A BOOK REC FROM TOM
Tom Barnett pointed out this tome to me in the comment section of his blog:
As I have not read a new economics book since Freakonomics came out, I’ll grab this the next time I run over to Border’s ( despite Col. Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy and War, sent courtesy of Shane, sitting there, staring me in the face, taunting me). Idoru needs to be finished too and…
So many books. So little time.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
A little change of pace.
Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett at TED (TED videos are usually outstanding – someday I’ll have to finagle an invite to TED). Tom’s presentation skills have really been honed in the sense of taking insider mil-issues and getting the concepts across to a lay audience, slick and fast, on their level, without oversimplifying. It’s an artful trick that takes considerable practice to master, much less make look easy.Conversations With History, featuring Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens is always an erudite interview, this is no exception.
On a lighthearted note, some pedagogy from the masters of slapstick. ;o)
ENTERRANS AMONG THE KURDS
Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has journeyed to the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq a second time on Enterra business. He’s had several posts reflecting on his experiences working in ” the other Iraq” or about the Mideast in general.
Probing the Edges of Globalization
Lessons from the Edge of Globalization: Part 2, Day 1
Labor Reform in the Middle East ( Dubai focus)
Kurdistan’s clan-based rulers and Peshmerga leaders have been exceptionally deft players in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, managing to have excellent relations with the United States, Iran and ( allegedly on the quiet) Israel. Quite a neat trifecta. Only Turkey remains a serious problem, deeply fearful of Kurdish revanchism, PKK terrorism and having assumed the role of protector of the Turcoman minority in Iraq ( ironically, reprising the posture that imperial Russia once assumed toward Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire that the Sublime Porte found so offensive).
To be a state or not to be a state, a choice the Kurds must make. One of the few things most countries can agree on is that international borders are no longer up for grabs via the use of force – Europe’s peace was built on the permanence of German borders and the Europeans are not going to reopen that topic, even in principle. The road to sovereignty, independence and NATO membership for Kurdistan runs only through Ankara but it requires strategic choices not seen in Mesopotamia since 1919.
THE STRATEGIC THOUGHT DEFICIT
Dr. Barnett, opining yesterday on the recent NYT op-ed on Kennan:
“The dearth of strategic thinking reaches a new low, or maybe this is just a Kennan scholar pre-hawking his new book.
Now we get the out-of-time argument that containment is the answer on radical Islam.
It’s not much of an argument, but rather a decent rehashing of Kennan’s thinking on the Sovs. The problem here, of course, is that al-Qaida doesn’t translate well to an authoritarian empire already in existence.
Another problem, which I flayed at length in PNM, is that global historical forces are moving in a direction very different from that of the late 1940s and early 1950s. We’re not in some bilat standoff of camps with little dynamic interchange between them. We’re watching a consolidation period unfold following a massive expansion of globalization, one that’s simultaneously accompanied by its further expansion thanks to the huge resource draw from rising Asia. ”
We have a severe shortage of Kennans these days. While of course, there was only one Kennan writing the Long Telegram there were also the Stimsons, Marshalls, Achesons, Nitzes, Forrestals, Vandenbergs, Lovetts, Dulles’, McCloys, Wohlstetters, Kahns and many others who came before and after Kennan who made their own contributions to the development of the Containment strategy. Our diplomatic and national security bench was deep in those days and often, these statesmen brought real experience in international finance, logistics and linguistics to the table ( Wohlstetter and Kahn were the cutting edge of the academic -strategist wave that replaced the Wall Street and Railroad company lawyer generation).
Today, we see most of our big picture and thinkers outside of government and often academia as well, writing books, giving speeches or building private sector companies. Tellingly, the most innovative policy of Bush’s second term was developed not by a White House aide or a Cabinet secretary but by General David Petraeus – and his counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq was only accepted by the powers that be out of political and military desperation. The Democrats are no better, having had essentially no new policy ideas in almost two generations and a deep desire to ignore the existence of foreign policy altogether.
In part, this is a generational problem. Not only are the Boomers an amazingly self-centered lot, endlessly obsessing on ( and trying to re-live) the political traumas of their now distant youth, but the statesmen among them cut their teeth on the Cold War, bipolar, pre-Globalization, rigidly hierarchical world and are, for the most part, unwilling to revisit their anachronistic assumptions. There are exceptions but these people are usually outliers in some way, personally or professionally.
We may need to construct our defenses for the 21st century by retooling civil society to become more resilient, adaptive and dynamic – for the short term, our governing class may be a lost cause.
BOOKS ARE SIGNPOSTS ON THE ROAD OF LIFE
“I cannot live without books”
– Thomas Jefferson
First, I’d like to thank Dr. Barnett and Dan of tdaxp for the kind remarks and links the past few days. Both men have often provoked me to new thoughts or reconsidered views and it is nice to know that I can return the favor on occasion.
Tom had a post Sunday entitled ” Why the grand strategist/visionary needs the discipline of books” that echoed something I’ve long believed. Something Lexington Green, in his enviably book-lined home, probably would agree with,
a) First, there’s really no substitute for a good “hard” book.
b) Fiction becomes a guilty pleasure.
Perhaps, the physicists and mathematicians among us ( Von, Shane, Wiggins) will put a word in for the elegance of the mathematical equation, but for me, the supremacy of the book reigns without a rival. As I reflect on the evolution of my thinking as a teen and an adult, inevitably there are many books and a handful of people who leap to mind. Many, many, books and very, very, few people.
As much as I love history, the best reading I have done, in terms of determined, sustained, thought, involved philosophy and economics – Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Keynes, Galbraith, Von Mises, Von Hayek, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Machiaveli, Kuhn -because it trained my mind to accept the discipline of formal logic. Logic is invaluable for a rational mind but wisdom is discerning logic’s limitations of functioning within paradigms and that the paradigms themselves are tools for the mind to understand a part of reality; and not one of these paradigms is sufficient to encompass the whole. You have to synthesize, learn, adapt – there is no point at which you ” rest” or become complacent with your expertise.
The joy is in the journey and not in the destination.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
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