We should not be in the business of building up firewalls between the Core’s good life and the Gap’s sorry existence, offering the latter merely our charity as a lifeline. To deny anyone in the Gap access to the same bright future we may presume as our birthright is to engage in the same sort of exclusionary ideology that dictators of all stripes have long employed to enslave their subjects. In the end, our sin of omitting the Gap from a future worth creating will be as reprehensible as any committed by the forces of disconnectedness we now engage in this global war on terrorism. Turning a cheek is one thing, but turning a blind eye is quite another.
The good news is that as globalization extends its reach, it forces us to engage distant threats not out of mindless aggression but out of an expanding definition of the self we seek to preserve. For much of our relatively isolated history, that self was merely these United States. After World War II, it expanded to a “free world” that was, in fact, nothing more than a closed-club West consisting of North America, Western Europe, Japan, and a few choice others. Now, years removed from that long Cold War, the self has grown to the Core as a whole, if only we have the confidence and courage to define yesterday’s achievements as tomorrow’s building blocks and not retreat into the past’s self-negating focus on the balance among powers within that shared community. To move beyond that myopic strategic vision, one that requires an enemy to be the mirror image of ourselves, is to realize that victory in this war on terrorism requires nothing less than shrinking the Gap out of existence—to make the self all-inclusive.
I no longer believe that America can be made safe at the expense of others. In this increasingly interconnected world, our vulnerability is not defined by the depth of our connectedness with the outside world but by the sheer existence of regions that remain off-grid, beyond the pale, and unconnected to our shared fate. For it is only within such disconnectedness that the “logic” of 9/11’s destructiveness can be accessed: If 1 cannot enjoy your good life, then neither will you. To bring these regions online with globalization’s expanding rule sets is to engage in the only strategic transaction worth pursuing in the twenty-first century—offering the Gap freedom in exchange for the Core’s security.
America’s task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization’s bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap.◈ This is a boundable problem with a foreseeable finish line. Moreover, if properly reconfigured, our military currently possesses all the skill sets needed to play both Leviathan across the Gap and “system administrator” to the Core’s ever-deepening security community. It is not a question of “paying any price” but rather being far more explicit—both with ourselves and our allies—about what America seeks to achieve through the application of military force in this global war on terrorism. In short, we need to make clear to all—but especially to ourselves—that the American way of war serves a purpose far higher than merely assuring this country’s security or imposing its justice upon others. To achieve this lofty aim requires nothing less than recasting the very structure of the U.S. military, a subject to which I now turn.
You’re Ruining My Military!
My entire career, I have heard this complaint from Pentagon audiences: “What you are proposing will ruin this military!” I heard it when I contended we should mentor the Russian military. I heard it when I argued we should seek to manage the post-Cold War era, not just sit back and wait for the near-peer competitor. And now I hear it when I say the U.S. military should play “system administrator,” or rule-set enforcer, for globalization’s advance. What critics fear is that strategists like me will—if we have our way—drag the military away from its “warfighting” core values and into a larger, messier context where the commanders will lose control to outsiders, where funding for high-technology combat systems will lag, and where the warrior spirit will be lost. They are right to level this charge, and yet I will plead Not Guilty. Yes, I do wish to change this military dramatically, but I likewise believe the time has come to admit that we need two militaries: one to fight wars and one to wage peace.
Today, America basically outspends the rest of the world on defense. Add up the entire world’s state spending on defense and America accounts for roughly half. Moreover, when you realize that America’s military is built to go overseas while the rest of the world’s armies are really built to stay at home, our advantage in what is known as “power projection,” or the ability to send our forces a great distance to wage war, is simply overwhelming. You want a military that only goes in with overwhelming force? You got it, 24/7/365. It is not a guideline to which we must adhere. It is not a standard for which we must constantly strive. It simply defines the international security environment in which we live. No enemy can stop us, and frankly, none of our allies can really project power on their own—unless we help them. We are the world’s Leviathan. We decide under what conditions wars will be fought between states—except when we can be trumped by nuclear weapons.
When that condition exists, then our Leviathan rule set defers to the larger rule set known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Fortunately, the only countries able to launch such wars vis-à-vis the United States all belong to globalization’s Functioning Core (United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India), leaving only the “proliferators,” otherwise known as Gap states that desire or actually possess nuclear weapons, as significant state sources of danger for the system. Not a direct threat to the United States, mind you, but only in the sense that any use of nuclear weapons on their part would represent a serious breach of that long-stable rule set.
The question this country has struggled with since the end of the Cold War has been, What should we do with all this unprecedented power? Some have argued we must refrain from using it, lest we incite other great powers to rise up against us. But we have used this power with great frequency, and no state or collection of states shows any sign of seeking to counter our advantage. The only signs of adjustment we see around the world are states simply accepting our overwhelming power by seeking to specialize in niche military capabilities that can be married with our own in coalitions (e.g., Norway, Poland). The rest is just smoke and mirrors, plus the Chinese obsessing over Taiwan. Simply put, we are the world’s Leviathan, and that status will not change.
Others have argued that America should use its force overseas only when our national interests are directly challenged or put at risk. Of course, that argument is typically coded to mean that our “interests” should be narrowly defined, lest we find ourselves managing an empire not of our choosing. But drawing a firm line between what America cares about enough to wage war and what the rest of the world cares about enough to wage war is hard, because wars between states are disappearing, leaving only conflicts within states or bad behavior by regimes as the main criterion for waging war. These internal situations are simultaneously everyone’s problem and no one’s problem, which makes them perfect situations for the United Nations. But because the UN does not wage war but only keeps the peace, it too defers to the Leviathan America as initial rule-set enforcer for the planet as a whole.
So to declare the United States has no “interest” in some egregious rule-set transgression merely because it occurs within a state and not between them is to say that America’s interest in extending the Core’s security rule set is not universal—in effect, that globalization need not be made global. Such arguments typically come off as Scrooge-like: “We shall always have the poor, and if they must die by their own hand, then let them be speedy about it and reduce the surplus population!” America will never be that uncaring simply because we are a nation built on universal ideals of freedom and equality, not limited to definitions of ethnic identity or “sacred lands.” As the world’s first multinational union, we are globalization’s wellspring, its inspiration. We can no more disown it than disown ourselves. Our interests are global because globalization must be global.
We all should ask, What gives
America the right to render judgments of right and wrong, or good versus rogue? If America takes on the worst offenders in order to extend the Core’s rule sets, then why not take on all offenders? Why not just admit we run an empire?
What gives America the right is the fact that we are globalization’s godfather, its source code, it original model. We restarted globalization after World War II and we have made it largely in our image. After fighting in two world wars, this was our solution to great-power war, and it has worked amazingly well. But we cannot abandon our creation now that we have already picked all the low-hanging fruit and only the toughest cases, such as terrorism, remain. This gift of global connectivity generating peace is one we must keep on giving, because to let the process stall is to risk its demise, to possibly lose all for which we have sacrificed so much in the past. The Cold War’s peace dividend is not a resource to be consumed by those lucky enough to sit currently at the Core’s table, but a benefit that must be made universal.
Why do we do it? Because we can and because it is good, by any rational estimation. And because if we do not do it, nobody else can or will, and nothing good can follow from such inaction.
America stands at the cusp of a new age in warfare. Big wars are out, small wars are in. Focusing on the big threat in the environment is out, managing the threat environment as a whole is in. A do-it-all, go-it-alone force is out, and specialized niche forces provided by allies are in. Does this mean the Pentagon eventually gets out of the big war business and devolves into a military social worker for the Gap? Absolutely not, but it does mean that the U.S. military is logically headed toward a bifurcation into two different forces: one that specializes in high-tech, big-violence war, and one that specializes in relatively low-tech security generation and routine crisis response.
The need for such a splitting of the force is highlighted in the near term by our experiences in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, but as the global war on terrorism unfolds, this institutional momentum toward bifurcating the U.S. military into a Leviathan force and a System Administrator force will only pick up speed. The System Administrator force will demonstrate our willingness to follow through on the interventions started by the Leviathan force, while simultaneously offering broader coalition opportunities to allied militaries that simply cannot keep pace with the transformation of our combat capabilities.
So in the end, it is not about “ruining” this military but returning it to its original roots. The Cold War military as we knew it no longer exists. From the early 1990s onward it has progressively bifurcated into two very different militaries—a process the Pentagon has had the devil of a time managing. All I am proposing is that we admit to ourselves that this splitting of the force into two militaries is no accident, but a logical response to the changing strategic environment of the past decade and a half.
The Pentagon needs to accept this growing bifurcation of the force, because we need both kinds of military if we are going to continue fulfilling America’s essential transaction with the world—that of exporting security to the Gap while simultaneously maintaining the Core’s collective security. We need both the capacity for deterrence and preemption provided by the Leviathan force, and the postwar security-generation capacity of the System Administrator force. In many ways, this unfolding bifurcation is nothing more than a back-to-the-future outcome: for the vast bulk of our national history we had a System Administrator force in the Department of the Navy and a Leviathan wannabe in the Department of War. We forced those two historically distinct roles into one department when we created the Department of Defense in 1947, primarily in anticipation of the hair-trigger nuclear standoff that subsequently developed between the United States and the Soviet Union. With that era now dead and buried, our military establishment naturally reverts to what it once was—a force able to wage both war and peace at the same time. Having and employing both types of force is how the Pentagon will do its part in shrinking the Gap across the twenty-first century.
The Essential Transaction
For about a year after 9/11, the master PowerPoint brief that I delivered throughout Washington described the Core-Gap divide and the rise of System Perturbations, and then made the argument about crafting a new ordering principle for the Defense Department. I always thought it was a fairly optimistic brief. I mean, here I was telling people about the Gap being the problem, that the entire world was not full of chaos. But as it turned out, I was simply scaring the hell out of people, and I could tell so by the questions they asked afterward.
Finally, after one brief to a very large, mostly military crowd at the Naval War College, a retired admiral named Tom Weschler stood up and said, “You’ve explained this Gap and you explained this new form of crisis. I’m on board. I want to shrink your Gap and get better at dealing with your System Perturbations. My question is, What do we get in return for doing these difficult things?” The admiral was asking for a happy ending, and my brief did not have one. It described suffering and crisis and asked for changes, but what I was not giving my audiences was something to be hopeful about in exchange for completing these grand historical tasks. Everybody needs that happy ending, that sense of hope in the future, otherwise you are simply trying to sell people diminished expectations—not a great motivator.
Let me tell you what we get when we do these difficult things. What America gets in return is the end of war as we know it. It gets a global economy with nobody left on the outside, noses pressed to the glass. Most important, it gets a definition of what constitutes the finish line in this global war on terrorism. In sum, shrinking the Gap gets us the final piece to the puzzle that is global peace. The end of the Cold War solved the threat of global conflict, and America’s continued willingness to play Leviathan has effectively ended state-on-state war. What stands between us and the goal of making globalization truly global is the threats posed by the forces of disconnectedness—the bad individual actors that plague the Gap. Defeat them by denying them the Gap as their own and the Core wins this war on terrorism, plain and simple.
The admiral’s question marked a turning point in my work, sending me back to the mapping of globalization’s flows that I did in the New Rule Sets Project with Cantor Fitzgerald. Once I reacquainted myself with the material, the much-needed happy ending immediately revealed itself: if the Core gets better at dealing with this new form of system-level crisis, it should be able to keep the four great flows (people, energy, investments, and security) in reasonable balance. Keeping those flows in balance is what allows globalization to continue its advance.
But it is not a matter of keeping those spigots wide open. Besides strengthening its ability to deal with System Perturbations, the Core must engage in a certain amount of firewalling, or preventing the worst sort of flows into, out of, and throughout the Gap: terrorism, pandemics, and the illegal movement of drugs, people, small arms, money, and intellectual property.◈ Because if we do not adequately preserve the Core, it is likely to seek too high barriers between itself and the Gap, and that will disrupt the flows that truly need to occur if the Gap is to be integrated over time. So it is a careful balancing act.
Beyond those two basic goals, which frankly speak more to the Core’s happiness than the Gap’s, there is the all-important and far more active task of shrinking the Gap. Globalization’s frontier cannot be allowed to solidify into a permanent divide between the connected and the disconnected. It must be constantly advanced, with clear victories regularly registering in the popular imagination. How the United States facilitates that advance is primarily through its private sector, or direct investment that moves the means of production from Core to Gap.
But treasure alone is not enough to shrink the Gap; some blood will be involved too. The Core’s investment funds will not flow into war zones, failed states, and terrorist havens, so the Pentagon’s essential task is to export security into those national and regional deficit situations that currently hold up economic integration. Saddam Hussein’s regime was such
a black hole, as was Charles Taylor’s in Liberia. North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is probably the worst of the bunch. The drug lords in Colombia are a security sinkhole. So is basically any repressive leader inside the Gap who simply refuses to leave power, like Castro in Cuba, Chavez in Venezuela, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Qaddafi in Libya—to name just a few “big men.” They should all go, and none of them should be succeeded by the idiot son, brother, nephew, or cousin. After four decades, isn’t there anybody in all of Cuba worthy enough to rule besides Fidel and his brother Raul? These dictators should go not just so that their own nations can be liberated from their repressive grasp, but also so that neighboring states can escape from the negative investment climate their continued presence generates.
Historical data demonstrate that foreign direct investment correlates highly with trade flows, geographic proximity, and overall economic openness, so being stuck next to relatively closed countries suffering internal conflict and/or political repression is a sure way to reduce your attractiveness to foreign investors.◈ Jordan will blossom as a target for foreign investment once Iraq is a connected, thriving society. The same will be true for Ghana in a calmer West Africa, or Uganda in a less violent Central Africa. Tunisia will certainly do better without Qaddafi next door, Botswana without Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Lebanon without Assad in Syria, and any of the Central Asian “stans” without all those leaders who seem to have trouble giving up their posts when their terms end. Even South Korea, an emerging market magnet for FDI, suffers from its proximity to its evil twin.◈ The Gap does not lack for economies trying to globalize, but many suffer guilt by association with their region’s security sinkholes.
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