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The U.S. Intelligence Community as Seers Without Sizzle
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
... In a world where shock has repeatedly been the name of the game, where tall towers fall in clouds of toxic ash, investment houses disappear in the blink of an eye, and a black man is the Democratic Party's candidate for president of the United States, the American intelligence community has been straining to imagine a future without surprises or discontinuities. As its experts summed the matter up in 1997, "Genuine discontinuities -- sharp nonevolutionary breaks with the past -- are rare, and our focus is on evolutionary change."

Lucky is the country that didn't bet its foreign policy on that bit of intelligence wisdom. Of course, in the long decade of hubris, from the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 (something American intelligence neither predicted nor expected) to the moment American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, it seemed obvious enough in Washington that a generational Pax Americana was settling over the world.

As a result, the futures the IC's analysts produced back then were remarkable mainly for their inability to imagine what was stirring under the surface of the obvious. As a result, when you visit those futures, you're not likely to have the urge to throw away your Arthur Clark or Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick or William Gibson classics. But maybe you'll still be curious, as I was, to know what that "community's" top minds missed when they peered ahead. Think of it as a window into the limits of our intelligence services when they tried to grasp the real nature of U.S. power by forecasting the future.
(5 October 2008)
I think part of the problem is that the intelligence estimates are conducted in an atmosphere of political correctness --they can't threaten the prevailing wisdom. I asked a former member of the CIA if he thought the CIA was monitoring peak oil websites. "I wish they were!" he replied. In other words - they are out of touch. This sentiment was echoed by a journalist who delivered a talk on peak oil to a group from the CIA. They don't get it.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) seems to have a better approach in their DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036 -BA

What Happened to the American Empire?
Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books via Marxmail
... Could the United States replicate the Victorian British Empire and establish a Pax Americana? Five years into the orrors of the failed invasion of Iraq, with two million refugees having left the country, it is hardly a surprise that the almost unanimous answer is No.

That simple negative raises the possibility that some subtler version of a Pax Americana might emerge, that the United States can become the leading player in a pluralistic international system rather than a “hyperpower” or hegemon, whose persuasiveness extends only as far as its military reach. On that, opinions vary. Nobody denies that the United States is uniquely equipped to wreak physical destruction anywhere it wants. It currently maintains more than seven hundred bases on foreign soil, including in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Apart from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has about 200,000 troops stationed overseas, and since September 11, it has also created numerous bases in Iraq and across Central Asia, including in such brutal dictatorships as Uzbekistan. A Web site that tracks security issues has estimated that in 2008, the US defense budget will be $711 billion, or about 48 percent of overall world military spending. This would be close to twice as much as the budgets of Europe and China, the second- and third-biggest military spenders, combined.

Nobody thinks America’s ability to construct social, economic, or political institutions is remotely as impressive. This is the problem of “soft power,” the concept used by Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist, to describe geopolitical influence that is exerted through the persuasive dissemination of culture, values, ideas, and economic aid rather than through direct projection of military or economic strength. The interesting question—although not to Robert Kagan, the foreign policy commentator, who sometimes seems to regard “soft power” as close to a contradiction in terms—is whether the United States can learn, or relearn, how to exercise “soft power.” Perhaps this thought has infiltrated the Department of Defense; the mandate of its newly created Africom, the US command for Africa, includes not only military security but economic development, humanitarian work, and nation-building.
(23 October 2008 issue)
Long essay and book review of several books on the prospects for the U.S. world empire. The essay seems oddly outdated, given the financial events of the last few weeks.

The article is not posted yet on the NY Review of Books website. -BA

Financial Crisis Dims Chances for U.S. Climate Legislation
Margaret Kriz, Yale Environment 360
Environmentalists had been looking to a new president and a new Congress to pass legislation dealing with global warming next year. But with tough economic times looming, the passage of a sweeping climate change bill now appears far less likely.
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In the coming months, as Washington struggles to contain the damage from Wall Street’s precipitous financial free fall, one of the first casualties may be the top piece of legislation on the environmental agenda: the adoption of a sweeping national program to control greenhouse gases.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate continue to rank climate-change legislation as one of their major priorities for the next Congress. So, too, do both presidential candidates. But there’s growing acknowledgement that with the United States on the verge of a deep recession, passing a bill that mandates a reduction of greenhouse gases and places a price on emitting carbon will be extremely difficult.

“Clearly what’s happening with the economy, and the scale it’s happening, takes all the oxygen out of the room for virtually anything else for the moment,.” said Debbie Sease, legislative director for the Sierra Club.

The odds are long for two reasons. First, with the nation facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression and high energy prices, many legislators will be reluctant to pass a bill that — at least in the short term — will make all carbon-based fuels even more expensive. “Financial realities will make it much more difficult for the new administration or Congress to put forth a very aggressive, economy-wide climate bill,” argued Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and one of Congress’s harshest critics of any climate-change action. “I believe the current financial crisis will only reinforce the public’s concerns about any climate bill that attempts to increase the costs of energy and jeopardizes jobs in the near term.”

Second, with the nation’s voters furious at poorly regulated financial markets that helped create the current meltdown, Congress is going to be reluctant to create a cap-and-trade system in which a new commodity — carbon emissions — will be traded on a large scale.
(6 October 2008)