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The Call of Nepal: My Life In the Himalayan Homeland of Britain’s Gurkha Soldiers by Col. J.P. Cross

Nimble Books, a publisher I am proud to be associated with, is rolling out the American edition of the memoirs of the legendary COIN specialist, soldier and linguist, Colonel John Philip Cross, of the Gurkhas. Foreword by Robert D. Kaplan.  Disclosure – I had a part, albeit a small one, along with Lexington Green, in connecting Col. Cross with Nimble Books, and I could not be more pleased to see this memoir in print. Not many books these days start by announcing how modern academics will hate it.

Cross was the focus of a story by Kaplan in The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 2006.

Review soon to come….

James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly recently posted on Colonel John Boyd ( Hat tip to Fred Zimmerman) and I missed it in the pre-Holiday chaos:

First in a series of year end pensees: grand strategy

Could end up being a very brief series, but here is one to start:

As my wife and I near our third consecutive Christmas/New Year stretch outside the United States, mainly we feel lucky for all that we’ve been able to see and do and experience in China and its environs.

But of course there are costs. And while I wouldn’t exactly put this at the top of the list of things we regret missing out on (compared, say, with seeing our families and friends etc), I am in fact sorry not to have been around for the last few installments of the John Boyd Conferences, where people interested in Boyd’s theories of competition gather to apply them to topics ranging from financial meltdowns to handling Iraq. Much more about Boyd via links you can find here, here (second item), here,  here, and here, for starters.

Read the rest here.

Both Tom and John have weighed in on the important piece by James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The $1.4 Trillion Dollar Question“:

Dr. Barnett:

“What Fallows doesn’t address in China’s vast surplus/savings is the huge and very real current sovereign debts and future mandates that are hidden in this development scheme: overseas resource dependencies demanding investment stakes, future aging costs, current and future enviro costs, future requirements to build out (and up) the poor interior, and so on.

Those are real sovereign liabilities because the people will expect some/much government help in these matters over time to ensure continued development and sustained movement up the product chain (gotta get as rich as possible before getting old).

Having said all that, Fallows’ analysis of the government’s logic is dead on. I suspect that, with all his time spent in China, we’ll see a book that does a big turn in explaining China to America. That will be a huge journalistic endeavor, and most welcome from someone with his considerable narrative talents.

As for the larger strategic question, we owe China a quiet international security order within which to develop, and sufficient partnership so as to obviate too much defense spending on their part. Eventually, Deng’s “grand compromise” of 1992 (PLA supports him on market acceleration in return for money and cover to modernize) must be tempered so that China doesn’t field a military for a war that should never happen and which it could never win. It needs to field a SysAdmin-heavy force that partners with us in mutual dependence: we can’t rule the peace with our Leviathan-heavy force, but they can’t rule war with their Leviathan-lite force either, so we must cooperate in extending and protecting globalization to our mutual advantage.”

John Robb:

“Fallows runs through the details of the “financial balance of terror” between the US and China and concludes that it won’t last long. However, of the reasons he listed for a collapse of the balance, he didn’t include the most likely: that China will need the money to shore up its domestic economy as the US heads into a lengthy and severe recession.

Remember, China hasn’t endured anything other than growth pain for over a decade. Further, the average Chinese citizens hasn’t reaped much from that boom. They don’t have the financial reserves to weather a crisis (and many of those that do will lose their shirts when China’s market bubble tanks). So where will this cash go over the next two years? Not into Blackstones or US Treasuries. Instead, it will be invested domestically. Into jobs and projects to shore up the little bit of legitimacy the Chinese government still has (we see a similar pattern with many of the globe’s marginally legitimate governments, from Saudi Arabia to Russia).

Frankly, I’m not sure that $1.4 trillion (the normative value of which is evaporating with each plunge in the dollar) will be enough to prevent China from disintegrating if this crisis becomes a panic.”

My two cents:

China holds enormous reserves in dollars because their financial strategy – parking surplus cash in Treasury securities – also represents an internal political strategy of deferring acrimonious, major, spending and investment choices that might precipitate division among the elite. China’s leaders are acutely aware of their nation’s deficiencies and historical tendency toward centrifugal, regional, disintegration and keeping the country intact and the state in charge is right up there in terms of priority with sustaining a fantastic rate of GDP growth. The dollar surplus represents an agreeable, strategic, “rainy day fund” consensus choice of the elite and significant changes here will only be in response to pressures or needs that the elite of the CCP can get behind as a whole. Likely, cautious changes but possibly also too little too late.

CHILDREN OF LIGHT, CHILDREN OF DARKNESS

Reinhold Niebuhr

The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:

“The biblical sense of history can make Niebuhr seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”

It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:

“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).

I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.

My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.

ADDENDUM:

Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.

WWII HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE EASTERN FRONT IN THE ATLANTIC

“The war between Germany and Russia is not a war between he two states or two armies, but between two ideologies–namely, the National Socialist and the Bolshevist ideology. The Red Army must be looked upon not as a soldier in the sense of the word applying to our western opponents, but as an ideological enemy. He must be regarded as the archenemy of National Socialism and must be treated accordingly”

General Reinecke of OKW , on Hitler’s “Commisar Order”.

Benjamin Schwarz reviews the latest historical scholarship of the frozen meatgrinder called the Eastern Front, in ” Stalin’s Gift” in The Atlantic.

Historian Norman Davies is dead wrong on Soviet participation in Hitler’s defeat “tarnishing” the war. Ok, I’m understating. Frankly he’s a borderline idiot. What would he have prefered ? A Nazi empire from the Azores to the Urals ? The U.S. carpet bombing Europe with atom bombs in 1946? What ?

A great historiographic review that added a number of books to my reading list.

( Yes, hideous subscription wall. Yes, shortsighted on the editor’s part, I realize. Get a subscription, you cheap bastards, and you won’t be inconvenienced)