The Inheritance by David Sanger

David Sanger is the Washington correspondent for the New York Times and he just wrote a book on some of the foreign policy challenges that Barack Obama will face in his 4 (hopefully 8) years in office. The book identifies 6 problem areas: Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, China, and terrorism. Ahem. Duh.

My advice is to skip the chapter on China. Read In China's Shadow by Reed Hundt if you want to understand China's challenge to American business. If you want a political assessment, try China Rising by David Kang. Just know that China has learned a lot watching our poor performance in Afghanistan and Iraq. And China is both a competitor and a partner in the world. It's important to remember it's both.

North Korea is a problem because it's selling its nuclear technology and equipment to whoever wants it. That thing that Israel blew up in Syria in 2007 was a nuclear reactor, identical to the one at Yongbyon. Bill Clinton didn't have much success with the Agreed Framework of 1994, but at least he got the North Koreans to stop production at Yongbyon. George W. Bush had even less success (although the North Koreans blew up the smokestack at Yongbyon in 2007 -- probably because it was a rusted-out piece of crap by then and may not have been operational since 2003).

Iran is a problem not because it will launch a warhead at Israel, but because it's going to trigger an arms race in the Middle East. If Iran gets the bomb, or gets close enough to make one, its Sunni enemies in the Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are going to want one too. I don't know what that will mean for the Middle East, but everyone seems to agree that a Middle East in which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are nuclear-armed is a bad thing.

We are losing the war in Afghanistan but Barack Obama has recently committed more troops. That's a good start, but according to a general in Afghanistan, winning will take 50 years. I wonder if most Americans can get behind an effort like that? And if anyone missed it, we have accomplished precisely nothing in Afghanistan. The problem has just shifted over the border into Pakistan.

The last thing that I want to comment on is our vulnerability to nuclear, biological and cyber attacks. Representatives from the government and private industry got together and created a likely scenario in the event of a massive cyber attack. Our energy grid would be wiped out, no communications, etc; Terrifying. I was thinking about how I would keep Daniela and myself alive in the event of a catastrophic event like that. I know that the first step is to fill up the bathtub and sinks with water while it's still running. But after all the food in the fridge spoils, what then? I thought I should know how to salt meat (that's how colonial Americans did it, right?) so I read about it for hours yesterday online. I think I might try it and see if I can get it to work. I did find a lot of blog postings by people who know how to do this. People who hunt their own food, smoke and salt it, and can do everything else that you would need for survival. If I can't figure out how to salt my own meat, I should at least make friends with someone who knows how. And get a gun. And figure out where in Western Mass we'll build our cabin to get away from the looters and zombies. I've seen enough in movies to know that zombies are going to be a real problem.

Is it insane that I thought about that?