Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 July 2005
I spoke with Matthew Bell over the phone the morning of the 29th of June, breaking from my morning of meetings with senior officials of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in TN for about a half-hour to do this interview over the phone in one of their managers' offices.
The piece appeared on "The World, a joint production of the BBC, Public Radio International (NPR abroad), and Boston's WGBH. It ran that evening in their international broadcasts. You can catch the 4+ minute segment online at: www.theworld.org/latesteditions/06/20050629.shtml. The entry is described as follows:
UNOCAL report (4:30)
California-based oil company, UNOCAL is considering a takeover bid from China's national oil company. The World's Matthew Bell has the story.
Here's my quote near the end:
Bell: . . . Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, publicly criticized China's military expansion earlier this month, and CNOOC's bid for UNOCAL is fueling those fears. But Thomas Barnett says those are misplaced fears. Barnett is an international security expert and the author of The Pentagon's New Map.
Barnett: From a purely economic angle, this makes perfect sense. In fact, it's a welcome sort of thing. The only reason why this is being cast as national security, frankly, is that there are elements inside the Pentagon that desperately need a China to justify the future of Star Wars and space wars and giant submarines, which are not justified by a global war on terrorism.