ESR's review of Great Powers

REVIEW: The responsible liberal's world view, By Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right, September 7, 2009

Steven Martinovich is is the Editor-in-Chief of Enter Stage Right and a long-time follower of Tom's work. He's done reviews of both PNM and BFA and subsequent interviews (find those links at the bottom of the GP review linked above). Here he gives us a nice, thoughtful review of GP.

If the title wasn't provocative enough for you, here's the lead:

Among foreign policy aficionados on both the left and right there has been a fight to claim Thomas P.M. Barnett as one of their own. Author of Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating and The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, Barnett has attracted both sides with a compelling worldview which sees an America play an essential role in fighting world poverty, ending the scourge of terrorism and civil war, and making the world safe for liberty and capitalism. With his latest endeavour Barnett has essentially declared himself as member of the centre-left and while that may be a loss for conservatives, it is an invaluable gain for liberals that have been flailing for a visionary foreign policy.

Barnett manages this feat with Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, an effort that is even more grand in its scope than his previous works. Building upon his last two books, Barnett offers a compelling vision which sees America give up its concern over near-peer competitors like China and Russia and instead collaborate with them on spreading globalization to Africa and the Middle East. The challenge for America, and its new allies, is to create a global middle class identity. It is an identity that America created, and thanks to globalization it is one that three billion people around the world want to join in on.

Check it out.

Comments

[rblx]

Tom as a liberal – That's interesting. I'm drawn to read Tom because I see him as post liberal and post conservative. Left/Right – Liberal/Conservative. All such 20th century concepts.

[Sean Meade]

post liberal, post conservative: i like it

[Lexington Green]

On the American political spectrum, Tom is center Left. But the article title is correct. Tom is responsible center Left, meaning he pays attention to real-world

Everyone wants to be post-liberal post-conservative, etc. But the dream of post-partisanship is the old dream of being post-political, which in turn means, everyone agrees with me. In a country the size of a continent with 300+ million people, that will never happen. Nor should it.

But our political system forces the creation of two large centrist parties, which are coalitions of disparate interests and philosophies, and we have to have labels for these two flavors. There is no getting around that. Liberal / Conservative works as well as any other, and has the advantage of many decades of usage, so you have some idea what people are talking about.

[large]

There's nothing out here in the middle but us roadkill!

[William R. Cumming]

Tom's writings definitely cannot be labeled left or right but instead argue for reason and long-term interests and stopping butting our (US) collective heads against the wall. It would be of great interest to hear arguments rebutting or responding to TOM but apparently those who lead our domestic and foreign policies are just having such a good time they don't read books anymore, certainly not Tom's, and they wish to make sure that the sand box is the one they grew up with not the one that now exists. Thanks Tom again for a great triad of reasoning and thoughfullness and hope you keep writing.

[ry]

I thought it was always apparent that Dr. B was, using west south west as an analogy, center left center.

[Martin Jacyno]

I'll take the smart center anyday. That seems to be where the thoughtful and productive dialogue takes place, but I'd be curious to hear Dr. Barnett's take on that and also whether or not the extremes can generate positive revolutionary ideas. Or are they more often than not simply destructive.

[Mark]

Gotta agree with Mr. Cumming. Well stated.

[stuart abrams]

Like much of our political vocabulary, the "left/right" division has its genesis in the so-called "enlightenment" of the 18th Century. Ultimately, however, this reflects a fairly narrow Eurocentric view of things that I find increasingly irrelevant to the 21st Century. I think that the fundamental political division in today's world is between those who wish to foster the development of globalization, and those who want to push it back, or eliminate it altogether in order to preserve traditional ethnic, religious, cultural, etc., hierarchies. This division cuts across the traditional left and right - i.e., we find proponents of globalization who are labeled both left and right, and opponents who are labeled left and right. I see a lot of similarities in the apocalyptic views of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists on the "right", and anti-globalization folks on the "left" like Naomi Klein. To be sure, there is plenty of room for disagreement about how best to foster globalization and what kind of shape it should take, but those divisions all occur within the reality-based community that embraces globalization.