Zitat des Tages von Thomas P.M. Barnett:
You can't drag people from understanding to action. A customer isn't actually at the last mile if you're the one dragging her to the finish line.
Homeland defense doesn't generate any force requirements beyond having enough National Guard to save lives in natural disasters and to baby-sit nuclear power plants on Code Red days.
To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.
An Obama administration truly looking to break with the molds of the past would stop treating Africa as an obligation and start treating it as globalization's next great opportunity, understanding that Chinese - along with Indians and Arab sovereign wealth funds - are natural partners in this process.
Crafty politician that he is, Obama was smart enough to set low enough standards for his administration to claim 'victory' by the summer of 2011 or so.
Is there anything about cyberspace that particularly screams Air Force? Not really. If cyber warfare is going to be as all-encompassing as it's made out to be by its vigorous proponents, then it will disseminate throughout the services even more than the drone phenomenon has.
Despite living in this post-9/11 age of transnational terrorism, the risk of death during air travel has plummeted to the point where we now measure it in the 'per billions' of passengers.
We need to remind ourselves that our ultimate goal is not to reduce greenhouse gases or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment. We all want to leave the planet in decent shape for our kids. Radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not necessarily the best way to achieve that.
The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA - thousands standing around.
Every U.S. president enters office promising stronger ties with our southern neighbors, only to thereupon largely ignore them.
An economically confident America has - since becoming a world power at the start of the 20th century - tended toward global engagement. It is during times of economic stress (1930s, 1970s) that America has become more withdrawn.
Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before.
There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power?
Barack Obama inherited a bankrupt economy, a bankrupt government, and a bankrupt foreign policy.
Wikistrat is my ninth start-up, so I've been through this process a few times. You have to go with what works. The power of example is compelling, so model the ideas that you want someone to understand.
Having grown up on 'Star Trek,' I've had one great dream since childhood, and that is to see my life end somewhere other than here on Earth.
I don't think, post 9/11, we're going to wait for real obvious things like Country A attacking Country B - because Country A doesn't attack Country B any more.
Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong.
Washington has a tendency to hold other powers to standards that it routinely flaunts - plain and simple.
