Interesting exchange with Kerry.
Bombay: Out with the old, in with the new
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett
¦"Bombay Moves to Push Out the Poor: Slums Are Razed as Plans Envisage Reinvented City," by Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post, 8 May 2005, p. A20.
If that's so true, shouldn't the Post call Bombay by its new name? Mumbai? I mean, it calls Beijing "Beijing" and not "Peking." So why use the old name on Mumbai?
Anyway, there is a long passage in BFA where I trace the journey from Gap to Core, and one of the things I cite is this sort of whole-sale gentrification. I have a decent citation on this already in the manuscript, but not one as good as this one. I figured one would come along eventually, and here it is.
This sort of bulldozing of shantytowns is both good and bad: good because it eliminates a lot of substandard housing and all the filth and disease that tends to go with it, but also bad of course because the very poor, who built these places, are forced into even tougher situations--or at least pushed into starting all over again.
But what is Mumbai to do? It's become a magnet for rural poor looking for a better life, and now roughly 8 of its 16 million citizens live in these shantytowns. Is Mumbai supposed to become one giant shantytown and let its infrastructure collapse?
But where to fit the poor?
All this urban renewal is a good thing, but it forces the government either into doing even more good and ambitious things, or face a political uprising from the poor who are displaced. Still, the change beats the status quo of massive widespread underdevelopment.
My favorite line in the piece is from a government official who says Mumbai needs big-time urban renewal to become a world-class city--"like Shanghai and Cleveland did."
Whoa buddy! Easy on Cleveland!
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 05:49 PM Evoked? Provoked? Ask Tom
May 11, 2005
The man who would be president
Dateline: SWA flight from BWI to PVD, 11 May 2005
Went to bed last night feeling fairly unsettled about the move to Indy. My wife's floating of the idea of building a house puts this venture in a whole new, frightening realm. Still, it's worth considering.
Despite the 0045 bedtime, I am up and at it at 0600, and I attribute the nervous energy to thinking/dreaming/obsessing about the housing choice.
I have to get out early because I have an 0745 breakfast in DC with a Catholic Monsignor who wants to talk about PNM. He a serious conservative of the Opus Dei variety, but we have a great talk over a reasonably good breakfast, and he gives me a book to consider as I move ahead on the vision. He's pleased that I say BFA will have a lot more religious and moral content and, quite frankly, so am I. The response from clergy of all faiths has been a pleasant surprise from the first book, so I naturally felt some of that thinking had to be captured in the second.
And no, for the fans of Dan Brown, I will confess that I was not given any orders to assassinate anyone.
I metro back to Union and then make the short walk to the Russell Senate office building, snapping a nice sunny photo of the Capital dome on my way up the steps. Once in, I'm up two floors and down one very long corridor to John Kerry's main office at Room 304. Jim Ludes, one of his top foreign policy gurus, leads me into his conference room where they've set up a wide-screen TV to take the brief from my Mac. I plug in and everything's good.
Having arrived only about 5 minutes before planned show time, the other staffers soon file in (a total of a half-dozen or so). "The Senator" (staffers love to identify their bosses with definite articles, as in, "The Member") is a few minutes late, delayed by traffic.
It's a believable excuse, having lived here for most of the 1990s and reading recently that DC is now #3 in annual man-years lost to traffic congestion (behind #1 LA and #2 San Francisco). So I chat up the staffers, who are all charming enough and ask interesting questions. Kerry's got this large collection of framed American political cartoons from the late 19th century and early 20th century. They run up the tall walls of his conference room, which has some fantastic antique light fixtures (Russell is cool and retro ornate in that way).
The man slips in unpretentiously and I stand up to shake his hand. Kerry's grateful for my stopping by and says so several times. It's standard patter for someone on the Hill, but both he and his staff sound all the usual grace notes unusually gracefully.
So I launch in. I was warned he likes to ask questions and he does throughout. I give him the current small brief (couple of slides on Core-Gap, the war-within-the-context-of-everything-else sequence, and the Leviathan-SysAdmin presentation). Not surprisingly, most of his questions presage the A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt states slide. After all, this is the presidential candidate who famously uttered the phrase "global test," a system to which my vision aspires even as I choose to highlight the process rather than the inclusiveness (being a great power elitist, myself).
What was cool about the exchange was not that Kerry buys this argument in concept, but all the interesting questions he asked about how you make it happen across the Core as a whole, especially when you extend the argument to its logical end points within the U.S. government, as I do in BFA.
The guy does get engaged deeply, and he displays an awfully sharp mind, which is no surprise to anyone who watched him across the campaign. Even though we didn't start until 0945 and I was told he had a hard target at 1030, he waved off his minder at the door and hung til the end of the presentation at 1100, asking a lot of practical questions on the far side about where and with whom these issues find real traction right now.
He's also better looking live than on TV, which is rare. Usually the other way arouind.
I can imagine he's a pretty good guy to work for, as hellish as working on the Hill is for staffers (low pay, long hours).
Before he leaves the conference room, Kerry asks how long I'll remain in RI, so some chance we meet again up his way in Mass before we ship out . . . if we ship out.
Vonne today raised the possibility of renting for another year in RI and continuing to look in Indy. But I'm against that. No reconn accomplished in that approach. If I'm renting, then I want to be learning the lay of the land in the process.
My guess is that we're both surfing real estate sites tonight. Oh, and I have to look over the "first pages" of the Esquire feature I wrote. Mark's assistant Tyler faxed them to my house today. I'll also be a featured contributor. The mag will use one of my PopTech shots.
Here's the daily catch:
¦ Brazil plays matchmaker in its own New Map Game
¦ China is absolutely right on North Korea: we've done nothing for them lately
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 08:35 PM Evoked? Provoked? Ask Tom
Brazil plays matchmaker in its own New Map Game
¦"Little Common Ground at Arab-South American Summit Talks," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 11 May 2005, p. A3.
Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is looking to "design a new international economic and commercial geography."
Hmm. Like a new map or something!
So he invites Middle East states to Brasilia for a joint regional summit. But while most of the Latin American leaders show up (12 in all), only 7 of the 22 Arab countries' leaders make the trip, and most who do just want to do the usual anti-American and anti-Israeli shtick, whereas the Latin American leaders naturally want to focus on economics and trade.
Still, it shows Lula's global ambition, which fits well with Brazil's rising status as a New Core pillar. I think picking Brazil as a "team nation" in The New Map Game was a very good decision.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 08:33 PM Evoked? Provoked? Ask Tom
China is absolutely right on North Korea: we've done nothing for them lately
¦"China Rules Out Using Sanctions On North Korea: Undercuts U.S. Strategy; Intelligence Appears to Be Inconclusive on Signs of Nuclear Test Plans," by Joseph Kahn and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 11 May 2005, p. A1.
Interesting Times story on China's ambivalence over Washington's push to have them put pressure on Pyongyang by denying them much need food aid and energy shipments.
China continues to basically say no, although astute and long-time observers argue that Beijing is likely talking a much hard line—off line—with Kim himself. But it does mean that any U.S. effort in the UN Security Council is likely to fail, despite Bush's personal efforts with Chinese president Hu Jintao over the phone.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, one of my dinner companions last night and chief American negotiator with Kim, is cited in the piece as having recently (late April) repeated "American arguments that China should squeeze North Korea," but China now says explicitly that linking the nukes question with the aid question is a bad idea. Does that statement embolden North Korea into thinking they can light off a nuke in a test and not suffer any consequences? We can only hope that Kim is that stupid, because that might push the Chinese over the edge faster than anything the Bush administration might be willing to offer in the short run.
The stand-off here is basically between a Beijing that wants a stable, non-collapsed regime in Pyongyang and a U.S. that values a Kim without nukes far more. So we're stuck for now—unless Kim lights one up. That could easily be the tie-breaker.
Would such a cut-off in aid by China make a difference? Already this year Chinese food aid to North Korea is close to being equal to all it gave across 2004, so yeah, it would probably be a severe stress on the regime. But after all, we're talking a dictator who let 2 million-plus of his own people die in a famine in the late 1990s because he refused to let in aid, so there's only so much to be done that route.
In my mind, China really fears the collapsed-regime-leading-to-a-flood-of-impoverished-refugees-streaming-across-the-border scenario—or basically the downside potential of the second half. This is also the opinion cited from an unnamed senior Bush official.
I mean, you look at Iraq and ask China if they want some of that right on their border right now. To me, that's the poor performance of our embryonic SysAdmin force coming back to haunt us in Asia, leading to our Leviathan being deterred by our inability to convince key players in the region that military solutions are feasible.
So, to the question, "Does it really matter if our occupation of Iraq went badly?" I will answer, "Yes, it does matter." Every time the U.S. brings out the Leviathan force it creates a huge demonstration effect, but likewise every time the U.S. doesn't operate the SysAdmin force well it creates a huge demonstration effect. The former deters would-be aggressors around the world, but the latter self-deters.
It all matters because it's all connected.
But the bigger reality is that we haven't done anything much for China that pushes them to think they'll be rewarded for helping us on North Korea. Until Beijing sees friendship with us being worth more—a whole lot more—than patronage of Pyongyang, we're stuck with Kim.
The good news is, we have the most power to change that stalemate, if we think long term. |
