Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Found here and cited below.

Shane's right in his comment: I do agree with the vast majority of the post, to include its criticism that my vision to date has relied a lot on stock characters (nations, militaries, corporations).

The reason why I don't just elucidate the super-empowered masses is two-fold:

1) When I speak to globalization's liberating freedoms, I'm assuming all that. My belief in markets isn't a belief in either governments or militaries or corporations, but in the individuals that animate them. I don't spell that out enough, I guess, in my writings. It's just the way I view them based on my years of interacting with these three actor-collectives. I know that makes me naive to some (oh, to rely on actual experience outside my almost 20 hours of teaching!), but I really think we win--time and time again--because of the quality of our people, which is enabled by our rule-sets and institutions (which, in turn, are nothing without these individuals, as we see time and time again). I could try to write that sort of book next, but I don't think that sort of writing is particularly my forte. Plus there are so many books out there like that, all of which proclaim the rising power of individuals, the wisdom of crowds, etc. I will think about Curtis' admonitions, though, as I write Vol. III. I spent a lot of BFA correcting people's wrong assumptions on PNM (meaning, where they filled in blanks in ways highly different from my assumptions). I think I would have done that naturally to a certain extent anyway, but his words help me focus.

2) In writing Vol. III as a how-to manual, I am sort of taking a pass on truly exploring the individual-led-change possibilities of this era. I mean, I'll take you through my version of it, but I don't promise to give you the same tour d'horizon on individuals as I did on the system in PNM and states/economies/societies in BFA. Instead of trying to be all things to all individuals in Vol. III, I'll explore the one thing I know well. I do that because I feel the knowledge is important in its own right, addressing a serious gap in our tool kit vis-a-vis other, rising societies of SEIs (especially China and India). I also do it because I feel, individually, that this is the next step in self-knowledge for me, and it's time--life-wise--to pass on the knowledge (most of my mentors were roughly this age when they started paying it . . . backward (I guess, in generational terms)). It also seems like the right book to write right now, for me career-wise and for the next step in spreading the vision. But writing the how-to is also a bit of a placeholder for me. The book on SEIs remaking the world in their vision--positively--is a book I could see writing with Steve a few years down the road. To write it now, amidst the very unfolding of what we're trying to do, would seem self-indulgent. We can either teach right now or do, and the do is too important, too much fun, and too lucrative to pass up (what, you thought we'd come up with a way to make both us and others impoverished?). That pathway, only hinted at here and there in our respective blogs, is coming about in ways that are stunningly exciting, teaching us a ton of lessons in the process. Steve, for example, is learning so much in pursuing Development-in-a-Box right now in his opening trips to Kurdistan, that it threatens to take over his own book project before he gets the chance to do the straightforward lay out of enterprise resilience and the like. To the extent he can pull off as much of the "teach" and the real-time "do" in his first book, then so much the better. But me, for a lot of where-I-am-today reasons, I just don't want to try to do both things on the fly. When I wrote PNM and BFA (like two movies filmed back to back), I was leveraging the first 15 years of my career. I didn't have to make any of it up, it was what I did for a living. Since I've left the Naval War College, I have spent a lot of time exploring what it means for me as an individual to affect change, with the most excitingly tangible stuff happening with Steve and Enterra. Someday, I or we (Steve and I) will write that sort of book, and it will be our version of Fifth Generation Warfare, which I believe, leveraging Dan Abbott's forays, will be fundamentally pre-kinetic (i.e., very Confucian), very economic, and hugely liberating and thus subversive in the worst way. But I want to learn all that stuff--first hand--before I try to write it up. I simply need my personal experience to catch up with up with my writing. Until then, Vol. III offers an angle of skills without trying to cover the entire gamut. In many ways, I would consider that approach to be de rigeur, meaning the tale of 5GW can only be told in mosaic. To the extent that is true, I would expect to offer many updates in the future on the roads built.