Thomas Ricks stokes the fire.

A small group of U.S. military experts and intelligence officials convened in Washington for a classified war game last year, exploring strategies for securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if the country's political institutions and military safeguards began to fall apart.

The conclusion of last year's game, said one participant, was that there are no palatable ways to forcibly ensure the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons -- and that even studying scenarios for intervention could worsen the risks by undermining U.S.-Pakistani cooperation. "It's an unbelievably daunting problem," said this participant, a former Pentagon official who asked not to be identified because of the game's secrecy. The contingency plans that do exist, he added, are at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, and are in "very close hold." Even so, he said, planners really haven't developed answers for how to deal with nuclear weapons stashed in Pakistan's big cities and high mountain ranges.

"The bottom line is, it's the nightmare scenario," said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who participated in an earlier exercise that simulated a breakup of Pakistan. "It has loose nukes, hard to find, potentially in the hands of Islamic extremists, and there aren't a lot of good military options."

Calculating the Risks in Pakistan

Here is former national security adviser Anthony "6 Nightmares" Lake:

I would not attribute absolute altruism to the West or deny that Chinese development projects have done some real good in Africa and for Africans.

What all of this says is that the creation of a more civilized world order is a long term project, and that the way to deal with the Chinese is not by hyperventilation but by pursuing efforts to help them see the advantage of integration into a mutually beneficial system, and, at the same time, cooperating with them when we have common interests while competing vigorously in areas where our interests diverge—for example, in access to energy resources.

I do believe there will be progress. The pressure brought on them by people like Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg over the Olympics apparently led to their doing more (if not enough) over Darfur. This shows that when it can be couched in terms of their interests, the Chinese can be brought into a more positive role on such issues.

Brangelina vs. Chinese Mercantilism in Africa

Francis Fukuyama, in the latest issue of The Washington Quarterly:

Not surprisingly, many in Washington, both on the Left and on the Right, are pressing for a change in US foreign policy objectives. In a German Marshall Fund survey of European and US attitudes on foreign policy in 2007, a solid majority (71 percent) of Europeans believed the European Union should promote democracy in other countries, but US support for this project declined to 37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2006, and 52 percent in 2005. When broken down along partisan lines, Democrats in the United States are about one-half as likely to support democracy promotion as Republicans. Among foreign policy elites, only those at the extreme on each end of the political spectrum advocate completely abandoning democracy promotion as a US foreign policy objective. Instead, skepticism is largely couched as “realism” and a return to a greater focus on traditional US national security objectives. From this perspective, democracy promotion should take a back seat to strategic aims such as securing US access to energy resources, building military alliances to fight terrorist organizations, and fostering stability within states.

Although focusing on the more traditional goals of national security is important, a zero-sum trade-off does not exist between these traditional security objectives and democracy promotion. Moreover, the Bush administration’s mixed if not disappointing efforts to promote democracy in the past few years do not mean that democracy promotion should be downgraded or removed from US foreign policy priorities. The United States should promote democracy, but there are new strategies and better modalities for pursuing this objective.

Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?

Robert Kaplan:

There is an attitude gaining currency in media and policy circles that lumps everything our military is doing abroad with Iraq. It says that our armed forces are overextended, that we are using them to force our democratic ideals down people's throats and that we need to be more humble and less militaristic. But on a deployment-by-deployment basis, the truth couldn't be more different.

More Kaplan:

Imperial Grunts

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

When North Korea Falls

While the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America’s daunting, imperial-like burdens.

While in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.

The Coming Anarchy

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet

Following on the last item above, see also, Johnathan Rapley on The New Middle Ages.

Unheralded military successes

Islamic militants have spread beyond their tribal bases, and have the run of an unstable, nuclear-armed nation.

Mmmm, candy ...

Pakistan: The Most Dangerous?

Latin America is deepening its democratic institutions, integrating into the global economy, and finally addressing endemic social inequalities -- in short, turning into something of a success story even as most outsiders look the other way.

A Quiet Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is growing more authoritarian at home and increasingly aggressive abroad. China’s global clout seems to expand by the day. And in the Middle East, a possible conflict with Iran looms on the horizon. For insights on this dangerous new world, FP turned to Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security advisor, author, and all-around foreign-policy guru.

A Conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski

Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications, originally published by Prentice Hall in 1961, was written by Melvin Dresher, a RAND research mathematician, during the heyday of Game Theory at RAND. This book introduced readers to the basic concepts of game theory and its applications for military, economic, and political problems, as well as its usefulness in decisionmaking in business, operations research, and behavioral science. More than forty years after its first publication as a RAND research study, and to celebrate RAND’s 60th Anniversary, RAND is proud to bring this classic work back into print in paperback and digital formats.

Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications

Examines the various factors that impelled leaders on both sides of the conflict in World War II to respond to immediate problems with actions resulting in effects that were often neither planned nor foreseen. Both Great Britain and Germany drifted into an escalation that ended in the wholesale bombardment of cities and civilian populations, when neither had originally planned any such action, and serves as the author’s lesson to show us how decisionmakers can respond once more to provocations and counterreactions. Emotional pressures, the fog of war, and judgments blurred by wishful thinking can produce decisions, even self-destructive decisions, and lead down an inexorable path to all-out, total war. More than thirty years after its initial publication, and to celebrate RAND’s 60th Anniversary, RAND is proud to bring this classic work back into print in paperback and digital formats.

The Road to Total War

In 1976 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde presented the following dilemma: “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it is not able to guarantee by itself.

On one side it can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society.

On the other side, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing to its liberalism.”

What answers can the liberal state offer to questions of social cohesion and ethical deficit that are affecting secularized democracies? Are we living in a secular or a post-secular society?

Reset put these questions to some of the most influential international intellectuals.

A range of European worldviews.

Reset - Dialogues on Civilizations | The dilemma of the liberal State