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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, takes a global
perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in
a model for the post-September 11 world. Barnett argues that terrorism
and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that
has developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he
divides the world along binary lines. An increasingly expanding
"Functioning Core" of economically developed, politically
stable states integrated into global systems is juxtaposed to a
"Non-Integrating Gap," the most likely source of threats to
U.S. and international security. The "gap" incorporates Andean
South America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia and much of southwest Asia. According to Barnett, these
regions are dangerous because they are not yet integrated into
globalism's "core." Until that process is complete, they will
continue to lash out. Barnett calls for a division of the U.S. armed
forces into two separate parts. One will be a quick-strike military,
focused on suppressing hostile governments and nongovernment entities.
The other will be administratively oriented and assume responsibility
for facilitating the transition of "gap" systems into the
"core." Barnett takes pains to deny that implementing the new
policy will establish America either as a global policeman or an
imperial power. Instead, he says the policy reflects that the U.S. is
the source of, and model for, globalization. We cannot, he argues,
abandon our creation without risking chaos. Barnett writes well, and one
of the book's most compelling aspects is its description of the
negotiating, infighting and backbiting required to get a hearing for
unconventional ideas in the national security establishment.
Unfortunately, marketing the concepts generates a certain tunnel vision.
In particular, Barnett, like his intellectual models Thomas Friedman and
Francis Fukuyama, tends to accept the universality of rational-actor
models constructed on Western lines. There is little room in Barnett's
structures for the apocalyptic religious enthusiasm that has been
contemporary terrorism's driving wheel and that to date has been
indifferent to economic and political factors. That makes his analytical
structure incomplete and more useful as an intellectual exercise than as
the guide to policy described in the book's promotional literature.
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Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
COMMENTARY: Not surprisingly, I
take issue with the notion that my approach seems to ignore the
non-rational actor. I am clearly an economic determinist, but I think I
speak at great length in the book about the non-rational actor threat in
the form of terrorism, making a sincere effort to describe such
"thinking" within the context of my connectivity paradigm.
Still, if the reviewer uses that knife against me just so he/she can lump
me in with Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama (who also started as a
Soviet scholar), then gee! I guess I will take that "insult"
without complaint! Best part is finally someone makes the point about the
unspoken half of the book: the narrative of what it has meant to be
someone pushing these unorthodox ideas across a career. As for whether or
not my book can serve as a policy guide . . . it already is for a host of
people in the defense community. I never would have risen to enough
prominence to even have sold the book to Putnam if not for that, so I
guess I can easily live with that seemingly academic judgment. |
Email Thomas P.M. Barnett
Biography
Putnam, 2004
The Pentagon's New Map
Esquire, March 2003
The
Pentagon's New Map
Global Transaction Strategy
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