The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett

A former senior military analyst with the U.S.Naval War College offers a thought-provoking analysis of the United States and global security that utilizes recent military history and strategy; economic, political, and cultural factors; and foreign policy and security issues to examine the future of war and peace, as well as America's role in the international community. 100,000 first printing. 100,000 first printing. Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Review This bold and important book strives to be a practical strategy for a Second American Century. In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization this countryÂ's gift to history and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a future worth creating not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is the defining security task of our age. His stunning predictions of a U.S. annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future?this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen From Publishers Weekly Barnett, professor at the U.S. Naval War College, takes a global perspective that integrates political, economic and military elements in a model for the postâ?September 11 world. Barnett argues that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war that has developed over 400 years, since the Thirty Years War. Instead, he divides the world along binary lines. An increasingly expanding Functioning Core of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global systems is juxtaposed to a Non-Integrating Gap, the most likely source of threats to U.S. and international security. The gap incorporates Andean South America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and much of southwest Asia. According to Barnett, these regions are dangerous because they are not yet integrated into globalism's core. Until that process is complete, they will continue to lash out. Barnett calls for a division of the U.S. armed forces into two separate parts. One will be a quick-strike military, focused on suppressing hostile governments and nongovernment entities. The other will be administratively oriented and assume responsibility for facilitating the transition of gap systems into the core. Barnett takes pains to deny that implementing the new policy will establish America either as a global policeman or an imperial power. Instead, he says the policy reflects that the U.S. is the source of, and model for, globalization. We cannot, he argues, abandon our creation without risking chaos. Barnett writes well, and one of the book's most compelling aspects is its description of the negotiating, infighting and backbiting required to get a hearing for unconventional ideas in the national security establishment. Unfortunately, marketing the concepts generates a certain tunnel vision. In particular, Barnett, like his intellectual models Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama, tends to accept the universality of rational-actor models constructed on Western lines. There is little room in Barnett's structures for the apocalyptic religious enthusiasm that has been contemporary terrorism's driving wheel and that to date has been indifferent to economic and political factors. That makes his analytical structure incomplete and more useful as an intellectual exercise than as the guide to policy described in the book's promotional literature. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist It has been generally recognized that the end of the cold war and the emerging threat of international terrorism presented new challenges in planning American diplomatic and military strategy. What has often been lacking is a coherent, integrated vision that assesses the new threats to American interests and provides a comprehensive plan for coping with them. Barnett, a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, presents his operating theory, which sees the principal threat to American security arising from dysfunctional or so-called failed states, which provide fertile ground for the recruitment and sustenance of terrorists. On the other hand, as such past adversaries as Russia and China are integrated into global economic and political systems, they are less threatening. To counter these threats, Barnett suggests some bold, even revolutionary, changes in our military structure and in the dispersion and utilization of our forces. Of course, both his analyses and remedies are open to debate, but Barnett's compelling assertions are worthy of strong consideration and are sure to provoke controversy. Jay Freeman Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved Review His work should be read not only by policy makers and pundits, but by anyone who wants to understand how the world works in the Age of Terror. -Sherri Goodman; Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Thomas Barnett is one of the most thoughtful and original thinkers that this generation of national security analysts has produced. -John Petersen, President, the Arlington Institute Barnett puts the world into context. -Esquire About the Author Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior adviser to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Central Command, Special Operations Command, the Joint Staff and the Joint Forces Command. He formerly served as a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College and as Assistant for Strategic Futures in the OSD's Office of Force Transformation. He is a founding partner of the New Rule Sets Project LLC, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and Esquire, where he is now a contributing editor. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface An Operating Theory of the World WHEN THE COLD WAR : ED, we thought the world had changed. It had-but not in the way we thought. When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began. The United States had spent so much energy during those years trying to prevent the horror of global war that it forgot the dream of global peace. As far as most Pentagon strategists were concerned, America's status as the world's sole military superpower was something to preserve, not something to exploit, and because the future was unknowable, they assumed we needed to hedge against all possibilities, all threats, and all futures. America was better served adopting a wait-and-see strategy, they decided, one that assumed some grand enemy would arise in the distant future. It was better than wasting precious resources trying to manage a messy world in the near term. The grand strategy...was to avoid grand strategies. I know that sounds incredible, because most people assume there are all sorts of master plans being pursued throughout the U.S. Government. But, amazingly, we are still searching for a vision to replace the decades-long containment strategy that America pursued to counter the Soviet threat. Until September 11, 2001, the closest thing the Pentagon had to a comprehensive view of the world was simply to call it chaos and uncertainty, two words that implied the impossibility of capturing a big-picture perspective of the world's potential futures. Since September 11, at least we have an enemy to attach to all this chaos and uncertainty, but that still leaves us describing horrible futures to be prevented, not positive ones to be created. Today the role of the Defense Department in U.S. national security is being radically reshaped by new missions arising in response to a new international security environment. It is tempting to view this radical redefinition of the use of U.S. military power around the world as merely the work of senior officials in the Bush Administration, but that is to confuse the midwife with the miracle of birth. This Administration is only doing what any other administration would eventually have had to do: recast America's national security strategy from its Cold War, balance-of-power mind-set to one that reflects the new strategic environment. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the different one we need to build in order to secure globalization's ultimate goal-the end of war as we know it. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization's tipping point. When we chose to resurrect the global economy following the end of World War II, our ambitions were at first quite limited: we sought to rebuild globalization on only three key pillars-North America, Western Europe, and Japan. After the Cold War moved beyond nuclear brinkmanship to peaceful coexistence, we saw that global economy begin to expand across the 1980s to include the so-called emerging markets of South America and Developing Asia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we had a sense that a new world order actually was in the making, although we lacked both the words and the vision to enunciate what could be meant by that phrase, other than that the East-West divide no longer seemed to matter. Instead of identifying new rule sets in security, we chose to recognize the complete lack of one, and therefore, as regional security issues arose in the post-Cold War era, America responded without any global principles to guide its choices. Sometimes we felt others' pain and responded, sometimes we simply ignored it. America could behave in this fashion because the boom times of the new economy suggested that security issues could take a backseat to the enormous changes being inflicted by the Information Revolution. If we were looking for a new operating theory of the world, surely this was it. Connectivity would trump all, erasing the business cycle, erasing national borders, erasing the very utility of the state in managing a global security order that seemed more virtual than real. What was the great global danger as the new millennium approached? It was a software bug that might bring down the global information grid. What role did the Pentagon play in this first-ever, absolutely worldwide security event-this defining moment of the postindustrial age? Virtually none. So America drifted through the roaring nineties, blissfully unaware that globalization was speeding ahead with no one at the wheel. The Clinton Administration spent its time tending to the emerging financial and technological architecture of the global economy, pushing worldwide connectivity for all it was worth in those heady days, assuming that eventually it would reach even the most disconnected societies. Did we as a nation truly understand the political and security ramifications of encouraging all this connectivity? Could we understand how some people might view this process of cultural assimilation as a mortal threat? As something worth fighting against? Was a clash of civilizations inevitable? Amazingly, the U.S. military engaged in more crisis-response activity around the world in the 1990s than in any previous decade of the Cold War, yet no national vision arose to explain our expanding role. Globalization seemed to be remaking the world, but meanwhile the U.S. military seemed to be doing nothing more than babysitting chronic security situations on the margin. Inside the Pentagon, these crisis responses were exclusively filed under the new rubric military operations other than war, as if to signify their lack of strategic meaning. The Defense Department spent the 1990s ignoring its own workload, preferring to plot out its future transformation for future wars against future opponents. America was not a global cop, but at best a global fireman pointing his hose at whichever blaze seemed most eye-catching at the moment. We were not trying to make the world safe for anything; we just worked to keep these nasty little blazes under control. America was hurtling forward without looking forward. In nautical terms, we were steering by our wake. Yet a pattern did emerge with each American crisis response in the 1990s. These deployments turned out to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the regions of the world that were effectively excluded from globalization's Functioning Core-namely, the Caribbean Rim, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. These regions constitute globalization's ozone hole, or what I call its Non-Integrating Gap, where connectivity remains thin or absent. Simply put, if a country was losing out to globalization or rejecting much of its cultural content flows, there was a far greater chance that the United States would end up sending troops there at some point across the 1990s. But because the Pentagon viewed all these situations as lesser includeds, there was virtually no rebalancing of the U.S. military to reflect the increased load. We knew we needed a greater capacity within the ranks for nation building, peacekeeping, and the like, but instead of beefing up those assets to improve our capacity for managing the world as we found it, the Pentagon spent the nineties buying a far different military-one best suited for a high-tech war against a large, very sophisticated military opponent. In short, our military strategists dreamed of an opponent that would not arise for a war that no longer existed. That dilemma is at the heart of the work that I have been doing since the end of the Cold War. How do we describe this threat environment? How did we fail to heed all the warning signs leading up to 9/11? How do we prepare for future war? Where will those wars be? How might they be prevented? What should America's role be in both war and peace? I believe I have found some answers. Now might be an appropriate time for me to tell you who I am. I grew up-quite literally-as a child of the sixties, somehow maintaining my midwestern optimism in America's future through the dark eras of Vietnam and Watergate. Captivated by the superpower summitry of the early 1970s, I set my sights on a career in international security studies, believing there I would locate the grand strategic choices of our age. Trained as an expert on the Soviets, only to be abandoned by history, I spent the post-Cold War years forging an eclectic career as a national security analyst, splitting my time between the worlds of Washington think tanks and government service. Though I worked primarily for the U.S. military, my research during these years focused on everything but actual warfare. Instead, I found myself instinctively exploring the seam between war and peace, locating it first in U.S. military crisis responses and then America's foreign aid, and finally focusing on its leading edge-the spread of the global economy itself. What I found there in the late 1990s was neither chaos nor uncertainty but the defining conflict of our age-a historical struggle that screamed out for a new American vision of a future worth creating. And so I began a multiyear search for such a grand strategy, one that would capture the governing dynamics of this new era. Working as a senior strategic researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, I first led a long research project on the Year 2000 Problem and its potential for generating global crises-or system perturbations, as I called them. Early in the year 2000, I was approached by senior executives of the Wall Street bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald. They asked me to oversee a unique research partnership between the firm and the college that would later yield a series of high-powered war games involving national security policymakers, Wall Street heavyweights, and academic experts. Our shared goal was to explore how globalization was remaking the global security environment-in other words, the Pentagon's new map. Those war games were conducted atop World Trade Center One; the resulting briefings were offered throughout the Pentagon. When both buildings came under attack on 9/11, my research immediately shifted from grand theory to grand strategy. Within weeks, I found myself elevated to the position of Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation, a new planning element created within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Our task was as ambitious as it was direct: refocus the Pentagon's strategic vision of future war. As the vision guy, my job was to generate and deliver a compelling brief that would mobilize the Defense Department toward generating the future fighting force demanded by the post-9/11 strategic environment. Over the next two years I gave that brief well over a hundred times to several thousand Defense Department officials. Through this intense give-and-take, my material grew far beyond my original inputs to include the insider logic driving all of the major policy decisions promulgated by the department's senior leadership. Over time, senior military officials began citing the brief as a Rosetta stone for the Bush Administration's new national security strategy. But the brief was not a partisan document, and the Defense Department was not the only audience hungry for this strategic vision. Within months, I was fielding requests from the National Security Council, Congress, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security. When Esquire magazine named me one of their best and brightest thinkers in December 2002, I began getting more requests, this time to brief in the private sector, concentrating in the field of finance and information technology. After I then published an article in the March 2003 issue of Esquire, called The Pentagon's New Map, which summarized the strategic thrust of the brief, invitations from both the public and private sectors skyrocketed. The article was republished many times over in Europe and Asia, and e-mailed to generals and diplomats and policymakers worldwide, and when I found myself in London one fall evening speaking in the House of Commons, I knew the material's appeal had vastly outgrown my ability to deliver it on a room-by-room basis. Thanks to this book, I am finally able to deliver the brief to you. I was once asked by a visiting delegation of security officials from Singapore how my vision of future war differs from traditional Pentagon perspectives. My answer was, Pentagon strategists typically view war within the context of war. I view war within the context of everything else. This book will be mostly about the everything else associated with war in the twenty-first century, or that essential connectivity between war and peace that defines globalization's advance. This vision constitutes a seismic shift in how we think of the military's place in American society, in how our military functions in the world, and in how we think of America's relationship to the world. All such contracts are currently being renegotiated, whether we realize it or not. As citizens of this American union, we all need to understand better the stakes at hand, for it is not the danger just ahead that we underestimate, but the opportunity that lies beyond-the opportunity to make globalization truly global. This book will describe that future worth creating. It will explain why America is the linchpin to the entire process, not because of its unparalleled capacity to wage war but because of its unique capacity to export security around the planet. It will provide a way to understand not only what is happening now, but also what will happen in matters of war and peace across this century. It will explain where and why conflicts will arise, and how we can prevent them. It will explain why this new strategy of preemption and this new global war on terrorism must be subordinated to the larger goal of spreading economic globalization around the planet. My purpose here must be clear from the outset: I am proposing a new grand strategy on a par with the Cold War strategy of containment-in effect, its historical successor. I seek to provide a new language, or a new context within which to explain strategic choices that America now faces. By design, it will be a language of promise and hope, not danger and fear. Some will interpret this as nanvetT, others as unbridled ambition. I choose to see it as a moral responsibility-a duty to leave our children a better world. Thanks to 9/11 and the two wars it has so far spawned, Americans now understand that there is no other great power like the United States. Instead, we begin to see the world for what it truly is: divided into societies that are actively integrating themselves into globalization's Functioning Core and those that remain trapped in its Non-Integrating Gap-that is, largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability. In this century, it is disconnectedness that defines danger. Disconnectedness allows bad actors to flourish by keeping entire societies detached from the global community and under their control. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, becomes the defining security task of our age. Just as important, however, is the result that by expanding the connectivity of globalization, we increase peace and prosperity planet-wide. This is the ultimate expression of American optimism, which right now is undoubtedly the rarest and most valuable commodity on earth. The simple fact is, an optimistic belief in the future is quite frightening for a lot of people. If I were to paint a future beyond hope, more would find satisfaction in the description, for it would leave us all more easily off the hook. My business-the business of national security strategy-is the business of fear, but it need not be. My colleagues far too often market that fear to the public, demanding trust in return. By doing so, they extort the public's sense of hope in the future, and this is wrong. It is wrong because America's hope in the future is what has for well over two centuries driven this amazing experiment we call the United States. I believe life consistently improves for humanity over time, but it does so only because individuals, communities, and nations take it upon themselves not only to imagine a future worth creating but actually try to build it. Despite our tumultuous times, I remain wholly optimistic that it can be done. My hope is that this book may help convince you of the same. -Thomas P. M. Barnett January 2004 --from The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett, copyright 2004 Thomas P.M. Barnett, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA), all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.