Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

US Foreign Policy Adaptations

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One David Kilcullen, former senior counterinsurgency adviser to General Petraeus in Iraq, talks about the relationship between the war on terror and smaller guerrilla wars being fought around the world.  He also discusses President Obama's plans for Afghanistan.  Mr. Kilcullen is interviewed by the Washington Post's David Ignatius at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security.   David Kilcullen, former Australian infantry officer, is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a partner at the Crumpton Group, a Washington, D.C.-based strategic advisory firm. Prior to joining CNAS, he served as Special Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. For more, visit cnas.org and search his name.

• Clinton Foreign Affairs Day Town Hall Meeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conducted a Foreign Affairs Day town hall to discuss foreign policy issues at the State Department.
• Obama Meets the CIA President Obama met with CIA personnel and delivered a public message to the workforce about the importance of CIA's mission to our national security.
• Pres. Obama Remarks on Lincoln Painting President Obama delivered remarks at the dedication of Abraham Lincoln Hall at the National Defense University

National Security Adviser Tries Quieter Approach On a foreign policy team of supersize egos, Gen. James L. Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, is flying below the radar. Compared with his immediate predecessors, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, General Jones is rarely seen at the president’s side. Neither does he serve as a gateway to the president, in the way that Samuel R. Berger was viewed because of his close friendship with President Bill Clinton. By his own account, General Jones favors more of a “bottom-up approach,” one very different from what has usually been practiced from the national security adviser’s corner office in the West Wing. During a National Security Council meeting in March on Mr. Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, General Jones, although seated next to the president, seldom voiced his own opinions, according to officials in the room. Instead, he preferred to go around the table collecting the views of others. But Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that General Jones was “a Marine, and he believes in team-building,” an approach that Mr. Holbrooke said had produced “a sophisticated, multilayer decision structure at the N.S.C. that did not exist before.” It has been General Jones, Mr. Holbrooke said, who has served as an important filter between the president and the military, particularly in advising Mr. Obama during the debate over when military requests for more troops were warranted for Afghanistan.

The Mellow Doctrine Amazing what happens when you cast aside the testosterone. I know bristling Dick Cheney believes America’s enemies now perceive “a weak president,” as do sundry Republican senators, but the truth is that foes of the United States have been disarmed by Barack Obama’s no-drama diplomacy. Call it the mellow doctrine. Neither idealistic nor classic realpolitik, it involves finding strength through unconventional means: acknowledgment of the limits of American power; frankness about U.S. failings; careful listening; fear reduction; adroit deployment of the wide appeal of brand Barack Hussein Obama; and jujitsu engagement. Already the mellow doctrine has brought some remarkable shifts, even if more time is needed to see its results. The Castro brothers in Cuba are squabbling over the meaning of Obama’s overtures. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez has gone gooey-eyed over the Yanqui president. Turkey relented on a major NATO dispute, persuaded of the importance of Obama’s conciliatory message to Muslims. From Damascus to Tehran, new debate rages over possible rapprochement with Washington. In Israel, I understand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to drag his Likud party kicking and screaming to acceptance of the idea of a two-state solution because he knows the cost of an early confrontation with Obama. Not bad for 105 days. The fact is the United States spent most of the eight years before last January making things easy for its enemies. It was in the ammunition-supply business. Deprived of an easy enemy, several countries are trying to calibrate how to become America’s friend, or at least normalize relations. They are uneasy about being left in the cold. On a recent visit to Damascus, Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, was intrigued to find Walid Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, asking him with concern whether there was “some sort of understanding” between the United States and Iran. There isn’t yet, but Syria, like many Arab states, is already worried about losing out to any American-Iranian détente. Conversely, Iran worries that it might lose its Syrian ally (and conduit to Hezbollah and Hamas) as a result of Obama’s Middle East peace effort. The fact is Syria’s interests in Iraq after a U.S. withdrawal will diverge from Iran’s: Syria’s priority is an Iraq in the Arab sphere.

• Addressing U.S., Hamas Says It Grounded Rockets

Country Response Stories

Japan Seeks to Fashion a New Economy For Japan, Nippon Chemi-Con's move realizes an inevitable shift: Its cherished tradition of manufacturing may finally move away from its high-cost market to lower-cost neighbors, leaving hundreds of thousands of Japanese workers jobless as the country struggles to reinvent its economy. In the 1990s, as China took on more manufacturing work once done in Japan, many Japanese feared their industries would be "hollowed out," with executive offices remaining at home while jobs moved abroad. But the past six years sparked a manufacturing renaissance, helped by cheap temporary labor, surging demand for Japanese products and a weak yen -- which made the price of exports competitive. Exports soared, reaching a record 16.5% of the overall economy in July-September 2008, after ranging between 8% and 10% during the 1980s and 1990s. Companies rushed to open factories at home, saying complex products, evolving technologies and the danger of manufacturing secrets leaking out made it important to keep factories close to headquarters. Now, Japan's manufacturing bubble has burst. Exports for February dropped by 49%, the fifth month of decline. The higher yen is pummeling companies' overseas earnings. The dollar, which was at 123 yen in July 2007, tumbled to 87 yen in December 2008, before recovering to the current level of about 100 yen. Japan's economy contracted at an annualized 12.1% during the October-December quarter. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecasts Japan's economy will contract 6.6% in 2009. How Japan fares in transitioning from its manufacturing-dependent growth model could determine how the world's second-largest economy emerges from the recession.

A new pecking order FOR years leaders in continental Europe have been told by the Americans, the British and even this newspaper that their economies are sclerotic, overregulated and too state-dominated, and that to prosper in true Anglo-Saxon style they need a dose of free-market reform. But the global economic meltdown has given them the satisfying triple whammy of exposing the risks in deregulation, giving the state a more important role and (best of all) laying low les Anglo-Saxons. At the April G20 summit in London, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel stood shoulder-to-shoulder to insist pointedly that this recession was not of their making. Ms Merkel has never been a particular fan of Wall Street. But the rhetorical lead has been grabbed by Mr Sarkozy. The man who once wanted to make Paris more like London now declares laissez-faire a broken system. Jean-Baptiste Colbert once again reigns in Paris. Rather than challenge dirigisme, the British and Americans are busy following it: Gordon Brown is ushering in new financial rules and higher taxes, and Barack Obama is suggesting that America could copy some things from France, to the consternation of his more conservative countrymen. Indeed, a new European pecking order has emerged, with statist France on top, corporatist Germany in the middle and poor old liberal Britain floored.

• How France is surviving the economic crisis
• Problems with the German economic model
• Joblessness soars in Spain
• Thatcherism for our times

Heirs to Fortuyn?  When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, something else was born that would mark American elites for decades thereafter: the notion that social-democratic Western Europe was far superior to the capitalist United States. Pity the poor American professor whose every junket to a European academic conference was marred by his continental colleagues' sneering over cocktails about his nation's shame du jour—Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq—or about American racism, capital punishment or health. This rosy view was never accurate, of course. Europe's socialized health care was blighted by outrageous (and sometimes deadly) waiting lists and rationing, to name just one example. To name another: Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the left's fanciful picture even further: Western European voters' widespread reaction against social democracy. The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the past three decades, social-democratic Europe's political, cultural, academic and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe's governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to Shariah. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe's incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. The other major reason for the turn against the left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowed economic growth. Timbro's Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden, for instance, which in the first half of the 20th century had the world's second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to No. 14, owing to enormous tax hikes. Government revenues in Western Europe go largely to support the unemployed, thus discouraging work. Over the last decade or so, the overall unemployment rate in the EU 15—that is, Western Europe—has hovered at about 2.5 to 3 points higher than in the United States. In France and Germany, it has ascended into the double digits (and that was before the global financial crisis that began in 2008). Western Europe's rate of long-term unemployment has consistently been several times higher than America's, denoting the presence of a sizable minority.

In Budapest, a Snapshot of a World Now at Risk The decline of the world economy is usually chronicled in numbers — 8.5 percent unemployment in the United States; 15 percent unemployment in Spain; Chinese exports dropping 25 percent; Japan’s dropping 49 percent; global trade expected to fall for the first time in 80 years, by more than 13 percent. But the numbers, cold and stark, do not convey the real cost this downturn may yet extract, if it isn’t turned around. Budapest does that. When I first visited, as an exchange student in January 1989, Budapest was the capital of Communist Hungary. And despite the moroseness that hung over the city like a cloud, it held a certain charm beneath layers of dirt and gloom. When I returned last month, a journalist on vacation, Budapest was Europe, as European as Paris or Barcelona, and as dazzling. Twenty years ago, Hungary was a Soviet satellite, one of the less hard-line regimes of Eastern Europe but Communist all the same. As a student of the Soviet Union’s domestic and foreign policy, I figured I knew the country intellectually. I had no idea. My first memory of Budapest was riding a subway from the train station to Moszkva ter, Moscow Square. When I emerged onto the square atop one of the many hills on the Buda side of the Danube, I was stunned. Across the steel-gray river, in Pest, stood Hungary’s Parliament, a collection of a dozen delicate Gothic spires surrounding a majestic dome. The dome was off-white with terra cotta-color tiles, its luster dimmed by the caked-on pollution. Still, it was audacious. I spent the next days discovering that Budapest, like the Parliament, was regal. But the grandeur seemed out of place amid the unmistakable sadness that hung over it and other Eastern European capitals of the time. When I returned to Budapest last month, I was once again amazed. After two decades of economic and political liberalization, the city’s potential was no longer hidden, glimpsed like a shadow disappearing around a corner. Budapest had become a dream realized, full of world-class hotels, ubiquitous construction cranes, mansions and museums scrubbed clean. Stylish women and men filled the subways and sidewalks. The stores were full to bursting, with local products as well as global brands. Hungary, it struck me, was part of Europe again. That is what is at stake in the current meltdown — a truly globalized world, increasingly connected and increasingly familiar, and, as the contagion of economic weakness has shown, more fragile because of its interdependence. In the years since China, then Russia and its satellites, joined the world economy, confidence has become the currency of this globalized world. One of our era’s dominant features had been a swaggering self-assurance, a sometimes smug pride in our modernity. Until it all started to come apart last year, a sense of optimism and possibility infected a border-hopping elite and, to some extent, the middle and working classes from Budapest to Bangalore.

20 Years of Going Nowhere The recent annual meeting of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, a Moscow-based think tank, underscored the confusion and distress among leading Russian politicians, analysts and policymakers. The meeting was dedicated to discussing the results of these last two decades. If in recent years they were all caught up in a frenzy of patriotism, muscle-flexing and shouts of "Russia is rising from its knees!" this spring has marked a clear shift in mood. Now they are much more sober and reflective. The economic crisis and Russia's continuing foreign policy failures have hit them like one big cold shower.This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is interesting to compare how far the West has advanced since 1989 and how Russia has fallen behind. First, NATO membership grew in three successive waves over the last 20 years, adding 12 new countries, including former Warsaw Pact countries and three former Soviet republics. In addition, the European Union similarly added 15 new countries in three waves of expansion, reaching a current total of 27 member states. But this expansion is by no means completed; a number of countries are standing in line to join NATO and the EU. Twenty years ago, Russia lagged behind the development of the Western world, and it has yet to close that gap. Since 1989, Russia has steadily lost its influence on the global arena and soured its relations with most of its neighbors. For example, relations with Georgia and Ukraine are now hopelessly ruined. Among the few friends that remain, relations are not nearly as strong as Russia would like. One vivid example: None of its allies, except Nicaragua, has recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. From 1989 to 2009, the number of Russia's friends has diminished while its ill-wishers have grown. In fact, the Kremlin suffered a double defeat: It lost its status as a global superpower and simultaneously failed to modernize its economy and institutions. In stark contrast to China and India, over the last two decades Russia has not managed to modernize its economy. Instead, its economy became even more reliant on raw material exports than during the Soviet era, and the country failed to create functional government institutions. The country has still not been able to develop independent courts or parliament, nor has it been able to build a modern army. Moreover, there is no effective control over the bureaucracy, little protection of private property and corruption continues to be a debilitating, systemic problem. In short, Russia remains a colossus on clay feet with a bad reputation in the world -- a fact well understood not only by the West and China, but also by our closest neighbors. A country run by a clan of siloviki with an economy so heavily dependent on oil and gas exports cannot become a center of influence or a respected global power, particularly when it must compete with advanced and influential industrial power centers such as the European Union, the United States and China. If Russia does not modernize its political and economic institutions, its decline will only get worse.

• The Oligarchs in the Government Corruption has become Russia's most profitable business. According to experts, the corruption market is worth $300 billion annually. Medvedev understands that corruption has reached unacceptable and dangerous levels and something must be done at the top echelons of government to control the situation.

India Defies Slump, Powered by Growth in Poor Rural States Growth has slowed in the new India of technology outsourcing, property development and securities trade. But old India -- the rural sector that is home to 700 million of the country's billion-plus people -- shows signs it can pick up the slack. The rural awakening helps explain why India continues to grow even as the U.S. recession drags on the world economy. The change is largely political. In years past, many state leaders rode to power with vows to give voice to lower-caste voters. But after failing for the most part to lift living standards, these officials have been replaced in many cases by leaders who have. In poor and largely rural states from Orissa in the east to Rajasthan in the west, many new leaders have invested in health, education and infrastructure. That has set the stage for the creation of industry and consumer markets and enabled upward mobility. It's unclear whether development spending in rural India will spark longer-term expansion. The countryside's strength comes in part from a trade policy that free-market economists say may hurt India in the long run. Tariffs on agricultural imports are among the world's highest and may have deterred investment in rural India. But these tariffs have also sheltered swaths of the country. An estimated 88% of India's rural incomes are tied to activities inside those markets, according to IIFL. Even slight improvements here are significant, economists say, because they build on a base of practically zero. India's economy has held up better than most, in spite of slowing tech sales and falling real-estate and stock markets. The International Monetary Fund projects India will grow 5.1% in 2009, faster than Brazil (1.8%) and Russia (-0.7%). India is also closing the gap on China, whose 6.7% projected growth for 2009 marks a sharp decline from recent double-digit gains.

Distant horizons WITH an unprecedented display of its rapidly growing naval armory, China has flaunted its ambitions as a global power. To mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), Chinese leaders on April 23rd reviewed a maritime parade of hardware ranging from nuclear submarines to amphibious assault-craft and fighter bombers. The only missing ingredient of naval might was an aircraft-carrier. Officials hint it will not be long before China has some of these too. Ten years ago, the PLAN’s 50th anniversary slipped by with little more than a few commemorative stamps and plenty of bunting. But the last decade has seen the fruits of a huge military modernisation and expansion programme, launched after tensions mounted in the Taiwan Strait in 1995 and 1996. This has included the purchase of billions of dollars worth of Russian naval hardware, and the deployment of homemade ships, submarines and missiles. The build-up has sent ripples of unease across China’s neighbourhood. China was anxious lest the parade, in the port city of Qingdao, sent too scary a message. It invited foreign navies to take part too, including America’s 7th Fleet, which sent a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Fitzgerald. The official theme of the show was “harmonious ocean”. China’s neighbours wish it were so. Some of the new weaponry on display in Qingdao suggested that projecting power is becoming a bigger priority for China. Among the vessels inspected by President Hu Jintao from on board a Chinese-made destroyer were two nuclear-powered submarines. China’s official press identified them as a Xia-class ballistic-missile submarine and a Han-class attack submarine. These are not China’s very latest models, but showing them at all was rare.

The World Depends on U.S.-China Cooperation Recent events confirm that we're living in a new world of disorder. North Korea tested a missile that could reach the U.S., and is threatening to resume its nuclear-weapons program; the Taliban is using drug money to destabilize Afghanistan and turn that country back into a terrorist safe haven; the financial crisis has sparked a global recession; and unchecked greenhouse gas emissions are transforming the global climate. These disparate challenges share one thing in common: They cannot be addressed successfully without cooperation between the U.S. and China. The most immediate opportunity for cooperation is in confronting the international financial crisis. China currently holds $2 trillion worth of largely U.S. dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves, and it is by far the world's largest holder of U.S. government debt. As the Obama administration increases that debt to finance its economic stimulus plan, China will almost certainly be called upon to purchase the lion's share of new U.S. debt instruments. China also has an interest in working with the U.S. to ensure those efforts succeed, because it depends on economic growth in the U.S. (still its largest single trading partner) to ensure stability at home. There is a compelling need to create a new dialogue on finance and economics. This conversation began with President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao's discussions at the G-20 summit this month in London. Meetings between U.S. and Chinese leaders have been dubbed the "G-2" by some to reflect the crucial role of economic negotiations between our two countries. To be sure, there remain a number of areas of serious divergence between Washington and Beijing. But with so many challenges facing our nations, the stakes are too high to allow old hostilities to impede constructive cooperation. Virtually no global challenge can be met without China-U.S. cooperation. By finding new ways to promote our common interests, the Obama administration can transform our relations with China and promote the global good.

Islamic World

Nicholas D. Kristof: Islam, Virgins and Grapes Muslim fundamentalists damage Islam far more than any number of Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this awakening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran. “We’re experiencing right now in Koranic studies a rise of interest analogous to the rise of critical Bible studies in the 19th century,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame professor and organizer of the conference. The Notre Dame conference probably could not have occurred in a Muslim country, for the rigorous application of historical analysis to the Koran is as controversial today in the Muslim world as its application to the Bible was in the 1800s. For some literal-minded Christians, it was traumatic to discover that the ending of the Gospel of Mark, describing encounters with the resurrected Jesus, is stylistically different from the rest of Mark and is widely regarded by scholars as a later addition. One of the scholars at the Notre Dame conference whom I particularly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is interpreted sensibly in context then it carries a strong message of social justice and women’s rights. If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be employed more productively, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy. There are signs of that, including a brand of “feminist Islam” that cites verses and traditions suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad favored women’s rights. Professor Reynolds says that Muslim scholars have asked that conference papers be translated into Arabic so that they can get a broader hearing. If the great intellectual fires are reawakening within Islam, after centuries of torpor, then that will be the best weapon yet against extremism.

• In Singapore, a More Progressive Islamic Education

Sitting Down With Islamists and the West TALKING to Islamists is the new order of the day in Washington and London. The Obama administration wants a dialogue with Iran, and the British Foreign Office has decided to reopen diplomatic contacts with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here. But for several years, small groups of Western diplomats have made quiet trips to Beirut for confidential sessions with members of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups they did not want to be seen talking to. In hotel conference rooms, they would warily shake hands, then spend hours listening and hashing out accusations of terrorism on one side and imperial arrogance on the other. The organizer of these back-door encounters is Alastair Crooke, a quiet, sandy-haired man of 59 who spent three decades working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He now runs an organization here called Conflicts Forum, with an unusual board of advisers that includes former spies, diplomats and peace activists. Mr. Crooke has spent much of his career talking to Islamists. “It seemed to me there was a real need to understand what was happening inside Islamism better, and to valorize what they were saying in ways that could be understood in the West,” he said. That project seems inseparable from his broader argument about dialogue. To illustrate it, Mr. Crooke describes an episode from the conflict in Northern Ireland in which the British put two opposing factions into a room for talks, “naïvely imagining that talking would help.” It did the opposite, reinforcing their anger. So the negotiators tried another approach: they asked both sides to write down their history and vision for the future on a piece of paper. After three more years of talks, the factions finally reached the point at which they acknowledged the legitimacy of the other side’s piece of paper. “George Mitchell once said to me, ‘you don’t even have a political process until you accept that the other side has a legitimate point of view,’ ” Mr. Crooke said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and relating it to the many obstacles between the United States and Iran. “Does America have the will and the patience for that?” he said. “I’m not sure we’re there yet.”

Indonesia’s Voters Retreat From Radical Islam From Pakistan to Gaza and Lebanon, militant Islamic movements have gained ground rapidly in recent years, fanning Western fears of a consolidation of radical Muslim governments. But here in the world’s most populous Muslim nation just the opposite is happening, with Islamic parties suffering a steep drop in popular support. In parliamentary elections this month, voters punished Islamic parties that focused narrowly on religious issues, and even the parties’ best efforts to appeal to the country’s mainstream failed to sway the public. The largest Islamic party, the Prosperous Justice Party, ran television commercials of young women without head scarves and distributed pamphlets in the colors of the country’s major secular parties. But the party fell far short of its goal of garnering 15 percent of the vote, squeezing out a gain of less than one percentage point over its 7.2 percent showing in 2004. That was a big letdown for a party and a movement that had grown phenomenally in recent years, even as more radical elements directed terrorist attacks against Western tourists and targets. The party had projected that it would double its share of seats in Parliament even as it stuck to its founding goal of bringing Shariah, or Islamic law, to Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, with 240 million people. Altogether, the major Islamic parties suffered a drop in support from 38 percent in 2004 to less than 26 percent this year, according to the Indonesian Survey Institute, an independent polling firm whose figures are in keeping with partial official results. Political experts and politicians attribute the decline to voters’ disillusionment with Islamic parties that once called for idealism, but became embroiled in the messy, often corrupt world of Indonesian politics. They also say that the popular president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is expected to be re-elected in July, appropriated the largest Islamic party’s signature theme of clean government through a far-reaching anticorruption drive. On a deeper level, some of the parties’ fundamentalist measures seem to have alienated moderate Indonesians. While Indonesia has a long tradition of moderation, it was badly destabilized with the end of military rule in 1998, which gave rise to Islamist politicians who preached righteousness and to some hard-core elements, who practiced violence. The country has only recently achieved a measure of stability.

Turkish Schools Under Scrutiny The first so-called Turkish schools in Central Asia were founded in the mid-1990s. Turkish educational institutions there -- as well as in countries from Russia to North America -- were set up by the Gulen movement led by Turkish Islamic scholar and author Fethullah Gulen. Gulen is a Sunni Muslim who advocates tolerance and dialogue among different religions. More than 65 Turkish educational institutions were once operating in Uzbekistan alone. There are some 25 Turkish schools, including boarding schools and two universities, in neighboring Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan has six such institutions. Throughout Central Asia, Turkish schools are known for their strict educational methods and discipline and are highly regarded by students and parents. The majority of national and regional education contests are won by Turkish lyceum students. Easily passing English-language tests, many graduates win scholarships to Western universities. Parents go to great lengths to enroll their children in Turkish schools, hoping such education will guarantee bright futures for them. Yet, Turkish educational institutions have come under increasing scrutiny in Central Asia. Governments as well as many scholars and journalists suspect that the schools have more than just education on their agendas.  In Turkmenistan, education authorities have ordered Turkish lyceums to scrap the history of religion from curriculums. Uzbek officials have expressed suspicions that Turkish-school graduates in government offices and other key institutions use their positions to weaken the secular government. They charge that graduates of Turkish schools promote an aggressive form of Islam and even a role for Islam in political life. There is something of an irony in the fact that such charges are being directed at schools inspired by the teachings of Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, though controversial, is generally regarded as a moderate Islamic thinker who condemns extremism and terrorism and promotes tolerance and harmony in society. He has written more than 60 books on subjects ranging from religion, Sufism, social and education issues, to art, science, and sports. The 68-year-old scholar calls on Muslims to study both religion and modern science, including Darwin's theory of evolution.

Emerging Challenges and Requirements

Battle is joined IT IS the new frontier for military and intelligence activity: cyberspace. For years military experts and computer scientists have speculated about the possibility of a nation’s infrastructure being attacked using computers, rather than bombs. There have been dark warnings of the danger of a “digital Pearl Harbour”—an unexpected strike in which digital attackers shut down America’s electrical grid or air-traffic control systems, or hack into nuclear-power stations and cause them to overheat. In recent years such concerns have been heightened by the first real examples of large-scale cyber-attacks—on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008. In each case, government websites were brought down by a deluge of traffic, apparently from Russia. The actual damage done was minimal, but it has all added to the sense of urgency, in America in particular, about the need to protect critical infrastructure from such an attack. In the past few weeks there have been alarming reports that America’s systems have already been infiltrated. On April 8th the Wall Street Journal quoted “current and former national-security officials” who warned that “cyberspies” from China, Russia and elsewhere had broken into the systems that control America’s electrical grid and had installed software that could be used to disrupt it. And on April 21st the newspaper said foreign hackers had penetrated computers containing data about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Does this mean America is suddenly under attack, and that war has broken out in cyberspace? It is difficult to believe that America, Russia and China are not all probing each other’s computer systems, and the picture is further complicated by the involvement of unofficial groups, such as those thought to have attacked Estonia and Georgia (whether or not they are backed by governments is a murky matter). But the most likely explanation for the sudden spate of scare stories is rather more mundane: a turf war between American government agencies over who should oversee the nation’s cyber-security. In one corner is the Department of Homeland Security, which operates the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a body set up to co-ordinate America’s various cyber-security efforts. In the other corner is the National Security Agency (NSA), which thinks it ought to be in charge. At stake are tens of billions of dollars in funding promised for a multi-year cyber-security initiative.

U.S. Scrambles For Civilian Crisis Management Having overwhelmingly relied on military force to address global security crises in recent years, Washington now appears to be scrambling for alternative methods. While the military component will continue for the foreseeable future to form the backbone of the U.S. strategy in hotspots like Afghanistan and Iraq, it is liable to be complemented by increasingly robust civilian crisis-management efforts. Ambassador John Herbst, the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization at the U.S. State Department, told RFE/RL on April 22 that the Obama administration is working "furiously" to set up a Civilian Response Corps (CRC). Herbst said he expects the CRC to become operational by summertime, and could continuously field up to 200 civilian reconstruction and stabilization experts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Herbst said civilian stabilization efforts will in future be the instrument of preference in the U.S. crisis-management toolbox. "We, I'm confident, represent the future of not just the American response, but I would say, [all together], the American response, the allied response, even the global response to the problem of failed states in ungoverned spaces," he said. Herbst is currently touring Europe in a bid to coordinate U.S. efforts with those of its main allies. But he said he has cast his net far wider, having recently traveled to China, India, and Brazil, among other places, in search of potential partners. The need for a broader, longer-term civilian engagement in the world's hotspots is felt across the board in Washington. The need in Afghanistan is felt especially keenly. Addressing a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on April 21, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, said the mission in Afghanistan needs more resources, and called for a "significant civilian investment." Flournoy said that it is "painfully clear that for several years, our effort on the ground has not been adequately resourced to defeat the insurgency and address the fundamental conditions that have enabled it to fester." The need for a broader, longer-term civilian engagement in the world's hotspots is felt across the board in Washington. The need in Afghanistan is felt especially keenly. Addressing a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on April 21, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, said the mission in Afghanistan needs more resources, and called for a "significant civilian investment." Flournoy said that it is "painfully clear that for several years, our effort on the ground has not been adequately resourced to defeat the insurgency and address the fundamental conditions that have enabled it to fester."

'The Age of the Unthinkable' It’s a finding enthusiastically embraced by Mr. Ramo, who argues in these pages that today’s complex, interconnected, globalized world requires policy makers willing to toss out old assumptions (about cause and effect, deterrence and defense, nation states and balances of power) and embrace creative new approaches. Today’s world, he suggests, requires resilient pragmatists who, like the most talented Silicon Valley venture capitalists on the one hand or the survival-minded leadership of Hezbollah on the other, possess both an intuitive ability to see problems in a larger context and a willingness to rejigger their organizations continually to grapple with ever-shifting challenges and circumstances. So how should leaders cope with the sand-pile world? How can they learn to “ride the earthquake” and protect their countries from the worst fallout of such tremors? Mr. Ramo suggests that they must learn to build resilient societies with strong immune systems: instead of undertaking the impossible task of trying to prepare for every possible contingency, they ought to focus on things like “national health care, construction of a better transport infrastructure and investment in education.” He suggests that leaders should develop ways of looking at problems that focus more on context than on reductive answers. And he talks about people learning to become gardeners instead of architects, of embracing Eastern ideas of indirection instead of Western patterns of confrontation, of seeing “threats as systems, not objects.” Though Mr. Ramo sounds annoyingly fuzzy and vaguely New Agey when he tries to outline tactics for dealing with “the age of the unthinkable,” he’s at least managed, in this stimulating volume, to make the reader seriously contemplate the alarming nature of a rapidly changing world — a world in which uncertainty and indeterminacy are givens, and avalanches, negative cascades and tectonic shifts are ever-present dangers.

• An excerpt from "The Age of the Unthinkable"

America in Terminal Decline? No Way, Says Geopolitical Expert George Friedman With its slumping economy, mountains of debt, ungodly deficits and overseas entanglements, many observers believe the end of the American era is at hand. Not so, according to George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR, a global intelligence company. In his latest book, The Next 100 Years, Friedman argues America's power on the world stage will actually increase in the 21st Century for three major reason: 1)The immense size of the U.S. economy: The current crisis is painful and America's deficits are shocking on an absolute basis but are "trivial" relative to the country's net worth, which Friedman estimates is about $340 trillion. 2) The unrivaled dominance of the U.S. Navy: Even in the digital age, control of the high seas is paramount in geopolitics. 3) The ability of the U.S. to absorb immigrants, both culturally and in terms of the nation's relatively low population density.

• "Split Down the Middle": Why China Won't Dominate the 21st Century
• West Has Already Won War with Islam, Says Leading Geopolitical Analyst

Re-thinking the Future: Capitalism 3.0 ?

Vive la différence! In Britain, Gordon Brown has declared—like Mr Sarkozy—that “laissez-faire has had its day”. Business chiefs clamour for Britain to get itself a proper industrial policy and stop relying on the mirage of finance. Howard Davies, head of the London School of Economics, wrote in praise of “French lessons on the state’s new role”. Even Peter Mandelson, a former European trade commissioner whom the French regard as a high priest of economic liberalism, recently turned up in Paris to learn more about what he calls industrial activism. “We have something to learn from continental practice,” he said, identifying French long-term strategic planning in such sectors as energy and transport. Behind the loose terms and caricature, however, what exactly does the French model consist of? Does it work? As governments try to work out the best balance between the market and the state, have the French got that balance right after all? A central feature of the French model is the state’s role as provider, cushioning citizens, redistributing wealth and propping up demand in hard times. But it has two other functions: planner and regulator. Long-term planning of public infrastructure is the best example of where it works well. Such French strategic planning is not only about long-term vision and infrastructure; it is also about putting in place the industrial supply chain needed to get there. The impulse to control, which underpins the French model, extends to the third function of the state too, that of regulator. The French are champion rule-makers. France’s big banks may have lost plenty of money, but they have certainly performed better than their British or American peers, and most are still in profit. One reason is tighter regulation. If the French model has broadly sheltered its people from credit-fuelled excess, kept demand buoyant and inequalities manageable, and delivered well scrubbed buildings and blooming flowerbeds to boot, does this mean that the model works? Or what is the catch? The answer lies in a generally disappointing macroeconomic performance, with low growth and high unemployment, and is explained by the flipside of each of the three roles the French model allocates to the state. But, as a senior French official points out, the Colbertist engineering culture is on the whole much better at devising and managing big planned projects than it is at dealing with bottom-up ideas and uncertain markets. France lacks start-ups, and its small firms have difficulty growing. Hardly any of the biggest companies listed on the Paris bourse were founded in the past 50 years.

Coming soon: Capitalism 3.0 Capitalism is in the throes of its most severe crisis in many decades. A combination of deep recession, global economic dislocations and effective nationalisation of large swathes of the financial sector in the world's advanced economies has deeply unsettled the balance between markets and states. Where the new balance will be struck is anybody's guess. Those who predict capitalism's demise have to contend with one important historical fact: capitalism has an almost unlimited capacity to reinvent itself. Indeed, its malleability is the reason it has overcome periodic crises over the centuries and outlived critics from Karl Marx on. The real question is not whether capitalism can survive -- it can � but whether world leaders will demonstrate the leadership needed to take it to its next phase as we emerge from our current predicament. Capitalism has no equal when it comes to unleashing the collective economic energies of human societies. That is why all prosperous societies are capitalistic in the broad sense of the term: they are organised around private property and allow markets to play a large role in allocating resources and determining economic rewards. The catch is that neither property rights nor markets can function on their own. They require other social institutions to support them. So property rights rely on courts and legal enforcement, and markets depend on regulators to rein in abuse and fix market failures. At the political level, capitalism requires compensation and transfer mechanisms to render its outcomes acceptable. As the current crisis has demonstrated yet again, capitalism needs stabilising arrangements such as a lender of last resort and a counter-cyclical fiscal policy. In other words, capitalism is not self-creating, self-sustaining, self-regulating or self-stabilising. The history of capitalism has been a process of learning and re-learning these lessons. This 'mixed-economy' model was the crowning achievement of the twentieth century. The new balance that it established between state and market set the stage for an unprecedented period of social cohesion, stability and prosperity in the advanced economies that lasted until the mid-1970s. This model became frayed from the 1980s on, and now appears to have broken down. The reason can be expressed in one word: globalisation. The postwar mixed economy was built for and operated at the level of nation-states and required keeping the international economy at bay. The lesson is not that capitalism is dead. It is that we need to reinvent it for a new century in which the forces of economic globalization are much more powerful than before. Just as Smith's minimal capitalism was transformed into Keynes' mixed economy, we need to contemplate a transition from the national version of the mixed economy to its global counterpart. This means imagining a better balance between markets and their supporting institutions at the global level. Sometimes, this will require extending institutions outward from nation-states and strengthening global governance. At other times, it will mean preventing markets from expanding beyond the reach of institutions that must remain national. The right approach will differ across country groupings and among issue areas. Designing the next capitalism will not be easy. But we do have history on our side: capitalism's saving grace is that it is almost infinitely malleable.

Thimphu Journal: Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer. “Greed, insatiable human greed,” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change,” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.” The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications. Specifically, the government has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance. It breaks these into nine domains: psychological well-being, ecology, health, education, culture, living standards, time use, community vitality and good governance, each with its own weighted and unweighted G.N.H. index. All of this is to be analyzed using the 72 indicators. Under the domain of psychological well-being, for example, indicators include the frequencies of prayer and meditation and of feelings of selfishness, jealousy, calm, compassion, generosity and frustration as well as suicidal thoughts.