Britain

The power of network visualization

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

We’ve been having an intriguing discussion recently in the comments on Zenpundit about mapping / modeling complex situations in a way that leaves us humans more liable to come to nuanced understandings and less liable to unintended consequences, and one point that keeps on cropping up is the need to pare down the number of nodes in our mapping without losing sight of the subtleties…

I was thus delighted to find, as I was doing my morning trawl of usual and unusual news sources, that Glenn Beck had come out with his estimate of how many Muslim terrorists there are in the world (10% of the global Muslim population, ie 157 million), Fareed Zakaria had refuted him — and there was even a helpful Silobreaker network diagram to show me how the relevant nodes under discussion fit together:

Beck Muslims and Brewery

I was delighted to see that (Mormon) Glenn Beck is more closely associated with (Muslim) Rep. Keith Ellison than he is with terrorists, and sorry to note that Beck’s Brewery and Islam are somehow linked… But naturally, once I had seen this much I wanted to drill down even deeper — so I entered the appropriate keywords at Silobreaker and found this:

silobreaker beck islam

You’ll see that Beck’s link with Al Qaeda is, thankfully, a weak one. And I think you’ll agree with me that even shifting from a six node to an eight node graph considerably ups the sophistication of analysis required to fully comprehend the issues portrayed.

*

In any case, I thought it might be appropriate to post Silobuster’s more detailed map of the current situation with WikiLeaks here:

Wikileaks Silobreaker

All becomes clear, eh?

I particularly like the node labeled “Gland” (it’s almost hidden but not quite, you’ll find it lower right, between PayPal and Twitter)– that might be the one I’d zero in on to get a fuller appreciation of the complexities of the situation.

And for the record, this post is an example of British “humor” — or as we prefer to call it, “dry wit”.

The Return of the Militants: Violent Dissident Republicanism

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That’s the title of a report just issued by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) — but it may not be about what you might think it’s about — depending which side of the Atlantic you’re from.

It’s about “dissident republican groups in Northern Ireland such as the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA, who continued to oppose the peace process”. And the phrasing of the title makes a neat illustration of Bernard Shaw’s aphorism about “two countries divided by a common language”.

I’m “divided by a common language” myself, as a Brit who has been here in the US more than half my life. And yes, I know, technically “Republicanism” should mean the sentiment that led to the War of Independence — but I checked with some American friends, and they reassured me that there’s “usage” of the phrase to refer to GoP philosophy…

Myself, FWIW, I’m a monarchist. Which I suppose makes me “conservative” — another divided word in our deliciously divided common language.

Size Matters

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Earlier this decade, it seemed that the French government was doing their best to oppose the United States. Someone asked me why.

So I struggled to come up with a way to explain my impressions concerning the foreign policy of The Fifth Republic at the time, finally settling on describing a child that stomped around in a fury, shrilly shrieking “We used to be a world power!” over and over again.

The reason why this image came to mind was due to the fact that France, like most European countries, had allowed their armed forces to rot away to the point that they had a terrible time projecting force beyond their borders. This loss of military ability corresponds to a loss in influence on the world stage. Instead of biting the bullet and increasing their commitment to building and maintaining a world class force of arms, the French under Jacques Chirac appeared to be determined to browbeat the United States into acting as a proxy branch of their own government.

The point to the overly long diatribe above is that regimes and cultures which have their own interests at stake are not inclined to listen to what you have to say if there are no consequences for refusing to negotiate.

Such dusty history sprang to mind when I spied this news article on the UK Telegraph server. It appears that two new aircraft carriers planned for the Royal Navy might just be the victims of budget shortfalls.

queen elizabeth class future aircraft carrier for great britain

(Picture source.)

The top brass, desperate to save the carrier project, have proposed cutting the British fleet in half!

“In a final appeal to the National Security Council, Navy chiefs yesterday offered to make cuts that would reduce the senior service to its smallest since the time of Henry VIII.”

“The Navy has argued that having two carriers is vital if Britain is to retain its place as a top-rank military power.”

There is nothing quite like an aircraft carrier for getting hostile regimes to sit up and play nice, and it is true that the United Kingdom needs these carriers if they are to retain their present level of influence on the future history of humanity. And yet, reducing the fleet to such anemic levels would make it impossible for Great Britain to meet commitments in other areas.

You could say that the Royal Navy is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this issue.

If there is one thing this proves, it is that the United Kingdom is not ready to meekly slide down the slippery slope into insignificance. Let us hope that such resolve is enough.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

Britain in Search of a Grand Strategy

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The United States is not the only Western power suffering from strategic uncertainty. James Frayne, a British political consultant who is a friend of this blog and an avid student of strategy, drew my attention to  his post at The Campaign War Room:

“Who Does UK Grand Strategy?”

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee – under the leadership of Bernard Jenkin – has been running a very worthwhile investigation into “Who Does UK Grand Strategy?” The uncorrected evidence has begun to be put online and it’s worth taking a look at. Peter Hennessy, Julian Lindley-French, and Hew Strachan gave evidence on 9 September, which you can read here. Foreign Secretary William Hague and National Security Adviser Sir Peter Ricketts gave evidence on 14 September, available here. Various figures from the MoD gave evidence on 16 September, available here. We have no meaningful national conversation in the UK on national strategy, so we owe Bernard Jenkin one for pushing this investigation forward. I haven’t had a chance to go through all the evidence yet and will post something longer on it further down the line.

Seems straightforward enough, but the quality of the links are really good; senior British officials in frank discussion of grand strategy. Here’s an example:

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A Few Words About India and the Anglosphere (bumped, five years later)

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[This post, inspired by this article provoked a conversation about the relationship between India and the Anglosphere. It seems like just yesterday I wrote about this (with Verity and I going back and forth in the comments) on Jim Bennett’s now dormant blog Albion’s Seedlings. My old post needed virtually no revision, so I am reposting it here. Setting the Way Back Machine for 2005 … .]

The comments to this post contained some vexation about whether or not India is part of the “core” of the Anglosphere. The implication seemed to be that one is either part of the Anglosphere or not, and that it was wrong therefore to suggest that India is not.

I think this is to misstate the issue. It is not “either/or” or “in/out” of the Anglosphere. It is a matter of degrees of participation. The USA, UK, Anglo-Canada, Australia, NZ are “core” areas because of very high degrees of commonality in language, law, business practices, cultural norms, etc. Jim Bennett talks about all this in his book, which you must all go and buy and read if you have not yet done so.

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