The Coming of the Fourth American Republic

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Zenpundit and Fabius Maximus are two of the most astute observers in the blogosphere and both have linked the this insightful article, well worth the time to read and digest. Written by James V. DeLong in The American: The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute the article is summarized this way by Fabius.

Summary: Slowly realization spreads that we are at the end of an era. Here is an interesting look at one aspect of that transition, and what might lie ahead. This is just a brief excerpt; I recommend reading it in full! At the end are links to other posts on this site about the death of the American Constitutional regime — and what might come next.

The premise is that the United States is about to embark on the Fourth Republic after the initial founding of the nation, followed by the Civil War and then the New Deal/Great Society run of the special interests. The author surmises that we are on the threshold of a major shift in the direction of the country, hence the Fourth Republic. In cautionary terms DeLong writes.

While we await events, none of this analysis should be regarded as a counsel of pessimism. Political arrangements should change with time and experience, and to expect the political architects of any era to foresee all the problems inherent in their institutions is to demand the impossible. By 2090, it will probably be time for the Fifth American Republic, and, Heaven willing, more after that.

On the other hand, it would be unwise to treat the issues with anything other than utter sobriety. The nation made a fundamental political transition peacefully on one occasion, and only with appalling bloodshed on another, and it is hard to buy ammunition these days because the dealers’ shelves are bare. So all patriots would be well advised to pick up a copy of Crane Brinton’s classic The Anatomy of Revolution, and figure out how we can achieve the necessary segue to the Fourth Republic without becoming a chapter in the next edition.

Read more:The Coming of the Fourth American Republic

Glossary for Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

As part of the run up to the release of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P.M. Barnett (Hardcover - Feb 5, 2009). I have enlisted myself, and my blog as a squire in his quest to bring America a vision and a course setting towards a more connected and safer world.

Over the next three weeks, I will be cross posting material from Tom's blog, that will help to prepare the ground for the engagement of words that Great Powers will inspire. Make yourselves ready my fellow thinkers; read, ponder and reason with all the powers of your critical minds as we prepare to carry this message afar.

Glossary from Great Powers

A Glossary of terms from

GREAT POWERS: America and the World After Bush
By Thomas P. M. Barnett

Asymmetrical Warfare - A conflict between two foes of vastly different capabilities. After the Red Army dissolved in the 1990s, the U.S. military knew it was basically unbeatable, especially in a straight-up fight. But that meant that much smaller opponents would seek to negate its strengths by exploiting its weaknesses, by being clever and "dirty" in combat. On 9/11, America got a real dose of what asymmetrical warfare is going to be like in the twenty-first century.

Big Bang - Refers to the strategy (alas, seldom articulated) of the Bush administration to trigger widespread political, social, economic, and ultimately security change in the Middle East through the initial spark caused by the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and the hoped-for emergence of a truly market-based, democratic Arab state. Thus, the Big Bang aimed primarily for a demonstration effect, but likewise was also a direct, in-your-face attempt by the Bush administration to shake things up in the stagnant Middle East, where decades of diplomacy and military crisis response by outside forces (primarily the United States) had accomplished basically nothing. The implied threat of the Big Bang was "We're not leaving the region until the region truly joins the global economy in a broadband fashion, leading to political pluralism domestically." The Big Bang was a bold strategic move by Bush, one that I supported. All terrorism is local, so either deal with that or resort to firewalling America off from the outside world.

Connectivity - The enormous changes being brought on by the information revolution, including the emerging financial, technological, and logistical architecture of the global economy (i.e., the movement of money, services accompanied by content, and people and materials). During the boom times of the 1990s, many thought that advances in communications such as the Internet and mobile phones would trump all, erasing the business cycle, erasing national borders, erasing the very utility of the state in managing a global security order that seemed more virtual than real, but 9/11 proved differently. That connectivity, while a profoundly transforming force, could not by itself maintain global security, primarily because a substantial rise in connectivity between any nation and the outside world typically leads to a host of tumultuous reactions, including heightened nationalism and religiosity.

Department of Everything Else - A Back-to-the-Future proposal (first offered in Blueprint for Action) to return to the past structure when the Army was the Department of War and the Navy was the "Department of Peace" (especially business continuity). This department would fill the gap between the current Departments of Defense and State, engaging in unconventional pursuits such as nation building, disaster relief, and counterinsurgency. In many ways, it could be a virtual department, bringing together various resources from the government, nongovernmental organization, and business sectors, along with foreign governments and the linchpin SysAdmin force. Compare the virtual department with the way movie companies work, coming together to make a film, then dissolving. Such a virtual department would work an Iraq one way and a Sudan very differently. In contrast with the Department of Homeland Security, our first and greatest strategic error in the long war on terror, the Department of Everything Else would realize that our American networks are only as secure as every network they are connected to. Such a department would feature many more civilian and older, wiser roles when compared with the current Defense Department.

Disconnectedness - In this century, it is disconnectedness that defines danger. Disconnectedness allows bad actors to flourish by keeping entire societies detached from the global community and under their dictatorial control, or in the case of failed states, it allows dangerous transnational actors to exploit the resulting chaos to their own dangerous ends. Eradicating disconnectedness is the defining security task of our age, as well as a supreme moral cause in the cases of those who suffer it against their will. Just as important, however, by expanding the connectivity of globalization, we increase peace and prosperity planet-wide.

Frontier Integration - Globalization has entered into an extended period of frontier integration--as in economic and network integration of previously off-grid or poorly connected societies. The historical example par excellence is the settling and taming of the American West after the Civil War. The chief activities are infrastructure building, the extension of social networks and rule of law, state building, the generation of permanent and pervasive security, the squelching of insurgencies and criminal mafias, and the formal marketization of existing and new economic activities--to include both "exploiting" the labor of and selling to the so-called bottom-of-the-pyramid population. America's frontier integration was continental-sized, involving millions. Today's project targets the globe's entire Gap, involving billions in so-called emerging or frontier economies. It also involves the impoverished rural regions of New Core pillars such as China and India. In general, neither Americans nor Europeans will lead this frontier integration effort. We price out too high. Instead, the frontier integrators of the age will be mostly Asians, who know better how to jump-start development in these harsher environments. America's role can be to mentor and enable the integrators, helping especially on security, or we can sit the whole thing out and hope for the best in terms of resulting political outcomes.

Functioning Core - Those parts of the world that are actively integrating their national economies into a global economy and that adhere to globalization's emerging security rule set. The Functioning Core at present consists of North America, Europe both "old" and "new," Russia, Japan and South Korea, China (although the interior far less so), India (in a pock-marked sense), Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the ABCs of South America (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile). That is roughly 4 billion out of a global population of more than 6 billion. The Functioning Core can be subdivided into the Old Core, anchored by America, Europe, and Japan; and the New Core, whose leading pillars are China, India, Brazil, and Russia. There is no substantial threat of intra-Core war among these great powers. However, there remain competing rule sets regarding what constitutes proper Core interventions inside the Gap, as recently indicated by Russia's contested intervention in Georgia's ongoing civil strife.

Globalization - The worldwide integration and increasing flows of trade, capital, ideas, and people. Until 9/11, the U.S. government tended to identify globalization primarily as an economic rule set, but thanks to the long war against violent extremism, we now understand that it likewise demands the clear enunciation and enforcement of a security rule set as well.

Grand Strategy - As far as a world power like America is concerned, a grand strategy involves first imagining some future world order within which our nation's standing, prosperity, and security are significantly enhanced, and then plotting and maintaining a course to that desired end while employing--to the fullest extent possible--all elements of our nation's power toward generating those conditions. Naturally, such grand goals typically take decades to achieve, thus the importance of having a continuous supply of grand thinkers able to maintain strategic focus.

Leviathan - The U.S. military's warfighting capacity and the high-performance combat troops, weapon systems, aircraft, armor, and ships associated with all-out war against traditionally defined opponents (i.e., other great-power militaries). This is the force America created to defend the West against the Soviet threat, now transformed from its industrial-era roots to its information-age capacity for high-speed, high-lethality, and high-precision major combat operations. The Leviathan force is without peer in the world today, and--as such--frequently finds itself fighting shorter and easier wars. This "overmatch" means, however, that current and future enemies in the long war on violent extremism will largely seek to avoid triggering the Leviathan's employment, preferring to wage asymmetrical war against the United States, focusing on its economic interests and citizenry. The Leviathan rules the "first half" of war, but it is often ill suited, by design and temperament, to the "second half" of peace, to include postconflict stabilization-and-reconstruction operations and counterinsurgency campaigns. It is thus counterposed to the System Administrators force.

Non-Integrated Gap - Regions of the world that are largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability. Today, the Non-Integrated Gap is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, virtually all of Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and most of the Southeast Asian littoral. These regions constitute globalization's "ozone hole," where connectivity remains thin or absent in far too many cases. Of course, each region contains some countries that are very Core-like in their attributes (just as there are Gap-like pockets throughout the Core defined primarily by poverty), but these are like mansions in an otherwise seedy neighborhood, and as such are trapped by these larger Gap-defining circumstances.

Rule Set - A collection of rules (both formal and informal) that delineates how some activity normally unfolds. The Pentagon's New Map explores the new rule sets concerning conflict and violence in international affairs--or under what conditions governments decide it makes sense to switch from the rule set that defines peace to the rule set that defines war. The events of 9/11 shocked the Pentagon and the rest of the world into the realization that we needed a new rule set concerning war and peace, one that replaces the old rule set that governed America's Cold War with the Soviet Union. The book explained how the new rule set will actually work in the years ahead, not just from America's perspective but from an international one.

Rule-set Reset - When a crisis triggers your realization that your world is woefully lacking certain types of rules, you start making up those new rules with a vengeance (e.g., the Patriot Act and the doctrine of preemption following 9/11). Such a rule-set reset can be a very good thing. But it can also be a very dangerous time, because in your rush to fill in all the rule-set gaps, your cure may end up being worse than your disease. The world is currently engaged in such a reset concerning international financial flows, in response to America's subprime crisis.

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System Administrators (SysAdmin) - The "second half" blended force that wages the peace after the Leviathan force has successfully waged war. Therefore, it is a force optimized for such categories of operations as "stability and support operations" (SASO), postconflict stabilization and reconstruction operations, "humanitarian assistance/disaster relief" (HA/DR), and any and all operations associated with low-intensity conflict (LIC), counterinsurgency operations (COIN), and small-scale crisis response. Beyond such military-intensive activities, the SysAdmin force likewise provides civil security with its police component, as well as civilian personnel with expertise in rebuilding networks, infrastructure, and social and political institutions. While the core security and logistical capabilities are derived from uniformed military components, the SysAdmin force is fundamentally envisioned as a standing capacity for interagency (i.e., among various U.S. federal agencies) and international collaboration in nation-building, meaning that both the SysAdmin force and function end up being more civilian than uniform in composition, more government-wide than just Defense Department, more rest-of-the-world than just the United States, and more private-sector-invested than public-sector-funded.

System Perturbation- A system-level definition of crisis and instability in the age of globalization; a new ordering principle that has already begun to transform the military and U.S. security policy; also a particular event that forces a country or region to rethink everything. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 served as the first great "existence proof" for this concept, but there have been and will be others over time. Some are purposeful, like the Bush administration's Big Bang strategy of fomenting political change in the Middle East, but others will be accidents, like the Asian tsunamis of December 2004, or America's recent financial crises.

From GREAT POWERS, to be published by G. P. Putnam's on February 5, 2009.

Barnett Offers a Gold Mine of Grand Strategy Nuggets

I am proud to claim that I have been an unabashed supporter of Thomas Barnett and his vision of a grand strategy to achieve a better future for our children. This past week a press release announced the publication of Barnett's third and most important book to date. I have posted the entire release with emphasis on some key points.

Great Powers press release »

GREAT POWERS
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Pub Date: February 5, 2009

GREAT POWERS:
America and the World After Bush
By
Thomas P. M. Barnett
"The Pentagon's New Map is easily the most influential book of our time. I never dreamed that a single book would change my outlook on the United States' role in world affairs, but one has."
- Thomas Roeser, Chicago Sun-Times

"Thomas Barnett is one of the most thoughtful and original thinkers that this generation of national security analysts has produced."
- John Petersen, President, The Arlington Institute

"[Great Powers] stands out for its in-depth analysis, historical acuity and delightfully witty prose."
- Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

Lately, we are being told this is no longer our world. America is in decline. Wars may be won, but the peace belongs to others and we have no choice but to get used to it. Others suggest it is not so much that America is in decline as that the rest of the world has caught up to us and, once again, the only thing we can do is get used to it. Taken for granted in each case is that the trends unleashed in the world today are unmanageable and chaotic and constitute a threat to our future. New York Times bestselling author and national security strategist Thomas P. M. Barnett sees things differently. "Globalization as it exists today was built by America; we're still its leader," says Barnett. "Further, the trends unleashed in this world of our making--a world modeled on our system of networks spreading, economies integrating, and states uniting--should be viewed not with foreboding but with a sense of possibilities for the future providing we have the will and strategic imagination to act in the present."

In GREAT POWERS: America and the World After Bush (G.P. Putnam's Sons; February 5, 2009; $29.95), Barnett--who has been described as "the most influential defense intellectual writing these days (The Washington Post)" and "one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time (U.S. News.com)"--presents a remarkable analysis of America and the world in the post-Bush era. He also offers a visionary grand strategy for how to proceed as we stand poised on the verge of what is arguably the greatest achievement of all time: the peaceful knitting together of a truly integrated global economy and the establishment of a truly centering middle class. Barnett believes it's up to America to shape and redefine what comes next. Now he offers a roadmap to exactly what that is and how we do it.

As our globalized system continues processing its worst financial crisis ever, Barnett sees the next few years as being the first true test of globalization. He writes, "President Barack Obama encounters an international order suffering more deep-seated strain than at any time since the Great Depression. If there was any remaining doubt that the world's great powers either all swim or sink together in this interconnected global economy, then this recent contagion has erased it. Globalization is no longer a national choice but a global condition, and at this seminal moment in history it demands from its creator renewed--and renewing--leadership. President Obama's opportunity to--as he often put it--'turn the page' could not be greater, for history rarely offers such made-to-order turning points." However Barnett also points out that the choices we've made over the past eight years have shifted the global landscape in ways that simply cannot be reversed with a new American president or even new American policies. It's not a matter simply of a course correction, but of a fundamental recalibration, and the opportunities it presents are far greater than the perils. GREAT POWERS gives us a clear understanding of both, and shows us not only how the world is now--but how it will be.
Barnett's theories and arguments are non-partisan. His supporters are both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Simply, he provides a way to frame the debate on how to make globalization truly global, retain great-power peace, and defeat whatever antiglobalization insurgencies may appear in the decades ahead. Above all he shows us that although there are many great powers at work in this complex world, it is America that has the greatest opportunity to extend or to sabotage globalization's stunning advances around the planet.

Highlights of GREAT POWERS include:

A look at how America went off the rails during the eight years of the Bush administration. "The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney" cited by Barnett are Lust, leading to the quest for primacy; Anger, leading to the demonization of enemies; Greed, leading to the concentration of war powers; Pride, leading to avoidable postwar failures; Envy, leading to the misguided redirect on Iran; Sloth, leading to the U.S. military finally asserting command; and Gluttony, leading to strategic overhang cynically foisted on the next president. ("Strategic Overhang" is the time it will take successive administrations to "burn off" the "weight" of long-pursued interventions with deeply sunk costs.) Barnett shows that facing up to these sins and the problems they have caused is essential to America's successful reengagement with a world left more unnerved by our government's counterterrorism strategy than it was ever perturbed by actual terrorists.
Barnett also looks at what the Bush-Cheney administration did right including its handling of a provocatively nationalistic government in Taipei; China's rise in general; Vladimir Putin's consolidation of power in Russia and that country's reemergence as a player to be reckoned with in international affairs; steering the U.S. through rough waters in global trade without succumbing to congressional or popular pressure for trade protectionism; and displaying a real strategic imagination regarding key development issues (outside its failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq).

A "Twelve-Step Recovery Program For American Grand Strategy." Barnett argues that our recovery doesn't stop with looking at what we did wrong. Fences need mending and relationships require repair. Drawing on the best traditions of self-help programs he describes the basic steps America needs to take to break out of the angry isolation in which it has remained somewhat trapped for the past eight years, regain some control over its destiny, and realign its as yet unstated grand strategy to a world transforming at an incredible speed.
A journey through America's two great historical arcs: the creation, transformation, and taming of the United States from 1776 to the start of the twentieth century; and the subsequent projection of that "states uniting" model upon the global landscape, beginning with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. In no uncertain terms Barnett shows that globalization as it exists today is an environment of our creating--the result of a conscious grand strategy pursued from the earliest days of our republic right through Bush's decision to invade Iraq. "What we've done is spread the same competitive spirit that drove our rise to other great powers now seeking to replicate that rise," says Barnett. "The trick will be in having the patience to steer the emergence of this global middle class while allowing the political freedoms of the rising great powers time to catch up with the economic freedoms they're beginning to attain."The core of GREAT POWERS consists of a chapter devoted to each of the five major elements of U.S. grand strategy. In each domain Barnett looks at the most important long-term trend for making globalization truly global in a post-9/11 world. He then explores a serious recent disruption that prompted new thinking on our part or a retrenchment from our grand strategic vision; offers a sense of the new rules that seemed to emerge as a result of the disruption; and outlines the "new normal" into which we slowly settled as the Bush years wound down. Jumping back outside the U.S. he then shows what happened to the long-term trend as America headed off on its own toward its "new normal." Finally, he identifies the major realignment we need to make to bring us back in line with the world of our creating and then lays out the global development we should be crafting over the next five years.

The five major elements explored in this core section are:

Economic - Barnett starts with what he considers the most profound economic dynamic of the last half-century: China's historic reemergence as a worldwide market force. He looks at the impact on the American system of 3 billion new capitalists (in China, Brazil, Russia, India, and all the smaller emerging markets); unfounded fears in the West that China's stunning rise challenges the notion that economic growth triggers democracy; and the extent to which China's economy increasingly mirrors our own. He delves into the implications of Wall Street's latest meltdown and what it says about globalization's interdependency. And he shows how rising Asia could become America's primary strategic asset in making globalization truly global. Says Barnett, "You want to 'drain the swamp' preemptively and foreclose opportunities for terrorists in the backwaters of the earth? If you really want to win this long war then do whatever it takes to make globalization go faster because jobs are the only exit strategy."

Diplomatic - Barnett explores the two main problems in current American grand strategy: our unreasonable expectation for immediate success (democracy), and our obsession with terrorists. He looks at the impact of America's big bang in the Persian Gulf (the toppling of Saddam); how we dropped the ball with Iran by fixating on its peril rather than its promise; and the need to "socialize" the Middle East problem by attracting Eastern military powers into the mix there as quickly as possible. He reflects on the extent to which a universe of players have succeeded in containing America's use of power internationally over the past several years (as well as the challenges the Obama administration will face in reversing that trend); and the implications of China's "soft-power" approach on the world stage. Finally, he explains why we need to build a team of rivals made up of the world's emerging powers who are better suited to the nation building/economy-connecting role than we are.

Security - Barnett begins by looking at the U.S. military's post-Vietnam "overwhelming force" mindset and how it was largely unprepared for what came next--the rough-and-tumble politics of wars fought within the context of everything else. (In Iraq "everything else" included the economic forces at work as globalization crept into the region as well as the social blowback that penetration was creating.) He examines the impact of the so-called "lost year" in Iraq (defined by most observers as the period running from early May 2003, following President Bush's declaration of "mission accomplished," through the explosion of insurgency violence in Fallujah the following April); and he reflects on the extraordinary paradigm shifts that have occurred within the military since then. Barnett goes on to explore the impact of the privatization of American foreign policy, and the inescapable realignment we now face: the reblending of diplomacy, defense and development in the long war against violent extremism. He wraps up this chapter by looking at what comes next in the long war: a shift in the center of gravity to Central Asia or Africa.

Networks - Here the author begins by looking at globalization's ability to create superempowered individuals and a shallower but wider pool of enemies. Barnett writes, "While emerging powers are increasingly integrated economically and great power war remains off the table thanks to nuclear weapons, every pirate and smuggler and druggie and transnational terrorist/criminal now registers on our radar." He looks at how our rules in the marketplace are shifting from "know your customer" to "know your supply chain," examines the particularly worrisome vulnerabilities of the global food trade, and explores the search for strategic deterrence in the age of globalization. Barnett also delves into the extraordinary changes that have occurred in infrastructure development in emerging and developing economies, and the opportunities these changes present for Western companies. He concludes by looking at our approach to post-conflict/post-disaster situations in areas of the world largely disconnected from the global economy, and argues for the need to create a "SysAdmin-industrial complex" that is just as hungry for these types of situations as our long-standing military-industrial complex is for "big war."

Strategic Social Issues - Barnett begins by looking at our social response to 9/11; the response of traditional, off-the-grid, patriarchal cultures (in this case the Arab world) to the incursions of the global economy; and what each of these can teach us about managing the loss of identity. He reflects on the disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina and the ways in which the fight against "global warming" became the counternarrative to President Bush's "global war on terror." (Barnett also explores the dangers of the former becoming as overhyped as the latter.) Other issues raised in this final realignment chapter include the need to link our middle-class ideology to globalization's emerging middle-class (rather than thinking in terms of erecting walls to shut out "unfair" competition); why we should consider a global economy no longer so dominated by America our greatest achievement rather than a signal of a "post-American age"; the challenges of continued economic growth in an environment of dwindling resources; the emerging competition of world religions; and the need to resurrect a progressive agenda focused on "cleaning up" globalization's many dark corners.

Barnett concludes GREAT POWERS by reminding us that although the future does have a way of happening--that it is inexorable--many of the twenty-first century's most important outcomes will be determined by the choices we make over the next dozen years. He writes, "The American System blossomed into an international liberal trade order, which in turn gave birth to the globalization we enjoy today. These are the United States' most powerful acts of creation. This world-transforming legacy created the twenty-first century environment, one marked by more pervasive poverty reduction, wealth creation, technological advance and--most important--stabilizing peace than any previous era in human history. That legacy is worth preserving, defending, and expanding to its ultimate height--a globalization made truly global."

About the Author:Thomas P. M. Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. He is the Senior Managing Director of Enterra Solutions, LLC, which advises governments on economic development, and currently serves as a Distinguished Strategist at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Howard W. Baker Center at the University of Tennessee. Named as "the strategist" in Esquire's first-ever "Best and Brightest" issue in December of 2002, he has been a Contributing Editor for the magazine, as well as a weekly opinion columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service since 2005.

Barnett has begun to offer excerpts from this soon to be released book on his popular blog that he has maintained since first coming onto the scene with his best selling The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint For Action .

Here is a taste of one of my favorite excerpts.

The American Trajectory

"The harsh truth is that most developing countries that embrace markets and globalization do so as single-party states. Sure, many feature a marginal opposition party, just as the Harlem Globetrotters always play the Washington Generals, but they're still single-party states. Mexico was like this for decades, as were South Korea and Japan.

Once economic development matured enough, a real balance took hold, and power started shifting back and forth between parties. Malaysia heads for the same tipping point today.
Americans, especially experts and politicians, typically view these regimes with a certain disdain, wondering how a public can put up with a manipulative political system where elites decide who runs for high office and only a tiny fraction of the population has any real influence. We demand more competition, more suffrage, and freer elections--now!

But take a trip back with me to the beginnings of our own country, and let me try to convince you that America needs to summon more patience with such developments, because we often demand of others what we certainly didn't have ourselves as we struggled to our feet as a nation. .

Remember this: Our country was born of revolution, including a nasty guerrilla war waged by a ragtag collection of militias against the most powerful military in the world at that time. We fought dirty, even launching a surprise attack during a religious holiday. We mercilessly persecuted fellow citizens who sided with the occupational authority. The enemy branded our military leader a terrorist. In fact, its parliament was the first in history to use such terminology to describe our violent attacks against its commerce. And true to our violent extremism, we "elected" this rebel military leader our first president in 1789. I use the word "elected" loosely, because he essentially ran unopposed--by design.

Less than 2 percent of our country's population was actually able to cast votes, as roughly half of the states chose electors in their legislatures--rich landowning patricians selecting one of their own. This rebel leader ran unopposed again for reelection three years later in 1792. When the general finally stepped down in 1797, an outcome by no means certain, he was replaced by another revolutionary leader--an unlovable enforcer to whom the revolutionary elite had delegated a number of unsavory jobs over the years. Like the general, this radical lawyer wasn't associated with an organized party as such. His revolutionary credentials were beyond reproach.
Our third president, one of the world's most notorious radical ideologues, ushered in a period of single-party rule in 1800. During that election, only six of sixteen states actually allowed the "people"--white men who met certain qualifications--to vote in the presidential race. Certain racial groups were denied the right to vote, as were women.

This one-party rule, subsequently dubbed the Era of Good Feelings, extended almost a quarter-century, getting so stale at one point that an incumbent president ran unopposed.
Finally, a whopping forty-eight years after we issued our famous Declaration of Independence declaring all men equal, we conducted a presidential election in which three-quarters of the states let their citizens vote directly for electors.

Four years later, in 1828, America finally saw an "outsider," meaning someone not from the first revolutionary generation or its immediate progeny, win the White House. Naturally, he was another war hero, who, over his eight years in office, brutalized his political opponents so much that they mockingly dubbed him "King Andrew."
The "king" then displayed the Putinesque temerity to handpick his successor, earning him the equivalent of a "third term."

This was the first half-century of American political history.

It took us 89 years to free the slaves and 189 years to guarantee African-Americans the right to vote.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage.

If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one. "(pp. 73-75)

Read the whole post: Excerpts from Great Powers, part 1

And part 2 follows with these headings.

Why our grand strategy needs to be realigned with the world.

Thank God for the Whiz Kids of Wall Street

The different world America sees

A world eager to herald America's return

What comes next in the "long war"

Connectivity and the global middle-class

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The practical challenge America faces

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Read the whole post at Excerpts from Great Powers, part 2

And as an added bonus here is a link to the deleted chapters courtesy of Tom's webmaster Sean

GP: the lost chapters

I urge everyone to spend a couple of sawbucks to purchase this important read. It will inspire you as much as it will inform you.

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Buy it here: Great Powers

Crystal Balls, Ouija Boards or Fate: Predictions for 2009

Niall Ferguson Historian, Author and esteemed Professor at Harvard and Oxford, created a look back at 2009, as he imagines it to be. Time will be the only judge and fate our time keeper.

Ferguson begins:

It was the year when people finally gave up trying to predict the year ahead. It was the year when every forecast had to be revised – usually downwards – at least three times. It was the year when the paradox of globalisation was laid bare for all to see, if their eyes weren’t tightly shut.

And coins a new title of the current economic crisis.

That was the true significance of the Great Repression which began in August 2007 and reached its nadir in 2009. It was clearly not a Great Depression on the scale of the 1930s, when output in the US declined by as much as a third and unemployment reached 25 per cent. Nor was it merely a Big Recession.

And this about the "great merger."

There was uproar when Timothy Geithner, US Treasury secretary, requested an additional $300bn to provide further equity injections for Citigroup, Bank of America and the seven other big banks, just a week after imposing an agonising “mega-merger” on the automobile industry. In Detroit, the Big Three had become just a Big One, on the formation of CGF (Chrysler-General Motors-Ford; inevitably, the press soon re-christened it “Can’t Get Funding”).

The rest of the world begins to shrink in our rearview mirror.

By the first quarter of 2009, however, the mood in Europe had darkened. It became apparent that the problems of the European banks were just as serious as those of their American counterparts.

This asymmetric character of the global crisis – the fact that the shocks were even bigger on the periphery than at the epicentre – had its disadvantages for the US, to be sure. Any hope that America could depreciate its way out from under its external debt burden faded as 10-year yields and the dollar held firm.

Obama channels Nixon.

The same was true of Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June – a decision that did more than anything else to sour relations with Hillary Clinton, whose supporters never quite recovered from the sight of the former presidential candidate shrouded in a veil. Not that the so-called “opening to Iran” produced a dramatic improvement in the Middle East region. Nobody had expected that either. It was more that, like Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, it symbolised a readiness on Obama’s part to rethink the very fundamentals of American grand strategy.

And finally, faint light appears in the waining days of 2009.

By year end, it was possible for the first time to detect – rather than just to hope for – the beginning of the end of the Great Repression. The downward spiral in America’s real estate market and the banking system had finally been halted by radical steps that the administration had initially hesitated to take. At the same time, the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

Read the complete article: An imaginary retrospective of 2009

Blog friend Mark at Zenpundit has this link to a post about the future.

“Socionomic” Futurism at Futurejacked

Related to that post is this byDave Schuler at Outside the Beltway, where Dave takes on one of the more over the top predictions to surface this week, the break up of the United States in 2010.

Breakin’ Up Is Hard to Do

UPDATE: Barnett: Top 10 foreign policy wishes for 2009

Tom Barnett weighs in with his third annual list of what he wishes the United States would do in the arena of foreign policy. It is noteworthy that several of Tom's wishes coincide with several of the predictions made by Niall Ferguson in his imagined look back at 2009.

10. President Obama's speech in New Delhi to the world's Muslims.

Ferguson predicting Obama paying a Nixon-like visit to Terhan, after Ahmadinejad loses.(see #3 wish).

8. America commits to completing -- even expanding -- the Doha Round.

Ferguson sees a deepening economic crisis worldwide that leaves the U.S. dollar the desired currency and in position to lead in expanding free trade.

7. A Securities & Exchange Commission for the global economy.

Ferguson predicted a world wide banking crisis that could lead to Barnett's suggestion coming to bloom.

3. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses Iran's 2009 presidential election.

Seems to be on everyone's wish list. Ferguson even suggests that Iran will abandon their Nuclear program after MA's departure, in order to resuscitate their flat-lined economy.

1. The U.S. economy turns the corner.

Fergusons final paragraph above, mirrors this wish.

The problem with predictions is that they can bee destroyed by seeing a "Black Swan", as Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, reveals.

War, A Social Science?

Vicksburg, May 22, 1863

Operation Cedar Falls, Vietnam

A major hat tip to Mark of Zenpundit for calling attention to a couple of excellent posts about The Social Science of War.

Mark writes:

The Social Sciences are a powerful but fractionating, reifying lens. Individually, they unearth certain aspects of large and highly complex phenomena albeit at the cost, at times, of distorting the proportional importance to the whole of the aspect that the social scientist chooses to study. The sociobiological perspective is a radical and controversial one but it is a position that is far more open to empirical investigation in a scientific sense than are many traditional components of strategic theorizing.

This subject is close to my heart and has been badly maligned in the past forty years. I have written many posts about the military and wars both past and present on this blog. We as a nation can not hope to achieve our diplomatic goals if we continue to stick our heads in the sand about the subject of war. The lead-off post that Mark highlights is by Adam Elkus of Re Thinking Security, who describes himself as, (I am a left-liberal...), has penned the seminal bugle call for re-introduction of the study of war as a social science. I whole-heartily concur with his premise that the study of war should become a part of the social science curriculum at every university.

Several developments in the fields of public, social and gender history offer other points of view that in the context of studying war, can add new facets to this complex subject.

My recent involvement with The John Boyd Roundtable, Debating Science, Strategy, and War led to an awareness of how John Boyd drew from the fields of history, physical and social sciences and Eastern Philosophy to develop his OODA Theory and how it's application has been extended far beyond the fields of battle to the business world, as illustrated by Chet Richards.

To add more support that war is a social phenomena is the book, The Culture of War by Martin Van Creveld.

Publishers Weekly says:

Hebrew University's van Creveld remains unsurpassed as a scholar of war. In this provocative volume, he challenges perhaps the subject's single greatest shibboleth—at least in Western culture. Since the Enlightenment, war has been described as a means to an end, serving essentially rational interests. Nothing, van Creveld asserts, could be further from the truth: war exercises a powerful fascination in its own right. To dismiss this is to overlook that war has generated a distinctive culture, from uniforms to war games to parades, that is despised and regularly denigrated as atavistic and irrational. Van Creveld demonstrates that war is an essential element of history, rooted in psychology.

As well as this book,The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny by Victor Davis Hanson who take the reader from Ancient Greece to the Civil War and World War II to argue, "that on rare occasions throughout the ages there can be a soul, not merely a spirit, in the way men battle."

Other media has discovered long ago that war is a social science. Think, Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, and Band of Brothers, as well as Ken Burns projects The Civil War and The War. These war films, amid the pyrotechnics and blood, hold revealing truths about human behavior.

It is well past common sense and time that the halls of American academia, take a second look at war, and it's profound impact on every epoch of human existence.

History Has A Trinity

My blog colleague Mark, the Master of Zenpundit.com posted a link Why Learn History? to an article that provides the best answer to a question Mark, and many who call themselves historians have received.

Mark begins:

This is a question I occasionally get from older children (and not a few childish adults). Despite the anti-intellectual motivation that is usually behind it, this is not an unreasonable question to ask. Basic questions are sometimes the best ones.
Diplomatic historian Walter A. McDougall has an answer that I can happily endorse:

I wholeheartedly concur with Mark's observation, and Walter A. McDougall's eloquent answer.

The Three Reasons We Teach History

In short they are:

One, obviously, is intellectual. History is the grandest vehicle for vicarious experience: it truly educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) provincial young minds and obliges them to reason, wonder, and brood about the vastness, richness, and tragedy of the human condition.

The second pedagogical function of history is quite different, and often seems to conflict with the first. That is its civic function.

—which brings us to the third, moral, function of history. If honestly taught, history is the only academic subject that inspires humility.

Mr. McDougall's article serves as an important reminder to all historians and teachers of history, that their mission, is to pass the record of human endeavor along to the next generation. But, the most important element, is to ignite a passion, so that the craft, and it's trinity for being taught continue to burn.

Don't miss reading this post!

Two days ago Steve DeAngelis of Enterprise Resilience Management posted an important essay that he crafted from an article in the New York Times entitled, Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike. http://enterpriseresilienceblog.typepad.com/enterprise_resilience_man/2008/01/the-curse-of-kn.html Steve's post The Curse of Knowledge is an excellent preface to an even more insightful essay by Mark Safranski, the master of Zenpundit.

Mark expands on the topic to offer two possible reasons for the decline in major creativity. In a nutshell, the first being, "the emphasis on vertical thinking by acknowledged experts." The second," that disciplinary fields... generate their own cultures.....where it is harder to rock the boat."http://zenpundit.com/?p=2551#comments

The answer to the decline in creativity is masterfully outlined by Mark. He relies on two of my favorite buzz words, horizontal thinking and metacognitively, using them to anchor his argument that; "Analytical-reductionism and Synthesis-consilience have to be regarded by serious thinkers as tools of equal value."

In all earnest I urge everyone to read these two fine posts by Steve and Mark. Take the time to read the links Mark provides to support his essay, they are invaluable in understanding this important topic.