I last complained that Ian Bremmer’s new book about national collapse, The J Curve, was lazy and unfocused. Bremmer also runs The Eurasia Group, a highly lucrative political risk consulting firm. Each year they release lists of risks to watch for, and leaders that will be big movers and shakers. Though I was unimpressed with Bremmer’s book, these reports are usually pretty good.
This year, their number 7 risk is Afghanistan/Pakistan, which contains some neat points: an undercommitment by the military gave the Taliban a chance to revitalize, and Musharraf’s apathy has given them a staging ground. They also see mounting political pressure as the GOP tries to avoid entering the Presidential season with two “losses” on its hands—Afghanistan and Iraq. They are pessimistic about Musharraf’s long-term stability in power, and his ability to weather his own upcoming elections.
Musharraf also made their Top 10 Leaders list, which is funny, considering it is populated almost entirely with bad men—Raul Castro, Moqtada al-Sadr, Vladimir Putin (even though he’s leaving office), Hassan Nasrallah, Dear Mahmoud, and Hu Jintao. The only kind of “good” leaders on the list are George Bush and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the PM of Turkey. No mention of any Central Asian leaders, despite the increasing role they play in global energy markets, nor any Europeans, despite the increasing role they play in both resolving Iran and global commerce in general. And what of North Korea? These lists were surely drawn up before the recent partial resolution of the latest nuclear crisis. Not a single mention of either Kim Jong-il or his weapons.
So again: lazy and kind of unfocused. This makes me think the Eurasia Group is really just a slightly more credible version of STRATFOR, if all they can muster up is generic blurbs about world leaders and events any casual reader of world news would know anyway.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust