To live in the Gap is also to suffer bad political leadership, which comes in two categories: leaders who cannot last long enough in power and those who insist on sticking around for too long. The first type of leadership engenders political instability, while the second tends to result in authoritarianism.
Using the CIA Factbook and looking back over the past thirty years, I can find almost a hundred countries that change their leaders either too frequently or not frequently enough. Of those 94 countries falling outside that happy medium, 87 are located within the Gap—or over 90 percent. When we look at the Gap as a whole, 30 percent of the countries there experience turnover less than every four years (on average), while almost 60 percent suffer leaders who tend to overstay their welcome (defined as staying longer than six years, on average). Only one out of every ten states in the Gap appears to feature a stable rotation of leaders. In contrast, nine out of every ten states in the Core fall within the happy medium of peaceful leadership rotation every four to six years.◈ What does that tell us about the Gap? It tells us that the Gap simply lacks the robust political rule sets that define the Core’s overall stability.
Life in the Gap is short.
Of the 50 states with the highest life expectancy rates (76 to 83 years), four-fifths lie within the Core. However, if we are to look at the 50 states with the lowest expectancy rates (37 to 57 years), all but one (South Africa) lie within the Gap.◈ On average, the Gap enjoys a life expectancy that is more than a dozen years shorter than in the Core. Imagine what gets lost in that shorter life span—the experience, the wisdom, the time to build and sustain institutions, the time spent raising the next generation. Then imagine the implications of having a population so skewed toward youth.
To live in the Gap is to be surrounded by a younger population. All of the countries in the world featuring a median age of less than twenty years old fall within the Gap (spread across Africa, Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia), while all of the countries featuring a median age above thirty-five years old are located in the Core.◈ What does having a younger population get you? On average, younger populations are more violent and prone to crime. It is a general rule of societies that the vast majority of crime is committed by young males under the age of thirty.◈ Societies with “youth bulges,” defined simply as one generation’s proportion of youth significantly surpassing that of the preceding generation’s, are also more prone to political instability. Right now the Middle East as a whole is experiencing a youth bulge, while Africa will remain in the throes of one for another couple of decades, because of continued high birth rates combined with deaths from AIDS.◈ The problems associated with youth bulges ensue as that “bulge” grows up, because the political system is stressed in terms of increased crime rates, greater demands for education and training, and finally requiring more jobs from the economy. If the economy cannot grow to meet such demands or if the political system cannot similarly adjust, then you have a problem, because—after all—revolutionaries and terrorists tend to be young men angry at the system, not the middle-aged wondering what happened to their youth.
Life in the Gap is brutal.
Hobbes said the worst thing about life absent the Leviathan was “continual fear, and danger of violent death,” both of which occur in spades inside the Gap. No matter what list of “current conflicts” you want to work from (e.g., University of Maryland, Federation of American Scientists, Global Security.org), you’ll come up with a number somewhere short of three dozen, with 80 to 90 percent of them falling squarely inside the Gap.◈ These wars will generate refugees, most of whom simply move into the next country over to escape the violence. That means most of the people fleeing these wars in the Gap never actually leave the Gap. Based on data from the U.S. Refugee Committee’s 2002 global survey, Gap countries currently account for 96 percent of the people forced to leave their country to escape warfare or similar deprivations, and 93 percent of all people similarly displaced internally within their home countries. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, an average of twelve million refugees seek formal asylum in another country each year. Virtually all originate in the Gap, but only one out of every four actually makes it into the Core.◈
Those who typically have a harder time escaping conflict zones are children, especially those orphaned by war or lured into combat units. Their lives are by far the most Hobbesian. Imagine a guerrilla war like the one America faced in Vietnam, but instead of sending nineteen-year-olds, we drafted kids as young as twelve. In the recent long-running war in the Congo, at least ten separate armed groups operating across the country were actively recruiting child soldiers.◈ This phenomenon is not restricted to Africa but is seen throughout the Gap, as entire generations of a nation’s youth are forever brutalized by a host of long-running rebellions or civil wars.
Naturally, the worst conflicts eventually draw in some sort of international response in the form of peacekeeping operations. Of the sixteen current United Nations peacekeeping missions, all fall inside the Gap.◈ Even when such long-running wars finally end, the shadow of conflict can extend for decades in the form of unexploded land mines. Of the eighteen countries identified by the U.S. State Department as suffering “severe impact” from unexploded bombs, all lie within the Gap.◈
Of course, not all the violence found inside the Gap stems from war. Of the three dozen groups officially designated by the U.S. State Department as “terrorist groups,” 31 operate primarily inside the Gap.◈ Likewise, 19 of the 23 states certified by the State Department as “major drug producers” are found inside the Gap.◈ When all these main sources of Gap violence (rebels, smugglers, terrorists) begin to network with one another, therein lie some of the most difficult challenges in America’s global war on terrorism.
Life in the Gap is solitary.
Not surprisingly, given all these difficulties, states in the Gap tend to be far less connected, in a simple communications sense, than states in the Core. A good measure of communications connectivity today is the number of Internet hosts found in a country. No surprise here: the more developed your economy becomes, the more connected your people become. So the most connected societies tend to be found in North America and Europe, while the least connected societies are found in the Middle East and Africa. But that rule of thumb hides some irregularities that better define the challenges ahead in shrinking the Gap. As technology expert John R. Harris notes, there are a host of “reluctantly connected economies” around the world. By “reluctantly connected,” Harris means that these societies are less connected than they should be in comparison with other states with equal levels of development (measured as per capita income). In effect, this category is made up of those more traditional Gap societies that are wary of having to deal with all the content flow associated with Internet connectivity. Not surprisingly, 20 of Harris’s 21 “reluctantly connected” states are found within the Gap—China being the exception.◈ As I noted earlier, China’s strategy here is one of selective censorship, although most indications are that the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to filter out the “bad” are failing.
I could go on and on with similar data, but I can almost hear some readers exclaim, “Enough, already, you had me at Leviathan!”
The point of that bombardment was merely to draw a clear line between the Gap’s Hobbesian reality and the Core’s Kantian peace. So how do we get the Gap to move from Hobbes to Kant? More Locke, as in John Locke, considered the philosophical father of the legal rule sets that define modern democracy. If you want to move the Gap from Hobbes to Kant, you need to focus on extending rule sets from the Core to the Gap. Remember the old Chicago Cubs double play of Tinker to Evers to Chance? Just think of the Gap’s progression as Hobbes to Locke to Kant, or from conflict to rule sets to peace—understanding, as I said earlier, that the sequence of rule-set adoption comes in a variety of flavors.
In my mind, the only way America and its close allies will ever come to grips with the cha
llenges of shrinking the Gap is to admit to one another that globalization’s Core-Gap division severs the international security environment into two distinctly different rule sets. Once we accept that underlying reality, we can help states trapped in the Gap begin their rule-driven migration into the Core.
Different Worlds, Different Rule Sets
Experts say that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing concepts in your head at the same time, to understand the truth of each while realizing their differences. I think the Core-Gap thesis challenges most people in the same way, forcing them to move beyond the usual pigeonholing arguments that define the foreign policy debates in this country today. Recognizing the Core-Gap divide does not automatically place you in one political camp or the other, and since the strategies required to move states from the Gap to the Core will invariably be multifaceted (e.g., military interventions, foreign aid, private-sector investments), arguments over how to shrink the Gap are equally difficult to classify.
My wife worries that I am secretly becoming a Republican, and judging by all the names I got called thanks to the Esquire piece, it seems like a legitimate concern. I guess what I find most amusing about all the labeling and epithets is the assumption that only a “hard-hearted conservative” would advocate war, when the country just experienced eight years of Democratic rule only to see our forces deployed around the world like never before. In many ways, the Bush Administration is doing the very same thing the Clinton Administration did: waiting until America gets bonked on the head and then bonking back commensurately. Clinton suffers through the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and strikes back with cruise missile attacks against al Qaeda training sites in Afghanistan and Sudan. Bush suffers through the far greater 9/11 attack and strikes back—commensurately—with invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Clinton did not call his strikes “preemptive,” but they were. Bush calls his wars “preemptive,” and the world worries about America creating an entirely new—seemingly unilateral—rule set for global security. That fear is understandable but overblown, in my judgment.
It is neither a Republican nor a Democrat approach when America strikes back at the Gap, because when the Gap strikes out at America, it has little to do with the policies of one administration or another. It has to do with America being intimately identified with a historical process that some within the Gap fear will destroy the world they know and love—and they are right to fear it. Globalization will eventually remake the entire Gap into an image we in the Core recognize far more than those currently trapped there. America has supported the advance of globalization for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations, whether we realized it or not. Up until recently, we had a Cold War to occupy our strategic attention span, and so we paid no mind to that globalization process, but now we are finally—thanks to 9/11—seeing the world for what it truly is: divided between the connected Core and the Non-Integrating Gap.
Dealing with that strategic environment will not be a Republican task or a Democrat task, but an American task that stretches across decades. The Clinton Administration skillfully pushed the U.S. political system to realize our system-administrator role when it comes to economic globalization. By that I mean America took the lead in enunciating the overarching economic rule sets that guided globalization’s advance across the 1990s, otherwise known as the Washington Consensus. Did that consensus last forever? Hardly, but that just points out that “system administration” is a nonstop job. Fine-tuning the rule sets never ends.
As I’ve said earlier, I believe the Bush Administration has, by and large, come to the conclusion that America needs to step up and play a similar system-administrator role in the realm of international security. In other words, it has come to realize that globalization’s security rule sets need to catch up with its economic rule sets. Where the Bush Administration has failed to date is (1) in not correctly identifying the Gap in all its splendid disconnectedness, and instead letting the problem set be narrowly—and wrongly—described by the Pentagon as an “arc of instability” that many of the Administration’s critics rightfully interpret as code for Middle Eastern oil producers; (2) in not being explicit with both the American people and our allies about the need for different security rule sets for the Core and the Gap; and (3) in not providing the public and our allies with a vision—or a story with a happy ending—that puts all these security rule-set changes into a larger context.
In short, the Bush Administration needs to level with the American public as to where this whole thing—this global war on terrorism and the preemption strategy—is really going. And if these policymakers themselves are unclear as to these strategies’ ultimate course heading, then they’d better let the rest of the citizenry in on the inside debates that apparently continue to rage between Colin Powell’s State Department and Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department. Because until the Bush Administration describes that future worth creating in terms ordinary people and the rest of the world can understand, we will continue to lose support at home and abroad for the great task that lies ahead. That would be a real shame, because—in many ways—the Bush Administration has made all the right moves security-wise, it just does not seem to know how to explain those moves in a way that does not scare the hell out of everyone.
I have a little trick I like to use when I give my grand-strategy brief on the future of globalization: when I get to this point in my talk, and start discussing what I think are the different security rule sets operating in the Core versus the Gap, I will ask the audience to yell out their worst fears about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy so far. Someone yells out, “We’re a global cop!” And I reply, “. . . in the Gap!” Another blurts, “We’re always so unilateral!” And I retort, “. . . in the Gap!” A third offers grimly, “We start wars preemptively!” And I follow with, “. . . in the Gap!” I know it sounds like an infomercial gimmick, but frankly, it works.
All the new security rule sets that the Bush Administration seems to be pushing do appear to many observers as reversals of long-held and cherished principles of U.S. foreign policy across the Cold War. These policies constituted a “winning hand” that led the West through some very dangerous and dark days. Many Americans and many allies are simply flabbergasted that now, with the Cold War in the bag, our government would ever consider going back on these bedrock principles of collective security, deterrence, and multilateralism.
The answer is, America is not going back on any of these ideals. They all still apply in spades—inside the Core. Inside the Core we have achieved something awfully close to Kant’s perpetual peace—not just inside the Old Core but likewise inside the New Core of Russia, India, and China. If we simply have the vision and the courage to understand that amazing historical achievement, and not resort to fear-driven needs to locate some near-peer competitor to guide our strategic planning, then we will likewise realize that this rock-solid security rule set simply does not extend into the Gap—for now. Understanding that the Gap remains a largely Hobbesian world should induce neither dismay at globalization’s limits nor panic over the security tasks that lie ahead. Rather, we simply need to roll up our sleeves, much as we did following the Second World War, and set about building the security rule sets that will guide the historical process of shrinking the Gap.
Harry Truman set in motion an enunciation of security rule sets that guided our Cold War strategy for decades, but those rules had no discernible political pedigree other than that singular American ability to be both pragmatic and optimistic at the same time. George W. Bush is making a similar push today, and if his can-do spirit strikes many critics as cockeyed and simplistic, all I will say in response is that morale matters when the road ahead is both long and challenging.◈ We will need many presidents—Democrat and Republican—over the coming decades who will keep our political system, our public, and the rest of the Core focused on the prize we seek: making globalization truly global by shrinking the Gap.
That’s when it clicked for me: I realized why so many Americans might be freaked by Bush’s “new” policy, when in reality, the strategy of preemption is not new, nor will it be universally applied. Mutually Assured Destruction, deterrence, and collective security inside the Core are not altered one whit by the Bush Administration’s new strategy of preemption, because it simply does not apply to the Core—only to the Gap. Inside the Core we have a host of official mechanisms, both bilateral and multilateral, to deal with any security issues that arise. September 11 did not change any of that rule set, nor does the global war on terrorism. When the Bush Administration talks preemption, it is talking about actors and regimes in the Gap that we must prudently assume might be undeterrable, simply because they do not live in the same world or adhere to the same security rule sets that we do. Our goal in using the preemption strategy is not to destroy the Core’s security rule set but to extend it.
Now, that might sound scarier than it really is. Think about how police are permitted to use deadly force within our society: much of the time they do so preemptively. Frankly, that’s the ideal. We want the bad guys stopped—if necessary, dead in their tracks—before they can do someone great harm. That is an amazingly difficult responsibility we impart to our police, and our confidence in doing so is driven primarily by our faith in the legal system—or internal-security rule set—that we have erected around this preemptive use of deadly force. We assume that whenever a cop steps over the line and ends up killing someone preemptively without probable or just cause, that officer will be taken off the streets and if need be severely punished for the mistake. But the fact remains, Americans have no problem with the preemptive use of deadly force to uphold the internal-security rule set we call “the law.”
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