Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

OP-ED: "'Competitive Cooperation,'" by Edward C. Prescott, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2007, p. A19.

You play up or you play down. As a sophomore in high school, I played varsity basketball. It was hard, because I was 16 and playing against 18-year-olds, but oh what a difference it made the next year when I made all-conference. There was simply no way I could have stepped up that much my junior year without all the time put in the previous one.

There is the huge temptation, now represented by the shamelessly pandering campaign of John Edwards, to say governments should be in the business of protecting their workers from foreign competition. But, of course, they shouldn't be, certainly not in an advanced country such as ours. With our wealth, we need to put in place whatever it takes to allow us to play up, not hide behind walls.

Why? As this article points out, "broadly speaking--and these broad operating principles matter--those counttries that open their borders to international competition are those countries with the highest per capita income."

Play up or play down.

This is more than mere correlation. Competitive openness is the key to bringing developing nations up to the standard of living enjoyed by citizens of wealthier countries. I am not speaking here of those countries faced with extreme poverty amid the ills of war, civil unrest, disease and famine. Those are countries with big problems and special needs, beyond the bounds of much economic theory. But I am talking about the majority of the world's population, who reside in countries with the opportunity for growth but who are stifled by protectionist policies and anti-competitive institutions.

That's a beautifully concise description of the broad principles that underlie my entire vision of growing the Core and shrinking the Gap. It says why economies isn't enough for all, but is enough for most. And why the military is necessary for some.

Here's the great tie-in for me WRT to America's historic role as sourcecode for this globalization (a topic that's being bolstered greatly by reading Kagan's brilliant book, "Dangerous Nation"):

How to explain this phenomenon? The answer lies predominantly with competition--aided by an attendant drop in transportation costs--that industries had to face from their new member states [here, he speaks of the growing EU over time]. With regard to Europe, it is useful to consider the example of the U.S., which from its early days, created wealth from the healthy competition among businesses and industries in its member states. This competitive cooperation was not a foregone conclusion during this country's formation, but its establishment has left an institutional legacy that has guaranteed the increasing standards of living that we all now enjoy.

And then you turn to Benjamin Friedman to realize that increasing standards of living are what expanded our democracy over time from its narrow origins of existing merely for land-owning white men.

It was the connectivity of transportation nets that drove this process. The Erie Canal made New York what it is today, and it facilitated the build-out of the trans-Appalachian "west." The Transcontinental RR did similar things for the trans-Mississippi West. Then jump ahead to the first president to travel abroad, T.R., and you're at the Panama Canal.

Taken in this light, the Department of Everything Else that was the Navy throughout our first 160 years was no mere lesser-included force. Instead, it was a key enabler of the freedom of the seas that made our connectivity with the rest of the world happen. Yes, we were free-riding on the British Empire and navy for decades, and when that corrupt colonial-based system self-destructed, our sourcecode emerged, ushering in an age of great power peace that now must extend itself down to those lesser-includeds because those lesser-includeds--in this super-connecting world--represent dangers far beyond their capacity for immediate death (the vertical scenario) and now threaten us primarily in their capacity for horizontal transmission of disruption and pain.

Does that signal a brave new world within which the lesser-includeds rule all, subjecting us to constant fear and disruption?

Hardly.

And that's where new definitions of resilience emerge.

But even in that effort at deepening our resilience (and yes, this is why working with a real genius like Steve DeAngelis makes so much sense for me right now), there are considerations of keeping our competition open and strong and pervasive, even as we seek cooperation from old enemies who now become our strongest competitors (thus the centrality of our emerging strategic relationship with China).

In all of this, we must remember how we first became strong here in these united states, because that process is what ultimately begat the United States that now has within its leadership role the task of creating a form of global peace long held impossible to achieve.