Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■ "BOOK REVIEW: Closing the globalization 'Gap,'" by Yoel Sano, Asia Times, 24 September 2004.

Here's the lengthy text in full, followed by my commentary:

http://www.atimes.com

BOOK REVIEW

Closing the globalization 'Gap'

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P M Barnett.

Reviewed by Yoel Sano

As US President George W Bush prepares for a global redeployment of military forces, he and his defense planners may well be advised to read The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P M Barnett, a senior strategic researcher at the US Naval War College.

Ever since the Cold War ended, political scientists, politicians, and journalists have been rushing to put forward a new "big idea" - a single, unifying concept that explains everything that has happened in the world, post-1989. So far, we have had Francis Fukuyama's End of History, George H W Bush's "New World Order", Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Robert D Kaplan's Coming Anarchy, Thomas Friedman's Lexus and Olive Tree, John J Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Michael T Klare's Resource Wars, and, of course, George W Bush's "war on terror".

Now Barnett, who has also worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as on projects for Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has presented his own new global paradigm: the principal division in the world is that between the "functioning Core" and the "non-integrating Gap", or simply, the "Core" and the "Gap".

The Core consists of the world's richest and most developed countries and regions - the United States and Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia - plus newly emerging economies such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Russia, China and India. Together, they comprise roughly 4 billion of the world's 6 billion population. The Gap consists of the rest of the world - namely Central America and the Caribbean, Andean Latin America, virtually all of Africa except South Africa, the entire Middle East plus Turkey and the Balkans, Central Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. In essence, the Gap is made up of those parts of the world that are failing to benefit from globalization; it is, in Barnett's words, globalization's "ozone hole".

According to Barnett, it is precisely this "disconnectedness" between the Core and the Gap that is the principal security threat to the US in particular, and the rest of the Core in general. He sees the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as the strongest manifestation of the widening gulf between the global haves and have-nots, and stresses that the Core ignores the Gap at its peril. In essence, he interprets the terrorists' message as being, "If I cannot enjoy your good life, then neither will you" (p 298). The real enemy is therefore not militant Islam, nor the Middle East, but rather the condition of disconnectedness.

Consequently, Barnett believes that the primary mission of the US - and therefore the US military - is to extend connectivity between the Core and Gap as far as possible, so that the latter can benefit from the third wave of globalization (Globalization III), which began around 1980. Barnett notes that virtually all post-Cold War US military interventions - in Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq - have been in the Gap. For the Core to be safe, the Gap has to become safe too.

Furthermore, closing the Gap does not distract from Bush's "war on terror" at all, since the main opponent in both Bush's war and Barnett's mission are anti-globalization forces - represented in their most virulent form by al-Qaeda. Barnett suggests that the US should start equating the idea of "national defense" and "homeland defense" with the notion of "Core security". Ultimately, the author argues, a global "war on terrorism" must create a happy ending for the whole world, and not just the US or the West. "Until the Bush administration describes [that] future worth creating in terms ordinary people and the rest of the world can understand, we will continue to lose support at home and abroad for the great task that lies ahead" (p 169).

At stake is nothing less than the future of globalization itself. Indeed, by way of example, Barnett notes that in 1917 the world lost Russia to the forces of disconnectedness and had to spend the rest of the 20th century paying the price. With this in mind, Barnett rails against internal Pentagon thinking that has sought to prepare the US military for a conventional conflict with a near peer competitor - ie, China - at some future date. Indeed, he sees China as the greatest opportunity on earth, rather than as a strategic threat. For Barnett, the worst thing that could happen is for the Core to become split between the "old Core" (US, Europe and Japan) and the "new Core" (China, India, Brazil). From this point of view, if US intervention in the Gap alienates the rest of the Core, thereby cementing a new division, then the cure becomes worse than the disease.

Barnett acknowledges the gargantuan task ahead in closing the Gap. Many groups or individuals reject the idea of joining the Core, fearing that the adoption of Western norms - which define the Core's norms - will mean the loss of their traditional way of life. He recognizes that globalization's advance will trigger more nationalism, not less, noting that what we are seeing is "not anti-Americanism per se, but a fear of a lost identity . . . Globalization empowers the individual at the expense of the collective, and that very American transformation of culture is quite scary for traditional societies" (p 123). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gender aspect of globalization - often overlooked by commentators. Barnett notes that precisely because connectivity empowers women relative to men, it will be opposed on that basis by most men in traditional societies.

Based on his work at Cantor Fitzgerald, where Barnett conducted "economic security workshops" discussing how security and finance work with one another, the author lists a set of "10 commandments of globalization":

1. Look for resources, and ye shall find.

2. No stability, no markets.

3 . No growth, no stability.

4. No resources, no growth.

5. No infrastructure, no growth.

6. No money, no infrastructure.

7. No rules, no money.

8. No security, no rules.

9. No Leviathan (US superpower), no security.

10. No will, no Leviathan. (pages 199-205)

The reference to "Leviathan" brings us to the author's ambitious plans to transform the US military entirely. In order to reconfigure the US armed forces for his new mission of promoting global connectedness, Barnett proposes bifurcating it into what he calls a "Leviathan Force" and a "System Administrator". The former will be geared almost entirely for conventional combat, go to war, and then leave once military objectives have been achieved. The latter force will move in after the Leviathan has left and essentially act as peacekeepers and providers of humanitarian and social aid in the aftermath of a conflict.

From Barnett's point of view, the new definition of a "just war" would be one that "leaves affected societies more connected than when we found them, with the potential for self-driven connectivity either restored or left intact" (p 326). As such, he supported the US war on Iraq on the grounds that it was aimed at reconnecting Iraq to the global economy. Weapons of mass destruction were therefore not the real issue. Furthermore, the author hoped, the 2003 Iraq war was supposed to be the trigger for a "Big Bang" that would force the leaders of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to open up their societies to the global economy.

In view of the need to connect the Middle East to the Core, Barnett criticizes those who call for the West to develop alternative sources of energy for the sole purpose of ending the Core's dependency on - and therefore political involvement in - the Middle East. He warns that such an outcome would further disconnect the region from the Core and risk turning it into another Central Africa. Indeed, he cites Africa as an example where the West's departure, post-colonial era, has left it more disconnected and troubled than ever before. Should the Core abandon the Middle East, it would risk turning the region into a "giant Taliban-like 'paradise' that keeps the West out, the women down, and our narcotics flowing".

In his concluding remarks, Barnett issues another series of commandments toward closing the Gap:

1. Re-creating and reconnecting Iraq to the global economy.

2. Removing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and reunifying Korea.

3. The overthrow of the Iranian clerical leadership by 2010.

4. The establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas by 2015.

5. The transformation of the Middle East through the rehabilitation of Iraq.

6. The emergence of China as a peer of the United States.

7. An Asian counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by 2020.

8. The amalgamation of the Asian NATO with the original NATO and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) to create a Core-wide security alliance.

9. The admission of as many as a dozen new states into the US, initially from the Western Hemisphere, by 2050.

10. The rehabilitation of Africa into the world economy.

These are extremely ambitious goals - something that The Pentagon's New Map is definitely not short of. Indeed, not only would these goals be resisted by al-Qaeda, Kim Jong-il, and other anti-US forces, but by significant elements within the Core, and even inside the Pentagon itself. In this regard, Barnett devotes much space in his book to anecdotes about the sheer bureaucratic inertia that he faced while working in the Department of Defense, with one frequent response from senior officers to his proposals being "You're ruining my military!"

Yet for all his enthusiasm, optimism and forward-looking vision, Barnett's notion that the world is divided into a Core and Gap is hardly new. It is, in essence, the division between the developed Northern Hemisphere and underdeveloped Southern Hemisphere that has existed for centuries. Furthermore, his map - illustrated on the inside cover - is occasionally misleading, in that several major emerging market states such as Turkey and Thailand - to name a few - are included in the Gap when they are more truthfully part of the Core - as are the Balkans, two countries of which (Bulgaria and Romania) are already members of NATO and candidate members of the European Union (EU). Not only that, large swaths of new Core countries such as China and Russia probably have more in common with the Gap than the Core. As such, Barnett acknowledges that his map is a 95th percentile, and certain outliers are depicted in the wrong zone.

To many, Barnett acknowledges, the Gap resembles the "Arc of Instability" - which runs from the Caribbean to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and North Korea. However, he rejects the similarities between the Gap and the Arc by noting that their differences lie in his belief that the concept of the Gap should be used for the purposes of improving these countries and societies. By contrast, US policy toward the Arc of Instability has been aimed mainly at "picking off bad guys" and making the countries stable, rather than improving economic well-being and linkages with the Core.

Barnett takes for granted that globalization is beneficial to the Gap. As such, the book does not address the issue of whether more globalization is "good" or "bad". Furthermore, in his zest to close the Gap, he seems reluctant to address the issue that forcefully connecting societies faster than their organic pace may actually create the backlash that will overwhelm integration efforts. This in turn could lead to voluntary secession from the Core and the precise opposite of what Barnett would like to see. One obvious example of this was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, where the autocratic and pro-American Shah's forced Westernization paved the way for a backlash; his project was rejected by his successor ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as "Westoxication". It has taken Iran an entire generation to slowly edge back toward the global economy.

Although Barnett sees al-Qaeda as among the most extreme anti-globalization forces, he emphasizes that Islam is not the problem per se, since all religions in the Gap are more fundamentalist than in the Core. Nonetheless, in view of the fact that the entire Muslim world lies within the Gap - not so much by design, but because of its underdevelopment - critics in the Muslim world might interpret Barnett's book as a being aimed mainly at intervention in their own sphere. The author fails to recognize that al-Qaeda - or militant Islam in general - is far from being anti-globalization. In fact it represents an alternative globalism; one aimed ultimately at creating a unified Islamist state from Morocco in the west to Mindanao in the Philippines in the east. Not only that, but al-Qaeda's activities, and indeed the spread of militant Islam, are greatly assisted by the globalized nature of today's world. As such, the truth would appear to be closer to the notion of "Jihad Via McWorld" described by Benjamin Barber in his 1995 book, Jihad Versus McWorld, rather than simply globalization versus radical Islam.

While Barnett hopes that the Iraq war will serve as the trigger for a new "Big Bang" that will open up the Middle East, the results so far look more like a failure, with post-Saddam Hussein Iraq possibly even more "disconnected" from the world economy than ever before. In this sense, the Iraq war is a sober warning as to what could go wrong if the US were to pursue Barnett's doctrine with the enthusiasm with which he writes.

The Pentagon's New Map in effect commits the US military to a never-ending mission of intervention practically anywhere on Earth. Although he appears to believe that the US will be assisted by other members of the Core, realistically there are very few countries with the manpower to carry out such a mission. The US itself would probably have to increase significantly the size of its military for the troop numbers required, since it is already stretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sharing the burdens with the Chinese and Indian militaries might be one way of addressing the troop deficit, but it is certainly doubtful that US defense planners would really be willing to see those two countries - China especially - evolve into the kind of peer competitor that Barnett envisages.

And even if China were to achieve that goal, there is no guarantee that the Pentagon's "new map" would not clash with any "new map" being drawn up by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. This would probably be true regardless of whether China becomes a democracy in the years or decades ahead. As such, there would be the possibility that the US (the old Core) would be forced to counteract the new Core (China) in a new titanic global struggle that would be bigger than anything the US currently faces in its "war on terror".

Sadly, Barnett includes virtually nothing about the evolution of the EU, or indeed the direction of China, Russia and India. The last three of these giants are racked with internal problems, with the potential to slip away from the new Core and back into the Gap.

Overall, The Pentagon's New Map offers some grandiose ideas about the possible direction of the third wave of globalization, and what it might mean for the world, and the US. Barnett is also right to look at the security aspect of globalization, which has thus far been comparatively neglected in earlier books on the subject. Furthermore, the author's optimistic tone is a welcome contrast to the pessimism of writers such as Samuel Huntington and Robert D Kaplan. However, Barnett may be far too confident in the United States' enthusiasm and ability to remake the world - or indeed, for the world to remake the United States. To this end, Barnett poses the question, asked by one of his readers: If his vision of the future comes about, what changes more, the US or the world?

This book does not have all the answers, but it is nonetheless a welcome addition to the wave of literature on globalization, and the future of the United States' grand strategy in the post-Cold War, post-September 11 world.

The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas P M Barnett. G P Putnam's Sons, April 2004. ISBN 0-3991-5175-3. US$26.95, 448 pages.

Yoel Sano has worked for publishing houses in London, providing political and economic analysis, and has been following Northeast Asia for many years.

COMMENTARY: For such an outstanding review of so many of the book's big ideas (probably the most comprehensive one to date), his criticisms are disappointingly bland and standard. It's almost like he feels the need to issue the usual complaints despite all the praise in order to keep it balanced. I go through each:

■ This is just North v. South dressed up: that one is awfully weak, since I include the ABCs of Latin America, plus South Africa, plus Industrialized Asia (Australia and New Zealand). So yeah, it's North vs. South if you discount all those countries. Here he just seems to ignore the central tenet of the book: connectivity is the measure. But at least he didn't voice any of that neo-Marxist crap about the Core needing the Gap to stay the Gap in order to maintain their standard of living.

■ He summaries my critique of the Arc concept well, but then basically has my vision advocating non-stop war all over the planet, and that's rather boneheaded given my persistent efforts throughout the volume to attack that false charge. For some reason he completely ignores those arguments. I dunno, maybe he just skipped Chapter 7.

■ Do I address whether globalization is good or bad for the Gap? Sure I do! I just focus on the security angle (globalization = peace, non-globalization = a lot of violence; does that seem like a good/bad call to you?). Later he praises the book for focusing on security, something nobody else does except to use it as an extreme source of pessimism (Kaplan, Huntington), but here he basically ignores my normative judgment regarding globalization's profound impact on security.

■ The bit about "organic pace" in terms of accepting globalization is good, but he ignores a major segment early in the book where I advocate letting countries pick and choose their routes and pacing regarding the synchronization of rule sets. In that section I argue how China vs. Russia vs. India have accomplished this evolution. For some reason, he simply forgets these arguments. He also forgets my focus on connectivity and my arguments that we don't seek to shove democracy down anybody's throats, letting them find their way (my bit on one-party states being okay) at their own pace. Again, I just seem to have too many arguments in the book for this guy to keep track of.

■ On judging the Big Bang after one year: hmmm, that's a bit fast in my mind. Did anyone really expect the Middle East to be transformed that fast? What about some "organic pacing"? Or maybe I should have only come up with a grand strategy for the summer of 2004, instead of for the next several decades. This guy's definition of strategic vision is a bit tight for me.

■ He says I'm write not to focus on Islam as the big enemy, but then says the real struggle is closer to Jihan vs. McWorld, so which is it with him?

■ He says the PLA's map may not be the Pentagon's, but I think I make a lot of points regarding China's future evolution that say the needs of the many will outweigh the needs of the PLA.

■ Finally, he says (sadly) that I don't speak to the future of big players other than the U.S. I disagree strongly on China, but it's a good criticism for the EU, Russia, and India. I do speak some pretty bold things in my "Ten Steps Toward a Future Worth Creating" regarding these states, and he covers that, but admittedly, I did so in a rather cursory fashion—hence the need for Son of PNM. Anyway, it's a book crammed full of huge concepts, and he's lamenting I didn't cram in even more! So I can live with that criticism.

Overall, this guy does a stunning job of summarizing the book, and his criticisms are fairly fair until he starts the laundry list at the end, and at that point he simply seems to forget significant passages in the book, which is surprising given his strong summary. But he treats the book awfully seriously and makes very nice comparisons to other authors that flatter me well, so hard to complain. This fellow put in a lot of work and it shows, and you have to like any review that does that, no matter the criticisms lumped in at the end.