Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■”Dysfunction Amid The Functioning Core,”

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

A reader, apparently a registered Democrat in PA, notified me of this review and sent along a link to an online PDF version. The review would appear to be solely about PNM, judging by the title, and yet, it’s a dual review of my book along with Larry Everest’s Oil, Power & Empire.

And no, that’s not exactly the pairing I would advocate (remember when Business Week paired PNM with Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack?). But there it is.

Here’s the complete review, followed by my commentary:

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!).