Role of Force

To relieve some stress and to show how complex the world can be, I present to you my visual map of the evolving security concepts in the world today.



This was created by VUE (Visual Understanding Environment by Tufts University.

Noam Chomsky's take on the election and state of democracy in the U.S.

I must say that I have utmost respect for Prof Noam Chomsky and his insightful opinions. More importantly, I identify with a good number of things which he says.

This is article that I am about to share. He mentions something very similar to what I have mentioned previously. That is about how the democratic election is a great advertising campaign and that we don't really know what the candidates stand for. That creates a weakness of delivering the people the policies that they want.

Anyhow, I won't spoil the fun and I need to write a real paper. Enjoy.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/24/noam_chomsky_what_next_the_elections

I seem to be a Conservative!

After an interesting email sharing from a peer at school I am beginning to find myself classified as a conservative. I've always thought of myself as a merely a pragmatist, believing that government need to govern with some good common sense, regulate when there are issues that free market economies cannot do, let it rest when free market is the best. Educate people if you need, let it rest when people exercise some personal preference and differentiate law from morality (personal only because universal morality is shifting sands).

This author the the below article however tucks all of it nicely into the conservatism tag, of which I'm sure it is what he calls himself. It's unveil satire at its best. Read well and enjoy.

We Blew It

A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.

by P.J. O'Rourke

11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the "rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

"I've got six sons," the farmer says.

"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.

"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin'??.??.??.??"

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't even deliver on Eleanor's promises.

It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the "French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens," continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285 billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration??.??.??.??)

Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes." Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out."

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned. They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.'?" Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions--bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony in there somewhere."

Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The American Idol

Congratulations to Senator Barack Obama!

He has ran an awesome and inspiring campaign that has not only enraptured America but truly the world. For me, as a thinking and pragmatic student of international relations and political sciences, popping out the bubbly now is certainly way to early.

It has been wonderful the be inspired by the message of hope and change but now is where the rubber meets the road. The world is certainly watching what the most significant and popular U.S. president in recent times is going to do next. How is he going to embark on creating that change he promised?

The weight is enormous and already we have letters from former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (though this was not target at Obama specifically) and even from the Russian activist and chessmaster Gary Kasparov.

For me, my call is not too different. From my part of the world, it is our great desire to continue to see a strong and influential America. It's presence is the anchor of stability of the region even though people might not realise it. This strength and security provided is like oxygen and you know it's important only when you lose it.

To counter the American decline, the immediate task is to place the U.S. economy on recovery and to return to the roots of its original success. This is certainly not achieved by become a socialist and a welfare state because that will encourage government dependency and create a negative spending spiral. America needs to reinvent the American Dream and push its people to the leading edge of innovation by bold reforms in education to allow meritocracy and equal opportunity and ensuring standards. Given people fish instead of teaching them how to fish would turn "New England" to the problems of England itself.

The industries of the U.S. should continue to push ahead with more R&D, abandon low productivity, low tech and failing assembly line industries that can be easily copied and done at even lower cost by China, Vietnam and other emerging economies. Funds used for protectionism should be diverted instead for focused job retraining and to move American people to the higher level jobs. Promote enterprise and create a vibrant and entrepreneurial business environment with lower taxes, aids to SMEs and funds for research. It must also address what is known as the reverse brain or "Flight Capital" as described by David Heenan.

In international affairs, it must co-opt China, Russia and India to share the weight of the world. It must heal the divide between the West and the Islamic World and continue to encourage them to embark on the march to modernity. In Iraq and in Afghanistan, it must understand the need for these countries to manage and learn, despite failures. It must then use strategic and limited successes as useful points of exits. It must however, not fail to demonstrate resolve in dealing with the inhumane acts of terrorism.

The list of task is not exhaustive and the enormity of the task is unmeasurable. This requires a Herculean effort of good governance beyond a mere popularity contest. The real test of the Presidency has just begun.

My Op-Ed on China

The phenomenal economic growth in China for the past few decades has awed the world. Its consistency and resilience has made many analysts to forecast that its current growth trajectory is expected to continue. Proper management of this new found economic strength via good governance will enable it to perpetuate itself and increase economic, military and inevitably political power.

Although a detailed study of China’s growth in the economic, social, environmental and political dimensions reveal that there are potential speed bumps, a casual analysis would perceptively conclude that China is indeed rising by relative comparisons over time and is attempting to fulfill its stated objective of becoming a da guo (大国 – great power). Using a traditional realist lens, this rapid change of power dynamics would lead to a change in the balance of power not only for the region but between China, a rising power and the United States, the de facto superpower of the world today. This potential instability from China’s rise is therefore a motivation for us to examine these interactions closely so that we may understand potential areas of friction and perhaps generate appropriate recommendations for policy makers to avert a violent conflict.

Understanding China

China has a deep desire to be a daguo since the time of Sun Yat-sen, and this desire has been spurred by the many years of humiliation that they suffer from the foreign powers that took advantage of the weak Qing dynasty in late 1800s. While the rest of the world marched toward modernity from World War II, the Chinese were caught in a civil war between the Nationalist and the Communist. Although the eventual Communist victory brought stability to the nation, it was trapped in the ideological contest during the Cold War and remained isolated from the world. It was only during Deng Xiaoping’s time, that China was able to reverse its policies and put China on track for economic expansion and growth.

With economic growth, comes the associated cost of interdependence and the need to co-operate and build trust. The Chinese leadership understands this security dilemma and has been careful not to derail their valued economic growth through any perceived aggressive actions. Deng Xiaoping’s warning of bu yao dang tou (不要当头 - do not seek leadership) exhorts self-restraint and humility while the more recent and proactive policies of fuzeren de daguo (负责任的大国 – responsible great power) advocated by Jiang Zemin demonstrates China’s understanding of its interdependent relationship with the rest of the world. These are important markers of their intent based on explicit principles that we know China has a propensity to rigidly adhere to.

China’s interactions with Asia

Regardless of the historical perspective of the Middle Kingdom or the articulated grand strategy by the Chinese leadership today, they share a commonality. That is the desire to be a great nation that is built on a strong economic base, so that it may derive respect and acknowledgment from its periphery. China’s policy of non-intervention in sovereignty of states and her purely economic engagements for mutual benefits, has won it many friends in Asia and beyond, but at times drawn flak from United States and other Western powers for its mercantilist approach that often turns a blind eye to issues of human rights and potential security threats.

In Asia, it has engaged in many regional arrangements which includes ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum), ACFTA (ASEAN China-Free Trade Area), TAC (Treaty of Amity and Co-operation in Southeast Asia), ASEAN + 3 (ASEAN + China, Japan and South Korea), SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Engagement) and other bilateral agreements. These are significant confidence building measures that builds on the premise of their increasing mutual economic interdependence that will potentially extend to forge a regional security arrangement that will add to the stability of the region. China has also renounced the use of force on the issue of the Spratlys in the TAC, playing a backseat role as a demonstration of goodwill to Southeast Asian countries. The net effect of Chinese actions is the shared belief of the region to integrate China to the international community and to accommodate China’s rise, while at the same time tapping on China as an engine for their economic growth.

The Deal Breaker

The lynchpin of the stability in Asia is undeniably the tumultuous relationship between China and Taiwan. This is the single issue that China will neither relent nor compromise on and is willing to stake its relationship with other nations on. We need to recognize that any compromise on this issue will negate China’s position as a da guo, and reopen old wounds of humiliation that it is trying to heal. China will therefore continue to engage a multi-prong strategy of exerting its soft power to gain legitimacy of her claim over Taiwan and at the concurrently use her economic weight to bend Taiwan’s will to seek independence. As a last resort, the use of force will serve as deterrence and physical coercion that will be applied should Taiwan decidedly declares independence.

The US – China Equation

The issues of Taiwan will be the key determinant of Sino-American relations in the years to come. The contest between U.S. ideology and Chinese pride will continue to persist unless one party is willing to back down to de-escalate the situation and break the stalemate. This issue had persisted in times when China was weak and is even more unlikely to change now that it has grown in strength. Because China’s rise is now evident, the only recourse is for U.S. to strategically accommodate China’s key interest and to engage her need in meeting the world’s expectation of her to be a responsible power. It would be unlikely that both nations would desire to escalate the situation to the point of war unless there is a failure of institutions and leadership on both sides that believes some benefit can be derived from a violent conflict. U.S. suspicion of China’s rise and their stalemate involving Taiwan will invariably lead to more persistent and intense conflicts. Past conflicts of the Taiwan Straits incident in 1995-96, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the U.S. spy plane incidents and the recent Chinese reaction to US sale of weapons to Taiwan are examples of what we can expect over the next decade. These conflicts will unlikely lead to violent conflict and will more likely result in the maintenance of a fragile status quo.

Obama as Beacon on the Hill

May be some people in their preferrential reading has concluded by my previous post on the US Presidential Elections that I am a McCain supporter. I am not.

I think I would like to correct that view as I have earlier mentioned that I was bipartisan in this whole affair and simply looking at the facts of this election.

In fact, I like the majority of the world, have a vested interest to see Obama elected. Here is a good Op-Ed piece by Nicholas D. Kristof of the The NY Times. The specific article I am referring to is http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/opinion/23kristof.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

In concurrence with a previous editorial written by Kishore Mahbubani, Obama is a picture of the future of the U.S. and the healing of the great divide between the East and the West and also Islam and the West. His presidency may well help the United States reverse course in its declining soft power. This is the representation of the sheer potential of change that he is able to bring and I certainly hope he will be able to do it.

I however stand by what I have said in my previous post. As the man who can possibly bridge the divide between the West and Rest and repair US tarnishing image, he cannot become an isolationist nor allow the US to become a paper tiger. The world will inevitably become a more unstable and dangerous place.

Of course my personal preference would be for China to take an increasingly large role in world leadership but that is a far away dream if I understand Chinese mentality and psyche well enough. Not only that, Chinese leadership has already expressed a clear doctrine to avoid being the leader but merely being the cheerleader or supporting cast. Hence, all our hopes are still pinned firmly on the United States of America.

Information Overload

What a wild and whacky two weeks.

I've never be inudated with so much information and so much perspective. I sought to understand. In good naval tradition, I needed to find anchor and get back to first principles. What I found was back on my pet peeve topic of good governance. Righteous, morally courageous leaders who would do the right thing.

It's not about democracy. It's not about free-markets only or government intervention or the lack of it. It's all down to looking at the basic axioms of the problem. In this case it was the root of human nature. That there would be greed that would motivate creativeness and would defeat the most brilliant of legislature. As the good book by Confucius writes in the Analects.

The Master said, “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.
“If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.”

Anyhow, this was also the week of debate for McCain and Obama on Foreign Policy. Thanks to the superior peer quality, I was directed to this wonderful exchange and debate of their foreign policy advisors hosted by the NBR (National Bureau of Asian Research)

or link here. http://www.nbr.org/asiapolicydebate/apdebate.html

It was also in this speech that a McCain advisor mentions a Washington Post of article by Singapore's founding father, Lee Kwan Yew on the cost of withdrawal from Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702429.html

I then found a whole slew of recent articles on the current affairs which he has made comments on which continues to illustrate my shared belief of good governance.

On China and bouquets for China:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-09/25/content_10107642.htm

On the Financial Crisis:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_282299.html

A related piece by Inquirer.net, quoting my other role model Kishore Mahbubani:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20080924-162482/End-of-an-era

On the accepting the Rise of China and India:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_281940.html

On why I like my brand of customised governance for my own home:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_281940.html

This really ties in with my Conflict Resolution Theory classes which featured good reading by Mohammed Ayoob (State Making, State Breaking and State Failure) and Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Synder (Why Emerging Democracies go to war) from "Leashing the Dogs of War" - Conflict Management in a Divided World.

I end of with a quote again from the Analects.

The Master said, “To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons.”

A Role Model - Kishore Mahbubani

Hello Fletcherites and readers of this blog,

Being a 2nd generation citizen of Singapore and having enjoyed the fruits of good governance, I certain that it is of no surprise that I am a great admirer of our founding father, Mentor Minister Lee Kuan Yew. I dare say that the success and the strong foundations of this tiny island nation were the life work of this great man.

Today however, I would like to introduce another role model for me. He is none other than Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. I vaguely remember my first introduction to this great thinker during a special forum held in my high school and he was the Permanent Secretary (Policy) at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs then. I was raptured by his clarity of thought and his ability to communicate clearly on issues of foreign policy and governance. For the moment on, I have always found myself drawn to his writings whenever I encounter them.

He has written a new of book on the emergence of the East. Ironically, his first book has a title that says, "Can Asian's think?". I have also found his commentaries on US Foreign Policy particularly insightful. On some quarters, his articulate and frank comments has not only drawn controversy and the ire of some Western journalists and commentaries who rejects his pro-Asian ideas.

I think the last article I read was one which he commented on the 3 presidential candidates of John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barrack Obama. I think it was expressed that he was most in favour of an Obama presidency.

More interestingly, I found that he is no stranger to Tufts University. He was also given the 2003–2004 Dr Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award by the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) at Tufts University.

I guess if there anyone is willing to read his works with an open mind, it would yield much value in my opinion.

Anyhow, here are some cool Youtube Videos of him at the Carnegie Council.





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