Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

POST: Panetta At CIA, By Andrew Sullivan, 05 Jan 2009

Couldn't agree more with Andrew here. Panetta is a real mensch.

ARTICLE: Pentagon Chief Sees Opportunities In Russia and the War on Terrorism, By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, January 5, 2009; Page A09

Another great reason for keeping Gates on: he views Russia with an un-hysterical eye, and realizes the rebranding potential that should prove useful to us in the years ahead.

ARTICLE: "Man-Made Disaster: Five years on, the Department of Homeland security is still a catastrophe," by Jeffrey Rosen, The New Republic, 24 December 2008.

The basic bit:

The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel the pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scare-mongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and generally are cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: That the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake.

I made this argument in both PNM and BFA, saying we should have focused outward on spreading nets and transparency and not inward on silly firewalls easily breached. I feel the same way about strategic missile defense: we reach for 20th-century answers to 21st-century challenges.

ARTICLE: "Behind Caterpillar's Big Scoop in China: Patience, persistence, and transfer of technology yield a coveted acquisition," by Dexter Roberts, BusinessWeek, 22 December 2008.

Caterpillar has made a lot of money off China's infrastructure build-out so far, and aims to capture a bigger chunk of that growing pie in the future.

So it basically takes the advice I've been peddling for a while: get into the game, learn the landscape, and buy in on something local to take fuller advantage. Unlike a firm in the national security realm, Caterpillar has got no problem with such a tack regarding China.

The story tells how Caterpillar buys Shandong SEM Machinery last Feb just before its 50th birthday (meaning it's a post-revolution firm). Caterpillar CEO Jim Owens says, "Thanks to the people of SEM, Caterpillar has been able to play an ever-growing role in China's growth."

This was a real coup. China typically wants to build up its own national blockbuster firms, so Caterpillar spent years talking Beijing into this purchase. Owens has been traveling to China since 1983!

The "two-tiered strategy" is described as such: use SEM at lower end to boost Caterpillar sales at upper end.

This is an old trick of Western companies: a high-end version buys its low-end competitor.

So Caterpillar, with both US plans to boost infrastructure and China's sheer requirement, has a bright future.

PRESENTATION: 10 Commandments for the President Elect - to Save the US Economy, By Juan Enriquez, Pop!Tech 2008

This is a great presentation by Juan Enriquez, with whom I shared a stage at Pop!Tech a few years back. Worth listening to the entire 30 minutes. Very sensible stuff on the financial crisis and how we realistically move forward.

The obvious national security take-away: defense spending is coming down, thus the need for more cooperation with allies who possess the bodies required for the tasks ahead.

Sorry to see Tom Ricks' new book ("The Gamble") coming out on 10 Feb. It is certain to be a best-seller, meaning one less spot on the list for the rest of us wannabes.

Getting there.

I've basically gotten the set down to the main arcs.

Down from roughly 180MB to 68MB, so it opens faster!

I spend the rest of tonight making slides come together a bit more so that every slide has all its components. Then I start the laborious task of animating. I would expect the final full brief to have something like 5,000 separate effects. You then combine a lot of the effects so you're looking at something between 500 and 750 clicks across 90 minutes.

ARTICLE: Israeli Troops Launch Attack on Gaza, By ISABEL KERSHNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY, New York Times, January 3, 2009

It's hard to argue with Israel's perspective. If someone neighboring my country is routinely firing rockets into my cities, I am going to attack those installations and I'm not going to leave until that infrastructure is profoundly disabled. You can cite civilian casualties all you want, but when you fire rockets into my cities, then it's merely a matter of whose civilians die and my military's job is to make sure they're yours instead of mine.

Simple as that so long as the rocket strikes remain the central issue.

(Thanks: Aaron Brown)

OP-ED: China key to U.S. foreign policy success, By FRANK CHING, Japan Times, Jan. 3, 2009

Obviously, in line with what I've been saying for several years now, just stated very clearly and succinctly.

(Thanks: Craig Nordin )

SCIENCE TIMES: "The Hidden Travels of The Bomb," by William J. Broad, New York Times, 9 December 2008.

Fascinating chart showing how the bomb travels from the U.S. (1945) to USSR (1949) and UK/Canada (1952) and France (1960) an then onto China (1964) and Israel (1967) and India (1974). Then we see Pakistan (1990) and North Korea (2006).

That gives us 9 nuclear powers after 61 years. Clearly, proliferation is dangerously "out of control"!!!!

Next up are Iran, along with--potentially--Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and arguably Turkey. Of those, I see only Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as serious contenders.

They would take us up to 12 nuclear powers.

Countries that got nukes or very close and then abandoned the programs include Belarus, Ukraine, Kazazkstan, Sweden, South Africa, Iraq, Switzerland, Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil and Libya. I see North Korea joining their ranks soon enough.

We created (through spies we did not catch or technology we chose to share) the first wave of nuclear powers. France and China created the second wave. Pakistan and North Korea create the future ones.

Since I was a kid, I have heard that we're within a few years of 30-to-40 nuclear states, meaning states with nuclear weapon arsenals.

Still waiting on that one.

NATIONAL: "Richardson Relishes Role As a Closer on Big Deals," by James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times, 9 December 2008.

I think Richardson would have been great at Commerce, so the loss here is substantial. He is a Clinton-like (Bill, that is) closer, a dealer-in-chief who can easily step up from the governor level to the national stage.

And given where the global economy is today, this would have been a hugely important and influential job--if done at a caliber I believe Richardson was capable of.

I expected big things . . . and for Richardson to be rewarded down the road as a result with an even bigger job.

But such is politics.

NATIONAL: "In Biggest U.S. Cities, Minorities Are at 50%," by Sam Roberts, New York Times, 9 December 2008.

In Cool It, Bjorn Lomborg points out that cities have already undergone a century-long temperature rise equivalent to that predicted for the planet over the 21st thanks to global warming.

Similarly, cities are telling us now what a post-Caucasion-majority America will look and act like.

Got rid of/consolidated 65 slides tonight.

Gotta quite before I mouse-click myself into a neck brace!

My trick after all that concentrated work: the Bowflex. One 20-min session and I am corrected!

Back at it in the morning . . .

Built the first section of the new brief almost entirely by scratch. That ended up being about 23 slides that I will eventually slim down to 5 or 6, mostly by layering extensively, and I don't want to do that until I run the brief a bunch of times and know how things work and how they naturally group together.

Today I plotted out all of Bradd Hayes' slides to the remaining 11 sections, and when I passed them all out and stuffed in the keepers from the old brief, I had a brief of 300 slides!

Now I slim it all down to probably about 100, which in the non-layered approach, actually equates to about a two-hour brief that in about a year will be compressed down to 50 or so thickly-layered slides.

Getting it from 300 thin slides to 100 thin slide won't be that hard. Some will be easy to layer, like a 15-slide sequence that shows the growth of the United States. Some I will just toss as neat points, but not strong enough to make the cut. Many will be squished together in very complex arrangements, where I take bits from 10 slides to build one.

But for now, this is the working master file, meaning one I will keep at hand from here on out as my maximum pool of images.

The next three days will be an insane push to get a package ready for the Thursday morning talk in DC.

Top 10 foreign policy wishes for 2009

My third-annual list of top 10 foreign policy wishes presented in reverse order of urgency:

10. President Obama's speech in New Delhi to the world's Muslims.

The president-elect will speak in an Islamic capital in his first 100 days. While the "hometown" choice is Jakarta, why not New Delhi? India possesses the world's third-largest Muslim population, twice that of traditional Arab leader Egypt, and could use some praise for its restraint -- so far -- after the Mumbai attacks.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

POST: China's New Export: Farmers, By Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times, December 29, 2008

Another story (this one more from the Chinese supply-side) of Chinese farmers emigrating to Africa in search of free land. History repeats itself in this frontier-integrating age.

(Thanks: Steve Epstein)