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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.

Fabius Maximus has hit his stride as a blogger with a highly informative set of posts on wargaming that later expanded to DNI.

War games, the antidote to “Victory disease”

Are war games a competitive edge of conventional forces vs. non-state 4GW foes?

The Achilles’ Heel of military simulations

At DNI:

During Millenium Challenge 2002

It is generally underestimated by the public (and even academics) how powerful games – especially free-play games- can be as a tool for learning; the cognitive potential of a well-constructed and rigorously moderated game is literally immense. ( and when coupled with mass-collaboration, social-networking, MMORPG  technology a level of validity might be realized that the old Prussian Grossgeneralstab or RAND apparatchiks could only have dreamed. Unfortunately, a rigged game becomes a powerfully persuasive lie, so integrity is key if gaming is to guide decision-making in the real world) A few examples:

” The gamers argued that insights arose from immersion in play. In 1956 Joseph Goldstein noted that the war game demonstrated ‘ the organic nature of complex relationships’ that daily transactions obscured.War-gaming gripped its participants, whipping up the convulsions of diplomacy ‘ more forcefully…than could be experienced through lectures or books’.”

” A team from the Social Science Division [ at RAND ] posed a number of questions which they hoped the unfoldig month of gaming would resolve. Chief among them was whether gaming could be used as a forecasting technique ‘ for sharpening our estimates of the probable consequences of policies pursued by various governments’. Would gaming spark “political inventiveness“, and more importantly, how did it compare to conventional policy analysis? Did gaming uncover problems that might otherwise be neglected? And invoking the emerging touchstone of intuition, did the experience impart to policy analysts and researchers “ a heightened sensitivity to problems of political strategy and policy consequences?”

  Sharon Ghamari- Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn [ emphasis mine]

Another example:

“What we encountered, though, once our game-called Therapy, as it happens-was finished, were two remarkable things, both of which Colin Powell and Richard Duke might have told us. First, of all the professions, psychiatrists and psychologists tended to do worst at the game; secondly, the synthetic process worked even better in reverse. Playing the game expanded people’s grasp of human nature in general and their particular group’s dynamics. But even more, watching people play revealed a depth of information about them, and about the world at large, that you would ordinarily expect only from months of official therapy“

The quote comes from an article “Wanna Play ?” in Psychology Today. Further insights in the article:

“In fact, the phrase “just a game” is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance. Games are anything but “just” anything. They cover the gamut of human endeavor and come in every package and medium you can imagine. Last year in the United States alone, 126 million board-style games were sold for $1.14 billion; video and computer games accounted for another $5 billion. It is impossible to calculate how much people benefit from games:

* Games are primers on turn-taking, the basis of all relationships.

* They can solve major crises in industry and teach people not to pilfer pencils from the company storeroom; in fact, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on them for that.

* They can be training grounds for legendary generals and make the difference between winning and losing wars.

* Finally, and most important, games can reopen doors into the world of pretending and childhood, reminding us of unadulterated fun, sparking creativity

Psychologically speaking, games have a knack for setting us free”

Instead of reading about games, you should be playing one 🙂

John Boyd used to preach that “Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds!”. Which is of course true but sometimes they use their minds to make new machines or use old ones in a novel way. So, as a counterbalance to the frequent discussions here of 4GW, COIN and the mental and moral levels of war, how about some computer wizardry as a change of pace? LOL!

About the Technology in Wartime Conference

“This conference will explore how computer technology is used during war — both for the purposes of combat/defense, as well as for human rights interventions into war-torn regions. Topics will include high tech weapons systems, cyberwarfare, autonomous aircraft, mobile robots, internet surveillance, anonymous communication, and privacy-enhancing technologies that aid human rights workers documenting conditions in war-torn countries and help soldiers communicate their experiences in blogs and e-mail.

Our goal will be to consider the ethical implications of wartime technologies and how these technologies are likely to affect civilization in years to come. Ultimately we want to engage a pressing question of our time: What should socially-responsible computer professionals do in a time of high tech warfare?

The proceedings will be broadcast live on the Web, and the presentations collected in book form online, released under a CC license, and made available to the public and policy makers looking for expert opinions on wartime technology issues during the election year”

Joi Ito is one of the sponsors and the list of confirmed speakers includes Noah Schachtman of WIRED and Bruce Schneier . They could use a few more warriors in their geek and academic heavy mix but it looks like it’s shaping up to be an excellent conference.

Hat tip to Charles Cameron.

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.

The other day I was contacted by one of Frans Johansson’s people, Kristian Ribberström who blogs at Stories From the Intersection and he asked me, as I have blogged on The Medici Effect a number of times, to mention the upcoming The Medici Summit on innovation and creativity to my readers. A description by Johansson:

“It is also high-noon time for me to announce what promises to be an amazing event! The Medici Summit on March 3^rd and 4^th next year will be unusual in its structure, exciting, inspiring and just plain fun. It is now open for registration and I am really very excited about this. It has long been a desire of mine to put together a conference that mimics the Medici Effect where people can come in with their own ideas and leave with those ideas recombined with someone else’s. There will be awesome speakers and plenty of opportunity to connect with others (some of them will be surprises and are not outlined exactly in the schedule). Very, very excited about this one! It is open for registration right now so head over there and register“