Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

"Handing Out Hors d'Oeuvres, Then Recalling the 107th Floor," by Dan Barry, New York Times, 1 September, p. A1.

Poignant story here that needs little comment: about a bunch of former Windows on the World workers who are now serving at various Republican Convention events while having to listen to the GOP wring every possible bit of emotion out of the 9/11 attacks for political purposes in this very tight presidential election season.

I got to spend a lot of time interacting with various Windows on the World personnel during the lengthy set-ups for each of our "economic security exercises" that we conducted atop World Trade Center 1 on the 107th floor in the years 1999-2001. It was an amazing restaurant and conference facility, like nothing else in the world. As proof of this judgment, let me point out that Windows on the World was—at the time of the attacks—the highest grossing restaurant (per square foot of space) in the entire country.

Now, of course, it's nothing. Windows on the World no longer exists except in the painful memories of those who survived or who lost their loved ones in the attacks. To listen to the GOP employ that day so blatantly in its convention imagery is to evoke a strange sense of ambivalence—at least within me. I mean, everyone wants that day to be remembered alright, but it cannot be evoked for any suffering or loss that isn't logically traced to some future worth creating. In other words, it can't be used in an open-ended fashion to justify all sorts of new rules that scare too many people, both here and around the world. Rather, it must be used to rededicate ourselves and our country to a "happy ending" that puts all the suffering of that day into proper perspective.

"Trying to Stay Competitive, Cambodia Joins W.T.O.," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 1 September, p. W1.

"U.S. Loses Trade Cases and Faces Penalties," by Paul Meller and Elizabeth Becker, NYT, 1 September, p. C1.

Great story on Cambodia feeling "forced" to joint the WTO, lest it be "smothered" by the international garment industry trade and its "new rules." Cambodia joining only puts more pressure on Vietnam to do the same, suggesting a sort of WTO-driven domino theory that I find quite comforting in that Thomas Friedman sort of way.

But don't think I relish watching that sort of dynamic wreak havoc on Gap states only. I also enjoy watching the U.S. suffer at the hands of the WTO as well, because it forces us to clean up all those tariffs and sanctions that we unilaterally impose on other states thanks to the efforts of numbskulls like Robert Byrd. All I can say there is, You go Canada!

"Talks To Disarm Shiites Collapse: Prime Minister Is Said to Cancel Tentative Pact," by Dexter Filkins and Erik Eckholm, New York Times, 1 September, p. A1.

"12 Hostages From Nepal Are Executed in Iraq, a Militant Group Claims: Gruesome images stand out because of the sheer number of the dead," by Sabrina Tavernise, NYT, 1 September, p. A8.

"Beneath Putin's Pedestal, the Ground Keeps Shaking: Russia's leader is supposed to provide stability. But that's what the country is missing," by Steven Lee Myers, NYT, 1 September, p. A4.

I hate to say it, but I think the back and forth with al-Sadr isn't going to end any time soon. This guy's negotiating tactics remind me of Arafat's: hard-core right up to the point where he's going to suffer a conventional defeat, and then he promises to rehab himself and join the political process, but then within days he's right back at the violence again once you've let your guard down, so you pummel him some more and the cycle of lies and apparent compromises continues to no good effect over time.

I am relatively sanguine about such a long-term course of events in Iraq because the situation there continues to serve the long-term purposes of the GWOT, which frankly is all about internationalizing—throughout the Core—the "new" threat of terrorism that the United States feels it is living with as a result of 9/11. So if our continued long-term occupation of Iraq leads to all sorts of other countries falling into their own showdowns with terrorism, whether it's hostages in the Middle East or violence within their own borders, it's better that we've made the Middle East and the global terrorism that its non-integration with the rest of the world has spawned the number one security issue for as many significant players throughout the Core as possible. In short, Iraq can't ever really get "too bad" for the purposes of getting the rest of the Core to wake up to the real security challenges that lie ahead for us all. In some ways, the worst thing that could have happened would have been for the Iraq occupation by the U.S. military to have gone too well, because if it had, neither the changes needed within the Pentagon nor within what should become a Core-wide collective security system would have begun.

Is that trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? Not really. In the end, it's only being realistic about how things change: i.e., failure brings change, not success.

I know that all sounds scary, because what people want to hear is that the GWOT will lead immediately to increased levels of stability and security. But it won't. We're at a point in history when new rules are emerging all over the place on issues of global stability and security, so expect more violence in the short run, not less, and expect to read more stories about everything going to hell in a handbasket, not fewer.

The choice between Kerry and Bush is not one between more or less violence and instability in the global security system, but rather a question of which leader will navigate us and the Core as a whole toward the promised land faster. Another way to put it is to say, Have we had enough of Bush's necessary "unilateralism" and should we now turn to a more nuanced Kerry sort of multilateralism? Or is that inevitable historical switch premature at this point?

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 1 September

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.

Both talks came about rather circuitously. It all started with a newspaper article profiling my ideas that appeared in the large Chinese pub known as the Nanfang Daily in early June. The author was a PhD candidate in history at Yale, a Chinese academic by the name of Xue Yong. As a result of the article, Prof. Niu Ke of the Department of History at Beijing University sent me an email, which started a correspondence between us regarding both the possibility of my book being published in China (we are coming to an agreement with Beijing University Press as I write), as well as my speaking there in the future (i.e., I told him about my (then) upcoming trip to China for the purpose of international adoption).

Niu eventually turned me over to a superior of his, Prof. Yu Keping, who
holds more than a few titles, to include being director of the China Center for
Comparative Politics & Economics (CCCPE) at BU, as well as the Center for
Chinese Government Innovations, also at BU. Yu also is a senior official in the
government's biggest publishing house (Central Bureau of Translation and
Edition). So let's just say the guy is very connected.

[Photo: Tom and Vonne Barnett,
Yu Keping, Zhang Yue]

Well, when it became clear that my spouse Vonne was eager to spend more time in Beijing than was allotted by our official tour process, I offered to come a couple of days earlier with an eye to spending a couple of days giving talks at various venues. Dr. Yu was very open to this suggestion, and immediately set up a talk at the prestigious China Reform Forum (a private-sector think tank promoting government reforms) for the 11th of August and another at the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party for the 12th (which would draw academics from the various institutions headed by Dr. Yu). In return, Dr. Yu arranged for a car, driver, guide and translator for myself and Vonne for our first two days in Beijing, not to mention all the meals and tickets to various shows and exhibits. This was not an official US Government trip, but rather something I tacked on to our adoption trip on my own.

The first talk occurred just 12 hours after we landed late on the night of the 10th of August, so I was a bit shaky after all that travel. The venue was the China Reform Forum, which is housed—quite literally—in a beautiful old compound-style house in an old neighborhood in Beijing. When I say compound-style, I mean a walled-off collection of small buildings all carefully integrated with one another and centered around a small courtyard—very traditional.

I was dropped off at the center by our driver, Mr. Liu, our guide, Ms. Zhang Yue, and our translator, who went by her American name of "Jennifer." I was met at the front gate by a young program officer from the Forum, which is apparently set up much like a Brookings Institution here in the U.S., and that is completely by design. This forum, as the Secretary General Wang Xuejun later explained to me over lunch, is really trying to jump start public policy debates in China as a whole, something that we take for granted but which remains largely in its infancy in China. In effect, it seeks to foster open debate among academic and policy wonks regarding future reforms in China in such a way as to both support and push the Chinese Communist Party leadership as it seeks to modernize China's economy, society, and—ultimately—its political system (although the last point is obviously the touchiest and therefore most low-key). The CRF is identified as the "think tank of the Central Party School in Beijing," so it's both officially sponsored and still a private-sector entity at the same time (much like a RAND or any other federally-funded research and development center, or FFRDC). Needless to say, it is a careful conversation, but a far more open one than I think most experts in the West realize, meaning few things are really off the table in these discussions.

The conference room where I gave my talk was full of photos of the Forum's
chief executive, Mr. Zheng Bijian (abroad on travel that day) with various
senior U.S. officials (both past and present)—most notably George W. Bush, Condi
Rice, Brent Scowcroft, and Henry Kissinger. So I was immediately impressed by
the place, even though the setting was rather sedate and low key. The CRF opened
just a few years ago, but already it has strong institutional ties with U.S.
think tanks like the Rand Corp, with whom it hosts an annual conference.

When I first entered the room, I snapped some photos for my memory, and then realized that I didn't see a projector anywhere, much less a screen. I got a bit nervous at that, but minutes later both appeared, along with all of the academics invited to hear me speak. Fortunately for me, all spoke reasonably good English, so no translation was required. I gave a version of the brief that focused on the Core-Gap thesis, the need for an A-to-Z global rule set on processing politically-bankrupt states, and the four flows of globalization. I then ended with a single slide of questions regarding the future of China.

I spoke for about an hour and a half, and then fielded questions for about 30
minutes. The questions were rather expected. Naturally, a significant discussion
ensued about Taiwan.

After the talk I was driven in a car, along with the Secretary General, to a
spectacular restaurant, where we were joined by my wife and her guide for a
lavish Cantonese meal that dragged on for a couple of hours. The discussion here
was more relaxed, but still to the point about the future of U.S.-Chinese
relations.

After an afternoon of eventful sightseeing, plus another great meal, plus
a night at a local tea house, I was back at it again the following morning.
On Thursday, the 12th of August, I was driven first to the CCP's Central Committee
headquarters in Beijing, where I paid a short office call on Dr. Yu Keping
himself. He gave me some of his writings on reforms, and I presented him with a
signed copy of the book (I had brought three, so one went to Dr. Yu, another to
the CRF's head guy, and the third to my new friend Prof. Niu Ke for setting the
whole thing up; Niu, BTW, is now the Yenching Scholar at Harvard for this
academic year, so I hope to interact with him some during his year in Boston).

After the office call, Vonne peeled off with guide Zhang Yue to visit Mao's
Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, while I went upstairs to a top-floor conference
room where I set up and gave a 75-minute presentation, following an intro by Dr.
Yu, to a group of about 50 academics. In this venue, I had a translator, so I
had to cut down my usual verbiage quite a bit, which was an interesting
challenge.

The questions here were similar to the ones I received the day previous,
although more focused on "soft power" issues between the U.S. and China versus
"hard power" stuff like Taiwan. The talk was followed by another long meal with
great conversation at a local restaurant. Then, like the previous day, we spent
the afternoon sightseeing and shopping with our driver, guide and translator,
finishing with a celebratory final meal together and an evening Chinese acrobat
show.

And now, my general impressions from the two talks:

· Chinese academics are no slouches. Their thinking is as sophisticated as anything you'll encounter in the West, and perhaps is better than most of what you encounter in Europe and Japan. They know China's biggest challenges ahead are dealing with its successes, not its failures, so these academics are eager to push the Theory of Peacefully Rising China not simply to put us at ease WRT to the persistent "rising threat" concepts concerning China, but also to open up serious dialogue with us regarding areas of common concern. As such, my treatment of China in PNM is viewed as radically positive from their perspective: here's an influential futurist in the U.S. who doesn’t automatically assume future conflict between China and the U.S.

· Chinese academics know all too well that China's biggest future challenges are internal vice external, but they aggressively seek to balance the two sets of issues in such a way as to make them complimentary, because they know that reforms cannot proceed internally if China faces a hostile world and that China will indeed face a hostile world if internal reforms do not proceed. So, in sum, they tend to think very holistically and system-wide, which—again—makes them very partial to my work.

· Chinese academics tend to ask questions very carefully, so that they get you to reveal your position more than theirs. But how they respond to your answers tells you all you need to know about how they view the problem. In short, they are not inscrutable. In fact, as a professional face-reader (you become one when you give as many speeches as I do), I would say that Chinese are relatively easy to read, meaning they're fairly transparent as audiences go. Having said that, I can't really tell you their views on things so much as tell you what positions I put forth that they seemed to receive well. Here's a quick rundown of my points that they seemed to like (and these points basically corresponded to the bullets I offered in my concluding slide regarding "big questions" for China):

o The biggest fear I have about China is a collapse of its internal banking system. In fact, that is the biggest fear I have right now for globalization as a whole.

o It makes sense for China's 4th generation leadership to focus more on China's rural poor than the 3rd generation did. It will keep China from destabilizing over the near term far better than any saber-rattling on Taiwan.

o I fear that the 3rd generation leaders still clinging to their last vestiges of power (Jiang Jemin especially) are seeking to push the Taiwan issue in order to record that historical notch on their belts before they leave the stage, and so I hope that this temptation will pass without incident, because I believe that China's vision for economic and political integration in Asia needs to be so much bigger than simply trying to get Taiwan back in the fold.

o I said that China's biggest challenge externally comes in the form of Beijing progressively enunciating a political and economic unifying concept that's larger than "China" but that is based around China's rising economic power. In short, Beijing needs to present to Asia and the world a vision of regional integration based on something bigger (and less threatening) than just "rising China." That is why I think the Theory of Peacefully Rising China is so important; it corresponds to the "happy ending" story that China needs to be telling the world right now, just like the U.S. needs to be selling some vision of a "happy ending" regarding the GWOT. Otherwise, fear will prevail, and China cannot afford the friction generated by that fear.

o I pushed the notion that China needed to keep up its relatively swift pace of economic, social and political reforms because if it did not, then gaps would open up between the rest of the Core and China regarding security issues such as Taiwan, North Korea and the Middle East in general. Specifically on those three issues, I said that nothing that Taiwan could do or say would really change the reality of its progressive economic (and ultimately political) integration with the mainland, so China needed to find its confidence level on that one and not let the talk out of Taipei rattle it so. On North Korea, I pushed the notion that an Asian NATO should logically arise out of the "victory" that should soon end the horrific regime that is Kim Jong Il's leadership of that nation. So China needs to define what is a win-win for everyone on that score, and begin that dialogue with the U.S. as soon as possible, because it's eventually going to happen and it should happen on our preferred timetable rather than on Kim's crazy one. On the Middle East, I repeated my usual notion that China was inevitably coming militarily to the region over the next couple of decades, either because the U.S. does a good job of exporting security to the region and China wants to help, or because the U.S. does such a bad job of it that China comes out of fear. Either way, China needs to get its security head straight regarding this inevitable long-term reality, so again, thinking beyond the myopic focus on Taiwan is crucial.

o My big point throughout both presentations was that China needs to stop asking itself what the world "owes" it and needs to start asking itself "What the world needs from China." In short, Beijing itself has the most say over whether or not the Theory of Peacefully Rising China comes to fruition or not. But that future worth creating will only come about as China learns to think more non-zero-sum about global security in general.

The general response I got to all these ideas was extremely positive, primarily in terms of relief. What I mean by that is these academics seemed very relieved to see someone of my stature in the U.S. national security establishment being able to view China not as a long-term threat but as a long-term strategic partner, because it told them that their hopes, as expressed in the Theory of Peacefully Rising China, are not in vain.

Having said that, don't come away with the impression that anyone there saw me as anything but a realist in my views on international security. In fact, both meals were taken up by much discussion about what labels to apply to my thinking. The consensus was that I was no "neocon" in their view, but rather both a "liberal" and a strong "realist." Now, some might tell you that's exactly what neocons believe they are, using "liberal" in the older meaning of that term, but I distinctly heard the Chinese applying it in the more modern way, meaning someone who favors progressive change and sees government in a positive light.

On both days, what I heard from everyone was the distinct wish that views such as mine would become the dominant ideology of the U.S. national security establishment, especially with regard to U.S.-Chinese relations, which—of course—was very gratifying. But more gratifying was the objective way in which they seemed to approve of my vision overall, meaning—again—they saw me as anything but an idealist. And if you know recent Chinese history, you know how much they fear "idealists" in general. That was the best aspect to the trip for me: that sense of being viewed as a pragmatic realist by my Chinese counterparts. Why? It told me that my "reproducible strategic concepts" can easily cross civilizational boundaries (at least as far as the Chinese are concerned), something that my critics often charge is impossible (e.g., my ideas are too "Western" and "rational").

So I walked away from the two days feeling awfully good about the two presentations and the prospects for PNM to have significant broadband impact once it's translated and published in China.

Now on to today's news. I am starting slowly my first day back, so just the New York Times here to get my feet wet:

What goes around in GWOT, comes around in GWOT

"Talks To Disarm Shiites Collapse: Prime Minister Is Said to Cancel Tentative Pact," by Dexter Filkins and Erik Eckholm, New York Times, 1 September, p. A1.

"12 Hostages From Nepal Are Executed in Iraq, a Militant Group Claims: Gruesome images stand out because of the sheer number of the dead," by Sabrina Tavernise, NYT, 1 September, p. A8.

"Beneath Putin's Pedestal, the Ground Keeps Shaking: Russia's leader is supposed to provide stability. But that's what the country is missing," by Steven Lee Myers, NYT, 1 September, p. A4.

What goes around in WTO, comes around in WTO

"Trying to Stay Competitive, Cambodia Joins W.T.O.," by Keith Bradsher, NYT, 1 September, p. W1.

"U.S. Loses Trade Cases and Faces Penalties," by Paul Meller and Elizabeth Becker, NYT, 1 September, p. C1.

What goes around on 9/11, comes around on 9/11

"Handing Out Hors d'Oeuvres, Then Recalling the 107th Floor," by Dan Barry, NYT, 1 September, p. A1.

"U.S. and Russia Still Dominate Arms Market, but World Total Falls," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 30 August, p. A7.

"China, U.S. Near an Accord on Nuclear Technology," by Charles Hutzler, Wall Street Journal, 2 September, p. A2.

Arms transfers are down globally, but up with regard to the Gap buying from the Core, with the U.S. and Russia still number 1 and 2 in terms of market shares. My, how little have things changed from the Cold War.
Meanwhile, China and the U.S. are close to new agreements that would send nuclear technology to the mainland in unprecedented flows. Hmm, that does seem like a big change.

When I was in college, the biggest global security issue was strategic arms control among those great powers now identified by me as belonging to the Core. Because they now belong to the Core, all that effort at controlling nukes is OBE. That's right. No one cares about it anymore. Wanna sell nuke technology to the Chinese? Be my guest.

As for conventional stuff, including missiles, there we're talking the Core's big powers selling whatever they can throughout the Gap. Why? That's where all the violence and danger is, so that's where the market is. No one is talking about limiting those flows either. Why? Too much money to be made.

It's amazing to me that the Core's great powers can see the win-win on sharing military-related technology among themselves but can't see the utility in restricting the flow of dangerous stuff to the Gap. It's like we think we can have our Kantian cake in the Core and somehow chow down on arms transfers to the Hobbesian war zones of the Gap. The two simply don't go together, but rather reflect the bifurcated nature of the global security environment today. Until, we get Core-wide understanding of the fundamental differences between the security rule set that dominates the Core and the lack of one in the Gap, this schizophrenic approach to fostering global "stability" will continue.

Don't get me wrong: I don't believe you can really restrict the flow of dangerous technologies from the Core to the Gap, because there will always be people and regimes in the Gap who will do whatever it takes to get their hands on the stuff. Those people I simply preempt when the time comes. Instead of that classic approach to high-end arms control, I think the Core as a whole should focus as much as possible on the little stuff, meaning the great flow of conventional small arms to the Gap. But here, like with abortion, we see the internal rule set clash in the U.S. hampering our ability to see the big-picture job that needs to get done. Our internal fight over abortion ruins much of our foreign aid on birth control inside the Gap, just as our insane fights over limiting access to dangerous small arms inside our own country makes us a laggard in pushing for similar restrictions globally.

[Advertisement] "A Coalition of the Caring Can Save a Million Lives: President Bush, Why Won't You Lead It?" New York Times, 2 September, p. A19.

"In Western Sudan, Fear and Despair Are the Ever-Growing Enemy," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 2 September, p. A1.

The United Nations is threatening Sudan with—God forbid—"economic sanctions"! Holy cow! That should stop the bloodshed overnight! Just like ten years of sanctions stopped Saddam's bloody rule . . ..

Where was the same "coalition of the caring" when 50,000 old people and children under the age of 5 died each year in Iraq over the course of the 1990s thanks to the economic sanctions levied by the UN? Twelve years of that gets you about 600,000 premature deaths. And that's only those who died because of the West's diddling on the subject. Let's not forget all the people Saddam killed in the years after Desert Storm and before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So what's so sacred now about Sudan that separates it from Iraq? Bush decides to end that slow-mo carnage and finally bring down Saddam, and for that he's vilified as some latter-day Hitler by the Left, which now seems more than willing to send troops into the Sudan. Is this coalition somehow under the impression that no U.S. lives would be lost in that long-term effort at disarming those blood-thirsty militias and keeping the peace? Is anyone under the illusion that this would not also quickly get cast as the imperial U.S. taking on Islam?

I'm so tired of this picking and choosing approach to international security. I think we should have done Iraq and I think we should be doing Sudan. The Left and Right can't fight over these individual choices tooth and nail and then wonder why so many jobs get left half-done or not done at all.

"Insurgents Seize Russian School; Scores Hostage: Standoff With Troops; Captors Seen as Chechens—Threat Made to Kill Children and Adults," by C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 2 September, p. A1.

"Bold Terror Strikes in Russia Raise Security Fears: Surge of Attacks All Linked To Chechen Rebels Proves Huge Challenge to Putin," by Guy Chazan and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 2 September, p. A11.

Russia is coming to the Middle East security-wise because everything it fears in terms of instability and danger lie to its south. Russia has let its military and security services languish over the past decade, and the ramping up of violence connected with Chechnya is going to push the Kremlin into re-militarizing its foreign policy and re-energizing its internal police forces.

Like China, India, and Western Europe in general, Russia's biggest security issues have to do with Muslims living both along its borders and along the "edges" of its society. The problems of integrating Muslims into democratic societies in the Core is just the microcosm of the problem the Core faces in integrating the Middle East into the expanding global economy.

I know a lot of people look at Russia right now and see ever more evidence of the world going to hell in a handbasket, but I see a nation getting its motivation to truly join a GWOT the hard way.

"China's 2 Top Leaders Square Off in Contest to Run Policy: President and Head Of Military at Odds," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 2 September, p. A3.

This is the political struggle that really matters right now in the world: the one between the 3rd and 4th generation leaderships of China. This is not a choice between two really rich white guys from Yale, but a serious struggle over the future course of the world's most populous country. The 3rd generation, exemplified by Jiang Jemin (still with the top spot in the military), is not going softly into the night, despite handing over power officially a while back to the far more technocratic 4th generation, led by President Hu Jintao. Jiang wants a hard line on Taiwan and full steam ahead on economic growth, whereas Hu is far more nuanced on Taiwan because he's looking to become a regional political statesman and not just the "conqueror" of the renegade province, plus he's far more attuned to the plight of the rural poor in China, something that really bears watching if China isn't going to come apart socially with all this booming development (my theory that the train's engine can't travel any faster than the caboose).

Because Hu sounds vaguely more Marxist with his populism, you might think he's the retrograde, but it's really Jiang who needs to be pushed off the stage. This guy is just way too much into solidifying his historical legacy, and his impatience on both economic growth and Taiwan is dangerous for the country and the world as a whole, because it threatens global stability with the twin specters of a banking crisis in China and a showdown with the U.S. over Taiwan.

The U.S. should not be standing by idly on this one, but should be sending strong signals in favor of Hu, who faces Jiang's continued attempts to garner for himself more control over China's foreign policy (e.g., he's trying to promote himself as the head of a new, U.S.-style national security council). Yes, Jiang is nominally a bigger friend to the private sector and to the provinces vis-à-vis Beijing, but the last thing we need is for China to spin out of control on any score, and that's more likely the more power Jiang accrues.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 2 September 2004

The following review appeared in the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0810/p17s01-bogn.html) on 10 August 2004. It was flagged and sent to me in China by the Naval War College's public affairs people. My comments follow, as does the daily catch.

For real security, America must shrink the global gap

US military must be able to strike and rebuild

By John D. Heel

The current debate about US foreign policy focuses on finding (or not finding) WMD in Iraq, the role of faulty intelligence in presidential decisionmaking, and—for conspiracy theorists like Michael Moore—how foreign powers shape US policy. In the short term (since, say, Sept. 11, 2001) these seem like large issues. But they are not. Thomas Barnett's book, "The Pentagon's New Map," puts these and many other matters in a compelling and elevating context that points toward "a future worth creating."

As the 21st century opens, Barnett suggests, the world is divided not between good and evil or "clashing civilizations," but between the connected and the disconnected, between globalization's "functioning Core" and the "non-integrating Gap." The good news is that the age of wars between states is over and roughly two-thirds of humankind—despite great disparities in wealth, health, education, and political rights—now live in the connected parts of the globe. The bad news is that only the US can shrink the Gap. Only the US can make globalization truly global.

In some sense, this is a personal intellectual odyssey. A new political science PhD (Harvard, 1990, with a dissertation on East German and Romanian policies toward the third world), Barnett learned to think "horizontally" from his mentors in the Center for Naval Analyses. He joined the Naval War College in 1998 and then worked for the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald on post-cold-war global assessments, before the company was decimated Sept. 11.

Throughout this odyssey, Barnett's thesis evolved. Its key elements reflect a variety of other views but are assembled here in a new and powerful fashion. A key theme is how hard it is to get new ideas into the minds of military leaders. Change is always threatening to patterns in congressional funding and to the military, whose leadership tends to be tied to the worldview that was dominant when they made "flag" (in this case, the cold war).

But Barnett calls on the military to attune itself to the real needs of Globalization IV—that is, the need to shrink the gap. This means a "bifurcated" military, something along the lines of the US military before the split into separate services. "America now has, for all practical purposes, a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else," writes Barnett. In his view, the US leviathan needs to be ready to strike into the gap with overwhelming force (as in Iraq) and lead a multinational process of rebuilding that creates opportunities for the affected country to join the core. This latter role, what Barnett calls System Administrator, is the most difficult for the US military to accept.

Barnett's book forces a rethinking of the current debate on the Iraq war. It encourages one to give up convenient but petty ideas that President Bush declared war on Saddam Hussein to settle old scores for his father or that his evangelical Christian views have drawn the US into a foreign policy "quagmire." And it forces one to recognize that preemption and unilateralism are not new in US foreign policy.

America's current action in Iraq is the grandest foreign-aid project since the Marshall Plan—something Democrats had called for over the decades for other parts of the world. Why not in the Middle East? Barnett asks. Anyone looking for a vision of how the new American Empire can be better than its predecessors may well find it here.

To be sure, his brilliant policy wonkiness leads occasionally to self-indulgence. The high he experiences when delivering rapid fire "killer briefs" is described far too often. And a fantasy account of his career as a Fox Mulder Doppelganger with top-secret clearance goes over the top without adding anything to his argument.

More important, Barnett's book opens up a "future worth creating." His vision of Globalization IV - the historic opportunity to make globalization truly global—will take patience and a better balance between using America's overwhelming military force (as global leviathan) and its postwar multilateralism (as System Administrator). But shrinking the gap will enhance America's security even as it improves life around the world. As Barnett points out, it's both worthy and self-interested.

•John D. Heyl is executive director of international programs and professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.

The Pentagon's New Map

By Thomas Barnett

Putnam320 pp., $26.95

COMMENTARY: I liked this review a lot, because the guy really appreciates the compelling nature of the book's big-picture thrust. His only criticisms are standard issue for the visionary: "This guy's got an awfully big head!" But they're fair enough (my Mom, for example, still hates the Mulder parody). Best of all, he doesn't present me as some sort of naïve do-gooder, but instead seems to appreciate the realism that flows throughout the analysis. He also approves of the career-story being weaved throughout the high-concept parts (and he catches that my thinking has evolved dramatically as a result of that "professional odyssey"), which is nice, but he does commit the error of reporting that I worked directly for Cantor. But that's nitpicking, because it's always a rather quick read when you're reviewing. All in all, this is one nice review for a national newspaper, especially from a academic historian of some real standing, because history buffs in general often get pissed off at how quickly I race through history to make my points (not enough detail!). Hmm, if I can get this good from the Monitor (first place I ever published an article), it makes me wonder when the Washington Post (where I've also published twice) will ever get around to reviewing it like they promised . . .. Maybe after C-SPAN shows the brief!

Now, onto the daily catch:

A struggle in China that bears watching

"China's 2 Top Leaders Square Off in Contest to Run Policy: President and Head Of Military at Odds," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 2 September, p. A3.

Why Russia is coming to the Middle East

"Insurgents Seize Russian School; Scores Hostage: Standoff With Troops; Captors Seen as Chechens—Threat Made to Kill Children and Adults," by C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, NYT, 2 September, p. A1.

"Bold Terror Strikes in Russia Raise Security Fears: Surge of Attacks All Linked To Chechen Rebels Proves Huge Challenge to Putin," by Guy Chazan and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 2 September, p. A11.

The Left want their Sys Admin force for Sudan

[Advertisement] "A Coalition of the Carine Can Save a Million Lives: President Bush, Why Won't You Lead It?" NYT, 2 September, p. A19.

"In Western Sudan, Fear and Despair Are the Ever-Growing Enemy," by Somini Sengupta, NYT, 2 September, p. A1.

More evidence of why arms control is a completely meaningless concept nowadays

"U.S. and Russia Still Dominate Arms Market, but World Total Falls," by Thom Shanker, NYT, 30 August, p. A7.

"China, U.S. Near an Accord on Nuclear Technology," by Charles Hutzler, WSJ, 2 September, p. A2.

"Un futur qui vaut la peine d'être créé : interview du docteur Thomas Barnett" (CheckPoint), posted 8 août 2004 @ http://www.checkpoint-online.ch/CheckPoint/Index.html.

This is the exact same text, just in French. I include it here simply because I like to capture such things for the record, plus it gives people who come to the site from other countries a chance to check the ideas and me out in a language more familiar to them. So sue me! I'm trying to be multilateral here!

Here's the full text, followed by a brief comment:

Un futur qui vaut la peine d'être créé :
interview du docteur Thomas Barnett

8 août 2004

e docteur Thomas P. M. Barnett a connu une brusque publicité en mars 2003 avec la parution d’un article controversé dans le magazine Esquire. Titré La nouvelle carte du Pentagone, l’essai de Barnett affirmait que les Etats-Unis devaient cesser de penser le monde dans les termes de la guerre froide, et adopter de nouvelles règles militaires, politiques et économiques pour faire face à la nouvelle réalité.

L’argument central de Barnett consiste à dire que la globalisation est la clef de la paix et que les Etats-Unis doivent utiliser toute leur puissance pour l’étendre aux pays déconnectés de ces deux tiers du monde qui jouissent d’une plus grande liberté économique.

«. . . Tous les grands problèmes, comme la guerre entre les grandes puissances, ont été résolus. Nous devons à présent passer à la violence subnationale et au terrorisme transnational. »

Sans surprise, la thèse de Barnett a provoqué le débat aussi bien à gauche qu'à droite. Elle a également donné lieu à la publication de The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, en mai dernier, une version élargie sous forme de livre de cet essai.

Vous avez commencé votre carrière par une spécialisation dans les affaires soviétiques. Quel était votre sentiment à la fin des années 80, lorsque vous saviez que votre carrière était menacée avant d’avoir réellement commencé ?

En fait, c’était un énorme soulagement. Passer un doctorat revient à s’engager dans une recherche très spécialisée pendant plusieurs années. C’était un grand rite de passage qui m’a beaucoup appris, mais qui m’a également convaincu que je n’étais pas un artiste de la recherche voué à demeurer dans un sujet très étroit – comme les relations entre l’Europe de l’Est et le Tiers Monde. De sorte que quand le mur est tombé, je me sentais également libéré. Je savais simplement que je me trouvais au point d’origine pour tout ce qui suivrait. Les seules questions étaient celles-ci : quel était le futur global que nous étions en train de contempler ? Et quel rôle allais-je jouer en essayant d’aider le gouvernement américain à s’adapter à ce nouvel environnement ?

Comment avez-vous fait la transition d’une concentration sur l’Union soviétique au monde dans son entier ?

La planification militaire américaine était devenue tellement isolée et simple, en raison de la menace permanente de la Troisième guerre mondiale, que je savais instinctivement, pour parvenir ainsi dire à ouvrir mes ailes, nécessaire d’aller au-delà de ce paradigme et d’explorer les relations existant entre la guerre et la paix, entre le conflit et la stabilité, ou entre la sécurité nationale et l’économie globale. J’ai donc beaucoup travaillé sur la stratégie navale, parce que le début des années 90 a donné lieu à une grande réflexion à ce sujet. Puis j’ai migré vers l’aide extérieure, en étant plusieurs mois durant consultant auprès de l’Agence des Etats-Unis pour le Développement International (USAID). Mais le grand pas, pour moi, a été de quitter la scène des think tanks de Washington afin de forger un partenariat de recherche unique entre Wall Street et le Collège de Guerre Navale à Rhodes Island, avec pour priorité la manière avec laquelle la globalisation altérait les définitions américaines de la sécurité nationale et internationale.

Je sais que c’est difficile, mais dites-nous en quelques mots : quels sont vos arguments dans votre livre, The Pentagon's New Map?

Ce livre n’est rien moins qu’une tentative de définir une succession à la stratégie de l’endiguement datant de la guerre froide, et donc de diagnostiquer la source exacte de la violence massive et du terrorisme au sein de la communauté globale afin de faciliter leur endiguement par des moyens militaires et diplomatiques, et finalement leur éradication par une intégration économique et sociale. Gagner cette guerre globale contre le terrorisme exige de rendre la globalisation vraiment globale et, de la sorte, éliminer la déconnexion qui définit le danger à notre ère. En inscrivant la guerre contre le terrorisme dans le grand processus historique de globalisation et en la liant explicitement à son expansion continue, je cherche à changer l’habitude de l’Amérique à mener une guerre uniquement dans son contexte et de l’amener à penser, à préparer et à faire la guerre dans un autre contexte.

Rétrospectivement, votre division du monde en deux camps principaux, avec d’une part le Centre efficient des nations qui sont économiquement développées, politiquement stables et intégrées à l’économie globale, et d’autre part le Vide, où se trouvent ceux qui sont déconnectés du Centre, devrait aller de soi pour de nombreuses personnes. Pourquoi, d’après vous, la plupart d’entre nous sont toujours restés à l’époque de la guerre froide et pensent à des chocs de cultures et d’idéologies qui mènent à des guerres que vous appelez la Big One ?

Le Département de la Défense a été créé en 1947 autour du principe unique et fondateur de la guerre entre grandes puissances, parce que c’est ce que nous connaissions et ce que nous avions prévu pour les années à venir. En réalité, les armes nucléaires ont tué les guerres de ce type, et aucune grande puissance n’est entrée en guerre avec une autre depuis leur invention. Mais jusqu’à ce que le bloc soviétique s’effondre, nous avons dû honorer ce principe fondateur, car notre dissuasion visait à prévenir la Big One dans toute son ampleur. Comme le Pentagone a vécu tant d’années dans cet état d’esprit, ils ont naturellement cherché quelqu’un pour remplacer les Soviets dans l’après-guerre froide, et ils ont choisi la Chine lors la crise du détroit de Taiwan en 1996.

Nous avons donc continué à financer des Forces armées high tech conçues pour des guerres entre grandes puissances alors même que nous avons passé les années 90 à mener essentiellement des opérations militaires autres que la guerre, sans haute technologie. Ce qui nous amène à la situation actuelle : des Forces armées capables de renverser 2 ou 3 Saddam par année, mais insuffisantes en personnel, en équipement et en imagination face aux défis que nous affrontons aujourd’hui dans la reconstruction de l’Irak. C’est pourquoi l’état d’esprit du Pentagone est important : il génère avec le temps la force que nous finissons par utiliser, qu’elle soit particulièrement adaptée à la mission ou non. Et lorsqu’elle ne l’est pas, comme en Irak depuis la fin de la guerre, il est raisonnable d’affirmer que les vies de nos soldats sont mises en danger sans raison.

Pour ce qui est de la séparation du monde faite par le livre comme allant de soi, je suis d’accord. Trop de gens avec quelques cours de sciences politiques derrière eux vont accuser le livre de simplement reprendre la vieille fracture entre les Nantis et les Exclus, ou – pire – la séparation entre Centre et Périphérie d’Emmanuel Wallerstein. Même si des similitudes existent, aucune n’est logiquement considérée comme un concept précurseur. Je ne parle simplement pas des riches ou des pauvres, mais de qui est connecté à l’économie globale ou non ; c’est donc une question d’orientation, et non de degré. En ce qui concerne le type de marxisme délavé de Wallerstein, il faut se souvenir qu’il affirmait que le Centre devait dominer la Périphérie afin de rester riche. Mon argument est l’exact opposé. Si quelqu’un veut me relier à Wallerstein, il ferait mieux de noter que j’ai renversé son argument aujourd’hui périmé (il a fonctionné quelque temps dans les années 70). Il est donc temps d’aller de l’avant, dans la théorie des relations internationales comme dans la planification au Pentagone.

Pourquoi la globalisation est-elle si nécessaire à la cause de paix ?

En bref, la globalisation propage la connectivité. Celle-ci accroît les options et les opportunités pour les transactions économiques à tous les niveaux, mais spécialement pour les individus. Ces taux de transaction en hausse et ces niveaux croissants de connectivité génèrent la liberté de choix, d’information, etc. Avec le temps, la connectivité a besoin de code, comme mes amis programmeurs aiment le dire, et davantage de règles signifie moins de conflits et plus de paix. La globalisation exerce certainement des secousses lorsqu’elle s’étend à des sociétés traditionnelles, et ce processus va générer de l’angoisse sociale, des changements politiques de grande ampleur ainsi que des réactions hostiles dans certaines sociétés. C’est tout le problème : alors que la globalisation avance, il faut d’attendre à davantage de conflits liés à cette avance, parce qu’elle met au défi les sociétés traditionnelles de changer profondément ; mais au fil du temps, l’effet durable de cette connectivité est la paix.

Est-ce que le neuf prend l’avantage sur le vieux dans ce processus ? Oui. Est-ce que l’individu prend l’avantage sur le collectif ? Oui. Est-ce que c’est mauvais ? Seulement si vous pensez cela du progrès (ou que la vie était meilleure par le passé). Dans mon esprit, toutefois, la majeure partie de la résistance à la globalisation ne porte pas sur l’orientation, mais la rapidité du processus. Le vrai cri de bataille des forces anti-mondialisation devrait être « moins vite ! ». Bien sûr, un Ben Laden ou un Al-Qaïda vont combattre la globalisation dans le monde islamique par tous les moyens, parce qu’ils voient leurs chances de ramener des sociétés entières à leur VIIe siècle paradisiaque disparaître un peu plus chaque année où la globalisation s’implante dans la région. Il faut donc s’attendre à ce que leur lutte devienne plus désespérée avec le temps.

Vous affirmez que la Chine n’est pas la menace – la nouvelle Union soviétique – que de nombreux conservateurs et ceux du Pentagone ont voulu faire accroire, parce qu’elle a trop à perdre sur le plan économique – ou même militaire – en défiant l’engagement américain envers Taiwan et le reste de l’Asie du Sud-Est. Comment voyez-vous la Chine dans 20 ans, et pourquoi ?

Je vois le potentiel d’un formidable partenariat stratégique, si les Etats-Unis ont la sagesse et le courage de faire les compromis nécessaires pour générer ce lien. La Chine posera un défi aux Etats-Unis sur plusieurs plans – économique, diplomatique, social, et notamment politique étant donné la lenteur de sa réforme ; mais aucun de ces problèmes ne va nécessairement dégénérer en défi militaire, à moins de penser que de nombreux Américains doivent perdre la vie pour défendre une Chine contre l’autre. Je peine à accepter ce scénario, parce que je continue d’observer une intégration économique systématique entre Taiwan et la Chine. C’est cette inexorable union économique qui alimente les discours politiques tranchés de part et d’autre, que nous devons gérer avec adresse et sans émotion. Dans 20 ans, la Chine peut et devrait être un énorme partenaire pour les Etats-Unis, cimentée dans une alliance de sécurité de type OTAN pour l’Est Asiatique qui provient de l’engagement partagé par la Corée du Sud, le Japon, la Chine et les Etats-Unis à renverser avec succès le régime brutal de Kim Jong Il et à réunifier la Corée.

Vous avez loué l’administration Bush pour avoir réalisé qu’une nouvelle vision stratégique et un nouvel ensemble de règles en matière de sécurité étaient nécessaires après le 11 septembre, comme la doctrine d’action militaire préemptive, mais vous l’avez pris à partie pour ne pas les expliquer au monde de manière adéquate. Comment le feriez-vous ?

L’élément-clef que nous devons forger, c’est un ensemble de règles complet sur la manière avec laquelle la communauté globale doit traiter des États en faillite politique – c’est-à-dire comment nous excluons du pouvoir de mauvais dirigeants avec l’approbation explicite de l’ensemble des grandes puissances. Nous avons de telles règles pour les États en faillite économique, mais pas sur le plan politique. Ces règles exigeront une organisation internationale spécifique, comme le FMI l’est pour les tâches de réhabilitation économique. Je vois cette évolution venir beaucoup plus logiquement du G-20 que du Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, et c’est donc là que je présenterais mes arguments.

Au-delà de cette tâche spécifique, cette administration a simplement besoin de mieux s’expliquer dans ses discours et dans sa campagne d’élection nationale. La conversation doit débuter avec la population américaine elle-même, si nous voulons faire avancer la question. Dès que le public américain aura une idée claire de cette administration – ou de celle qui suivra – quant au cap pris par cette guerre globale contre le terrorisme, nous serons mieux en mesure de nous expliquer devant le monde extérieur. Mais tant que nous n’aurons pas dépassé ces mythes périmés sur « le gendarme planétaire », « la guerre perpétuelle » et « l’empire américain », nous ne pourrons pas mener le débat national nécessaire pour mettre sur la table les vraies tâches et s’y mettre sérieusement.

Comment réagissez-vous à l’argument de Robert Kagan dans son livre Of Paradise and Power, selon lequel « il est temps de cesser de faire comme si les Européens et les Américains partagent une vision commune du monde, ou même comme s’ils vivent dans le même monde » ? Si l’Europe et les Etats-Unis ont une vision fondamentalement différente de la manière d’exercer la puissance, comment pourront-ils trouver un accord sur un ensemble de règles sécuritaires, économiques et politiques que vous jugez à présent nécessaire ?

Je pense que nous devons nous concentrer en premier lieu sur une entente avec les puissances du Nouveau Centre (comme je les appelle) et laisser ce processus attirer les Européens au bercail. Je ferais donc d’abord avancer les choses avec la Chine, l’Inde, la Russie, le Brésil, etc., ou simplement le groupe des 20+ qui a émergé à l’OMC des négociations de Doha sur le développement. Si nous essayons constamment d’avoir les Européens avec nous, nous risquons de manquer les accords et les compromis assurant la profonde coopération de toutes ces puissances émergentes. Je me concentrerais donc sur le Nouveau Centre et je laisserais l’Ancien Centre venir à son rythme. L’Europe va rester focalisée sur son intégration intérieure pendant des années, alors que le Japon suivra la Chine où qu’elle aille, simplement parce que leurs destins économiques sont tellement entrelacés.

Comment l’implique le titre de votre livre, c’est peut-être le Pentagone qui le doit le plus se recréer parmi toutes les agences gouvernementales pour cette nouvelle époque. En fait, vous prônez une transformation complète du Département de la Défense comprenant la séparation des Forces armées en deux composantes – une force Léviathan capable de mener les grandes guerres et une force d’Administration de Système qui devrait gérer les nations qui sont en voie d’être intégrées au vide. Quelle réponse avez-vous obtenue des principaux responsables militaires à qui vous avez communiqué cette idée ?

Vous seriez surpris du nombre de jeunes amiraux qui réalisent non seulement que cette voie est possible et nécessaire, mais qu’elle se produit déjà autour d’eux. La vraie question est combien de temps il faudra à notre gouvernement pour reconnaître et codifier cette scission du Département, parce que l’essor de la force d’Administration exige vraiment une énorme coordination des efforts entre le Pentagone et le reste des institutions de politique étrangère. En définitive, la force d’Administration n’est que partiellement alimentée par le Département, avec la majorité du personnel venant d’ailleurs et les « gardes du corps » venant des armées.

Mais la vraie réponse à la question est celle-ci : lorsque vous changez les opinions des capitaines et des colonels à ce sujet, vous mettez en marche un potentiel de changement dans les 10 prochaines années, parce que c’est le temps qu’il leur faut pour monter dans la hiérarchie dans la culture « plus haut ou dehors » de nos Forces armées. Et l’échec est ce qui tend le plus à pousser ce changement, par opposition au succès. Je pense que l’échec se prépare aujourd’hui dans notre occupation de l’Irak, et donc que le potentiel de mon concept de force d’Administration croit rapidement au fil des mois. Nous voyons déjà des propositions issues du Bureau du Secrétaire à la Défense et de la Maison Blanche, respectivement, pour des « forces de stabilisation » spécifiques au sein des Forces armées US et pour une « force d’opérations de paix globales » qui nous engagerait avec d’autres armées, et donc je vois vraiment cette idée avancer et prendre de la vitesse avec les événements en Irak. Mon travail, par conséquent, consiste simplement à semer les idées dans les esprits des futurs amiraux et généraux qui en définitive vont présider à cette profonde transformation.

Est-ce qu’il est néanmoins réaliste de penser que les Forces armées américaines peuvent être réorganisées d’une manière aussi ambitieuse ? Ce n’est pas seulement la transformation d’une force issue de la guerre froide, mais la réorganisation d’une structure créée voici plus de deux siècles.

En séparant en deux le Département de la Défense, nous ne faisons que revenir à la même articulation qu’ont connue les Forces armées US durant l’essentiel de leur histoire – c’est-à-dire un Département de la Guerre et un Département de Tout le Reste (ou ce que nous avions l’habitude d’appeler le Département de la Marine). Ma scission Léviathan / Administration non seulement n’est pas nouvelle, mais en plus elle n’est pas difficile à imaginer, parce qu’elle est bien plus proche de la tradition militaire américaine que les bizarreries imposées par cette aberration historique appelée guerre froide. Revenez au passé et lisez l’histoire de la Marine et du Corps des Marines. Ce que je décris comme étant le rôle de la force d’Administration est en fait l’histoire de ces deux services avant la Seconde guerre mondiale.

Vous considérez que propager la globalisation est une mission morale pour les Etats-Unis, et pas simplement une manière de rendre l’Amérique plus sûre. Cela implique un rôle accru à l’étranger, sur le plan militaire et politique. Comment répondez-vous aux accusations qu’il s’agit simplement de la création – même involontaire – d’un Empire Américain ?

Avoir un empire implique l’imposition de règles à la fois minimales et maximales, ou non seulement ce que vous pouvez mais aussi ce que vous devez faire. L’Amérique n’a jamais été attirée par l’imposition de règles maximales, que ce soit à domicile ou à l’étranger. L’usage de ce terme, empire, relève tout bonnement d’une histoire biaisée – un simplisme déguisé en raffinement. De plus, menée correctement, cette méthode ne nécessite pas un effort plus grands des Forces armées américaines. Vérifiez l’histoire des activités militaires US dans l’ère de l’après-guerre froide, que je décris longuement dans mon livre. Nous travaillons bien trop dur pour gérer l’environnement sécuritaire global aujourd’hui, parce que nous ne sommes pas équilibrés et nous ne parvenons pas à amener d’importants alliés à partager cette vision mutuellement bénéfique. Ce n’est pas un effort qui ferait exploser le budget. Il s’agit de gérer le monde plus intelligemment et de partager cet effort avec d’autres, unis par une vision commune. C’est un plus grand effort sur le plan diplomatique, certes, mais cela ne provoquera guère de banqueroute vu qu’il s’agit avant tout de discussions.

De nombreux éléments dans votre livre rendent nerveux à la fois les gauchistes et les conservateurs, que ce soit une présence militaire accrue dans le monde ou des soldats américains engagés activement à l’intérieur des frontières américaines. Quelle difficulté aurez-vous à vendre votre vision de l’avenir ?

Encore une fois, regardez notre histoire de la fin de la Guerre froide. Nous avons été énormément impliqués et présent dans tout le Vide que je décris dans le livre. Nous ne parlons donc pas de plus de présence ou de plus d’implication, simplement d’un meilleur emploi de nos gens et de nos efforts. Rappelez-vous, le Vide n’est pas le monde entier, mais recouvre environ un tiers de l’humanité. Au sein de cette population, nous parlons de 8 à 10 situations qui nécessitent une réponse militaire à un instant donné, et nous y viendrons à chacune l’une après l’autre. Mais nous avons passé l’essentiel des années 90 en étant impliqués dans 5 à 7 situations de réponse majeure dispersées autour de mon Vide. Nous sommes donc bien habitués à cette charge de travail. En fait, ce sera bien plus facile avec une force rééquilibrée plus efficacement autour du Vide (et non du « monde »).

La force d’Administration connaîtra des engagements bien plus proches des Gardes-côtes que des armées de la Guerre froide en « patrouillant dans les rues » de l’Amérique. Elle ressemblera beaucoup à l’actuelle Garde nationale de plusieurs façons, et le changement ne sera donc pas un gros problème, à moins d’être quelqu’un qui imagine les « hélicoptères noirs » de l’ONU fondre sur lui chaque fois qu’il voit un soldat de la Garde nationale à un coin de rue durant une alerte terroriste accrue. Je n’ai pas vu l’Amérique paniquer lorsque la Garde était partout pendant la récente Guerre d’Irak. Je dis qu’il faut davantage se fier à notre système politique que se laisser aller à de telles craintes. Orwell continue d’avoir tort : la technologie renforce bien davantage l’individu que l’État.

The Pentagon's New Map est en définitive un manifeste optimiste, puisque vous croyer clairement que la paix perpétuelle n’est pas seulement possible, mais faisable. Quelles sont nos chances de rétrécir le Vide et de ramener le tiers restant de la population mondiale dans le Centre ?

La globalisation continuera d’avancer aussi longtemps que nous ne la bousillerons pas. Par cette avance, elle va générer un énorme tumulte dans les sociétés traditionnelles, qui à son tour va générer énormement de violences irrationnelles que nous devrons neutraliser. Le futur que je décris est plutôt inévitable, aussi longtemps que nous ne perdons pas notre calme et notre détermination à affronter les défis sécuritaires qui se présentent. Seulement 15 ans plus tôt, nous passions nos journées à s’inquiéter d’un Armageddon nucléaire global, et maintenant nous sommes tous en train de traquer et de neutraliser des sales types qui pratiquent le terrorisme ou imposent à leur société une cruelle isolation du monde entier. On pourrait penser que la voie est plus difficile, mais elle ne l’est pas. Tous les grands problèmes, comme la guerre entre les grandes puissances, ont été résolus. Nous devons à présent passer aux noix les plus dures craquer, à savoir la violence subnationale et le terrorisme transnational, mais ces problèmes sont bien moindres que les précédents. Nous sommes sur le point de mettre un terme à la guerre comme nous l’avons connue depuis des siècles. La guerre interétatique devient une guerre de dinosaures, et la globalisation continue de se répandre dans le monde, hissant des centaines de millions de personnes hors de la pauvreté en l’espace des deux dernières décennies. Tout ce dont je parle dans ce livre, c’est la manière d’attirer le tiers restant de l’humanité dans le vie agréable que la plupart d’entre nous partagent déjà – une vie sans violences massives, une vie où la connectivité économique et la liberté individuelle s’accroissent. C’est un futur qui vaut la peine d’être créé, et il est à notre portée.

Texte original: Steven Martinovich, "A vision for the future", Enter Stage Right, 3.5.2004

Traduction et réécriture : Lt col EMG Ludovic Monnerat

COMMENTARY: The Merovingian had it right in "Matrix: Reloaded": anything in French simply sounds cooler and more sophisticated (as he said of swearing in French: "It's like wiping your ass with silk."). As someone who took French two years in high school in the mid-1970s (whoa Daddy!), it's awfully nice to see myself come off so expertly in the language. More to the point, it's interesting that the Swiss military have so much interest in my work. People assume the Europeans dislike me and my ideas, when the exact opposite is true among the militaries there. I expect to be visiting a lot of Europe in coming months, as the invites continue to pour in. Suffice it to say, seeing this interview in French only makes me want to see PNM in French all the more, but I'm pretty sure that will happen eventually.

"A future worth creating: An interview with Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett" (Enter Stage Right), posted 3 May 2004 @ http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0504/0504barnettinterview.htm.

I did this email interview in bits and pieces during my racing around in the first week of the book PR tour with Putnam. Most of it I dashed off in bed while hanging out with a sick kid and watching "Saturday Night Live," but despite all the distractions, it seemed to turn out all right. Here it is in full, followed by a short commentary:

A future worth creating: An interview with Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett

By Steven Martinovich

web posted May 3, 2004

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett exploded into the public's consciousness in March 2003 with a controversial article in Esquire magazine. Entitled The Pentagon's New Map, Barnett's essay argued that the United States needed to stop thinking of the world in Cold War terms and to craft a new military, political and economic rules to deal with the new reality. Barnett's key argument is that globalization is the key to peace and that the United States had to use its political, economic and military might to extend it to those countries disconnected from the two-thirds of the world enjoying greater economic liberty. Not surprisingly Barnett's thesis has provoked debate on both the left and the right. It's also prompted The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, a book length version of the essay. Dr. Barnett was kind enough to sit with ESR and discuss his ideas.

You began your career specializing in Soviet affairs. How did you feel in the late 1980s to know that your career was threatened before it really even began?

Actually it was a huge relief. To get the Ph.D. is to engage in very specialized research for several years. It was a great rite of passage that taught me much, but it also convinced me that I was not a drill-down artist who wanted to remain trapped in a very narrow subject matter -- such as East European-Third World relations. So when the wall came down, I felt like I too had been given my freedom. I just knew I was at the creation point for that which would follow. The only questions were: what was that global future we were staring at? And what new role could I cast for myself in trying to help the U.S. government adjust to this new global environment?

How did you make the transition from focusing on the Soviet Union to the wider world?

U.S. military planning had become so isolated and pristine due to the overlay of the threat of WWIII, that I knew instinctively that if I was going to spread my wings, so to speak, I needed to get out from under that paradigm and explore the seams that exist between war and peace, between conflict and stability, or between national security and global economics. So I did a lot of work on navy strategy, because the early 1990s featured a big re-think on that whole subject. Then I migrated toward foreign aid, putting in many months as a consultant with the U.S. Agency for International Development. But the big step for me was to leave the Washington think tank scene and forge this unique research partnership between Wall Street and the Naval War College in Rhode Island, with the focus being how globalization was altering America's definitions of national and international security.

I know it's difficult but in a nutshell tell us what you're arguing in The Pentagon's New Map?

This book does nothing less than try to enunciate a successor to the Cold War strategy of containment -- in effect to diagnose the true source of mass violence and terrorism within the global community so as to facilitate their containment by military and diplomatic means, and ultimately their eradication by economic and social integration. Winning this global war on terrorism entails making globalization truly global and -- by doing so -- eliminating the disconnectedness that defines danger in this age. By locating the GWOT within the larger historical process of globalization and linking it explicitly to its continued expansion, I seek to move America out of the habit of waging war solely within the context of war and into the habit of thinking about, preparing for, and waging war within the context of everything else.

In hindsight your dividing of the world into basically two camps, the Functioning Core of nations that are economically developed, politically stable and integrated into the global economy, and the Gap, those disconnected from the Core, should be self-evident to most people. Why do you think that most of us are still stuck in Cold War era thinking of clash of cultures or ideologies that lead to wars you refer to as The Big One?

The Defense Department was created back in 1947 around the singular ordering principle of great power war because that's what we knew and that's what we foresaw in the years ahead. In reality, nuclear weapons killed great power war, as no two great powers have ever gone to war with one another since we've invented nukes. But until the Soviet bloc fell away, we had to honor that ordering principle because the war we deterred was the Big One for all the marbles. Since the Pentagon spent so many years in that mind-set, they naturally looked around for someone to replace the Sovs in the post-Cold War era, settling on the Chinese with the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1996. So we continued to buy one military (high-tech for great power war) even as we spent the 1990s doing mostly low-tech Military Operations Other Than War. That yields the military we have now: able to do 2-3 Saddam-style takedowns a year but undermanned, under-equipped, and under-imagined in terms of the challenges we now face in trying to rehab Iraq. That's why the Pentagon's mindset matters: it generates the force over time that we end up using, whether it's particularly suited for the job or not. And when it's not, like in Iraq since the end of the war, it's reasonable to argue that the lives of our personnel are put unnecessarily at risk. So this vision stuff really matters in the end.

As for the breakdown of the world in the book being self-evident, I agree. Too many people with a couple of Poli Sci courses under their belt will criticize the book as simply replicating the old Have-Have Not breakdown, or -- worse -- Immanuel Wallerstein's Core-Periphery breakdown. But while similarities exist, neither is logically considered a precursor concept. I'm not talking who's simply rich or poor, but who's connecting up to the global economy or not, so it's a matter of direction, not degree. As for Wallerstein's brand of watered-down Marxism, let's remember that he posited that the Core needed to keep the Periphery down in order to stay rich. I'm making exactly the opposite argument. If anyone wants to link me to Wallerstein, they better note I turn that now outdated (it worked for a while in the 1970s) argument on its head. So it's time to move on in international relations theory as well as Pentagon's planning.

Why is globalization so necessary to the cause of peace?

Simply put, globalization spreads connectivity. Connectivity increases options and opportunities for economic transactions on all levels, but especially for individuals. Those rising transaction rates and growing levels of connectivity generate freedom of choice, information, etc. Over time, connectivity requires code, as my software friends like to say, and more rules mean less conflict and more peace. Globalization certainly shakes things up as it moves into traditional societies, and that process will generate social anguish, political changes of the strongest sort, and hostile reactions in certain societies. So there's the rub, as globalization advances, expect more conflict associated with that advance, because it tends to challenge traditional societies toward great change. But over time the lasting effect of that connectivity is peace. Does the new trump the old in the process? Yes. Does the individual trump the collective? Yes. Is this bad? Only if you think progress is (or conversely, that life was better in the old days). But in my mind, most of the resistance to globalization is not about direction, but speed of advance. The real battle cry of anti-globalization forces should be "slow down!" Not "go away!" Of course, a bin Laden and an al Qaeda are going to fight globalization's advance into the Islamic world tooth and nail, because they see their chances to hijack societies there back to their 7th century definition of paradise slipping away with each year that globalization encroaches a bit more into the region. So expect their struggle to get more desperate with time.

You argue that China isn't the threat -- the new Soviet Union – that many conservatives and those in the Pentagon have made it out to be because it has too much to lose economically, not to mention militarily, by challenging America's commitment to Taiwan and the rest of southeast Asia. What do you see from China then in 20 years time and why?

I see the potential for tremendous strategic partnership, if the U.S. has the wisdom and courage to make the compromises necessary for generating that bond. China will be a challenge to the U.S. on many levels -- economically, diplomatically, socially, and especially politically given its slow pace of reform -- but none of those issues necessarily segue into a military challenge, unless you think a lot of Americans should give up their lives defending one China against another. I have a hard time with that scenario, because I continue to witness wholesale economic integration between Taiwan and China. It's that inexorable coming together economically that fuels the tough political talk on both sides, which we need to manage skillfully and without emotion. China twenty years from now can and should be a huge partner for the U.S., cemented in a NATO-like security alliance for East Asia that arises out of the shared commitment of South Korea, Japan, China, and the U.S. in successfully removing the brutal Kim Jong Il regime from power and reuniting Korea.

You laud the Bush Administration for realizing that a new security rule-set and strategic vision was necessary after 9/11 -- such as the doctrine of preemptive military action -- but take it to task for not explaining them to the world adequately. How would you go about this?

The key thing we need to forge is an A-to-Z rule set on how the global community processes politically bankrupt states -- in effect how we remove bad leaders from power with the expressed approval of the community of great powers. We have one for economically bankrupt states, but we don't have one for politically bankrupt states. That rule set will require a dedicated international organization, like the IMF is for economic rehab jobs. I see that evolution coming about far more logically in the G-20 venue than the UN Security Council, so that is where I would make my case.

Beyond that specific task, there is simply the need for this administration to explain itself better in its speeches and in this national election campaign. The conversation has to start with the American people themselves if we are going to move the pile on this one.

Once the American public gets a clear sense from this administration -- or any that follows -- as to where this whole global war on terrorism is going, then we'll be better able to explain ourselves to the outside world. But until we get past these outdated myths about "global policeman," "perpetual war" and "American empire," we won't be able to conduct the national debate we need to conduct to get the real tasks -- like the one I mention above -- out on the table for serious action.

How would you react to Robert Kagan's argument in Of Paradise and Power that "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world"? If Europe and the U.S. have a fundamentally different view of how power is to be exercised, how can two ever reach agreement on the security, economic and political rule-sets that you say are now necessary?

I think we concentrate on getting a new understanding with the New Core powers (as I call them) first and let that process draw the Europeans into the fold. So I would concentrate on making things happen first with China, India, Russia, Brazil, etc., or basically the Group of 20-plus that have emerged in the Doha Development Round negotiations in the WTO. If we spend forever trying to get the Europeans signed on, we risk not making the deals and compromises to secure the deep cooperation of all these emerging powers. So I'd focus on the New Core and let the Old Core come along on its own pace. Europe will remain focused on internal integration for years, while a Japan will follow wherever China goes, simply because their economic fates are now so intertwined.

As the title of your book implies, it's the Pentagon perhaps that needs to remake itself the most of any government agency for this new era. In fact, you advocate a complete transformation of the Department of Defense, including splitting the military into two components – a Leviathan force capable of fighting the big wars and a System Administrator force that would administer nations that are being integrated into the gap. What's the response been like from the senior military officials you've passed this idea by?

You'd be surprised how many of the younger flag officers realize that not only is this pathway possible and necessary, but it's already happening all around them. The real question is how long it will take for our government to recognize and codify this growing bifurcation of DoD, because the rise of the Sys Admin force really requires a huge coordination of effort between the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In the end, the Sys Admin force is only partially manned by DoD, with the bulk coming from elsewhere and the "bodyguards" coming from the military services.

But the real answer to the question is this: when you change the minds of the captains and the colonels on this subject, you set in motion the potential for change within the next ten years, because that's how fast they move up and into control in the up-or-out culture of the military. What tends to drive that change more is failure as opposed to success. I think that failure is brewing today in our occupation of Iraq, so I think the potential for my concept of the Sys Admin force to emerge grows rapidly with each month. Already we see proposals, respectively, out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and White House for dedicated "stabilization forces" within the U.S. military and a "global peace operations force" that involves us with other states' militaries, so I definitely see this ball rolling and picking up speed with events in Iraq. My job, therefore, is simply to seed the minds of the future admirals and generals who will ultimately oversee this profound transformation.

How realistic is it really though to think that America's military could be reorganized in such an ambitious fashion? It's not only a reorganization of a Cold War force, but a reorganization of an organization dating back over two centuries.

All we do in bifurcating the Department of Defense is simply to return it to the same breakdown that defined the U.S. military for the bulk of its history -- in effect a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else (or what used to be called the Department of Navy). So my Leviathan-Sys Admin breakdown is not only not new, it's not even hard to imagine because it's far closer to U.S. military tradition that the oddities forced upon it over the course of the historical aberration called the Cold War. Go back and read your histories of the navy and Marine Corps. What I describe as the role of the Sys Admin force is basically the history of both military services prior to World War II.

You see the spread of globalization as a moral mission of the United States, not simply an exercise to make America safer. That implies a greater American role overseas both militarily and politically. How would you respond to accusations that this is merely the creation -- even if unintentionally -- of an American Empire?

Empire involves the enforcement of both minimal and maximal rule sets, or not only what you cannot do but what you must do. America has never been about the enforcement of maximal rule sets, either at home or abroad. The use of that term, empire, is simply bad history -- simplicity masquerading as sophistication. Moreover, if done right, this pathway does not require a greater effort on the part of the U.S. militarily. Check your history of U.S. military activity across the post-Cold War era, which I detail at length in this book. We're working far too hard at managing the global security environment now because we're not well-balanced and because we're doing a poor job at attracting important allies to this mutually-beneficial vision. This is not a budget-busting effort. This is about managing the world more intelligently and sharing that effort with others united in common vision. That's a bigger effort diplomatically yes, but last time I checked that doesn't exactly break the bank since it's mostly just talk.

There is a lot in your book that will make both liberals and conservatives nervous, whether it's an increased military presence around the world or American soldiers in the future actively operating within American borders. How hard do you think it will be to sell your vision of the future?

Again, check out your history since the end of the Cold War. We've been hugely involved and present all over that Gap I describe in the book. So we're not talking more presence or more involvement, just a better use of our people and efforts. Remember, the Gap isn't the entire world, but encompasses roughly one-third of humanity. Within that population, we're talking 8 to 10 situations that need military responses at any one time, and we'll get to each in turn. But remember that we spent -- on any given day -- most of the 1990s involved in 5 to 7 major response situations spread around my Gap. So this workload is very much something we're used to. It will actually get a lot easier with a rebalanced force more efficiently spread around the Gap (and not the "world").

The Sys Admin force that evolves will feature service that's far closer to the Coast Guard than to the Cold War military you're imagining "patrolling the streets" of America. The Sys Admin force will look and feel a lot like the current National Guard in many ways, so the change won't be a big deal, unless you're someone who imagines the UN "black helicopters" bearing down on you every time you see a National Guard soldier on a street corner during a heightened terrorist alert. I didn't see America panic when the Guard was all over the place during the recent Iraq war. I say trust your political system more than giving in to those fears. Orwell continues to be wrong: technology far more empowers the individual than the state.

At one point you state that we have to expand our concept of the national security crisis to include 'system perturbations.' Could you explain what you mean by that term and what new challenges and opportunities they offer?

The concept of System Perturbations is just my attempt to recast crisis from the concept of sheer destruction (smoking holes, conventional war, etc.) to sheer disruption (the temporary depression of the rule sets that define peace and stability). The terrorist attacks of 9/11 did not involve much destruction when compared to wars in general, and the loss of life was not unprecedented when compared to something like how many people die in car accidents each month or from handguns each year. Remember, we lost more men on the beaches of Normandy one morning back in 1944, and then followed that up with similar losses on a regular basis for months on end. What defined 9/11 the shock-to-our-system was not the sheer destruction or the level of casualties, but the sense that rule sets were thrown temporarily out of whack or called in question for a serious length of time. All of a sudden Americans didn't have a sense of what it meant to be safe or how they should understand the concept of war/terrorism/what-should-we-call-this-exactly? The attacks of 9/11 are felt most in the huge influx of new rules created in its aftermath, two of the most important being the Patriot Act and the new strategy of preemptive war. So the concept of System Perturbation measures a crisis by how many rules are replaced/generated, not by the level of death or destruction. I think that way of defining crisis and instability makes more sense in the interconnected world we live it. The opportunity here is the same as the danger: until we get good at handling disruptions of connectivity like a 9/11, our enemies in this global war on terrorism will continue trying to inflict such disruptive events upon our societies. So expect more 9/11's until you can demonstrate that such efforts are meaningless because our systems (economic, political, social, security) are so robust that the disruptions suffered are minimal.

You devote much of your time explaining what the Core must do to expand globalization -- or in other words peace -- but what responsibilities do nations in the Gap -- those not connected to the globalization process -- have?

Basically, the societies of the Gap have to move beyond the historical suspicions they still carry with them from the Colonial Age. Globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. To join the global economy is simply to put in place sufficiently stable rule sets within your political system and economy to attract the foreign direct investment that drives real integration. It means rotating your leadership every 4 to 6 years, as 90 percent of the Core does. And if you cannot achieve that happy medium, you need to accept the aid of the Core in making it happen, even when that means taking down your corrupt, authoritarian "president-for-life."

In the end, though, most of the compromises will have to come from the Core, like in the Doha Development Round.

One criticism of The Pentagon's New Map is that you see the world in an entirely rational manner. Some cultures and even entire nations, including some in the Middle East, seem to be completely uninterested in joining this new global order despite its perceived benefits. How would you react to that criticism?

This criticism baffles me, since I define this huge resistance to globalization throughout the book, citing that resistance's willingness to engage in catastrophic acts of terrorism as the main danger to globalization's advance. All of that violent resistance is logically defined as non-rational (meaning more drive by emotion than logic), so where exactly do I fail in this model to account for it, since I make it the centerpiece of my view of global struggle? Perhaps I should have employed more obscure poli sci jargon throughout the text, but frankly, I consider this criticism to be a non-issue. I say it quite clearly in the book: everyone welcomes connectivity but not every society can handle the content flows that come with that connectivity because it challenges traditional definitions of a life well led. So will we see resistance to globalization? Definitely. Does my model seem more robust if I label such resistance "non-rational"? Maybe to egghead academics, but I didn't write this book for them.

Related to this somewhat obtuse criticism is the charge that I'm the second coming of Norman Angell, because I argue that connectivity necessary breeds the logic of cooperation among great powers. The history on this one is just stunningly bad. I'm Norman Angell with nukes, if you must know. Again, great power war died with the invention of nuclear weapons. We invent them in 1945 and no two great powers have ever gone to war with one another since. It's not woolly-headed to see this era's globalization as ultimately a source of global peace among great powers, it's simply realizing that this historical version of globalization has proceeded in the aftermath of the development of a stable nuclear deterrence among great powers. As for non-rational actors who get their hands on WMD, as I say in the book, you preempt them with all deliberate speed. So again, how I'm ignoring non-rational actors in this book is simply beyond me.

Then again, you've gotta give the academics their shot to tag you with the charge of "ignoring" their preferred jargon. I mean, heck, I never even use the phrase "soft power." Shouldn't I get at least a B-minus for that alone? Then there's my complete refusal to work in "hegemony" or "hegemonic."

But I digress . . . or perhaps just regress.

The Pentagon's New Map is ultimately an optimistic manifesto since you clearly believe that not only is permanent peace possible but doable. How optimistic are you that we can actually shrink the Gap and bring the remaining 1/3 of the world's population into the Core?

Globalization will continue to advance so long as we don't screw it up. By advancing, globalization will generate a lot of tumult in traditional societies, in turn generating a lot of irrational violence that will have to be suppressed (see, I'm learning to address my critics better!). So the future I describe is rather inevitable so long as we don't lose our cool or our resolve in dealing with the tough-but-clearly-boundable security issues ahead. Just 15 years ago we still spent our days in this business worrying about global nuclear Armageddon, and now we're all about hunting down and disabling bad guys who either seek to engage in terrorism or who keep this societies cruelly isolated from the outside world (and yes, I am thinking about that mass-murdering Kim Jong Il next). It may seem like the road ahead is harder, but it isn't. All the big problems, like war among great powers, have been solved. Now we move onto the tougher nuts to crack, meaning sub-national violence and transnational terrorism, but these issues are nowhere near the problem sets we faced previously. We are on the verge of ending war as we have known it for centuries. Interstate war is going the war of the dinosaur, and globalization continues to spread around the world, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in the last two decades alone. All I am talking about in this book is how to invite the remaining one-third of humanity into the good life most of us already enjoy -- a life without mass violence and a life with growing economic connectivity and individual freedom. It's a future worth creating, as I say, and it is completely within our grasp.

Thanks very much for joining us Dr. Barnett.

Steve Martinovich is a freelance writer from Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

COMMENTARY: I have to say that I'm amazed at what a good interview I gave here. I don't mean that in an objective sense, but rather that I'm personally very happy with the combative tone I chose to employ here. I think Martinovich's questions were not only good, they reflected his effort to summarize a lot of the criticisms being offered in various reviews already out at that point, so I really liked the tone of this interview because it allowed me to get a lot of counterattacks off my chest (like Wallerstein, Angell, bifurcation not as radical as it sounds—historically speaking, and so on). Rereading it again, I now understand why the Swiss online military journal wanted to translate it: it comes off as very muscular and confident. I don't think I would have given such bold responses if I hadn't been in the middle of all that PR hullabaloo with the book tour, but clearly I was pretty warm sitting there in bed on a Saturday night to crank out this material that fast.

Reviewing the Reviews (Enter Stage Right), posted 3 May 2004 @ http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0504/0504thepentagonsnewmap.htm.

Enter Stage Right is obviously a conservative online journal. Here's the review in full, with my commentary below:

The Pentagon's New Map

War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

By Thomas P.M. Barnett

G.P. Putnum & Sons

HC, 435 pg. US$/C$39

ISBN: 0-3991-5175-3

A vision for the future

By Steven Martinovich

web posted May 3, 2004

As commentator Mark Steyn has argued, on September 11, 2001 many of us realized that the rules of September 10, 2001 were no longer valid. Perhaps no one more so than Dr. Thomas Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, who for the past decade has been examining the world after the Cold War. Sensing that rules that have governed the world disappeared along with the Soviet Union, Barnett has formulated a new set of rules for our new reality.

Originally outlined in a 2003 article in Esquire, Barnett's magnificent The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century argues that the moral mission of the United States is to extend the benefits of globalization to the one-third of the world that is disconnected from the global community. America's new strategy isn't to prepare for the next great clash of civilizations, as commentators like Samuel Huntington have theorized, but rather to create a more secure world by eliminating the seeds of conflict.

In Barnett's world, Earth is essentially made up of two groups. The first is the Functioning Core, nations like the U.S., Canada, much of Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India and several other nations. The second is the Non-Integrating Gap, made up of the Middle East, most of Africa, parts of Central and South America and parts of Asia. The Core is defined by economic, political and military stability while the Gap is home to poverty, authoritarian regimes and conflict. Led by the U.S., Barnett argues, it is the Core's mission to shrink the Gap and usher in a new era of relative global stability.

Not surprisingly much of the work will be the responsibility of the United States as it is the only nation powerful enough to act anywhere it chooses. Before it can be successful, however, a massive reorganization is needed. The centerpiece of this reorganization is the Pentagon, an institution Barnett says remains mired in Cold War thinking. Although it is slowly shifting its emphasis from fighting The Big One to the new asymmetrical threats of 9/11-style attacks, the transformation is far from complete. There will be future wars that the U.S. will be drawn into; conflicts were a massive Cold War style force will be of little use.

This new military -- one that would eventually see the present force split into two radically different organizations -- would then be used to provide security to Gap nations. It is only with security, Barnett argues, that globalization will be able to take root. As Gap nations are slowly added to the Core, these regions will become safer and by extension the threats to global security will diminish. The United States -- with help from other nations -- will play the role of global policeman and occasionally, when necessary, global SWAT officers.

Understandably this vision of the future will provoke accusations on both sides of the political fence that Barnett is describing nothing less than an American empire. American soldiers will be used to enforce a global capitalist order for the benefit of the West, they argue, in the same way that British redcoats once safeguarded colonial provinces. Barnett dismisses that notion as simplistic and insulting.

"America does not shrink the Gap to conquer the Gap, but to invite two billion people to join something better and safer in the Core. Empires involve enforcing maximum rule sets, where the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war or peace, and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. We push connectivity above all else, letting people choose what to do with those ties, that communication, and all those possibilities. Many in the Gap, and not just a few in the Core, will choose to opt out."

For the most part Barnett praises the Bush Administration for realizing that a new strategic vision was necessary, including formally adopting the policy of preemptive attack. He does, however, find fault in the Administration for failing to explain clearly to both Americans and their nation's allies how this new strategic vision will work. "It may seem facile to say that this administration has made the right strategic moves only to tell its story poorly to the world, but perceptions matter plenty in this highly charged period of world history." Given the strained relationship between the U.S. and its allies, it's clearly not enough simply to do the right thing; you have to convince people you're doing the right thing.

Eschewing the gloomy predictions of a world in constant chaos, Barnett instead offers an optimistic view of a future that many of us will be alive to see. We will have to pay a price to see this future, both in blood and money, but if we do nothing we'll have to pay and receive nothing for our troubles but more strife. Regardless of whether you agree with Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map is a remarkable and revolutionary achievement that should provoke discussion about the rules governing our post-9/11 world. The Pentagon's New Map is a once in a generation achievement that demands not only our attention, but also our action.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

COMMENTARY: What can I say? Decent review of the big points, a bit partisan in emphasizing my general approval of the Bush Administration's security policies since 9/11 (I criticize them a lot too), but a good focus on my argument that we need to explain ourselves much better to the world, plus the guy calls the book "a once in a generation achievement"—plus the guy's a Canadien! I mean, how in hell could I have forgotten this review? 'Nough said.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 3 September 2004

Watched Bush's film and then most of his speech last night and have to admit: this guy is neither out of touch like "41" nor ready and willing to lose this election like his old man did in '92. From a historical standpoint, I liked Bush's framing of today as being similar to the years following the end of WWII more than I did Kerry's framing of today from the perspective of Vietnam. I realize both reached back to history that serves them best personally in the race, but I think Bush's choice sits better with most Americans because it recalls a bold time, a bold vision, and a bold president.

On the other hand, the GOP convention did project much less passion than the Democratic one did. Yeah, the Republicans really want four more years, but the Dems really REALLY want Bush out.

And yet, as I predicted, already Iraq fades more than most expected as THE issue of the campaign. And with the various new struggles emerging (e.g., Russia's dark days with terrorism, France banning head scarves and telling terrorists they won't give in, the Nepalese rioting against Muslim churches and business after the beheadings in Iraq, South Korea now admitting it's dabbling in nuclear weapons grade uranium, Iran acting tough vis-à-vis the IAEA), Bush's promise to be more straightforward and bold comes off better than Kerry's calculated nuancing. Frankly, that line about Kerry asking the UN for permission to use U.S. military force sticks in too many people's minds, reminding people of how Clinton's team let security matters linger unresolved for so long through his two terms. Bush's team is moving troops, shifting bases, and holding firm in Iraq, whereas Kerry's team is reduced to saying things like, "we wouldn't move so fast," "we'd do it more carefully," "we'd put off that decision for a later date." None of that really comes very well, in my mind.

Yes, I think the Dems would do better across the board in running the country, and I will vote for Kerry, but I suspect just enough of the undecideds out there will see a fairly scary world right now requiring a fairly bold president, so I think Bush and Cheney will squeak by. And the polls suggest that. Bush had a slight lead going into the convention, which isn't how a wounded president (like "41" in '92) looks when he's getting ready to be unseated.

I read the papers quickly today, because I am suffering a full-blown sinus infection that has me ready to use a power drill on my right cheekbone. So my threshold for, "Do I really care enough about that article to blog it?" was awfully high today. Simply put, I don't function well with sinus infections, so rather than try to offer a lot of bad analysis quickly just so I can say I did it, let me harken back to a healthier time in my life (early May) and enter into the record some stuff that apparently fell through the cracks in my otherwise consistent effort to make sure everything important that's been written about PNM makes it into the blog.

The stuff that fell through the cracks was a review of PNM by Steven Martinovich of Enter Stage Right. In addition to publishing this rather positive review, Martinovich interviewed me by email and posted that online as well. Amazingly, I forgot completely about both when it came to putting together the compilation pages of "Reviews with Author's Commentary" and "Print/online media interviews with Tom Barnett" with my webmaster Critt. Then again, I do seem to recall that the site was down right during the middle of my book tour, when these two items were posted, so maybe that's why I forgot all about them.

I remembered them recently only because I got an email from a guy names Ludovic Monnerat, apparently a Swiss Lt. Colonel who translated Martinovich's interview into French and posted it on CheckPoint, a "site d'information militaire Suisse." Monnerat sent me the article when I was in China, and when I read it, I remembered the Enter Stage Right materials and vowed to address them once I got back finally. So, now I'm doing it.

Here are the three posts then. I will comment on each separately:

Reviewing the Reviews (Enter Stage Right), posted 3 May 2004

"A future worth creating: An interview with Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett" (Enter Stage Right), posted 3 May 2004

"Un futur qui vaut la peine d'être créé : interview du docteur Thomas Barnett" (CheckPoint), posted 8 août

“Internationally, Taking Sides in the U.S. Presidential Race: In Europe, seeing ‘a world election in which the world has no vote,’" by Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, 4 September, p. A10.

“Bush’s Second Term: Aiming for a transformation,” by David Brooks, NYT, 4 September, p. A27.

“Kerry Urges Voters to Look Past Bush’s ‘Last-Minute Promises,’” by David M. Halbfinger, NYT, 4 September, p. A1.

Already the Europeans are fretting over four more years of Bush, but they see it coming, primarily because “he comes over as a strong leader and John F. Kerry doesn’t.”

I think David Brooks has it right: Bush’s second term will be more transformational than the first. Already, he’s rewritten what it means to be Republican, which used to mean small government but now means a very activist government and a very activist foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Kerry’s latest pitch is to beg voters not to listen to Bush’s promises. That sort of tack worries me a lot. Doesn’t sound like a winner’s approach, now does it?

“China’s Revolutionary Tactic: Bailout,” by Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post, 26 August, p. E1.

Fascinating story of China’s government bailing out a big private corporation whose potential bankruptcy is seen as too dangerous to social stability to allow the scenario to unfold. Before you say, “See, China’s still socialist!” Let’s remember how many times the U.S. Government has bailed out big corporations in this country, or the S&L crisis for that matter.

I have often said, and I said in China in August to my hosts: the biggest danger to global stability right now is a banking crisis in China. If D’Long International Strategic Investment Co. is China’s version of Long-Term Capital Management, then I say, bravo for seeing the writing on the wall and taking the necessary steps in time.

“South Koreans Repeat: We Have No Atom Bomb Program,” by James Brooke, NYT, 4 September, p. A3.

File this one under “disingenuous”: now the South Korean government scientists who enriched some weapons-grade uranium said they did it only because they “were curious.”

Yes, it was a small speck and yes the experiment occurred four years ago, but South Korea has engaged in secret bomb works before, having done it in the early 1970s when they feared the U.S. was getting soft on nukes and protecting them from the North.

Korean popular culture loves the myth that it’s the “outsiders” known as Japan and the U.S. who constantly thwart Korea’s nuclear ambitions. As we draw down our troops on the peninsula, I say let the South Koreans have that enriched uranium yellow cake and eat it too. If they’re right and North Korea is secretly in love with them, it will all work out in the end without any U.S. troops dying for this goofball society.

“200 Die as Siege at a Russian School Ends in Chaos: Captives Escape During Hours of Fighting,” by C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 4 September, p. A1.

I wrote in the Washington Post in April that the U.S. and Russia should be strategic allies in the Global War on Terrorism, along with India and China. I was roundly ridiculed by some for my naivete. I mean, how could we expect Russia to give a damn about how America fares in the Middle East, they have their own problems with radical Muslims seeking to break away from the country.

Well, those problems have really ratcheted up in recent weeks, with the twin bombings of the jetliners and now the massive killings that resulting from the hostage taking at the school (which is about as low as you can go). Think Russia simply looks at the U.S. and says, “This is all your fault for invading Iraq”? Or do you think Moscow increasingly begins to understand that we’re in this together.

We need allies willing to kill those who must be killed, and we need allies who won’t get squeamish about doing that. The Russians are close on this score—really close and getting closer.

“Bridging the Gap” in “The Sound and the Fury,” Esquire, September 2004, p. 49.

Here’s what the editor writes in introducing the three letters printed in the September “Style Issue”:

Months after military strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett offered foreign-policy advice to George W. Bush (“Mr. President, Here’s How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy,” June), the letter keep coming in.

Here are the three short letters in full:

The “Gap/Core” theory is a sick delineation of the globe that makes no exception to the might-makes-right rule. I’m all too afraid that Bush may subscribe to this theory (once it’s explained with pretty pictures and a patient advisor) and go on a rampage to boost his re-election chances under the guise of bringing the world into the “Core.” I think I may move to Canada.

DAVID KASDAN

Las Vegas, Nev.

Perhaps Barnett should have started with an explanation of why increased globalization is a positive goal. This might have prevented his views from being rejected up front by readers who don’t view increased multinational corporate power as being a goal worthy of even nonmilitary effort.

STEVE PERKINS

Duluth, Ga.

Barnett was able to capture the way many people in support of the war feel but are not eloquent or educated enough to articulate. As a member of the military, I find it refreshing to see something other than Bush-bashing stories. While I’m not necessarily in favor of everything the president does, he certainly does not deserve the constant attacks he seems to receive from the media. You have earned my respect and praise for breaking the one-sided mold that so much of the media falls into.

CDT. ADAM LYNCH

West Point, N.Y.

COMMENTARY: In order:

· Kasdan’s whine is just what you want in a negative letter: some name-calling, an insult of my moral character, and then the fear voiced that this vision may well represent the way the government is actually moving. In short, he doesn’t lay a glove on me, and simply frets over my apparent influence. Boo hoo. He should think about moving into the Gap if he’s so high and mighty in his moral outlook. Then again, he might have to subscribe to the might-makes-right amorality of my vision then . . .
· Perkins’ letter is okay, but orthogonal in an unhelpful (but ain’t I smart) sort of way. Sure, I could have written an entire treatise on why globalization is good as well, but it would have been a 10,000-word article at that point. Can I be accused on not doing enough on that score in the book as well? Yes, I can. There I have no excuse at 150,000 words, except that I decided that I wasn’t an expert on the economic side of globalization, but the military side, so I decided to write the book that only I could write, and not simply regurgitate the better analysis of others. Still, viewing globalization as merely the extension of the corporate reach of big companies is awfully naïve. Perkins should probably go see a Michael Moore movie if he wants that sort of pabulum spoon-fed.
· Lynch’s letter is fine, but awfully predictable. I like the compliment that starts it off. But the real reason why Esquire published that one had nothing to do with the article’s content, but rather because they wanted to give themselves a pat on the back for being so “balanced,” which is fair enough because they truly are in covering Bush.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 4 September 2004

About three doses of Augmenten into a 10-day antibiotic regime and I feel about 5000% better. Sinus infections are like fevers: they race upward until you are bedridden, but when they’re broken, they disappear in terms of major symptoms literally overnight.

This is good, because I have promised Mark Anderson I would pen a special issue letter for his online distribution and they pretty much want it no later than Monday. By then, all the head fog will be gone, plus I should be pretty pumped from the biggest exposure on cable TV that I have ever received: almost 6 hours tonight on C-SPAN. That’s right, the first showing of the 2:40 brief will be at 8pm, prime time as promised by Mr. Lamb himself, with the repeat following almost immediately (there will be a short 15-minute pair of speeches in between the two showing of my brief at National Defense University speech last June 2nd, one by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the second by a congressman at the American Legion’s recent national convention).

Here’s the official listing pulled from www.cspan.org:

08:00 pm2:40 (est.) Speech, The Pentagon's New Map, National Defense University, Thomas P. M. Barnett , U.S. Naval War College

10:42 pm0:17 (est.) Speech, American Legion Convention, American Legion, Christopher H. Smith , R-NJ Richard Myers , Joint Chiefs of Staff

11:03 pm2:41 (est.) Speech, The Pentagon's New Map, National Defense University, Thomas P. M. Barnett , U.S. Naval War College

It’s good they mentioned the Naval War College, because I don’t use NWC imagery or logos on my slides, although I do reference the college up front in the talk quite a bit.

I prefer having both showings on Saturday rather than having the second on Sunday afternoon, which was the plan until very recently, because I don’t think anyone is watching on Labor Day Sunday afternoon. This way, people who surf and bump into the brief during the first showing, can catch it again if intrigued.

Anyway, the way I look at it, it’s like CSPAN has given me their entire prime-time and late-night Saturday night lineup, and no matter how you slice it, almost six hours on cable delivered nationally is a good thing. My only fear is how well the CSPAN cameras were able to track both me and the slides, but when I talked to the head camera guy after the presentation, he seemed very happy with the capture, so I’ll just have to hope for the best.

Needless to say, I’m psyched, and I’m trying to talk my kids into watching it with me on the big screen TV in the basement. They probably will, since I’m taking them to the movies (Hero) and the beach (after 5pm mass). But I know they won’t last for two long. At two hours and 40 minutes, I am one long movie, but that only makes getting on CSPAN in this very long format all the better, because now I have the best version of the brief down on tape, available for people to buy if they really want to (although it would be nice if I got a cut—say, I don’t exactly remember signing anything!).

I really have to thank Paul Davis of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (which is where the brief actually takes place at NDU) for the length of the brief. He set this whole thing up so I could brief the entire class at ICAF before they graduated. Later, he said the only complaint from the students was that they didn’t have me at the start of the year instead. So, this year, that’s exactly what we’re going to do: I will brief the entire new class at ICAF on the 14th of September. I will also be briefing the entire class of the Naval War College on the 7th, and the entire Air War College class in early November. Makes you wonder what the Army War College has against me . . . oh yeah, the Sys Admin force.

Got some stories to blog today, plus the letters to the editor in the September issue of Esquire regarding my June article, “Mr. President, Here’s How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy, but before I go on to those, let me say that I caught Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech to the Republican National Convention on CSPAN this morning as I was folding laundry after mowing the lawn and I must say, that man is some fabulous political theater. The Dems are lucky he can’t run for president, because he has good content, delivers it extremely well, is photogenic and popular as all get out, and he’s just plain entertaining like neither presidential candidate this year can ever hope to be. As a Democrat, I would seriously consider voting for him for president (he can’t run because the Constitution bans Americans of foreign birth from national office), and that makes him awfully potent as a campaign asset for the Republicans (he’s a real stealer like Reagan was).

First I’ll comment on the Esquire letters:

The letters keep pouring into Esquire on “Mr. President” article

“Bridging the Gap” in “The Sound and the Fury,” Esquire, September 2004, p. 49.

Then on to today’s small catch:

Russia: a strategic ally in the making

“200 Die as Siege at a Russian School Ends in Chaos: Captives Escape During Hours of Fighting,” by C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 4 September, p. A1.

Seoul: We were just playing with matches!

“South Koreans Repeat: We Have No Atom Bomb Program,” by James Brooke, NYT, 4 September, p. A3.

Chairman Mao must be turning in his crystal sarcophagus

“China’s Revolutionary Tactic: Bailout,” by Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post, 26 August, p. E1.

This election is looking better and better for Bush

“Internationally, Taking Sides in the U.S. Presidential Race: In Europe, seeing ‘a world election in which the world has no vote,’ by Patrick E. Tyler, NYT, 4 September, p. A10.

“Bush’s Second Term: Aiming for a transformation,” by David Brooks, NYT, 4 September, p. A27.

“Kerry Urges Voters to Look Past Bush’s ‘Last-Minute Promises,’” by David M. Halbfinger, NYT, 4 September, p. A1.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 September 2004

When I got done watching the show last night at 10:45 pm, I checked PNM's standing on Amazon. It was just above 2,000, after spending most of the day at around 500. Needless to say I was a bit bummed.

Then I checked my email accounts and found about 200 messages from people who saw the show. Maybe 4 could be considered negative, the rest wildly positive for the most part. That showed me that when I have the chance to really lay out the material, it goes over well.

How well?

When I got done responding to all those emails (yes, some people are never happy until you read the magnum opus they sent along with their comments), I checked back on Amazon and found the number down to 57.

More emails, and then it was down to 14 just before midnight.

Getting up this morning, it was 5 at around 9am, then 4 around noon, and now #3 at just before 3pm EST, with only the Swift Boats book about Kerry and some Susanna Clark novel (preorder only) ahead of me. God, would I like to knock out the Swift Boats Veterans book out of first place for more reasons than one. . .

So, I have to be pretty happy with the bounce. Only wish I got a slice of all those DVDs that CSPAN is going to sell . . ..

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 September 2004

I'll keep this brief.

As for CSPAN's production values: hard to complain. Felt the main head-on camera struggled at first with how to cover my movement while keeping track of the graphics. But he got better with time. As brief wore on, the second, close-in camera to the left of the stage started doing close-ups of the screen in addition to all those crowd reaction shots. The angle on those was a bit awkward, but it was easier to read the screen that way than when the head-on camera tried to shoot it through all the overhead lighting.

As for the crowd shots: the angle at which the side camera caught people was too far "above" their eye-lines, so when audience members were looking down at their notebooks as they wrote down things, it looked at though they were sleeping. Got more than a few emails decrying this, but it was strictly an optical illusion. I know, because I was there, and I notice anyone sleeping like they're holding up a big sign saying "BORING." Trust me, no one slept at that event, despite the appearances in some crowd reaction shots.

As for the sound: sometimes my sound effects came in too heavy, but can't complain about my mike too much, although sometimes I moved my arms too much and got some muffling. I was glad that, at about the midway point in the brief, they caught one of the section slides coming up along with the Law and Order ch-ching sound. Because until that was seen on camera, I couldn't see how the audience at home could understand the meaning of the sound effect (which is meant to signal the start of a new section in the brief).

As for me: I was very still for the first 20 minutes or so, then I started my usual back and forth pacing, which I think the camera-man (head-on one) handled well. Whenever I went upstage to the screen I would pass in and out of lights, which was a little disconcerting, but how was I to know? I liked how I kept my delivery fairly deadpan throughout. Not sure why I did, but sometimes that's just the way I feel. Room laughed at all the usual jokes, but CSPAN sound didn't pick it up unless it was a big laugh (just no mikes pointed that way).

You can tell how bad my allergies were that day by how low my voice was. Amazing to note: I don't take a drink at any time in the show, except the off-camera break between first and second halves and then just before Q&A. Doesn't seem like much to average person, but remember I was talking non-stop without any lozenges (stopped using those after I heard myself once) and my throat was in pretty bad shape. Still, I like the lower sound of my voice anyway, so I'll take it.

As for my appearance. I made sure to get my haircut right beforehand, so that looked good. And amazingly, despite all the awkward overhead lighting (which is NOT flattering), my emerging bald spot wasn't its usual shiny self (thank God for small favors). Thank God my wife also talked me into buying a whole new wardrobe of suits before the book came out. I was really happy with how I looked in the navy blue 3-button. Shirt with cuff links looked good, as did the well-tied tie (never easy for me). So looks-wise, I was very pleased. The suit made a nice V out of my, so it wasn't like every time I turned around you just wanted to gasp, "my God what a big ass" or anything. I also like how erect I stayed (not easy for that length of time, which is why I must move around), and how my hand gestures were measured and not distracting.

Overall, I liked the show a lot. When you watch yourself on something like that, you fear so many things, almost none of which occur here. I did flub about a dozen lines (meaning a mispoke a word or just a syllable), but that's par for the course when you're talking non-stop for 2 hours and 40 minutes. It is amazing to realize I go that long without any script. I have never written the material down anywhere, and yet it does not vary from speech to speech by more than about 5 percent, I estimate. It is a true oral performance from the stage--a one-man show that's never exactly the same and yet always pretty much the same.

I was happiest with the Q&A, because I got good questions that let me drive home points I really wanted to make before I got off the stage, like the one about the role of women in Islamic countries (the question from the Pakistani officer--got a lot of emails about that). Best, though, was that I didn't lose my cool with any, nor did I cut people off (except the Pakistani officer one time early in his question, but then I realized what I had done and dialed down my excitement level to make sure I let every person ask the question in full--not easy, when you're that pumped up after going that long!).

Overall, then, I was extremely happy with the outcome. I know Putnam loved every second they ran that byline under the screen (Thomas P.M. Barnett, Author: The Pentagon's New Map), because being able to match the content with the book is paramount in an opportunity such as this. Was it my best performance? No, but a very good one. Could any production do a better job on capturing both me and the graphics? Sure, but CSPAN did pretty well, and used the two cameras to the best of their ability, getting better as they went along. So no complaints. Again, when you think of all the things that can go wrong but did not, you are ecstatic with the outcome.

And then there's the Amazon bounce, which sees me at #3 still as of 1600 on Sunday. And then there's the ability of anyone now to order the DVD for themselves, which steals a little of my thunder, but is good in the long term.

So I walk away from this feeling awfully good, not to mention relieved.

And yeah, my wife Vonne did give me some grief about the references to her, but nothing I can't handle after 18 years of marriage!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 September 2004

Okay, at least one totally self-congratulary post (if you discount the previous two). I mean, who knows when I'll ever be able to do this again.

Here's the top ten on Amazon right now:

1) Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry

by John E. O'Neill, Jerome R. Corsi

2) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel

by Susanna Clarke

3) The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

4) Trace (Kay Scarpetta Mysteries)

by Patricia Cornwell

5) The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks

6) American Soldier

by Tommy Franks, Malcolm McConnell

7) The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown (Author)

8) Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

by Mark Crispin Miller

9) The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7)

by Stephen King

10) Angels & Demons

by Dan Brown

Here's the top ten from B&N:

1) Unfit for Command

Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry

John E. O'Neill / Hardcover

2) Trace (A Kay Scarpetta Novel)

Patricia Cornwell / Hardcover

3) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clarke / Hardcover

4) The Dark Tower VII

The Dark Tower

Stephen King / Hardcover

5) American Soldier

Tommy R. Franks / Hardcover

6) The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown / Hardcover

7) The 9/11 Commission Report

The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Authorized Edition)

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks / Paperback

8) The Pentagon's New Map

War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Barnett / Hardcover

9) The South Beach Diet

The Delicious, Doctor-Designed, Foolproof Plan for Fast and Healthy Weight Loss

Arthur Agatston / Hardcover

10) Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Lynne Truss / Hardcover

Gotta be happy to be doing battle with the Davinci Code and Stephen King at the same time! No matter how brief it is, the taste of single-digits is pretty heady stuff.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 September 2004

Too many emails!

If you want to buy DVD of Book Notes appearance from Memorial Day weekend broadcast ($19.95), go here:

Book Notes appearance by Tom Barnett

Here's the details:

Program ID: 182064-1

Format: Booknotes

Event Date: 4-27-2004

Location: Washington, District of Columbia, (United States)

Last Airing Date: 5-31-2004

Length: 59 minutes

Sponsor(s):

C-SPAN

Appearances by:

Barnett, Thomas P. Professor - U.S. Naval War College

Summary:

Professor Barnett talked about his book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, published by Putnam Publishing Group. He described the changing natures of war, security, and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. He explained a theory of the effects of globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to forecast future military needs. He also uses autobiographical elements to explain the behind the scenes workings of the Pentagon and described the PowerPoint presentation that he presents.

If you want to buy DVD of brief ($24.95) shown on CSPAN over Labor Day weekend, go here:

American Perspectives taping of Tom Barnett's brief

Here's the details on that one:

Program ID: 182105-1

Format: Speech

Event Date: 6-2-2004

Location: Washington, District of Columbia, (United States)

Last Airing Date: 9-4-2004

Length: 2 hours, 41 minutes

Sponsor(s):

Fort McNair

National Defense University

Appearances by:

Barnett, Thomas P. Professor - U.S. Naval War College

Summary:

In a three-hour Power Point presentation Professor Barnett takes a global perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in a model for the post-September 11 world. He 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 into an increasingly expanding "Functioning Core" of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global systems and a "Non-Integrating Gap," the most likely source of threats to U.S. and international security. Professor Barnett uses this map to call for a new system for deployment of the U.S. armed forces. Professor Barnett is the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, published by Putnam Publishing Group. In the book he described the changing natures of war, security, and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. He explained a theory of the effects of globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to forecast future military needs. He also uses autobiographical elements to explain the behind the scenes workings of the Pentagon and how his PowerPoint presentation has been used.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 5 September 2004

And it was a very good day . . ..

[Still at #3 at Amazon]

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 September 2004

Remember the scene in "Bruce Almighty" where he's answering everyone's prayers via email and he can't possibly keep up with the flow, so he just starts saying "YES!" to everyone?

That's the closest description I can come up with for my life in the past 24 hours. I've answered emails for about 12 hours out of the past 24, averaging a response every 30-40 seconds. Yes, that means I skim the content very quickly, look for a hook or question to respond to, hit REPLY, type in the one or two sentences that personalize it, then I paste the standard bit about "thanks," "enjoy the book and site" and my name. I tried to type some new each time for the first couple of hours, but my hands started shaking after a while and the numbers in my email box grew faster than I could answer and delete them. So I had to start cheating somewhat by prepackaging much of the response.

Getting emails on broadcast is very different than getting them on Esquire articles. There I got a lot of hate mail (about 50% I would say), but here it's maybe one of every 40 emails, so much nicer.

Do I wish I could spend the time to respond to all like I usually do? Yes, but I know people value the speed of response more than the content when they feel so motivated as to send something off immediately upon seeing you on TV, so I try to meet that expectation, sacrificing the content somewhat.

Plus, frankly, I just can't stand having unread email in my accounts. Bugs the hell out of me. Plus, I just can't stand not replying immediately if someone goes to the effort to send something to me. Many write that this is the first time they've ever sent an email like this, so you want to be as responsive as possible.

Still, it all becomes a blur with that sort of volume. Not that I'm complaining, but the time I've spent on this gets stressful with the family, who wonder why I feel the need to stay chained to the PC all day on a beautiful Labor Day weekend Sunday.

I've saved a bunch of the nicest ones, and would love to post them, but that's probably too self-congratulatory (something I got an email about!).

Anyway, besides all the responses I sent out, I want to thank everyone again generally for the flood of emails. Very thrilling to receive and read, despite the crush. Things like that are fairly rare in life, so you try to enjoy the fact that you've managed to touch people enough to move them to such efforts.

To my surprise, PNM is still #3 on Amazon this morning. My wife said, "Maybe they don't update the list on holidays." Hmm. Here's hoping she's wrong.

Dropped back down to 8 on B&N, but hard to complain about being in the single digits again on Amazon and for the first time on B&N.

In fact, I'm hoping people are buying the book mostly online this time, for I fear the numbers won't be on the shelves in many bookstores at this "late" date. Remember, the book came out in April and the competition is crushing this year on political books.

Anyway, no news stories to blog today. Burned up all my PC time on the emails. Kids are getting restless.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 September 2004

The show is "Here & Now" out of WBUR in Boston. I did a 20-minute interview with host Gail Harris (apparently a guest host) back in early May. It ran originally on 13 May 2004 and you can hear the original audio at their site.

It's going to be rerun, I am told, during the noon hour show today, or at around 12:20 to 12:30. Slight chance they may not use it if something better comes up, but this was the latest heads up I got from the producer of the show, who was nice enought to track me down and let me know. So, if you're listening, you may hear it. If you want to hear it anyway, click on their archives above.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 September 2004

I'm just plain sore now. Several hundred emails more today, and since I need about 25 laudatory ones to balance each and every piece of hate mail (nothing too threatening yet--just the vague "I hope bad things happen to you and yours"), I remain compulsive about answering each.

Experiences like this always remind me that fame is to be desired more than actually achieved--fun for a while, but not a life's pursuit. Still, it's so encouraging to receive so many emails from people who say they've never written an author before, never watched C-SPAN before, never listened to anything of that sort before, etc. You love those sorts of response so much, because that's the real teaching aspect--turning people on who haven't been turned on before to a particular subject. Makes me respect all my teachers from over the years all the more, when I think about it.

Still, I am really starting to ache. Typing hour after hour is just plain difficult. After a while it feels like an orgy--nice, yes, but how long can you do it? Perhaps I should have experienced this when I was younger, but I'm almost certain I would have become insufferable, whereas I feel like I remain sufferable (annoying, yes, but sufferable).

No attempt at blogging news stories. Between email marathon sessions, I gave brief to entire Naval War College class today in big hall at Newport, and that is a burnout experience all its own. Big laughs today though, and that energy alone propels you even as your brain decomposes in real time.

Thanks again to the hundreds who sent emails. I have saved many. Why? I have no idea except my hotmail account is huge now that I gave Bill Gates his $20 finally, so why the hell not. A private treasure trove to wallow in on rainy days.

I also keep the hate mail though--primarily to aid the investigators (yes, I am talking about you in particular!).

•“Turkish Surprise: As Nation Struggles to Join EU, Maker Of TVs Shows Way: Koc’s Manufacturing Success Highlights Both Progress, Hurdles to Membership Bid; Europe’s Most Efficient Fridge,” by Hugh Pope, Wall Street Journal, 7 September, p. A1.

Fascinating article on how Turkey proves itself economically in its longstanding bid to join the EU. Turkey remains the Seam State most likely to join the Core in the near-term. It has put in its security dues for decades, has cleaned up its internal act to the point where the generals aren’t the political threats they once were, and it’s the most modern and secular Muslim country in the world, by many experts’ estimation.

If not Turkey, then who from the Muslim world can really join the Core, and if not now, as we seek to transform the Middle East, then when?

•“China Ex-President May Be Set to Yield Last Powerful Post,” by Joseph Kahn, NYT, 7 September, p. A1.

This would be very good news for the world.

•“Putin Angered By Critics On Siege: West Fails to Grasp Situation, He Says,” by Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post, 8 September, p. A1.

Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House, engage in talks, ask him what he wants so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limits in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child killers?

That was Putin’s response to calls from Western critics that he seek to negotiate with Chechen separatists.

Nice comeback.

•“U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq: U.S. Deaths Pass 1,000; Pentagon Is Not Certain When Central Areas Can Be Secured,” by Eric Schmitt and Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 8 September, p. A1.

This administration has taken a surprising but understandable tack on Iraq: the White House prefers to admit a September slump, forego any October surprise, and apparently put off the bad news until January, hoping that when that bad news invariably comes, the main price will be paid by Iraqis fighting insurgents, not U.S. troops.

That the Pentagon chooses to admit that coalition forces do not control a major chunk of Iraq on the same day that it announces it has surpassed the 1,000-death mark in this operation should put the war back on the front burner in this election, but in a strange twist it may actually bury it further in the public’s consciousness. By giving Allawi several months to try and negotiate settlements with insurgent factions, the U.S. military hopes to train up the Iraqi forces sufficiently to constitute the bulk of the warfighting force that ultimately retakes the Sunni triangle come January, in what will surely be some fierce fighting if political settlements cannot not reached.

Can Iraq recede from this election in the meantime?

As long as the Swift Boat Veterans’ book targeting Kerry can remain number 1 on Amazon, don’t underestimate how ugly this campaign may still get.

Dateline: SWA flight 227 from BWI to Providence, 8 September 2004

Spent the day on the run. Up at 0530 to catch an 0800 plane to BWI. Rental to DC, then gave lunch time speech at DC think tank. Then a long and winding road to suitably non-descript location in Northern Virginia to spend an afternoon discussing the possibility that PNM is the real deal (the grand strategy that prevails) with someone who might act on it in a big way in coming months and years as the national security establishment revamps itself in light of the 9/11 intelligence failures. It’s a quiet conversation that strains my brain cells to the limit. This guy is a serious thinker with serious problems requiring serious solutions. Am I interested in helping? There are some offers you cannot refuse on a day when the U.S. announces the 1000th casualty in Iraq.

Here’s today’s catch:

•"U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq: U.S. Deaths Pass 1,000; Pentagon Is Not Certain When Central Areas Can Be Secured,” by Eric Schmitt and Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 8 September, p. A1.

•“Putin Angered By Critics On Siege: West Fails to Grasp Situation, He Says,” by Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post, 8 September, p. A1.

•“China Ex-President May Be Set to Yield Last Powerful Post,” by Joseph Kahn, NYT, 7 September, p. A1.

•“Turkish Surprise: As Nation Struggles to Join EU, Maker Of TVs Shows Way: Koc’s Manufacturing Success Highlights Both Progress, Hurdles to Membership Bid; Europe’s Most Efficient Fridge,” by Hugh Pope, Wall Street Journal, 7 September, p. A1.

•“Oil Explorers Searching Ever More Remote Areas,” by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 9 September, p. C1.

The main evidence for this is that big oil discoveries are becoming more rare, as oil companies, bitten dramatically by the under-$10-a-barrel prices that came out of the Asian Flu of 1997-98, have gotten a lot more stingy in terms of both exploration and development since then--meaning they look for certain payoffs and simply don't accept risk like they did. Does having oil at $40-a-barrel or higher lately increase that risk taking? Not as much as you'd think, at least so far.

Why not? Oil companies more and more think of themselvs as energy companies, so it's all about making money off energy, not just about oil. Oil is only really about transportation in the global economy (plus petrochemicals and industrial feedstocks), whereas the gas and coal and renewables are all about electricity, which continues to grow all over world and not just in emerging markets going car-happy like China is right now (we got stuck in plenty of traffic jams when we were there in August). Transportation is moving toward hydrogen, with hybrids as the half-step, and that sense of historical momentum doesn't exactly make energy companies want to go out on major long-term investment "limbs" for oil like they used to, and that reticence will only grow, I think.

You can say that much of these restrictions on drilling and exploration are self-imposed (environmental concerns, countries isolated by economic sanctions), and you'd be right. If we didn't have such restrictions, we'd be finding and exploiting oil all over the dial, but those considerations aren't easily swept aside, so the underinvestment pattern continues, soon--I would argue--to be overwhelmed historically by a sense of clear momentum to hydrogen, which will come from natural gas, which is all over the world and not just in "Muslim countries."

So our collective decision making (environmental, political, economic, social) are all working against oil production, and over time, as emerging markets like China bump up against some real capacity limits, you'll see that pain and desire translated, perhaps far faster than anyone realizes today, into heightened momentum toward hydrogen-fueled cars.

So it won't be the end of the world, nor the end of cars, nor the end of anything really. But it will be the start of some amazing new global rule sets.

•“Saudis Fight Militancy With Jobs: Private Posts Formerly Held by Foreigners Are Offered to Locals,” by Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 31 August, p. A1.

It's a decent bet and the right thing to do, but it only delays the fall of the House of Saud. I don't say that as a criticism per se. I don't want the House of Saud to drop overnight. I want it to mutate into the House of Windsor slowly and with great transparency, accomplishing the feat in . . . say . . . a generation's time.

Today, just 13 percent of the Saudi workforce--private, that is--is actually Saudi. The rest are foreigners. Amazing no? It used to be that many Saudis entering the workforce could be put on the government's tab, but now that job pool can cover only about 10 percent, leaving 90 percent as potential recruits for bin Laden.

This is the Beverly Hillbillies effect coming to haunt them after three decades of the good life. Saudi Arabia had a small population three decades ago, but all that oil wealth led to an explosion of the population, to the point where today, more than a third of the entire population is under 15 years of age. So they went "overnight" (demographically speaking) from the "old mountaineer barely kept his family fed" to a trust-fund society where enough of the population had a decent enough life to seriously expand their ranks with kids. That gets you a bulging population, that gets you youth without solid connections to prosperous futures, that gets you the danger of unrest, and so now the old model of using guest workers is rapidly being altered to accomodate all those young males needing jobs.

But guess what? All those males entering the private sector and making lives within it are going to start demanding more pluralism from their government over time. If not on the dole, then they'll be more demanding, especially in terms of protecting their accumulated wealth.

You know where this is going. It's called a middle class that demands democracy, women's rights, etc.

Does this turn of events buy off potential radicals in the meantime? Yes. But it sets in motion a far more powerful economic trend that can't be suppressed by a secret police, and it's called rising expectations coupled with a sense of entitled ownership growing ever more free from state control.

•“Massacre Draws Self-Criticism in Muslim Press,” by John Kifner, New York Times, 9 September, p. A8.

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.

No Israel? Middle East still sucks at globalization and is falling behind.

No U.S. Military there? Middle East still sucks at globalization and is falling behind.

No Western influences? No oil trade? No occupiers? The Middle East still sucks at globalization and is falling behind.

The real courage to be found right now in the region are the critics willing to say the harsh truths, like Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, a TV executive at a popular Arab station, writing in pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat:

It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims . . .

The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings all over the world, were Muslim. What a pathetic record. What an abominable 'achievement.' Does this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture? . . .

Let us contemplate the incident of this religious sheik allowing, nay, even calling for, the murder of civilians. How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?

•“Abduction of Peace Activists Brings War Home in Italy,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 9 September, p. A14.

The greatest shock here was not just the awful fact itself, that two vibrant young Italian women were kidnapped in Iraq, dragged from their office by attackers who, it seems, knew their names. The deeper jolt was that they worked for a relief group that was outspokenly against the war in Iraq and helped child victims of the war.

France has it's two journalists held hostage because of the head-scarf ban, and now Italy joins the ranks of those suffering incomprehensible attacks. Can we blame it all on the "chaos" unleashed by the war? Hmm, taking Western hostages in the Middle East, where have I heard that before . . . ?

This isn't about winning a war of ideas, not for them, and it shouldn't be for us either. Our world is growing smaller as the Core grows larger, and we're simply at the point in history when that growth process is bumping up against the desire of too many in the Middle East to keep the big bad world at bay, securing the region's permanent retardation as societies, economies, states--right down to the level of individuals hell-bent on doing nothing more than generating hell on earth.

And yeah, this world is too small for both visions of the future, so the Gap has to go, along with all those hate-filled types who will fight tooth and nail, waging wars of perversity, to keep the Gap the Gap in the Middle East. We're watching a civilization die, and the wounds are self-inflicted.

•“Questions For a Wartime President,” by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 31 August, p. A21.

•“A Democratic Foreign Policy,” by Joseph Biden, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 9 September, p. A16.

President Bush has a special responsibility this week to explain how the war is going and what strategy he will pursue if he wins a second term. John Kerry owes the country the same clarity.

Joseph Biden, whom I would take any day over Richard Holbrooke as SECSTATE in a Kerry Administration, does a decent job in today's WSJ:

Democrats would challenge the American people and our allies to refocus our attention, reallocate our resources and reform our institutions to address this challenge [terror]. Together, we have to take seriously the task of economic development, commit to broader and deeper debt relief, buffer countries against economic shocks, give them tools to combat corruption, dramatically expand our investment in global education, reorient the Bretton Woods institutions and the U.N. to stabilize weak states, and lead the world in a massive effort to combat the scourge of disease, especially AIDS.

We also have to take seriously nation-building. This administration came to office disdaining the concept, only to be confronted with the two biggest nation-building challenges since World War II. Thus far, it merits a failing grade in both Afghanistan and Iraq. A Democratic foreign policy would empower experts to plan post-conflict reconstruction ahead of time, not on the fly; it would build a standing roster of international police to handle security after we topple a tyrant; it would create a system to rapidly stand up indigenous security forces. And Democrats would make sure that when it comes to a war of choice, we think twice about initiating the conflict if we're not prepared for the post-conflict.

Please.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 9 September 2004.

I was approached by Jon Compton, editor of Fire & Movement: The Forum of Conflict Simulation just before PNM came out in late April. He asked if I could pen something op-ed'ish for his magazine, which he had just taken over and was hoping to return to its former glory.

This is how Jon intros the piece in Issue 134 now out:

. . . Thomas P.M. Barnett wrote an article for Esquire magazine last year entitled "The Pentagon's New Map," in which he described what he believes is the new security environment that the U.S. finds itself in today. His recent book of the same title more deeply explores his thoughts on the matter. I asked Prof. Barnett what he thought the role of the commercial board wargame industry might be in the new world war in which we find ourselves. His response is included in this issue. It's definitely worth a close read.

Below is the piece I wrote for him. No additional commentary needed. I think it stands pretty well.

Gaming War Within the Context of Everything Else

By

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor,

Warfare Analysis and Research Department, Naval War College

[pp. 15-16]

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a senior strategic researcher and professor at the Naval War College. His latest book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, is published by G.P. Putnam's

Sons (April 2004).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Naval War College, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

Last January the U.S. military conducted a huge tabletop wargame in Alabama designed to test out new, "transformational" technologies and force postures in four emerging warfighting areas. The military's version of board games is used primarily to stretch minds and test new ideas at low cost—usually in the range of 1/5th the normal cost of a more realistic exercise. While the technologies employed were certainly impressive (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, with almost unlimited loiter time), the actual scenario used was downright pathetic, indicating just how low the Pentagon's imagination has sunk despite being more than two years past the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (not to mention the anthrax scare, the DC sniper case, SARS in China, and so on and so on).

The scenario, you ask? It was basically the same one the military has been using for a good decade now: a large unnamed Asian land power exhibits a rather unhealthy interest in a small, island nation off its coast. Seems this large unnamed Asian land power has designs on this little state, which just so happens to be a close military friend of the United States. Now, this scenario was kept secret, but let me go out on a limb here and suggest that the "near-peer competitor" in question was none other than China. How can I state this with utter certainty? Because basically every big wargame we've conducted since the Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1996 has been a replay of that scenario, even as most military intelligence suggests that if China were to invade Taiwan anytime soon, it would likely go down in history as the "million man swim."

So why is the Pentagon so stuck on this largely implausible scenario? Pure lack of imagination. Simply put, the ordering principle of the Department of Defense (DoD) hasn't changed one whit since the Cold War: we built DoD around the core conflict model of great power war back in 1947, and nothing has come along to knock that baby off its doctrinal pedestal since. When the Soviets went away officially at the end of 1991, we hung on to the hope of their eventual return through the strategic planning pillar known as "reconstitution," a fancy word meaning we'd hedge against their revival until we could dream up something better to force size ourselves against.

That something better came in 1996, when we shadow boxed the Chinese in the Taiwan Straits during one of their periodic shows of force designed to scare the Taiwanese political leadership from making any declarations of political independence from the mainland. Don't get me wrong, I believe this is a scenario worth gaming, because if it went down, a lot of important things would immediately get screwed up in Asia, which represents almost half of humanity. My problem with the scenario is that it represents the height of imagination right now inside the Pentagon regarding the future of warfare, and as far as I'm concerned, it is the strategic planning equivalent of steering by staring at your rear-view mirror.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us a glimpse of what "asymmetrical warfare" in the 21st century is going to be all about. It won't just be some other great power or some regional rogue keeping America from accessing some future battlespace they hope to own, because frankly, there ain't no such thing as a conventional battlespace anywhere in the world that our military force cannot access. Asymmetrical warfare in the future is going to feel more like you're trying to play football while the other guy has decided to play soccer. In other words, you won't be playing the same game, with the same rules, or even the same scorekeeping.

Great power war effectively died with the realization of mutual assured destruction thanks to nukes. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state war is going the route of the dinosaur: basically no one engages in it anymore. What's left is plenty of violence within states and non-state actors looking to hijack societies from globalization's creeping embrace so they can disconnect those societies from the global grid and have their way with the captive population. Increasingly, the most motivated non-state actors will employ terrorism to scare off advanced states from caring about those societies they seek to hijack from history. That's basically the al–Qaeda's game, and if it reminds you of a similar movement of a century earlier (Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks), then you were paying attention in history class.

Like Lenin, Osama bin Laden has proven himself a capable leader of a transnational terrorist movement, and like Lenin, bin Laden seeks to break off a huge chunk of humanity (a billion Mulsims living in predominately Islamic societies) from the Western-dominated global economy so as to be able to lord over them in their collective pursuit of a "good life" divorced from all that Westoxification imposed by globalization's advance. Bin Laden (and all the Bin Ladens to follow) realizes that time is not on his side. In twenty years, the Saudi Arabia he hopes to jerk back to some seventh-century version of paradise simply won't be there for the taking, so he has to move fast. If Lenin realized he had to start his socialist empire by targeting the most pre-capitalist societies, bin Laden seeks to begin his version of Islamofascism by targeting the most pre-globalized societies. That's why al-Qaeda has flourished up to now in some of the most backward, disconnected states such as Sudan and Afghanistan.

The struggle I describe here is basically the dominant conflict model of the 21st century: between those who would lead their states toward embracing globalization and enmeshing their governments within the security rule sets it imposes and those who seek to disconnect relatively backward states in order to impose their particular brand of isolating authoritarianism. What I'm talking about here is basically a Risk for the era of globalization. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda don't just want to drive the U.S. military out of the Middle East, but to drive the Middle East out of the world. That's the global war they are waging when they take down the twin towers on 9/11. And it's the global war America (or at least the Bush Administration) believes it's waging when they take down Saddam Hussein in the Middle East. Al-Qaeda seeks to disconnect the Middle East from the global economy, whereas the United States seeks to reconnect the Middle East to the larger world—one big game of Risk.

Now if someone could just clue the Pentagon in on what's really going on, because, if left to their own devices, military strategists will continue gaming the Taiwan Straits ad infinitum. Why? It's a wonderful proving ground for various weapons systems they are convinced they need. Do they really need these systems? Depends on whether you think the Chinese diesel submarine threat is the big obstacle between some future, downstream global reality we seek to generate through the strategic employment of our military forces around the world and us.

Myself, I don't stay up nights fretting over Chinese diesel subs, not when China is sucking up foreign direct investment like crazy and putting massive state enterprises up for auction (want to know what the biggest Initial Public Offering in the world was last year? China Life Insurance!). No, I see a China busting its rear end trying to integrate its society with the global economy, and as far as I'm concerned, that push for connectivity is a very good sign. When I look around the world, I see danger and violence overwhelmingly concentrated in the most disconnected states and regions, like Africa and the Middle East. Moreover, that's where the bulk of the terrorist groups are, because it is primarily within those regions where we find the endemic conflicts and authoritarian regimes that breed such desperate people.

But gaming the spillover effects of raging civil wars and far-flung terrorist networks is hard, dang it! And awfully complex to explain to a Congress that just wants to know in whose district the Pentagon plans on building that fabulous new weapons system or expensive platform. Gaming the sort of war al-Qaeda seeks to wage against the United States wouldn't look anything like the tabletop wargames the Pentagon knows only too well how to play. Instead of just gaming war within the context of war, you'd have to game war within the context of everything else—Risk meets Monopoly meets Life meets . . ..

But that is exactly what we saw on 9/11: war within the context of everything else. The New York Stock Exchange was shut down for a week. Do you think they gamed that one in the Pentagon wargame last January? Or air travel being shut down for an even longer stretch? Or a bulge of hate crimes against Arabs? Or a rush among Americans to buy guns? Or insurance companies refusing terrorism coverage? Or a GM auto plant in Indiana shutting down because it couldn't get a computer chip from Taiwan "just in time?”

All of these downstream effects occurred in response to 9/11, along with our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with a host of new anti-terrorism laws being generated around the world, along with an immediate slow down of foreign students visiting the United States, along with . . .. Is the Pentagon gaming any of those aspects of this global war on terrorism? Is anybody? Do we even understand warfare of this nature?

Let me give you an even better example. The U.S. Census Bureau says two-thirds of America's population growth between now and 2050 will come from Latinos immigrating here from Central and South America. Without that flow of bodies, our Potential Support Ratio (PSR) of workers-to-retirees will plummet dangerously. That's the future economic strength of this country in a nutshell. Guess what happens in response to 9/11? We tighten our borders and already we see a diversion of that flow to Europe. You want to know who made that call? Bin Laden did. He's playing a game of Risk we don't understand, because we lack the imagination to do so—because we only understand war within the context of war and not within the context of everything else. We're role-playing 20th century warfare across a global security system against opponents who already moved onto the 21st century's version of warfare across a global economic system. We lack even the language to describe this new form of warfare. So we call this new form of attack a "9/11." What will we call the next one? Well, I guess it depends on the date.

Rest assured, the Pentagon will know exactly what to do . . . when China invades Taiwan. As for the next 9/11, military strategists don't have a clue, because they can't wargame that scenario, because those board games simply don't exist.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the commercial board wargame industry cranked out plenty of games designed to scope out the core conflict model of the day—the Sovs streaming the Fulda Gap and everything else that would follow. But where is that industry today? Where are the games that will teach a new generation of strategists to think about war within the context of everything else? Or strategic minds that will recognize a 9/11 as something more profound than just three buildings being hit?

Board games are all about tracing cause and effect, thinking several moves ahead, and seeing the entire playing field in one fell swoop. Show me the board that can locate a 9/11 somewhere on a battlespace that includes energy markets, global financial flows and labor migration patterns and I'll show you a game worth playing, because you'll be describing the conflict that few in the world understand and yet all in this world find themselves operating within.

America is currently engaged in a global war that is neither global nor a war in any way we've previously understood or experienced. We need a new lexicon to describe this sort of warfare, and the commercial wargame industry has a vital role to play in this voyage of discovery. The sort of in-depth, context-rich role-playing games that are typically filed under Fantasy need to be reclassified, through revision and expansion, under Complexity, because they offer many of the skill sets strategic planners need to master in the battles ahead.

The Pentagon needs to start understanding this global war in all its non-military complexity, so that we can employ our military assets around the world for maximum impact. The military is reaching for this understanding in its pursuit of effects-based operations, which is just a fancy way of saying that smoking holes are—in and of themselves—not nearly enough to win the wars ahead. You can see this in Iraq today. Did we wargame the Saddam takedown effectively? The results speak for themselves. Is it clear we didn't have a clue about the occupation? Again, the results speak for themselves.

As a result, the U.S. military has wandered into—with almost no strategic forethought—what even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admits is the "super bowl of terrorism." Show me the commercial board game that effectively prepares tomorrow's military leaders for the Iraq-occupation-after-next and I will show you a product that saves lives.

The intellectual challenge is clear. The only question is how the commercial wargame industry will respond.

Today's catch:

•“Questions For a Wartime President,” by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 31 August, p. A21.

•“A Democratic Foreign Policy,” by Joseph Biden, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 9 September, p. A16.

•“Abduction of Peace Activists Brings War Home in Italy,” by Ian Fisher, New York Times, 9 September, p. A14.

•“Massacre Draws Self-Criticism in Muslim Press,” by John Kifner, New York Times, 9 September, p. A8.

•“Saudis Fight Militancy With Jobs: Private Posts Formerly Held by Foreigners Are Offered to Locals,” by Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 31 August, p. A1.

•“Oil Explorers Searching Ever More Remote Areas,” by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 9 September, p. C1.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 10 September 2004

Got a call yesterday from Doctors Without Borders. Apparently they caught that I use their logo in my presentation (the one shown on CSPAN) in a slide where I talk about the Sys Admin force needing to be able to interact with a far wider array of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and PVOs (private voluntary organizations) in post-conflict and post-disaster relief ops and security generation.

They wanted quick explanation of concept. I said I advocated more cooperation between military and NGOs and PVOs as a good thing. This representative said Docs Without Borders doesn't want that per se, but prefers separation so as not to muddy definitions of who's who. Docs just left Afghanistan after 24 years. Why? Their personnel started being targeted by terrorist insurgents there. So their stand is, we want nothing to do with the U.S. military.

And they'd like me not to use their logo, because they feel it might imply they approve of concept.

Interesting choice for me. Of course, I say nothing of the sort in my presentation (that Docs approve of the concept), and since I don't use the logo for commercial gain, but in a public presentation as a USG employee, I don't have to agree with their request.

I think the answer will be that I will continue to use the logo, but now tell the story of the phonecall, emphasizing their position and talking about how that position reflects the bad job the military has done historically in such relationships.

Of course, their answer can be to decry the concept and the ideas associated with it, but that's only par in a world without borders on free speech.

Interesting feedback, huh?

•“Polls Suggest War Isn't Hurting Bush: Mounting Deaths in Iraq Have Not Resulted in Major Backlash in Public Opinion,” by John F. Harris and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 10 September, p. A10.

So how come Bush is doing so well in the polls? When "these results challenge what some public opinion analysts had for years assumed was a reliable link--which some scholars argued operated with an almost mathematical precision--between combat deaths and erosion of support for military operations."

Good quote from always reliable Andrew Kohut of Pew Research Center: public support "does not so much track with number of casualties per se, but with the public's sense of whether things are degrading." Or, as I argued in my book (p. 204), what the public needs to see are: "(1) the goals are well defined; and (2) the cost seems worth the potential gain." In other words, does the op make sense to the pubic, and do they think we're succeeding, or at least not screwing it up too badly?

So you have to ask the question again: why is Bush doing so well? I don't think the Swift Boat Veterans' bullshit is doing this to Kerry. I think it reflects some bias too many voters may have against a Dem candidate. I mean, my God, the man is a decorated combat veteran who's killed the enemy and been wounded by live fire, and he's still trailing Bush 53 to 37 on who would handle Iraq better in the future! Right after the 1000th casualty is announced and following a week where Bush intimated that we could not win the GWOT and the Pentagon admitted we don't control a big chunk of Iraq (the toughest Sunni part).

So you really do have to wonder, Michael Moore's successful movie notwithstanding, whether or not a major chunk (now just half, but only down 20 percentage points from May 2003--when I would have expected a much bigger decline) of the population really do buy the man's attempts at explaining the bigger picture and goals of transforming the Middle East to end the scourge of transnational terrorism coming out of there.

•“Powell Says Rapes and Killings in Sudan Are Genocide,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 10 September, p. A3.

While the declaration has no immediate effect on the role or obligations of the United Nations, said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, it could be viewed as tantamount to invoking Article 8 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide--the first time that any nation had invoked that provision calling upon the United Nations to take action.

I credit Powell on this one. Good call. Here's hoping it has some effect on the rest of Core that needs to reach some level of caring on this that supercedes the non-stop bitching on Iraq.

•“Intelligence Test: On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents: Sgt. McCary, Fluent in Arabic, Improvises Tactics in Field; Not the War He Trained For; Deception Within the Rules,” by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A1.

Sgt. McCary graduated from Vassar College with a degree in French literature before enlisting in the Army in 2000. Before basic training, he had never touched a gun in his life. Because he had a college degree and a knack for languages, the Army sent him to its Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., for Arabic instruction. He picked up the language so quickly that his instructors nicknamed him "the sponge."

In the last year, the sergeant has conducted more than 1,000 interrogations of Iraqi insurgents, trying to figure out how they are organized and where they are hiding. He's walked hundreds of patrols, dodged rocket-propelled-grenade fire and watched friends--both Iraqi and American--die grisly deaths. So far, 19 soldiers and three Iraqi translators in his battalion have been killed.

His presence on raids helped in efforts to bring in only Iraqis who had actual knowledge about the insurgency. It also had another benefit. Interrogating detainees in the first few minutes after capture allowed him to question suspects while they are disoriented and unable to construct a good alibi. He says his battalion is the only one he knows of that uses counterintelligence in this way. "I didn't realize how innovative we were until I started talking with friends from other units," he said.

Lt. Col Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman in the Pentagon, says it isn't unheard of for counterintelligence soldiers to accompany troops on raids. "But we don't have enough of these assets to use them in this war on a regular basis," he says.

Vasser.

French literature.

Hundreds of times walking the beat, getting to know his precinct.

1,000 interrogations and no bad photos, just real information.

Not unheard of, but we're desperately short of guys like this.

This is why when gray beards like Gen. Bob Scales says the Sys Admin concept is ludicrous, I have to wonder what planet he's on. I see a US Army desperately struggling to create just such a force right on the ground now in Iraq. Scales can say his Army will always be able to do both the warfighting and the cop-on-the-beat stuff, but tell me we have enough McCarys in this Army of One.

•“A Farsighted New Fortress Mentality on Wall Street: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation,” by Landon Thomas Jr., New York Times, 10 September, p. C1.

An amazing idea. Gee, I wonder who thought of that?

That would be Cantor Fitzgerald in their historic series of "economic security exercises" with the Naval War College. The same Cantor that somehow survived 9/11 despite losing the bulk of its HQ employees on 9/11. [see the accompanying story in the Times, "Firm That Was Hit Hard on 9/11 Grows Anew," by Riva D. Atlas, p. C4; and "'New Cantor Fitzgerald Now Looks to Compete," by Ann Davis and Aaron Lucchetti, Wall Street Journal, p. C1.]

But the biggest change on the "Street" belongs to that "Street" itself:

Indeed, of all the institutions on Wall Street, the exchange--which was forced to close for four business days after the attacks and was said in August to be a target of a terrorist threat--has enacted the most significant and far-reaching security and contingency plan.

•“Odds of Bird-Flu Epidemic Rise As First Thai Death Is Confirmed,” by Gautam Naik et. al, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A2.

International health authorities say the death on Wednesday of a young man in Thailand from bird flu provides another worrying sign that the world may be edging toward a long-awaited influenza pandemic against which humans have little protection.

Tests have confirmed that the death of the 18-year-old man was caused by the H5N1 bird-flu virus, the first such human casualty in Thailand since the disease re-emerged in Asia in July.

If this virus mutates toward the ability of being able to jump quickly from person to person, we could be talking an epidemic of very big proportions. Everyone now knows that the connectivity of the global economy means an epidemic can travel very quickly, primarily through air travel (as all System Perturbations seem to do, yes? Whether the time bombs are the planes themselves or the sick bodies within). So we may be looking at the biggest flu since the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed 20 million.

Inconceivable? No. Would it perturb the system something fierce? Yes.

And it will be a war to tame it if it does come--this pandemic. It will be war within the context of everything else like nothing we've ever experienced to date.

•“[op-ed] Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him: Unless peace is made in Chechnya, the war may spread,” by Fiona Hill, New York Times, 10 September, p. A27.

Clearly, he was sending a message that he needs the United States and Europe to pay careful attention as he responds to the massacre. More specifically, he was saying three things: first, the situation in the North Cauccasus is no longer just about Chechnya but involves dozens of potential ethnic and religious conflicts across the region; second, the West must stop simply criticizing me for the war in Chechnya without offering me any realistic solutions; and third, some things you are doing are making it more difficult for me to resolve the situation.

1) Chechen independence can't be on the table

2) Putin should not be pushed to negotiate with the former Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, who is used up as a unifying force within the Chechen population, and

3) We need to share intell with the Russian to help them "discern the links between the Beslan terrorists and others operating in Europe" (which are known by many European states) and we could "offer Russian troops and police opportunities to train alongside their European counterparts on border security and antiterrorism strategies."

Hmm. Sounds like some Sys Admin work to me. Raising security practices among Seam States and sharing intell across the Core as a whole.

I may have to write another book . . .

Dateline: Above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 10 September 2004

[NOTE: When I first posted this blog on 9/10, I cited friend and fellow blogger TM Lutas as the author of the following lengthy posts about PNM. TM sent me an email today saying I was mistaken. While he sent me notice of the posts, and does himself also post at Chicago Boyz.net, he is not the author known as "Lexington Green." Who is Lex? I have no idea, other than he must have studied economics at U. Chicago. So my apologies for misidentifying TM and not giving "Lexington Green" his due at the time of my initial posting. Here is the post re-edited as a result.]

Lexington Green (a pseudonym, I imagine) writes at Chicago Boyz , which is explained as:

Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago boys including those pictured above, and others who helped to liberalize Latin American economies.

Here is the first more general blog:

August 21, 2004

Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map

For some time now I have had a stack of books I've been going to blog about. The top of the stack is Thomas Barnett's book The Pentagon's New Map. First, the book is good, it is worth reading, and you should do so. Barnett is engaging and smart and is seriously trying to think through important questions. This is demonstrated not only by the book, but also by Barnett's website. Barnett's book has been reviewed far and wide, and on his website he publishes the reviews and responds to them. In fact, his website is almost the ideal of what a web-minded author can do. He engages in a dialogue with reviewers and responds to criticisms. Others, hopefully, will adopt his approach. May they also have the stamina to sustain it.

I read the book a few months ago and I hope I can make sense of my notes. I'll focus on points that relate to issues which interest me. There is much in the book which I simply won't touch on here. There are plenty of summaries on his site, if mine is too cryptic. But everybody reading this blog has heard about it and has some idea what it is about -- The Core and The Gap, to get it down to five syllables. These terms, as well as many others, are part of Barnett's idiosyncratic nomenclature.

Barnett asserts throughout that globalization means increasing "connectivity" to "content flows", and that "disconnectedness is itself the ultimate enemy." The Core is that part of the world in which is "functioning within globalization" because it "accepts the connectivity and can handle the content flows associated with integrating one's national economy to the global economy." How countries handle the "content flow" turns on their internal "legal rule sets". Traditional-minded (or just oppressive) countries try to limit the content, e.g. Internet pornography or criticism of the government. Core countries also succeed in "harmonizing their internal rule sets" to the "emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets." Success at synchronizing with the global rule set, itself an evolving set of norms, means investment and other "connectedness" increasingly links a country to the functioning Core. The pace at which countries make these transitions, and which parts of the global rule set they adopt first, vary. A good index of "connectedness", as Barnett notes, is the way a society treats its women, a point Ralph Peters has also made.

Barnett addresses at length the more strictly military side. He correctly notes that the United States has been spending more and more "billable hours" in the last 20 years, starting before the Cold War even ended, sending its military into the disorderly and violent regions of the Gap (Haiti, the Balkans, the Middle East). It has done so on an ad hoc basis as crises boil over, with no over-arching rationale to these various ventures. This is in part because the military has resisted acquiring the capability, equipment and knowledge needed to intervene with long-term success in these places. Each intervention has been treated by the Pentagon as a distraction from some forthcoming major war, which looks less and less likely to occur any time soon. The military, according to Barnett, still clings to a planning and training and acquisition mindset focused on one Big One akin to WWII or the Cold War, with China nominated to sit in the Bad Guy chair. Barnett sees this fear of China as overblown, if not unfounded. The military needs to learn that the Gap is not a distraction from its job. Its job is the Gap and there is no exit strategy.

Barnett says we need to recognize that the security goal of the United States is to eliminate the sources of disorder and terrorism at their roots, in the Gap. We need to learn and accept that connectedness has raised the cost of fighting within Core way too high for sensible people to contemplate. And most compellingly, nuclear weapons are always in the background as a deterrant if anyone were foolish enough to start an intra-Core war. So, the Core states have too much to lose by fighting among themselves and they know it. Hence we are happily surprised to find something like a firm basis for perpetual peace in the nicer parts of the world.

According to Barnett, a big part of why people worldwide have "freaked" about Bush's assertion of preemption and apparent unilateralism is they don't realize, because the Bush team has failed to clearly articulate it, that the "rule set" for the Core (Mutual Assured Destruction, deterrence, collective security) is still in place. We we only mean to operate in the rougher, more Hobbesian fashion in the Hobbesian badlands of the Gap.

So much for the descriptive part. Barnett goes on to advocate making it an express goal of United States policy to "shrink the Gap." One way to do this is to encourage trade and particularly technology transfer to the Gap. He believes it is futile to try to prevent dangerous technology from reaching rogues in the Gap by restricting trade. Barnett advocates a robust system of threats and preemption instead.



… if you have a bad actor, whether he is a superempowered terrorist like Osama bin Laden or a rogue leader like Kim Jong Il, who has a long list of boxes that says he is not to be trusted or that the world would be a better place without him, then I say you move on to preemption. There is no negotiation at this point in the process, because you have given them plenty of warnings and requests to cease and desist. In the case of a regime, you simply keep ratcheting up your demands for compliance, and when the regime cannot comply and cannot be provoked into a precipitating action by your constantly growing military pressure, you preempt. In the case of a terrorist group, you skip even these preliminaries and preempt the moment you have any of them in your crosshairs.



Barnett notes "that may sound pretty harsh", and rightly so, though I like the sound of it. I think those who don't like Bush's "unilateralism" will also 'freak" if we do things way, especially if we announce we are going to. Barnett asks rhetorically, what "gives America the right to make such decisions"? He answers that "'might makes right' when we are talking about America playing Gap Leviathan." And when the French get in a snit, what then? "[I]f the other Core powers want a greater say in how we exercise that power, they simply need to dedicate enough defense spending to develop similar capabilities." In the meantime, "America will need to act unilaterally inside the Gap on a regular basis . . . because … quite frankly -- no other military power on the planet even comes close to matching our capabilities. [H]ave no delusions: the United States owns the only 'fist' in the business." Again, this sounds pretty realistic.

However, Barnett says the problem is that the United States cannot do Part 2 of a war all by itself. We can conquer anybody, but getting the conquered territory up and running requires lots of help. We need to get the rest of the Core to assist us in these ventures, not just "the Brits and Aussies" (i.e. the Anglosphere, a word Barnett does not use). How, do we get other Core powers to join us in the "follow-through effort"? Mostly, "we need to be more explicit with [our] allies about the better world we want to create whenever we undertake these necessarily difficult tasks." Bush et al failed to articulate this vision, hence isolating us unnecessarily.

I'm not exactly sure why we need the other guys to help us do Part 2, assuming we were to acquire the skills needed, but let's just take it that Barnett is right that we do need help. Barnett goes on to ask what happens if others do not buy our vision of a "happy ending", what then? Uncharacteristically, he does not provide a plausible seeming answer to this.

This points up one of my biggest problems with the book. The Core is an amalgam of countries with interests and beliefs which conflict. Yes, intra-Core warfare is highly unlikely, especially in the "Old Core". But explaining ourselves more carefully before we invade somewhere in the Gap is not ever going to make the Russians or the French or the Chinese support us. These countres have learned over the centuries to survive in a harsh, zero-sum world in which their own unique and prized identities were always in constant, mortal danger. All of these ancient countries resent American power. All of them want more freedom of action in the World. All perceive the United States as in some degree hostile to their interests. None of these countries wants to blow up a trading partner, or get in a war with another powerful country. But any of them could very well want to see the United States suffer some spectacular failure in the Gap because they may well believe that such an outcome would enhance their own status and opportunities. The Core is still a realm of zero-sum competition for some of the players. Shrinking the Gap is not a project they are going to want to invest a nickel in if the USA will do the heavy lifting anyway. And there is always the chance the USA will suffer some exploitable setback while policing the Gap. Many countries would, sensibly enough from their perspective, rather stand on the sidelines and see what opportunities emerge from the smoke when the USA ventures into the Gap. Barnett is aware of this dynamic, but I think it is more important than he apparently does.

This leads me to another related point, which is something which Barnett hints at, but is not explicit about. As I read the book, I repeatedly thought, "the Core of the Core is the Anglosphere." The Core "rule sets" which Barnett refers are classically those of Anglo-American liberalism -- representative democracy, apolitical militaries, strong sovereigns with delimited powers, flexible common law, free trade, free markets, openness to immigrants, economic dynamism and openness to change. These values and institutions were spread around the world by the maritime trading powers, Britain, then America. I think Barnett is therefore mistaken when he says that the United States is "globalizations godfather, its source code, its original model", "its first great multinational state and economic union". He acknowledges that the USA restarted a previously derailed globalization in 1945. However, I would attribute more than he does to this older globalization of the 19th Century and earlier. (See Kevin H. O'Rourke, Jeffrey G. Williamson,Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy). So, contra Barnett, the true "first great multinational state and economic union" was the British Empire, which we were once part of. It was this first globalization, which was ruined in 1914, which laid much of the foundation of the globalizing order the USA picked up in 1945. The "source code" Barnett is looking for is therefore not the architecture of the early Cold War Wise Men. They put upper stories on a structure that stared much earlier, whose foundations go back to the middle ages in England. This very ancient civilization originated in England, and is the source of the liberal order established in its colonies, and which is the source of the "rule set" which is now spreading around the world.

Why does this remote ancestry matter, since Barnett is addressing what the United States should be doing now? Because to "shrink the Gap" we need to understand how the Core became the Core in the first place -- a process which began in a particular place and time, i.e. England in the Middle Ages. (See Alan MacFarlane's wonderful books The Riddle of the Modern World, and its sequel The Making of the Modern World: Visions from the West and East.) (And while you are at it, pre-order Jim Bennett's forthcoming book on the Anglosphere.) We need to accurately understand the foundations of our political and economic success -- our "rule sets" in Barnett's parlance -- if we wish to understand what it will take to "shrink the Gap", i.e. to build states and to spread the benefits of our values and institutions around the world.

The fact that the dominant "rule sets" we hope to spread into the gap are Anglo-American is yet another source of intra-Core tension. These Anglo-American values and institutions enjoy at best mixed popularity in Old Europe. France in particular does not like "Anglo-Saxon" liberalism. (See this earlier post, citing Walter Russell Mead's review essay of recent French books.)

On the military side, Barnett repeatedly and accurately points out that Britain, Australia and the United States are reliable allies who are increasingly intermeshed and interoperable. This is the Anglosphere in arms. While Uncle Sam is the Leviathan, these junior powers continue to make disproportionate contributions. (The United States and Canada are joined at the hip economically, though Canada has long remained in our shadow militarily. Even so, we have a long-standing defensive alliance (NORAD) with Canada.) So, nothing in Barnett contradicts the notion that the Anglosphere is the core of the Core in terms of institutions and values, strength of alliances with the USA, or military capabilities. He just does not focus on it, or the ongoing intra-Core tensions this fact will continue to provoke.

Barnett mentions astutely notes that of the "New Core" countries, "China is the most worrisome" and India is the most promising." I think he gets this almost exactly right.

China faces the biggest challenge to changing its "rule set" -- moving away from one party rule. The Party is maintaining itself in the saddle by playing up nationalism and by bribing the People's Liberation Army with rhetoric and funding which keep the PLA dreaming and planning its big showdown with the USA over Taiwan. Barnett notes that the "rule set fallout from a United States-China conflict" would "effectively bar[] Beijing from stable Core membership for the foreseeable future." That is correct in my view. Let us hope the hard-faced men in Beijing manage to ride the tiger and not get into a war with the USA. Even if they "win" it will be a disaster for all parties. China can make the world a monumentally better place, or do horrendous damage, and it is all a matter of luck how the Party oligarchs handle the next few decades. I wish there was a way to put more certainty into the equation, but I don't see it. Offer a decade of the rosary daily for things to go well in China. (Yes I am literally suggesting you pray for this. I do.)

And India. One of Barnett's most unusual insights is his awareness of the critical importance of India. This is a point I have long believed and few others seem to focus on it. Barnett intriguingly mentions India as a "former colony" of Britain in the same breath with Australia, and even refers to India as "a crucial military partner" of the United States. Barnett sees India moving more and more toward the Core Anglophone states, both economically and militarily, a point made several times on this blog. He quotes approvingly a comment that India is "the most important country for the future of the world" because "if globalization succeeds in a democratic society where half the population is impoverished and one-quarter is Muslim, then it can succeed anywhere". I don't exactly agree. India will succeed relatively early and briskly precisely because it is a former British colony, which has a large population with a facility with English, a large and relatively wealthy diaspora population which wants to return and invest in India, a functioning democracy and a fairly well-functioning court system a relatively competent and law-abiding military all of which it inherited from Britain. India is not a long shot to succeed at globalizing, once it abandons the socialism it also inherited from Britain, it is an odds-on favorite to do very well indeed. (See the much-discussed essay Can India Overtake China?.)

Barnett offers a nice rebuttal to the claim often made by British scholars (e.g. Niall Ferguson, Paul Kennedy, Paul Johnson) that we are in fact (or ought to be) an "Empire". This is a pet peeve of mine, and Barnett pithily points out in his own unique consultant-speak that Empires are about "maximal rule sets" where the globalized world order America is establishing is about "minimal rule sets". (At some point I'll finish a partially written post in lawyer-speak about why the United States is not an empire, but Barnett's riposte will have to hold you for now.)

Barnett makes a two-pronged argument for America exerting itself to shrink the Gap. On the negative side, he points out that Gap is the source of disorder, criminality, terrorism and other Bad Things in the world, and this is only going to get worse unless conditions there improve. So, we need to do it to protect ourselves. On the affirmative side he makes an impassioned and evidently sincere argument that the United States, to be true to its own patriotism and its own destiny must help to spread the blessings it enjoys to the rest of the world, to end "disconnectedness" and bring everyone into the globalized Core. He addresses many of the obvious counter-arguments, which discussion I won't summarize here. He forthrightly says that American lives will be lost in the process and that it is a cause which is worth that price. I'm not sure that he is right because I'm not sure that "connectivity" is a cause which can inspire the Jacksonian core of America to go to war, or that they will perceive need to bring order to the Congo to protect America in the long run. They have tended to want to stay home and only venture abroad to destroy specific threats. In Walter Russell Mead's parlance, Barnett is offering a modernized Wilsonianism, an approach which has never enjoyed strong majority support. Also, I found myself asking whether this venture is this really something which is demanded by our founding principles and our very identity? Barnett has not fully convinced me it is. But he'll keep writing and I'm still listening.

The practicality aspect in particular concerns me. I'm also not sure we really can pull off the kind of rock-bottom nation-building which would be necessary in the worst parts of the Gap. Does this mean millions of people are condemned to tyranny or poverty or both? Maybe. Not by me. By history, by fate, maybe. I wish it were otherwise. Maybe it is. Maybe very great improvements can be made for the lives of vast masses of people, even if the United States has to conquer the places to bring it about. Barnett has not yet convinced me it is possible. (Francis Fukuyama's book on state-building, which I read and hope to write about on the blog, takes up this question.) And if it is a long-shot, I don't want our soldiers dying in the mud for it. But I am open to hearing and seeing more arguments on this point from Barnett and others, because he may be right about the scope of what is possible. Iraq is a test case, even though it is not the test he would have preferred.

Another facet of the book seems mistaken to me. Barnett's Gap is all one color. Core, Gap. Two zones. Now, such a bipartite division is a useful simplifying tool as far as it goes. But just as I think there is a Core-of-the-Core (the Anglosphere, potentially eventually including India), I think there is a heart of darkness in the Gap -- the Arab Middle East. Barnett hates this idea. In Pentagon-speak, this represents a focus on the so-called "Arc of Instability", and is code language for keeping a lid on the oil-producing regions of the world. That issue aside, and even accepting Barnett's framework generally, the most threatening part of the Gap is this region -- Islam famously has "bloody borders". We have a huge population surge there, with many young men who have no opportunities in horribly stunted economies, oil revenue which has allowed exposure to the Core and access to its products and weapons without having to adopt its values and institutions, a popular and violent ideological mutation of Islam which presents a particularly serious menace, a strong aversion to much of the Core's liberal values based upon even a more benign interpretation of Islam, and the problem that we are reliant on the material located under the surface of these places. Whether spreading "connectivity" into this area is going to lead to pacifying it is a very open question. It is just as likely to provoke a violent response. And we cannot choose to ignore what happens there, as we can and do about places like Burundi. We have to take an interest in these places. Barnett has not convinced me that a program for dealing with the Gap generally (1) will work in the Arab Middle East, or (2) will not be a distraction from the most urgent menaces we face, which do originate there. We need to focus on the primary danger first, and if we eventually get to Colombia and Zaire and Burma, good. But the recruiting grounds for a future Mohammad Atta and his colleagues has to be dealt with first. If the Gap is to be shrunk, if it can be shrunk, we should start there for our own good.

Barnett has many interesting things to say about the changes which will be necessary in the military and other arms of government to carry out the tasks he is proposing. His proposal that the military be divided into a Leviathan force, to fight wars, and a SysAdmin force to manage the peace, seems like a wise course. The great fear the military has is that it will become diluted if it gets into too many ancillary roles. If we do it his way, one part of the military can retain a total focus on shattering America's foes without too much distraction. It could stay focused on high- and medium-intensity operations. As Steven Biddle put it in his brilliant recent book, our enemies only resort to unconventional warfare because we have such an overwhelming edge in conventional warfare. We should make absolutely sure we maintain that. The way to square the circle is to create an arm of the military which has the specific job of supervising the post-war phase. This force, as Barnett notes, would be composed of older personnel, would have more of a police function, would have a range of reconstruction skills, would have a high level of interagency cooperation, and would otherwise possess distinct capabilities which did not overlap with Leviathan. (Incidentally, Leviathan is a darn cool name. We need to come up with something better for SysAdmin.) Building the SysAdmin force makes sense to me whether or not we make transforming the Gap our primary focus.

This relates to a point I have thought about a lot. Our Army is always, always, always surprised when it has to do occupation, nation-building and constabulary work. They never learn. They don't want to learn. They refuse to prepare or to commit resources or people to the task. They want to spend money on fancy weapons, train for and fight "proper" wars, and come home. But it rarely works out that way. This persistent, culpable negligence is something the military really needs to deal with. (See this essay, and this one for good books on lessons learned the hard way and then ignored.) We cannot afford to relearn for the umpteenth time these same hard lessons.

There are a lot of reasons why this has repeatedly happened. (1) The military is properly focused on the biggest dangers, and defeating those. Insurgencies are not perceived as existential threats the way the Wehrmacht or the Red Army were. You can lose Vietnam and survive. If you fail to defeat the blitzkreig coming down both sides of the autobahn into the Fulda Gap, you have lost everything. (2) The military is driven by budgets, and counterinsurgencies don't have many big-ticket purchases associated with them. (3) The military is driven by career-enhancing postings, and counterinsurgency operations have few glamorous, resume-building opportunities. A victory is when nothing happens. And they offer many, many opportunities for career-destroying mistakes. So, the expertise always evaporates. No one wants to go near this stuff. With good reason. That is why political leadership is necessary to make the soldiers think about, equip for, train for, and do well the distasteful but necessary things they don't want to do. Barnett's proposed SysAdmin force would be an institutional home for these capabilities and this knowleged, and it would be composed of a group of people who would lobby for their organization and its budgets.

(The military is already thinking somewhat along these lines. See this fascinating article, which proposes something akin to Barnett's SysAdmin force. The author proposes an interagency government task force to be attached to each Marine expeditionary unit and Army brigade, particularly in urban combat, so that the reconstruction process can start in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, even during the fighting.)

This post is insanely long and it could be a lot longer. Go read Barnett's book.

Here is the second blog, more specifically on the Sys Admin concept:

August 22, 2004

Further Thoughts on Barnett's Proposed SysAdmin Force and State-Building

My previous post about Thomas Barnett's book The Pentagon's New Map was so well-received (see the comments to that post), that I decided I'd put down a few further thoughts on it.

Barnett's call for a distinct SysAdmin force to handle peace-keeping, stability operations, nation-building, etc. is probably his best idea. These tasks will not go away. We can either do them well or do them badly. We can either allow them to erode our military's core function of war-fighting, by misusing a war-fighting military to undertake tasks it is not trained or equipped to do, or make sure we have the full range of capabilities in place. The very good article Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly. Its author, Maj. Robert M. Cassidy makes this point.

[t]he military organizations of great powers …embrace the big-war paradigm, and because they are large, hierarchical institutions, they generally innovate incrementally. This means that great-power militaries do not innovate well, particularly when the required innovations and adaptations lie outside the scope of conventional war. In other words, great powers do not win small wars because they are great powers: their militaries must maintain a central competence in symmetric warfare to preserve their great-power status vis-à-vis other great powers; and their militaries must be large organizations. These two characteristics combine to create a formidable competence on the plains of Europe or the deserts of Iraq. However, these two traits do not produce institutions and cultures that exhibit a propensity for counter-guerrilla warfare.

Moreover, however dire the need for low-intensity and reconstruction capabilities may be, the Big War capabilities must be created and maintained, a point which Barnett is very clear about.

Steven Biddle puts it very well in his brilliant recent book, Military Power: Explaining Defeat and Victory in Modern Battle. Biddle's focus is on what he calls "mid- to high-intensity conflict", i.e. conventional warfare in "the middle part of the spectrum ranging from guerilla warfare at the low end to global thermonuclear war at the high end." He then asks: "Why this focus? Is this just irrelevant 'old thinking' in an ere of counterterrorist warfare, ethnic conflict, coercive strategic bombing, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?" The answer:

The answer is no. While major conventional war is only one among many important missions, it remains far more important than some now suppose, and it will be for the foreseeable future. It will also remain the most expensive mission to fulfill, it will remain the central purpose for the majority of the U.S. military, and it will continue to occur between other parties in other parts of the world.

In the emerging war on terrorism, for example, counterintelligence and police work against terrorists hiding in the shadows will be accompanied by periodic major warfare against states who harbor them. …

[A]mong America's most powerful escalatory threats is the ability topple regimes by invading and taking political control of their territory -- that is by fighting and winning a major conventional theatre war. … Even where this ultimate sanction is unused, its existence makes other more coercive means more effective …

Nor are concerns with major warfare limited to great and regional powers, or wholly superseded by ethnic disputes, guerilla warfare, or other low-intensity conflicts elsewhere. The recent wars in Bosnia, Croatia, Eritrea, Zaire/Congo, Rwanda, Azerbaijan and Kuwait were all mid- to high-intensity conflicts I which combatants sought to take and hold territory in conventional ways.

So, we clearly need Leviathan and will continue to do so for the imaginable future -- probably forever.

However, we do not yet have a well-developed suite of low-intensity capabilities to complement Leviathan. Major Cassidy cites to a report from the United States Institute of Peace, which contains excerpts of interviews with senior U.S. Army officers who participated in operations in Bosnia. "The USIP report also concluded that peace operations are the new paradigm of conflict that will confront the army in future deployments as more failed states emerge and peace enforcement and nation-building become staples of the senior military leadership diet.'"

The USIP report quotes General Shinseki as saying:

Army doctrine-based training prepared him for warfighting and leadership at all levels, but “there wasn't a clear doctrine for stability operations. We are developing it, using the Bosnia experience, to define a doctrine for large stability operations. But it is this absence of a doctrine for a doctrine-based institution that you walk into in this environment. There you are in a kind of roll-your-own situation.

Cassidy also quotes "[a] study, [in which] the former Implementation Force chief of staff expressed the need to "build a military capable of many things—not just the high end." That study, A Force for Peace and Security U.S. and Allied Commanders' Views of the Military's Role in Peace Operations and the Impact on Terrorism of States in Conflict(1999) is here. A more recent update of the report is here. These studies, which I have only skimmed, appear to give a good overview of what the SysAdmin force would, at least in part, look like.

"Rolling your own" is something we cannot do in the future. The postwar situation in Iraq has a distinct "roll your own" feel to it. It is imperative that the United States do better at these things.

These same concerns are also addressed in this recent article, The Army's Dilemma, which concludes:

It is essential to remember that the US Army, the premier land force of the world’s sole superpower, must maintain primarily a warfighting focus in its culture, organization, training, and modernization plans. That is unassailable as the Army’s central focus. The issue for the Army is one of balance. Given the changing realities in how the United States will conduct future joint operations, plus the fact that mid- to low-intensity missions will clearly dominate in the coming decade or more (and the Army is the optimal force for such missions), the Army has to reexamine how it will balance its traditional focus on high-end combat operations with the need to perform the other missions that will predominate in the coming years.



Answering this question is exactly what Barnett is doing, with his suggestion a separate force with its own identity "to perform the other missions". These authors suggest that the resolution is "…nothing less than a cultural change, and these are neither lightly undertaken nor easily accomplished, particularly in conservative military organizations." I like Barnett's idea better. Keep the Leviathan culture just like it is. It is good at what it does. If you need a different culture to do a different job then create a different entity which can embody that different culture. Barnett's proposal makes a lot more sense. Let the warriors be warriors. When you really need a warrior, nothing else quite does the trick.

A breakthrough for Barnett's sales pitch in the Pentagon will come when the Army realizes that SysAdmin is not a threat to their warrior culture. Rather, it is the only way for them to preserve their warrior culture.

It occurs to me that this need to undertake two functions, one fighting major wars, one dealing with lesser contingencies in the Gap, has some analogy to a historical case. Specifically, Britain's performance in the last 150 years or so sheds some light on what the United States is going to need to do in the future. (And even if the analogy is not so strong, it is an interesting digression so sit still and read it.)

The very short version is this. Britain rose to preeminence in the mid-19th Century and started the 20th Century as a very wealthy and influential world power. It lost its Empire and became a second rate power as a result of costly participation in major wars. Some of this decline was inevitable, possibly. But the way it happened was not. Britain had two distinct groups of security challenges, (1) policing its Empire and the Empire's frontiers, and (2) deterring and if necessary defeating major-power threats to its Empire or to Britain's home island itself. It did the first task decently well and cost-effectively and humanely, at least in comparison to other colonial powers. But as a consequence of the disastrous human and material costs, and initial defeats, in the major wars it was compelled to fight, Britain could no longer sustain its Imperial enterprise. The British failed to master what Biddle calls medium- to high-intensity war. They failed to make the necessary investment to build continental-scale military forces prior to either world war. Despite early, episodic insights into modern warfare, the British failed to develop appropriate doctrine or equipment and failed to teach, buy and train as needed. The lessons about charging machine guns that they taught the Sudanese dervishes at Omdurman were lost on them. (See Daniel R. Headrick'sThe Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century.) The lessons they learned about attacking infantry armed with magazine rifles, which they learned the hard way from the Boers (and which were captured in Swinton's Defense of Duffer's Drift) were lost. The British thus failed to acquire an army which could deter Germany in 1914, or which could fight as effectively as possible if committed to battle.

The British by the end of World War I had made huge strides in developing doctrine, tactics and equipment (e.g. tanks, which they invented) needed to survive and to attack and to prevail in modern warfare.

(See Paddy Griffith's Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916-18.) The British proceeded to squander all of this knowledge, won at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the period before World War II. Even the victories of the last 100 days in 1918 were forgotten as soon as possible and only the massacre on the Somme was remembered. In light of these memories and its pre-existing biases, the possibility of fighting the Third Reich was greeted in the 1930s with horror. The British leadership recoiled from that prospect and sought technological panaceas such as "strategic bombing". So they again failed to create adequate military power to deter war or to wage it in a tolerable fashion if deterrence failed. When they were compelled to go onto the Continent after all in 1939, they had to enter that conflict in a condition even less well-prepared than they had been in 1914. They extemporized, and that doesn't work against professionals. They were repeatedly smacked silly by the Germans. They never completely got the hang of major, high-intensity war, and the British army generally performed poorly most of the time throughout World War II. The section in Russell A. Hart's recent masterwork Clash of Arms describes this inter-war failure by Britain in harsh but fair detail. (If you read one work of military history in the next year, read this one.) In other words, the British Army's institutional bias was a large factor in their disastrous performance in and preparation for the major wars against Germany, both of which they did not so much "win" as barely survive. (A classic book on this topic which I read recently is Michael Howard's The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defense Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars.)

The United States must not and will not follow in Britain's path, of course. We must always maintain Leviathan and keep it current and devote the human and material resources needed to make Leviathan second to none. We must always have a force which can deter conventional war, or prevail if deterrence fails, or make credible threats and deliver on those threats if necessary. We are however, faced with the challenging task of learning to do things Leviathan cannot do, things that the British used to do fairly well -- police and build institutions in what Barnett calls the Gap.

The British Army in the 20th century was too distracted by and bound up with its Imperial policing role, its proto-SysAdmin role. It did not want to do high-intensity warfare, i.e. spend the money and effort to learn to be Leviathan. To the old-time British army "normal" soldiering was running around in Waziristan or Somaliland or in the highlands of Burma. Our Army's institutional bias is the other way -- it has no nostalgia for chasing the Apaches or the Moros (to say nothing of the Phoenix Program). It's hallowed memory is of the clattering, green juggernaut which rolled over the Wehrmacht in 1944-45. Frankly, if there must be bias, ours is better. Better to mishandle the threats which are not existential. But even better than that, and best of all, would be to create a military which is organized to carry out well all of the tasks which it is ordered to undertake. The knowledge of how to carry out the low-intensity end of the spectrum exists. A distinct arm of the military charged with those functions is Barnett's best suggestion, and I think we may see it come into being. I hope so. (But call it something other than "System Administrators". Give it a more appealing name. Send all suggestions directly to Barnett. Ha.)

Of course, Barnett wants his SysAdmin team to do more than win counter-insurgency struggles. In fact, they may not get involved until Leviathan has finished at least the heaviest part of that heavy lifting. SysAdmin's true tasks would get underway as the shooting died down, and it began to function as a security force, and to build a local police force, and then schoolhouses and hospitals … . Barnett wants it to have a large inter-agency component, be multi-lingual and deal with foreign governments and NGOs. "The SysAdmin force will not be in a hurry to leave, and will remain until the locals are ready to assume control or the UN mission is up and running. All the broken windows will be fixed before this force departs, and the American public will come to understand that these are the troops who remain after we bring the boys home." I could quote at length his description of the proposed SysAdmin force, which is fascinating.

One element of the SysAdmin force that Barnett doesn't mention is that it could become … popular. There are a lot of people who want to "make a difference" and have some adventure in their lives, but are not young and rock-hard enough to be a paratrooper. For one thing, old guys like me, too old for Leviathan, could maybe work for it. (I wonder if they need any monolingual 41 year old lawyers with prostate problems? Honey, great news! I'm taking an 80% pay cut and we're going to Somalia!)

This all begs the question I raised in the prior post of whether we really know what the Hell we are doing if we try to do state-building. Do we really know how to get Gap territories organized for participation in the Core? I will mention here that Francis Fukuyama's short book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. I read this a few months ago. I strongly recommend it. (So does Max Boot, in this review.) (I'll note that Fukuyama is a very reliable writer. All his books are good. He is condemned by those who haven't read him for his "End of History" thesis, but he is more right than wrong even on that point, properly understood.)

Fukuyama appears to summarize much of the current wisdom on the topic, with many good footnotes to current scholarship. He breaks "state-building " out into building various interconnected institutions, some harder than others to construct. He makes a distinction between "strength of state institutions" and "scope of state functions". The ideal is a strong state with limited scope -- i.e. a state which is very effective at its core competencies (law enforcement, protecting property rights, honest and efficient tax collection being rock-bottom basics) and which does not get too mixed up in other stuff. The old Soviet Union had too much scope and too much strength in the wrong areas. Zaire has neither. Both are bad. Fukuyama refers to four "aspects of stateness", all of which must function, in increasing difficulty of importation or imposition: "(1) organizational design and management, (2) political system design, (3) basis of legitimization, (4) cultural and structural factors." He notes an important fact -- foreigners who go into Gap locations frequently destroy local institutions in their zeal to quickly do good. For example, rather than try to reform a corrupt, under-funded and incompetent local public health agency, they just step in and take over the function, hiring the few able locals. The local capacity withers entirely. Fukuyama also notes the basic challenge of measuring public sector outputs, a point with larger application.

All in all, Fukuyama's book offers the unspectacular but positive news that we know a fair amount about state-building on the level of administrative and political organization, but less on providing legitimacy and the cultural end of the spectrum. So, there are some things we don't know and others we can't know, and if we undertake these tasks we can count on them being difficult and providing us with surprises. A particular complicating factor is the extent to which cultural factors prevent the "connectivity" which Barnett sees as critical. In other words, if you can install the top of Fukuyama's chart, the superstructure, can you also generate or impose a cultural foundation which will support it if what is there already is not working? How hard is it to have foreigners create a government and then have people who live there think it is legitimate? Anyway, Fukuyama's short book is a good guide to the challenges that the SysAdmin force will be facing in the mid- and late-occupation phase.

Another point more specifically related to this blog and its small-l libertarian cousins comes to mind. Fukuyama quotes Milton Friedman, who said after the fall of the Soviet Union that the best course was "privatize, privatize, privatize". Friedman later conceded that he "was wrong" and "the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization." This points to a larger point, which is the growing consensus of the imperative need for effective government, and how its absence is the worst thing going on in the world. Those of us of a libertarian cast of mind need to adjust our thinking somewhat. We reflexively think: Government Bad. I know I do. Plus as Fukuyama points out, most of the 20th Century was a tale of bad deeds by too powerful governments. However, the mere fact that a state is a state does not make it "Our Enemy", as Albert Jay Nock famously called it. The State may never be our friend, but its necessity is apparent, especially when you look at places which don't have one. There is an optimal middle ground on this. Providing the Gap with Good Government is the foundation needed to get the people in these areas on the road to a better life, and ourselves a more peaceful world. How much we can really do to make this happen is an open question.

This need for functioning government, and much else of value, is summarized very well and in detail in Martin Wolf's brilliant new book Why Globalization Works. (Stellar review in the Economist, here.) The one sentence version: "Good markets need good governments." (Once I finish this book, I may have more to say about it on this blog.) Wolf's section on the initial wave of globalization, its collapse in 1914-45 and its Postwar resurgence is superb, and worth the price of the book alone. Wolf is the Chief Financial Commentator at the Financial Times. His recent Hayek Memorial Lecture is an appetizer-sized portion of the book, which should make you go buy it and read it.

Another book which I just finished reading also focuses on these issues -- but it looks at the true "first round" of state building in the Middle Ages -- Joseph Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. Strayer wrote the book with the state-building of the decolonization-era then going on in the 1950s in the background. In one comment on contemporary affairs, Strayer noted that those former colonies had armies but not much else. This did not bode well at the time, and subsequent events have not been happy. The first things the early kings of England and France put in place were law courts, both to impose peace and to sort out property disputes and enforce property rights, and they organized tax collection so it was systematic rather than predatory. The very first functions of the very first (and most successful and longest-lasting) modern states were the same core functions which Fukuyama identifies as the basics for state-building today. Some things don't change. Or not much, anyway.

Here's today's catch:

•“[op-ed] Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him: Unless peace is made in Chechnya, the war may spread,” by Fiona Hill, New York Times, 10 September, p. A27.

•“Odds of Bird-Flu Epidemic Rise As First Thai Death Is Confirmed,” by Gautam Naik et. al, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A2.

•“A Farsighted New Fortress Mentality on Wall Street: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation,” by Landon Thomas Jr., New York Times, 10 September, p. C1.

•“Intelligence Test: On Ground in Iraq, Soldier Uses Wits To Hunt Insurgents: Sgt. McCary, Fluent in Arabic, Improvises Tactics in Field; Not the War He Trained For; Deception Within the Rules,” by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 10 September, p. A1.

• “Powell Says Rapes and Killings in Sudan Are Genocide,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 10 September, p. A3.

•“Polls Suggest War Isn't Hurting Bush: Mounting Deaths in Iraq Have Not Resulted in Major Backlash in Public Opinion,” by John F. Harris and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 10 September, p. A10.

•A letter from Yuki Yokoyama; sent Monday, August 30, 2004

Hi. My name is Yuki Yokoyama.



I am an undergraduate student in California State University Northridge, and my major is Communication Studies.



I have purchased your book in July and read it over the summer in order to be prepared for the class I had in mind for taking, which is an interdisciplinary class called "Glopan Peace and Justice."



I was amazed by the wisdom encoded in your book when I finished reading it. (It took me quite a while because I am a Japanese international student who practically began studying English five years ago.)



Here is my story: On the first day of the class, we were asked by one of the professors (we have three professors in the class because it is an interdisciplinary course) to introduce ourselves to other class mates and ask four questions to different students individually.



When I were asked to ask the fourth question, the question was whether we as a humanity achieve a state of global peace and an establishment of universal justice. Being influenced by the optimism I leaned from your book, I answered to the other student that "I think it is possible." Then, she took the other position in extreme and said, "no, it will never happen."

As a result of my personality, I answered back to her, "of course we can! The question session ended with her parting shot, "we'll see!"



Soon after the class ended, I realized the meaning of what I have just done. It is much, much harder to prove my position with substantial, empirical evidences. So I started to brainstorm hypothetical strategies that we can achieve the "global peace and justice."

By the end of the week, I had developed four primitive hypotheses.

Then, I decided to refer back to your back because I remembered the surge of positive emotion when I first finished reading your book.



Then my eyes got caught on the chapter 8's title; "Hope Without Guarantees." Then, I thought, I got the answer that I had been looking for. Your thesis is backed with 10 hopes without guarantees. So as my hypothesis is backed with 4 hopes without guarantees. I realized that whether the hypotheses would turn out to be true or not does not really matter. It is a fact that there are hopes without guarantees in our hands!



I'm not sure whether I can prove my hypotheses are achievable, but I am quite certain that

I can convince the student that I am standing on the right position.



Furthermore, I realized when I read the director's commentary that the chapter is not the conclusion.



Thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to touch on the wisdom, enabling me

to find a reason to commit, and, most of all, giving me your time for reading this letter.



Sincerely,



Yuki Yokoyama

•“Budget Fares Change Face Of Air Travel For Indians,” by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 10 September, p. W1.

Most people flying now are completely new to the industry, which spells very good things for airport infrastructure spending in India. Right now 15 million fly a year. By 2010, that number is expected to be at least 70 million, but I’d guess much higher. As one airline executive there explained, “Low-cost airlines will unlock a massive aviation and tourism growth potential.”

That, my friends, is connectivity of the best sort. Everybody makes money, people get to travel, connections are made.

•“Kerry Criticizes G.O.P. for Failing to Renew Weapons Ban,” by Jodi Wilgoren, New York Times, 11 September, p. A11.

Kerry wants the ban, and so does Bush. But Bush isn’t pressuring lawmakers in his party to do anything about it, and that’s plain sad, because that’s about making sure seats stay Republican and sacrificing American lives in the process.

•[op-ed]“What Russia Knows Now,” by Victor Erofeyev, New York Times, 11 September, p. A31.

We Russians believe that grief brings people closer together - it has always been and still is a feeling that is shared. Sept. 11 changed the image of the United States in Russian consciousness forever: we realized that we live in a single world and that world is in need of our care and protection. Sept. 11 also affected us in another way. The whole of Russia was struck by the disciplined manner in which Americans and their government behaved during that tragic time.

The Russian state, alas, has lagged behind the heart: the leadership here has lacked the courage to draw the conclusion that we share a common enemy. I am by no means one of those who believe that America under George W. Bush has done everything right. In apparent mockery of its own freedoms it has developed ominous tendencies toward Orwellian social distortion. But at the same time, I admire America for seeing what we should have seen in Russia . . .

Russia is far from certain that it has any substantial relationship to this newly imperiled civilization. It relapses into a stupor in the face of its enemy's audacity. It looks back, sometimes with nostalgia, on Stalin's cunning imperial maneuvers, at his seizure of half of Europe. Nowadays it is awkward and ungainly.

But while Russia has been unsuccessfully searching for its own national idea since the collapse of communism, the extremists have listed it as one of their enemies, and have acted accordingly. A war has begun here, and we have to live by the laws of wartime and submit to the ruling authority. This authority has unfortunately inherited a bad legacy; it is not responsible to anyone and it is inclined to tell lies. But no matter what one might think of Mr. Putin - we know his weaknesses, we know his penchant for censorship and restrictive legislation - he is the one who must lead us. In the absence of any real political opposition or civil society, it is the president who must decide whose side Russia will be on in the war. As to the right decision, there is no question.

Russians would like to remain hors de combat in the conflict of civilizations, but they won't be able to. On Sept. 11, 2001, we wept in sympathy with America; after Beslan we have to dry our tears and try to build genuine ties with the West.

Here is Zenpundit’s piece. No comment from me. I think it stands on its own. Although I will say this, his points on NGOs brings to mind the negative response I got a couple a days ago from Doctors Without Borders regarding my concept that the Sys Admin force should seek greater cooperation with Non-Governmental Organizations in post-conflict situations:

Monday, August 30, 2004

LEVIATHAN BOUND: THE DANGERS OF KANTIAN RULE SETS AND UNACCOUNTABLE NGO'S

Joseph Nye is justly famous for his articulation of the concept of "Soft Power," the oft-times intangible but influential weight of a nation-state's cultural, ideological and memetic base that substantively makes that society distinct, attractive and persuasive to others. This is contrasted with the "Hard Power" of military and economic might that can intimidate, bribe or coerce. While it's easily arguable that Hard Power is more important or decisive a factor in international relations than Soft Power my response would be, "In what kind of time frame?"

The longer the time frame we are considering the greater the weight we must give to the implications of Soft Power. Great Britain of George III was awash in hard power but its mercantilist empire did not survive the effects of the words of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. Furthermore, when we recognize the implications of soft power it is all more crucial that we understand the premises of certain soft power trends that are competing in the marketplace of ideas for long-term dominance. Ideas and ideologies do evolve in the real world in response to events but their trend lines tend to stay in the direction of their logical conclusion unless they are conclusively refuted.

This brings me to Tom Barnett's PNM theory. In The Pentagon's New Map, Dr. Barnett discusses many key concepts in his Global Transaction Strategy, one of which is Rule Sets—the recognized principles by which states interact and evaluate actions or policies in terms of their legitimacy. Terms like "rogue state," "war of aggression," "just war," "illegal combatant" carry in them the implicit understanding of what it means to have operative rule sets. The problem is that there is a significant divergence between the traditional Rule Set the United States has used in international relations since the end of WWII and the vision currently entrancing most of Europe and Transnational Progressive NGO activists. Dr. Barnett refers to the second as "Kantian Rule Sets" denoting the idea of the Kantian "perpetual peace” that exists within the Core. This new Kantian Rule Set developed with American encouragement and advice to solve "the German problem"—see Dean Acheson's memoirs on the diplomacy behind the Schumann Plan—and to integrate Japan irrevocably into the Core.

Unfortunately, the Kantian Rule Set that worked so well in neutralizing the unbalancing geopolitical claims of Germany and Japan and safeguarding their neighbors is incredibly ill-suited to handling the rogue state aggressors, anarchic failed states and apocalyptic Islamist terror groups that run riot in the Gap. The premises of the Kantian Rule Set prohibit the Leviathan function Dr. Barnett sees as necessary to foster connectivity and control imminent disasters. It is really a rule set for a post-Gap world. If you have any doubts about this I offer Bosnia, Rwanda and the Sudan as an example of the humanitarian and moral costs to applying Kantian Rule Set restrictions to prevent meaningful humanitarian intervention in the Gap.

That however is the danger of misguided moralism in misapplying a standard that can only exist between states that accept the premises of the rule set that governs the Core. There is a second danger in that groups who do not relish the prospect of "Connectivity" with increased flow of information, people, goods, transparency and accountability have seized on Kantian Rules to keep the Gap poor and disconnected and aggrandizing power for themselves. They are not what you could describe as friendly toward market mechanisms, democratic accountability or honest debate.

One of their key arguments is the illegitimacy of traditional, Westphalian concepts of national sovereignty, which they like to misrepresent as "New Sovereigntist" when most of these historic principles are still the operative tenets of International Law. Legitimacy, in their view, is vested rather ambiguously, in a collection of transnational bodies, courts and commissions which create a consensus opinion from the larger community of IL scholars and NGO activists. Sort of a Transnational Progressive Ulemna, to borrow a concept from Islamic jurisprudence and equally unaccountable to those over whom they purport to claim authority.

These NGOs have moved to claim political power through established mechanisms like the UN and the World Bank, often advocating Deep Ecology positions that do not reflect the wishes of the citizens of the Gap states activists claim to be championing, blocking much needed development projects. Recently The Schlesinger Commission upbraided the venerable Red Cross for attempting to hold the United States government accountable for controversial protocols to the Geneva Convention that require "police model" restrictions on the U.S. military that the U.S. has neither signed nor ratified. This misrepresentation of their preferred and novel interpretation of treaty clauses or International Law as a supposedly universal and accepted standards is a frequent NGO tactic for accumulating power or "containing" U.S. policy. NGOs count on journalists and citizens of democratic states not having the inclination or time to read tedious treaty clauses or case histories and try to attach a negative connotation to policies that might promote Connectivity in the Gap.

Not all of the NGOs or even the majority of them have this ideological agenda in mind. Most of them were founded and continue to operate with the intention of helping people in dire circumstances. Much of the work they do is invaluable. However, we must be aware that the Transnational Progressive trend is out there in the NGO world, it has political currency in important circles and the logical conclusions of this ideology are exceptionally pernicious. Deep Ecology alone contemplates a scenario that I can charitably describe only as Hitlerian in scope. They are not working to help the farmer ambling behind a water buffalo.

People living in the Gap should not be condemned to the precarious Hobbesian world of genocide, war and famine to suit the interests of wealthy professional activists and string-pullers residing comfortably in the Core.

6:01 PM

Click here for Zenpundit’s site and the posting

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 11 September 2004

No, I don’t plan to wax philosophical about the enduring meaning of 9/11 today. There’s enough of that in the media to satisfy everyone. Instead, I wanted to cross-post an entry from online philosopher Mark, aka Zenpundit, which I think does a nice job of reminding us that even though 9/11 was a shock to the system, or what I call a System Perturbation, the Core fundamentally lives within the stability exemplified by Immanuel Kant’s dream of perpetual peace. But that rule set, as I so often point out, does not extend into the Gap, and so what we felt on 9/11 was that Hobbesian world of pain and brutality reaching into our own. America has chosen to respond to that challenge, whereas Europe as not. America has chosen, through this administration that looks to be on the verge of winning re-election, to deal with the main source of transnational terrorism in the Gap right now, which is the Middle East. We chose to set off a System Perturbation inside that Middle East by taking down the nastiest hombre there and throwing down the gauntlet before all the forces of disconnectedness in the region.

What has been the cost of this response? Roughly 750 combat deaths to date, with another 250 lives lost in accidents, diseases, and other sundry ways (as they are every year inside the military with its population of roughly one million souls). How does that stand against the almost 3,000 souls we lost at the start of this war? That is for God to decide in the long term and the American electorate to decide in early November. But no matter what the relatives losses on either side, the matter of the bifurcated rule set remains. Both 9/11 and the Iraq takedown are more related to globalization’s progressive penetration of the Middle East than they are to each other. That much I am certain. In joining this Global War on Terrorism, we joined an ongoing conflict between the forces of connectedness as represented by globalization’s advance and the forces of disconnectedness as represented by nihilistic transnational terrorism, but have no doubt, the bodies have been piling up on both sides for many years prior to 9/11. We just start counting anew on that date.

But we don’t need to stay stuck on that date, and we shouldn’t link current policies to that past grievance, because that’s not what American patriotism should ever be about. We need to be about future triumphs, not past tragedies, even as those tragedies served ably as spurs to great historical actions that we needed to undertake—namely, finally doing something about the Middle East.

Having said that, we need to be careful that we divorce our logic on transforming the Middle East from one of revenge to one of genuine hope for all involved. We seek to connect the Middle East to the Core not simply to eradicate transnational terrorism but because it’s the right thing to do for the people there, whether we like them or not. So we need to move beyond 9/11 as a rationale and learn, in that most Christ-like way, to love our enemies more than ourselves. Easy? Never. But revenge and payback isn’t a strategic vision, and that’s what’s required for the global future worth creating: that sense of how it works out not just for us but for everybody.

Speaking of moving on, I caught myself answering an email from a professor at a DC-based college today, and by doing so I too mentally crossed a line. He had asked if it would be possible for me to collaborate on a course with him because he likes PNM so much and has incorporated it deeply into his current courses. I replied that I was interested, but didn’t know how to pursue such a thing from afar (I mean, how to arrange for travel alone?). Then I asked him point-blank: how hard would it be for me to get a permanent post at a university in the DC or surrounding area.

No real forethought, it just urped out of me.

So I had to wonder why.

I thought about the Naval War College mistakenly charging me 34 hours of leave without pay for the last week of my China trip, even though I had submitted a leave slip invoking the Family Medical Leave Act, which allows me to use sick leave for big family events like an adoption. Yeah, you notice that much money all of a sudden gone in your paycheck!

But that seemed petty to cite that. Working for a huge bureaucracy does suck, but that’s not why leave.

How about this? A new assignment I really don’t want: ginning up alternative global futures to justify naval force structure arguments in some upcoming budget drill in DC. Christ! That’s exactly the sort of make-work crap that drove me outta DC and the Center for Naval Analyses. We’re not really supposed to do that sort of service-partisan “research” up in Newport, but such is the state of affairs in the Pentagon, so my big research opportunity of coming months is anything but research or an opportunity. It’s budgetary hack work. I’ll gin up scenarios I don’t believe in to justify force structures I don’t feel are warranted by the current security environment.

How can I say that in advance? I just know that whatever we produce will need to be “robust,” meaning it will show beyond a shadow of a bureaucratic doubt that the Navy should not be cut in relation to the Army or Air Force. To me, that kind of work is soul killing for a serious grand strategist and futurist, because it’s basically whoring. I’m not a naval strategist, nor a army one, nor an air one. I want what’s best for the country, not what’s best for one service, and because I’ve never served, I just don’t bleed navy blue, or green, or any of those other colors.

And you know what? That objectivity is essential for what I do well and what I did in writing PNM. You don’t come up with Leviathan and Sys Admin if you simply can’t bear to see your precious service “destroyed” by these “crazy ideas.”

Then I think again.

I’ve whored before to make money and I’ll whore again. And maybe . . . just maybe, I’ll be able to change some minds with the great and daring work I’ll do on this study.

And no, I’m not waiting for pigs to fly outta my ass. I really do believe I can do good work even under bad circumstances.

So if it’s not the petty BS of the bureaucratic life, nor the indignities of paying the bureaucratic piper in terms of analysis, then why the desire to move on?

Perhaps it’s just the seven years I will have put in come next summer. Call it the seven-year-itch.

Perhaps I’ve simply grown beyond the venue, or grown stale, or grown too comfortable and egotistical. Maybe I just want to be scared, and scrambling again for every G.D. inch!

Or maybe I’ve just consummated what this chapter in my life and career have logically turned out to constitute: I spent years working the grand strategic vision and now I’ve got one. Maybe I just need to see the next mountaintop worth climbing.

Or maybe I worry about living in such an incredibly white place with an Asian daughter.

Or maybe I like Rhode Island more than I like Rhode Islanders.

I have to admit: while boogie boarding with son Kevin this early eve I did see the most incredible sky, like a beautiful sea shell, and it made me realize what a spectacularly gorgeous place it is where we live. And yet, I don’t feel particularly at home here, and talking to many long-term transplants about that feeling, I don’t ever expect it to go away.

You know, when the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix offered to do my Dad’s dangerous heart surgery (he eventually succumbed to complication post-surgery), he said no, despite knowing the great skill he would enjoy at such a prestigious place. No, my Dad said, “If I’m going to die, I want to go home.”

And frankly, this isn’t the place I would think of in that light, and at age 42, I have to start wondering: Where is that place?

Today’s catch:

•“What Russia Knows Now,” by Victor Erofeyev, New York Times, 11 September, p. A31.

•“Kerry Criticizes G.O.P. for Failing to Renew Weapons Ban,” by Jodi Wilgoren, New York Times, 11 September, p. A11.

•“Budget Fares Change Face Of Air Travel For Indians,” by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 10 September, p. W1.

•A letter from Yuki Yokoyama; sent Monday, August 30, 2004

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 12 September 2004

I took a political philosophy course at Harvard as a graduate student with the legendary professor Judith Shklar. Originally from the Baltics, she had a slight accent and this way about her that reminded me of the most intimidating nuns I had ever encountered in grade school at Immaculate Conception in Boscobel WI. Trying to debate philosophy with this woman was like trying to box Muhammed Ali in his prime: she would just float around your arguments, smiling wanly, and then sting you like a bee. I had a cat like her at the time. His name was Karl. This black cat could cut you with his right paw three or four times before you’d even know what was happening. He was the Waco Kid of cats. Shklar was like that: an unbelievably adroit mind.

Well, one time she pounced on me during class. Now, you have to remember, this class was me, Andrew Sullivan, Fareed Zakaria, Minxin Pei, and a few others just as sharp. She wanted to know my opinion of an op-ed that had appeared in the New York Times that morning, and I froze. I always read the Times at night, to chill after a lot day of studying. She could sense my hesitation and fear, old Judith could, so she was nice to me that particular day. The professor announced to the class: “Ah yes, I see. Mr. Barnett likes to read the paper at the end of the day, much as I like to read the Sunday Times on Sunday night. So we’ll give him a pass on this one.”

And she moved on around the table . . ..

This is just my long-winded way of saying that I’ll blog any stories from the Sunday Times tomorrow, not today, because I like to read it about 10pm on Sunday nights, after all the cleaning’s been done and everyone’s in bed.

So instead of stories today for the bulk, I’ll offer a selection of the letters I received from people regarding the C-SPAN broadcast of my brief at National Defense University (originally taped 2 June, shown 4 Sept). I only kept letters from the first 100 or so. In all, I must have received somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 letters, but I only kept some (primarily) from the first 100 or so, because I figured those would be all I received, and I wanted to remember as many as possible.

Now, I’m happy to say (on some levels), that my email box is back to being filled daily with penis-enlargement and mortgage ads, apparently the two things a 42-year-old father of four desperately needs—at least in the minds of the spammers. So here’s a bunch in no particular order. Just ones that caught my eye. I will include names, but not the email addresses. And don’t worry, whenever anyone wrote “not for posting” on the letter, I was sure to delete upon reading.

Will confess that none of the nasty ones are in here. Got a special file for those.

Here we go:

LETTER

Dear Mr. Barnett:



I have just read your most recent weblog entry and watched a rerun of your speech (date 6/2/04) "The Military in the 21st Century". I cannot wait to read your book. You are quite blessed with intellect and a wonderful teaching delivery. Wonderful - completely enthralling. You have done more in your 41 years than I could do in 400.

(I also enjoy the humor you insert in your lectures).



From a humble NY music teacher who loves to read and learn,

Jane Keidel Bader





P.S. If you have a mailing list please add me on it. My husband will enjoy your writing.

LETTER

I'm hopelessly hooked to your presence on the scene* as an important figure (* the scene is the maelstrom of bits of information that assault the senses in our culture on a minute by minute basis). You're important because you're an "explainer" who's also an optimist.

Further, you appear to be dealing with the reality of the political structure instead of complaining that it even exists. It's more than refreshing, it's enlightening because it doesn't even begin to bother with the fait accompli of the world's current power structure, but is simply focused upon making it work right, and why.

Frankly, I probably never would have read you had I not by chance "channel surfed" into your presentation on C-Span last weekend. My path over the years, since the 1960's when I came of age, has been from Marshall McLuhan to Noam Chomsky, for instance, seeking to make sense of the world that I live in. I've been inordinately exposed to the sector of popular information that's pessimistic about our future, and I've found myself not feeling very hopeful about the future of our world. I've felt this way all of my adult life.

You've changed that for me. Before you, Daniel Yergin assuaged my pessimism to a small degree with his books, "The Prize" and then "Commanding Heights". But I've never encountered anything like your work to this point. And I probably never would have purposely gone looking in your direction, either.

What you've changed for me is my "heart and mind" about the prospects for our future under the vast, complex bureaucracy of our government, the "military-industrial complex" that Ike defined in his farewell speech, and all the attendant noise that this indordinate complexity generates in the world. From what I can see, you've done that for a lot of other people, as well.

You've de-mystified the process that produces change within the system, as well.

I believe that your activities in bringing this information to the public sector are important, but I fear that you will run up against the same problem that Noam Chomsky has: the message isn't reducable to "sound bytes".

Or is it?

I did a google search on "pessimism" and got 321,000 hits. Then I did a search on "optimism" and got 1,540,000 hits. This says it all: optimism has a bigger market than pessimism.

That's the "hook".

Jeff Barnard

LETTER

I was channel surfing and came upon your lecture on CSPAN. I live in Santa Cruz CA, the "National Headquarters" for every hippy and liberal in America. Personally, I have participated in at least two dozen protests against the war in Iraq and have been a very strong anti-war advocate. After I watched your lecture, I hurried to our local bookstore and with difficulty, found your book. I read for about 30 minutes and decided to purchase the book, next week, I still have two books sitting on by reading sofa at home. I am amazed at how you have put this information in such simple terms and explained to me what the hell is going on. I love your work so far, I will still speak against the war, but at least I have begun to understand why it's happening. Thank you very much! If

you're ever in the Santa Cruz area, your soy nonfat mocha is on me.

-helbard.

p.s. I loved the graphics on CSPAN, very clever, too bad they are missing from

the book.

LETTER

Dear Mr. Barnett,

Thank you for your work and your passion for your work! Your appearance on C-SPAN and my subsequent reading on your Web site has re-ordered my understanding of the World and of myself.

Your briefing gives the first legitimate, coherent argument I’ve heard as to why there are solid strategic reasons to be in Iraq, and which can help the cause of world peace. Your work has had the effect of helping me see the broad context of the ideological rhetoric taking place and I suddenly feel I am viewing political questions from outside of the communications echo-chamber network for the first time, because I’m finally looking at foreign affairs through the lens of a scientist committed to objective truths, rather than from the perspective of an ideologue seeking to win an election or a news personality working for a network that depends on the advertising of ideologically motivated businesses.

I believe that an important component of the new paradigm that global civilization is entering into is transparency, openness and truth. What your work helps me see is that what so many, including myself, have reacted to against Bush, is not that invading Iraq was necessarily a bad thing (which is what I thought until I read your work), but that he and his administration did not have enough respect for its citizenry to even attempt to articulate to us the main reasons why they wanted to invade Iraq. Wolfowitz admitted this in his Vanity Fair interview last year, in which he said they settled on WMD and specious connections to Al Qaeda, because they thought the public wouldn’t buy the real desire, which was to bring democracy and work to more fully integrate the region into the world economy (and also, of slightly lesser strategic importance, to shift military bases out of Saudi Arabia). I understand they made their calculation based on getting the war off the ground in time to create a positive case study for the reelection campaign, but I still resent it and hope Kerry will manage your strategy more competently.

So, thank you for all your hard work and research that allowed you to integrate so many different disciplines into your Global Transaction Strategy and for thinking strategically and optimistically of a future in which we can all live in together and prosper!

Sincerely,

Eric Forst

Culver City, California

LETTER

Mr. Barnett:

My husband and I caught (most) of your presentation on C-SPAN on 9/04/04, and were transfixed the entire time. We had only one (rhetorical) question when your presentation was over: Why are you not given an hour of prime time to enlighten the American public? It's a sad truth that most of what we get from the general media (i.e. CNN, MSNBC) re: the Middle East is politically motivated and dumbed down to baby food. I would suggest that you accept any opportunities to present to a larger audience even though at first glance it may seem fruitless.

I read your blog, I know you're busy with thousands of other emailers so the fact that you read this is enough.

Rock on,

Zoey Rawlins, MBA 2005

LETTER

Dear Dr. Barnett,



I was fortunate to catch you on cspan the other night, and just wanted to let you know that I was blown away. Without a doubt, you were the best thing I've seen on t.v. in years.

Thank You !!!!!

Do you have any political aspirations ?

Yours,



Kelby N. Phillips

LETTER

Quickly, I just wanted you to know you've reached way beyond your usual audience of government/military personnel and touched the common man in the street (me). My compacency has been challenged and I am grateful. As a Republican isolationist, you have eloquently given me sufficient data to convince me your observations are valid. After watching your presentation on CSPAN, I had the best night of sleep since before 9/11. I intend to read MUCH more of your excellent work. Truly, I thank you.

-Chaz Thompson

LETTER

Tom,



I watched your program on C-SPAN last night, twice!

I think it is the most informative program I've ever seen on TV.

The matter is so timely and your case so compelling it needs to reach as wide an audience as possible.

What would it take to get you to come to Cleveland?

If the people were better educated (like I became last night), it would be easier for the politicians to support implementation of your recommendations.

Keep up the great work.



Best Regards



Rich Lowrie

Cleveland, OH

LETTER

Dr. Barnett-

I happened upon your taped briefing last night on CSpan while awaiting Hurricane Francine to appear.

Had to stay up until 2 am for the finish.

Wonderful presentation and very illuminating. I really enjoyed the whole thing but especially the interplay with the Pakistani gentleman.

When I can get out I will go to B&N to get your book and I intend to follow-up on your blog page.

Thanks for an interesting evening.

Richard J. Greenspan, DDS

LETTER

Dear Dr. Barnett,

I was fortunate enough to catch most of your presentation at the War College on C-Span yesterday, and wanted to let you know that I am very excited about the work you are doing. I had never heard of you prior to yesterday. I'll be out today looking for a place to buy your latest book.

In a country filled with confusing noise and political baloney, you are a rare and unique voice of sanity who inspires confidence that there is at least ONE person out there who may be able to positively influence the future that we all must move forward into.

I am a 56 year old man, working as a taxicab dispatcher in Worcester, Ma.

Jeff Barnard

LETTER

Dear Mr. Barnett,

I am and many others I know in Asia are very interested in your concepts especially About China , Far East and oil and gas.

Please direct me to your material that will give your view of this region , foreign direct Investment and oil and gas . Thank you for any sections I can read on line.



May I say that I feel lucky to have seen your Presentation lecture , The Military in the 21st Century--on C-SPAN TV today. Although I understand it is about the US military I feel it is very valuable for its global picture .



Are your books , The Pentagons New Map available in Singapore , Indonesia and Thailand ?



If not, how would several people I know in thoses countries aquire your book soonest. It is very important for them to have it to read as quickly as possible.



How would they get a copy of the video presentation lecture i saw here in Hawaii today?



I am an American who has worked in Asia much of my life ,now retired . I have many friends who are still working in Asia and should read your book . Some need it immediately as everyone is struggling with what the future holds and how to face it the best way economically in Asia .

Thank you for any help and directions .

Aloha from Hawaii

P.M. Lorentz

LETTER

Dear Thomas,



Just by accident I caught your talk on C-SPAN at 11 o[clock. Most of it went over my head, but being very interested in world affairs I was mesmerized by your presentation, and I am encouraged that the military and our government has clear thinking men like you to advise them. I went to your web page and read your blog. I am so happy to read that you will be voting for John Kerry. The real reason for this E-mail is to give you a recipe that may help you relieve the sinus infection.



Fresh ginger. . .. Grated on a fine grater so that you can get some juice

Garlic . . .. . ...put through a press

Fresh lemon juice

Honey

Very hot water

Cayenne pepper



In a 8 oz. cup add 1tsp. or more ginger juice, 1lg clove garlic 1 tsp or more lemon juice, honey to taste, HOT water, and a few generous shakes of pepper.



Drink this a few times a day. It will not cure the infection if it is very severe but it really helps with very bad head and chest colds and may give you some relief.



I know this sounds trite, but. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . ..Thanks for your service to our country!!!! I hope the people in power listen to your ideas and take them to heart. Our future depends on it.



Respectfully,

Barb Juras

LETTER

Dear Dr. Barnett:

I had to write after seeing your presentation on C-Span. I am a 67 year old woman who remembers the clear cut rational of World War II and the cold war. Either us or them. Since the end of the cold war, our foreign policy has seemed to be without purpose; our military reactive and tentative. You have presented a very positive vision of what the world could be. I hope those in power in our country and abroad see the wisdom in your vision and plan accordingly.

Also, I wish to commend you for your response to the gentleman from Packistan who asked why the west does not make an effort to understand the Moslem culture. While government officials and the press describe the "culture war" between the west and Moslem countries in terms of wealth and power, I believe you properly described it as a difference of women's participation in life. You are the only person I have heard describe it thus, and also to note that the west already has been through this process. Thank you for being so candid in your response.

Sincerely,

Lucille Gray

LETTER

Hello Mr. Barnett,

I was awestruck by your presentation. I sat down and caught over an hour's worth and it made so many geopolitical issues clear to me. Most notably "following the money" to see who our allies or potential allies are or will be.

I found that $3,000 per capita figure which determined the benchmark for a happy state fascinating. The more money flowing into an out of a country the more likely "Barbie" has established a beach-head and the more likely we have an ally.

When Saudi Arabia's inflow/outflow benchmark was presented, it became clear why the most blood-thirsty terrorists seem to come out of there.

Another point I thought was really cool was when you stated our next line of attack would be to hunt down "bad actors" with one of those "Nintendo gizmos", that flying drone with those hell-fire missles. ("Hell-fire", what a name. Makes you definitely not want to be on the business end of one of those weapons.) Anyway. I found that the battle theater will become more like the classic, Alexander the Great paradigm whereas you kill the leaders first.

I plan on watching the rerun on Sunday.

I hope you are on somebod's radar for a potential Secretary of State gig on 2006.

Tony Austin

--

Creative Director

LETTER

Dr. Barnett,

As an ex-Democrat, non-Republican (independent) I have been ideologically disenfranchised by the current administration's take on globalization; and yet not wholly won over by the left's "hearts and flowers" socialism.

I stumbled across the C-Span replay of your June 4th presentation at Ft. McNair, National Defense University regarding the role of the military in the 21st century, and was Astounded by your logical summations of where we are and where we're headed.

Nice presentation, too. Dry wit goes a long way with me intellectually.

Damn, what a concept: Logic. Statistics. Extrapolations. Facts. Flashy presentation software. It's been a great way to sit through a hurricane (Francis is right on top of us right now.)

If some of your ideas and explanations had been used by either party in their all-too-simplistic rhetoric I could have been swayed in either direction. Hell, if the Bush administration had just bothered to explain WHY they were making the moves they were, instead of so stupidly lying to me, I wouldn't have so strongly opposed them. I'm all for tossing out dictators.

Unfortunately, It seems clear that they don't know what they're doing when it comes to following through on foreign policy.

Thanks for the food for thought. I was ravenous.

I'm reading every article of yours I can find.

Sincerely,

Tim Powell

LETTER

Sir:



I just watched your speech 'The Pentagons new map' on C-Span. This 'new map' was a very interesting concept on the use of military sources and how they should be managed. I would like to thank you for the information I learned. Your recorded speech also helped to put some things into perspective for me. I work for a leading semiconductor manufactory here in Austin (freescale, formally known as Motorola SPS) and trained workers from China in the not so distance past. Your explanation of China as a 'new core' hit home for me because I could see it from working with these folks.



I produce local television access in Austin and would like to ask your permission to use some of the information I learned. In particular I would like to use your terms that explain 'the gap, the old core and the new core' from your speech to tie together what I call 'misinformation about globalization'. Also do you have the power point slides used in 'The Brief' speech made available to the public? I would like to get parts of your message out through my access television program.



Thank you.



David Holsonbake

Austin Texas

LETTER

Being an ordinary American woman, age 56, with very little knowledge of the military, turning on C-Spann tonight by chance, I must say I was truly transfixed in my seat seat listening to your lecture about the world and the military decisions of the future. You are a brilliant man and you made it so understandable, although so many new concepts were introduced to me that I was glad I had my VHS recorder available to record you so I can go back and re-listen to parts of it again. Your comments on connectivity and our real relationship with the world makes so much sense you wonder why more people don't see it the way you do. I almost think that speech should be passed out as a DVD to accompany your book, which I am going to look for on Tuesday.

I don't know enough to ask real pertinent questions, but one question in my mind while I was listening to you - was the Marshall plan for Europe and the reconstruction of Japan after WWII the predcessor of the System Administration you were talking about - keeping in mind that the war was finished at that point. Perhaps this is a thought you might include in future speeches/lectures.

Thanks again for an astounding opening of my mind experience tonight - and here I thought I was just a stagnant befuddled beginning senior citizen.

Maureen Kennedy

LETTER

Mr. Barnett,



I am an airline pilot, (currently for Continental Airlines), who has spent a good deal of my aviation career living and working in the Middle East. I was riveted by your lecture of 06/02/04 on C-Span; it explained so much of what I experienced in that part of the world during the last decade and a half. I am not sure it gave me much hope, but I definitely have a more complete picture.



I have ordered your book on Amazon, and can't wait to read it. Thank you so much for being on C-Span and the work you do.



Warmest regards,



William F. Newland

Manhattan, Beach, CA

LETTER

Dear Mr. Barnett,



I had the pleasure this evening of watching your presentation on CSPAN (from 6/2004). I do not view CSPAN to regularly, but one of your slides caught my eye so I continued to watch. I am writing to simply tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation. You have an excellent ability to discuss an issue as complex as the U.S. military role in future world affairs with precise clarity and simplicity.



I must say that I have been disheartened recently watching the presidential election coverage, where it seems that our candidates lack substance, and real issues are replaced by finger pointing and misinformation. A new hope of mine is that whoever leads our country over the next decade and beyond will have people with insight such as yours influencing their policies.



Thank you again for the excellent presentation. I look forward to reading your book!



Sincerely,



Thomas K.

Philadelphia, PA

LETTER

Dr. Barnett -



I greatly enjoyed your briefing broadcast on C-Span this evening. With a son who is a Plebe at the US Military Academy at West Point (Go Army, etc. - sorry!), I am very interested in the future you paint for the military.



Can you provide any advice I can pass on to our Cadet Private as he begins his military career, that he may be better prepared to lead in the next decade?



David Bockstanz

Emmaus, PA

LETTER

Tom

Got your book and saw you on C-Span. Superb. Keep it up.

I hope the military reorganizes to two-forces quickly yet am not optimistic in short term as we are really disorganized for gap administration.



Example: the Army has no regular Army, active duty, military police general as a warfighter (i.e. a general to go into the gap). Instead we take field artillery generals and put them in charge of prisons or at JTF-6 (counter-drug/law enforcement) or send infantry generals to train police forces in Iraq instead of MP generals.



Now, the Army would not take an MP and put him in charge of an artillery unit but the Army will take an FA general and put him in charge of a police unit. How dumb is that? And that Rummy allows this to exist is puzzling. Anyway, one can see that Army branch bureaucratic politics will inhibit the transformation needed for GWOT. I pray your idea of a 4-star MP general for the system admin force will happen sooner than later but expect a good fight from the old guard.

Regards

Steve

LETTER

Dear Tom,



I just saw the last 1.5 hours of your show. Have to admit it was great. I will tape the second showing so I can see it in full.



I am a 20 year vet of the USAF retired in 1996. I was very surprised when you talked about the "purple flags." As an enlisted near the end of my career I can recall discussions with my friends about the idea that the miltiary should gel into one large force. The US Armed Forces or whatever. The idea being in line with your thoughts on the flags. I think that your idea holds more water at this stage. Starting at the top would be better but in the end I still think that in the end it will be one uniform.



I also agree with the seperation of the forces to the extent that you showed. Had there been a place for me to stay in and be productive without being pushed ot get more rank or get out, I would have stayed in at the level I was at (MSgt.E7) We need to make use of the talent that is continuing to get out becasue they are frustrated with the staus quo like I was.



Thanks for your time, I have you book on the way and hope to hear more from you in the future.



Dave Seibert

LETTER

Tom,



I am here in Orlando waiting for FRANCES, the hurricane, to hit and was watching the Weather Channel. While flipping threw the channels, I accidentally “tuned in” to your lecture. I have not checked the weather, since, but instead watched your whole lecture.



First time somebody finally explained what is really going on Iraq, North Korea, and so forth, than what I get from the media and their 1 to 2 minute analysis. I understood about 70% of your lecture, because I don’t know all the DOD and “Inside the Beltway” terminology.



Again, thank you. I wish you had a bigger audience to hear your lecture.



Sincerely,



Peter S. Björklund

Contract Software Developer

Orlando, FL

LETTER

You are the first person I have heard make sense of what changes are occurring within the US and the rest of the world and how this is impacting our defense. Just dumb Luck I caught you on CSPAN tonight. I am going to go buy the book. Good job, Good health. (Sinus infections are a bitch)

LETTER

Dr. Barnett;



Cspan got me this week. Like a really good sermon, (there aren't many of em) you have to listen to it again. Maybe I'll go looking for your book this week.



You must dream in graphics. Good show.



Marty Thurber

Fargo ND

LETTER

I've never watched anything on C-Span that sucked me in like your talk on the Military in the 21st Centruy that is being broadcast on C-Span right now. I will grab your book tomorrow.

If the book is, as I assume, the argument I saw you making tonight, I hope the next president will give it a read.

Tim Beidel

South Portland, ME

•"Let a Thousand Ideas Flower: China Is a New Hotbed of Research," by Chris Buckley, New York Times, 13 September 2004, p. C1.

•"Rivers Run Black, and Chinese Die of Cancer," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 12 September 2004, p. A1.

•"In a Tidal Wave, China's Masses Pour From Farm to City," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 12 September 2004, p. WK6.

But there are huge costs involved with that leap, with environmental damage leading the list. There was a reason why our third "economic security wargame" with Cantor Fitzgerald in the NewRuleSets.Project was about environmental damage: you can't grow an economy that fast, sucking up that much energy, without exactly a profound human toll.

Don't believe me? Then go back and reread my posts about traveling in China, where I couldn't see the sky on a cloudless day in Guangzhou. China is full of rivers that are polluted and cities with "red alert" conditions 365 days a year.

The Chinese are reaching--as they always seem to do--the social tipping point on pollution faster than just about anyone in human history. And it will be both destabilizing economically even as it is stabilizing politically. It will destabilize economically because it will demand from China's private sector a far greater effort at reining in pollution, which won't be cheap, and as a result will begin whittling away China's enormous cost advantages associated with all that cheap labor. But it will stabilize things politically because, as the masses begin to agitate upwards for better environmental regulations and responsibility, the political system will inevitably pluralize itself to accommodate those demands. In short, China will be a lot richer in 20 years as a result, but also a lot freer and a lot cleaner.



And there's no turning back this train. The massive industrialization of China has set in motion one of the biggest internal migrations in human history--if not the biggest. And again, it's one of the most rapid ever witnessed--if not the most rapid. In 1990, only about a quarter of rural Chinese worked in non-farm industries. By 2000, that percentage was just over three-quarters. That, my friends, is a profound rule set shift for not only China, but the world. It sets in motion the sort of discombobulations that gave socialist revolutionaries like Vladimir Lenin dreams of conquering the world a century ago.

Why? He posited that all those just-off-the-farm laborers wouldn't be able to land jobs in the city, so there they'd be--trapped in urban environments with diminished expectations and thus just ripe for radicalization. No slouches as left-wing-deviationalists they, the Chinese Communist Party leadership understands that it is playing with fire on this one, so the races (and they are so many in China right now) are on! The race to create jobs. The race to industrialize. The race to stem the rising tide of pollution. The race to quell labor unrest. And so on and so on.

China's rapid development is a threat alright, but not in the way the Pentagon understands it. It is revolution within the context of everything else--and it matters to all of us whether we realize it or not.

•"Chechen Rebels Mainly Driven By Nationalism: Islamic Role Described as Real but Limited," by C.J. Chivers and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, 12 September 2004, p. A1.

Putting it in such stark terms (Is it nationalism or radical Islam?) is very misleading. The question really should be: Does the movement seek to connect the society up to the outside world more than it is now? Or is it likely to lapse into authoritarianism once in power and generate significant disconnectedness between the society and the outside world?

I don't see Chechen independence serving the cause of connectedness, and so whether or not there are strong ties between radical Islamic terror groups and Chechen nationalist terror groups isn't the be-all-and-end-all question for me. I see the violent path to power here as serving the Forces of Disconnectedness through the Caucasus region as a whole, and so I don't distinguish between their terror and that of the Taliban in Afghanistan or Al-Qaeda in the Gulf: they seek similar ends, which I define as exclusionary rule sets designed to keep some in and the rest out.

•"Merchant Class Casts Lot With New Iraq For Now, Despite Physical and Fiscal Risks," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 12 September 2004, p. A11.

Many wonder if the danger is too great for them to stay. Yet so far, some entrepreneurs like Mr. Hanna are deciding not to give up. The chaos is their new life, and many are learning to adapt.

"Sometimes I am thinking to leave my country," he said on a recent Wednesday in his Baghdad shop. But, he added: "I am Iraqi. I am respected here. My dream is here, not in another country. So I will wait to see what will happen."

For now, Mr. Hanna is optimistic but guarded, so we should be too:

"No new investment until we see what will happen," he said. "I want to see people coming back to Iraq, foreigners coming, businesses opening up. I don't want to leave," he added. "Believe me."

•"Preventive War: A Failed Doctrine," editorial, New York Times, 12 September 2004, p. A12.

•"Russia May Fight Terror Pre-Emptively," by Associated Press, Dallas Morning News, 13 September 2004, [captured from Early Bird]

So now Saddam's status as enemy has shifted to "hypothetical." And they accuse the Bushies of rewriting history!

The point of taking down Saddam was to trigger a significant System Perturbation on the Middle East as a whole. There is no doubt that transnational terrorism stems from that region, and that that terrorism is a direct threat to national security. That threat will not end until the Middle East is integrated with the outside world, or--more specifically--what I call the Core. That would never happen until Saddam was gone. Now he is, and the process begins for real.

Is it easy? No way. Have we created a "super bowl of terrorism," as Paul Wolfowitz has called it? Absolutely. Is it better to fight them over there than over here? You bet. Will the rest of the Core eventually come around to that understanding? Good time to check back with the Italians, French and Russians.

Russia, especially, is warming up to the idea that maybe just sitting on your heels and waiting for them to come to you isn't the answer. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is to take the fight to them. Russia's very able foreign minister Sergei Ivanov now says that a "pre-emptive strike may involve anything except nuclear weapons."

Sounds to me like a new security rule set emerging . . ..

Here is the piece in whole, followed by my commentary:

Publication:East Valley Tribune;

Date: Sunday, September 12, 2004 ;

Section:Perspective;

Page:106

THE PROTRACTED CONFLICT

Waging war — and peace

In order to truly win the struggle against terrorism, America must connect ‘Gap’ with ‘Core’

- Linda Turley-Hansen is a syndicated columnist and former veteran Phoenix television news anchor who lives in the East Valley.

She can be reached by e-mail at letters@lindastake.com.

To all those who are convinced that George W. made a mistake by waging war on Iraq, pick up a hot-selling book by Thomas Barnett, a military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College. Critics are calling his vision of solutions to today’s world conflicts "a template," a "Rosetta stone."

The title might intimidate the average Joe (that’s me), but fear not. "The Pentagon’s New Map" is thoroughly readable. Besides, we’re much in need of fresh ideas, void of stale, political wind.

My first reaction in watching the Harvard Ph.D.’s ideas on C-Span was hope. I relaxed for the first time since 9/11. Who was this guy who views the bigger picture with a super-size lens? I soon found out.

This Valley is full of people who believe Christ’s return is just around the corner, but first, we can expect global catastrophes of inconceivable proportions. Of course, it’s the sitting president who has started the beginning of the end. Then there are the others who agree Armageddon is unavoidable, but perhaps without deity’s appearance to save us. Kerry is going to do the saving.

Barnett has different ideas. His "new map" divides the world into the "Core" (or the haves) and the "Gap" (or the have-nots.) Barnett fully supports Bush’s decision to take out Saddam Hussein and suggests that North Korea be next — because there cannot be global peace until crazy dictators in the "Gap" are removed to allow "connectivity" with those in the "Core."

Why does Barnett support carefully identified targets of war? In a telephone interview, he told me that helping "Gap" citizens escape cruel domination is the only road to their economic development, which is a connector to "Core" states — then peace. But, in doing so, Barnett stresses that America must build a strong contingent that comes in right behind the tanks and planes to mend and heal the broken nation — and that’s where he says Bush blew it.

Is it his fault? Barnett says no. Presidents before Bush sent troops into troubled "Gap" areas with no plans for putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again. So, according to Barnett, the second half of the equation, the system of peacekeepers who bring stability, must be developed by "Core" countries, but not necessarily under the label of democracy. In this scenario, in the future, America’s number one export will be security.

What caught my ear first, like an explosion, was Barnett’s contention that developing countries, which keep women under wraps, will never build economic stability. Instead, they breed hostile thinking.

"Our goal should be very simple here: Keep young girls in school at all costs, delaying sex and pregnancies." Then, he points out that women are potential entrepreneurs who can build village economies with the help of small loans from "Core" nations. The trick, of course, is to get the women out from under the veils of male dominance.

In a brief departure from my book report, I’m intrigued by Barnett’s understanding of the power of women’s role in civilization beyond childbearing. It’s my take that the spirit of any society that would cut out half of its citizens is steeped in evil. The devastating practice of eliminating the intuitive side of a community is laced throughout history.

It’s interesting that in order to pursue evil activities of domination, creeps like Osama bin Laden have had to first disenfranchise women. They force them into brutal, submissive conditions and prevent them from having influence, including in their own homes. Their imposed silence leaves the men with nothing to balance their reality.

So why do these nut-cakes wage terrorism? I think it’s simple: It’s a lot easier to cook up war games than teach a child to read or work out a disagreement with the wife. It satisfies sick egos to sit around the campfire and brag about how tough they are and how many people they can kill with one airplane. For good measure they throw in a few religious references. They have no comfort from family love or country. They’ve desecrated home.

And that’s Barnett’s point. Until there is economic reason to stop waging war, so-called "freedom fighters" will continue to spread their immoral work. He predicts that if peacekeepers can train one generation of youth and give them a taste of what can be, they’ll never go back in the caves again. He predicts that world peace is possible in his lifetime.

It’s true. Barnett’s theories require a nation of courageous, visionary Americans, beginning with our commander-in-chief, plus "Core" allies. I think four more years of George Bush might be the way to go.

This quick review is simply a tickler, but for me stirs new understanding. Read the book, or go into Barnett’s Web site, www.thomaspmbarnett.com. Then, as Fox News says, "You decide!"

LINDA TURLEY-HANSEN COMMENTARY -

FRESH VISION: Naval War College analyst Thomas Barnett’s new book sets out a plan for defusing today’s increasingly deadly world situation.

COMMENTARY: Little unhappy with her describing the Core-Gap as Haves versus Have-nots, but she gets the rest of the story down awfully well, so that's a minor complaint on my part. Obviously, what's different about this review is the focus ont the role of women in economic development, which is admittedly a sidelight in the book but one that draws in readers who might not otherwise pick up PNM, so I'm very grateful to this journalist for bringing up that angle to my work. Plus, I like how she handles my criticism of the current regime: noting it but not overselling it. All in all, a great review, especially for citing the website.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 13 September 2004

My kids always know to be careful around me on game days, because I can be a fairly tense person where the Packers are involved. I know, I know. Owens and McNabb looked awfully good yesterday, as did Culpepper and Moss. And we're playing the league's toughest front-7 on defense tonight--at their place (Carolina). The truth? Buddy, I can't handle the truth! I just know all is possible with an 0-0 record. So I'll grit my teeth and do my yelling from my hotel room tonight.

Speaking of holding on . . . PNM is clinging to 99th place on Amazon's hourly Top 100, as it has for the entire weekend. Tough little bugger. But thanks again to Brian Lamb and C-SPAN. The book has no business spending an entire 8 days in double-digit heaven on Amazon, this being about its 20th week in circulation. But it just goes to show, when I get access to the audience, I can move the book just fine.

Today's main offering is a nice review that appeared over the weekend in a local AZ paper. Spoke to the woman last week by phone. She had caught the C-SPAN and decided she had to do a review. This veteran TV news anchor was really struck by what I had to say about women in the PNM.

The C-SPAN broadcasts seem to be generating their own little media buzz. Got my first offer to go on talk radio in several weeks. Going to do one-hour with Alex Jones on Wednesday at 1pm EST. Just Googled him and didn't like what I saw: lotsa conspiracy stuff. So my appearance may be very brief if he starts spouting anything too oddball. Scheduled for an hour. Click here for affiliates.

Here's today's catch (and no, I won't blog the North Korean situation until I read something other than guesses and speculation):

•Preventive war isn't going away, just ask Russia

•Iraqis fighting for their right to market

•Nationalism versus Islamic radicalism: a false dichotomy

•Today's rather compelling yin-and-yang(-and-more-yang) on China

■"A 'Shiite Strategy' in Iraq?" op-ed by Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A27.

Think we can't end up with three "Iraqs"? Think again. This is the pathway that corresponds in PNM to the "Arab Yugoslavia" scenario (see the section "The Big Bang as Strategy"). Kudos to Fareed for his diagnosis.

■"India Steps Away from the Old Song and Dance: Bollywood Film Is First Mainstream Offering to Directly Address HIV Epidemic," by John Lancaster, Washington Post, 29 August 2004, p. A18.

■"China's Orphans Feel Brunt of Power: Party Thwarts AIDS Activist's Unofficial School," by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A1.

India's first big Bollywood film looks at an HIV-infected woman who loses her job and then fights back to regain her dignity. Sound familiar? It should, it's basically a "Philadelphia" redux, absent the usual Bollywood formula of "seven fights, ten songs, four kisses." Big stars play the lead, their excuses being the same ones Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks offered way back when: they wanted to stretch themselves as actors.

This is a big deal. Bollywood films have a huge Gap audience. Why? Most are about the clash of modernity and tradition: daughter of traditional dad falls for modern lover and … well, you know the rest. So for Bollywood to finally tackle AIDS this unsparingly (she gets it from sex, not some transfusion), this issue really comes out of the taboo closet in the world's second-largest country.

Meanwhile, the stigma attached to HIV in China seems as strong as ever, as witnessed by the rough treatment an unofficial AIDS orphanage has received. Here's the key analysis on that one:

The party still tries to control all social organizations in China. But after a quarter-century of capitalist-style economic reforms, Chinese enjoy greater prosperity and personal freedom than ever before under Communist rule, and growing numbers are taking advantage of both to band together and campaign for causes as varied as environmental protection, and end to domestic violence and the preservation of Chinese architecture.

The party has said it welcomes the rise of these civic groups, recognizing that they can provide much-needed services as the government sheds the welfare commitments of its socialist past. But it has also expressed worry that they might threaten the party's monopoly on power, and it has tried to exercise control by setting up its own organizations, limiting the number of new ones that people can establish and requiring them to find government sponsors. At times, the party simply declares a group illegal and crushes it.

■"Putin Moves to Centralize Authority: Plan Would Restrict Elections In Russia," by Peter Baker, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A1.

■"Pakistan Losing Grip on Extremists: Attacks on Officials Linked to Al Qaeda," by John Lancaster and Kamran Khan, Washington Post, 29 August 2004, p. A1.

Putin is using the Beslan massacre as his own 9/11, or System Perturbation that allows him to push through some very significant tightening measures. Feeling that too many vertical political controls were snipped by reformists across the sloppy Yeltsin years, he's seeking to tighten up the very horizontally-challenged Russia (which spreads itself over more time zones than I can count).

How worried should we be? The reformists' real success in the 1990s was to snip as many vertical (or top-down) economic controls as possible. Those gains for freedom aren't being reduced by this act, even as significant political freedoms may well end up being lost for quite some time. Remember the Chinese argument I state in PNM: freedom is about 90% economic and only 10% political. When Putin moves seriously against free enterprise in Russia, then I get scared, but until then, his push to maintain his political grip may well be exactly what is required to keep Russia a functioning member of the Core. Because remember this, if Russia loses control of the Caucasus, guess who inherits that front in the GWOT?

As for Pakistan, more disturbing evidence that the government there controls little beyond the capital. High-level US officials are admitting (and I use the word "admitting" since this same administration talked openly about making Pakistan a "major, non-NATO ally" recently) that Pakistani extremists and "second-rung Al Qaeda operatives from Arab countries" are apparently growing a significant alliance in the country's ungovernable northwest territory.

Pakistan's security services grew these "home-grown militants" to employ them against the Sovs in Afghanistan (with US help) and then later in its long-running dispute with India over Kashmir (to the dismay of the US). With Musharraf saying he won't rein them in until he gets a deal on Kashmir, US patience, along with those of other allies, is growing thin. But the Pakistanis don't see it that way. Instead they feel like they're doing all they can in this GWOT and keep asking what the US is going to do for them in return.

Interesting question. What exactly would we want to do to help Pakistan?

To me, Musharraf's plea is an empty one: he says he wants to be part of the Core, but he clings to his "olive grove" with a reckless abandon that belies his stated desire. And don't cite me that "honor" argument. "Honor" is to international relations like "statistics" are to the NFL: they're for losers.

■"$3 Trillion Price Tag Left Out As Bush Details His Agenda," by Mike Allen, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A1.

■"The Choice on the Deficit," editorial, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A26.

■"Trade Flip-Flops: It's odd that Bush has chosen this moment to threaten China with protectionism," op-ed by Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, 13 September 2004, p. A21.

■"U.S. Wants to Cancel Poorest Nations' Debt," by Paul Blustein, Washington Post, 14 September 2004, p. A6.

Scary and slightly counter-intuitive article on page 1 of the Post stating that Bush's second term plan for the budget would likely cost about $3 over a decade (one in cuts, two in new spending), while a similar analysis of the agenda Kerry put forth in Bean Town clocks in at about $2 trillion (all new spending). Yeah, yeah, what's a trillion?

What a minute . . . that's a lot of money!

Isn't it weird to read the Wash Post endorses a Democrat for president because he's actually pushing an agenda to control government spending while the Republican is going hog wild on spending? Is it just me, or it that completely backwards?

As the Post points out, deficit hawks aren't happy with Kerry either, but it's odd that more Republicans aren't taking Bush to task for the massive expansion of government he's unleashed. Yes, you can say Osama unleashed it, but it really is our choice, and it's a dangerous one. Already, US Treasury bonds are going unsold at auction. There are limits, and Bush seems determined to test them with an aggressive foreign policy that seems to expect the rest of the world to pick up the check.

On the other hand (and please, Kerry backers, stop sending me emails telling me not to be so even-handed), Bush's flip-flops on trade and protectionism seem small and obviously particular in their search for electoral college votes, whereas Kerry comes out point blank against things like a Central American Free Trade Agreement, telling me he lacks Clinton's magic at avoiding making globalization the "enemy" of the workers. Plus, the Bush White House is pushing a new plan to cancel billions upon billions of public debt for a host of the poorest Gap states, making U2's Bono presumably quite happy.

Upshot for me? Bush loses me on the $1 trillion in permanent tax cuts. I'm a major beneficiary of the cuts, and they don't strike me as worth all the pain they are going to cause the federal government over the years ahead, especially as we spend a lot of bucks in what I consider to be a serious GWOT. If Bush was as serious, he would abandon making his tax cuts permanent.

■"Officials Discount Nuclear Suspicion In N. Korea Blast," by Anthony Faiola and Joohee Cho, Washington Post, 13 September 2004, p. A15.

But I do discount the notion that what happened was the actual nuke test we all fear and expect Kim will someday soon unleash. Why? The "horse diagnosis" here seems as compelling (even more so) than the "zebra diagnosis," meaning the simpler answer is probably a screw-up, an accident, a genuine snafu. Everybody thinks that an authoritarian system runs like clockwork, when in reality it tends to be amazingly inefficient, and it's primarily in that stunning inefficiency that control is maintained. So this blast is probably just an accident, like the one in April. They have accidents in authoritarian countries—plenty of them. It's just because they go to such lengths to hide them that we tend to fall back on zebra answers when the horse diagnosis will do.

None of this changes anything. We still need to push hard on Kim. He still needs to go down, and soon. We still need that takedown to occur with the strong partnership of China, Japan, and Russia. The reunification of Korea still needs to serve as cornerstone for an East Asia NATO. We need that NATO so we can reduce troops there and get our bases realigned more toward the Gap and this Global War on Terrorism.

But the blast does serves as some nice pretext, not that much is needed with Kim, who's probably got about 3 millions shortened lives on his conscience already—if he had one, that is.

■”Dysfunction Amid The Functioning Core,”

by Bob Slone, The Lancaster County Democrat, September 2004, p. 11.

DYSFUNCTION AMID THE FUNCTIONING CORE

By Bob Slone

“When individuals cannot find opportunity in life, they are reduced to fighting over what’s left over: the land and the cultural identity they attach to its history.”—Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map.

An unfortunate side effect of the Clinton years has been the relative economic excess most of us enjoyed during his administration. It became an opiate to our collective concern and later, like a bunch of party goers waking in a post-excess fog, we found ourselves shuffling through the kitchen to our new espresso machines when a brick in the shape of the Iraq war came crashing through the window. As comfortable people often do, we relaxed when the Bush administration offered to go chasing after the evil brick throwers while the rest of us turned our attention back to our coffee and finding someone to come repair our window.

The problem is, those brick throwers are people who believe they have no recourse left in their lives other than to break our windows and, unless we provide them with some alternatives, we’re going to be repeating this cycle for a long time. The boys in D.C. were pretty good at fighting the Cold War but they don’t have much experience chasing brick throwers.

That is the premise of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s book, The Pentagon’s New Map, an intelligent, if not slightly self promoting, proposal on the future state of global power.

Barnett, a Harvard Ph.D., strategic researcher, expert on the Cold War and strategic insider to the Pentagon and political administrations, divides the world into two groups. The Functioning Core is made up of countries that have accepted globalization and moved economically and militarily toward stability initiatives based on competing and existing globally. The U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, China and even the former Soviet Union are included in that group. The second group, the brick throwers, are the Non-Integrating Gap countries. Most of the Mid-East countries, Africa and parts of South America are still ripe with fence building regimes who can only control through fear and anger in their primarily poor, uninformed populations.

Barnett’s book is a crucial read for any citizen, any voter, interested in making that vote count by supporting intelligent alternatives to global hegemony. It lifts the reader beyond the obvious and proposes intelligent alternatives to how we go forward managing globalization within the context of those in power today and those that will assume power tomorrow.

Armed with a broader vision for the future, Americans must be seen as facilitators rather than global policemen. Rather that simply sitting at the table staring into their coffee and hoping others will chase away the evil brick throwers, the American public will have to re-engage in more robust and decisive management of the pople we elect to serve us while paying more attention to managing those who would have it otherwise. It is that disconnect between “we the people” and our ship of state that Larry Everest brings into dramatic and sharp focus in his book Oil, Power & Empire.

Everest, a correspondent in the Mid-East and Asia for over 20 years, lays bare the intrigue, mistakes and blunders that have led to the current situation in Iraq since the time of British Colonialism. Most disturbing is the trail of manipulation over multiple administrations that have left Bush with the opportunity to put Big Oil in charge of our foreign policy and to put our military at their disposal.

This book is important because it builds a practical history of Iraq, its culture and its inherent political instability, making it a prime target for manipulation. It is into this unstable milieu that the Bush teams (Sr. and Jr.), found themselves able to front Oil into an unabashed grab for oil rights in a process that has broken international agreements, excluded our traditional allies and set up the conditions that making “winning” Iraq an impossibility. There can be no reasonable exit strategy when the main participants don’t wish to leave, and there should be nothing but concern that this scenario could repeat itself in Iran and other countries over time.

These are great companion books—one very much in the present and simply gut wrenching it its clarity and perspective; another offering hope, a way to establish intelligent, and even compassionate, leadership in a world of brick throwers and knee-jerk reactionaries. Both present clear reasons why Americans must address the influence of wealth and business in our foreign policy and why that element add unprecedented urgency to find our collective conscience and voter energy once more.

COMMENTARY: Whew! Pretty mad and pretty soaring at the same time, what’s interesting about this populist-styled review is how easily it absorbs PNM’s message as that amenable to a leftist perspective. More typically, it is the rightist perspective that is considered PNM’s natural fellow-traveler (something I need reject nor accept in whole), so it’s awfully nice to see a true liberal focus primarily on the hope, compassion, and optimism of PNM, while apparently ignoring my critique of many of the arguments that Mr. Slone so passionately praises in Everest’s book, which frankly, I think poorly of. It is fascinating to me that Slone can read both my book and Everest’s and see a hearty condemnation of the confluence of wealth and business in our foreign policy, when clearly I feel as though I offer nothing of the sort. Rather, if anything, I celebrate it in the original sense of the term, liberal. Still, overall, I love this review because it almost reads like the original book proposal we marketed, one which promised a primer for voters who we assumed were hungry for exactly this sort of non-partisan information. There are sentences in this review that I not only could have written, but actually did write in the original PNM proposal! So that makes this one very satisfying review as far as this author is concerned (and yes, I caught the line about "slightly self promoting"--from a politico no less!).

Dateline: SWA Flight 227 from BWI to PVD, 14 September 2004

Any Bears fans should avert their eyes through the first para:

That was one fabulous win last night by the Packers. Yes, the Vikes and Eagles both looked good, but both were playing at home against weak (Giants) to middling (Cowboys) teams, whereas the Pack won on the road against the NFC champs. What was impressive about the win was not just the butt-ugly 100+ yardage that Ahman Green cranked (not a pretty run in the bunch), nor Favre’s complete lack of mistakes, but just the confident way they played against a team nobody (check out the ESPN pregame) picked them to win. And you gotta like a defense that blitzes that effectively. Only one game, yes, but a very good one.

Okay, now that that’s out of my system, I wish I could report we (me and my webmaster) saw it coming before yesterday but we did not. So we too were a bit surprised at having the site shut down by the provider for exceeding our bandwidth flows. Real problem is that the C-SPAN broadcasts created such a huge demand for the slides, that when I direct these people to the Pre-Production Storyboard pages, all that graphics downloading taps out our allotment. Yes, we immediately put in to have it boosted dramatically, but I won’t pull the slides, because to me they are interesting artifacts of the book-writing process, and more than anything, I see the site as an archive—primarily for me. Having the slides on the site allows me to beg off the many requests for a copy of the PPT file itself, something I simply don’t hand out.

Why? It’s my baby and my life’s blood, so why in hell should I simply hand it over to anyone on the web who asks for it? So instead of handing it over, I direct people to the static slides, which, because the brief mutates constantly, grow older by the day. You might say, “You need to spread your word, so why not put the brief online?” First, the animation doesn’t work online, and second, I wrote the book for that purpose. That’s a message I spent months getting down just so. That can never be with the brief, which is just a bunch of whirling images without the oral soundtrack. “Being there” for the oral pitch is what I do, so I resist efforts to separate me from the material, just as I insisted (along with editor Mark Warren) that the book be written in a very first-person style. I didn’t spend a career getting the vision to this point to have it casually unleashed upon the world; I want to control that process as much as possible, primarily because I fear misinterpretation.

So, everyone who wants the brief emailed to them as an attachment, understand it will never happen. Meanwhile, we buy more bandwidth to accommodate all the downloads, and life goes on.

Today I was in DC to do a repeat of the C-SPAN broadcast: same theater at Fort McNair, same college (Industrial College of the Armed Forces), same guy introducing me (now good friend Paul Davis), and pretty much the same package (with about a dozen or more changes sprinkled throughout the slides). Only thing different is the crowd. Last June I just caught the tail end of the school year, briefing the entire class on its way out the door. Their big complaint in the feedback was, “Why didn’t we get this material at the start of the year?” So here I am back again in roughly three months, doing a repeat performance for this year’s class at the start of the school year. Combine this brief with the one I seem to give every year now to the Naval War College class, plus the one I scheduled to give at the Air War College in Alabama in November, and we’re really only talking about the Army holding out at this point. But good news on that front as well: finally got the invite from Ft. Leavenworth and the lessons learned/warfighting lab down there—and so life goes on.

I flew in last night even though I am not talking until 1330 today. Why? Two big reasons: one, I don’t like to fly there and back on the same day; and two, I don’t like to fly the day of a brief as long as the long I offer at Fort McNair (the mega, 50+ slide version). You have to remember, this is one long, one-man show of almost three hours of me talking in strict synchronization with the slides. That’s a lot of RAM and hard-drive usage. My CPU is cranking at just under 100 percent the whole time, which means I can’t let my mind wander much during the show. It is an exhausting affair. Sometimes I can barely talk afterwards, and often, about a third of the way through, I catch myself wondering if I’m going to make it to the end that day, or should I just bag it and walk off the stage for once.

But I never do. Once in the show, it’s all about finishing. Much like playing a long piano piece (I just started Beethoven’s 8th Sonata, Opus 13, Adagio Cantabile), once you’re in, you don’t stop until you hit the finish line. It’s almost instinctive.

So I have a fairly strict routine for a show this long: get there the night before (not late), get a good night sleep (no, the beer and the game didn’t help, but the 1330 start did), and then find some way to busy the mind right up until the show. Then leap out of my hotel room, dash across town, and show up just in time to start the show without much forethought. Then it’s bang-bang-bang until you’re done, and then you can’t believe you just talked non-stop for almost three hours straight. In many ways, it reminds me of running the marathon: best not to think about the finish until you can see it. Until then, stay within yourself, working each stride to the best of your ability.

Yeah, much like the Packers last night.

I must say, though, that it is weird to be traveling alone again, after three weeks with Vonne and two weeks with baby Vonne Mei. I always miss my family on the road, and it feels nice to realize I miss Vonne Mei as well, even the 3am feedings she sometimes insists on. But it does feel normal to be alone on the road again, which is almost always how I travel. Like anybody, I have routines and preferences, and while traveling with Vonne was great (I remembered why I originally loved hotel rooms as a young man), it’s nice to be off the tour bus.

The brief went okay at NDU. I say okay because I started awfully slowly and had the break much later than last time. It always amazes me how no two briefs are ever the same, despite my using the same material by and large. Today, however, I was guilty of trying out new material, which never goes quickly, plus I loaded up the brief with even more slides than last time. Going right to the edge of my time limit, I only answered one question, which made me feel bad, but I offered to answer any by email if sent. I also signed maybe 40 copies of the book, which is always nice. Also got an interesting invite to a policy "writing group" inside State (they were there checking me out—apparently PNM sits on more than a few desks there, like DepSecState Armitage), and heard of an NDU negotiating exercise that is going to use the concept of splitting the force into Leviathan and Sys Admin as a bureaucratic scenario to be played out by students in coming weeks. Also looks like I'll be invited to brief all the new one-stars in the congressionally-mandated Capstone program (another guy checking me out). Add to all that I get an invite via my Blackberry to brief the Defense Science Board, a high-level group of grey beards who advise SECDEF (been waiting on that one for about a year or more). So clearly, the vision is picking up steam

All in all, a wonderfully reinforcing experience, even if it wasn't my best performance (alright, alright, the "St. Pauly girls" from last night didn't help, but I can't watch the Pack without tipping a few back; anyway, my "bad performances" tend to exist only in my mind, as several who had their books signed said I was much better "live" than on C-SPAN).

Today I offer another review. This one is from a local Democratic party newsletter in Pennsylvania. It’s a great review that shows the book in the way I like it most to be interpreted: as fundamentally compassionate and driven by a need to care about the world outside our borders—even outside the Core.

Following the review, here’s today’s catch (all from the Washington Post, because—damn it!—I’m in Rome):

■Sometimes a banana is just a banana in North Korea . . .

■Why I can't vote for the big-government Republicans

■Maintaining the "grip" is what maintains connectivity—and the Core

■India and China grappling with AIDS, each in their own bottom-up way

■Fareed Zakaria cracks the code on Iraq

■"Navy Plans to Buy Fewer Ships," by Renae Merle, Washington Post, 7 September 2004, p. E1.

Na levo is an old Russian phrase that means, "on the side" (or literally, "on the left"). It has the connotation of being an underground or not quite legal activity.

Navy announcing it’ll buy only four ships in 2006, compared to 9 planned for 2005. How can this be when the defense budget is growing leaps and bounds?

All that growth is to pay for personnel, whose costs have risen 30% since 1999, and for current operations, which are NEVER planned in the budget.

That’s right: we NEVER plan for any operations in the defense budget. Isn’t that amazing? We plan only to buy stuff, and train and take care of our people—that’s basically it. Every time we actually use them in any operation, the Pentagon has to go scrambling to Congress for supplementals. This is why wars kill force structure, meaning we buy fewer tanks, ships and aircraft. So anyone who thinks the Pentagon dreams of wars so they can buy stuff is just plain misinformed. Wars kill force structure.

This idiotic reality is yet another good reason why we should bifurcate the force into the Leviathan (hopefully only rarely used—and paid for by supplementals) and the Sys Admin, whose budget would be mostly about operations. We need to separate our preparation for war from our actual operations, and when I say operations I mean the back half stuff, which always ends up costing a lot more than we plan because it ends up taking much longer than we plan.

■"On Iraqi TV, a Welcome Take on Reality: Shows Rooted in Everyday Life Provide an Escape From War," by Jackie Spinner, Washington Post, 10 September 2004, p. A1.

But it gets better:

An upcoming drama series on al-Sharqiya called “The Looters” will feature families who grew rich off the spoils of ransacking after the U.S.-led war last year. Another show, called “Iraq’s Most Melancholy Home Videos,” will capture reactions of Iraqis watching footage of former neighbors now living abroad. “Blessed Wedding” will follow a young couple as they get married, go on their honeymoon and adjust to domestic life together.

“The Iraqis were not used to these kinds of programs,” said Alaa Dahan, 37, the director of al-Sharqiya, the country’s first privately owned satellite TV station. “But we have to depend on the reality, to focus on the reality, particularly what happened after the war, both the positive and negative sides.”

■"Party Democracy in China Is on Agenda," by staff, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2004, p. A19.

■"Pirated Goods Swamp China: Official Crackdown Has Little Effect," by Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post, 7 September 2004, p. E1.

China’s economy is swamped with counterfeit money, videos, drugs—you name it. The feel of the place is like America at the turn of the start of the last century: jittery with ambition, a bit raw with its manners, but growing like crazy. All the fakery means little can be trusted there, and that inefficiency is really getting to be a drag on the economy as it seeks to open up more and more to the outside world. Counterfeiting survives at such high levels because the party can be bought and sold on a regular basis, through bribes and corruption, to look the other way. But all that pirating pisses off the rest of the Core, which pushes China to do better.

China’s answer: open up the party to new levels of democracy. Why? It’s the best way to clamp down on corruption (Gorby called it glasnost!). That politics being led by the nose by economics—and thank God for it.

■"Russia’s Planned Energy Giant Will Be Open to Western Investors," by Gregory L. White and Chip Cummins, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2004, p. A1.

■"Putin Backs Gazprom Bid To Buy Big Oil Company: Deal Would Consolidate Kremlin Control," by Erin E. Arvedlund, New York Times, 15 September 2004, p. W1.

Yes, this will be one big company, but profit-wise, majority-state ownership doesn’t translate well into earnings. But it will do this: it will remind the global economy that Russia’s seat at the table isn’t based on rotting nukes anymore.

■"Bush Succeed in Tying Iraq, Terror War," by Jackie Calmes and Jacob M. Schlesinger, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2004, p. A16.

■"Loss Leader: At 0-7, Adviser Bob Shrum Is Well Acquainted With the Concession Speech," by Mark Leibovich, Washington Post, 10 September 2004, p. C1.

He has succeed in making more Americans see the war in Iraq as part of the broader war on terror, for which Mr. Bush consistently has gotten higher approval ratings in polls than has Democratic foe John Kerry. In addition, Sen. Kerry has struggled to say what he would do differently in Iraq, a shortcoming exacerbated by Republican successes in highlighting his vacillations on the problem.

“The Bush campaign has worked hard, really hard, for months, to make terrorism and security”—not Iraq specifically—“the issue of the election, and as usual, they’ve done it with enormous discipline.

So we go from the Comeback Kid to Gore the Bore to Reverse the Curse.

Tell me this is good . . ..

■"Adultery a Crime? The Turks Think Again and Say No: No Support Gained In the Parliament," by Susan Sachs, New York Times, 15 September 2004, p. A3.

■"Jakarta Bombing Linked to Al Qaeda: Morning Blast Kills Nine, Wounds 150," by Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, 10 September 2004, p. A18.

Why? You’re Seam because you still have idiotic debates like that. But you’re also right on the cusp of the Core because—dang it!—you got a parliament full of sensible enough people to blow that piece of nonsense right out of the water.

That’s what I mean by Seam State—could go either way.

But I also mean it as a state that’s at the front line between Core and Gap, or logically located where you’re going to find the violence that comes from globalization penetrating relatively traditional societies. In other words, it’s where the bombs will mostly go off.

■“The Pentagon’s New Map,” by Don Morrissey, Public Governance.org, September 2004.

Public Governance “Book Review in Brief”

THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP by Thomas P. M. Barnett.

Putnam Publishing Group, 2004, 389 pages, $26.95

CORE THESIS: Around the world, the “have-nots” are “disconnected” from global commerce, and they pose a mortal threat. The U.S. role is to lead, militarily where necessary, the “connected” states in an effort to impose security and begin reconstruction and development of those “disconnected” countries and regions. This will require a radical shift in how U.S. policymakers view their mission, leading to a completely restructured defense establishment.

WRITING STYLE: Aside from the self-invented jargon, this books offers an almost “There I Was” style. It contains a good bit of biography and “insider” stories about the Pentagon. One gets the impression that NEW MAP is what the author almost says it is -- a book-length extension of a heavy-duty Power Point presentation. It has some of the feel of a typical DOD brief. Nonetheless, Barnett conveys powerful ideas succinctly and with clear logic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College. In partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald, Barnett directed the “NewRuleSets.Project” (a multi-year effort to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic “rules of the road” for international security). He also directed the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project and ran projects for the Center for Naval Analysis and the Institute for Public Research. In sum, he has gobs of experience and credentials, but that hasn’t killed his imagination or sapped his energy.

WHO NEEDS THIS BOOK: (a) Anyone connected with the White House who realizes that the President’s foreign policy, while solidly designed, has been poorly described and defended; (b) pundits who don’t have a clue about what’s at stake in the “war on terror”; and (c) European policymakers whose heads are not irrevocably stuck in the sand.

WHO SHOULD STEER CLEAR OF THIS BOOK: Anyone who has a vested interest in the world one recalls from before 9/11/2001. This means a person with economic or power positions threatened by events and demands since then. But “vested interest” also refers to individuals and groups that are psychologically dependent on a bygone era and in denial about the need to change, which by definition means trading the security of the known for the insecurity of the unknown.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Don Morrissey worked on Capitol Hill during 1980-95, where he helped fund and organize anti-Communist counterinsurgency activities in several countries including Afghanistan. He is now a legislative strategist with expertise in the financial-services industry. Reactions welcome at DonaldJMorrissey@aol.com

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For those who like traditional book evaluations, here’s a longer take…

THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

Since an earlier Bush Administration introduced it in 1991, the phrase “New World Order” has done much to help conspiracy theorists. The rest of us went through the 1990s wondering: “New World Order, huh? What is Dat? And where does the United States fit in?”

This reasoned and sometimes brilliant book is the best single place to find workable long-term answers. Barnett’s key contribution is building a bridge over the torrent of today’s events (war on terror, globalization, cross-Atlantic finger-pointing) to what he calls “a future worth creating.”

Much of today’s debate exposes a disconnect (about the size of the Grand Canyon) between the immediate — “global war on terror” — and the longer term. The latter requires defining and executing the critical role for the United States in the new era of globalization. Some smart-alecky critics of the Iraq war claim that terrorism is process, not a place. Ergo, why are we in Iraq? Barnett makes the connection between the process (terrorism) and shows us the place -- where it is; why it is; and what we need to do about it.

But first, a slight digression. NEW MAP’s second chapter contains a paragraph both Presidential candidates and every pontificator on the “war on terror” need to memorize. It is the most concise description you will find of the military aspects of the global war on terror: “[T] his global war on terror is simultaneously fought across all three of the levels I cited earlier: Network war across the global system to disrupt terrorist financing, communications, and logistics; state-based war against rogue regimes that harbor or support such terrorist groups; and special operations that target individuals for either capture or -- when dictated by circumstances -- serial assassination.”

That’s it in a nutshell. We are experiencing the clarity of a nuance-free zone. And that was only the author’s preamble.

In the new era of globalization, according to Barnett, the fault line is not “north vs. south” or “rich vs. poor” or “communist vs. capitalist,” but “the Functioning Core” and “the non-integrating Gap.” The “Core” countries and regions live within, or try to move towards, the mutually understood and accepted “rule-sets” that provide global stability and prosperity. The countries or regions in the “Gap” either can’t or won’t do so.

Listen to Barnett define the bifurcated world. A region or a country in the “Core” can (1) “accept the connectivity and can handle the content flows associated with integrating one’s national economy to the global economy”; or (2) “seeks to harmonize its internal rule-sets with the emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets”; or is (3) “administered by a single dominant party that — in fairly technocratic style — engineers a systematic, state-directed economic development strategy.”

The “Gap” is where none of this exists.

Okay, this time in plainer English. Security, the rule of law and institutions not only allow you to interact with your neighbor, but your neighbor’s neighbor, his neighbor’s neighbor, and so on. No matter what the geographical distance, you have commerce: Ideas, people and things all move relatively freely and under mutually understood and accepted rules. With true commerce, you have connectivity. If you are “connected,” you are part of the “Core.”

Without security, and lacking laws or institutions that allow you to connect to the middle, long, and sometimes short end of the neighbor’s-neighbor chain, under mutually accepted rules, you fall into the “Gap.”

This is also where you have mass murder, rape and pillage. (I’m not sure in which part of the world Hollywood fits.) It’s also where you tend to have despots, theocracies, warlords and just plain thieves doing the “governing.” (Again, the Hollywood question arises.)

Now for the kicker: in a post-Cold War world, virtually all wars, terrorism, and terrorists come from the “Gap.” Thus, the key national security and foreign-policy objective for the United States, over the coming decades, is to systematically shrink the “Gap.” We need policies that move individuals, families, tribes and nations out of it. Since many will prefer to stay where they are, this means transforming several regions and environments.

Multilaterism Yes, Exit Strategies Probably Not

First, Barnett wants the U.S. to educate domestic audiences and also our “Core” allies as to why the rule-sets of globalization are critical to global stability and prosperity. By definition, a “functioning Core” works on a degree of consensus. Thus the imperative to consciously expand the “Core” (or shrink the “Gap”) needs a degree of consensus and commitment.

Barnett lays out part of this explanation: “I think four things need to be spelled out clearly to both our citizens and the rest of the Core: (1) that arms control as we have known it for decades is now dead and buried; (2) that it is not a question of ‘when’ unilateralism makes sense, but ‘where’; (3) that while it’s okay for America to — in most instances — get the ball rolling on specific security threats within the Gap, eventually all jobs there are multilateral efforts; and (4) since there is no exiting the Gap militarily, there is no such thing as an exit strategy.”

Second and more important, the U.S., as the only power capable of doing so, must take the lead in advancing these “rule-sets” inside the “Gap.” This is where Barnett’s long experience with force structure and strategy (grand as well as military) come into play. To take the lead in a systematic and long-term way, Barnett favors changing the U.S. military force from its current structure to two different forces:

The first is called “Leviathan” and “would be a smaller, deadly military organization with technological superiority.” Not unlike the forces that operated in Afghanistan and Iraq (at least in Iraq from March to May 2003). This force would tackle rogue regimes and its special-ops component would handle the individual cadres not defined within rogue regimes. This force would be the spear-tip in the thrust to lay down the first security “rule-sets” where they do not exist today.

The second, called “Sys-Admin,” would be civil-affairs oriented and network-centric, providing resources and technical expertise for old or new friends in need. They would be the follow-on resources to maintain the security rule-sets and help initiate the reconstruction and development activities to allow “connectivity” to take root. Here is the force that has been, or rather should have been, operating in Iraq from May 2003 on.

This military transformation, and all it entails, plays to Barnett’s strong suit. He tells the tale much better than a Web review can convey. What matters is that he has thoroughly thought through the structure and activities necessary to carry out his key mandate: That the U.S. role in the New World Order is to lead the imposition of rule-set changes in those parts of the world where today’s norms either thwart global stability or are non-existent.

What About China, Russia, Fundamentalist Culture?

I like where Barnett has ended up (can’t you tell?) -- yet no single book with NEW MAP’s ambition could be completely convincing. Accordingly, after appreciating the book’s neat and clean strokes, a reader begins to wonder about…well, “gaps” in the new scheme. Let me briefly mention three:

First, Barnett is too sanguine about the ability of the U.S. to “connect” the “unconnected” world through imposition of “peace” (security rule-sets) and support for commerce (globalization). Some people don’t want to be connected (Al Qaeda, most Middle Eastern rulers) and are willing to kill and die to stay disconnected. Followers of Osama bin Laden are the most radical of those who are “resisting change” not because globalization will squeeze their enterprises, but because they see their sacred values as being under siege. No matter how well we follow Barnett’s strategic imperative to shrink the “Gap,” an irreducible number of peoples and/or countries will hate us not for what we do, but for what we are. How do you solve that?

Second, he is disdainful of any threats to U.S. security that appear outside the “Gap,” including the biggest one I see: China. It would also be wise to account for potential tensions with a revitalized “nationalist” Russia.

Third, since his forte is military, he comes up short on saying anything about the non-military institutions and policies that need changing to address the world as he sees it. If anyone thinks that institutions such as the State Department, USIA, CIA, AID, IMF, World Bank or NATO are capable of effectively addressing the world Barnett describes for, they need to send me whatever prescription medicine they are taking. More on the need for widespread institutional change in the next segment.

Working the Plan Before You Have Worked Out the Plan

Barnett is calling for a basic change in the strategic framework of U.S. foreign policy -- akin to the changes that occurred between 1945 and 1950. This also entails managing a change in the structures that undergird policy.

The strategic framework that governed the following four decades is contained in “NSC-68” (National Security Memorandum #68), which became official on April 14, 1950. But The Truman Administration had begun to function under some of its principles when confronted with Soviet attempts to dominate war-torn Europe, several years before NSC-68 became policy.

Starting in 1947, the Truman Administration delivered military and economic support against the communists in the Greek Civil war. It acted covertly in the Italian political and economic environment to prevent a Communist takeover in 1948. During 1948-52, the Marshal Plan lifted Europe from wartime ashes and allowed it to be a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Truman and his people also reorganized the U.S. military and national-security apparatus with the National Security Act of 1947, which among other things created the NSC, the CIA and a new, separate military service, the Air Force.

Similarly, Barnett credits the Clinton Administration, in the post-Cold War era of globalization, with actively taking “the lead in enunciating the overarching economic rule-sets that guided globalization’s advancing across the 1990s.”

He credits the current Administration with recognizing that “globalization’s security rule-sets need to catch up with its economic rule-sets.” This includes the actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as well as efforts by the Pentagon to begin “transformation” of the military.

So a rough parallel emerges. The United States in both cases, following the end of a war, reacted to a crisis in ways that are congruent with a strategic framework – but without having the name. And by changing the strategic framework, it becomes necessary to change the structure and apparatus of the government to accomplish that new “mission.”

Barnett does a good job of describing and applauding what he sees as the U.S. military’s efforts to initiate and manage the change that goes along with the new strategic framework. His book does not offer much on how the other cultures and institutions of U.S. foreign policy will need to change, or how each set of responsible officials will execute that change.

The “change process” we’re witnessing today, in policy and structure, is similar to that at the start of the Cold War. Rather than being seamless, it takes place in fits and starts. And the lesson from 1945-50 is that the “framework” of policy might not be fully in place before the structural changes are accomplished -- or vice versa. Barnett appears to believe that, if you follow the logic of his strategic framework, then managing the structural change will become obvious. Without mentioning Peter Drucker, he affirms the latter’s prescription from the business world: “Structure follows strategy.”

But I think the author’s biggest contribution is implicit: Until the U.S. understands and manages a change in its basic strategic foreign policy outlook, the wrong questions will continue to be asked; and the wrong measurements will continue to be used to define the relative “success” or failure of U.S. foreign policy.

From the NEW MAP perspective, media coverage of activities in Iraq and Afghanistan has mostly dealt with the wrong things. The author states that “the fundamental measure of effectiveness for any U.S. military intervention inside the gap must be: Did we end up improving the local security sufficiently to trigger an influx of global connectivity?… Increasingly, our military interventions will be judged by the connectivity they leave behind, not the smoking holes.”

A last point about the “education process” advocated by Thomas Barnett: “Until the Bush Administration describes the future worth creating in terms ordinary people and the rest of the world can understand, we will continue to lose support at home and abroad for the great task that lies ahead.” Exactly. THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP is a stab at creating the NSC-68 for this “era of globalization.” And an impressive one.

_________________________________________________

Feedback is welcome by reviewer Don Morrissey – write to DonaldJMorrissey@aol.com

For a lively Providence Journal account (from March 2003) of author Barnett’s background and advocacy methods, see http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/Projo%20profile%20of%20Barnett.htm

COMMENTARY: You can tell this guy worked on the Hill because he’s such a smart-ass, and a clever one at that. This is simultaneously one of the best summaries of the book and the funniest review I have read to date. He probes the book’s weaknesses better than any reviewer to date, but likewise is the most forgiving given its scope and stated ambitions. As a veteran of many Pentagon briefs, Morrissey knows where to poke holes, and I don’t argue with his catches. Hell, I loved the review solely for the “who needs this book” and “who should avoid it” paras, which were not only spot-on in their analysis, but good enough for stand-up they’re so funny. Overall, very sharp mind, very sharp review. Anybody who takes the book that seriously can fire at will as far as I’m concerned.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 15 September 2004

Monday I get a call from someone who says she produces/books for the "Alex Jones Show" out of Texas, and will I go on for an hour to discuss the book? I say yes, without any forethought, figuring I'll check the guy out online before the hour approaches.

Then I head off to DC to brief at National Defense University and get back this morning in office. In my in-box I have a warning from the Public Affairs Office at the college: I better check this guy's site out before I go on. My PAO doesn't say I shouldn't appear, just that I need to understand what I'm getting into.

So I check out www.infowars.com and it's some pretty bizarre stuff. Some of the loopiest bits include: the CIA kills Nick Berg and stages the whole video, the Bush Admin secretly engineered 9/11 to institute a reign of tyranny, Israel secretly runs Hamas to its own ends, the ACLU is secretly a communist front organization, IMF seeks to rule the world, and so on. I'm talking some of the most high-end dumb-ass, conspiracy nonsense you can find on the planet. Everyone in this paranoid universe is either a "patriot" American holding off the one-world-government or part of the "globalist/communist" conspiracy. The material is so badly put together, full of some of the most self-contradictory analysis I have ever seen, that it almost comes off like a parody. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, it's just so amazingly stupid.

The Bush Administration’s almost Nixonian quest for secrecy has fueled far too much of this stuff, which is ironic in the extreme, since we’re talking the Republicans here—not exactly the party of expansive government. But where this White House has failed to explain a foreign policy that I largely agree with, fools have clearly rushed in (and cashed in as well).

Yes, I realize this need for all-encompassing conspiracies also reflects a lot of fear out there about the complexity of the modern world, and that people reflexively reach for simple answers in desperation. But geez! You're sinking awfully low if you’re listening to shock jocks like Alex Jones on a regular basis. Then again, if you want more than anything to live in constant fear about current events, much less future ones, and you happen to live in the vicinity of one of his radio affiliates, then he's your man, because every bit of news that comes down the pike CONFIRMS to Mr. Jones—yet again!—the amazing "globalist/communist plot to create one-world government."

No, Jones is not even a serious star in the fear business. Just a bit player peddling his stuff across a local radio stations, but as any true fear-monger, he's firmly convinced he's at the center of the universal struggle between good and evil, so his confidence in marketing insecurity is marked. Judging by some of the emails he fans have sent me, he works a pretty sorry crowd of very scared people. I don't sense the same fear in him, but more the perverse joy of manipulating fear in others. It is intoxicating no doubt, but it's a pathetic way to earn a living. One imagines Jones was either terribly bullied or a terrible bully as a child. You don't just develop that skill set overnight; it takes years of twisting a normal personality just so.

Of course, you don't rule out that it's all just an act with people like Jones. But you'd like believe he's got at least some excuse better than his wallet.

Anyway, after checking out the site and feeling my stomach turn at the notion that I would legitimize this guy's crap by appearing on his show, I called the number listed on his site for press inquires, heard a voice message from the same woman I had spoken with, and left a message saying I was not going to be able to appear on a show that went out of its way to sow fear and loathing (especially toward the U.S. Government) in the way that this guy apparently has been doing for quite some time.

The Alex Jones Show doesn't check its messages when it's on the air, so when 1pm rolls around, a tech rings me up expecting me to go on. I say no, and give the same reasons. They about five minutes later I hear from the great man himself by phone. I do indeed—as he later recounts on his show—describe his act as "despicable" and ask "How do you sleep at night?" He replies that "our side is winning" and that "true American patriots" will stop my book's scheme to "enslave the world through globalism."

You get the drift: some real dialogue that I'm sure would have delighted his listeners (whose emails are some of the most poorly written hate letters I've ever received—although I must admit it's some mean trick on my part to be both a "communist" and a "slave to Wall Street," cause you know how well those two concepts mesh together), but alas, I wasn't interested. I try to tell him as much, but Mr. Jones is one of these types who, when confronted by opposing views, simply starts yelling his slogans non-stop no matter what you say. The funny thing, a guy like that makes for a wonderful party apparatchik. I mean, he'd be a natural at a show trial. But isn't that always true with such head cases? Scratch the surface and you find this little kid inside just dying to perform the very same role he condemns.

So we're basically talking a frustrated demagogue here, and while it's one thing to humor these people a time or two in email replies, it's another thing to waste your time doing their jobs for them, especially when that job is fundamentally about making people fear the future, which is basically the exact opposite of what I seek to do in my work.

So, thwarting Jones'—dare I say it?—plot to "reveal the truth" about my plan for "slavery" around the planet ("prison planet" is a big theme of his site, which has a wonderful, Alice Cooper-ish feel—absent the self-mocking tone, of course), I leave poor Alex hanging for an hour, because his Air Force general coming on to critique PNM won't appear until the hour is up, so he spends some time recounting our lively phonecon, and then starts taking callers. I listen through the first one via the Internet, get bored almost instantly, and then shift back to the real world.

Should I have gone on to debate this "expert"? There's always that desire to stand up to these sorts of blowhards, but I feel a real responsibility to the men and women of the U.S. military, so when it comes to appearing in venues like the Alex Jones Show, which posits that everything the U.S. military does is part of some White House plot to dominate the world/imprison everyone/institute martial law/create a one-world government/etc., I simply believe it's wrong to lend any sort of legitimacy to his endeavors. Just the way Jones bragged to me over the phone that several Texas senators and congressmen had been on his show in the past told me that this would be an uneven exchange: my reputation diminished as his credibility is enhanced. Frankly, I saw nothing of value in that transaction. Moreover, if you're a serious Alex Jones listener, I would consider you so lost to the world of fear and paranoia that any such effort on my part would be a waste of time. I don't work the fringes. I leave soul-saving to the priests. I work the vast middle—you know, the ones who think for themselves.

Yes, in a free country you have to put up with that sort of fear-mongering nonsense, but you don't have to participate in it or lend it any air of respectability by appearing in its venues as though they are similar to the "mainstream media" that Mr. Jones constantly keeps referencing. I've simply known too many good souls who've lost their lives over the years to protect the rights of people like Mr. Jones to engage in free speech, and to me, appearing on that sort of show is a genuine betrayal of their sacrifice. I don't choose to be in the business of fear mongering, even as I understand its marketability to the public.

Today I offer another review. This one is from Public Governance Institute in Alexandria VA. It’s a interesting review in its easy-to-follow format. Following the review, here’s today’s catch:

■GOP discipline versus “reverse the curse”

■Why Turkey and Indonesia are Seam States

■Putin’s gearing up for real international economic leverage

■China’s new rules all come in good time

■Iraq’s funniest homebuilding videos

■Why DoD needs to stop funding wars na levo

■"Japan Lawyers See Seismic Shift: Influx of British, U.S. Firms Jockey for Position Ahead of New Rules," by Martin Fackler and Ichiko Fuyuno, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2004, p. A15.

This is a beautiful example of rule sets being altered by new entrants to the market:

Foreign lawyers suddenly are flocking to Japan, and the influx is forcing change in Japan's cozily insulated ways of doing business.

Dozens of U.S. and British law firms have opened or expanded operations here in recent years, drawn by market-opening changes, rising demand for legal services and a rebound by Japan's long-dormant $5 trillion economy.

Anyone want to tell me again about how unchanging the "Asian way" is?

■"Investing in Basics in Europe's War Zone: Srebrenica Fruit Warehouse Represents a Sign of Hope Amid Bosnian War Ravages," by Beth Kampschror, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2004, p. A15.

■"Laos Is Looking Like a Gold Mine to Foreigners: Boom in Commodity Prices Draws Investments by Mining Companies Straining to Find New Deposits," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2004, p. C1.

It doesn't sound like much, just a fruit produce warehousing and shipping facility, but it's the only Foreign Direct Investment to date in scary old Srebrenica (as a rep from the Swedish company admitted, "Just the name Srebrenica gives you the chills."). Why wouldn't it? "More than 1,000 of the estimated 8,000 men and boys massacred by Serb forces in 1995 are buried in a stark graveyard not 300 feet from the warehouse."

But let me tell you this: when you can't produce goods in factories because they're all blown up, you go back to growing stuff on the land for export. Bosnian GDP was only 9% ag back in 1989, but it's almost 20% now. So you sell whatever the hell you can raise, and you raise whatever FDI facilitates that connectivity to the outside world.

Does it work? My wife buys Bosnian raspberries in our local chain grocery story. There's now enough connectivity for raspberries to make it all the way from war-devastated Bosnia to our little island in New England.

That's the good FDI can do. But you have to grab it when you can. Laos right now is attracting all sorts of FDI and attention from mining companies. Surprising? It is when you realize that:

This little, landlocked country has never been a gold mine for foreign investors.

It has fewer than seven million consumers, no railroads and only a few paved highways. Its economy is managed by aging Communists. Worst of all, it is honeycombed with unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War.

But thanks to a global boom in commodity prices, Laos is starting to look good to the world's mining companies.

Who is driving that boom? China. China is helping to bring capitalism and FDI to Laos.

How about that for a domino theory?

How would my new favorite nutcase Alex Jones explain that one away as part of the "globalist/communist conspiracy"?

Let me beat him to the punch: "Our side is winning! Our side is winning! Our side is winning!"

Which side, you ask?

Hmmmmm. Damn! Those old labels just don't work anymore.

What's a ditto-head to do?

■"Russians Cite Porous Security In Jet Bombings," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 16 September 2004, p. A1.

See if this sounds familiar:

First through police bungling, then in part through a petty bribe, the two Chechen women who killed themselves and 88 others in the bombings of two Russian passenger jets last month were able to pass uninspected through layers of airport security and checks, even after being identified as possible terrorists, Russia's senior prosecutor said Wednesday.

Yes, yes, I know, the conspiracy types will see the master plan at work on this one too, but it's really just the global principal of low-paying jobs yields sloppy work and a susceptibility to corruption.

Putin doesn't so much need to beef up his security services and police, but clean them up. He needs to pay people better. That means better collection of taxes. That means more economic rule sets, which in turn attracts investment, and so on and so on.

See, you can do the military-market nexus with just about any news story!

■"Struggle For the Soul of Islam," by Bill Powell, Time, 13 September 2004, p. 53.

■"Shaking Up Islam in America," by Asra W. Nomani, Time, 13 September 2004, p. 66.

The first article also caught my eye primarily in terms of a map, a global one that delineates the worldwide distro of Muslims as a percent of national populations.

Yes, a good chunk of the Gap (the center North) is defined by predominately Muslim-centric states in Southwest Asia and North Africa, but that only accounts for about 40 (max, 50) percent of the Gap's total population. The rest is largely Christian (Catholics and Protestants, with evangelicals and Mormoms gaining fast), whose version of those religions is likewise far more fundamentalist than their counterparts in the Core.

Thinking about that Core-Gap delta in religious fundamentalism brings us to the issue of what happens when the Core integrates Gap regions. The answer is that both sides are changed: the Core gets re-fundamentalized somewhat, while the Gap gets reformed.

Impossible you say? Wait til the U.S. Catholic church imports enough young firebrand priests from Africa and Latin America. But also check out the women-led reform elements within the U.S. Muslim community. This civil war within Islam has more than one front. As the activist-author of the secondTime article boasts (with some real conviction )"The rest of the Muslim world is watching how reform takes hold in America."

■"Mission Still Not Accomplished: With U.S. control imperiled in Iraq, the military vows to oust the insurgents from their havens. Here's what it will take," by Johanna McGeary, Time, 20 September 2004, p. 36.

This site is simply for the map supplied in the story[here's a version I pulled off Time's site--not the exact same one in the mag, but very similar], because it's a good one that pretty much lays out the three Iraqs we'll end up with if the current scenario of conflict (Sunnis)/compromise (Shiites)/stability (Kurds) continues to play itself out.

You may see a lot of failure in this picture, but I see a lot of realism and pragmatism—not to mention some serious opportunity for more stirring of the pot in the region. For remember, this was never just about Saddam. It was always about transforming the region as a whole and—by doing so—laying a serious System Perturbation on the breeding grounds of transnational terrorism.

■"How Russia's Chechen Quagmire Became Front for Radical Islam: Aligning With Arab Militants Gained Money, Fighters For Rebel Leader Basayev; Swapping 'Che' for Allah," by Andrew Higgins, Guy Chazan and Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 16 September 2004, p. A1.

A well-written article that shows how necessity make bedfellows of the most surprising sort. Shamil Basayev, a currently high-profile Chechen warlord waging "jihad" against the Russian actually began his career as a rebel separatist worshipping Che Guevera. Ten years later, the guy who never prayed is now "Allah's slave." You get the feeling that if Bill Gates had supplied a few million, Basayev would be a Microserf instead, but perhaps that's rather petty on my part.

Here's some more sensible analysis:

Mr. Basayev's journey from romantic rebellion to Islamist terror mirrors the evolution of the Chechen cause: It began as a nationalist struggle professing democracy and freedom as its goals, but is now soaked in the rhetoric and blood of global jihad.

Gee, guess I'm not the only one who has trouble remembering which side of the global conspiracy he's on. More to the larger point:

Beneath the changing slogans is a broader shift set in motion by the end of the Cold War. Radical Islam has mutated into something akin to communism in the past—a convenient, off-the-shelf ideology that can clothe complex local conflicts that few would care about otherwise. These include separatist struggles in Aceh in Indonesia, Indian-controlled Kashmir and Russian-ruled Chechnya. In a host of other countries from Morocco to Malaysia, Islamists have replaced communists as the principal source of opposition to established ruling orders.

By donning Islamist garb, leaders of these widely different causes can open the door to foreign funds, particularly from wealthy Gulf states, and also to manpower from a pool of footloose militants looking for work. Many who have know Mr. Basayev over the years question his newfound religious zeal but acknowledge his skill at tapping the opportunities offered by global jihad.

So let's get it straight here once and for all: I am a cog in the global CAPITALIST conspiracy, not the socialist-communist-fascist-fetishist-sadist-feminist-homosexualist-one-world-governmentalist-am-I-leaving-anyone-out-ist conspiracy. I do want to see globalization become global, and people everywhere enjoy the freedom of markets.

So sue me . . . if you live in a country with the appropriate legal rule set.

■ "Minding 'the gap': Foreign policy in the present reality," by Alan L. Gropman, Washington Times, 3 August 2004, p. 15.

Gropman is a professor at National Defense University in the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He is, by and large, a supporter of my work, having arranged—for example—my talk to the worldwide conference of civil affairs officers last June in Raleigh NC. But he's also a critic, which isn't a problem per se, except that his criticism is so absolutely "here and now" on a vision that purposely tries to extend itself over decades (check out his title). Despite that tendency toward obtuseness, it's an interesting enough read.

Here’s the complete review, followed by my commentary:

Minding 'the gap'
Foreign policy in the present reality
By Alan L. Gropman

[insert]

Political books

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Putnam, $26.95, 435 pages (with front cover art)

Thomas Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map" is a must read for people who are paid to be or are learning to be strategists, because it is packed with new and usually sound ideas. Its thrust is solid, if not all of its branches, and there is plenty of food for thought herein to drive constructive discussions in the Pentagon, at U.S. war colleges and in defense-oriented think tanks.

Thomas Barnett's concept is that the United States and the remainder of what he calls "the core"—most of Europe, Northeast Asia and the Antipodes—will know no peace and will ultimately lose the war on terrorism unless it shrinks what the author calls "the gap"—the rest of the world including nearly all of Africa, most of South America, Central Asia, the Middle East (excepting Israel), and most of Southeast and Southwest Asia.

The core is "connected"—that is, it is globalized—and it follows the rules acceptable to the market-oriented world, which induces a smooth flow of capital, people, energy and security.

The gap, on the other hand, has not been globalized, because it does not follow the rules, and this denies it the foreign direct investment that would lift it economically and psychologically.

The disconnected gap has become a base for smuggling of drugs and people, crime, money laundering and, most importantly, terrorists. The role of the United States is to lead the core in "shrinking the gap" by globalizing it. The author adopts a benign phrase for America's proper role: "System Administrator."

For America to become this, Mr. Barnett calls for a more enlightened foreign policy, an improved and reformed State Department, and a quite different military.

He also calls for an end to the Pentagon's obsession with a rising peer competitor (China) and its insistence on force-structuring for a war he believes we will never fight. He demands a vastly increased focus on military forces that can be useful in connecting the disconnected.

The author recognizes the necessity of maintaining a war-fighting force, albeit reduced, to deter any prospective adversary that might consider challenging the United States militarily. He then describes the rest of the military as a force trained and equipped to engage in peace operations.

Moreover, he recognizes that the Defense Department, through it has the potential to be infinitely useful in globalizing missions, must be much more closely integrated in interagency policies and activities, because improving the lot of the states and people in the gap is a prodigious task.

"The Pentagon's New Map" has shortcomings, however. The author has an astonishing unrealistic view of both international and domestic political realities. He seems to have no idea of how much negative baggage any U.S. president in the year 2004 carries as he tries to make the United States the "System Administrator."

These do not detract from the key thrusts of the book, but many of his proposed actions are idealistic and impractical as this country "shrinks the gap."

To begin with, the United States may be, as he argues, the greatest force for good in the world, but too many in the world do not see America that way and would too often see its "System Administrator" actions as self-serving and not done to benefit "the gap."

Has he missed the way most of the world views our war in Iraq? Were he to take his ideas overseas, he would find great skepticism about the United States. Mr. Barnett would hear distrust and cynicism, not only from current and previous challengers like Iran and North Korea, but also from allies like France and Germany.

He understands that shrinking the gap means that America must buy what is produced in the gap, for example agricultural products and textiles, but he ignores the power of agricultural and dairy lobbies in the United States. Taking an example that will stand for dozens: In the most recent free-trade agreement discussions with Australia—America's most loyal ally in the Asia-Pacific region—the United States deliberately excluded sugar from the agreement, a commodity produced in great abundance Down Under.

Mr. Barnett also advocates the removal "of Kim Jong Il from power [f]ollowing the disposal of Saddam Hussein," without a word of explanation on how the People's Republic would view this.

These departures from reality, however, do not bar this reviewer's strong recommendation to strategic thinkers to read "The Pentagon's New Map."

Alan L. Gropman is the distinguished professor of national security policy at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University. His views are his own.

COMMENTARY: Gropman does a nice review of the main points of the book, but then gets rather myopic in his view in terms of its "shortcomings." I don't advocate the Sys Admin force as something to be accomplished overnight by the incoming administration in January 2005. I am very clear in the book that this will be an evolution over several years. Gropman seems awfully caught up in the "present reality" of George Bush's administration. So yeah, this White House has pissed off a lot of people around the world, but restoring that reputation doesn't have to take any longer than it did to damage it: it's simply called electing somebody new and different to the White House.

Gropman also misses the arguments I make in the book about the Sys Admin force being highly multilateral. He makes it seem as though it's strictly a U.S. force—again filtering too much of his analysis through the "present reality." I mean, geez! I'm supposed to be surprised that Iran and North Korea won't like the book? I've briefed foreign militaries from all over the world on this subject, and have presented the brief in India, China, and the UK, with invitations coming from a host of other nations, to include Australia, and guess what? They all seem to get the concepts just fine. In fact, it was the Chinese themselves who said my "pragmatic idealism" would be too complex for most Western minds to comprehend (claiming, naturally, that only a sophisticated mindset like those possessed by the Chinese themselves could understand this pairing of Yin [Sys Admin] and Yang [Leviathan]) and—you know what?—based on this review I'm beginning to wonder if they're not right!

As for his trade examples, Gropman needs to pay more attention to the WTO Doha Development round negotiations, where the Old Core just gave up huge concessions on ag subsidies and tariffs, despite "the power of the agricultural and dairy lobbies" (Hey buddy! I'm from Wisconsin here! Don’t tell me about the dairy lobby!).

Yes, he does tap me on not explaining in detail how I think Kim should go down in North Korea. Amazingly, I don't try to pull that one out of my ass whole-cloth in the book.

In the end, it's a typically academic review: likes the book but has to point out my many "departures from reality." Gropman's main failing in his inability to get out of his "present reality."

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 16 September 2004

The time since we got back from China has been rather hellish in terms of scheduling. As I had expected, a ton of invitations for speaking engagements flowed into my email accounts while I was in China throughout most of August, and keeping track of what I said to whom got rather nightmarish as we kept switching cities every week. Then, when I got back to the office, there was the magnificent effort of trying to untangle all these dates, eventually saying no to a bunch of them and tying the rest up in bundles as best I could.

Then the C-SPAN broadcast hit and I spent a week doing almost nothing but email, right as my three oldest kids were getting back to school and we were adjusting to having a new baby in the house. Then, just as that cleared, a new wave of invitations started streaming in, both public and private (with the latter mostly being universities right now). Suffice it to say I am booking (both across the US and overseas) through April of '05 right now. Since I can't really rely on my admin guy at the college for help on anything beyond handling all my travel requirements, vouchers, etc., I am my own scheduler, which really makes me appreciate how nice it would be to have an assistant.

But, finally I am starting to get ahead of the curve—just a little bit. The yellow sticky notes around my screen in my office are slowly being reduced in number, and I've drastically cut down the number of times I've had to exclaim to my wife "Was I supposed to do that?" in recent days, so I'm starting to feel myself to be the master of my domain once again.

In general, I'm shifting away from the concerns of promoting the book (and all the media stuff that entails) and toward the promotion of the vision—or bureaucratic change that vision aspires to.

[BTW, right now I'm beating Niall Ferguson, Sam Huntington, and Bob Woodward on BarnesandNoble.com, and Lee Harris, John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead on Amazon.com--not that I track the "comparables" obsessively or anything . . .]

I know, I know, so many reviews point out how "unrealistic" many of my ideas are, and yet somehow that doesn't stop various military commands, the Pentagon, the Joint Staff, the State Department, the national labs, and the intelligence community from issuing all these invitations for high-level briefs and—better yet—discussions and informal advisory roles. As we planned with Putnam, the book is now just ripening in many policy and decision makers' minds as a serious road map for change during whatever transition emerges from this national election (to Bush II or Kerry I). So everybody who's inviting me across the USG is doing so with an eye to whatever strategic planning process they're currently working through. I don't pretend to have many answers (I didn't leave much out of the book—that was the whole point!), just a consistent framework for viewing the world and where U.S. national security policy should want to take that world.

Of course, having the capacity for real big-picture stuff not only puts you in high demand at moments like these, but it gets you all sorts of unwanted attention from those (like my TX admirer yesterday) who are more than certain that you're part of the global plot for . . . . somebody . . . . to rule the world. [I realize I should know who, but frankly, after you've been called all the names I've been called, you have a hard time remembering which side in this epic struggle you're supposed to be working for—sigh!].

Good thing I handle ambivalence well . . .

Today I offer yet another review. This one is a second one from the Washington Times (no direct link to archives that charge). The first one was by Congressman Mac Thornberry (R-TX) back in early June, but apparently that wasn't considered either a formal review (although it listed the book title like one, it's actual title was "Rethinking Strategy") or the editors there decided that once was not enough. I know the author of this review vaguely, and his split verdict is typical of many—but not all, by any means--senior academics in the world of professional military education.

Following the review, here’s today’s catch:

■How Chechnya joined the GWOT—on the wrong side

■Iraq's new map

■The Gap is not a Muslim world (half-true)

■Russia's 9/11 (part 1) was just as ugly as ours

■When FDI comes a knockin' in the Gap

■Regime change in Japan: send in the lawyers!

■"In Vast Archipelago, Unlikely Force Gains Grip: Democracy; Muslim Nation Is Expected To Unseat Leader in Runoff; Undeterred by Bombings," by Timothy Mapes, Wall Street Journal, 17 September 2004, p. A1.

Yesterday I cited Seam States as where the bombs go off, like in Indonesia. But Seam States are also where you'll find the radical democrats standing up to radical terrorists, corrupt bureaucrats, and indifferent corporations:

Just six years after the bloody collapse of President Suharto's 32-year authoritarian regime, thousands of citizens groups have sprung up across the archipelago, fighting for everything from environmental protection to human rights, and challenging Indonesia's tradition of government by tiny elite. They have been aided by the blossoming of a free and aggressive local media after decades of suppression under Mr. Suharto.

The vertical shock of Suharto's stunning downfall unleashed a series of quiet horizontal scenarios:

While Indonesia's decentralization drive initially unleashed a wave of corruption, it also held the seeds for democratic reform. Undertaken to frustrate the ability of another dictator to take power, decentralization has given citizens the ability to make a difference and fight corruption in their local governments. Now, it's having an impact on the national stage.

Tradition yielding to new rules. An authoritarian regime yielding to democracy. A country opening up to the outside world, only to suffer corruption and terrorism and yet—life gets better as a result.

That's a Seam State in a nutshell. It's on the edge of both the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. It's full of tumult and some real flashes of violence, but it's also full of hope and potential that needs to be nurtured by the Core's great powers.

■"Watch Out," Joseph S. Nye's Review of Fortress America by Matthew Brzezinski, Washington Post, 12 September 2004, p. 3 [Book World].

I have long predicted that the Department of Homeland Security will become the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. What do I mean by that? The joke on Ag is that it now has something like two bureaucrats for every farmer in America. Well, this review notes that DHS has 186,000 employees, and most good estimates of global terrorism put the highest numbers of active players in the 10,000 range, with a potential for almost 100,000 more active sympathesizers or potential recruits. That means we already have one DHS employee for every terrorist on the planet and, with any luck (given the recent Republican flare for enlarging government), we'll pass the 2-for-1 mark within the second Bush Administration.

Best line in the book: Israeli security expert who says TSA stands for "thousands standing around."

■"Iraq Study Finds Desire For Arms, But Not Capacity: No Large-Scale Program; Draft Is Said to Cite Intent by Hussein to Act if U.N. Eased Curbs," by Douglas Jehl, New York Times, 17 September 2004, p. A1.

This lengthy government report basically confirms what we've heard before: no evidence of any big WMD program in Iraq at the time of invasion. The new part is the assertion that Saddam displayed a clear intent to seek WMD if the UN ever lifted its sanctions.

Aha! Say some. That proves the sanctions worked.

Yes, they worked. They also probably killed a half-million Iraqis under the age of 5 because of lack of access to enough nutrition and medical care (don't believe me, ask UNICEF, which generated the estimate.

So we could have chosen to either keep on killing 50,000 Iraqi kids a year or let Saddam get back to his goal of WMD.

Or we could have stopped all those deaths, losing 1k of our own people in the process and triggering a deadly insurgency that has killed a mere fraction of that horrific number, AND removed Saddam from power along with the threat of his getting his hands on WMD.

Ah, but who cares about 50,000 Iraqi kids dying a year? I guess I missed that footage in Michael Moore's movie.

Don't tell me those brave American military personnel sacrificed their lives for nothing.

■"Shift From Traditional War Seen at Pentagon," by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 3 September 2004, p. A1.

An article describing a much-celebrated brief given to SECDEF Rumsfeld regarding "a new long-term strategy that shifts spending and resources away from large-scale warfare to build more agile, specialized forces for fighting guerrilla wars, confronting terrorism and handling less conventional threats."

According to the principal undersecretary for policy, Ryan Henry, who gave the brief:

The lesson learned in Iraqi Freedom is that in some areas, we have capabilities overmatch . . . We can't see many competitors that are coming at us in the traditional domain . . . In the business world, this is the equivalent of coming up with a new product in a new market.

Hmm. New product, new market. I like the lingo. It's almost like he's talking about the exporting of security!

Here's one key new idea in the mix: the "stretch goal" of "being able to invade a country, keep 200,000 troops there for five years, and be able to organize, train and equip a local military force of 100,000 troops in just six months."

Now, you have to wonder why there is such the huge rush to train the local troops in six months if the U.S. plans on staying five years. I mean, it's almost like they don't want to admit that the U.S. military is going to be administering a political and economic system for any length of time.

Hmm. Administering a system. I like that phrase as well!

Here's the best part of the article, though. Check out the graphics from the PowerPoint brief. The old view shows an almost Manthorpe Curve-like unity of purpose: focusing on the "big one" of conventional great power war. But the new view shows a force spread out unevenly toward the two ends of the spectrum, almost as if one is focused on big-time, catastrophic war and the other is focused on the "everything else," with less left over It's almost as if the force is being split in two in terms of capabilities!

Try this as you look at the slide: turn your head sideways by leaning to the right. Now substitute "individual" for "guerrilla and unconventional wars and counterterrorism," swap out "nation" for "conventional state-to-state wars," and plug in "system" for "weapons of mass destruction and new technological threats." Then, check out my diamond-vs-hour-glass capabilities slide from my brief and tell me we're not basically talking the same deal.

■ Net Assessment, Air & Space Power Journal, Fall 2004, p. 110

The reviewer here, Col. Fullhart, apparently caught my brief earlier this year as part of the Air Force's Senior Leadership Orientation Course, or SLOC, that occurred at Arlie House out in rural VA last June. I've given my brief at the last two such SLOCs, which I love to participate in, because you're catching colonels just as they become generals (or one-star brigadier generals).

Here’s the complete review, followed by my commentary:

The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas P. M. Barnett. G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishers (http://www.penguinputnam.com), 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, 2004, 320 pages, $26.95 (hardcover).

Run, don’t walk, to your local bookstore and buy this book or order it on your computer! Why? Let me explain. I first met Thomas Barnett in a briefing he gave to a group of recent brigadier-general selectees. At the beginning, some thought that this might be a square-filler lecture on world events. By the time he finished, however, much of the oxygen had left the room. I quickly followed up with a Web search (http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com), yielding an Esquire article on Barnett that outlined a new way of looking at where our future threats would come from and what implications they held for our military in general—and the Air Force in particular. Needless to say, I was delighted when I heard that a forthcoming book of his would expand on the subject. It didn’t disappoint.

In brief, The Pentagon’s New Map outlines the demise of the nation-state as the principal model for future adversarial scenarios. Barnett provides some credible statistics and evidence of the relationship between "disconnected" parts of the world—stretching in a band from parts of Africa, through the Middle East, and into Asia—that have recently served as a breeding ground for what we have collectively called terrorists. Dealing with such circumstances will challenge traditional military thinking, alter the types of programs and equipment needed, and expand the concept of jointness—including a totally revised and energized interagency process. Such ideas are now regularly making the rounds in Washington, DC, and other arenas, even to the extent that we will need a Goldwater-Nichols Act for the interagency process. Barnett’s book gives as good an insight as any I’ve read into some of the thinking taking place throughout the Bush administration. It promises to help shape discussions and decisions that will determine the outcome of the next Quadrennial Defense Review, assessment of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, and changes contemplated for the Total Force. Thus, the answer to my question "Why do you need to buy The Pentagon’s New Map?" is that it will help you understand the most likely world in which you will lead and the changes that world portends for our military.

Col Randal D. Fullhart, USAF

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

COMMENTARY: As reviews go, this one was more "both thumbs up!" than a summary of the main points. That's fine, because I appreciate what Fullhart was trying to do in this short space of words: get other officers to read the book. In that regard, he certainly gives it his all, meaning he uses all the right buzz phrases and gives all the right reasons why somebody moving up the ranks of the Air Force should really make the effort to read PNM. Throwing out the notion of a Goldwater-Nichols Act for interagency processes is a good one. G-N set the standard back in 1986 for the concept of inter-service jointness that defines the modern U.S. military's unprecedented prowess in warfighting. I agree that something equally profound needs to be written into law regarding the interagency process that must come to define our unprecedented prowess in waging peace—if we're ever going to secure any lasting victories in this Global War on Terrorism. I look forward (hopefully) to meeting this guy when I brief at Air University in a few weeks.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 17 September 2004

Took a look at the family finances recently and realized I had a choice to make: either I start running whole-hog on consultancy stuff on the side (meaning, outside my rather heavy professorial duties at the Naval War College) or my now family of six needs to return to a simpler life-style.

Choice number one is an easy one to make: I've done well in this sort of side-work in the past and so it would simply be a matter of resurrecting the business I let die to write PNM and promote these past months (to include this time-consuming blog).

What a minute! How many kids do I have now?

Hmm, bad sign.

Anyway, to get back to Barnett Consulting as my after-hours passion would likely mean killing this site, or at least making it a static monument to PNM—sort of keep-the-flog-and-kill-the-blog scenario. That would sadden me a bit, because I enjoy the thrill of writing each day, and if you want to be a good writer (which I do), you gotta exercise each and every day.

Choice number 2 sucks, no other way to put it.

So what to do?

My wife turns to me yesterday just before I head out with the kids to school and says, "Maybe you should write the sequel to the book."

A 30-minute phonecon with publisher Neil Nyren at Putnam and Son of PNM lives!

Why the turnaround, you ask? Didn't you recently decry this idea in favor of pushing some form of the "Emily Updates," my decade-old diary/meditation on the strategies of keeping a young family alive and kicking during the firstborn's battle with cancer?

True, but if that baby is going to fly, it will do so in a non-time-sensitive manner. Plus, that baby's pretty much out of my hands anyway, sitting with my personal editor and alter ego, Mark Warren from Esquire. He's got the vision for the book on that one. Me, I already wrote it all down. Plus, as my agent Jennifer points out, there's no need to rush Mark on that effort. It's a tricky beast, that one, so better to give him all the time he might need. Meanwhile, how to amuse myself and pay the bills? Cause I know this weblog shtick ain't gonna do it! I've read all the articles describing how that business model doesn't work, not even for former classmate Andrew Sullivan.

Yes, true.

But I do enjoy writing it, and it does help me process a tremendous amount of material that I would collect and analyze anyway. Frankly, I've been doing it for years. Now, the only difference is, I write the stuff down and have a searchable archive as a result (on the web no less, so I can tap wherever I roam).

Yes, also true.

Plus, the weblog (roughly one million words and counting) is my way of processing a lot of feedback on the book, plus interpret current events vis-à-vis the book's material, which allows me to extend that material even further, which in turn has generated new slides for the brief.

Meaning, I guess, I'm working extra hours for the government and not getting paid. Yes, wonderful business model, that Internet.

I gotta slow down here. The interior monologue is getting a bit confusing. I know I have a series of good reasons to pursue the book sequel option. Let me just try to write them down simply:

1) Going whole-hog on consulting would be family stressing, and I travel enough for the government giving speeches all over the planet. This father of four (one still a baby) needs to do no more harm to his family than he's already doing. Writing a book can be done from anywhere, as I proved last time. Plus it would add no stress to my already heavy government workload.

2) I don't want to give up the writing life, or the blog. I'm just getting good at both.

3) All this writing on the blog shows I've got a lot to say beyond what I squeezed into PNM. In fact, I'm bursting at the seams to extend the material. While it's nice to crank it out raw every day online, there's no reason why a polished version that's far more coherent wouldn't do well as a book.

4) Plus, all the experiences I've had since writing the book last August and September tell me there's a public—not to mention a US Government and governments around the world—hungry for this sort of comprehensive, optimistic-yet-pragmatic vision of a future worth creating (hmm, not a bad title).

5) I know for a fact that there are at least 20 strands I can pull from the book, that I only enunciated there in the most bare, toss-off sort of fashion (e.g., A-to-Z global rule set on processing politically bankrupt states, ten steps toward a future worth creating [hmm, that phrase again . . .]). Each are worth a good 4k each. I sold Putnam the first time on a 70k high-concept book (which later mushroomed into a 140k hybrid of high concept and autobiography), and this time around I won't have to introduce myself so much, so I really could keep it overwhelmingly high concept, simply drilling down on a couple dozen big-picture concepts that I covered only in the most cursory fashion in the sprawling, somewhat over-stuffed PNM.

6) The reaction I get from the brief still is enormous not only within the US Government, but from abroad and from average citizens alike—witness the flood of emails about the C-SPAN broadcast, and the huge uptick in speaking engagements. That tells me PNM is scratching a market that's bigger than I realize.

Aw screw it! Here's the only reason I need: I'm trapped giving this brief in my day job non-stop, and it doesn't look like it's going to end because I wrote PNM on the side. If anything, it's only gotten worse. I can't keep giving the same one-man off-Broadway show for the rest of my career. It's becoming the "little mind killer" from Dune. And the rest of my day job is heading south--intellectually speaking—as I'm being dragged into very prosaic operational issues that bore me to tears (still, the regular paychecks are nice). Simply put, I need to reach beyond PNM's material in order to keep my strategic wits about me in this budget-focused age inside the Defense Department. It's use-it-or-lose-it! Since I don't really have any client inside the government for what I want to think about next, I need to invent my own—and Son of PNM is it.

Here's the plan: get my head together enough to write and field a proposal by the end of the month. Assuming it's a go with Putnam or somebody else if they pass, then it's three months to plot it all out in my brain (that's almost 100 hot showers, so a big water bill and the danger of splotchy-looking skin, but do-able). Write 80k in January (blog will definitely go lite that month), have Mark and I edit it in February and March, and deliver to Putnam (fingers crossed) around April Fool's for a fall '05 publication date. Since PNM the paperback will be coming out from Berkeley (a Penguin Group company) around that time, it's good scheduling to be heading back to book sellers with news of the PNM sequel.

There. I've written it and posted in my blog. So now I know I'm serious about it!

Now to start talking to the lawyers and various deans at the college. I broke tradition by writing PNM as a bestseller. Time to mend some fences and make some reassurances . . ..

Today I offer yet another review, and if it gets tedious to read these, then simply skip on by.

Whoa dog! I recognize that touchy tone from the Emily Updates! Somebody send you an email complaining?

Well, yes, someone did. This person even had the temerity (a word I've always wanted to use) to tell me I needed to be more "narcissistic" and stop inputting all this stuff "other people" write about PNM. He said he read the blog for my ideas, not other people's stuff.

Wait a tick! You? MORE NARCISSISTIC? Is that even possible?

Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but he actually wrote that.

Are you sure it wasn't me, in yet another example of your raging interior dialogue?

No, he had a different eddress from yours, which, if I recall, is tom@tom.tom?

{almost breathlessly} You had me at tom . . .. {verklempt!}

Anyway, this review is from the journal Air & Space Power Journal, and it's by the Brigadier General-select who's inbound as the next commandant (I've been told, but I can't confirm) of one of the schools located at Air University at Maxwell AFB in Alabama (maybe the Air Command and Staff College?). Following the review (and my commentary), here’s today’s catch:

■The Pentagon's new long-term strategy

■If only we had waited to invade! Saddam really wanted WMD, after all!

■DHS: The Department of Agriculture for the Twenty-First Century!

■A more optimistic view on Indonesia as a Seam State

•"Many See Musharraf Keeping Army Post to Cement Power," by David Rohde and Salman Masood, New York Times, 18 September 2004, p. A2.

A sure sign you are stuck in the Gap: your leader is both president and top general. If you are afraid to rule politically without direct, uniformed control over the military, then you are not running a stable national system, but one always just a few steps away from a military coup (which, of course, is how Musharraf came to power five years ago).

Military leaders have been "saving" republics like that going all the way back to Julius Caesar, and the historical record is very bleak indeed.

•"NATO Runs Short of Troops to Expand Afghan Peacekeeping," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 September 2004, p. A3.

A year ago NATO committed to setting up provincial military bases around Afghanistan in order to extend the security rule of the governing coalition led by Karzai into the previously ungovernable hinterlands. As of today, almost nothing has happened. Right now it is estimated that 80% of all Afghans live in areas beyond the control of the Kabul-based central government, which makes the planned national elections pretty iffy. Because NATO is begging its members for troops and receiving little in return, it looks like most of the country will be without any external security forces helping maintain order during the elections.

This sort of half-assed effort by NATO is sending all the wrong signals. They have committed—on paper—to staying in Afghanistan at least through 2009, leaving behind a trained indigenous military of 70k men, but so far only about 15k have been trained and there isn't even enough NATO troops to make the upcoming national elections look like a sure thing.

Right now NATO has 27k peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo, but because the Sys Admin effort there has been equally weak (after all these years), European countries are wary of stealing from that Peter to pay this Paul.

What is holding up NATO is not the money or the manpower so much as the fear of failure. And watching the U.S. effort in Iraq does not give them any reason to suck it up any time soon, because it seems to say to Europe: If you do well anywhere, the U.S. will just rush ahead and create more jobs for you. In effect, the NATO reluctance to do more in Afghanistan is a no-confidence-vote for our occupation efforts to date in Iraq.

This is why I believe the generation of a truly robust Sys Admin-type force within the U.S. military is THE big bottleneck in this global war on terrorism. We will not move forward until we generate this capability and convince our allies throughout the Core (and not just Europe), that we mean business in shrinking the Gap. No winning hand, no coalition support. It's that simple.

•"Nuclear Agency's Action on Iran Falls Short of U.S. Goal," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 18 September 2004, p. A3.

The U.S. fails again in its ongoing attempts to get the International Atomic Energy Agency to bump up its concerns to the next level: the "grand jury" that is the UN's Security Council. Instead the IAEA is going to issue more "calls" to Iran to stop enriching uranium and answer the agency's outstanding questions of where exactly it's going with its nuclear power programs.

For now, the Europeans favor this softer approach, because they fear having the matter put to a vote in the UNSC. Not a bad stand on their part, given the situation in Iraq and with North Korea. Only so much the system can handle at any one time, which makes Iran's purposefully move in this direction a good strategic call on their part.

There were always trade-offs with going into Iraq, and if you have to make a call on "who next?" it's definitely North Korea before Iran, simply to relieve the human suffering and repression there, which is far greater than in Brezhnev-era-like Iran, where the revolution is pretty much a faded relic of the past.

So, deciding to go into Iraq may well have bought us a nuclear Iran. How bad is that trade? Not as bad as you would think. Having two nuclear powers in the region (Israel and Iran) would probably trigger some movement toward a more permanent solution for the Israeli-Palestinian Authority stand-off. Why? Iran won't feel itself secure enough on regional security matters until it has nukes. Teheran has watched the U.S. dismember Afghanistan on its right and Iraq on its left, and so the mullahs are feeling mighty nervous right now, even as they plot their designs on the Shiite portion of the increasingly tripartite Iraq. They want the nukes because they believe it will make them serious security players in the region—somebody who can either be ignored nor contained by external powers like the U.S. or the Europeans.

This scenario pathway is probably inescapable now, but that only means the U.S. will need to get back to some sort of détente-like pathway with Teheran following our national election. This was in the works prior to 9/11, and it will likely have to be resurrected by whoever wins in November. Not because they would want to, per se, but because North Korea will probably take precedence and the system simply can't handle another big showdown in the Gulf so long as Iraq continues to burn.

•Political Science [section], Library Journal, 15 June 2004, p. 85.

This review came out a while ago, but I apparently missed it at the time. Caught it recently thanks to citation in Contemporary Authors draft entry sent to me for review. Here's the short review, followed by my commentary:

BARNETT, THOMAS P.M. The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Putnam. 2004. c.402p. maps. ISBN 0-399-15175-3. $24.95 INT AFFAIRS

Barnett (U.S. Naval War Coll.) here proposes a clear and comprehensive strategy for the United States based on the distinction between "core" states integrated through the world economy and states in the nonintegrated "gap." Because threats to security emanate from states in the gap, the author seeks to shrink the gap by promoting altered "rule sets" governing the flow of people, energy, investment, and security. America's role is to export security and advance connections between the core and the diminishing gap. The author carefully explains why his approach differs from strategic thought aimed at subduing what he calls "arcs of crisis" or "the main enemy." He also makes a good case against those who advocate withdrawal from an "empire" or a "global-chaos strategy." Though he supports the war in Iraq, he criticizes the Bush administration for fostering an impression of vindictiveness rather than a "future worth creating." The reader must imagine how Barnett would deal with states that prefer to remain disconnected, but overall this is an important contribution to debates about globalization and U.S. military policy. Recommended for all academic and public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/04.].

--Zachary T. Irwin, Sch. Of Humanities and Social Science, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie

COMMENTARY: Awfully well-done summary of the book, with quick judgments inserted concerning the argument. All accomplished in 177 words before the summary recommendation. Not sure where he got "the main enemy" or "global-chaos strategy," but I guess he generated those phrases on his own and felt the need to mark them with quotations are jargon, so to speak. Reviews like this are pretty important, because on this basis many libraries choose whether or not to buy a copy or two. That matters when there is a spurt of interest like that following the C-SPAN broadcasts of the brief over Labor Day weekend, because many book stores had already returned most of their unsold copies to Putnam by that time, so your choices were: back order, order online (which quickly became a back-order situation) or check it out of your local library (either directly or via inter-library loan). So a real gateway review I was grateful to receive, especially as it encouraged academic libraries to pick up a copy. Remembering my grad-school days at Harvard, I realize how blessed I was to be able to utilize a research library of Widener's quality, because decisions such as these can make a real difference in how easy it is for your average grad student (typically pretty hard up for money) to get his or her hands on a volume.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 18 September 2004

Gloomy day of rain, so no soccer match for son #2, but contemplating a 5K with son #1 tomorrow in Providence—rain or shine. Quality time is quality time.

While watching a DVD last night with the boys, I started reviewing the 10 inches of weblog I’ve built since March. Yes, it stacks about that high.

The good news is, there are ideas and snippets I want to clip from about half the pages so far (and I’m only deep into April, when I was still constructing a lot of background material for PNM’s publication date). The bad news is: how to organize. That’s what Putnam is going to want to see most in a book proposal: clear organization.

This is what I find myself leaning toward right off the bat, understanding that I always—as a top-down thinker—put together the entire package in my head before I can even start thinking about the content. In short, I love to make lists, grids, X-Ys, etc. ad nauseum. I will do probably a hundred versions of this outline in the next week, before writing something up late next week and sending it off to my agent for review.

Best news yet is that Mark Warren is up for the notion. Spoke to him briefly last night as he was sweating out yet another Esquire deadline (middle of the month is a bad time for people in magazine business, I discover). If we get the proposal approved in October, then we’ll spend a weekend together in Wisconsin at a Packers game, so plenty of time to banter around what needs to be done in the book.

Already, I get a number of emails about the second book. All full of good ideas, but I will confess I tend to skim them with an eye to discounting any idea that takes me away from what I know best, which is the big picture. In short, my drill-down is not the same as everyone else’s. If it was, there’d be little point in writing the book.

My first cut at chapters would look like this:

Preface) to link first book to purposes of this book

1) What the world needs now (what the world system lacks—e.g., the A-to-Z rule set on successfully processing politically-bankrupt states done up big time beyond the cursory reference in PNM; different style of leadership from US; different unified command plan for US military)

2) How we grow the Core (with emphasis on securing New Core’s permanent integration [so China goes here]; drawing on Ten Steps to a Future Worth Creating [from concluding chapter] list that speak to Core expansion)

3) How we shrink the Gap (likewise drawing on Ten Steps; emphasis on competing scenarios and disaggregating the host of key scenario timelines)

4) Villains that stand in the way (both inside the Core and the Gap—building off TM Lutas’ good phrase “implicit villains”)

5) Heroes yet identified (this would simultaneously be my “signposts” and “how to” chapter, using the construct of identifying—in advance—important people who would necessarily arise in this grand historical process, such as “the four-star military police general”)

Conclusion) would probably be a “what can you—the reader—do in your daily life to make this future come true”—so very advocacy oriented.

Those are the yellow-sticky notes now arrayed on a cupboard in the kitchen. I keep generating section notes and arraying them underneath the various columns, with the whole thing naturally mutating simultaneously across all parameters and I wind my way through the blog database and keep coming up with new and often conflicting ideas. This is a very sloppy phase of the work, but I enjoy it. It is the crunching time.

Noting two reviews today. First one is a non-review from magazine The Futurist. In the Sept-Oct issue they review only one book formally (The Cheating Culture), which has nothing to do with the future whatsoever, but really is just a social diagnosis for today. PNM just gets a blurb under “world affairs,” which I won’t repeat here or comment upon because it’s a straight lift from Putnam’s own “book description” that’s on both Amazon and B&N.com. Might have hoped for more from The Futurist, but there you have it.

So review I’ll offer today is another library-oriented one, this time from the Library Journal. It's a concise little piece from an academic.

Following that, here is today's catch:

•No grand jury yet on Iran and its nuke effort

•NATO wants a winning hand before committing any more to Afghanistan

•You can't join the Core if your president is also your uniformed military leader

Here it is with no comment from me (just an enter-it-into-the-record sort of thing):

BARNETT, Thomas P. M.

PERSONAL: Son of John E. (a lawyer) and Colleen (Clifford) Barnett; married; wife's name, Vonne; children: four. Education: University of Wisconsin, B.A. (honors); Harvard University, A.M., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Home--Portsmouth, RI. Office--Warfare Analysis and Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Code 39, 686 Cushing Road, Newport, RI 02841. E-mail--tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

CAREER: CNA Corporation, Alexandria, VA, project director for Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research, c. 1990-98; U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, professor and senior strategic researcher, 1998--; Barnett Consulting, Portsmouth, RI, owner, 1998--; Department of Defense, Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project, director; Office of Force Transformation, Department of Defense, assistant for strategic futures, 2001-03.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

WRITINGS:

Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker, Praeger (Westport, CT), 1992.

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Putnam (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of articles to Esquire, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

Military theorist Thomas P. M. Barnett's second book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, "is a must read for people who are paid to be or are learning to be strategists," Alan L. Gropman wrote in the Washington Times: "it is packed with new and usually sound ideas." In order to reduce emerging threats to the United States, Barnett theorizes, the United States must concentrate on connecting the areas that have not yet been reached by economic development to the global economy. He terms the developed nations--the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Australia, Israel--the "core," and the undeveloped regions of Africa, Asia, and South America the "gap." Nearly all threats to the United States originate in the gap, so "shrinking the gap" should be an effective way to reduce those threats. In order to assist with integrating the gap into the core, Barnett suggests that the American military be restructured to make it better suited to peacekeeping and nation-building operations. Barnett's strategy is "clear and comprehensive," wrote Library Journal contributor Zachary T. Irwin. Reviewing the book in Business Week, Stan Crock called The Pentagon's New Map "provocative" and noted that "when describing the inner workings of the Pentagon, Barnett is insightful and often amusing." A Publishers Weekly reviewer also praised the book, commenting that "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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2004, Jay Freeman, review of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, p. 1408.

Business Week, May 17, 2004, Stan Crock, review of The Pentagon's New Map, p. 24.

Futurist, September-October, 2004, review of The Pentagon's New Map, p. 63.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2004, review of The Pentagon's New Map, pp. 161-162.

Library Journal, June 15, 2004, Zachary T. Irwin, review of The Pentagon's New Map, p. 85.

Publishers Weekly, March 22, 2004, review of The Pentagon's New Map, p. 71.

Washington Times (Washington, DC), August 3, 2004, Alan L. Gropman, review of The Pentagon's New Map, section A, p. 15.

ONLINE

Thomas P. M. Barnett Home Page, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com (August 27, 2004).*

Here's Mark R. Anderson's intro to my special letter:

Publisher's Note: I first picked up Tom Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Map, before I'd been introduced to him, for the simple reason that it had a sense of inevitability about it: The Pentagon obviously was re-assessing its role in future U.S. global military policy, as we had heard from past Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Bill Owens, in his opening remarks to our first Future in Review Conference. While some generals continued to hold onto the old mentality of big ships and big bases, there was a strong new movement afoot to redesign the military for future engagements, which likely would be very different from those imagined during the Cold War (I recommend Bill's book on this, Lifting the Fog of War.

At first I suspected this book might be a War College-generated apology for the Pax Americana I have written about in the past, an intellectual afterthought to justify deploying the U.S. military everywhere. But a close reading of the book convinced me that not only does Barnett take issue with the Bush/Rumsfeld/Neocon plan (Barnett is not in favor of the Iraq War, at least not for any of the reasons deployed by Bush), but that his worldview allows for ultimately reduced U.S. policing based upon increasing Connectedness between what he calls the Core (developed countries) and the Gap.

In this sense, I believe he has assembled a new world view which is based upon economic realities, and which avoids old left/right word and strategy traps by using new, baggage-free terms to describe global issues. Because I also believe that providing Net connectivity is an inherently positive process which increases communications, trade, and ultimately peace between nations, I have found Tom's work compelling. I would advise SNSers to read it carefully, and to completion, before reacting too strongly; by the time you are finished, I think you'll tend to agree that this is a new way of thinking about the global map which should be discussed by everyone, and not just the Pentagon. Leaders in technology will find this thought process in close alignment with the benefits of a global broadband rollout. – mra.

COMMENTARY: Since a lot of my lingo and ideas spring from the world of IT, I felt Mark's intro to my summary of the book's main concepts was right on.

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 19 September 2004

Rushing through another Sunday. Up to mow lawn, then Son #1 and I do 5k road race for ovarian cancer over in Mass. Then it's Packers versus Bears, listening over the Internet, while Kev and I get a start on a school project.

Spent last night watching movies with the kids and reading through more of the blog. Every time I do this, I get a lot more optimistic about Son of PNM, because I realize my gut instinct for pursuing this is dead on. There is so much material in those blogs: a couple of good cites, a couple of good analytic paras, and two killer lines each and every day. The trick will be organizing, but that's my strong suit, so the internal sense of momentum builds.

Actually, more than a few of the emails I receive on PNM II are pretty good with the suggestions. One yesterday reminded me of trick I did in Y2K report (crisis response load measure for US military worldwide), so keep 'em coming.

Did something very whimsical yesterday. Wife loves to roam Net looking for "best cities to live" and she left her browser sitting on Madison, WI, where we met at college, fell in love, got married, and where Daughter #2 will be baptized in October (same priest, same church).

So, on a whim, I surfed the University of Wisconsin-Madison site, found a job opening for Assistant Professor in poli sci (international relations), and put together an updated resume and cover letter. The package sits in my mailbox out front, waiting for the Monday pick-up.

Am I serious? Not really, I tell my wife. If requested, I'll interview simply for the practice.

Hmmm, she replies, that's what you said about interviewing at the Naval War College and six years later, we're still here.

Hmmm, I counter, and then slink off to the PC.

No news stories for today as I read the Sunday Times late, so two entries to clear some decks. First is Mark R. Anderson's intro to piece I wrote for his "strategic newsletter" series. His company is found at Strategic News Service. His "special issue" letters are considered very cool, so it was an honor to be asked to pen one. You get his service by subscription, and supposedly everybody who's anybody in information technology reads his stuff. I don't include my piece here, because it's an adaptation from the book (Preface and last chapter), so if you want to read that stuff, buy the book!

The second sub-post today is simply the draft of the entry on me for the Contemporary Authors series. I include it simply to get it in my database.

■"Commodities Are Riding on China's Coattails," by Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times, 19 September 2004, p. BU3.

It's almost hard to understand how important China is becoming for the global economy, but this article gives you a good sense. Here are two eye-popping stats: China now accounts for 30% of world coal consumption and 40% of steel. That burgeoning level of demand has commodities experts talking about a boom market that may well stretch a decade, which will translate into a lot of investment into those industries, because China's rise seems to have caught many there by surprise, so with demand outpacing supply in the shorter-run, prices are rising rapidly since 2001 and that will trigger new investment flows so that capacity catches up. Prior to China's rise, commodities were stuck in a 20-year Bear market, so capacity fell idle over time.

Here's the dig: many of these big global sources for commodities like energy and precious metals either lie deep inside the Gap or are key Seam States like Indonesia or South Africa, so China's rocketing demand is creating economic links between itself and the Gap in ways rather unimaginable not too long ago. So, again, will China need to become more interested in Gap stability and/or shrinking the Gap over time? You tell me.

■"Lessons From a 'Textbook' War Crimes Trial: Milosevic Proves Adept at Throwing Wrenches Into the Works," by Marlise Simons, New York Times, 19 September 2004, p. A4.

Slobodan Milosevic's trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hauge was supposed to set a new gold standard, his being the first trial of a European leader for war crimes since Nuremburg and the Nazis. But surprise! He's not cooperating and his boycotting of his own defense is making it hard for the case to proceed. In effect, he's putting on much the same good show Herman Goering did back in Nuremburg, and for now, his back and forth over his blood pressure (he stops taking his meds) and his regular outbursts over the "joint criminal enterprise" of the ICC is just enough to keep the train from leaving the station.

Should it? Many legal experts say that to expect Milosevic to cooperate is sheer folly, so the ICC better get used to it and move on, otherwise it risks looking like a paper tiger, something that would give cheer to the Charles Taylors and Saddam Husseins of the world.

■"Iran Moves To Roll Back Rights Won By Women: Hard-liners in the government are having their way, at least for now," by Nazila Fathi, New York Times, 19 September 2004, p. A13.

As I've said before, when we decided to do both Afghanistan and Iraq, we sacrificed the progress toward reform in Iran and any hopes for near-term rapprochement between Tehran and Washington. And no, don't tell me it was impossible because Iran supports terrorism in the region, because we managed to start détente with the Soviets while they were doing the same all over the world.

But when the US took down both the Taliban and Saddam with ease (the occupations and reconstructions being another thing), it was only natural that Tehran would immediately experience a back-tracking effect in terms of the reforms put forth by the moderate president Mohammad Khatami—the most promising would-be Gorbachev for Iran yet. And since women's rights are one of the few screws the mullahs can actually turn in their twisted universe (it's still quite legal under Iranian law for a man to marry up to four permanent wives and have an unlimited number of "temporary" ones—although most in society frown upon such things), we're watching yet another bit of blow back from the Bush Administration's efforts to transform the Middle East. Doesn't mean it was wrong to try this tack, it just means this scenario pathway will be full of slippery slopes leading in all directions.

Most of those directions are positive, however, even as they create tumult and anxiety locally, because that gets people debating the issues and forces them to make choices, rather than just accept the status quo or—worse—let the elites put the screws to them out of their fear that real reform and change is just around the corner, waiting to topple their repressive regimes. So you may see yet another example of the Big Bang strategy gone wrong, whereas I see a frightened Iranian leadership reaching for straws. They can piss all they want, the wind heading their direction is only growing in strength:

"It is very obvious that the new Parliament would like to impose a strict model of covering for women, but they will not succeed," said Ahmad Zeidabadi, a political scientist and journalist in Tehran. "The more they put pressure, the more they get a reaction because people simply do not think such restrictions can solve their more basic needs."

Imposing restrictings on women's dress has been a barometer—showing how far the authorities are willing to go to allow social freedom and give more rights to women.

Nearly two-thirds of Iran's population is under 30, and more than 60 percent of university students are women. Women have become more vocal, and they demand equal rights. They want jobs and more legal rights within the family structure.

"The general trend in this country is moving towards reforms," said Haleh Anvari a political analyst in Tehran. "These restrictions are like putting a little stone in front of a huge storm that is going for reform," she added, referring to efforts made by the new Parliament.

It's because of signals like that and general demographic trends like those cited here that I argue for America's next effort being against North Korea vice an Iran. I think we've got enough stirring of the pot going on in the Middle East right now, and as that plot thickens, we'll need to free ourselves progressively from military commitments elsewhere. Europe is ready for this, but East Asia is not, and Kim is the culprit there.

So I'm sticking to my predictions that Iran is closer to a host of tipping points than many realize, meaning we do best by making Iraq a success story or at least enough of a tumult that Iran is sucked into the larger regional process of change it unleashes.

■"Hu Takes Full Power in China As He Gains Control of Military: Orderly Transfer Gives Freedom to Maneuver," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 20 September 2004, p. A1.

Good news finally on the Chinese leadership front. When Jiang Zemin gave up his control over the military yesterday, the 3rd generation of leadership truly left the stage. Now, Hu Jintao has more control at an earlier age than any leader since Mao, which suggests that the 4th generation's run of leadership will be a vigorous one.

But don't see danger for the U.S. necessarily rising in this pathway, because remember that it's Hu who is pushing the theory of the "peacefully rising China." Indeed, most experts expect Hu to now be able to chart a more flexible course with Taiwan and Hong Kong since Jiang won't be around any more to trump him with calls of being a soft nationalist. You want a sense of who Hu is? Remember his response on SARS. China did the usual cover-up until Hu stepped forward and forced a level of transparency unseen before in Chinese history. Doesn't make him a perfect guy, but it means his instincts are good, such as his focus on the rural poor in China.

Overall, this is a very good sign for the future of the Core.

■"Effort To Train New Iraqi Army Is Facing Delays: Key Posts Are Unfilled (Lag Is Laid to Complexity and Methodical Ways of the Pentagon)," by Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 20 September 2004, p. A2.

■"U.S. and Europe Expect to Reach Pact on Iraq Debt by End of Year," by Michael Schroeder, Wall Street Journal, 20 September 2004, p. A2.

A while back Central Command split the command structure in Iraq, basically going with one command that would focus on building up the provisional government's institutional capacity to restore order (the Sys Admin work) and a second that would focus on quelling the insurgency (the Leviathan job). The Sys Admin job is called the Multinational Security Transition Command (clear enough language, as far as I'm concerned), and the standing up of this body has been slow going from the start.

Three months into the effort, described by all as the highest priority task in Iraq right now (we've backed off from squelching the insurgency strongholds to gather our strength in this manner prior to a big December push preceding the hoped-for January elections), and less than half of the command's staff are in place. Who are they missing most? Lawyers and procurement experts. Here's what observers are saying:

Senior military officials in Washington and in the Persian Gulf region say the delay in filling the headquarters jobs stems from the Pentagon's methodical—some say plodding—approach to establishing a new organization with the complex mission of preparing more than 250,000 members of the Iraqi police, border patrol, national guard and army for duty.

So what has Lt. Gen. David Petraeus resorted to in his quest to stand up his command? He has begged, borrowed and stolen from military commands all over the world, tapping even West Point and the British in Iraq. Plus he's relied extensively on contractors.

Petraeus has the toughest row to how, because his own Army evinces the greatest amount of resistance to the concepts embodied by the Sys Admin force. Yes, I know I get a lot of emails from younger officers who cite all the change from below, but it's the resistance at the top that worries me—not Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker but all those generals around in the Pentagon, plus all the "gray beards," or retired flags who now operate in all those Beltway Bandit think tanks that perform studies and analyses.

This resistance is only natural, because the Army's evolution toward the Sys Admin force will be the most painful of the four services (although the Navy, if it ever catches on, will realize it places a close second). So when people ask me, "How long will it take for the Pentagon to move toward the Sys Admin force?" I reply simply, "The speed of advance will be a function of the pain and failures we encounter in ongoing operations like Iraq."

It's both that simple and that sad.

On a better note, Europe and the U.S. seem set to forgive Iraq's debts by the end of the year. Why should that take more than a year and a half for the "West" to agree to? Pretty much an asinine argument over the exact percentage to be cut. The U.S. wants 90%, Europe 80%, and Russia more like 65%. This sort of chintzy debate over percentage points shows how little intra-Core unity exists over the question of what it will take to integrate Iraq into the global economy after many years of sanctions. Holding up this decision has only scared off foreign direct investment immeasurably over the course of the occupation.

This is yet another huge example of why the A-to-Z rule set inside the Core on how to process politically-bankrupt states within the Gap is so crucial. Negotiating this on a case-by-case basis in hugely inefficient, leading to these sorts of idiotic fights over pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile Iraq burns and American personnel are losing their lives as the Core's "great powers" diddle over how the financial "pain" is spread.

Then again, if you're not going to fund the Sys Admin force sufficiently, I guess there's not much of a hurry to forgive the country's debts, because FDI can't flow until both the market and military sides of this tightly-wound nexus are accounted for.

Dateline: Loews Coronado Bay Resort, San Diego CA, 20 September 2004

Here it is (and I don't care how self-absorbed it sounds): Whenever things are going well in my personal life, the Packers suck. But when things head south in my life, the Packers always come through.

I can cite data on this going back . . . uh . . . a while. No, this is not to imply a tortuous young childhood corresponding to the "glory years" of the Lombardi effort. I'm just saying that when things are going well for me, the Packers tend to screw the pooch, but when it feels like life is beating me down, the Packers win. To wit: my daughter gets cancer in 1994 and the Packers go to three straight NFC championships, two Super Bowls and win one NFL title (to bolster their league-leading total of 12). Then we move to Newport, my career takes off, and the Packers, despite having Brett Favre, can't seem to get back to the Super Bowl. That's not just a coincidence.

Do I feel responsible for this state of affairs? Life is life and I can't control many things. I just cite the observations as they come to me, and let the chips fall where they may. After having a bad week with new baby and the kids in school, the Pack beats Carolina in the opener. Then I decide to shake off my ennui regarding my fear that I'll be giving the same brief for the rest of my life and announce I'm going after the Son of PNM and . . . the Pack loses to the Bears at home.

I know what you're thinking . . . besides the part about delusions of grandeur and fanatical narcissism: I should have delayed my decision until afterwe played the Bears. I mean, if I done it this week and we lost to the Colts on the road, it would have seemed perfectly understandable. Now, in effect, the secret is out.

Here's the good news: we never should have won in Carolina. Those two quick turnovers at the beginning of the second half were just too good to be true, much like Ahman Green's fumble providing the Bears a 14-point turnaround just before halftime. So we won one we were supposed to lose and then lost one we were supposed to win: yin and yang and the season's only two weeks old. So fear not: homefield throughout the playoffs is still possible.

Yesterday son Kevin took first place in the male-under-13 category at a 5k road race in New Bedford MA. I was very proud of his effort, coaching him along the way. Kev and I have a lot of fun doing road races, and the time just to ourselves matters a whole lot to both of us. His time wasn't his best (31:26 versus best of 28:18), but he pulled out a first place running along the ocean into a stiff wind for almost two-thirds of the race, finally catching two older kids at the two-mile mark and then never looking back. I know he wouldn't have made anywhere near the same effort without me running alongside him, something the other boys didn't have, but that's why I do it: it's a teachable moment like few others. Kev got this funky heavy star trophy, all engraved and such and he was pretty thrilled. Me, I was just happy that he learned something about how much he could really give when he puts his mind to something, and how sacrifice in the short-term can often lead to satisfaction over the long haul—something I think about as I gear up for Son of PNM.

I've now read through July in the weblog archives, and I am getting more optimistic by the minute about having enough material for Son of PNM. In many ways, that overstuffed book had far too much material for one volume. It easily could have been three or four books, something my brother-in-law Steve opined when we sent the monster off to Neil Nyren last fall. In short, there are so many strings to be pulled and so many explanations to be extended that not only with the book be a legitimate sequel to the original, it's likewise in danger of being overstuffed at 80k. But that's a good problem for me, because I like to write at a fairly fast-paced and conversational level, rather than drilling down too much on detail. So as I look at Son of PNM, I say to myself: PNM outlined the future worth creating, but its sequel is going to lay out how the story will end. If PNM started with a Pentagon-centric view of the world and history, then the Future Worth Creating sequel is going to expand its vision far beyond those narrow confines, hopefully bringing along all the same readers but likewise capturing that many more. And yeah, keeping it at 80k will be important, because the thicker the book, the harder the sale.

Flew into San Diego late last night, which is always surreal because you fly right over the downtown as you land at its very-much-in-the-middle-of-town airport.

You know that scene in "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" where the Bride is flying into Tokyo to do battle with O-ren? It's a lot like that landing in San Diego (and nothing like landing at Narita outside Tokyo): you seem impossibly close to all these high-rises and street scenes. Yes, it is mesmerizing and scary at the same time, because you know that the runways here are short so both the landing and take-off are far more dramatic in tone.

I'm here to kick off defense investors conference, giving the day-one luncheon keynote. I got talked into this months ago when my calendar for the fall seemed like it was going to be lite. I don't regret it too much now, since it's given me two long flights and some downtime at a fancy spa to do a lot of weblog reviewing (plus recover from the Packers' loss). To the extent that I feel like some government hack (trust me, I'm not the only Defense Department here speaking) being exploited by a private company to run an investor conference, that only makes me more determined to write Son of PNM for all it's worth. Why? Either I chart my own path or others chart it for me.

On that score, I have advice coming at me from all corners. I spent about three hours this afternoon with Bob Jacobsen, an interesting veteran of Silicon Valley who's become an informal adviser on what to do next with the unfolding phenomenon that is PNM. It was an eye-opening discussion about what's really possible right now in my career. Good stuff to know, because Wednesday I face a number of discussions at the Naval War College with superiors regarding my "talents" and how to make them fit within the culture that is the college.

Hard to complain one way or the other. PNM could have landed with a complete thud, which certainly would have simplified my life. Instead, it opened up just enough possibilities that I now face some real questions on what I want to do next, and with whom. I don't fear such questions: you have to ask yourself each and every year whether or not what you've got going right now still makes sense or not. If it does, you stay put. If not, you move along. Asking the question is not the problem, knowing the answer is.

Here a handful of stories from yesterday's Times and today's Times and Journal:

■Pentagon's low-balling the Sys Admin force in Iraq is backfiring, but a good call on Iraq's debt is in the works

■Hu's your daddy now in China?

■ Iran restores the hard-line on women

■Milosevic forging his own new rule set at ICC

■China is the engine driving global commodity train

■"Irreconciliable Differences: Foreign Partnerships in Thailand Dissolve as Economy Gains," by Shawn W. Crispin, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2004, p. A20.

When the Asian Flu hit back in 97-98, a lot of foreign companies swept in and bought into partnerships with ailing local firms. The hope was that these European and U.S. firms would bring along with their ownership better accounting and management practices that would clean up the cozy-but-more-than-slightly-corrupt "Asian values" that dominated a lot of financial deals there. Did this occur? To a certain extent, yes, and I've cited plenty of articles along those lines. Does this mean that every marriage of convenience made sense? No, mergers and acquisitions fall all the time in the West, often at a rate much like real marriages, so it's not a bad sign that many of these partnerships ended up dissolved as Asian economies revived.

What's the number one reason cited? Western companies focus more on short-term profits, whereas Asian companies prefer a longer perspective emphasizing re-investment and enlarging market shares slowly over time. Is either view automatically better? No. It all depends on the local circumstances and the prospects for global markets. No all "Asians values" were bad, just the ones about cozy loan practices and a lack of transparency in markets. Asia has plenty to teach the Old Core about how to thin strategically across time and not just space. So integrating Developing Asia will ultimately change us—the Old Core—as much or more than it will change the New Core.

And that's just fine.

■"As Prices Soar, Doomsayers Provoke Debate on Oil's Future: In a 1970s Echo, Dr. Campbell Warns Supply Is Drying Up, But Industry Isn't Worried; Charges of 'Malthusian Bias,'" by Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2004, p. A1.

A great and very balanced article on the subject. I recommend it word for word.

Campbell says oil production has peaked, and his "scary scenario" is that it will end up costly more and more to produce oil over time. This would mean that the world would be forced to switch off of oil and onto something else. How long would it take. Campbell predicts the world will use oil for the next century or so, but that it will have to switch progressively to more efficient sources of energy or risk lower productivity. He assumes this switching over will go badly, thus the oil age will end with a dramatic thud.

The oil industry says Campbell completely ignores the role of technology in not only finding more oil, but in redefining the very concept of oil, to wit the new discoveries of huge amounts of reserves in oil shale rock and tar sands. Is it harder to extract oil from these substances? Yes. Will technology provide answers? Yes, say most experts, who blow off Campbell as a myopic doomsayer.

Frankly, I buy both arguments and find them completely complimentary and rather banal. We will progressively run out of easily accessed oil. That will raise prices over time, pushing us to new technologies that allow us to extract oil from shale and sands. But as those new sources cost somewhat more, and as the world progressively works to decarbonizes its transportation energy usage (not to mention it's use of coal to generate electricity) due to environmental concerns (like clean air and global warming), technologies also arise in the automotive industry to push us toward hybrids and ultimately to hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

All of this occurs over the next two to three decades, as fast as it makes sense to unfold. Who will decide? Largely the markets, but politics will play a key role, primarily in the form of environmental activism. Will energy companies stand in the way? Judging by their lack of investment in oil infrastructure and processing capacity, no. How about car companies? Do you think they'd like to swap out the entire fleet of automobiles in the world a couple of times over the next two to three decades? Hmmm, let me think about the profit potential there and then answer YES!.

So, in my mind, all this debate about a catastrophically abrupt change from one era to the next is pure BS. I think the most logical tracks will be located in China, where the plussing up of the car population is so rapid, that, along with all the other development there, it's generating a huge uptick in air pollution that the Chinese will soon reach a tipping point on. As they reach and surmount that tipping point, watch for Honda and Toyota, as well as local producers, to push the progressive toward hybrids and hydrogen cars. That push will only sweeten the global sales opportunities for the entire automotive industry, which is already running from the latest bit of California's clean-air mandates in the direction of more plans for hybrids and hydrogen-fueled cars. My guess is that China's explosive growth will be a faster spur, and I say that as someone who was deeply impressed—first hand—by the amount of smog currently choking China's bigger cities.

Can a System Perturbation rock this otherwise fairly gentle pathway? Sure, but it's likely to be environmental in nature, with China in the lead, rather than supply-side in nature, with America totally freaking out and dissolving within a global economic meltdown (not that I wouldn't mind consulting on that thrilling movie script).

■"Ex-General Appears to Win By Big Margin in Indonesia," by Jane Perlez, New York Times, 21 September 2004, p. A6.

The key phrase in that headline is "ex-general." When you're Musharraf in Pakistan and you refuse to stop wearing the uniform, that's bad, but taking off that uniform and winning the presidency is fine, so long as it's clear that civilians rule over the uniforms.

Why did General Yudhoyono win? Simple:

The results indicate that Indonesians are yearning for change after three years of lackluster leadership from Mrs. Megawati, who presided over an anemic economy and during whose term a homegrown radical Islamic group carried out three terrorist attacks.

General Yudhoyono presented himself as a man of competence who could set things right, though he gave few details of precisely what he would do. He pledged to continue the civilian rule that was established after General Suharto's ouster, and was viewed as more of a reformer than Mrs. Megawati, who largely practiced status quo politics.

■"In Harshest Critique Yet, Kerry Attacks Bush Over War in Iraq: President Answers With Quick and Sharp Rebuke," by Jodi Wilgoren and Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 21 September 2004, p. A1.

Kerry lands all the right body blows in his critique. What America needs to do immediately is repair its alliances, train Iraqi security forces, make a huge and concerted effort to reconstruct Iraq's infrastructure, and make sure the elections there happen on time in January.

Problem is, Bush's counter is that he's doing exactly all those things, and that it took Kerry until just 43 days before the election to come to the same conclusion.

Kerry's problem is that he's right, but Bush is right too, so Kerry is left with the only argument he has: I'll do a better job. Doing that better job is seeing the connection between those four points: We need to cut the deals with other Core pillars in order to get them to join our peacekeeping efforts in Iraq big-time, plus get them to pony up a lot more reconstruction money. A firm commitment not just from Europe on these two points, but from eastern, New Core pillars like Russia, India and China would go a long way to demonstrating resolve, de-Occidentalizing the coalition's skin tone, and seeding strategic despair among the forces of disconnectedness currently operating within Iraq.

What Kerry is not mentioning yet, and he should, is what those deals would necessarily be, noting that most of these states would—in effect—charge his administration less than they're going to charge a re-elected Bush administration. If he did mention those deals, he probably sound a lot of positive notes with an electorate that's awfully nervous about America's plummeting standing in the global community.

Most of these deals would cost Kerry special interest votes, but they would show a vision he currently lacks, as does Bush. So America would need to reverse itself on a lot of treaty stances the Bush administration undertook in its first term, and it would have to scale back things like planning for a regional missile defense system in Asia, or God forbid, making Pakistan a "major, non-NATO ally" over India's protests. We'd have to support Russia's bid to join the WTO, get more say in NATO, and ultimately join the EU. We'd have to find a way to describe a Kyoto Treaty we could sign, as well as a Doha Development Round treaty we could support in the WTO—one that would drastically slash our ag protectionism.

Yes, America would suffer economic adjustments across the dial, but ask yourself, wouldn't those changes be worth it in the end, if we could get Core-wide support for an effort to transform the Middle East and connect those societies up far more broadly to the global economy? Or do you think transnational terrorism and hatred of America inside the Gap is going to go away if we kill enough terrorists and put up enough walls between our good life and all the pain and suffering trapped inside there?

So you tell what the hard choices are.

■"Second Thoughts for a Designer of Software That Aids Conservation: Simpler rules may be more effective than computer models," by Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 21 September 2004, p. D2.

Great article on environmental planning that has proceeded with the aid of pioneering computer models and simulations. The program in question, Marxan, was designed by an Aussie grad student with help with a math professor. The program is considered quite good, and as such is having a revolutionary effect on environmental planning around the world.

Now that math professor is raising some caveats about relying too much on the program, saying that—in effect—no program should override a consistent effort to revise environmental plans along the way on the basis of observed changes stemming from the original remediation steps undertaken. Sounds reasonable, yes?

It's one of the oldest debates and I run into it all the time in government planning: the "perfect plan up front" versus "ad hocism along the way." Guess what? Neither side makes any sense. When you wait on the perfect plan, you often never even get started. Or, if you actually write it up and start implementing it, the sticking-to-the-plan mentality typically becomes the biggest threat to long-term success.

I first bumped into this sort of thinking when I did reengineering work with Africa Bureau in the U.S. Agency for International Development in the mid-1990s (part of Al Gore's reinventing government program, which was really quite visionary in many ways). We're seeing the same dynamics at work now in the debate over the 9/11 Commission's laundry list of changes for the Intelligence Community ("Do it all or be doomed!" we are warned).

The analogy I ginned up for USAID used the model of planning originally developed by Bill Walsh in his legendary coaching stint at San Francisco, otherwise known as the West Coast Offense. The basic description is this: you plot out the first twenty plays of the offense, and you stick to that plan no matter how much success or failure you experience. Twenty plays are typically no more than one-third to one-fourth of the total plays you'll run, so it's like have a firm plan for the first year of a four-year plan, knowing you'll recalibrate at the start of year 2 based on the intell you've gathered in year 1. That's basically what the Walsh method was all about: testing the environment while doing your best to achieve initial success. But once those first 20 scripted plays were done, then it's all about adaptive planning. That's not learning on the fly so much as learning as you go, with appropriate breaks for rethinking and recalibration. That's why West Coast teams tend to score a lot in the second and third quarters, even as they often fall behind early in the game. Because it's all about where you finish, not where you start.

Makes you kind of wish Central Command had Bill Walsh helping them out, doesn't it? Don't worry, they're getting there.

■"I.M.F. Chiefs Sees Potential Hazard in U.S. Fiscal Policies," by Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, 21 September 2004, p. W1.

■"World Bank Chief Backs Putin Moves: Wolfensohn Links Proposal To Tighten Kremlin's Grip With Recent Terror Attacks," by Alan Friedman, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2004, p. W1.

The IMF worries over the combo of our rising public deficit and our ballooning trade deficit, saying that the combo "could set off a sudden fall in the dollar and reverse the global economy." That means we're playing with fire when we dramatically plus up our deficit to wage a global war on terrorism and pretend that development doesn't somehow put globalization's advance at risk—again, my accusation that this administration has a tendency to wage war strictly within the context of war, without considering the everything else.

Meanwhile, I do applaud the World Bank's Wolfensohn when he cautions global markets to avoid rushing to negative judgments about Putin's recent moves in Russia to recentralize political control. The World Bank has loaned Russia a lot of money, and doesn't want to see all those efforts at energy and infrastructure development go down the drain. Modernizing Russia's economy comes before liberalizing its political system, and if hardening the latter is the price for firewalling the former from the destructive grip of anarchic terrorism, then so be it. Political freedom is useless without economic development.

■"Indian Country: Our military has the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare," by Robert D. Kaplan, Wall Street Journal, 21 September 2004, p. A22.

■"Iraqis Warn That U.S. Plan to Divert Billions to Security Could Cut Off Crucial Services," by James Glanz, New York Times, 21 September 2004, p. A10.

There is no mystery why Robert Kaplan is a favorite of the military: he gets what they do incredibly well, he respects what they do and how much they sacrifice to get it done, and he pulls no punches in how he describes the reality of warfare. The problem with Kaplan is that he is such a myopic thinker, seeing war solely within the context of war, never recognizing the larger forces at work for both good and ill. As such, his diagnoses tend to be dead-on, and his prescriptions dead-on-arrival. The man's strategic horizon is the next skirmish, and as such, he's not surprising in his relentless pessimism regarding warfare without end throughout the Gap.

It's too bad, because he's the Ernie Pyle of his generation. The problem is, too many in the military see him as a serious strategic thinker, when he's a good reporter and nothing more. I don't mean that as a criticism. I think good reporters are rare and he's one of the very best. It just disturbs me that his analysis passes for strategic thought for far too many officers within the U.S. military. Kaplan offers no vision, no strategy, nothing beyond accurate descriptions of the current state of warfare inside the Gap. He is the global war on terror's best sideline reporter, but he's the wrong source to cite on how to run the entire the entire franchise.

Kaplan's piece in the Journal reflects his usual brilliance in observation and description, and his usual myopia on strategy. Yes, it's great to speak about the role of the U.S. military inside the Gap being very similar to that of the U.S. cavalry in settling the Wild West—great analogy. But Kaplan sees only the Indians, believing there to be no settlers worth mentioning. His analysis about keeping small footprints (size of forces on the ground) throughout most of the Gap's tumultuous war zones also makes great sense, but as usual, he misses the larger picture regarding the permanent fix over time. Kaplan's "taming the Gap" strategy is just non-stop whacking of bad guys with no end in sight. It's a war of calculated perversity that he wants us to own up to as an end in itself—namely, just keeping those savages far outside the gate. He believes that by stating this truth baldly, he's toughening up America for the nasty, never-ending war ahead. His golden rule seems to be: do unto to others before they do you. In effect, he's taken the "security dilemma" concept long used to describe why states go to war, and he's downshifted it to his view of non-stop warfare against individuals throughout the Gap. To not recognize the "truth" of his description is to delude yourself, in his mind.

It disturbs me to no end that many in the military see Kaplan as a serious thinker about the future, because I believe he has absolutely nothing to say about it, other than it will look almost exactly like today (so get used to it). His non-vision is disheartening in the extreme, and it speaks to a Robert Heinlein-like "Starship Troopers" future dystopia where we should all adopt a warrior spirit in order to survive. And as usual, his hyperbole masks his lack of strategic thinking ("the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare").

Kaplan consistently misses the forest for the trees. Here's a good example:

In Indian Country, as one general officer told me, "you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid projects."

At the end of the article, Kaplan seems to argue for something very similar to what I describe as the Sys Admin force, or something between the Defense Department's myopic focus on war and the State Department's myopic focus on peace:

Because of the need for simultaneous military, relief and diplomatic operations, our greatest enemy is the size, rigidity and artificial boundaries of the Washington bureaucracy. Thus, the next administration, be it Republican or Democrat, will have to advance the merging of the departments of State and Defense as never before; or risk failure. A strong secretary of state who rides roughshod over a less dynamic defense secretary—as a Democratic administration appears to promise—will only compound the problems created by the Bush administration, in which the opposite has occurred. The two secretaries must work in unison, planting significant numbers of State Department personnel inside the military's war fighting commands, and defense personnel inside a modernized Agency for International Development.

The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army never learned the lesson that small units of food soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry forage for horses: whose contemporary equivalent are convoys of humvees bristling with weaponry that are easily immobilized by an improvised bicycle bomb planed by a lone insurgent. Had it not been for a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad, security would never have been brought to the Old West.

Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form. To help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches.

Again, I don't argue against the man's brilliance as a reporter, but he only sees the first half of the game—never the second. And that's just plain wrong. That sort of "realism" is truly the little mind killer, the sapper of morale, the death of hope. Settlers? Hell, they exist all throughout the Gap. They're just called the locals who actually do want their homes, villages, and societies connected up to the larger world outside. They're not all blood-thirsty savages, no matter how many Westerners the terrorists manage to behead. Kaplan's future is not worth creating because it's not a future whatsoever—just a continuation of the killing present.

As the Times article makes clear, it should be an either-or choice on security versus infrastructure, or war versus peace, or Leviathan versus Sys Admin. You have to do both. Kaplan knows that and even argues for it, but seemingly only in order to temporize a hopeless situation because—remember—there's no railroad nor any settlers coming to his vast wastelands of death.

There is a profound military-market nexus that undergirds the Core; shrinking the Gap means we need to build one there as well—not just cover our blood tracks. When the military listens to journalists and op-ed writers and treats them as source of strategic thought, they create a dangerous feedback loop. Journalists only know what you tell them, so if it's a self-licking ice-cream cone you're looking for, Kaplan is your man. But if you want to build a future worth creating, or if you want today's sacrifices by our service men and women to actually matter over time, then you need to avoid his soul-poisoning "realism."

Because when there's no "railroads," you're basically on a road to nowhere.

I don't want to sound too harsh on Kaplan, cause I think he's a brilliant journalist, much like I admire Thomas Friedman. In fact, if you combine Kaplan's realism with Friedman's naïve optimism, you basically have me. That's not my none-too-subtle hint that I possess the combined talents of each; just my argument for finding a middle space between the two. No, markets won't do everything for you in taming the Olive Tree world, but also no to the notion that the Gap will always been a non-stop killing zone. There has to be a pathway between these two extremes. Kaplan searches for it with his merging-of-State-and-Defense idea, as—I imagine—Friedman will in his upcoming book on geopolitics. I'm not saying my vision is the total answer, just that I got there first by looking at both the military and the market, and recognizing the nexus between the two.

Dateline: SWA Flight from San Diego to Providence, 21 September 2004

I get a lot of emails on a daily basis, and it seems that I've settled into a sort of permanent groove of a hundred or so each day from people who want to talk about the book. About a third at any one time are repeat offenders/complimenters, with two-thirds newbies. It's a big time commitment on my part to answer all those emails in one way or another (I don't pretend to give them all my all, nor should anyone expect me to unless I want to visit my kids every other weekend), but I learn so much in the process, that a continuous stream of thank-you's (with the occasional "dial down the meds/caffeine/sheer hatred" offered without regret) only makes sense.

What I get more and more from a certain select bunch of people, typically within the defense community, is that, while they love PNM and agree overall with its vision, I am guilty of underestimating the tremendous amount of reform progress that's occurred on their watch within their respective office/command/agency/service. In short, it's "I'm-changing-as-fast-as-I-can-here-so-when-we-you-declare-me-certified?"

Here's the answer I offer everyone: I'd love to bless every bit of reform, but I chose—for now and for the foreseeable future—to rely extensively on specific encouragement to individual entities combined with a heaping dose of damning criticism of the system as a whole. By declaring partial victories all over the dial, all I would end up doing is reassuring a lot of reformers that they've done enough on their watch, when in reality the Defense Department as a whole has a very long way to go. So I prefer to remain the firebrand with an exceedingly high standard for acceptable change rather than lower my sights and declare the victory already won. Why? To me, whenever that happens, and I've seen it plenty of times in large government bureaucracies, all the stubborn status-quo types whose main strategy has been to wait out the agents of change ("They get tired/bored/depressed/self-satisfied and quit!") simply resurface in a vengeance and it's back to the same-old, same-old quicker than you can say "SECDEF cried uncle."

Does that mean I don't like hearing these stories of reform and change?

Absolutely not, I love to hear about them. I just keep my eyes on serious tipping points across the system as a whole. I live naturally at 30,000 feet (actually, 34,000 feet right now), so I prefer that perspective. Plus, as a strategist versus a warfighter, I prefer to focus on what I know and leave the ground floor experts to argue what they know.

But yes, eventually we all must land in the real world. I make a point of visiting it regularly. I know my critics love to describe me as trapped inside the old stone buildings of detached Newport, but the real problem I have with my bosses is that I never seem to be in my office! Instead, I seem to traipse non-stop around the planet, visiting various military commands and luxury hotels—and yes, you have to do both if you want both sides of the military market nexus. That's what limits both Tom Friedman (he, of many nice hotels) and Robert Kaplan (he, or many smelly, sandbagged HQs) in the way they try to describe both globalization and the global war on terrorism, respectively (see more below).

Here a bunch of stories from Times and and Journal:

■Kaplan on how the Gap will never be won

■IMF warns on U.S. debt, World Bank sympathizes with Putin's moves

■ The best plans are revised plans

■Kerry drives deep into Bush's territory on Iraq, but settles for field goal

■The "cautious reformer" wins in Indonesia

■Doomsayers correct on end of oil like Marx was right on end of capitalism

■Some "Asian values" are just fine (sort of)

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 22 September 2004

My situation at the college is undergoing a transition. There is the way things were, and I have been told that formula is now unsustainable because of my heightened visibility (meaning the book).

I need some time to figure out exactly what this new regime means for me and my family, and where to go from here.

So a break from the blog for now. Back in a while, after I've figured out what the new rules mean for the new me.

Til then, send me emails about great jobs in great places to raise your kids.

Dateline: still above my garage, Portsmouth RI, 22 September 2004

So I lied, sort of . . .

Got in late last night from San Diego, so took off a little early from work today to catch Em run a race up in Portsmouth--Catholic schools mini-cross country race at RI School for Deaf. Tough enough little course at almost two miles.

Anyway, she runs hard, not spectacular, but hard. On one stretch where they're on the far side of the school and out of sight, she stops and walks for a bit. She seems to be having a bit of an allergic reaction to the pollen and working her lungs so much (something we fear a bit due to the radiation way back when). So she's a bit pink in face (almost 80 today here) and a slight wheeze (meaning we should probably do some Albuterol preemptively before races in the afternoon like that).

Em seems a bit panicked when I try to urge her on as she's coming around this school. So I tell her to do what she can and not to worry, she looks good running (she's really a natural mid-distance runner--like 400 or 800). So as Em's rounds the second-to-last curve and feels the edge pick up a bit as runners sense the last leg unfolding, she plusses up her speed about four fold, passes a good dozen runners, fades a bit, gets passed by a much larger girl who has all her friends yelling her on, and then passes her back just before the finish line (those friends were really pissing her off with their comments, Em said later).

And all I could think was how amazingly happy I was that she was still alive, ten years after diagnosis, finishing an almost two-mile race.

That child gives me a lot of strength.

■"Time to Squeeze Syria," op-ed by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, 16 September 2004, p. A31.

■"Saudis Take a Small Dose of Democracy: Results of Local Ballots May Determine Whether Electoral Experiment Is Widened," by Scott Wilson, Washington Post, 16 September 2004, p. A18.

Strong words from Jim Hoagland on the need to finally start pushing Syria over its "decades-long control over Lebanon," calling it "an urgent new task" in transforming the region. Recently, he notes, the UN passed a Security Council resolution that called on Syria to withdraw its troops from the country by a 159-0 vote. Why? Assad the Younger is strong-arming the Lebanese Parliament to extend the presidential term of his preferred lackey, and promising to double the number of troops in the country by year's end. Meanwhile, Beirut continues to re-establish itself as a regional vacation spot, despite all those years of civil strife, so you'd have to think that if Syria ever got out, Lebanon would be able to reconnect itself to the outside world as it once was.

In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia continues to try and head off Osama bin Laden's appeal at the "pass." Besides passing out jobs to young male Saudis that previously went to guest workers, now the House of Saud is passing out ballots in local elections that will pick half of the seats on municipal council boards around the country. This is a first in more than four decades and the first done on a national scale in over seven decades. Why did it take so long? I guess because America didn't decide to invade one of its neighbors and seek to install a democracy until last year.

Here's the silent kicker: a new by-law says everyone over 21 can vote, unless they're in the military/security forces. Did it say women could vote? No. But it didn't say they couldn't either . . ..

■"On Ground in Iraq, Capt. Ayers Writes His Own Playbook: Thrust Into New Kind of War, Junior Officers Become Army's Leading Experts," by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2004, p. A1.

Another impressive Greg Jaffe story: this time on how the return of junior officers with recent field experience in Gap counterinsurgency is shaking up that citadel of Army new thinking: the elite Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It's to the point where Lt. Gen. William Wallace "has told superiors that officers returning from Iraq who attend [the school] know more about counterinsurgency than their instructors." Out go the usual lectures and in come discussion groups. As one major puts it, "This is entirely a bottom-up war."

I would make the following distinction: it was a top-down first half (warfighting against a military), but it's a bottom-up second half (peacewaging against an insurgency). Big platforms raining down death worked just fine in the former, but it takes very innovative boots on the ground to win the latter.

The war in Iraq taught the U.S. military almost nothing, because we overmatched our opponent so effectively. The transformation of the Leviathan force is going along just fine. Where we're learning plenty is in the Sys Admin work that's followed the end of "major hostilities." Army Chief of Staff (and former commander of Special Operations Command) Gen. Peter Schoomaker says [in Jaffe's paraphrase] "the Army is in the midst of the most wide-ranging changes since World War II."

Hmmm . . . "since World War II." Interesting how we keep hearing that phrase so much in security affairs since 9/11. New era, new rule sets, and so new strategy, new structure.

I say it again, the Iraq War changes nothing, but the Iraq Occupation transforms transformation from its long-time focus on the front-half force to the back-half force. Get the back-half force down right, and it's a permanent off-season for the front-half crew. That's global peace in our time, there for the creating.

I have a tentative invite from Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Leavenworth to come and brief in late November. College-willing, I will make that trip.

■"Online and Even Near Home, New Front in the Terror Fight," by Eric Lipton and Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, 23 September 2004, p. A1.

Good piece about the real "fifth column" in this global war on terrorism: networks. Story starts by describing an Internet company nestled in bucolic Clifton NJ that unwittingly played host to an Arabic-language web site "where postings in recent weeks urged attacks against American and Israeli targets." Not only that, you could download instructions on kidnapping and how to use a cellphone to remotely detonate bombs.

The Revolution-in-Military-Affairs cum Transformation crowd in the Pentagon has long dreamed of a networked opponent against which we'd wage wars of great complexity. Well, that enemy has arrived, but it won't do us much good to put a cruise missile through the window of this building.

■"Indians Answer Cellphones' Call: Economic Liberalization Spurs Rush to Serve Vast, Untapped Market," by Eric Bellman, Wall Street Journal, 23 September 2004, p. A13.

■"India Sets Focus On Better Life In Rural Regions: Singh Believes His Nation May Show Path to Coping With Islamic Aspirations," by Murray Hiebert and Marcus W. Brauchli, Wall Street Journal, 23 September 2004, p. A13.

The good is the booming growth of cellphones throughout India, thanks to deregulation. As always, it's not about the amount of rules you have, but how good they are, which typically means how simple they are. For many years, the cellphone industry in India was getting nowhere thanks to a plethora of fights over who could do what where. Then, 10 months ago, rule sets were clarified enough for the price wars to begin. That's all it took, just enough rule-set certainty for the big players to risk the large investments. So now people all over India are connecting up like never before.

The better: new PM Manmohan Singh's continuing commitment to focus on the rural poor, believing that if done right, India could serve as a model for how a state deals with the economic aspirations of Muslims without triggering a clash of civilizations. His key point, though, is not economic in nature, but focused on security: you can't sacrifice key civil liberties to stave off extremist violence. As he says, "This is not an easy path."

I say, count your stars we have Singh in power because this guy is very sharp. And yes, he is an economist by training. His ability to locate the military-market nexus drives his subtle understanding of how economic development must become the biggest weapon we wield in this global war on terror, which will only end when we successfully shrink the Gap.

■"China Sets Its First Fuel-Economy Rules," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 23 September 2004, p. W1.

■"Guess Who's Invited to Dinner: Group of 7 Nations to Meet With China," by Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, 23 September 2004, p. C1.

The article says Beijing pushed the new rules in place (approved already, but not officially announced yet) out of fear for its soaring oil imports. True enough, but frankly the fear of rising pollution has something to do with these rules as well. How tough? Tougher than U.S. standards but a bit easier than the ones self-imposed by the auto industry in Europe to stave off regulation. Because the first phase is similar to our current standards, U.S. automakers aren't scared. And the most popular car in China, VW's Santana, will make the first-phase cut as well.

But everybody watch out for the second phase, beginning in 2008, because those tougher standards will have a ripple effect globally since China is becoming such a huge car market. Since the calculations are by weight, owning a minivan or SUV in China will be expensive, and that's just what the Chinese are hoping to discourage: big vehicles.

If that's today's good news, then the even better news is that China will meet with the Group of 7 for the first time next week, and everyone expects this historic event will kick start more serious talks about the country ultimately expanding the ranks of this very elite club. This is only a ministers' meeting, done on the side from the annual World Bank/IMF meetings, but it's a real tipping point in China's integration into the Core. The speed of entry will depend largely on how long it takes China to make the yuan convertible, signaling its clear willingness to share a deeper economic fate with the rest of the G-7 heavyweights. Does China rank among them yet? Yes, it's GDP is roughly similar to that of both Canada and Italy, G-7 stalwarts.

Interesting to note that Iraq and debt relief for Gap states dominate the rest of the agenda, showing yet again how naturally the G-7 has come to dominate as the main Old Core negotiating venue for not only Gap issues, but especially those with a security angle. Once that Old Core club expands to include New Core pillars, it's logical role as the system's functioning executive will be in place.

[As a weird sidenote, I was shocked to see that the Times' main title on the second story did not include a question mark at the end. Really!]

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 23 September 2004

Surfacing carefully… looking left and right before crossing the street . . .

And I'm off!

First, a technical announcement: Hope you like the black font. Now all you older types can stop sending me those emails about taxing your eyes.

Second, a legal announcement: I don't conduct book-signings in my office at the college. I very carefully avoid such "appearances." I am, however, willing to verify my identity as author of PNM through the free provision of handwriting samples to anyone who shows up unannounced. Any paper will do, though I have a preference for acid-free.

Got an email today from a Penn State student-journalist who wanted to share his reference to a core concept (actually, the Core concept) from PNM. He claims to be the first collegiate journalist to employ such an off-hand reference, and he may be right.

Here's the piece posted today in the Collegian:

My Opinion

Olympics keeps tabs on world economic progress

This past August I really enjoyed tuning in to the Summer Olympics in Athens. Aside from watching the United States clean house in just about every competition (except, of course, men's basketball), there were certainly some memorable scenes.

The Iraqi soccer team reaching the tournament's semifinal match and Robina Muqimyar and Friba Razayee becoming the first women from Afghanistan to compete in the Games gave their war-torn countries an enormous emotional uplift and restored pride to their homelands that had sorely suffered under their now-deposed dictatorial regimes.

The Olympics have always provided the perfect stage for such unforgettable stories and seemingly bring the world a little closer together in that warm, fuzzy, kumbaya kind of way. That's certainly all well and good.

But there's also another perspective from which you can look at the Olympics, which I think is probably not really noticed by your average Joe or Boris or Khalil.

Every morning during the Olympic fortnight, I'd go online to check the medal count. The usual top guns were always leading the pack: the U.S., the Russians, the Chinese and the Aussies. When the Games ended, the aforementioned countries made up the top four medal winners, respectively, followed by Germany, Japan, France, Italy, South Korea and Great Britain to round out the top ten.

I thought about those countries for a moment, put on my geo-political and political economy thinking caps, and began to realize why these particular countries were racking up all the medals. First of all, look at where these countries are located - or should I say not located. None of them are found in unstable regions where economies and means of communications are isolated from the rest of the world. They are part of, as U.S. Naval War College senior strategist Thomas Barnett terms it, the "functioning core" of globalized, interdependent states.

In other words, these countries' economies make the world go 'round. You cannot pick up the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times Business Day section without reading about the explosion of the Chinese and Russian economies. Despite China's recent dabbles in protectionist trade policy, China's GDP blazed ahead at annual rate of 9.1 percent last year. And in the face of creeping authoritarian rule from the Kremlin, the Russian economy was firing on all cylinders at 7.3 percent in 2003.

Not to be left out, the American economy, despite the ruminations of what Arnold Schwarzenegger would call "economic girlie-men," is also humming along quite nicely.

But what really drives the world economy is these countries' interdependence with one another.

Put the paper down for a moment and look at your Nike Airs or Adidas for a second. I'll betcha a large crab bisque at the Allen Street Grille that the shoe size label on the underside of your shoes' tongue reads "MADE IN CHINA." It is no surprise that the United States makes up China's biggest export market. And it certainly says a lot about the world's attitude toward China when the International Olympic Committee approved the Chinese capital of Beijing for the host for the 2008 Summer Games.

Russia has also joined this vast web of global economic interdependence in a radically short period of time. The financial news channel, CNBC, is airing from Russia this week.

This is certainly a tell-tale sign of the economic progress Russia has made over the last decade (the political side is another, unsettling story). I don't know if anyone could have imagined 20 years ago, during the height of Ronald Reagan's standoff with the Evil Empire, that Russia would be hosting America's premier financial news outlet attempting to attract new business and investment from Western CEOs. Not to be outdone in their contributions to the world economy are the Asian tigers of Japan and South Korea and the European heavy-hitters of Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy.

So is it any wonder why the top ten medal winners make up the majority of the movers and shakers of the global economy? For the good majority of cases, where you find globalization entrenched in a country's everyday life is where you'll find the most gold, silver and bronze medal winners. You can't argue with the numbers.

In Athens, Robina Muqimyar, one of two women who competed for Afghanistan, ran the 100 meter dash in 14.14 seconds. American Lauryn Williams clocked in at 10.96 seconds to win the silver medal. That difference is a gaping 3.18 seconds. That difference is symbolic of how far countries like Afghanistan have to go to catch up with everyone else.

But Muqimyar isn't worried. "I'm going to train harder and I hope to have the facilities in Afghanistan," she told the Associated Press. "I will really get ready for the 2008 Olympic Games. I hope I can win a medal, at least a bronze medal."

I hope she does, and that her country is as optimistic as she is.

Matthew Valkovic is a junior majoring in history and international politics and is a Collegian columnist.

It's an interesting point Mr. Valkovic makes.

Doing well at an Olympics points to a country on the rise, but hosting an Olympics is—I would argue today—really a sign of integration into the Core. Check out the hosts listed below for the Summer Games (not fair to include Winter Games, since the requirement for snow pretty much keeps you out of the Gap). No city that has ever hosted the modern games currently lies inside my Gap. Doesn’t mean they were all secure inside the Core at the time (e.g., Moscow, Mexico City), nor that some didn't later lapse into war with one another (something great powers could still do before nukes), but it's an interesting correlation:

Athens (1896), Paris (1900), St. Louis (1904), London (1908), Stockholm (1912), Antwerp (1920), Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932), Berlin (1936), London (1948), Helsinki (1952), Melbourne (1956), Rome (1960), Tokyo (1964), Mexico City (1968), Munich (1972), Montreal (1976), Moscow (1980), Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Sydney (2000), Athens (2004).

Here’s today’s catch:

■The good and the better on China

■The good and the better on India

■Network-centric warfare meets a truly networked opponent

■Why I hope to brief at Leavenworth

■The Big Bang's latest reverberations

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 24 September 2004

Good news is that I spent the pre-job morning hours banging out a first draft of my Son of PNM book proposal. It now sits with my agent and personal editor!

Bad news is that I plan on hanging out with my kids now that my day job is done, so no blog of current events because I'll read the papers late tonight.

Expect a flow over the weekend though: big review in Asia Times Online, an interesting off-hand mention in the Seattle Times, some feedback from Mark Anderson's newsletter audience, and interesting exchange with a "missiologist" regarding the "10/40 Window" (Google that one!), and a number of great stories sent to me by devoted readers.

But tonight, it's just me and my four.

■"Panel Calls U.S. Troop Size Insufficient for Demands," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 24 September 2004, p. A12.

Pentagon appoints a panel of outside experts. They review the commitments around the world. They look at the troops. They see the effects of the asymptotic rise in crisis/conflict response days that stretches back to the end of the Cold War even as our personnel resource base has declined (early 90s) or remained flat (since).

Guess what they decided?

We're short of troops.

Aha! The draft is coming!

Fat chance.

What's coming is a new rule set. We spent the 90s pretending we could technologize the problem away, or deny it's existence (Powell Doctrine), but now the feces are hitting the air-circulation device and the only choices that remain involve dramatically new rules.

We are going to civilianize and internationalize the peacekeepingn function. That is why the Sys Admin begins in the Defense Department but ultimately migrates across the Potomac to something/somebody else. This force will ultimately become something part of the US government and yet not. Run by the U.S. and yet not.

We won't do it because we want to in the Pentagon. We won't do it for some conspiracy toward one-world government or UN-rule. We'll do it because we have no choice. We'll do it because the evolution of the strategic environment demands that we do.

We'll do it because there's a Gap and it must be shrunk.

I don't predict, I reveal. You can hate the revelation, or you can get busy.

■"Another Triumph For the U.N.: Debating the fate of Darfur as the innocent suffer," op-ed by David Brooks, New York Times, 25 September 2004, p. A27.

Brooks is really pissed, and when he's really pissed, he's quite eloquent:

And so we went the multilateral route.

Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.

And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.

Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.

We did everything basically right. The president was involved, the secretary of state was bold and clearheaded, the U.N. ambassador was eloquent, and the Congress was united. And, following the strictures of international law, we had the debate that, of course, is going to be the top priority while planes are bombing villages . . .

But the multilateral process moved along in its dignified way. The U.N. general secretary was making preparations to set up a commission. Preliminary U.N. resolutions were passed, and the mass murderers were told they should stop - often in frosty tones. The world community - well skilled in the art of expressing disapproval, having expressed fusillades of disapproval over Rwanda, the Congo, the Balkans, Iraq, etc. - expressed its disapproval.

And, meanwhile, 1.2 million were driven from their homes in Darfur.

There was even some talk of sending U.S. troops to stop the violence, which, of course, would have been a brutal act of oil-greedy unilateralist empire-building, and would have been protested by a million lovers of peace in the streets. Instead, the U.S. proposed a resolution threatening sanctions on Sudan, which began another round of communiqué-issuing . . .

The resolution passed, and it was a good day for alliance-nurturing and burden-sharing - for the burden of doing nothing was shared equally by all. And we are by now used to the pattern. Every time there is an ongoing atrocity, we watch the world community go through the same series of stages: (1) shock and concern (2) gathering resolve (3) fruitless negotiation (4) pathetic inaction (5) shame and humiliation (6) steadfast vows to never let this happen again.

The "never again" always comes.

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.

■"China's Blurred Horizon: Spreading sands. Thickening smog. Toxic groundwater. Welcome to China, an economic success and an environmental disaster,"," by Joshua Kurlantzick, Washington Post, 19 September 2004, p. B1.

■"Bad Air and Water, and a Bully Pulpit in China,"," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 25 September 2004, p. A4.

■"California Backs Plan For Big Cut In Car Emissions: 11 Years To Take Effect; Toughest Rules in Nation--Challenge Expected From Automakers,"," by Danny Hakim, New York Times, 25 September 2004, p. A1.

China's not on the verge of conquering the world economically, as some fear. But neither is on the verge of total collapse from overgrowth, as others fear. It is rapidly approaching a tipping point on environmental issues.

The time we spent in China was like stepping back and forward in history simultaneously: it was like visiting Victorian England when the industrial revolution was laying waste to the environment and the political rule sets simply couldn't keep pace, but it was also like looking at the future of much of the Gap as it plays catch up. Both images inform. To catch up is to get dirty, but to get dirty is to accelerate the move to clean.

We can't stop countries from wanting to catch up economically, and they will dirty their countries in the process. We can just help to get them there as quickly as possible and then be ready with the advice and tried-but-true rule sets that help them deal with the damage and get over that hump. The SOx and NOx cap-and-trade regime that we put in place in the early 1990s is a great example. That's a rule set that many in the U.S. seek to export to China and other emerging markets. We know it works, and we know that when you really need it, you need it bad.

China is reaching that really bad moment, and it will force a host of new rules. Already, the voices are appearing inside China. The Ralph Naders and Greenpeaces of that society are beginning to find their voices.

It used to be that watching California was like watching the future of the world, because what started there typically spread elsewhere. Increasingly, and espeically on environmental issues, China will become the California for the New Core and most of the Gap. Its experiences in the years ahead will inform the world on what it means to get rich and then get clean.

Can it be done? Did the U.S. do it?

When I was in China it was very nostalgic to smell cars burning that much lead. It was like stepping into my childhood.

But everyone needs to grow up someday. China will, have no doubt. They won't do it because it's good or peace-loving or because we tell them to. They'll do it because that have no choice.

■"To Rally Stocks, China Moves To Ease Foreign Trading Rules,"," by Bloomberg News, New York Times, 24 September 2004, p. W1.

Does China institute these new rules for the sake of transparency? To please Wall Street? To embrace capitalism?

Hell no!

China opens up yet again because of the slump in the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets, which feed foreign investment flows into the overall economy. Their spigots seemed a bit tight, and so they opened them up a bit more.

They do it because they need the money.

People accuse me constantly of being soft on China (maybe it's the baby!). I'm not. I expect China to be China, now and forever. They change when forced. So to predict their change is not a matter of wishing, it's a matter of seeing ahead as to where they will have no choice.

Not art, not magic. It's called legwork and a systematic approach to thinking about global futures.

■"Laughing Instead of Screaming,"," by Caryn James, New York Times, 24 September 2004, p. B29.

Yet another interesting example of the long-term social effects of a System Perturbation like 9/11: that which would have seemed offensive in humor is now de rigeur.

The Statue of Liberty is bombed, but that is the least of the horrors in Larry Beinhart's scathing black comedy, "The Librarian," about a plan to seal the next presidential election; the conspiracy includes hired killers working for the Department of Homeland Security . . .

Like many other current political fictions, these [books being reviewed] take a skewed approach to realities too fraught to face head-on. In addition to comedies in which death and global tragedies occur, there are fantasies that lead to a kind of superrealism.

Then she goes on to review Philip Roth's latest book where Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency in 1940 and anti-semitism sweeps Nazi-sympathetic America.

The point of the article to me is how deep the changes have been with regard to the System Perturbation of 9/11: that which was unfunny is now funny. Why? Apparently we feel we have no choice but to deal with these demons.

■"Polar Views of Iraq Are Defining Election: Despite the Pitfalls for Bush and Kerry, Candidates Stay on Topic,"," by Dan Balz and Jim VendeHei, Washington Post, 19 September 2004, p. A1.

■"Echoes of a 1972 Loss Haunt a 2004 Campaign,"," by Todd S. Purdum, New York Times, 24 September 2004, p. A1.

Carville and Begala have taken the reins in Kerry's campaign, and have decided to take Bush on--head-on--over Iraq. The question of Iraq rightfully dominates the debate, because it asks the question, "Where is this entire war on terrorism going?"

Bush links Iraq to the war on terror. I buy that. Change the Middle East or rearrange office chairs in the Department of Homeland Security.

But the question now isn't, Was Iraq the right thing to do? That's a done deal. Now the question is, Who will do a better job with Iraq and the Middle East over the next four years?

Who will move that pile without ruining our economy? Who will effectively civilianize and internationalize the U.S. military presence there? Who will cut the deals necessary to bring the rest of the Core to the Middle East now as opposed to later, when it all falls apart because we tried--stubbornly--to do too much on our own without accepting the compromises needed to gain allies?

I think Bush was the right choice in 2000. I agree with most of what he did, especially in Iraq. I also believe he's the not the man to do what's necessary for the next four years. I think the costs will be too high.

That's the message the Carville and Begala have to run through Kerry's mouth. They have to be a one-note-Johnny for the rest of the game, but especially that first debate in Miami this week.

If Kerry can really connect at that debate, then it will be a long TD-drive to start the 3rd quarter in this contest. It will be a monumental affair. It will be Kerry's to lose.

So if he does, the Dems will have no one to blame but themselves for picking him.

■"Venezuela's Oil-for-MiGs Program: President Chavez appears fully prepared to menace neighboring states,"," op-ed by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2004, p. A15.

I have to admit that I like this lady's stuff by and large. She's fairly hawkish, but she never seems to be unreasonable about it, and her charges tend to stick.

O'Grady's really got it on for Hugo Chavez, as many of us do. He's just clever enough with his populism to appear legitimate, but he's not really doing anything to move the pile in Venezeula. Does he distribute the oil wealth better than the previous controlling elite? Yes. But he also doesn't do any better in improving Venezuela's long-term economic connectivity with the outside world, something a country cursed by oil needs to do with that wealth over time. Instead, he picks fights, he buys arms, he talks tough, he cracks down on dissident, he creates a bully militia to break heads when he feels the need. in short, Chavez is never going to be good for Venezueal over the long run. He's ruled for a while, and shows all signs of never wanting to give up power, so he's pretty much near the top of the list of "big men" who will eventually need to be toppled if the Gap is going to get shrunk.

O'Grady details his regional meddling in this op-ed: he bullies Bolivia like Syria bullies Lebanon, he's building up arms to a level that makes absolutely no sense given his neighbors (unless he's planning to do things to them, which Venezuela engages in every so often)--like $5 B in MiG fighters from Russia. Where is he going with all this? Nowhere good, that's for sure.

Chavez got away with strong-arming the attempted recall vote, but it's only going to get more ugly and he alienates more and more people there and is forced to manipulate the political process more and more to stay in power. I predict he'll declare himself President-for-Life at some point, setting in motion what will be an inevitable endgame with the U.S. at some fork down the road.

Dateline: from the worldwide headquarters of Barnett Consulting, Portsmouth RI, 25 September 2004

I have to thank everyone for all the real estate guides and detailed living information that we've received over the past week. I'm a bit stunned by the response. I pass it all along to my spouse, who--as always--is in charge of thinking about where we'd ultimately like to live in this country.

Right now we're leaning toward a return to the Midwest, which is something we've toyed with in the past, so it's hard to say how serious we are about it.

We're serious to this extent: I'm pretty certain I've reached the point in my career when it's time to figure out how to market what I have in terms of capabilities for the maximum gain and the maximum creative freedom. At 42, I'm looking at a great 20-year stretch of my highest creativity--I am certain. If I think of my six years in Boston at Harvard as one stint, then my 8 years in DC as another, then in closing up the seventh year here at the college, I need to think about what the next package should be all about. I know it will include more books, and lots more writing of this sort (the blog, newsletters, articles, stuff like that), because I really enjoy the writing life. I also know that I need to expand my clientele horizontally as much as possible.

The book is doing that for me in the US Government work for now, drawing me to military commands, the Intelligence Community, and elsewhere. But this isn't sustainable at the college, which wants me to focus on navy stuff for navy clients. Fair enough, since they pay the salary. It just doesn't meet my needs for growth or--frankly--that of the Navy's. But that's not my call, and since I don't seek to make it my call (no interest in management here), then I have little right to complain. I just need to figure out what will work best for me and my family and pursue that for all it's worth.

Everything in these big decisions revolves around the school year, because we're not interested in moving our kids out of one school and into another except across a summer. So there's a lot of thinking and effort for us to accomplish in the next several months, to include--I hope--the writing of Son of PNM for Putnam. Ideally, we'd leave on our own terms, creating the best possible legacy relationship between us and the college. Maybe we can do that this year, but then again, mebbe not.

But I've always prided myself on being able to make the toughest choices with the strongest sense of confidence--not to mention speed. Today I decided that Son #2 just wasn't ready for soccer at age 4--organized soccer that is. Jerry loves to play with me in the back yard, and that will continue, but our experiment at having him try to play on a team this year has come to an end. Tough call, because you hate to quit anything, and yet, there's no point in extending something that's no longer working and only creates bad memories.

So you make the call on the spot, and you move along.

I offer a number of articles from yesterday and today, plus some Post stuff from last Sunday's edition. I wanted to clear my deck of these today, leaving tomorrow for posting a bunch of electronic stuff that I've come across or that readers have sent me.

So here's what I got for today:

■Chavez is cruisin' for a bruisin'

■The four next years in Iraq

■9/11 perturbed America's sense of humor

■When the spigots tightened, China loosens up

■China reaching the environmental tipping point

■David Brooks would like his Sys Admin force now for Sudan

■Calling all Sys Admins!

Passed on to me by reader, it comes via Stratfor, which is enough notice in the press for me to cite it openly. [Later, on the 27th, I find this citation from old Washington Post, which I get in mail: "Syria Begins Dismantling Some Outposts in Lebanon," by Scott Wilson, 22 September 2004, p. A25.]

Indications are that Syria is redeploying troops in Lebanon in reaction to recent U.S. warnings, and experts consider this yet another good example showing that Assad the Younger is willing to deal.

Everyone wants to crap all over the "neocon debacle" that is Iraq, and while we should decry the poor planning and the misalignment of our force structure to the needs of post-conflict resolution (hence my call for the Sys Admin force), people continue to lose sight of the reality that taking down Saddam was about laying a System Perturbation on the Middle East as a whole. Yes, this administration tried to sell you on the shining beacon of democracy called Iraq being the centerpiece, but that was always a long-term notion. By focusing on that and trying to argue for its discrete fungibility, the White House was seeking to control expectations of how big a regional tumult might be created, but frankly, that was the plan all along--in a for penny, in for a pound.

Now, with the Saudis trying elections and Syria redeploying troops in Lebanon, we're starting to see the change that's been over four decades in waiting. I was at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston yesterday with my son (he's writing an essay for school) and listening to Kennedy talk about the Middle East in 1958 . . . my God, you could have taken the exact words and put them in a presidential candidate's mouth today (e.g., repressive regimes, poor development, irrational hatred of West, danger of violence). That shows you how almost nothing has changed there in the last half century. By going into Iraq, we set in motion a wave of change that will remake the Middle East, but it won't all be pretty and it won't all come fast. It will drag on for decades, just like conquering Western Europe in WWII bought us a many-decade babysitting job that's only ending today.

■"Who Hurts if China breaks? Most analysts think the economy will land softly. It had better -- an awful lot is riding on it," by Mark Gongloff, CNN Money, 24 September 2004, cnn=yes"http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/23/markets/china_effects/index.htm?cnn=yes

Sent to me by Justin Baxter of NY.

Great article that tries to get reader to realize just how important China's economy has become to the Core as a whole. People talk about the extreme danger of the U.S. economy failing. Well, China is closing in on the same status.

Here's the key excerpts:

Chinese officials, riding herd on the world's second-biggest economy -- if the undervalued yuan is adjusted to give it purchasing power parity with the U.S. dollar -- have recently tried to cool things down by clamping down on bank lending and foreign investment.

To some extent, they've succeeded. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth has slowed a smidge, from a rate of nearly 10 percent in the second half of 2003, and money supply has tightened. In fact, some observers hope China will soon loosen the screws a little, letting money flow more freely again . . .

"Show me an example of one other emerging market economy that's made such a transition without huge disruptions along the way -- I would love to see it," said Zachary Karabell, co-portfiolo manager, along with Dan Chung, of the China-U.S. Growth Fund at Fred Alger Management. "I think they have been remarkably successful, and I feel more confident about their ability to make more right decisions than wrong decisions" . . .

The China-U.S. Growth Fund, with about $24 million under management, is just one of the players with a lot riding on China's economy. Other mutual funds include the Dreyfus Premier Greater China fund and the China Regional Opportunity Fund at U.S. Global Funds.

In addition to several Chinese and Hong Kong-based companies, the China-U.S. Growth Fund also serves as a "Who's Who" of U.S. multinationals with growing interest in China . . .

China's Asian trading partners, including Japan, Taiwan and Singapore, would suffer from a hard China landing, as would Latin American suppliers of wood, copper and other commodities. Some economists fear a meltdown of China's banking system would spread financial pain all the way to the United States.

You're going to see a lot more overview articles like this in the mainstream press. It's why I've been telling people for a couple of years now that the worst global security scenarios I can come up with all start with a financial failure in China.

Two stories sent to me by readers. First is an AP story on base closings (basically the Andy Hoehn study in OSD that I talk about in PNM--years in the works). The second is a Washington Times story on Chinese peacekeeping in Haiti! (On my!)

Here's the key bit on the first story, from the AP, dated 23 September 2004:

Over the next decade, the military will abandon 35 percent of the Cold War-era bases and buildings it uses abroad, even as it seeks to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to help fight terrorism.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was outlining the plan Thursday to the

Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a report to Congress, the Pentagon offered details of the "global defense posture." The planned changes, once completed, will result in "the most profound reordering" of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements were set 50 years ago, according to the report.

The most widely noted aspect of the plan, which was announced in broad terms

last month by President Bush, is the withdrawal of 70,000 U.S. troops and 100,000 of their family members from bases in Germany and South Korea. That has gained attention in part because it means fewer U.S. bases probably will be shuttered in the 2005 round of base closings than if there were no withdrawal.

Pentagon seeks maximum flexibility

Less well understood is that even while troops will return to the United States from Germany and South Korea, the Pentagon will be building up its network of "forward operating sites," sometimes called "lily pad" bases. These are more austere than the large, fully developed bases - dubbed "Little Americas" - where U.S. forces stood guard during the Cold War.

"During the Cold War we had a strong sense that we knew where the major risks and fights were going to be, so we could deploy people right there," Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in an Associated Press interview Wednesday.

"We're operating now in a completely different concept," said Feith, chief architect of the global realignment plan.

"We need to be able to do that whole range of military operations (from combat to peacekeeping) anywhere in the world pretty quickly."

The Pentagon is seeking maximum flexibility in the decades ahead in responding to terrorism and other potential threats, including those to oil supplies. So the military wants a range of basing and access agreements with as many countries as possible and in as many regions as it can.

So big, in fact, that it will change the way all other great powers think about and employ military power in the world. China, recently, took the step of pitching in with peacekeeping troops in Haiti, of all places. Now, some in the U.S. security community will get all hot and bothered about this, citing the "very bad precedent," but this is silly in the extreme. We're floating proposals out of the White House for a global peacekeeping force and China's the most populous nation in the world. Does it make any sense for them to sit on the sidelines? Of course not.

Here's the Washington Times story on China (excerpted), which I received from reader Terry Collier):

By Bill Gertz

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published September 6, 2004

_____



China's Public Security Ministry is set to dispatch a 130-man "special police" unit to Haiti this month in the first deployment of Chinese forces to the Western Hemisphere, Bush administration officials say.

The first advance unit of the police troops, who are specially trained for riot and crowd control, will over the next two weeks join the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, the multinational force known as Minustah dispatched to the war-torn Caribbean island.

The main body of the force will arrive a short time later and will deploy to the port of Gonaives, say officials who insist on anonymity.

Administration officials are concerned that the Chinese government will use the troop deployment as a way to put political pressure on the Haitian government, one of the few nations retaining diplomatic relations with China's rival Taiwan.

"It's been a big year for China," says one official opposed to the deployment. "They put a man in space, won gold medals at the Olympics, and now they are going to put troops in the Western Hemisphere for the first time."

The official says China's first military presence near U.S. shores would

boost Beijing's long-term strategy to "supplant U.S. influence" in the region. "China is pursuing a maritime strategy in the Caribbean to gain access and control over port facilities, free trade zone infrastructure, fisheries, oil and minerals, and off-shore banking platforms" . . .

Administration officials say the decision to permit the Chinese to join the U.N. force in Haiti was made quietly, without a full debate among defense, foreign policy and national security agencies.

"This was done by the people in charge of peacekeeping," one official says. China has sent small numbers of observers to previous U.N. peacekeeping missions but has declined earlier requests to send active units . . .

Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang, head of the Communist Party's political police and security organ, says the dispatch of the troops is an important diplomatic move and reflects China's "devotion to world peace and stability."

Gertz's breathless reporting here is a bit much. He goes on to make it sound the beginnings of a 21st Century Cuban missile crisis when all we're talking about here is 125 riot cops. Ooooh weeeee!

Gertz later cites some secret SouthCom report about China trying to use its economic interests in the region to supplant U.S. military power. He cites intell support to Venezuela's Chavez and arms sales to Cuba. All of this stuff if piddling in the extreme, compared to our broadband mil-to-mil interactions throughout Asia. Putting China's current efforts in the Western Hemisphere in the same light is a bit much. Where China is really vulnerable is in the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. just so happens to have the bulk of its overseas forces right now engaged in an occupation of the world's second largest source of oil. If you think that somehow China "controlling" the Panama Canal (which has become so irrelevant thanks to new ships that are beyond "Panamax"--or too big to go through the canal, that officials there are talking about widenind it) compares to our military domination of the Straits of Hormuz when it comes to the global economy and how it works, then you're sorry misinformed.

America is going to need a lot of help in shrinking the Gap. China will need to be a significant player. We cannot even dream of pursuing such a strategy while maintaining a fear-based, competitive relationship with China. Either we choose to do something about the Gap in order to win this global war on terrorism, or we choose to plan on China as the near-peer and start locking down America from terrorist attacks. You tell me which speaks to a better world and richer, more developed America.

Here we go with a trio of stories sent to me by readers.

First up is the Business Week 27 September 2004 cover story on how the future of the IT sector will be found in the New Core and the Gap, not the Old Core, where technology is already too saturated to offer significant long-term growth potential.

Take that, Immanuel Wallerstein and the rest of your pinhead neo-Marxists!

Here's the key excerpt from the piece "Tech's Future," to which I was alerted by Justin Baxter of NY:

During the first 50 years of the info-tech era, about 1 billion people have come to use computers, the vast majority of them in North America, Western Europe, and Japan. But those markets are maturing. Computer industry sales in the U.S. re expected to increase just 6% per year from now to 2008, according to market researcher IDC. To thrive, the industry must reach out to the next 1 billion customers. And many of those people will come not from the same old places but from far-flung frontiers like Shanghai, Cape Town, and Andhra Pradesh. "The robust growth opportunities are clearly shifting to the developing world," says Paul A. Laudicina, managing director at management consultant A.T. Kearney Inc.

Tech companies are scrambling to cash in on what they hope will be the next great growth wave. Led by China, India, Russia, and Brazil, emerging markets are expected to see tech sales surge 11% per year over the next half decade, to $230 billion, according to IDC. What makes these markets so appealing is not just the poor, but also the growing ranks of the middle-class consumers. Already, there are 60 million in China and 200 million in India, and their numbers are growing fast. These newly wealthy consumers are showing a taste for fashionable brands and for products every bit as capable as those available to Americans, Japanese, and Germans.

The Old Core desperately needs to keep integrating the New Core and shrinking the Gap if it's going to remain rich. It's that simple.

Second piece also from Justin Baxter, and it's an interview in the same issue of Business Week with Sarbuland Khan, who is the Executive Coordinator of the U.N. Information & Communications Technologies Task Force. Here's the key excerpt on the role of the Internet:

Q: When and why did the U.N. decide that Internet access is important for economic development.

A: This came out of the General Assembly debate on globalization. We studied the role of the technologies and determined that unless developing countries are able to leverage technologies, and particularly the Internet, they won't be able to achieve their goals.

The Internet can diffuse information and bypass some of the obstacles they face. With better information, people can get better integrated into the economy. And they can be independent economic actors, not just receivers. The ICT Task Force was created, bringing together government and industry representatives. It's a multi-stakeholder approach.

The first step is creating an awareness among policymakers that this can be done. The Internet can be a major shaper of change in the developing countries. We've seen it happen in places like Costa Rica, Estonia, and Ireland. In Costa Rica, in 10 years, it leapfrogged other nations. There are many countries with better resources, and they're bigger, but they're way behind.

The second step is to help create the right policy and regulatory environment for broadband, and satellite, and wireless.



The third step is to work with the private sector to lower the costs of technology. There's a reward here for them. If technology diffusion takes off, the private sector can invest and make money in places where they wouldn't have made a profit before.



We're very early in the process. It's hard to say that X technology investment led to Y growth. But early evidence shows that those that adopt technology fast and early, do well.

Guess which region in the world has the worst ICT penetration? That would be the Middle East. Guess which region is the source of most transnational terrorism? That would be the Middle East.

Oh, but if we gave up Israel to the repressive regimes there, then it would all be okay, right?

Last piece sent by Ram Narayanan, who pushes pieces on India to people all over the web. It's about President Bush and PM Singh meeting and how that signals the coming agreement to open up the two countries trade far more on technology. Here's the key excerpt from the 23 September 2004 story from the Mercury News:

"Bush-Singh meeting hints at tech sales boost: U.S. AND INDIA
>MOVING TOWARD STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP," By Daniel Sneider

Iraq has become the black hole of American foreign policy, sucking up all attention. Every once in a while, though, a ray of light escapes the black hole. That happened this week when President Bush had breakfast with the new Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, in New York. With little fanfare, the two governments announced small but crucial steps toward removing barriers to cooperation in areas such as space, nuclear power, high technology and defense.

The apparently warm meeting between the two men was a welcome sign. It indicated that the formation of a left-of-center government in India after elections this spring has not slowed the move toward strategic partnership between the world's two largest democracies.

The attention to India by the Bush administration should be applauded. The emergence of India as an economic dynamo and an Asian megastate is among the most significant developments of the last decade.

The American response to this change should not be reduced -- as Democratic candidate John Kerry seems to have done -- to complaints about the outsourcing of American jobs. The growing economic relationship between India and the United States is no small matter.

But our interaction is much broader, and potentially much more beneficial to Americans, than what a bumper sticker implies.

American companies are eager to exploit opportunities to sell to India -- sales that create jobs right here. But they face a bewildering set of controls on the export of technology to India, enforced by an entrenched bureaucracy.

These are the outcome of India's decision to test nuclear warheads in 1998 and join the club of nuclear powers. After those tests, the United States slapped on sanctions that severely controlled the export of sensitive technology, such as high-speed computers, to India. Those restrictions have eased somewhat in recent years but it remains very difficult for American firms to get clearance to sell high technology to India.

The Bush administration, spearheaded by former U.S. Ambassador to India and now deputy national security adviser Robert Blackwill, wants to break through these roadblocks. In January, the two governments announced the outline for ``Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership,'' or NSSP.

The United States will gradually lift controls in three areas -- civilian nuclear technology, commercial space programs and dual-use technology that could be used for both defense and civilian purposes.

In turn, India will tighten controls on the export of such sensitive technologies to other countries and make sure American technology is not used in its nuclear and missile programs. Last week, the two governments announced the first phase, some of which is classified, but includes making it easier for American companies to do business with India's civilian space organization.

Guess which country was cited in a recent World Bank "Doing Business 2005" survey report as cutting its regulations and improving it's foreign direct investment and trade climate most in the last year? That would India.

Thanks to T.S. Walsh for sending me that last cite. I plan on getting the WB report.

Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 26 September 2004.

A bunch of stuff posted today to clear out my mailboxes. Great cites (articles) and sites I plan to employ in the next book, so keep 'em coming!

First I just leave you with this article from the Seattle Times. I replay it in whole because it's pretty good, but really because I love the casual cite from the book, which shows how it's entering the mainstream lexicon of strategic thinkers in this country:

Thursday, September 09, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Collin Levey / Times editorial columnist

Kerry's coercive economic patriotism threat to U.S. firms, global prosperity

For the love of a horse race, the recent injection of talent into the Kerry campaign sounded like a good idea. The old Clinton strategists have parachuted in to get the Democrat back on course after the GOP convention. Less Vietnam, more Keynes was the plan, since voters give John Kerry his only lead — a 3 point margin — on domestic economic issues.

So the folks who brought us "It's the economy, stupid" are now trying to market Kerry as the Sesame Street candidate. " 'W' stands for 'Wrong,' " Kerry has thundered. And President Bush is the "Outsourcer in Chief."

Impressed as we are by Kerry's spelling prowess, he's now articulating a protectionist policy prescription to make Pat Buchanan blush. The plan is to create economic patriotism similar to the "Buy American" campaigns of old, but by coercing the behavior of business instead of rallying consumer choice. By closing "loopholes" and offering "rewards," Kerry says he'll make American companies keep their jobs here.

Fat chance. Even if government wanted to do such a dimwitted thing, it couldn't begin to compensate businesses for revenue they would lose by operating inefficiently. Nor do protectionist policies sit well overseas, a lesson Bush himself learned the hard way after seeing his steel tariffs smacked down and threatened with retaliation abroad. (Wasn't Kerry supposed to be all about patching up relations with our "allies"?)

At the moment, Kerry seems to be doing his own part for the economy, hiring half the country to join his campaign staff. He shouldn't look too closely at the sources of his campaign wealth, though. Hollywood sends scads of post-production work and animation to India, while movies are shot in Canada. The Heinz Company — being efficient and sensible — operates 57 of its 79 factories overseas.

Of course, we applaud anything that keeps condiments plentiful and cheap, even if Heinz's good business sense is the source of Teresa Heinz Kerry's fortune. But then where does Kerry get off opposing trade deals with countries such as Singapore and Chile? They're hardly powerhouse threats to American prosperity. He and running mate John Edwards supported trade with China, a country that poses a much greater competitive threat to the sort of American jobs that are no longer holding their own, but then that was before they began running for the White House.

Of course, any first-year analyst will tell you that job growth has been slow to recover in part because businesses have preferred to focus on productivity rather than rehiring.

Even so, the unemployment rate attached to today's "slump" is comparable to the unemployment rate facing Bill Clinton after his first term. Compare that to the 9 percent rate now in France and Germany and you start to get the picture. Around the world, rich countries are falling behind in the scramble for jobs not because of "unfair" competition but because of the tax and overhead costs imposed by their welfare states.

Meanwhile, Kerry's economic prescriptions should be seen in the context of our times. Contrary to the protesters at the Republican convention, you cannot sensibly be against globalization and the war in Iraq. Trade is the road to peace and prosperity for poor and often unstable nations. We contribute more in direct investment to developing nations than we send in government aid. The process has lifted more people out of poverty in China than anything else. Does anybody doubt that peace and stability for the whole world have been helped by China's shucking off of Maoist radicalism for capitalist growth?

And — stay with us — when countries break through the ceiling of $3,000 per capita gross domestic product, every indication is that they tend to get out of the violence business, according to "The Pentagon's New Map" author Thomas Barnett. We help get countries over that threshold through investment and the multinational corporations that Kerry has demonized.[italics mine--TPMB]

That's a tough notion to fit into a campaign slogan — not as catchy as accusing Bush of "exporting America." So Kerry's plan is to close the tax loopholes for outsourcing and "reward" companies that help create jobs here at home. He also would raise taxes on "the rich" and small businesses, while offering "incentives" (read tax breaks) to major corporations that engage in inefficient business practices.

To a less nuanced mind, this sounds like what the left used to call "corporate welfare." More broadly speaking, we should be troubled at the prospect of an America that wants international co-dependency with the United Nations while galvanizing American companies to withdraw from the world.

John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, has huffed that "companies like Maytag are more loyal to the American dollar than they are to the American flag." Never mind that Sweeney's union members today are increasingly public-sector bureaucrats and health-care workers, not factory workers. When was the last time labor decided to moderate its wage demands for "patriotic" reasons?

For that matter, Kerry hasn't held a job in the private sector since he was making cookies 30 years ago, and Edwards' most sustaining relationship with the drivers of the American economy has been by suing them.

We hope businesses will keep focusing on making the best products at the lowest prices, wherever that leads them to invest and hire. That's certainly likely to produce better results than trying to figure out what Kerry wants them to do by sorting through the mess of conflicting "incentives," taxes and mandates he has been proposing.

Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com

Why do I cite this? It's important that PNM can be a touchstone easily accessed by writers and thinkers. That's what a reproducible strategic concept should be. That's what containment was during the Cold War. That's what I'm aiming for in this effort.

Here are the articles and cites I'm relaying from readers:

■Technology is the key to growing the Core and shrinking the Gap

■It takes an entire Core to shrink the Gap

■The China syndrome

■Bit more intell on Syria and latest U.S. pressure

■"Britain Offering to Pay Off 10% of Third World Debt: A challenge to help the neediest countries get back on their feet," by Alan Cowell, New York Times, 26 September 2004, p. A16.

Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer says all the IMF has to do is revalue its vast gold supplies and it can cancel huge chunks of the Gap's public debts. The IMF gold right now is purposefully undervalued at roughly 1/10th it's market value. Add this voice to the White House and Dem candidate Kerry and it's getting to be a chorus beyond just Bono.

Total "third world" (basically Gap) debt is estimated at $200b, which is less than half the Defense Department's annual budget, to put it in perspective.

What the IMF holds in gold is valued at $8.5 b, but its current market value is over $80 b, meaning all the IMF would have to do is simply revalue the gold and much of the Gap's debt to it could be written off the books. Meanwhile, when a small country like the UK says it will set aside $180m a year in a pledge to cover 10% of that debt all by itself, you begin to wonder why the Core as a whole shouldn't be able to take care of this issue.

Ah, but this must all be seen as the dream of naive thinkers like Bono. Things like killing Gap debt while policing its wastelands . . . are simply too fantastic to contemplate.

Now, selling them arms, that's a different thing.

■"Saddam, the Bomb and Me: Was Iraq a nuclear threat? Yes--and it still is," op-ed by Mahdi Obeidi, New York Times, 26 September 2004, p.WK11.

You know, Stalin was one whacked fellow his last few years. But when you have that sort of power, crazy is as crazy does . . ..

Quite the summary from Saddam's old bomb maker, used to promote his newly released book.

He says Saddam was well en route to getting the bomb prior to the 1991 war, but that UN sanctions stopped him after that. He didn't try to get around those sanctions. Why? Obeidi's explanation is a beauty:

Another factor in the mothballing of the program was that Saddam Hussein was profiting handsomely from the United Nations oil-for-food program, building palaces around the country with the money he skimmed. I think he didn't want to risk losing this revenue stream by trying to restart a secret weapons program.

Wow. That's a neat explanation for how sanctions "worked" while killing 50,000 Iraqi kids every year thanks to malnutrition and lack of access to medicines. Although I guess you might call them "sanctions of mass destruction," as some did.

Why did we get it wrong in our intell?:

In addition, the West never understood the delusional nature of Saddam Hussein's mind. By 2002, when the United States and Britain were threatening war, he had lost touch with the reality of his diminished military might. By that time I had been promoted to director of projects for the country's entire military-industrial complex, and I witnessed firsthand the fantasy world in which he was living . . .

By 2003, as the American invasion loomed, the tyrant was alternately wroking on his next trashy novel and giving lunatic orders like burning oil around Baghdad to "hide" the city from bombing attacks.

Sound familar? It's the basic package you find in the Gap. It's what we have in North Korea. It's what we have in Zimbabwe. There are a few other places as well. Not a neverending list, but one that's always hard to ignore when the facts finally sneak out into the sunlight, like they do in a book such as this one.

The "still is" part of this op-ed refers to all those nuke scientists who hit the road once the regime fell. Proliferation-types always sound this note. It's the WMD equivalent of "people don't kill people, guns do!" Catch the scientists and we'll all be safe, we're told.

■"Egyptians Wonder If Dynasty Is Near: Mubarek's Son Gaining Prominence," by Daniel Williams, Washington Post, 24 September 2004, p. A14.

The latest idiot son is on the move in the Middle East. Why? Egypt can't possibly find anyone better after 23 years of "emergency laws." How long has Mubarek the Elder ruled? That would be 23 years.

What will the next "emergency" be? Here's guessing it could be Hosni Mubarek's fading health, and the "emergency" requirement that the parliament in his pocket declare his son his successor one fine day.

Never happen? The son visits the U.S. recently and gets audiences with Rice, Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld. A recent shake-up of the cabinet puts a few of his best friends in seats. And at the recent national convention of the Mubarek party, aka National Democratic Party, our boy served as MC.

I know, I know, Gamal has been a banker. Tough work when you're daddy's your country's Big Man. Betcha he clawed his way to the top.

Yes, I see reform coming to the Middle East if the U.S. would only pull out of Iraq . . ..

■"With a Raceway, China Motors Toward the Modern Age,"," by Howard W. French, New York Times, 26 September 2004, p. YT3.

Yet another sign of China's aggressive rise: Formula One racing has appeared in Shanghai, that Big Apple of China. The new $300m race track there is part of a $5b complex designed to anchor China's burgeoning car culture and nurture nationalistic dreams of selling autos the world over!

In a China fresh from its success in the Olympics, and in the thick of preparations to hold the 2008 Games in Beijing, a sort of national sports mania has gripped the country. There is a determination to be world class in whatever the form of competition, almost no matter what the cost. In most cases, simply invoking the glory of China is a sufficient justification for the expenditure.

No, I know, China can't be understood. It's an inscrutable place, inscrutable culture, inscrutable people.

Wake me up when NASCAR arrives.

■"Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law," by Ginger Thompson, New York Times, 26 September 2004, p. A1.

Read this excerpt and tell me you can't see the analogy to trying to squash terrorism in the Middle East:

They are gang members, known here as "maras," after a species of swarming ants. Indeed, over the last decade gangs have spread like a scourge across Central America, Mexico and the United States, setting off a catastrophic crime wave that has turned dirt-poor neighborhoods into combat zones and an equally virulent crackdown that has left thousands of gang members dead, in hiding, in jail or heading to the United States.

The authorities estimate there are 70,000 to 100,000 gang members across Central America and Mexico. In the last decade, gangs have killed thousands of people, sowing new fear in a region still struggling to overcome civil wars that ended just a decade ago. Gangs have replaced guerrillas as public enemy No. 1.

The presidents of Honduras and El Salvador have called the gangs as big a threat to national security as terrorism is to the United States. They have revived old counterinsurgency strategies and adopted zero-tolerance laws known as Mano Dura, which loosely translates as "firm hand," that bypass basic rules of due process and allow them to send young men to prison for nothing more than a gang tattoo.

Instead of offering reassurance, official campaigns inflame public fear. And in the last year, human rights investigators have begun to report alarming increases in the numbers of young men killed by the police and vigilantes.

No one denies that gang violence requires a tough response. No one - not even the nurses who remove his tattoos - feel sympathy for men with brutal histories, like Mr. Antúnez. But many human rights advocates and community leaders worry that the aggressive measures governments are taking against gangs have not solved the problem as much as they have spread it.

Thousands of gang members are fleeing north, moving with and preying on the waves of illegal migrants who travel to the United States, which is taking aggressive measures of its own and deporting thousands of gang members on immigration violations. The effect is to churn the gangs throughout the region.

When experts count up the actual and potential terrorist pool in the Middle East, they tend to cite 10 + 90 = 100k, or 10k active + 90k potential = a total at-risk population of 100k.

What's interesting to me about this story is the same phenomenon we're seeing in Latin America with gangs is what we're seeing in the Middle East with our Iraq occupation and the crackdowns by the regimes there who--not out of sympathy with our cause but out of simple fear--are doing similar things to delegitimize activity that may have been tolerated at lower levels but once it got to the point of threatening regimes, triggered a reaction from above that's brutal and harmful to civil rights.

Chiapas seems to be the Mexican "seam state" on this one, sharing a rather lawless border with Guatemala.

This crackdown is not going so well. In countries riddled with corrupt police systems, rule of law tends to get tossed to the side in crackdowns such as these. Plus, lo and behold, when you go after someone, they tend to respond in kind, so crime goes up, not down.

But perhaps most to the point: again we see weak governments inside the Gap struggling to deal not with traditional state-on-state security threats, but threats from subnational and transnational groups, showing once again that Gap states tend to feel beseiged from above and below, while Core states pretty much want their borders strengthened, their migration rule sets toughened, and to send in the Marines now and then to clean things up in the bad neighborhoods.

But this story gives you the sense, that old model of ignoring the Gap just isn't working anymore. Something more is needed, and if we don't offer it, the problem will migrate to our neck of the woods.

Thomas P.M. Barnett

May 2004

The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC 2020 project are those of individual participants. They are posted for discussion purposes only and do not represent the views of the US Government.

Introduction/Executive Summary

The short answer is yes. But the more important answers are that:

1) This future is worth pursuing because it represents genuine historical progress in the de-escalation of mass violence

2) This problem-set is boundable and easily described as a grand historical arc of ever-retreating resistance to the spread of the global economy, and

3) The sequencing of the regional tasks involved is of our own choosing.

1) Internally, the U.S. must rebalance its own force to reflect the new focus on operations other than the now classic short, highly technological “effects-based” war meant to take down a regime and its military;

2) Externally, the U.S. must recast its national security strategy to reflect the overriding goal of extending globalization, or the connectivity associated with the global economy, thus abandoning a balance-of-power mentality vis-à-vis other putative peer or near-peer competitors in the military sphere (not the economic); and

3) Within the community of advanced nations, the U.S. must work to establish an A-to-Z rule set (e.g., international organizations with generally recognized procedures) for the managing of politically bankrupt states, i.e., those that are utterly corrupt or suffering some other crisis of governance.

What that sequencing argument really says is that it all begins with the Defense Department generating the required institutional capacity for “peace-waging” that it already possesses for warfighting. Absent that effort, the political leadership may be greatly constrained in its ability to forge the new security alliances required to successfully contain and ultimately shrink the sources of mass subnational and transnational violence in the global community. Without those alliances coming into being, the system as a whole will remain handicapped in its ability to reduce the number of political bankrupt states, and this negative status quo will ultimately settle into a sort of “civilizational apartheid” whereby the frontiers of the global economy demarcate—in a lasting fashion—the divide between the “connected” regions and those areas that remain fundamentally “disconnected” from globalization’s advance.

The Historical De-Escalation of Mass Violence

The post-Cold War era has witnessed an amazing “downshifting” of the source of threats to global stability. In this short span of history, the world has moved from an era in which global nuclear war was the dominant threat, through a transitional era in which it seemed that regional rogues would become the primary source of system instability, to one in which it is increasingly recognized that transnational or non-state actors will constitute the main source of violence—sometimes of a mass nature—that has the capacity to perturb, even in a significant fashion, the functioning of the global economy. In effect, America’s definition of the threat has de-escalated from an “evil empire” to “evil regimes” to “evil actors.”

Today, in the Global War on Terror, the United States faces the fundamental prospect of waging wars on individuals—not states and their armies, nor grand security alliances and whatever “civilization” they might represent. Consider the major military interventions the U.S. has made since 1989, the pivotal year in which the Soviet bloc began to unravel:

• In the Panama intervention, the U.S. went in after just one man—Manuel Noriega

• In Somalia, U.S. attention effectively settled on the disruptive actions of the so-called warlords—Mohammed Farah Aideed in particular

• In the former Republic of Yugoslavia, the Serbian regime’s hostile actions were effectively ended with the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic and his ruling clan

• Going into Afghanistan, our targets focused overwhelmingly on the ruling Taliban leadership and that of al Qaeda

• In the takedown of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the main goal of U.S. forces was to capture and/or kill a “deck of cards”—or roughly 50 senior members of the governing elite.

The problems that the U.S. military currently faces in successfully pursuing a Global War on Terrorism are therefore logically located at the level of “bad actors,” and not at the level of inter-state war (which has effectively disappeared across the post-Cold War era) or system-level war (to wit, the U.S. no longer faces an effective military threat from another great power, but merely the potential threat from some putative downstream “near-peer competitor”). In effect, the challenges we face today in taking on the task of increasing global stability reflect the immense success the U.S. has had in eliminating past sources (real or potential) for mass violence throughout the world. Other system-level powers no longer exist to threaten global peace, as the U.S. remains the world’s sole military superpower and the stability of nuclear balances among the world’s advanced nations is essentially unquestioned (because if it were, where are the new efforts to negotiate strategic arms control among these countries?). With state-on-state wars effectively disappearing, in large part thanks to the demonstrated willingness of U.S.-led coalitions to reverse any regional hegemon’s attempt to expand through military conquest, the locus of the most salient threats to global stability are logically found at the level of individual actors, whether they are already embedded within existing failed states or seek to capture political control of such a state.

The Ever-Retreating Resistance to the Spread of the Global Economy— a Boundable Problem Set

The definition of “state failure” needs to be reflect the fundamental struggle of the age: a state is “failing” if it either cannot attract or build itself the connectivity associated with globalization’s progressive advance or if it essentially seeks to retard or deny the development of such connectivity out of desire to maintain strict political control over its population. The former situation reflects the usual definition of “state failure,” meaning the regime in question cannot generate sufficient stability (from physical all the way up to financial) within its borders to allow for effective economic transactions with the outside world, whereas the latter reflects the willful pursuit of some level of disconnectedness from the outside world (and typically the “corrupt” influences it imposes) as a method of maintaining authoritarian rule.

Terrorist networks are likely to seek out the most disconnected/failed states in order to set up bases for a variety of reasons:

• If the regime in question lacks control over its own borders or territory, the country offers the potential for sanctuary (e.g., Pakistan, Afghanistan still)

• If the country in question is experiencing civil strife, it offers the potential for recruitment and regime change leading to new political leadership that can be co-opted for cooperation with and support to the terrorists (this situation may be reappearing in Sudan, and could appear in more sub-Saharan African states in coming years).

• If the regime in question is solidly in power and exercises authoritarian control over its population, it often offers opportunity—sometimes on a cash and carry basis and sometimes as a result of genuine ideological affinity—for specific avenues of cooperation/support (e.g., Liberia's Charles Taylor offering sanctuary in return for bribes, the Iranian government's systematic support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia's back-door attempts to bribe terrorists to engage in jihad anywhere other than in Saudi Arabia).

Viewed in this manner, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are just the latest version of an exclusionary/rejectionist ideology that demands from its members that they do everything within their power to halt the spread of the "corrupt" capitalist world economy. By doing so, they would successfully break off from that system's creeping embrace some portion of humanity that they, in the manner proscribed by their ideology, believe they have "liberated" and "preserved." They would do this through a combination of repressive internal political controls (police state), strict separation in terms of political boundaries (bloc-versus-bloc demarcations), and a generally hostile security stance vis-à-vis the outside world in general, but specifically against the most powerful military power within that "corrupt" capitalist world-system (Britain for Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ network, the United States for bin Laden and the al Qaeda network).

Understanding that the current era's Global War on Terrorism is nothing more than the continuation of a long historical arc associated with the expansion of the functioning core of the global economy (traditionally defined by the market economy, free expression, and the opportunities they entail) is crucial to determining both the length of the strategic struggle ahead, as well as its likely pathways.

So far, we have seen the anti-capitalist forces in the world progressively retreat across history:

• Having failed to hijack Germany with a Communist insurrection during and just after the first World War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially retreated to a pre-capitalist environment in order to successfully break off a nation (Russia) from the capitalist world system (though 10 years later they began to build an industrial system).

• Other Communist successes followed historically, other than those generated by the Soviet Union's military successes in World War II (i.e., the conquering and subjugation of Eastern Europe), and were based on even further retreats back into the past—namely, Mao's peasant-based revolutions (and all the variants that followed in various Third World locales, with varying levels of success),

• The peak of this retreat, as far as the Communists were concerned, was seen in the Soviet Union's shift to support of “Countries of Socialist Orientation” following the Cuban missile crisis. In effect, the Communists experimented with the notion that future successes were to be had in breaking societies off from the capitalist world system and would involve the world's poorest and most economically backward states. This experiment failed miserably, and with it, the grand historical retreat of the Communists’ influence began in the early 1980s, abetted by the rise of internal reformist leaderships in both the Soviet Union and China.

• With the end of the Cold War, strategic thinkers in the West tended to assume that no coherent resistance to the then-rapidly enlarging market world order would emerge again—or the notion voiced by Francis Fukuyama of an "end of history." In retrospect, this was a fundamental misreading of history. History was simply resuming after the Communist planned-economy interlude, with the locus of violent resistance to the global economy's spread shifting to the traditional cultures of the Middle East.

• To the extent the United States and its allies succeed in connecting the Middle East to the global economy beyond the slim bond currently offered by the energy trade (which results in wealth for elites but no broad economic development), those elements committed to violent resistance against the spread of the "corrupt," Western-derived global economy (the threat of "Westoxification") may yet again retreat into the past by targeting ever-more pre-globalized societies as their next venues for revolution/jihad. In other words, as we succeed in the Middle East, we may be setting ourselves up for the next historical round in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scenario Pathways for Future Integration of Disconnected Regions into the Global Eeconomy

Four broad regions can be currently identified as suffering a disproportional lack of broad technological, social, economic and political connectivity to the global economy. As such, it is within these regions that all of the internal and terrorist violence since the end of the Cold War can be located, as well as more than 90 percent of U.S. military interventions over the same time period (for details on this mapping of instability and "disconnectedness" across the world, see my The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons), 2004). These four regions can be loosely described as Southwest Asia/Greater Middle East, Asia Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean Rim/ Central America/ northern Andes region.

Stipulating that the current administration's focus on generating a "big bang" of political change in the Greater Middle East will mean that efforts by the United States to integrate these disconnected regions will begin—in a sequential fashion—with that region, then six alternative scenario pathways can be described:

Discussing each of those six scenarios in turn, in order of judged likelihood, and understanding that some U.S. effort will be made at all times across all four regions, but likewise realizing that a sense of successful sequencing is necessary if political support for such interventions is to be maintained among the public (i.e., avoiding a sense of accumulated responsibilities beyond our national capacity to manage):

1. Rogue State Focus: In this scenario, the United States focuses on dealing with the so-called “axis of evil” regimes, a process that began with Iraq and would subsequently focus on Iran and North Korea.

• Stipulating a strong U.S. focus on Iran in conjunction with the ongoing effort in pacifying and rehabilitating post-Saddam Iraq, the question would then be, at what point does the situation in the Persian Gulf permit a new focus on regime change in North Korea and a ramping up of efforts across Southeast Asia as a whole to deal with the threat of transnational terrorism and ideologically-inspired insurgencies there?

• Beyond the East Asia/Pacific region, the next choice for significant interventions designed to disable dangerous, rogue-like situations would logically be the long-running failed state of Colombia.

• In this scenario, U.S. attention would turn to Africa last, primarily because of the lack of any rogue regimes there capable of mounting even indirect threats to either the United States' homeland or the functioning of the global economy.

The advantage of this approach is that by moving fastest against the existing rogue regimes, strong precedents would be set with regard to future potential regimes of that sort. The major disadvantage would be the global community's lack of an A-to-Z rule set on how best to handle a politically-bankrupt regime, meaning the system's major powers could experience significant divergence of opinion regarding the utility of preemptively disabling these regimes, in large part because of the huge military and nation-building resources that would be entailed while the other advanced countries struggle with stagnant economies and aging populations.

2. Islamic Arc Focus: A focus on integrating the Islamic world as a whole would yield a sequence beginning with the Greater Middle East, and then an eastward shift toward the major Islamic populations of South and Southeast Asia.

• Africa would follow next, given the slow but steady penetration by Islam in societies there that has been going on since around 1100 (see Ibn Khaldun).

• The Caribbean Rim region, overwhelmingly Christian in religious preference, would constitute the final effort in this historical pathway if it were necessary.

The advantage of this approach is that it speaks most directly to the fears of major powers the U.S. desires as allies in a Global War on Terrorism (Europe, Russia, India, China), as all these political entities have their own concerns about being able to integrate Islamic sub-populations. The major disadvantage is obvious: a clash of civilizations approach carries, among other things, heavy racial overtones, which would make political support at home in the U.S. hard to maintain, thus raising the attraction for many people of accepting the offer of "civilization apartheid" from Islamic radicals, that is, containing them and walling them off.

3. Failed State Focus: Following a focus on the Greater Middle East, which would last at least through the stabilization and functioning of a Palestinian state:

• This pathway would wind next through Africa—ground zero for failed states in general.

• Beyond Africa, arguments can be made for a subsequent focus on Asia Pacific rather than the Caribbean Rim on the basis that state failure in the former has greater potential negative impact on the global economy than that in the latter (which tends to generate economic refugees migrating toward the U.S.—not itself a problem and in many ways an economic benefit).

The major advantage of this pathway is that it focuses on the most disconnected regions first and foremost (Middle East and Africa), thereby achieving the greatest good in terms of advancing globalization most quickly to those regions most in need of broader economic connectivity. The major disadvantage is that we tackle the toughest nuts to crack first, raising the question of America's staying power in this long-term effort, not to mention that of other advanced countries who may not see much economic gain in pursuing this pathway beyond securing the flow of energy coming out of the Persian Gulf.

4. Homeland Security Focus: Following the initial effort to deal with Middle East-inspired transnational terrorism:

• This pathway shifts focus to the Caribbean Rim and the dangers presented by instabilities closest to our borders. This pathway would be driven, therefore, by internal perceptions derived from the inflow of Latinos, Jamaicans, and Haitians into the U.S. population, and the need to maintain America's internal coherence against the "threat" Sam Huntington thinks is posed by multiculturalism.

• Asia Pacific would form the tertiary focus here, simply because, after those coming from our own hemisphere, Asians will constitute the fastest-growing minority in the U.S. in coming decades.

• Africa would therefore be stuck in last place in this historical pathway.

The major advantage to this approach is the possibility of maintaining popular support for the security effort over time. The major disadvantage is the flip side: America is perceived as isolationist and overwhelmingly concerned with its national defense as opposed to international stability in general. (This option is included simply for logical sequence. As Herman Kahn once said, you have to include the jokes in a sequence if you want to identify the real options.)

5. Natural Resources Focus: This pathway basically focuses on access to energy, beginning with the Greater Middle East:

• And then shifting to Africa and the additional energy sources that are being developed there for us.

• The Caribbean Rim would constitute the tertiary focus,

• With Asia Pacific receiving the least attention.

In many ways, this pathway could be described as the new colonialism whereby the functioning parts of the global economy (West plus East) fundamentally focus on bringing order first and foremost to those regions that possess crucial raw materials for the growth of the global economy. The major advantage here is the economic logic, whereas the major disadvantage is the popular cynicism such an approach would engender.

6. Humanitarian Aid Focus: this last scenario sees the United States focusing on humanitarian aid efforts following its successful pacification of the Middle East. This would translate into a secondary focus on the Caribbean Rim (due simply to proximity and a larger domestic constituency pushing for such aid) and a tertiary focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Asia Pacific would receive the least focus because of the better economic development situation there. The major advantage here would be the logic of focusing on the underlying conditions that give rise to subnational violence (societies in economic distress), and the major disadvantage would probably be the difficulty of achieving discernible progress except over a very long term.

The first and most obvious rule-set change must occur within the Defense Department itself: moving off the paradigm of the near-peer competitor as a force-sizing principle. So long as the Pentagon views the Global War on Terror or interventions in internal conflicts as "lesser included," sufficient resources would not be devoted to those capabilities within the military required to deal with the operational challenges of eradicating the local, root causes of subnational and transnational violence. In effect, planning for war against a near-peer competitor must be demoted to the position of a hedging strategy, possibly requiring no more than one-third of the investment in R&D and procurement the U.S. makes, with the bulk of such investment prioritized to the areas of small-scale contingency warfighting and long-term nation-building and peace-keeping roles and missions---including the shift of DOD funds to other agencies.

Unless the U.S. military effectively "seeds" the "back half" force designed to win the peace, having the world's preeminent "first half," or war-winning force yields little strategic advantage over our enemies in this Global War on Terrorism. Moreover, until the United States demonstrates the commitment to nation-building and peace-keeping following any major combat intervention overseas, it will not attract the coalition partners who can augment U.S. forces with the numbers of ground troops required to follow through on any effort for nation-building.

Not having that "back half" capability sufficiently in place restricts the ability of U.S. political leaders to argue the utility of preemptive war for regime change and preemptive war within the larger context of the Global War on Terrorism, primarily because prospective coalition partners will not believe our declared intention of successfully concluding the intervention by making the long-term effort at integrating the successor regime into the global community of states. Instead, our efforts at preemptive war will be viewed as nothing more than "drive-by regime changes" or worse, the geopolitical equivalent of "revenge killings."

The failure to attract sufficient coalition partners for the back-half effort would, over the long run, deny the United States the ability to make ad hoc responses to rogue regimes, with each effort considered unique by the global community, and would not lead over time to an enunciation of an A-to-Z rule set, complete with attendant international organizations to guide the process.

What would such a global A-to-Z rule set look like? I can—in a very cursory fashion—describe it as follows:

1. The existing United Nations Security Council functions primarily as a sort of global "grand jury" that is able to indict parties within the global community for acts of egregious behavior

2. What is needed next in the process is a sort of functioning executive body, made up of the world's advanced nations, to issue effect "warrants" for the arrest of the offending party. This body is logically located within the existing community of the G-8 (or better yet, G-20) states, because not only do these states wield the majority of the world's military power, but their financial resources are required for the successful implementation of the "back half" effort of nation-building.

3. At that point of agreement among the world's great powers, a U.S.-dominated warfighting coalition engages in whatever variation of force-on-force effort is required, apprehending the indicted elements within the targeted battlespace.

4. Following the cessation of major hostilities, a more balanced international security force, including U.S. constabulary units, could replace the U.S.-dominated warfighting force in-theater.

5. Once sufficient security was generated, peace-keeping and nation-building efforts would ensue under the auspices of an internationally recognized organization whose constitutional make-up and procedural approach is roughly equivalent to that of the International Monetary Fund in the rescue of economically-strapped states.

6. The final step in the process would be the legal processing of those actors identified in the original indictments within whatever specific procedures might be established by the International Criminal Court.

This paper has argued that subnational and transnational violence will represent the fundamental focus of U.S. national security efforts in the coming decades, but that this development represents tremendous progress in the institution of a global security system within which neither system-level nor state-on-state war remains a viable or widespread threat.

The major obstacle for the U.S. in dealing with this threat is its own inherent tendency—through the mechanisms of its long-range national security planning—to require that a worst-case scenario involving another great power serve as the "greater inclusive" force-sizing principle. Until the U.S. national security establishment moves from this outdated paradigm of focusing on the greatest hypothetical threat and toward a more purely capabilities-based planning paradigm focused on managing that strategic environment as a whole, the tasks associated with subnational and transnational threats arising from the Global War on Terrorism will continue to be viewed—both programmatically and politically—as an additional or cumulative burden that may then be regarded as simply too great to bear over the long run.

In reality, such a judgment is completely unwarranted, because it reflects an institutional unwillingness by U.S. administrations to persuade the military establishment and its immediate supporters to recognize and take advantage of this country's past overwhelming successes in reducing the threat of system-level war and the incidence of state-on-state war. This inability to exploit past successes will continue to deny us future ones so long as the U.S. national security establishment subscribes to the view that the present global security situation is one of "chaos" and “uncertainty,” without any specifics, and thus cannot be remedied by any long-term pursuit of a grand strategy designed to generate a successful conclusion to the Global War on Terrorism.

Dateline: Portsmouth RI, 27 September 2004

Last May I had the opportunity to participate in a conference on the future of warfare held at the Center for Strategic Studies in Alexandria VA. The event was put on for the National Intelligence Council, which has since published all the papers online. I described my participation back then, noting it was a good two-day event. Now that the NIC has posted the pieces, I'm free to post my contribution here as a stand-alone article.

I was asked to answer the question: Will the future be one of never-ending transnational and subnational violence. The answers I offer won't surprise, as they're basically variations on my usual PNM themes. Where I extend the melody this time was in the scenarios regarding Gap integration. In other words, I posited possible pathways down which the world might travel if the Gap is to be shrunk. Also for the first time in an article format, I spell out the six components of what I call the A-to-Z Core rule set on how to process politically bankrupt states in the Gap. Finally, I spell out my "retreat into the past" argument about radical Islam being the latest version of global resistance to the spread of the capitalist world system in more detail than I do in PNM, using a series of bullets to trace out the major points.

I was pretty happy with the piece, and I intend to extend it further in Son of PNM. Like my never-ending and always evolving brief, the ideas encapsulated in PNM are worth playing out in almost endless variations, because it's in such efforts that we winnow out the weaker arguments and boil the remainder down to its essential truths.

Here's the article in full, followed by today’s catch (bit here and there—didn't get to them all tonight):

■The killer ants are coming . . . from the Gap!

■Chinese, start your engines!

■The next idiot son rises in the Middle East

■ Saddam: following the Stalinist storyline to the bitter end

■ Proposing new rules on debt bookkeeping

Dateline: the business center of a Holiday Inn which has only wi-fi highspeed Internet in rooms and all the bridges to Ethernet cards are being used and the biz center PC won't take my Memory Stick and I don't have any floppies and it's midnight so . . .

No blog today.

Too bad. Feels kinda constipated to have written 3500 words and not post it.

Will see what I can do on road tomorrow in various buildings. Gonna give a talk somewhere in Northern Virginia . . ..

On the brighter side, both my agent Jennifer Gates and my personal editor and compadre Mark Warren LOVE the 9-page proposal I put together for a book entitled, A Future Worth Creating: Followed By Some Killer Sub-Title Generated by Neil Nyren. I sweated that response all weekend after sending to them on Friday.

Now, I am psyched!

I will post today's material as soon as possible. Sorry for the delay. Baltimore a bit of a mess right now with storm and flights cancelled, so hotels a bit stressed.

■"Disillusioned Japanese Give Business an Earful: Public Starts to Speak Up As Traditional Views Shift; Softbank President Taps In," by Ginny Parker, Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2004, p. A20.

■"Russia's Battle for Cellular Territory," by Anna Ivanova-Galitsina, Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2004, p. A18.

I love stories about cell phone coverage growing. In Japan, the struggle over high-cost cell phone service is helping trigger a consumer revolt across a wide swath of industries and sectors. Connectivity requires code, but it also creates consumer expectations regarding service and price, and if those expectations are not met, then watch out! (even in normally sedate Japan!).

In Russia, the growth of cell phone markets is yet another example that the country is hardly going to hell in a handbasket, as former Soviet experts are always wont to point out (nostalgia is the sweetest of emotions). Seventy of Russia's 89 regions now have cell phone coverage and the rest should have it within a couple of years.

Can you believe that only 3 big cell phone companies dominate the market? Sounds almost communist!

Certainly never could happen here.

Can you hear me now?

■"Efforts to Reduce U.S. Addiction to Oil Are Few," by Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2004, p. A8.

Accompanying this rather standard article is an interesting map showing a variety of views of the global oil market and how it changes between now and 2020.

Some great points are made: First, global oil demand rises from 82 million barrels a day today to 104 by 2020. Guess how much North America accounts for in that growth? Less than 10% (roughly 2 of 22 mbd). Europe's total doesn't grow at all. So where's it mostly coming from? From emerging markets. India and China alone will account for almost a quarter of the growth. Not surprisingly, the net production of both countries will decline quite a bit over the next coming years, meaning they join the rest of the Core (save Russia, Norway, Mexico, Canada and the UK) in becoming increasingly dependent on the dreaded "foreign oil."

The map shows all the oil producers considered to be "high risk." Naturally, they virtually lie inside my Gap.

■"Are the Terrorists Failing? Rather than bringing Islamic regimes to power, the holy warriors are creating internal strife and discord, says a French Arabist," op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 28 September 2004, p. A27.

Ignatius' op-ed is mostly a recounting of a recent speech by a French Arabist, Gilles Kepel, in a book-promotion tour (for The War for Muslim Minds). Here's the key section:

Kepel believes that the United States has stumbled badly in Iraq, and he's sharply critical of U.S. policies there. But that doesn't mean the jihadists are winning. Quite the contrary, their movement has backfired. Rather than bringing Islamic regimes to power, the holy warriors are creating internal strife and discord. Their actions are killing far more Muslims than nonbelievers.

"The principal goal of terrorism—to seize power in Muslim countries through mobilization of populations galvanized by jihad's sheer audacity—has not been realized," Kepel writes. In fact, bin Laden's followers are losing ground: The Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been toppled; the fence-sitting semi-Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia has taken sides more strongly with the West; Islamists in Sudan and Libya are in retreat; and the plight of the Palestinians has never been more dire. And Baghdad, the traditional seat of Muslim caliphs, is under foreign occupation. Not what you would call a successful jihad.

Kepel argues that the insurgents' brutal tactics in Iraq—the kidnappings and beheadings, and the car-bombing massacres of young Iraqi police recruits—are increasingly alienating the Muslim masses. No sensible Muslim would want to live in Fallujah, which is now controlled by Taliban-style fanatics. Similarly, the Muslim masses can see that most of the dead from post-Sept. 11 al Qaeda bombings in Turkey and Morocco were fellow Muslims.

A perfect example of how the jihadists' efforts have backfired, argues Kepel, was last month's kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. The kidnappers announced that they would release their hostages only if the French government reversed its new policy banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves in French public schools. "They imagined that they would mobilize Muslims with this demand, but French Muslims were aghast and denounced the kidnappers," Kepel explained to a Washington audience. He noted that French Muslims took to the streets to protest against the kidnappers and to proclaim their French citizenship.

■"City of Fisherman in Pakistan Becomes Strategic Port," by Amy Waldman, New York Times, 28 September 2004, p. W1.

The Chinese are moving into Pakistan in a serious way, primarily through economic investments designed to access energy and minerals there, but ultimately to build—by land—new bridges to Central Asia and the even larger energy resources there. China fears relying on the Persian Gulf, and having all that energy floating through some of the most dangerous and contested waterways in the world. But it's also banking on success. China is looking for more ways to build connectivity to Western markets, and—by doing so—speed up its own internal integration effort with its own internal Gap—namely, the western regions (particularly Xinjiang province). Just so happens there are Muslim separatists there, the Uighurs, whom Beijing has been relatively successfully targeting in its own Mini-Me version of the global war on terrorism.

The Chinese investment in the port of Gwadar works for the Pakistanis as well, because they're eager to reduce their alliance on the port of Karachi, which has been blockaded successfully by the Indian Navy in the past.

As I have told officials time and time again across the Defense Department: China is coming to the Middle East. It's not coming because it wants to. It's coming because it has to. The only question that remains is: does China come in a manner that complicates or compliments America's attempts to transform the region. Surprisingly to some, the choice is really ours to make. But to understand that choice, we need to start seeing China's emergence as being something truly global in stature, and not just a matter of dominating Asia's future economic development. The latter is already in the works, but the former can still be successfully steered to our advantage.

I guess the real question is, who in the U.S. Government is thinking along these lines, much less doing anything about it?

■"Chechens' Terror Links Drawing Attention," by Vladimir Isachenkov, Associated Press via Yahoo News, 26 September 2004, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040926/ap_on_re_eu/russia_terror_ties_1.

This story mirrors a recent Journal story on the Chechen leader Shamil Basayev. My basic take on that article was that it showed how radical Islam and al Qaeda were becoming an umbrella organization to which "adherents" flowed simply out of necessity, changing their spots along the way. Basayev, in that article, was described as a very recent "convert" to Islam. What struck me about that article was that it reminded me how, during the Cold War, many revolutionary leaders "found" Marxism. Why? Typically because they were first turned down by the West or—specifically—the U.S. Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh wrote his declaration of independence from colonial master France, cribbing it whole-cloth from Thomas Jefferson's original. He saw himself as a natural George Washington, and couldn't understand why Washington could not. We didn't recognize him as such, because France was a big ally vis-à-vis the Sovs, so guess what? Ho had to become communist and Vietnam suffers that choice to this day.

Am I suggesting we should have sided with Basayev? No way. I see that independence movement as just more fracturing of the Core, as well as historically irrelevant/counterproductive to the larger integration processes of globalization. All I'm saying is that when you can't join one side, you're left with the other, and the other right now is radical Islam. When this happens, you'll see that transnational movement absorb all sorts of cats and dogs, Basayev being one of them.

This article points to the opposite effect: not only are the Basayev's of the Gap switching their stripes to join the radical Islam camp, but the radical Islam camp is basically accepting all comers. Point is, this movement, which always had a tenuous grip on religion because of the way it twists the Koran to its own cruel ends, will become increasingly divorced from that larger meaning over time as it accepts all comers who share the same basic end: kill the Westerners and drive them from our lands. Now, in effect, both sides of this equation are actively recruiting the other side, just like it was with the ideologically-barren-but-entirely-opportunistic Soviet bloc for the latter half of the Cold War (or basically, after they made their peace with the West with détente).

Did we create this phenomenon by invading Iraq? No, but we certainly accelerated it. Could we have prevented this phenomenon from emerging? Also no. Radical Islam is the best offer out there right now to those hoping to offer prolonged violent resistance to the expansion of the global economy and its "nefarious ways" of "perverting local cultures." Since the global economy (the Core) is impinging right now primarily upon those regions where Islamic faith is most in abundance, this us-versus-them breakdown was not only in the works, it was inevitable. The only question for the Core is how fast we seek to engage this struggle: do we hold off, accept the offer of civilizational apartheid, and wait them out? Or do we seek to actively transform the Middle East, bring it into the larger global economy in a broadband fashion and—by doing so—end its disconnectedness and defeat those committed to perpetuating and deepening that disconnectedness?

I say, embrace the tough tasks with zeal. They only grow worse from delayed action.

■"Thais Suspect Human Spread of Bird Flu: Fear Woman Got Virus From Family," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 28 September 2004, p. A3.

Now it looks like the emerging threat of the avian flu took a turn for the worse: it would appear that human-to-human transfer is possible.

Human-to-human transmission of a new strain of influenza has long ranked at or near the top of nightmares for public health experts, who warn that it could in theory cause a pandemic killing millions of people worldwide, and possibly hundreds of millions.

■"Competition from China and India is changing the way businesses operate everywhere. Here's what companies are—and aren't—doing to survive," by Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 27 September 2004, p. R1.

This is a real beauty from a great analytical reporter:

The boom in China's world-wide exports—up 125% in four years—has left few sectors unscathed, be they garlic growers in California, jeans makers in Mexico or plastic-mold manufacturers in South Korea. India's punch has been far softer, but the impact has still altered how hundreds of service companies from Texas to Ireland compete for billions of dollars in contracts.

The causes and consequences of each nation's surge are somewhat different. China's exports have boomed largely thanks to foreign investment: Lured by low labor costs, big manufacturers have surged into China to expand their production base and push down prices globally . . .

India, too, is prompting a massive rush east by many U.S. and European service providers. But, unlike the manufacturers that headed into China, service companies didn't go to India until cheaper and increasingly sophisticated Indian enterprises invaded their territory.

Imagine a United States that's growing in wealth but still has to provide for all the poor living in Latin America, and you get closer to understanding the huge tasks China faces in development in the coming years.

■"Truckers of Iraq's Pony Express Are Risking It All for a Paycheck," by James Glanz, New York Times, 27 September 2004, p. A1.

The wild west metaphors Robert Kaplan likes to employ are extended by this piece. Why do people engage in this dangerous sort of activity? Same reason why men take dangerous jobs all over the world—it's the money. Shrinking the Gap will always be about the money, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what's settled the Bad Lands all over the Core; it will be the same in the Gap.

But the story also gives you a sense of the fragile connectivity that exists now between Iraq and the outside world: it takes truck drivers willing to be shot at—or far worse if they're captured alive.

■"Iraq Sees Christian Exodus: As the Minority Religion Flees, a Cultural Shift Grabs Hold," by Yochii J. Dreazen, New York Times, 27 September 2004, p. A17.

The Christians, otherwise known as the moderate middle, are leaving Iraq in serious numbers. What was not too long ago a population of roughly one million is now down 15% and plummeting with the recent wave of bombings and other intimidations at their homes, places of business, and churches.

This is the biggest exodus since the Jews largely left in the 50s and 60s. As one Christian put it, "We have a proverb, 'After Saturday comes Sunday,'" meaning after the Jews are forced to leave a country you can expect the Christians will be driven out next.

The trifurcation of Iraq is looking more and more realistic, placing it squarely in my "Arab Yugoslavia" scenario pathway.

■"Army May Reduce Length Of Tours in Combat Zones: Fear That Fall in Recruiting Could Clash With Needs in Iraq and Afghanistan," by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, 27 September 2004, p. A1.

■"U.S. Says More Iraqi Police Are Needed as Attacks Continue," by Walter Pincus, Washington Post, 28 September 2004, p. A23.

■"Taking On Sadr City in a Pickup Truck: Four Deaths Illustrate Vulnerability of Iraqi Forces," by Steve Fainaru, Washington Post, 28 September 2004, p. A1.

First piece is just another example of the pain the Army is feeling right now in terms of personnel. Recruitment is suffering because one-year stints in southwest Asia are not a big draw. Since Vietnam, the Army has sought to limit deployments in combat zones to six-month stretches, so both it and the Guard will see how close they can get back to that standard without screwing up the rotations too much. It won't be easy, but it's a good idea—one I'm sure my godson will appreciate as he prepares to go over.

Obviously, it would be better to be able to backfill our troops with Iraqi police and security forces, but it hasn't been easy to get those numbers up, what with the terrorist attacks against recruitment and training centers. Adding to the difficulty, while our troops have most of what they need, the Iraqi security forces are trying to get by on the cheap. As the third story states, there's a huge disparity in the "sophisticated weaponry and armor" that the U.S. soldiers possess compared to the "vastly inferior equipment" of their Iraqi compatriots. Clearly, this does not look like a winning hand as the January elections approach, which will naturally make our efforts at internationalizing the effort all the more difficult.

We've gotten so good at employing overwhelming force (a key tenet of the Powell Doctrine) during warfare, but what we haven't mastered yet is the employment of overwhelming security during the occupation. The Sys Admin force, like the Military Operations Other Than War doctrine from which it stems, remains the stepchild inside the Pentagon. That will change and the Iraq occupation will make it so.

Dateline: Holiday Inn at BWI Airport, MD, 28 September 2004

Flew to Baltimore-Washington International today for a couple of days of meetings/briefs. Today my schedule brought me to the Pentagon to sit with senior staff from the J-5 (Plans and Policy) of the Joint Staff. This is the same branch I briefed last spring in the off-site event covered by Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Jaffe in his profile of me.

As you might expect, these guys try to take the longest view of things like the war on terror (inside the Defense Department now it is called more and more the WOT, instead of the GWOT, a change I approve of, simply because I say it's a war only inside the Gap, whereas it's basically a law-enforcement ops inside the Core). It was a great session, held in the Secretary's Executive Conference Room in the National Military Command Center (I sat at the head of the V-shaped table, which was pretty weird, since I'm so used to always standing up the entire time in rooms like that—made me wonder if I could catch "neoconservatism" from a chair). J-5 told me in advance they didn't want the brief, but simply to have me sit with them and discuss a series of questions they wanted to pose. So that's what we did for two hours. I got a lot of good feedback in the process, and plenty to think about. I feel myself close to an explosion of new slides. I just need a couple of days back in the office to settle it all out in my brain.

Meanwhile, here's a bunch of stories from various papers on various dates (reducing my backlog quite a bit):

■More Army adjustment as the Sys Admin role drags on

■If this be "Indian Country," then they be the Pony Express

■The middle is disappearing in Iraq

■China and India reshape the Core, each in their own way

■More scary news on the Bird Flu in Asia

■Why Pakistan may end up being China's mess to fix

■Yet another example of why it isn't Islam versus the West

■David Ignatius cracks the code on the Big Bang strategy

■A Core-Gap map that's all about the oil

■Cell phones lead the way in changing both Japan and Russia

Dateline: Same Holiday Inn as last night, outside BWI Airport, Baltimore MD, 29 Sept

Boy, that's a real old SNL reference!

Long day with much to tell, but too tired. Spent money with US Air Force strategic planners in Pentagon discussing their future wargame strategies for capturing the real tasks ahead not just for the Leviathan force, but for the Sys Admin one as well. The Air Force remains, as always, my most receptive audience. There is a good story to tell on this interaction, but it deserve some real time and effort to spell it out, so I'll do it tomorrow sometime. There's an admission of error involved on my part, so you want to do it right.

Spent afternoon giving the brief at a sort of a midcareer "university" for intelligence community officials, a workshop series that's run for them by a special private contractor somewhere in proverbial Northern Virginia. A very interesting audience with very good questions. I enjoyed the interaction immensely and felt recharged intellectually as I headed out the door.

In all, the day told me that I do my best learning when I get the chance to really vet my stuff with wide-ranging audiences. I took so much in during the past two days, I really need several quiet hours in my office to figure out what it all means. Based just on what I got yesterday from the J-5 people, or specifically from one very sharp Navy SEAL, I spent about 90 minutes this morning adding all sorts of new graphics to a number of existing slides, making points that I now realize remain unclear in both the brief and PNM.

I know I get a lot of interesting feedback by vetting stuff here, but there's nothing like F2F with serious practictioners to move the many piles of ideas in your head. Frankly, nothing replaces a live audience and the fear/thrill factor it generates deep within this inveterate performer. TV just doesn't compare, despite the richness.

That's a point my buddy Art Cebrowski always likes to make: there is a trade-off between reach and richness: you go for one and you tend to sacrifice the other. That's why I don't think I could live on either just briefs or just books. I need both. I need the richness to replenish, and the reach to feel the impact.

Nuf said. Lights out.

No stories to blog today, but see that I managed to post yesterday's blog and its accompanying host of articles.

■"Not Another Soviet Union," by Eugene B. Rumer, Washington Post, 24 September 2004, p. A25.

Here's the first excerpt that puts recent events in perspective:

The notion that Russian democracy is dying or dead because of Putin's reform is no more accurate than the idea that Russia was ever a democracy. The bloody confrontation between Boris Yeltsin and his parliament in 1993, the patently unfair reelection campaign Yeltsin waged against his Communist opponent in 1996, and the equally skewed parliamentary election campaign of 1999 are just a few examples of Russian democracy in action that do not pass the "you know it when you see it" test.

. . . many Russians . . . Never mistook the political system of Yeltsin's Russia for democracy. To them it was chaos. Western endorsements of Yeltsin as the democratic leader of Russia were greeted with suspicion. Western endorsements of economic changes in Russia were viewed with disbelief as the nation teetered on the brink of insolvency, while a handful of fabulously wealthy oligarchs flaunted their wealth and influence. Then Russian finances finally crashed in 1998.

Since then, as the average Russian sees it, Russia has followed its own course. Foreign advisers have left. The state has reasserted its guiding hand in strategic sectors of the economy. And the state has consolidated its control of the media. The oligarchs have been reined in. Russia's international prestige has been restored, and the country has assumed its rightful place in the firmament of global powers. All that and the economy's 7 percent annual growth rate have led many in Russia to the conclusion that the country is back on track.

The tragedy of Beslan has shattered the image of Russian stability.

Have we seen this pattern in Russian history before? Yes. Have we seen the country slip back into authoritarism? Every time. What makes this time different? Really only the lack of a traditional great power threat to tip Russia back into paranoia and retreat into the schizophrenic mix of isolationism and expansionism that has marked its centuries of history.

So what is the real danger Russia faces?

Why, that would be a great power deciding it needed to define Russia as an enemy.

And so that's the danger voiced at the end of the piece: don't demonize Russia at this point in history. Think long-term and strategic and realize the commonality of strategic interests between Russia and the rest of what I call the Core

■"Outsourcing Finds Vietnam: Loyalty (and Cheap Labor)," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. W1.

■"Offshoring Forces Tech-Job Seekers To Shift Strategy," by Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post, 30 September 2004, p. E1.

When you see articles about Vietnam pushing itself as a target for outsourcing, you're watching globalization's version of the domino theory at work in Asia. Example is a very powerful thing.

Vietnam is poor and its infrastructure sucks, but it is good at educating. In the past, it's focused on math, but now it's focusing on computer skills. Good move, because when you combine $100 a month wages with skills, you get competitive really fast. Former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson believes Vietnam will be competing with India and others in outsourcing within five years. I think he's right. Trick will be replacing French with English, because the former is the colonial legacy.

But there's something in Vietnam's history since its reunification three decades ago: after fighting 20 years to break away from the capitalist global economy in the form of its colonial master France and becoming an outsider to the global economy following the war involving the U.S., Vietnam is still a very poor place. Disconnectedness was the price Ho Chi Minh and other leaders were willing to pay for independence, but it created a hugely negative legacy—one not shared by Asian Tigers who sought broadband connectivity.

It's a lesson worth remembering when you think about Chechnya and what real "independence" is likely to do for that society.

As for American tech workers, what is the answer? Some jobs won't go overseas, like those involved in security, technical troubleshooting, or anything with real fast turnaround times or the F2F work. So if you're not good at those things, you better become good as fast as possible.

■"Damned If They Do . . . Energy-Starved Asia Revisits Hydroelectric Options Despite Pitfalls," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2004, p. A15.

What will Developing Asia do in order to meet its ballooning energy demands?

The real question is, What won't it do?

Lacking industry but blessed with rivers, poverty-stricken Laos once dreamed of becoming the Kuwait of hydroelectric power. In the early 1990s, developers rolled out a list of planned projects for the Southeast Asian nation, topped by the largest infrastructure investment in its history: A $1.2 billion dam called Nam Theun 2.

Opposition by environmentalists slowed its progress. Then, the Asian economic crisis of 1997 killed the project. But now, Asia is thirsty for power again—and Nam Theun 2 is back in play.

Its resurrection encapsulates an emerging debate in Asia: Power demand is soaring, but the region also has some of the world's foulest air. So, governments are turning back to hydro, a relatively clear alternative to coal or fuel plants—but one that has environmental consequences of its own due to its potential to damage rivers and displace communities.

Nonetheless, hydro projects are in the works across the region, especially in China and Myanmar, which itself has 51 dams in various stages of development, by one estimate. Laos has 18.

All that activity also has reopened a debate over what role, if any, big lenders like the World Bank should play in promoting dams.

Watching Asia struggle with this is like watching a slice of America early in the 20th century, when we were throwing up dams all over the place, in large part for very similar reasons (need the energy, to hell with the environment, and lotsa cheap labor lying around). Today, Asia's electricity demands are about 3/4 that of the U.S., but by 2025, it will be 1/4 more than the U.S.'s. That's a lot of energy—a rough tripling. So expect Asia to try everything within its power. What the World Bank needs to do is fund such projects and let the locals figure out the environmental consequences on their own schedule. Otherwise we end up being guilty of telling Asia to find some historical path toward development that we ourselves were unable to manage in our past.

And yeah, that is awfully hypocritical.

■"Is Halliburton's KBR a Hot Deal? Parent Says Plenty of Companies Want to Acquire Distressed Unit; A Partial Spinoff Is One Option," by Russell Gold, Wall Street Journal, 29 September 2004, p. C1.

"Iraqis Look With Hope to School Openings Twice Delayed by Violence," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. A8.

Why is Halliburton getting rid of Kellogg Brown & Root, the infamous military contractor? Frankly, that side of the business has gotten so complex and hard that Halliburton wants to lose the distraction, as this article points out.

Many of the current defense contractors specializing in on-the-ground security and other Sys Admin-like roles for the U.S. military naturally rose out of the ranks of the oilfield services industry. Why? That was an industry that needed a lot of Sys Admin-like security and admin work performed in rugged, dangerous locations around the world—i.e., where most of the oil is found.

But now that the Sys Admin role is getting so big and so complex and so political with the Iraq occupation, Halliburton wants out.

Why anyone buy KBR? Lotsa suitors say yes. Why? It's a big and growing field, so there's a lot of opportunity for someone to really give it a go. It just can't be a sideline business for large corporations anymore. It's just too hard to manage in that way.

When we do Sys Admin work, we won't just be doing facilities and VIP bodyguarding anymore, we'll be doing things like reconstituting entire national education systems that have suffered years of devastating repression and deprivation, like in Iraq. That's not something you can just hire some tough guys to do, but it's the sort of thing we'll be doing a whole lot more of in the future.

Calling the Sys Admin concept just "peacekeeping" misses the mark by a ways. It's a lot more complex and inter-agency than that. That's why the military's role in the Sys Admin force will be primarily one of bodyguarding and peace-enforcement, leaving the complex "humanitarian" and reconstruction stuff to civilians and international organizations. So when some in the Army say, "I don't want to be turned into your Sys Admin force and have to do all those things," my reply is, "Don't worry, you won't. You'll only make up a small share of the total force package!"

Of course, that reply scares them even more, because they correctly guess that it means their budget won't be going up, nor will their troop numbers, and that's the real lesson the Army wants to pull out of the Iraq occupation: How to save our force structure!

■"Interceptor System Set, But Doubts Remain: Network Hasn't Undergone Realistic Testing," by Bradley Graham, Washington Post, 29 September 2004, p. A1.

■"China Readies Riot Force For Peacekeeping in Haiti," by Edward Cody, Washington Post, 30 September 2004, p. A21.

■"An Irresolute Foreign Policy," op-ed by Albert R. Hunt, Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2004, p. A17.

■"I.M.F. Asks China to Free Its Currency from Dollar," by Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. C1.

Our approach on China in the U.S. government, but especially in the Pentagon, is just plain nutty in many ways. Here is a country joining the global economy, our economic rule set, and reforming itself as we advocate, and what do we offer in return?

How about the latest boondoggle version of Star Wars? Does it work any better than the last? No. What's the total bill up to now? Over $100 billion dollars, or roughly 1/2 of the entire sovereign debt owed by the Gap to the Core. Are we going to deploy it anyway? Oh yeah, to fulfill Bush's 2000 campaign pledge. Who's it designed to stop? North Korea, but ol' China's on the wrong side of the ledger as well. Is this the likely way America is going to suffer a nuclear attack? Not if the experts are at all correct. That scenario will most likely involve terrorists with a suitcase version, not something coming in on a missile. So why push this instead of something better, like a security alliance in Asia if North Korea is the big justification? Wouldn't that make things easier with China? Who wants to make things easier with China!

Ah, now we get closer.

Remember, those dastardly Chinese have their troops in our neck of the woods now: a whopping 125 cops trained for riot control in their first total-package (command, control, logistics) participation in a UN peacekeeping mission.

Wow! An entire contingent of 125 cops. We're talking bigger than . . . uh . . . maybe . . . most of the small-city police forces in America!

But then . . . we must keep on eyes on China, and the China hawks inside this administration, who want China back on the table in terms of global security fears.

Listen to Albert Hunt:

Don’t forget China. Remember back to the spring and summer of 2001. Administration hardliners, with Mr. Bush's apparent concurrence, told us China was the greatest danger in the world, a threat to American hegemony. That's why building an expensive missile-defense system was more important than less sexy matters like combating terrorism.

Privately, the hardliners still make those arguments; some say in a second Bush term, China will have to be confronted. No one has the foggiest notion what the man who has been president for the past 44 months believes.

But why bother with that sort of arcane stuff when we can spend billions on a Star Wars system that even the Pentagon doesn't trust one whit.

■"Experts Confront Major Obstacles In Containing Virulent Bird Flu," by Keith Bradsher and Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. A1.

Just the preparations the world is making for the possibility of the avian flu becoming a pandemic killer of millions is—in and of itself—generating new rules across the system. Like the scheduled Y2K event in information technology, the much anticipated pandemic flu (and the avian version seems the best bet we've seen come along in a very long time) to rival the Spanish one of 1918 seems to be generating a precursor wake of sorts—I guess you could call it a bow wave that hits you long before the boat reaches you.

Drug companies love to cite all sorts of reasons why you can't do what the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Controls are trying to do with such an unknown flu as this one (like stockpiling vast amounts of vaccines that can't really be tested in advance)—before it really even appears as a pandemic. But guess what? The system of connectedness across the Core is so dense that almost no one is willing to wait, so new rules ensue on vaccine creation and testing, and genetic techniques to isolate the strain and map its essential building blocks. Those rules can't wait on 20 million dead to make it a comfortable profit margin.

And that means that the avian flu is already becoming a System Perturbation of sorts within the global medical community. Here's hoping it stays there and doesn't spill over into the economic, political and security realms.

■"Growing Pessimism on Iraq: Doubts Increase Within U.S. Security Agencies," by Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, 29 September 2004, p. A1.

■"The Politics of Fear: Kerry Adopts Bush Strategy of Stressing Dangers," by Jim VandeHei and Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, 29 September 2004, p. A1.

■"Rivals' Foreign Policy Stances Show Few Clear Distinctions," by James Bennet, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. A1.

■"Kerry Is Widely Favored Abroad: Hostility Toward Bush Revealed in Surveys and Interviews," by Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post, 29 September 2004, p. A14.

It is scary to read the strategic despair that's spreading out of Iraq and across the national defense establishment. But all it really represents is the military's realization that they do not possess a winning hand there. In short, the military solution isn't enough. Defeating the insurgency is not an end, but a means to enabling the reconstruction of Iraq and its reconnection to the global economy and the world outside. But we're not winning the latter battle, so no matter how well we temporize the former situation, it doesn't spell political victory in the end, and that's what's depressing.

How do we get beyond this stalemate? We internationalize this thing like crazy. A much bigger peacekeeping/counterinsurgency force that would feature not just an Old Core, paleface cast, is the first answer. When the terrorists look across the line and see not just Americans and Europeans, but Chinese, Russians and Indians (three "civilizations" which historically have shown plenty of willingness to kill Muslims when required), the strategic despair would leave our side and begin to infect theirs.

But how to achieve this "unbelievable" proposal? How to bribe Russia, and China, and India? Maybe no Star Wars pointed against China. Maybe no outsourcing backlash against India. Or declaring Pakistan a "major, non-NATO ally." Maybe we push Russia's desire to join the WTO, then NATO in a more full fashion, and then maybe the EU itself!

No, no. All these things are too fantastic.

No, going it largely alone in the Middle East and transforming it all by ourselves, somehow integrating those economies into the Core all by ourselves. No, that's not fantastic. Cutting hugely popular deals with the Russians, Chinese, and Indians would be far more fantastic. How do I know such deals would be popular? Just by seeing how strongly foreign nations want Kerry to beat Bush, and to end the perception of US unilateralism in this profoundly connected Core.

But Kerry has a hard time making this sell, since he believes in most of the same things Bush does on the key burning security issues of our day. But that's the funny thing: all these issues that piss off potential New Core powers from helping us in Iraq are not "burning security issues," but easy give-aways if we're really serious about winning a global war on terrorism. I mean, for Christ's sake! What's more important to you? Defeating transnational terrorism or the Kyoto Treaty?

Kerry runs real risks by sounding more Chicken Little-like than Bush already does. He needs to spell out his willingness to be a real dealmaker, something Bush has never mastered nor shown any inclination to even learn. Clinton was a deal-maker and Clinton got economic issues solved during his 8 years of working globalization. Kerry needs to present himself as a Clinton-like deal-maker on security issues in the age of globalization. He needs to show not just the downside of four more years of telling our allies we don't need them. Kerry needs to show he understands there's a huge upside to successfully internationalizing this war on terror. It's win-win for as far as the eye can see. It's the happy ending the American public is desperate to hear about.

■"Conoco Wins Lukoil Bid, a Window on Iraq," by Erin E. Ardvedlund and Heather Timmons, New York Times, 30 September 2004, p. C1.

■"As Westerners Move Into Russia, Its Vast Oil Wealth Keeps Growing: BP, Others Boost Production With Basic Tools of Trade; Reserve Estimates Surge," by Gregory L. White, Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2004, p. A1.

Conoco wins a big chunk of Lukoil in a bid, and that opens up both Russia and Iraq to its efforts to find more oil and better develop existing fields. Why Iraq? Lukoil has rights there from Saddam's time.

See, I told you it wasn't going to be some zero-sum game for just American oil companies in Iraq!

Moreover, alread in the past few years, Russia's proven oil reserves have grown dramatically simply because Western firms came in with better technology and exploited existing and marginal fields with enormous success rates. Experts are now guessing that revamped statistics on Russia's reserves may rocket it from number 7 in the world rankings to number 2, or above Iraq and only behind Saudi Arabia.

Take that, Hubbert's Curve!