This week, debate in the Senate began in earnest on the federal energy bill - and the debate in the US, around the world, and on the internet shows no signs of abating. In a widely cited poll, Yale University researchers found that an overwhelming majority of Americans are worried about dependence on foreign oil (92%) and want government to develop new energy technologies to address it (93%). Apparently, they haven’t been reading their Kunstler, or else they’d know that there are no solutions other than the long-overdue destruction of our sinfully consumptive civilization - or maybe they’ve been reading their Engineer-Poet instead, and know better than to buy into sci-fi catastrophilia.
…Or maybe they’ve been keeping up with New Energy Currents here at Winds of Change, a broad, monthly roundup of new developments in energy science, technology, and policy. By John Atkinson of chiasm
Tom Barnett has a new article up at Wired titled the New Magnum Force.
The Geneva conventions, as it turns out, served a few purposes: They created an international order, separated the civilized nations from the outlaws, and protected Americans. The 1949 convention was designed to prevent a rerun of the atrocities of the last great global war - a struggle between sovereign states. Today, we’re waging a new type of war (for us, at least) against a new type of enemy (the Man With No State). Unless we want to spend the rest of this conflict trying to rationalize police brutality and torture, the US needs to acknowledge (1) that it’s not above the law; and (2) that it needs a new set of rules for capturing, processing, detaining, and prosecuting such nonstate actors as transnational terrorists. In short, we need Dirty Harry to come clean. Frontier justice must be replaced by a real justice system. And there’s nothing wrong with figuring this out as we go along.
I’ve linked to Tom Barnett a lot. What first brought Tom to my attention was a front page WSJ article that profiled him, his view on a grand military strategy for the US, and the famous PowerPoint presentation he’s used to brief our military and executive officials on said strategy for the past several years.
Now you can see the brief first-hand, one he gave to the Defense Department’s 25th Highlands Forum, courtesy CSPAN. Go here to watch the stream. The presentation is 90 minutes long, the full segment more than two hours, and RealMedia is required. (If you don’t have it, there’s a link on the CSPAN site.)
This is required viewing. Take the time.
The Pentagon’s New Map author Tom Barnett was on NPR earlier this week; here’s a transcript of the interview. I found this exchange interesting:
INSKEEP: When you’ve been brought in to work with and advise some of the senior US military officials who are running military affairs in the area of the world that you write about, what’s your sense of the big unanswered questions that are on their minds?Mr. BARNETT: I think the two big questions that are out there are really what we’re going to end up doing with Iran and its push for the bomb, because Iran is such a key security pillar in the Middle East, that if it’s not on our side, it’s hard to see how we’re going to affect a stable, peaceful, connecting Middle East. It’s going to be a difficult time there as long as they’re in the position of vetoing any effort we make in that region.
The second question is really the question of rising China. We have to look at them much like the British looked at the United States in the first several decades of the 20th century. We have to see them as a rising power to be co-opted, not confronted, because I think if you look at their strategic interests and you look at our strategic interests, the overlap there is absolutely tremendous. It’s Asia whose energy requirements are going to double in the next 20 years. So in many ways, our quest for a more stable, connected Middle East serves the interests of a rising China far more in a direct sense than it does America.