Imagination, boldness, vision and fortitude wanted – How do you face a changing world fraught with more threats and impossible choices when you have less resources, or when resources are concentrated where national security responsibilities are not?
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Frailties and Contagion: A bug is creating strange phenomena with the editing process this week, but there is still a lot to read, even if it is not always on the front page. The focus for the week is, besides the East Asian rising tensions, on the Middle East and the Syrian conflict increasingly impacting other countries, not only in the fragile region but also in Europe… which is, somehow, no less fragile, if for different reasons.
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Global Experiment and Fog of Transition: Those two labels – the first borrowed from Paul Krugman’s now famous interview, and the second from Global Trends 2030, among others, itself adapted from von Clausewitz’s fog of war – seem to describe most aptly the current period, and the short (to medium?) term future.
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The Actors and the System: Powerlessness? If we were to estimate the power of the actors by their ability to stabilize the system, they would not fare very well, and this, in itself, is a signal that tensions will most probably continue to rise and escalate in intensity, as well as widen in scope. One of the interesting question would thus be: How long can this system withstand the pressure until it breaks?
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Some Light within Darkness – For a change, let us focus on the positive (within the multiple remaining and rising challenges): climate change and environmental factors emerge this week as being increasingly integrated within our understanding of the complex dynamics at work in conflicts and more broadly threats or dangers to national security. Is the painting depicted scarier? Certainly, but understanding is also a crucial step towards solving properly problems… hopefully.
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Look East: Indicators are turning red! The possibility of war – between China and Japan… and the US (security treaties can also have an escalating effect) and ? – is now very much on the agenda, despite all wishful thinking and previous disbelief. The dire financial situation of Japan, which everyone tries so hard to ignore, while US potential sequestration shockwave nears and Europe polarizes, are not the most stabilizing context and factors. We had a window of opportunity, at the beginning of February, it closed. Shall we see another opening up of “the funnel of choices” (Nye, 1993: 68-69)?
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Joseph Nye, Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History, (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
On the persistence, resilience and escalation of tensions… despite (past) appearance and hope.
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Towards a multiplication of increasingly fragile states? This is what could mean the report on the state of infrastructures in the U.S. (and probably other so called rich countries?). It is a crucial weak signal that could trump all others: imagine weak, increasingly fragile “rich countries” on the backdrop of all the other tensions and threats…
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No74 – 15 November 2012
Patterns, battles and conflicts, ongoing, escalating or to come, emerge as articles are read in clusters, as a system: e.g. US as top oil producer with Peak oil theorists disagreeing, the battle for the Arctic, Chinese Energy thinking and 6C increase in temperatures.
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No73 – 8 November 2012
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