Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

If you're coming over from the Patriot, be sure to check out the Glossary in the sidebar. Tom has a lot of specific-to-him terminology that you might want to learn more about.

+ So far I like these guys, their style. It's interesting that they're getting right into the Iraq War and not recapping the books. It's more interesting for those of us who are VERY familiar with the books.

+ The roots of our failure in post-war Iraq go far back in buying a big-Leviathan military, but doing mostly SysAdmin-type work all across the 90s. 'We bought one military and operated another one.'

+ We keep going to the West for help in these operations. But it's way too expensive for them, in euros and public opinion, to do it. The New Core countries, especially Russia, China (1.3M man army), and India (1M man army) can help us out much more economically. Peacekeeping is a good deal for them, pay-wise. They're not squeamish about killing. The public opinion is not resistant to military action and, frankly not as important.

+ 1st caller: How do we get those forces? Answer: We have the Leviathan force with no 'near-peer'. But we don't have the SysAdmin force. We need the Department of Everything Else to coordinate interagency, international cooperation.

+ The hosts are doing a good job of interrupting Tom when they need to re-focus the conversation or just break up his speaking.

+ They know his stuff, too, and can lead him with info they garnered from the C-SPAN talk. So, at this point, they break in with the important: Nowadays, our friends will be more like us economically than politically.

+ Hosts: What candidates should we be looking for? Answer: Centrists like Hillary or McCain, or even a Gingrich [though he's got the WW3 metaphor wrong ;-)].

+ Asking how Tom likes weblogging. Answer Tom didn't give: >3500 posts-worth of like ;-)

+ 2nd caller: C'mon. China's bad on human rights. Is that really gonna change? Answer: Freedom is 90% economic and 10% political. Buy, sell, live do what/where I want. China is flowering economically. The price they pay is single-party state. How much change can they really make at one time? Biggest urbanization in history.

+ 3rd caller: Hillary isn't a centrist. And you'e not giving Bush any credit for India agreements and it's unfair. Tom: More weird myopia on nuclear gun control. Repubs who don't trust gun control in the States try to push it internationally.

+ We can soft-kill Iran with connectivity. They're going to get the bomb unless we occupy Iran [or nuke it]. We need to get these countries talking and developing collective regional security cooperation. Iran didn't like our talk and launched a very-effective, pre-emptive proxy war in Lebanon. We raised them to regional pillar by taking down their major competitors to the east and west. [Too bad we didn't get anything out of it, not even a little leverage...]

If we start a dialogue with them, they'll give us the business for a long time, just like the Soviets did. But they need us to help them with FDI. They're eating their seedcorn right now with these high oil prices.

That's it for me. What'd you think?