Find the original at www.suntimes.com/output/roeser/cst-edt-roes05.html

My commentary follows:

Chicago Sun-Times

Book lays out America's challenge in the world

February 5, 2005

BY THOMAS ROESER

I never dreamed that a single book would change my outlook on the United States' role in world affairs, but one has. It's obscure but powerfully influential; easily in rank to that of naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan who, late in the 19th century, laid out the strategy for our expansion into a great world power in a book only the military groupies had read. This one is The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century by Thomas Barnett (G. T. Putnam's Sons, 2004), easily the most influential book of our time.

It's obvious that George W. Bush is an engrossed disciple. The president's inaugural brimmed with natural law and Aquinas, but without the Barnett ballast it left me cold.

Obviously, Barnett occupies front-rank in Bush's thinking. Since the Cold War ended, we've been trying to come up with a unified theory of the world and a military strategy to fit, which Barnett has done.

Barnett, former professor and senior strategist at the U.S. Naval War College (as was Mahan), wrote an Esquire magazine article, which led to the book. It was a takeoff from the famous power-point briefings he gave the Pentagon in the early days of the Bush administration.

He divides the world into three parts, the first a functioning grouping of states that have been integrated into the world economy. This includes North America, much of South America, the European Union, Russia, Japan and Asia's emerging economies (China and India), Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, a total of 4 billion people. This is what he calls the Core.

In contrast, what he calls the Gap will be the source of much of the world's problems in the 21st century: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia and much of Southeast Asia. The Gap's total population is 2 billion.

The third group consists of the ''seam states'' along the Gap's boundaries: Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. We and other Core nations have our work cut out to firewall these seams. China patrols its northern border against terrorists; Russia is concerned with the Caucasus.

Much of our problem since the end of the Cold War has had to do with the Gap. Bush was correct to move on Iraq because ''it is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world . . . and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence,'' Barnett writes.

He adds: ''Show me areas where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions . . . media flows and collective security, and I'll show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living and more deaths by suicide than by murder. . . . But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and, most important, the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists''óthe Gap.

Barnett points out that we have successfully exported security to the old Core, but Core nations must encourage more private investment to shrink the Gap.

''Think of it,'' he writes. ''Global war is not in the offing'' because our nuclear stockpile guards against it. Supposed war with China is not in the cards but we must supply more security from the public sector and more private investment to the Gap.

''Africa . . . will need far more aid from the Core than has been offered in the past. . . . This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military but that is the wrong way to look at it for what we're dealing with are problems of success, not failure. It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us'' to keep the peace.

Great book, great read. Read it and tell me what you think!

COMMENTARY: Hard not to like. Clearly the guy feels empowered by the book, and that's exactly what we were going for. Mark Warren and I wanted non-expert readers to find the book very accessible, to the point of feeling like they had been read into the program big-time, because with that feeling comes a sense of awareness that's powerful. People feel like they look at the world differently, with more confidence about America's role in history, and that makes for a better citizen. Or at least it beats the hell out of scaring people from every page. Plus, making it accessible means it's translatable. This guy could render the entire book fairly simply and directly, using a minimum of jargon (really none at all besides my new lexicon of Core-Gap).

And yes, I do enjoy the comparison to Mahan, especially since my requested departure from the same college he once headed.