I was just checking out the wikipedia article for the “Great Game“, a phrase coined ala-”World War II” to describe a series of political and military events and which all the namesakes to this blog were contributors. In the article, I saw this sub-section:

New Great Game
Main article: New Great Game

With the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the United States displaced Britain as the global power, asserting its influence in the Middle East in pursuit of oil, containment of the Soviet Union, and access to other resources…

The New Great Game? That phrase has been thrown around for years to describe the Cold War, the post-Cold War 1990s, the current exploration of resources in the Middle East, but how does it warrant it’s own article? Clicking the main article I found this priceless content:

The New Great Game is a current competition between the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, India, and Pakistan to secure reliable long-term sources of petroleum and natural gas through the construction of oil pipelines in the post-Soviet nations of Central Asia. The term was coined by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in reference to the original Great Game between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for strategic supremacy in Central Asia in the 19th and early 20th century.

And so begins a blog post posing as a wikipedia article. After this opening it goes on for pages, breaking out a Risk-style categorization of allies and neutrals, balancing interests, and an inexplicable temporal breakdown into three “phases.”

At this point it has been edited by dozens of editors and contributors, but examining the history of the article you can see how the kernel of this nonsense was first written by a now-deleted user “RoyalDutchEmpire,” and the bulk of the current nonsense was written by another now-retired wikipedia contributor KazakhPol (most edits since have been minor and grammatical). Both these contributors noted the primary inspiration for the article as “The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia” written by Lutz Kleveman. And that’s how a random opinion becomes a complete wikipedia article.

As for the CA view on Mr. Kleveman, to quote Younghusband from 2003 before this blog was started and when discussions of this nature were limited to email:

I think Lutz is a putz with an axe to grind.

First he steals Ahmed Rashid’s idea for the title of his book, and then he goes all imperial in a region that has floundered for the past few years. There is a lot of geopolitical posturing etc in Central Asia, but it is not as significant as the original Great Game…

In my opinion Lutz is just being alarmaleftist. Washington has started “waiting” in the Caspian region for the last couple of years.

If I had more time I’d nominate this blog-style essay posing as a real article for deletion. As it happens I’ve just made a note in the discussion section.

Being a milcol guy in a pacifist country like Japan can get you into some interesting conversations. the other week one of my new coworkers asked me what I thought of Japan’s North Korea policy, and why the US wasn’t doing more about Pyongyang. In the end he was looking for an explanation why the US didn’t just invade North Korea like it did Iraq. This is a question a lot of people were asking in 2003. Kevin Cooney has an interesting angle in his book Japan’s Foreign Policy Maturation: A Quest for Normalcy (pp. 110):

Japan needs the U.S. involved in Northeast Asian [sp.] not just for its own security but also for regional stability. ”¦ by keeping potential regional hegemons in check. ”¦ Without North Korea as a the principal threat facing Japan, the need for the continuing existence of the U.S./Japan alliance could be questioned by the people in both countries. The obvious response that China still remains a threat may be politically impossible to verbalize.

If the threat of North Korea dissolved (somehow) there would no longer be a need for US troops in South Korea. Justification for US troops in Japan would dry up (according to Cooney) and the US would be basically left with Guam. With the US-Japan Security alliance severely weakened — if not nullified outright — Japan would have to start redirecting more cash away from its export-based economy and towards its defense, which would not make some of its regional “partners”? very happy. So, why not keep Kim Jong Il around (alive, kicking and contained) to justify the forward positioning of 80,000 US troops and the opportunity to get a peaceful dialogue going between all the regional players? Remember the real estate agent’s motto: location, location, location!

Addendum

However, if the cause of North Korean dissolution was a US invasion, the Americans would be gaining a new territory and could either give up its real estate in Korea and Japan or justify basing there as part of the supply line. This is somewhat similar to what happened in Iraq: after 2001 the US had to move its troops out of Saudi Arabia but needed real estate in the Middle East to project power in the Arab world (i.e. not Israel or Turkey). Iraq was the home of a bad actor and a twelve year low level conflict. The location was good, the house was a bit of a fixer-upper, but all that was needed was to have the tenant kicked out and we could move on in. The strategic movement of troops to a neighbouring country and giving up of territory for an ally will be familiar to all the Risk players out there.

UPDATE: Dr. Barnett responds in an unfortunately typical vitrioled post (“analytically-narrow”… “drunken [sic?] the Kool-Aid”… “Dark Lord”, etc., etc.). If anyone sees a real response in there, please share the substance in the comments.

ORIGINAL POST:

Dr. Thomas Barnett has built his career on describing the world as divided between a rich and developed “Core,” and an unconnected and undeveloped “Gap.” We’ve tried to “map” this gap several times here at CA to try and understand where the exact lines are. But when it comes down to it, the biggest indicator of the gap-core border is not homosexuality laws or war risk insurance policies, but simply looking at birth rates. All the developed societies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific quickly stopped producing babies once they became rich. The undeveloped world in Africa, South America, South Asia and the Middle East continues to grow at astounding rates. Compare a map of birth rates to a map of Barnett’s Gap and you get a crystal clear correlation: the higher the birth rate, the worse off the country.

It almost defies logic. The most miserable, ungoverned disasters of nations on this earth—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan—are the ones with the highest growth rates. Or as Robert D. Kaplan said in this interview on PBS more than a decade ago on April 5 1996:

All the new babies in the world are not being born in Japan or Scarsdale or Singapore. They’re being born in poor African countries, subcontinental India, and the poorest parts of our own societies. It’s like one part of the world is going in one direction, but a large swath of humanity is going in another. And overpopulation, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural dysfunction, are going to make a critical mass of the Third World so far behind that they won’t be able to catch up.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is optimistic that the core counties can shrink the gap. Perhaps. But to paraphrase from Coming Anarchy, the world population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, it’s 6 billion today, and it will break 9 billion in 40 years. Although optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, a whopping 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world. Places like the Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan where governments do not function, the economy a wreck, and exports are non-existent. These places are already security black holes, and its only going to get worse as their populations explode.

This population growth will put an increasing strain on our environment and our energy resources. And while neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, time may ultimately prove them right.