In the book Spook Country William Gibson paints a picture of Cuban-Chinese gangsters who do parkour and communicate through a manufactured language called Volapuk.

Gibson describes Volapuk through the character Milgrim on page 16:

When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke.

I sometimes find myself doing a similar thing if I have to send a Japanese-language email on a Windows box that doesn’t have East Asian languages installed. But Volapuk isn’t simple phonetic translation, it selects Latin letters based on visual similarity to Cyrillic letters. Some letters can be encoded a number of different ways, thus, like l33t, Volapuk can sometimes prove difficult to translate.

With the spread of the Internet use since the 1990s (and rise of Unicode) this problem has pretty much been solved – with the exception of mobile phone-using Russian immigrants, I would suspect. Then there is the “Soviet” solution to just create a separate Russian internet, as covered by Passport and AE.

It is interesting how soon nuance enters the analysis of IR theorists. After the cold war many analysts had dire outlooks on Asia. Predictions of Japanese rearmament and war were abound with such book and article titles as The Coming War with Japan and The Coming Confrontation between China and Japan. Yet nearly two decades after the end of the cold war Japan has yet to rearm to its full potential and there have been no wars in Asia. A common argument made by realists is that Japan yearns to be a great power, and return to a “normal” foreign policy by casting off its pacifist constitution and rearming to a level commensurate with its economic power. Though there has been a minuscule increase in defence spending, Japan has yet to rearm to the level consistent with its economy and technological advancement.

Once the influence of the zeitgeist wore off (bursting of the economic bubble?) more nuanced analyses come to the fore. Some twist the old theories to capture the empirical evidence, creating new splinters such as “mercantile realism” and “realism through neoliberal institutionalism.” Some simply says that Japan is neither pacifist nor militaristic but that its survival and economic strength depend on a stable order. Japan is not in danger of being attacked by China because of the American security umbrella. Moreover, Japan need not balance against the United States since it does not fear an attack. Richard Samuels seems to have come around to a similar outlook. I am currently reading his new book Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia which was released at the end of the summer. It attempts to trace the history of Japan’s grand strategy and forecast its future aims. A tall order. Samuels argues that Japan will strike a balance between strength and autonomy, preventing it from becoming too dependent on America or too vulnerable to China. This is a more moderate position than the other post-cold war analyses, but still within the realm of balance-of-power realists. Still, it is a difficult proposition.

My view is much more culture based. I believe that the Japanese government won’t act until it is too late. It will take an emergency for them to get their act together. They will stall and try to maintain the status quo as long as possible, without preparing for the worst. Then everything hits the fan. In other words, there is a lack of a grand strategy. Consider it part of the greater arc of Japanese history. Japan has a sort of island mentality. They will keep on doing the same old thing until some sort of disruption causes everything to change: think Mongols, Jesuits, Black Ships, SCAP. I know it isn’t some grand theory of international relations, but my view is limited by my personal experience living in Japan for so many years. That’s my two yen… back to the book.

Greed, pollution, piracy, terrorism, storms, flags of convenience. From the first day out of drydock to the day they are dismantled (or sink, or left to die), the undervalued cargo ship plies dangerous waters. The oceans are untamed and likely untamable according to William Langewiesche in his 2004 book The Outlaw Sea. The ocean covers 70% of the planet, yet we humans know little of what happens beyond our shores. There is a savage power out there from another time, but it is in our time.

The audiobook is particularly good as the authour himself reads in his gravelly, well-travelled voice. The first third of the book is the best as Mr Langewiesche describes with austere poeticism the dangers of the sea, where the rule of man is spotty at best. The legal loopholes set up to regulate international trade are big enough… well to drive a ship through. The fierce storms faced down by a single young officer at the helm are terrible and inspiring. The second third of the book is almost a book within a book. Langewiesche describes the sinking of the Estonia and covers the surrounding investigations and conspiracy theories in excruciating detail. The final section deals with Alang and the shipbreaking industry, ghastly in its pragmatism.

The authour does not judge or moralize the barbarity of the ocean world, but aims to describe the situation with a healthy dose of skepticism. I don’t think he is as cynical as he is realistic. It is no wonder he is a companion of Robert Kaplan at The Atlantic Monthly. If you have seven hours to spare, download the audiobook and get taken away to a world I caught a glimpse of earlier this year. It will make you appreciate that in spite of what many people think, we aren’t quite out of the wild yet.

Not that we all don’t have enough to read, but I stumbled on a wealth of North East Asian security articles in English on the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses website. They produce the quarterly Korean Journal of Defense Analysis which covers all sorts of topic related to NE Asia. All articles since 1999 are listed on the site and can be downloaded for free as PDFs. I picked up a couple of interesting ones on Japanese grand strategy and maritime terrorism. Check it!

Well, that’s one less book on the pile. I finished John Robb’s Brave New War today. I really liked this book, it was fast-paced, concise, full of examples and most importantly rooted in realism.

The book touches on all the stars: old theorists (Sun Tzu, Liddell-Hart); new theorists (Lind, Barnett, Hammes); journos (Friedman, Rashid, Hersh); even Our Bob makes an appearance (pp. 59). Regardless of all the theoretical strands that appear in the book doesn’t really present a Universal Theory of Everything^TM, binding them in the darkness. Rather, I think Robb makes a very important contribution to the literature in describing underlying trends that will prove to be problematic for all the new high-level theories of globalization and warfare evolution. He emphasizes the real-world background noise, providing an extra dimension of practical context for the Core-Gap/4-5GW/Flat world/knifey-spooney crowd. Brave New War is like the theory of dark matter: it doesn’t explain how stuff works, but why theories don’t work as expected in the real world. Global guerillas and systempunkts are features of the futurescape, variables that new theories of war will have to account for. Brave New War gives a jolly good heads-up for the next iteration of conflict theory and is highly recommended for those brave souls intent on dreaming it up.

I usually have a bunch of half-read books lying around the house. One or two will be top priority and the rest are usually for light reading. Here is the stack I am going through now (note that this is not counting the stuff I should read):

I would like to tag the following people for a pic of their stack: Soob, Mark, strategist and I would love to see what the members of KI are reading. (See lists for Eddie and AE) Add your list in the comments or leave a trackback.