By now, we’ve all read enough horror stories to know that we have to exercise restraint in what we post on Facebook or Friends Reunited. But are we sufficiently attuned to the risks of You Tube and camcorders in cellphones?
Before you answer that question, you may wish to view this engaging film of David Gergen* shaking his booty like it ain’t no thang on a Davos dancefloor. As David Steven and I have been known to observe, we’re all of us always engaged in public diplomacy, whether we realise it or not…
* Foreign Policy Adviser to Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Ford and Nixon; Professor of Public Service, John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
I’m at a conference in The Hague on National Safety and Security. The conference has just been opened by Guusje ter Horst, the Minister of the Interior & Kingdom Relations, in the Netherlands. It’s a good speech and I’m chuffed when she begins to talk about how important it is that we move away from the traditional ‘need to know’ approach and begin to think about the ‘need to share’ on issues of national security (they really buy into the report we launched last year).
Last night I managed to sit next to Peter Schwartz, the former Head of Scenario Planning at Shell, who was asked a question about climate change. He pauses (for effect), looks at the guy and says… ‘of course climate change is a big risk but there is something bigger round the corner.’ I drop my fork (for effect).
Last point (before Guido Bertolaso finishes his talk on international cooperation). No one I’ve spoken to can remember when ‘National Security’ became a conference topic. Sure, there have been lots of conferences on aspects of national security but none that have focused on ‘national security’. One interesting trend I’ve noticed recently is the number of governments pursuing their own national security strategies at a time when the discourse is focused on ‘global risks’, and ‘international cooperation’. The Dutch Government, Norwegian Government, and Canadian Government have all published one in the last few years. The Australian and French Governments are about to start (they’re all here too); and of course the UK Government is about to publish their strategy imminently. I have my own ideas but I think I’m going to ask our speakers… they must know the answer.
Last year’s big issue at Davos was climate change – unsurprisingly, given that it was the first time the WEF crowd had convened since the Stern Review was published and An Inconvenient Truth was released. This year, for all the worry about meltdown in financial markets, the big issue was by all accounts scarcity.
Gideon Rachman, writing his weekly column in yesterday’s FT, agrees:
Without a big short-term crisis to distract them, the international politics crowd were able to look at longer-term trends. They too are trying to understand the consequences of globalisation. But while the bankers grapple with the top end of the process – the movement of billions of dollars around the world financial system – the political analysts are increasingly preoccupied by the way globalisation is affecting people at the bottom of the pile. The costs of food and energy are rising fast. The availability of water is also becoming an issue, from Australia to Africa. The struggle for these three basic commodities – food, energy and water – came up repeatedly in Davos.
And he’s not only worried about the problem. Just as much of a concern is whether the world’s institutions and policy elites have the capacity to manage it:
Soccer crowds in England like to abuse match referees by chanting: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” If protesters had been able to get near the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, they could justifiably have aimed the same chant at the world leaders who assembled in the Alps.
These people are meant to be the “masters of the universe”: presidents, prime ministers, bankers, billionaires. If anybody can make sense of world events, it should be them. But the air of confusion in Davos was both palpable and alarming.
Update: rising food prices also got a mention in President Bush’s State of the Union yesterday…
Every once in a while, I come across a person who still hasn’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s definitive article on ketchup. Well, you should read the article. You probably don’t think ketchup is a very interesting subject, but you’re wrong.
And I began to read, and lo, I saw that he was right.
Last December, one book in particular seemed to crop up on every newspaper or magazine’s list of books of the year: Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The Economist, for instance, calls it “this thorough and persuasive study”, noting that “as a New York Times journalist who has covered espionage for many years, Mr Weiner knows what he is talking about”.
The book is also, by all accounts, a complete hatchet job on the Agency. As the Economist summarises,
The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner’s view the CIA was lamentable at both.
But the spooks aren’t taking any of this lying down. For proof, see a much more entertaining review of the book – on the CIA’s website. Nicholas Dujmovic, a member of the CIA’s History Staff, demonstrates that catty academic bitchiness is by no means limited to universities:
…the thing about scholarship is that one must use sources honestly, and one doesn’t get a pass on this even if he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. Starting with a title that is based on a gross distortion of events, the book is a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as serious history; it is the advocacy of a particularly dark point of view under the guise of scholarship. Weiner has allowed his agenda to drive his research and writing, which is, of course, exactly backwards.
The CIA’s review is highly amusing, but too shrill to convince. More interesting is a piece from last September by former SIS director Sir Richard Dearlove, whom the FT persuaded to review the book. Like the CIA, he’s not a fan:
If you are disposed to think badly of the CIA then Tim Weiner’s book is for you. It is written to confirm your prejudice and give it historical substance. However, if your interest is in serious intelligence history, a coming subject in universities on both sides of the Atlantic, then “the history of the CIA ” that Legacy of Ashes claims to be should be approached with caution… This is a polemic that uses a fundamentalist style of argument – every fact is harnessed to a single theme – to demolish the myth of the CIA and its reputation. In short, the work lacks subtlety of interpretation or analysis and risks losing what merit it has on account of its uncompromising bias.
But Dearlove also makes a more subtle point: that “the very polemic of Legacy of Ashes threatens its welcome argument that there should be less adventuring on covert action and that the CIA should concentrate its clandestine resources on true espionage, the collection of intelligence from human sources”. He continues:
As we mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11, two concerns are critical: what should be the role for US intelligence, and for the CIA in particular, in the new world of 21st century threats; and how the intelligence and security community should be controlled and organised with the complex checks and balances of the US system of government. Weiner proffers no solutions himself – more cerebral writers such as Richard Posner are striving to provide them.
Fortunately the CIA’s legacy in this respect is not one of ashes – there are in fact already solid foundations on which to rebuild, although it will take a decade of consistent clear-minded leadership to bring to maturity the intelligence capability that the US now needs. However there is no quick political fix. Congress and the White House, please note.
