Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 30 December 2004

Finished going through blog today, organizing all the book notes I've taken, and perusing a couple of last books.

Got out the book proposal and put all the main sections out on the table, writing down each on a sticky note. Stared at it for a long time, knowing that I've long known I would rejigger once I got to this point. Tossed about 5 of the proposed 18 sections out, then added in a good dozen that came to my head. Rerationalized the whole thing to 18 again. Ordered them just so. Came up with preferred section names for about half of them, place-holders for the rest.

Then called Mark and talked him though the whole thing. "Do we have a book here?" I ask repeatedly, and he seems more and more certain the more we talk about. Enough for today. I will let it sit for a day and get back to it on Saturday, when I'll read back through all my meta-notes from the blog and various articles and books, sifting through several hundred ideas to see which could go where. I will inevitably rejigger the outline quite a bit in this process. Then Sunday I'll organize the source material, tossing all the pieces of paper into the various 18 piles (if I still have 18 at that point).

Basic set up for now is: Preface, a Chapter "zero" that does sketch of 2025 realities, a Chapter One that speaks to tools to be created and understandings to be achieved for the Core as a whole, a Chapter Two that focuses on how the Global War on Terrorism working out to some sense of a finish (obviously a Middle Eastern focus), a Chapter Three that speaks to growing the Core (obviously an Asian focus), a Chapter Four that speaks to scenario pathways for shrinking the Gap (at the system level, at the state level, and at the individual level), a Chapter Five that deals with the major obstacles (longevity, sacrifices, resources) to shrinking the Gap, and a Conclusion that sums everything up in an innovative sort of way that I don't care to reveal here (an interesting twist on scenarios that I've employed before in my work, but never for a publication).

So this is the rough plan - at least until I revisit it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I get up and pen the original essay for the first Rule Set Reset newsletter. Then it's all three Lord of the Rings (extended) movies in a row with the kids. We start at 1pm with the assumption we'll finish just before midnight.

Today I toss out both versions (original in English and edited one in Portuguese) of the email interview I gave a couple of weeks back to the Brazilian magazine Epoca:

■ First up is the edited article that actually appeared in Epoca in Portuguese. Click here for the blog post and go here for the original at .

■ Secondly, find the original email interview (in English) that I submitted to Mr. Filho back in mid-December.

Passing on the current news blog again. It's the reality of the effort on the book right now.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Permalink

THOMAS BARNETT

O profeta do império

[NOTE: That's a picture of me standing on the Mall about a half mile from the U.S. Capitol building. It was a very foggy day.]

Consultor do Pentágono aposta que 12 países virarão Estados americanos até 2050. Entre eles estão o México e nações asiáticas

EXPEDITO FILHO, de Nova York

A globalização pode ser uma arma tão eficiente quanto os Exércitos no mundo que surgiu depois do ataque terrorista às torres gêmeas do World Trade Center. Por meio de concessões comerciais e de investimentos do setor privado em países que ainda não têm suas economias irrigadas pelo capital globalizado, o mundo do futuro será mais pacífico. As nações que continuam isoladas e compõem o chamado gap da globalização - localizadas em parte do Caribe, dos Andes, da África, dos Bálcãs, da Ásia Central, do Sudeste Asiático e do Oriente Médio - teriam suas economias ligadas ao chamado núcleo globalizado, onde já se encontram Estados Unidos, Europa, China, Japão, Rússia, Índia, Brasil, Chile e Argentina. Com a redução desse vão entre os países periféricos e os de centro, o terror estaria com seus dias contados, acredita o professor Thomas P.M. Barnett, da Escola Naval Americana. De outubro de 2001 a junho de 2003, o doutor em Ciências Políticas pela Universidade Harvard foi assessor e estrategista do secretário de Defesa, Donald H. Rumsfeld, e, hoje, presta consultoria para o Pentágono. Em entrevista a ÉPOCA, explicou as idéias que compõem o livro O Novo Mapa do Pentágono, recentemente lançado por ele nos EUA.

ÉPOCA - Qual é o novo mapa do Pentágono?

Thomas Barnett - O mapa começa por traçar os lugares para onde os Estados Unidos têm enviado tropas ao redor do mundo desde o fim da Guerra Fria. São pontos de violência maciça ao redor do globo, para os quais sentimos a necessidade de dar uma resposta. Do contrário, muita instabilidade pode resultar disso e muita gente pode morrer. O que fiz foi traçar uma linha em torno de 95% desses casos e perguntar: o que há nessas regiões para atrair intervenções militares americanas de tempos em tempos?

ÉPOCA - O que resultou dessa análise?

Barnett - Observei que essas regiões são formadas por países menos conectados com a economia global. Muitos exportam apenas uma ou duas matérias-primas e poucos produtos manufaturados. Chamo essas regiões de não-integradas - o fosso (gap, em inglês). Fazem parte dele a maior parte do Caribe, a porção andina da América do Sul, quase toda a África, os Bálcãs, a Ásia Central, o Cáucaso, o Oriente Médio e muito do Sudeste Asiático. Dentro desse fosso encontram-se todos os conflitos desde o fim da Guerra Fria: as guerras civis, a limpeza étnica, o genocídio, o estupro em massa como instrumento de terror, crianças forçadas a guerrear, os principais exportadores de drogas e os grupos terroristas que mais nos preocupam. Percebi que desconexão com o mundo globalizado implica perigo.

ÉPOCA - Em que sentido?

Barnett - Se sua economia não está conectada com a economia global, a probabilidade de seu país viver uma situação de violência em massa é muito maior. Assim como o risco de atrair uma intervenção militar do exterior, mais provavelmente dos Estados Unidos. Existe também o que chamo de núcleo funcional da globalização ou, grosso modo, onde vivem dois terços da população global. Nele estão incluídos América do Norte, Europa, Rússia, China, Índia, Japão, Coréia do Sul, Austrália, Nova Zelândia, África do Sul, Argentina, Chile e Brasil. Entre esses países há uma chance muito remota de guerra, no sentido tradicional. Portanto, a principal missão militar das nações do núcleo é trabalhar coletivamente para melhorar a segurança no fosso. E, com isso, ajudar essas regiões a se integrar na economia global de maneira mais justa.

ÉPOCA - Qual é o papel do Brasil nesse novo mapa do Pentágono?

Barnett - O Brasil é parte do núcleo funcional da globalização porque saiu da forte dependência de exportação de matérias-primas para um novo perfil econômico, que inclui produtos manufaturados como aço, uma agricultura forte em escala industrial e avanços reais em produtos médicos e de biotecnologia. O Brasil também é um país estável, sem risco real de guerra, embora como muitos países do fosso tenha alguns problemas de segurança em sua fronteira. Especificamente, na área da Floresta Amazônica.

ÉPOCA - Nesse novo desenho, há algum risco de o Brasil perder a Floresta Amazônica?

Barnett - Não vejo risco. Muito pelo contrário. O Brasil precisa - e está sendo bem-sucedido nisso - gerar transparência na Bacia Amazônica para impedir tráfico de drogas, pilhagem ambiental e que terroristas busquem refúgio na floresta. Acredito também que o Brasil precisa jogar um papel maior na segurança não apenas da América do Sul, mas de uma forma geral nos países da chamada região do fosso. Cada vez mais, a saúde econômica do Brasil vai depender de sua habilidade em se manter conectado com a economia global. É notável o crescimento dos laços econômicos entre o Brasil e a China nos últimos anos.

ÉPOCA - O senhor prevê que até 2050 mais 12 países virarão Estados americanos. Como será isso?

Barnett - Economicamente, o México já é parte dos Estados Unidos. E, até 2050, um em cada três eleitores nos Estados Unidos será hispânico. É grande a probabilidade de o México se juntar ao país de maneira pacífica para criar um novo e maior Estados Unidos da América. A nação mudaria à medida que novos Estados se juntassem, como aconteceu no passado. Não é apenas uma questão de alguém desaparecer, mas de se juntar a algo maior que todos vejam como benéfico.

ÉPOCA - A nação terá Estados também na Ásia ou no Oriente Médio?

Barnett - Os Estados Unidos são o único país no mundo fundado em torno de uma idéia, e não de um território. Nosso conceito de Estados juntos para formar uma união política e econômica maior pode se espalhar pelo mundo. Somos a união política e econômica mais antiga e bem-sucedida. Não há razão para esse modelo não crescer. Assim como ocorreu com a União Européia, espero ver uma união de Estados asiáticos nas próximas décadas. O conceito é muito maior que a nação ''América''.

ÉPOCA - Países como França e Alemanha aceitarão a hegemonia americana?

Barnett - Não vejo hegemonia. Não sei o que essa palavra significa na atual era da globalização. Essa é uma velha linguagem aplicada a uma realidade nova e muito mais complexa. Como dizer que os Estados Unidos fazem a guerra sozinhos se outros pagam para comprar a nossa dívida? Nenhum país age sozinho, porque tudo está conectado. Hegemonia é uma palavra de um tempo que não existe mais.

ÉPOCA - Que tipo de relação haverá entre a China e os Estados Unidos?

Barnett - A China e os Estados Unidos serão parceiros estratégicos porque compartilham interesses econômicos. A influência da China ao redor do mundo é baseada na adoção do capitalismo, que, por sua vez, gera enorme demanda por recursos. Isso é bom e natural. Então, não deve haver receio de nossa parte. Não vejo uma nova guerra fria. Apenas alguns idiotas em altas esferas que ainda sonham com esse nonsense.

ÉPOCA - Os Estados Unidos vão invadir a Coréia do Norte?

Barnett - A questão-chave é conseguir que a China queira que o ditador da Coréia do Norte, Kim Jong II, deixe o poder. Se os Estados Unidos e a China entrarem no palácio de Kim para falar que é hora de sair, meu palpite é que ele se submeterá, como Baby Doc, no Haiti, ou Charles Taylor, na Libéria. Se ele não aceitar pacificamente, seus subordinados vão ajudar na remoção dele. Acredito que sua base de poder está muito mais abalada do que se imagina. Então, não acredito em invasão. Vejo mais um golpe engendrado com pessoas locais. Kim conseguiu armas nucleares e não é possível confiar nele como um ser racional. Além disso, a Ásia precisa de uma aliança militar que amarre todos os grandes poderes e gere equilíbrio, como a Otan faz na Europa. A remoção de Kim é o gatilho para esse desenvolvimento positivo. A hora dele chegou.

ÉPOCA - Por que o senhor pensa que o mundo de seus filhos depois do 11 de setembro está mais seguro que o de seus pais durante a Guerra Fria?

Barnett - Meus pais viveram a ameaça de guerra nuclear global, que hoje não é sequer cogitada. Dizer que os terroristas podem conseguir a bomba nuclear não é o mesmo que duas superpotências nucleares entrarem em guerra. Não há comparação entre os dois períodos. O que enfrentamos hoje é a violência entre Estados e terroristas transnacionais. Isso é mais complexo, mas os problemas são menores.

ÉPOCA - O senhor considera George W. Bush preparado para liderar essa transformação?

Barnett - Bush foi perfeito no período pós-11 de setembro. Acredito que respondeu à altura. Nisso, ele foi como o ex-presidente Harry Truman depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial. A questão agora é: a política de Bush será aceita pelo mundo? Se não for aceita, as vitórias dele podem ser temporárias e custar mais caro do que valem. A longo prazo, penso que fará um bom segundo governo. Sua reeleição foi a confirmação de que os Estados Unidos estão levando a sério a guerra contra o terrorismo. A possibilidade de o mundo se ajustar nessa direção é maior que a de Bush mudar seu ponto de vista, embora ache que ele adotará um estilo mais suave com os aliados.

ÉPOCA - O Pentágono subestimou a Al Qaeda?

Barnett - Sim. Subestimamos o papel dos terroristas no mundo pós-Guerra Fria porque falhamos em reconhecer a profundidade de nossa vitória. Não há mais nenhum perigo de guerra entre as grandes potências. A guerra entre Estados está desaparecendo porque o poder militar americano é incomparável. Quando esses assuntos estão fora da mesa, o que sobra é o terrorismo. O Pentágono não se sente confortável lidando com o terrorismo porque essa guerra é muito assimétrica. Mas o 11 de setembro requer que lidemos com essa ameaça agora. Isso significa mudar o nosso Exército dramaticamente nos próximos anos.

ÉPOCA - A Al Qaeda ainda desafia os Estados Unidos. O mundo ficou mais seguro depois da invasão do Iraque?

Barnett - O mundo ficou mais seguro. Só não está ainda mais porque a ocupação foi mal conduzida. Os Estados Unidos precisam de dois tipos de força militar: uma especializada em guerras como essa que derrubou o odiado regime de Saddam Hussein. Outra capaz de efetivamente manter a paz e os esforços de construir uma nação. Os Estados Unidos precisavam manter ambas as forças por algum tempo. Se a ocupação malfeita provocar o surgimento dessa força focada na manutenção da paz, terá servido a algum propósito.

ÉPOCA - Algo mudou na organização dos grupos terroristas?

Barnett - Depois da invasão do Iraque, a Al Qaeda e outros grupos terroristas do Oriente Médio em geral estão de volta ao padrão geográfico que vimos nos anos 70 e 80. Ou seja, eles podem atacar em todo o Oriente Médio e em partes do sul da Europa e da Rússia. Mas não parecem capazes de voltar a atacar os Estados Unidos. Então, é melhor que a violência ocorra no lugar ao qual ela pertence do que nas ruas de Nova York. Não se vence uma guerra global contra o terror até que o Oriente Médio se junte ao núcleo funcional da globalização, oferecendo mais que apenas petróleo e terrorismo. Precisamos conectar aquela região com o mundo exterior mais rapidamente do que os Bins Ladens possam desconectá-la.

ÉPOCA - Por que o senhor acredita que o Oriente Médio sofrerá grandes transformações nas próximas duas décadas?

Barnett - São três fatores. A juventude entrará na meia-idade e isso criará uma sociedade impaciente por mudanças políticas. Além disso, o tempo está se esgotando para a economia baseada no petróleo. A demanda global por petróleo atingirá o pico em 2025. Em terceiro lugar, os Estados Unidos estão no Oriente Médio para ficar, porque se saírem o terrorismo internacional fará algo até pior que o 11 de setembro.

ÉPOCA - Outros países seguirão os passos dos Estados Unidos na região?

Barnett - A expectativa é de que os países poderosos da Ásia entrem no Oriente Médio por causa de seus interesses econômicos. É bom lembrar que a Ásia já consome a maior parte do petróleo que sai do Golfo. Essas necessidades vão dobrar nas próximas duas décadas. O Iraque de hoje é só um palito de fósforo. O fogo vai ser aceso, se não pelos Estados Unidos, por outro país. É só uma questão de tempo.

ÉPOCA - O senhor é o sonhador de um novo mundo conectado ou o filósofo da hegemonia americana no século XXI?

Barnett - De novo essa palavra. Hegemonia nega conexão e a América é a conexão personificada. Acreditamos em certas premissas para gerar riqueza e desenvolvimento, enquanto alguns outros países geram conflitos e insegurança. Seria ótimo se os governos do mal, localizados no fosso, pudessem desaparecer sem esforço militar do centro, mas isso não é plausível. Países isolados representam sempre um grande risco de violência. O mundo é pequeno e está ficando menor ainda. O conflito está desaparecendo na região do centro do planeta e permanecendo apenas no fosso. Reduzi-lo é acabar com a guerra. O fim dos conflitos iguala hegemonias, e aí eu não sei o que essa palavra significará.

Formação Doutor em Ciências Políticas pela Universidade Harvard e professor da Escola Naval Americana

Trajetória
Assessor e estrategista do secretário de Defesa americano, Donald H. Rumsfeld, até junho de 2003

Ocupação atual
Consultor do Pentágono e autor do livro O Novo Mapa do Pentágono, lançado nos Estados Unidos

Posted by at 8:29 PM | Permalink

Epoca -- What is the new Pentagon's map?

Thomas Barnett -- The map begins by plotting where the U.S. has sent its military forces around the world since the end of the Cold War. These are not places, in effect, where we were—as we did in the Cold War—hoping to counter any Soviet influence, so these were the natural "hot spots" of mass violence around the world, to which we felt a need to respond, otherwise too many people might die and too much instability might result.

Epoca -- How did you find that?

Barnett -- What I did with this map was simply draw a line around 95% of those cases and ask, What is it about these regions that seems to attract U.S. military interventions time and time again? I came to the observation that these regions were, by most definitions, made up of those countries that are least connected to the global economy. Typically, many of them export one or two raw materials but very little manufactured goods, for example. I called these regions the Non-Integrating Gap. These regions include much of the Caribbean Rim, the Andes portion of South America, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Middle East, and much of Southeast Asia.

Inside this Non-Integrating Gap one finds, since the end of the Cold War, all the wars, all the civil wars, all the ethnic cleansing, all the genocide, all the instances of mass rape as a tool of terror, all the children forced into combat units, all the UN peacekeeping missions, and virtually all the major narcotics exporters and terrorist groups that we worry most about. So my motto became, disconnectedness defines danger. If your economy is not well connected to the global economy, odds are you are far more likely to experience mass violence and thus attract some military intervention from the outside—most likely from America.

Epoca -- How this new map is divided?

Barnett -- Counter to this image is what I call the Functioning Core of globalization, or roughly two-thirds of the global population. In the Core is included North America, Europe and Russia, China, India, Japan and South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Among these countries, I maintain, there is little chance for war in any traditional sense. Therefore I argue that the main military mission of these Core states is to collectively work together to improve the security situation across the Gap and—by doing so—shrink that Gap over time by helping those regions integrate themselves with the global economy in a fair and just manner. That integration, while facilitated by security provided by the Core, is ultimately a private-sector-driven process by which the Core sends foreign direct investment into the Gap and helps those countries move up the production chain toward real economic development.

Also, by shrinking the Gap, I believe you end the disconnectedness that fuels not only conflicts and wars, but also generates the seeds of international terrorism. So, in my view, America and the Core win the Global War on Terrorism by shrinking the Gap and—by doing so—making globalization truly global in a far and just (but also secure) manner.

Epoca -- What is the role of Brazil in this map?

Barnett -- Brazil is part of the Functioning Core of globalization because it has moved off of a strong dependence on exporting mostly raw materials to a new economic profile that includes manufactured goods like steel, industrial agriculture (Brazil is, I believe, the number one meat exporter in the world), and real breakthroughs in medical and biotechnology sciences. It is also a stable country with no real risk of war, although it, like many states ringing the Gap, suffers some security issues with its borders—namely the Amazon forest area.

Epoca -- Do you think there is risk of Brazil losing the Amazon?

Barnett -- I see no risk of Brazil losing the Amazon. Quite the contrary, I see Brazil needing to, and succeeding in, generating greater transparency throughout the Amazon basin so as to preclude negative activities there involving narcotics trafficking, environmental pillaging, and rebels/terrorists seeking sanctuary. If anything, I believe Brazil needs to play a bigger security role not just in South America but elsewhere in the Gap. Increasingly, Brazil's economic health will depend on its ability to maintain its connectivity to the global economy. Look at how much Brazil's economic ties have, for instance, grown with China in recent years.

Epoca -- After the Middle East crisis, Brazil and South America lost relevance. Why do you think that the free trade area of the Americas is going to be a reality in 2015?

Barnett -- I think there are strong economic reasons for this FTAA to develop, but such negotiations typically slow down dramatically in harder economic times. The notion was proposed in the very prosperous 1990s, and now seems less realistic. But as the global economy once again picks up speed, I expect progress to continue either on a FTAA, or such progress on things like a Central American FTAA or bilateral agreements between the U.S. and other Latin American states that the group of involved nations as a whole will once again push far harder to make FTAA a concrete possibility. For now, however, America is rightfully accused of paying too much attention to a global war on terrorism and not enough on fostering more Core-Gap economic and trade connectivity. I believe America must also end much of its protectionism on agriculture in the current Doha Development Round of the WTO. A more balanced mix of security and trade issues in the second Bush administration would go much farther in winning a global war on terrorism than focusing too much just on security issues.

Epoca -- The violence in Iraq is increasing; the terrorist organization al Qaeda continues to defy the USA. Do you think the world is safer now after the Iraq occupation? Why?

Barnett -- I think the world is safer after the Iraq war, but less so because of how badly we have conducted the Iraq occupation. I think America needs two types of forces: one that specializes in wars of the sort that toppled the hated Saddam Hussein regime and one that specializes in effective peacekeeping and nation-building efforts. I have thought America needed both forces for quite some time, and if it takes the botched Iraq occupation to bring such a second (i.e., peacekeeping-focused) force into being, then it at least serves that purpose. As for Al Qaeda and Middle East terror groups in general: after the invasion they are all back to the same geographic pattern we saw in the 1970s and 1980s, meaning they can strike at will throughout the Middle East and reach into the southern portions of Europe and Russia. They do not seem able, anymore, to reach all the way into the United States, so obviously this is a real improvement—from our perspective—when compared to 9/11. Does the Middle East feel more secure after the removal of Saddam from power? I think not, but I truly believe that the grievances of virtually all transnational terrorism lie in the Middle East itself, so better for the violence to occur there, where it belongs, than on the streets of New York. People criticize this current administration for trying to transform the Middle East, but I ask you, do you think that terrorism emanating from that region will end simply if the world pulls out of those countries and stops buying that oil? Or do you think it only ends if Bin Laden and others have their way and turn the region into a giant version of Taliban Afghanistan? If that occurs, do we have a safer then? Or a more dangerous one?

People want simple answers to complex issues, but there are none. You cannot win a global war on terrorism until the Middle East joins the Functioning Core of globalization offering more than just oil and terrorism. The countries there need broad economic connectivity to the outside world that allows their young people a chance to make their own economic way rather than relying on "trust fund" governments who control too much of the wealth generated by all that oil Until that happens, we will continue to suffer from authoritarian regimes in the region, and those regimes will continue to attract the attention of desperate terrorists who want to topple them. If I though that just killing all the terrorists would work, I would advocate that, but I do not. I think we need to connect the Middle East to the outside world faster than the Bin Ladens and Zarqawis of that region can disconnect it. To me, that's the real global war on terrorism.

Epoca -- Do you think the world of your children (after 9/11) is safer than the world at the time of your parents during the Cold War?

Barnett -- Yes. My parents faced global nuclear war, which is not a danger today. To say that terrorists are far more likely to use a nuclear bomb is not the same as two nuclear superpowers going to war. To me, there is no comparison between the two ages. Since we've invented nuclear weapons, no two great powers have ever gone to war, despite the long rivalry between us and the Soviets during the Cold War, and since the end of the Cold War, inter-state wars have largely disappeared. Now we face mostly subnational violence within states and transnational terrorists. More complex on many levels, yes, but far smaller problems. Big wars between big states are a thing of the past, and now we're getting down to the truly harder security issues to tame—like terrorism. But you have to keep some historical perspective on it all.

Epoca -- After the end of the Cold War, do you think that the Pentagon underestimated the role of terrorist groups like al Qaeda as a result of clash of civilizations or culture?

Barnett -- Yes, we did underestimate the role of terrorists in the post-Cold War world, but we did so because we failed to recognize how profound our victory had been in the Cold War. There is no significant danger of war among great powers anymore, and inter-state war is disappearing because America's military prowess is unmatched. When those big issues are off the table, what you are left with is terrorism. The Pentagon is uncomfortable dealing with terrorism because that sort of warfare is so asymmetrical, but 9/11 requires that we deal with that threat now, and that means changing our military fairly dramatically in coming years.

Epoca -- You said that the Middle East will be transformed over the next two decades. How will this transformation happen?

Barnett -- Three trends will push it. First, the "middle-aging" of the population, as the current youth bulge moves into its thirties and forties. That demographic aging of the population will make societies more impatient for political change. Second, time is running out on the oil economy. Global oil demand probably peaks around 2025. As soon as that happens, the Middle East's hold on everyone attention begins to drop precipitously. As that reality draws near, expect to see governments there try to change themselves in terms of being more receptive to populations they can no longer bribe with oil wealth. Third, the U.S. is in the Middle East to stay, because if we pull out, transnational terrorism will simply pull us back in by doing something even worse than 9/11 to draw out attention back. Beyond the U.S., expect basically all of the powers of Asia to come to the Middle East militarily in coming years out of their growing economic interests. Asia already takes the majority of the oil coming out of the Gulf, and it's requirements double in the next two decades, so you do the math and tell me Asia's interest in, and presence with regard to, security in the Persian Gulf won't skyrocket in coming years. Put those three trends together and the Middle East of today will inevitably change radically over the next two decades. Iraq of today is just the match, but that fire was going to be lit by someone if not the U.S. It was just a matter of time.

Epoca -- In your book you anticipate that Kim Jong-Il must be removed from power and Korea must be reunited during the second term of Bush administration. How can Kim Jong-Il be removed?

Barnett -- Key here is to get China to want Kim gone. If U.S. and China can walk into Kim's palace and say that the time has come for him to go, my guess is he might take the package if enough if offered, like a Baby Doc in Haiti or a Charles Taylor in Liberia. If he won't go peacefully, then I target his subordinates to aid you in his removal. I think his power base is far more shaky than is popularly believed. He isn't the all-powerful leader. So in the end, I don't see any invasion, more an engineered coup either with locals or operations focused specifically on him. Kim's list of crimes against his own people is a long one, including a self-induced famine that killed at least two million. He's next because he's got nukes and he can't be trusted to be rational, and because East Asia needs a NATO-like military alliance that binds all the major powers there and rules out great power war for all time, like it has in Europe. Kim's removal is the trigger for that positive development. He's a very evil man whose time has come.

Epoca -- In this new map, what kind of relationship will have China and United States?

Barnett -- The U.S. and China must be and will be strategic partners out of shared economic interests. China's influence around the world is based on its adoption of capitalism which in turn generates huge demands for resources. This is both natural and good, so no fear on our part should be involved. I don't see a new cold war, only some idiots in high places who still dream of this nonsense. They are growing very few in number.

Epoca -- Would countries like France and Germany accept the American hegemony? How the America would work in this scenario?

Barnett -- I don't see hegemony. I don't even know what that word means in today's era of globalization. Again, I think that is old language applied to new, far more complex realities. Does America wage war unilaterally if others pay for it by buying our debt? There is no such thing as "free riders," as everything it too connected for that simple model of power-hoarding. Same with "hegemony." It is a word from a time that no longer exists.

Posted by at 8:28 PM | Permalink

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 December 2004

Quiet day going through rest of past blog posts (October through now), cataloguing ideas for the sequel. Tomorrow is the Big Think that puts it all in order, or at least creates the plan for what unfolds over three-dozen days.

Or nothing comes to me and I freak out completely because the contract just arrived in the mail from Putnam . . ..

I keep struggling with the notion that this book isn't going to be a compilation of future trends, predictions, etc., nor a tour d'horizon in terms of country-by-country descriptions, nor a giant reply to PNM critiques, nor a literary tour of the host of other foreign policy books recently written. Other people do all those sorts of books better than I could, so I have to keep reminding myself what it is I'm really trying to do here, and that is simply take the logic of PNM and extend deep into the future. I have the power of the approach, and now I'm going to really use it.

So the book is at once a description of how positive we could make the international security environment in the year . . . say 2025, plus a description of the tasks we'd need to complete and the institutions and rule sets we'd need to construct to get to that future worth creating, along with plenty of descriptors and sign posts for the journey foreseen.

That's what I'm trying to lay out. So it won't be a book that's written along the lines of, "If I can't find some other book or article that already said this, then I won't either!" Like the upcoming Esquire article (and even the one in Wired, I'm not interested in limiting the logic to that which people today find realistic, but extending it to that which people of tomorrow can find feasible (plus I want to write at something approaching that mix of density and speed). So it will be a book written not to impress the senior realists, but the upcoming idealists. It should fire the imagination without straining credulity.

Why I'm saying all this is that, in going through the huge number of references in the blog and reading a dozen or so books, I keep fighting the notion that I'm collecting data or "proof" per se, as though anyone is going to buy this logic extended into a future vision because I've got good endnotes or something. Instead, the book needs to read like a how-to description of getting from A to Z, if I were forced to plot it all out in a defensible, practical fashion.

You can't write that like some future history, as quaint as that approach is, but you can scenario-ize it here and there, present-tensing the account as you move through time. But you need to stay on top of it; you need to own it—as Mark Warren likes to say. In effect, you're writing it out exactly as you'd do it—if given the chance.

Sure, you can write a book about how nothing works out and there's loads of future conflict. The store shelves are full of those. But a realistic roadmap toward an ideal outcome, now that's different, not one full of caveats, and could-be's, but full of optimism and a sense of purpose in explaining itself.

That kind of book isn't a long one, so shooting for roughly half the length of PNM (actually, PNM's original target) makes sense. Keep it lean and tight, running almost at essay speed throughout, and then I'll let Mark demand that I fill in the gaps as he defines them in the editing process (he keeps predicting it will be roughly 100,000 words, no matter what I say).

So if PNM was mostly history and diagnostics, with a big dollop of prescriptions and rule-set enunciations, then the sequel is going to be one big exploration of one grand horizontal scenario—an unfolding future worth creating.

In short, all the fumbling through articles and the assembling of putative footnotes is—by and large—an exercise in training more than serious preparation. I need to write what I need to write, and then go back and slip in references as they make sense, not build this piece around references per se. The narrative will drive this, not the data points.

Today I toss out two recent reviews, one a group one in The National Interest and the other by Mark Safranski (yes, that man with clearly too much time on his hands!) for the History New Network.

I was going to run through two interviews I recently gave to Nihon Keizai Shimbun (in Japanese) and Epoca (in Portuguese), but I can't locate my original English text for either and I don't want to post without those. I have sent emails to both journalists looking for help. So those will go out hopefully tomorrow and Friday.

No news blog today. Head too full of book and news too sad from Asia. Good time to just listen and learn.

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Issue Date: Winter 2004/05, Posted On: 12/22/2004

Dreaming Europe in a Wide-Awake World

By: James C. Bennett

The world today is a vastly different place from what it was thirty years ago. Then the picture was dominated by the stark contrast between the generally prosperous and free First World, the economically stagnant and drably totalitarian Second World, and the seemingly hopeless Third World. Today, that disturbing but fairly simple tripartite classification has been replaced by a much more complex picture. What stands out in this new picture is the way winners and losers are emerging within each of the former categories. Within the former Third World, erstwhile basket cases such as China and India have become awakened giants, economically dynamic and increasingly more assertive on the international stage, while other Third World locations have become more of a Fourth World, sinking into a Conradian heart of darkness, breeding a seemingly endless mess of massacre and terrorism. The bright lights of Prague, Budapest and Warsaw signal a reborn eastern Europe, while Belarus and Ukraine struggle, and Russia wavers in between. Even in the First World, more and more is heard of Atlantic Divides and a growing feeling that America and a uniting Europe have less in common with each other and more in common with other parts of the world. Making sense of this complexity and illuminating a path forward is the intellectual task of today, one which becomes a metric for judging all international trends and policy analysis.

One of the most interesting analytical problems is that presented by the divergent paths taken by the developed nations of the First World, and their respective degrees of success. These are sometimes segmented out as Europe, America and Japan, but the more useful division is probably one of Japan, Continental Europe and what are variously called the "Anglo-Saxon" economies or, increasingly, the Anglosphere. In the early 1970s, all three of these regions were seen to be facing roughly the same set of problems: first, stagnation of a modified market economy defined by substantial economic regulation, high marginal tax rates, and a fairly high percentage of GDP captured by the public sector, as well as high wage levels and inelastic industrial structures reinforced by strong unionism; second, a declining birthrate, which promised trouble downstream for pay-as-you-go pension and benefits programs; and third, a weakening of the old sources of social cohesion, particularly religion, patriotic narratives in education and the media, and (in some countries) ethnic homogeneity.

From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, all three sectors of the developed world enjoyed a general economic expansion. Continental Europe and Japan in fact each experienced more rapid growth and development than the English-speaking nations, mainly from the spur of postwar reconstruction. However, as more and more of the Third World began adopting aggressive, export-driven industrialization strategies, the old cozy collaboration of government protection and passing wage increases on to the consumer began to fall apart.

The Anglosphere nations, led by the United States and Britain, reacted by reducing marginal tax rates, privatizing and deregulating markets, and refusing to subsidize declining smokestack industries. High levels of immigration were accepted, reversing the demographic patterns of decline. Continental European nations responded by increasing European integration, thus expanding internal market opportunities but retaining and even reinforcing the "social market economy"--legislated job protection and generous social benefits, particularly for the unemployed.

A wave of European Union-mandated privatizations ended the most egregious boondoggles, and small, protected national companies were absorbed into a smaller number of EU-wide champions, which were protected more subtly by disguised subsidies and ingenious non-tariff barriers. Meanwhile, most European nations accepted "guest workers", increasingly from North Africa and Turkey. But their assimilation into European national cultures was never aggressively pursued.

Finally, Japan addressed essentially the same set of problems through aggressive use of automation and offshore production, honing their competitive capabilities, and continuing a rather blatant policy of domestic protection. Japan also employed other labor-saving strategies and a minimal number of temporary foreign workers, though making clear that they were expected not to become permanent residents.

So the world economy must today be considered as one vast experiment. The object of this experiment is to determine whether the developed nations might continue to enjoy at least their current levels of prosperity, while the large developing nations of India and China become major economic players and a host of smaller, newly industrialized countries acquire the capability to offer almost every sort of manufactured good and advanced service at the same quality and lower price.

Author Neal Stephenson once famously described this process ending with a global standard of living stuck at "what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity." The challenge for the developed world is to avoid this fate, while not retarding the emergence of these major new players. At the same time, we must deal with those parts of the world that, for whatever reasons, are not climbing the ladder to prosperity. Engagement with these disadvantaged areas is less a matter of philanthropy than of the acute security challenges presented by the current anarchy. These areas, instead of exporting trade goods, are supplying large numbers of desperate immigrants, legal and illegal, and smaller but highly troublesome numbers of criminals and terrorists.

It is in this global and historical context that we must examine Europe's present and future, and what they may mean for the United States. Any static view of Europe today, or one that merely contrasts Europe and the United States in a less-than-global context, is worse than useless. Whatever the relative standings of Europe and the United States may be today, they will be different tomorrow. For anyone seeking to understand Euro-American differences in this context, Jeremy Rifkin's and Olaf Gersemann's respective treatments of Europe relative to America provide examples of two dramatically contrasting approaches encountered in this debate.

One holds that the American approach is dynamic and responsive to competition, and thus it is progressive, and therefore good. The other holds that the European Union, by increasing the scale of its market beyond that of the United States, will overcome whatever inefficiencies remain from its social market capitalism and overtake the United States, and thus that it is progressive, and therefore good.

Gersemann's treatment is closest to the first position. Its particular distinction lies in addressing the "yes, but. . ." arguments made by Europeans and their admirers when addressing the visible GDP gaps between America and Continental Europe. These run "Yes, America has a substantially lower unemployment rate . . . but that's because so many Americans are in prison", or "America makes more jobs, but they are low-wage, service-sector 'McJobs.'" (Gersemann characterizes the latter argument as "We can't actually make any jobs, but if we did, they would be good ones.") Gersemann systematically and persuasively rebuts such arguments.

Rifkin's book is a strange duck. It initially seems to offer a conventional example of the second Europeanist position. And in fact, it does include the standard Euro-critiques of the American socio-economic approach: prisons, McJobs, consumerism and so on. As usual, these arguments are used to fill in the argumentative gaps created by the shortcomings of actual, existing Europe, as opposed to the theoretically ever-more-efficient Europe beloved of the Wall Street Journal and the Economist.

Layered underneath these fairly standard approaches, however, is a deeper and more philosophical level of argument than Europeanists usually present. Rifkin argues that the European approach (The European Dream of his title) is precisely the abnegation of traditional progressivism in its most fundamental sense: the belief in the desirability of material and scientific progress, and the individual identity and freedom that accompany it. Thus, Rifkin's is a two-level critique of America contrasted with virtuous Europe. First, he asserts that Europe is surpassing America on the conventional criteria of prosperity. But he then adds that where economic success is absent in Europe, that's okay too, because progress is bad for you anyway.

Rifkin, therefore, requires critiquing on both levels. Gersemann, in debunking the general Europeanist criticism of America, (his book was written prior to the release of The European Dream) provides an excellent analysis of Rifkin's surface level. The case for the coming European triumph over America is quickly refuted. Gersemann, himself a German financial journalist (currently Washington correspondent for Wirtschaftwoche), convincingly refutes all of the prevailing Euro-legends about America, from the supposedly collapsing middle class to medical care to income inequality. He likewise documents the growing structural and demographic crisis of a Europe that has created more unfunded obligations than it can fulfill--while producing too few children to pay the bills their parents are racking up.

Immigration, which is now hoped to be able to fill the demographic gap, remains problematic. It is exactly the postmodernist multicultural narrative so praised by Rifkin that has created an unassimilated immigrant underclass. This underclass is a poor candidate for stepping up to the greater taxes needed to fund the lavish pensions now coming due. Young, mostly Muslim families struggling under ever-increasing payroll taxes will hear calls from ethnic-based politicians to repudiate the checks that old rich white Europeans had written to themselves. To the extent that Rifkin holds up Europe as a model for Americans to emulate, he is in effect urging the purchase of a ticket on the Titanic.

At this point one must turn to the underlying level of Rifkin's critique, that of the entire complex of ideas of autonomous individuals with enforceable constitutional rights. In essence, Rifkin is saying "Okay, perhaps United Europe will after all be poor and strife-ridden. But at least you will lose your freedom and individualism in the bargain." Rifkin presents a distillation of the positions of a number of European intellectuals over the past decade or two (but with roots in a Europeanist tradition going back much further). This argument states, roughly, that the entire idea of progress--of autonomous individuals possessing stated constitutional rights in a contract-based market society--is a historical aberration, and an unfortunate one. Rifkin traces it to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution and certain precursor events, including the introduction of scheduled time by the Benedictine order.

In Rifkin's narrative, medieval people lived a collective lifestyle, in which individuals were embedded in a web of connections and did not think of themselves as apart from their colleagues. It was only the introduction of the proto-capitalist mentality that shattered this comfortable universe of family, congregation and community and transformed mankind into alienated individuals. The coup de grace was provided by extreme Protestant sects in the English Civil War, who used the new invention of printing to shatter the last stands of community by preaching the direct link, via the Bible, between man and God. These individuals went on to develop capitalism and technology, destroy the environment, subdue the Third World, and create our current world of SUVs, beef eating, obesity, and excessive punctuality (to give some idea of the bêtes noires inhabiting Rifkin's earlier works critiquing the American way of life). America is of course the ultimate example of this alienated world, while Europe is on the path back to connectedness, mostly by creating vast, unaccountable bureaucracies and substituting positive rights (things the state must do for you) for negative rights (things the state cannot do to you).

What Rifkin is talking about is familiar to anyone who has studied the historiography of the Industrial Revolution: Marx and Engels on alienation, T”nnies' distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft societies (the former Rifkin's medieval, status-based, "connected" societies, the latter modern, contract-based individualist societies), and Max Weber's famous "Protestant Work Ethic" thesis.

All these theorists posited a world characterized by universal laws of cultural evolution: Everyone was once tribal, then agricultural, then feudal, then modern (or is destined eventually to become so). The Marxists posited subsequent stages of socialism and communism, and others debated how, when and why peoples moved from one stage to another. Rifkin's novel contribution is to identify the emerging European postmodernist society as the next stage. Instead of a proletarian revolution ushering in central planning, we are to have a centralized bureaucratic revolution that will plan proletarian immobilization.

But what if there are no inevitable stages of social evolution? What if some people have never displayed the characteristics of Gemeinschaft society, but have been individualists from as far back as records could show? This in fact seems to be the case. It is the English (and their cultural descendants throughout the Anglosphere) who for many centuries have been the exception. Over the past thirty years, an intellectual revolution has been taking place in historical sociology, led in particular by Alan Macfarlane (whose works deserve a more substantial treatment in this regard than is possible here).

Macfarlane and his associates have demonstrated very convincingly that English society back to Anglo-Saxon days has been characterized by individual rather than familial landholding; by voluntary contract relationships rather than by inherited status; and by nuclear rather than extended families. Individuals were free of parental authority from age 21 on, and daughters could not be denied their choice of husband (unlike on the Continent). The English nobility, regularly churned by elevation of commoners and marriage of younger sons to non-titled families, tended to mix freely with the rest of society, rather than being a separate caste, again as on the Continent. Rather than the English Reformation being the event that caused this change, it seems to have been (for the majority of the population) the event that brought formal theology and church government more in line with the pre-existing customs of the country. So the English "peasant" that Hollywood is fond of depicting turns out to be the figment of a 19th-century Marxist's imagination.

Macfarlane's body of work represents a momentous intellectual revolution. The implications of this revolution have not yet been fully realized, or even generally understood. It suggests that modernity and its consequences came particularly easily for the already-individualistic English. Conversely, it came particularly hard for the Continental Europeans, whose societies were characterized by all the non-individualistic features England lacked. It was to these Continentals that the intrusion of individualist, market-oriented relations was particularly disruptive and shocking. With medieval traditions of representative government moribund or long vanished, it is not surprising that Continental states had a particularly difficult time adjusting to parliamentary government, experiencing instead frequent coups, revolutions and periods of authoritarian rule, spiraling down to the abyss of fascism and communism.

It has been usual to write the history of the past two centuries of Continental Europe as one of modernity and democracy punctuated by periods of exception, but it may be more accurate to see the period from 1789 until the very recent past (France's current political arrangement dating back to 1958, Spain's to 1976) as a long, difficult and perhaps incomplete period of adjustment to modernity. Although certainly the majority of most Continental populations made a perfectly successful transition to modernist life, a significant minority never fully bought in to the psychology or assumptions of liberal society, and thus were easily recruited into the darker visions of fascism. That may explain why Anglosphere nations never developed significant fascist movements, despite experiencing the same traumas of postwar disillusionment and economic depression.

In this light, Rifkin's European dream becomes just one more chapter of what economist Brink Lindsey has aptly dubbed the Industrial Counter-Revolution--a diversion from the path to modernity rather than an effective alternative to it. Fortunately, this version of it lacks the fascination with violence and the cult of leadership that characterized the previous rejection of modernity in Europe (not to mention the effective military organization). Still, the Europeanist dream as articulated not just by Rifkin but by many intellectuals incorporates so many of the tropes of the authoritarian anti-Americanists from the Europe of 1921-45 that the current "Atlantic divide" (which in reality is still more of a Channel divide) may not be easily or quickly resolved.

One must then ask, if the divide between les Anglo-Saxons and the Continentals is genuinely deep rooted, why have Atlantic relations over most of the past fifty years been so relatively tranquil? It may be because the Cold War years, with their combination of Soviet threat and open American markets for recovering Continental industries, and with the Third World economically invisible, provided a period of unique military-political stability and economic opportunities that provided uniquely strong incentives to smooth over problems. With the end of the Cold War, the first incentive has disappeared. With the rise of the newly industrialized countries, the European share of the American export market continues to shrink. Japan now competes for the luxury markets Europe used to dominate, India targets software, while China and the East Asian Tigers take the low-cost manufactured-goods slot from Japan. The Anglosphere nations have navigated this tightrope with a combination of maintaining the high-technology pioneer slot, aggressively combining offshore, low-cost labor with their managerial and financial talents (a strategy followed by Japan as well), and growing their domestic services sector, primarily by entrepreneurism. Continental Europe has so far proven too slow and inflexible to follow this pattern. In this environment, the Anglosphere-Eurosphere divide promises to widen, not shrink.

Rifkin's analysis either ignores or trivializes this problem, despite his frequent invocation of the term "globalization", which in his eyes becomes primarily a justification for European-style multiculturalism. Fortunately, this global context is becoming more widely recognized. Two new books coming from the opposite sides of the British debate on Euro-Atlantic relations, Timothy Garton Ash's Free World and Christopher Booker's and Richard North's The Great Deception, provide a much more illuminating discussion, and one rooted much more soundly in current realities.

The British debate is particularly interesting, because Britain is a sort of canary in the mine for Euro-Atlantic relations. Any perturbation in those relations is usually foreshadowed by a perturbation in British politics over the same issues. This debate thus cannot be resolved without finding a consensus on exactly what "Europe" and "America", or increasingly, "the Anglosphere" mean, and where and how Britain fits into each. This debate has been continuing unresolved for decades. As issues such as the Single Currency and the current European constitution have begun to present Britain with the prospect of an irreversible commitment to the EU, the debate has become increasingly acute and shrill.

Timothy Garton Ash, a British historical scholar of high reputation and a convinced Europeanist, has produced a work that promises to help move the debate toward a consensus on at least the underlying questions, if not necessarily the right answers to them. He imaginatively casts Britain as a four-faced Janus, looking simultaneously in four directions, each of which represents an aspect of British reality, and each of which calls Britain down a particular path. These four directions he identifies as Europe, the Anglosphere, the wider globalized world, and finally the inward-looking focus on the traditional Britain. The Europeanists call for the whole-hearted involvement of Britain in the European Union, the Anglospherists call for the rebuilding of institutional ties to the United States and the Commonwealth, the globalists emphasize the UN and other fully international or transnational bodies, and the Little-Englanders emphasize the recovery of traditional Britain with an unaligned, self-interested foreign policy. Resolving this "Janus dilemma" is both Britain's problem and a wider problem of the Euro-Atlantic West.

Ash's formulation is a welcome advance for the Euro-Atlantic debate. One of the principal obstacles to a useful discussion of Euro-Atlantic issues and Britain's options therein has been the insistence by the Europeanist side that Britain is entirely a European power and that its Anglospherist side is either defunct or irrelevant. Ash states forthrightly that "the Anglosphere is an economic reality", both in the sense that the economies of the English-speaking nations share a recognizable and distinct profile compared to others, and that they do a very substantial amount of business with each other. He cites also the "Inglehart Human Values and Beliefs" study, which found that English-speaking nations form a separate and distinct cluster from other world cultures. So for Ash, the question becomes, "what formulation of interests balances Britain's European, Anglosphere, global and inward sides?"

His question is useful because it proceeds primarily from his awareness of the new global situation: one in which the need for the poorest of the Earth to catch up, the need for the newer developed nations to prosper, and the need for the old developed nations to preserve their prosperity each gets due attention. His answer is, basically, for the developed nations, and particularly the Euro-Atlantic West, to set aside whatever differences they have, renew the mutually advantageous working relationships they enjoyed between 1945 and 1989, and focus on creating a genuinely global prosperity.

In pursuit of this goal he makes a remarkable plea for mutual understanding, reaching out to Americaphobes in Europe and Europhobes in America. His attempt at explaining the actions of the United States since September 11, 2001 from the American point of view for the benefit of Europeans is fascinating to read. If it had been written by any literate American other than a convinced internationalist, it would seem like an unremarkable statement of reality. In fact, it represents a stupendous feat of imaginative reconstruction on Ash's part, comparable to Anthony Burgess's writing a first-person novel-length narrative from a homosexual viewpoint in Earthly Powers.

Given this recognition of the genuine case for an Anglosphere identity and dimension, two questions for Britain regarding Europe arise. First, is Britain a European nation with a special relationship to the United States, or is it an Anglosphere nation with a special relationship to Europe? Second, given that it must interact with both spheres, what should the exact nature of the institutional ties with each be? Ash does not really answer the first question, although his presentation gives plenty of evidence for the idea that its Anglosphere identity is primary, while his stated conclusions imply that the European predominates. Ash's answer to the second question is essentially that Britain must fulfill its destiny by participating fully in the European Union and embracing further integration. But it must also attend to its Anglosphere side by pursuing larger Euro-Atlantic integrative structures, such as a trans-Atlantic free-trade area and a revived NATO integration.

Laudable as such structures are, Ash at the last minute weakens his argument by shying away from the difficult points. His diagnosis is convincing, his prescription less so. The question comes back to this: Are the structures of the EU the best vehicle for resolving Britain's need to maintain both cross-Channel and intra-Anglosphere ties? And are the structures of the European Union adequate to the task of maintaining the integration of Europe in the wider Euro-Atlantic world, and in the world in general?

Before attempting to answer this question, it would be highly advisable to read Booker's and North's The Great Deception. These authors, experienced journalists and committed British Euroskeptics, have written a history of how the EU came to be and what the consequences of its peculiar genesis have been. The book is a substantial achievement. It meticulously documents the origins and development of the Union, and in the process destroys a number of common myths, including ones beloved of Euroskeptics and Europhiles alike. For example, although they write from a Euroskeptic perspective, the authors dispel the charges made by many Euroskeptics, including historian John Laughland, that the EU derives primarily from wartime Nazi plans for a Europaische Wirtschaftgemeinschaft (European Economic Community, also the original name of the EU). They demonstrate that such plans were never much more than a propaganda exercise to permit collaborationists to rally local support in occupied countries, and that there was no significant continuity between this planning and postwar Europeanist activity.

On the other hand, they re-examine the myth that the EU was the product of gallant anti-Nazi resistance fighters who wished to make sure that war and tyranny would never trouble Europe again. In fact, Booker and North demonstrate that the Europeanist idea dates back to the experience of Jean Monnet and a handful of European bureaucrats in the First World War. They first glimpsed that the way to achieve intra-European economic (and ultimately political) integration was through the same kind of unelected international technical organizations, such as the World War One Inter-Allied Maritime Transportation Board, in which they routinely made decisions that affected the economies of a third of the globe.

It was these experiences that led Monnet and a few partners to set up a series of economic bodies during the chaos of postwar reconstruction, beginning with the European Coal and Steel Community. Having once established them, they relentlessly expanded their reach. The underlying pretense--that the move toward European integration was primarily an economic rather than political exercise--is the "Great Deception" of the book's title. Like a miser hoarding his coins, Europeanists never missed an opportunity to shift power away from nation-states. This strategy led to the European Union, but also became its Achilles' heel. For in gathering power by stealth and exercising it without effective accountability, a substantial "democracy gap" arose--alas, not entirely to the creators' dissatisfaction.

Populations in many European countries repeatedly found their governments making decisions that went against their explicit wishes, and finding, like the Irish, that when they voted the "wrong" way on European matters in referenda, they were told in effect to "vote again until you get it right." This democratic deficit, inherent in this model of transnational governance, threatens to weaken support for European solutions just when the pressures of demography demand they be strengthened and reformed. For the British, who have an escape hatch in the form of their Anglosphere and global connections, this may not be fatal. But for the Continental Europeans, their pressing problems require a realistic assessment of their global situation.

Draw a circle on the map of a thousand miles radius, centered on Brussels. Within that circle the states are free and democratic, and military conflict is virtually unthinkable. Now draw a similar thousand-mile circle centered on Tokyo. Within that circle or very near lie a half-dozen states. Three of them have nuclear weapons and the rest are close. These states are rising economic, technological and industrial powers. In contrast to Europe, it is highly conceivable that such weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction, could be used at any time. The transnational institutions and agreements that preclude war in democratic Europe have little purchase in this region.

Europeanists have maintained that Europe's model is the world's future, but while Europeans were combining nation-states into a wider entity after World War II, northeast Asians were taking an existing single-market area (pre-war Japan, which integrated Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria) and turning it into separate nation-states, with equally prosperous results. Even today there is no visible movement to a Northeast Asian Union, although many writers automatically assume that other regions will imitate European structural models. Both Free World and The Great Deception suggest the conclusion that the EU is probably a one-off happenstance from unique historical circumstances. Once one leaves the immediate neighborhood of Brussels, transnationalism does not seem so inevitable.

America faces both Brussels and Tokyo, and must act in both of these universes. It deploys troops and nuclear weapons in both theaters. Is it any wonder that America cannot wholeheartedly adopt the Europeanist outlook?

Yet it is this global environment that we must consider as we contemplate Thomas P. M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map. Barnett describes a world in which the historically industrialized nations are the Old Core, the new industrial powers are the New Core, and the bulk of the old Third World that has not achieved takeoff is the Gap. He sees the task of the 21st century as stabilizing the Gap enough for it to adhere to the Core through "connectivity"--flows of capital, people and trade goods. In order to sustain these flows in a stable world, he would combat anti-globalization jihadis (not all of them radical Muslims) with a combination of hard military power, "soft" economic-political power, and a new synthesis of the two: a "nation-building" capability which he calls the "System Administrator." This last would have been called a colonial constabulary and colonial civil service in the 19th century. Its mandate today, however, would not be an imperial one, but would emanate from the web of transnational institutions that have sprung up, and the bulk of its power would be provided by the United States.

Many of Barnett's basic assumptions--the generally beneficial effects of globalization, the utility of connectedness in fighting the anti-globalization jihadis, and the stake that the Core nations, old and new, have in seeing globalization defeat the jihadis--will meet with general agreement. He is also to be commended for realizing that the entry of India and China as first-rank players is a major development of our era, and for constructing a worldview that integrates this fact fully rather than treating it as an afterthought. But his worldview and analytical framework still deserve closer scrutiny.

It makes sense to focus on connectivity as a factor in Gap-state failure, for instance. But Barnett goes further, maintaining that lack of connectivity is the most useful predictor of Gap-state failure and violence inviting outside military intervention. He originally defined the Gap by observing the clusters of U.S. military interventions during the 1990s and then trying to define what these areas had in common. One of these four clusters was the Balkans, specifically the former Yugoslavia and Albania. Yet although Yugoslavia was less "connected" by Barnett's criteria than, say, Austria or Italy, it was certainly far better connected by almost any definition than Bulgaria or Romania, both now candidate countries for EU accession. It seems his "connectivity" metrics might actually be markers for something else. Perhaps the "strength of civil society" is a more reliable underlying predictor of a state's ability to lift itself out of the Gap than connectivity per se.

A much more significant weakness is that Barnett's focus on the Core-Gap dichotomy leads him to minimize the importance of the existing links that connect particular Gap countries with particular Core nations. Given cheap air transport and telecommunications rapidly moving to a worldwide flat rate, the old paths of empire and emigration have given rise to a series of fluid, overlapping worldwide network civilizations. In the place of the British Empire there is now a demotic Anglosphere of Birmingham curry houses and Indo-American software engineers, a son of Jamaican emigres becoming Secretary of State, and Filipino immigrants commanding British, Australian and American troops together. The cocked hats and pith helmets these days are only seen over the faces of hometown boys made good and appointed Governor-General in Kingston or Belmopan. In much the same way, the former realm of the conquistadors is now a demotic Hispanosphere, the old French empire is now a Francophone network, and so on.

The key point here is that these new constructs all cut across Core-Gap lines, yet they are almost always the most effective lines along which the money, people, goods and services will flow to bring connectivity from the Core to the Gap. Rather than striving for universality of approaches, we would do better to work with the grain and maximize the use of these existing channels.

This applies also in matters of grand strategy. Bismarck famously remarked that the most important reality of the 20th century would be the fact that the United States spoke English. The most important fact of the 21st century may be the fact that the educated and ambitious of India have made of English not merely a useful foreign tongue, as have the Chinese, but a language they have taken into their homes and their literature, and into their heads and hearts by creating their own version of it. The new rising generation of well-educated, tech-savvy Indians increasingly regards this intertwining of India and the Anglosphere not as a colonial relic, but as a valuable card that history has dealt to their country, and one that should be played. Evidence that it is being played can be seen in both the quietly accelerating Indo-American military cooperation and the rapidly accelerating economic interpenetration between India and America.

The all-Core alliance against the anti-connectivity actors in the Gap that Barnett and Ash in effect advocate has the nature of a grand coalition--that is, one that enlists all significant actors. Typically, however, grand coalitions do not last. Sooner or later, one or more players decide that they can do better outside the system, and a new oppositional alignment emerges. Some Core nations are already in the business of pimping their Core status to Gap states to achieve narrow national goals--the role of France in providing militarily useful technologies to Gap states being a particular example. So even if the grand coalition can be assembled, we must consider who might be tempted to bolt.

Continental Europe in general, but especially "Old Europe", has tended to see this emerging world as a game in which they are dealt a progressively worsening hand with every shuffle of the cards. Thus they have concentrated on cashing in chips for short-term gain, while trying to trip up stronger players when the opportunity strikes. At present, the costs of being in the coalition would probably include making major and painful structural adjustments to their economies. Domestic European electorates might therefore be tempted by the alternative of a Euro-Islamic alliance, in which Middle Eastern oil states would prop up unreformed European economies in return for international support, high-tech weaponry and open access to Europe for Islamic economic migrants. The growing "Eurabian" bloc of Islamic voters would thus combine with anti-reform pensioners to veto any other political alignment, driving politics in the direction of the Euro-Islamic solution.

This alignment might then attempt to pick off one other major player from the grand coalition. Russia would probably find this unattractive, given their problem with radical Islamic separatists, and Japan would gain little from it. China might be tempted by access to energy, European weapons technology and the European market, so long as their access to the American market was not entirely precluded. China might not be so much a partner as a semi-detached fellow-traveler, careful never to fully alienate either side. Russia might well try to play a similar semi-detached role to the Anglosphere-India-Japan group.

Under this scenario, we might see the world gradually align into several loose competing politico-economic alliances whose elbow-jostling would not rise to the level of war, or even cold war. The above scenario may in fact be emerging now, with an Anglosphere-plus-India-plus-Japan-plus-Russia team contending with a Euro-Islamic-Chinese bloc. Within such a framework there would still be a need for high-level international agreements and organizations to bind the major players together within a limited framework--to facilitate world trade and prevent any major conflagration among the major powers. But a new world order it would not be, and the transnational elements in it would probably wield about the same amount of influence as during the Cold War.

All in all, the European model is unlikely to be replicated on the world stage--and it may be scaled back and even dismantled in Europe itself when the evidence that India and China are overtaking it becomes too embarrassingly clear. As for the really big picture, instead of problematic schemes for transnational governance on the European model, we are likely to see the gradual rise of associated commonwealths, achieving more modest goals more effectively on a basis of cultural, legal and linguistic affinity. Rifkin's "European Dream" is likely to remain exactly that.

James C. Bennett is president of The Anglosphere Institute and author of The Anglosphere Challenge.

COMMENTARY: I will admit, that the first time I read this I read only the parts about PNM and felt Bennett was a complete ass. Then my fellow bloggers told me to chill and read the whole thing more closely, thin-skinned fellow that I am. Realizing Bennett's bent, as it were, I get his arguments a whole lot better, and realize his complaints about the vision all amount to interesting observations that I could easily plug into the PNM sequel.

More specifically: Bennett's bit about "connectivity" being a poor predictor of conflict is a bit narrow, because I view connectivity both in terms of the internal civil society that he cites, and the external connectivity to the world. In other words, it's hard to get the latter without having a good portion of the former. But I learned something by his critique, and that is, I didn't explain that point enough.

The bit about the old colonial ties as a methodology to shrink the Gap is something that I have considered often, and plan to use in the sequel. I just ran out of gas in PNM, frankly.

On the possible bunching across the pillars of the Core, I buy his analysis, and agree that creating the new institutions to deal with that possibility is crucial in the years ahead. To me, though, such avoidance of a split within the Core is—in itself—a new world order worth achieving.

All in all, a lot of effort from one guy to cover all those books, and in terms of his treatment of my book, awfully respectful given the competition.

So I walk away feeling a bit smarter but not unduly challenged, and that's nice after a critique.

Posted by at 5:21 PM | Permalink

Find the original here @ http://hnn.us/articles/9212.html.

12-27-04: News Abroad

Why Some Are Calling Thomas P.M. Barnett Our Age's George F. Kennan

By Mark Safranski

Mr. Safranski is an educational consultant to secondary schools. He frequently writes about the military.

Americans tend to be a practical people. When faced with a problem we experiment, improvise and muddle through until we succeed or we move on to more fruitful endeavors. De Tocqueville wrote, “The spirit of the Americans is averse to general ideas and does not seek theoretical discoveries.” A truism evidenced even in our greatest politicians – Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt – who during a crisis, broke from tradition but did so without any grand design. As a result America has often suffered from the early results of “muddling through” until we found a Ulysses S. Grant or a George Kennan who could provide not merely a tactic but a strategy.

The War on Terror sharpened and embittered a debate over national strategy that has plagued America’s elite since 1991 when the Soviet collapse eviscerated the need for containment. Globalization, the unification of Europe and the rise of the new economy badly shook all of the assumptions upon which the old, bipolar, Cold War world rested. America may have been--in Madeleine Albright’s phrase--the “indispensable nation,” but it was also a hyperpower without a role. A reluctant policeman at best, babysitting Saddam, cutting and running in Somalia, dithering in Haiti and gamely whistling through the graveyards of the Balkans and Rwanda.

Then came the morning of September 11. Swiftly followed by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, in the Sunni Triangle, signs of “muddling through” can be discerned.

Into this breach strides Thomas P.M. Barnett, a Naval War College professor and DoD strategist who seems to have written not an “X article" but the “X book” of the decade, still riding high on Foreign Affairs bestseller list, a briefer to both Rumsfeld’s senior staff and John Kerry’s campaign advisers. Barnett, whose overarching paradigm in The Pentagon’s New Map is really the Convergence of Civilizations, not the Clash – seems poised to join George Kennan on the short list of American grand strategists who like Alfred T. Mahan or Herman Kahn, stimulated policy changes that were broad and deep.

The Pentagon’s New Map (PNM) argues that military strategy can work only in the context of everything else and that a major part of the context that the Pentagon must recognize are the geopolitical tectonic shifts wrought by Globalization, which he describes using the following PNM terminology:

The Core: The industrialized, connected to the information economy, mostly peaceful, rule of law abiding, liberal democratic world.

The Old Core: The heart of the core, the old G-7/NATO/Japan states led by the United States.

The New Core: Those modernizing states that joined the Core in the 1980's and 1990's – not as liberal, democratic or law-abiding as the Old Core but they have more or less irreversibly committed to moving in that direction - China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and the like.

The Gap: The Third World regions mostly disconnected economically and politically from the Core. Hobbesian in character, ridden by violence, oppression, poverty and anarchy. Ruled by despots--if ruled by anyone--committed to keeping their nations disconnected as a political survival strategy.

Rule-Sets: The explicit and implicit rules that provide the framework by which nations interact and function internally. There is a clash of rule sets between the Gap and the Core and within the Core between Europe, which mostly cannot and will not intervene in the Gap to enforce rules, and the United States, which can – if it chooses..

Connectivity: The degree of acceptance of globalization's many effects and the ability of a nation's individuals to access choices for themselves. Most international hotspots are in the most disconnected parts of the Gap.

Global Transaction Strategy: Barnett's equivalent to "containment" - a national and Core strategy to "Shrink the Gap" by connecting and integrating into the rule sets of the Core.

System Perturbation: The ultimate shock to a system that by “turning the world upside down” forces a response and a re-ordering or Rule-Sets. 9/11 is the most recent example.

Barnett argues that Globalization is a dynamic exchange relationship defined by “four flows” between the Core and the Gap that affect international stability:

■ Migration of people from the Gap to the Core

■ Movement of energy from the Gap to the Core.

■ Movement of money from the Old Core to the New Core

■ The export of security from the Core to the Gap – that only America can provide.

The unity of the Core is maintained, in Barnett’s view, by the common adherence to Rule-Sets that promote peace, transparency, markets, liberal values. This Rule-Set is what prevented wars among members of the Core since 1945. Rule-Sets are enforced in the Core but can be exported to the Gap in two forms: “Leviathan” – a massive, crushing, military sledgehammer -- think D-Day-- or by "System Administration” – the nation-building, humanitarian intervention operations typified by the UN in East Timor.

The two forms of military power are almost symbiotic. Without a Leviathan force in Bosnia, lightly armed UN blue helmets could not prevent Serb paramilitaries from committing mass atrocities. In Iraq, without a Systems Administration force, the United States has not been able to rebuild the country or restore order. The Pentagon, geared up to fight the Next Big Enemy, is now poorly positioned, Barnett argues, for System Administration missions, which account for the majority of U.S. military deployments. Afghanistan and the Iraq Wars are exceptions. Even the Terror War against al Qaida depends, ultimately, on the nation-building expertise that the Europeans have and the Pentagon needs to acquire.

What the United States and Core requires, according to Barnett, to deal with the terrorism, rogue states, WMD proliferation, anarchy and pandemics is a Global Transaction Strategy to “shrink the Gap” by fostering “connectivity” to the Core. Calling for a new vision of “war in the context of everything else,” PNM strategy cannot be conceived in traditional military terms but as full-spectrum intervention to foster the flows of globalization. Soft power here is equally important, as is access to technology, humanitarian programs by NGO’s and the exchange of ideas that could potentially strengthen fragile civil societies. As a Leviathan, present circumstances make the United States truly indispensable but removing tyrants alone is not enough. The rest of the Core is needed along with international organizations to help dysfunctional nations make the jump from Gap State to a newly industrializing member of the Core.

As a doctrinal possibility, Barnett’s ideas are currently being very serious attention by CENTCOM, Special Operations Command (which already conceived of “warfighting” as only one small part of their mission arc) and the Joint Forces Command and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Comparisons to containment are frequent but there are some significant differences between containment and Shrinking the Gap.

George Kennan’s prescription was essentially to “hold the line” by walling off or “containing” the Soviet menace from the West until monolithic totalitarian Communism began to mellow as a system or collapsed. The stakes of failure were extremely high during the Cold War for the United States but the tasks to implement containment were familiar and relatively easy ones. The Truman administration established on a global scale the old “Cordon Sanitaire” that the French had tried without success in Europe after Versailles: vigilant, defensive military and diplomatic alliances, deterrence and measured responses to Soviet provocations over time.

Thomas Barnett is really proposing “integration” instead of containment. The economic and political conditions that generate terrorism, genocide, WMD proliferation, dictatorship and anarchy in the Gap are to be ameliorated by a comprehensive civil-military engagement by the Core to “connect –up” to functional rather than dysfunctional Rule-Sets in priority problem states. This is a more complex agenda diplomatically than containment, which had the advantage of a truly malevolent enemy in Josef Stalin. Chaos does not have a human face – though Osama bin Laden vied for that title – and the problems of today’s world are intersecting and interconnected in a Gordian knot of diverse security threats.

The advantage Barnett has in having his ideas become the sword to cut this Gordian knot is that unlike the preemption strategy of the Neocons, PNM is a non-zero sum game. The United States gets to wear the White Hat again in allied eyes by pushing a strategy that stresses mutual interests instead of just unilateral survival. China, which is not even an ally, has already accorded The Pentagon’s New Map a respectful hearing by senior academic advisors to the Chinese government. PNM strategy, unlike the National Security Strategy of the United States, does not scare the hell out of the rest of the world.

Instead The Pentagon’s New Map offers a hopeful ending, “a future worth creating.” When skeptical leaders of foreign states ask American ambassadors and Generals “Yes, but what are you fighting for? What is in it for us to help you?” – we’d better have an answer.

COMMENTARY: What do you say when you get what you want? You say, thank you, and leave it at that. Few people get PNM like Mark does. I feel like he is a true fellow traveler on this intellectual journey of mine, and I say that even though I've never met the man and know almost nothing about him other than he's much more polite and intelligent in emails than I tend to be. What's clear is that Safranski has a gift for history, and when I say gift, I mean that when he opens his mouth, everything gets clearer instead of more complex (naturally, he's a teacher). That's a real talent, and I'm very happy that PNM has received the benefit of that insight, because it seems like such a better book whenever he talks about it. PNM was built to be like that, meaning something that pushed people to new heights. So Mark's heightened understanding means a lot to an author who's never made it through a day yet without wondering if he's completely full of shit.

Posted by at 5:21 PM | Permalink

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 29 December 2004

Got this email this morning when I woke up:

Mr. Barnett,

After reading your book (twice), and since religiously following your blog, I decided to view your CSPAN show last week. Well, being both bandwidth and Cable-challenged (I'm in the Gap of information technology, I swear ;) ), I sked a friend to tape it for me. Of course, Murphy's Law, he forgot, so I set off this AM to buy the DVD from CSpan. When I went to Google to find the URL for CSpan's store, I discovered something. . ..

Thought you might be interested to see what you get if you type in the phrase. . . cspan store . . .into Google.

Look at the first result. Remember, Google ranks based largely on popularity. What's it feel like to be king of the world???? Ride the wave!

- John, from Connecticut, who still wants to know if you're speaking near me and who's citing you in his essay to the USNI

So here's the resulting capture, top six hits:

#1) C-SPAN Store -- The Pentagon's New Map: PowerPoint Presentation The Pentagon's New Map: PowerPoint Presentation. Program ID: 182105-1 Format: Speech Event Date: 6-2-2004 Location: Washington, District . . . www.c-spanstore.org/cgi-bin/cspanstore/182105-1.html - 21k - Dec 27, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

#2) Booknotes
. . . and journalists. Only $20.95, including shipping Buy Videotapes. Visit
the C-SPAN Store to buy Booknotes videotapes. [ Learn More . . .
www.booknotes.org/ - 18k - Dec 27, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

#3) Books & Films
. . . via their website at: http://www.cspan.org Please access program #174127, titled "Vietnam Adoptee Experience from the AMNH" for CSPAN store ordering details. . . . www.vietnambabylift.org/Books&Films.html - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

#4) Book TV.org
. . . Encore Booknotes David Halberstam, The Fifties. Book TV Coffee Mug Own an 11 ounce ceramic Book TV mug, from the C-SPAN On-Line Store. . . . www.booktv.org/ - 12k - Dec 27, 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

#5) Compare Prices and Read Reviews on CSPAN at Epinions.com
. . . Subscribe to reviews on this product. Marketplaces, Store, Rating, eBay, . . . Search "Buy it Now" for CSPAN, . . . www.epinions.com/tele-TV_Channels-All-CSPAN - 35k - Cached - Similar pages

#6) Ohio Casts its Electoral College Vote LIVE-CSPAN 12ET
. . . line is longer than I thought - I might need to go back to the store!! . . . I cant wait for the mootbats 'hearings' on CSPAN at 4:30 Eastern, another 500,000 GOP . . . www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1300388/posts - 43k - Cached - Similar pages

Meaningful? Would mean more to me personally if I got a DIME!

But yes, it's nice. . .

Posted by at 10:11 AM | Permalink

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 December 2004

Blur of a day: started by getting up at 4am and jumping into limo that I find waiting for me out in the dark on my snow-drifty driveway. Then a 90-minute drive to Boston while I peruse two books I'm wanted to read in anticipation of starting work on the sequel to PNM.

Arrive at local video remote facility in Watertown around 6am and surf the web for about 30 minutes, until the tech says Fox wants me in the seat NLT 0640. I'm wearing what one usually puts on in the dark at 4am: black slacks, navy blue mock-turtle and tan shoes. So I slip on blue dress shirt, jacket from navy blue suit and nice dark blue tie and voila! I'm just fine for a chest-and-up remote shot.

The interview goes well enough. Two hosts of "Fox & Friends" are energetic (Brian Kilmeade and E.D. Hill), which is good because I'm not even after two large mugs of coffee. I make the mistake of taking the tech up on his offer to watch the show in my camera lens, which is helpful because I can then check my position and I know when I'm on-screen. But even just the distance between Boston and NY creates a weird time lag, meaning if I move my head a bit I see it on camera a second or two later, and once you start noticing that, it's a short distance to slurring your words in order to re-synch that which can never be "sunch."

Still, despite one word drop, it looks fine at home later at 8am, after the driver drops me off at home (I give him a signed copy cause he says he loves to read books of people he's driven) and I can check out the tape that Video Link is always so kind to provide instantly after each performance.

After I drop Jerry off at pre-school I'm into my office for a day of organizing stuff and catching up on sundry details (planning to move, you know!), but I find time to appear with Brian Kilmeade at 1140 am EST as he subs on Tony Snow's radio show (that goes better, I feel, because we have more time), plus I do a quick interview with a newsletter editor from the Center for Defense Information regarding China (that article should be out in day or two) and I quick Q&A with a Pittsburgh-based journalist for a Saturday edition feature he does for the local paper. That's four interviews in roughly ten hours, which feels kind of weird for the 28th of December, but I think I'm enjoying the bumps from Ignatius and the C-SPAN broadcasts, so I answer the mail as it comes in.

And yes, I still call myself a Naval War College professor for now, because it takes too long to explain my upcoming departure.

Spent the night reading May through October blogs. Cataloguing before the grand reset of table of contents on Thursday. My brain is cooking right now, so much so that I often feel like I'm coming down with something. I can tell I am really close to the big creative tear that will be about 40 days of writing.

In addition to all those interviews, let me cite a trio of recent articles that highlight PNM and/or quote me with regard to it:

■ First up is Jonathan Gurwitz with his op-ed entitled, "Internet, knowledge light the path to victory for open societies." That story ran on 26 December in the San Antonio Express-News and on 28 December in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (as "Internet a Beacon for Open Societies").

■ Second piece is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service (or FBIS) translation of an August article written in Slovene for the Slovakia daily paper Delo, which in Russian means "stuff" or "business" or "affairs" (and I assume the root is same in Slovene). The title is "The Pentagon's New Map," a commentary by Barbara Kremzar. The FBIS notation was "Slovene Commentary Says Success of US Troop Redeployment 'Difficult To Assess.'" The pub date is 17 August 2004.

Was going to give you third piece from Nihon Keizai Shimbun in which I was quoted by journalist Hiroyuki Akita in an 18 December story on intelligence reform, but he sent it to me only in Japanese and I can't make the font work here, so I'll post a PDF of his full interview article with me from 15 December (tomorrow, I promise) and provide the transcript of our phone interview for reference. I speak so slowly in Japanese anyway . . .

First off, a quick spin of the news dial (a slimmer version that I will favor between now and end of book writing).

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink

■"Toll In Undersea Earthquake Passes 25,000; A Third Of The Dead Are Said To Be Children: Fear of Disease; Thousands Are Missing—Many Tourists Are Killed," by Seth Mydans, New York Times, 28 December 2004, p. A1.

■"Aid Agencies Go to Work as Tasks Continue to Mount," by Eric Lipton, New York Times, 28 December 2004, p. A10.

Question of whether this will be System Perturbation has little to do with trigger, since that one is impossible to be traced back to any human causality, like global warming or something. Also unlikely to change living near shore in those areas, cause this is a one-in-gajillions shot.

Where it can trigger massive new rule set flow would be in public's sense of bad recovery, meaning either too long/inefficient or too imbalanced (either inside states or when various states are compared). It's those differentials that anger people the most, act of God or no.

Quiet story to all this, buried in second story, are the US Air Force C-130s, Navy P-3s and Pacific Command's consideration of sending "several thousand American troops to the effort." Nothing unusual about that. It happens all the time. And it usually gets even less notice in the press.

■"Venezuela Agrees to Export Oil and Gas to China," by Chris Buckley, New York Times, December 2004, p. A1.

Analysts in DC and especially the Pentagon will squirm and vent mightily on this one, but it's no more surprising than Iran or Sudan or anybody else. This is simply "get it where they (the West) ain't" for China, meaning those oil sources we may shun or underplay are natural targets for a very needy China.

■"Supermarket Giants Crush Central American Farmers: The Food Chain (Survival of the Biggest)," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 28 December 2004, p. A1.

Watching this is like watching small farmers where I grew up in Wisconsin in the 1970s, except there it was the mega-farmers who crowded in far earlier than the Cub Foods grocery behemoths. By the time Windward Farms was done, almost half the farms kids I knew from 1st grade were living in town by 6th grade. It was stunning, but unstoppable.

The alternative was a local economy based on low levels of ag production, and that just wasn't going to last. Sad for small farmers, yes. But frankly, there's nothing sacred about them, any more than coal miners or any other hard-scrabble lifestyle. They last until they can't last, and then they're gone almost overnight. People get nostalgic, and wax poetic about the life lost, but time moves on.

Real tragedy for Central America is lack of alternative employment, I would imagine (and confirmed, I see, about 20 paras into the text). What saved area where I lived was rise of Land's End and other manufacturers. But you can't fight consumers wanting cheaper food. That doesn't work. Rather than fighting this as rear-guard action, governments there need to attract foreign direct investment that triggers alternative jobs. Job loss is a tragedy. Job transition is a fact of life in globalization.

■"Al Qaeda Shifts Its Strategy in Saudi Arabia: Focus Placed on U.S. and Other Western Target in Bid to Bolster Network, Officials Say," by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 19 December 2004, p. A28.

This is Osama backtracking at his real Ground Zero. Going after the House of Saud and other symbols of authority is creating a backlash, as in uncool. So recruiting is down and the network is weakening.

So the backtrack is to resume targeting the evil West. Gets Osama close to nowhere, but it keeps the faith alive.

Good sign for the Global War on Terror, but bad sign in terms of reform in the kingdom. As always, the House of Saud temporizes with great mastery.

They are survivors, that lot. Crappy rulers in so many ways, but survivors.

■"Yushchenko Wins 52% of Vote; Rival Vows a Challenge: A clear victory in Ukraine, but a daunting task ahead for the victor," by C.J. Chivers, New York Times, 28 December 2004, p. A3.

You have to like that outcome, and the Kremlin is swallowing hard, but swallowing. It's like the head ref just pulled his head out of the instant replay tent and reversed the call!

Posted by at 10:56 PM | Permalink

Web Posted: 12/26/2004 12:00 AM CST, San Antonio Express-News

The origins of the Internet lie two generations in the past in Cold War fears of nuclear destruction.

The original concept, spelled out by RAND Corp. scientist Paul Baran in a 1962 study, called for a decentralized communications network that would allow the military to maintain command and control of its forces in case of Soviet attack.

The proposed network would contain multiple nodes and connections so that if some locations — and the data they possessed — were destroyed, surviving locations would retain the ability to communicate and possess the database of the entire network.

This conceptual framework reveals much about the differences that underlie free and unfree societies. Knowledge is power. Fascism, communism and socialism — political philosophies that rest on the concentration of power — could never have conceived of an Internet. The protection of knowledge, which is to say the protection of the totalitarian regime, requires centralization not dissemination.

In ways that could not have been foreseen four decades ago when the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects began work on ARPANET, the decentralization of knowledge is generating historic revolutions. In science and medicine, researchers collaborate across continents and marshal decades of accumulated knowledge at their fingertips.

In politics, the Internet combines the historic impact of every technological innovation that preceded it: the printing press, radio, television, the photocopier, the fax machine, the VCR and the cell phone.

The rulers of closed societies are fighting a losing battle against a technology that no weapon, no censor and no physical or digital barrier can ultimately impede. China's attempt earlier this year to block 1,000 words — including "democracy," "freedom" and "liberty" — from the nation's most popular instant messaging service is emblematic of this futile effort.

The most important book on the reading list of policy-makers and military strategists right now is "The Pentagon's New Map." In it, Thomas P.M. Barnett, a professor at the Naval War College, suggests that the great fault line in international relations is not along religious or cultural divides. Rather, it is between a functioning core of nations and what Barnett calls the "non-integrated gap," between nations connected to the modern age of knowledge, wealth and progress and those disconnected from it.

Barnett's specific prescriptions on how to shrink the gap will be debated for years to come. His basic strategic assessment, however, is sound: "All we can offer is choice, the connectivity to escape isolation and the safety within which freedom finds practical expression."

In presenting this choice to the world — in Afghanistan, Iraq and scores of other nations — the United States and its allies in the functioning core are engaged in a desperate race against time. As 9-11 foreshadowed, the confluence of violent ideologies with modern technologies makes the destruction of one or more great cities far more likely than the Cold War did.

Recently Google, the company that revolutionized Internet searches, announced a historic development in the history of the Internet and mankind.

Google revealed its plan to index, scan and make available through its search engine what may eventually be tens of millions of books from five of the world's greatest libraries: Oxford University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the New York Public library.

A derivative benefit exists to decentralizing so much knowledge — including hundreds of thousands of rare editions to which the public has had little or no access — beyond simply sharing it. Should we lose the footrace with nuclear terrorism, our modern body of knowledge will not go the way of the ancient Library of Alexandria, the great repository of classical knowledge lost to history in the cataclysmic fires of some forgotten conflict.

The Internet and its philosophical propositions — conceived in response to the threat of a different cataclysm — are now among the chief weapons deployed against a disconnected enemy. It also serves as a digital storehouse for humanity should that enemy ever achieve its apocalyptic goal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jgurwitz@express-news.net

Posted by at 10:55 PM | Permalink

Slovene Commentary Says Success of US Troop Redeployment 'Difficult To Assess'

Originally published on 8/17/2004 by Delo (Internet Version-WWW) in Slovene .

[FBIS Translated Text] Germany, which used to be home to the biggest US military contingent in Europe, is at least slightly saddened. With the closure of military bases, from where the Americans would scare for decades the Soviet Union and also led a military attack on [former President Slobodan] Milosevic's Serbia, whilst both presidents Bush used to settle scores with Saddam Husayn from there, the Americans will finally bid farewell to nice little American towns and the Germans to quite big financial gains. But the punishment of the ally that condemned the war of the president son is merely a less important element in the biggest redeployment of the US army after the end of the Cold War. It's been months that [Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon had been drawing up its new map of the world in which different threats call for different kinds of alliances.

Because the new terrorist threats are so extensive from the American perspective, the little treats, which certain Eastern European allies are going to get in the shape of new, more flexible bases, will not bring much Cold War nostalgia. It is not by chance that the defence secretary travelled to Russia and not to Poland just before the announcement of the new strategy. Washington needs Russia's quiet approval - or at least not loud opposition - of the anti-terrorist and energy front in Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but also approval of the anti-ballistic and other missiles system in Alaska.

But above all, the Americans will try to bring closer to its targets in the Arabic-Persian Gulf the Russians - and Chinese and Japanese and the Europeans - both by trying to convince them of yet another "Islamic" nuclear bomb and by establishing peace in Iraq. The number of fallen US soldiers in this country is fast approaching the number thousand and the US army is already feeling the burden of long-lasting fighting. If it wants to avoid a general call-up, which with the inclusion of the boys from the neighbourhood would certainly spark off a new Vietnam syndrome, Washington cannot keep its servicemen and reservists in peaceful Germany.

It is as yet difficult to assess the final success of the announced changes, but the worl