Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  9. The grand strategist is therefore interested more in direction than in degree of change, recognizing that politics lags dramatically behind economics and that security lags dramatically behind connectivity.

  10. Grand strategy isn’t about keeping it a “fair fight”; the grand strategist desires as many allies as possible and as few enemies as possible, and so he’s interested in everything and anything that brings adherents to his cause while sapping his enemy’s numbers.

  This chapter is about that “everything and anything” that either wins hearts and minds—or at least disarms them. Everything we’ve examined up to now suggests that globalization’s expansion plays into our hands. Now let’s factor in those trends where mitigation will be the order of the day, rather than exploitation, for therein lies—as far as America is concerned—the most challenging realignment of all.

  THE UNDENIABLE TRAJECTORY: THE DEVIL WE KNEW

  Nothing retraditionalizes a culture as quickly as crisis, especially crisis triggered by violent contact with outsiders. When that happens, ancient legends are dutifully resurrected—as in, This is how we dealt with such monsters before! America in 2001 was ripe for just such a retraditionalization, having just gone through the single biggest influx of immigrants our country has ever absorbed in one decade. According to the American custom, as long as the economy hummed, all this change was taken in stride, but once the tech crash of 2000 segued into the corporate scandals of 2001, all the usual elements were in place for a nativist backlash: stagnating incomes, fears of the country being overrun by the latest version of “those people,” and a sense that America had lost its competitive edge—witness “good” jobs being “shipped overseas.” When terrorists struck on 9/11, the Statue of Liberty was recast overnight from a welcoming symbol for immigrants to the poster child for homeland security. Suddenly, Americans no longer owned the future but scrambled to prevent it. We’ve been scrambling ever since.

  Cultural critic Susan Faludi’s 2007 book The Terror Dream paints a fascinating portrait of our social response to 9/11 and the wars since spawned. It is at once accurate, somewhat overtaken by events, and yet highly predictive of the road ahead in this long war against violent extremism. Faludi observes that America reflexively retraditionalized itself following 9/11’s shock. We retreated into our past or, specifically, the 1950s childhood of our Boomer leadership—comfort food spiced with familiar fears. Self-absorbed individualism was out, nurturing families back in. Wimpy male icons were dumped for he-men, especially soldiers and firefighters (make that firemen!). There were immediate predictions of marriage and baby booms. Security moms suddenly ruled the political landscape and body-snatching aliens once again threatened our streets (“Is that man wearing a turban?”). Our political leaders likewise indulged. Square-jawed, tough-talking Donald Rumsfeld instantly morphed into a craggy babe magnet, and George W. Bush embraced his inner cowboy by donning a military flight suit and routinely giving out salutes. More predictably, hawkish pundits gleefully blamed feminism for making America too pacific, too Oprah-ish, too emasculated. In his polemic The Enemy at Home, conservative Dinesh D’Souza even went so far as to suggest that America should rein in its provocative young women, lest their sexuality and outspokenness invite future attacks from Islamic fundamentalists. It was American mirror-imaging at its best: If our 1950s superconformity kept those Soviets from turning red-blooded Americans into socialist automatons, then a retraditionalized post-9/11 America would likewise protect us from those Muslim fundamentalists. Smells like teen spirit to me!

  Delving deeper into the American psyche, Faludi also notes that after 9/11 our media started resurrecting appropriately frightening archetypes, chief among them being the rescue of the vulnerable maiden snatched from the frontier homestead by savages. The classic movie that immediately springs to mind here is John Ford’s The Searchers, starring iconic John Wayne as the former Confederate soldier who spends years tracking down a young niece held captive by bloodthirsty Indians who “ruined” her; he almost dispatches her in an “honor killing” at the end before coming to his senses. This simple narrative is a staple of American literature, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, and its tale of hostage-taking “savages” is no myth. One of my Barnett ancestors suffered this strange fate in western Pennsylvania in the late 1700s. But these frontier attacks were less frequent than popularly portrayed. Most wagon trains traveling the nineteenth-century Oregon Trail reported no violence from Native Americans, finding them instead quite helpful. That era’s dime novels told a different story, as did later Hollywood films. Abduction and rape were not the biggest threats pioneer women faced. That would be disease. Nor were they weaklings who needed constant male protection. Life was simply too hard and demanded too much from them.

  But when you read Faludi’s chapter on Army soldier Jessica Lynch, it gets hard to deny that the post-9/11 myth-manufacturing got way out of hand. The lurid storylines of torture and rape by “Saddam’s beasts” simply weren’t true, and neither were the cartoonish portrayals of Lynch as either female Rambo or hapless hostage. Lynch handled the ordeal with admirable skill, despite all the media misrepresentation. The real hero was lost in the intense media blitz surrounding Lynch’s rather staged rescue from an Iraqi hospital, where—by the way—she received great care by local doctors. That hero, according to Lynch herself, was fellow soldier and good friend Lori Piestewa, a Native American who acted with uncommon bravery when their unit was attacked in March 2003. Piestewa was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. military. A prominent peak in the Phoenix mountains—which I climbed with my children a year later—today bears her name.

  As Faludi concedes, much of this retraditionalization phenomenon associated with the trauma of 9/11 has faded with time. There were no marriage or baby booms, and reports of the death of irony were greatly exaggerated. With Nancy Pelosi taking over leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senator Hillary Clinton nearly becoming America’s first female major-party nominee for president, plus Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s star turn as John McCain’s running mate, it gets hard to argue that the role of women in our society has suffered any damage whatsoever as a result.

  In the end, American citizens do more than merely shop to marginalize extremists: We simply realize that we like being our modern selves more than we fear their attacks on our modernity. Just like our enemies, we decide that we’re not going to have our lives dramatically altered by this latest iteration of globalization’s Kulturkampf (and no, it won’t be the last). Instead, with our typical focus on self-help and self-improvement, we largely shelve our original, Oprah-like instincts to explain ourselves better to the world, and instead set about that most insulting of American practices: We began deconstructing the “Islamic threat” in our mass media, making the “disturbing” subject a sort of national obsession (also very Oprah-like) . Within five years, we had processed this learning to the point where humor became an appropriate weapon, the surest sign being the network sitcoms that began the process of demystifying Islamic ways—to wit, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and the CW network’s Aliens in America. As always, given our uniquely synthetic mash-up of culture, we ultimately choose to view Muslims as being more like us than dissimilar, our Judeo-Christian identity being increasingly expanded to a Judeo-Christian-Islamic identity that recognizes all such religions as “children of Abraham.”

  I know, we really are Borg-like in that manner—just like the globalization we spawned. But putting us on some nationwide “war footing” is hardly the answer, either. By casting this struggle as an all-out war of survival, requiring such mobilization, we’d be guilty of buying into the radical fundamentalists’ ideology that claims (1) they speak for all of Islam, and (2) this is truly a clash between civilizations instead of one within a single civilization. Thus making the conflict symmetrical would amount to elevating al Qaeda to the status of a legitimate
international actor, which it is not, being unable and/or unwilling to seek such political credentials. In the end, their resistance really is futile, so why pretend otherwise?

  The attacks of 9/11 were a classic case of “chosen trauma”: We chose to become deeply attached to these events. In America’s “thirty years’ war” with radical Islam since 1979, as historian Michael Oren puts it, we did not let similarly tragic events absorb our attention in the same way. Yes, we can all now say that Bush-Cheney lied to us about Iraq and that without such trickery America never would have gone to such lengths to transform the Arab world. But let’s be honest here: Americans were collectively more than open to this vision of taking care of the “frontier savages” problem once and for all. Indeed, we have a long history of being moved to such high retribution. For Americans, the cry “Remember the [chosen trauma]!” has always been aimed at triggering immediate action, and not merely remembrance of some tragic shame we all share. As frontier settlers, Americans are natural problem-solvers: Once society identifies the danger, the posse is rounded up and direct action taken.

  Here’s where Faludi’s larger point about America naturally dipping into the metaphors of its frontier-age past makes sense when you consider our age of rapid economic globalization. When the global economy expands today, it naturally moves into the most traditional, off-grid cultures left to be found on this planet, disrupting patriarchal social structures and predictably eliciting violent fundamentalist backlashes. We “contaminate” the Arab world, for example, much in the same way that American settlers once spread “white contamination” among Native Americans in the trans-Mississippi West in yet another fearful dream of civilizational destruction featuring gold of a different color. As back then, today both sides in this perceived clash of civilizations see their destiny commanded by scriptures: They “cleanse” themselves of our contamination as we push them to recognize that all men—and their faiths—are equal, with everything else going at market prices. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo are now replaced by equally compelling and charismatic figures, the badlands shifted to the wondrously harmonic Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. As before, the invaders ponder infinite spaces, while the locals assume infinite time. In the resulting conflict, both perceptions will ultimately be proven wrong—yet again. And the ultimate cause will be the same: a vast sucking sound from the East. Nothing invades like insatiability.

  Just as in our wars of today, America’s wars against the Western Indian tribes were enormously expensive and cost a significant number of lives. There was a constant sense of frustration and the spiraling of conflict into chaos. Corners were frequently turned, only to see America suffer new humiliating reversals that led—as always—to more crushing reprisals. It was a long war featuring stubborn insurgencies that dragged on for decades. The U.S. Cavalry and the Sioux, for example, fought for thirty-five years. And yes, the conflict became more messianic the further it extended, as warriors who recognized that their cultures were being destroyed through assimilation adopted apocalyptic religious visions out of sheer desperation. Where more than a century ago some radical believers dreamed that a warrior dance (the Ghost Dance) might bring on a new world of the past, today we face those who dream that the perfectly calibrated terrorist strike will usher in their vision of a seventh-century pre-economic paradise. It is as sad and conclusive as a dying man’s last breath.

  This isn’t about winning. The outcome of this thirty years’ war was decided by Deng Xiaoping the year it began: 1979. Our strategic realignment here is about managing the loss of identity—both theirs and ours. As this convergence of civilizations unfolds, the Arab world will lose its unique distance from the rest of humanity and America will eventually lose its place as humanity’s revolutionary force without equal, our success in assimilating their collective identity into this American System-cum- globalization signaling yet another stage in its maturation beyond our control. In the end, then, both sides lose their devil.

  Remember, the Union lost its Northern identity even as it defeated and assimilated the Confederacy. It lost it in the trans-Mississippi West, yielding to a new Western identity that commands America’s imagination to this day. The same fate befalls us now, in this moment of our nation’s unprecedented historical success. The American “world order” that emerged from the Cold War’s end wasn’t “new.” It was a century in the gestation and five decades in the making, the fall of the Berlin Wall merely marking our global coming-out party that was the 1990s. It was also overwhelmingly economic in nature, which is why our national security leadership, so ingrained with the delusion that they controlled all that was crucial in international affairs (otherwise known as the realists/ neocons’ soda-straw view of reality, for truly here the two camps suffer the same strategic myopia), had virtually no idea how to manage its further advance—until 9/11 interceded and revealed a world they once again recognized as their own.

  Unfortunately for them but fortunately for the rest of humanity, the seed subsequently planted by Bush-Cheney—and the fearful story that they wished to tell—has found no lasting purchase.

  THE AMERICAN SYSTEM PERTURBED: KATRINA AND THE GORE COUNTERNARRATIVE

  Hurricane Katrina served as a narrative tipping point for multiple storylines in America’s ongoing grand strategy of shaping a post-9/11 world. First, it effectively erased what remained of Iraqi expectations for an elevating reconstruction of their economy by their American occupiers. If they had, as General David Petraeus told me, a “man on the moon” belief regarding American capabilities up to that point (i.e., they assumed we could do anything after that enormous technological feat), then Washington’s Katrina response completely sealed their pessimism. Indeed, many Iraqi leaders plausibly feared an immediate redirection of American attention from their country to the homeland. The American public’s perception of the Bush administration likewise took a dive from which the president never recovered. Now it was clear, just as it was to the Iraqis, that the American government lacked the wherewithal to manage such complex humanitarian disasters both abroad and at home. Third, by signaling with great force President Bush’s emerging lame-duck status, Katrina ushered in the earliest postpresidency seen since Richard Nixon faced impeachment and ultimately resigned twenty months into his second term. And Bush’s diminished presidency had significant international repercussions. Suddenly, allies were openly challenging our leadership, rising powers began ignoring the same, and a rogue’s gallery of tinhorn dictators started back-talking the United States in every forum imaginable. It was open season on American credibility, no matter what the subject.

  Katrina itself served as a microcosm of the Iraq response, with Louisiana’s local and state governments playing their own incompetent occupational authority and the Bush administration displaying all the same situational awareness and speed that it previously brought to Iraq—meaning virtually none. According to former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, the federal response to Katrina featured all the classically bad management stages, moving slowly from denial to containment, then shame-mongering with blood-on-the-floor heads rolling, and finally a concentrated push to fix real problems. As in Iraq, interagency coordination within the federal government was confused and weak, with nobody really seeming in charge of the situation until Army Lieutenant General Russell Honoré took command of Joint Task Force Katrina two days after New Orleans was devastated by the storm surge. It wasn’t until deep into the first week of September 2005, however, that law and order was reestablished in New Orleans (and yes, Blackwater gunmen were involved), where looting and violence had been substantial (although hardly as chaotic as initially reported).

  The overall impact of Katrina was a national humiliation. Over 1,800 people had been killed and approximately 378,000 were displaced from New Orleans alone, creating one of the largest internal diasporas in American history! U.S. oil production from the Gulf of Mexico was shut down for a substantial period, and America received government donat
ions from all over the world. Mexican troops, providing emergency aid, operated on American soil for the first time since 1846. Naturally, many pundits began comparing Katrina-the-poststorm-response to Iraq-the-postwar-response, arguing that America’s incompetence in Iraq had tied down troops—specifically the National Guard—that should have been available back home. But the real crux of the matter wasn’t available resources so much as the “last resort” mentality of the federal government: Much like the immediate postwar situation in Iraq, the Bush administration displayed a strange operational detachment from the proceedings until the resulting instability grew out of control.

  Fortunately, this was not the case among the U.S. private sector, whose immediate logistical response to Katrina significantly outperformed that of governments at all levels. Wal-Mart’s network prowess was in awesome display, along with other bottom-of-the-pyramid sellers who recognized that the do-it-yourself demand for recovery would be substantial. Erik Prince’s Blackwater Worldwide firm mounted its own impromptu relief response on the spot, winning enough emergency contracts from various players to convince him to begin a new line of products and services aimed at domestic disaster operations. When you place Blackwater’s experience in Iraq on security alongside its humanitarian supply response in New Orleans, then Prince’s ambition for mounting a private-army peacekeeping response to the Darfur situation becomes more understandable. In effect, he spots an unmet demand for outsourced sovereignty services at the bottom of globalization’s pyramid and aims to meet it. Just because failed states fail to attract public-sector responses doesn’t mean they cannot elicit private-sector ones.

  But the aspect of Katrina that caught most Americans’ imagination was the theme of environmental collapse, right out of Jared Diamond’s bestselling book of the same name. As soon as urban planners began arguing that New Orleans would never return to its previous population because it simply could not support so many people on such a fragile environmental base, Katrina became a touchstone in public debates about unsustainable environmental policies in a world increasingly marked by global warming. To many, Katrina quickly became a symbol of everything wrong with America’s overall approach to this issue—yet another “inconvenient truth” not yet confronted.