Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

I am asked, "Why not jump on the demonize Russia bandwagon? Is this all about protecting your notion of the Core and Russia's membership"

[second iteration, and yes, I get as many chances as I want because this is my blog]

Of course that has a lot to do with it. Grand strategy isn't about changing your focus every couple of years. Done well and pursued vigorously, you are doomed to piss off most of the people most of the time, because you'll be a contrarian at points when people's dander is up. But if you want to be a team player, try football.

My initial definition of the Core has been and always will be: these are not places where America should expect to war (Duh! That's how I came up with the Map in the first place!). You can counter, "But we should expect to go to war with everybody all the time! That's the only prudent thing to do." But I disagree. A strategy of defending against all possibilities is not a strategy, but a ceding of all initiatives to your enemies. Plus, successful grand strategy is about maximizing your friends and minimizing your enemies. It's not about a fair fight, but a completely unfair routing of your opponents. You just need to be clear about who those are and who your friends are and who you can live with and work with from among the undecideds.

Reducing the battlespace, so to speak, is something I consider to be a very profound reality/principle/goal (because not doing so tends to waste my troops' lives), and so I was willing, in the first iteration of the map, to slip in as many countries as possible, knowing that some of my choices (Russia and China in particular) were controversial, forward-leaners that could slip back (to the delight of many). [And yeah, I was plenty ballsy doing this in the E Ring of the Pentagon in the months right after 9/11, but I saw my chance.]

But since both were recognized nuclear powers and both were seeking (and still seek) to maximize their economic connectivity with the outside world (to their complete advantage, OMG!), that was a fairly easy call to make. If Turkey, for example, was a recognized nuclear power, it would have been impossible not to put it in the Core (notice how all the Gap nuclear powers are inherently unrecognized--part of the cost of being nuclear powers inside the Gap).

It was never my intent (nor my wording) to suggest that being in the Core meant you could not war in the Gap--anything but. So China, if it were to wage war on Taiwan, would seriously cross the Rubicon, in my mind. They know how that signal would be interpreted, and thus have gone out of their way to signal their non-desire to be maneuvered into that choice (reflecting their leadership's intelligence regarding what they're trying to achieve overall). America, by and large, has played that one very smartly.

The same would be true for a Russia that militarily subdued the Baltics or Ukraine. When you re-introduce war into situations where the Core has collectively said to itself, "We think we've got this one in hand for the long haul," then you'd shift defense thinking inside the Core away from its post-9-11 tendency to focus on the Gap and once again have it start giving preeminence to defending against such possibilities inside the Core. This, to me, is how you destroy globalization. Depending on how we play Russia in the weeks and months ahead, we can certainly put much of Europe and the U.S. on that pathway.

I see that as a stupid strategic choice that throws away decades of effort and sacrifice to get our international liberal trade order (just the West til about 1980 and called the global economy and globalization since) to where it is today, with just a mere one billion truly offline and the Gap eminently shrinkable--albeit with plenty of social tumult and violence to accompany that process (but not too much to handle for a Core whose attention isn't diverted back to senseless intra-Core conflicts). I thought along these lines for a long time before PNM was published. My first major effort at the Center for Naval Analyses in 1991 saw me advocate radically ramping up navy-to-navy cooperation with the Russians. So I've been making this argument for 17 years and am not (surprise!) eager to trash the situation over Georgia's miscalculations. If we put immature democracies (who start wars more than any other type of state historically) in that driver's seat, we're screwed.

I'm also not eager to see the U.S. military reflexively trash the evolution thus far achieved in this long war against radical extremism. A whole lot of sunk costs poured down the drain in that pathway too. So yeah, I chose to honor the sacrifices of those thousands of American soldiers right now a bit more than Saakashvili's stupid call.

Yes, it would definitely feel good to indulge in the desire to get all jacked up on Putin right now and teach him a thing or two in no uncertain terms. If our strategic situation was better, that would be tempting. But it's not, and I believe in the choices (Afghanistan, Iraq) that we've made so far, and so I'm not willing to toss those on the bonfire just yet either.

I just think people who advocate the harsher lines aren't thinking this through in terms of the ultimate costs we can pay in our haste.

Again, I am far more easily talked into sliding countries from the Gap to the Core than vice versa. If it makes you feel better, you can chalk that up to my arrogance and my pathetic desire to defend my model. I'm more than okay with that judgment, because, as always, I view events in terms of decades. To me, that's how you conduct grand strategy.

[And yes, it was correct for the Naval War College to fire me under the pretext (one of many) that my ideas had gained such traction across the defense community that I would seek to defend them in a manner that pushed me past acceptable defense-centric analysis and into defense-centric advocacy. My defense to that accusation remains the same: what seems like advocacy inside the defense community remains solid analysis when the world outside defense is adequately accounted for. I am guilty of interpreting war-within-the-context-of-everything-else, to be sure, but I consider that the sine qua non of grand strategic thinking. So f--k 'em if they can't take real grand strategy! But yeah, I realize that what I advocate in terms of evolving the U.S. military made me a traitor to my initial tribe--the Navy.]

We have had almost two decades to get Russia feeling happy and secure in its place in the world--to find a new self-identity that it can be proud of. We have largely wasted those two decades. We asked and asked and asked and Russia gave and gave and gave, and finally Russia got fed up. That development, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. I want a confident, demanding Russia. I need it to run some parts of the world and help shrink some parts of the Gap I won't pretend anybody else is stepping up to handle. But I need a rule set for how that's done that I can live with, along with the rest of the Core. By not integrating Russia better into Core institutions (like NATO, which should have been killed a while ago and reborn immediately as something from Vancouver to Vladivostock--remember that one from Jim Baker?), we've done a half-assed job, giving Russia just enough connectivity (which is substantial, business-wise, and if you're slow on that uptake, you need to read deeper into the WSJ and if you're unwilling to learn then you should remain satisfied with your head-up-your-ass perspective and spare me your insights) to get rich but not enough larger pol-mil context to truly make itself happy and secure inside the Core.

To a certain extent, Russia's rebirth was inevitable (it's got a ton of stuff and it's a highly literate population), and as we've seen in past history, its depressive phases are always followed by some manic episodes. Again, we've had years and years to work this one and we did little to prepare for this moment. If I'm king of the West, Russia is already deep inside a revamped Northern Hemispheric Security Alliance (a term from an old CNA pub I did in the mid-90s that looked ahead to roughly now). Would that have prevented all such turbulence from Russia? No. But better to finesse it within that context than to face what we face now: Russia is simply marking its sphere of influence more overtly and proposing its own rule set for its management. We didn't invite Russia properly into our 21st century, so, denied any acceptable ownership of its own 20th century history (better it be all buried, say I), it slipped back into its 19th (quelle surprise, mes ami!), and yeah, that makes our management of Russia's membership in the Core a lot more complicated. We denied them proper attention for a long time and now they're acting out to garner negative attention: "You don't let us decide some of your rules, then we'll simply decide on our own where we can!"

Of course, a certain amount of this rule-set competition is inevitable. Hell, it's part of doing business (meaning, economics) in this world. China, for example, is constantly trying to fence off new technology rule sets (this standard or that) because it gets the logic that "he who controls the initial standard gets to dominate the market." Russia itself is clearly trying to do that in natural gas (its better long-term play) and a host of precious metals. Sure, it's doing it in a crude way, but not unlike an America playing to its strengths (like cotton) in the early 19th century. What we did to Britain, for example, in the 19th century (cheat like hell and ask for all manner of exceptions from the dominant economic/trade rule set), Russia and China and others now seek to do with us. Tough to manage, yes, but it beats the hell out of arms races and proxy wars in the Third World and brinkmanship over stupid macho bullshit. So again, I will be very, very slow to push that button.

But more than that, I want America to act its age and recognize its progeny in globalization and to think long and hard about casually trashing any of that amazing legacy out of temporary fears better managed by cooler heads. We've worked ourselves into a bit of a strategic tie-down here. We won't be unwinding that position for quite some time, unless we're willing to trash those efforts (ill advised). The manner in which we achieved this tie down (stubborn unilateralism) has created a very bad example, which, unfortunately but hardly to our surprise, Russia is following in its usual way (f--k the diplomatic prelims, we're going in!). Moscow also now seems to echoing our use of "time horizons" when confronted with demands to leave (you know, as Jon Stewart puts it, that thing you head towards but never actually reach!). These guys are annoyingly quick learners, like a four-year-old who instantly picks up your swears.

But admitting the reality that we're living out the last few months of a very lame-duck presidency isn't the same as freaking out and making frantic choices at Mikhail Saakashvili's behest (who the f--k elected him to run American foreign policy?).

Tom Friedman has it right: Russia can go down this path to a certain extent and there's nothing we can do about it. But if Putin persists, then Europe will spend the bucks and make the supremely uncomfortable effort to redirect on both oil and especially gas. It'll be a bitch, but I'll tell you up front, a lot of companies are going to make a shitload of profit taking advantage of Putin's stupidity. To a degree, this path is already somewhat set and should be pursued (sign me up for the shitload!) anyway. In the meantime, however, we should stay calm but firm. Hell yes, put all sorts of carrots and sticks on the table, but be very careful with the latter, because when security promises are involved, they often get carved in stone very quickly, creating dynamics that are unbearably hard to control and which could easily overwhelm the transmission of the far more profound economic signals.

Yes, letting this thing work out economically takes more time and restraint and patience and steely nerves (go back and read your George Kennan, because the logic is the same even if the direction of connectivity is reversed). It's a lot easier simply to pull your gun out of its holster and start waving it around. The problem with the latter is what you do to the Core as a whole with such behavior (again, it's that modeling of stupid behavior that often gets you even more imitators).

To his great credit, Bush continues to act presidential, like the leader of the world's most powerful military and biggest national market. He's got a crappy hand to play right now, but he's doing it well. I don't agree with all the choices, but tactics are not my forte, which is why I don't issue lists of steps. Plus, quite frankly, nobody in government, when they're working such stuff, pays any attention to the peanut gallery on such things--nor should they.

Both candidates are spouting off a bit, McCain a bit more so. But that's expected. The view changes when you shift from the stump to the Oval Office.

In the end, though, one thing we've got to get used to is that America won't get to run the Core's many rule sets all by itself, anymore than it'll get to decide--all on its own--how the Gap gets shrunk. And no, radically redefining the Core down to just a League of Democracies is not the answer, because we'll find they're not particularly interested in taking orders from us either--those uppity bastards!

Competition for defining preferred Core rule sets will be fierce in the years and decades ahead. [I was never under any other illusion, and if you think otherwise, you've never understood my writing. Go back and peruse the NewRuleSets.Project material, because the whole point of that research, which I learned about at the knee of Bud Flanagan and Phil Ginsberg of Cantor Fitzgerald, is that the competition to define dominant rule sets is everything.] I want to keep that competition largely economic, and will bend over backwards to avoid any headlong rush into militarizing that--especially when the trigger is an intervention inside the Gap. So no, I won't go to the mattresses over Russia in Georgia, nor over China's passive aggressive approaches in Sudan or Myanmar or a host of other places, nor would I over India messing around with Pakistan, nor Australia's smart peacekeeping efforts in Oceania (what's to complain about?), nor South Africa's poor job of handling Zimbabwe, nor Brazil stepping up on all sorts of trade issues on behalf of the Gap or finessing Chavez (quite nicely, if you're paying attention), nor NATO's somewhat lazy-ass efforts in Afghanistan (my apologies to the Dutch and Canadians for lumping them in). We will be finessing and managing all manner of Core-into-Gap interventions in coming years. Indeed, I see creating that rule set as the most important security policy issue out there.

Or we can restart the Cold War with Russia and see how that dissolves the Core and expands the Gap and obviates any intelligent follow-through on the long war against radical extremism and see if we like those pathways better.

You know where I stand. If you want to work through such issues with me, comment away. If you just can't stand my logic, then fuck off and blog it better yourself. As always, blogging inside the comments isn't welcome. If you have another row to hoe, then make the commitment yourself and win your own audience with your own ideas. Of course, straw-men versions of my thinking are always available for pummeling. They emerge miraculously all over the blogosphere, and with enough manure, actually crack a seed now and them.

I consider this venue important as a work space, but it's not my life's work. I'm not a frustrated anything. I get all the real-world opportunities I can handle, and working with Steve, we and Enterra are getting a load of truly strategic opportunities to shrink the Gap and help win this long war. I consider all those opportunities supremely important. Hell, I've devoted my life to them when I could have simply sat on my ass cranking all manner of junk in print ("The 100 conserva-liberals who are ruining America!"), collecting the bucks while dumbing down my fellow citizens. I don't sleep half of my nights away from my family year after year because I love hotels or flying. I walk into room after room where there's no financial payoff whatsoever, charging those who can pay through the noses to finance my efforts throughout the military. I do it all because I want my life to have meaning and because I believe in making the world a better place and because I think that just sitting on my ass at home intellectually masturbating in the blogosphere would be a colossal waste of my talent (Although it is wonderfully fun to vent, isn't it? Hell, I can't do my day job sometimes unless I get it off my chest like this, plus it's [meaning the cost of Sean] a lot cheaper than therapy).

And I'm ssssspent! [Austin Powers declares, tossing his camera to an assistant]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want to think strategically, you've got to dial down the emotion when it comes to decision making and you've got to retain faith in what got America here to this point. Going all wobbly and frantically striking back is not strength, but weakness. This was not a direct attack on America but a very purposefully indirect one against the rule set we've long sought to impose around the world. I believe in that rule set, but I'm not under the illusion that I can make everybody else on the planet meet its standards overnight--especially when we ourselves cut corners when it suits us.

I do know this, though: we are winning this battle on a systemic basis--hands down.

And that's where our confidence should arise.

And that's why I wrote Great Powers the way I did. We need that confidence now more than ever, and the world needs us to have that confidence now more than ever.

Because, in the end, America and America alone is the only country truly capable of killing globalization.

And that's an awesome responsibility.

I know the response I get with one of these long posts ("Barnett is really lashing out against the blogosphere!") and frankly, I'm more than okay with that. The blogosphere is a large, unruly mob that sometimes exhibits the wisdom of crowds but often just processes emotion. I have no intention of steering that process. This is a workspace I use for my intellectual musings. It is neither my "official statement" (which usually doesn't include F-bombs--mostly true) nor my "frantic attempt" to do anything other than simply give you a glimpse into my thinking today. I refuse to take the blog that seriously because I see no evidence that it steers serious action but rather reflects real world events (although I do appreciate its reporting skills). I view my blog as largely a heuristic device, meaning a teaching tool. I think it can shape minds over the long haul but is a poor source for decision-making because--again--it's more the unruly mob and I'm with James Madison and his concerns on that one.

On "Mad Men" there is this mantra of, "The day you sign a new client is the day you lose an old one." It's a smart admission of real-world reality. Every time you make a call, you alienate some while solidifying with others and winning some new. The day you start worrying about holding onto your audience more than your thinking, you're finished as a useful source for strategic logic.

I know who I am and what I'm trying to achieve. I am uninterested in racing ahead to the front of the mob, pretending to lead.