Inside the Gap, getting the conversation started is half the battle
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:10 PM
¦"Muslim Scholars Increasingly Debate Unholy War," by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, 10 December 2005, p. A1.
¦"Zimbabwe to Outlaw Groups That Promote Human Rights," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 10 December 2005, p. A5.
Give credit where it is due: moderate Muslim intellectuals in the Middle East are pushing for a reappraisal of the Koran's meaning with regard to violence perpetrated in the name of Allah against "infidels," etc. None too surprisingly, we're not talking clerics, but hard scientists (often the engineer who's looking for a more logical reading).
Is the Big Bang working then? You bet.
The debate, which can be heard in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, is driven primarily by carnage in Iraq. The hellish stream of images of American soldiers attacking mosques and other targets are juxtaposed with those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading civilian victims on his home videos as a Koran verse including the line "Smite at their necks" scrolls underneath.
The key thing, in my mind, to making sure the Big Bang has what should be its ultimate impact, is keeping the fight in the backyard of those who need to feel its impact most:
In November, 26 prominent Saudi clerics signed a petition supporting the "defensive jihad" in Iraq. Although their statement ruled out attacking relief workers or other uninvolved parties, it was interpreted as a signal for Saudis to volunteer. Osama bin Laden and his followers emerged from a similar call 25 years ago to fight in Afghanistan, a fight that they subsequently spread around the globe.
Except now it's coming home to roost, as it should.
Getting this debate started within Islam is half the battle, because until that reappraisal happens within Islam, no amount of language from outside designed to shame involved people is going to have any real impact. Again, I don't believe in any "war of ideas" because I don't believe it makes any sense to cast this as a "clash of civilizations." This is a civil war fostered within Islam by globalization's creeping embrace. U.S. policies are certainly an irritant, but they are also largely a dodge for both the radicals and the intransigent repressive elites they hope to dislodge. Both sides cite our policies as the real reason for either their violence or their repression, and the real answer is, U.S. policies are ultimately meaningless, because changing them would essentially change nothing about what's truly wrong with the region, which is that these societies basically suck at globalization thanks to repressive social orders that keep women off-line from economic and political life and create self-limiting tensions between economic progress and definitions of religious piety.
Islam is the problem, but it's also the answer, so getting this debate moving is absolutely important, even if we as outsiders really have nothing to offer to it.
Anyway, it sure beats what's going on now with Zimbabwe, where Mugabe's cruel and violent regime is now banning any groups, domestic or foreign, that push human rights on any level. This is pure disconnecting strategy, because a quarter of Zimbabweans live abroad, so the best way to curtail their influence is to kill off or ban any organizations through which their money might find supportive outlets for pushing positive change.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:09 PM
Dollar days won't last forever
¦"Dollar's Dominance Erodes: Greenback Weakens, but Has Room to Fall; Primacy Not in Danger," by Michael R. Sesit, G. Thomas Sims and Andrew Morse, Wall Street Journal, 10 December 2005, p. C14.
The dollar is still big in the global economy, but that dominance is slipping.
Whenever the EU and the US are compared, experts far too often cite population (EU is bigger) and GDP (US is bigger by about 30%), but better measures come in things like stock market capitalization ($14T for US and only $5T for EU). Of all the currency transactions in the world today, almost 90% of them involve the dollar, while less than 40% involve the Euro being exchanged. Official holdings of foreign currencies overwhelming favor the dollar at almost 65%, while the euro has grown to just under one-fifth of all holdings.
And yet the Russian central bank is considering reducing its dollar share, and OPEC has reduced its dollar-denominated accounts, and China is buying far less Treasurys this year compared to last. Of course, much of that shifting is in response to the falling value of the dollar, so the system as a whole is correcting for America's spendthrift ways by raising the cost of our imports and decreasing the price of our exports. But with the dollar held by so many all over the world, that decline in dollar value better be both gradual and seen as a temporary shift, because each time it happens, the euro seems to get a bit bigger on global markets, signaling the rise of an inevitable financial near-peer in Europe to go along with the manufacturing near-peer in China and the R&D near-peer in Japan. Eventually, all those economic near-peers will alter political relationships the world over, and those altered political ties will impact America's security relationships with the world, meaning the transactions implied by our exporting of security will become far more transparent, and thus will be far more scrutinized, debated, and challenged—far more so that they are even today.
This is why America's retreat to "homeland defense" sends all the wrong signals at this point in history. It says we're scared, that we're in it for ourselves, and that we less and less equate international stability with American security.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 09:09 PM
Japan-Korea: they said it would always last
¦"Korean romantic hero holds Japan in thrall: Frenzy over heartthrob symbolizes changing relations between peoples," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 10 December 2005, p. 13A.
It is very fashionable inside U.S. defense communities to go on and on about how the Koreans hate the Japanese, who hate the Chinese, who are naturally aggressive and expansionistic toward everyone. There is no real evidence for any of this outside the realm of military actors on all sides who often going out of their way to declare such "realities" and engage in provocative statements and actions vis-à-vis one another.
Oh sure, there's the occasional soccer match where the Chinese jeer the Japanese like crazy, although it never reaches the violent crescendos of a good Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons NBA game!
In reality, Japan is becoming the center of coolness and style not just in the U.S., but throughout the world (to include Asia), whereas to be Chinese nowadays is becoming more than a little hip in many locations in Asia, simply because China is a very happening place.
But there's also the sheer embracing within Asia of anything that seems both cool and modern but isn't American, which explains Japan's recent obsession with all things Korean (although God knows, the Japanese are the most fickle of fad followers, so who knows which culture they'll become obsessed with next).
My point is this: way too many in my community speak of cultural animosities in Asia as though they are as immutable (and—of course—they're always "rising") as similar "experts" long ago declared them to be throughout a war-torn Europe that could never hope to unite whatsoever after two hugely bloody and perverse "civil wars" known as WWI and WWII.
The reality is far more sanguine than the vast majority of our national insecurity experts can perceive.
I know, I know, as globalization brings these cultures ever more in contact with one another, there's plenty of friction, as such familiarity immediately breeds no small measure of contempt, and when it goes online, it tends to go quite overboard (like most behavior online—the world over). But to paint Asia as some hotbed of nationalistic rivalries with governments hell-bent on the inevitability of armed conflict over a "host of geographic flash points" is just nonsense. Yes, Kim should go and Korea reunited, and yes, Taiwan may be stupid enough to force something with the mainland, but the region is a collection of war-erupting tipping points waiting to happen. In reality, the big focus is economic development and trade adjustments in response to the amazing and dynamic rise of both China and India.
In my mind, the pining for war in Asia that seems to infect so much Pentagon strategic thinking is a symptom of the general unease the military feels vis-à-vis the global war on terrorism. In general, the Defense Department misses good old-fashioned third-generation warfare between states, instead of this complex, messy, and morally ambiguous fourth-generation warfare against truly networked opponents.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett |
