Thomas P.M. Barnett

Chirol (of Coming Anarchy)emailed me to point out a post on Sun Bin, What if the Gap consumes the Core? (Incidentally, Sun Bin also linked Tom yesterday.)

Sun Bin begins (linking to Joseph Wang):

Joseph Wang believes there may be tremendous lack of imagination for us to not visualizing the scenario of gap consuming the core in the Barnett theory.

First of all, without being defensive, of course Tom can imagine or visualize the Gap consuming the Core. However, 1. He does not think it is likely, given the economic trends he details, and 2. He chooses not to focus on the pessimistic. He leaves that to guys like Peters and Kaplan.

Tom recognizes the dangers we face, saying we need to firewall the Core off from the Gap's worst exports.

Sun Bin quotes from Wang's post:

The one thing that bin-Laden understands that unfortunately most people don't is the central nature of the economic front on the war on terror. Put simply, if we get to 2100, and most of the world is living in decent middle class conditions, then bin-Laden will lose. If we get to 2100, and most of the world isn't living in decent middle class condition, then bin-Laden or someone like him will win.

I think Tom would generally agree with this statement, though even in the case of a 'loss' when we get to 2100, the war still wouldn't be over.

As to the nightmare scenarios Wang mentions, Tom does not normally try to account for sheer global catastrophe in his theory. If:

enough Americans and Chinese are stupid enough to go to war against each other;
there is a global epidemic;
Saudi oil fields are destroyed;
something goes horribly wrong, like one of Bill Joy's bugbears (genetics, nanotech, or robots) gets loose;
a meteor hits the earth;

then all bet are off. If one (or all!) of those things happen, yes, we're probably in really big trouble. The future worth creating will be set back quite a bit. At that point, you can put Tom's books back on the shelf and dust off your favorite apocalypse.

Not to say that we simply sit back and wait for those things to happen. In fact, Tom's Blueprint for Action, especially, gives all sorts of prescriptions for creating a stronger globalization that will militate against the conditions that give rise to disasters like these (except for the meteor ;-).

This is where Wang ends up, with a few strategies to 'rage against the dying of the light' that line up with Tom's ideas.

Back to Sun Bin's post. He argues the seriousness of this possibility of the Gap consuming the Core with histories of cultural collapse. I read Tom's hope as being that we can rise above these cycles because of all the ways the world is different today, but I'll leave the specifics to him, should he care to address them.

Entropy is a sure bet. But I'm still with Tom, that the optimistic futurists usually beat the pessimistic futurists. For all their grousing, the world has not turned out like Malthus or Orwell or Marx feared.

I emailed this post to Tom, and here are his comments:

1) Never bet against human--much less American--ingenuity and perseverance in response to calamity. There is the "ugly American," but the "unimaginative" or "lazy" American is an Occidentalist myth. I don't eschew fantastically dark scenarios to keep my vision elegant. I simply believe that bottom-up and horizontally networked societies like ours will trump top-down elite-driven vertically -chained political and ideological movements/societies. We simply underestimate our own resiliency. My first great glimpse of this came in my Y2K work. Nothing I see since tells me otherwise--just the opposite.
2) the smart warriors find a way to make their opponents feel like their losing is actually winning. Integration forces a certain loss of identity, so to do it successfully, those integrated need to feel like they're "conquering" or changing the host more than vice versa. Done well, the line between illusion and reality is meaningless. So yeah, sure, the "Gap will consume the Core," just like Latin America will "consume" North America through the Hispanicization of America. Big deal! I don't care who's perceived to be on top, because the "sex" is the same.

Give me scarier bogey-men! I grew up in the Cold War and frankly find all these "new" ones rather weak. The "buy-out" or co-optation gets cheaper with each passing decade.