Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

TASTE: "Professors on the Battlefield," by Evan R. Goldstein, Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2007, p. W11.

"The shift is the zeitgeist is embodied by Gen. David H. Petraeus," we are rightly told, and a seminal turning point is how he used academics (especially anthropologists) to vet his new counter-insurgency strategy (I was fortunate enough to get my own interaction on the subject in Leavenworth in December 2005 when I spoke to the student body and interviewed Petraeus for the "Monks of War" piece in Esquire and came away duly impressed with the vision as it was shaping up). Petraeus's "unprecedented collaboration" with Sarah Sewall of Harvard resulted in a "conference that brought together journalists, human-rights activists, academics and members of the armed forces to exchange ideas about how to make the doctrine more effective and more humane."

Sewall's positive influence was such that Petraeus asked her to write one of the resulting manual's opening essays. Very cool.

Naturally, a lot of academics see a Vietnam-in-the-remaking, but again, recasting everything we're learning (much of it--again) as simply leading us to the same outcome is such an intellectual cop-out. It's not the early 1970s. It's not a bipolar world. Globalization is moving into a completely different phase. Back then we came to see the futility of proxy wars against the Sovs, and now some want to see us recognize the futility of rapidly instituting democracy in a society not ready for it ("Sold!" say I).

But even if we trip lightly to that unremarkable conclusion, there still exists the problems of failed states and rogue regimes and the inescapable reality of the Long War against radical extremism.

The bipolar struggle with the Sovs was an elective, but the Long War is a requirement. We were in charge of the Cold War, along with the Sovs. But nobody's in charge of globalization's rapid expansion around the planet, and it's the main driver of this conflict. We can respond to that driver or ignore it, but we can't just wish it away, and waiting out the Gap will not get us a "victory" of any sorts, just more pain coming our way.

What saddens me most about the left and right nowadays is that the extremes fail to recognize the marvelous impetus created by globalization's scarily rapid advance: now we're forced to do something about the disconnected, the bottom billion, the left behind, and so on. We're forced not out of charity but out of sheer self-interest: this thing is going down and we can make it better or we can make it worse, but it's going down.

To me, that sort of inevitability--of our own making!--marks this era as probably the most important one to date in human history. We manage the journey from 6.5 to 9 billion over the next quarter-century or so, and do so in a fashion that makes globalization truly global, and we've made a huge turning point in human history happen.

Roddenberry and the rest of the optimistic/pessimistic sci-fiers always projected WWIII with nukes as the ultimate turning-point test and we are lucky enough to have this instead (all residual fantasies about nuclear war aside--and no, nuclear terrorism, as real as that threat may be--is not the same). Instead of just avoiding a terrible end, we're faced with the challenge of the future worth creating.

That's an amazing gift from history, but one that will require efforts from all quarters to make happen.

And in that regard, watching the military come back to society as a result of Iraq is a very good thing--all Vietnam flashbacks aside.