Cultural preference
Six traits in the Middle East
Soft power factors
Six traits in the Middle East
Soft power factors
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Relative Cultural Power: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
The tripartite struggle for leadership of the Islamic world between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey rages on in the modern world. These regional powers probe each other's peripheries indirectly. Turkey's deliberate blind eye to the rise of ISIL, for example, was a gamble that instability in Shiite Syria would drain Iran's strategic strength. Regional powers also compete with cultural influence. Modern social science provides data for a useful comparison of these three nations' cultural "soft power" in their regional competition.
Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede has a lifetime of work on cultural power on his personal website. We don't have to go all the way to the Netherlands to use his wisdom. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a lens through which we can view a nation's cultural inclinations. Comparing the six Hofstede scores of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey can tell us how they are likely to interact as regional powers. The Hofstede Centre has enough data on each of these countries to make meaningful comparisons.
I pulled the Hofstede Centre's country comparison drop-down menu for the three countries in question. I also viewed their data on the United States as a baseline for comparison. The US scores high on individualism, masculinity, and indulgence. Iran scores higher than the US on power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Saudi Arabia scores higher than the US on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. Turkey also scores higher than the US on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. The obvious first impression from this baseline comparison is that these three Middle Eastern powers have very different cultural priorities than the US. Their higher power distance scores predispose them to accept autocratic regimes. High preferences for uncertainty avoidance would favor maintenance of their existing social orders and formal rules, even if this comes at a high cost in economic losses or human suffering.
Comparing the three countries to each other reveals that Saudi Arabia has by far the highest power distance and masculinity. This implies that Saudi Arabia has the most to lose from disruptions to its social order by ISIL or other non-state actors, and that it would respond to such disruption in a more masculine way. Note that a masculine policy from Saudi Arabia is not necessarily the same as an effective military response. Saudi armed forces are notoriously ineffective, as their difficulties in combating Yemen's Houthi faction make clear. The strong Saudi commitment to fighting in Yemen leaves it strategically vulnerable to any ISIL penetration of its northern border. Any social stress from fighting an insurgency on two borders would be exceptionally acute for Saudi Arabia given its high Hofstede scored for masculinity and uncertainty avoidance.
Third Eye OSINT assess that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will continue to prefer proxy fights against ISIL and each other in the near term. The countries' strong preferences for maintaining social order, as measured by their Hofstede scores, currently outweigh any inclination to express their rivalry in more masculine forms like direct combat. Cultural norms offer one predictive approach in conjunction with other considerations of geostrategy, such as demographic pressures, economic cycles, and competition for resources. The three primary Middle Eastern rivals will continue to test each other's influence. Their cultural preferences indicate how severely they will react to existential threats from non-state actors like ISIL.
Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede has a lifetime of work on cultural power on his personal website. We don't have to go all the way to the Netherlands to use his wisdom. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory is a lens through which we can view a nation's cultural inclinations. Comparing the six Hofstede scores of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey can tell us how they are likely to interact as regional powers. The Hofstede Centre has enough data on each of these countries to make meaningful comparisons.
I pulled the Hofstede Centre's country comparison drop-down menu for the three countries in question. I also viewed their data on the United States as a baseline for comparison. The US scores high on individualism, masculinity, and indulgence. Iran scores higher than the US on power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Saudi Arabia scores higher than the US on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. Turkey also scores higher than the US on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. The obvious first impression from this baseline comparison is that these three Middle Eastern powers have very different cultural priorities than the US. Their higher power distance scores predispose them to accept autocratic regimes. High preferences for uncertainty avoidance would favor maintenance of their existing social orders and formal rules, even if this comes at a high cost in economic losses or human suffering.
Comparing the three countries to each other reveals that Saudi Arabia has by far the highest power distance and masculinity. This implies that Saudi Arabia has the most to lose from disruptions to its social order by ISIL or other non-state actors, and that it would respond to such disruption in a more masculine way. Note that a masculine policy from Saudi Arabia is not necessarily the same as an effective military response. Saudi armed forces are notoriously ineffective, as their difficulties in combating Yemen's Houthi faction make clear. The strong Saudi commitment to fighting in Yemen leaves it strategically vulnerable to any ISIL penetration of its northern border. Any social stress from fighting an insurgency on two borders would be exceptionally acute for Saudi Arabia given its high Hofstede scored for masculinity and uncertainty avoidance.
Third Eye OSINT assess that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey will continue to prefer proxy fights against ISIL and each other in the near term. The countries' strong preferences for maintaining social order, as measured by their Hofstede scores, currently outweigh any inclination to express their rivalry in more masculine forms like direct combat. Cultural norms offer one predictive approach in conjunction with other considerations of geostrategy, such as demographic pressures, economic cycles, and competition for resources. The three primary Middle Eastern rivals will continue to test each other's influence. Their cultural preferences indicate how severely they will react to existential threats from non-state actors like ISIL.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Naval War College Foundation's Global Hotspots Symposium 2015 In San Francisco
I attended the Naval War College Foundation's annual San Francisco seminar last month. This is the third time I've attended and this year's "Global Hotpots Symposium" delivered my money's worth. The photos below depict the day's action at the Marines' Memorial Club. The comments below are paraphrased from the speakers, with my own thoughts in bold text.
The first speaker described the insecurity plaguing the Middle East. Her factual descriptions of conditions in the region were impeccable. The story of ISIS's rise from the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria is well-documented. The Assad regime's brutal suppression of its own people was a factor the West must acknowledge. ISIS captured billions in wealth from looting Iraqi assets in Mosul and draws fighters from around the world. Disproportionate numbers of wanna-be jihadis are coming from Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon.
I disagree with expert assessments of ISIS's tactical and operational prowess. Photos of their "technical" gun trucks with anti-aircraft weapons hastily placed in pickup trucks show an amateurish approach to fire support. The gunners in the truck beds aim wildly without even using iron sights. They exhibit no evidence of combined arms maneuver despite claims of capturing US-made Iraqi armored vehicles and aircraft. I have seen no evidence in open sources of a logistics system ISIS uses to sustain its captured materiel. Terror tactics work against Iraqi forces with no ideological cohesion or nationalist sentiment of their own.
I do agree with our NWCF speaker that ISIS excels at information operations. Erasing the Iraq-Syria border signals Arab rejection of Sykes-Picot colonialism. Executing POWs wearing orange jumpsuits symbolizes revenge for the perceived US humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Gitmo.
Syrian refugees have been straining civil society in Jordan and Lebanon for several years. Sunni Arab states may be turning against ISIS, at least among the Gulf sheikdoms. Turkey and Saudi Arabia could easily be decisive against ISIS if they act. Saudi Arabia just committed more air and ground forces to fight the Houthis in Yemen than they ever committed against ISIS. The kingdom obviously believes Iranian influence to its south is a bigger threat than barbarians to its north. The NWCF speaker astutely observed that the Sunni states tolerated ISIS's expansion as a way to pressure Iran.
Sunni ISIS fighters obviously target Shia. I don't buy the argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to Iran that justifies Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Tehran's threat of a nuclear program is more valuable as a strategic deterrent to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I also don't buy arguments that ISIS cannot be destroyed with military force. They have a strategic-level center of gravity in Raqaa that a ground campaign can destroy. They also have financial channels from oil revenue and donations that the US can interdict.
Our speaker noted that ISIS's logistics system includes smuggling routes across Turkey's southern border. The anti-ISIS coalition's effort to retake Kobane makes decent strategic sense in that context. The coalition's failure to counter ISIS propaganda makes no sense; ISIS's narrative of romance, revenge, honor, and adventure appeals to disaffected youth.
The second NWCF speaker described recent tension between North Korea and South Korea over the Northern Limit Line (NLL). He recapped recent Hermit Kingdom antics as a reminder that the country's "Byungjin line" requires a dual track of economic development and nuclear weapons. The world still cannot confirm whether the DPRK has installed a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.
The Korean War Armistice left the two Koreas' western maritime boundary undefined. The North has tested the US and ROK commitments to uphold the NLL several times. North Korea appears to have three aims: maintaining economic rights to fishing and crabbing waters; retaining Haeju's port access to save shipping costs on its maritime route with China; and maintaining the ease of dropping SOF on islands close to the ROK.
North Korea has zero interest in submitting its NLL objections to international mediation. Its KPA Navy is too weak to seize disputed islands outright from the ROK. The Cheonan sinking incident was the North's way of testing how much the US and ROK are willing to escalate after an obvious provocation. I am unclear on whether the NLL represents an airspace boundary as well as a maritime one. I do not know whether the ROK has an identification friend or foe (IFF) system compatible with US aircraft but common sense dictates that they should. South Korea's declared ADIZ clearly extends beyond the NLL, so any North Korean air-sea operation in the NLL's vicinity would demand a military response.
I attended a separate lunch discussion with a senior expert who shared his impressions of the Middle East from several tours. I was not surprised when he said the US underestimated the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq. I figured that out during my own tour, when it was obvious that Sunnis and Shias would not return to formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. A similar sectarian fragmentation is not currently evident in Afghanistan. That's the good news, provided the US can keep a token force there long enough to ensure there is no fragmentation. The senior official's best success metrics in both Iraq and Afghanistan were not the number of successful troops in contact (TIC) reports or KIA counts. He valued statistics on local recruitment of military and security forces, along with school enrollment. Those successes proved that tribal leaders in either country accepted their government's legitimacy.
The third NWCF lecturer addressed the future of urban warfare. The most recent Israeli-Hamas war showed how targeting insurgents in cities often destroys infrastructure. The US learned that the hard way in Iraq; just watch the many YouTube videos of JTACs calling for CAS on some building. We also learned that occupying forces end up owning government services, a lesson learned and forgotten in WWII.
Africa is rapidly becoming a laboratory where urban violence tests tribal and sectarian fault lines. Boko Haram's objective is larger than seizing Maiduguri. Their Islamist application of Sharia law appeals to people in corrupt parts of northern Nigeria who have grievances against Nigerian institutions. The larger story of how Chad and Niger carried the fight against Boko Haram must include Nigerian forces' failure to reinforce liberated towns. Al-Shabaab's resurgence is another story the West must hear, because that terror group still has a strong hold on Somalia and is now threatening Western malls after its Kenya mall attack.
Our lecturer endorsed US forces training its division-level formations in full-scale urban warfare. I searched Google for "sewer drone" to find tech options US forces can use in urban warfare. Advice from JAGs on ROE and targeting will be integral to urban warfare. Many of the asymmetric advantages the US brings to a conventional fight are negated when defenders have an advantage in urban terrain.
The final NWCF speaker addressed the possibility of a new Cold War in Russian-American relations. Russia has begun targeting military exercises at NATO areas. NATO's response has been to preposition equipment in Eastern Europe and step up Baltic air patrols. Remember, folks, "NATO" has always been the US instrument for influencing Western Europe. Our European friends rarely take action to assert their interests without US leadership. Russian opinion polls show a rapid shift against the US, but not so much against Europe until recently.
Russia's national psyche has always been predisposed to insecurity and paranoia. I recently attended a gathering of Russian emigres in San Francisco. A lot of them truly believed that pedestrian traffic islands around town were some kind of conspiracy to launder money. It would have been funny if this wasn't indicative of multigenerational Russian paranoia about any official pronouncements.
The apotheosis of the "vatnik/vatnost" phenomenon represents how far Russia has regressed from its post-Cold War openness. Search Google for those words to see an Internet meme celebrating the revival of reactionary, anti-intellectual traditions that Western materialism cannot vanquish. I won't link to the vatnost's retrograde image here, so go find it. The West recognizes Russia's new belligerency and so do former members of the Warsaw Pact who resented Russian dominance.
The West must understand why free market shock therapy worked in the Baltics and Poland but not Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. I suspect the answer lies partly in the US's willingness to extend military cooperation to those successful states but prematurely curtailed Russia's NATO participation. A strong security link to the West would have made Russian-speaking elites feel safer about sticking with free market reforms. I may explore this theory in future blog articles if no one in the US foreign policy community picks it up.
Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy explores how Putin expropriated KGB funds. His recent admission that Russian forces invaded Crimea and provoked its secession prove his duplicity. John Schindler's XX Committee discusses the Chekhism of the Siloviki around Putin, providing invaluable insights into Russia's ruling elite. US reluctance to challenge Putin emboldens him despite Russia's obviously diminishing power. The NWCF expert believes Russia's geostrategic pivot is to its east given China's demand for Russian natural resources. He also believes this will lead to a divorce when they can no longer hide their rivalries. I think that divorce will come sooner than anyone expects when China's economy crashes. I also noticed that many of my Russian-speaking friends in the San Francisco area often repeated Russian media narratives about Ukraine's supposed aggression and "Nazi Galitchina" nationalism. Russia definitely won the propaganda war with Russian language media in Ukraine and elsewhere.
All of the NWCF panelists combined for a final panel and took audience questions. Here come the panel's answers, in a stream of consciousness style with no unifying theme. More Middle East nations are at risk of collapse due to poor governance. The West cannot wear down Russia with spending programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative because the US's ballistic missile defense plan just pumps up Russian nationalism. It's hard to assess the US response to North Korea's cyber actions. The ROK's heavy Internet connectivity is very vulnerable to cyber attack. It is very interesting that piracy is more prevalent on Africa's west cost than its east coast (i.e., Somalia and the Horn of Africa). The US still has substantial interests in anti-piracy, stability, and development in the Horn of Africa. The US Navy's Maritime Strategy mentions A2AD as a stalking horse for countering China, with less attention to civil affairs after budget cuts. China sees global hotspots differently than the US, with separatists in Xinjiang and Tibet figuring prominently. The US can slow but not stop Iran's march to acquiring nuclear weapons because Iran plays with the Non-Proliferation Treaty's limits. It will be easy for Iran to get weapons-grade HEU if it can keep enrichment ability. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to follow Iran into a nuclear arms race. Boko Haram's captive schoolgirls have either perished, dispersed, or returned home; many are still held captive. Arabs think the US State Department's information operations campaign against ISIS lacks credibility. ISIS has a heavy Twitter presence with thousands of sympathetic accounts. The human capacity to handle deprivation has postponed resource wars and ingenuity drives more efficient resource use. Russia's economy and demography won't support Putin's planned army expansion. The Obama Administration truly believes its electoral mandate is to avoid foreign relations.
This concludes my synopsis of the Naval War College's 2015 expedition to The City. A lot of black swans lurk in the world. Look at China's tensions with India, a delayed economic crisis over Greece's inevitable exit from the euro, and migrations from Central America to North America that challenge our southern border's security. US war colleges and private think tanks do a pretty good job of training American leaders to solve strategic problems. I will extend my own discussion of strategy here on Third Eye OSINT.
Full disclosure: The opinions I express in this article reflect my own views and do not reflect the official positions of any US Government entity.
The first speaker described the insecurity plaguing the Middle East. Her factual descriptions of conditions in the region were impeccable. The story of ISIS's rise from the remnants of Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front in Syria is well-documented. The Assad regime's brutal suppression of its own people was a factor the West must acknowledge. ISIS captured billions in wealth from looting Iraqi assets in Mosul and draws fighters from around the world. Disproportionate numbers of wanna-be jihadis are coming from Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon.
I disagree with expert assessments of ISIS's tactical and operational prowess. Photos of their "technical" gun trucks with anti-aircraft weapons hastily placed in pickup trucks show an amateurish approach to fire support. The gunners in the truck beds aim wildly without even using iron sights. They exhibit no evidence of combined arms maneuver despite claims of capturing US-made Iraqi armored vehicles and aircraft. I have seen no evidence in open sources of a logistics system ISIS uses to sustain its captured materiel. Terror tactics work against Iraqi forces with no ideological cohesion or nationalist sentiment of their own.
I do agree with our NWCF speaker that ISIS excels at information operations. Erasing the Iraq-Syria border signals Arab rejection of Sykes-Picot colonialism. Executing POWs wearing orange jumpsuits symbolizes revenge for the perceived US humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Gitmo.
Syrian refugees have been straining civil society in Jordan and Lebanon for several years. Sunni Arab states may be turning against ISIS, at least among the Gulf sheikdoms. Turkey and Saudi Arabia could easily be decisive against ISIS if they act. Saudi Arabia just committed more air and ground forces to fight the Houthis in Yemen than they ever committed against ISIS. The kingdom obviously believes Iranian influence to its south is a bigger threat than barbarians to its north. The NWCF speaker astutely observed that the Sunni states tolerated ISIS's expansion as a way to pressure Iran.
Sunni ISIS fighters obviously target Shia. I don't buy the argument that ISIS represents an existential threat to Iran that justifies Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Tehran's threat of a nuclear program is more valuable as a strategic deterrent to Saudi Arabia and Turkey. I also don't buy arguments that ISIS cannot be destroyed with military force. They have a strategic-level center of gravity in Raqaa that a ground campaign can destroy. They also have financial channels from oil revenue and donations that the US can interdict.
Our speaker noted that ISIS's logistics system includes smuggling routes across Turkey's southern border. The anti-ISIS coalition's effort to retake Kobane makes decent strategic sense in that context. The coalition's failure to counter ISIS propaganda makes no sense; ISIS's narrative of romance, revenge, honor, and adventure appeals to disaffected youth.
The second NWCF speaker described recent tension between North Korea and South Korea over the Northern Limit Line (NLL). He recapped recent Hermit Kingdom antics as a reminder that the country's "Byungjin line" requires a dual track of economic development and nuclear weapons. The world still cannot confirm whether the DPRK has installed a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.
The Korean War Armistice left the two Koreas' western maritime boundary undefined. The North has tested the US and ROK commitments to uphold the NLL several times. North Korea appears to have three aims: maintaining economic rights to fishing and crabbing waters; retaining Haeju's port access to save shipping costs on its maritime route with China; and maintaining the ease of dropping SOF on islands close to the ROK.
North Korea has zero interest in submitting its NLL objections to international mediation. Its KPA Navy is too weak to seize disputed islands outright from the ROK. The Cheonan sinking incident was the North's way of testing how much the US and ROK are willing to escalate after an obvious provocation. I am unclear on whether the NLL represents an airspace boundary as well as a maritime one. I do not know whether the ROK has an identification friend or foe (IFF) system compatible with US aircraft but common sense dictates that they should. South Korea's declared ADIZ clearly extends beyond the NLL, so any North Korean air-sea operation in the NLL's vicinity would demand a military response.
I attended a separate lunch discussion with a senior expert who shared his impressions of the Middle East from several tours. I was not surprised when he said the US underestimated the Sunni/Shia divide in Iraq. I figured that out during my own tour, when it was obvious that Sunnis and Shias would not return to formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad. A similar sectarian fragmentation is not currently evident in Afghanistan. That's the good news, provided the US can keep a token force there long enough to ensure there is no fragmentation. The senior official's best success metrics in both Iraq and Afghanistan were not the number of successful troops in contact (TIC) reports or KIA counts. He valued statistics on local recruitment of military and security forces, along with school enrollment. Those successes proved that tribal leaders in either country accepted their government's legitimacy.
The third NWCF lecturer addressed the future of urban warfare. The most recent Israeli-Hamas war showed how targeting insurgents in cities often destroys infrastructure. The US learned that the hard way in Iraq; just watch the many YouTube videos of JTACs calling for CAS on some building. We also learned that occupying forces end up owning government services, a lesson learned and forgotten in WWII.
Africa is rapidly becoming a laboratory where urban violence tests tribal and sectarian fault lines. Boko Haram's objective is larger than seizing Maiduguri. Their Islamist application of Sharia law appeals to people in corrupt parts of northern Nigeria who have grievances against Nigerian institutions. The larger story of how Chad and Niger carried the fight against Boko Haram must include Nigerian forces' failure to reinforce liberated towns. Al-Shabaab's resurgence is another story the West must hear, because that terror group still has a strong hold on Somalia and is now threatening Western malls after its Kenya mall attack.
Our lecturer endorsed US forces training its division-level formations in full-scale urban warfare. I searched Google for "sewer drone" to find tech options US forces can use in urban warfare. Advice from JAGs on ROE and targeting will be integral to urban warfare. Many of the asymmetric advantages the US brings to a conventional fight are negated when defenders have an advantage in urban terrain.
The final NWCF speaker addressed the possibility of a new Cold War in Russian-American relations. Russia has begun targeting military exercises at NATO areas. NATO's response has been to preposition equipment in Eastern Europe and step up Baltic air patrols. Remember, folks, "NATO" has always been the US instrument for influencing Western Europe. Our European friends rarely take action to assert their interests without US leadership. Russian opinion polls show a rapid shift against the US, but not so much against Europe until recently.
Russia's national psyche has always been predisposed to insecurity and paranoia. I recently attended a gathering of Russian emigres in San Francisco. A lot of them truly believed that pedestrian traffic islands around town were some kind of conspiracy to launder money. It would have been funny if this wasn't indicative of multigenerational Russian paranoia about any official pronouncements.
The apotheosis of the "vatnik/vatnost" phenomenon represents how far Russia has regressed from its post-Cold War openness. Search Google for those words to see an Internet meme celebrating the revival of reactionary, anti-intellectual traditions that Western materialism cannot vanquish. I won't link to the vatnost's retrograde image here, so go find it. The West recognizes Russia's new belligerency and so do former members of the Warsaw Pact who resented Russian dominance.
The West must understand why free market shock therapy worked in the Baltics and Poland but not Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. I suspect the answer lies partly in the US's willingness to extend military cooperation to those successful states but prematurely curtailed Russia's NATO participation. A strong security link to the West would have made Russian-speaking elites feel safer about sticking with free market reforms. I may explore this theory in future blog articles if no one in the US foreign policy community picks it up.
Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy explores how Putin expropriated KGB funds. His recent admission that Russian forces invaded Crimea and provoked its secession prove his duplicity. John Schindler's XX Committee discusses the Chekhism of the Siloviki around Putin, providing invaluable insights into Russia's ruling elite. US reluctance to challenge Putin emboldens him despite Russia's obviously diminishing power. The NWCF expert believes Russia's geostrategic pivot is to its east given China's demand for Russian natural resources. He also believes this will lead to a divorce when they can no longer hide their rivalries. I think that divorce will come sooner than anyone expects when China's economy crashes. I also noticed that many of my Russian-speaking friends in the San Francisco area often repeated Russian media narratives about Ukraine's supposed aggression and "Nazi Galitchina" nationalism. Russia definitely won the propaganda war with Russian language media in Ukraine and elsewhere.
All of the NWCF panelists combined for a final panel and took audience questions. Here come the panel's answers, in a stream of consciousness style with no unifying theme. More Middle East nations are at risk of collapse due to poor governance. The West cannot wear down Russia with spending programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative because the US's ballistic missile defense plan just pumps up Russian nationalism. It's hard to assess the US response to North Korea's cyber actions. The ROK's heavy Internet connectivity is very vulnerable to cyber attack. It is very interesting that piracy is more prevalent on Africa's west cost than its east coast (i.e., Somalia and the Horn of Africa). The US still has substantial interests in anti-piracy, stability, and development in the Horn of Africa. The US Navy's Maritime Strategy mentions A2AD as a stalking horse for countering China, with less attention to civil affairs after budget cuts. China sees global hotspots differently than the US, with separatists in Xinjiang and Tibet figuring prominently. The US can slow but not stop Iran's march to acquiring nuclear weapons because Iran plays with the Non-Proliferation Treaty's limits. It will be easy for Iran to get weapons-grade HEU if it can keep enrichment ability. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to follow Iran into a nuclear arms race. Boko Haram's captive schoolgirls have either perished, dispersed, or returned home; many are still held captive. Arabs think the US State Department's information operations campaign against ISIS lacks credibility. ISIS has a heavy Twitter presence with thousands of sympathetic accounts. The human capacity to handle deprivation has postponed resource wars and ingenuity drives more efficient resource use. Russia's economy and demography won't support Putin's planned army expansion. The Obama Administration truly believes its electoral mandate is to avoid foreign relations.
This concludes my synopsis of the Naval War College's 2015 expedition to The City. A lot of black swans lurk in the world. Look at China's tensions with India, a delayed economic crisis over Greece's inevitable exit from the euro, and migrations from Central America to North America that challenge our southern border's security. US war colleges and private think tanks do a pretty good job of training American leaders to solve strategic problems. I will extend my own discussion of strategy here on Third Eye OSINT.
Full disclosure: The opinions I express in this article reflect my own views and do not reflect the official positions of any US Government entity.
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Announcing America's New Counter-ISIL Strategy
The CEO of Alfidi Capital paid close attention to tonight's national address articulating a new strategy against ISIL. Third Eye OSINT stream-of-consciousness reaction to its major points was powered by pure genius. Stand by for a recap.
Making the case for emerging threats in the MENA region means understanding their sociocultural context. Radical Islam animates ISIL, pure and simple. Claiming it is not an authentic Islamic force invites ridicule in the souks of Cairo and Riyadh.
Citing barbaric tactics and genocide correctly places the threat in a category requiring international response. This supports international conventions dating back decades and more recent responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine.
Air strikes are easy against equipment we recognize, i.e. captured US materiel. The US can quickly exhaust its high-value target list of easily identifiable vehicles. The harder part is destroying ISIL's very mobile C2 network of bad actors.
I like the word "destroy." The US must DESTROY any armed force that threatens violence against our homeland, national leadership, or citizens abroad. The widely-shared photo of someone outside the White House displaying ISIL's flag on a smartphone proves how easily a threat can reach our own C2 nodes.
The national leadership endorses strikes in Syria. Terrorists deserve no safe havens. Training and equipping proxy forces is not as easy as rhetoric makes it sound. The moderate Syrian opposition is mostly cut off and surrounded in many areas where it was formerly active, according to open source reporting.
I'm pretty sure I could assess Iraqi armed forces' condition from my laptop, using open media. US advisers knew the condition of the Iraqi partners they trained all throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom. Western journalists who have covered Iraq since the US troop withdrawal in 2011 knew about the endemic corruption and incompetence in the Iraqi military. NPR's Fresh Air broadcast today discussed this in detail.
Excuse me . . how and why are we enlisting Arab nations' help? Many Gulf sheikhs privately funded Syrian radicals who joined ISIL. Wealthy Kuwaitis and Qataris were willfully blind to the misuse of donated funds intended for humanitarian projects in Syria. There's nothing secret there and it's all in open source media.
Ruling out US ground forces lengthens the time needed for a counteroffensive. Unready Iraqi forces cannot carry the load until they can reconstitute in safe havens far from ISIL-controlled areas. This means extensive retraining under American supervision in either Kurdistan or the Shiite south of Iraq.
Referencing America's economic and scientific strength is obviously intended for a foreign audience, especially the Ebola comment. Foreign intelligence services will review the inventory of America's aid programs mentioned and ask their American ambassadors how they will benefit by joining this coalition of the willing.
Ending with "vanquished from the earth" is a good call that articulates a desired end state. The US is in "it to win it" but only with air power for the time being. Air campaigns against highly mobile urban insurgencies are not effective without ground forces conducting COIN in liberated territory. US planners will eventually realize the need to introduce competent ground forces. Active-duty US military members should not make vacation plans for 2015.
The American response to ISIL's emergent threat was delayed by a politically-driven unwillingness to acknowledge its potency. Echoes of that unwillingness remained audible in tonight's address. The National Security Council's mission is to synchronize threat warnings with a whole-of-government response to threats. Political operatives who supplant foreign policy professionals among NSC staffers are incapable of providing thereat warnings or staffing strong responses. The tragedy of America's new counter-ISIL policy is that it came long after the threat was obvious. It is still incomplete without a US ground force option.
This concludes today's commentary. Have a nice evening.
Friday, January 17, 2014
First Glance At Global Water Risk For 2014
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" pondered "Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink." That's one of the coolest lines I've ever seen in literature. It's also a cool segue to discussing risks to global stability from a lack of access to potable water. Three fourths of the earth's surface is covered in water but only a small amount is fit for human consumption. That small amount will be subject to competition in the years ahead.
The World Resources Institute studies water risk through its Aqueduct global mapping tool. I mentioned last year that a China-India resource conflict within 15 years (thus, by 2028) is my pet theory. The Aqueduct map shows India more stressed for water than China in each scenario. Perusing the Aqueduct's supporting publications reveals those river basins under the most stress from water extraction. A large number of the highest-risk basins are in China, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Water supply risk gets a special mention in the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report for 2014. This report cites food and water crises as major risks but does not link them to a water-energy-food nexus that implies tradeoffs and prioritization of efforts. A couple of paragraphs in Box 1.3 on page 15 do not do the topic justice. I find it odd that the report places both water and food in the upper-right quadrant of its global risk matrix but an oil price shock is in the lower left quadrant. It seems to me that an energy price shock in the water-energy-food nexus will almost immediately drive secondary effects in water and food. The vulnerability of water production industrial control systems to cyberattack is another risk the WEF identified separately, even though that can also impact the water-energy-food nexus.
The UN's World Water Development Report (WWDR) will be an annual guide for policymakers once the next edition comes out this year. While we wait for that publication, the UN-Water Analytical Brief from October 2013 expands upon the water-energy-food nexus as a basis for security. The most positive observation in that brief is the recognition of transboundary water management (TWM) commissions where neighboring countries can discuss water management. I am unclear at present whether these commissions can adjudicate disputes as binding arbitrators; I'm guessing that they cannot unless they point to signed UN conventions or other sources of international law. I like that the brief assigns a dollar figure to watershed management in some regions.
The UN's World Water Development Report (WWDR) will be an annual guide for policymakers once the next edition comes out this year. While we wait for that publication, the UN-Water Analytical Brief from October 2013 expands upon the water-energy-food nexus as a basis for security. The most positive observation in that brief is the recognition of transboundary water management (TWM) commissions where neighboring countries can discuss water management. I am unclear at present whether these commissions can adjudicate disputes as binding arbitrators; I'm guessing that they cannot unless they point to signed UN conventions or other sources of international law. I like that the brief assigns a dollar figure to watershed management in some regions.
My first glance impression, based on the above studies and what I learned at the WorldAffairs 2013 conference last March, is that Pakistan will come under water pressure first and most severely of all the potential crisis regions. Pakistan's water from the Indus River originates in India. Pakistan will face a tradeoff between agriculture and hydropower if it doesn't get enough water for both functions. This will force it to play an increasingly destabilizing game provoking India via Kashmir. India will be tempted to retaliate by extending its influence into Afghanistan as a back-door way to destabilize Pakistan. New Delhi is already preparing this strategic option by extending diplomatic and military overtures to Kabul. India can win a conventional conflict with Pakistan over water access, provided the conflict does not go nuclear and China does not intervene with military force.
The Middle East is a different story. Every major Middle East river is shared by two or more nations and national borders do not coincide with watershed boundaries. Water is more important than oil because it has no substitutes, but the Middle East's vast oil and gas resources enable it to adapt water infrastructure to the region's needs. Water systems present attractive terrorist targets but shared management among regional rivals can be a basis for cooperation that deters state-sponsored groups from attacking infrastructure. The Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) offers a way forward that is neutral toward infrastructure for delivery, as almost every Middle East nation borders the open sea and most are wealthy enough to afford desalination technology.
Water shortages are relevant to Syria's instability, possibly more so than the Arab Spring. The country's population growth stressed its environment and a multi-year drought from 2006-11 drove millions of rural dwellers into food insecurity and urban migration. The Assad regime subsidized water-intensive crops, favoring inefficient techniques (i.e., flooding over precision irrigation) that overdrew groundwater.
There's no shortage of knowledge about water resources. I believe TWM entities will find it useful. Trade in food and other commodities represents the transfer of virtual water, or embedded water, between regions. The Global Water Partnership (GWP) has a useful toolbox for applying integrated water resources management (IWRM) that impacts the virtual water trade. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) awarded its most prestigious prize to the CGIAR International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and helps implement the UNDP Water Governance Facility (WGF). These are all transnational sources of best practices. Applying their lessons in Asia and the Middle East requires TWM bodies ready to go to work.
The lack of reputable TWM organizations in the Middle East and Asia will be a detriment to regional stability. Arab recalcitrance over the US-sponsored Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan was a partial cause of the 1967 Six-Day War. The only TWM organization covering Israel and its Arab neighbors I have found is the Arava Institute's Center for Trans-boundary Water Management. The Carnegie Endowment presented its "Blue Peace" comprehensive IWRM plan in 2011, but I do not know whether any Middle Eastern nations signed on for implementation. The Indian-based Strategic Foresight Group published "Water Cooperation for a Secure World," regarding the potential for water resource cooperation to reduce the risk of war. My Web search for evidence of water cooperation between India and China indicates the two countries have been willing to share data, but long-term cooperation is hampered by their border disputes.
The world's water problems present an opportunity for the United States to emerge as an honest broker in regions key to its strategic interests. The US can use a DIME-based outreach via USAID water and sanitation development programs focusing on efficiency and demand reduction. The DIME approach's success metric should be a reduction in the target region's water footprint, using the Water Footprint Network's data. Leveraging the World Bank's work on water development will give the DIME effort credibility.
Asia and the Middle East will have to manage their water resources in different ways, with or without US assistance. The UN FAO Natural Resources and Environment Department has data and programs useful in resolving water disputes, most of which are now sub-national. If regional rivals cannot peacefully adjudicate water disputes through TWM commissions, they will come into conflict. There is no substitute for water. The Pacific Institute maintains a Water Conflict Chronology. The list of conflicts is likely to grow in the future.
The Middle East is a different story. Every major Middle East river is shared by two or more nations and national borders do not coincide with watershed boundaries. Water is more important than oil because it has no substitutes, but the Middle East's vast oil and gas resources enable it to adapt water infrastructure to the region's needs. Water systems present attractive terrorist targets but shared management among regional rivals can be a basis for cooperation that deters state-sponsored groups from attacking infrastructure. The Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) offers a way forward that is neutral toward infrastructure for delivery, as almost every Middle East nation borders the open sea and most are wealthy enough to afford desalination technology.
Water shortages are relevant to Syria's instability, possibly more so than the Arab Spring. The country's population growth stressed its environment and a multi-year drought from 2006-11 drove millions of rural dwellers into food insecurity and urban migration. The Assad regime subsidized water-intensive crops, favoring inefficient techniques (i.e., flooding over precision irrigation) that overdrew groundwater.
There's no shortage of knowledge about water resources. I believe TWM entities will find it useful. Trade in food and other commodities represents the transfer of virtual water, or embedded water, between regions. The Global Water Partnership (GWP) has a useful toolbox for applying integrated water resources management (IWRM) that impacts the virtual water trade. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) awarded its most prestigious prize to the CGIAR International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and helps implement the UNDP Water Governance Facility (WGF). These are all transnational sources of best practices. Applying their lessons in Asia and the Middle East requires TWM bodies ready to go to work.
The lack of reputable TWM organizations in the Middle East and Asia will be a detriment to regional stability. Arab recalcitrance over the US-sponsored Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan was a partial cause of the 1967 Six-Day War. The only TWM organization covering Israel and its Arab neighbors I have found is the Arava Institute's Center for Trans-boundary Water Management. The Carnegie Endowment presented its "Blue Peace" comprehensive IWRM plan in 2011, but I do not know whether any Middle Eastern nations signed on for implementation. The Indian-based Strategic Foresight Group published "Water Cooperation for a Secure World," regarding the potential for water resource cooperation to reduce the risk of war. My Web search for evidence of water cooperation between India and China indicates the two countries have been willing to share data, but long-term cooperation is hampered by their border disputes.
The world's water problems present an opportunity for the United States to emerge as an honest broker in regions key to its strategic interests. The US can use a DIME-based outreach via USAID water and sanitation development programs focusing on efficiency and demand reduction. The DIME approach's success metric should be a reduction in the target region's water footprint, using the Water Footprint Network's data. Leveraging the World Bank's work on water development will give the DIME effort credibility.
Asia and the Middle East will have to manage their water resources in different ways, with or without US assistance. The UN FAO Natural Resources and Environment Department has data and programs useful in resolving water disputes, most of which are now sub-national. If regional rivals cannot peacefully adjudicate water disputes through TWM commissions, they will come into conflict. There is no substitute for water. The Pacific Institute maintains a Water Conflict Chronology. The list of conflicts is likely to grow in the future.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Iraq Liberation Ten Year Anniversary Scorecard
Ten years ago today, the United States led a coalition of the willing to liberate Iraq from the Saddam Hussein regime. Let's run through the neighborhood and examine the strategic results.
Iraq. The liberated Iraqi people suffered anywhere from 109,000 to over 1,000,000 deaths, depending on who does the counting and whether it includes sectarian violence and deaths from disease or malnutrition. Iraq is no longer governed by an autocrat but its democratic institutions are still weak. The country is still periodically beset by sectarian violence and instability. The good news is that Iraq has functioning democratic institutions and is producing oil for export, although energy supermajors are beginning to sour on Iraq's business climate and poor infrastructure. The bad news is that the Sunni and Kurd minorities are not full partners in Iraq's governance. Iraq is a winner, just barely.
Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been ascendant since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. Its remaining regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Israel, are unwilling to officially cooperate to restrain potential Iranian hegemony. A continued U.S. military presence in the Middle East deters Iran's overt ambitions. This does not deter Iran from using asymmetric methods to influence the Syrian insurrection (Quds Force support to the Assad regime) or the Iraqi government (support to Shiite sect leaders). Iran is probably the biggest winner of the war.
Saudi Arabia. American assurances sustain the kingdom against external threats. Oil revenue sustains it against internal unrest. The House of Saud bribed its citizens to ignore the Arab Spring and the gamble paid off. The Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force stopped Bahrain's unrest from spreading. It's business as usual in Riyadh as if nothing changed in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia is a big winner.
Kuwait. The Saddam regime posed an existential threat to Kuwait as long as it existed. Kuwait now has a much freer hand in dealing with its neighbors. A large U.S. military presence in the Emirate ensures its security. Kuwait is a big winner.
Israel. The oldest democracy in the Middle East is no longer faced with the threat of land invasion or ballistic missile attack from Iraq. The Palestinian insurgency is still a problem but it has one less Arab sponsor. Israel is a big winner.
United States. America's years in Iraq cost over 4400 combat-related casualties and have afflicted thousands more veterans with combinations of mild ailments and severe wounds. The best estimates of the financial costs exceed US$2T including direct appropriations, interest on debt, supplementary expenses in related budget lines (State Department aid), and deferred costs of veterans' care. The opportunity costs of careers unfulfilled and businesses interrupted by repeated mobilizations of the military reserve components are incalculable. The U.S. gained no permanent military basing rights other than the right to continue a large advisory mission under the supervision of its embassy in Baghdad. Concessions for U.S.-based energy producers were mostly limited to support services and a U.S.-Iraq trade framework has taken eight years to implement. The U.S. strategic position as guarantor of the balance of power in the Middle East is unchanged; this came at an enormous cost in lives, prestige, material, and treasure. The United States cannot lose as long as it remains engaged in the Middle East with all elements of its national power, but the price of truly winning is now higher than ever.
Iraq. The liberated Iraqi people suffered anywhere from 109,000 to over 1,000,000 deaths, depending on who does the counting and whether it includes sectarian violence and deaths from disease or malnutrition. Iraq is no longer governed by an autocrat but its democratic institutions are still weak. The country is still periodically beset by sectarian violence and instability. The good news is that Iraq has functioning democratic institutions and is producing oil for export, although energy supermajors are beginning to sour on Iraq's business climate and poor infrastructure. The bad news is that the Sunni and Kurd minorities are not full partners in Iraq's governance. Iraq is a winner, just barely.
Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been ascendant since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. Its remaining regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Israel, are unwilling to officially cooperate to restrain potential Iranian hegemony. A continued U.S. military presence in the Middle East deters Iran's overt ambitions. This does not deter Iran from using asymmetric methods to influence the Syrian insurrection (Quds Force support to the Assad regime) or the Iraqi government (support to Shiite sect leaders). Iran is probably the biggest winner of the war.
Saudi Arabia. American assurances sustain the kingdom against external threats. Oil revenue sustains it against internal unrest. The House of Saud bribed its citizens to ignore the Arab Spring and the gamble paid off. The Gulf Cooperation Council Peninsula Shield Force stopped Bahrain's unrest from spreading. It's business as usual in Riyadh as if nothing changed in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia is a big winner.
Kuwait. The Saddam regime posed an existential threat to Kuwait as long as it existed. Kuwait now has a much freer hand in dealing with its neighbors. A large U.S. military presence in the Emirate ensures its security. Kuwait is a big winner.
Israel. The oldest democracy in the Middle East is no longer faced with the threat of land invasion or ballistic missile attack from Iraq. The Palestinian insurgency is still a problem but it has one less Arab sponsor. Israel is a big winner.
United States. America's years in Iraq cost over 4400 combat-related casualties and have afflicted thousands more veterans with combinations of mild ailments and severe wounds. The best estimates of the financial costs exceed US$2T including direct appropriations, interest on debt, supplementary expenses in related budget lines (State Department aid), and deferred costs of veterans' care. The opportunity costs of careers unfulfilled and businesses interrupted by repeated mobilizations of the military reserve components are incalculable. The U.S. gained no permanent military basing rights other than the right to continue a large advisory mission under the supervision of its embassy in Baghdad. Concessions for U.S.-based energy producers were mostly limited to support services and a U.S.-Iraq trade framework has taken eight years to implement. The U.S. strategic position as guarantor of the balance of power in the Middle East is unchanged; this came at an enormous cost in lives, prestige, material, and treasure. The United States cannot lose as long as it remains engaged in the Middle East with all elements of its national power, but the price of truly winning is now higher than ever.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Report from WorldAffairs 2013 in San Francisco
I was honored when the World Affairs Council of Northern California invited me to attend their WorldAffairs 2013 conference as a member of their first-ever Veteran Fellowship Program. The WAC wants its members to benefit from the experiences of military veterans from our recent conflicts. I attended every session of this conference last week and gathered wisdom straight from the mouths of thought leaders. My summaries of the key speakers' comments are in regular text, so attribution is implied, and my own observations are in italics.
CEO Jane Wales introduced some of the transitions, disruptions, and innovations we could expect to encounter at the conference. She emphasized that governance is the management of shared problems and stewardship of shared resources. Of all things, that reminded me of a line from President Bill Clinton's second inaugural address that government is not the problem nor the solution (neither of which he defined at that time). Social contracts are contested worldwide; Egypt held elections before it had ratified a constitution, so there was no social contract for the elections to validate. Climate change is the ultimate disruption, requiring us to set aside biases and work together. Readers of my Alfidi Capital blog know that I have expressed skepticism of anthropocentric climate change theories. Skepticism is the minority view among the world's policymaking elite, so the rest of us must live with carbon trading and more stringent environmental regulation.
John Steinbruner keynoted on climate change, an appropriate enough transition from the introduction. He broke down the scientific understanding of carbon dioxide into the thesis that CO2-driven thermal impulses drive energy imbalances throughout Earth's history, and the thermal imbalance projected for our time is running late. We cannot presume an effort to mitigate this thermal impulse will take effect in time to moderate global geophysical changes. I disagree; there's a ton of literature on mitigating climate change and plenty of lobbying money available from the sectors who can profit from implementing countermeasures. The UN has made climate change mitigation an international norm. The World Bank is promoting investment in mitigation technologies. Businesses who want to make some easy money can jump on this bandwagon. Pakistan is at the forefront of the coming thermal impulse because Himalayan runoff sets its dependence on the Indus River watershed. Reduced Indus River water flows will complicate Pakistan's water delivery tradeoff between agriculture and hydropower. What happens if Pakistan can't solve its water crisis? Regimes faced with insoluble (no pun intended) domestic problems often resort to nationalism and aggression. This may be sufficient incentive for India to share water resources more generously with Pakistan, but India has its own tremendous need for water. Climate change will induce failed states, prompting instability and intervention. Instability may not always be followed by intervention. India could easily intervene in Pakistan, either benevolently by sharing water or in response to Pakistani provocation. Israel and the Palestinians will face water conflicts but no armed Arab coalition has ever been able to force Israel to do anything. Mr. Steinbruner warns us not to count on global political leaders to initiate a globally integrated response. Volcano eruptions have shown us how sulfate aerosol injections into the stratosphere counteract CO2's warming effect. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption is a good example. These injections are no substitute for mitigation because they risk acidification of the oceans that will alter the global food chain. Aw come on, ashen fish will be the new delicacy, just like blackened redfish once took the culinary world by storm. I'm allowed to be sarcastic. Mr. Steinbruner's preferred solution for converting our hydrocarbon economy to a non-calamitous mode is the massive expansion of nuclear power using small reactors, because biomass energy won't be sufficient by itself. I wonder if he's referring to molten salt reactors using liquid salt thorium. Mr. Steinbruner dropped a bombshell when he said the member of the intelligence community who sponsored his NAS briefing was publicly outed in a possible attempt to derail his report. It's a shame that the intelligence community does this to itself. Sponsors should be more discreet.
Mr. Steinbruner's talk gave me, a climate change skeptic, plenty of food for thought. Addressing climate change is similar to making Pascal's Wager on the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. Betting on accommodating climate change and being wrong has far more favorable consequences than betting against its existence and being wrong. The trouble with mitigation lies in game theory; the first advanced economy to opt out of a climate control regime will attract a burst of short-term investment from hydrocarbon energy producers. That's why the UN and World Bank are creating norms and incentives to minimize the chance that major carbon-generating nations will opt out of things like carbon credit trading even if emerging economies refuse to opt in. There's plenty of money to be made from the move to a mitigation regime. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has plenty of carbon-related projects begging for investors and entrepreneurs to turn them into businesses. The use of carbon injection in oil and gas fracking sounds like a win-win for both carbon sequestration and energy production, provided it doesn't cause small earthquakes. Carbon control will work best when it's subject to free market incentives. Let traders make markets on carbon products.
I elected to attend a panel with Daniel Sneider and Jonathan Penby on "China's Economy: A Genuine U.S. Rival?" Alfidi Capital blog readers know I sold off my remaining Chinese equity holdings last year out of alarm over that economy's malinvestment and questionable data. Mr. Fenby noted that the partial market reforms of Deng Xiaoping have pulled more people out of poverty than ever before in history. Views of China's future as either "collapse" or "world ruler" are flawed because it will remain poorer than the U.S. on a per capita basis even if its GDP becomes the world's largest. China's leadership knows double-digit growth isn't sustainable; IMHO the massaged growth figures from China's statisticians are clumsy efforts at managing expectations. The "pig cycle" in food is the foundation of China's economy. That means every year should be the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac, oink oink. Bad loans and the shadow banking system raise the first-ever possibility of defaults on China's sovereign-backed debt. Actually, previous Chinese governments have defaulted on debt in the 1920s and '30s, so this will be the first Communist default. China's growth is a political story that legitimizes the monopolistic role of the Communist Party but needs a new model besides building infrastructure. Agriculture is their Achilles' heel because one bad harvest will wreck the economy. China prices its water and energy so cheaply that waste creates shortages. This means re-pricing it to reflect scarcity will curtail growth and increase price inflation. There's no way out of it! Any reforms would affect vested interests of Party insiders and cause short term stagflation. Party leaders are terrified that any reform will start a Gorbachev-style implosion.
The discussion moved from development to its effects on strategy and social structure. China is "people rich and resource poor." Resource scarcity at home drives China's resource acquisition strategy in Africa. China often imports its own workers for its projects in Africa, which is no help to local employment. I had no idea. A recent hacking intrusion in the U.S. was traced to a Chinese university campus near the PLA's cyberwar HQ. Most protests are local, single issue, and often environmentally focused. The Party has successfully co-opted the middle class, so revolution to upset the existing regime or a repeat of the 1989 uprising is unlikely. The last thing a secure middle class wants is seven hundred million peasants threatening their social status with demands for democracy. The most powerful ideologies in China today are materialism and nationalism. Failure to deliver materialism means the regime will be tempted to overcorrect by pushing nationalism. A slow growth model in China can't meet rising expectations unless population falls rather dramatically. This makes military aggression inevitable.
Addressing China's military is always fun. Mr. Fenby thinks the PLA is inefficient, technologically backward, and heavily politicized. IMHO Westerners need to realize that China's concept of joint warfare is immature because ground-based operations predominate over everything. The navy and air force are considered subordinate arms of the PLA. The army's origins as the muscle behind Mao's Long March to unification count for everything in the strategic emphasis of Chinese warfighting doctrine. Mr. Fenby thinks the PLA is not an independent political actor. I disagree. China's PLA owes much to the Long March but has also never quite shed the warlord impulse among its generals. The maiden flight of the Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter went right over President Hu Jintao's head to his apparent surprise. Mr. Fenby doesn't subscribe to the theory that China uses North Korea to provoke the U.S. It's more likely that they fear a unified Korea allied with the U.S., which would mean they fought the Korean War in vain to keep the U.S. away from the Yalu River. China does not control the DPRK in the way the Soviet Union controlled the Warsaw Pact, but it does exert enough influence to moderate Pyongyang's behavior. The good news is that Beijing is fed up with Pyongyang's more extreme antics.
The risk of debt default in China is largely with the shadow banking system because state-owned banks can be ordered to bail out bad banks. We went through our own version of this in the U.S., where the SIFIs aren't state-owned but our regulators and politicians are bank-owned. It's a distinction without much of a difference. Anti-corruption campaigns go nowhere be cause they threaten the wealth that Part leaders have amassed. Police don't stop cars marked with military plates, which is why those plates are for sale on the black market. Privileges that can be commoditized will always be abused.
I wasn't able to attend the concurrent focus sessions on left-leaning Latin America and inevitable climate change, so someone else will have to publish whatever lessons they learned. The next keynote was from Chris Anderson on the Maker Revolution. Folks, being a maker is the next big thing and is sustainable in a way that dot-com models and home equity will never be. He had an older model, producing a plastic toy. Life expectancy and population size were constants for much of human history until the Industrial Revolution. Makers are leading the third phase of this revolution by combining desktop manufacturing, digital design, and cloud computing. Anyone can download apps that will allow you to capture an image with your smartphone, modify the image as a 3D mesh scan, and port that scan to a manufacturer. Crowdfunding participation accelerates market research for a new prototype. I get the creative commons licenses covering common generic designs, but there is huge potential for IP owners to use lawfare against designers who infringe on copyrights with careless scanning. That is how big traditional manufacturers will try to shut down maker sites. Mr. Anderson's best insight was that globalization is driven by labor arbitrage. Labor costs have declined as part of a finished product's value chain. Arbitrage via global labor differentials becomes less of a factor in sourcing production. Time arbitrage becomes the new deciding factor in production. This puts a whole new spin on speeding products to market. Faster entrants who modify simple images into designs will win in the additive manufacturing space.
Additive printing adds material layer by layer, which means they can fall apart by layer. This is why the recent controversy over printing firearms parts in 3D is overblown. The firearm will blow up on first use. Delamination is the limiting characteristic of what 3D printing can make. This rules out 3D printing for parts subject to stress from torque or temperature.
Mr. Anderson switched gears quickly to the coming proliferation of drones. Additive manufacturing will make lots of cheap drones available for everyone. He thinks agriculture is a big potential drone market because drones can be programmed to conduct daily automated crop surveys, allowing instant decisions on farm management techniques like pesticide application and irrigation. The cost savings to farmers from pesticide reduction and water conservation will be huge, more than the cost of printing a drone and crowdsourcing its navigation app. He closed by pointing out the future of education at Khan Academy and Udacity, although schools that adopt his suggestion of plugging a 3D printer into their computer lab will of course accelerate their own obsolescence. If that's the stalking horse, it's a good one.
That was just the first day, March 7. Friday's action was even more fun. I fulfilled my obligation as a Veteran Fellow by hosting a Friday morning breakfast table discussion on the sustainability of China's rise as a world power. I thank the very thoughtful people who shared my table for many ideas: the potential for conflict between China and its neighbors, especially India; China's access to water; the capabilities of its slightly used aircraft carrier; the state of its rare earth metal mining sector; and plenty of other food for thought. Speaking of food, the St. Regis Hotel's catering kitchen is pretty good.
The Friday morning keynote on the U.S. fiscal crisis brought Laura Tyson over from U.C. Berkeley and Gillian Tett from the Financial Times. Ms. Tyson had good facts on the macro economy but I disagree with her dismissal of inflation. She may be unaware that the BLS has underreported the CPI for decades with hedonic adjustments and other tricks. She even thinks the U.S. doesn't have a real fiscal crisis. I wish I could show her the Reinhart/Rogoff point we crossed when our nation passed 90% debt/GDP over a year ago. I hope she returns to this conference after we have our Minsky Moment. I guess someone had to represent the Paul Krugman camp of spending our way to prosperity.
Ms. Tett was up next, putting economies into their socio-political context. BTW, she was really attractive. I can't help but notice, plus her British accent made me think of some of Doctor Who's cute assistants. Okay, enough of that, let's summarize what she said. Troubled economies grapple with dysfunctional political systems. Moderation broke into turbulence in 2007, and now we face brinksmanship and gridlock. Europe's postwar politics forced incremental change by consensus. The Eurozone is fractured between its elite and masses. The ECB has forestalled crisis but reform doesn't happen without discomfort. I admit I'm unsure of what she meant; the ECB doesn't have powers comparable to the Fed that would enable it to force reform, regardless of anyone's comfort level. IMHO Europe's problem is not just lack of federal integration; they simply have too much debt.
Ms. Tyson and Ms. Tett went back and forth on the 2008 financial crisis. I disagree with their use of the word "unprecedented." History gives us plenty of precedent for regimes where excessive debt and political capture lead to financial repression and currency debasement. Ms. Tett combined two related observations. First, war is an effective crisis-solving strategy by creating a national rallying cry against a clear threat. Second sacrifice requires social cohesion. In other words, war forces cohesion and enables solutions to previously impossible problems. Whether those solutions are efficient, legal, or even moral is left to be addressed by historians. Ms. Tyson noted just how impossible it is to solve our problems given our political structure. She mentioned Nate Silver's analysis that Congressional incumbents are vulnerable to extremist challenges, inhibiting compromise. She also said that support for compromise outside the political process doesn't penetrate the Beltway. In other words, we're in an "ancien regime" scenario and the breaking point will bring us something we probably haven't seen before as a crisis-resolution mechanism. Germany flirted with letting Greece leave the euro in 2012, and now they hide the cost of the bailout from their own taxpayers. It doesn't hurt yet because this cost ensures a benefit to German exporters from keeping Greece in the euro; when the hurt becomes to large to ignore, Germans will revolt and Greece will see the brightly lit exit sign. My impression of this panel is that the participants were circumscribed by the known boundaries of elite consensus thinking at this time. They can't break out with the kind of discontinuous solutions that would solve our perpetual financial crises - shrink the Eurozone, bankrupt some TBTF SIFIs, end the Fed's QE - because elites at Davos, Bilderberg, and other locales feel the muddled status quo is working out just fine. People inside an unsustainable status quo usually can't see the stress fractures until it's too late. Just ask anyone who thought the Palace of Versailles was a safe refuge in 1789.
Next up was a panel on assessing the U.S.'s top security challenges. Pakistan is a failed state and problem for the U.S. but more development aid sure would be nice. I disagree. Pakistanis by and large despise the U.S. They are very willing to accept our relief aid in natural disasters but this has never changed their attitudes. The hatred is cultural and endemic thanks to the radicalization of much of Pakistan. Aid won't fix it IMHO. It reminds me of the "who lost China" debate in the late 1940s, as if some mythical level of American intervention anywhere (except a totally defeated and psychologically exhausted belligerent like Germany, Italy, or Japan after WWII) can determine every nation's destiny. BTW, any endorsement of developmental aid for Pakistan must account for the enormous Saudi funding of Pakistani madrasas that create radical mullahs.
The panel noted that anti-drone reports are often colored by Pakistanis who want to portray them as negatively as possible. The U.S. military has assessed that drone trikes cause very little collateral damage. The U.S. may have the moral high ground after all but we can only help our own case by publicizing drone missions. The "evil drone user" meme plays into the hands of radical Islamic operatives' information operations campaign directed against U.S. allies who might otherwise permit drone use.
Syria is a problem, with the civil war now destabilizing its neighbors. See what happens when we start arming and training "freedom fighters" with no clue as to their true intentions? Israel is far more secure with the Assads in power. Radical Islamists taking over Damascus will make everyone nervous. The West has learned nothing about the Middle East. Even Laura Tyson admitted during her panel that the West can succumb to confirmation bias when it sees pro-democracy aspirations where there are none.
Iran is a different problem. They have no nuclear weapon now but the West has few military options to play. Tehran can play an oil supply shock, which will IMHO hurt themselves more than anyone else. A U.S.-Israel bombing campaign will rally Iranians to their regime, consistent with the conclusion of every strategic bombing study the U.S. has ever undertaken. IAEA's continuing inspections give the world insight into whether Iran will make a final weaponization decision and close off diplomatic options. Iran does not have free elections; the Supreme Leader makes the important decisions. The Arab Spring embarrasses Iran. The Green Revolution opposition wants the U.S. to stay out of direct involvement in Iran's internal affairs and criticizes the sanctions for hurting the Green presence among the middle class. The Gulf Arab states quietly urge the U.S. to attack Iran, sort of like elementary school kids who have fun goading bigger kids into a fight. Israel is not likely to strike Iran as long as their military intelligence establishment is not fully on board. It's been a while since I checked DEBKAfile; they were prescient in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
I should mention that some local high school students gave a great presentation on their simulation of a peaceful resolution of a crisis in Africa. I remember my own participation in Model U.N. meetings in high school. This kind of thing is a fun and safe way to introduce future thought leaders to the policy community. They even produced a newsletter just for this conference, with a photo of our Veteran Fellows prominently featured. The kids are alright.
The after-lunch keynote from Fouzia Saeed on the women's movement in Pakistan was inspirational. Pakistani women face daily harassment and honor killings still occur. One of her key innovations was to convince bank regulators to include sexual harassment policies in their bank audits. This movement for equality is IMHO one of the few forces stabilization preventing Pakistan from collapsing into all-out radical Islam. Moderates and professionals who remain engaged in civic life are a bulwark against nutcase mullahs. She noted that the activist paradigm does not see problems the same way as the development paradigm. Discrimination crosses the rich/poor, urban/rural divides (unlike development, which focuses on the poor).
I hit up another focus panel on China's new leadership. The new government is four months old and hit an early populist success with a ban on alcohol consumption in the military. Economic policy is typically rolled out at the Third Plenum in October, so the world will see then whether reformist claims are true. The Deng template gave incentives to city and province leaders in the Party who built support for his reform agenda. Rhetoric supporting the rule of law has not yet been translated into policy action.
China since 2009 has increasingly used coercive diplomacy and maritime patrols to try to change accepted facts of sovereign claims to territory. Chinese civilian policymakers have become more belligerent while military leaders have remained restrained and concerned with controlling escalations. China's Foreign Ministry is not the source of foreign policy, which is driven by domestic politics. China used to rein in its military ambitions so it's economic growth wasn't jeopardized. Now it shows a greater willingness to risk escalation. The lack of an NSC-type body makes final authority less clear and risks miscalculation. The U.S. and China are aware they are in a strategic rivalry, so Washington must confine this rivalry to a manageable level.
Here comes the most important revelation of this particular panel. A major soil pollution survey is a Chinese state secret! The public release of the amount of arable land taken out of production by heavy metal contamination would be alarming. I believe American national strategists should closely follow the statistics on food exports from the U.S. to China. This will establish the susceptibility of China to U.S. pressure, much like the Soviet Union's dependence on U.S. wheat during the Cold War. The risk for the U.S. is that applying resource pressure can backfire if the target's dependency is extreme. The U.S, slapped an oil embargo on Japan that precipitated its decision to strike Pearl Harbor. Using food as a strategic lever against China can risk open conflict! The good news is that China is not yet engaged in a massive pre-war military buildup despite 15 years of an increasing military budget. China doesn't even produce aircraft engines domestically and Russia doesn't sell China its most advanced weapons. .
China is notably allowing U.N. Security Council discussions of sanctions against North Korea. China lost face when North Korea defied its request not to test ballistic missiles. China's contribution to the Korean War isn't even acknowledged in North Korea's museums. Ouch!
One audience member in the China panel made a brilliant observation that China's pursuit of a comprehensive area denial strategy, its presence in Pakistan's Quetta port, and its support for a Myanmar pipeline that will enable it to bypass sanctions will all reach a culmination point in 2025. I will have a lot more to say about these and other strategic thrusts in future blog posts. China is an emerging threat to India, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. Analysts cannot ignore these developments.
Someone asked about the fate of Tibet. Maybe they attended too many of those Tibetan freedom concerts that never freed Tibet. The panel noted that China is 92% Han ethnicity and there is no doubt that Tibet will remain part of China. Tibet is strategically critical to China's national survival. So is Xinjiang. There is no chance that these theoretically non-integrated regions will separate politically from the People's Republic of China. This is true in the absence of an existential threat, but things can change when a threat fulfills its potential. It is difficult but not impossible to imagine events that would result in the breakup of China into several parts. Plenty of Western analysts missed the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The closing keynote address of the conference belonged to Fareed Zakaria. He ran through the ups and downs of the last three decades of the U.S.'s political and economic history in parallel with his own career progress as a policy analyst. Civilization is resilient. The end of the Cold War has brought a political and economic convergence in which the "rise of the rest" brings competition for the West. Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are imperiled by the Information Revolution.
The most worrying U.S. statistic for Mr. Zakaria is that it now takes much longer for employment to return to pre-recession levels than ever. Technology is now much more productive with less skilled labor. He thinks the U.S.'s demographic growth will eventually drive a new housing boom. I think there's more to housing than demographics. Stagnant incomes and huge student loan debts are serious counterweights to any demographic impulse to leave the nest. The nations' existing housing stock is at an all-time high with banks still holding shadow inventory and interest rates bound to rise in the future. Sorry, folks, but twentysomethings are staying in the nest. He recognizes that the U.S. government is terrible at VC-type investing but can do large-scale basic research on energy technology. Indeed, I agree. He correctly traces the Arab Spring to economic anxiety over food price inflation. I'd like to see more mainstream analysts make the ultimate connection to the Fed's QE driving hedge fund money into hard assets and private equity into farmland. I also suspect analysts will have to walk back claims that Arab Spring bribery was more effective than repression once they consider the Peninsula Shield Force's action in Bahrain.
Mr. Zakaria's analysis of Syria was a breath of fresh air. Imposing a no-fly zone will not restrain the regime because almost all of the fighting is in urban areas. Many weapons handed to the insurgents have already ended up in the hands of Kurdish rebels fighting in Turkey. The Alawites are 12% of Syria's population and are fighting because they fear a massacre if the regime is defeated. The insurgents are very factionalized and there are few desertions from the Syrian army. I am very impressed with his analysis.
He noted that Iran (and Persia) have practiced sophisticated statecraft for 5000 years. They won't just give up under pressure from the U.S. Our President's negotiating room is limited by likely criticism from political opponents. This guy was on a roll. Development aid goes farther when targeted to women. Women enrich intellectual conversations but but men still tend to dominate mixed conversations. I'm not sure which group of developing countries he meant with these remarks. The U.S. experience in Afghanistan shows that development aid in a xenophobic, patriarchal society will be misappropiated by men and never get to women. If it does get to women, they may even reject it if it disrupts their accepted roles in rural life. Some countries are just really tough nuts to crack. Mr. Zakaria had one good academic anecdote from the informal mantra of Harvard University academic committee meetings: "Everything has been said, but not everyone has said it." Harvard sounds like a civilization ruled by windbag egotists. Mr. Zakaria escaped, to his credit and our benefit.
This was a totally awesome conference. I'm grateful for the chance to host a discussion table and I will definitely be involved in the World Affairs Council for many years to come. See you all next year.
CEO Jane Wales introduced some of the transitions, disruptions, and innovations we could expect to encounter at the conference. She emphasized that governance is the management of shared problems and stewardship of shared resources. Of all things, that reminded me of a line from President Bill Clinton's second inaugural address that government is not the problem nor the solution (neither of which he defined at that time). Social contracts are contested worldwide; Egypt held elections before it had ratified a constitution, so there was no social contract for the elections to validate. Climate change is the ultimate disruption, requiring us to set aside biases and work together. Readers of my Alfidi Capital blog know that I have expressed skepticism of anthropocentric climate change theories. Skepticism is the minority view among the world's policymaking elite, so the rest of us must live with carbon trading and more stringent environmental regulation.
John Steinbruner keynoted on climate change, an appropriate enough transition from the introduction. He broke down the scientific understanding of carbon dioxide into the thesis that CO2-driven thermal impulses drive energy imbalances throughout Earth's history, and the thermal imbalance projected for our time is running late. We cannot presume an effort to mitigate this thermal impulse will take effect in time to moderate global geophysical changes. I disagree; there's a ton of literature on mitigating climate change and plenty of lobbying money available from the sectors who can profit from implementing countermeasures. The UN has made climate change mitigation an international norm. The World Bank is promoting investment in mitigation technologies. Businesses who want to make some easy money can jump on this bandwagon. Pakistan is at the forefront of the coming thermal impulse because Himalayan runoff sets its dependence on the Indus River watershed. Reduced Indus River water flows will complicate Pakistan's water delivery tradeoff between agriculture and hydropower. What happens if Pakistan can't solve its water crisis? Regimes faced with insoluble (no pun intended) domestic problems often resort to nationalism and aggression. This may be sufficient incentive for India to share water resources more generously with Pakistan, but India has its own tremendous need for water. Climate change will induce failed states, prompting instability and intervention. Instability may not always be followed by intervention. India could easily intervene in Pakistan, either benevolently by sharing water or in response to Pakistani provocation. Israel and the Palestinians will face water conflicts but no armed Arab coalition has ever been able to force Israel to do anything. Mr. Steinbruner warns us not to count on global political leaders to initiate a globally integrated response. Volcano eruptions have shown us how sulfate aerosol injections into the stratosphere counteract CO2's warming effect. The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption is a good example. These injections are no substitute for mitigation because they risk acidification of the oceans that will alter the global food chain. Aw come on, ashen fish will be the new delicacy, just like blackened redfish once took the culinary world by storm. I'm allowed to be sarcastic. Mr. Steinbruner's preferred solution for converting our hydrocarbon economy to a non-calamitous mode is the massive expansion of nuclear power using small reactors, because biomass energy won't be sufficient by itself. I wonder if he's referring to molten salt reactors using liquid salt thorium. Mr. Steinbruner dropped a bombshell when he said the member of the intelligence community who sponsored his NAS briefing was publicly outed in a possible attempt to derail his report. It's a shame that the intelligence community does this to itself. Sponsors should be more discreet.
Mr. Steinbruner's talk gave me, a climate change skeptic, plenty of food for thought. Addressing climate change is similar to making Pascal's Wager on the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. Betting on accommodating climate change and being wrong has far more favorable consequences than betting against its existence and being wrong. The trouble with mitigation lies in game theory; the first advanced economy to opt out of a climate control regime will attract a burst of short-term investment from hydrocarbon energy producers. That's why the UN and World Bank are creating norms and incentives to minimize the chance that major carbon-generating nations will opt out of things like carbon credit trading even if emerging economies refuse to opt in. There's plenty of money to be made from the move to a mitigation regime. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has plenty of carbon-related projects begging for investors and entrepreneurs to turn them into businesses. The use of carbon injection in oil and gas fracking sounds like a win-win for both carbon sequestration and energy production, provided it doesn't cause small earthquakes. Carbon control will work best when it's subject to free market incentives. Let traders make markets on carbon products.
I elected to attend a panel with Daniel Sneider and Jonathan Penby on "China's Economy: A Genuine U.S. Rival?" Alfidi Capital blog readers know I sold off my remaining Chinese equity holdings last year out of alarm over that economy's malinvestment and questionable data. Mr. Fenby noted that the partial market reforms of Deng Xiaoping have pulled more people out of poverty than ever before in history. Views of China's future as either "collapse" or "world ruler" are flawed because it will remain poorer than the U.S. on a per capita basis even if its GDP becomes the world's largest. China's leadership knows double-digit growth isn't sustainable; IMHO the massaged growth figures from China's statisticians are clumsy efforts at managing expectations. The "pig cycle" in food is the foundation of China's economy. That means every year should be the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac, oink oink. Bad loans and the shadow banking system raise the first-ever possibility of defaults on China's sovereign-backed debt. Actually, previous Chinese governments have defaulted on debt in the 1920s and '30s, so this will be the first Communist default. China's growth is a political story that legitimizes the monopolistic role of the Communist Party but needs a new model besides building infrastructure. Agriculture is their Achilles' heel because one bad harvest will wreck the economy. China prices its water and energy so cheaply that waste creates shortages. This means re-pricing it to reflect scarcity will curtail growth and increase price inflation. There's no way out of it! Any reforms would affect vested interests of Party insiders and cause short term stagflation. Party leaders are terrified that any reform will start a Gorbachev-style implosion.
The discussion moved from development to its effects on strategy and social structure. China is "people rich and resource poor." Resource scarcity at home drives China's resource acquisition strategy in Africa. China often imports its own workers for its projects in Africa, which is no help to local employment. I had no idea. A recent hacking intrusion in the U.S. was traced to a Chinese university campus near the PLA's cyberwar HQ. Most protests are local, single issue, and often environmentally focused. The Party has successfully co-opted the middle class, so revolution to upset the existing regime or a repeat of the 1989 uprising is unlikely. The last thing a secure middle class wants is seven hundred million peasants threatening their social status with demands for democracy. The most powerful ideologies in China today are materialism and nationalism. Failure to deliver materialism means the regime will be tempted to overcorrect by pushing nationalism. A slow growth model in China can't meet rising expectations unless population falls rather dramatically. This makes military aggression inevitable.
Addressing China's military is always fun. Mr. Fenby thinks the PLA is inefficient, technologically backward, and heavily politicized. IMHO Westerners need to realize that China's concept of joint warfare is immature because ground-based operations predominate over everything. The navy and air force are considered subordinate arms of the PLA. The army's origins as the muscle behind Mao's Long March to unification count for everything in the strategic emphasis of Chinese warfighting doctrine. Mr. Fenby thinks the PLA is not an independent political actor. I disagree. China's PLA owes much to the Long March but has also never quite shed the warlord impulse among its generals. The maiden flight of the Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter went right over President Hu Jintao's head to his apparent surprise. Mr. Fenby doesn't subscribe to the theory that China uses North Korea to provoke the U.S. It's more likely that they fear a unified Korea allied with the U.S., which would mean they fought the Korean War in vain to keep the U.S. away from the Yalu River. China does not control the DPRK in the way the Soviet Union controlled the Warsaw Pact, but it does exert enough influence to moderate Pyongyang's behavior. The good news is that Beijing is fed up with Pyongyang's more extreme antics.
The risk of debt default in China is largely with the shadow banking system because state-owned banks can be ordered to bail out bad banks. We went through our own version of this in the U.S., where the SIFIs aren't state-owned but our regulators and politicians are bank-owned. It's a distinction without much of a difference. Anti-corruption campaigns go nowhere be cause they threaten the wealth that Part leaders have amassed. Police don't stop cars marked with military plates, which is why those plates are for sale on the black market. Privileges that can be commoditized will always be abused.
I wasn't able to attend the concurrent focus sessions on left-leaning Latin America and inevitable climate change, so someone else will have to publish whatever lessons they learned. The next keynote was from Chris Anderson on the Maker Revolution. Folks, being a maker is the next big thing and is sustainable in a way that dot-com models and home equity will never be. He had an older model, producing a plastic toy. Life expectancy and population size were constants for much of human history until the Industrial Revolution. Makers are leading the third phase of this revolution by combining desktop manufacturing, digital design, and cloud computing. Anyone can download apps that will allow you to capture an image with your smartphone, modify the image as a 3D mesh scan, and port that scan to a manufacturer. Crowdfunding participation accelerates market research for a new prototype. I get the creative commons licenses covering common generic designs, but there is huge potential for IP owners to use lawfare against designers who infringe on copyrights with careless scanning. That is how big traditional manufacturers will try to shut down maker sites. Mr. Anderson's best insight was that globalization is driven by labor arbitrage. Labor costs have declined as part of a finished product's value chain. Arbitrage via global labor differentials becomes less of a factor in sourcing production. Time arbitrage becomes the new deciding factor in production. This puts a whole new spin on speeding products to market. Faster entrants who modify simple images into designs will win in the additive manufacturing space.
Additive printing adds material layer by layer, which means they can fall apart by layer. This is why the recent controversy over printing firearms parts in 3D is overblown. The firearm will blow up on first use. Delamination is the limiting characteristic of what 3D printing can make. This rules out 3D printing for parts subject to stress from torque or temperature.
Mr. Anderson switched gears quickly to the coming proliferation of drones. Additive manufacturing will make lots of cheap drones available for everyone. He thinks agriculture is a big potential drone market because drones can be programmed to conduct daily automated crop surveys, allowing instant decisions on farm management techniques like pesticide application and irrigation. The cost savings to farmers from pesticide reduction and water conservation will be huge, more than the cost of printing a drone and crowdsourcing its navigation app. He closed by pointing out the future of education at Khan Academy and Udacity, although schools that adopt his suggestion of plugging a 3D printer into their computer lab will of course accelerate their own obsolescence. If that's the stalking horse, it's a good one.
That was just the first day, March 7. Friday's action was even more fun. I fulfilled my obligation as a Veteran Fellow by hosting a Friday morning breakfast table discussion on the sustainability of China's rise as a world power. I thank the very thoughtful people who shared my table for many ideas: the potential for conflict between China and its neighbors, especially India; China's access to water; the capabilities of its slightly used aircraft carrier; the state of its rare earth metal mining sector; and plenty of other food for thought. Speaking of food, the St. Regis Hotel's catering kitchen is pretty good.
The Friday morning keynote on the U.S. fiscal crisis brought Laura Tyson over from U.C. Berkeley and Gillian Tett from the Financial Times. Ms. Tyson had good facts on the macro economy but I disagree with her dismissal of inflation. She may be unaware that the BLS has underreported the CPI for decades with hedonic adjustments and other tricks. She even thinks the U.S. doesn't have a real fiscal crisis. I wish I could show her the Reinhart/Rogoff point we crossed when our nation passed 90% debt/GDP over a year ago. I hope she returns to this conference after we have our Minsky Moment. I guess someone had to represent the Paul Krugman camp of spending our way to prosperity.
Ms. Tett was up next, putting economies into their socio-political context. BTW, she was really attractive. I can't help but notice, plus her British accent made me think of some of Doctor Who's cute assistants. Okay, enough of that, let's summarize what she said. Troubled economies grapple with dysfunctional political systems. Moderation broke into turbulence in 2007, and now we face brinksmanship and gridlock. Europe's postwar politics forced incremental change by consensus. The Eurozone is fractured between its elite and masses. The ECB has forestalled crisis but reform doesn't happen without discomfort. I admit I'm unsure of what she meant; the ECB doesn't have powers comparable to the Fed that would enable it to force reform, regardless of anyone's comfort level. IMHO Europe's problem is not just lack of federal integration; they simply have too much debt.
Ms. Tyson and Ms. Tett went back and forth on the 2008 financial crisis. I disagree with their use of the word "unprecedented." History gives us plenty of precedent for regimes where excessive debt and political capture lead to financial repression and currency debasement. Ms. Tett combined two related observations. First, war is an effective crisis-solving strategy by creating a national rallying cry against a clear threat. Second sacrifice requires social cohesion. In other words, war forces cohesion and enables solutions to previously impossible problems. Whether those solutions are efficient, legal, or even moral is left to be addressed by historians. Ms. Tyson noted just how impossible it is to solve our problems given our political structure. She mentioned Nate Silver's analysis that Congressional incumbents are vulnerable to extremist challenges, inhibiting compromise. She also said that support for compromise outside the political process doesn't penetrate the Beltway. In other words, we're in an "ancien regime" scenario and the breaking point will bring us something we probably haven't seen before as a crisis-resolution mechanism. Germany flirted with letting Greece leave the euro in 2012, and now they hide the cost of the bailout from their own taxpayers. It doesn't hurt yet because this cost ensures a benefit to German exporters from keeping Greece in the euro; when the hurt becomes to large to ignore, Germans will revolt and Greece will see the brightly lit exit sign. My impression of this panel is that the participants were circumscribed by the known boundaries of elite consensus thinking at this time. They can't break out with the kind of discontinuous solutions that would solve our perpetual financial crises - shrink the Eurozone, bankrupt some TBTF SIFIs, end the Fed's QE - because elites at Davos, Bilderberg, and other locales feel the muddled status quo is working out just fine. People inside an unsustainable status quo usually can't see the stress fractures until it's too late. Just ask anyone who thought the Palace of Versailles was a safe refuge in 1789.
Next up was a panel on assessing the U.S.'s top security challenges. Pakistan is a failed state and problem for the U.S. but more development aid sure would be nice. I disagree. Pakistanis by and large despise the U.S. They are very willing to accept our relief aid in natural disasters but this has never changed their attitudes. The hatred is cultural and endemic thanks to the radicalization of much of Pakistan. Aid won't fix it IMHO. It reminds me of the "who lost China" debate in the late 1940s, as if some mythical level of American intervention anywhere (except a totally defeated and psychologically exhausted belligerent like Germany, Italy, or Japan after WWII) can determine every nation's destiny. BTW, any endorsement of developmental aid for Pakistan must account for the enormous Saudi funding of Pakistani madrasas that create radical mullahs.
The panel noted that anti-drone reports are often colored by Pakistanis who want to portray them as negatively as possible. The U.S. military has assessed that drone trikes cause very little collateral damage. The U.S. may have the moral high ground after all but we can only help our own case by publicizing drone missions. The "evil drone user" meme plays into the hands of radical Islamic operatives' information operations campaign directed against U.S. allies who might otherwise permit drone use.
Syria is a problem, with the civil war now destabilizing its neighbors. See what happens when we start arming and training "freedom fighters" with no clue as to their true intentions? Israel is far more secure with the Assads in power. Radical Islamists taking over Damascus will make everyone nervous. The West has learned nothing about the Middle East. Even Laura Tyson admitted during her panel that the West can succumb to confirmation bias when it sees pro-democracy aspirations where there are none.
Iran is a different problem. They have no nuclear weapon now but the West has few military options to play. Tehran can play an oil supply shock, which will IMHO hurt themselves more than anyone else. A U.S.-Israel bombing campaign will rally Iranians to their regime, consistent with the conclusion of every strategic bombing study the U.S. has ever undertaken. IAEA's continuing inspections give the world insight into whether Iran will make a final weaponization decision and close off diplomatic options. Iran does not have free elections; the Supreme Leader makes the important decisions. The Arab Spring embarrasses Iran. The Green Revolution opposition wants the U.S. to stay out of direct involvement in Iran's internal affairs and criticizes the sanctions for hurting the Green presence among the middle class. The Gulf Arab states quietly urge the U.S. to attack Iran, sort of like elementary school kids who have fun goading bigger kids into a fight. Israel is not likely to strike Iran as long as their military intelligence establishment is not fully on board. It's been a while since I checked DEBKAfile; they were prescient in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
I should mention that some local high school students gave a great presentation on their simulation of a peaceful resolution of a crisis in Africa. I remember my own participation in Model U.N. meetings in high school. This kind of thing is a fun and safe way to introduce future thought leaders to the policy community. They even produced a newsletter just for this conference, with a photo of our Veteran Fellows prominently featured. The kids are alright.
The after-lunch keynote from Fouzia Saeed on the women's movement in Pakistan was inspirational. Pakistani women face daily harassment and honor killings still occur. One of her key innovations was to convince bank regulators to include sexual harassment policies in their bank audits. This movement for equality is IMHO one of the few forces stabilization preventing Pakistan from collapsing into all-out radical Islam. Moderates and professionals who remain engaged in civic life are a bulwark against nutcase mullahs. She noted that the activist paradigm does not see problems the same way as the development paradigm. Discrimination crosses the rich/poor, urban/rural divides (unlike development, which focuses on the poor).
I hit up another focus panel on China's new leadership. The new government is four months old and hit an early populist success with a ban on alcohol consumption in the military. Economic policy is typically rolled out at the Third Plenum in October, so the world will see then whether reformist claims are true. The Deng template gave incentives to city and province leaders in the Party who built support for his reform agenda. Rhetoric supporting the rule of law has not yet been translated into policy action.
China since 2009 has increasingly used coercive diplomacy and maritime patrols to try to change accepted facts of sovereign claims to territory. Chinese civilian policymakers have become more belligerent while military leaders have remained restrained and concerned with controlling escalations. China's Foreign Ministry is not the source of foreign policy, which is driven by domestic politics. China used to rein in its military ambitions so it's economic growth wasn't jeopardized. Now it shows a greater willingness to risk escalation. The lack of an NSC-type body makes final authority less clear and risks miscalculation. The U.S. and China are aware they are in a strategic rivalry, so Washington must confine this rivalry to a manageable level.
Here comes the most important revelation of this particular panel. A major soil pollution survey is a Chinese state secret! The public release of the amount of arable land taken out of production by heavy metal contamination would be alarming. I believe American national strategists should closely follow the statistics on food exports from the U.S. to China. This will establish the susceptibility of China to U.S. pressure, much like the Soviet Union's dependence on U.S. wheat during the Cold War. The risk for the U.S. is that applying resource pressure can backfire if the target's dependency is extreme. The U.S, slapped an oil embargo on Japan that precipitated its decision to strike Pearl Harbor. Using food as a strategic lever against China can risk open conflict! The good news is that China is not yet engaged in a massive pre-war military buildup despite 15 years of an increasing military budget. China doesn't even produce aircraft engines domestically and Russia doesn't sell China its most advanced weapons. .
China is notably allowing U.N. Security Council discussions of sanctions against North Korea. China lost face when North Korea defied its request not to test ballistic missiles. China's contribution to the Korean War isn't even acknowledged in North Korea's museums. Ouch!
One audience member in the China panel made a brilliant observation that China's pursuit of a comprehensive area denial strategy, its presence in Pakistan's Quetta port, and its support for a Myanmar pipeline that will enable it to bypass sanctions will all reach a culmination point in 2025. I will have a lot more to say about these and other strategic thrusts in future blog posts. China is an emerging threat to India, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. Analysts cannot ignore these developments.
Someone asked about the fate of Tibet. Maybe they attended too many of those Tibetan freedom concerts that never freed Tibet. The panel noted that China is 92% Han ethnicity and there is no doubt that Tibet will remain part of China. Tibet is strategically critical to China's national survival. So is Xinjiang. There is no chance that these theoretically non-integrated regions will separate politically from the People's Republic of China. This is true in the absence of an existential threat, but things can change when a threat fulfills its potential. It is difficult but not impossible to imagine events that would result in the breakup of China into several parts. Plenty of Western analysts missed the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The closing keynote address of the conference belonged to Fareed Zakaria. He ran through the ups and downs of the last three decades of the U.S.'s political and economic history in parallel with his own career progress as a policy analyst. Civilization is resilient. The end of the Cold War has brought a political and economic convergence in which the "rise of the rest" brings competition for the West. Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are imperiled by the Information Revolution.
The most worrying U.S. statistic for Mr. Zakaria is that it now takes much longer for employment to return to pre-recession levels than ever. Technology is now much more productive with less skilled labor. He thinks the U.S.'s demographic growth will eventually drive a new housing boom. I think there's more to housing than demographics. Stagnant incomes and huge student loan debts are serious counterweights to any demographic impulse to leave the nest. The nations' existing housing stock is at an all-time high with banks still holding shadow inventory and interest rates bound to rise in the future. Sorry, folks, but twentysomethings are staying in the nest. He recognizes that the U.S. government is terrible at VC-type investing but can do large-scale basic research on energy technology. Indeed, I agree. He correctly traces the Arab Spring to economic anxiety over food price inflation. I'd like to see more mainstream analysts make the ultimate connection to the Fed's QE driving hedge fund money into hard assets and private equity into farmland. I also suspect analysts will have to walk back claims that Arab Spring bribery was more effective than repression once they consider the Peninsula Shield Force's action in Bahrain.
Mr. Zakaria's analysis of Syria was a breath of fresh air. Imposing a no-fly zone will not restrain the regime because almost all of the fighting is in urban areas. Many weapons handed to the insurgents have already ended up in the hands of Kurdish rebels fighting in Turkey. The Alawites are 12% of Syria's population and are fighting because they fear a massacre if the regime is defeated. The insurgents are very factionalized and there are few desertions from the Syrian army. I am very impressed with his analysis.
He noted that Iran (and Persia) have practiced sophisticated statecraft for 5000 years. They won't just give up under pressure from the U.S. Our President's negotiating room is limited by likely criticism from political opponents. This guy was on a roll. Development aid goes farther when targeted to women. Women enrich intellectual conversations but but men still tend to dominate mixed conversations. I'm not sure which group of developing countries he meant with these remarks. The U.S. experience in Afghanistan shows that development aid in a xenophobic, patriarchal society will be misappropiated by men and never get to women. If it does get to women, they may even reject it if it disrupts their accepted roles in rural life. Some countries are just really tough nuts to crack. Mr. Zakaria had one good academic anecdote from the informal mantra of Harvard University academic committee meetings: "Everything has been said, but not everyone has said it." Harvard sounds like a civilization ruled by windbag egotists. Mr. Zakaria escaped, to his credit and our benefit.
This was a totally awesome conference. I'm grateful for the chance to host a discussion table and I will definitely be involved in the World Affairs Council for many years to come. See you all next year.
Friday, March 1, 2013
The Impossibility of a Two-State Israel-Palestine Solution
The Internet is full of well-intentioned ideas for peace in the Middle East, specifically a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of these ideas are garbage. This conflict is as old as the earliest settlements in the Levant. It will continue until one party is no longer able or willing to continue the conflict and the remaining party is a viable nation-state.
The most promising chance for peace in the modern era was the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement of 1919. The end of WWI allowed a window of opportunity for wise Arab leaders to acquiesce to a Jewish state in Palestine, in exchange for Jewish help in developing their economies. The borders of the proposed Jewish homeland were contiguous with all of what are today called "occupied" Palestinian territories. The entirety of this territory gives a single state strategic depth and is defensible. The meddling of Great Powers's Sykes-Picot Agreement ruined what would have been a comprehensive peace. Meddling continued with the UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, with borders so ludicrous that no one in their right mind could accept them. Palestine's borders are just as ludicrous today, with the Gaza Strip and West Bank obviously indefensible and impossible to sustain economically.
Palestinians have never been fully accepted by other Arabs, who view them with disdain as interlopers with little legitimate claim to territory. Their inability to assimilate into Israeli civilization is not Israel's fault; indeed, many Arabs have succeeded as Israeli citizens and have been elected to the Israeli Knesset. Arab Israelis retain their Muslim religious affiliation and have served honorably in the Israeli military. Their kinship with Palestinians has not prevented them assimilating into Israeli society. They have found peace in their own way. Many other Arabs and Israelis work for peace in their own ways, despite radical Muslims who reject Israel's right to exist.
The international narrative advocating some kind of two-state solution is a curiosity. Its persistence attests to the deep pockets of its sponsors, specifically the petroleum-producing Arab states, and the ready audience among naive advocates in the NGO and diplomatic communities. I would like a two-state advocate to explain who will defend the Golan Heights from a corps-strength Arab armored assault.
The state of Israel and the Palestinian diaspora are two incompatible civilizations. The untenable status quo puts a non-viable proto-state of Palestinians in the midst of a viable Israeli democracy. This subjects the Palestinian people to the endless manipulation of outside powers, specifically radical Islamic governments and movements that view them as permanent dependents. This is a tragedy for the Palestinian people that a two-state solution will perpetuate. The stronger civilization at this moment in history is clearly Israel. It is a democratic, multi-ethnic, technologically advanced society that has been a bulwark of American security interests in the Middle East for most of its modern history. The United States would do well to align its interests with those of Israel, the ultimate guarantor of its own Arab citizens' security.
Friday, December 7, 2012
My Encounter With Paula Broadwell, Where Nothing Happened
I remember it like it was yesterday. I went to the Marines Memorial Club on May 9, 2012 to hear from the author of All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Book tours are a fun way to meet semi-important people. I didn't look closely at the book's cover, so I missed the chance to note that the biographer had a ghostwriter. That should have been red flag number one that the book, its primary author, its subject, and its promotional tour were all contrived to one degree or another. Analysts like yours truly can't afford too many oversights like that.
Paula Broadwell was immediately noticeable. I did get the chance to briefly talk with her about her background in the military. I mentioned my interests in foreign policy and she nodded approvingly. She then turned her attention to others in the room who were going to prep her for her talk. No flirting took place at all.
I didn't take notes during her talk, which was just as well because there wasn't much of substance to remember. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she mentioned the CIA's drone program. I didn't ask anything during the Q&A at the end because I didn't see any further mystery about her biographical subject that needed to be revealed. Boy, was I ever ignorant of what was left unsaid, like whether "All In" was some snarky inside joke between author and subject about what they were really doing. The whole tone of her talk painted David Petraeus in saintly terms, so much so that I was turned off from ever reading her book. The term "hagiography" kept popping into my head, like so many uncritical "lives of the saints" stories I recall from the catechism of my youth. One could be excused for thinking The Greatest General Of Our Time (TM) had no flaws besides the tendency to work too hard, which is the one most important flaw that job interview candidates are told to mention to a hiring manager.
The talk ended and I briefly watched Ms. Broadwell interact with her audience before I left. I stated in my title that "nothing happened" and I truly mean nothing happened in her entire talk that warranted attention. The whole show left me with the impression that David Petraeus wanted this woman polishing his image in the public's mind to "shape the battlespace" for something else. Only time will tell whether that something else is a campaign for elected office.
The revelation of l'affaire Petraeus puts her sales pitch into its proper context. Ambitious people have their courtiers and hangers-on. Ms. Broadwell reminded me of every single mid-ranking female executive I encountered while working for large investment firms. They all exuded feminine appeal from every pore and leveraged this persona to get everything their hearts desired. Performing special favors for a powerful mentor is just another rung on the way up the ladder.
I am at least relieved to note that this sad affair was not a penetration by a foreign intelligence service or an attempt at blackmail (although obviously some form of "penetration" took place, heh heh). Whatever notoriety Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell have earned will be completely forgiven by 2016 should either of them enter politics. Their carefully constructed personas as dynamic, virile, all-American forces of nature will survive and thrive in whatever narrative awaits the national stage. It is a stage, after all, and Americans expect their favorite performers to make repeat appearances. The show must go on.
Paula Broadwell was immediately noticeable. I did get the chance to briefly talk with her about her background in the military. I mentioned my interests in foreign policy and she nodded approvingly. She then turned her attention to others in the room who were going to prep her for her talk. No flirting took place at all.
I didn't take notes during her talk, which was just as well because there wasn't much of substance to remember. She giggled like a schoolgirl when she mentioned the CIA's drone program. I didn't ask anything during the Q&A at the end because I didn't see any further mystery about her biographical subject that needed to be revealed. Boy, was I ever ignorant of what was left unsaid, like whether "All In" was some snarky inside joke between author and subject about what they were really doing. The whole tone of her talk painted David Petraeus in saintly terms, so much so that I was turned off from ever reading her book. The term "hagiography" kept popping into my head, like so many uncritical "lives of the saints" stories I recall from the catechism of my youth. One could be excused for thinking The Greatest General Of Our Time (TM) had no flaws besides the tendency to work too hard, which is the one most important flaw that job interview candidates are told to mention to a hiring manager.
The talk ended and I briefly watched Ms. Broadwell interact with her audience before I left. I stated in my title that "nothing happened" and I truly mean nothing happened in her entire talk that warranted attention. The whole show left me with the impression that David Petraeus wanted this woman polishing his image in the public's mind to "shape the battlespace" for something else. Only time will tell whether that something else is a campaign for elected office.
The revelation of l'affaire Petraeus puts her sales pitch into its proper context. Ambitious people have their courtiers and hangers-on. Ms. Broadwell reminded me of every single mid-ranking female executive I encountered while working for large investment firms. They all exuded feminine appeal from every pore and leveraged this persona to get everything their hearts desired. Performing special favors for a powerful mentor is just another rung on the way up the ladder.
I am at least relieved to note that this sad affair was not a penetration by a foreign intelligence service or an attempt at blackmail (although obviously some form of "penetration" took place, heh heh). Whatever notoriety Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Broadwell have earned will be completely forgiven by 2016 should either of them enter politics. Their carefully constructed personas as dynamic, virile, all-American forces of nature will survive and thrive in whatever narrative awaits the national stage. It is a stage, after all, and Americans expect their favorite performers to make repeat appearances. The show must go on.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Iraq Potential Unity Diminished But Not Destroyed
Strategy Page is raising an alarm about the Iraqi political system careening off its democratic rails. I am not so alarmed. Violence is normal in the Arab world and the use of terror attacks, extralegal threats, and intimidation should not surprise Western observers. Iraq will never clone a Western political process no matter how much advice the United States provides. Iraqi self-governance will retain facets of brutality that are ingrained in Arab political culture.
In December 2009, I estimated Iraq's chances for "success" as a unitary state at 60%. I stand by that estimate. Suicide bombings have not yet returned to the epidemic levels at the height of the war. Iraq's generational dynamics are such that a full Sunni-Shiite civil war is unlikely because many survivors of the last Sunni-Shiite conflict, the Iran-Iraq War, are still alive and remember the horror. Only the intervention of Sunni Arab neighbors would upset the balance and they don't trust each other enough to work together (GCC Shield Force notwithstanding). That Shield Force was able to stabilize Bahrain, a small country, with a short-duration deployment. It is too small to pose an existential threat to the Iraqi military establishment. Arab military coalitions are ineffective because Arabs don't trust each other. Only those Arab forces that acted in concert with a Western sponsor (as in the first Persian Gulf War under US leadership) can operate at even a minimal level of effectiveness. This means that other Sunni Arab states have little hope of influencing Iraqi politics with a threat of land invasion. Iraqi Shiites have little appetite for mass expulsions or worse directed against its Sunni minority because they value integration with the world economy after decades of deprivation under UN sanctions. They will continue to find ways to make life uncomfortable for Sunnis but they value their new investment links with the outside world too much to risk anything more harsh.
We shouldn't use Anglo-Western standards of normalcy to judge Arab internal stability. There will be more bombings. That does not mean Iraqi self-governance will fail.
We shouldn't use Anglo-Western standards of normalcy to judge Arab internal stability. There will be more bombings. That does not mean Iraqi self-governance will fail.
Friday, January 13, 2012
U.S. Calls Iran's Bluff In Strait Of Hormuz
I covered U.S.-Iranian tensions in a recent blog post. It is obvious that the U.S. has the strategic upper hand and is taking pains to ensure Iran's leadership understands the situation. Stated concerns over a "rogue Iranian naval officer" doing something unpredictable are probably a red herring to cover the U.S. naval posture.
The U.S. is also taking pains to shape the information battlespace. Stories about using dolphins to hunt underwater mines show off a capability Iran lacks. Feel-good stories about saving Iranian seaman hijacked by pirates send a strong message that the Iranian navy can't even safeguard its own commercial traffic. Analysts enamored with Iran's potential use of Sunburn or other anti-ship missiles ignore the U.S. Navy's Rolling Airframe Missile. The SeaRAM system is notable for its absence from recent media coverage. The silence speaks volumes. Iran should hear the message.
The U.S. is also taking pains to shape the information battlespace. Stories about using dolphins to hunt underwater mines show off a capability Iran lacks. Feel-good stories about saving Iranian seaman hijacked by pirates send a strong message that the Iranian navy can't even safeguard its own commercial traffic. Analysts enamored with Iran's potential use of Sunburn or other anti-ship missiles ignore the U.S. Navy's Rolling Airframe Missile. The SeaRAM system is notable for its absence from recent media coverage. The silence speaks volumes. Iran should hear the message.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Analysis Of Gen. James N. Mattis' Shultz Lecture
In August I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Gen. James N. Mattis (USMC), commander of U.S. Central Command, address the Marines Memorial Club as part of its George P. Shultz Lecture Series. You can watch a video recording of his lecture online. If it seems like waiting over a month to post a review is a long time, bear with me. I was waiting for another geopolitical shoe to drop, and that shoe recently landed.
Gen. Mattis' remarks were quite substantial. He noted that Iraq lacked an Arab Spring uprising. I wonder whether that is because the Muslim Brotherhood has no Iraqi chapter that can instigate one or if Iraqis are just so sick of unrest that they can't muster any enthusiasm for further social disruption. I wanted to hear more details about Iranian Quds force units operating in Iraq and whether they've penetrated Muqtada al-Sadr's organization. The General mentioned they're operating in Syria too and are the only thing keeping the Assad regime in power. I think Gen. Mattis' assessment of Syria gives Iran too much credit; the Assad family has plenty of support among Syria's business class, it has successfully isolated or co-opted many of the regime's opponents, and defections from the Syrian military have not significantly degraded its combat power.
As an aside, Iran's ability to manipulate events in the Arab world will always be circumscribed by its Shiite and Persian identity, no matter how many rockets it ships to Hezbollah or how many special operators it can send to Iraq and Syria. Did Iran send Quds operators to Bahrain during its Arab Spring unrest? It has claimed that country as historically Iranian but couldn't influence the outcome there thanks to the GCC's deployment of the Peninsula Shield Force. Score that as a Saudi victory over Iran in their never-ending contest for leadership of the Islamic world. Anyway, back to the lecture.
Gen. Mattis' summary of progress in Afghanistan is spot-on. IMHO the American military has finally internalized the successful COIN approaches that stabilized Central America in the 1980s. The military effort in Afghanistan is now facilitating Taliban defections provided those defectors renounce violence and support the Afghan government. Requiring them to break ties with Al Qaeda is probably unnecessary IMHO. The U.S. has mostly defeated Al Qaeda and is now threatened by other terrorist networks that regenerate in Pakistan (more on that below).
The General was distinctly proud of CENTCOM's military-to-military contacts in support of diplomacy in the region. Hey folks, that's DIME at work, and the military is very willing to play ball with the other elements of national power. The Egyptian military seems eager to hold elections and turn over power, but IMHO we all may regret the lack of formal organization in Egyptian politics. The Muslim Brotherhood is the most well-organized political actor in Egypt and will easily play a leading role in an elected government. Islamic thinkers are fond of using the "democracy as train station" metaphor, meaning democracy is merely a way station enabling Islamists who can seize power and enact Sharia law. Egypt under Sharia would pose a major threat to Israel's security, but neither I nor Gen. Mattis are capable of speculating on whether that outcome is probable.
Now, about that other shoe I mentioned up front. Gen. Mattis' comments on Pakistan were very circumspect, mentioning that they fear India but have moved troops into their west to help the U.S. The U.S. military is traditionally very restrained in public comments that may contradict the government's publicly stated diplomatic positions; once again, we do DIME quite well, thank you very much. The U.S. government's diplomatic position on Pakistan is subtly shifting. Adm. Michael Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently excoriated Pakistan's ISI for aiding and abetting the Haqqani network's recent attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. It is not clear whether uniformed ISI officials exercised C2 over the attacking cell, but the support the ISI provides to Haqqani fighters has long been clear. It was safe for Adm. Mullen to vent because he is about to leave government service, so he has no reason to fear career repercussions for his candor. It is becoming safer for others in the military to pick up an anti-Pakistan line now that the rest of the U.S. government is turning against Pakistan's proxies. The Treasury Department has recently sanctioned some Haqqani Network leaders. I believe it is a matter of time before the rest of the network will be formally sanctioned. That will make them fair game for the full range of U.S. offensive action, including covert disruption of their supporters.
The U.S. is slowly but surely distancing itself from Pakistan due to that country's increasingly public tilt toward China as a benefactor and its profound lack of cooperation with U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The rupture will not be complete until the bulk of U.S. combat forces have departed Afghanistan because those forces need a line of communication through Pakistan for support.
This Shultz Lecture Series is a big treat for geopolitical junkies and Marines Memorial Club members like yours truly. The Life Membership I paid for ten years ago has paid off many times over. It was even cool to see George Shultz himself get up and about at the venue. The guy just doesn't know how to slow down.
Gen. Mattis' remarks were quite substantial. He noted that Iraq lacked an Arab Spring uprising. I wonder whether that is because the Muslim Brotherhood has no Iraqi chapter that can instigate one or if Iraqis are just so sick of unrest that they can't muster any enthusiasm for further social disruption. I wanted to hear more details about Iranian Quds force units operating in Iraq and whether they've penetrated Muqtada al-Sadr's organization. The General mentioned they're operating in Syria too and are the only thing keeping the Assad regime in power. I think Gen. Mattis' assessment of Syria gives Iran too much credit; the Assad family has plenty of support among Syria's business class, it has successfully isolated or co-opted many of the regime's opponents, and defections from the Syrian military have not significantly degraded its combat power.
As an aside, Iran's ability to manipulate events in the Arab world will always be circumscribed by its Shiite and Persian identity, no matter how many rockets it ships to Hezbollah or how many special operators it can send to Iraq and Syria. Did Iran send Quds operators to Bahrain during its Arab Spring unrest? It has claimed that country as historically Iranian but couldn't influence the outcome there thanks to the GCC's deployment of the Peninsula Shield Force. Score that as a Saudi victory over Iran in their never-ending contest for leadership of the Islamic world. Anyway, back to the lecture.
Gen. Mattis' summary of progress in Afghanistan is spot-on. IMHO the American military has finally internalized the successful COIN approaches that stabilized Central America in the 1980s. The military effort in Afghanistan is now facilitating Taliban defections provided those defectors renounce violence and support the Afghan government. Requiring them to break ties with Al Qaeda is probably unnecessary IMHO. The U.S. has mostly defeated Al Qaeda and is now threatened by other terrorist networks that regenerate in Pakistan (more on that below).
The General was distinctly proud of CENTCOM's military-to-military contacts in support of diplomacy in the region. Hey folks, that's DIME at work, and the military is very willing to play ball with the other elements of national power. The Egyptian military seems eager to hold elections and turn over power, but IMHO we all may regret the lack of formal organization in Egyptian politics. The Muslim Brotherhood is the most well-organized political actor in Egypt and will easily play a leading role in an elected government. Islamic thinkers are fond of using the "democracy as train station" metaphor, meaning democracy is merely a way station enabling Islamists who can seize power and enact Sharia law. Egypt under Sharia would pose a major threat to Israel's security, but neither I nor Gen. Mattis are capable of speculating on whether that outcome is probable.
Now, about that other shoe I mentioned up front. Gen. Mattis' comments on Pakistan were very circumspect, mentioning that they fear India but have moved troops into their west to help the U.S. The U.S. military is traditionally very restrained in public comments that may contradict the government's publicly stated diplomatic positions; once again, we do DIME quite well, thank you very much. The U.S. government's diplomatic position on Pakistan is subtly shifting. Adm. Michael Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently excoriated Pakistan's ISI for aiding and abetting the Haqqani network's recent attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. It is not clear whether uniformed ISI officials exercised C2 over the attacking cell, but the support the ISI provides to Haqqani fighters has long been clear. It was safe for Adm. Mullen to vent because he is about to leave government service, so he has no reason to fear career repercussions for his candor. It is becoming safer for others in the military to pick up an anti-Pakistan line now that the rest of the U.S. government is turning against Pakistan's proxies. The Treasury Department has recently sanctioned some Haqqani Network leaders. I believe it is a matter of time before the rest of the network will be formally sanctioned. That will make them fair game for the full range of U.S. offensive action, including covert disruption of their supporters.
The U.S. is slowly but surely distancing itself from Pakistan due to that country's increasingly public tilt toward China as a benefactor and its profound lack of cooperation with U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The rupture will not be complete until the bulk of U.S. combat forces have departed Afghanistan because those forces need a line of communication through Pakistan for support.
This Shultz Lecture Series is a big treat for geopolitical junkies and Marines Memorial Club members like yours truly. The Life Membership I paid for ten years ago has paid off many times over. It was even cool to see George Shultz himself get up and about at the venue. The guy just doesn't know how to slow down.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Analysis of Joel Brinkley, "Israel And The Arab Spring"
I attended a lecture today at the Commonwealth Club of California by Joel Brinkley, Pulitzer Prize winner and experienced journalist. His lecture "Israel And The Arab Spring" spent remarkably little time on the Arab Spring's causes and its effects on Israel. Audience questions drove him to frame everything in terms of the stalled Middle East peace process, which showed the audience's pro-Palestinian bias and covered little new ground.
Mr. Brinkley's opening contention that Israel's foreign policy is the most self-destructive ever was a shocker, depending on your interpretation. From the perspective of Bay Area idealists who wish Jews and Arabs could lock arms and sign "kumbayah" after forgetting 3000 or so years of tribal conflict, I suppose Israel's heavy-handed approach to cracking down on threats can appear self-destructive. Mr. Brinkley argued that the Arab Spring's emphasis on nonviolent protest opens a window of opportunity for Israel to engage in dialogue with whomever in the Arab community is leading such protests. If only life were so simple.
The Arab Spring has little to do with the Anglo-West's projection of its own pluralistic and humanistic values onto Middle Easterners. Underemployed Arab youths expressed their anger at largely secular regimes over high food prices and few job opportunities. There will be precious little diplomatic opportunity for Israel to open dialogue with radical Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood should they come to power in Egypt. Some in Israel's political establishment should know this already, as Hamas was created from the Muslim Brotherhood and has never wavered from its goal of destroying Israel. Mr. Brinkley acknowledged Hamas' intransigence later in his lecture. We could all use some deep background on the larger story of the Muslim Brotherhood's role in the Arab Spring.
Some of Mr. Brinkley's other observations point to further intractability in the Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict. He noted that Palestinians evicted from their historic homes in Israel proper don't seem to want to return no matter they're offered. Perhaps the victim mentality of living in occupied camps is so ingrained now that they can't imagine life outside of a ghetto. He mentioned that Israel, for its part, won't surrender its fortifications on the Jordanian border to allow for a more secure Palestinian homeland. This is actually pretty reasonable IMHO. Israel has been repeatedly invaded by its Arab neighbors and its lack of strategic depth means it must position an early-warning tripwire as far forward as possible.
The whole Israel/Palestine mess won't be resolved the way our tolerant Bay Area audience at the Commonwealth Club would like. The ultimate solution is really rather simple and won't look anything like the results of a negotiation. In all of human history, no two tribes or civilizations have ever been able to simultaneously occupy the same piece of real estate. The stronger civilization always emerges victorious; it can absorb the weaker civilization demographically; it can forcibly relocate the weaker party; or it can pursue a strategy of annihilation a la Genghis Khan. The stronger tribe at the moment is Israel, but that advantage may not last longer than another generation given the Palestinians' accelerating birthrate. The water tables upon which both nations must subsist are declining. That in itself will force a conflict over who gets to live where. Mr. Brinkley dismissed the final audience question over demographics as no big deal; he may wish to revisit that stance in the years ahead.
Mr. Brinkley's opening contention that Israel's foreign policy is the most self-destructive ever was a shocker, depending on your interpretation. From the perspective of Bay Area idealists who wish Jews and Arabs could lock arms and sign "kumbayah" after forgetting 3000 or so years of tribal conflict, I suppose Israel's heavy-handed approach to cracking down on threats can appear self-destructive. Mr. Brinkley argued that the Arab Spring's emphasis on nonviolent protest opens a window of opportunity for Israel to engage in dialogue with whomever in the Arab community is leading such protests. If only life were so simple.
The Arab Spring has little to do with the Anglo-West's projection of its own pluralistic and humanistic values onto Middle Easterners. Underemployed Arab youths expressed their anger at largely secular regimes over high food prices and few job opportunities. There will be precious little diplomatic opportunity for Israel to open dialogue with radical Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood should they come to power in Egypt. Some in Israel's political establishment should know this already, as Hamas was created from the Muslim Brotherhood and has never wavered from its goal of destroying Israel. Mr. Brinkley acknowledged Hamas' intransigence later in his lecture. We could all use some deep background on the larger story of the Muslim Brotherhood's role in the Arab Spring.
Some of Mr. Brinkley's other observations point to further intractability in the Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict. He noted that Palestinians evicted from their historic homes in Israel proper don't seem to want to return no matter they're offered. Perhaps the victim mentality of living in occupied camps is so ingrained now that they can't imagine life outside of a ghetto. He mentioned that Israel, for its part, won't surrender its fortifications on the Jordanian border to allow for a more secure Palestinian homeland. This is actually pretty reasonable IMHO. Israel has been repeatedly invaded by its Arab neighbors and its lack of strategic depth means it must position an early-warning tripwire as far forward as possible.
The whole Israel/Palestine mess won't be resolved the way our tolerant Bay Area audience at the Commonwealth Club would like. The ultimate solution is really rather simple and won't look anything like the results of a negotiation. In all of human history, no two tribes or civilizations have ever been able to simultaneously occupy the same piece of real estate. The stronger civilization always emerges victorious; it can absorb the weaker civilization demographically; it can forcibly relocate the weaker party; or it can pursue a strategy of annihilation a la Genghis Khan. The stronger tribe at the moment is Israel, but that advantage may not last longer than another generation given the Palestinians' accelerating birthrate. The water tables upon which both nations must subsist are declining. That in itself will force a conflict over who gets to live where. Mr. Brinkley dismissed the final audience question over demographics as no big deal; he may wish to revisit that stance in the years ahead.
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