“The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It” by Joshua Cooper Ramo, Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2009
…… is touted as a national best seller on the cover and contains three pages of praise before one arrives at the first chapter. The pages of praise are a collection of journalistic icons of the Left. Be leery of authors who stack positive reviews up front. It’s as if the content won’t stand on its’ own and needs the support of ideologically aligned names to sell the book. Noticeably absent were reviews from a credible military source or an actual foreign policy expert or agency like, say, the Strategic Studies Institute. The title alone disregards the millennia-old concept by sages of ages past that Man’s consideration of the “unthinkable” is ….well, impossible because it is …..unthinkable. The author does prove the point that there really is nothing new under the sun if one exerts some effort to understand the real world. He does do a magnificent job of dissembling with the liberal use of oxymorons like “organized instability. His book reminds one of the sophomoric, Swiss cheese philosophizing of pseudo-intellectuals bent on destroying the status quo without a clear map of what to replace it with. He admits as much throughout his book.
The first chapter drips with gushing, schoolboy, hero worship for none other than the world’s most deadly terrorist threat – Hizb’allah. “I found myself particularly fascinated and intrigued by their capacity for creativity and innovation, even in the pursuit of ‘shocking ends’. The rest of the paragraph idolizes Hizb’allah’s apparent perfect record of military victories over the Israeli army. Terrorist groups don’t change their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs in the trade) unless they encounter failure. Failure to them requires a change in procedure. So if Mr. Ramo is so fascinated with Hizb’allah’s continuing ability to innovate” he must ask them why they are continually doing so. It’s also quite easy to be “creative and innovative” in efforts to terrorize the world or, should I say, the non-radical Islamic world when your group has financial and ideological support of the leading terrorist state – Iran, the technical support of the IRA (in the beginning) and the KGB, and the logistical support of Russia. It’s easy to continue to exist when your group teaches succeeding generations to think of other human beings as pigs and rats that deserve extermination. It’s easy to continue the murder of innocent men, women and children when your members hide behind their own families and their neighbors’ while civilized governments abide by the Geneva Conventions. It’s quite easy to look successful to myopic admirers when terrorists can attack soft targets at will while governments must defend everywhere and hope for the best. It’s a weak, coward’s way to fight. A terrorist group is hardly worthy of praise for innovation- unless you are promoting their cause.
“In order to understand how our global order is now working and changing, I knew I needed to be intimate with the ideas Fouad carried around, no matter how repellent they might be. In a way, the passion for innovation and the ‘geeky curiosity’ of fighters like Fouad reminded me of friends of mine who has started great Internet companies or people I knew who were managing gigantic hedge funds.” While comparing terror operations of Hizb’allah with the predatory practices of hedge fund owners who bet their own money on their clients’ failures is certainly appropriate, one has to wonder at the author’s oblivion to the fact that America has led the world in number of patents and Nobel Prizes since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution –BPN (Before Politicized Nobels). Foreign countries send their most talented to the United States for higher education for a reason – including China. It is specifically because America is the only place foreign students have the freedom to be innovative that they come here. That freedom doesn’t exist in their countries.
Ramo continues: “Before we can move on to addressing the main problem of this book, which is about how we can best navigate an increasingly complex international order, we need to clear up an important question that remains unanswered: why, despite our overwhelming material and military superiority over the rest of the world, do we still have this creeping and evidently justified sensation of insecurity? My argument so far has been that it is because many of our best minds, blinded by optimism and confusion, are using out-of-date and unrealistic models of the world. This is why our uneasiness about resting our future in their hands is inevitable. Despite their good intentions, most of our foreign policy thinkers today resemble students who arrive to take a test that is composed in a language they do not speak.”
I disagree with the author’s opinion that that is the main problem of the book as I will continue to articulate. In this incidence, I don’t believe the author has read the 9/11 Commission Report or he would know why we are still at risk. The problems were identified in The Report to Congress. A day after 9/11, I, like many, predicted that Congress would respond by creating another bureaucracy and throw mountains of money at the problem without making us one iota more secure. Today we have a laughable Department of Homeland Security (having worked for them myself). But Mr. Ramo fails to remember that thanks in large part to the FBI there have been very few terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 – even if it means redefining the term to avoid political embarrassment. His description of Americans with an overwhelming sense of insecurity is overblown and geographically isolated. Remember, if you are a High Value Target -like New York City or Washington, D.C. – for terrorists’ whose main objective is to publicize their goals the terrorists only have to be lucky once. Mr. Ramo also apparently has never witnessed wargaming at the various military war colleges or visited the war plans rooms at the pentagon. The Department of Defense spends hundreds of millions of dollars paying think tanks like RAND to assist in dealing with “the unthinkable” – even if DOD doesn’t always listen (they don’t even read their own Counterinsurgency manual). My perspective from participating in war games and reading those of higher echelons as professional development (something the author should expand on) our military leaders are not as blind as he assumes. I have witnessed ethnocentric, narrow-minded thinking in higher ranking officers bent on making a “Custer” career for themselves and I’ve seen the same thinking in lower ranking enlisted men. But, as it applies to the military on the average the author is wrong on this point. Inside the sycophantic beltway where “GroupThink” is rampant, he is more accurate in both military and political bureaucracies like federal civilian service and the military-industrial complex. More insidiously his declaration that the United States government and it’s military are “blind” smacks of “agi-prop” (destablilizing government’s by attacking their credibility). In this regard, well done!
“Today our ‘sandpile order’ is churning out new ideologies as fast as it produces new computer software.” (p.73) Perhaps it is the unceasing “Long War” of the Left pushing to de-legitimize the Constitution of the United States through “new ideologies” like moral relevancy and historical revisionism that is causing this “organized instability?” These ideologies aren’t new. They have been tried and failed often throughout history.
Chapter Two titled “The Sandpile” introduces a Danish physicist and biologist (Ramo is big on tying international politics to ecology) Per Bak who “hypothesized that after an initial period in which the sand piled itself into a little cone, the stack would organize itself into instability, a state in which adding just a single grain of sand could trigger a large avalanche – or nothing at all.” Ramo reports this hypothesis as occurring around 1980 so it- apparently – was not the hallucinations of a UC Berkeley professor conference with totes of “ecologically engineered biologicals” Esoterically one can compare piles of sand with “the underlying physics of the world.” But we already had Durant’s History of the World decades before Bak for that – not to mention the letters of John Adams and other Founding Fathers. This is to be expected from an author who seems to worship man and nature over the Divine. He does make a valid point: “past a certain point, the internal dynamics of these systems (earth’s crust, ecosystems, stock markets, international politics) were simply, bewilderingly unknowable.” As long as one is unable to accept that all matter is a form of intelligence obedient to God’s will science will reach a point of “unknowability”. Remember, the first universities were temples. Man’s penchant for greed –reflected in the Tax Code- make stock markets impossibly “complex” but with derivatives coupled with the aiding and abetting of Congress it appears only the CEOS understand such a “complex” system – and every politician who leaves office (finally)- to leave richer than when they took office. The Bilderburg Group also seems to be able to “master” international complexities quite well as well.
In Chapter 4 the author cites Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Fund who, with a $2 billion “small investment” from Edmond Safra, the “legendary” Lebanese banker, invested “in one of the most unstable markets of the world – Russia.” Browder’s “legend” was “not a little burnished by the fact that he was the grandson of Earl Browder, a former head of the American Communist Party.” Author Ramo admires the way CEO Browder’s strategy was to “Buy, agitate, sell: this was Browder’s strategy.” He is apparently one of those yuppies Ivy League college presidents spoke of when they expressed concern their graduates expressed no moral code in conducting business – as long as it gained a profit.
Ramo does include some good financial advice for every American in this chapter considering our current emperor and his imperial guard have failed to stop the decades old, national financial hemorrhaging.
Ramo attributes the fall of the USSR on its’ being “organized into instability.” (p.66) Is that another way of saying communism is a failed political idea? Recent history seems to continue proving it so in China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Of course, according to the author, Ronald Reagan had nothing to do with “tearing down this wall” of the Soviet Union. He is correct in citing surveys showing a majority of Russian citizens, after 70 years of mandatory political lobotomizing, choose to return to the old style communist regime. Learning to be free to choose is difficult and takes many generations to accomplish.
“Change produces unpredictability and surprise. That means that any time we push for change – and my contention is that we need even more change than we have today – we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that much of what we’ll get is unpredictable.” Sounds like Lenin’s dream of anarchy to me……and the platform of the president of the United States. And, of course, we can look at the “Arab Spring” for proof that agitation really does bring about unpredictable (to some who look but will not see) events. How’s that working out? What’s the total number of dead Americans in the Middle East now…..?
“As in most every revolution, new technologies benefit revolutionaries the most. And the culture of revolutionaries, that psychology of risk and curiosity and confidence admixed with joy is custom-built to find ways to wedge into the places where big-ticket power doesn’t reach.” “And mixed with ideology, technology only speeds the spread of revolutionary ideas.” (p.96) Ramo’s rhetoric reminds me of the “most used Hispanic Studies textbook in the United States” – Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo F. Acuna…..as well as Das Kapital. Like Acuna and Marx, Ramo seems to have a Freudian fixation on revolution. I wish he had been in El Salvador to see what the FMLN did to people who came out to vote for the first time in their lives. I wish Ramo was familiar with the term “walls of lead” days after Castro took over Cuba. I wish Ramo saw the faces of the five hundred men, women and children Che’ Guevarra personally sent to the firing squad -many of the men his former co-insurgents. When one of them asked “Why are you doing this to us?” Che’ replied “I can’t tolerate anyone who doesn’t think like me.”
I agree with the author that we throw too much money and not enough thinking into our wars. Too often we have military planning that “stares instead of shifts” their eyes to the total picture. (p.163). But I disagree with his premise that it is “cheaper to defend than to attack”. There are many options available in attacking. The Israelis are masters at the economic attack as a defensive strategy. That’s the reason they still exist as a nation. Too bad Ramo didn’t choose them to admire for creativity and innovation – a nation of people who literally made the desert blossom like the rose. He develops this concept into a catchy phrase “deep security”. He is totally wrong on that. I prefer to attack our enemies on their soil (with surgical precision – not mass invasion) not “try to understand our enemies more fully” hoping their animus will be assuaged by our cultural affinity. “If I were running American foreign policy, I would want to focus on empathizing” quoting technology wizard Michael Moritz. (p.152) That’s just pure bull shit. Those Americans without political blinders today know and understand Islam for what it really is and choose to fight it.
Of the whole book, I agreed most with his portrayal of the goings-on at the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. And we did just about the same after World War II.
Out of many, many parts of the book I found most disagreeable was on pages 190-192 where he recommends changing the name of Homeland Security and Department of Defense to “Department of Resiliency” – and manages to tie national health care under its’ aegis! I think the Department of Homeland Security should be abolished. Our national security should be divided into two departments: domestically the FBI and the CIA internationally. All the other federal, state and local law enforcement should work through those respective agencies. Our national security should be a flatter line and block chart the same way Sears flattened theirs and saved themselves from bankruptcy. Ramo recommends a concept in which it is impossible to consider all possible threats. Interestingly, this is totally contrary to that held by many military intellectuals (if that itself is not an oxymoron) of: “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” in which the analyst must consider all possible courses of action. Ramo comes closest to actually proclaiming “Peace In Our Time” in this chapter. But he follows it with a section on the Iraqi War which is spot on regarding Bush’s political purity turning victory into defeat by Bremer’s adamant dissolution of the Iraqi military. However, he uses Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’ testimony before Congress: “it’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself” as a supporting argument. That was pure CYA on the Bush administration’s part. The Special Forces general who briefed Bush on the invasion plan –apparently having read Sir Robert K. Thompson’s Defeating Communist Insurgency and other seminal works on the subject- originally asked for exactly the correct number of troops prior to the invasion. That number was whittled down to a “politically acceptable number” by Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Ramo is only partially wrong on the effect of the American bombing campaign on North Vietnam. In the words of Giap “We were on the verge of surrendering when you quit bombing us!” And if it weren’t were Johnson and McNamara MTBIH (may they burn in hell) playing soldiers on the Oval Office floor our Air Force would have bombed the dikes and forced North Vietnam into an unconditional surrender. It’s hard to fight a war when you are trying to keep from drowning. Kind of a reverse ‘drain the swamp’ strategy.
He concludes the section of the book most critical of our military thinking by ignoring the fact that in all of our wars we are the only nation that helped rebuild our enemies’ countries. He ignores the fact that we are the most generous –and forgiving – nation in the world.
Second only to Hizb’allah, the author, a quasi-ex-patriot to China, touts the fantastic “innovation” of China as another model to emulate. “Change is the center of all of their lives. ……They operate with the self-regard and courage of people who believe that ‘the tide of history is on their side’ and that “they see this process as one in which destabilization of the existing order is not only necessary but inevitable.” (paraphrased from Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”). Yes, it’s easy for China to have a remarkable GDP when the Central Party subsidizes the Yen. This creates a gross disadvantage to other countries who let the international market determine the value of their currency. Ask any uprooted Chinese farmer how he feels about losing his ancestral home to a factory run by prison labor – all for the benefit of the “State”. In that regard the author is not far amiss in comparing China’s “progress” with America’s federal, state and local governments’ use of imminent domain. The author should step out of his comfort zone and devote some time to reading China’s 1999 National Defense Strategy in which the Chinese government declares unlimited war on the United States. And they mean “unlimited” in every sense of the word that Hizb’allah does.
I agree with the author that the time to approach foreign policy and national defense in a fresh, non-ethnocentric way is long overdue. That, however, is hardly a new, “provocative” suggestion. His solution for “deep security” sounds more like Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” in which, “a few will die but many will survive.” Tell that to Holocaust survivors. Despite his assertion that “deep security” can be achieved and the Cold War would have been unnecessary and much less expensive if we had just “talked it out and seen our adversaries’ view points”, it wasn’t won by seeing our adversaries’ points of view. It was exactly because we knew the dangers of communism and resisted them that the world is free today. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles can be credited with igniting the Korean War when he used Ramo’s “deep security” concept by stating publicly that the United States had no strategic interest in the Korean peninsula.” The North Koreans invaded the South the next day. President Carter almost lost the Cold War by placing “human kindness” over security preparedness and destroying our foreign human intelligence capabilities. The author’s assertion that “effects-based” thinking is a solution to national defense is a late-comer to the U.S. army. The Center for Army Lessons Learned Handbook 05-19 dated May ’05 is devoted to “A Special Study on Effects-Based Approach to Military Operations”. But, admittedly, when I called the major who wrote the article to ask why this concept wasn’t used Army-wide, he replied that “a three-star over ruled a two- star.” Of such are national security issues are resolved.
Despite the institutional inertia the pentagon is infamous for, outside-the-box thinking is not new to the military. Before the author was born, H.D. Little Hart was arguing for an “Indirect Approach” after World War I.” The author does give credit to George F. Kennan in his 1964 Elihu Root Lecture “On Dealing with the Communist World” beseeching the government to be less ethnocentric in its’ foreign policy thinking but it wasn’t as “touchy, feely” as that proposed by the author. In the first Iraqi War, a rogue lieutenant colonel proposed a new Course of Action to General Schwartzkopf – attacking and destroying the critical nodes in the deep battlefield instead of suppressing forward Iraqi forces with massive artillery barrages. When Schwartzkopf heard he would be more famous than Patton if he did so, he slammed his fist on the table and said “By God! That’s what I want!” More pertinent to the author’s generation are the “I’m OK, You’re OK” –genre of Utopian thinkers.
The author states on page 35 “Political power is spreading more widely than when Morgenthau wrote. More than 90 percent of the nongovernmental organizations in the world were created in the past ten years, for instance.” And “…….it can be hard to say who is right or wrong in a moral argument…..” In doing so, he illuminates one of the major causes of destabilization in the world – politicized NGOs- and the source of social disintegration within the United States – moral relativity.
Ramo expends a considerable amount of print to the “Sandpile Effect”. This concept originated in the late 1980s, from a conjecture made by Danish physicist and biologist Per Bak comparing a pile of sand to nations – “organized instability”. The level of technology –and peace- we Americans enjoy today could not be possible if we were living in the degree of unsupported massive “organized instability” the author posits. The FBI and the U.S. military have had no small part in ensuring that. I prefer a lone terrorist nuclear threat to Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War – especially since I don’t live in one of the urban jungles. Armed Predators do an amazing job of destroying the threats these days…at their homes.
As an aging –and scarred idealist myself – encouraged by the idealized reviews, I hoped by reading the entire book I would find an interesting and useable new approach to world peace. I failed to find such a panacea that considered the crushing limitations of the real world and the basic nature of man. Ramo does have two or three sentences toward the end that give him an “out” from totally trashing America and her military but the overwhelming majority of the work is slanted by Left inclinations to bash anything American – or of an older (and wiser) generation than his. With the author’s continuous usage of phrases from Obama speeches linking Utopia with everything from “hope and change” to the environment and national health care, he appears to be simply another of Lenin’s “Useful Idiots” in praising the public agendas of groups whose hidden agendas are universally the destruction of the West and America in particular. I threw my copy of the book on top of Jeffrey Sachs’s book “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities For Our Time”. Sachs is a much more practicable tome – though equally idealistic [his strategies have worked in some countries] – recommended by the Naval War College. The danger in Ramo’s book –and the reason I wrote an analysis – is that the concepts he proposes are the same as the Obama administration – and how’s that working for us?
Finally, after reading the book I found the author himself to be the most “blinded by optimism and confusion….. using out-of-date and unrealistic models of the world.” Of all the industrial giants in the world’s freest country Ramo’s modeling preference is for foreign terrorists or Socialists. Why? Does he really think that trying to understand our enemies’ points of view (“deep security”) will keep them from attacking us? Does he not know his recommendations for the indirect approach and effects-based planning were discussed –and flatly ignored- by our generals? These proposals are neither “innovative nor creative” as his slobbering reviewers claim. The only review that approaches accuracy is that of New York Times Book Review editor Gary Rosen –apparently a more widely read author- when he states “the formula on display here- reported vignettes, grand theorizing, surprising juxtapositions, – will be familiar to readers of Thomas L. Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell, [as well as H.D. Liddell Hart, Robert K. Thomas, etc.] and Ramo [certainly] executes it with verve”. Verve, yes. Innovation? No.
