Of two tsunamis and the ADD foreign policy of the ADD nation

The tsunami and earthquake that tragically struck Japan today could not come at a worse moment for the Japanese. The economy has been struggling for almost two decades to recover and seemed poised to make progress, but now has suffered yet another bitter blow. The costs of rebuilding will add to already high deficits and high anxiety. It is only fortunate that there is perhaps no other country in the world as well prepared to deal with earthquakes and their consequences as Japan.

That said, the disaster also resonates in many ways with what is happening elsewhere in the world. It reminds us that "black swans" are not rare events. Indeed, the first few months of this year have demonstrated yet again that nothing in this world is as commonplace as the unexpected. That is no doubt more a commentary on the way we arrive at expectations than it is on the nature of life on the planet.  In just the past 10 weeks alone, we have seen revolutions, earthquakes, major economies downgraded by credit ratings agencies, spiking energy and food prices, and the usual accompanying market roller coaster rides that bespeak the fact that we are collectively spun around by events more often than your average weathervane is by the daily breeze.

Another way the tsunami resonates is with the images we have already seen on the television of it sweeping ashore — a great black wave of destruction — causing havoc and then retreating to the sea. As I watched I couldn’t help but wonder if that was not how we were ultimately going to view the upheaval that has rocked the Middle East this year. There came a wave and great drama and then, almost as quickly, the wave withdrew and was forgotten.

Certainly, we are at risk of such an outcome at the moment. If Qaddafi succeeds in pushing back the rebels during the next couple of days, the world may well conclude — if it has not done so already — that supporting the Libyan opposition may be a losing proposition. And if Qaddafi wins and reestablishes his control on the country through brutality, it will send a strong message to other regimes across the region that the right response to rebellion is to be both ferocious and merciless.

That message is in turn being abetted by another equally pernicious one that has been sent this week: the unmistakable support the U.S. is quietly offering to autocrats in the Persian Gulf. We are all for democracy and are willing to throw our support behind rebels provided the countries they may destabilize don’t produce too much oil. In the cases of our friendly petro-sheiks, "prudence" and "national security interests" compel us to avow resolute support for existing regimes while gently but inoffensively suggesting they consider modest reforms.

We may one day conclude that it was the combination of inaction on Libya and the loud and clear secret message to the Gulf that ultimately triggered the receding of the Jasmine Tsunami. But other factors have also been in play. Look at this week’s headlines about ethnic conflicts in Egypt. Transformations such as the one envisioned by the young Twitter revolutionaries in that country are fragile and as the world’s attention has drifted westward to Libya, an opening has been created for competing forces in Egypt to pursue their various strategies without scrutiny and in some cases with undeserved impunity.

How many stories have you seen on TV this week about Egypt? Not so many, as cash-limited media redeploy to focus on the crisis of the moment. As a result for leading players throughout the Middle East, the economics-induced fickleness of the media is one of the most important political realities. In speaking yesterday with a very wise and senior American national security expert, other examples of how important the fact that the news media can hardly keep two stories in their mind at once came up. "It’s not just Egypt," he said, "what about Iraq? Do you think nothing is happening there? No, we just don’t cover it anymore and that has opened the door to all kinds of bad actors to move in."

The same reasoning, suggested my friend, has at least subconsciously been factored into the recent moves by Gen. David Petraeus to tee up America’s eventual declaration of victory in Afghanistan — the one that will proceed our can’t-happen-soon-enough departure from that country. The fact that such a declaration won’t stand up to any sort of enduring scrutiny won’t matter because there really won’t be any enduring scrutiny to speak of.

It used to be an objective of U.S. military doctrine to be able to wage two major wars in two different theaters of operation at once. I am not sure it was ever an objective of most of the media. But it is certainly true that these days in a world of shrinking budgets and black swans arriving by the flock, sustained coverage of any one important story at the levels necessary to make it an ongoing emotional or intellectual priority for the average viewers is impossible. This in turn has made America an ADD nation with an ADD foreign policy in an ADD world. Which may in the end make Andy Warhol as important a foreign policy thinker as Henry Kissinger — each issue gets its Warholian 15 minutes of fame and attention and if nothing decisive is done in that very short window of opportunity then the force Kissinger called the most powerful in politics, inertia, sets in, tsunamis recede and the status quo regains the upper hand.