Blogger Simon World recommended Pundita to me. Good call. She just opened my eyes to a perspective I had never considered before - but I'd better. And so should you, I think.
Winds of Change.NET has covered and explained The Bush Doctrine before, but Pundita looked at it from a new perspective - a global development perspective. This idea bring new insights to Barnett's "Pentagon's New Map" core/gap thesis. It clarifies some key issues around global socio-economic development (or non-development). And it links into concepts that touch on our survival in ways that go beyond WMDs.
We'll start with China and the rascal rabbit of life's surprises:
"The drawback with pinning faith on planning is that one can't predict and control life, much less plan for life's surprises. So as messy as the free society is, it has the edge where it counts -- in the struggle for survival -- because a democracy allows for highly diverse input to government in response to new challenges. That increases the chance that an effective response can be quickly mustered to deal with life's surprises."
That's the core, and it feeds nicely into Mark Steyn's scathingly dead-on essay Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The [ruling party] communists, of course. He thinks India is a much better bet. Me too - even given India's famous bureaucracy and limited economic liberalization. The problems China faces, as chronicled in Winds comprehensive post about China's potential futures, are likely to demand more adaptability than China's current system can produce.
Unfortunately, that problem may hit us on a very personal level.
Pundita approaches The Bush Doctrine from the perspective of a long-time development professional, and notes:
"That's why I used the examples of Beijing's awful initial response to SARS and H5N1 in the Ducking Reality essay. Beijing's reaction to the SARS outbreak perfectly illustrates the stagnant aspect of dictatorship. Beijing honestly believed they could erase all trace of the original source of the outbreak, which was a military hospital. But someone who worked at the hospital called a relative in Taiwan; the relative then called back to the mainland, then ping! the wascal wabbit Reality was suddenly beyond Beijing's control."
Why does this matter? Try this on:
"And there is the 10,000 pound gorilla. I received a letter in response to my recent mention of H5N1; the writer referred to the possibility of a pandemic. I didn't have the heart to reply that it would be a statistical anomaly if there is not a pandemic. In other words, it will be a miracle if the human race dodges this bullet."
Discarded Lies ran a January post referencing Mark Helprin's "Our Blindness" essay, about 'expected unexpected' threats and the 1918 pandemic that killed 50 million people. I knew I wanted to do something with it, but it sat in my bookmarks for months as I wondered what. Pundita just handed me the key that snaps it into a larger and more meaningful framework.
Back to that rascal rabbit of reality:
"...In this discussion, the Chinese villagers represent the intelligence/knowledge base 'river' in every society. If that river is dammed up by dictatorship -- the pool, represented by the government, stagnates. Ideas can't flow, responses can't flow.
...Today, the lead-time has greatly shrunk for many challenges. That means the ability to muster a quick, effective response depends greatly on a society's flexibility. The river must flow: the government must have ready access to the knowledge base and intelligence represented by the society as a whole.
So when President Bush talks about democracy saving civilization, he's looking at democracy from the angle of its ability to harness society's river of knowledge and keep it flowing. I venture that is what China's leaders don't understand about the Bush Doctrine. If so, they're not alone."
No, they aren't. I had missed it, too. Wolfowitz, judging by his record in places like Indonesia and his comments about "removing the shackles on democracy" rather than the idea of "exporting" it, may have grasped some of it. Now that he's in charge of the World Bank (whose essential failure is explained in Pundita's Never Assume), I hope so.
Belmont Club put it well in his Nov. 2004 post Pro and Contra:
"History may remember Jacques Chirac as one of the most prolific institution builders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The European Union and the United Nations are but some of the multilateral projects he sought to strengthen in the belief they would serve as a prototype for the future ordering of the world. Wolfowitz's vision seems altogether more complex. He seems unwilling to speak of institutions outside the context of empowerment, as if to speak of instruments of governance without freedoms was tantamount to prescribing tyranny. Their difference of opinion may be rooted, not so much in an argument over bureaucratic arrangements, but in their view of the nature of man himself."
Which view wins, matters.
"Which view wins, matters."
Chirac is loosing, on every point. France is in decline. The EU will change it's character: from a bureaucratic, centralist institution, built from the bottom down (French Europe) to a a union of democratic-nation states who form a common market (British Europe).
21th century will see the end of the aristocratic-bureaucratic centralism, which has been the continental European model of statehood for century, and it will see the triumph of the democratic, empowering structures that have evolved in England and USA.
Hope so. Ulrich.
Great blog btw, your guest writers too, really enjoyed those.
And Joe, gems on India Uncut, thanks for pointing at em. restates something i had mentioned before, that you can be denied permission to open up a shop.
Flat out Denied, by the commie burocrats. thanks to that universal socialist evil, leftist totalitarians who have a rather narrow view of human rights. (look at all the redundancy in that sentence)
A man from Taiwan goes to China, says he wants to make power supplies, the Chicoms said great .. how large a building will you require, he comes back with plans,, they tell him, ok it will be ready in 6 months.
In 6 months it was complete, by the end of the year he was in full production and they was building a second factory opposite a grass plaza crossed with sidewalks picnic tables and doted with shade trees. in 7 months it was also in full production.
Thats impossible in India ... it Impossible in the USA for that matter ... that factory complex now is the largest supplier of computer power supplies in the world, and get this, they still say "Made in Taiwan" well thats where the company HQ is.
Dear Mr Katzman:
Your insightful essay goes to the heart of a point I've struggled to make in a thousand ways in what must be hundreds of published essays by now.
By many twists and turns, over the course of many years, governments in the Free World lost their compass -- not only their moral compass but also their survival compass. The Bush Doctrine is a simple recognition of that; it restores the compass and points the way back from the brink of disaster for civilization.
There are several reasons why this has not been widely seen and understood. One reason is that the doctrine has been confused with the US-led global war on terror; another is that the US invasion of Iraq met with protest from many quarters. There is a tendency to see the doctrine as a US ploy to justify the war on terror and US imperial objectives. Such views act as a mental screen, which prevents an objective assessment of the principles on which the doctrine rests.
Then, too, there is Bush himself: he is a national leader, not a philosopher. Yet I suspect he made a conscious decision to outline the doctrine with the broadest strokes and leave it to others to fill in the picture it conveys. If that was indeed his decision, it is ultimately a wise one, for the Bush Doctrine does not belong only to America. It belongs to the world. As you noted in the closing sentence of your commentary, it matters greatly that the view informing the doctrine wins out.
Kindly relay my best regards to Bill Roggio, and thank you for your well-written insights.
I agree with Raymond about India. China is a better place for business if English language skills, or getting locally generated profits out of the country, are not important. There is much more talk than action in terms of India becoming more hospitable for business.
Man, this is the stuff that makes me reluctant not to check in for a couple of days.. excellent.
>Thats impossible in India ... it Impossible in
>the USA for that matter ... that factory
>complex now is the largest supplier of computer
>power supplies in the world, and get this, they
>still say "Made in Taiwan" well thats where the
>company HQ is.
Ummm...nope.
Opening factory complexes on virgin U.S. sites was my father's particular skill set for ZF Industries. He opened an axle plant in Alabama, a service center in Michigan and a multi-occupant manufacturing plant for Ford in Chicago.
The long pole in his execution process was dealing with high level corporate managers, not government regulations.
Specialists, like my father, in opening new site simply have a better grasp of the interlocking utility requirements, local, state and federal government requirements as related to getting the multiple vendors and users to agree on anything.
Since his retirement, his appearances before the local property tax assessment board in San Antonio, Texas have been life altering experiences for those local politicos trying to justify taking more of his money.
Tom,
The key 'graph from the Steyn piece that Joe linked too:
India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
Whatever the problems with the socialist mandrin bureaucrats in India, the formal economy in India is starting to displace the informal economy in a way that China cannot match. By definition, China's goverment cannot treat its people like consumers nor do the vast majority of rural Chinese villagers want to act like consumers.
Indians want to be consumers and Indian businesses are responding to that. That piece of human infrastructure is why India will beat China.
Freedom wins.
I think Pundita's Key is going to hit the big time. She's attained lift-off, IMO, and is going to be admitted to the inner circle of Blogosphere Movers And Shakers.
Trent, go here:
http://indiauncut.blogspot.com/2005/06/myth-of-indias-liberalization.html
It's from a trackback on the China thread below this one.
Tech Central Station has an interesting article today which shines some interesting light on this whole idea. You can find it at :
http://techcentralstation.com/061705A.html