Right Pulse

…but not Kevin Rudd, in Foreign Policy’s ‘top 100 global thinkers’.  If I recall correctly FP rejected Rudd’s silly neo-liberalism essay for publication last year. The fact that Gordon Brown made the list, given the abysmal state of the UK, is a little strange . So Rudd misses out. It really is rather funny to see Rudd – who was meant to be a foreign policy guru – flounder on foreign policy from day one. He’s managed to annoy the Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Indonesians for no reason other than clumsy diplomacy. Is there anyone else in the region he wants to annoy?

However one Australian did make the list:

44. David Kilcullen

for writing the book on how America fights small wars.

Counterinsurgency expert | Washington

A gregarious former lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, Kilcullen had an epiphany as a Ph.D. student in political anthropology. At root, guerrilla movements were motivated not by radical ideals, but by mundane, everyday drives; defeating them requires protecting the population and developing an in-depth knowledge of local social networks. In 2007, as the Iraqi insurgency was reaching its height, Gen. David Petraeus brought him on as a senior advisor, and many credit Kilcullen’s ideas with saving countless lives. Now, the Aussie has begun applying his out-of-the-box thinking to Afghanistan, starting with his book The Accidental Guerrilla. “If I were a Muslim,” Kilcullen told the New Yorker, “I’d probably be a jihadist.… The thing that drives these guys — a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now — that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

….

Worst idea: The notion that the West can afford to fail in Afghanistan and still have a chance of preventing the collapse and terrorist takeover of Pakistan.