Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: Followers of Sadr Emerge Stronger After Iraq Elections, By ANTHONY SHADID, New York Times, March 16, 2010

ARTICLE: Tehran aiding al Qaeda links, Petraeus says, By Bill Gertz, Washington Times, March 17, 2010

After the successful putsch back home, Tehran feels more than comfortable enough to pursue its anti-American meddling full-time in Iraq (where it's clients did fine in the election), Afghanistan and the larger region. The more we're tied down as we seek to exit, the less likely our military will be to agree to anything launched against Iran, meaning it's an intelligent asymmetrical defense by Iran that's designed to keep us on the defensive on our way out the door.

Obama seems to have walked into this dynamic with no more intelligence than Bush-Cheney. Everybody, it seems, needs to prove their cojones with Iran on the nuke issue ("We will not tolerate!"), sacrificing larger, more important efforts in the meantime. The sad part remains the reality that our "toleration" isn't required, so the only people we're kidding is ourselves.

I see a clever exiting push by Obama but no real effort to improve the situations regionally. It's the same brain-dead we-take-on-all-comers bullshit. I see nothing inside the military in terms of leadership that's trying much to improve that performance, just the usual braking on stuff they see as stupid diversions (e.g., attacking Iran). Obama is simply riding the Bush-Cheney drawdown trajectory, replicating it in Afghanistan.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

OPINION: "Obama's Foreign Policy Paradox," by Matthew Kaminski, Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2010.

OPINION: "Road to the Nut House," by Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 13-14 March 2010.

WORLD NEWS: "Israel-US spat adds to rising view of Obama as pushover: The White House effort to get peace talks going again is floundering," by Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, 13-14 March 2010.

Kaminski's argument: the oddity that Obama is doing well on the wars (Iraq & Afghanistan--although calling the former a "war" gets awfully old and inaccurate) but doing poorly everywhere else. The latter situation feeds the perception of weakness, which contradicts what should be a perception of war-leader strength.

So the jury is out on the "paradoxical" Obama. Will he go down as a kowtower to dictatorships or the job-finisher in Iraq and Afghanistan?

My sense of the linkage between the two: Obama is surprisingly go-it-alone in both realms. America is forging its withdrawal in Iraq on its own, and largely fighting its way to hoped-for success in Afghanistan on its own. Yes, in both instances there are allies galore standing nearby, but the show remains ours--as do all the key decisions. Ditto for the reach-outs to various regimes. Other than the elevation of the G-20, these efforts all strike me as rather tightly held enterprises.

All this fits the image of a tightly self-controlled White House manned by Obama and his four top lieutenants (Jarrett, Gibbs, Emmanuel and Axelrod). It also fits the my-way-or-the-highway omnibus method of domestic legislation.

In short, despite all the great rhetoric about a multi-partner world, there is a strong bilateralist tone to this administration--right down to the special ambassadors, with multilateralism seeming to be America working everybody to get what it wants and those "wants" constituting our multilateral vision--sort of slapped-together omnibus feel there too. It's simply the headlines I'm reading.

And then you read Noonan's take on the "Game Change" election history book and you get this disturbing take that seems to feed the controlling impression:

Barack Obama, who interestingly gets the best treatment in the book--protect those sources!--is not immune [to criticism]. He is smart, "and he not only knew it but wanted to make sure everyone else knew it." In meetings with aides, he controlled the conversation by interrupting whoever was talking. He is boastful, gaudily confident. Before his 2004 convention speech, a reporter asked him if he was nervous: "I'm LeBron, baby," he answers. "I got some game."

I wince at that description, especially the interrupting part. That is ego unbridled, in my experience. True leaders, I find, are more quiet during presentations and debates and then weigh in decisively at the end; the weaker the decision-maker, the more frequently he interrupts. Just something that jumped out at me, in part because I had the same impression from his townhall meeting with legislators on healthcare that was broadcast--long before I read Noonan's take on the book. He seemed to have a pathological need to dominate the dialogue--beyond the presidential prerogative, like dominating the process equaled dominating the outcome.

The Luce and Dombey bit about "who's in charge?" misleads, in my mind. I fear that Obama is far too in charge and that what we suffer is underempowered subordinates, the result being a profound lack of strategic imagination. Where are the bright lights of this administration on foreign policy? I mean, we've got names and reputations, but other than the apology tour, the flow of big ideas internationally is non-existent. It seems they're all used up domestically and we're seeing a commensurate neediness on the foreign policy side that everyone--friend and foe alike--are picking up.

Obama did a great job of darn near instantly recalibrating our relationship with the world, and I can understand the tight control on that process, but now's the time to turn the assembled talent loose, and so far this does not seem to be the case.

I sense a flood of bitter memoirs coming in 2013, and that most will be painfully on-target.

WORLD NEWS: "North Korea hit by Seoul move to halt sand imports," by Christian Oliver and Song Jung-a, Financial Times, 19 March 2010.

South Korea, famed exporter of all sorts of high-tech goods, no longer finds a compelling use for one of its separated-at-birth/evil twin's major exports: sand.

That's it. North Korea is good for sand and not much else.

That's what disconnection does to your economy.

ARTICLE: Afghan women fear loss of hard-won progress, By Karin Brulliard, Washington Post, March 16, 2010

While the temptation of deal-making on the basis of cultural enclavism is great (we make a truce with you and you get to do what you want in this enclave), the larger reality is that we'll likely be drawn back in sooner than we think--and the treatment of women will be the underlying driver.

The Taliban simply won't be able not to screw it up. It's not what they do, it's who they are.

NEWS ANALYSIS: Opportunity in a Fight With Israel, By MARK LANDLER, New York Times, March 16, 2010

I'm not optimistic that this show of diplomatic force will do anything more with Israel than the similar one previously launched in the direction of Beijing.

I would expect Israel to ignore it just like Beijing did, and then Obama looks even weaker as a result.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

WORLD NEWS: "US unveils solar-powered embassy design," by Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times, 24 February 2010.

NYT review made fun of the look, but I like it.

And it sure as hell beats what we got jerry-rigged up now around the old embassy. Last time I was there in London, I felt embarrassed to enter it.

[Ed. The official site. Scroll down for images.]

U.S. NEWS: "U.S. Weighs How to Track Diseases Livestock: Meatpackers Worry That New, Narrower Effort Won't Reassure Foreign Buyers; States Fear They'll Be Hit With the Tab," by Scott Kilman, Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2010.

The meat industry is upset that the USG is abandoning a planned $120m livestock tracking system "designed to limit the economic and human-health impact of animal-disease outbreaks."

The fear? The narrower replacement program "could exacerbate worries abroad about U.S. meat exports." State officials, as usual, spot an unfunded mandate from DC.

The feds argue back that the six-year-old voluntary program being replaced never attracted enough players to work.

The U.S. beef industry still hasn't recovered from the mad-cow outbreak in 2003. Big foreign markets were lost--like South Korea. Some for good.

The system launched (NAIS, or National Animal Identification System) after that scare was designed, like an Australian program, to track cattle their entire lives using electronic ear tags and tiny transponders and 15-digit serial numbers.

Canada, Japan and the EU have similar programs.

Problem? Many American ranchers spurned the program over "everything from privacy to religious issues, crippling the effort."

Sad to say, but sounds like the stubborn U.S. industry is getting what it deserves.

New fed plan, responding to that failure, is truly suboptimal for the age: state governments are to track cattle and only cattle that crosses state borders.

Oh, how very 19th century!

Fed officials can't even guess at the percentage of cattle/chickens/swine left outside that gem of a concept.

Meatpacking companies are freaking, knowing that our rule-set is lagging dramatically behind the rest of the advanced world. (aka, the Old Core). The great failure? Who wants 50 different outbreak rule-sets?

One state official says it'll be patchwork at best, taking the system BACK at least a decade in capability.

Nice.

The NAIS voluntary system only attracted about 500k farms and ranches, or about 36% of the total. Many farmers feared being held responsible financially for disease outbreaks. I have no idea why some sort of reasonable cap on individual liability couldn't have been created, with federal backing. Do we want to sell meat globally or not?

US beef exports fell 80% after the 2003 mad cow event. Fifty nations banned our beef.

And seven years later we've decided to go for an even looser, more patchwork monitoring system.

This, from the allegedly "socialist" Obama.

Sad state of affairs.

ARTICLE: Thom Yorke Names New Band, By BEN SISARIO; Compiled by JULIE BLOOM, New York Times, February 25, 2010

I am intrigued (Flea comes aboard?) and a bit unnerved by Thom Yorke's decision to create a new, non-Radiohead band. I bought all of their albums a while back and then last year dove into them like I'm diving into "Lost" on DVD. Radiohead is becoming all I listen to, as of late. Naturally, being a maven-type, I love a known universe to master, so I don't mind arriving perhaps just as the group breaks-up (allegedly on the advice of concerned management due to the increased fighting over which songs got onto albums--how Beatlesque).

Yorke is truly the driving force behind Radiohead ("We operate like the U.N. I'm America.''), so if his temporary departure gets permanent, I am in new territory.

INTERNATIONAL: "Assassinations: A time to kill: The professional and presumably state-directed killing of a leading Palestinian has been exposed in embarrassing detail. Perhaps such methods have had their day," The Economist, 20 February 2010.

Referencing the recently publicized Dubai hit, there's no big mystery: Israel has long played the eye-for-an-eye game, which is almost never classified as terror when the good guys do it because, quite frankly, the good guys seek no terror as a result--just the outcome of dead enemies. And yet, state-sponsored assassination is a fairly symmetrical response to terror, so the uncomfortable associations are legion.

America, back in the 1970s, came to the conclusion that the assassination of foreign leaders was a big no-no. It was presented more broadly as a complete ban on assassinations (a term most people associate with important figures and inappropriate to murdering rank-and-file types), but that was never really the case, especially when it came to non-state actors--pretty much always considered fair game. After 9/11, those quiet exceptions became the highly publicized rule.

So now the differences between the U.S. and Israel on this score are, by my way of thinking, far less. Makes little difference if it's an agent or a drone-driver pulling the trigger, killing in onesies will look and feel like assassination, even though, in a frontier-integrating age, it can all be written off as taking out the trash--as in, bad actors who simply refuse to conform to the extension of rules into previously law-deficient environments (always an offensively normative call to the integrated--"What do you mean we can't do that to our women any more?").

In general, I think we simply need to use the term more discretely. Leaders are assassinated; everybody else is simply killed--no matter how elaborate the process.

Tom got this email written by a son writing to his father who is a regular blog reader:

i was waiting to go into the room where my physics lecture is and i looked in at what class it was and i started listening and the guy was teaching thomas barnett's stuff to them, like the a-z ruleset for bankrupt countries or something. i thought it was kinda funny. (must have been a globalization class)

The dad wrote to Tom:

Connectivity, connectivity, connectivity..... so easy to understand it's just like the most important rule in deep water diving, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

Could have been anything from Business to PolySci to Military Science...

Tom writes:

Always fun to hear. Best story I ever got in this regard was my nephew Brendan at UW-Madison sitting through an IR (international relations) course lecture and then seeing my image pop up as the prof took them through my ideas. Why best? He's my sister's son and he's studying Russian at Madison just like I did thirty years earlier. Brendan, a serious student and IR enthusiast, just gets so excited when he tells the story ("That's my Uncle Tom!").

I'm actually Uncle Tom to about 20 nieces and nephews and coming up on almost ten grand-nieces and grand-nephews.

I have never lived in a cabin.

For close to a decade now I've been roaming the world, delivering in Johnny Appleseed fashion a message that I refined just after 9/11 for the secretary of defense's Office of Force Transformation: The world's core powers must develop a systemic approach to postwar and post-disaster coalition interventions inside what I call the "Non-Integrated Gap," by which I mean those countries and regions least connected to globalization. This vision encompasses the so-called "whole of government" approach, but extends it vigorously to also include the private sector, based on the knowledge that jobs are the only exit strategy.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

These are some photos I shot with my phone on the spot. One (the shot-up car) we used for the WPR piece. These are the rest.

The pretend clock tower at the center of the "town square."

Clock tower in foreground. In background is six-story hotel with pre-damaged wall (sort of collapsed in from either blast or quake) that is specifically designed to practice tall-building ops of all sorts.

Pretend local neighborhood: shops on bottom, apartments on top. Designed to replicate urban density.

Dental facility in left-behind hospital. The National Guard/Army specifically asked for all the equip to be left behind by the state (which ran the "colony" years ago) so they could use the site as a hospital venue for training.

Mounted cameras in same space so as to capture training ex's for evaluation.

Local convenience store where I had lunch with the general who commands Camp Atterbury and the LCOL who runs Muscatatuck (pronounced as roughly, "my cat is stuck"). Pretend terrorist/insurgent in window signifies that everybody who operates a business in the facility is simultaneously in play in any exercise. There was a funny blown-up photo in the store of two SEAL snipers totally done up in camo (the whole walking bush thing) standing in line to buy Gatorades with a normally dressed woman standing between them, like it happens all the time.

EDITORIAL: "World leaders are choosing recession: Nations with surpluses can prevent global stagnation," Financial Times, 20-21 March 2010.

Super-saving as condemning others to deflation and stagnation.

Gist:

So, the world faces a choice: either the serial exporters can choose to consume more and rebalance the world economy through growth. Or . . . they can sit on their hands, allow demand to crumble and rebalance the world economy through stagnation. There is only one sane answer.

Wolf's case stated more baldly.

Orthogonal to the pegged/convertibility debates on China, this question is cast here primarily as a matter of public policy choice on the part of central governments.

COMMENT: "Tackling insurgents is not enough for America," by Tyler Moselle, Financial Times, 19 March 2010.

Is it just me or does this excerpt scream cluelessness to you?

Proper US strategy toward the country should be a mixture of nation-building, stability operations, long-term humanitarian and economic development, precision-based counter-terrorism strikes, political negotiations with the Taliban--plus counter-insurgency to put down the Taliban.

Instead, our man in Harvard says it's all lopsided COIN.

I don't know what this guy thinks COIN is, but to me, it's everything in his list and always was. I mean, what's exactly left if COIN is none of those things?

I can't tell if this guy is just ignorant or a nitpicker on terminology, but he hails from the Carr Center for Human Rights at JFK, meaning he works for Sarah Sewall.

So we're warned that COIN is not a panacea for everything.

Oh, thanks. I was really hoping it would be.

WORLD NEWS: "Ahmadi-Nejad meets clergy in move to repair relations: President pays rare visit to holy city," by Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Financial Times, 19 March 2010.

The story presents the rapprochement totally in theological terms (the hidden imam and what not) and suggests Ahmadinejad is trying to shore up waning support.

I see it differently. Ahmadinejad meets with opposing forces when he feels strong, not weak.

COMMENT: "The weak renminbi is not just America's problem," by Arvind Subramanian, Financial Times, 18 March 2010.

The call for a multilat rules-based solution versus a bilat fight between Beijing and Washington.

IMF not up to the challenge, we are told, and WTO is natural venue, because "undervalued exchange rates are de facto protectionist trade policies because they are a combination of export subsidies and import tariffs."

Plus, the WTO has a genuine dispute settlement process that works reasonably well.

Imagined deal: China submits to negotiations to determine rule set and US promises not to brand it as manipulator, plus China is recognized as a "market economy" by the WTO.

Hope is that the Doha Round would be revitalized in addition.

Actually, I like this thinking a lot.

ARTICLE: Sade Stays on Top, By BEN SISARIO; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF, New York Times, February 24, 2010

I have all of Sade's stuff and really enjoy watching the group come back together and once again achieve huge success--totally on their own schedule. Very cool collection of people.

SECURITY | PRIVACY: "The Snitch In Your Pocket: Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time--without the benefit of a warrant," by Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, 1 March 2010.

Every good American law was preceded by some awful abuse of rights, whether by bad actors or over-exuberant government.

So go easy on the Orwellian hysteria. The fix is predetermined.

FEATURE: "UG99: Its Spores Ride the Wind, Wiping Out Wheat Crops And Spreading Famine," by Brendan I. Koerner, Wired, March 2010.

Scary wheat fungus appears at the border of Uganda and Kenya around 1998, and then slowly migrates northeastward ever since, reaching the Iran-Iraq border region last year.

Assuming it will eventually reach the Pakistan-Indian border, then we're talking one of Asia's most crucial breadbaskets. Turkey could also be reached.

BUSINESS: "Mergers in the fertilizer industry: A growth business; Feeding the world has become a mouth-watering opportunity," The Economist, 20 February 2010.

The run-up in ag commodity prices in 2008 alerted a lot of investors to the coming expansion and profitability of that global market.

So the subsequent downturn, thanks in large part to the Great Recession, signals a buying period.

Thus we see plenty of M&A in the fertilizer industry.

As always, China is a huge driver: big population, rising income, poorly enriched land.

OP-ED: A Kingdom Slowly Changes, By IAN BREMMER, New York Times, March 16, 2010

Nice piece that echoes a recent one by Dowd on change bubbling up within Saudi Arabia thanks to King Abdullah.

Anecdotal, but the data is piling up in bits and pieces.

The conclusion:

Don't be surprised if King Abdullah is one day remembered as the man who brought the beginnings of real change to a place that badly needed it. And don't be surprised if Saudi women are the ones to make the most of the new opportunities.

(Via WPR's Media Roundup)

OP-ED: Let's Fight Over a Big Plan, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times, March 16, 2010

Description in this piece from an Israeli expert on Iran's strategy vis-a-vis Israel:

Iran's strategy, explains Grinstein, is simple: Destroy Israel through a combination of asymmetric warfare -- like Hezbollah's war from South Lebanon and Hamas's from Gaza; delegitimize Israel by accusing it of war crimes when it combats Hamas and Hezbollah, who fight while nested among civilians; "religiousize" the conflict by making it Muslims versus Jews, focusing on symbols like Jerusalem; and, finally, suck Israel into "imperial overstretch," e.g., keep Israel occupying the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, which Iran & Co. believe will lead to "Israel's implosion."

Strikes me that it's a mini-me version of Iran's efforts versus the U.S. in wider region, with the "stickiness" coming in both states' fixation on Iran's nuclear program.

U.S. NEWS: "Drone Kills Suspect in CIA Suicide Bombing: Agency Hits Back After December Deaths of Seven Agents; Panetta and McChrystal See Pressure Rising on al Qaeda, Taliban," by Siobhan Gorman and Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal, 18 March 2010.

Tell me how this differs from the storyline of "Munich": You kill ours and we hunt you down and kill your perpetrators with no effort at a judicial proceeding.

I try to remember that when things like the recent Dubai hit are debated.

This remains a mafia-style decapitation war. I don't have a problem with that. But the reality of this pot should be remembered when discussing the kettle that is Israel.

+ Musing 5GW mentioned Tom.
+ The League of Ordinary Gentlemen quoted Tom: "America is modern globalization's source-code".
+ Paul Musgrave reviewed GP.
+ The Pilgrim Sailor linked Wal-Mart exports rules to China.
+ KoopTech linked The Map.

ARTICLE: 'US-Colombia military base pact is misunderstood', By Brett Borkan, Colombia Reports, 19 March 2010

The whole thing is an interview with Tom, so please go check it out.

Tom writes:

Only quibble I make: I told him upfront I was not an expert on Colombia or our cooperation there but that I could only respond in a general strategic sense. I would have liked to see that disclaimer made up front. But otherwise very happy with the translation made on an over-the-phone interview.