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May 2003 issue

OUR SEMIANNUAL STYLE ISSUE in March featured a leonine Benicio Del Torro on the cover.  But the story that drew the most attention was Thomas P.M. Barnett's provocative essay, "The Pentagon's New Map."  Barnett, an advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, argued that regions of the world most resistant to the influence of globalization (the Gap) are also the most dangerous trouble spots.  Thus, he said, America's strategic priority should be to shrink the Gap.

Barnett's analysis of global issues is a frightening example of the idiocy behind the thinking of saber-rattling hawks in the Bush administration.  His glib, jargon-filled briefing presented a simplistic analysis of global politics stunning in its vapidity.  The world will be more stable and secure as nations and peoples become interdependent, but the current lack of connectedness in regions like Africa is much more the result of colonialism than a foolish resistance to globalization.  The contradiction in Barnett's thinking is that while he has steadfast faith in a global economy, he thinks the way to achieve this is through unilateral military action.  Barnett's hubris would be laughable but for the fact that it is shared by Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney as they lead us into disaster.

David R. Anderson
Framingham, Mass.

"The Pentagon's New Map" is a very important piece that I hope many, many people get to see, consider, and use to draw some sense of courage and resolve.  I am troubled by the state of world affairs and hope people reading this article will take, as I did, some comfort from what should be, and most likely will be, America's role in the shrinking Gap.

Michael Shannon
Washington, D.C.

I wonder if Barnett has questioned anything he was ever taught throughout his military education.  His ethnocentrism and his denial of any sort of historical context for the sorry state of our globe are disappointing.  He has somehow transformed isolated groups of terrorists into a magnified view of the entire Third World, while implying that the United States is the best "functioning" model of a democracy!  Those people who represent the world's "ozone hole," as Barnett so eloquently stated, simply must forget the world as they have known it and instead accept corporate America, a joke of a president, and mind-numbing media into their lives in order to become "successful."  People like Barnett perpetuate this same globalized terror they intend to quell.

Brooke Jacobson
Seattle, Wash.

Thank you so much for publishing "The Pentagon's New Map" for the Pax Americana.  How thrillingly horrific to hear someone expound at length on the idea that we are in a position to manipulate and control the entire world.  Even more interesting was Barnett's assertion that the world would see great benefit from the tender mercies of the commercial and military interests of the U.S.  One wonders if Barnett has ever read a history book, if he has examined in detail the justifications for megalomania published across the centuries.  If he had, he might see that he really just invented new words for an old concept: There are those in this world whom we can exploit ("The Core") and those who are not yet exploitable ("The Gap").  Even a schoolyard bully knows that what you cannot get through oppression (excuse me, globalization), you can take through force.  The maps were really cool, though.

Norman Council
Lansdowne, Pa.

It's a shame that 99.9 percent of the American people don't live in the world Barnett inhabits - a place where globalization is assumed to be a good thing, where countries whose intrinsic economies were ruined by colonialism and imperialism are now considered as belonging to the Gap, and where the one imperial military power left, the U.S.A., must ride to the rescue to straighten everything out.  For the rest of us, I ask Barnett: Will you or your firstborn be leading the charge into Baghdad?  How will we pay for these endless military undertakings?  And last: Who, in the long run, benefits from this plan other than global corporations?

David McCorquodale
Wilmington, Del.

While my colleague Barnett's piece is provocative, I am unconvinced that his argument on "shrinking the Gap" should be taken very seriously - or even if his argument is executable.  While the author makes clear in small print that his views "do not necessarily reflect any official policy"--and, equally, my comments here do not--the title of this short essay might suggest otherwise to most readers.  And while there is logic in simplifying complexity, there are real pitfalls as well.  I agree that "disconnectedness means danger," but I cannot buy into Barnett's proposition that a country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity.  Moreover, given Barnett's careful bet-hedging, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Argentina are potential candidates for the Gap, but such hollow reasoning leaves only North America, Chile, and Western and parts of Central Europe as part of the Core--a pretty small core.  At best, Barnett proposes a crude economic materialism that should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The real cost to the Core of not investing in the Gap in the right way and early enough is likely to be decades of military engagement and political frustration.  While Barnett attempts to justify intervention, we ought, instead, to be justifying investment.  Whenever we look at a map, it ought to be obvious that these are two different things.

P.H. Liotta, Ph.D
Naval War College
Newport, R.I.

Thomas Barnett responds:

Readers who view America's "rap sheet" as a litany of economic exploitation, military oppression, and political hypocrisy are bound to find my views dangerously arrogant, hopelessly detached from both "real life" and any "honest" history.  But the nature of the attack in these letters does reveal something profound: An optimistic belief in the future is quite frightening for most people.  If I had painted a future beyond hope, more would have found satisfaction in the description, for it would leave us all more easily off the hook.  We could express disgust at those "greedy bastards" who ruin life all around us and - having voiced our righteous indignation - retreat to cynical distraction.  (Honey, would you throw another sanction on the fire?)

I believe life consistently improves for humanity over time, but is does so only because individuals, communities, and even entire countries take it upon themselves not only to imagine a future worth creating but actually to try to build it.  I work for the finest government in history, in the greatest country in the world.  I am proud to be associated with the best military on the planet.  I get up every morning convinced that my job is to change the world, and I remain wholly optimistic that it can be done.