When Senator John McCain spoke at National Defense University to my graduating class of mostly military officers in 1999, he would have been familiar with one of the tenets of "professional military education," that the strategic environment is one of volatility, uncertainty, complexity,
and ambiguity. VUCA - the military always likes easy to remember acronyms - was a useful way to see the world. Years later, Donald Rumsfeld told us mock-poetically about "known unknowns" and a raft of other garbage as a way of ducking responsibility for the quagmire that Iraq was becoming.
VUCA, though, remains a helpful prism with which to look at the world, which includes all the elements in spades:
- Volatility - Just look at today's worldwide stock market reaction to bad news from the US
- Uncertainty - Will Israel hit Iran? If it does, how will Iran harm our people in Iraq?
- Complexity - Darfuris are African Muslims, but so are the "Arabs" attacking them
- Ambiguity - Is it better to have Russia or Georgia as an ally in a showdown with China?
Pick just any issue - Israel/Palestine, Venezuelan or Nigerian oil, claims to the Arctic Ocean seabed - and there will be VUCA galore. John McCain, self-professed national security candidate, former military man, son and grandson of admirals, used to know that. If he still does, then why did he choose a person who believes in good/bad, black/white, right/wrong? With us/against us? Has he learned nothing from the folly of the last eight years?
Here is, from David Talbot's essential Salon.com article today, the scariest thing about Governor Palin:
It's truly frightening that someone like Sarah has risen to the national level. Like all religious fundamentalists -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim -- she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil -- you destroy it. Talking with the enemy is not part of their plan. That puts someone like Obama on the side of evil.
Forget all this chatter about whether or not she knows what the Bush doctrine is. That's trivial. The real disturbing thing about Sarah is her mind-set. It's her underlying belief system that will influence how she responds in an international crisis, if she's ever in that position, and has the full might of the U.S. military in her hands. She gave some indication of that thinking in her ABC interview, when she suggested how willing she would be to go to war with Russia.
The words are those of Reverend Howard Bess, a retired Baptist minister in Alaska who has clashed with Governor Sarah Palin over freedom of speech and other issues over the years. He lives next to her home town of Wasilla, where she served as mayor for several years.
Reverend Bess knows her personally, whereas Eve Ensler, who writes in the Huffington Post, probably does not. But their assessment of Palin's mind-set is similar. Says Ensler:
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
There it is - ambiguity and complexity - to be dealt with by a fundamentalist dualist? I'm not sure about Ensler's belief that Palin doesn't believe in thinking. But the question is: does she act (or shoot) before thinking, before weighing all those VUCA uncertainties? I don't want her test to be in the VP's office.
I forget who said that his job was to show the complexity behind simplification, but that is the challenge of the Obama-Biden team when faced with the McCain-Palin duo. The election may be won with sound bites, but the world's problems can't be solved with them. America's many crises - self-inflicted by an administration that is about to say bye-bye - cannot be resolved with "thanks but no thanks" repeated ad nauseam. But is the electorate ready for multisyllabic words?
Dueling with dualists. In some parts, the answers are ready before the questions are asked.