If You Think You Understand The Role Of Social Media In The Arab Spring Uprisings (And Particularly If You Don't), Watch This Video...

 

This video is an hour long and, frankly, I didn't think I would have the time this morning.  Started watching nonetheless and became riveted by one of the most cogent explanations of the role of social media in activism I have heard.  Even if you disagree (and this is not my area of expertise so I hope those that do disagree will do so in the comments so we can all learn), it is well worth the hour it takes to watch.

(Many thanks to my friends at Sharp for this!)

Sabotaging The System, The Cyberwar Plan, The PRC's Cyberwar Capability and Trillions (Cyberwar Link List)

Cyber stuff is everywhere these days and the last couple of weeks have seen a number of interesting articles and videos make the rounds:

• Sabotaging The System. I would start the tour of this particular horizon with the recent 60 Minutes report on the cyberthreat. Readers should note that, in addition to the video below, there is quite a bit of additional material on the website as well.
  

Watch CBS News Videos Online

• The Cyberwar Plan. The National Journal recently posted an online article that discusses in some detail the US's own offensive cyberwar capabilities. Whether you agree with Jeff Carr or not over the appropriateness of this article, it is the most comprehensive piece I have seen on what is likely an open secret among the hackers of the world and those that sponsor them.
• Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation. This research report actually came out last month but it is one of those kinds of reports that, if you haven't seen it, you should. It is very solid open source analysis by the good people at Northrop-Grumman for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
• Trillions (via Gizmodo). This one is probably my favorite entry on the list. It is not directly related to cyberwar but it provides an interesting perspective about where all this is going to go -- is going to have to go -- before too long.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Towards An Unruly World: Ideas Of Interest (Day 1 -- International Security Forum)

Related Posts:
Live-blogging The ISF
BBC Monitoring

The ISF Conference began yesterday at the International Conference Centre in Geneva. It is a magnificent facility, with 640 attendees, and the speaker's list looks very interesting but the rules of the conference are going to cramp my style.

The whole ISF is being held under the Chatham House Rule and this prohibits me from citing who said what. That said, I can report some of the ideas to emerge from the conference.

Some of these ideas were unsurprising but some of them either had surprising twists or were brand new ideas entirely. I will start with the unsurprising ones first:

The Parade of Horribles. Climate change, war, terrorism, energy, food and water shortages, the demographic time bomb, WMDs, cyberwar, economic collapse... Lawyers call a lengthy string of terrible things like this the "Parade of Horribles". It is a rhetorical device designed to engage attention and compel action and it was used in much the same way here. What was interesting was the degree of consistency -- the same list of threats came up in multiple different contexts.

China and India. There seemed to be a good bit of concern and a certain sense of inevitability that China and India would emerge as future powerhouses. Nothing new here, of course, but the degree of certainty about this shift in power was noticeable. Certainly I heard more of this type of talk here in 24 hours than you do in the States over the course of several months. In addition, it was rarely just "China" and mostly "China and India".

Solutions. There was also a remarkable consensus about solutions: Reinforce international institutions (including the UN Security Council and regional initiatives); establish the "right amount" of regulation for markets; and increased coordination between defense, diplomacy and development agencies/organizations.

Some of the surprises:

Cyberwar/crime. There was far more talk concerning this issue than I thought there would be. If you take a look at the panels in detail, you can see that cyber takes up quite a bit of real estate. Interestingly, there is not a single panel devoted exclusively to terrorism (though it permeates the discussions here) but there are several devoted exclusively to cybersecurity issues. At one point there was even talk of Alternate Reality Games!

Emphasis on intelligence analysis tools and methods. No one called it that, of course. No, they used code words such as "security foresight" but they couldn't fool me -- they were talking about intelligence. Collection of information did not seem to be an issue; figuring out what the info we have actually means did.

"Resiliency". I think I witnessed the birth of a buzzword. The word "resiliency" kept coming up. The need to build resilient societies, have resilient systems. I think that the use here is similar to the way environmentalists use the word "sustainable" and the way network theorists use the word "robust". There was a sense that the runaway process of globalization had sacrificed too much of the world's resiliency for the sake of efficiency and that at least part of the current set of problems was due to this imbalance (Note: John Robb has been talking about the "resilient community" for quite some time but it was interesting to see the same term crop up here).

Surreal Saturday: Molten Iron Throwing (YouTube via Neatorama)

Neatorama featured this video earlier this week of Chinese farmers who have -- for hundreds of years, apparently -- thrown molten iron against a big wall in lieu of launching fireworks for the lantern festival.

Global Risks 2009: Hard Landing Predicted For China (World Economic Forum)

The boffins of Davos have done it again. This year's Global Risk Report, prepared by the World Economic Forum is on the street and a more grim story I have rarely read.

Consider these findings (Bold mine):

• "The decline in export demand has led to a substantial reduction in China’s overall economic growth, increasing considerably the risk of a hard landing that would stress the financial system and could generate social tensions within China and beyond as other economies face similar declines."


• "Although global equity markets have declined on average by more than 50% in a very short time, the vicious circle between falling asset values, write-downs and attendant pressure on the capital position of financial institutions and continued deleveraging appears to be unbroken. This vicious circle is now affecting manufacturing, services and households around the world and the credit crunch has generated a substantial weakening of economic activity and growing credit losses."


• "The US, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain and Australia are all already running high deficits. Massive government spending in support of financial institutions and growth are threatening to worsen fiscal positions that are already precarious in many countries. The convergence of this decline with rising health and pension costs in industrialized economies due to demographic trends will place further fiscal pressure on governments."


• "...uncertainty in the financial sector, falling asset prices, poor credit conditions, weak demand and rising unemployment could create a deflationary spiral. However, the short-term risk of deflation must be seen in the context of a long-term inflation risk caused by the large monetary stimulus in pursuit of financial and economic stability and the risk posed by the growing public debt. Economic history is littered with periods during which governments reduced their debt burden through inflation."

These guys were spot on last year when they indicated that the greatest risk for 2008 (in terms of risk and dollars lost) was asset price collapse. Let's hope they are less accurate this year...

• Note: With respect to China at least, the DNI's threat assessment last year mentioned a similar threat (in much less stark terms). I noted at the time that all of projects we had done here at Mercyhurst regarding China saw the wheels starting to come off the Chinese juggernaut sometime after the 2008 Olympics. The dynamic pretty much went like this in every case: Something -- environmental degradation, energy prices, corruption, downturn in the business cycle -- threatens the social contract between the Chinese Communist Party and the people of China. This social contract basically says "We will allow the CCP to rule as long as things are getting better for me and mine." Once they start to get worse, the regime change clause of the Mandate of Heaven kicks in...
  

The report this year is organized around the same types of risks as last year's report. There is a briefing chart supplement this year with some very interesting graphics in it. The image below, for example, shows the inter-related nature of the risks (click on it to get the full briefing report).

Also useful is the YouTube video interview with the editor of the report:

The most disappointing thing about the report this year is that the WEF decided not to include the raw numbers as they did with last years report. This makes it much more difficult to provide an overall risk assessment that takes into consideration both potential costs (dollars and lives). They had two options, I guess, after last year's report: Do the combined risk analysis themselves or make it much more difficult for others to do so. It is a shame they decided on the less transparent course of action.

Chinese Repression Of The Uighurs (ISN)

ISN has an interesting brief on China's continued repression of the Muslim Uighur population (in light pink on the map below) in western China under the mantle of counter-terrorism activity. Written by Diane Chido, an independent writer and analyst (and graduate of Mercyhurst!), it covers the basics and provides interesting background to the recent spate of incidents in Xinjiang Province.

Click for a larger version.

Related Posts:
Let Freedom Blog! Chinese Dissidents Write Backwards To Beat Government Filters
China's Demographic Problems

Let Freedom Blog! Chinese Dissidents Write Backwards To Beat Government Filters (WSJ via Digital Inspiration)

Great article in the Wall Street Journal recently about recent rioting on southern China and how Chinese bloggers are defeating internet censorship, in one case, by using a simple widget that lets them write backwards. The text is still readable but the automatic filters set up by the government don't recognize it (The WSJ has a paywall so if you want to see the full article, take a look at it soon. Digital Inspiration has a summary and some additional links).

Can You Balance The US Budget? Can You Make Decisions Like A Chinese Official? (American Public Media And Wikiversity)

With all the brouhaha concerning DIA's recent announcement concerning the creation of several video games to help train new analysts, I thought it would be worth mentioning a couple of other "serious games" I have run across (one yesterday and one quite some time ago).

The first, Budget Hero, is a flash based game (see screenshot below) that lets you pick options to help balance the US Federal Budget. Basically, after a short intro brief, you get to pick tax and spending policies in order to try to accomplish your goals without busting the budget. Once you have selected your series of policies, the game calculates how well you have done against a couple of benchmarks and then reports back to you on how well you have accomplished your goals and how well in tune you are with others who have played the game.

The game really gives you a good idea of the relative values of different policies. It also highlights the fact that some policies are important for their emotional impact but have little real impact on the total budget (By the way, if this game is at all accurate, the next administration will have its work cut out for it. The kind of answers that tend to work are not going to be very palatable). The best I have been able to do is to keep the government afloat until 2044. If anyone figures out a way to beat that, drop a comment.

The second game is one I have been meaning to blog about for some time. One of our former students (he just graduated), Pat Noble, an analyst with the FBI, put together an interesting simulation of Chinese political decisionmaking processes called Forbidden Kingdom (he did this last year in my Advanced Analytic Techniques class so, no, there is no relation to the movie of the same name). The screenshot below shows the game board (which you have to build) and the rules and all the other materials you need are available for free over at Wikiversity.

All simulations have to balance playability with realism. Pat's challenge was to make a game that captured some of the essence of modern Chinese political thinking in a short, interesting game. As someone who watched the research and development of the game, has played the game and heard countless stories about others playing the game, I think Pat accomplished just that.

Excellent "Lesser Taught" Language Resource (DLI via DangerRoom)

Wired.com's DangerRoom featured an excellent language resource from the Defense Language Institute for some of the lesser known (only because they are lesser taught in the US) languages. Not everything on the site is accessible to non-military but the stuff that is available is very good. In addition to the fine language resources, I was particularly impressed with the "Countries In Perspective" section that provides short, descriptive country studies on about 20 countries.

China's Demographic Problems, India As A Counterbalance To China And A Revolution In Political Economy Against Jihad (Fora.tv)

A few recent gems from Fora.tv:

Nicholas Eberstadt: China's Looming Demographic Troubles
AEI Fellow Nicholas Eberstadt discusses the effect of an aging population on China's workforce, the skewed gender demographics and its implications, and the future of China's social capitol.
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008
Location: Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA,
http://fora.tv/2008/04/28/Nicholas_Eberstadt_China_s_Looming_Demographic

Mark Helprin on India Counterbalancing China
Mark Helprin answers whether India, an up and coming power in the world, will act as a counterbalance to China.
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008
Location: Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA,
http://fora.tv/2008/04/28/Mark_Helprin_on_India_Counterbalancing_China

A Revolution in Political Economy Against Jihad
Walid Phares calls for a revolution in political economy in the war against jihad.
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008
Location: Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Washington D.C.,
http://fora.tv/2008/04/23/A_Revolution_in_Political_Economy_Against_Jihad

Strengths And Weaknesses Of The Great Firewall Of China (The Atlantic Monthly)

James Fallows over at the Atlantic Monthly has done an excellent article on the Great Firewall Of China called "The Connection Has Been Reset". He finds many weaknesses with it (apparently it is easily circumvented) but finds that the major strength of the Chinese effort to censor the internet is the social pressure -- the chilling effect -- it creates. Definitely worth the read.

China's Future (A Warm-up), The Dangers Of Pakistan And Talking To Iran (Fora.tv)

The first couple of videos might be a good warm-up for the Black Swan Web Conference on Monday, March 3 and the rest provide insights into some of the other crises and issues around the world. All are under 5 minutes.

China's Political Scenarios
Johns Hopkins University author-in-residence James Mann discusses possible political scenarios for China.
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=3022

Examining the China Fantasy
Johns Hopkins University author-in-residence James Mann examines the China Fantasy, the premise from his latest book of the same name.
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=3020

The Dangers of Pakistan
Madeleine Albright discusses the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan and asserts that Pakistan is currently the most dangerous country in the world.
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=2995

Dealing with Iran Intelligently
Barbara Slavin stresses that dealing intelligently with Iran is extremely important for every future president of the United States.
Program and discussion: http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=2903

Chinese Hackers, Travel Safety And What's Running On My Computer? (Resource Roundup)

The Dark Visitor. I ran across this blog this weekend and while it may be well known to some, it was new to me. While I am no expert on China or on hacking, I was impressed by the depth and scope of the offerings. The credentials of the author also seem quite robust. If Chinese hacking is an area of interest, this is likely a blog well worth watching.

International Travel Safety Information For Students. The State Department has put out a press release that any student thinking about going abroad for the summer should check out.

exeLibrary. Push Ctl-Alt-Delete on your windows based computer, click on Task Manager, click on the Processes tab. Do you understand what your computer is doing? Ever wonder what "realsched.exe" really is? This is the place to make sense of all that stuff running in the background on your computer. McAfee Site Advisor gives it a "green check" so it is unlikely a deceptive or malicious site.

China In The Year 2020: Three Political Scenarios (Black Swan Forum)

Jeff Carr over at IntelFusion is sponsoring a web conference through his Black Swan Forum on the future of China featuring Cheng Li, Senior Fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institution on March 3 from 1300-1400 PST. You will have to drop Jeff a note at the Black Swan Forum (email address in the flyer below) to get a login but he is willing to open the conference up to anyone who meets the criteria he outlines.

(A note about the embed below: I am testing a new service name Issuu.com to embed pdfs into blogs. Obviously, it would be a better example if this pdf had multiple pages but the process of using Issuu.com to upload a pdf and make it immediately available to readers is very easy and, hopefully, compelling. If you have any comments on the user experience, don't hesitate to leave them)

Podcast: The Potential Partnership Of India And China (Harvard Business School)

I have recently discovered the papers and other products put out by the Harvard Business School through their "Working Knowledge" series. All good stuff but I thought that this brief podcast by Prof. Tarun Khanna was particularly interesting given the recent discussion of China and India in the DNI's recent threat assessment. HBS doesn't give me an embed option for their podcast so you have to go here to listen to it or you can click here to download it.

Chinese Cyberwarfare (ISN)

Rachel Kesselman, a Mercyhurst grad student, just published an interesting piece of analysis on Chinese cyberwarfare with the International Relations and Security Network (ISN). (Way to go, Rachel!)

Finding Weaknesses In Jihadist Propaganda (Monograph)

Major Timothy King recently published a monograph through the School of Advanced Military Studies at the Army's Command and General Staff College titled, "Finding Weakness In Jihadist Propaganda." Using a comparative case study method, MAJ King looks at Communist China and finds the techniques used there "has striking similarities to the current Jihadist social revolution".

Highlights from the abstract and the text include:

• "Despite the advantages of globalized communications, the Jihadists do not “own” the battlefield. They are effectively using the battleground (television, internet, satellite TV) but pale in comparison to America’s potential. Today, America does little to compete with the Jihadists in the realm of information operations. America can win the war of ideology on the information battlefield should it ever decide to compete."

• "Osama Bin Laden has “hijacked” the neorevivalist ideology by omitting the original egalitarian (albeit utopian) motivation. Their strategy is reliant on violence; it may serve in the short term as emotional gratification but it fails to return Islam to preeminence."

• "The fact that there is not an undisputed unified leader of the Jihad should be exploited."

• "Alternative ideologies such as the idea of “Islamic Democracy” exist and should be co-opted into a new ideology that receives the support from legitimate governments worldwide."

• "The Jihadist military is its strongest entity but it lacks a legitimate government to retain political gains of military action. The Jihadists lack the governmental institutions the guarantee a continuance of change."

• "Education, now that it has started, is difficult to stop or contain. Globalized communications allow Muslims unprecedented access to legitimate information as well as propaganda. Our task is to enable those Muslims to access information easily through language barriers and infrastructure.'

• "The use of television programming, traditional and satellite open a “free speech” zone where the Jihadists have taken the initiative. With American help, modern Islamic television can broadcast high quality programming that promotes peaceful modernization."

Origins Of FBI Counterintelligence And More (LOC)

The Library of Congress provides an excellent teaching/training/research resource through its periodic webcasts. One of the most recent is a 50+ minute presentation on the Origins of FBI Counterintelligence done by Ray Batvinis (who has just authored a book on the same topic).

Other webcasts that may be of interest include:

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Why Terrorist Ideologies are So Powerful

War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda"

The African Colonial State and the Encounter with Decolonization

China's Return to Tradition: How to Interpret the New Forces Emerging in China

China Rediscovers its Own History

You will need a RealPlayer plug-in to view the webcasts.

China Economic And Security Review Available: Wanna Play Connect The Dots?

The US-China Economic And Security Review Commission made its full report to Congress available to the public today. Executive Summary-like announcements were made earlier in the week and picked up and commented on by a number of blogs, etc. Here are some highlights of the report (all italics are mine and the points are listed in the order I found them in the report. I will talk about the color coding in my comments after the quotes):

"China’s economy remains heavily dependent on manufactured exports to sustain its rapid
economic growth and to provide jobs for a rural population moving to urban areas in search
of higher pay and benefits. Chinese authorities have not been willing to alter this pattern,
even if pushing exports means violating WTO rules or free market principles."

"China’s mercantilist policies are taking a huge toll on small and medium sized manufacturing
facilities and their workers in the United States. While U.S.-based multinationals can transfer
and have transferred much of their production to China to serve that market, small and
medium-sized manufacturers in the United States are not as mobile. They face the full brunt
of China’s unfair trade practices, including currency manipulation and illegal subsidies for
Chinese exports. This is significant because small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent
60 percent of the manufacturing jobs in America."

"China’s economic policies violate the spirit and the letter of World Trade Organization
membership requirements. The United States is not limited to countering China’s industrial
policy tactics through the WTO, however. It can use other WTO-sanctioned trade remedies to
protect itself, such as Countervailing Duties (CVDs) and antidumping cases."

"At the present time, U.S. officials are neither carefully tracking the persistent attrition of the
U.S. defense industrial base as more and more manufacturing is outsourced offshore, nor
identifying and justifying on national security grounds an irreducible minimum defense
industrial base that the United States should retain regardless of the cost or effort required to
do so."

"Chinese military strategists have embraced disruptive warfare techniques, including the use
of cyber attacks, and incorporated them in China’s military doctrine."

"The Chinese defense industry, while still lagging far behind that of the United States, has
begun achieving noteworthy progress over the past ten years."

"China is supplementing the technologies that its defense industry obtains through
commercial transfers and direct production partnerships with an aggressive and large-scale
industrial espionage campaign. Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so
extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technologies."

"A major objective of Chinese S&T policy is to acquire technology that will strengthen the PLA
while it also realizes commercial benefits."

"China is pursuing an energy diversification strategy that seeks to find cleaner alternatives to
coal. However, as long as the environmental costs of burning coal are not built into coal’s
price, the degree of diversification into natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy
sources will have little impact on the complexion of the fuel supply, and China will continue to
rely on coal as its primary energy source and increase its reliance on oil."

"If China’s underlying environmental problems are not addressed effectively, this could
become another source of unrest that could challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s
control of the country."

"The bilateral relationships China is building around the world—many if not most of them
largely motivated by its quest for energy supplies and other resources—have resulted in an
increase of its global economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural influence that has the
potential to challenge U.S. interests."

"Although India does not want to be perceived as “ganging up” against China, it will seek to
expand its multilateral relationships to hedge against China’s growing influence and military
strength. In part because of this, opportunities exist for U.S.-India cooperation on economic
and security matters and in the promotion of democratic values and governance throughout
Asia."

"Through its media control regime, the Chinese government has been able to manipulate and
influence the perspectives of many Chinese citizens. While the majority of the Chinese
people understand that the information provided by Chinese state-owned media
organizations may not be free of censorship and propaganda, they have little choice but to
rely on it when forming their opinions about the outside world. Beijing has used this capacity
to create deep feelings of nationalism inside China and can use it to incite strong antiforeigner
sentiments among the Chinese people when it wishes to do so."

"The strong nationalism Beijing has fostered may constrain its options to respond to
international incidents. This could result in exacerbating tensions in a sensitive situation and
turning a misunderstanding into a conflict."

Comment: There seem to be three themes that cut across the boundaries laid out in the report that are worth exploring. In an effort to help connect the dots, I am experimenting with color coding the facts above as a way of linking them to the themes.

The first theme (color coded red) seems to be about a slow-motion economic death spiral. It goes something like this: China depends on manufacturing for its growth and it is growth that, to a certain extent, legitimizes the Chinese Communist Party's rule. The manufacturing depends on coal and oil for energy and this is unlikely to change. Coal and oil use cause terrible pollution and environmental degradation which could (will likely?) lead to unrest that could (will likely?) challenge the Chinese Communist Party's control over the country. Finally, if the CCP gets pushed to the wall, its hole card is to allow the government controlled press to drum up nationalist sentiment that essentially blames foreigners for China's problems -- sentiment which it may not (will likely not?) be able to control.

Yoikes! That is a pretty bleak picture of the future of China and, since so much of the US's and the rest of the world's stuff is now made in China, it is actually a pretty bleak picture for all of us.

If it is true.

What is maddening about this report is that it outlines lots of possibilities but makes few real estimative calls and provides no real time frame. As any battalion commander, CEO or Ambassador worth his salt will tell you, "Son, anything is possible. I need to know what is likely." The authors of the report should have read more Kent (or, if you don't like Kent, then
Schrage).

The second theme (color coded in blue) seems to have to do with China's impact on the US economy. As I read it, they are saying that what China is doing is unfair, particularly to small and medium enterprises, but that there is something the US can do about it. As a corollary to this, there seems to be some genuine concern that our defense industrial base has eroded to a point where we are essentially dependent on China.

This dependence seems to me to be due to the networked nature of a globalized economy. If globalization is about anything, it is about efficiency. It achieves this efficiency at the cost of robustness, however. This is not to say that the global economy is fragile; rather, it is overly concentrated. Imagine if the scenario described by the red quotes above comes to pass and we are faced with a China at some point in the future where the Communist Party has collapsed and has been replaced by any number of xenophobic strongmen, where western factories have been trashed by outraged Chinese tired of the pollution the factories bring. Where will you buy your TV? This is not as trivial as it may sound. The US, to the best of my knowledge, does not have the ability to manufacture CRTs, LCDs or Plasma screens anymore. We are wholly dependent on foreign companies, mostly Chinese, for these type products as well as many, many other products we need. You might be able to live without a computer screen but the US military can't.

I am reminded of Chapter 4 of Machiavelli's The Prince where he describes a similar situation involving the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the King of France (Yes, Machiavelli was the world's first network theorist...). The Ottomans, because their system was centralized around the Sultan, could move very quickly but, if the Sultan were removed, the system would collapse (or rapidly acquiesce to the new ruler). The French, on the other hand, had a largely decentralized system where it was relatively easy to conquer a single baron or what have you but to control all of France was nearly impossible. Modern scientists like Laszlo Barabasi have explored a middle ground where networks are more or less optimized -- mixing the best of robustness and efficiency. It seems like it would be possible to extend this same logic to the global economy and make a more rational and better informed judgment about the " irreducible minimum defense industrial base that the United States should retain regardless of the cost or effort required to do so."

The final theme (color coded in green) seems to have to do with the military threat represented by China. It doesn't seem to be much at present which means that the primary approaches will likely be asymmetric in the highly unlikely case of near term direct conflict. Over the medium to long term, though, the Chinese are going to try to steal any sort of technology they can (particularly if it has a military use), in order to try to catch up. Interestingly, the report all but anoints India as the strategic counterbalancing piece in this latest round of the Great Game.

Oldtimers used to say that the Soviets play chess while Americans play football as a way of highlighting the cultural differences between the two super-powers with regards to strategy. Well, the Chinese play Weiqi/Go. Anyone who has ever played this game knows that it requires a very long-term strategy. This, in turn, implies that the Chinese will view their defense strategy as a game of inches -- of small gains that accumulate; not big, flashy wins. I know that this is simplistic but it seems to track with the statements coming out of this third theme in the report.

Beyond all this idle speculation comes another interesting but apparently overlooked report suggesting that the Chinese economy is actually much smaller than most people think raising interesting concerns about the timing for all these possibilities.