14. Pakistan There is always the real danger of their having the bomb and using it out of weakness in conflict with India (very close call with December 13, 2001, New Delhi bombing). • Out of fear that Pakistan may fall to radical Muslims, we end up backing hard-line military types we don’t really trust. • Clearly infested with Al Qaeda. • Was on its way to being declared a rogue state by U.S. until September 11 forced us to cooperate again. Simply put, Pakistan doesn’t seem to control much of its own territory.
15. North Korea Marching toward WMD. • Bizarre recent behavior of Pyongyang (admitting kidnappings, breaking promises on nukes, shipping weapons to places we disapprove of and getting caught, signing agreements with Japan that seem to signal new era, talking up new economic zone next to China) suggests it is intent (like some mental patient) on provoking crises. • We live in fear of Kim’s Götterdämmerung scenario (he is nuts). • Population deteriorating—how much more can they stand? • After Iraq, may be next.
16. Indonesia Usual fears about breakup and “world’s largest Muslim population.” • Casualty of Asian economic crisis (really got wiped out). • Hot spot for terror networks, as we have discovered.
New/integrating members of Core I worry may be lost in coming years:
17. China Running lots of races against itself in terms of reducing the unprofitable state-run enterprises while not triggering too much unemployment, plus dealing with all that growth in energy demand and accompanying pollution, plus coming pension crisis as population ages. • New generation of leaders looks suspiciously like unimaginative technocrats—big question if they are up to task. • If none of those macro pressures trigger internal instability, there is always the fear that the Communist party won’t go quietly into the night in terms of allowing more political freedoms and that at some point, economic freedom won’t be enough for the masses. Right now the CCP is very corrupt and mostly a parasite on the country, but it still calls the big shots in Beijing. • Army seems to be getting more disassociated from society and reality, focusing ever more myopically on countering U.S. threat to their ability to threaten Taiwan, which remains the one flash point that could matter. • And then there’s AIDS.
18. Russia Putin has long way to go in his dictatorship of the law; the mafia and robber barons still have too much power. • Chechnya and the near-abroad in general will drag Moscow into violence, but it will be kept within the federation by and large. • U.S. moving into Central Asia is a testy thing—a relationship that can sour if not handled just right. Russia has so many internal problems (financial weakness, environmental damage, et cetera) and depends too much on energy exports to feel safe (does bringing Iraq back online after invasion kill their golden goose?). • And then there’s AIDS.
19. India First, there’s always the danger of nuking it out with Pakistan. • Short of that, Kashmir pulls them into conflict with Pak, and that involves U.S. now in way it never did before due to war on terror. • India is microcosm of globalization: the high tech, the massive poverty, the islands of development, the tensions between cultures/civilizations/religions/et cetera. It is too big to succeed, and too big to let fail. • Wants to be big responsible military player in region, wants to be strong friend of U.S., and also wants desperately to catch up with China in development (the self-imposed pressure to succeed is enormous). • And then there’s AIDS.
Disconnectedness Defines Danger
Problem areas requiring American attention (outlined) are, in the author’s analysis, called the Gap. Shrinking the Gap is possible only by stopping the ability of terrorist networks to access the Core via the “seam states” that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries. In this war on terrorism, the U.S. will place a special emphasis on cooperation with these states. What the classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia.
Mapping America’s War On Terrorism
An Aggressive New Strategy
The maps on these pages show, all United States military responses to global crises from 1990 to 2002. Notice that a pattern emerges. Any time American troops show up—be it combat, a battle group pulling up off the coast as a reminder, or a peacekeeping mission—it tends to be in a place that is relatively disconnected from the world; where globalization hasn’t taken root because of a repressive regime, abject poverty, or the lack of a robust legal system. It’s these places that incubate global terrorism. Draw a line around these military engagements and you’ve got what I call the Non-Integrating Gap. Everything else is the Functioning Core. The goal of this new strategy is simple: Shrink the Gap. Don’t contain it, shrink it.—THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
The West
The East
Esquire, June 2004
Mr. President, here’s how to make sense of our Iraq strategy
Thomas P.M. Barnett
One of the architects of the Pentagon’s New Map of the world offers a most important guide to a) why the boys will never be coming home and b) why this is the first step toward a world without war.
Esquire, June 2004 v141 i6 p148(6)
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 © Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Is this any way to run a global war on terrorism?
The new conventional wisdom is that the warmongering neocons of the Bush administration have hijacked U. S. foreign policy and sent the world down the pathway of perpetual war. Instead of dissecting the rather hysterical strain of most of that analysis, let me tell you what this feedback should really tell us about the world we now live in. And as opaque as the administration has been in signaling its values and true motivations, I will try in this piece to explain what Iraq should mean to us, why all the pain we have encountered there is the price we must pay to ensure a peaceful century; and why this is the birthing process of a future worth creating.
There is no doubt that when the Bush administration decided to lay a “big bang” upon the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein and committing our nation to reconnecting a brutalized, isolated Iraqi society to the world outside, it proceeded with virtually no public or international debate about the scope of this grand historical task. I, however, see a clear link between 9/11 and President Bush’s declared intention of “transforming” the Middle East.
In the March 2003 issue of this magazine, I published an article called “The Pentagon’s New Map” [available at Esquire.com/barnett], which was about work I had spent years doing at the Naval War College and the Pentagon to figure out the true threat environment for the United States in a post-cold-war world. The answer? Most of the world is peaceable and functioning. I call that the Core, and it is basically the parts of the world, including China, where globalization has taken root to some degree. The rest of the world, which had never been considered by the Pentagon to be a direct threat, much less the gravest threat we face, is made up of the countries that remain disconnected, either because of abject poverty or political or cultural repression: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. This I call the Gap. The primary goal of the foreign policy of the United States should be, in my view, to shrink the Gap. Nothing about our Iraq experience has changed this view.
The only way America can truly achieve strategic security in the age of globalization is by destroying disconnectedness. We fight fire with fire. Al Qaeda, whose true grievances lie wholly within the Persian Gulf, tried to destroy the Core’s connectedness on 9/11 by triggering what I call a system perturbation that would throw our rules into flux. Its hope was to shock America and the West into abandoning the Gulf region first militarily, then politically, and finally economically. Al Qaeda hoped to detoxify the region’s societies through disconnectedness.
But the president decided correctly to fight back by trying to destroy disconnectedness in the Gulf region. We seek to do unto al Qaeda as it did unto us: trigger a system perturbation that will
send all the region’s rule sets into flux. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the global globalizing world—from our rule sets, our norms, and all the ties that bind the Core together in mutually assured dependence.
Disconnecting the great disconnector from the Gulf’s security scene is only the beginning of our effort, because now Iraq becomes the great battlefield for the soul of the whole region. That second victory will be far more difficult to achieve. Our efforts to integrate Iraq into a wider world will pit all the forces of disconnectedness in the region against us. Therefore we must enlist the aid of all the forces of connectedness across the Core—not just their troops but their investment flows and their commercial networks.
America needs to demonstrate to the Middle East that there is such a thing as a future worth creating there, not just a past worth re-creating, which is all the bin Ladens will ever offer Muslim populations—a retreat from today’s diminished expectations. If America cannot muster the will—not to mention the Core’s aid—to win this struggle in Iraq, we will send a clear signal to the region that there is no future in the Core for any of these states, save Israel.
History’s clock is already ticking on that great task. As the world progressively decarbonizes its energy profile, moving away from oil and toward hydrogen obtained from natural gas, the Middle East’s security deficit will become a cross that not even the United States will long be willing to bear. The bin Ladens of that region know this and thus will act with increasing desperation to engineer our abandonment of the region. Like Vladimir Lenin a century earlier, bin Laden dreams of breaking off a large chunk of humanity into a separate rule set sphere, where our rules hold no sway, where our money finds no purchase, and where our polluting cultural exports can be effectively repelled. Bin Laden’s offer is the offer of all would-be dictators: Just leave these people to me and I will trouble you no further.
By taking down Saddam Hussein and turning Iraq into a magnet for every jihadist with a one-way ticket to paradise, America has really thrown down the gauntlet in the Middle East; it has finally begun exporting security to that part of the world for real. In the past, we always had ulterior motives: to keep the Soviets out, to keep the oil flowing, to keep Israel safe. But reconnecting Iraq to the world is so much bigger than any of those goals. It is about creating a future worth living for a billion Muslims we could just as easily consign to the past.
Powell Doctrine, R.I.P.
WHAT DOES THIS NEW APPROACH MEAN FOR THIS NATION and the world over the long run? Let me be very clear about this: The boys are never coming home. America is not leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the world. It’s that simple. No exit means no exit strategy.
One of the worst strategic concepts the Pentagon ever came up with was General Colin Powell’s notion that America should never intervene militarily overseas unless and until an exit strategy is clearly defined. The legacy of that dictum has poisoned the U. S. military’s strategic planning ever since, generating the force we have today—perfect for drive-by regime changes and understaffed for everything else.
Fortunately, the Powell doctrine has died with Operation Iraqi Freedom, and with it dies America’s decades-long tendency to blow off all the suffering and instability that plagues the Gap, or what we used to call the Third World. What is so amazingly courageous about what the Bush administration has done in trying to generate a “big bang” throughout the Middle East is that it has committed our nation to shrinking a major portion of the Gap in one fell swoop. By doing so, I believe this administration has forced America to finally come through on promises repeatedly offered during the cold war but never delivered upon. The irony, of course, is that the administration is guilty of such grotesque dissembling over its rationale for the war that it is unable to fully take credit for this historic achievement. And its dissembling has also aroused the passions of the empire crowd.
The concept of an “American empire” is very chic right now in literary and academic circles, and since the Bush administration never seems to offer a sufficiently comprehensive answer to the question weighing on most Americans’ minds (“Where is this all leading?”), many of our best and brightest have connected the relevant dots and declared Washington the de facto Rome of a new imperial age.
This is all nonsense and bad history to boot. Empires involve enforcing maximal rule sets, in which the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war or peace and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. Our goal must be to extend the Core’s security rule set into the Gap and, by doing so, shrink the Gap progressively over time. This is not about extending America’s rule but about extending the genuine freedom that collective security provides. All this talk about empire mistakenly seeks to impose a nineteenth-century simplicity upon a twenty-first-century complexity. In short, this era’s version of globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. To deny that achievement is to discount the vast improvement America brought to the system administration of globalization following World War II compared with earlier, deeply flawed efforts by Europe’s monarchies—Britain included.
There is no doubt that many governments in the Core still view the world system as a balance of powers, and so any rise in U. S. influence or presence in the Middle East is seen as a loss of their influence or presence there. Too many of these “great powers” are led by small minds who prefer America’s failures to the Core’s expansion, because they perceive their national interests to be enhanced by the former and diminished by the latter. They prefer the Gap’s continued suffering to their own loss of prestige, and they should be ashamed of their selfishness.
But America is far from alone in this great historical quest. As we realign our global military-basing structure to better reflect our continuing role as military Leviathan throughout the Gap, we leave behind old friends in Western Europe and embrace new ones in Eastern Europe. We increasingly trust East Asia to police itself while we export security to West Asia. We even go so far as to imagine and work toward future bases sprinkled throughout the African continent, a region long abandoned by the West to suffer decades of endemic conflict and disease.
The New Strategic Paradigm:
Disconnectedness Defines Danger, or,
Kiss Those Dictators Goodbye
SO, WHY ALL THE DISSEMBLING ON THE PART OF OUR political leadership? Well, the truth is, we are just coming to terms with a new grand strategy for the United States, the historical successor to containment, and our government doesn’t yet have the words to explain this vision to the world. So we come off as dishonest, which is a terrible mistake, because this vision describes a future worth creating: making globalization truly global. This is something to be proud of, not something to run from.
The defense community spent the entire post-cold-war period scanning the strategic horizon, desperately searching for the fabled “near-peer competitor” that would someday replace our late beloved foe, the Soviet Union. About eight years ago, most defense strategists fell in love with China, convincing themselves that here was an enemy worth plotting against. Since then, the great bureaucratic push to “transform” the U. S. military into the high-tech warrior force of tomorrow has focused almost exclusively on that conflict model—basically China’s invasion of Taiwan in 2020.
It was a beautiful dream, one easily sold to a Congress whose only interest in national-security planning is “Will you build it in my district?” It also corresponded to the Bush administration’s view of the world prior to 9/11, which focused exclusively on great powers while expressing disdain for the Clinton administration’s feeble attempts at nation-building in Third World wastelands. Frankly, it made everyone in Washington happy, because casting China as the future enemy provided the national-security establishment with a familiar villain: big, bad, and communist.
Naturally, the
defense and intelligence communities reshaped themselves for this “new” challenge. We hired China experts by the barrelful and scripted all our war games to feature a large, unnamed Asian land power with an unhealthy interest in a small island nation off its coast. You want to know why we don’t have a clue about what goes on inside the Gap? Because our military strategists spent a decade dreaming of an opponent that would not arise, for a war that no longer existed. We’re the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the streetlamp instead of near his car a block away, because “the light’s better over here.”
The new rule set here is a simple one: We need to refocus all of our war-planning and intelligence systems from the Core to the Gap. This doesn’t mean we still don’t maintain a hedge against possible Chinese mischief. It just means a new strategic paradigm rules the roost: Disconnectedness defines danger. You want to locate the real danger in the system? Focus on those countries or regions most disconnected from the global economy, not those desperately working to integrate themselves with the outside world—like China.
What the intelligence failures on Iraq and al Qaeda should tell the Bush administration (and any that follow) is that it’s time to get explicit with the American people and the world about how there are simply two very different security rule sets in the world today: one that corresponds to the stable and overwhelmingly peaceful Core, and another that corresponds to the violence-ridden and increasingly unstable Gap. What scares most people about the Iraq war is the sense that the Bush administration lied to them in order to whip up sufficient popular support for taking down Saddam Hussein. The White House comes off like the cop who yells out, “He’s got a gun” and then airs out the “suspect” with a barrage of shots, only to discover later that he was just pulling out his wallet.
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