Once upon a time.. ... ..

Introduction > ideas and challenges

... the book's release will turn a lot of readers onto the ideas and challenges presented within.

March 2004

The Concept of Seam

A key notion of mine with regard to the Core/Gap divide is that numerous “seams” mark the various divides that separate these two worlds within a world. The most straightforward expressions of this concept are Seam States that lie along the boundary between the Core and Gap. Now, admittedly, while I made a point of capturing roughly 95 percent of U.S. non-humanitarian crisis responses (1990-2003) within the Gap (meaning I drew my Gap boundary in order to keep the vast majority of those responses within the resulting shape), I did have some leeway in deciding exactly where the line fell. [full text]

The Military-Market Nexus

I spend a chapter (#4, The Core and the Gap) in my book presenting what I know is a rather simplistic and clearly reductionist model of globalization as four key flows worth preserving and keeping in balance. My basic notion is that the U.S. and other great powers must do whatever it takes to allow these resources to continue flowing from those regions where they exist in abundance to those regions where they are scarce. My four flows, detailed first in my article with Hank Gaffney entitled "The Global Transaction Strategy" are as follows:
  1. People have to flow from the Gap to the Core, as the latter ages demographically.
     
  2. Energy has to flow from the Gap to the New Core especially (specifically, Developing Asia), where energy use will double in the next two decades.
     
  3. Foreign direct investment needs to flow from the Old Core (U.S., Europe, Japan) to the New Core (especially China, Russia, and India) in order to enable their further integration into the Core.
     
  4. Finally, security has to flow from the Old Core (especially from the system Leviathan known as the U.S.) to the Gap, with a special emphasis in the near- and mid-term on the Middle East due to its central role as breeding ground for transnational terrorism and as the major source of energy for Developing Asia.
Those are the four flows: security, money, energy, and people. Keep 'em in balance and globalization will continue to progress. Screw any one of them with this Global War on Terrorism and we can end up killing globalization just like we did back in the 1930s. [full text]

Disrupting the Flow: jihad and immigration

Remember that the four flows must be kept in balance, meaning none can be shut off to accommodate the needs of any other:
  • Security from Core to Gap
  • Energy from Gap to Core
  • FDI from Old Core to New Core
  • People from Gap to Core
The aspect most vulnerable to disruption of the flow of People in this Global War on Terrorism is clearly immigration, or the human firewall the Core will be sorely tempted to throw up between itself and that “insane” Gap filled with suicide bombers. [full text]

Balancing connectivity with safety

This will be the main thrust of my Outlook article for the Washington Post next Sunday. Here’s a group of articles that speaks to how such New Core powers as China, India and Russia are dramatically connecting themselves to the global economy—and each other. [full text]

April 2004

Connectivity: The Measure of Effectiveness

Last post for today involves great USA Today story on economic situation in Iraq post-Saddam. Most of the press on the occupation sees only the security angle, committing the sin of viewing war solely within the context of war and not in the context of everything else. The “everything else” in Iraq is going like gang-busters, seeding connectivity that will ultimately link the Iraqi people with the outside world in a way that precludes the return of Saddam II.

That is the only Measure of Effectiveness that matters when we militarily intervene overseas: Did we leave the place more connected with the outside world than we found it? [full text]

Threats to Core unity

... missile shields in general strike me as 21st century Maginot Lines—incredibly expensive and divisive to build and easily circumvented by those really desiring to do us harm. Plus such firewalls also speak to the mind-set that says, “Let’s stop them at the border,” versus “Let’s figure out how to eliminate the hostility in the first place."

... “U.S. to Mandate Fingerprinting And Photos of More Foreigners,” by Rachel L. Swarns.

The U.S. had started this sort of stuff with developing countries in the aftermath of 9/11, and now they’re expanding this very contentious practice (it sure has pissed off the Brazilians, for example) with 27 industrialized states, all of whom are reasonably considered our allies.

Why the push? The reasonable fear is that terrorists will exploit the more lax security systems of allies to gain entry into the U.S.—in effect exploiting a “seam” in our defenses. So, in an effort to export new security rule sets, we force these additional security burdens on close allies, hoping it will push them to raise the security practices within their own states.

... Third article is about Russia’s response to all those east central European states joining NATO formally (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia). Written by Steven Lee Myers (a great security reporter), it is entitled, “As NATO Finally Arrives on Its Border, Russia Grumbles” (page 3 in print edition).

Trigger for this grumbling is NATO sending a handful of Belgian F-16’s plus their support groups into the Baltic states to fly “purely defensive” sky police-type missions overhead. Against whom? Moscow logically asks. Al Qaeda’s secret air force? [full text]

May 2004

Rule Sets: A key difference between Core and Gap

They dismember the bodies of security personnel and have a street party to celebrate it in Falluja. We catch some Reservists treating Iraqi prisoners to humiliations and our people will likely spend years in a military jail as a result.

That’s a key difference in rule sets on security. We have them in the Core; they’re missing in the Gap.

Getting the rules straight in this global war on terrorism

The truest indicators that 9/11 signaled the need for a rule-set reset is that—three years later—we’re still arguing first and foremost over definitions and terms in this global war on terrorism. These two articles demonstrate that continuing rule-set clash. [full text]

Everything you need to know by how they treat their women

They say you can learn everything you need to know about a man by how he treats women. The same is true for countries—even for how they promote women’s rights through foreign aid. [full text]

The real clash of civilizations is over sexuality

One issue I raise in the book [pp. 135-36] is that what traditional societies—especially Muslim-dominated ones—fear most about globalization penetrating their insular worlds is not the notion of democracy that accompanies it, but the very American images of sexual liberation and gender equality. In short, it’s a clash of genders—stupid!

That is what makes the pictures coming out of the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal so damaging, although I for one feel most politicians and media people are hyping the event unnecessarily by describing it as setting back U.S.-Islamic relations “several decades.” Frankly, it takes something like genocide to set relations back “several decades.” This scandal is bad, alright, confirming the worst fears of those in the Islamic world who believe that letting globalization in will mean the rapid Americanization of their culture. [full text]

The A-to-Z rule set on processing politically bankrupt regimes

In my book, I cited Sebastian Mallaby's original enunciation (Washington Post, 21 Oct 02, "The Lesson In MacArthur") of the need for an IMF-like international organization to oversee the rehabilitation of politically-bankrupt states after the Leviathan force led by the U.S. engages in Core-sanctioned regime change in the Gap. Here he resurrects the idea with even more force. A worthy read.

Garten's piece highlights the reality that when Core consensus gets reached on efforts like Iraq, or any politically-bankrupt regime in the Gap, it's far more likely to occur within the G-8 (or better, the larger G-20 declared by Clinton a few years back) than in the UN. [full text]

June 2004

Why nuclear arms control is dead

Point I push in the book: isn't it amazing how nobody talks about strategic arms control anymore inside the Core, but only about WMD proliferation inside the Gap?

Why is this? The Core is set on MAD—no two ways about it. We may dream inside the Pentagon about war with China, but it's complete bullshit. MAD applies there as it does throughout the Core.

It's inside the Gap that we worry about powers having nukes—like Pakistan, Iran, North Korea. And we worry about those technologies spreading, because we catch these guys selling secrets for pennies on the dollar on a regular basis.

But that danger isn't answered with either lotsa US nuclear missiles or with any half-assed Star Wars (which will never work worth a damn and cost bijillions). No, that issue is answered with preemptive war when called upon. [full text]

Why firewalling off the Gap sometimes makes sense

As I argue in PNM, there are three things worth firewalling ourselves off from the Gap for, simply because the free traffic in these "goods" is too high a price to pay for openness. One is terrorism ('nuf said). Two is drugs (gotta keep some lid). Three is pandemics. [full text]

Havel sees moral need to act on Kim Jong Il now

Great op-ed in the Post. Havel notes that humanity has found out about genocide in the past through eye-witness accounts, and that we now have the testimony of thousands of North Korean refugees in our possession regarding the amazingly cruel regime of Kim Jong Il—"a man responsible for the loss of millions of lives."

As Havel notes, "[Kim] sustains one of the largest armies in the word and is producing weapons of mass destruction even as the centrally planned economy and the state ideology—known as juche, a blend of nationalism and self-reliance—have led the country into famine."

When these desperate political refugees escape into China, what does it do? It refuses to recognize them as required by international treaties, and forces them back across the border, where—when caught—these people are thrown into political prisoner gulag camps. [full text]

July 2004

The biggest security threat to the New Core

I said it repeatedly in the original Esquire article—“and then there’s AIDS.” This is the biggest security danger in a Russia, India, and China right now. And when the U.S. government doesn’t do everything it can to encourage stronger and cheaper efforts to combat this global security issue, we just buy ourselves insecurity on the installment plan.

Brain drain may leave Gap brain dead on AIDS

Two more scary articles about how the brain drain of docs and nurses from Gap countries suffering high rates of AIDS infections puts those populations at even higher risk of segueing into outright humanitarian disasters that may someday attract humanitarian interventions from the U.S. military—believe it. [full text]

The 9/11 Commission Report: a national security self-help guide

After all the previews and leaks, to actually get the report is naturally a bit anti-climatic. But it's more disappointing than that, in my mind, because it's basically a self-help guide that seems to suggest that what's really broken in this global war on terrorism is the United States itself—or specifically the national intelligence community. I have to admit, this judgment is so easy to make, so pat in content, and so unimportant over the long haul that I cannot consider the commission to be anything less than irrelevant to the real tasks at hand:

1. Understanding the world for what it is in this era of globalization

2. Understanding the threat of terror as a function of that world and the spread of the global economy and all the influences it inflicts upon traditional societies

3. Enunciating a genuinely coherent U.S. grand strategy to deal with that world in a way that terror is reduced as a threat over time—i.e., making globalization truly global in a fair and just manner

4. Reshaping our national defense establishment to meet that challenge—i.e., the bifurcation of the force into a warfighting Leviathan force and a peacewaging Sys Admin force

5. And then letting the Intelligence Community, as well as the Congressional oversight community, reshape themselves in order to both serve and communicate with that increasingly bifurcated military force structure. [full text]

August 2004

The Sys Admin force and the dialectics of change

We are in a real historical moment of dialectical change inside of the Defense Department. We have strong forces pushing for a new force paradigm to fight this global war on terrorism, and Special Operations Command is the cannibalizing agent preferred by all, but as anyone at SOCOM will tell you, simply growing that command isn’t the answer, just a solution looking for one. The reason why SOCOM is so attractive, is that it seems like the perfect fusion of the front half (trigger-pullers) and back half (civil affairs) forces, or what I call the Leviathan and Sys Admin forces. But to simply “bigger” SOCOM will—in the end—simply corrupt it. By focusing all our reform dreams on this one command, we’re simply putting off the inevitable, but far larger task of admitting the bifurcation that must occur within the force as a whole. [full text]

September 2004

The theory of peacefully rising China

My webmaster Critt has pushed me to write something more specific about the two presentations I gave to various Chinese academics and officials in Beijing in mid-August at the start of our grand adoption trip through China. It's a good idea, so let me give you a quick description of each talk and then give you some general sense of the feedback I got from the collective audience. [full text]

Where is Islam going with all this violence?

The historical question for the Muslim world is, "Where are you going with all this?" Where are you going with the radicalism, the rejectionism, the nihilism, the cult of death, the keeping-out-the-West, the death-to-infidels, the whole nine yards.

Where are you going with this? Where does it take you? What's the happy ending you generate? If not for you, then your kids. Tell me what that world looks like.

If you ask that question to a serious radical, all you will hear about is the past. There is no future in that vocabulary, just past tragedies leading to current grievances that . . . if met . . . would solve nothing. [full text]

David Brooks would like his Sys Admin force now for Sudan

As I have said many times, the UNSC is a grand jury, nothing more, nothing less. It can start a process that goes nowhere until we build the A-to-Z Core-wide rule-set on how to process politically-bankrupt states in the Gap. Until we do, keep this piece for handy reference. It will be rewritten and republished many, many times in the years ahead. [full text]

October 2004

Rethinking what constitutes security in Africa, as in food

Desert locusts are sweeping across Africa like something in a Cecile B. DeMille movie. Experts predict a quarter of the crops will be lost, putting in danger the economic well-being of . . .say . . . 150 million.

Typical of the UN and rich Core states, of the $73m promised, less than a third has actually been delivered (see, it's not only Iraq whom they hold from). The first op-ed argues that for a measly $25 m or so more, the problem could essentially be defeated. But short of that effort, we're looking at a serious deprivation situation in the making.

Can you imagine a market-military nexus on this one? Devastation of this sort pushes people of lands over here and creates fights for lands over there. Eventually it gets dressed up in terms of tribes and religions and civilizations clashing away, but basically it's a struggle over dirt, generated by an environmental disaster.

As the man says, pay me now or pay me later. Or better yet, just ignore the whole thing. [full text]

How many earths are required?

The World Wildlife Fund (to which my spouse funnels money, natch!) put out is annual "ecological footprint" pub, and it's a good one to review. Their point is that, increasingly thanks to globalization, any country's footprint is far larger—in a geographical sense. As a whole (but mostly in the Core), we're "outspending" the world's resources by about a fifth every year, which—of course—in unsustainable.

But instead of needless fear-monging, the report asks the logical question: How is the world going to rationalize that equation. Here I am reminded of the Architect's model of network growth and change: you create something (global economy), it aggregates and grows in size (Old Core joined by New Core), and all that stress needs to be rationalized (rise of environmentalism in most advanced states), but then that new rule set needs to spread across the planet (acceptance). [full text]

November 2004

9/11's most pervasive new rule set is classified

Good bit about an expanding new security rule set coming out of the 9/11 experience that receives very little press coverage (hmm, must be because it's so secret!).

It is clearly true that the Bush Administration has gone hog wild in expanding the Cone of Government Silence in response to 9/11, which is a direct reversal of what Clinton did. Does that make one administration evil and the other good? Not exactly. It means we were more willing during the Clinton years to think America would not only do better economically but be safer security-wise in a global environment of greater openness. 9/11, not surprisingly, makes us collectively recoil from that vision, but the question is, For how long and how hard?

Did we get careless with info in the 1990s? Sure, it was happening all over society and the economy and government, and privacy was suffering plenty in the process. Now privacy suffers in a different way, or so it would seem (Now it's just the government that wants to know all about you? Come on! Business still does too!).

My problem with the extent and tone of this push for secrecy from the Bush Administration is that it so negatively dovetails with their close-mouthed tendencies in explaining themselves and their national security strategies, instead leaving it to the conspiracy theorists to fill in the many blanks. Of course, when you're as obsessed with secrecy as this White House has often been, what happens too often is that countries that are or should be your allies end up feeling really outside of the loop, which is what gets you the backlash we have today on Iraq, meaning not just the American people but the rest of the Core feel like they were sold a bill of goods on that one. [full text]

December 2004

Testimony to the Congressional Overseas Basing Commission

TESTIMONY SUBMITTED TO THE OVERSEAS BASING COMMISSION BY DR. THOMAS P.M. BARNETT PROFESSOR, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE [9 November 2004]

First, let me thank the Commission on Overseas Basing for inviting me to testify here today. [full text]

When security gets solved, economic connectivity can begin

The WTO agrees to start membership talks with both Afghanistan and Iraq. This is the beginning of economic and political connectivity for both countries after decades of isolation resulting from security issues. Did it take a U.S.-led coalition war to topple both regimes before these states could even begin the conversation of joining the Core economically? Sure. For some Gap states, that will be the first required step.

But does that mean it’s the required first step for all in the Gap? Hardly. Even an Axis of Evil state like Iran, which is close to gaining acceptance by enough WTO members to start similar negotiations, could begin this integration process simply by acceding to the Core's major security rule sets regarding WMD.

Notice I don't say "major security rule set," because there's more than one. For some states, the rule must be, "the Core can't trust you with WMD under any conditions," but for others, it's "you need to see nukes are for having in a mutually-assured destruction balance, not for using." When you're talking a North Korea, there is no balance and there is great suspicion that Kim Jong Il doesn't get the whole "having, not using" argument. But is the same true for Iran? Is there no balance in the region that could be usefully manipulated to increase regional security? And has Iran exhibited the gamesmanship on its pursuit of nukes that suggests it buys into the logic that nukes are for having, not using? [full text]

No U.S. SysAdmin, no Core SysAdmin

Simply stated: if the American military doesn't show up, there is no multinational party. And the American military ain't showing up so long as it remains bogged down in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And it will remain bogged down there until the situation either settles on its own, settles because the U.S. creates some local ownership of the issues, or settles because the U.S. gets some major new help from outside powers. Of those three choices, I'd say local ownership is the most realistic.

So if you want help for Sudan, help this administration figure out how to generate some local ownership on Iraq and soon. Because until that situation settles, there'll be no U.S. military effort in Sudan, and that means no European effort. [full text]

Americans care, some more than others

The New York Times sees the U.S. essentially short-changing on aid while wasting money on foreign interventions, and by doing so, the editorial board there fundamentally misses the military-market nexus. To shrink the Gap is to engage in both building up security inside the Gap and increasing its market connectivity to the Core. Does the U.S. specialize in the former more than any other Core power? Yes. Can the U.S. be expected, therefore, to keep pace with the rest of the Core on foreign aid? No. Does that make America "indifferent"?

Ask someone in America who's lost a loved one in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Ask them if they can easily equate higher taxes to the death of a child, or spouse, or parent. America has sacrificed a significant number of their "only begotten sons" in this global war on terror, signaling that—in the truest sense—they love their enemies more than themselves.

Tell me Jesus wouldn't understand that one.

Tell me Jesus wouldn't also say, put your money where your mouth is. Does America pull its weight on foreign aid? Not in terms of official developmental aid. But frankly, that's a drop in the bucket anyway when compared to far more important and larger aid flows.

Take America's willingness to let in foreign workers and immigrants. What they send back in remittances is routinely 5-6 times what we spend in aid. Remember that when those immigration-hating Europeans lecture us on foreign aid.

Also remember that "crazy," "far too religious" America also gives a huge amount of private charity aid to the Gap. Foreign policy "experts" are constantly decrying the "indifferent, ignorant" American public that cares not for suffering throughout the Gap, and yet, where is all this charity coming from? Faith-based groups are the biggest providers. These red-state types are also the ones who agitate most regarding human rights abuses in places like Zimbabwe and North Korea. They're the ones who scream the most about the effective genocide going on in the Sudan.

Where are the liberal street protestors on any of this? [full text]

Approaching the tipping point

This is what I take from 2004: people want a hopeful vision and a guide to what they might do to help bring it about. PNM ends the year # 78 on Amazon (78! Tell me that one back in April when it came out and I would have shouted "Shut up!"). All the finger-pointing books have come and gone. All the backward-looking books have come and gone. Eight months later, PNM remains. And the reason why is that it's not a grand strategy for the summer of 2004, it's a grand strategy for what lies ahead: for the Long War that spreads the Long Peace--which has long defined the Core--into the still tumultuous Gap. That future worth creating has been years in the understanding for me, and it will be years in the making for this planet. But 2005 is as good a year to start as any, and I look forward to it immensely. [full text]

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