Nye sluchaino chto the Yukos auction …
Barnett
¦"An All-but-Unknown Bidder Wins a Rich Russian Oil Stake: Auction of Seized Yukos Unit Raises Suspicions," by Erin E. Arvedlund and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A1.
¦"Mystery Russian Company Wins Bid on Yukos Unit: Offer of $9.37 Billion Seals Fate of Beleaguered Firm, But Many Questions Linger," by Gregory L. White and Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2004, p. A1.
Nye sluchaino chto is a wonderful old Russian phrase that means, "It is not by accident that . . ..
The Yukos move to seek bankruptcy protection in U.S. courts spooked Gazprom's German financial bankers, and so, it would seem, Gazprom's financial bid must have fallen apart prior to the auction. So surprise! A mystery buyer emerges that no one's ever heard of before! What does that phrase mean? It means, that if this obscure small company really had $10b in cash to buy up Yukos, the international business community would have heard of it by now.
My guess is that this company will turn out not to have the financing ready, meaning the auction will be repeated in several weeks time, and by then, my guess is that Gazprom will have it's package in order.
That's the minority view from the articles, as I glean them.
The majority view is that this company, Baikal Finans Group, is nothing more than a front for Gazprom or some other "state-friendly company" (or some combo thereof).
I like the minority view myself, because I like the idea that a U.S. court somehow forced this outcome, proving yet again that connectivity requires code and sometimes code can ruin the best-laid plans of mice and men.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 07:02 AM
In the long run, we'll all be energy independent
¦"Declaration of Energy Independence: We can end our reliance on foreign oil by 2035," op-ed by Robert McFarlane, Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2004, p. A15.
So America should shoot really hard to be energy independent by 2035!
Fine and dandy, say I, but you know what? That date is so far into the future that it's essentially meaningless to describe that goal as a practical strategy to run the world between now and then. Frankly, there's no way we can temporize the current security situation in the Middle East for another three decades, so either we solve it dramatically by then (making energy independence irrelevant) or we screw it up so badly well before then that if that is truly our goal, we'd need to crash-course well before 2035.
All this talk of getting off oil to solve our security issues is a huge and rather useless diversion from the tasks at hand, not to mention the debates at hand. The violence in the Middle East is all about globalization, not energy dependency per se. It's a reaction to the encroachment of modernity into traditional societies in the region, not a function of the regional governments' reliance on oil exports for revenue. The latter truly delays the movement by those regimes toward reform, but that delay is being overwhelmed by globalization's advance, which is clearly not a process that's going to wait around until 2035 for America to engineer a military pull-out on the basis of being energy independent.
The U.S. will have moved onto the hydrogen economy well before 2035, and it won't be because of some godawful government plan to make it so. It will happen because the technology makes sense and the markets figure out how to employ that technology while making a lot of profit in the process.
People who talk incessantly about energy independence as the answer to the challenges/sacrifices/demands of a global war on terrorism are living in denial. It is a cop out argument, not a strategy whatsoever.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 06:58 AM
4GW is what you end up with when you do SysAdmin badly
¦"In Iraq, Less Can Be More: We should focus on better training for fewer troops," op-ed by Peter Khalil, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A29.
¦"Local Heroes: A Vietnam strategy is working in Iraq," op-ed by Andrew Borene, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A29.
¦"Disquiet in Iceland That Its Peacekeepers Dress for War," by Sarah Lyall, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A4.
There is an idiotic argument in the Fourth Generation Warfare literature (descriptive of the intifada-like guerrilla war we now face in Iraq) that says the snafu-ed occupation proves that the Network-Centric Operations that won the war ultimately proved illusory. Nothing is further from the truth. The NCO-driven warfighting phase of the takedown would have set up a positive occupation, save for the fact that we didn't pursue that follow-on phase in anything close to a truly comprehensive, SysAdmin fashion. That we now end up with a 4GW-like insurgency situation does negate the takedown, it negates the poor follow-on effort that should have prevented that conflict's emergence.
Let me clue you in on this struggle: NCO is the language of the air guys, whereas 4GW is the lingo of the ground guys. The ground guys feared that Kosovo + Afghanistan + the Iraq takedown was making it look like we no longer needed a ground force, and so they argue against the utility and validity of NCO. Conversely, the air guys have used that experience to argue against 4GW, although few are making that case now except to say we should withdraw—in Powell Doctrine fashion—as soon as we run out of traditional targets to bomb.
The real answer, of course, is—in effect—to split the difference. Do NCO right and there's no rogue government we can't take down, but if we can't prevent the probable follow-on 4GW response, there's not much sense in toppling any regime. Plus, on some level, we need to fight transnational terrorism throughout the Gap in a 4GW fashion, although most of that will be done by Special Ops guys, not Marines and Army. So if we restrict ourselves to the regime-change argument, we can say the two functions are intimately linked: dominance in NCO means 4GW is all that's left for opponents to employ in their resistance to our state-by-state effort to shrink the Gap by targeting rogue regimes.
Is that a bad thing? Being so good in NCO that no one's really willing to fight us in that realm? Hardly. That just describes the dominance of our Leviathan force. But clearly, once we get into any occupation, even with the best of SysAdmin efforts, we need to maintain and field a small warfighting capacity that can come into the postconflict stabilization arena and kick ass as required.
We know how to do this: it's called fighting side-by-side with the locals and training them as we go along, building up their skills. This is not capital-intensive, but personnel-intensive. And it requires that sometimes our SysAdmin cops will have to act like soldiers, something that will be shocking for those coalition partners (like an Iceland) that believe such peacekeeping will only occur in truly peaceful areas.
Will this relegate the SysAdmin function and its embedded capacity for 4GW into some sort of "clean up" role, operating always in the wake of the Leviathan? Only in truly big cases, where the takedown of the regime is required. But by and large that SysAdmin function will be out there working the Gap on a daily basis, whereas the Leviathan spends the vast majority of its days back at base inside the Core.
In this way not only does our unparalleled capacity for NCO enable a new focus on 4GW, but a strong 4GW capacity enables the SysAdmin's successful functioning by making clear that we're just as tough in the second half as we are in the first half.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett |
