Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

WEBSITE: Global Incident Map

This thing seems an exercise in self-absorption: suspicious package at a Home Depot here and a guy arrested outside Obama's hotel there, foiled plots and cells discovered, but gloriously quiet Sudan doesn't rate a notation and Mugabe's ongoing terror against his people doesn't rank a star in Zimbabwe.

Our "suspicious events" in the Core naturally trump an ongoing genocide in the Gap. This is strategic hypochondria. You look at this map and see a Core "awash" in terror, seemingly engulfed in fear, with threats peaking around every corner. Meanwhile, placid Africa is clearly the place to be--hardly any terror to speak of!

The density of connectivity in the Core and the surrounding security naturally generate a flood of "abnormal" events that must be checked out, whereas in much of the Gap, ongoing failures, breakdowns and a certain base level of snafus and criminality are taken as the norm.

The profound difference between the Core and the Gap on such issues are on display right now between the Old Core and New Core China. The kind of "scandals" China suddenly encounters because of its supply chain connectivity to the Old Core is stuff China would have simply swept under the rug back home in previous times (I mean, big deal! A bunch of people get poisoned!). But because the Old Core has much higher standards, once China is connected it suddenly finds itself held to those higher standards, and all sorts of stuff previously blown off is now a scandal or worse.

That was my primary reason in defining the Core-Gap breakdown in the first place: the Core has all sorts of rule sets, the Gap largely lacks them. So everything out of the very tightly defined norm is a "crime," or "terrorism" or a "crisis" in the Core, while all sorts of stuff goes on constantly in the Gap that doesn't raise the Core's interest much at all (again, how can my "nightmare scenario" for bioterror in the Core possibly be compared to an ongoing war somewhere inside the Gap?). Almost anything trips the wire in the Core, while virtually nothing does so inside the Gap.

So naturally, we're the ones trapped in a climate of unending fear.

Inside the Gap you're lucky to make it to 50. Inside the Core you live with the terror of learning through genetic analysis exactly what could kill you in your sixties versus your seventies. We do have it tough.

Thanks to Robert Langland for sending this.