Recommended: The State of the World: Explaining U.S. Strategy

George Freidman, over on his STRATFOR site, has a very good article entitled The State of the World: Explaining U.S. Strategy. It is a very good assessment of our current foreign policy strategy and objectives, and whether or not they are likely to be sustainable in the future., Well worth reading.

More Beyond Blue

Walter Russel Mead has continued his excellent American Interest series "Beyond Blue" with parts 4, Beyond Blue Part Four: Better Living in the 21st Century, and 5, Beyond Blue 5: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. This a is an outstanding series, based on rethinking the Blue (liberal) social model that worked pretty well in the past but clearly is no longer applicable in today's world.

The essence of the issue in part 4 is summed up in the following quotation:

120 years ago, agriculture was in crisis because fewer people were needed to produce the world’s food supply. Today, the middle class is endangered because fewer people are needed to do the world’s routine factory work and information management. In both cases, the economic dislocation and painful change were the side effects of progress rather than the signs of dissolution. The reality last time around was that with fewer hands needed at these routine tasks, more human energy, talent and skill were available to do other things: to produce the goods and services that a more sophisticated and much richer modern industrial society would want and need.

Today we don’t need our whole workforce to provide for the wants of industrial society. Fewer and fewer workers produce all the food, all the factory products and all the basic administrative and technical support the social machine needs in order to carry out the tasks of the industrial age. So what do we do with the rest?

From Part 5 on jobs, this quote struck me as right on:

Some mourn the passing of the old ways; some are glad. It doesn’t, fundamentally, matter. The real political division in American today is between those who think the old days can come back if the government does the right things (tax rich people; pump enough money into state and local government, health care and the higher ed industry; raise tariffs high enough and sprinkle enough subsidies on enough industries to protect and rebuild the manufacturing sector) and those like Via Meadia who think that Humpty Dumpty can’t be put together again, no matter how many of the king’s horses and king’s men set up federal egg patching programs.

Those who think the magic can return are free to organize into political movements and rage against the dying of the light; it’s a free country and VM thinks everyone should do their best to advance their ideas and policy options in the political world. But this fight will at most slow down the pace of change; the real contest in America is going to be about what to do next. Energy over time is likely to flow from nostalgia for the old toward the construction of the new.

Recommended: The New North: The World in 2050

Laurence Smith's book The New North: The World in 2050 is about the best, most accurate, and most concise exploration of the major forces likely to shape the world over the next 40-50 years that I have read. Smith deals with human population growth and migration; growing demand for resources such as energy and water; globalization; and climate change. He argues that these forces will shape a new world in which, for geological and climate change reasons, the nations in the higher latitudes of the north will gain at the expense of the rest of the world. Fascinating to read.

Recommended: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

In foreign affairs, there are liberals and realists. Liberals view foreign affairs from an optimistic ideology that believes that reasonable people can always negotiate successfully, and that there is a better world ahead with world peace. Realists have a darker view that human nature hasn't changed appreciably in the past several thousand years, and so we need to deal with the world the way it really is, not the way we wish it were. John Mearsheimer is a foreign affairs realist (as are Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinsk), and makes a very good case for this position in his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. As he points out, the evidence of history is heavily on the side of realists and against the liberals. This is quite a readable book, but an important one.

Here is a thought

It appears that the US has little more leverage left in the Iran situation. It occurs to me that perhaps an out-of-the-box idea may be our best bet.

Suppose the US announced that if and when Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the US will immediately supply our allies in the Middle East with working nuclear weapons (not the technology to make them - just finished, working weapons). Sounds crazy?

Consider, if Shia Iran knew that the day it masters nuclear weapons all of its Sunni neighbors would also have them, courtesy of the USA, thereby immediately neutralizing any advantage Iran might think they would gain, they might reconsider their efforts to get to nuclear weapons. They might consider themselves safer (as the lone Persian Shia nation surrounded by Sunni Arab nations that don't like them) if no one in the Middle East (including themselves) had nuclear weapons.

Consider, if Russia thought Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons would immediately put a fully nuclear-armed Middle East on its borders, it might suddenly find it prudent to be more helpful in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Consider, if we don't give Turkey and Saudi Arabia and other allies in the region nuclear weapons, they are going to develop them on their own in any case if they face a nuclear-armed Iran. If we give them working weapons, but not the technology to make them, we still control proliferation better than if all these nations develop their own internal nuclear capabilities.

Yes, it is certainly a startling proposal. but offering it might give us the leverage with Iran (and Russia) that we currently lack.

The Iran dilemma

There has been a lot of saber-rattling recently from both Israel and the US on the one hand, and the Iranian leadership on the other hand. Israel and the US say that allowing Iran to acquire working nuclear weapons is unacceptable. Iran says it will not stop its nuclear work, though of course it still insists it is only for “peaceful” purposes, a claim which is at variance with the uranium enrichment facilities it has build and even occasionally shown off to Western observers.

We made the same claims about North Korea, but when push came to shove we never did anything effective about stopping the North Korean effort, and eventually they developed a working nuclear weapon. But the consequences of a North Korean nuclear weapon are much different from the consequences of Iran getting a nuclear capacity. For one thing, North Korea is highly pragmatic – the power structure is only interested in surviving, not in annihilating one of its neighbors.

The Iranian leadership, on the other hand, appears to be bent on an apocalyptic religious vision, which includes eliminating Israel, initiating a second holocaust (and by the way, eliminating the USA as well). Just last week Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, again called Israel a "cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut", a remark he has made more than once in the past. Whether this language is just for domestic consumption or not, it is worrying.

Beyond the threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran will almost certainly incite other countries in the Middle East to develop their own nuclear capability as quickly as possible. Remember that Shia Iran is thoroughly distrusted by all the Sunni nations around it. We already have a dangerous tinderbox with nuclear-armed Pakistan and India facing each other. A nuclear-armed Middle East, with all the sectarian hatreds in play there, would be a real nightmare.

Then there is the question of a possible Israeli attack on Iran to slow their nuclear program. Such an attack wouldn’t eliminate the threat, just slow its approach, and perhaps not by that much. But it would certainly cause a worldwide crisis, and quite possibly bring the US into the war whether we want to or not. If the Iranian response included disrupting oil traffic in the Gulf, and/or increasing attacks on US troops in Iraq, it is hard to see how we could avoid getting involved. And of course if Iran really did fire nuclear missiles at Israel, I don’t think the US public would be willing to see Jews once again subject to a holocaust without a very strong US response.

And then there is the rest of the world. Russia is unlikely to be of any help to us in this issue. It would suit their purposes quite well to have us tied up in yet another Middle Eastern quagmire. Europe is not culturally or politically inclined to be of much help, and in any case has little effective military force that it could contribute even if it wanted to. The UN would be as impotent as it usually is, especially with the veto power Russia and China have in the Security Council.

This is indeed a thorny problem. I don’t envy the administration. There are no good options – just bad ones and worse ones. But certainly it is not a time for appeasement. We have very little leverage in this situation, but what little we do have would evaporate immediately if we appear to waver in our support for Israel in this matter. If we are seen to waver even a little, our other Middle Eastern allies will read our weakness and it will reinforce their belief that the US cannot be trusted as an ally in the crunch. That will have serious and long-term consequences for us that will be very unpleasant.

Recommended: Truth, lies and Afghanistan

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis has written a piece in the Armed forces Journal: Truth, lies and Afghanistan. It is worth reading. He just finished touring Afghanistan for the past year. Fundamentally he reports that, despite the rosy and optimistic views of administration spokesmen, Afghanistan is a disaster and getting worse every day.

We already know that the Bush administration mislead us (or deliberately lied to us) about our supposed success in Afghanistan. Apparently the Obama administration has done the same. I'm not surprised, but I am disgusted.

Recommended: Government Cannot Create Sustainable Jobs

In the Opinion Europe section of the Feb 3, 2012 Wall Street Journal, Arnold King has written an interesting piece entitled Government Cannot Create Sustainable Jobs. King argues that the only kind of jobs that can really revitalize the economy in the long run are jobs that are sustained by market forces. Jobs that are created by government subsidies are, by definition, not sustainable by market forces (if they were, subsidies wouldn't be necessary). He argues that the Keynesian view that in times of depression the government should replace the demand that is missing in the marketplace is an erroneous approach, because the jobs aren't sustainable once the government subsidies are withdrawn, as they must be eventually. And the expensive government policy has done nothing to create more truly sustainable jobs in the economy.

This argument is especially relevant in view of the recent bankruptcies of several "green" initiatives subsidized by the Obama administration, and of the anemic recovery produced by the massive stimulus package. His views are worth thinking about.

Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure

Part three of Walter Russell Mead's series described in the previous post is now available: Beyond Blue Part Three: The Power of Infostructure

Recommended: Beyond Blue

Walter Russel Mead has a fascinating pair of postings on his American Interest blog. They are Beyond Blue Part One: The Crisis of the American Dream, and Beyond Blue Part Two: Recasting The Dream. They are well worth reading and pondering.

Mead argues that the current liberal social model is simply obsolete - the world has simply changed too much for it to be realistic any more (he explains exactly why this is the case in part one). Part two then begins to explore what a new liberal social model might look like if it were tailored to today's world. It is a fascination pair of articles.