The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Suddenly it doesn’t feel like two disconnected worlds anymore. Suddenly the shape on my slide jumps out at me as something else—a dividing line between a real world whose functioning we take for granted and an unreal world whose disconnectedness we’d better learn to understand. Suddenly I’m no longer just looking at a map that plots out past operations, but one that outlines future strategies. Suddenly I don’t need the bogeyman of a near-peer competitor to motivate my “defense transformation,” because I realize we simply don’t have the military that we need to deal with all this disconnectedness, all this pain, all these lesser includeds. Suddenly I understand the danger isn’t a who but a where.

  Suddenly my eyes light up . . . because I know I’ve finally found that one slide.

  Fast-forward to March 2002 and I’m walking into the Secretary of Defense’s briefing room. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon and around the table sit all the senior aides to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom are currently overseas, which is why these guys are free to take my brief. At this level, someone like me is lucky to get a fifteen-minute slot to pitch three or four slides. My immediate boss in the Pentagon, Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski, the Secretary’s senior adviser on the future of warfare, has arranged a ninety-minute window.

  I dive in with my presentation, firing off my arguments in rapid succession. When I get to the slide that displays U.S. crisis responses over the 1990s, I offer my definitions of globalization’s Functioning Core and Non-Integrating Gap. I have their attention, all right, but I can see them searching the slide for the answer to the “So what?” question. Then I click my remote and that big red blob dissolves into view, encompassing all the regions they intuitively realize are now in play for the Defense Department in this global war on terrorism. I say, “What you are looking at are the battle lines in this war. This is the expeditionary theater for the U.S. military in the twenty-first century.”

  Suddenly their eyes light up . . . and the Pentagon has a new map.

  To Live And Die In The Gap

  In the March 2003 issue of Esquire, I published a piece on the Core-Gap thesis entitled “The Pentagon’s New Map.” The text was passed around the Pentagon like crazy. One of my colleagues at the War College had it forwarded to him by e-mail roughly a dozen times from friends inside the building, each declaring, “You have got to read this!” I knew immediately what all the e-mails and reprints signified: I had finally created a reproducible strategic concept.

  The moment and the map had met.

  Outside the defense community, the article generated even more heat, and I must admit I was completely unprepared for both the volume and the harshness of the response by readers. My e-mail inbox was overflowing with hate mail, and Esquire itself received a huge flood of letters, the majority of which were harshly negative, mostly because I came out clearly for the war against Iraq. Many of the people who wrote in thought I had generated this grand theory simply to justify the war, when in reality I had developed the Core-Gap thesis long before the Bush Administration started their fullcourt press to depose Saddam Hussein.

  The reason I so easily fit an argument for the war within my “shrink the Gap” strategy wasn’t that I thought Saddam had to go right then, but that I knew he had to go sometime, and the spring of 2003 was as good a time as any.

  Hussein’s regime was a textbook example of everything we need to eliminate in the Gap: a bad leader who stuck around way past his expiration date, a regime that terrorized its population for decades, and a society so decimated from violence that it could take years to find and dig up all the mass graves—much less identify the remains.◈ Of course, there are plenty of people in our political system eager to debate for months on end whether or not Saddam really had weapons of mass destruction, and that is right and proper, but for me, that was never the point. Taking down Saddam forced the United States to take responsibility for the security environment in the Gap, and that’s why I supported the war. By reconnecting Iraq to the world, we are not just rehabilitating a longtime pariah, we are stepping up to the role of Gap Leviathan in a way no other nation in the Core could even dream about.

  Of course, that’s pretty scary business.

  It’s scary to Americans who wonder what that role will entail in blood and treasure. It’s scary to other great powers who wonder if the United States plans to extend its influence purposely and permanently at their expense. It’s scary to all the other nasty regimes inside the Gap, who will be wondering who’s next. Frankly, it’s scary to just about everyone, because no one in the U.S. Government has really made the long-term case about where exactly we intend to go with all these new strategies, new bases, and new willingness to topple regimes preemptively.

  Probably the scariest notion is that no one in the U.S. Government has really thought this whole thing out beyond Iraq, meaning the Bush Administration always had Saddam in its crosshairs and took advantage of events to nail him when it could. If that were the case, then a lot of the arguments I offer in this book might seem easily dismissed. But that would be shortsighted in the extreme. Saddam was always going down, because confrontation with the outside world was just about the only shred of legitimacy his regime had left following its disastrous invasion of Kuwait. Having to play that card for all it was worth meant his rule was always just a step or two away from the inevitable endgame.

  I think the simplest explanation of how this global war on terrorism has come to define the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is that these policymakers are essentially Cold War types who came into power determined to tie up what they felt were the loose ends of that bygone era, or America’s relationships with fellow great powers. By doing so, they hoped to clamp down on the “chaos” of the post-Cold War era. Their biggest mistake was assuming that if they got Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and India in line, then all the “smaller bits” would likewise fall into place, when in reality the rogues of the world aren’t taking advice, much less orders, from anyone nowadays. China does not control Pakistan or North Korea, and Russia’s ability to steer former client states is virtually nonexistent.

  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 woke this administration—and this country—to the new realities of the international security environment, where the lesser includeds of the Cold War have risen to the top of the threat pile. This unprecedented development is less the result of all those rogues and transnational actors getting their hands on dangerous technologies than the great powers simply moving beyond the military competitions of the past and into the shared reality of membership in globalization’s Core. That Core represents, in many ways, the promise of great-power unity many experts identified in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War’s collapse, or what George H. W. Bush dubbed the “new world order.” That order did not jell across the 1990s, primarily because the United States refused to step up and define the essential security rule sets that would cement that unity and direct it toward common purpose. America failed that historical moment primarily out of fear for what it might entail in terms of our management of the global security environment.

  As the go-go nineties unfolded, that choice not to act seemed quite reasonable, because it appeared as though globalization itself would play Leviathan to the security system, forcing strict adherence to basic economic rule sets. If a country misbehaved, then the international marketplace would punish its economy far faster and with greater vehemence than any sanction or diplomatic response could. Meanwhile, all the United States had to do militarily was simply babysit the chronic rogues sitting on the outskirts of the global economy, making sure they did not rock the Core’s boat, as it were.

  What 9/11 proved was that the Core continues to ignore the Gap at its own peril. The Bush Administration decided, quite rightly, that new security rules were in order. But for now, these rules stand simply as America’s new formulation of its inherent right to self-defense. Since we are, by far, the world’s largest military power, those assertions com
e off as quite frightening to the rest of the world, because it remains unclear to what lengths this nation will go in order to secure that defense. The rest of the Core’s great powers are equally interested in achieving the same sort of security for the global economy, but they remain, quite reasonably, skeptical that the Bush Administration’s definition of “victory” in this global war on terrorism will not involve sacrificing the Core’s security for America’s defense.

  Where the Bush Administration’s senior policymakers have failed most egregiously to date is in their inability to move beyond their own, antiquated balance-of-power mentality, which twists both their language and the logic. A global war on terrorism has to promise a happy ending for the planet as a whole, not just for America, or the “West,” or even all the Core’s great powers. The win-win solution here involves both the Core and the Gap, but instead of articulating and advancing such a global agenda, the Bush Administration has consistently lapsed into political gamesmanship of the most venal sort in its interactions with fellow great powers—to wit, the “punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia” formulation following those nations’ resistance to the United States-led war in Iraq. That sort of boneheaded diplomacy has undercut what has otherwise been a bold, even visionary effort by this Administration to forge a new international security rule set, generating fear when genuine respect was clearly in the offing.

  I recognize that fear, because it’s jumped out at me in all the letters and e-mails I continued to receive about my Esquire article even after the war in Iraq concluded. Once the debate simmered down about whether we should go to war, people started asking questions not just about where America is heading with these new rule sets, but what we hope the world might look like when we finally get there. Taken in that light, “shrink the Gap” strikes many readers less like a battle cry and more like an exit strategy. A task once begun feels half done.

  It continues to amaze me how much that simple map outlining the Gap is so provocative to so many different readers. Don’t get me wrong, most of the letters I still get are negative, but for a different reason than before. Instead of just being labeled a warmonger, now I’m often accused of “writing off” a large chunk of the world as “hopeless,” when I intend just the opposite. All the map really does to people is challenge them to explain how they would propose we “shrink the gap,” and that is what makes most readers so uncomfortable with my thesis—it suggests we have some moral responsibility to do better by the Gap. It’s not about revenge and it’s not about making ourselves feel good. It’s about doing the right thing because we can.

  From the voluminous flow of messages I received from around the world, I would surmise that there are three basic responses most people advocate when confronted with the Core-Gap thesis. The first basic response I would locate on the left, or liberal, end of the political spectrum. What these people are most upset about is the notion that the U.S. military is clearly headed toward “perpetual war” all over the Gap, which in their minds will only make things worse there. They advocate a sort of Hippocratic, “do no harm” approach that readily admits that the Core is largely to blame for the Gap’s continuing misery and therefore should rescue those in pain, but do so primarily through state-based foreign aid and private charities. The “do no harm” aspect refers to their strong desire to see America bring its military forces back home and stop all these military interventions overseas, the underlying assumption being that fewer military interventions on our part would actually improve the international security situation by not scaring our allies so.

  The second basic approach is simply to say, “That’s the way things are” and to blame the Gap for its own problems. These responses came more from the right or conservative end of the political spectrum. These writers’ basic point is that the Gap is not America’s problem and that if we make it so, we will eventually end up running some “empire” that will corrupt both our souls and our political system. If the left wants to pray for my soul, the heartiest right-wingers are more interested in kicking my ass. To them, I am clearly a key player in the latest conspiracy of the one-world government that wants to enslave the American people under the tyrannical rule of the United Nations, the Jewish cabal that runs Wall Street, or the Seven Days in May crowd waiting deep in the Pentagon’s basement for the signal to launch their military coup d’état!

  The more mainstream response from the right focuses on the notion that shrinking the Gap is simply too big a problem for the United States to take on—militarily or otherwise. Instead, they bluntly advocate a sort of civilizational apartheid that strikes me as a mirror image of what I believe many violent antiglobalization forces would also prefer—including Osama bin Laden. Rather than fix the Gap, these respondents prefer segregation. The most common way this gets expressed is the idea that if America would only end its dependence on foreign oil, illegal narcotics, and cheap immigrant labor, we could just build a big fence around this nasty neighborhood called the Gap and not have to deal with it anymore. People who advocate this twenty-first-century form of isolationism do not argue so much for pulling our military forces home as positioning them around the Gap as a sort of global border patrol, making sure the bad stuff stays in the Gap so we can continue our good life in the Core—you know, Buy American!

  Then there are those who have written in agreement. These respondents see both a moral culpability on the part of the Core and a moral responsibility on the part of the sole surviving superpower, the United States, to shrink the Gap by all means possible—including the use of force in the worst situations. This moderate middle views the Gap’s plight more pragmatically, citing the history of past colonialism by Core states in terms of both the good and bad legacies, the right and wrong lessons to be drawn, and their underlying optimism that America—always the reluctant imperialist—would do better than those European powers had in centuries past. The only morality these moderates touched upon was the immorality of doing nothing.

  I obviously prefer the middle way too, because the whole utility of defining the Gap lies primarily in its use as a framework to guide our strategic sense of progress or failure. Like the Cold War containment theorists, I believe it is essential that we be honest with ourselves about the world we live in, and to me, that means—first and foremost—that we identify the sources of mass violence in the system and work to progressively shrink those sources. What I like about the Gap is that it reflects an undeniable historical record: when America finally broke free from the Cold War and let the resulting international security environment tell us where we as a nation needed to redirect our “security export,” the Gap was the demand pattern that emerged. There is no denying that problems in the Gap reflect a tremendous legacy of past abuse and unfairness on the part of the Core in general, but “shrinking the Gap” as a strategic vision is not about making amends for the past. Instead, it is a practical strategy for dealing with the present danger that will—on regular occasion, I believe—reach into our good life and cause us much pain if we continue to ignore it. But more than just looking out for ourselves, shrinking the Gap is a strategy that also speaks to a better future for that roughly one-third of humanity that continues to live and die in the Gap.

  To that strategic end, it is important for Americans to understand how life is so dramatically skewed within the Gap. When the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described what living in a world without a Leviathan was like, he said a man’s life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”◈ That description captures the relative differences between life in the Core and the Gap. In the Core, we have our all-encompassing Leviathan that prevents mass conflict from breaking out either between states or within them—known respectively as the principles of collective security and the rule of law. In essence, the Core does not need an external Leviathan because we have internalized the principles. As such, the United States truly plays no significant Leviathan-like role across the Core, nor does it need to, given the fact that all the great powers
that desire the deterrence capability of nuclear weapons already possess them—with the possible exception of Japan.

  But no such Leviathan exists throughout the Gap, except for those times when the United States—with or without the United Nations in tow—musters the necessary will to extend our security rule sets there. So if the Core seems to be living the dream of Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace, then the Gap remains trapped in Hobbes’s far cruder reality.

  Life in the Gap is poor.

  To live in the Gap is to be surrounded by significantly higher rates of poverty. First, there is the generally low level of income. Of the 118 countries listed by the World Bank as “low-income” or “low-middle-income” (below $2,936 per capita annual), 109 are located inside the Gap. Then there are the truly impoverished, or those living on less than $1 per day. According to World Bank statistical surveys over the past two decades, about two-thirds of Core states feature poverty rates of less than 10 percent, while two-thirds of Gap states suffer rates above 10 percent, and one-third feature rates above 30 percent. In numerous African states, the poverty rates rise as high as 60 to 70 percent.◈ Americans simply have no understanding of how crushing that kind of poverty can be. Simply put, we have never been that poor in this country—not even in the Great Depression.

  Life in the Gap is nasty.

  To live in the Gap is to be less free, on average. According to Freedom House’s 2003 survey of states around the world, 48 countries out of a global total of 192 surveyed were rated as “not free.” Of those 48 states, 45 are located within the Gap. The three that are not inside the Gap are the Cold War leftovers China, Belarus, and North Korea. Of the other 60 or so other states located within the Gap, half are considered “free” and half “partly free.” In contrast, of the almost 90 countries considered “free” in the world, close to two-thirds are located within the Core.◈