… (the Middle East version):
Why can’t America be more like China?
(a) Stay out
(b) If you have to interfere, help whoever’s losing (but not too much)
(c) Recognize there’s an intricate theological argument going on that we can’t hope to understand:
Marc Andreessen on the triangular dynamic tensions of tech innovation:
These technologies escalate the power of government, but they also escalate the power of business, and they also escalate the power of individuals. So everyone’s been upgraded. And it’s a recalibration of who can do what, and everybody can do new things, so everybody’s uneasy about it. Governments are very worried about what citizens are going to be able to do with these new technologies. Citizens are very worried about what governments are going to do, and everybody’s worried about what businesses are going to do. It’s this three-way dynamic that’s playing out. And so for any of these individual issues, it’s not just “What is one leg of this triangle going to be doing?” It’s, “What are all three of them going to be doing, and how will the tension resolve itself?”
Much of interest also on the NSA, net neutrality, and especially Bitcoin:
By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined. No one wants to think too much about what is happening in Africa.
The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the Neoreactionary Coalition, whose purchase is strengthened by the flight of 20 million Cathedral Loyalists to Canada and Europe (incidentally toppling both into terminal chaos). The Provisional Trichotomous Council, selected primarily by a process of military promotion and delegation from within the major Neoreactionary guerrilla groups, now confronts the task of establishing a restored political order.
Rough Triangles analysis from William Lind:
… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and Iran” — both Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.'” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a “conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”
How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its history — of which it will be producing a good deal — as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.
All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out. We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors (especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …
In other words America is gone, replaced by this tricycle of strife. And the paternal hand wheeling it down the road is Vladimir Putin’s. Andrew Sullivan thinks this is proof, if any more were needed, of Barack Obama’s surpassing genius. He writes that America’s ejection is not a bug but a feature; that “Obama, reflecting American public opinion, is perfectly happy to have Putin assume responsibility for the Middle East. Let Russia be drained, bankrupted and exhausted by managing that fractious and decreasingly important part of the world.” In Sullivan’s view Putin is hurting his fist against Obama’s jaw.
But Sullivan doesn’t quite understand that Russia is not going to “manage” the Middle East but raise it up against America. Totalitarians don’t do management. They do conquest. They do agitation. They do trouble. As for upkeep, Putin will be sending the bill to the White House. He will get Obama to pay for it. When Egypt starves expect the bill to come to Washington. After all, why use “food as a weapon?” Yet when the time comes to kiss the ring, Putin will receive the obeisance of the sheiks while Obama will be sent to the back of the bus, even if America is paying for the bus. That is nothing new. Perhaps Sullivan has never heard of Lenin’s bon mot “when we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.” Putin is probably familiar with the phrase: heck, he probably went back by Time Machine and ghostwrote the original line for Lenin.
I’m not at all sure how much of this I agree with, but it’s brilliant, and indisputably thought-provoking.
Whatever the moral philosophy that underpins this, it ends up in the right place:
Now in the large I’m for the bombing of foreigners — partly on principle and partly just personal satisfaction. … But sometimes there really is nothing at all in it for us and we’d all be better off if they brutally slug it out for a few years.
[Edited to eliminate the off-key quasi-qualmy part]
The sensitive version.
ADDED: RAND does rough triangles: “Divide and Rule focuses on exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts. This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations (IO), unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces. … the United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace. … U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the “Sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict” trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.”
Is it conventional wisdom yet?
ADDED: Peter Bergen at CNN: “Doing nothing will not be treated kindly by future historians writing in the same vein as Power.” (Every time you read that sentence you’ll get more out of it.)
It’s not exactly a formal pact between the United States and Al Qaeda, but no one honestly thinks it’s anything really different. Either it’s a rough triangles play, or it’s sheer insanity.
Time won’t tell, but it will hint, as the intervention proceeds. If it makes things worse, before guttering out into indecision, stalling resolution, then it might make sense. In any case, it’s big.
(Drew M. at AoS is a seriously hard-core rough triangles guy: “We should help whichever side is losing at any given moment but only to the extant that it enables them to fight on to take and inflict more casualties. There’s no scenario where one side winning helps us.”)
On learning that Hamas and Hizbollah are now fighting each other in Syria, Peter Ingemi writes:
This sets up the possibility that the greatest threats to Israel and the US will be clashing in Syria & Lebanon, in a long and bitter struggle and moreover as Iran doesn’t want to lose their clients and the Saudis and others want to bleed Iran this has the potential to become a mass killing ground for the most vile and despicable enemies the western world has faced.
And all of it happening without us, or Israel lifting a finger.
For a foe of radical Islam it’s practically a wet dream, we just have to sit back and let them slaughter each other and if one side starts to lose, we aid third parties to reenforce [Sic] them enough to keep the fight going until the cream of the jihadist crop finds themselves, shot, gassed or blown up.
And at this point where you contemplate the solution to so many problems that pesky Christian belief comes in. … That’s when you look at your glee at the death of your enemies and feel ashamed.
Nick B. Steves sent this along to keep the discussion moving forward:
[Click on the image to enlarge]