Saving the US from Itself - Dr Paul Monk

Osama bin Laden's death was a big if belated achievement for the US, but how much significance should we attach to it? The al-Qaeda leader's ideas retain wide currency and he could be converted into martyrdom. Yet it could be argued that the real challenge to Washington since 9/11 is not Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or China, Iran or North Korea, but egregious errors and abuses within the US.

Fiscally, our guest speaker Paul Monk asserts, the US has been poorly governed for many years. President Obama, despite a bad inheritance from his predecessor, is a long way from solving the problem. Wall Street, too, has many lessons still to learn from the greed and scandal of the past. Dysfunction in the Great Republic, Dr Monk will argue in his address, is a greater threat to capitalism, democracy and security than Islamist extremism.

Accordingly, he believes, we need a renewal of the financial underpinnings of democracy, which requires not state capitalism, but a fundamental rethinking of standards of transparency, accountability, incentives and the prudential framework within which government and business interact.

Dr Paul Monk is a founder of Austhink Consulting (www.austhinkconsulting.com), a niche firm specialising in business and policy decision architectures, the analysis of competing hypotheses and reasoning in the law. He has a Ph.D in international relations and is a former senior intelligence analyst with the Defence Intelligence Organisation, where he headed China analysis in the mid-1990s. Dr Monk is the author of several books, including Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (2006). He is a well known essayist and commentator in the serious press, on radio and television. His latest book is The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009).