The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Eventually the situation spins out of control and nobody really knows what to do. Economic crashes effectively marked the end of both tumultuous decades, followed by the rise of seemingly new sorts of security threats to the international order. In the 1930s, it was fascism and Nazi Germany, while today most security experts will tell you it is radical Islam and transnational terrorism. In both instances, the community of states committed to maintaining global order was deeply torn over what to do about these new security threats—try to accommodate them or fight them head-on in war? Most of the time we cannot even agree on what to call these threats—for example, what makes a government a “rogue regime,” and when are terrorists legitimately viewed as “enemy combatants”? If there are no easy answers, then there are no common definitions, and that means rule sets are out of whack.

  Meanwhile, the global economic order will inevitably grow brittle if there is widespread confusion over what constitutes legitimate threats to international stability and order (e.g., al Qaeda? America the out-of-control hyperpower?). Everyone becomes more worried about the future, and so trust decreases across the system, making compromises all the harder to achieve. If it gets really bad, states stop cooperating on economic rule sets altogether, and start turning on one another in security matters. In the 1930s, the global economy basically collapsed in on itself, as the major players put up walls around their economies in the form of tariffs and other restrictions on trade. Today, we face similar temptations as the Core and Gap fight over the former’s high agricultural subsidies and the latter’s high tariffs against industrial imports. In the 1930s, the world drifted toward global war, while today many around the world speak ominously of America’s growing “empire” and the prospect of “perpetual war.”

  My shorthand for rule-set divergence in the 1990s is roughly the same as the one I would offer for the 1920s: economics got ahead of politics, and technology got ahead of security. In effect, we let the world get too connected too fast. Not that connectivity itself is bad, for I’m a huge believer in the free flow of mass media, ideas, capital, goods, technology, and people. Rather, we didn’t construct sufficient political and security rule sets to keep pace with all this growing connectivity. In some ways, we got lazy, counted a little too much on the market to sort it all out, and then woke up shocked and amazed on 9/11 to find ourselves apparently invited to a global war.

  The question that now stands before us is whether or not this decade ends up being a repeat of the 1930s, when, by God, we really did end up in a global, total war. World Wars I and II, in combination with the self-destructive economic nationalism of the 1930s, completely wiped out all the gains in global economic integration achieved by that first great globalization era of 1870 to 1914.

  Taking to heart the lesson of the demise of Globalization I, the United States decided to institute a new global rule set following World War II, or one that restored some sense of balance to the economic, political, and security rule sets that defined what later became known as the West. I’m talking about the resource flows (Marshall Plan), the massive reorganization of the U.S. Government (Defense Act of 1947, which created the Defense Department, the CIA, and other entities), the creation of a slew of international organizations (United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank), new economic rule sets (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, Bretton Woods agreement on a currency stabilization regime), and the forging of new military alliances (the most important being the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). This period of rule-set “reset” took the better part of a decade, consuming U.S. diplomatic and military efforts deep into the 1950s. This Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  Nor was it promulgated without a significant amount of longrange planning, of the sort we seem to have forgotten in the Pentagon, perhaps because the bulk of that historic planning occurred in the State Department. Here we had the so-called wise men, most notably George Kennan, who looked around the world and decided it wasn’t hard to identify the main sources of mass violence in the system over the previous quarter-century: basically a militarist Germany, an expansionist Soviet Union, and an imperialist Japan. So they did the logical thing: they created a long-term strategy to buy off the two losers from World War II while waiting out the third.

  Their dream was simple enough, but amazingly bold: perhaps by the end of the century both Germany and Japan would be so pacified and economically integrated into a resurgent West that they would never again pose a threat to global peace, and maybe—just maybe—the Soviet Union would collapse of its own accord and join the dominant Western rule set in perpetual peace. Now, of course, this is basically history. But step back to 1946, and that simple plan looks less like a strategic vision and more like a daydream. To many security experts of that era, the notion that we could rehabilitate Nazi Germany and imperial Japan while simultaneously standing up to the Reds was simply ludicrous. We had neither the will nor the wallet after fighting World War II, and our experience in the Korean War made it seem like this new world would feature lots of U.S. casualties for very uncertain and unsatisfactory outcomes.

  Sound familiar? This is why I prefer comparing George W Bush to Harry Truman rather than Ronald Reagan. Reagan didn’t win the Cold War but had it handed to him on a silver platter. Truman really got the ball rolling, just like Bush, who—if he plays his cards right—may yet set in motion a new strategic security paradigm that will far outlive his presidency. But that will happen only if the Bush Administration generates reproducible strategic concepts, or a compelling containment-like vision that other, successor administrations can also champion. Reproducible here means both Republicans and Democrats can understand them in the same basic way. Not identical, mind you, but we can’t be forever arguing about definitions. Trust me, the military wants this sort of bipartisan consensus in the worst way.

  This outcome, obviously, is far from certain. If I compare Bush favorably with Truman in terms of action, I’d be forced to give him a failing grade to date in terms of strategic vision, which is just a fancy way of saying how he explains his foreign policy to the public and the world. No doubt Bush has a far tougher task than Truman, because Truman’s enemy was more clearly defined by its military threat, whereas Bush’s enemy is characterized less by a direct threat to our way of life than a sheer rejection of it. The Soviets were really out to get us, whereas the antiglobalization forces—represented in their most violent form by an al Qaeda—don’t seek our historical destruction so much as a sort of permanent civilizational apartheid.

  Because we called the post-World War II period the Cold War, history remembers those decades mostly as a scary, strategic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. In reality, that was the sideshow of the containment strategy. The real goal of that visionary strategy was to resurrect globalization on three key pillars: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Between 1950 and 1980, we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, as roughly 10 percent of the global population controlled the vast wealth of the resurgent global economy. But around 1980 it got even better, if you listen to the World Bank, which notes the emergence across the 1980s of roughly two dozen globalizing economies, to include such current globalization welterweights as South Korea, Brazil, and India, not to mention the emerging heavyweight of that class China.◈

  That wondrous story of Globalization II (1945-1980) is the buried lead of all Cold War histories yet written. Truth be told, Globalization II was the Cold War’s raison d’être, whereas Globalization III (1980 and counting) is its “peace dividend,” the pot of gold we spent the 1990s fruitlessly searching for in the U.S. federal budget. But you know what? It was completely worth it, because globalization, with an assist from the spectre of nuclear weapons, has effectively killed the idea of great-power war—all-out conventional (nonnuclear) war among the world’s most powerful states that concludes only when one side is completely defeated. But even better than that, Globalization II and III have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty over t
he second half of the twentieth century. While the world’s population has doubled since 1960, the percentage living in poverty has been cut in half.◈

  For those of you who thought that globalization was invented in the 1990s, let me tell you why all this talk about rule sets is important. We let economic nationalism outpace political reason in the 1930s and we got a Great Depression for our failings. We let the technology of killing get ahead of our ability to manage security relationships among great powers in the 1930s and we got the Second World War and the Holocaust for our failings. We stand at a similar point in history now, having just gone through the “roaring” nineties only to wake up with a four-aspirin hangover called the Asian flu, the tech crash, 9/11, and the global war on terrorism. How we move ahead depends greatly on how we view our world and the rule sets that define it.

  Despite being the world’s sole military superpower, America needs to understand that it stands on the cusp of a new multipolar era defined by globalization’s progressive advance. It also needs to realize that the emerging global conflict lies between those who want to see the world grow ever more connected and rule-bound and those who want to isolate large chunks of humanity from the globalization process so as to pursue very particular paths to “happiness.” If we as a nation, through our diplomatic and security strategies, succeed in closing the rule-set gaps that currently exist, we will do far more than make our nation more secure or wealthier, we’ll finally succeed in making globalization truly global.

  The task that lies before us is no less historic or heroic than that surmounted by the so-called greatest generation over the course of the twentieth century. And, yes, this task will consume a similar length of time.

  In retrospect, what was scariest about the rule-set misalignment of the 1990s was that the world was trying to administer a very complex system using tools designed for another era. The package of new rule sets America forged after WWII was designed to prevent the collapse of Globalization I, not necessarily to advance the far more complex and comprehensive Globalization III. They were designed to prevent war among great powers, not necessarily to deal with rogue regimes and transnational terrorist networks.

  The rule sets we put in place in the late 1940s and early 1950s have not aged well in most instances. Some, like the International Monetary Fund, have morphed dramatically over the decades, leaving behind their original functions (currency stabilization) and taking on new roles (lender of last resort) as globalization expanded and matured. Other rule sets, like having World War II’s winning coalition constitute the permanent, veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council, are seriously out-of-date. Even NATO is at great risk of losing its identity as it struggles to admit former socialist states, much less pursue combat operations somewhere other than Europe.

  When 9/11 exploded into the global consciousness, it crystallized that sense of rule-set misalignment, not just for grand strategists but for average citizens too. Much as at the end of World War II, America simply wasn’t ready to deal with its own success at the end of the Cold War, and so it spent much of the 1990s letting the international security environment run on cruise control—defined as lobbing a few cruise missiles every time some bad boy like Saddam or Osama got seriously out of line. Collectively, we became too enamored with free markets and too suspicious of government, assuming that “hidden hands” would keep us secure, along with rent-a-cops and gated communities. Much of this self-delusion was based on the notion that the new economy obviated much of what might be called the normal upkeep of various political and security rule sets. I mean, if the Internet was simply going to remake all aspects of society and repeal the business cycle, then the political and security realms were simply going to have to take a backseat to this technologically driven global revolution.

  In reality, the rise of this new economy meant we needed more stringent, not more relaxed political and security rule sets. Simply put, in the rush to connect the world up to the grid, we forgot to make sure we kept things safe for the average person. So, yeah, global nuclear war deservedly became a nostalgic notion, but the “democratization of violence,” as Fareed Zakaria calls it, moved the planet into a new era of dominant threats.◈ Instead of an almost abstract, all-consuming Armageddon that everyone could push to the back of his or her consciousness, now we all go through a litany of personal exercises—raising arms, spreading legs, surrendering watches and shoes—every time we want to fly a commercial airline. With the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the strategic threat morphed into something far more up-close and personal, in a shockingly abrupt transition from one era to the next.

  That is what I call a “rule-set reset.” It is when you realize that your world is woefully lacking certain types of rules and so you start making up those new rules with a vengeance because—by God—we simply cannot ever let something like that ever happen again! Such a rule-set reset can be a very good thing—putting your house in order, so to speak. But it can also be a very dangerous time, because in your rush to fill in all the rule-set gaps, your cure may end up being worse than the disease. No government that tried to deal with the Great Depression of the 1930s set about purposefully to destroy the global economy of that era, and yet they did—with the best of intentions.

  To me, 9/11 was an amazing gift—as twisted and cruel as that sounds. It was an invitation from history, albeit one with a horrific price tag. But 9/11 the world-historical event must ultimately yield far more hope than fear, far more love than hatred, and—most important—far more understanding than pain. But that will happen only if America chooses to see it for what it was: feedback from a world in significant distress. On that morning, America was forced to wake up from the dreamlike nineties. We were compelled to recognize the great rule-set gaps that afflicted the world order, leaving so many trapped in significant pain and suffering. That these heinous terrorist acts were perpetrated by those committed to destroying Globalization III should only strengthen our resolve to deny them the outcome they so desperately seek: that of condemning some portion of the global population to isolating deprivation.

  But it’s not enough simply to cram our political system with a plethora of poorly thought-out rule sets. That’s not to say that the Patriot Act is all bad, or that the Bush Administration’s new policy of preemption necessarily represents a dangerous turn in our nation’s history. These new rule sets were both inevitable and much needed. Fortunately, within the U.S. political system we have the judicial branch to fine-tune the Patriot Act and every other domestic rule set that follows. But on the world stage, the global community is the court in which our appeals for new rule sets must find eventual acceptance if we are to be successful in extending Globalization III to its logical ends. The global rule set’s real reach is not defined by this superpower’s ability to project military power, but by the progressive reduction of those global trouble spots to which U.S. military power must consistently deploy.

  Have no doubt, new global rule sets are being forged all over this planet as a result of 9/11 and our self-proclaimed global war on terrorism. The only questions that remain are, Which rule sets will find the widest acceptance? And how far will America go—or change—to make sure its preferred rule sets prevail?

  Present At The Creation

  Growing up as a kid in the sixties, I found myself inexorably drawn to the national nostalgia for the 1940s. Part of that was the two-decades-back recycling the mass media typically engage in, but a lot of it had to do with the sharp contrasts between the Vietnam War and World War II—or the “bad” versus the “good” war.

  Like most kids in the sixties, I played “war” a lot, and our enemies were always the Nazis, who were a splendid, iconic sort of enemy. Beating them explained the good life we were living in the 1960s. So just as my daily Catholic mass celebrated Christ’s victory over death in a ritualistic fashion, I and my friends routinely triumphed over the Nazi evil in my backyard. It just made sense in a way that the evening news coverage from Southeast Asia never
could. It was reassuring. It seemed right. Heck, even the Russians had been our friends back then.

  My mom’s father collected World War II newsreels, and these 16-millimeter archives became my time machine for visiting that simpler, more understandable past. Like the heroes in most time-travel stories, I wanted so much to live back in the days when my entire world seemed to have been born. Those early postwar years marked the beginning of everything that dominated the Cold War era: all the rule sets, institutions, rivalries, alliances, strategies—even nuclear weapons. As I went off to college in 1980, determined to become a Soviet expert and join the struggle of our age, I couldn’t help but curse my generational timing. I wanted to be Dean Acheson or Paul Nitze. I wanted to become one of the “wise men.”◈ I wanted to be present at the creation.

  Instead I was present at the demise, although that certainly looked a long way off in 1980. In fact, it looked like we’d be stuck, strategy-wise, in almost suspended animation for my entire career. All the big rule sets seemed carved in concrete. I was reading textbooks that were often a decade old, and that wasn’t a problem, because nothing much had really changed in our understanding of the superpower struggle.

  Then I moved on to graduate studies at Harvard, where I got to learn directly from the giants in the field, like the Russian historian Richard Pipes and the Soviet foreign policy expert Adam Ulam, heavy hitters who advised presidents. Imagine entering an academic discipline in which you knew full well you would never come close to achieving what these masters had accomplished, because, frankly, they were the originals in the field who wrote all the pathbreaking books.