The Glen Mitchell Show (KERA 90.1FM, Dallas TX)
with guest Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett
13 February 2003
Glen Mitchell: Since the end of the Cold War the U.S. has been trying to come up with a quality theory of the world and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, Thomas P.M. Barnett—a professor of Warfare Analysis—has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving a briefing continually at the Pentagon and the CIA. Today he is going to give it to you, and in the process explain why military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is necessary and inevitable. After the news from National Public Radio.
[news break]
Glen Mitchell: Welcome back. Thomas Barnett believes that when the U.S. finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or force disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Rather it will mark a historical tipping point. The moment Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization. It's why, he says, public debate about the war has been so important, because it forces Americans to come to terms with what he calls "the new security paradigm that shapes the age"—namely, that disconnectedness defines danger. It's why war with Saddam Hussein's regime is necessary and inevitable, because it is dangerously disconnected from the globalized world, from its rules and norms and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.
He lays out his argument in the current edition of Esquire in an article called "The Pentagon's New Map." It’s a distillation of a briefing he has been giving to the Pentagon and the intelligence community since September 11. Thomas Barnett is an advisor to the Defense Department and a professor at the Naval War College and we'll take your calls for him a bit later as well at (214) 871-9010, or 1-800-933-5372. We're also at gms@kera.org. Thomas welcome.
Dr. Barnett: Glad to be here.
Glen Mitchell: You break the world down into two major components: the Functioning Core, Core for short and the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap for short. What are their defining characteristics?
Dr. Barnett: Well, let me tell you how I made the division in the first place. The whole article—this whole new way of looking at the world—begins with a very simple set of observations. First, what I do is I plot out on the global map all the places this country has sent its military forces since the end of the Cold War, approximately 130 times—a lot of activity. Second, I draw a line around 95 percent of those cases to see if I can spot any sort of pattern among the regions. Now, the regions we tend to send the bulk of our troops over the 1990's includes the Caribbean rim, the northern tier of South America, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans of course, former Yugoslavia, the Caucuses, the Middle East, Central Asia, and most recently, a good chunk of Southeast Asia.
Now, when you look at that collection of regions as a whole, which constitutes roughly two billion out of a global population of six (billion), you notice that these are the states and regions that are having the most trouble with globalization. Either they can't integrate themselves with the global economy because of abject poverty, repressive regimes, an inability to attract foreign direct investment, or they're simply connected to the global economy in only a limited manner, like the exporting of a single raw material—think of the countries in the Middle East with their oil exports—and their real problem with globalization is that they can't handle the content flows that come with all that connectivity. As you noted, those are the regions I call the Non-Integrating Gap.
When you look at the rest of the world, or those places where we haven't sent our military forces over the last 12 years, these I define as the Core of functioning globalization. These are the states or regions that are progressively adapting what I call their "international rule sets" to match the emerging global rule sets of transparency, free markets and collective security. That's the rest: North America, Europe, Japan, the emerging markets—most notably China, India—plus the bulk of the former Soviet bloc states. That's roughly four billion out of a population of six billion in the world.
So, when you put these observations together and you come up with this conclusion—this stunning conclusion, I think—that the less connected a state is to the global economy, the more likely America sends troops there at some point, either to quell some internal instability or to deal with some poignant threat to regional security. You could say with regard to Iraq, you're talking about both situations there.
Now, until 9/11, the kind of danger we were talking about—these interventions around the world—was really an "outside, over there" kind of danger. It didn't really have anything to do with the American homeland. But of course, with 9/11 and the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this concept that Tom Freedman—a New York Times op-ed columnist—likes to tell, that of a super empowered individual (someone capable of waging war on a level that only states could do in the past), this concept becomes very real in the form of bin Laden and al Qaeda. And then this concept explains internal strife and instability in such a way that connects it to individual security in this country, meaning that kind of danger is something that can now reach across borders and create danger within our own country.
Mitchell: How easy is it for a country to move from the Gap to the Core?
Barnett: Well, that's a big question. My basic argument is that one of the reasons why broad band economic connectivity between a country like Liberia or Niger or a Bolivia or Peru or something like that doesn't get broader over time is because the country itself doesn't have the rule sets in place to attract foreign direct investment, to attract the money or the means of production from advanced states down there to take advantage of the cheap labor. Of course if it was just a matter of cheap labor, then Haiti would be one of the productive capitals of the world because there is lots of cheap labor in Haiti. There has got to be other reasons why business doesn't move to Haiti.
The basic argument I offer is they don't have the rule sets there—the robust legal system, the transparency, the controls over their financial and banking systems—that really attract the advanced states' economic entities (corporations) to come down there and take advantage of that cheap labor. One of the reasons why we see the lack of rule sets in many instances is, there tends to be a lot of conflict and insecurity in the region. That is why I make the basic argument that it is important for the United States over time to—in effect—export security to those parts of the world that lack internal regional security because it encourages foreign direct investment by outside corporations. They need to see a stable rule set there and as long as there tends to be rebels trying to break off from the country or civil wars or internal instabilities of any sort, that's what keeps capital out of the country and that's what keeps the country out of the core.
Mitchell: Thomas Barnett, my guest. His article appears in the current edition of Esquire magazine. You describe countries like Argentina and Brazil that have had trouble trying to adapt globalization while things improve. As you pointed out, it often takes time. You concluded: "It's always possible to fall off the bandwagon called globalization and when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you're lucky, so too will American troops." How come?
Barnett: Well, typically when a country tanks in terms of a financial crisis—we saw this with the Asian flu in the late 1990's—you're going to see internal strife. If you're lucky, that kind of internal strife is limited to something like riots in the streets, or demonstrations and protests against the perceived inequality brought about by this financial crisis. But in some instances you're going to see parts of the country—in effect—try to make a break for it.
Indonesia, for example, was a thriving, newly emerging industrial state in the mid-1990s when they get hit by the financial panic of the so-called Asian flu in '97/98. That leads not only to instability throughout their archipelago but to—in a couple of instances—countries trying to—or chunks of that country trying to—break off, most notably East Timor and the Aceh section of the island of Sumatra.
Now these kinds of situations end up leading to—in many instances—international peacekeepers having to come in. If you don't get international peacekeepers, then you tend to be a country that's left to its own devices. For example, just having gone through some sort of financial panic, the entire country is in tumult. If you get a part of your country trying to break off, you're lucky if you get some international help. And the country that can really provide that time and time again, the only military power that can really send its troops great distances and support them for long periods of time, that's the U.S. military.
Mitchell: If you have a question for us: 214-871-9010 or 1-800-933-5372. I gather what you're describing is a different kind of mindset from the Cold War—and one we sort of have to catch up to—when we assumed during the Cold War the only countries that could hurt us would be people like us: advanced societies, advanced countries, countries from the Core. That's no longer true, and we have to start thinking about the world in that way. Is that a fair reduction of your argument?
Barnett: Yes. There arose a principle within the Department of Defense's long range planning across the 1990's called the "near-peer competitor." What the near-peer competitor was … sort of … what it constituted, was sort of a threat "to be determined." We lost the old Soviet threat, which was our force sizing principle. We knew if we were just about the same size as their military and maybe just a little bit better in technology, we would feel secure. When that went away in the beginning of the 1990s, we didn't really have anybody to size our forces against. So we invented a concept across the nineties called the near-peer competitor—sort of the assumption that some other great power would arise down the road.
Now that great power that most people talk about—that near-peer competitor that we assume may be out there—is typically China in most planning documents and most planning concepts. And to me that's a dangerous kind of construction of past thought, because—in my mind—China is not so much the problem, it's the prize in globalization. It's a tremendous market. The integration of that part of the world (developing Asia), which constitutes a good one-third or more of the global population, is really the most important task within the process of globalization right now. Better to get off that kind of paradigm and to really focus on the kind of activity that we actually engaged in for the past 12 years.
Again, all those cases I cite, 132 cases of interventions we conducted across the last 12 years, 125 of them are in that part of the world I call the Gap. These are poorer countries. These are countries with very young populations. If they have exports, it tends to be a single raw material. It's not a threat environment that constitutes a near-peer in any measure, and so we see this new concept that a lot of people have been arguing about—in some ways in competition with this concept of the near-peer competitor—and that's called asymmetrical warfare: the notion that when we have to go in and have to deal with certain security situations around the world, we're probably going to be dealing with threats and enemies who are far less superior to us and hence will try to fight us in unusual ways to take advantage of our weaknesses instead of trying to fight us head on. If you think about it, 9/11—a very asymmetrical attack. They didn't try to duke it out with our tank divisions. They rammed a couple of planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon using our own vulnerabilities, our own openness against us.
Mitchell: And that's why as you say, September 11—in a perverse sort of way—did the U.S. security establishment a favor.
Barnett: Absolutely. It really jerked us out of this kind of long range planning against hypothetical enemies and really took this concept of transformation—this concept we've been working on for several years now (how do we take advantage of all the technology and the information revolution to make sure our military forces are as strong as possible and really without a peer in the world)—it took that goal of transformation out of this long range, future warfare and made it important to the "here and now." And we're seeing that kind of network-centric warfare—that kind of transformed military in the operations we engage—in Afghanistan, where we put very few people on the ground and actually pulled off this concept of regime change very quickly with I believe somewhere in the range of about a dozen and a half casualties on the U.S. side. When you think of what the Soviets had to do to put down what they saw as a bad regime and support their own in Afghanistan across the 1980's, that really looks like a paradigm shift. So again, 9/11 is kind of a gift to us, jerks us out of that long range thinking, and makes this technology important right now.
Mitchell: You formulate a simple security rule which goes "a country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity." So the less they are like England …
Barnett: ... Switzerland ...
Mitchell: … or Switzerland, and the more they are like Yemen or Iraq, the more likelihood there is going to be U.S. intervention.
Barnett: Right. Think about the so-called rogue nations as we identified them at the beginning of the nineties. It's a Cuba, it's a Libya, it's a Syria, it's an Iraq, an Iran, a North Korea. Now we're down to the so-called Axis of Evil: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. All three of these countries are pretty much cut off from the outside world. Iran has dealings with the outside world basically in terms of oil and not much else. North Korea almost an autarkic state—almost completely shut of and cut off from the rest of the world. All they do to try to connect themselves to the global economy is sell weapons that we don't want them to sell, to people we don't want them to sell to. And Iraq, of course. That's been a situation where we've been keeping Saddam—so to speak—in the box for the last 12 years. Pretty much a cut off society.
Lo and behold, these are the situation we really worry, not only in terms of what these countries are willing to do (not feeling part of the international community, not feeling beholden to our norms and our international laws and regulations and our belief systems), but we worry about them in a secondary sense—that is, are they willing to support terrorist networks? Are they willing to provide sanctuary to terrorist networks? In the Cold War, terrorists had the old Soviet bloc to disappear into whenever they wanted to go offline. Now with bin Laden, you've seen where he's gone, where al Qaeda has spread to since we kicked them out of Afghanistan. And the places we've been looking for them since—Somalia, Yemen, Northwest Pakistan—again we are talking about some of the most cut off, remote, non-connected parts of the global economy.
Mitchell: Thomas Barnett is my guest. He is an advisor to the Defense Department and a professor at the Naval War College. For sometime he's been giving a lecture to the Defense Department, to the intelligence community and others. It's sort of boiled down to an article now. It appears in the current issue of Esquire. It's called "The Pentagon's New Map". If you have a question for him, we are at (214) 871-9010 or 1-800-933-5372. We're also at gms@kera.org.
[commercial break]
Mitchell: Welcome back. If you want to talk to us today, again (214) 871-9010 of 1-800-933-5372. I sort of got the chronology here from the magazine which suggested since September 11 you've been making this presentation to the Defense Department and intelligence community and elsewhere. Is that accurate? I mean, were you thinking about this beforehand and September 11 made them think, "hmmm, Barnett may be right. Maybe we should get him in here to talk to us?"
Barnett: Well this is an interesting story in its own right. This is a strong connection between myself and the current director of the Office of Force Transformation, a retired three-star admiral—Vice Admiral of the U.S. Navy—called Art Cebrowski. He's kind of a legendary figure in his own right. The father of net-centric warfare, he was selected by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to head this new office, to be—in effect—the transformation guru thinking about how we change our military to adapt to what a lot of us believe has been an international security environment that's changed dramatically in the past 12 years. What we saw on 9/11 was—for many of us—sort of a crystallizing experience.
The conversations I've had with Art Cebrowski and a lot of other people in the defense community really stretch all the way back to when we first looked at the Year 2000 problem—if you can believe it. We started to imagine what a really traumatic, really tumultuous event would look and feel like in the globalized economy. Of course, the Y2K thing was a scheduled event, so it gave us the kind of unique opportunity to imagine what if a lot of bad things happened all at once—all around the world. We came up with a variety of scenarios to explore that topic, and our worst case scenario actually frightened a lot of people because we made a lot of bold predictions: like maybe the stock market would be knocked out for four or five days; maybe air travel would be knocked out for 10 days or two weeks; maybe you'd see people rushing to but guns because there was a new sense of panic in society; maybe you see the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies scrambling around the world seemingly to deal with all these kinds of exotic scenarios all at once. We put that whole scenario package to bed when Y2K came and went kind of quietly, but it was interesting to get a lot of phone calls from the press who had read the report after 9/11 wondering how much we actually came close to predicting some of the tumult we experienced in this society and around the world in the days and weeks following 9/11.
So, this is a conversation about a new form of crisis that we've been having in various circles throughout the defense community for about four or five years. So when 9/11 comes along and kind of grabs everybody's attention, it was a surprise to us as much as everybody else, but the system perturbation that was unleashed by 9/11 was not so much a surprise because we'd been looking at the global economy for quite some time for these kinds of hints as to a new crisis model and we think it was really proven in 9/11. That's why I got plucked out the War College by my old boss, Art Cebrowski, and asked to take this temporary position in his Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense . . . to kind of explore this new security environment and ask what have we learned as a result of 9/11, and what does that learning tell us about how we transform our military in the coming years?
Mitchell: One more question, then we'll get some calls. There was a third group of countries you write about in addition to the Core and the Gap and these are the Seam States. What are they, and why are they important?
Barnett: Well, when you draw that big line, that big circle kind of stretches across the equator, around my so called Gap countries. What you notice is there’s a lot of countries that kind of line the seam of this Core/Gap divide. There are a lot of the countries that we’ve really focused on in the last year and a half after 9/11 in terms of improving those countries’ security measures. Now why is that?
When you look at a map of networks of global terrorist organizations, what you tend to find is, they tend to be located, headquartered, spread around the Gap that I describe. Where they want to do their mischief, of course, is in the Functioning Core as I describe it—like a New York, like a Washington, like a United States. To get to us they have to come across these so-called Seam States. These are a lot of countries where the control by the capitals or the regimes is a little bit weak and so there is a lot of concern on behalf of a lot of U.S. security officials that—in effect—terrorist networks can kind of infiltrate more stable countries through the countries that lie along the seam of my described gap. Classic countries like this? We worry about Thailand. We worry about Colombia and Brazil, for example. We worry about Colombia where we know that there are growing ties between the narco-drug traffickers, rebel groups there, and international terrorists. So, there is some concern that there is money flowing back and forth. There’s technology flowing back and forth and in some instances there is concern that maybe they’re accessing the U.S. by sending people over into these kinds of countries and then running them up, say through a Mexico, or through the island countries in the Caribbean. So, in many ways, what we find when we talk about how much security do we need to achieve in Core countries (as I would call them, like the United States) is that we don't have to increase our security tremendously. In many ways, what we have to do is get the seam countries just to work on their security practices.
Mitchell: Thomas Barnett is my guest. His article appears in the current issue of Esquire. It is called, “The Pentagon’s New Map.” If you want to talk to him, we’re at (214) 871-9010 or 1-800-933-5372 or gms@kera.org. Scott. Good afternoon.
Scott (Caller #1): Yes, good afternoon. You talk about these seam countries and when you talk about them raising their security, what you are not saying and what history has and our influence has proved is that means anti-democratic principles. And remarkably in all these areas, we’ve found that the blowback to the United States policy during the Cold War is that we’ve supported tyranny there and you talk about unstable governments and the bad third … well, in many of these places we’ve supported tyranny or we haven’t bothered with it or it was left to shambles between Russia and the U.S. during the Cold War. Instead of a military approach to this, why don’t we form a Marshall Plan to bring the people into economic proficiency? It would probably save us a lot of money over the long run.
Mitchell: OK, well that’s actually part of the argument that we haven’t gotten to yet that’s in the article, but do you want to go and address that?
Barnett: Yeah, what I'm actually talking about when we talk about the desire to integrate countries from the Gap to the Core—it’s not a military strategy. You don’t bomb them into integration. You don’t invade them into integration. What you do is—in situations when there are failed states, where there is chronic conflict—you send just enough security, in terms of military alliances or presence of our troops in the area or our willingness to intervene when there are crisis situations. You send just enough security to stabilize the situation to get the non-governmental organizations, the private voluntary organizations, the U.N., the aid groups in there to do the triage. And then your interest in keeping a military presence there is strictly to get the country back on its feet and get it to the point where it begins to attract foreign direct investment. Because when you lose that foreign direct investment (the willingness of the advanced world to send its money, to send its means of production for long term growth), then you really lose everything.
My favorite example of this one—as of lat—is Madagascar, a beautiful island country off the coast of Africa. They had become across the 1990’s a magnet for foreign direct investment in the textiles industries. So this country with tremendous poverty, tremendous ecological diversity, starts to attract money from the outside world because it had just enough rule sets in place that corporations were willing to take the risk, to come in and take advantage of their cheap labor. The country starts to have a bit of an economic revival across the 90s. Then something bizarre happens. They have a presidential election and at the end of this presidential election, two individuals still think they are the president—if you can believe such an outcome. Instead of the United States, where we have a robust rule set that deals with this (including lawyers and courts and what not), so we don’t have to actually pull guns on one another to figure out who is president, that’s what happens in Madagascar. And as soon as the strife returns, the money leaves and all that development leaves with it. So the goal of the military intervention is not to run an empire. It’s not to prop up authoritarian governments. It’s really to get enough stability in there so that the government itself can constitute itself in such a way as to attract foreign investment.
Mitchell: But change like that is often difficult and you say fear stands in the path in that kind of change. Fear of what? The unknown?
Barnett: Well, the fear factor I like to cite most specifically has to do—for example—with the Middle East. The Middle East has been an economic underperformer for decades. They have plenty of smart people there. There’s plenty of entrepreneurship there. What you have, though, is countries that are largely dependent on a single raw material. If you look across the 20th century, when a country is dependent on a single raw material, inevitably an elite rises up, creates some sort of ideology that says “we deserve to have more control over this than the masses do,” and somehow the wealth doesn’t seem to get distributed.
Classis case in point is Saudi Arabia. Ruled by, in my mind a royal mafia of about a thousand princes who seem to get most of the wealth, whereas the rest of the country remains largely under developed. When you have that kind of situation, it creates its own sorts of dynamics, a sort of powder keg. You have young men, for example, in a Saudi Arabia who don’t really have any sort of outlet for their future. They don’t get much of an education because education isn’t promoted unless you’re interested in taking religious education. There’s not a lot of jobs because there’s not a lot of industry. There’s just the oil industry that’s pretty much run by the government. So you have this tremendous bulge of youth in Saudi Arabia, something like 40% of the population under the age of 15. They’ve got nowhere to go in terms of ambition. They’re not allowed a lot of contact with the outside world, so they become prey to radical ideologies.
And lo and behold, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise, there’s nothing for them to do except to turn on themselves. We get 15 of the 19 terrorist hijackers (September 11) coming from Saudi Arabia, a country that’s—by all descriptions—a strong ally of the United States. Why Saudi Arabia can’t change that equation? It’s difficult for a country that really follows a strict Islamic view of the world and a view of development to open itself to the outside world. Your population is going to have access to all sorts of content (MTV, Britney Spears, Hollywood movies) that are going to say things to them that maybe you’re uncomfortable with as a ruling elite. So you tend to clamp down on that, not allow it to occur. Because if you do allow that to occur and people start to demand more freedom in terms of their personal lives, or economic freedom, you may lose control—you, the elite of some country. And if you do that and start becoming a westernized, secular state, then you’re probably going to incur the wrath of terrorist groups that believe your future—a country like Saudi Arabia—should be something very strict and something very much in a kind of a …what we would call a backward code of behavior.
If bin Laden would have had his way with Saudi Arabia (he’s a Saudi by birth), he’d take that country right back to the 7th century like they did in Afghanistan. So dealing with that kind of threat always upon you, the Saudis, the ruling elite there, is pretty nervous about instituting any sort of change and yet when you don’t institute change, where do all those young people put their ambition? Unfortunately, many of them are putting it into activities that lead to terrorist activity around the world.
Mitchell: Let’s get some more calls and we’ll pick it up with John in Plaino. Hi.
John (Caller #2): Hi. Great show today and a very pertinent topic. My question concerns—it's more of a comment—if you could elaborate on your assessment of the Gap countries. What I mean is, from a cultural or religious perspective. You kind of touched on some points concerning Saudi Arabi,a for example, just now. But, you know at the end of the day I think most Americans are more worried about some kind of Islamic terrorist striking targets in the U.S. versus, let’s say, Bolivian or Argentinean terrorists if their economies continue to slide downhill.
Barnett: Right.
John (Caller #2): How do you factor that into your analysis, and could you just enlighten us on something more? I’m actually from an Islamic country, but I’m from the Christian minority and I’ve got first hand experience of how—in a lot of ways—intolerance and even violence (and this isn’t politically correct because I’m sick and tired of hearing political correctness concerning this) is ingrained in the culture and the religion. I don’t think anybody could claim that the religious and cultural scenario—say, in Venezuela or Colombia—is the same as in Islamic countries.
Mitchell: All right, thanks.
Barnett: Well, the first thing I would like to point out is, when people are confronted with this picture of the world and they see this Gap, the first instinct (and it’s a natural one) is to say, "Isn’t this really all about the Islamic part?" The first thing I like to caution is, pretty much every religion is represented inside the Gap. What you find in pretty much all of these religions inside the Gap are versions of this religion—any religion inside the Gap—they tend to be the most fundamental sorts of expression of that religion. For example, the kind of Christians you’re going to find in Africa and South and Central America are a lot more fundamental, meaning a lot more kind of the old time Christian, than you’re going to find in the United States. The reason why religions tend to be more fundamental in less developed parts of the world is, religions tend to serve a real survival function. It is not just something people take advantage of in terms of spiritual fulfillment or thinking about larger thoughts beyond themselves. It’s really a networking kind of concept that allows them to find survival opportunities in a harsh environment. So that’s the first point I’d like to make. Don’t give into the temptation to say its just Islam.
Another temptation you get when you look at the Gap is this temptation to say, “If only we could kind of firewall ourselves off from these bad parts of the world (in effect, try to limit our connectivity to them), then we wouldn’t have to send military forces there over time." The way this gets expressed in the U.S. economy, and it takes a certain anti-Islamic tint to it, is to say if we just weren’t so dependent on foreign oil then we wouldn’t have to worry about those people. My problem with this perspective is multifold, but the most basic way of expressing it is, if we think that destroying what little connectivity these Islamic states have with the rest of the world (which is basically about oil), if we destroy that connectivity, tell me how that’s going to make a better situation in those countries. If we basically torpedo their only real method of getting commerce with the rest of the world …in my mind, if you go down that path, all you end up doing is turning the Middle East into another central Africa, where across the 1990’s we had big death, 2 to3 million killed during the ongoing civil war across the middle of that continent. It’s page 25 of the New York Times. We don’t send troops there. America, by and large, doesn’t seem to care.
So I say, when people say to me, “We only care about the Middle East because of oil” … I say, thank God on some level. Because there are parts of the world that have no good grasp on our attention and those places can burn quite silently. To me, the reason why I want to get the Middle East settled security-wise is, I want to develop—as much as possible—broadband economic connectivity between those populations (largely Muslim, very young) and the outside world.
Because, in reality, you’re going to see global demand for oil probably top out in the next 20 to 30 years as we start moving toward hybrid cars and then fuel cell cars. Royal/Dutch Shell, the big oil company, already has global scenarios out to 2020 that predict a peeking of global oil demand. That’s going to be a big change in the next, you know, generation and a half. When I see these kinds of numbers, those kinds of predictions, what I see in the Middle East is the clock running.
These countries have to settle themselves down, security-wise … have to find some way to reconcile their Islamic faith with the notion of greater connectivity with the outside world. Because the end of the oil age, the end of their ability to make money solely through the export of oil, is going to come within 20 or 30 years. It’s really going to peak and then sort of drop. So we have the clock running in terms of our ability to get about a billion Muslims connected somehow to the global economy. Otherwise we may lose them in a much more profound way in the future and I see nothing but trouble coming out of that.
Mitchell: Thomas Barnett is my guest. His article in the current issue of Esquire is called “The Pentagon’s New Map.” We’ll take a break and be right back.
Mitchell: Welcome back. Thomas Barnett is my guest. He is a professor at the Naval War College, currently on loan to the Defense Department as an analyst. His article appears in the current issue of Esquire magazine. It’s called “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Let’s get a call from Tom in Dallas. Hi.
Tom (Caller #3): Hello. We see on TV that Iraq is very impoverished, people riding donkeys, living in mud and stone huts. I’m just wondering, does Saddam control his country with food? You know, like over his reign of 18-20 years, the people who support him eat. I was wondering what your comment is on that.
Mitchell: All right.
Barnett: Well, Saddam, by my definition, is a classic Stalinist—basically a very strict authoritarian ruler whose main interest is staying in power. So he’s willing to use basically any tool against his own population to achieve that end. The other thing you have to remember about a Stalinist is that they need an external enemy. They need somebody on the outside to point to and say, “This is why things have been so bad in our country. The world outside is so dangerous. These bad people are trying to get us." … something along those lines. I’ve always said Saddam needs the United States as an enemy a whole lot more than the United States would ever need Saddam as an enemy, because we’re really largely interested in making the global economy work and keeping international stability going as much as possible in as many places as possible. If Saddam disappeared tomorrow, there would still be plenty of jobs for us around the world in terms of security issues to worry about. But for Saddam, he really needs an external enemy.
With specific reference to the food situation there, I think you really get into the question not just of Saddam’s willingness to harm his own people, but the impact of the sanctions over the last dozen or so years. There have been really credible efforts to try to figure out how many people are actually suffering on an annual basis from the sanctions which really do depress the Iraqi economy tremendously. I’ve seen some good estimates by solid researchers that say maybe 100,000 people a year in Iraq die prematurely because of the really poor standard of living there. Most of these people are going to be young kids under the age of five or old people over the age of 65 who don’t get the right kind of food, the right kind of diet, are more susceptible to disease, and thus die early. If you think about that and start to add those numbers over the last 10 or 12 years, then the sanctions that the international community has placed on Iraq—you could argue—have been responsible for perhaps as many as one million deaths over the course of that decade. Now that's kind of a nasty argument for the international community because, ultimately, what we've done with these sanctions is allowed more than enough food to get in there to actually take care of the people.
What Saddam has done over the past 12 years is keep a tight grip over what food does come into the country and what food is grown there and makes sure that those who support his regime are well fed and anybody who he thinks might give him trouble, those are the people who end up on the short end of the stick. But when you think about that kind of food as a weapon, I think, you have to trace it not only to Saddam but trace it to the international sanctions which, in my mind, raises some difficult questions. When we talk about, say, a Persian Gulf War I back in 1990-91, where, according to the most extreme (and quite high) estimates, maybe 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died and maybe 100,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the war. That's 200,000 compared to maybe 4,5 or even 6 times that amount from the sanctions over the last 10-12 years. So when you start talking about "How long is enough?" and "Is it a fair and just thing to risk more deaths?" I'd say you have to look across the 1990's and you really have to look at the suffering that's come about as a result of these sanctions.
Mitchell: Is that why you say war with Iraq would be "necessary, inevitable and good?"
Barnett: Well again, Saddam needs an external enemy, so he's going to keep causing trouble to remain on our radar much like a Kim il Jong does in North Korea. Since he is unwilling to abide by the rules of the global economy and trade in a normal fashion, he's tended to try to engage the world strictly in terms of basically illegal goods, illegal technologies. Again, that's going to incur the wrath of the United States, which is interested in limiting the spread of dangerous technologies, specifically those related to what we call "weapons of mass destruction." So he's had a willingness to engage in, for example, the pursuit of chemical and biological weapons, which history has shown he is very willing to use not only against Iranians in the Iran/Iraq War but against his own people in certain very disastrous instances. Our concern is not just with that he is going to keep provoking his neighbors, keep provoking the system, but also because he is so close to so much of the world's energy supply he can do some dramatically bad things for globalization if he so chooses to engage in big warfare like he engaged in when he conquered Kuwait back in 1990.
Then, of course, there is that concern we have about his connectivity to international terrorist networks. Iraq was a Soviet client state in the 198's. They have long supported terrorist networks. They remain one of those kinds of countries that are basically off-line from the global community. Those are the places terrorist groups tend to go when they seek sanctuary.
So you put this whole package together (the damage he does to his own people, the danger he represents directly to his neighbors and indirectly to the United States by his willingness to support terrorist networks, and the danger his regime represents in terms of what it might do to disrupt the global economy by attacking other countries in the region who control a lot of the world's energy resources), that's a pretty potent package. In my mind, that says unless he steps down, he's going to keep provoking and eventually we are going to go in.
Mitchell: Let's get a call next from David in Fort Worth. Hi.
David (Caller #4): Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Let me just preface by saying I'm an aerospace engineer on one the nation's newer military programs and I had a comment or question about transformation.
Barnett: Uh-huh.
David: With specific reference to the upcoming war with Iraq, is it truly transformational just to use transformational tools and technologies yet with the strategies of days gone by? In other words, it seems like with Iraq, we are using fancy new tools with the warfighting mentality of our grandfathers. What I mean is, we saw with September 11 the foe is not a standing army of 350,000 with planes and missiles, but that the foe is a small, motivated set of individuals. And my question is, is it transformational to do what we are apparently going to do with Iraq just because we're using transformational gadgets?
Barnett: Well I think you have to disaggregate this potential war into a series of separate tasks. One, we want to get a hold of whatever capacity the regime has to use weapons of mass destruction. That will be primarily a special operations forces kind of effort. That will be very unconventional, and—I will argue—very transformational because it's going to invoke very different organizing principles, very different strategies. If you read in the press, that kind of conflict has already begun on some level. These forces are already prepping that battlefield.
The second task is to take down the regime itself. That will be very much focused on Baghdad. That will involve situations very possibly of urban warfare. It's going to be, by in large, a conflict to take down specific individuals. We have some experience in that going back to, say, the take down of the Noriega regime in Panama. I would argue that you'll see transformation in some of the things we are going to do, in some of the technologies and networking principles we are going to take advantage of. I think you saw big glimpses of this in Afghanistan, where you put one person on the ground, a special operations forces person in with a laser guided designator, and he can bring down—in a very networked real-timed fashion—tremendous amounts of fire power, very discretely placed with smart weapons, smart bombs, and what not. In those two spheres, I see more unconventional approaches, taking advantage of the networking that has really proceeded a pace across the 1990's in the U.S. military.
The third task, of course, is going to be defeating whatever military opposition there is. There are some concerns about, Are the people going to rise up and support Saddam Hussein's regime and kind of fight us kind of tooth and nail, block by block? I think there will be a certain amount of that, but I suspect it won't last particularly long because I think it will seem rather pointless. I don't think many people are going to be willing to die in the end for that regime. So that third task is going to probably be largely against the so-called Republican Guard. In that instance you're going to see very traditional military activities, I would argue, in terms of how it unfolds. It will be our military against their military.
But that is only one of the three big tasks and the other stories, they won't get told in the press to the same extent as the conventional style of war will be told, because that's better for pictures and its easier to follow and explain. By in large, those other things tend to be more secretive and more Special Forces kinds of stuff and those stories—for a lot of good reasons—don't make it into the press. The main story for the mass media, in many ways, will be the struggle between us and the Republican Guard.
Mitchell: One final question from J.D. in Dallas. Hi.
J.D. (Caller #5): Hi Mr. Barnett. I really appreciate your remarks on the whole oil issue. In that vain, there is another issue about the use of force. People are really polarized about the view of the United States as being a kind of imperialistic thug in the world community. Others view the United States as a liberator, bringing freedom to countries. I'd like for you just to comment on that and what we can do to affect that view of the United States.
Mitchell: And you have about a half a minute to do it.
Barnett: Well I would just point out, look at the places in the world today that are fairly stable. You're going to find strong military-to-military relations between our military and that part of the world. You're going to tend to see U.S. military alliances. You're going to see long-term bases there. So where we go, good things tend to follow—when we stay and put in the effort in a broadband fashion (not just the military, but the foreign direct investment and all that kind of stuff).
The thing I like to emphasize with the Gap concept is … this concept bounds the problem. We won't be a global cop. We'll be the cop that walks the beat primarily in the Gap. That's where most of our business is. So when I think about this Core/Gap distinction, one of the reasons I like to use it is, I think it should reassure Americans that we're not looking at a future where we're going to be invading the entire planet, doing all sorts of things all over the world. There's really a bound-able set of issues. This 2 billion living inside the Gap, where most of our security issues are found. By and large, as long as we go in with the right mind in terms of not just quelling the disturbances and getting the heck out, but really trying to integrate these countries, I think it's a bound-able problem and a do-able task.
Mitchell: And it was a fascinating article. Thank you very much.
Barnett: Thank you.
Mitchell: Thomas Barnett's article appears in the current issue of Esquire magazine. It's called "The Pentagon's New Map." We'll be right back.