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AN UNDIPLOMATIC HISTORY

One of my favorite liberal bloggers, the ubiquitous praktike, is deeply puzzled by Pundita’s characterization of the State Department’s senior grades – the CSRA superclass eligible and often used for political positions as well as career bureaucratic management posts – as poweful and secretive ” Mandarins”. praktike writes:

” Pundita is making no sense “ when she in turn wrote:

“Running alongside those trends, and fed by the Cold War, is a foreign office—the US Department of State—that by 2000 had gathered more power than all three branches of US government. This is an opaque power, remarkably evocative of the Mandarins’ power under Chinese dynastic rule.”

Having read more diplomatic and political memoirs than I care to remember, going back to the early 20th century plus select chunks of FRUS for certain periods I would opine that Pundita is pretty much on the mark. This situation prevails regardless of what political Party controls the White House though the effect is much reduced when and where a strong-willed President with a competent staff is deeply engaged in foreign policy matters. Overall, State is probably happier with Democrats in office but then again look at what happened to Jimmy Carter. Power trumps partisanship.

No it isn’t the case that the State Department dictates policy or even operates like Whitehall senior civil servants with their minister but few Americans understand the considerable power that accumulates in the hands of a head of a regional desk or in the top tier of State’s senior career employees as a collective. While the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 greatly increased the President’s control over the Executive Branch in theory, in practice, the drawn out Senate confirmation process has led to a lot of career people filling the political appointee slots. In other words, more or less the opposite of the law’s intention. Mostly, this is done on the lower policy levels – the deputy assistant secretaries – but sometimes they can snag the big enchilada like Lawrence Eagleberger did.

When a President is not paying much attention or is ill-informed on foreign affairs – Bill Clinton – or has a disengaged style and/or a weak NSC decision process – Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter – one of two things usually happens. Either the State Department runs away with the interagency process and turns policy, slowly, over time and endless meetings to its preferences rather than the President’s or basically the administration foreign policy process comes to resemble Beirut in the 1980’s with media leaks, attempted coups and vicious character assassinations. It makes for fine theater but a poor foreign policy.

The State Department is not a nefarious entity but their responsibility is to give advice and then execute policy whether or not it comports with the inclinations of Foggy Bottom’s received wisdom and not stall, obfuscate, leak or sabotage what they regard as the ” bad” policy of a bozo President or a law passed by some yahoo House Committee Chairman.

Making foreign policy is the prerogative of the people’s elected representatives, though at times they let that power run through their fingers like fine grains of sand.

FORUM FOR FANS OF PNM: BLOGGING THE FUTURE

I’m hip deep in some primary source research today, but I have added a site to the blogroll that fans of PNM will find very interesting, as well as interactive. Critt Jarvis has set up BLOGGING THE FUTURE as a discussion forum for PNM theory intersecting with globalization-foreign policy issues. You can ask Dr. Barnett questions directly (or Critt for that matter) and put in your views on world events. The site requires registration and a valid email address which should help keep the discussion on a higher plane than the average blogospheric comment section.

Hope to see you there !

RECOMMENDED READING WITH A FEW OBSERVATIONS

Dan at tdaxp bitch-slaps the eminent and usually wise, Victor Davis Hanson about the room in his post on the implications of revoking tenure on Peer-to-Peer networks. Hanson’s recent essay on this topic reads more bitter than smart. Or at least less smart than I associate with VDH. Come to think of it, he’s had some other sloppy generalizations of late. Sharpen your noodle Professor, you can and have done much better thinking in the past.

At Whirledview we find three posts to examine: CKR has two in reaction to the Foreign Affairs article by the formerly respected Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In the first CKR critiques McNamara’s argument and goes on to explain the crucial the issue of stockpile degradation. In the second post, CKR comments on the ” Global Strike ” article by Wiliam Arkin in the Washington Post and asked:

“The big question is what the response of Iran or North Korea would be to such an attack. Presumably global strike planning includes taking out bases from which missiles could be launched against Israel, Seoul, Tokyo, or Anchorage. If the pre-emptive/preventive strike takes place as planned, and if the intelligence is correct, there should be no retaliation. How much retaliation is considered acceptable? This would indicate how good the intelligence needs to be, and how perfectly the munitions need to perform. “

Inspired by CKR, I emailed Mr. Arkin and asked him a technical question regarding the destructive parameters of a potential of a robust-earth penetrating nuke strike on a hardened target vs. a time-sequenced series of conventional armed superbombs like the MOAB. Mr. Arkin wrote me back and confirmed that the destructive potential of the latter technique would be in the same ballpark in terms of effect, assuming it was done properly ( something that would require air supremacy or total surprise). Neither of us really could figure out why the nuclear option was therefore featured so prominently in the Global Strike policy. Perhaps it is a distractor or a nod toward deterrence of proliferation. I’m not against the nuke option per se, just curious as to why it was presented as the primary military option by the Bush administration when in fact, it isn’t.

The third post at Whirledview was by PHK who featured a Naval War College professor Todd Greentree who is in the midst of writing a book on the implications of Small Wars for American foreign policy ( is there something in the water at the Naval War College that produces strategic thinkers ?). PHK is kind enough to link here to my Syracuse post as she makes some much needed points about hyperpower hubris in formulating strategic policy, citing the wisdom of von Clauswitz.

In the spirit of Episode III, I am linking to Stuart Berman’s commentary on the subject. Stu sold me on this one with the following sentence alone:

“After considering the dust up in Cannes over comparisons between American policy and the Empire I find that the comparison requires a significant vacancy of thought.”

Indeed.

That’s it for now.

PUNDITA’S WRATH OF KHAN

I greatly enjoy reading Pundita and highly recommend her blog for anyone looking to discuss root causes of foreign policy problems, particularly from a geoeconomic analytical perspective. Today was no exception as she expounded on the problem of global criminality in government by drawing on the example of the great Mongol conqueror Temujin, who became known to history as Ghengis Khan -correctly pointing out that he was ultimately a preserver of civilization rather than a destroyer like Attila or Alaric.

Usually I simply let Pundita’s posts speak for themselves and link but today I have a number of comments to make. Pundita responds to a question on foreign relations with corrupt governments:

“That is a fair question. The answer is that you don’t make policy for crooks or law-abiding governments; you make policy for the era and consistently apply the policy. “

Here we see the difference between thinking strategically, which only a few leaders in American history have managed to do, and muddling through by reacting ad hoc to unfolding events as if all misfortunes or opportunities are simply coincidental. The latter is the preferred stance of the State Department which sees itself as the guardian of the status quo. It is also the preferred stance for the USG of all those who look with alarm at the prospect of the decline of statism abroad and the rise of globalized, free market, exchange. They like a lumbering, blind, stupid and passive United States better than active and clear-eyed one.

“The age of globalization came and intersected with megapopulations and the scramble by poor governments to make oil payments and build up their arsenals. And nobody–no major government–was ready for the upshot, which was crime on a scale we haven’t seen since the days of Genghis Khan’s youth.

The Khan hadn’t imagined how many crooks there were in the world but as his conquests proceeded he found out. The same key factors were in play at that time as now. There was a boom in global trade–the globe at that time. The boom was fed by the demands of the walled cities, which fed a population boom. The upshot was that a caravan couldn’t travel two miles without being set upon by brigands or marauding tribes, which meant payoffs, which bumped all the way up to highest government levels. “

The Khan’s initial reaction, it must be told, was chillingly utilitarian. He obliterated the cities that resisted with the thoroughness of the Romans at Carthage so that the urban civilization of the neighboring peoples would be replaced with the pastoral one of the Mongols. Fortunately for the world, Ghengis Khan proved to be an empiricist and he changed his policy when he was presented with new data.

“This was accompanied by price gouging, usury, and every type of dirty business and corruption you can think of. All that led to cities living under constant threat of attack.

All that was accompanied and fed by a level of hypocrisy that would be right at home in today’s world. The Khan saw it all. He saw the Chinese mandarins and the emperor worship they promoted. He saw the Calculator Christians, who totted up conversion rates while stepping over starving Christians. The Turks lectured him about Islam. He looked at their showy mosques and how they treated women and the poor. He told them to their faces they were phonies. “

Ghengis Khan was unusual in his day that as a ruler his policy was freedom of conscience. The Khan was most partial to the Nestorian Christians, who were the weakest of his subjects, being significant mainly in the Buddhist-Hellenic kingdoms North of the Amu Darya and West of Tibet. He was ” Qaan monghka tangri-yin kuchun-dur” the universal emperor by the will of Eternal Heaven and did not feel the need to force diverse peoples into the Mongol worship of Tangri. The Mongols were most adversarial toward Islam, until the later conversion of some Mongol tribes ( the Golden Horde) because of Islam’s aggressive attitude of superiority and intolerance which Mongol generals regarded with utter contempt ( ” What have you to teach us, we who have the Yasaq of Ghengis Khan ?”).

“In short, it was chaos. All the gains civilization had made during the preceding few centuries were in danger of being wiped out. With the help of a brilliant Chinese bureaucrat, the Khan saved the day. He did this in many ways, some of them horribly ruthless. Yet the single greatest reason for his success at ruling over so many peoples was a fair code of laws that he enforced with consistency; consistency meaning no exceptions, not even for the Yakka Mongols–his own tribe.

The upshot was that, “A naked virgin carrying a sack of gold could walk unmolested from one end of Genghis Khan’s empire to the other.”

The bureaucrat was actually a Khitan, an ethnic group related to the Mongols that had been Sinicized culturally, a prince named Ye-liu Ch’u ts’ai who was a highly educated administrator and statesman. He became one of the Khan’s closest advisors and helped make Ghengis Khan’s austere moral code – the Yasaq ( ” Regulations”) – a functional governing system as well as a moral one. It was he who convinced the Great Khan of the advantage of sparing cities by showing him their annual economic productivity – essentially their GDP – in taels of silver and how they could be taxed. Before Ye-liu, the Mongol leadership was contemplating the extermination of the entire Chinese race – about 10,000,000 people at the time – and the conversion of China’s agricultural lands to grazing territory.

“The key concepts are fairness and consistency of application. There is not a single factor to explain the rise and scope of globalized crime, just as there is not a single factor to explain criminality. There can be different reasons why governments come to rely on crime. However, there is only one reason governments in the modern era consistently get away with crime: that’s if other governments employ a double standard in their relations with criminal governments–a standard that shifts with the expediency of the moment.”

Agreed. A ruler who takes bribes is operatring on a range of the moment time horizon. Such actions do not remain secret. They are noticed and imitated by underlings and by foreigners who will then offer yet more bribes. The cycle of corruption then accelerates and spreads like an infection to connected systems. Unless the infection is ruthlessly cut out.

Ghengis Khan made a signal example of one governor of a neigboring province to his growing empire who had looted a caravan that Ghengis Khan had sent to the Emperor of the short-lived empire of Khwarizm. The corrupt governor was captured alive by the Mongols and executed by the pouring of molten silver into his eyes and mouth. The lesson was not lost on anyone.

“People can adjust to a double standard if it’s consistently applied; what they can’t adjust to is a high level of uncertainty. If you have the means to force people to live according to your shifting political whims, you breed the sense among them that nothing can be relied on, that integrity is a penalty, that truth has no meaning. So then you should not wonder why, when criminal behavior becomes rampant.”

Uncertainy in the rule of law is destructive to economic productivity because it prevents rational planning on an individual basis and drives people in a society to become risk-averse and secretive – to fly below the radar of rapacious authorities and predatory gangs.

“Policy begins not with your expectations of others but with how you conduct yourself. It begins with the rules you lay down for your company or government’s conduct. If the rules are inconsistently applied, “foreign” policy is a joke. As with any joke, it won’t be taken seriously”

Actions speak louder than words. As much as the Left excoriates and mocks George W. Bush for his policies in the GWOT, there are a number of unsavory regimes that are now thinking twice and three times before acting. Some are reacting by advancing with haste into confrontation, others have run-up the white flag and still others are paralyzed with fear and doubt. Regardless, all of the rogue states have been knocked off of their timetables and their game plan by George Bush. Something for which he deserves credit.

“One General Temujin–Genghis Khan–was quite enough for world history. We now have much experience to guide us, so humanity should be able to avoid the need for another supercop of the magnitude represented by the Khan. The ball, however, is in our court.”

It should have been enough but too many of the other potential ” cops” are morally wavering, sitting on the fence in regards to the criminal regimes and the Rule-sets we will collectively enforce against them. When the leader of a major American ally has a vacation home that his own countrymen have mocked as ” Chateau Iraq” then the global police force is in need of, if not a Super-cop, then at least a Serpico.

PNM & 4GW: PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AND THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION [ UPDATED]

Earlier this week, on his blog, Dr. Barnett commented on 4GW theory and propaganda:

“We are told by Fourth Generation Warfare adherents that what is real and what is perceived are two different things, with the latter almost always trumping the former’s impact on the 4GW battlefield. Much as with cyberwar, however, 4GW’s theory of conflict often seems overwhelmed by the sheer mass of stuff that goes on accidentally in the global environment, such as the recent journalistic snafu by Newsweek.

Point being: as globalization grows and complexity takes root over more and more of the planet, the ability of any 4GW-waging warrior to have his attacks rise above the level of “white noise” in the system gets harder and harder. “

Critt Jarvis suggested to me and a few others that this topic bears further examination and I agree. Information and perception are critical aspects of connectivity and the media has become a dynamic feedback loop that helps shapes how people, individually and collectively, will frame and interpret events. This of course depends on what information succeeds in capturing their attention. Those of us in the Core live not only in the era of ” White Noise” but also in the age of Mass Distraction.

Some background to consider:

First, while we face an ever increasing onrush of information the format by which ” news” content is sorted before we receive remains primarily “Pulitzerian”, regardless of the source. That is to say in the journalistic ” what, where, who, why, when – lead paragraph ” frame invented by the 19th century newspaper titan Joseph Pulitzer, whose method was swiftly copied by all his rivals and later adopted by both Radio and Television news broadcasters essentially unchanged. It is so ubiquitous a method of organizing information that its implications are virtually invisible. It is ironic, but al Jazeera is an unwitting conduit of Westernization. Their broadcast content may be critical of America and sympathetic to Islamism but the broadcast format itself is teaching their Arab audience to process information like Westerners. The medium here, as McLuhan wrote, is the message. No indigenous Arab or Chinese or Indian or other cultural-epistemological model of news information processing will be likely to develop because the triumph of the Pulitzerian frame has preempted such an evolution.

Secondly, the twentieth century was an era of top-down, centralized, communications. In free press America, until the 1990’s, our access to information was effectively determined by a narrow Oligopoly of the broadcast Networks and the New York Times which set a tone of corporate liberalism for the media. While the occasional cranky voice might appear on the Right (Col. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, William Loeb’s Manchester-Union Leader) or Left (The Village Voice, The Nation) it was a fairly monotonous political consensus. The totalitarian states, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, the USSR, Red China took message control to the nth degree – so much so that Russians and Germans became more adept at reading what information was made conspicuous by its absence ( or finely graded nuance) in the state media organs than by what was actually published.

The overall effect was that globally, societies operated ” on message” to a relatively low ratio of ” White Noise”; public attention was directed to subjects and opinions within a set of defined societal parameters and then to only a few subjects at a given time.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the repeal of the” Fairness Doctrine” and the rise of alternative media, the power of the gatekeepers, if not broken, has been badly battered. From an elite perspective, the barbarians are past the gates, in the city and setting up shop. This diversification of media voices has brought a much higher degree of potential transparency to government and media operations.

It is far harder now, whether you are interrogating al Qaida captives in Afghanistan or making editorial decisions on the slant of a CBS news segment to keep the information process secret from the information consumer. It is also the case that the sheer volume of information transmission, the number of mediums and the esoteric variety of content is subdividing mass audiences into networks of niche subcultures – the ” demassification” predicted by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. It is harder and harder to command mass attention because an event that once might command global or at least national attention is often merely a needle in a haystack of media choices and goes undigested by vast swaths of the population. Even for those who do see and react to an event find that the ” news cycle” has accelerated and devalues the significance of any event, on average, the way inflation devalues a dollar.

How can this situation be manipulated in a 4GW sense ?

Deception, misdirection and camouflage are naturally easier to achieve necause it takes advantage on the increase in media ” White Noise” to which Dr. Barnett has referred. Occasionally, a mega-story will develop by chance that manages to capture the imagination of the masses and dominate various mediums for varying lengths of time – the Tsunami, the OJ Simpson Trial, the death of a revered world-historical figure – and so on. These are periods in which to initiate operations that must fly under the radar.

Since a a grave natural disaster does not happen on a weekly basis – Weapons of Mass Distraction can be employed, essentially psychological warfare conducted by hyping psuedo-issues in the media, a technique that relies upon the same cognitive principles as does negative advertising in political campaigns. It doesn’t really matter intrinsically what side ” wins” on such issues as Terry Schiavo, steroids in professional sports and the ” appearance of impropriety ” ethical scandal of the week – the real win is moving the media attention away from a subject you’d rather not have them notice. ” Feeding the Beast” makes for a more docile pet and regular ” feeders” are recruiting journalists and through them, their editors and producers.

As Dr. Barnett suggested, those clamoring for attention in the fractured, global, mediasphere have their work cut out for them. Not only do they face the structural problems mentioned above but events are perceived through different cultural-linguistic frames in a way that prejudices against a complexity of message. Such groups will have to rely upon two primary tactics:

Archetype imaging to hit the lowest common psychological denominator but the widest cross-cultural appeal. The grotesque beheadings carried out by Zarqawi’s al Qaida offshoot in Iraq exhibited a lurid fascination in the global media. The shelf-life of this stunt was relatively short.

Magnitude. Staging an event on a scale that cannot be ignored such as 3/11 or 9/11 – some of these are full fledged System Perturbations.

The media is a dynamic feedback loop. It can be prompted, shaken, fed, distracted, manipulated, intimidated or engaged but outside of a few isolated, totally disconnected Gap hellholes like North Korea, it cannot be controlled. It is part of the environment for the players on the global stage, shaping them and being shaped by them.

UPDATE:

Critt Jarvis, posting on Dr. Barnett’s blog, develops the discussion further bringing in the ideas two thinkers I now feel I need to learn more about – John Robb and Dan Gillmor. Critt is also recommending von Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom. I concur – though if readers have a bent toward more technical economic explanations I would recommend Hayek’s underappreciated mentor Ludwig von Mises, particularly his Socialism and Human Action.

( Note this is NOT a recommendation or endorsement of some of the kooky, Rothbardian, anarcho-capitalist followers on the internet who misrepresent themselves as serious students of von Mises. These folks, who once published the most bizarre review of PNM on record, are IMHO, a gang of crypto-Trotskyite crackpots. I’m not sure if even Murray Rothbard- who was way out there himself- would have endorsed all of their internet antics.)