Director's Commentary on the Book Proposal of Great Powers
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 3:47AM
Thomas P.M. Barnett

I've edited this post. Now, Tom's commentary comes first, and the book proposal comes second.

I thought it would be fun to revisit the book proposal after running through all the changes that happened with the Table of Contents. It's like, on those second discs, when the original screenwriter/story person and first producer recall shopping around the idea and you realize how much the movie changed from their original ideas--inevitable.  Now, you have to remember that this is the summer of 2007, so about 18 months ago. I had written in May a book proposal for "How to Become a Grand Strategist" and had that proposal gently rebuffed by Neil Nyren, who said, I'll do the book with you if that's what you really want, but it's not the book I'm looking for right now from you at this point in your career. Hearing that Neil actually considered me to have a career as a book author was enough for me to change my mind.

So I retooled in June and wrote this in July. Putnam thereupon offered me about half of the advance I got for both of the first two books, primarily in response to the far lighter sales of the second one, Blueprint, which we all now agree wasn't handled in the best way (I've lamented that storyline enough). I knew I was going to get a smaller advance and this one was a bit lower than I was hoping for, but you have to understand: it's really an advance, meaning they're pre-paying you and not paying you in addition to your royalties. The bigger the advance, the longer it takes for you to "earn out," or payback the advance and start getting royalties--something that most books never do. So a more modest advance means you'll actually have a chance of seeing royalty money sooner. In this case, we have some riders in the contract that advance those payments if I sell a certain amount in a certain timeframe, meaning if this book does as well as PNM, my advance will be similar in total sum. I kind of like that contract better, to tell the truth. Being incentivized is the way to go.

First off, with this proposal, you notice how relatively short it is. The PNM proposal ran like 50 pages and was about 25k, if I remember. BFA was only 10 pages, because it was an obvious sequel to PNM. This one fell in between: 19 pages and 6200 words. No need to intro myself or Mark or spell out my commitment to selling (beyond the perfunctory). Rather, just sell the content and the timing.

The original title, The Coming Realignment: Reconnecting America's Grand Strategy to a World Transforming was totally mine. The sentiment remains, obviously, but the words changed. Neil came at me first with Great Powers and then later with the subtitle. We went back and forth a lot, but Neil got his way on both. The clincher for me? Warren kept saying it was right for Tom Barnett to be putting out a book right now with that title--it just sounded right.

Right off in the opening I give a series of mis-alignments that were/are unfolding. I later pirated that sequence for a column entitled, "To rejoin world, U.S. must rejoin conversation." The first three words in the column are "Sen. Barack Obama." I had just spend an hour with his top Senate foreign policy guy, Mark Lippert, in his office right around the time he was getting ready to announce, so I was clearly intrigued. It's interesting to note that he's the only candidate I mention in the proposal.

I later used the mis-aligning dynamics described here as a slide in my Pop!Tech presentation on the book (pre-writing) that I delivered later that October. That slide and its seven part model translated right into the book in terms of the seven sections repeated in each of the alignment chapters. I don't use the slide or the formula in the brief (too time consuming, plus the brief is a screenplay, not the novel).

Here it is:


prop slide.jpg

 

Click here to see a pdf of all seven slides.

You note the use of "propose" and "impose," which I later use in my telling of the two arcs of American history (19th C and 20th C).  There's also the bit from my lawn guy about killing weeds v. growing grass. That makes it into the book too.

I make it clear about the overall theme linking U.S. history and the current age: frontier integration. You also see me basically write out my "history of globalization as a series of successful replications"
slide, which I still use.

Then, when I get to describing the structure of the book, note that the original idea was three parts. I only dreamed up the new starting part (imagined Part One: The Process Observed) when I actually got close--a year later--to the writing. That's when I felt that immense urge to pre-write a lot. Other than adding that first part, the other three parts pretty much entered into the later writing phase "as is," which the difference being that I cut down the realignments from six to five. In getting the six, I was using the old "6 lenses to view the world" that I had been employing since the mid-1990s. They were later confirmed by Thomas Friedman in his own rendition in Lexus and the Olive Tree.  Neither of us were being particularly original, as these were/are the same six lenses that most global consultancies use: economics, politics, social-demographic, technology, environment and military/security--pretty standard stuff. I just felt like I could and should collapse the social-dem and environmental stuff together, and recast the technology in terms of networks. Collapsing is common in my writing: I start with all these categories and then as I start writing, I find that they sneak "forward."

Note in the description of the Foreword that I want a regurgitation of my lexicon and themes up front. This urge generated the original Chapter 3 (then moved up to 2) that Mark and I submitted to Neil in June 2008: the "20 Questions" chapter. All the way back then I was feeling the itch.

Then into the three-part structure:

 

 

Pretty cool to reread with the perspective of today. As always, I do feel like I delivered what I promised, no matter the zig-zags in the process.

 

 

 

Book Proposal
for:

 

The Coming Realignment:

Reconnecting America's Grand Strategy to a World Transforming

 

Neil Nyren

 

G.P. Putnam's Sons



Dear Neil:

 

 

I am writing to propose a work of non-fiction, entitled The Coming Realignment, which will answer the questions on every American's mind right now:  Where do we go now in this "global war on terror" that's so far generated more insecurity than lasting stability in its wake?  More immediately, how does our nation rejoin the world after the seemingly endless disasters of the second Bush administration?   And does American leadership really make a difference anymore in a world being so clearly transformed by globalization's rapid advance--epitomized by China's rise? 

Poll after poll around the world suggests that America's standing has rarely been lower, and historians seem unanimous on only the following point:  our next president will face a more intimidating global agenda than any American leader has since Truman--meaning George Bush simply didn't measure up.  No wonder our nation seems so out of sorts.  In Bush's myopic focus on Iraq, it feels like the rest of the world is passing us by: 

Meanwhile, al Qaeda's top leadership once again controls a state-within-a-state (Pakistan's Northwest Territories), American casualties in Iraq are higher than ever (despite the surge), and Americans are more jittery and divided than ever (while Chinese are more confident and ambitious than ever).  The upshot?  America polls somewhere just north of Sudan's janjaweed, while China's "charm offensive" comes off like a clinic on how to effectively employ "soft power." 

How could we let ourselves get so disconnected from the rest of the world at a point in history when everything--and everyone--seems to be growing more interconnected with each passing day?  In a global economy increasingly modeled on our own pioneering political and economic union, how did we let ourselves become so isolated from the very global trends we've spent decades of blood and treasure to enable?  How is it that we're so uncomfortable in the very world we've created? 

As I argued in my first two books, 9/11 should have done more than just snap us out of our "go-go 90s" reverie; it was supposed to bring us back to a world in profound pain and tumult from globalization's jarring expansion across the post-Cold War period.  During Bush's first term, he seemed to make all the bold moves we craved in our post-9/11 fright, narrowly earning him a second term despite the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War.  New rules were proposed in abundance, and America was clearly on the offensive.  But what didn't happen in Bush's second term has effectively carved his successor's agenda in stone:  having adopted our own new rule set for ordering this brave new world, we didn't bother to get anyone else's agreement on the blueprint. 

So now comes the great realignment. 

The world was speeding along several, nosebleed-inducing trajectories prior to 9/11, any one of which could have dominated the Bush agenda if 9/11 hadn't come along:  skyrocketing global trade and financial transactions, China's stunning rise, the destabilizing emergence of new nuclear powers, the global immigration flood, the mounting consensus on global climate change, the compelling agenda of African development, Russia's inevitable resurgence, higher oil prices due to persistently rising global demand, and so on and so on.  Everything changed on 9/11 because 9/11 changed everything in America, and so our altered trajectory altered the planet's pathway by extension.  But as I've noted many times, globalization comes with rules--not a ruler.  What America could once impose, it is now forced to propose--a key distinction the Bush team routinely ignored. 

Unlike America, the rest of the world had too much on its plate to take off the rest of the decade to fight terrorists; globalization's "lawn" was thickening across the vast majority of the planet despite Washington's myopic focus on killing "weeds" here and there.  And so the global rule-setting agenda seemed to leave us behind, to the apparent delight of a Bush Administration that never saw a global treaty it couldn't dismiss out of hand.  Now, as the second Bush term winds down, the White House has rediscovered the joys of multilateralism just as our pool of prospective allies has been reduced to Israel and nobody else.  Don't laugh, because apparently that's a quorum for Bush-Cheney's last war before riding into the sunset--Iran, the ultimate scapegoatfor our failures in Iraq. 

This rising tide of anti-Americanism is simply feedback; the rest of the world is telling us how much they miss the "old" us while constantly ratcheting up the price for our readmission to their good graces.  Since the Bush team has no intention of admitting our current isolation from old friends and potentially new allies alike, they remain uninterested in recalibrating their post-9/11 grand strategy of democratization-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun, even as the global attractiveness of the China's development model grows exponentially throughout the very same regions we target in our long war against radical extremism (hint, hint--from history). 

It's tempting to say that all the next president must do is repackage Bush's liberty agenda and deliver it more diplomatically, but if America is going to rejoin this world of its own making, then globalization will demand far greater adjustments.  We've already tried channeling the Ford Administration (e.g., Cheney, Rumsfeld) through George W. Bush, and several GOP presidential candidates clearly want to channel Reagan, but resurrecting past presidential models, even one as globally successful as Clinton's, is unlikely to answer the future mail.  The realignment of the global economic order is staring us in the face, with a similar rearrangement of global politics right on its heels.  9/11 gave us the heads up on the new global security environment, but even there we're just beginning to get a handle on the breadth of this new challenge (Chinese toothpaste, anyone?).   In short, all this rising connectivity continues to radically alter global order, imposing the greatest challenges to those currently attempting to cover the most developmental ground--e.g., China, India, Brazil.  America might find globalization bewildering, but frankly, we're in the middle of the pack on that subject. 

So the grand realignment I want to explore in this book isn't simply a matter of America's course-correction from the Bush years.  It's a fundamental recalibration for all involved.  Quite frankly, we've never lived through such a profound reordering of the global order since 1945, and our first attempt--this clumsy deification of the counter-terror war--has failed to adequately reorient us to the far different world we continue to find ourselves struggling to understand--much less lead.  To use an early Cold War analogy, we've gone through our panicked "anti-communist" phase; now comes the time when we start recognizing the "new frontiers" just on the horizon.  Making that transition from seeing the danger in its entirety to envisioning the opportunity in its entirety is everything right now.  The first Bush term got us through the former but the second administration failed to advance us on the latter, hence the overwhelming sense of being "off track" in this country (we see burden everywhere and opportunity nowhere). 

That's the fundamental understanding that will animate this book:  the realization that we're all living through a period of planetary-wide "frontier integration."  With globalization's stunningly rapid expansion from 1990 to 2007, we basically moved--in terms of world population--from a 1/6th solution set to 5/6th challenge set, leaving behind the "bottom billion"--as Paul Collier calls it in his recent book of the same name--as the final frontier to be integrated (basically, the guts of my Non-Integrating Gap).  Once we add those three billion new capitalists, we set in motion a global change process that either succeeds in consolidating globalization's grip on the planet or essentially disintegrates it into a series of regionalized economies whose competitive nature and residual zero-sum mentality ensure the re-bloc-ification of the international political-military order.  In short, we either integrate all these new capitalists successfully or it's back to the future on great power rivalries, proxy wars in distant locales, and pointless arms races--all so very attractive because they're all so very familiar to those old-timers still running most of the show. 

To understand the promise and peril of this frontier integration age, we'll need to look to our past to remember how we once managed such a feat in North America (e.g., the settling of the American West, 1865-1890), which in turn will help us better interpret the rise of such frontier-integrating powers as Brazil, China, India and Russia.  That understanding unlocks the grand strategic logic of the coming decades:  in a frontier-integrating age, your best allies are other frontier-integrating powers.  America aspires to this role, despite its maturity, because we possess the world's only superpower military.  The New Core pillars, as I call them, have no choice but to aspire to such a role, both internally (to marshal their own forces of development) and externally (to both access raw materials and to make new markets).   

This is hardly our first go-around in terms of global integration through the self-interested spread of market economics.  Europe's rise was predicated largely on its own consolidation of national markets and regional infrastructure.  In short, it got its act together and then turned to the rest of the world to replicate itself and its successes, for, to move up the ladder of global production, one needs to find replacements for the rungs below.  This is essentially what Europe accomplished with North America across the 19th century, before turning with more cynicism to the pure exploitation of its overseas colonies in the latter decades of that century.  The United States, the main beneficiary of that replication process, later returned that favor in kind by bailing Europe out of its self-destructive civil wars of the first half of the 20th century, only to seek its own economic replication in Asia, whose nations dutifully followed the American economy as it scaled the heights of the global production chain.  Now, as Asia itself reaches the upper ranks in so many sectors, signified by China's emergence as the third great wave of auto manufacturing in the region (after Japan and Korea), we witness its natural desire to replicate its economic success elsewhere in the global economy.  So as Europe once did to the "New World" and the U.S., in turn, enabled in Asia, now that region's rising pillars will naturally extend to the next wave of emerging markets.  Thus, as we consider who will naturally "shrink the Gap," it's only logical that the main conveyors of globalization to that "bottom billion" will be globalization's most recent success stories, or what I've called the New Core (e.g., Brazil, Russia, India, China and other emerging markets).  Understanding that key realignment is how we reconnect our grand strategy to the governing dynamics of the age--the consolidation of globalization's recent expansion and its further extension into that "bottom billion."  Simply put, there is no "saving Africa," there is only integrating Africa.  It won't be American arms plus Western aid that does the trick (our preferred strategy of "limited regret"), but American boots on the ground plus Asian entrepreneurs that generate the critical mass of economic connectivity. 

Through my first two books, I have prepared an audience of global opinion leaders, as well as average Americans, for this level of understanding, and in this third volume, I aim to deliver it in spades.  Let me now describe how I see this book being organized: 

Neil, since you and I have discussed this approach at some length--at least in conceptual terms--I don't want to drag this proposal out much further.  To me, this is the big picture mix of personal and philosophical that marked my last two books, and I know that's what you're looking for in this volume, which we both agree should target early 2009 for release.

The details of production are straightforward enough: 

As for the usual rah-rah, you and Putnam know my work ethic, respect my strenuous schedule of speeches and media appearances, and value the global audience I've been steadily building through my blog, the Scripps column, and the Esquire  articles.  I really think this can be a very important book that expands that universe while speeding up further the changes and reforms my work has already inspired throughout the national security community here in the United States. 

I value this partnership greatly, and deeply appreciate your efforts to steer me away from a narrow book to something more on this grand scale. 

Let's make it happen!

Tom

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