew increasingly dismissive of the possibility of war, creating serious friction with the White House.

Last December, when the National Intelligence Estimate downgraded the immediate nuclear threat from Iran, it seemed as if Fallon's caution was justified. But still, well-placed observers now say that it will come as no surprise if Fallon is relieved of his command before his time is up next spring, maybe as early as this summer, in favor of a commander the White House considers to be more pliable. If that were to happen, it may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year and don't want a commander standing in their way.

And so Fallon, the good cop, may soon be unemployed because he's doing what a generation of young officers in the U.S. military are now openly complaining that their leaders didn't do on their behalf in the run-up to the war in Iraq: He's standing up to the commander in chief, whom he thinks is contemplating a strategically unsound war.

It's not that Fallon is risk averse -- anything but. "When I look at the Middle East," he says late one recent night in Afghanistan, "I'd just as soon double down on the bet."

When Fallon is serious, his voice is feathery and he tends to speak in measured koans that, taken together, say, Have no fear. Let Washington be a tempest. Wherever I am is the calm center of the storm.

And Fallon is in no hurry to call Iran's hand on the nuclear question. He is as patient as the White House is impatient, as methodical as President Bush is mercurial, and simply has, as one aide put it, "other bright ideas about the region." Fallon is even more direct: In a part of the world with "five or six pots boiling over, our nation can't afford to be mesmerized by one problem."

And if it comes to war?

"Get serious," the admiral says. "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

2.

It was Rumsfeld's fall that led to Fallon picking up his greatest and, inevitably, final mission. Smart guy that he is, Robert Gates, the incoming secretary of defense, finagled Fallon out of Pacific Command, where he'd been radically making peace with the Chinese, so that he could, among other things, provide a check on the eager-to-please General David Petraeus in Iraq.

As the head of U.S. Central Command, his beat is the desert that stretches from East Africa to the Chinese border -- a fractious little sandbox with Iraq on one edge and Afghanistan on the other and tens of thousands of American boots already on the ground in both. Pakistan's there in one corner, threatening to boil over and spill its nuclear jihadists forth upon the world; in another, the Gaza Strip continues to hum like a bowstring; and up north, the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, the 'Stans, rattle along under dictators who range from the merely authoritarian to the genuinely insane. And right in the middle lies Iran.

Where there's peace in the region, how do you keep it? Where there's war, how do you contain it or end it? Where there are threats, how do you counter them? For starters, you might want to make some friends. Which is what Fallon was doing recently on a tour of his area of responsibility.

It's late November in smoggy, car-infested Cairo, and I'm standing in the front lobby of a rather ornate "infantry officers club" on the outskirts of the old town center. Central Command's just finished its large, biannual regional exercise called Bright Star, and today Egypt's army is hosting a "senior leadership seminar" for all the attending generals. It's the barroom scene from Star Wars, with more national uniforms than I can count.

Judging by Fallon's grimace as his official party passes, I can tell that the cover story in this morning's Egyptian Gazette landed hard on somebody's desk at the White House. U.S. RULES OUT STRIKE AGAINST IRAN, read the banner headline, and the accompanying photo showed Fallon in deep consultation with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

Fallon sidles up to me during a morning coffee break. "I'm in hot water again," he says.

"The White House?"

The admiral slowly nods his head.

"They say, 'Why are you even meeting with Mubarak?'" This seems to utterly mystify Fallon.

"Why?" he says, shrugging with palms extending outward. "Because it's my job to deal with this region, and it's all anyone wants to talk about right now. People here hear what I'm saying and understand. I don't want to get them too spun up. Washington interprets this as all aimed at them. Instead, it's aimed at governments and media in this region. I'm not talking about the White House." He points to the ground, getting exercised. "This is my center of gravity. This is my job."

Fallon was quietly opposed to a long-term surge in Iraq, because more of our military assets tied down in Iraq makes it harder to come up with a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East, and he knew how that looked to higher-ups. He also knows that sometimes his statements on Iran strike the same people as running "counter to stated policy." "But look," he says, "yesterday I'm speaking in front of 250 Egyptian businessmen over lunch here in Cairo, and these guys keep holding up newspapers and asking, 'Is this true and can you explain, please?' I need to present the threats and capabilities in the appropriate language. That's one of my duties."

Fallon explains his approach to Iran the same way he explains why he doesn't make Al Qaeda the focus of his regional strategy as Centcom's commander: "What's the best and most effective way to combat Al Qaeda? We tend to make too much or too little a deal about it. I want a more even keel. I come from the school of 'walk softly and carry a big stick.'"

Fallon is the American at the center of every circle in this part of the world. And it is a testament to his skill, and to the failure of American diplomacy, that so much is left for this military man to do himself. He spends very little time at Centcom headquarters in Tampa and is instead constantly "forward," on the move between Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all the 'Stans of Central Asia.

He was with Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf the day before he declared emergency rule last fall. "I'm not the chief diplomat of this country, and certainly not the secretary of state," Fallon says in Kabul's Green Zone the next night. "But I am close to the problems." So, he says, that leaves him no choice but to work these issues, day in and day out.

Late that night, I am sitting with Fallon deep in the compound that encompasses the presidential palace and the International Security Assistance Force. We are alone inside the cramped office of ISAF's chief public-affairs officer.

Fallon had spent several hours with "Mushi" the day before in Islamabad, discussing his impending decision. The press coverage would emphasize how Fallon had sternly warned Musharraf not to impose emergency rule. But on this night, the admiral seems neither alarmed by the move nor resigned to its more negative implications. As he talks, Fallon casually takes off the elastic bands that clamp his camo pants to his regulation tan boots. He's beat after a long day that included meetings with President Karzai and a helicopter trip to Khost, Osama bin Laden's pre-9/11 Afghanistan stronghold. But it was the martial law next door in Pakistan that is the focus of the world. Fallon has been through this before.

"I didn't do any preaching," Fallon says about his talks with Musharraf. "In a previous life here, I had two extra constitutional events: a coup in Thailand, and a head of the military took over in Fiji. So I talked to the president for quite a while yesterday, both with the ambassador and then alone. He walked me through his rationale for what he was going to do and why he was going to do it and why he thought he had to do it. We talked about what planning he'd done for this, the downsides of this, what could happen, and how that could screw up a lot of things. At the end of the day, it's his country and he's the boss of it, and he's going to make his decision."

Before he walked into that room in Islamabad, Fallon had plenty of calls from Washington with instructions to pressure Musharraf down another path.

"I'll talk to him," Fallon replied. "There's an awful lot of china that could break. So I'll do it in a professional manner, because I still have to work with him."

As the admiral recounts the exchange, his voice is flat, his gaze steady. His calculus on this subject is far more complex than anyone else's. He is neither an idealist nor a fantasist. In Pakistan, he has the most volatile combination of forces in the world, yet he is deeply calm. "Did I tell President Musharraf this is not a recommended course of action? Of course. Did I tell him there are very negative effects that this could have? Of course. Is he aware of these? Yes.

"He's made his calculations. He feels very strongly that he's responsible for his country. His alternative is to step down. That would not be the most helpful thing for his country."

Why not?

"It's a very immature democracy. Look at the history of the place. It's rough. Musharraf knows his country. He knows what he's got. Their factions, their tribes. There's that group of folks that wants nothing more than to start war with India, another group that wants to take over the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], another group that wants to take over part of Baluchistan. He's got a tough road. Most guys in his position do."

As for Washington's notion that Benazir Bhutto's return to the country would fix all that, Fallon is pessimistic. He slowly shakes his head. "Better forget that."

Less than two months later, of course, his rueful prophesy will be confirmed when Bhutto is murdered by militants in Rawalpindi.

Meanwhile, Fallon argues that with U.S. plans in the offing to arm Pashtun tribes against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the FATA, now would not seem to be the time to be pushing the democracy agenda in Pakistan.

When Fallon asked Musharraf, "How long do you expect to have to do it?" the general answered, "Not long." And twenty-four hours later, Fallon counseled patience. After all, he said, think about how strong America's military relationship is with Egypt despite Hosni Mubarak's twenty-seven-year "emergency rule."

But that doesn't mean the relationship building remains limited to just Musharraf, and so the rest of Fallon's long day in Islamabad was spent networking with General Ashfaq Kayani, former head of Pakistan's much-feared Interservices Intelligence agency and new chief of army staff. If Musharraf were ever to step or be pushed aside, Kayani is a leading contender to replace him.

But more to the point for Fallon, Kayani becomes the operational point man for any increased collaboration between the U.S. military and the Pakistani army to tackle the issues of the FATA, which a Centcom senior intelligence official calls "the huge elephant in the closet."

That's putting it mildly. The tribal region is where, according to our own National Intelligence Estimate last year, Al Qaeda was reconstituting its operational capacity, and was now in its strongest position since 9/11.

As with Pakistan, Fallon keeps his powder dry when he deals with Iran. He doesn't react like Pavlov's dog to inflammatory rhetoric from inflammatory little men. He understands the basic rule of international diplomacy: Everybody gets a move.

"Tehran's feeling pretty cocky right now because they've been able to inflict pain on us in Iraq and Afghanistan." So the trick, in Fallon's mind, is "to try to figure out what it is they really want and then, maybe -- not that we're going to play Santa Claus here or the Good Humor Man -- but the fact is that everyone needs something in this world, and so most countries that are functional and are contributing to the world have found a way to trade off their strengths for other strengths to help them out. These guys are trying to go it alone in this respect, and it's a bad gene pool right now. It's not one with much longevity. So they play that card pretty regularly, and at some point you just kind of run out of games, it seems to me. You've got to play a real card."

And when the real cards finally get played, that's when Fallon will double down. 

3.

The first thing you notice is the face, the second is the voice.

A tall, wiry man with thinning white hair, Fallon comes off like a loner even when he's standing in a crowd.

Despite having an easy smile that he regularly pulls out for his many daily exercises in relationship building, Fallon's consistent game face is a slightly pissed-off glare. It's his default expression. Don't fuck with me, it says. A tough Catholic boy from New Jersey, his favorite compliment is "badass." Fallon's got a fearsome reputation, although no one I ever talk to in the business can quite pin down why. There are the stories of his wilder days as a young officer, not the partying stuff but more the variety of rules bent to the breaking point, and he's been known as anything but a dove in his various commands, which makes his later roles as champion for engagement with both China and Iran all the more strange.

In keeping with the naval-officer tradition of emasculating bluntness, Fallon can without remorse cut the nuts off peers and subordinates alike. But it is more the intimation of his ferocity than its exercise that has the greatest effect. And Fallon has recently discovered that his reputation can leave him open to stories that might sound true but are not. Last fall, it was reported in the press that Fallon had called General Petraeus an "ass-kissing little chickenshit" for being so willing to serve as the administration's political frontman on the Iraq surge. The old man had told reporters that it hadn't happened like that -- that that's not the way he operates, and, in fact, any time he talks with Petraeus, there are only two men in the room -- the admiral and the general -- and their exchanges remain private. And when they're not in the same room, "We e-mail each other constantly and talk by phone just about every day." Just the two of them, he says. No outsiders observing. The press sources had an overactive imagination, Fallon said. Now when the subject comes up, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand.

"Absolute bullshit," Fallon tells me.

Fallon and his executive assistant, Captain Craig Faller, say that they both suspect "staff agitation" to be behind the story. Interservice rivalry is mighty strong, and Admiral Fallon is the first navy man to be head of Centcom, so it's not hard for them to imagine somebody from the Army stirring the pot.

Fallon says the tip-off that the story was bogus was the word chickenshit. "My kids called me up laughing about that one, saying they knew the story wasn't true because I never use that word."

So put Fallon down as a "bullshit" and not a "chickenshit" kind of guy.

And in truth, Fallon's not a screamer. Indeed, by my long observation and the accounts of a dozen people, he doesn't raise his voice whatsoever, except when he laughs. Instead, the more serious he becomes, the quieter he gets, and his whispers sound positively menacing. Other guys can jaw-jaw all they want about the need for war-war with...whomever is today's target among D.C.'s many armchair warriors. Not Fallon. Let the president pop off. Fallon won't. No bravado here, nor sound-bite-sized threats, but rather a calm, leathery presence. Fallon is comfortable risking peace because he's comfortable waging war. And when he conveys messages to the enemies of the United States, he does it not in the provocative cowboy style that has prevailed in Washington so far this century, but with the opposite -- a studied quiet that makes it seem as if he is trying to bend them to his will with nothing but the sound of his voice.

So when, during a press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, Fallon whispers, "The public behavior of Iran has been unhelpful to the region," with his pissed-off glare and his slightly hoarse delivery, he is saying, I'm not making you an offer; I'm telling you what your options are right now.

"Iran should be playing a constructive role," he continues. "I hear this from every country in the region."

Translation: I've got you surrounded.

He'd rather not do it, but if he has to go to war, there won't be any anguish. Whatever qualms Fallon had about using force were exorcised long ago in the skies over Vietnam.

"I try to be reasonably predictable to my own people and very unpredictable to potential adversaries," he tells me.

No wonder Fallon sticks out like a sore thumb with the neocons, who have the unfortunate tendency to come off as unpredictable to their allies and predictable to their enemies. Which is the opposite of strategy. He knows this stuff cold, because he's had his hand on the stick for a very long time. The oldest of nine kids, Fallon's old man was a mailman in Merchantville, New Jersey, following his World War II stint in the Army Air Corps. As a boy, Fallon delivered newspapers, bagged groceries, worked in the local Campbell's Soup plant, and would become the first in his family to attend college. His dad's military experiences, along with those of several of his mom's brothers, naturally pushed him in the direction of West Point.

But his local congressman screwed up his application, and so Fallon chose the naval ROTC program at nearby Villanova, a Catholic haven that has produced three Centcom commanders. More than thirteen hundred carrier landings later, Fallon began his long climb through various combat command experiences -- including Desert Storm and Bosnia -- to the pinnacle of his profession: four four-star assignments that include vice chief of Naval Operations, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, and then boss of Pacific Command and Central Command in rapid succession.

Sitting in his Tampa headquarters office last fall, I asked Fallon if he considered the Centcom assignment to be the same career-capping job that it'd been for his predecessors. He just laughed and said, "Career capping? How about career detonating?"

At the time, I took that comment to be mere self-effacement. I have since come to think that Fallon was deadly serious.

Weeks later, back in that hotel lounge in Kazakhstan, after a brutal eighteen-hour day of wall-to-wall summits and meetings, Fallon is in a more pensive mood, admitting that he never expected to stay this long in the service. At sixty-three, he's one of the oldest flag officers in uniform, and if you count his ROTC time, he's been in for a whopping forty-five years total. And at this cookie-cutter chain hotel deep in the 'Stans, Fallon wears an expression that is equal parts fatigue and bewilderment. "I expected to be running a start-up company by now," he says.

But something else came up.

4.

When the admiral took charge of Pacific Command in 2005, he immediately set about a military-to-military outreach to the Chinese armed forces, something that had plenty of people freaking out at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. The Chinese, after all, were scheduled to be our next war. What the hell was Fallon doing?

Contrary to some reports, though, Fallon says he initially had no trouble with then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld on the subject. "Early on, I talked to him. I said, Here's what I think. And I talked to the president, too."

It was only after the Pentagon and Congress started realizing that their favorite "programs of record" (i.e., weapons systems and major vehicle platforms) were threatened by such talks that the shit hit the fan. "I blew my stack," Fallon says. "I told Rumsfeld, Just look at this shit. I go up to the Hill and I get three or four guys grabbing me and jerking me out of the aisle, all because somebody came up and told them that the sky was going to cave in."

But Fallon stood down the China hawks, because as much as military leaders have to plan for war, Fallon seems to understand better than most the role they also have to play in everything else beyond war. And like a good cop, Fallon doesn't want to fire his gun unless he absolutely has to. "I wouldn't have done what I did if I didn't think it was the right thing to do, which I still do. China is our most important relationship for the future, given the realities of people, economics, and location. We've got to work hard and make sure we do our best to get it right."

For Fallon, that meant an emphasis on opening new lines of communication and reducing the capacity for misunderstanding during times of crisis. But beyond that, it meant telling the Chinese, "If you want to be treated as a big boy and a major player, you've got to act like it."

If you want recognition of your power, then you have to accept the responsibility that comes with such power. That's the essential message Fallon delivered to the Chinese, and if that meant he was out of line with the Pentagon's take on rising China, then so be it. If it seemed as though Fallon was downplaying the threat of North Korea's missiles, it was because he preferred pushing a regional response that signaled a united front but still left the door open for North Korea to come in from the cold.

Fallon now brings the same approach to Iran in Central Command: "I want to go through something positive rather than a negative like Iran, which is a real problem." To that end, and right on the heels of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's meetings with Middle Eastern ministers of defense, Fallon held a similar summit of Persian Gulf chiefs of defense in Tampa earlier this year, something Centcom has never attempted before.

Could Iran be a participant in something like this down the road?

"Oh, absolutely, eventually. It's like the Chinese," he says. "It would be great if Iran turned into a team that decided to play ball in the end."

So how does something like this happen?

How do you turn Iran into a responsible regional player? How can the United States even approach Iran when the regime seems populated by only hard-liners and ultraconservatives?

You start down low, says one of Fallon's senior intelligence officials. For example, there's the shared interest in stemming the flow of narcotics from Afghanistan to Iran. "Iran has a huge drug problem," so that's "a potential cooperative area." More recently, the Iranians promised to stop the flow of munitions into Iraq, arguably contributing to the dramatic decrease in U. S. casualties from roadside bombs. After three sets of talks with the Iranians last summer that went nowhere, another round is being teed up. To Fallon, this sort of engagement is crucial, given America's overall lack of experience in dealing with Iran.

"I don't know as much as I'd like about Iran," he says. "You've got to go elsewhere, to people in other countries. There aren't many Americans who've had extensive experience with these guys. So that puts us both at a disadvantage. Plus they're secretive -- intentionally so -- about us. It makes it more of a challenge."

Early in his tenure at Pacific Command, Fallon let it be known that he was interested in visiting the city of Harbin in the highly controlled and isolated Heilongjiang Military District on China's northern border with Russia. The Chinese were flabbergasted at the request, but when Fallon's command plane took off one afternoon from Mongolia, heading for Harbin without permission, Beijing relented.

The local Chinese commander was beside himself. It was the first time in his life he had ever met an American military officer, and here he was at the bottom of a jet ramp waiting for the all-powerful head of the United States Pacific Command to descend. Then, to his horror, he realized that Fallon had brought his wife, Mary, along for the trip. Scrambling to arrange the evening banquet, the Chinese commander brought his own wife out in public for the first time ever. 

When the time came for dinner toasts, after the Chinese commander thanked Mrs. Fallon for coming, the admiral returned the favor by thanking the commander's wife for her many years of service as a military spouse. The commander's wife broke down in tears, saying it was the first time in her entire marriage that she had been publicly recognized for her many sacrifices.

And there was peace in our time.

5.

Fallon is what is called a "four-star action officer," meaning he tries to do too many things himself. He spends no more than a week each month in Tampa, Centcom's headquarters. Captain Faller jokes that if it weren't for federal holidays, Fallon's staff wouldn't know what a day off even was.

Fallon travels at least three weeks out of each month, spending, on average, two weeks in theater, meaning the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia. He travels to Iraq and Afghanistan every month like clockwork.

It's an unseasonably warm early-winter morning in Kabul, and Fallon is out in the field, walking his beat. And short of the president of the United States himself, this convoy is the richest and most opportune terrorist target in the world at present. So everybody wears the heavy armor. Weighed down by a helmet that feels like twenty pounds -- applied directly to my forehead -- and a desert-camo flak jacket that's decidedly heavier, I climb into the back of an armored Suburban that'll play third-on-a-match in Fallon's three-vehicle convoy. We are told to expect a bumpy ride, as ours is the vehicle that will routinely swerve from side to side to position itself to ram any vehicle that might approach the command vehicle from the side.

It's like riding in a car with the biggest asshole in the world behind the wheel. We almost pass Fallon's vehicle -- time after time -- only to slam on the brakes, slip back behind, lurch over to the other side, and do the same thing. A word of advice: Don't do this on a heavy breakfast. Fallon's personal enlisted aide, strapped in next to us, says our driver is actually being fairly mellow, on the admiral's orders. That's good to hear, as the streets are full of women and children on foot.

Thirty minutes after we've left the maze of barricades that line every entrance into the Green Zone, giving the place a sort of Maxwell Smart sense of never-ending doors, we arrive at a military airport where two Black Hawk UH-60's await. I ride with Fallon's senior aides in the second one. I am strapped into a four-part harness, the body armor keeping me well cocooned. Minutes after takeoff, as is the universal custom among military personnel, everyone but the personal-security-detail soldiers is asleep.

I scan the moonscape that is the mountains west of Kabul.

Traveling at high speed, we've been dipping ever so gently around the mountains as we travel to Bamiyan Province, ancient home to the giant Buddhas that are no more -- parting shots from the once and future Taliban. I can spot Fallon's Black Hawk out the window, framed from above by the sky and below by the barrel of a large machine gun sticking out of our helicopter's side. It's manned by a rather short fellow whose face is almost completely obscured by his Star Wars blast shield.

The view is amazing and reminds me why banditry and smuggling remain dominant industries here. Every road seems to lie at the bottom of a narrow, meandering ravine, and every walled compound looks like a fort out of America's Wild West days. Most of the time, the only things moving across this barren landscape are the shadows from our helos.

We alight from the Black Hawks after touching down on a strip of asphalt located in the center of the wide, flat plain that is Bamiyan Valley. Immediately your eyes are drawn to the dominant geological feature: cliff walls as high as skyscrapers that run along the valley's northern edge as far as the eye can see. Carved into the stunning vertical cliff are two empty frames, each running fifteen or so meters deep into the rock. Here stood the gigantic stone Buddhas carved hundreds of years ago by monks who lived in a warren of caves connecting the statues.

We're met at the landing zone by the Kiwi colonel, Brendon Fraher, who leads a small unit of New Zealand's finest civil-affairs specialists operating out of a small fort a few clicks away. The camp is home to a Provincial Reconstruction Team manned by the Kiwis, who work hand in glove with U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and ISAF personnel in coordinating coalition reconstruction aid to this province.

As we head to a convoy of armored Ford F-350 pickups, Fallon says that Fraher reports two enemy rockets landed nearby yesterday, but other than that, all's quiet. We speed off to meet the only female provincial governor in Afghanistan. Pulling up to the local government building, we pile out of the pickups and file into a large receiving room blanketed by modest Persian rugs and surrounded by even more modest couches. Just inside, we strip off the helmets and vests and heap them into a pile of fabric-covered metal and ceramic in the corner, all of it too heavy to hang on any coatrack.

Fallon -- who's done this sort of thing so often, he seems to glide through the protocol -- zeroes in on Governor Habiba Sarabi, a middle-aged woman of average height who's dressed in a reform sort of way -- head covered but face exposed. Despite all our accompanying security, you've got to believe she's the biggest Taliban target in the room.

Tea is served and formal greetings are exchanged with no need for translation, as the governor speaks English with calculated fluency, a skill she demonstrates a half hour into the meeting, when Fallon makes clear that he wants to hear her complaints.

It's a tricky moment for Sarabi, because she's basically critiquing Western aid and the military agencies represented by the officials surrounding her now. It's like bitching about your parents in front of Child Protective Services: Strike the right note and you might suddenly find yourself free of them for good.

Speaking about a road long-promised by Kabul and the coalition that would connect this isolated valley to Afghanistan's central circular artery, the Ring Road, she suddenly blurts out, "This is three years that the Bamiyan people have been waiting for this road!"

Fallon aggressively queries the assembled officials in order, running from the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy to the USAID leader to the ISAF officers and, finally, the local Kiwi PRT commander. Each offers a typically complex, bureaucratic response in turn. Glancing at the governor, I can almost feel her anger rising.

With obvious passion, Sarabi interrupts the proceedings with a stream of complaints about the length and complexity of USAID's planning process. This is where her fluency in English suddenly falters, as Sarabi's sentences start trailing off, leading the assembled officials to fill in the blanks.

"It is very... "

"Long?" chimes in the USAID official.

"And there is such a lack of...ahh." Sarabi raises a finger to her chin, scanning the far wall as if the word lingers there.

"Coordination?" offers the deputy chief of mission.

"It all makes me so incredibly...how do you say?"

"Mad?" one officer suggests.

"Depressed?"

"Angry?"

It's almost like an auction now as the bids keep rising. I'm just about ready to toss in my personal favorite, "pissed off," when Fallon weighs in with "frustrated" -- no question mark.

Sarabi turns toward the admiral, a sly smile passes across her face.

Fallon starts probing yet again, this time cutting off officials, as their answers obscure rather than illuminate.

Emboldened, the governor piles on with a new complaint: Every winter, a local river becomes impassable for a local migratory tribe that is then stranded outside the valley.

Fallon asks the deputy chief of mission, "Are you aware of this?"

The DCM replies, "No, I wasn't, and I promise to look into that."

Fallon's on a roll now, and the governor is beaming, but his efforts soon head into a bureaucratic cul-de-sac that no one in the room can fix. Kabul's central government simply does not prioritize this heartland province. Fallon asks the senior American ISAF officer if the coalition could arrange a Bailey pontoon bridge just for the winter months. In return, he gets a complex answer about past surveys.

Fallon cuts him off and turns to the governor. "I tell you what, I'm not getting a satisfactory answer here. I'll be honest. I don't think we can do anything for you this winter. However, I will try to get, from many miles away, a screwdriver big enough to push this process for next year."

The governor immediately thanks Fallon for his promise.

Fallon doesn't forget details like that. Six months earlier, he noticed that the American flag flying outside the Hyatt hotel in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, was frayed. He had told one of the defense attachés at the U.S. embassy to get it replaced. The beaten-up flag was still there when we arrived. It's late on the fifth straight day of nonstop travel that has taken Fallon's entourage from Florida to Qatar to Pakistan to Afghanistan and now to Kyrgyzstan. Tomorrow, Tajikistan, where he'll have to put up with the Putin clone who is president. So at the moment, maybe the flag is not all that's frayed. His gaze fixed on it, Fallon quietly repeats his order, his voice so low and so quiet that you can almost hear somebody's next promotion getting axed. 

6.

Unlike his Arabic-speaking predecessor, Army General John Abizaid, Fox Fallon wasn't selected to lead U.S. Central Command for his regional knowledge or cultural sensitivity, but because he is, says Secretary of Defense Gates, "one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today."

If anything has been sorely missing to date in America's choices in the Middle East and Central Asia, it has been a strategic mind-set that consistently keeps its eyes on the real prize: connecting these isolated regions in a far more broadband fashion to the global economy. Instead of effectively countering the efforts of others (e.g., the radical Salafis, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabists, Russia's security services, China's energy sector) who would fashion such connectivity to their selfish ends, Washington has wasted precious time focusing excessively on transforming the political systems of Iraq and Afghanistan, as though governments somehow birth functioning societies and economies instead of the other way around.

Waiting on perfect security or perfect politics to forge economic relationships is a fool's errand. By the time those fantastic conditions are met in this dangerous, unstable part of the world, somebody less idealistic will be running the place -- the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, Iranians, Saudis. That's why Fallon has been aggressively hawking his southern strategy of encouraging a north-south "energy corridor" between the Central Asian republics and the energy-starved-but-booming Asian subcontinent (read: Islamabad down through Bangalore and then east to Kolkata), with both Afghanistan and Pakistan as crucial conduits.

On this trip, he's been shepherding a new bridge that links isolated Tajikistan with Afghanistan. The potential here is huge: Tajikistan is 95 percent mountainous and extremely food dependent. Its main asset is its untapped hydroelectric capacity. Afghanistan presents just the opposite picture -- food to export but most of the country lacks an effective electric grid.

So what should America be pushing first in both states? Free-and-clear elections for massively impoverished populations, or whatever it takes to get Tajikistan's resource with Afghanistan's resource? Which path, do you think, would scare the Taliban and Al Qaeda more? To Fallon, there isn't even a question to answer.

But this part of the world is defined by its fortresses, and is not known for willingly connecting to the outside world. Tajikistan's powerful security chief, Khayriddin Abdurahimov, had been doing his best to gum up the works on the just-finished bridge, which he allowed to open for business only four hours a day. Having just achieved control of the country's border-security agency, Abdurahimov believed the bridge made the country vulnerable to Afghanistan's dangerous drugs and nothing more.

On the eve of Fallon's arrival, President Emomali Rahmon intervened and extended the bridge's operating schedule to eight hours a day, admitting to Fallon in their first summit that he needs to do more to champion the economic potential.

But Fallon doesn't stop there. Immediately following his meeting with Rahmon, he meets face-to-face with the highly secretive Abdurahimov, who almost never meets with foreign officials.

Just as with Musharraf, Fallon does not preach. He suggests, he encourages, he cajoles, he offers, and he debates, but he does not preach -- save the gospel of economic connectivity. Even there, he is not eager to appear competitive with any regional power. "I don't want to create the impression that we're just replacing the Russians," he says.

He just wants a damn bridge.

Fallon gets his bridge. 

7.

Fallon's got a spread in a little town in Montana. The streams of this town seem to be full of eighteen-inch fish that he says he'd like to take a crack at someday soon. But the fish of Fallon's town are safe for the moment.

While Condoleezza Rice and the State Department manage a vague endgame on the two-state solution in Palestine, Gates and Fallon have begun the regional-security dialogue that's truly regional in scope.

The rollback of Al Qaeda seems to be both real and continuing, save for the border region of Pakistan. And to gain greater flexibility to plan for the region, Fallon says that he is determined to draw down in Iraq. One of the reasons Fallon says he banished the term "long war" from Centcom's vocabulary is that he believes real victory in this struggle will be defined in economic terms first, and so the emphasis on war struck him as "too narrow." But the term also signaled a long haul that Fallon simply finds unacceptable. He wants troop levels in Iraq down now, and he wants the Afghan National Army running the show throughout most of Afghanistan by the end of this year. Fallon says he wants to move the pile dramatically in the time he's got remaining, however long that may be. And he gets frustrated. "I grind my teeth at the pace of change."

Freeing the United States from being tied down in Iraq means a stronger effort in Afghanistan, more focus on Pakistan, and more time spent creating networks of relationships in Central Asia. With Syria and Lebanon recently added to Centcom's area of responsibility, look to see Fallon popping up in Beirut and Damascus regularly. And he says he is more than willing to take on Israel and Palestine to boot, which for now remains a bastard stepchild of European Command.

The Persian Gulf right now is booming economically, and Fallon wants to harness that power to connect the failed states that pockmark the landscape to the outside world. In this choice, he sees no alternative.

"What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They're like sewers, and they begin to fester. It's bad for business. And when it's bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we're back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you're moving backward."

Fallon has no illusion about solving the Middle East or Central Asia during his tenure, but he's also acutely conscious that with globalization's rapid advance into these regions he may well be the last Centcom commander of his kind. Already Fallon sees the inevitability and utility of having a Chinese military partnership at Centcom, and he'd like to manage that inevitably from the start rather than have to repair damage down the line.

"I'd like to continue to do things that will be useful to the world and its inhabitants," he says. "I've seen a lot of good things, and I've seen a lot of stupid things."

And then there is Iran. No sooner had the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei signaled a willingness to deal with any American but George W. Bush, and no sooner had Fallon signaled America's willingness to refrain from bombing Tehran, than a little international incident occurred.

Just the kind of incident that doughy neocons dream sweetly about. Right after the new year, three American ships were passing through the Strait of Hormuz, exchanging normal greetings with Gulf State navies, checking them out as they passed. The same with the Iranian navy. And then, suddenly, small Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps boats started speeding toward the American ships, showing, the admiral says, "very stupid behavior, showboating, and provocative taunts. Given that it was a small boat that did in the USS Cole, this was very dangerous behavior."

The Iranians dropped boxes in the water, simulating mines.

"Remember," he says, "my first day on this job, I was greeted by the IRGC snatching the British sailors, and so it was a sense of here we go again. You wonder, Are they really acting on their own, because the pattern seems clear."

Fallon's eyes narrow and his voice becomes that whisper: "This is not how a country that wants to be a big boy in the neighborhood behaves. How are we supposed to take these guys seriously as players in the region? You'd like to deal with them as big-league players, but when they do this, it's very tough."

As before, there is the text and the subtext. Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.

And time will tell whether being reasonable will cost Admiral William Fallon his command.

Blast from my past: "The State of the World"--with commentary track (2007)

 

The State of the World

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Illustration by Joe McKendry

Esquire, May 2007, pp. 108-15 & 136.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

In this exclusive post, writer Thomas P.M. Barnett reassesses and updates his overview of the global geopolitical situation. [DATED: 30 April 2007]

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire asked me to write a blog post on "The State of the World" in order to extend or update it a bit. So... This behemoth weighs in at roughly 6,500 words -- 500 longer than the actual piece. Oh well, Marty Scorsese always out-blabs his own movies when he does commentary, but that’s the whole idea, is it not?

What most people don’t realize is that, if an article appears in the May issue, it comes out in early April, which means it goes to the printers in early March, which means you edited it in February and probably wrote it in late January or early February, meaning you researched or reported it back in December. Now, when it’s a set piece (e.g., you interview somebody), the timeline’s not so crucial, but when you’re presenting the “State of the World,” you’re trapped somewhat in dealing with current events (duh!), so you’re not only dealing with some hedging language here and there, you risk some great intervening event ruining your whole party.

I had my share of fear in that regard on this piece, in large part because it seemed like Bush was launching a number of diplomatic initiatives around the dial as the piece was “shipping out” (meaning, going to the printers in early March). So factoring in all those possibilities was crucial, and yet, I had high expectations that no serious breakthroughs would be achieved, in keeping with the tone of the piece (Bush’s post-presidency). I’m unhappy to say I wasn’t disappointed by the administration, which just confirms my judgment rendered long ago that Bush’s post-presidency basically began with Katrina (can’t get it done in Iraq, can’t get it done at home), hence the general trend of rising backtalk from the world (and the Dems), less cooperation from major allies, and more powers taking matters into their own hands (including Nancy Pelosi), seems to proceed apace.

What I’m going to do in this post is this:

1. Deconstruct the thinking behind each segment, providing director’s commentary, so to speak. 
2. Extend each segment by rendering a judgment as to how it’s held up over the past few weeks. 
3. Give you a sense of where my thinking is going now on each segment.

So, I’ll give you a sort of a past-present-future troika for each segment.

I’ll be as blabby as I g -- damn wanna be, because that’s how I blog, so don’t wade through all this unless you’re naturally a “Disc 2” kind of DVD watcher and love this sort of backstory detail (like most egomaniacs, I love to deconstruct my own thinking most of all).

Let me start with the extended title page and intro.

The State of the--

No, screw that. Let me start with the cover!

The May 2007 Cover 

Deconstruction: I totally approve of Halle Berry on the cover.

How it holds up: Like most men my age, I’ve never quite gotten over Monster’s Ball and like to be reminded of that fact as frequently as possible. 

Looking further ahead: I may try to link up with fellow Hoosier Tom Chiarella on the subject. Halle “interviewed” him for the piece.

As I’ve over said about working for Esquire, it’s not like I was the guy who shot Britney Spears when she wasn’t wearing any pants. But I have met the people who did...

Okay, back to the original plan. 

Now that the Bush presidency is over, it's time those of us left behind assess the damage and seize the opportunities. There's plenty of both. But there's no time to waste, so let's get started: the good news, the bad news, and the news that could change everything.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This was the title of the piece from basically the moment Mark proposed it to me in early December. As soon as he planted that seed, I started setting aside articles from my blog collection that I thought were appropriate. Easy to do at the end of the year, because everyone’s writing that sort of stuff.

I was excited to try the piece and wasn’t particularly intimidated by the scope, because it’s the sort of world-survey stuff I grew up on during my early years of doing strategic planning for the Navy at the Center for Naval Analyses. Seriously, we’d just sit around cranking this sort of stuff like we were doing daily warm-up exercises or something -- you know, sharpening-the-blade kind of activity.

About two weeks before I started brainstorming on the structure of the piece at the beginning of Feb, I interviewed my old mentor at CNA, Hank Gaffney, who’s famous for generating this sort of material in his sleep. I simply talked him through a tour of the world’s major regions and major relationship and major crises, and we calibrated our sense of what was going on. It was an up-front sanity check for me to make sure I wasn’t going off on any benders. I later had Hank read the piece for any boners that stuck out, because when you write at this level, you naturally step on toes and transgress reality now and then, because you’re compositing a lot of trends and material and bold statements like that can be poorly rendered if you’re not careful. Hank caught a few, gave me several parentheticals to insert, and generally validated the piece (no, he doesn’t agree with every take I offer here, but I don’t expect that from anyone).

Now, the big question for me on this piece was structure. How to do the tour without being highly repetitive (I mean, everything feeds into everything else) and highly contradictory (when you’re whipping through things, it’s always appropriately ass-covering to say, “on the other hand” every other sentence)? Plus, it’s just the nature of the time we’re in now that it’s both pregnant with possibility and dulled by a sense of interregnum: you can see so much potential right on the horizon, you just know that most of it will wait until Bush is out of office. On the other hand … (see how easy that is!), I know from other end-of-term times that a lot of below-the-radar stuff does actually get accomplished in the waning months of a presidency, often by the most anonymous of people, so you don’t want to shut any doors on stuff.

To that end, I kept finding myself struggling to define the governing structure of the piece. Would I just run Bush out of town on a rail? Would I give you the half-glass-full wherever possible and leave open the notion of the great foreign policy correction designed to secure the legacy?

Then I thought: I’ve already given Bush the two “Mr. President” pieces, and since he had his chances (as all presidents do), now was the time to take stock in that early-post-presidency sense (my argument on the blog for months now), while simultaneously setting up the conversation for what comes next, since the election’s preliminaries are already overshadowing this presidency. So I was tempted to offer some grading scheme, although that always seems so prosaic. I thought about thumbs-up or thumbs-down (so very Rome). I even toyed with glass-half-full or empty. None were rocking my boat.

I knew there was a host of issues I wanted to cover, so I spent the entire Friday (about ten hours straight) before the Super Bowl just sitting in my home office above the garage writing list after list on my white board, seeing what would stick. I kept struggling with a sequence for the issues, but each time I tried to craft one, I realized I was setting myself up for a particular line of argument, and I didn’t want to commit to any one line of reasoning. I wanted to go bang-bang through the subjects, saying what I felt was going well, where I was scared, and where I thought the next possibilities were.

Now, when I’m trying to dissect the world like that, I often build a big matrix full of questions to organize and deconflict the material (so you don’t repeat too much). I tried a variety of approaches, but kept coming back to “the good,” “the bad,” and “the wildcard” (or basically, the optimistic view, the pessimistic view, and what could change either). I’m just anal enough to like a round number (ten, dozen, “sweet sixteen,” etc.), so I kept dicking around with the number of issues to cover, mentally deconflicting the implied components.

Once I had the list down, I started to fill in the blanks on good-bad-wildcards, but I kept thinking, “This is going to be a waste of time because I won’t structure the piece like this.” I kept hoping that giving it this sort of structure would reveal an obvious narrative logic, but it didn’t.

Finally, it dawned on me: just forget the narrative logic and make the piece modular. That way I didn’t have to choose whether I’d go overboard on Bush either way. Instead, I’d give both arguments plus the look-ahead segue. Plus, if I kept it super-modular, I could avoid a lot of bridging language that would force me to shorthand a lot of material (when you write in the essay structure, you constantly have to write yourself into and out of paragraphs, and so you spend a lot of words making all those transitions happen). So doing entries meant I could keep it bang-bang but likewise dense, plus I could go both ways on the judgment and intrigue you with the wildcards as provocative projections.

Once I started thinking this way, the piece seemed a lot easier. Plus, it felt like I was -- in many ways -- going back to the “map” article and coming full circle on the Bush administration: here I would just repeat the tight briefing style of delivery that Mark had talked me into on the hotspot survey we added to the ’03 map.

Having settled all that (and clearing it with Mark by phone), I quickly ginned out my matrix on the 16 subjects, and decided I would write them without thinking about sequence, so they’d need to stand alone, material-wise. I planned each segment to be about op-ed column size, or about 700-750 words, which gave me about 300 for good and 300 for bad and maybe a quick 150 for the wildcard. Pretty tight quarters.

I wrote half of the entries over the next day (Saturday) and the other half on Sunday, finishing just before the kickoff of the Super Bowl. As I penned them, they felt great, so I felt pretty relaxed about how the edit would go with Mark.

How it holds up: Mark wrote the expanded sub-title himself, and once I saw it, I felt a bit shocked about committing myself to the post-presidency idea. But when I thought about it more, I realized this was just Mark recognizing a major theme from my blog over the past year, and either I believed in that analysis or I didn’t. I did, so I got comfortable with the opening and remain so to this day.

As I noted above, Bush and Co. (specifically Rice) gave me a bit of a scare in late February and early March when it seemed like he was finally getting around to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation to start engaging the region as a whole in serious diplomacy (especially coming on the heels of the announced freeze deal with Kim Jong Il), but as we’ve seen since, all of that’s gone basically nowhere, in large part, I would argue, because everyone’s discounting this presidency pretty heavily, meaning they’re balancing the utility of any deal now versus waiting on possible bargains down the road in the administration’s last days or the successor administration’s first days.

So when I read the title and intro today, I’m still very cool with it. We’re giving you the state of the world, so do with it what you will, America.

Looking further ahead: I keep coming back to this prediction I made when I first started writing about the emerging Bush post-presidency: everyone in the world is going to reduce prices by about half whenever the new president arrives in Jan ’09. By that I mean it’ll be 50 percent off the top of any implied price for renewed cooperation for America. Everyone will give the new president a massive discount because everyone will be so happy to have America-the-Normal back. Frankly, they miss us when we’re gone.

The only guy I think who might not get that discount would be McCain, because of his stand on Iraq. Everyone else seems so clearly solutions-based in their thinking -- as in, how does America get what it wants out of the Middle East as soon as possible? -- that I don’t see their elevation to the presidency signaling anything but the notion that everything (and everyone) is on the table for negotiation come Jan ’09.

No, that doesn’t mean any “selling down the river” stuff to any ridiculous degree. It just means flexibility and pragmatism and deal-making will be the order of the day. I think everyone around the world will welcome that new tone and that it’ll pay off, because -- again -- the world misses America when we go off on a bender like Bush on Iraq.

 

001 Iran: The Coming Distraction

Good News: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered a worse midterm election than George Bush, with his political allies losing metro elections all over the country and his mullah mentors failing to grab seats in the crucial Assembly of Experts, a college-of-cardinals body that'll pick Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's successor. With the supreme leader on a Francisco Franco-like deathwatch, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani's stunning resurrection (crushed by Ahmadinejad in the '05 presidential election, now he's the Assembly's deputy mullah) suggests our latest Muslim "Hitler" is nothing more than a Persian Newt Gingrich. And over the next two years, we're looking at a potential wholesale swap-out of the senior leadership, and if the result isn't more pragmatism, expect supremely pissed-off college students to do more than just chant "Death to the dictator," like they did recently during an Ahmadinejad speech. Iran is crumbling from within, economically and socially, much like the late-Brezhnevian Soviet Union. In any post-Khamenei scenario, Rafsanjani could easily play Andropov (patron) to the rise of some would-be reformer (like the currently ascending mayor of Tehran) who'd likely try to restructure (perestroika, anyone?) the failed revolutionary system as a going concern in the global economy. Bush's recent full-court press -- UN sanctions, moving a carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, arresting Iranian operatives in Iraq -- has put the mullahs on the defensive and might end up being very clever. But the president's got to be careful. The minute he gets violent, Beijing and Moscow are outta here, not to mention the American public.

Bad News: Iran is successfully spreading its influence throughout the region, with significant regime-bonding investment strategies unfolding in southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But since that's intimately tied to the price of oil, Iran's strategy is subject to Saudi containment. Tehran's mullahs may put a muzzle on Ahmadinejad now and dump him in two years, but they still want the bomb (and no, that's not an irrational desire after we toppled regimes to their east and west). As far as they're concerned, America's wars to date have left Iran the regional kingpin, and they're right. So Tehran might as well start acting like it while taking the necessary precautions against an inevitable downstream military confrontation with Washington. (Did I mention that the Persians gave us chess?) Iran's shown itself to be a crafty asymmetrical warrior, using proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to demonstrate that it can conflate the region's conflicts at will, so it is not to be underestimated. The mullahs get deterrence all right, as well as preemptive war. If you're unconvinced, talk to Israel as it continues to lick its wounds from last summer.

Wild Card: As Tehran nears the bomb, Israel may well strike first, convinced the second Holocaust is imminent due to Ahmadinejad's skill at turning phrases. A signal of the end times to many believers, it may well be Dick Cheney's plan all along. The problem is, Israel's not up for much more than a token strike (unless it goes preemptively nuclear, at which point all bets are off), so having Israel try and fail conventionally may be a necessary precursor for Bush's -- and the Saudis' -- final solution. But don't expect Iran's pragmatic mullahs to sit on their hands in the meantime. They recognize a losing hand when they see one and may well trade off on Lebanon and Shiite Iraq if Israel's push comes to Bush's shove. At that point, everyone will recognize that Riyadh -- and not Tehran -- really won the Iraq war.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: To me, this was always the most animating aspect of the list: the sense that Bush is gearing up for another war. As I’ve written in my blog extensively, I believe Bush and Cheney were clearly setting Iran up for a major military strike/war before the end of their second term. You could just see it in the whole re-running of the WMD drama. No surprise, but Tehran didn’t sit on its ass waiting for the blow, using their proxies in the region to launch a pre-emptive asymmetrical strike against our proxies in the region (i.e., Hamas and Hezbollah target Israel), striking with great purpose before the midterm elections rolled around over here. By doing this, Tehran’s basically said, “You think I can’t conflate this mother-f -- ker anytime I want? Then you don’t get this whole Shiia thing, do you?”

And no, Bush doesn’t get it.

How it holds up: The vaunted F2F opportunity at the regional peace conference on Iraq came and went without so much as a whimper (seriously, read any press on it?). Bush continues the press on Iran with targeted sanctions and the plus-up in naval activity arrives on schedule, but since Bush is not really offering any out here, or even a serious venue to discuss such an exit for Iran, nothing seems to be happening.

Everyone got excited when the Russians seemed to yank Tehran’s chain on back-payments for the nuke work, but that’s just a contractor bitching, because Moscow really does want to protect Tehran’s back on this, not because of any ideological solidarity. This is strictly business, nothing personal.

China continues to play along and why the hell not? If it works (the squeeze), then Iran’s not a hotspot anymore and China can access its oil and gas in peace. If it goes badly and the West tries to shut down Iranian oil exports, then China will just step in and steal Japan’s share (something Tokyo freaks about silently on the sidelines).

The EU and its companies will string this out as long as possible. No one wants to lose access to Iran, because once lost, companies find it extremely hard to get back in again down the road. Frankly, it’s better for us if such companies don’t lose access, because eventually our solution set becomes reconnecting Iran to the world through business.

As for the recent British hostages deal, as far as I was concerned, that was just another asymmetrical strike against our proxies in the region. We slap on some harder sanctions and start snatching Iranian operatives in Iraq, so Tehran fights back by grabbing some Brits: all designed to signal without triggering direct conflict with the U.S. What’s the signal? Tehran wants to deal.

Hardliners on our side keep saying, “But we’ve offered Iran plenty in the past and it keeps saying no.” That’s bullshit. We’ve never offered Iran anything of value that it really wants. Basically, Tehran wants some sense of regime security and its place in the sun and Bush doesn’t want to offer either, so Iran keeps fighting back the best it can and we keep taking the pain, hoping we can drive up Iran’s pain in a nastier way that will bring them to the table on our terms. That won’t happen because Iran won’t roll over on the nuclear question so long as the U.S. threatens regime change.

As I wrote in Esquire back in early 2004, I’d temporize on the nukes (Iranian nukes will change nothing) and cut what deals are necessary to get us relief on Iraq, setting up the mullahs for the soft-kill through expanded economic connectivity. I’d send Nixon to China (read Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant book, “Nixon and Mao” for all the fascinating parallels here) and finesse Iran over the longer haul. But since the Bush crowd is so impatient and so godawfully Manichean in its mindset, there’s just no chance that’ll start before Jan ’09, when we’ll still be trying to figure out how to find a place for Iran in the Middle East. So Bush punts on that one.

Looking further ahead: It does worry me how so many in Congress and so many of the prez candidates are mouthing hot-and-heavy on Iran, like it’s time to check who’s gone limp on this litmus test, because it’s all just so Rovian to fall into that trap. Sometimes when you watch lips moving you hear the House of Saud talking, sometimes you hear AIPAC, and sometimes it’s just the usual end-of-times crap that’s so popular nowadays (“Iran gets the bomb and our Savior returns to protect the Holy Land!”).

The overwhelming presumption of Iranian irrationality just doesn’t impress me. We’re just not being very rational ourselves, just because both the Saudis and the Israelis are working overtime to get us hot and bothered enough to do their dirty work for them. It’s bad enough that we swallow our enemies’ propaganda so willingly, but when our “allies” do it, we should know better. No one should expect the Saudis or the Israelis to look out for anybody but themselves.

Our interests on Iran seem clear: we have to find a place for it in the Middle East. The revolution has failed and the society is sinking fast. It feels empowered in the region because of the Shiia revival, but that’s got a short half-life. The mullahs know their long-term situation is not bright, and the smart ones realize that their bargaining position will never be better than it is now (e.g., America hurting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re close to the bomb, Shiia revival, Bush’s post-presidency), so the time for deal-making is at hand. Would we get a fair shake from Tehran? Hell no. They’d try and take us for everything they could, given our difficulties in Iraq, but here is where our silly need for clear “victories” does us in. They are plenty of ways to skin this cat, but Bush seems intent on just rerunning the whole Iraq approach again on Iran, and that’s not going to solve Iran prior to the end of the term, and that means Iran will continue to screw us as much as possible on the subject of Iraq in the meantime.

And that really sucks if you have any loved ones in Iraq right now.

002 The Middle East: The Big Bang Theory

Good News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Cynically expressed, the Big Bang strategy was always about speeding the killing necessary to trigger systemic change, so the worse Iraq becomes, the more the process picks up speed. I mean, you can't get to the punch line any faster than by forcing the House of Saud to deal directly with an Al Qaeda hornet's nest right next door in the Sunni Triangle (the Saudis' first choice was a security fence on the border -- go figure!) while simultaneously triggering Riyadh's proxy war with Tehran in Baghdad. Toss in some Israeli nukes and finally the neocons have really got this party started, because those are the three knockdown fights they believe need to unfold before any serious restructuring of the region's power relationships can occur. A lesser variant has Washington prying Damascus away from Tehran, holding down the fort in Baghdad, and getting Riyadh's tacit approval for Israel's preemptive war on Iran in exchange for a supported solution on Palestine, but that almost seems boring in comparison.

Bad News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Bush and the neocons never had a clue about what was naturally coming on the heels of Saddam's fall (i.e., the Shiite revival) any more than they had a plan about Iraq's postwar occupation. Their in-progress Iranification of the Long War against the global jihadist movement makes even less sense than Bush's poorly planned decision to invade Saddam's secularized Iraq. The Salafist jihad spearheaded by Al Qaeda is exclusively Sunni derived, so why add into the mix their hated enemies, the Shiites? Bush is like the barroom brawler who enters the joint and declares, "I'm taking all of you bastards on" -- read: axis of evil -- "right here and now!" His administration has committed the fatal mistake that Clinton deftly avoided in the Balkans: They've let the conflicts accumulate instead of tackling them sequentially. The White House's unfolding Iran strategy is nothing more than an ass-covering exercise on Iraq and Afghanistan -- a third splendid little war to divert attention from the two previous failures.

Wild Card: If there was ever a time for Al Qaeda to cripple Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, now is it. Delivered with the right fingerprints, Al Qaeda might be able to get just enough unity among the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for a full-blown war with Iran. Nothing would set China on a more aggressive course regarding its long-term access to energy in the region, and therein lies Osama bin Laden's best hope for setting "rising Asia" against an aging West in the Persian Gulf.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Of all the segments, this one drove me to the good-bad-wildcard approach the most, because I’m so clearly of two minds on the subject. Yes, it would have been better if we had done Iraq right from the start, but since we didn’t and we’re stuck with Bush through Jan ’09, there’s almost the sense that the worst Iraq gets, the more it is likely to foster desperate and dangerous change in the region, and since any change beats the status quo, you have almost this perverse, pro-Bush desire to hope that Bush continues to screw up Iraq so that the follow-on regional dynamics are as profoundly upsetting as possible.

Then you start getting paranoid and wondering if Bush and Cheney do that on purpose, and thus you get the tone of this segment.

How it holds up: Because this is meta-analysis of region-wide possibilities, this one was going to get screwed up by current events only if Rice pulled off some magic at the regional peace conference on Iraq, which she didn’t even seem to try. I know it seems like Sy Hersh is going overboard on the Iran war scenario, but I honestly think it’s very important to sound that alarm early and often on Bush and Cheney because -- again -- left to their own devices, I do think they were targeting Iran for the end of the second term. Given the macho factor in DC on the Iran issue, I do worry that the right trolley car coming down the street will suddenly become enough for Bush to sell his next war on his way out the door, bequeathing to the next president a serious lemon just like his old man did to Clinton on Somalia (“Have a nice presidency, asshole!”).

Looking further ahead: The more I think about the Middle East in grand historical terms, the more I believe that its capacity for self-destruction will do itself in. Yes, everyone will continue to buy its oil and gas, but no one will be planning to keep the region in its future requirements and everyone will slowly but deeply discount their connectivity to the place. To the extent that happens and alternative energy dependencies are pursued, the Middle East can be effectively firewalled from globalization’s future, making Africa’s future bright by default (the last great untapped labor pool).

The bright spot? The smallest Gulf states seem to be pursuing the most innovative and intelligent economic connectivity with the outside world. If they can have a Singapore-like demonstration effect and pull the others along, then there’s reason for optimism. Again, the scarier we make Iraq look, the more these countries are incentivized to imagine a different future -- sad to say.

Then again, fear is a great motivator toward change.

003 Globalization: Life During Wartime

Good News: The world has never enjoyed a bigger and more dynamic global economy than the one we're riding high on right now, with unprecedented amounts of poverty reduction concentrated in China and India alone. Advanced economies are expanding steadily in the 2 to 3 percent range, while emerging markets dash along in the 7 to 8 percent range, giving us a stunning -- and steady -- global growth rate of roughly 5 percent. Rising Asia will add upwards of a billion new consumers (i.e., people with disposable income) in the coming years, providing the biggest single impulse the global economy has ever experienced. Financial flows in 2005 hit $6 trillion, more than double the total in 2002. If terrorists are running the world, nobody has told the global financial markets.

Bad News: There's plenty to be nervous about, especially if you're a white-collar worker who's always assumed your job can't be outsourced. (Hint: If your graduate degree involved tons of memorizing facts, you're in the crosshairs.) But with financial panics becoming far less frequent and damaging (e.g., a recent scare in Thailand passed without turning contagious), the biggest dangers now are political. Trade protectionism is on the rise (keep an eye on our Democratic Congress), and the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Round is going nowhere because the West refuses to reduce agricultural subsidies. But neither trend surprises, as a rising tide lifts everybody's demands when it comes to trade deals.

Wild Card: A supply shock in the maxed-out oil industry, which faces a persistently rising long-term global demand due overwhelmingly to skyrocketing requirements in emerging markets led by China and India. "Peak oil" predictions are overblown, focusing exclusively on easily extracted, known conventional reserves. If prices remain high, then the shift to exploiting unconventional reserves and alternative energy sources will grow exponentially. But timing is everything, so a shock to the system could have the lasting effect of moving us down the hydrocarbon chain faster toward hydrogen, nuclear, and renewables. When that happens, it won't be just Al Gore sticking out his chest in pride -- we'll all be able to breathe more easily.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: First is simply to note the title of one of my all-time favorite Talking Heads songs.

I wrote this segment first and meant it to headline the piece, because to me, it’s stunning to realize that despite all this terrorism and Middle East bullshit, the world has never been more at peace or thriving economically as it is today. And the future’s so bright for globalization that I gotta wear shades to look ahead.

Most of the time I think it’s just me and my buddy Larry Kudlow sounding this non-alarm, because the fear mongering on CNN and Fox is just so frickin’ out of control at this point in history, as one uses it to condemn Bush’s failures (CNN) while the other uses that to excuse them (Fox).

How it holds up: Better than ever, I must say. Doha continues to go nowhere, but bilateral trade agreements are continuing to be cut (we’ve just finished our proposed free-trade pact with South Korea and Bush sends it soon to the Hill), and the Middle East continues to slowly but surely connect itself more and more to the outside world during this oil boom (unlike last boom).

Yes, I expect the Dems to do a certain amount of stupid stuff on trade in Congress, and I expect Bush to stand up for free trade and fight them tooth and nail (Bush has actually been wonderfully sensible on foreign trade throughout his time). Lou Dobbs and his ilk notwithstanding, I expect cooler heads to prevail, with the best news being that, other than Edwards, none of the prez candidates are talking much protectionism.

Looking further ahead: I’m hoping the Korean-U.S. deal, once it goes through Congress, will accelerate the movement toward a free trade agreement for Asia proper that integrates America nicely into the mix. The big fear of recent years was that the U.S. would eventually get shut out of any ASEAN-plus enlargement process, but if the Korean-U.S. deal serves as template for others to cut similar deals with us, then we might just negotiate ourselves right into some larger Pac-rim package, and that would be great.

004 Al Qaeda: The Global Brand

Good News: We have killed or captured a good portion of Al Qaeda's senior brain trust, meaning the generational cohort of leaders who built up the transnational network to the operational peak represented by the 9/11 strikes. As a result, Al Qaeda's network is a lot more diffuse and dispersed, with the surviving leadership's role trimmed back largely to inspirational guidance from above on strategy and tactics. Yes, Al Qaeda now takes credit for virtually every terrorist act across the globe, but the truth is that its operational center of gravity remains southwest Asia -- specifically Iraq's Sunni Triangle and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. As worldwide revolutionary movements go, this one is relatively contained and successful only in terms of generating local stalemates against intervening external powers, meaning we get to pick the fight and keep it consistently an "away game." As the Middle East "middle-ages" -- demographically speaking -- over the next quarter century, time is definitely on our side, since jihadism, like all revolutionary movements, is a young man's game.

Bad News: Al Qaeda's operational reach may now be effectively limited to the same territory (southwest Asia and extending to adjacent areas) as were the classic Middle Eastern terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, but that just means America's efforts to date have made us safer at the expense of allies in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In short, we've turned back the clock but made no strategic headway, plus we've created a dual cause célèbre in Iraq and Afghanistan that will stoke Al Qaeda's recruitment efforts for the long haul. Neither winning nor losing, the Bush administration has merely engineered a back-to-the-future operational stalemate at an unsustainably high cost in blood and treasure, effectively isolating America from the world in the process. Strategically speaking, we've reached a dead end.

Wild Card: Al Qaeda's pursuit of a weapon of mass destruction (think biological, not nuclear) is unrelenting, meaning eventually we will face this threat, and ultimately one side in this Long War will need to break out of the strategic stalemate. The key question, then, is, Which side is more energized and which is more exhausted? With the majority of Gulf oil now flowing to Asia and that trend only increasing with time, won't the American public eventually revolt at the notion that it's their oil and our blood? Osama sure hopes that one more strategic bitch-slap does the job.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: To me, this is both the most depressing and the most over-hyped segment, meaning you can feel bad about it but you really shouldn’t. By sinking our teeth into Afghanistan and Sunni Iraq (where the insurgency’s based), we give Al Qaeda a lot of definition and structure where there wouldn’t otherwise be, meaning we attract them to these battlegrounds of our choosing and let our professionals duke it out with their version of professionals. All said and done, our casualties have been low and slow in coming for a “global war,” and the fight’s over there instead of over here.

How it holds up: Just fine. I mean, you may hang on Peter Bergen’s every word about the whereabouts of Osama and Mullah Omar and so on and so forth, but as somebody who looks at this whole package as holistically as possible, it doesn’t strike me that terrorists are running anything in this world save for the tribal areas in NW Pakistan and Sunni Iraq -- and Allah bless ‘em -- they can have them both.

Looking further ahead: Yes, Virginia, there will be another 9/11. But keeping things in perspective, I don’t think al Qaeda will ever measure up to the hype nor justify the expenses we incur. I’m not saying the preparations we make, the security measures we take, or the money we spend is wasted. I think all that stuff is good and necessary and important for the sheer reason that globalization is complex and demands all such efforts.

I just don’t think that -- over time -- transnational terrorism will routinely be able to rise above the white noise level of day-to-day disruptions and disasters and snafus arising from globalization’s continued expansion.

005 Iraq: The Quagmire

Good News: The Kurdish areas are secure and thriving economically. Then again, they've been in the nation-building business ever since America started that no-fly zone in the early 1990s. The insurgency is still centered primarily in the Sunni Triangle, so many parts of the Shiite-controlled southeast are surviving okay, thanks in part to significant Iranian investment. Though the central government remains weak, it has forged some important compromises, like a deal to share oil revenue. Following our last best effort on the "surge," the inevitable U. S. drawdown -- and "drawback" from combat roles -- will look like Vietnam in reverse: We shift from direct action to advising locals. With any luck, Iraq's not much more of a fake state than Pakistan or Lebanon is, and America's military presence can retreat behind the wire of permanent bases in the Kurdish areas or Kuwait, where we currently keep about twenty-five thousand troops. By increasing our naval presence in the region, America can return somewhat to its historic role as offshore balancer in the region. And by participating in the regional peace conference on Iraq, it seems Bush may have finally discovered diplomacy in the Middle East. About time.

Bad News: Baghdad itself is an unmitigated disaster, and the Sunni Triangle has become a no-go zone for all but the most heavily armed outsiders. The horrific social toll of constant violence and massive unemployment is measured in dog years, meaning Bush's surge strategy is far too little and way too late. There is no "Iraq" any more than there was a "Yugoslavia," so America will have to accept this Humpty Dumpty outcome for what it is: a Balkans done backward. The Iraq Study Group rejected partitioning, saying it would be impossible to divide up major cities. Too bad the locals didn't get the word, because that low-grade "ethnic cleansing" proceeds rather vigorously -- neighborhood by neighborhood -- fueled by rising sectarian violence that outside interested parties (Iran, Saudi Arabia) clearly feed. America cannot stem this tide; only a combined effort by the neighbors can.

Wild Card: The right wrong move by embryonic Kurdistan could trigger a military intervention from anxious Turkey, especially after the highly contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk votes to join "free Kurdistan." Also looming is a Saudi-Iranian proxy war within Iraq itself, just as the persecution and targeting of restive Shiite minorities by entrenched Sunni regimes hits an inflection point regionwide -- nudge-nudge, wink-wink from the White House. For now, the Saudis seem content to 1) limit Iran's oil revenue by ramping up their production and 2) curb Iran's influence in Lebanon by funding Hezbollah's opponents. The regional peace conference on Iraq puts everyone at the same table, but if Sy Hersh is correct that Bush has already "redirected" on Iran, that parley might just be for show.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This was the trickiest one to write, given all the competing perspectives on the subject. I mean, you could spend 10k words on definitional issues alone (Civil war or not? Winning or losing? What do any of these words mean anyway?).

How it holds up: The whole McCain deal on walking through a market struck me as odd (why does he choose stands like that?), although his basic take on our predicament remains sound (from America’s perspective, “victory” or “progress” is all about reducing U.S. casualties). I just wonder why talking about what comes next is such a third rail for so many politicians (“Give the surge a chance!”), when everyone should know that the surge will logically succeed over the short haul but get untenable over the longer haul (opponents will lay lower and simply wait us out, knowing our troops strains will grow almost exponentially).

Given that Bush isn’t really trying any serious regional diplomacy, I can’t escape the feeling that the surge was never designed to succeed in the first place, but just to give Bush the excuse to broaden the conflict to include Iran down the road (again, the animating aspect to this entire piece) because then he can say, “I tried, but Iran screwed us over and now it’s payback!”

Looking further ahead: This segment is obviously the most frustrating to contemplate, in large part because Bush continues to make our military fight under the worst possible strategic circumstances.

As I look to the next prez, only Giuliani makes me think he’s got the go-your-own-way courage to cut the deals necessary to extricate our combat troops from harm’s way in a reasonable amount of time while making that transition seem less like a “loss” and more just plain common sense. I mean, you take what you can get after a while, and what we’ve got is a free and safe Kurdistan, and relatively stable and safe and recovering Shiite Iraq, and that hell-hole called Sunni-land.

The notion that we somehow “lose Iraq” unless we fight it out in Sunni-land until all the bitter-enders have all met their bitter end is just goofy.

Since Bush seems unable to define anything short of that mythical desired outcome as “victory,” we’re in desperate need of somebody who can. Hell, the Balkans were a piecemeal victory/stalemate/loss that slowly but surely turned into something we’re all relatively proud of, so why do we think we’re ever going to reach some magical moment where everything’s perfect in Iraq as a whole so we can pull out with our pride somehow completely restored?

Simply put, Rudy’s the most Nixonian of the bunch, and we need a plain-talking hardass to make this work. He’s got just enough gravitas and just enough arrogance to pull it off -- unless the cast of “Law & Order” runs as a full-slate.

006 The Long War: The Theater-After-Next

Good News: As we squeeze the Persian Gulf-centric radical Salafi jihadist movement, that balloon can expand in two directions over the near term: north into Central Asia or south into Africa. For now, Central Asia is relatively quiet, and local authoritarian regimes -- with the consent and support of all interested outside parties -- aim to keep it that way. Simply put, there are just too many untapped energy reserves in that region for neighboring great powers (e.g., Russia, Turkey, India, China, and even Shiite Iran) to let radical Sunni terror networks establish significant beachheads. Remember, China and Russia set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization way before 9/11, so calling our recent arrival (now down to just one military base in Kyrgyzstan) the resumption of the "great game" is a bit much. The Chinese and Russians are basically watching our backs on this one, and we should continue to let them do so because...

Bad News: ...This fight's headed south into sub-Saharan Africa over the long haul. The recent rise and fall of the Islamic courts in Somalia was but a preview of coming attractions. Don't believe? Then check out similar north-versus-south (i.e., Muslim versus Christian) fights simmering across a wide swath of middle Africa (basically where the desert meets the grasslands and forests), because it might not surprise you to find out that the cowboy and the farmer still can't be friends. Al Qaeda, according to our Defense Intelligence Agency, recently brokered an alliance with the Algerian Group for Salafist Preaching and Combat and has famously issued threats regarding any potential Western intervention in Sudan's Darfur region to stem the genocidal war being waged by the invasive Arab janjaweed against indigenous black Africans. Success in the Long War will not be marked by less violence or less resistance but by a shift in the geographic center of gravity out of the Gulf region and into Africa. Egypt, with its looming succession from Mubarak father to son (Hosni to Gamal), will continue to either fulfill or fail in its role as continental bulwark, much the way secular (and poorly appreciated) Turkey holds the line for Europe. But in the end, Africa simply offers too many attractive traction points for the Salafi jihadists not to engage as the Middle East middle-ages.

Wild Card: Bush has already announced and will sign into existence sometime between now and the end of his administration a new regional U. S. combatant command: AFRICOM, or African Command. The placeholder, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, now sits in a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti. It was originally set up as a picket line to trap Al Qaeda operatives as they exited the Gulf for the dark continent. These are the guys who recently helped engineer Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia, and their command represents a serious experiment in combining the "Three D's": diplomacy, development, and defense. AFRICOM will be the future of the fight and the fight of the future.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This is really based off the slide in my briefing that deconstructs our efforts to lay a Big Bang on the region. The assumption is, eventually we succeed (time is simply on our side, so it’s all about not screwing up in the meantime). When we do, where does the fight go next? Logic says the radical Salafis will retreat to the northern half of Africa, so then the next question becomes, How do we make that continent as unattractive as possible to radical Islam over the coming years and decades?

How it holds up: This is basically the subject of my next piece for Esquire, which I’m structuring right now as I finish up interviews back here in the States, so I’m passing on this one.

Looking further ahead: Look no further than the July issue.

007 Defense Department: The New Coin of the Realm

Good News: The Army and Marine Corps continue to calibrate their forces and doctrine to adapt to the long-term challenges of counterinsurgency and a return to the frontier-taming functions last witnessed when our Army of the West really was just our Army in our West. With General George Casey coming back from Iraq to become Army chief of staff and General David Petraeus, chief architect of the U. S. military's new counterinsurgency manual, slotting in behind him in Baghdad, that much needed trend can only accelerate. Two other solid moves by Bush: 1) selecting former CIA chief Robert Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense (at this point in the fight, it's better that insider agency types run the Pentagon than the outsider neocons) and 2) sliding Admiral "Fox" Fallon over from Pacific Command to Central Command, bringing along his substantial diplomatic experience and stubbornly strategic vision. (He led a PACOM effort to bolster military-to-military ties with China despite disapproval from Rumsfeld's Pentagon.) With AFRICOM standing up in 2008, we're seeing some serious lessons being learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Failure is a great teacher.

Bad News: The acquisition overhang from Rumsfeld's transformation initiative remains large, meaning we've still got way too many absurdly complex and expensive weapon systems and platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft) in the pipeline. As ongoing, largely ground operations increasingly exhaust the Army and Marine Corps (and their respective reserve components) both in personnel and equipment, many tough funding cuts loom on the horizon. Rumsfeld never confronted those hard choices, preferring in the end to send his generals to the Hill to beg for more money and let defense contractors stuff emergency supplemental bills with their pet programs. Hopefully, intel-savvy Gates will recognize that a substantial resource shift must ensue, in effect curtailing the Pentagon's obsession with smart weapons and boosting its ability to crank out smarter soldiers. But much depends on how Gates and the Bush administration continue to interpret China's rise in military terms. If you keep hearing the word hedge, then expect the Pentagon to keep overstuffing the war-fighting force while starving the nation-building one, and that nasty habit matters plenty if it's your loved ones over in southwest Asia today.

Wild Card: A winner would be Congress somehow stepping up and delivering "Goldwater-Nichols II," or an omnibus restructuring legislation that fixes the broken interagency process (the real cause of our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan) just as the original fixed the dysfunctional interservice rivalries that plagued our military in the post-Vietnam era. Of course, the really bold step would be to create some Cabinet-level department that focuses on transition or failed states. We basically know how to deal with countries in war (Defense) and peace (State). What we lack, though, is a bureaucratic center of gravity that specializes in getting weak states from war to peace. Presidential candidates and a blue-ribbon commission or two are already raising this proposal, so it's out there, waiting for our next massive fuckup to bring it into being.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one is pretty straightforward analysis of institutional change, very much in line historically with the “Monks of War” piece from March of last year.

In general, I’m very optimistic about the scope and rate of change in the military’s adaptation to the Long War. Clearly, Iraq’s the great strain, but nobody’s talking about packing it all in after we wrap up Iraq, so there’s a clear consensus growing that the military needs to adapt itself comprehensively to this new security environment.

As recently as last Quadrennial Defense Review (2005), you were seeing a lot of idiotic articles claiming the Middle East is “just a blip” and the real long-term fight is with China, but the continuing crushing reality of Iraq and Afghanistan and the rising sense of Africa’s importance seems to have squelched that talk -- and that’s both realistic and good.

How it holds up: Both Fallon and Petraeus are such straight-talking, stand-up guys that no matter how the surge goes (and I expect it to go better at first but then become unsustainable over time), there won’t be any silly stab-in-the-back mentality among the military. Guys like Petraeus cut their teeth in the Balkans, and they’re simply too smart for that intellectual dodge, so again, I’m very confident that the learning curve flattens but we keep climbing it vigorously across the defense community.

Looking further ahead: The question of how Africa Command turns out is a big indicator of the military’s further strategic adjustment in this Long War. Again, I beg off of that one until the July issue.

Other than that, expect to hear a lot of very legitimate “train wreck” tales about personnel and some very hyperbolic ones on long-term force structure acquisition (most of the high-end stuff we’re buying today we could purchase in smaller future numbers and still easily remain the world’s strongest military without any loss in our ability to hedge on China).

In industry, watch how Lockheed Martin uses its new purchase, Pacific Architects & Engineering, to move into the “second half” or postwar/post-disaster world. PAE is the KBR of the State Department. Lock-Mart bought it to position itself better for the future, and when the world’s largest defense contractor makes a move like that, you pay attention.

008 War on Terror: The Legal Underpinnings

Good News: The International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 2002 as a permanent version of the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. As an international court of last resort, it's designed to put war criminals on trial for crimes against humanity. With 104 signatory states, the ICC possesses a well-credentialed system for adjudicating and imprisoning such bad actors. What it's missing is a mechanism for bringing them to justice. Oddly enough, the United States possesses a military force with global reach that routinely snatches these guys, only to hide them in secret prisons and put them on secret trial with secret evidence. The U. S. has kept the court at arm's length, fearing its power enough to negotiate bilateral immunity treaties with roughly a hundred states around the world where we anticipate the possibility of future military interventions (since we fear our soldiers and officials will be subject to war-crime accusations). These arrangements will retard the development of global case law. Eventually, Washington will come to its senses.

Bad News: The Bush administration's continuing Dirty Harry take on the Geneva Conventions destroys America's international reputation for the rule of law, providing us with a host of highly questionable practices in the name of "global war," such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the holding of ghost detainees who disappear into the paperwork, the ordering of "extraordinary renditions," by which suspects are deposited with allies who have long histories of torture, and the extraction of confessions by methods right out of the Salem witch trials. If our own Supreme Court can't stomach much of this, how can we expect to win any hearts and minds abroad by mimicking the human-rights abuses of the very same authoritarian regimes (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Egypt) targeted by our lawless enemies, the Salafi jihadists?

Wild Card: Abu Ghraib didn't do it. Gitmo hasn't done it. Short of killing fields being dug up, it's hard to imagine what would dramatically alter the playing field as seen by the Bush-Cheney team. Bush the Decider, after all, basically blew off both the November election and the Iraq Study Group, so it would seem he's not one to be swayed by much when his famous gut tells him otherwise. Our best hope would seem to be for our Supreme Court to step up more aggressively over time -- maybe even before Oslo starts handing out Nobel prizes to the whistle-blowers.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one is my favorite segment, very much an extension of the “Dirty Harry” piece I wrote for Wired way back when (Oops! Shouldn’t have mentioned that!). It’s such an obvious and clear-headed point that you’d think it wouldn’t need to be stated in print, and yet it’s so great to do just that and make clear that America needs to rejoin the world on this contentious subject.

How it holds up: No problems here. We’re never going to be able to talk ourselves out of this pathway of realigning our rule set on terror with some larger, globally-accepted rule set like that being forged by the International Criminal Court, because all the secret trials and stuff will continue to embarrass ourselves no matter how they turn out.

Looking further ahead: This one is such a no-brainer for a new president, that I assume almost any of the front-runners could handle it (aren’t they all lawyers?).

No big whoop for anybody who doesn’t gag on the word “multilateral.”

 

009 Afghanipakistan: The Ungovernable

Good News: The Karzai regime muddles along, keeping the bulk of Afghanistan reasonably stable while enabling legitimate economic growth in those pockets not controlled by the druggies. The Musharraf regime does one better in Pakistan, which is growing at a solid clip and finally starting to attract foreign direct investment that underscores its strategic location as connector between the energy-rich southwest-central Asia and the energy-hungry south and east Asia. When you're talking about the parts of both countries that are effectively governed by the center, either situation is arguably described as a slowly modernizing "success story" in the Long War. Hey, when Iraq defines the floor, these two mark -- by comparison -- the ceiling.

Bad News: The problem is, of course, that neither capital effectively controls the hinterlands, which overlap precipitously along their shared, mountainous border. There the poppy trade booms, prestate tribalism rules, and the Taliban are back in the business of state-sponsored terror, thanks in no small part to a de facto peace treaty with Musharraf's regime. The Pashtun tribes of northwest Pakistan have been ungovernable for as long as history records. While outsiders can effectively ally with them against perceived common enemies, as America did against the Soviets in Afghanistan, none have effectively conquered them. And yet the Taliban are carving out a ministate within these lands, employing their usual brutal techniques. The result is, once again, a secure sanctuary for Al Qaeda's global leadership (to include Osama bin Laden) and a training ground for motivated jihadists.

Wild Card: The next 9/11-like attack on American soil -- especially if WMD are involved -- could well trigger the gravest consequences for the Taliban's state-within-a-state. Americans might just countenance a limited nuclear strike in an eye-for-an-eye moment of unleashed fury and frustration. Unthinkable? We did it to Japan under far cooler circumstances but for similar reasons -- namely, a full-scale invasion seemed prohibitively costly in human life. Is nuking Afghanistan advisable? No, nuking is always a bad idea. But rubble, as they say, makes no trouble, and bombing them back to the Stone Age would be a very short trip.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one also leverages itself off a previous piece I wrote for my syndicated weekly column, although I expanded the logic considerably with recent intelligence reports.

This segment was hard to keep balanced in that the good news ain’t so good and the bad news could get awfully bad if the right lucky strike gets pulled off.

How it holds up: Everything on this one tracks nicely.

Looking further ahead: This one scares me the most for all the obvious reasons.

 

010 China: The Slated Near-Peer

Good News: China's torrid growth continues, despite all predictions that it must soon end lest it tear the country apart through some combination of the horrific environmental disasters just unfolding, a financial panic caused by a still-rickety banking system, or -- Mao forbid! -- political unrest among the masses of rural peasants left behind in abject poverty. So long as the foreign direct investment flows (China's the number-one target in the world outside the West) and export volume rises, the Chinese Communist Party, which has staked its regime legitimacy almost entirely on raising income levels, continues to pull off the seemingly impossible: creating a world-class domestic market while whittling down the world's largest state sector. How hard is that? Bill Clinton created more than twenty million new jobs in America across his eight years as president. China's leaders need to generate almost the same number of new jobs every year to keep this juggernaut moving forward.

Bad News: China's military buildup is real, although America's slated to outspend it by roughly $10 trillion over the next two decades, so our lead seems pretty safe. What's so scary right now about China's strategic relationship with the United States, or lack thereof, is that our economic interdependence is very real and rapidly expanding while our security ties remain embryonic at best and highly suspicious at worst. Even if we get past North Korea, the Taiwan situation still divides us strategically, and as China increasingly penetrates the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America with its rather unprincipled investment strategies, opportunities for conflict with U. S. security interests will abound. Given the right breakdown of cooperation over Iran (or failure to get any in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela -- you name it), wecould be looking at a resumption of cold-war binary thinking by which Washington hawks calculate every international loss (or even slight) as China's zero-sum gain. Factor in a Democratic-led Congress eager to take on the threat of "cheap Chinese labor" and their underappreciated currency, and what should be globalization's strongest bilateral relationship could easily turn into its worst -- even the cause for its demise.

Wild Card: You'll get the same answer from Wall Street CEOs and White House staffers: Nobody wants to see a financial meltdown triggered inside China, because nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has any idea how bad that could get for the global economy as a whole. Eventually, something has to give in China's still-white-hot economy, so the question really isn't Can a financial panic happen in China? but rather How will America handle it when it does?

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: If you read my blog, you know I write about China constantly, so this one was easy to pen. It reads like a greatest-hits list of statements from my current brief on global affairs, so it’s very much my mainstream thinking.

How it holds up: Bush continues to be very reasonable and moderate on China, and for that I thank him. Unlike Clinton, Bush has plenty of China hawks to parry, and he’s remained vigilant on that subject -- probably his greatest foreign policy achievement.

Looking further ahead: The big thing on China that I always mention is the swap-out of their leadership from the 4th to 5th generations, a shift that will dramatically increase our potential cooperation with China.

Actually, I have a piece sitting with Esquire right now on this subject, so I’m hoping to have another major-league swing at this later in the year.

011 North Korea: the Persistent Outlier

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in maintaining a fairly coherent unity of effort with Russia, Japan, China, and South Korea, in that we're all still talking and cooperating and worrying about the same things. Admittedly, we've not accomplished much vis-a-vis Kim Jong Il's regime (the recent deal smells of a Clinton-like "freeze," with the truly hard details -- like the actual bombs -- left to the future), but the dialogue itself is laying the groundwork for a post-Kim effort to construct an East Asia NATO-like security architecture that cements China's role as the Germany of Asia and ends fears of emerging security rivalries with offshore Japan. (Asia's never enjoyed a stable peace when both China and Japan were powerful.) While Kim's successfully blackmailed us in the past on nukes, his kleptocratic regime's reliance on self-financing through criminal activities does leave it vulnerable to the sort of stringent financial sanctions recently imposed by the U. S. That tactic begins to work when Chinese banks, more interested in maintaining their international credit ratings, start choosing transparency over illicit dealings with Pyongyang. Talk Tokyo and Beijing into a naval blockade and we may set an endgame in motion.

Bad News: The recent Bush deal is a bad deal that should give no one comfort, as it is unlikely to force Kim into giving up his nukes (not when the blackmailing still works for aid), and then there's the unacknowledged second nuclear program that Pyongyang bought from Pakistan years back. We haven't even begun the negotiations on that one yet. Unlike the years-in-the-making danger of a nuclear Iran, Kim's got the necessary missile technology in hand, and he tested his first crude nuke last October. Remembering East Germany's fate, Kim confronts the high likelihood of not just near-term attempts at regime change but the inevitable liquidation of his entire nation as the wrong half of the last divided-state situation to linger beyond the cold war. Despite Ahmadinejad's fiery threats, Iran's mullahs have plenty to live for, while Kim's got everything to lose, making his long-demonstrated siege mentality and willingness to sacrifice millions of his own people to preserve his rule two crucial indicators of his undeterrability. The problem with the slow squeeze we're pursuing is that eventually it'll trigger some reckless act from Kim, which in turn sets in motion the following scary scenario: South Korean and U. S. forces pouring in from the south and sea, Chinese forces entering from the north to prevent refugee flows, and somewhere in that small chaotic space, the world's fourth-largest military armed with some unknown number of nuclear devices and a Gotterdämmerung-inducing ideology of racial superiority. No wonder Beijing's not so psyched to get it on.

Wild Card: Beijing's clearly in the driver's seat on this one, which makes the government's not-so-quiet examination of Ceausescu's rapid fall in Romania in late 1989 (hint: Moscow's KGB gave him a push) all the more telling. China's leaders are definitely exploring an exit strategy on this one, the timing of which couldn't be more crucial for the future of Sino-American relations.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: This one’s based largely on conversations I’ve had with the Chinese during two trips last year to Beijing. I remain consistent on the subject: I don’t think Beijing’s leaders can turn Kim into a “mini-me Deng Xiaoping,” so either they get rid of him or they risk a far riskier conflict scenario that puts them at great danger of miscalculation with the U.S.

How it holds up: Chris Hill is one of those career diplomats who often rise up to become second-tier superstars at the end of an administration -- you know, when all the principles get bored with the details of foreign policy. He’s done a magnificent job of simply keeping the whole thing moving, even as the current envisioned outcome is totally Clintonian.

Looking further ahead: In my observation, both South Korea and China are preparing fairly realistically in military terms for North Korea’s collapse, so I’m optimistic that when the times comes it’ll go okay.

012 The White House: The Bush Imperative

Good News: There's about twenty months left in W.'s presidency and his heart's one helluva lot stronger than Cheney's. The Iraq tie-down pretty much means Bush can't start any more wars anywhere else, despite all the tough talk. Much like Jimmy Carter near the end, Bush seems wholly engulfed by the Gulf, but since nobody other than that pesky Hugo Chávez seems intent on pressing our disadvantage, that's probably a good thing. Although this administration has been willfully oblivious to its gargantuan federal deficits up to now (what is it about Republican administrations?), Bush has somewhat cynically found religion on the subject recently, declaring his new goal of eliminating those deficits somewhere around the end of his successor's first term. Talk about passing the buck! Then again, if Bush's surge strategy in Iraq creates even the slightest semblance of job-not-too-horrendously-done and allows for our troops' effective withdrawal from combat duty there by January 2009, I doubt we'd hear any complaints from the new resident at 1600.

Bad News: Condoleezza Rice is proving to be an even weaker secretary of state than Colin Powell, although at least she talks out of only one side of her mouth. Then again, since Rice's diplomacy consists solely of delivering White House talking points the world over, that is a mean trick. All dissing aside, the real problem with American diplomacy under Bush (if you can call it diplomacy) is that Dick Cheney has been in charge of it all along, and now that ¸ber-ally Don Rumsfeld is gone at Defense, we won't even see its muscular version (the Bush Doctrine) employed anymore, leaving us with basically no foreign policy whatsoever. The big problem with this state of affairs is that Bush's postpresidency has started earlier in his second term than any leader since Richard Nixon, leaving America's global leadership adrift at a rather fluid moment in history. I'm not just talking the Long War but the other 95 percent of reality that actually makes the world go round. With Tony Blair leaving office in the UK, there's virtually no adult supervision left anywhere, which is sad because, with a global economy humming as nice as this one is, the world could really take advantage of some visionary leadership right now to tackle a host of compelling global challenges like AIDS, global warming, childhood diseases -- you know, the whole Two Bills/Bono agenda!

Wild Card: Bush has said repeatedly that he's on a personal mission to deny Iran nuclear weapons, and Cheney wants nothing more than to go down in history as the man who restored power to the American presidency. Put those two scary dynamics together and you've got the mother of all October surprises come 2008. Washington is naturally all abuzz with this prospect, causing Bush to deny publicly any plans for war. But as we've learned with this administration, it's Deny, deny, deny, and then strike! If and when Bush pulls that trigger, watch the Democratic Congress start impeachment proceedings. That'll make it two-for-two with Boomer presidents, but that only makes sense for a generation who came of age with Watergate.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Clearly, I tee off on Rice here, but I honestly think she deserves it. She is the classic example of the Peter Principle whereby people get promoted beyond their skills. As the consummate protégé, she’s just not genetically cut out to be a serious leader and Bush’s second term suffers dramatically as a result (though not Cheney’s ...).

Mark set this one up as the “great ending” prior to the jump page. It’s the climax of the piece, in many ways.

How it holds up: Well, since this one lays out the fear that’s animated my thinking on Bush and Cheney for quite some time now (the planned inevitable strike on Iran somewhere near the end off the second term), there was never any danger of it being up-staged in the meantime, unless you believe those rumors that the Bush White House offered a variety of strike packages to Blair WRT the hostage mini-crisis.

Looking further ahead: I do honestly feel that if people who care about this subject don’t continue to attack this notion, we seriously risk its unfolding. Bush may get nostalgic near the end, but Cheney will not.

013 The Rising East: The Degree of Compliance

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in drawing both Russia and China into multilateral security discussions on Iran and North Korea, and even when both nations routinely water down our proposed responses, they're staying in the conversation, offering their own helpful ideas (like Moscow's proposal to outsource Iran's uranium enrichment) and generally becoming more comfortable coordinating security policies with the West's great powers on issues of shared concern. It may not sound like much, but such routine is what builds up relationships over the long haul. As Washington's relatively successful courtship of rising India has shown, it's the small gestures that matter most, like the United States finally acknowledging New Delhi's standing as a nuclear power. With India and China, we're looking at two big body shops -- as in, million-man-plus armies -- that logically should someday soon be enlisted for long-term cooperative peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Africa, where both nations currently deploy tens of thousands of nationals in market-making commercial and developmental activities. You want to do stuff on the cheap? Well, you better find cheap labor.

Bad News: Each of the big players suffers from strategic myopia, meaning none are currently capable of punching their weight internationally at America's side. With Russia, it's their obsession with their so-called near abroad (the Caucasus and Central Asia) and Putin's aggressive push to renationalize the commanding heights of Russia's new economy -- namely, the energy sector. The Chinese, despite their ballooning reliance on distant foreign energy sources, still act as though their entire strategic environment boils down to the Taiwan Strait. Ditto for India and Kashmir. South Korea's ready to climb on Oprah's couch over its queer embrace of its long-lost sibling to the north, but don't expect it to climb out of any foxholes anytime soon on our behalf. Toss in glass-jaw Japan and there's not really anybody in the East we can count on in a tight spot.

Wild Card: The truly intriguing wild cards are local disasters that provide the U. S. military the pretext for drawing out these rising states' militaries in cooperative humanitarian responses, the way the 2004 Christmas tsunamis helped the Pentagon reestablish military-to-military ties with Indonesia (as well as triggering the internal solution of Indonesia's Aceh secessionist movement). If there's going to be a global-warming tipping-point disaster, it'll probably unfold in the East Asian littoral.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Pretty basic stuff. Just couldn’t do a tour of the world and not address India and Russia on some strategic level.

How it holds up: The “bad news” stuff is my most depressing take on the subject, because -- of course -- I advocate aggressive partnering with these nations. But the truth is, there will be a lot of hand-holding and strategic mentoring between here and getting these new pillars to the altar on such alliances. Each day we see plenty of evidence that all of these players are punching below their weight internationally on military affairs, and yet each sees their global economic profile continue to blossom.

Looking further ahead: We desperately need a visionary on this subject in the White House in 2009. I’d rule out McCain and Edwards and Thompson, but Clinton, Obama, Giuliani and Romney could all make it happen. We have simply got to abandon this Bush habit of casually adding new enemies while adding no new allies.

014 The Aging West: The State of Alliance

Good News: Recent elections and those looming on the horizon are not producing a crop of anti-American leaders among our traditional allies, which is extraordinarily generous on their part given the unprecedented anti-Americanism that's pervaded the vast majority of the world across the Bush administration. With France and the UK in transition, Germany's Angela Merkel has emerged as Europe's most powerful female leader since Margaret Thatcher, to whom the "iron Frau" is most commonly compared. Most important for America, Merkel is intent on keeping the transatlantic relationship strong and bolstering the role of NATO as its preeminent security structure. With Shinzo Abe taking the reins in economically resurgent Japan and pushing for expanded ties with NATO, we're seeing the old West as a whole assume a more forward-leaning security posture. Given the UN's enduring weakness, NATO's imprimatur is as close as America can get to approval by the international community for most overseas military interventions, with our Balkan missions serving as the best model to date.

Bad News: Though NATO is in Afghanistan, the many operational limitations imposed by individual members make its employment consistently suboptimal, and it has done little to bolster U. S. troop efforts to tame the Taliban's growing influence in the south. As for Iraq, the Middle East, much like all of Africa, simply remains a bridge too far for this collection of former colonial powers who aren't much interested in any lengthy return engagements (although the French occasionally pop up in Africa now and then). Other than the Brits (who've already opted out of Bush's surge strategy in Iraq), it is hard to imagine NATO countries taking serious numbers of casualties anywhere outside of Europe (okay, the French and Italian effort in south Lebanon has some merit), not with the EU's growing unease over its "absorption capacity" of new eastern members and popular fears of the invasive species known as Homo Islamicus. In a Long War with a high body requirement, it's unrealistic for America to assume that its traditional military allies, all of whom are demographically moribund, will suffice for the quagmire-like interventions that lie ahead.

Wild Card: The globalization wormhole that connects the United Kingdom to Pakistan features substantial two-way traffic whose upshot is a steady stream of radicalized expats landing in British working-class neighborhoods on a daily basis. The West's "stargate" on this, Britain's world-class internal security service, MI5, cannot possibly uncover every plot, so if that lucky strike hits the right target at the right time, our European friends could suddenly veer into a Children of Men-like extreme-lockdown scenario.

COMMENTARY TRACK: 

Deconstruction: My ode to Mark Steyn, God forgive him. 

How it holds up: Since I ask nothing of the Europeans, they cannot disappoint me, now can they?

Still, it’s sad to contemplate less utility over time in this alliance, because so many of these officers are really quite exceptional and can teach us a lot. But maybe that’s the way to look at it: not many bodies but plenty of good mentors.

Looking further ahead: Actually, I take back what I said on Afghanipakistan, because this scenario is the one I truly think is inevitable, despite the new James Bond. 

015 All the Rest: Other Complications

Good News: Despite all the ominous news, the developing world is not awash in civil strife. Africa, for example, was suffering from sixteen major civil or cross-border conflicts half a decade ago but endures only a half dozen today. Thanks to the commodities boom, infrastructure development there has shifted from being a supply-push aid effort led by the West to a demand-pull construction effort led by the East. In Latin America, the only serious insurgency still operating is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the dozen recent elections there produced far more market-friendly leaders than Chávez-like populists. East Asia's relatively quiet, with nasty flare-ups in Sri Lanka and East Timor, and the dominant economic trends there continue to be rapid marketization and long-term integration with China, globalization's premier final assembler of manufactured goods. Best of all, the current oil boom has triggered voluminous "east-east" capital flows, whereby Arab energy producers direct their surplus capital to Asia's infrastructure build-out while Asia's high savings rates are beginning to flow into the Gulf's emerging financial hubs, in addition to its energy sector. 

Bad News: The West's stubborn holdout on its agricultural subsidies keeps the WTO's Doha Round from doing what it should to jump-start agricultural markets in developing economies. While China's doing plenty to create infrastructure in many resource-rich states, it's also replicating the profile that European colonial powers once employed: trading low-cost manufactures for even lower-end commodities. Net result? Local producers and small manufacturers tend to be crowded out by China's Wal-Mart-like impact. No wonder rising economic nationalism in Latin America, for example, is increasingly directed at China instead of just the usual culprits in the West.

Wild Card: Anything that torpedoes China's economic juggernaut would have a huge impact throughout the developing world, so probably the nastiest wild card to cue up would be the SARS/avian-flu-after-next that both derails Asian economies while overwhelming the meager public-health capacities of developing economies.

COMMENTARY TRACK:

Deconstruction: Of all the titles, this one I regret the most, because, truth be told, there are very few complications out there.

Actually, come to think of it, this is the one title Warren changed! The original was, “the complicating variance” (to rhyme with “alliance” and “compliance”).

Of all the segments, this is the one I owe the most to Hank in terms of his inputs and guidance.

How it holds up: Just fine. Again, the world’s much quieter and far more peaceful than people realize. In historical terms, we’ve never had it so good. 

Looking further ahead: It’s the most inevitable scenario (something bad this way comes to China’s financial markets), but after the stock bubble burst in the Middle East and Thailand’s currency scare passed with no real after-effect, I’m getting much more optimistic on this score.

016 The Wildest Card: 2008

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Let me submit that we're living through the final months of the hedgehog presidency of one George W. Bush, whose greatest failure has been his lack of strategic imagination.

Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign gears up, let me presume to offer this: avoid hedgehogs. Don't listen to candidates who tell you this whole election boils down to one thing and one thing alone. We need a president with more than one answer to every question, one whose tool kit is as diverse as his -- or her -- ideology is flexible. We need a deal maker, a compromiser, a closer. We need someone able to finish what others cannot and start that which others dare not.

We need a leader who knows many things, because we've had quite enough of those who know only one big thing.

COMMENTARY TRACK: 

Deconstruction: Sharp readers will recognize this as a lift from a column I wrote on Bush months ago. No worries, as I retain copyright. 

Honestly, I threw in these paras to end the piece because I couldn’t think of any better way to terminate the first draft and the Super Bowl kickoff was just minutes away and I figured Mark would toss it and make me write something new.

How it holds up: Mark didn’t toss it because it remains three of the coolest paras I’ve ever written in terms of soaring political prose.

Looking further ahead: So far I’ve mixed it up with representatives/operatives of two Dem candidates (Clinton distantly, Obama once-removed) and two GOP guys (Brownback F2F twice on Iran and a credible candidate to be named later -- after I sit down with him this Friday and give him the full-up brief). This last possibility intrigues me most, because word is, he really loved Pentagon’s New Map.

My wife, as always, worries I’m turning Republican. I keep telling her the Dems won’t have me!

But on some level, I say, “F -- k ‘em all!’ I can’t wait on these people to get elected. With the Bush post-presidency so moribund, I decided to pursue my own personal foreign policy a while back and it’s going great so far.

I suggest you do the same...