Fareed Zakaria Discovers Hedging In China

Everyone's global international relations guru, Fareed Zakaria, has an Op-Ed in the WaPost this morning in which he--wait now--reveals to the waiting world the value of a hedging strategy with respect to China.  Permit me to share some of his brilliance with you:

"I would propose thinking of American policy toward China more in terms of a "hedge" strategy. Many investment funds buy stocks hoping that they will rise in value, but they also bet against some companies (or other financial instruments) to ensure that if the market turns downward, they will be protected. (Hence the name hedge funds.) Similarly, the United States should maintain a close and productive relationship with China, hoping that this will ensure a peaceful and prosperous Asia. If, however, China's rise becomes threatening and destabilizing, America should also have in place strong alliances with other Asian powers such as India and Japan - which Obama's trip sought to accomplish - as building blocks to balance Chinese expansionism."

 Thus endeth the lesson, students.  Uber-Professor Zakaria has dispensed with his indispensable global wisdom, and the US must now pursue it.  We will all now add "hedging" to our lexicon, and from Turtle Bay to Foggy Bottom, the new intelligentsia will   appear on CNN and Bill Moyers' Journal to extol the virtues of "hedging".

Oh--what's that you say?

We are already hedging?

And folks have been talking about hedging behavior for years in places like this, and this?    And this? 

Ok.  Never mind.  Go back to thoroughly ignoring Fareed Zakaria.

Fareed Zakaria Responds To Those Who Called Him Out...

...in this WaPost editorial.  It certainly seems as if he's willing to grant that the response to Al Qaeda has had something to do with its diminishing threat.  And since he's been so kind as to concede that point, I'll concede that there have clearly been bureaucratic excesses in the pursuit of that diminishment. 

Fareed Zakaria Thinks We Overreacted to 9-11

Everyone's favorite sorta-hard-to-pigeonhole-Indian-American-IndianAmerican Fareed Zakaria has taken to the the airwaves and blogwaves this week to tell us that the United States overreacted to 9-11.  Here's a sample of what he's peddling:

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

Far be it from me to argue with Newsweek Magazine's designated arbiter of all that is centrist and just in international affairs, but isn't there just a tad bit of a logic-bomb in Zakaria's thinking?   Could it be that Al Qadea is simply not that deadly a threat BECAUSE of the "over"reaction of the US and its allies?  Reminds me of the annual New York Times story decrying "filling prisons even as the crime rate drops", as if there is no correlation. 

Does any rationally thinking person believe that Osama Bin Laden and the boys believed that they would pull off the big attack on September 11 and then spend the next 9 years hiding in holes?  No--they saw it as the opening salvo in a civilizational war they were bound and determined to win, one that would include many more attacks in the US on scales both grand and modest.  But that hasn't happened.  And it hasn't happened because we "over" reacted. 

More "over"reaction, please. 

Fareed Zakaria On Goldman

Fareed Zakaria is a smart guy, a little too CNNish in a "global community" kind of way, but smart nonetheless.

He does a good job in this piece laying out the broad strokes of the government's case against Goldman Sachs.

At the end of the day, Goldman will walk because while what they did strikes many of us as wrong or unfair, it will not be found to be illegal. There continues to be a difference between unfair and illegal, and that is a good thing.

President or Prime Minister?

I've got no love of Fareed Zakaria--he's a smart guy, but sorta leans in that "world citizen" direction so prevalent in Eurpoe--but he really nails it on the head in his criticism here of Barack Obama's Presidency. A key graph:

If he represents all the people, Obama should remember that for 85 percent of Americans, the great health-care crisis is about cost. For about 15 percent, it is about extending coverage. Yet his plan does little about the first and focuses mostly on the second. It promotes too little of the real discipline that would force costs down and instead throws in a few ideas, experiments, and pilot programs that could, over time and if rigorously expanded, do so.

I think Zakaria overplays Obama's "centrist" approach to the stimulus and the banking crises. But the criticism that Obama's become more of a party hack than a President is spot on.