I'm Becoming a Disciple of T.P.M. Barnett

Two great posts from one of our best strategic thinkers:

There are always intell reports that explore all potential downsides. Their existence proves nothing, because that's intell's job: list me the bad things that can happen if I do this, or if I don't do this.

It's like the surgeon telling you before the op about all possible complications. Their potentiality is but one element to be calculated in your decision.

That's why this notion of "faulty intell" is all wrong. It's not how intell works. You get a range of potential outcomes (inevitably, all worst case) and then you make your call.

The presumption of "good" or "bad" intell can't really be proven per se. Some always ends up being "amazingly prescient," the rest is a load of hyperbolic crap.

When things work out, no one cares about all the "bad" intell. But when it goes badly (always for a host of reasons and decisions, or simply because the decisionmakers prefer the sub-optimal outcome to no action at all), then the "amazingly prescient" intell is inevitably touted as "proof" of the intell "failure" (I made this argument first in PNM).

Also inevitably, there will be calls for "reform," none of which can possibly overcome this essentially political decisionmaking process, nor will it stop the very same politicians from declaring their pet defense programs "crucial" because "we live in a world of COMPLETE UNCERTAINTY!"

In short, no president can be "controlled" or "corrected" by perfect intelligence--a useless concept if ever there was one.

Bush and Cheney made their decisions. Until the casualties began piling up ("high" by today's standards, marginal by yesterday's), their decisionmaking was supported--in poll after poll and congressional vote after vote--by the clear majority of Americans and their leaders. Once the bodies piled up and a sense of non-progress ensued, a clear majority turned against those decisions--and those decisionmakers.

That's just how it works in our political system.

So the real correction is--duh!--get the casualties down, not "fix intell."

Iraq stopped being a binary outcome a long time ago. Kurdistan is where we've won, and Kurdistan is where we'll manage to define a partial victory, reduce our exposure and casualties by concentrating the bulk of our troops there, and continue to sequence the rest of Iraq toward something better over time (back to Hoagland and Friedman--and me for two-plus years now--on engaging Iran and keeping this Big Bang strategy alive).

For some, it will always be solely about kinetics and the intell that justifies it.

To others, it'll always be a mix, a sequence, a balance.

The former is a strategy all right, just not a grand one.

And no amount of good intell will overcome that mindset.

And:

An overwrought argument from Mann, who specializes in them.

China is no "new" model or threat. It follows the model of Singapore, and before that South Korea, and before that Japan: a single-party state that bases almost all of its legitimacy on rising income and development through export-driven growth. It is a self-liquidating model: eventually the society wants more political freedom to go with that wealth. China's just so fricking huge and so poor that this process isn't going fast enough for Mann--hence the inevitable "threat."

Mann recognizes neither those past examples nor the significant economic and personal freedoms unleashed inside China over the past quarter century. His Z not having been reached fast enough, he discounts all movement from A since the bizarre depths of Mao's cultural revolution, which is no more distant politically than our Vietnam.

While China's "new" model, such as it is, appeals greatly to many authoritarian regimes in the Gap, there are scant few there that can possibly replicate it (yeah, size matters)..

I mean, name one Gap regime to date that has successfully emerged using China's model? Just interacting with China economically hardly connotes successful subversion to its model. It simply indicates recognition that external economic connectivity is a prerequisite for raising incomes at home, and yeah, if you're an authoritarian leader ruling over a stagnate economy, that's attractive.

As for our take on it, we should logically welcome any so-called model that promotes external economic connectivity, because we know where that goes historically (i.e., where Japan and South Korea finally ended up: creating political freedoms that match their system's potential--something that took us a while to achieve as well).

In short, China carries our economic model's water for us, pushing us to marry up our political model with it over time (what we seek to encourage in China, we logically seek to encourage in similar situations across the Gap). Hardly an alternative model, China's path is but a steppingstone to outcomes we naturally seek. I mean, crawling might be described as an alternative to walking, but only until you're able to walk, then it suddenly seems like a passing phase.

China's "model" will never move beyond crawling, because it's about transforming a hugely rural, impoverished, disconnected society (one-sixth of humanity) into an urban, consumeristic, connected one. Once achieved, and China is nowhere near that at this time, with well over half its population still living in very Gap-like conditions, then its model self-liquidates that all before it.

China's future leaders know this, so do our smart observers. Mann ain't one of the them. He knows his China from a long way back now, and he'll never recognize another.

Confusing China's influence-peddling with model propagation is a new academic fad in search of actual data to prove its distinctiveness, but there is none. China's model is not unique, but a copycat of something we've seen before in "rising Asia," just not on this scale. Prior to that, the USSR had its own bankrupt version. China's model will extend itself only where China extends itself, and since China's economic ties remain exceedingly mercantilistic, that won't be far.

In short, the academic tomes touting China's "victory" are arriving just as the Gap is beginning to turn on China, and just as China's starts feeling the scary blowback from its extension of trade nets deep into the Gap. As always, the academics are right on time.

Hardly a great threat, this "model," but merely a tool to be manipulated by leaders more strategically imaginative than our current crew--or the ideologically-myopic Mann.

The first is funnier. The second is more substantive. I think I'm becoming a disciple of T.P.M. Barnett.