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The Tracy McCray Show (KROC 1340 AM, Rochester MN) with guest Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett 27 March 2003 McCray: News Talk 1340 KROC am. It's 10:09 on the Tracy McCray Show with Andy Brownell and Tom Olstrum will be in tomorrow, but today Andy and I have a guest that I'm very excited, very excited to meet. Good morning Andrew. Brownell: Good morning. McCray: I'll let you get into place a little bit. Let's go into the phones and introduce you to Thomas Barnett. He is with the Naval War College. Good morning Thomas. Barnett: Good morning. Brownell: Good morning. McCray: How are you doing today? Barnett: Very well. McCray: Now, you are originally from Wisconsin so you're all about this springtime snowstorm that we're having here. Barnett: Yeah. I've got plenty of relatives back in the Midwest still and in Minnesota particularly. McCray: Well, I read your article actually, on the show here we have talked a couple of times about what is going to happen to Iraq when this is all over, and it's something Andy and I talked about every once in a while and then low and behold, last week somebody sent me a link to your article that is in this month's Esquire magazine called "The Pentagon's New Map" and it's basically, well, I'll let you describe what your theory is. I would say it's about globalization, but tell us about your article in Esquire. Barnett: Well, the reason why it has gotten a lot of attention with regard to Iraq is because what it does is it puts the question of us going into Iraq and the likelihood that we're going to end up being involved there for some time to come, within a larger context, and not only in terms of the planet and understanding globalization, but really in terms of our history over the last 10-15 years. The article, as we call it "The Pentagon's New Map" begins with a simple series of observations, because in effect we've been struggling inside the Pentagon for the past dozen years or so to come up with some sort of new operating theory for the world. Basically, kind of figuring out whose us, whose them, what do we have to worry about in terms of threats and what I did was basically looked at where we've sent U.S. Military forces over the past dozen years, basically since the collapse of the Berlin Wall - 130 cases roughly - and what I noticed was you could draw a line around 95 % of it, capture the vast majority of it, and you would have this big swath running across the equator that included the Caribbean Rim, the Andes portion of South America along the northern tier, most of Africa, the Caucuses, the Balkans, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and what was interesting was when you draw a line around all those regions and you look at that roughly 2 billion people inside you're struck by this observation. These tend to be the parts of the world that are having the most trouble with globalization. They're having the hardest time either integrating their national economy to the emerging global economy because of things like politically repressive regimes, abject poverty, endemic conflicts - which tend to generate terrorists over time - or maybe they just don't have the robust legal system to attract direct foreign investment that really moves the means of production from more advanced states to developing states. It really integrates a country like we've seen China become integrated over the last 20 years. McCray: In your article you call it, that these areas are disconnected. Barnett: Yeah, in effect because they can't integrate their economy to the global economy or if they are able to do so, perhaps they can't handle the kind of content flows that come about from that interaction. They can't handle the Britney Spears videos, the movies, all those tempting ideas of individual freedom and women's rights and other things that are very challenging for traditional societies. So you look at the Middle East for example. A big chunk of the world's population, about 1/5 when you add it all up - and count the Muslim chunk as a whole - about 1/5 of the world's population, a little over a billion, but when you look at that part of the world, it doesn't represent say, 1/5 of the global trade. It doesn't attract say, 1/5 of the foreign direct investment flying around the planet. It's more like about 3 or 4% of global trade. It attracts more like about 1 to 2% of foreign direct investment. When you talk about other measures of connectivity - fiber optic cables, network connections on the Internet, transportation connections, the movement of goods and services and people for vacations and getting education in other parts of the world, when you look at the Middle East and this part of the world beyond the Middle East that I call the non-integrating gap, in effect where globalization is kind of thin, we're talking about places that are low on all of these measures; low connectivity with the outside world. So what I did in the article that I think helped a lot of people when they were thinking about why are we going into Iraq? Why do we keep getting into trouble with this country again and again? It put it in this larger context that said, "Don't be surprised that we send military forces to deal with some of the most isolated countries in the world, because those are the types of places we've been sending them for the last 12 years." When you look at what I call the functioning core of globalization, everybody else, four billion (people) out of a global population of six (billion people), although we've planned to have wars with those kinds of countries, like a Russia for 40-50 years, and we've planned in an abstract fashion about the danger of a rising China in the future, these are not the places we've been sending our forces since the end of the Cold War. McCray: Just this morning when I was re-reading your article, there was a part that jumped out at me. It says, "ever since the end of World War II this country has assumed the real threat is countries of similar size, development and wealth - world powers like ourselves," but that's not fleshing out to be the case at all. Barnett: Right. I mean what we did after World War II, and you have to go back to that time period to understand why we made these choices - you're one of these wise men putting together the Defense Act of 1947, you're looking around the world, you've lived through two world wars, and you know where the violence in the system is, it's a Germany, it's a Japan, and you're worried about Russia. So you put together a package to deal w/ those types of problems. You create a U.N. Security council that gives veto votes and permanent member status to those countries that you want to keep at the table to make sure that they are always talking and don't go to war. So you build an entire military in effect o prevent this what I call "great power war." It was a necessary thing. I mean it was an amazing achievement the second half of the 20th century to basically end war in Europe among the great powers and to take Japan from one reality to another and to wait out the Soviet threat. I mean we accomplished an amazing amount in the second half of the 20th century. But, you're stuck with this kind of perspective that because of institutional momentum almost, hasn't gone away with the end of the Cold War. We've moved so far away from that "great power war" threat, and on 9/11 we bumped into something else and began to understand that maybe the threats and the danger - this is where the historical record I cite of responses over the last 12 years comes into play - maybe the danger doesn't come from places like us, big countries, countries that are integrating with us, maybe it comes from the disconnected parts of the world. Brownell: Really Thomas, that's an interesting point, when you were talking about the latter half of the previous century and it brings China to mind, a point in your article I found fascinating was that one reason we might not consider China such a risk is that by integrating than into this global market place, we are requiring them to play by our rules. Barnett: Right. McCray: That was one of the things former Governor Ventura always was saying, "we need to get China on board," so when I read that part of your article I said uh-hah, that's exactly what our former governor was talking about. I need to take a break, but when we come back, our guest, Thomas Barnett will talk more about his article, we'll talk about, a bit more about the core and the gap and about one of the unexpected benefits of September 11 that I found in your article that was pretty interesting. Our guest, Thomas Barnett, you can check out his article through the Tracy McCray web page. We'll take a break and be right back at KROC. ----------------------------------------------BREAK----------------------------------------------- McCray: News Talk 1340 KROC am, it's 10:19 on the Tracy McCray Show with Andy Brownell and you'll be invited to give us a call after the bottom of the hour at 282-1234. Our guest is Thomas Barnett from the U.S. Naval War College. Good morning again Thomas. Barnett: Good morning. McCray: Tell us, we were talking about this article that you've written, "The Pentagon's New Map." What is you association with the Pentagon? Barnett: Um, my day job in effect is that I'm a professor at the Naval War College. I've been here since 1998. We had a very legendary boss start up around the same time I did, a guy named Art Cebrowski who at that time was a three star or Vice Admiral in the U.S. Navy. He's a legendary figure because he's the one who is considered the father of this concept of network centric warfare, or in effect moving the defense department from kind of an industrial age model of throwing lots of stuff at somebody, to kind of an information age model where it's what they call an effects based operation and all the precision guidance, and all the communications and networking. He comes on about the same time I joined the War College in '98. We do some interesting work together - looking at the Year 2000 problem, develop some models on that, which come pretty close to predicting some of the things that happened after 9/11, not that we were predicting 9/11 but we had thought seriously about what a real crisis in the international system would look and feel like in the age of globalization. I had been conducting after the Y2K work, a series of workshops at the top of the World Trade Center, oddly enough, with the firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which a lot of people know because they lost so many people on that deadly day, looking at the future of globalization and how it all comes together and how you think about it in a systems fashion, how it relates to issues of national and international security, which is where the origins of this article begin to be found. Well 9/11 basically kills the project I was working on with Cantor Fitzgerald because so many people died in the attack and at that point Art Cebrowski just retired from the War College. He goes off to work for Secretary Rumsfeld in a special office called the Office of Force Transformation where these ideas of moving the military from industrial age models to information age models is going to be given wide play. He becomes sort of a guru for this concept they call transformation and a lot of the ideas we had been discussing, about asymmetrical warfare and unconventional threats from an unconventional international security environment seem to be proved on 9/11, so I guess I was asked by Art Cebrowski in effect to become one of his assistants in this new office. I do it long distance, traveling down to Washington, as I need to. McCray: You said one of the things in the article, one of the good things that happened from September 11, which you're kind of touching on there is it really highlights the difference in what you're calling the core and the gap, which before, and I remember having this conversation many times with listeners and between Andy and myself, after the September 11 attacks people said, how can we go attack al Qaeda, they don't have a country, they're just a group. That's exactly what I think the basis of the difference between the core and the gap. Barnett: Well, in many ways what you're talking about is parts of the world in this gap that I call them, that feel like they're under constant onslaught from this process called globalization that demands you adhere to all these alien rules of transparency and free markets and collective security and again it's very challenging for traditional societies and it's not surprising that you see in effect the uprising of individuals and groups who say, I don't want my world to be changed in this way, and in effect I want to preserve this reality - that this society that I live in not be Americanized which is how globalization is often shorthanded. McCray: Sure. Seems western, like western. Barnett: Right, so you get a bin Laden who says, I don't want your rule sets, I don't want your women's liberation, and your legal systems and all this transparency and interaction which will radically remake my society that I not only want to keep where it is, but in many ways I want to take it backwards. I want to take it back to some seventh century paradise like they did with Afghanistan. So, what we're up against here are in effect the friction of globalization spread, people who are saying we want to preserve our life and our group identity and we're willing to fight in effect for chunks of the world and if bin Laden had his way, he would take as many Muslim countries as he possibly could offline from this globalization process and in effect declare your rule sets don't matter here. This is not the first time this happened in the world. We had a globalization process, the second half of the 19th century and we had friction come up there, it was called Bolshevism and there was a charismatic leader called Vladimir Lenin who in effect dreamed of taking a vast chunk of Europe offline and create kind of a separate world where our rules didn't apply and special kinds of rules applied and he succeeded in creating the Soviet Union and that became the Soviet bloc and what those people blocked for 70 years of isolation was environmental devastation, short life spans, you know, terrible despair and it's taken years and years to come out of it. I don't want to see something like that happen in the Middle East, so I think it's not just a matter of we take these people on because they're threats to the United States not just in terms of bringing their violence here, but we take them on because we don't want to see a big chuck of the world's population go off some isolating path. As I've said before, the Middle East's already too isolated. Brownell: Thomas, you've just highlighted a lot of my views perfectly with what you've just said and I see globalization as an inevitability and I guess my question to you is, how do you explain taking Saddam Hussein and his regime out of the picture, how do you explain how that will assist in the lessening the isolation of let's say Iran or Saudi Arabia or some of the other nations over there? Barnett: Right. I mean you can sort of take your pick of the parts of the world that are in this gap and what needs to be dealt with first. I mean there are a lot of people who argue we need to go into Central Africa because there's AIDS and there is chronic conflict and there's three million dead in that part of the word through ongoing wars. Why focus on the Middle East? There is some truths to the argument that says it's because of the oil. But I don't like that excuse because my response to that is in effect is thank God there's oil in the Middle East because there's parts of the world where there isn't anything that we value, like Central Africa and there's not much hope that anyone is going to go in anytime soon to deal with that. McCray: It would give them a sort of trump card if they were to come on board with the whole globalization thing because then they would have quite something to trade. Barnett: Right, right, but I mean when you're talking about the Middle East, the big holdback is in the Middle East in effect, that's all they've got to trade and they don't provide economic opportunity for a broad section of their population and when you get people, and you know it shouldn't be surprising for example that 15 of the 19 terrorists on September 11 were from Saudi Arabia because if you're a young man in Saudi Arabia and you're not a member of the royal family and you're not going to go into the oil industry and you don't get much of an education except in religious school, where are you going to go in life? What's going to be the economic opportunity for you? They literally stand around, they call them wallers, young guys with no future who just wait in urban areas in Saudi Arabia for something to happen and lean against the wall and eventually somebody comes along and says I can make your life meaningful. Six months later you're flying a plane into the World Trade Center and yeah your life has more meaning but you've got to give the Middle East more opportunities, more choices than that. Why does dealing with Saddam help in that? Again this is a chunk of the world's population that has woefully under preformed economically in terms of integration with the outside world. They just don't have much. It's very restricted dialogue we have with the Middle East, basically give us your oil, we'll give you money, keep your darn terrorists. We need to have a wider dialogue to take out a security threat like Saddam allows the kinds of countries like a Jordan, like a Qatar that are moving in a direction of greater integration, more liberalization, giving their population more access to the outside world, more possibilities for trade and opportunity that allows those voices to become the dominant voices in the Middle East, not a Saddam, not an Osama, not a Yassir Arafat, all of who are talking about violence and more violence. McCray: We have to take a break. Thomas Barnett is our guest and I had a whole page of questions before we started this interview and now I have a whole other page of ones I want to ask you. One of the things we can talk about when we come back is the Darwinian aspect of this, which I think is interesting, the islands gap, or the islands of core that are in the gap, I want to talk about that and you know, I guess we need to have some callers call in with their questions too, 282-1234 so hold on Thomas and we'll take a break for news and we'll be right back with more of the Tracy McCray Show. ----------------------------------------BREAK--------------------------------------------------------- McCray: News Talk 1340 on KROC am, this is the Tracy McCray Show with Andy Brownell and our guest is Thomas Barnett. He's from the U.S. Naval War College. Good morning again Thomas. Barnett: Good to be here. McCray: You know, Andy and I both were very interested in our article and then when I went to your website and saw that you were a Packer fan I thought ugghh… Brownell: Then I almost ripped it up. Sorry about that Thomas. Barnett: The only season ticket holder from the great state of Rhode Island. McCray: Well I knew I had to get you on the phone when that turned out to be the case. Brownell: You know, before we dive into this again Thomas, the one observation I had while you were talking and while I was out doing the news and thinking about things, is that the gap kind of coincides with the oldest civilized areas of our planet. Can you come up with a theory of why that is? Barnett: Well, there's a, I show that map in these presentations I've given so many times all over Washington, all over academia, all over think tanks and what I hear time and time again is I have this map at home they say but it's precipitation rates, it's biodiversity loss rates, it's certain religions, it's ability to adopt new information technologies, it corresponds to a lot of different measures. Yeah, they are some of the oldest civilizations in the world, that's because those tended to arise in the warmest places and that's another explanation people have used for why there tends to be less development across the middle section of the world, these are the hottest and in some ways, some of the toughest places to live and it doesn't encourage you, like we were encouraged say in Wisconsin and Minnesota to figure out how to do things indoors and pursue more industrial kinds of paths as opposed to sustenance agriculture. Another thing you hear a lot when you look at this map, or some of the responses I get is, isn't this really all about Islam? McCray: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. How does religion play in what is happening in the gap, because it seems that they are kind of hand in hand. Barnett: Right. My response is to say well I'm talking about the Caribbean and the northern part of South America too. I'm talking about Africa and I'm talking about Southeast Asia. So we're really talking about all the world's religions when you add it all up and what you find in this gap is they all seem to be more fundamental. McCray: Thomas has written an article called "The Pentagon's New Map." That's the article that we're talking about, that you can access through TracyMcCray.com. It's just a fascinating article and one of the things I wanted to talk about, I mean I've got a whole list of questions, but you touch on it briefly in one of the paragraphs, you call it Darwinian pessimism because it kind of becomes an us and them thing and you said you know, it used to be they thought people in the former Soviet Union couldn't do business, they just couldn't function that way and now a lot of people are saying, well the Muslims, they can't behave themselves. They can't work in an economic society. Talk about that a little bit. I think it is really interesting. Barnett: Well, it's this sense that you get that we are imposing American values on the world and what gives us the right, and should we really be about say liberating an Iraqi people. Maybe they prefer to live under an authoritarian regime. I have a lot of trouble with these kinds of responses because I think that the desire for individual freedom is universal. I think the desire to worship God in your own way is universal. I think the desire to choose your own path in life in terms of job and career is universal. We've had this kind of pessimism in the past. There were a lot of people when we decided to do the Marshall plan and get involved in the rebuilding of Europe who said you know, these people are going to be fighting forever. They just, they can't stop. We heard that about a Japan, about a Russia. They lack a democratic gene. It's their nature, they're Slovs. They can't become capitalists. Time and time again this bias that they're really different evaporates when you give people the opportunity. McCray: Even recently when you were talking about China, you know we can't sign this and become part of this new world with China because they just can't function in that way. Barnett: Because they've been authoritarian forever and yet look at what that country has become in the last 20 years, when they started getting in effect economic freedom and look at the development, the wealth that has been accumulated there, the tremendous creativity that has been unleashed. So when I hear these arguments, again I've lived just long enough to remember the ones with Russia and China and I call it the "Muslims are from Mars" kind of argument, that says, well they think differently, they value life differently, they really can't be businessmen, they really can't handle democracy. I see a lot of Muslims living all over this world in democratic, capitalistic societies who are thriving. McCray: We heard that so many times after September 11. We just can't understand how these people think. Rowenell: Well, we've got a group of Muslims putting up a 26 story tower right now in downtown Rochester to show you what kind of entrepreneurs they can be. In your article you mentioned that we're going to have to pay a lot of attention to what you refer to as the seam. Maybe you could explain what the seam is and what crucial role that plays in this theory. McCray: The countries that are on the seam. Brownell: Right. Barnett: Right, and really Iraq is like that and so is Yugoslavia. It's the reason we do those kinds of situations over in the 90's and we don't go all the way into a Central Africa, which really does seem lost inside the gap. But this notion of the seam states, becomes on, if most of the violence, most of the endemic conflicts are kept within this gap area where globalization is thin, those endemic conflicts are going to be where you see the terrorists incubating because it's that kind of chronic conflict which creates very desperate nihilistic people who are willing to do whatever it is to your part of the world and make you deal with it on some level like bin Laden does with 9/11. If you look at the maps where they say where are the terrorists? Where are the suicide bombers? Where are their headquarters? They're all inside the gap. Their interior lines of communication are all inside the gap. If you look at where al Qaeda moved its gold, where it moved its people, they moved them throughout the gap. Where they want to do their mischief of course is in the core and to get to the core they have to find in effect kind of sloppy security states to transit through. McCray: The seam states. Barnett: Right, what we call the seam states. If you look at where we've really gone and pursued bilateral security cooperation in a very heightened fashion since 9/11 you will find these states that lie along this seam of what I call this gap. What they are trying to do in these situations with the Philippians or an Indonesia is help them deal with whatever endemic kind of terrorist groups that they may have and to tighten the kind of security practices these countries have so that when these guys try to get access to what I call the core they have a harder time kind of breaking through. You see this in South Africa where the U.S. Treasury has been making a lot of efforts to help the South Africans with their banking regulations and procedures because there's some fear on our part that that's sort of a back door that al Qaeda has been accessing to get to global banking networks to move their money and what not. They don't walk into New York and do these kinds of things because the rule sets are strong here. They go to someplace on the fringe and that's where they get access. Brownell: I did note that you did mention one of those seam states is Mexico, which is darn close. Barnett: Right, I mean Mexico is, it's really apart of the core, it's really a seam state as well. It's almost a part of the United States economy in a very explicit sense. We're going to be sending social security payments down there and they tend to let them vote up here and we let people vote down there. I mean they're almost becoming the United States, but it is a big access point, even more so because the only other way unless you're coming in by water is through Canada and Canada tends to have better security practices by in large. We tend to catch them coming across the border more than we do with Mexico and in part that's where the drugs tend to come up and we've seen and become concerned about the transnational terrorist connections that have developed with the narco-terrorists down in Colombia over the last 10 or so years. McCray: Well we've talked about the seam states there. We have to take a break but I would like to talk about the islands because the two islands you mentioned, we've been hearing a lot about recently, which is Israel and North Korea so we'll take a break and we'll come back. Thomas Barnett is on the Tracy McCray Show. We're talking about "The Pentagon's New Map" and we'll talk about islands next on KROC. --------------------------------------------BREAK----------------------------------------------------- McCray: News Talk 1340 KROC am it's 10:48 on the Tracy McCray Show with Andy Brownell and our guest Thomas Barnett from the U.S. Naval War College is joining us to talk about his article, "The Pentagon's New Map" from Esquire magazine. You can access it through TracyMcCray.com. Thomas we were talking before about the seam states, the countries that are on the border between the gap and the core but, there are as you point out in your article, a couple of islands which we hear about all the time, Israel and North Korea. Explain the islands and are there any other islands that you didn't mention. Barnett: Well, it's not surprising we hear about them because in both instances in effect they're fish out of water. McCray: Sure. Barnett: Israel is one of the most globalized societies in the world, but it's stuck in the Middle East, which is one of the most isolated parts of the world, low levels of trade and connectivity with the outside world, so they stick out like a sore thumb and it's not surprising they represent not only a threat along the kind of religious lines of their very existence and why some in that part of the world want to see them eliminated and why they have such great concerns about their security. But they represent an even greater threat in many ways to that part of the world because of the example they set. They show, because I mean Israel is I think a very large population, very large segment of their population are Arab born, in effect kind of Arab Jews, that people from that part of the world can be globalized and there's not real great distinction that precludes that possibility except you tend to have to have the kind of rule sets that we talked about like democracy, like transparency in your business practices that attract that kind of foreign direct investment and it's such an amazing challenge they represent in terms of the connectivity they have. I think in many ways, that drives a lot of the resentment from the rest of that part of the world. McCray: You said they're almost though becoming a bully in that area. Barnett: Well, they've had to survive and it's a part of the world where the strong pick on the weak because it’s the part of the world where control over raw materials that really defines power. I mean it's kind of hard for the strong to pick on the weak in a society that's based on brainpower, but it's easy to do when you're talking about control over something like oil or gold or diamonds. Brownell: But doesn't that kind of, the irony of it that Israel with its lack of natural resources has the strongest economy in the region. Barnett: Right, that's because they've had to use their brainpower. McCray: So, Israel is an island in the gap and North Korea is an island in the core. Barnett: Right. I mean here's another great example of, make me the argument that somehow people in that part of the world lack a democracy gene of a capitalist gene. Here's two twins separated at birth so to speak, South Korea, I think it's like the ninth largest economy in the world, a real powerhouse on all levels, very connected to the outside world and here's the very same people just to the north, tremendously isolated and what are they? They're one of the big threats in the system. Their only connectivity with the outside world is their willingness to sell dangerous technologies and who do you sell dangerous technologies to? You sell them to outlaws. McCray: To the gap, yeah. It's so interesting, you know what, that is a perfect way to explain the difference between the core and the gap is North Korea and South Korea. OK, let's talk about rebuilding Iraq because right now the President and Tony Blair are getting together to talk about what's going to happen after this war is over and so what do you think. You were kind of hinting off air that you're not sure it's the headed in the right direction. Barnett: Well, I think the Bush Administration has actually been wonderfully clever in the way that they've pursued this. When you talk about the United States and you talk about the rest of the world and who can actually do something about bad situations in the gap, we're the only military that can send our forces any distance to do anything. There's nobody who even comes close. The Brits are fairly professional but on their own they couldn't manage it because they just couldn't manage the scale. So when the U.N. and the U.S. sit down and try to figure out what to do with an Iraq for example, the U.N. is all for a kind of, let's get to the peace keeping, let's get to the rebuilding, but they don't have any assets to really stop the conflict, to make the disarmament happen. So the Bush administration, I think, made a wonderful case of kind of inevitability. We're going to do this, you can bless this with resolutions, you can dress this with some coalition partners but in the end it's going to be a largely unilateral affair for fundamental reasons because we're the only ones who can really take a military force and go there. Now that creates a lot of friction between us and our allies. A lot of people in America concerned that we didn't get a blessing from the United Nations, that this has led to great fracturing between us and Europe. How's this thing going to be repaired? McCray: Yeah, how do we kiss and make up? Barnett: Right, and here I think the Bush administration has done something pretty clever again. It's a little bit like the briar rabbit story. They have laid out a plan for rebuilding Iraq in the next year or so. They've committed a certain amount of money towards it. It's almost an impossible task to do that fast. The amount of money they've laid forward, a lot of people in the development community say not nearly enough and yet the fact that they're willing to make the push to start this process creates a dynamic within which, in effect, we can be rescued by our friends and that's how you kiss and make up in effect. You've already got Tony Blair saying I'm going to do my darnedest to make sure the U.S. administration allows the U.N. back into the picture and France and Germany and Russia and a lot of these countries that frankly have the connectivity with the oil reserves there in terms of commercial interests. They're all jumping over themselves to say well we may have not supported the war, we may have had our differences, but we all want to be there for the rebuilding process. McCray: We'll rebuild together. Barnett: Right, and I don't think Americans should be worried about that. Some people said, you know you're putting the cart before the horse to go there and start this trouble without the U.N. blessing. In many ways the U.N. is all about what comes after. I mean that's where their assets are. They really can't stop wars. That's only something the United States can do so it's not putting the cart before the horse. The horse is definitely in front here when the U.S. decides to finally do something like we did in Yugoslavia and elsewhere because the U.N. has typically taken a pass on these situations like Yugoslavia, like Rwanda. They have a hard time making these decisions and yet when the peace is achieved and you can actually peace keep, that's when the U.N. steps in. So my motto is sort of the United States is in the business of saving the world from itself and the United Nations is in the business of saving the United States from itself and that's not a bad dynamic because somebody has to lead this grand circus against these threats and they are tremendous efforts. It's not wrong for us to get the lead with the military because we're the only ones who can provide it, but then that allows the rest of the world to get back into the process and kind of save us from our own ambition over the long haul because what we're trying to do with Iraq is integrate them with the outside world and of course you need the outside world to participate in that. Brownell: Thomas, what about the, you know the European view is by acting unilaterally, moving our military across the world, establishing these spheres of influence inside the gap, I know they don't refer to it that way, we are creating a de facto empire and that they complain that their lessons of imperialism should be heeded. That it will just lead to pain for the United States in the long run by having these garrisons of troops established in the far outposts throughout the world. How do you address that kind of concern? Barnett: Well, I think empire is a bit of a stretch because we're not really interested in the long-term occupation of anything. We're really interested in just making sure certain rules; certain rule sets are operative in the global economy. That there are certain bad things you don't engage in. That there are basic standards that you try to pursue and your internal rule sets - your government, your economic activity - that will allow you to integrate yourself with the outside world over time. So when we go into an Iraq and take on a negative security situation, a real law breaker so to speak, who is, I would argue, holding back a good chunk of the world's population by creating a lot of insecurity that makes them unwilling of afraid to move ahead with reform processes that would help them integrate with the outside world over time, we're not engaging in imperial activity because what we're really trying to do is just open up the Middle East. Will we benefit from that? Yeas, but the Middle East will benefit a whole lot more than we'll benefit from it. I like to use this phrase from the World of Information Technology - system administrator. The guy or gal who keeps the network up and running, who says, these are the basic rules. I'm not going to tell you what web site content you have to put on or what emails you send. I'm not controlling your life. Here are the basic rules that need to be enforced so we can all play nice, so to speak. McCray: We are just right flat out, out of time, but I have to ask this question. Is it a Yin and Yang kind of thing? Can the whole world be a core? Do you have to have a gap to have a core? Do you have to have both of them or can we all be core? Barnett: Well, what drives globalization historically is excess money in the system and what is good in the system right now is that the core gets older. What has driven the integration of China over the past 20 years has been a lot of that 401K money looking for better yields. Why? Because we all want to retire with pensions. So the fact that the core gets older means that we have to import people from the gap, which is a good pressure release valve over time, but it also means we have to send our money to places where we can get the highest returns. For the last 10-15 years that has been China that's been sucking up all that foreign direct investment. Eventually, China will fill up on that and that money will need to go someplace else. Do we get to a point where everybody is up to a certain level? Well there will always be a gap between the richest and the poorest. The point is to get everybody to move forward. McCray: Well, I so appreciate your time and I wish we had another hour. I've been cursing the clock for the last five minutes. Thomas Barnett has written and article called "The Pentagon's New Map." I would love it if more people could read this and we could maybe talk about it a little on tomorrow's show, but Thomas I'd like to thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Barnett: Sure. McCray: I know you're very busy. We squeezed you in this week and hopefully we can be in touch at some time in the future. Barnett: Definitely. McCray: All right, thank you Thomas Barnett from the U.S. Naval War College. We'll take a quick break before news at KROC. |
