The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Clearly, both of these new rule sets put these four crucial flows at risk. The Patriot Act could have a Core-wide demonstration effect, influencing how nations not only deal with potential terrorists in their midst but also how they manage permanent immigration, temporary visas for educational and work purposes, and tourism in general. So far, human connectivity between the Core and Gap seems to have suffered quite a bit, as traffic on all levels has slowed or been redirected since 9/11.◈ Some of this flow reduction is expected, as new rule sets are put in place and adjusted, but to the extent that these flows become permanently depressed or diverted, globalization will remain out of balance.

  The new U.S. strategy of preemption puts at risk the flows of energy, security, and investments. In the eyes of many around the world, America may already be guilty of attempting to export too much security to the Gap too fast in the course of toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and undertaking the long-term occupation of what can accurately be described as the “Yugoslavia of the Middle East”—a crossroads of civilizations. Clearly, few informed observers around the world—not to mention here at home—bought into the extreme optimism expressed by some Bush Administration officials about a one-year-to-eighteen-month rebuilding/occupation process.◈ In cancer terms, this was not going to be a mere lumpectomy and then send the patient on her way. This is a full-body transformation of Iraqi society, which cannot occur in a regional vacuum, hence the Bush Administration’s honest embrace of the goal of transforming the Middle East as a whole.◈ We may have gone in for a penny, but we have assumed the full pound, and that is only right, because how we transform the Middle East will reshape the world’s energy market in coming years and decades.

  How America’s too vigorous export of security puts investment flows at risk is a far more complex tale, logically stretched out over a far longer time frame. In essence, Core states prefer to invest in other Core economies, because they see a shared vision of a future in that process. Foreign states have bought U.S. debt over the years—both public- and private-sector—not merely because America is a good financial risk, but because they preferred to be associated with both America’s future and the world that future portends. So America enjoyed all the privileges of owning the world’s preferred reserve currency, meaning it has never been hard to sell our debt around the world because other countries love holding dollars, which has become Globalization Ill’s equivalent of Globalization II’s gold standard.

  But the dollar will not remain “as good as gold” forever, if only because the European Union’s euro will invariably rise up as a reserve currency “near-peer competitor.” Over the longer run, an East Asian equivalent of the euro must inevitably arise, probably a combination of China’s yuan, Japan’s yen, and South Korea’s won.◈ In short, each pillar of the Core will market its own reserve currency and, by doing so, sell its own vision of a global future worth creating. While the United States will clearly remain the world’s sole military superpower, economically speaking, the playing field will be multipolar, giving the system as a whole the opportunity to “vote” with their reserve currency choices on competing future images of globalization’s advance and the rule sets (political, economic, social, and security) that define that advance. America can certainly go it alone militarily, but it cannot go it alone financially. The share of total investment in the U.S. economy that is financed by foreign sources now reaches close to 20 percent, while in the 1970s that share rarely rose above 5 percent.◈ In the end, that money will do most of the talking, because shrinking the Gap will largely be a private-sector affair, driven by foreign direct investment flows—not U.S. tanks.

  The rule-set reset triggered by the system perturbation known as 9/11 has unleashed profound forces of change that continue to reshape the strategic security environment. In that regard, 9/11 serves as a historical template for a new definition of international crisis: that which temporarily destabilizes but permanently alters the functioning of the global economy. This new definition of war-versus-peace speaks not to megatonnage, or Armageddon-like casualty totals, or even the conquest of one state by another. It does not measure destruction but disruption, and its ultimate impact is described not by body counts but by rule counts—as in the new rule sets that emerge in its wake.

  When America dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in the summer of 1945, it ushered in a new era of warfare. At the time, and for a long time after, we believed this new form of war constituted a real threat to global stability, when, as we later discovered, its emergence ultimately resulted in nothing less than the end of great-power war. From the vantage point of 1945, however, it was clear to America’s “wise men” that an entirely new set of rules was needed to guide U.S. national security planning in the decades ahead. These rules were built around a new definition of international crisis, one most closely realized in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. But that definition of international crisis has outlived its usefulness, as has the ordering principle it was founded upon—the model of great-power war.

  Today, America and the world stand at a crossroads similar to the one we faced following World War II. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have provided us all a glimpse of the new form of international crisis that will define our age. As such, I believe it is absolutely essential that this country lead the global war on terrorism, because I fear what will happen to our world if the forces of disconnectedness are allowed to prevail—to perturb the system at will. But as we wage this war, we must keep in mind that not all compromises are worth making, not all risks are worth taking, and not all futures are worth creating. Globalization will remain out of balance so long as America herself remains out of balance, and America will remain out of balance until we achieve new understanding of what constitutes real crisis in our age.

  5 – The New Ordering Principle

  In 1982, A fledgling movie director named Godfrey Reggio released an art film that explored humanity’s increasingly complex and lasting impact on the planet through the extensive use of time-lapse photography. Its title was Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi Indian word meaning “life out of balance.” The trick of time-lapse photography has always greatly intrigued this futurist, because I like the notion of being able to fast-forward history’s unfolding. Globalization as a world-historical process often strikes a lot of people—and societies—as a sort of fast-forward, or time-lapse, experience: that which was is so rapidly replaced by that which will be. The concept of “life out of balance” is a natural response to that sense of life sped up—rule sets out of whack or missing altogether. We tend to associate that feeling with disruptions in our personal lives, or whenever fate has pulled us out of normal time into crisis.

  My wife and I had our own koyaanisqatsi moment back in the summer of 1994, when I discovered a lump protruding through the abdominal wall of our two-year-old firstborn, Emily. I distinctly remember the sensation of first touching this lump, which swam around her lower abdomen whenever she shifted position, like the fin of a shark circling for a kill: we had unwittingly stumbled into a war zone.

  A mere four hours after I received the shocking call from Emily’s pediatrician telling us her ultrasound had revealed something very serious, Vonne and I were sitting in a Georgetown University Hospital conference room with the chief of pediatric oncology and the head pediatric surgeon. It was a beautiful, cloudless summer day—July 8, 1994. The doctors and the attending social worker were amazingly blunt in their assessment: the cancer, known as Wilms’ tumor, had apparently spread from her kidney to both lungs. We were told that Emily had a decent chance of surviving, “But you will all pay a steep price.”

  Two weeks later we arrived home after two major surgeries, five days of chemo, and Emily’s first radiation session. As we went to bed that night, I received the final kicker to our fortnight of surprises: Vonne told me she was pregnant. She had waited until we got out of the hospital to dare take the test. Koyaanisqatsi.

  The steep price the medical professionals had predicted included bankruptcy
and divorce. The historical odds said this medical war would destroy our finances and send Vonne and me down such different pathways that we would inevitably find each other unrecognizable. The only way we could survive, according to our kindly social worker, was to forge a new balance in our lives. We needed to decide what was essential, and what was superfluous. We needed a new definition of both normalcy and crisis. We needed nothing less than a new ordering principle for our marriage as a whole, one that would guide our planning for a family worth preserving.

  As I later wrote of Emily, “she is the girl that lived.”◈ She tangled with her Voldemort while just a toddler and, like Harry Potter, she walked away with a nasty scar. Kevin, our second-born, kept us centered throughout the year-and-a-half struggle. He was our little Buddha, the serene center of our otherwise tumultuous universe.

  We never did go bankrupt, although we came close, and Vonne and I did not divorce, although those were some of the worst years of our marriage. By the time things had settled down four years postdiagnosis, we had changed friends, cars, hairstyles, religions, towns, jobs, and our entire outlook on life. Some of these changes were permanent, others not, but all occurred for a reason—our life needed a new balance. We had babies to keep, bathwater to toss. We had new rules to enforce, others to revamp. We had met a parent’s worst nightmare, and embraced it for all it was worth.

  To me, Emily’s cancer was an amazing gift—as twisted and cruel as that sounds. It taught us many valuable lessons and reordered our lives for the better. It showed us what it means to want a future so badly that you will do whatever is necessary to achieve it, even as that effort kills many past dreams of a life well led. Most important, it gave us a confidence to make difficult decisions regarding which connections in our lives must be maintained at all costs, and which could be severed with acceptable loss.

  When the terrorists struck on 9/11, the world achieved koyaanisqatsi, and many things were thrown out of balance: our citizens’ sense of individual security, our nation’s definition of acceptable risk, and our world’s acceptance of American military power. All must be reordered, rebalanced, and redefined, because—in many ways—our country now faces the same threats Vonne and I once embraced. We can bankrupt our nation fiscally and morally if we are not careful in the battles we choose and the connectivity we sacrifice. Amid the avalanche of new rules we rush to apply, we can easily leave globalization permanently divided—Core against Gap, Old Core against New Core, America against the world. We need a new ordering principle for U.S. national security, one that reassures our friends as much as it deters our collective enemies.

  Osama bin Laden’s message on 9/11 was essentially this: You will never be able to live with us in your midst. We will attack you from within. We will never give you peace. Your only choice is to remove us from your world by removing yourself from ours. The only alternative to this outcome is that one of us must die.

  That is absolutely right—one of us must die. Either the Core assimilates the Gap, or the Gap divides the Core. Either the forces of connectivity prevail or the dictators of disconnectedness thrive. This cancer either spreads or we exterminate it. There is no exiting the Gap; there is only shrinking the Gap. Achieving the latter means all the bin Ladens must be defeated, no matter their ideologies, their hatreds, or their threats. For if we fail in this struggle, globalization will never become truly global, and thus will remain painfully out of balance—koyaanisqatsi.

  Overtaken By Events

  Before September 11, 2001, I spent as much time as anyone in the Pentagon describing the likely aftermath of a 9/11-like event, although I spent virtually no time wondering what might actually serve as a trigger, because I do not believe such “vertical scenarios” can be predicted with any accuracy. Frankly, that is the best anyone can do in this business, and those who tell you otherwise are either trying to sell you something or they are just plain lying.

  As I watched the two towers of the World Trade Center fall, I, like the rest of the world, was gripped by shock and horror. But as the days passed and the aftermath became clearer, I became excited in the perverse way that only a security scenario planner can—I realized I had covered this ground before.

  When I arrived at the Naval War College in the summer of 1998, my timing was just about perfect, because that same month Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski took over as president of the college. Admiral Cebrowski was well on his way to becoming a legendary figure within the military—the widely acknowledged “father of network-centric warfare.” In many ways, Cebrowski stands as the General Curtis LeMay of his age, the flag officer whose vision of future warfare remade not only his own service but the entire defense establishment. Needless to say, I was looking forward to both meeting this great man and working for him.

  Then, to my severe disappointment, I was handed my first assignment. The task came directly from Cebrowski: a study of the security issues surrounding the upcoming Year 2000 computer problem, eventually known to all as Y2K. I was flabbergasted. It seemed like the dumbest idea I had ever come across. It was just a software glitch, for crying out loud! It wasn’t going to have anything to do with international security! I complained about the assignment to my dean, but I was told unceremoniously that as the professor with the least seniority, I was perfect for the job. I knew no one else on the faculty who wanted to lead the study, because it just seemed so “out there,” and Cebrowski was both famous and infamous for being “out there.”

  What Art was really trying to do with this study was push the military to think seriously about what constituted a system crisis in the age of globalization. He saw Y2K as a heuristic device, or a teaching tool, that would allow us to educate the Pentagon about the changing definitions of crisis and instability in the Information Age. Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine—in advance—what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age. What was so neat about the study, which I directed, was that it soon became an exploration of so much more than just Y2K-the-software-glitch. In fact, we spent almost no time discussing that aspect of it with all the experts we convened for a series of workshops in the study, which was called “The Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project.”◈

  Instead of focusing on the trigger of the software failures, we assumed those failures would happen and instead asked, If Y2K turns out to be a global disaster, what will this process of disruption and associated responses (economic, political, social, and security) look and feel like? Remember that a lot of people were generating Y2K scenarios during the countdown, and most of these tended to the extreme, primarily because they were written by techies who know the vulnerabilities of all that connectivity and who, by the nature of their personalities, tend to have a very dim view of humans in general. In short, you had a lot of Web heads predicting a worldwide panic quickly becoming The End of the World As We Know It. Most of these people were fun to talk to, some even to meet in person, but I never liked any of them getting too close to me physically, and giving out any personal information was strictly verboten!

  Anyway, what we did in the workshop series was first bring together a host of network experts from as many sectors of the economy as possible to discuss the range of possible disruptions. I also added to this first group a number of social-behavioral experts who could help us understand popular perceptions and reactions. From their inputs, I generated a six-phase scenario that explored the buildup toward January 1, 2000, then the onset of the crisis, and then its unfolding aftermath to the point where it effectively ended or was superseded by some follow-on crisis. Then we had a second workshop to bring together an international group of experts to discuss how the world would react to the worst-case scenario as framed, which was followed by a third workshop with U.S. national security officials in Washington, D.C., where we ran them through the scenario and had them brainstorm likely U.S. military re
sponses around the planet. The last workshop with Cantor Fitzgerald involved getting input from financial players about the likely reactions of global markets to the scenario as laid out. Our goal in these workshops was simple: On New Year’s Day 2000, there would be no reason for anyone in the U.S. Government to say, “I had no idea it could be like this!”

  Now, I knew there was a lot of paranoia among certain segments of the population regarding Y2K, the end of the Second Millennium, and so on, so I sought permission from the Naval War College to post all my workshops’ materials on a publicly accessible Web site. I could see some journalist writing a shocking expose about how the Pentagon was using these War College workshops to secretly plan martial law in response to the social chaos that would erupt on New Year’s Day when all the lights went out and the computers crashed, so I was hoping to be as transparent as possible to allay any such fears. I was told no. Being a good Catholic, I decided to circumvent that rule set and seek forgiveness later, and posted the entire project’s analysis on my own personal Web site at Geocities. Many thousands of hits later, I had achieved fairly high visibility in the online Y2K debate, but because all this Naval War College material was being posted at Geocities and not on the college’s official server, wild rumors began circulating on the Internet that the site was really just a front for a CIA-supplied cover story designed to lull the public into believing that the Pentagon was really sharing information with them when in fact the secret plans for martial law were well under way! Naturally, I was considered to be nothing more than a figment of the CIA’s imagination.