SF Chronicle interview

ARTICLE: Interview with analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett, By Matthew B. Stannard, San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 2009

A sample:

Q: What did the Bush administration get right?

A: Historians are going to look back on rising China and say America, at least under the Bush years, did not get that wrong. They didn't pick any stupid fights, they didn't engage in self-destructive trade protectionism, they showed a certain patience that China was changing very dramatically on the inside and didn't push the democracy agenda too rapidly in a country undergoing that level of change.

Q: What mistakes did the Bush administration make?

A: This tendency to see allies only in the West, when we really should look upon these rising great powers of our age as sort of younger versions of ourselves, remembering when we were the new guy on the block back in the 1880s, 1890s.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

The print interview was culled from a much longer interview, saved as audio.

Comments

[historyguy99]

"Strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett has been compared to writers such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and classic military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. But perhaps his closest intellectual cousin is Niccolo Machiavelli, the oft-misunderstood proponent of understanding power and politics for what they are, not for what we wish them to be."

Most revealing insight is in the first paragraph.