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I just received my review copy of If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration by Dr. Chet Richards ( thanks Chet!). 

I will tackle this book and write a proper review once the Osinga Roundtable comes to a close but in casually flipping through the pages just now, I can say that it is tightly written and that Dr. Richards was unsparing in asking tough questions about the geopolitical-military subjects that interest many readers here. We’ll have to see if his answers are as radical as those he offered in his previous work. Looks quite good though.

Stay tuned.

Abu Muqawama pointed to a  must-read essay in The New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna of The New America Foundation ( if you are not familiar with this think tank’s orientation, you can get some idea by checking out their board of directors). This is a lengthy, grand historical ( and overly deterministic) narrative of relative American decline and a coming age of superstate multipolarity with a critical “swing vote” being held by New Core/Seam states like Russia and Brazil.

“Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”

The Geopolitical Marketplace

At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war “peace dividend” was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing – and losing – in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules – their own rules – without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an “East-West” struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

Read the rest here.

My reaction to Khanna’s essay, distilled from his upcoming book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, are mixed.  Clearly, great effort and thought that has been put into this project by the well-read Mr. Khanna and his Thomas Friedmanesque globetrotting reportage is nothing but impressive. Clearly, Parag Khanna “gets” that globalization is a dynamic and complex system with interdependent “frenemies”; which I infer that he splices liberally with geopolitics and  the hard cultural conflict of Sam Huntington. A synthesis of civilizational conflict and convergence.

While erudite, Khanna’s geo-economic/political argument regarding the inevitable decline of the liberal international order has been made before (anyone recall Lester Thurow or Paul Kennedy?) in the early 1990’s, the 1970’s, late 1950’s, early 1930’s and perhaps originally in the gripping angst of the Lost Generation of WWI. Perhaps even further, as Russian intellectuals of the Silver Age like Aleksandr Blok were already worrying themselves sick about ” the Yellow Peril” even before the Russo-Japanese War.  And as he freely admits, Khanna’s geopolitical model of three, contending global centers of gravity bears a strong resemblence to Orwell’s. Khanna offers some sound, if modest, advice for American policy makers though the soundness of his counsel is independent of the validity of his thesis. There’s a great deal of glossing over the longitudinal weaknesses of the EU and China and minimizing of  the adaptiveness of America in this essay in order to make the declinist narrative as deterministic  as it comes across.

That being said, well worth your time to pop open a cold one and read it.

ADDENDUM:

Dr. Nexon has his evaluation of his former student’s work at The Duck of Minerva

ADDENDUM II:

CKR has an awesome critique in the comments section here.

Dr. HistoryGuy99 has entered the building.

Libby at The Newshoggers takes note.

protein wisdom rejects it as unwise – and I agree that the article probably reflects the geopolitical hopes of some NYT editors in their lighter moments when they are not too busy slandering Iraq War veterans.

Love fest from Washington Note.

A brief excerpt from the comment from blogfriend Charles Cameron:

“The warfare of the Aztecs, the berserkers seeking Valhalla, and most significantly today, the Islamists seeking martyrdom – these are not “rational actors” in a sense that tweaking our Prisoners Dilemma tables will not address.

To know them, we must think not merely our of the box but out of boxes, take not just the road less traveled but a path so overgrown a machete is required to cut it, and no one can say whether it was a path before, or is new found land, a haunt of owls or badgers, or an habitation of ghosts… a trackless track as zen might call it, crossing the Cartesian rift between brain and mind, passing between real and imaginal, fact and myth, story and history as easily as we might pass between Colorado and Wyoming.”

That resonated with me earlier today when I read a blurb in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly ( who appear to owe Ralph Peters some kind of credit for their   cover story) regarding the disproportionate number of engineers in the ranks of Islamist terrorists, which led me to google these fine papers, posts and theads:

The Engineers of Jihad (PDF) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog-  The original paper

Soob -“Engineers of Jihad ” – Excellent analysis by Subadei’s co-blogger Munz

The Small Wars Council – “Engineers of Jihad” 

Foreign Policy – subscription required ( sorry, cheapskates)

RichardDawkins.net –  Worthless, normatively speaking but contains mocking speculation for comic relief

Belgravia Dispatch – illustrates the 4GW angle

Most MENA nations have very limited systems of public and private education and literacy rates are far lower than state figures generally admit. In some instances, Arab states may have illiteracy rates reaching into the 40th percentile.  The well educated, multilingual and scientifically trained are a definite elite in the Arab-Islamic world diverging socially and psychologically from a majority who speak only colloquial Arabic or an ethnic minority language and  (possibly broken) colloquial Arabic.  See Dave Schuler’s comments on Diglossia. Moreover censorship, repression and the boundaries of permissible social, political and cultural discourse vary significantly from Tangier to Bahrain.

In this climate, an engineering education creates a mind capable of rigorously rigid – one might say predisposed to doctrinaire – logical thinking in terms of process with an artificially circumscribed mental palette of content. Narrow vision and a powerful intellect will yield different answers to problems than will a panoramic vision and a powerful intellect. Islamism would serve to reinforce the tendency toward rigidity while ramping up the emotional intensity of the response to frustrating obstacles to solving problems.

Could the “Cartesian rift” or dichotomy of which Charles writes be healed by greater access to liberal education in the Mideast? Ideally, yes, as both a world of possibilities would open up alongside a propensity to question received authority that liberal education brings. On the other hand, the report by Gambetta and Hertog puts humanities majors as disporortionately represented among secular, leftist, terrorists so liberal ed may simply stir the domestic pot in the Mideast  because most societies there remain, to a degree, repressive tyrannies in terms of politics.

Cheryl “CKR” Rofer of Whirledview, who initiated the Nuclear Policy “Blog Tank” challenge, skillfully brought the series to a summative conclusion with a second round-up and then a consensus post. I’d like to take a moment to look at both posts by CKR:

“The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – Pulling It Together”

“The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy – The Consensus Statement”

While I have previously linked to the contributions from Dave Schuler and Charles Cameron, Cheryl’s first post above featured several other bloggers to whom I would like to draw attention with a brief excerpt:

Cernig – “America’s Nuclear Policy

“I’ve written before that trying to apply the Cold War assumptions of nuclear retaliation to assymetrical stateless actors is like running with nuclear scissors. it’s far more likely that you’ll fall and injure yourself or some innocent in a messy way than accidentally stab the one murderer in a crowd.

Jason suggests a posture based around a minimum deterrent force, I assume involving only a couple of hundred warheads, “prioritizing deployment on submarines which are impervious to any comprehensive first strike or pre-emptive attack.” I think that’s a good first step but would then move on to a “Virtual Swords” concept as explained by Jeffrey Lewis. Dr Lewis quotes an article from a friend of his which notes this isn’t a new idea”

PoliGazette – “Of Linus and Nuclear Weapons”

“So the fundamental question that must begin the debate over a post-Cold War nuclear weapons policy in the U.S. is: Can nuclear weapons enhance U.S. security, and if so, how? General Lee Butler, retired former commander of the United States’ nuclear weapons forces, has a surprising answer: Nuclear weapons in actuality provide very limited contributions to U.S. national security. The reason is that nuclear weapons are politically and militarily virtually unusable.”

Wampum – “Packages and Packaging”

“First, the point made by John Kerry in 2004 remains — the greatest threat to the United States (as well as Japan, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Europe, Canada, and the Russian Federation) is the risk that the existing stockpiles of devices and fissile materials will eventually be re-purposed, and the better policy is to allocate resources nominally reducing that risk model, up to and including unilateral partial disarmament. The alternative “single weapon” risk model was articulated in the same debate by George W. Bush, and independently by Peter Daou’s sometime employers, Mssrs. Ted Turner, Sam Nunn, Warren Buffett and others, and without loss of generality, by the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator proponents.

Restated, the greatest quantifiable risk has no agency, and cannot be “deterred” or engaged in human discourse. It is rust. Sensor failure. False alarm. The next greatest quantifiable risk has agency, but also cannot be “deterred” or engaged in political discourse. It is covert or overt expropriation of devices or fissiles. Restated, it is sensor and inventory control failure”

 Rofer did an excellent job summing up the consensus points in a discussion of nuclear weapons policy that featured bloggers with a wide spread of political and philosophical positions:

“Overview
The bloggers who have contributed to this blog-tank range in views across the center of the political and hawkishness spectra. Nonetheless, we have achieved a fair degree of consensus.

Nuclear weapons strategy is part of a broader US military and international relations strategy, but it can be discussed by itself. To some degree, development of all these levels of strategy is iterative.

We need to identify short-term and long-term goals and give each its appropriate place. While abolition of nuclear weapons may be a long-term goal, making it too immediate can be counterproductive.

Nuclear weapons have a paradoxical relationship to power. They cannot be used, but their threat is potent. If a nation is tied too closely to a requirement to retaliate, its options may in fact be limited.

Nations that have nuclear weapons want to preserve their exclusivity, but that desire may increase the valuation of nuclear weapons by other nations.”

Read the rest here.

A further comment, on Cheryl’s “Blog Tank” concept. Her format was important in its’ own right:

 This experience is one that bears repeating; and similar things have been called for by others, notably Michael Tanji who is part of the effort by Threatswatch.org to become a “Think Tank 2.0“. The blogosphere, for it’s many faults and idiosyncratic subculture, has matured to the point that there are enough experts and gifted amateurs that a person could probably organize an impressive intellectual “swarm” on nearly any topic under the sun in fairly short order. Just by asking folks of intelligence and goodwill to help.

To paraphrase an old revolutionary, brainpower is lying in the streets for the taking.

I’m pleased to offer a different perspective here from blogfriend Charles Cameron of Hipbone Games who blogs at Forensic Theology. Charles has a deep academic background in comparative theological studies and he is offering insight into the mindset of millenarian religious radicals and what their motivations might mean for the concept of nuclear deterrence.  Cameron seeks to address an aspect that is, surprisingly, seldom highlighted properly in the media despite the U.S. having been at war with Islamist terrorists since 2001. The number of voices who have also tried to do so – Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy, Tim Furnish and Michael Scheuer – have focused exclusively on radical Salafist and Mahdist Islamism while Cameron puts these in context  with all eschatological religious extremists, mythic archetypes and other primal currents of human culture.

Charles Cameron’s post is really an 18 page paper of considerable intellectual depth and subtlety and I offer it here to readers with a strong endorsement for your careful consideration.

“Religious and apocalyptic background to nuclear policy making”

“I read about Cheryl Rofer’s invitation to the blogosphere of 18 December, suggesting that we should form a “blog-tank” on nuclear policy, on my blog-friend Zenpundit’s blog. My purpose here is to offer as background to that ongoing discussion of nuclear policy, some reminders from the spheres of religion and mythology.

It is my purpose here to suggest that the actions, plans and motives of those who are subject to religious drivers, and in particular drivers of an apocalyptic or “end times” nature, are, by reason of their seeming irrationality and fringe quality, often overlooked by those whose specialties revolve around such things as centrifuges and the enrichment of uranium, short-range missiles and their forward deployment, and so forth – and that a theological understanding of the place of nuclear weapons in the eschatological thinking of radical religionists of a variety of stripes is one of the key desiderata in an effort to come to grips with the realities of proliferation and peace”.

Read the rest here (PDF)