The Last Day of the First Decade of the 21st Century

On this final day of a decade ushered in with unfounded fear of the now forgotten Y2K bug, then eclipsed with the events of 9/11 and the twin wars that unfolded in its wake, and still sputter like the lit fuse on an un-exploded bomb. This decade compared to others in the 20th century turned out to be better than most. Three billion people world-wide began to reap the rewards of free markets and for the first time in history join the ranks of a growing middle-class. The wars, however tragic for those who lost loved ones, were less intense than the killing fields of those found in any decade of the 1900's.


As we wait today, to usher in 2010 and the next decade of our future, I will share a few links that stood out as a measure of our success as a people. Then one final thought about those who have paid the price of trying to confront an evil that if not checked, desires to return the world to feudal times, where totalitarianism and fundamentalism cloaked in the guise of religion threatens all those who seek a better future for their children.

One blog that I visit on a daily basis has consistently shown itself to on the cutting edge of observations that are balanced and reveal the innovative and resilient nature of free and inquiring people. Steve DeAngelis, founder of Enterra Solution's blog Enterprise Resilience Blog has shown itself to be the gold standard of positive observations of the human condition in the 21st century. Here are a few posts that reflect the positive developments of the past decade and hope for the future. I will let Steve's words introduce this first post.

For all of the usual reasons, this is my favorite time of the year. One naturally begins thinking more about family, blessings, and giving to others. But I also like this time of year because the New York Times publishes its "Year in Ideas" section that highlights "noteworthy notions of [the current year] — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather"

Read more:
New York Times Year in Ideas

Steve's next post is more about innovation and how new ideas have catapulted our connected world further ahead than ever before.

In a couple of recent posts (Promoting Innovation and Entrepreneurship and The New York Times' Year in Ideas), I've focused on end of the year recognition for innovative ideas and companies. The Economist has also published its list of winning innovators for 2009 ["And the winners were...," 12 December 2009 print issue]. The article notes that The Economist "was established in 1843 to take part in 'a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress'. One of the chief ways in which intelligence presses forward is through innovation, which is now recognised as one of the most important contributors to economic growth. Innovation, in turn, depends on the creative individuals who dream up new ideas and turn them into reality." The magazine presents Innovation Awards in eight categories: bioscience, computing and telecommunications, energy and the environment, social and economic innovation, business-process innovation, consumer products, a flexible “no boundaries” category, and the corporate use of innovation. This year's winners include some innovators who have been mentioned before in my blogs. The list of winners this year is:

Read more:
More Prizes for Innovation

Finally, Steve looks back at the past decade and used two counter-points of view to illustrate a realistic look back that still bodes hope for a better future.

Nobel Laureate, economics professor, and New York Times' op-ed columnist Paul Krugman suggests that we label the past decade "The Big Zero."

Has the world really stopped progressing in any meaningful way? In a very thoughtful essay on progress, The Economist asks, "Why is the modern view of progress so impoverished?"

Steve's commentary on the excerpts from the Ecomomist and the supporting essay 'It’s Getting Better All the Time', by the late Julian Simon and Stephen Moore, provides a measure of balance and sets the stage for hope that humans can still make a difference.

Humans have always known that there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. One can have great knowledge without being wise. Wisdom is the correct use of knowledge....

Despite the view of pessimists, the worst predictions of past and present fear-mongers have not come to pass. For example, with exceptions of countries like Iran and North Korea, neither "Orwell’s nor Huxley’s nightmares have come to life."

I'm idealistic enough to believe that men and women of good will can make a difference in the world. Evil will always live as a companion to good, but that fact need not impede progress altogether. As the New Year and new decade begin, let's work to ensure that it is not another Big Zero.

Read the whole post:
A Look at Progress

Finally, As the sun sets on this decade, Michael Yon posted this photo essay that speaks volumes about human spirit.

On this small base surrounded by a mixture of enemy and friendly territory, a memorial has been erected just next to the Chapel. Inside the tepee are 21 photos of 21 soldiers killed during the first months of a year-long tour of duty

Inside the tepee are the 21 photos, and a Bible. The book is opened to Psalm 31.

Read more:
Into Thine Hand I Commit My Spirit

A Trio of Topics

This week the news has been peppered with both political parties firing verbal shots or parrying thrusts over what is turning out to be a true bureaucratic cluster fornication. If any one has lived lucky this week it is the President who gets a chance to fix the problem without having to do it while answering to the families of 277 lost souls and an througly outraged citizenry, had the bomber completed his jihad.

The mainstream news media in the United States has been leaning slightly backward to be objective and not blame the President for the failure of policies further down the chain of command. British papers have been more revealing about the potential threat posed by grassroots jihadist who have been training in Yemen for the next wave of terror. Yemen warns of hundreds more al-Qaida operatives in country and asks for help from the Guardian.

Leading off this week I turn to this post from wired.com's Danger Room. Noah Shachtman, gets a major nod for posting this look inside the mind of "underware bomber" or perhaps the guy who burned his balls off, trying to get 72 virgins.

Here’s a rare chance to step inside a would-be terrorist’s head. From 2005 to 2007, underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab appears to have posted 310 times to the Islamic Forum on Gawaher.com, under the handle “Farouk1986.”

Read more
 a look-inside-the-underpants-bombers-mind

I wrote in a previous post about how this story is resonating across the blogs.  Blogfriend Mark wrote this short post, correctly entitled  A Short Rant....

And from Threatswatch, comes this commentary by Michael Tanji.
Of No Pratical Significance

Turning back to the cold stark mountains and valleys that make up Afghanistan we turn our attention to Steven Pressfield, bestselling author and founder of the much read blog It's The Tribes Stupid. Steve has thrown his considerable skill as a writer and interviewer to showcase an ongoing series with Afghan Tribal Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai. Steve's recently interviewed retired U.S. Army Major, William S. “Mac” McCallister about COIN in a tribal society. An inciteful read that compliments articles and interviews with people with boots on the ground experience in Afghanistan. COIN in A Tribal Society

Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, second from right

Topping off todays reads is this from the men at The Art of Manliness. Part II of their popular motivational posters starring Winston Churchill.

What Comes Next? In The Wake, of The Latest Airline Bombing Attempt.

Nigerian Arrested in Failed Plane Attack Claims Links to al-Qaeda This headline was the lead story on newspapers and every news broadcast worldwide, Christmas Day. It could have been much worse if the alleged bomber had been successful. We would be mourning the unexplained loss of 278 lives when an airliner exploded and fell to earth as it entered U.S. airspace. Thanks to a combination of inept execution and the bravery of some passengers, we will have the opportunity to discover how this latest attempt at terrorism came about.


This story has begun to resonate across the blogs where it will touch millions of minds and trigger responses that are both insightful and offer ideas and warnings about what to expect when the inevitable finally occurs.

One of the first to post a comment is respected grand strategist Thomas Barnett who weighs in with two brief comments to yesterday's devlopments. Here is the money line, in the first post.

Said it a million times: we are an ultra-violent society. The Occidentalism of the Salafists is severely misguided. We are anything but wimpy momma's boys. We can't wait to kill, so we're the wrong society to pick a long war with.

Read more:
Imagine that: Home-grown mass murders in America

Barnett goes on with his next post to note his personal connection to Northwest Flight 253 and his first thoughts on this foiled attempt.

I've taken Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, even connecting through the Netherlands from Africa. I remember the African security being fairly lax, and the Dutch being much tighter, with the usual screening before you board the plane by special personnel (who ask a lot of questions).

Nice to see the spirit of United 93 lives on in passengers.

Will this stuff ever go away? Unlikely. But important to remember how easy it was to hijack planes in the 1970s and then how that tactic went away in the 1980s thanks to heightened security.

Read more:
A familiar flight and--thankfully--a familiar ending


To be sure airline security will increase in the coming days. My own off-the-cuff observation would lead me to look back at what happened in the wake of the failed attempt by Shoe bomber, Richard Reid. Today, we all queue up and remove our shoes to be X-rayed along with our carry-on luggage. I suspect that if it was a small vial of liquid and powder as reported, that in the future all luggage containing any of that kind of material will have to ride in the cargo hold. One or two more incidents will have us down to wearing TAS issued slippers and sanitized coveralls and having only the reading material in the seat pockets to pass the time. I am being a bit fascias, but before Reid, who would have thought about having to shed our shoes and pad across dirty terminal floors clutching our britches as we waited for the tray to disgorge our worldly possessions.

UPDATE:

The Small Wars Council has begun to weigh in on this subject with this discussion thread. Explosive device set off aboard airliner at Detroit Wayne International Airport

And for those who might think bending the rules to defeat your enemy is a 21st century rightwing neocon invention.

The Battle of Trenton, 1776

Merry Christmas, 2009

Christmas has come to mean a time of peace and selfless giving, far beyond those whom hold the Christian faith. Almost every country pauses to celebrate the season and in doing so silently acknowledges the message of Christmas and our shared human spirit to care about our each other as we would want others to care for us.

Being a history centric blog, I thought it would be timely to look back at other Christmas's when our country was at war and share a few stories of how Christmas was celebrated amid thousands of souls who just hours earlier were trying to exterminate each other.

The first and most famous Christmas in modern wartime happened in the opening months of World War I. December 25, 1914 set the tone for a civility that was never to be repeated on such a scale in future wartime Christmas Truce, 1914.

British and German soldiers meeting on Christmas 1914

As the war progressed and the hatred deepened, the truces fell to a cession of shelling, but no contact between oppoing forces.

World War II saw some cease fires during Christmas, with opportunities to clear the wounded from the battlefield, but no mass laying aside of weapons on the scale of Christmas 1914. One incident, occured Christmas Eve, during the Battle of the Bulge endured for a time, then like many war stories lacking gore, faded from memory. This story comes courtesy of Bill's Vietnam Memorial Page The story begins:

A man now, Fritz Vincken, narrates this true story about when he was a small boy at the time in 1944. The Battle of the Bulge was at its height. A German cook who was with the German Army there had left his wife and the above mentioned little boy in a shack way in the woods seemingly from harm's way.

It was December 24th, Christmas Eve and it was a very cold night. Many soldiers on both sides became lost from their units and were looking for a place to stay. Three American Soldiers were lost around the area where the shack was. They saw the light from the shack and the smoke from the chimney. They saw their chance to warm up. They knocked on the door and asked if they could come in. The German lady had a small chicken cooking for themselves but invited the Americans in to warm up and for the Christmas meal.

One of the American Soldiers was wounded and the lady tried to make him comfortable. There was a language barrier for a time till one of the soldiers found out the lady could speak French as well as German! So everything was going well and the Americans were feeling right at home!

Read more:
A Christmas Miracle At The Battle of The Bulge

German soldier, December 1944

American soldiers December 1944

Every year of America's involvement in Vietnam saw the call for a Christmas Truce, to coincide with major Vietnamese holidays like TET and Buddha's Birthday. True to form the truces were marked with countless violations, the most famous being TET 1968.

My own exposure to Christmas Truce, Vietnam Style, came Christmas Eve 1966. I had been in country only a couple of weeks and was assigned to guard the perimeter. Our bunker contained 4 men, who would rotate the guard two by two, every four hours. I was part of the second watch; Two hours in to my watch, Christmas Day was greeted a few minutes after mid-night with a metallic thud and the crash of an impacting mortar round fifty meters behind our bunker line. Two more rounds fell and then green tracers briefly stitched the once silent night. Mass panic overtook most of our little party of green troops as my bunk mates scrambled from their sleep and prepared in our untested minds to be overrun.  One member of our little group, was a grizzled often busted, thirty something corporal, who had already served one tour with an avation unit in 64, and had returned by choice when our unit deployed. He rose up  grunted, and said, "That's just the Gooks wishing us Merry Christmas.," upon which he rolled over and went back to sleep. Sure to our comrade's prediction, the night fell silent. For the three of us, we did not sleep a wink. Dawn, found us glued to our weapons, the past six hours filled with thoughts of Christmas's past and the reality that for some of us, we might never see another Christmas. As I sat pointing the M-60 out at the un-coming enemy, my thoughts turned to how ironic it was that less that a short decade earlier, I had awakened to find a toy machine gun under the Christmas tree. And how that winter past, my brother and neighbor friends spent the next several weeks refighting the WW II battles of our fathers, amid the orange groves surrounding my grandparents home.

Bunker at a Firebase in Vietnam

My year in Vietnam passed and as province would have it, we all survived to see our families and celebrate Christmas 1968, at home in the bosom of our families. In memory of that Christmas and to honor my fellow veterans of that war I have linked two sites that look back at Christmas time in Vietnam.

Christmas Time in Nam Stories courtesy of Looking back Vietnam blog.

And from Vietvet.org  a collection of poems and recollections of Christmas in Vietnam.

And the beat goes on as troops pause to celebrate once again.

A Look Back At The Week Before Christmas, 2009

T'was the week before Christmas 2009, and the blogs were all settling in for a short winters respite to remember, peace on earth and a pause before plunging ahead into 2010.

With the Copenhagen climate summit wrapped up, two sites had articles that caught my eye and are worth a look. Yale Global focuses this next post on how China the worlds top polluter emerges as green tech leader.

BEIJING -- Xu Shisen put down the phone and smiled. That was Canada calling, explained the chief engineer at a coal-fired power plant set among knockoff antique and art shops in a Beijing suburb. A Canadian company is interested in Mr. Xu's advances in bringing down the cost of stripping out greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal.

Steve DeAngelis of enterprise resilience blog wrote this post last week as the meetings were struggling to find common ground.

As the climate summit in Copenhagen continues, all eyes remain on the world's two great polluters -- the U.S. and China -- for a breakthrough. The U.S. has shown some willingness to compromise, but China remains reluctant ["U.S. pledges billions; China says climate pact is doubtful," by Juliet Eilperin and Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, 17 December 2009]. As disheartening as China's position might be, Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based green advocacy group, claims that in some "cleantech" areas, "China is now more advanced" than the United States ["China's Surprising Clout in Cleantech," by Adam Aston, BusinessWeek, 30 November 2009 print issue]. China has partially climbed aboard the environmental bandwagon along with the U.S. and India because it now sees opportunities where it once saw roadblocks to development.

Read more:
China and the globes green future

Continuing his successful run of excellent blog posts, Mark of Zenpundit offers this to amuse and get you brain cells going.

History is an empirical profession based on standards of evidence - in part. It is also an art of crafting a narrative that can effectively communicate the meaning of the evidence of an event that is known to exist. Leopold von Ranke, one of the founders of the modern historical method, admonished his students that history should explain ”wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” ( “Tell it how it really was” or “how it actually has been”) and eschew grand theories in seeking causation. These are difficult objectives to balance.

Read more:
The Weakness of the Historical Method

Turning to the war in Afhanistan. Michael Yon files this brief report.

20 December 2009

Arghandab, Afghanistan

As Christmas approaches, many people are thinking about the troops, who in turn are thinking about loved ones at home. Cards and letters are tacked up on many walls. The favorites are from the little kids, with questions like, "How do you go to the bathroom?" "Can you eat dinner?" "Does it hurt to get shooted?" It goes on.

I emailed to Command Sergeant Major Jeff Mellinger, asking if he had any words for the troops this Christmas. Jeff came right back with this awesome letter

Read CSM Mellingers letter:
As Christmas Approaches

On that note take a few minutes and read about our world and how it has been studied. Then pause and think about Sargent Major Melingers words.

"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace."

Napoleon, and later General George Patton made "Audacity, audacity, always audacity." a famous phrase encouraging bold courage in the face of great challenge. In the same vein, blog friend Mark of Zenpundit has shown intrepid audacity for calling attention to the rogue beast roaming the strategy room in the White House for the past eight years.

It is the elephant in our strategy room - if the elephant was a rabid and schizophrenic trained mastodon, still willing to perform simple tricks for a neverending stream of treats, even as it eyes its trainer and audience with a murderous kind of hatred. That Pakistan’s deeply corrupt elite can be “rented” to defer their ambitions, or to work at cross-purposes with Pakistan’s perceived “interests”, is not a game-changing event. Instead, it sustains and ramps up the dysfunctional dynamic we find ourselves swimming against.

Mark is writing about a post that he linked from Dawn.com. The post itself is worth the read are many of the 200 comments. The comentary penned by Mark is masterful and as several of his readers note, is "spot-on." I think that his words ring out like Jefferson's metephoric "fire bell in the night," calling to, "America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite" to heed the warning before the mastodon turns on it's audience.

Read more: None Dare Call it A Rogue State.

After reading both Mark's post and the linked article, take the time to join the discussion or better; send a copy to your congressmen, senator, or even the White House, with a note that we are all watching and waiting for them to act with the same intrepid courage of those who call for this discussion.

December 7, 1941

December 7, 1941

Coast Guard Cutter Taney Dec 7, 1941

Coast Guard Cutter Taney, Baltimore

USS Hoga, 2007

USS Nokomis, Pearl Harbor, December 7th

This is a rerun of my post last year on December 7th, 2008. The message is eternal.

Each year the memory of The Pearl Harbor Attack, 7 December 1941" fades away as each soul who was touched by that event, passes on. This is true not only for the ever dwindling memories of those who lived to experience the event, but of the fading memories of the children who were raised on the recollections of their parents. The third and forth generations barely know what happened on that day and how it effects their lives today.

Today, December 7th Pearl Harbor Day, is remembered mostly by those above, and historians who with each graduation class, produce fewer who care about the study of war.

Taking a look back, it is important to recognize that we preserve the primary evidence of this seminal event in American History. Slowly decaying below the waters of Pearl Harbor is the symbol of that day the USS Arizona (BB-39). In a few decades she will embody the words "dust to dust" as she in her own way returns to the earth that emitted the ore that built her.

There was over one hundred warships and dozens of yard craft in Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Today, there are just three surviving vessels from that day. The best preserved is the US Coast Guard Cutter Taney the only surviving vessel who actually took part in firing back at the attacking planes. The Taney went on to serve in both oceans during the war and after the war, returned to being an patrol cutter with active duty in Korea and Vietnam. She was retired after fifty years of service, and is preserved in Baltimore Harbor as a reminder of her honored past.

There are two lesser known surviving vessels. True to their reputation for toughness, they are both tugboats. The Tug Hoga served in Pearl Harbor during the war and went on to a second career as a fireboat for the City of Oakland, California. Today, she rusts amid other laid up warships in the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet, while waiting to be transferred to Little Rock, Arkansas where she is to be displayed in a World War II memorial.

The USS Nokomis (YT-142), has an even more interesting story. On duty in Pearl Harbor December 7th, she fought fires and rescued personnel from the water from the outset of the attack. She went on the serve as a yard tug during the war and then spent her elder years as a tug in San Francisco bay. A few years ago she was purchased in an auction in 2002 by Melissa Parker, who then founded the Historical Tugboat Education and Restoration Society, HTERS Home, USS Nokomis. The society is working to restore her to wartime livery, with the funds raised by offering educational cruises on one of her sister tugs.

It is important to preserve these few links to our past. Holding history in your hands and walking the decks of such vessels gives a window to pause and step back in time to have a brief moment to understand the events through the view point of those who were present.

Two other blogs also pause today to look at those less remembered.

EagleOne remembers one ship and it's crew who have been lost to history, in this post entitled: Sunday Ship History: 12-7-41

Somewhere in the miles between Tacoma and Hawaii, a steam ship plods through the ocean. Thirty-five souls are aboard in transit between one place and another. The ship's superstructure is white, her hull dark. She carries the name SS Cynthia Olson. Built in 1918, once named Coquina. She's now part of the Olson Shipping line out of San Francisco. A "steam schooner" they call her - all 250 feet of her. She's got a load of Army supplies and a thousand miles to to go to reach Diamond Head.

Two of the men aboard are in the Army, the rest are merchant sailors, some are veterans of a hundred sea trips, others newer to world of big oceans and little ships. Men on watch, men eating, men sleeping or reading or dreaming. A sailor smokes a cigarette. Another ties his boots. Casual chatter among the bridge watch and the engineers down below watch gauges and spin valves, adding or releasing steam, oil, water.

Out there at sea the ship is not alone. Unknown to the Captain or the crew, they have an unexpected companion. Suddenly a shadow rises from the depths and begins to attack them using a deck gun. The ship's crew radios for help, describing the gunfire from the submarine that suddenly appeared beside them at sea. The radio signal is weak and then gone - the message it carried is shocking - an unprovoked submarine attack on a merchant ship at sea.

CDR Salamander gives his readers a window on that day as seen from the people of Hawaii, in: Hawaii at war.

December 7, 1941 changed America forever in ways that have sent us plunging ahead into a vast new world of wonders and danger. It is important to pause and reflect back, before we loose all consciousness of those times.

600 Years of Naval Strategy

Zheng he's voyages 1405-1433

China's String of Pearls

Getting back into the daily routine after three weeks of what for a historian could only be dubbed the "mischief of historians," observing and collecting impressions to sound out what I already knew of the empirical data about China. I began to catch up on some of the blog posts that really caught my eye. One post by Galrahn jumped out at me because his headline put two two of my favorite subjects on the same line.

Let's begin by looking at his revealing post although small like a keyhole, would reveal a room of fresh ideas,China and Mahan.

Galrahn took note of his conversations with another blog favorite, Tom Barnett about the rise of China's interest in seapower. He then links an article from the Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine by James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara entitled, Mahan's Lingering Ghost .

The key point of the article focuses on the real goal behind the theory of sea power by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. Their point is that Mahan saw maritime strategy in these terms.

Naval preparedness is the sharp edge of maritime strategy, then, but it is only a means to an end. For Mahan, commerce was the true path to affluence and national greatness: "War has ceased to be the natural, or even normal, condition of nations, and military considerations are simply accessory and subordinate to the other greater interests" they serve.17 Prosperity took precedence. The "starting point and foundation" for comprehending sea power was "the necessity to secure commerce, by political measures conducive to military, or naval strength. This order is that of actual relative importance to the nation of the three elements-commercial, political, military" (our emphasis).18

This is why nations covet access to faraway regions like Asia. In essence, commerce is about unfettered access to the means for producing wealth and national power. Reliable access is impossible without the military means to protect it, and to keep others from denying it. Mahan thus advances a tripartite concept, which we call his first "trident" of sea power. Access to sources of economic well-being-foreign trade, commerce, and natural resources-ranks first within the Mahanian trident, military access third. This cuts against the usual, military-centric understanding of Mahan.

I immediately took notice of this passage because during my recent trip I visited the Ming Dynasty Tombs, where 13 of the 16 Ming Emperors are buried. The Changling tomb of the third Ming Emperor, Yongle Emperor, has an exhibit that traces the acomplishment of this emperor, now considered one of the greatest in Chinese history. One exhibit is given prominence, and is centered to draw attention to Admiral Zheng He who under the sponsorship of Emperor Yongle led seven naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433.

My wife said that when she was growing up in China she could not recall ever hearing about Zheng He. Her recollection was of visiting the tombs as a girl as a way of having a grasp on how old their history was, but little focus was given to any acomplishments of the ancient ones. Since 2005 China has proclaimed July 11th, Maritime Day to commerate the date of Zheng He's first voyage in 1405.

Zheng he's ship compared to the Santa Maria

What was the motivation for these voyages? Not global conquest or imposition of their political system on their neighbors. The goal was to support the tributary system and promote trade and commerce. Historians are somewhat divided on why China ended the voyages and imposed the Hai jin order banning maritime activities. One thing is certain, today's China appears poised for the first time in 600 years to reach a level of power equal to the early Ming Dynasty.

How does this all square with Alfred T Mahan's theory? Let us look at the Yongle Emperor's goal. He wanted to gain respect and demonstrate to those in the extended region that China was the superpower because she controlled the seas. The result, would be tribute and commerce leading to prosperity and continued "national greatness" for China. A great plan, but in a world of a belief in the Mandate of Heaven manipulated by palace Eunuchs fate deemed a different result.

Fast forward 500 years to 1905 and Captain Mahan becomes a favorite of President Theodore Roosevelt who in 1907, sends the Great White Fleet around the world to demonstrate to the world that America had arrived and would secure the seas to insure safe commerce for the United States.

Today, it is understandable that strategists and historians in China are looking back at what could have been if they had continued to press their naval advantage. Armed with Mahan's principles of sea power and remembering the greatness that once was, China looks to ensure that this time they will protect their sources of trade and commerce in the same way that the Yongle Emperor through his agent, Zheng he envisioned. Alfred Mahan's proven strategy appears to fit nicely into China's matrix to regain what they see as their rightful place in history.

How do we Americans view China's rise and are we willing to adjust to a changing world. Recent polls conducted by the Pew Research Center has uncovered a distrubing new trend in American;s view of the world. Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High

The general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations are apprehensive and uncertain about America’s place in the world. Growing numbers in both groups see the United States playing a less important role globally, while acknowledging the increasing stature of China. And the general public, which is in a decidedly inward-looking frame of mind when it comes to global affairs, is less supportive of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan than are CFR members.

However, the percentage saying that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own” has reached an all-time high of 49%. Four years ago, 42% agreed that the U.S. should “mind its own business” in international affairs; in December 2002, just 30% agreed wiHowever, the percentage saying that the United States should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own” has reached an all-time high of 49%. Four years ago, 42% agreed that the U.S. should “mind its own business” in international affairs; in December 2002, just 30% agreed with this statement.th this statement.

As our nation seems to be turning inward and away from a world that for many Americans is both foreign and too troubled to be of our concern it would be wise to remember some of the reasons that China turned her back on the sea and in turn the world beyond her immediate borders.

At the same time that the voyages were being financed, the Yongle Emperor was building the Forbidden City which took 13 years and 200,000 workers to complete. Other government spending far outstripped the revenues. Most of the Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty to protect their borders. To better serve the new capital food needs, thousands labored to rebuild the Grand Canal. With so much money going out to fund government programs the country chose to turn away from what Chinese decision makers saw as a troubled world.

Here we Americans stand 600 years later, the strongest military and economic nation on the planet. We are overextended with massive spending programs that spread from military adventures to out-of-control social spending, coupled with bail out money spread to banks and the auto industry. The decision makers in the United States are the voters, and like the Ming emperors and their advisors, the burden of their own making threatens to contract into isolation at a time when renewing Mahan's strategy echoes from across the Pacific.