I hear a lot of analysts dissing public-private partnerships as unholy. I think back to my early days, as a think tanky type, working for CUE (an NGO, in partnership with the USG), and even including NATO in my Project Renaissance paper.
I suppose I was more of the golden boy in those days, courted by the intel community, wined and dined, living in DC off and on. No wonder I considered myself some kind of "NATO professor". Pretty nutty right?
In my defense, I had the childhood and young adulthood of an expat, i.e. I was Third Culture, living my identity as a USAer from the outside, one could say from various "alien" perspectives. No wonder I'd write about the ET point of view (ETPV I called it). I was seeing Earth as a whole.
I was (and still am) a globalist, meaning I can't help but think I live on a planet (is it different for you?).
I'd like to have longer conversations with these analysts, as I'm sure they have a lot of special case instances to go through, of when and how NGOs, funded by governments and other donors, were used for evil ends. CUE was working on refugee resettlement, in the aftermath of the American War in Indochina.
However, the whole pattern, of players in the public and private sectors, getting along and even coordinating to some degree, doesn't seem by definition wrong-headed.
I'll leave the door open, in other words, to people who want me to stop with the Project Renaissance talk already, which has evolved, but still has some of the same elements.
I still throw around GST as competitive with the more LAWCAP-oriented thinking most think tanks still traffic in (yawn). I still keep the Bucky stuff on the table and play the game of XYZ vs IVM (insider jargon).
But as a globalist, and a believer in various kinds of inter-sector (public and private) coordination, I'm not thereby turned into a clone of "the globalist" as if we're talking about some single mentality. Do we think nationalism is one, and only one, school of thought? That'd be ridiculous right? I rest my case.
