rgj...Internal Political and External international diplomatic or war decision-makers [sometimes mistakenly referred to as LEADERS ] are thought to be governing, solving problems for the nation states- yet all decision-makers everywhere are subject to perverse incentives to protect their authority, power to dominate and control, paycheck and position. Key-word decision-makers. problem solvers like #Obama are doing something entirely different- iNDUSTRIAL TRADITIONAL LEADERS ARE BAFFLED AND BEFUDDLED- HELL BENT ON PURSUING YESTERDAYS ANSWERS TO TODAYS PROBLEMS.. You cant win a complex game if you are grossly mistaken about what your opponents AND FRIENDS are doing. Is our current world situation dangerous- very much so. Is it less dangerous because of the brilliant and unconventional thinker in the White house?..Yes- the way out of global war, a collapsing global trade and a thousand years of war that seems to be a certainty is in sight- but it is made more dangerous by internal political decision-makers who seek power and nothing else. #Republican and #Democrat decision-makers seek personal and PARTY power to dominate and enrich themselves and cronies- rather than protect their own nation. And yes, individual nations within the #EU have a similar but less dangerous problem. #Russia, #China are both in the grip of psychopaths who seek only power & CONTROL- if the only tool you own is a hammer- every problem looks like a nail. Meanwhile, #Brazil, #India and #Peru are the worlds leaders in advancing a workable DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLIC, growing economic power at a rate that matches the economic decline in Russia....rgj Mutual miscalculation is one of the most dangerous errors in foreign policy. Deliberately escalating a crisis does, after all, sometimes work: when you’re better able to endure its consequences than your rival, they might make concessions they otherwise wouldn’t. But crises are hard to predict. They don’t always move in straight lines. You might be less resilient than you thought—or your rival might be tougher. He may have tricks up his sleeve you didn’t expect. Making this kind of miscalculation hurts you. And when your opponent makes a similar miscalculation, you both lose. Thus, for example, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, thinking he could reverse some unpleasant concessions Iraq had made to Iran years before while the young Islamic Republic was weak. And he made big gains in the early days of the war. But the conflict stalemated and dragged on. Two years later, the Iranians had reversed most of Saddam’s victories and held the upper hand. The Iraqi strongman proposed a ceasefire. Now it was Iran’s turn to err—it went on the attack into Iraq, pursuing the end of Saddam’s regime. They didn’t succeed. The war dragged on for six years and ended exactly where it had begun—but both sides had seen hundreds of thousands of their young men killed, both sides had spent enormous sums of money, both sides had seen their cities bombed and infrastructure ruined. Both sides lost. The consequences of that mutual miscalculation hang over both countries today. The United States and Russia may be on that path today as the crisis in Ukraine sparks talk of a “new Cold War.” Paul J. Saunders, executive director of the Center for the National Interest and associate publisher of this magazine, has just released a collection of essays from Russian and American experts on their nations’ policy options in a crisis. The prognosis is grim. “The overarching conclusion of the four papers,” writes Saunders, “is that both the U.S. and Russian governments are likely to believe that they possess acceptable policy options to not only confront one another but to impose significant costs on the other party if necessary.” These mutually confrontational policies don’t come without a price, he warns: a “foundation of this judgment...is a failure to recognize the potential price that their own nation may pay in a direct conflict or (more likely) in a long-term adversarial relationship.” And that’s not all. Though one occasionally hears lamentations that today’s chaotic world lacks the moral and strategic simplicity of the old Cold War (that’s a misreading of history, by the way), a new Cold War would lack some of the stabilizing mechanisms that had given it a measure of predictability. Old connections between officials have been broken, “the informal rules and patterns of the Cold War have been forgotten,” and a more globalized, more interconnected world “has made...bilateral relations harder to understand or predict.” Opportunities for mutual miscalculation may abound until both sides “figure out how to deal with one another...through a succession of trial-and-error experiments.” Saunders notes that Washington and Moscow have been here before, when the Cold War first began; “even after over a decade [of trial and error]...the two sides came dangerously close to a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.” TNI will be releasing the four essays in the collection online next week; you can also read them (and Saunders’ insightful introduction) here, at CFTNI’s Ukraine Watch website. Unlike Iran and Iraq, the outlines of a mutual miscalculation seem to be spelled out beforehand.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:11:09 +0000
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