Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

Book discusses how the world is chaotic and how we use old paradigms to respond. Recommends resiliency and not just Reponses. ( )

Picked this up after seeing Reid Hoffman's recommendation. A thoughtful look at how distributed ("cloud-based") organization and thinking can be applied to public/foreign policy. ( )

Ramo argues that the rapid changes in the world call for new theories and strategies to deal with them. Specifically, he applies complexity theory from the physical sciences to the social milieu and challenges us to figure out how to deal with the implications.

According to complexity theory, some systems evolve into a critical state in which minor disturbances create huge changes. Think of a sandpile, and how the addition of one more grain of sand can set off an avalanche. You can’t predict which grain of sand will do it, no matter how much you control your experiment, because too many factors, internal to the accumulation in the sandpile, would affect the outcome.

Now think of the situation with terrorists. We build missiles and they use box cutters. We screen for box cutters and they use shoe bombs. We can no longer predict when, where, or how the threats will come. So how can we protect ourselves?

First, we must make some conceptual adjustments. Building the biggest missiles or highest fences is not the guarantee of safety it used to be, in an age in which technology and creative thinking can compensate for size. Also, Ramo warns us not to fall for the "soft revolution" fallacy, according to which the fact that other cultures like blue jeans, American music, and fast food means that they want to be like Americans in every other way as well, or even that this will cause them to feel affection towards America. Such ethnocentric blindness only serves to increase American vulnerability to terrorism. Americans need to understand that not everyone in the world is as besotted with us as we ourselves are. To the extent that we bother to learn about other perceptual frameworks instead of just our own, we will not only increase our empathy but our preparedness as well.

Secondly, Ramo suggests that we think of the body politic as a human body; one that needs a healthy immune system to survive. That is, instead of just reacting to events, he advocates the preventive medicine of strength, flexibility, and the capability for quick response and gear-changing. He argues that putting good infrastructure (education, health care, and communication systems) in place is far more efficacious than waiting until a crisis erupts and then trying to catch up. By the time you get solutions in place, he says, the old crisis is over and a new and different one has taken its place. He implores us to learn the habits of connection and a global ethic instead of alienation and isolation. He wants us to open up our ossified bureaucracies and empower people to create and think and act on the local level. (“The last time the National Security Council was seriously reengineered was forty years ago. The fundamental structure of the State Department has not been revamped since World War II…") Highly decentralized groups, Ramo points out, can “bend, adjust, and attack based on a far better sense of local conditions than any central commander could ever have.”

Evaluation: This is a really smart guy. But his writing is very simplistic. I feel like he’s trying to make sure he reaches the widest possible audience, but I'm not sure he won't lose an important segment of that potential audience instead. Nevertheless, I like what he has to say, once he gets it out. He has a nice philosophy, with ideals evocative of Saul Alinksy, Michael Lerner (of Tikkun), Cass Sunstein, and other possibly quixotic but nevertheless admirable intellects. ( )

Joshua Cooper Ramo is Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, which makes him a high priced consultant in the field of foreign relations. He's a Nixon to China kind of guy, speaking Mandarin and promoting the idea of talking to those funny furriners, even if they do eat strange food and speak in unintelligible gibberish. I'm sure he hangs out with Henry Kissinger. He has written two books about China and one about skydiving.

In this newest book Ramo discovers that the world doesn't always do what we expect and he proposes that we all get loose and flexible as the best way to deal with crisis. Ramo seems to think that this is something new. I tend to disagree with him. The problems du jour change but the surprises have kept on coming throughout history. Every time that our peerless leaders, whether they be Nixon or Napoleon, thought they had a handle on things, all hell has broken loose.


Ramo believes that the high degree of global interconnectedness we are experiencing today, in trade, communication and travel make the world more unstable instead of less. Viruses from afar can hitch rides on airplanes and travel thousands of miles in a few hours. Trouble in the U.S. mortgage markets cause a panic in Russia and China. A bunch of highly educated Saudi's, financed with millions in oil money, can wreak havoc in New York, London or Washington D.C. It would actually be more impressive if a gang of goatherds from the Afghan mountains could do that, but without the Saudis money that still isn't possible.

The pace of things has surely speeded up, but we haven't seen anything like the 1918 flu epidemic or the black death, for some time. (Knock on wood.) Genghis Khan made a pretty hash of things for the Chinese in his day and the South Sea Bubble is still the most egregious example of financial markets gone bad. Things have not really changed all that much.

I do rather like Ramo's proposed solutions. He has invented the term "deep security," which means paying attention to the basics, like ensuring meaningful work for people and giving them universal health care as a way of cushioning the effect of financial panics, employing diplomacy, to ensure that our enemies as well as our friends know what we (talking about the U.S. here) expect from them and what we are willing to do to get it. It may be a hard sell politically but I do think that aggressively fighting AIDS and engineering clean water supplies in sub Saharan Africa will, in the long run, lead to fewer wars, fewer pirates and fewer terrorists.

It took quite while, after chapters of scary scenarios, for Ramo to get to his point about "deep security," and even then, I found him a bit vague on details. Creating "deep security" is a lot of work. Even talking about it is. It's a lot easier to make up slogans like "bomb bomb Iran," which is why politicians do so much of that sort of thing.

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