Avuncular American

Obama: No Crying Over Spilt Oil

Poor President Obama.  All those pundits trying to get him to become the Emoter-In-Chief.  At least Frank Rich in today's New York Times advises him to take a course more in keeping with his character: "Don't Get Mad, Mr. President.  Get Even."

Once the leak is plugged (you see, I'm the incurable optimist), once the cleanup is underway, then is the time for systemic action.  It has to do with oil people embedded in the Interior Department and Monsanto people writing safety regulations in the FDA, and lobbyists in bed with politicians in Congress.

Thanks, by the way, to IdiomsByKids.com for the great illustration above. As we already know thanks to Malia Obama, the kids get it.

No use in crying over the disaster caused by, as Frank Rich calls them, the "corporate corner cutters."  That CCC of corrupt conniving capitalists - as opposed to virtuous capitalists, who really do exist - has to be kept under the thumb of regulators.  But that is for the aftermath, once BP (aided, perhaps, by the US Navy's deep sea specialists) plugs the flood of oil spewing from the ocean's floor.

Meanwhile, deploy the CCC.  You thought that the Civilian Conservation Corps went the way of the Depression and the ensuing New Deal.  Well, you're right.  And wrong.  The CCC lives.

Under a glowing photo of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Conservation Corps, consisting of 3,000 18 to 25 year olds (with over 100,000 alumni since its inception in 1976), is able to deal with many environmental disasters, including

Oil Spills, Search-and-Rescue, and more --There are specially trained oil spill cleanup crews and search and rescue crews.

That is just what we need, at least until the Obama Administration creates and trains a similar Federal corps.  Maybe Arnold will allow Barack to Federalize the CCC - the state needs all the revenue it can get, and BP could be made to pay the bill.

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida - what are you waiting for?  Write to the CCC's Director David Muraki ([email protected]). 

Bubba Gump Wept

With due deference to the people at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market®, and to the creators of Forrest Gump, Bubba, and Lieutenant Dan©, attention must shift - urgently - to removing the millions of gallons of crude that is floating around (or suspended under the surface of) the Gulf of Mexico.

As a good friend in Sarasota Florida reminds me, there is the matter of hurricane season.  Airborne "oil spray" is added to the toxic mix, according to this report.  Now BP can put that on its growing list of liabilities.

While I am no expert on the esoteric world of crude oil and its properties - though I've stepped on my share of it on the world's beaches over the years - I do know about VLCCs.  Very Large Crude Carriers (photo, DNV "Managing Risk"). Or how about ULCCs - the nec plus ultra in crude carriers.

These behemoths can carry some 2 million barrels of crude, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal trade item, there seems to be no particular urgency in whether these giants spend their time in the Gulf or in the North Sea.  It's just a market matter.

Well now, how about the Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, MARAD.  Look at their site, and try to find some reference to the unfolding Gulf BP disaster.  For an agency that just celebrated "National Maritime Day," about its historic achievements, how about a little contemporary activism?

Why not commandeer some of these VLCCs and ULCCs to go off Louisiana and pump up some of that sludge, even if it is a mixture of crude oil, golf balls, and seawater?  At 2 million barrel capacity, you can suck it up and sort it out later at the refinery.

In the time-honored Washington phrase that usually gets bureaucrats moving - "DO SOMETHING!"

The Right to Dry Atop Tangier

Tangier, Morocco is known for many things - commanding view of Gibraltar from the African side, birthplace of Tangerine traveler Ibn Battutah, as an "International Zone" from 1912 until Moroccan independence in 1956.  However, despite a very impressive wind power farm in the distant hills, it may not come to mind as a poster child for environmental awareness or alternative energy.  Until this:

My closeup taken on our host's rooftop does not do the scene justice.  Peer above the drying dishcloths and you'll see a sea of - antennas and satellite dishes, yes - laundry, flapping in the brisk breeze.  Tangier's outskirts might be sinking under the weight of all the concrete as it awakens from its decades-long torpor, but at least the inhabitants of the ancient medina are saving on clothes dryer electricity bills.

Stop for a moment.  Did you ever smell laundry dried outside by your mother or grandma?  Think back and sniff the freshness.  Tangier's laundry has it, because there they have the Right to Dry.

I was so busy thanking my lucky stars about being able to fly back to Europe through the volcano cloud that I let Earth Day pass without comment.  Before we left Morocco, local newspapers were already gearing up, with schoolchildren and civic groups preparing to plant trees.  Essential work there, where ancient trees are not safe from property developers.  Even business groups have sounded the alarm over the seemingly unending urban sprawl.

But back in the medina, the flapping of the sheets, the gurgling of the fountain in the courtyard, the distant throb of car ferry engines, the coast of Spain a reminder of Al-Andalus... for a while, you are taken back in time.  Some human activities don't require high fossil fuel consumption.  Just a little mint tea, as the sun sets over the Strait.

Earth Day is important, but it's what we do the Day(s) After Earth Day that is vital.

It's still not too late to plant that tree...

South of Europe's Volcanic Cloud

Al hamdulillah.  Thank God.  Thanks also to Royal Air Maroc, which got us back to Brussels yesterday from Tangier, just as Belgian air space was opening to allow a few flights to land.  Our flight from Morocco was on schedule, and the scene at Tangier's shiny new airport was a picture of calm.  We didn't realize how lucky we were - TV cameras were on hand at Brussels to record horror stories from travelers who had been stranded for days.  Whereas we were just returning on our planned day and flight.  Lucky us.

House guests in the medina of Tangier (of which more in a coming post), looking out onto the Strait of Gibraltar and across to Spain, we knew that we at least had options - ferry, train, bus - that the poor travelers stuck in airports did not.  But the feeling that the entire continent to the north, and the incessant flow of planes across the Atlantic, had come to an almost complete halt was eerie, a bit like the oppressive atmosphere of On The Beach, Nevil Shute's post apocalyptic novel turned into a classic film in 1959.

In On The Beach, the cloud of course is invisible nuclear fallout, and the refuge - only temporary, which gives book and especially film a sense of "après nous, le Déluge" - is Australia.  The rest of the Southern hemisphere has already succumbed to the radiation.

The eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano may be a natural phenomenon, but its effect on the airline industry and the rest of the world economy that is linked to this vital means of moving people and things has brought images of apocalypse to TV screens worldwide.  Whether it's your airmail letter delayed or misrouted, your rose farm in Kenya wilting in the sun, or your vacation plans ruined, the effect of this spewing spoiler is universal.  The AP has a good economic roundup.

Questions are already being raised - in a way that no amount of lecturing on air travel's effect on climate has done - over the viability of an economic model that can be grounded by almost invisible dust.  Great Britain's launching of Royal Navy ships to help repatriate its citizens has heroic echoes of Dunkirk, but the real long term solution to this vulnerability will be less photogenic.  More telecommuting, better rail/air regional hubs, and better coordination than a five day delay by European transport ministers in dialing up a conference call.

We're not yet "On the Beach," helplessly waiting for the cloud to descend upon us.  It is not, as the French title of the film goes, "Le Dernier Rivage."

Coastal Protection, Then and Now

If you’re like me, you may not have known that the patron saint of customs agents is St. Matthew. What better place, then, to hike along the sentier douanier, the customs path that follows Brittany’s rugged coastline, than at Pointe St. Mathieu, west of the port of Brest?

Customs agents used to scout the horizon for signs of smugglers trying to ply the tax-free liquor trade. In the 1940s, German bunkers consumed huge amounts of concrete in a futile quest to ward off Allied invaders. Their hulking presence is especially evident here on the watery approaches to Brest, where the Germans established an important U-Boat base.

Brest is still an important maritime center, home to France’s naval academy, and the Crozon Peninsula across the bay is reputed to be a nuclear site. But the French patrol vessels that ply these waters are probably as interested in preventing pollution than in warding off hostile ships.

Offshore, an astounding 40,000 ships a year travel the maritime highway en route to and from the English Channel. Most of them are good international citizens; some crash on the rocky outcroppings that dot the Mer d’Iroise; and some deliberately flush out their oily fuel tanks and pollute some of the most pristine waters in Europe, which have been given UNESCO protected status.

The threat is not only from offshore: industrial agriculture, especially intensive pork and chicken production, has resulted in massive nitrate pollution of Breton fresh water resources. As this wends its way to the sea, smelly (and potentially deadly) green algae creates a hideous sludge on some of the most beautiful coves and beaches in Western Europe. It’s a tragedy, but one that only comes to public attention when a horse or a dog succumbs to the toxic fumes. So far, humans have only had close calls.

Interestingly, Brittany was one of the three regions in last week’s first round of elections where Socialists and Ecologists failed to reach an agreement on joint lists for next Sunday’s second round. If any region needs more environmentalists to take on entrenched interests, it is Brittany.

Nowhere else is the contrast between differing economic models as drastic. Raise millions of pigs and chickens for our fast food, spread their waste over the fields, and scare off potential tourists who come to Brittany for its combination of rural charm and coastal adventure? If ever there was a challenge for sustainable development, it is here.

Eisenhower Wept: Embassy London's Grosvenor Farewell

Think of it as akin to Canada picking up sticks from its gleaming Embassy edifice opposite the Capitol and moving to the towers of Crystal City.  Sure, it's still near the Metro, and you can glimpse the Potomac, but people would ask what does it mean?

Don't worry, the Canadians aren't about to leave their prized perch, where Congress is reminded daily of the United States' northern neighbor.

But, as we were reminded by yesterday's announcement of the choice of an architect, the US is leaving its historic Embassy location on London's Grosvenor Square, whose postal code W1A 1AE gives you an idea how central it is to Britain's political institutions.  The Qataris are buying it.

We are, you see, moving to the Borough of Wandsworth across the Thames.  The Wandsworth Council (thanks for the architect's drawing) is happy about what it terms

the biggest regeneration opportunity in central London. The Council has identified the potential for thousands of new homes and jobs in the area which stretches from Vauxhall Bridge to Battersea Park.

Battersea, for those of you who know London, is best known for its huge (defunct) power station on the Thames, and Vauxhall (of car manufacturing fame) is the "post-industrial" neighborhood that is now home to the new MI6 HQ (at least the secret part of the "special relationship" will be closer, literally).  There is also, apparently, a memorial to Benedict Arnold in the neighborhood.

I wouldn't want to begrudge the people of Wandsworth this development opportunity, but how many foreign embassies in Washington are moving to Northeast D.C. in the cause of urban development and diversity?  Likewise, I'm happy that the architect is as energy-conscious as security-aware, choosing "miracle polymer" ETFE, which appears to be a material of the future.

But what does it mean?

A decade ago, I was working at the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square.  I used to see small groups of demonstrators line up outside my window, protesting about whatever US policy they objected to at the moment.  This was 1999-2000, and though we were in our pre-9/11 mode, we were anything but blissfully ignorant about the need to enhance security.

The demonstrators weren't the problem - Grosvenor Square had accommodated thousands during anti-Vietnam War protests in the Sixties - and the Metropolitan Police kept them in check.  Vehicular proximity was a real concern, and we were working with the authorities and the neighbors to find a solution.  We even had worked out an arrangement with the Canadian High Commission - across the Square, in a building that used to be our pre-1960 Embassy building - to rent some of their unused office space while whole sections of our chancery underwent major security and other upgrades.

Then September 11, 2001 happened, and I guess all these plans (I had already moved on) were put on the shelf.  By the time I wandered back to Number 1 Grosvenor Square a couple of years later, the place was a maze of concrete bunkers and barriers, and if I was put off, imagine the effect on the locals.

So, what does it mean?  One, it means that the State Department has decided that for its Embassy in the UK to be "modern, open, and secure," it must leave its historic location.  When I say historic, I don't mean the present building only, which was the height of architectural modernity when it opened.  As Philip Kennicott writes in today's Washington Post

The relocation... breaks a tradition of American diplomacy at Grosvenor Square dating to John Adams's appointment as the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James's in 1785.

Will the new Qatari owners care about the statue of Dwight Eisenhower that graces Grosvenor Square outside the current embassy?  Maybe it can be moved to Embassy Wandsworth, which will become the new symbol of Brand America.

Does the move indicate that we've decided that, like a mutant diamond, "terrorism is forever?"  Terrorism isn't new, only its weapons are.   And believe me, ETFE notwithstanding, if someone wants to find a way to target an embassy, they will.  Just as you lock your car door, you do want to put reasonable obstacles in their way.  But they will evolve beyond truck bombs, and already have, as we learned on 9/11.

The only thing I can say is that care has been taken to incorporate aesthetics into things like stand back, blast barriers, and polymers.  That is much more than can be said of the generation of "Inman Embassies," whose design often resembled forbidding fortresses.

The days of building new American Embassies in leafy residential neighborhoods have long been over, though many older ones still exist, beefed-up though they have been with bollards and, ick, barbed wire.  Maybe the bronze Eisenhower statue can be uprooted and moved across the Thames, where future embassy staffers can contemplate with irony the words from his inauguration, etched on the pedestal:

"The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world."

Océans

Jacques Perrin's new film Océans deserves wide-screen viewing, and I now regret that I never saw his 2001 Peuple Migrateur (Winged Migration) in the cinema.  For viewers requiring documentary purity, Roger Ebert's comment on Perrin's previous film still holds, this time for Océans:

[F]acts are not the purpose of "Winged Migration." It wants to allow us to look, simply look, at birds--and that goal it achieves magnificently. There are sights here I will not easily forget.

Substitute "sea animals" for "birds" and you have Océans.   Those of us who might doze during an earnest TV nature documentary won't be able to get any shuteye during Perrin's film.  The images are too spectacular, the soundtrack too stirring.  Perrin's voice is heard only occasionally, so the sea's own sounds stand out all the more.

No ordinary film maker sets out to present us 100 minutes of footage - eye popping though it is - on the sea without having a keen environmental sensibility.  Perrin certainly does, but he doesn't bludgeon the viewer with his message.  In fact you spend a good half of the film marveling at his unique shots of animals - fish, of course, but also marine mammals, aquatic birds, sea-going reptiles, invertebrates... everything lives down there - while wondering "when our we going to see the pollution?"

If anything, Perrin's editing for a wide audience has pared his film down from what might have been a tedious TV documentary on the threats to the oceans and our overall environment.  French TV's long running weekly "magazine of the sea" Thalassa invited Perrin for an entire evening a few weeks ago.  He provided a "making of" Océans (30 minutes, in French) plus lots of other footage that we expected to see in the film, but which probably just would have blown their time limits.

But Perrin's footage of the "Pacific Trash Vortex" in Océans - a closeup that could have been filmed in a very dirty swimming pool - is an understatement.   He knows that the Pacific's mid-ocean Texas-sized trash vortex is a death trap for millions of creatures, but even with the help of the European Space Agency (ESA), it's hard to capture that on film.  Ecological hell is best seen seal-level, as a mammal navigates an offshore swamp of detritus, within sight of a petrochemical plant belching out its gas-flaring worst.

France seems to excel in producing film makers who make us care about our natural environment.  Perrin was only making his debut as an actor (he's been in well over a hundred films and has produced or directed dozens more) when legendary undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau was attaining worldwide fame.  In recent years, environmental activist and outdoorsman Nicolas Hulot has put Ushuaia on the map, and aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has used his lens to document our amazing Earth from Above.

"Facts are not the purpose," as Roger Ebert said, but an appreciation of our precious watery resource and its denizens - that is what is behind Perrin's Océans.  The converted will see it - but how about those not in the choir?

(Poster - official site)

Climate: Earth's Recirc Button Still On

Whatever just happened in Copenhagen - and I reserve judgment 'til I've read a comprehensive debrief - the underlying problem of carbon overproduction hasn't gone away.

One thing is for sure: this post and millions like it, and the millions of emails and spam mails sent daily, will add their share of greenhouse gases to our planet's already full atmosphere.  I read somewhere that the spam sent to Hotmail accounts alone consumed the equivalent of the production of 5 nuclear power plants.  Only they're more likely to be coal-fired plants...

It's like we're in one big airplane, folks, Earth Airlines, breathing in that stale air constantly recirculated around us.  The flight never ends, and fresh air is a relative concept.  So am I going to cease blogging?  Hardly.  I'm already using public transport for most movement throughout Brussels, and I try to climb the staircase vice using the elevator in my building a good half of the time.  But I still am dependent on electricity coming - in the case for Belgium and France - from a mix of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.  I"m in the grid.

For Brussels and its surrounding countryside, the solid waste equivalent of the closed circuit effect was illustrated this past week with odoriferous obviousness.  The private sector contractor in charge of the city's main waste treatment facility decided, apparently without consulting the city (capital region) authorities, to shut down the facility and dump Brussels' untreated effluent into the rivers flowing through and out of the capital.

Into someone's back yard, that is. The backyard being the Flanders region, already prickly about the presence of the million Francophones, expatriates, and immigrants who make up Brussels, in their midst (Brussels is entirely surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders).  Every time I flushed the toilet, I felt like saying "excuseer mevrouw en meneer" or some such thing.

The Francophone Brussels environment minister even had to scurry home from Copenhagen to handle the PR mess, since all she could do about the other mess was to frustratedly order the contractor to re-open the plant, which will be done - eventually.

The affair shows, with visual and nasal effect, how no man is an island, or how "down the drain" doesn't end when you flush the toilet.  Homeowners with septic tanks know that the honey-dipper must come or the system backs up; for those with municipal sewerage systems, it gets more complicated.  But someone else always lives downstream.

Maybe politicians weren't the right people to send to Copenhagen.  How about some HVAC technicians to explain that polluted recirculated air remains polluted unless filtered?  Better yet, stop polluting the air in the first place.  Or plumbers, who know that garbage in will result in garbage out, unless purified to an acceptable level.

When it comes down to it, perhaps even in the hearts of the most die hard climate change deniers, it should be common sense and a sense of self-preservation that forces us to do the right thing.  But as last week's ballyhoo in Brussels over solid waste flowing downstream should show us, governments cannot count on their contractors to do the right thing or even the most basic of civic-minded actions.  Not without controls, oversight, rules and regulations.  The job of governments, and the people who elect them.

Strasbourg, Freiburg, My Burg: Saving Earth City By City

We recently spent an extended weekend in beautiful bourgs within easy driving distance of Brussels: Freiburg, Germany; Strasbourg, France; and Luxembourg (capital and country of same name).  For climate change negotiators in Copenhagen, a visit to these three cities near the Rhine and the Moselle rivers could help point the way to a post-carbon future.

None are car or carbon-free, and all are just as over-the-top Christmas-decorated as any typical Germanic town this season (photo: Strasbourg's Place Kleber and its 100 foot-high century-old pine tree).  But their approach to public transportation specifically and urban planning in general would be worth cloning worldwide.

Strasbourg, a city on the Rhine and the object of French and German invasions, occupations, and liberations before a united Europe put an end to all such turf-battling, is built on and between canals, rivers, and water courses of all sorts.  Which didn't keep city authorities from building a beautiful ultra-modern tram system that links downtown with its outlying suburbs.  If only Strasbourg could lick its problem of New Year's Eve car burnings (the young hoods who set fire to their neighbors' cars are not motivated by any extreme green politics; they're just hoods out to attract attention thanks to eager TV cameras)...

Across the Rhine, Freiburg im Breisgau (official website; not to be confused with nearby Fribourg in Switzerland) is a Green Mecca.  Predictably, its mayor is a Green Party member.  Not so predictably, he rules with a conservative CDU deputy.  Environmentalists from the world over flock to Freiburg to see its Vauban neighborhood, which is known for its sensible use of alternative energy sources and low-carbon footprint.  The city nestles in the foothills of the Black Forest, and with vineyards close by, has an almost perfect setting for a mixed economy that points the way to a sustainable future.

Back to reality in Brussels, where we watched an evening devoted to Copenhagen on French TV (France 2).  One of the documentaries showed Adelaide and its surrounding region, with drought-induced water shortages changing the lifestyles of urban and rural Australians alike.  And yet, in today's Washington Post, you can read about ""A Lingering Pool of Disbelief," Blaine Harden's report on climate change denial in one of the countries hardest hit: "despite a decade of record drought, Australian farmers refuse to buy into climate change."

Maybe they are taken in by the Saudi skeptics, the "ClimateGate" conspiracy theorists, and the Bush dead enders who think it's all in our fervid imaginations.  Tell that to the Alpine or Himalayan mountain guides who hike through dried scree where there used to be glaciers thirty years ago, or to the Bangladeshi families who have had to move yearly to escape the rising rivers downstream.  Maybe the deniers have their own aquifers, their own micro-climates, maybe their own survivalist militias with limitless cans of pork and beans for when climate refugees start to head north.  Maybe it's all in their imaginations - the pipe dream that somehow they can escape from the wages of their profligacy.

For those of us who have a firmer footing in reality, heed the burgs - Freiburg and Strasbourg - that are set to thrive in a post-carbon future.

America: Exceptional, Indispensable, or Musclebound?

Two unrelated but thought-provoking seminars in Brussels, plus a Presidential address from West Point later today, have put American foreign and security policy on my mind.  If the spin is accurate, we are told to expect the announcement tonight of an Afghanistan surge by the President from the US Military Academy.

Bob Herbert in the New York Times today ("A Tragic Mistake") calls escalation - to use a Vietnam-era term - in Afghanistan "the easier option"

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime.

Is that true - that the United States has been in "permanent state of warfare?"  That was one of the premises behind Michael Moore's 2002 hit Bowling For Columbine, but for a less hysterical look at a "permanent state of exceptionalism" since the outset of the republic, let me talk about the very serious conference organized around the book launch of "Exceptionalisme américain et les droits de l'homme" (American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by two young ULB law professors Ludovic Hennebel of the Magna Carta Institute and Arnaud Van Waeyenberge of the Perelman Centre).

Non-lawyer that I am, I was most interested in one of the assertions in the book/conference by Van Waeyenberge: that the European human rights concept of "human dignity" - curiously - is not a concept that is enshrined in the US Constitution, though I suppose the Bill of Rights goes some way towards rectifying the omission.  But even there, the enumerated rights don't really address human dignity.

Maybe that's why there is a discipline called Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS), "Breaking the cycle of humiliation."  Remember how the general public in the US appeared to be less than horrified at the revelations of Bush/Cheney-approved torture?  Perhaps they have become inured to the routine hand and foot shackling of even non-violent suspects in the American judicial system, the fitting of slavery-evoking "spit guards" on young minority defendants, the chaining of women prisoners as they deliver babies... yes, "exceptionalism" can include lots of affronts to human dignity.

One shining example of taking exception to Bush/Cheney legal and moral exceptionalism was in the JAG corps, the military's judicial and prosecutorial cadre in the Judge Advocate General branches of each of the services.  If the US still claims adherence to the Geneva Conventions, it is in large part thanks to several senior military lawyers and judges, who put their careers on the line.

Venerable Realists, and Realistic Upstarts

Exceptionalism, and Madeleine Albright's "indispensable nation" were also the subject of an IERI conference that I moderated on readings of three prominent American strategic thinkers: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel Huntington.  I was relieved that the analyst, Jacques Lippert of IERI, took issue with Huntington's "clashing civilizations," as his amalgam of Chinese/Islamic threats to the West always sounded like the lumping together of deadly enemies Iran and Iraq with outlying crazies in North Korea to form Bush's "Axis of Evil."

But lest the audience of European Union functionaries and diplomats get the impression that American strategic thought is caught in a Kissinger-Brzezinski time warp of the Seventies, I harped on about Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich and his take on realism as an antidote to the dark ages of neoconservatism. In "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War" (my review), Bacevich builds his argument against military adventurism, and against the bipartisan tendency to look to military solutions for thorny world problems.  A musclebound muscle man is like a one-note song.  Bacevich's most recent book, "The Limits of Power: American Exceptionalism," should be required night table reading for Obama Administration advisers.

Just as Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Albright incarnated the mid-20th century European exodus to the safety of the United States, so do some of today's brightest thinkers on international affairs - Fareed Zakaria and Parag Khanna - represent another, southern, diaspora of growing importance in 21st century USA.  Their books point to "the rise of the rest" or a dynamic, resource-rich "second world" that has come up out of the old Third World.  Neither would sign on to the "realpolitik" definitions of national power that narrowly focus on troop strength or missile range.  They would, however, see merit in the DIME construct that the US military likes to inculcate in its strategic thinkers, that Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic pillars constitute crucial elements of national power.  Not in isolation, but collectively.

Colin Powell, soldier and diplomat that he has been, knows a thing or two about the bases of national power, and was a keen believer in that phrase "all elements of national power."  His Powell Doctrine, which includes overwhelming force coupled with national purpose and an exit strategy, may be due for a revisit, as we learn in today's post from Diplopundit.

If so, it couldn't be more timely.