Grazia!
To fellow foreign policy aficianado Pundita for her unsolicited but gracious posting (cross-posted to RBO as well, doubleplusgood thanks!) on Threats in the Age of Obama
The Virtual Think Tank and thinking about security threats in the Twenty-First Century
Mark Safranski, whose ZenPundit blog has been a staple at Pundita since the early days, is a contributor to the newly-published Threats in the Age of Obama, a collection of essays edited by Michael Tanji. ZenPundit has assembled quotes from a few of the essays in Tanji’s book, which give an idea of the breadth of interests represented by the contributors. I haven’t yet read Threats, and I’m not familiar with all the people that Tanji has gathered for his book (see the list of contributors below). But from the names I’m familiar with the book is a good overview of the security threats that Obama’s administration needs to deal with.The book is also an example of the Virtual Think Tank; as such it’s as much an example of cross-discipline thinking as it is a primer on this era’s security threats.
….Tanji, a former supervisory intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, is well-aware of the limitations of the Virtual Think Tank (see his essay on the topic, which I’ve linked to above). But clearly he hopes its unfettered scope will prevent the worst oversights to arise from the blinkered research and analysis that academia produces.We should all hope. In this era, when a handful of people can wreak as much destruction as a million-man army, the window for saying, ‘Back to the drawing board’ is very narrow.
Read the rest here.
February 20th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
[…] now links to a review by Pundita (cross-posted at The Real Barack Obama) of the book. Here’s what […]