Questions for Kent Moors.

Q: Why should Americans care that Saudi Arabia has fallen on hard times?

If the situation continues for any time it will lead to political instability in Saudi Arabia.

Those who argue for American self–sufficiency, that we can somehow produce the energy we need here in the U.S., don’t understand the nature of the oil market.

In my judgment, we have about 30 years left of a sustainable crude oil based economy.

Saudi Economic Problems, American Foreign Policy and the Future of Oil

The world does not look today the way most anticipated it would after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Great-power competition was supposed to give way to an era of geoeconomics. Ideological competition between democracy and autocracy was supposed to end with the "end of history." Few expected that the United States' unprecedented power would face so many challenges, not only from rising powers but also from old and close allies. How much of this fate was in the stars, and how much in Americans themselves? And what, if anything, can the United States do about it now?

In a selfish world, enlightened wisdom may be beyond the capacities of all states. But if there is any hope, it lies in a renewed understanding of the importance of values. The United States and other democratic nations share a common aspiration for a liberal international order, built on democratic principles and held together, however imperfectly, by laws and conventions among nations. This order is gradually coming under pressure as the great-power autocracies grow in strength and influence and as the antidemocratic struggle of radical Islamic terrorism persists. If the democracies' need for one another is less obvious than before, the need for these nations, including the United States, to "see further into the future" is all the greater.

The September 12 Paradigm

War Nerd:

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

South Ossetia, The War of My Dreams

James Dobbins:

It is highly flattering to be offered this opportunity to offer thoughts on a new grand strategy for the United States. I must admit, however, to certain reservations about the utility of such exercises. Having entered public service at the beginning of the Vietnam war and continued through the rest of the Cold War, the short lived New World Order, and the opening campaign of the War on Terror, I have become persuaded that the United States has enduring interests, friends, and values, all of which militate for a high degree of consistency in our behavior and continuity in our policies. Observation of the war in Iraq has only reinforced this view.

The contemporary schools of foreign policy – realism, Wilsonianism and neo-conservatism – provide pundits and political scientists with useful instruments for analysis but afford poor guides for future conduct. Wise presidents and legislators will pick and choose among these alternative efforts to describe and prescribe for a world that defies easy categorization, worrying less about ideological coherence and more about incremental progress toward long-term national goals which do not and should not, in the main, change from one Administration to the next.

Of course we need a national strategy, and of course it must evolve with changing circumstances, but I doubt we need a new strategy every year, or even every four or eight years. Rather than use my brief time here to lay out an entirely new and fully developed strategic construct, therefore, I feel I can better serve the Committee by explaining how our existing national security strategy should be modified in light of recent experience and changing circumstances.

Does America Need A New Grand Strategy?

War is unique, but the same point holds in other contexts, including the domain of climate change, in which costly precautions inevitably create risks. This is not to say that we should not take action to avert the dangers posed by climate change; we should. But if we take steps to reduce risks, we will always create fresh hazards. No choice is risk-free. For environmental and other problems, we need to decide which risks to combat - not comfort ourselves with the pretense that there is such a thing as a "safe" choice.

The nations of the world should take precautions, certainly. But they should not adopt the precautionary principle.

Throwing precaution to the wind

The global order is changing. The 21st century will be marked by many competing sources of global power. Across politics, economics, culture, military strength, and more, a new group of countries has growing influence over the future of the world.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality is a Stanley Foundation project designed to raise awareness, motivate new thinking, and ultimately improve US foreign policy regarding this global transformation. Our aim is to discuss several of the countries challenging the global order, major issues which cut across national boundaries, and how all of this will impact American lives.

As this new world unfolds, America will increasingly need other nations, and they will need us in order to build a better future. Leadership and cooperation in this situation require understanding the world as it really exists.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality

Security and stability in the 21st century have little to do with traditional power politics, military conflict between states, and issues of grand strategy. Instead they revolve around the disruptive consequences of globalization, declining governance, inequality, urbanization, and nonstate violent actors. The author explores the implications of these issues for the United States. He proposes a rejection of “stateocentric” assumptions and an embrace of the notion of the New Middle Ages characterized, among other things, by competing structures, fragmented authority, and the rise of “no-go” zones. He also suggests that the world could tip into a New Dark Age. He identifies three major options for the United States in responding to such a development. The author argues that for interventions to have any chance of success the United States will have to move to a trans-agency approach. But even this might not be sufficient to stanch the chaos and prevent the continuing decline of the Westphalian state.

From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy

A report from the Rebel’s Republic, a breakaway state in western Bosnia where the Minister of Smiles rules alongside the Minister of Artificial Blondes.

Letter from Bosnia

Hizbollah’s takeover of much of West Beirut began as a cost-of-living strike on 7 May 2008. Yet the course of events, their speed and ultimately violent turn exposed the true stakes. For almost four years, Lebanon has been in a crisis alternatively revolving around the government’s composition, its program, the international tribunal investigating Rafiq al-Hariri’s assassination, the choice of a new president and the electoral law. All attempts at peaceful resolution having failed, it has reverted, more dangerously than ever, to its origins: an existential struggle over Hizbollah’s arms. The government’s 14 May decision to reverse the measures – removal of the airport security chief and questioning Hizbollah’s parallel telephone system, a key part of its military apparatus, precipitated the crisis – is welcome as is the Arab League-mediated solution. The onus is now on all Lebanese parties to agree a package deal that breaks the political logjam and restricts how Hizbollah can use its military strength without disarming it for now.

No party can truly win in this increasingly volatile lose-lose confrontation. Hizbollah clearly prevailed in the military showdown, demonstrating its ability to overrun any opponent. Politically, however, the balance sheet is far different. Outside its own constituency, it is seen more than ever as a Shiite militia brutally defending its parochial interests rather than those of a self-proclaimed national resistance. The blatantly confessional aspect of the struggle has deepened the sectarian divide, something the Shiite movement long sought to avoid. Hizbollah’s principal Christian ally, General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, appears deeply embarrassed. Although Lebanon’s intense polarisation might enable him to retain most of his followers in the short term, over time his alliance with Hizbollah will become ever more difficult to justify. The government has remained in place and will be able to continue rallying domestic and international support.

But the principal Sunni party, Saad al-Hariri’s Future Movement, has equal reason to worry. The March 14 coalition was forced to back down and revoke its controversial measures. The Sunni community is bewildered, stunned by its inability to resist Hizbollah’s three-day takeover and angry at a leadership accused of letting it down. Pressure on the heads of the Future Movement to bolster its military capacity will grow; simultaneously, some militants will be drawn to more radical, possibly jihadi movements. Its other allies, notably Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, appear demoralised and defeated. The army, too, has been dam­aged, unable to restrain the opposition and harshly criticised by the ruling March 14 coalition as well as many ordinary Sunnis. The risks of an escalating sectarian conflict are real and dangerous.

By withdrawing its decisions, the government has helped calm the situation. But a threshold has been crossed, and it will be very hard to turn back the clock. To minimise the risks of a more dangerous conflagration, renewed efforts pursuant to the Arab League agreement are needed to settle on a new president and national unity government that accepts for now Hizbollah’s armed status while strictly constraining the ways in which its weapons can be used. In the longer term, stability will require that third parties cease using Lebanon as the arena for their fierce regional and international competition and, just as importantly, that Lebanese political leaders cease enabling such costly interference.

Lebanon: Hizbollah’s Weapons Turn Inward

Every 20 years or so, the end of America is nigh — ever since the 18th century when, in France, Comte de Buffon fingered the country as a den of degeneracy while Abbé Raynal slammed its cultural poverty: America had not yet produced “one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius.” In 1987, in his book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” the Yale historian Paul Kennedy saw the United States on the road to perdition — this, four years before the suicide of the Soviet Union, which left America all alone in the penthouse of global power. Now, two decades on, it is the much-hyped “great power shift” toward Asia that will turn the United States into a has-been.

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria