Wikistrat and Obama's "Pivot"
First, let me say, I am very pleased to be a part of Wikistrat. This is a new type of consultancy that is best described as a combination of Facebook and Wikipedia merging with geopolitics. Eventually clients, which will include governments, think tanks, and private corporations will be able to suggest scenarios for the consultancy to game out for them as they look to uncover potential outcomes. In fact, it is my understanding there will be a lot of interplay where clients can even introduce "shocks" into a scenario. So a group could be analyzing the outcome of the North Korean power transition after Kim jong-Il's death and a client could ask the group to game out the impact of an assassination attempt on successor Kim jong-Un.
The potential is limitless.
There are many truly talented people involved in producing great analysis on a myriad of possible major geopolitical issues.
To give an idea of the talent assembled here- Wikistrat's chief strategist is Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett is a well known Pentagon consultant and has columns and blogs that are read in the geopolitical community on a regular basis. Examples include:: a regular Vanity Fair column on foreign policy, a regular column at World Politics Review, an occasional blogger for Time, has written numerous books including the well regarding "Pentagon's New Map."
That's just one.
Anyway, the power of Wikistrat is just now at the first stages of being harnessed. CNN's Fareed Zakaria (and the well known author of books including the controversial "Post-American World") recently asked Wikistrat to outline ten trade-off's resulting from the much ballyhooed Obama "Pivot" to Asia. The Wikistrat opened the question up to us and then Barnett synthesized the information for this piece that ran on Zakaria's CNN webpage to devoted to his TV show, GPS.
I was one of the numerous analysts that contributed ideas for the article and while I think my more "realist" take is a bit of an anomaly among the group, I think my contributions added some value and I am very much looking forward to continuing with this.
In the meantime, I urge anyone interested in geopolitics to check out Wikistrat. I think this is a model that will catch fire over time in terms of helping decision makers in many different arenas navigate their way through the complexities of our globalized world.
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