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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #10Chapter Four: The Core and GapSection: The Flow of Security, or How America Must Keep Globalization in BalanceCommentary: This tenth "deleted scene" was cut for pacing, I imagine. I include it here because it lays out a slide I use in the brief to great effect. The section deals with the notion that you can track the Core's changing public export portfolio over the various eras of globalization. Here is the chart that explains the breakdown by era:
Deleted Scene: The Core's Public Exports By Era[TEXT BEGINS] U.S. security is the only public-sector export from the Core to the Gap that matters in the age of globalization. If you went far enough back in history, say, to the 19th century's age of empires, you could say the Core's main public-sector export was administration (i.e., keeping the natives from getting restless while we removed all those raw materials), and that its main private-sector export was Christianity -- through missionaries. After the Second World War, America found itself the sole surviving member of the Core, and so its first order of business was to resurrect those parts of Globalization I that could still be salvaged: Western Europe and Japan. Due to our success in these efforts, globalization's Core was re-formed around those three pillars, and then in the late 1950s a new form of public-sector export to the Gap came of age -- foreign aid. America created the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) began their comprehensive effort at what the Europeans like to call Official Developmental Aid, or ODA. When the Arabs got rich thanks to the oil price shocks of the 1970s, state-based arms transfers enjoyed a brief heyday as the leading public-sector export, but that phenomenon faded with the end of the Cold War. Now, global arms sales largely rise and fall with economies: when Gap countries feel richer, they buy more, but when they feel poorer, they buy less.1 Now, in the age of globalization, U.S. security exports are the leading public-sector export from the Core to the Gap. Because foreign direct investment has overwhelmed ODA flows to developing economies, in effect pulling half the world's population from Gap to Core status, U.S. security exports to the Gap become the single most important public sector flow from the Core. Clearly we are also a leader in technology and cultural exports, but these are fundamentally private-sector transactions that any advanced economy can provide, and neither flow can be delivered in a strategic fashion because the global marketplace makes all the decisions, not Washington strategists looking for specific outcomes. [1] For details, see Richard Grimmett, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1994-2001," (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, August 2002). [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
