Fouche's Magnum Opus

I've searched in vain for a modern Hunter S. Thompson to satirize today's world of foreign policy and national security. But now Joseph Fouche has, after some prodding, expanded some of his more hilarious Twitterings into a farce of biblical proportions. If hearing the words "black swan" and "accidental guerrilla" excites you like the midnight premiere of Iron Man 2 , you have a PowerPoint-shaped dartboard, and you always eat soup with a knife, this entry is for you.

Everyone else will be completely baffled, especially when the George Kennan giant robot emerges in the beginning. It is a truly epic ride that manages to tie everything from the classical historian Ibn Khaldun's theory of civilizational decline to the Python programming language together. I'm frankly amazed he managed to write it without the world spontaneously combusting. But he did!

If you don't want to burrow deep into the inside baseball, his main point is that American strategy is split between two tendencies - the "magic bullet" devised by technocratic professionals and the emergent populist tendency of the crowd (e.g. Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonians). The merge point lies somewhere between the machine dreams of MacNamara's systems analysts and the 19th century P2P empire-building of Manifest Destiny. The problem, as Fouche argues, lies in generating cohesion that can animate the traditional sources of American power.

Comments

[Cameron Schaefer]

I agree, when I read this post I was blown away, he managed to combine two years of my studies on COIN, 4GW, emergent behavior, etc. all into one hilarious satire. Bravo Fouche!

[A.E.]

I want my George Kennan action figure!!

[Joseph Fouche]

Reading over it again, the whole thing reminds me of the premise of the Star Trek: The Next Generation first season episode "The Skin of Evil":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_of_Evil

[A.E.]

Crazy..