Mindy Audlin's interview with Tom
Friday, September 25, 2009 at 2:26AM Remember when Mindy interviewed Tom? She wrote later to ask if she could include the transcript of that interview in a book called Voices of Peace: 21 Visionary Leaders Engage in Humanity's Most Urgent Conversation. We agreed and publish the transcript here as well.
(Check out the website. You might be interested in the book.)
We
are very blessed to have the unique opportunity to talk with a
former assistant for strategic futures in the OFT, Office of Force
Transformation, and a professor at the Naval War College, among many
other things. He is the author of The
Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st
Century and his latest book,
Great Powers: America and
the World after Bush. We are
delighted to have with us today Thomas P.M. Barnett.
Well,
Tom, I saw you speak last year. You were at the annual conference for
the Association of Global New Thought and I was absolutely riveted by
your message, and thought it was fascinating. It is a little unusual
for us to have political strategists on our Leading Edge program, but
your message is a Leading Edge message, and I thought it was really
important to bring your vision, your ideas to this forum. There is so
much in what you are seeing for the future that is really aligned
with what we teach here at Unity. On the very first page of your book
The Pentagon's New
Map, you write:
"When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began. The United
States had put out so much energy during those years trying to
prevent the horror of global war, that it forgot the dream of global
peace." Why is it so important for that shift in perspective to
occur?
Well, it
is actually crucial now, experiencing as we are arguably I believe
the first global economic crisis of the globalized age. You have to
go all the way back to 1982 to really find a global recession, but
back then, we did not really talk about global economy; we really
only talked about the West - about twenty five percent of humanity at
the time, even though it controlled about seventy percent of the
global productive power and wealth in the system. But now we really
are talking about a global economy that encompasses, by a lot of
measures upwards of eighty five percent of the world's population.
So the package that we pursued, the model of development that we had,
really went all the way back to the early 1800's, when the
Industrial Revolution hit Europe and England, in particular. That
model, rather resource-intensive, obviously has to change fairly
dramatically when you are talking about not one-tenth or one-fifth or
even a quarter of the world's population engaged in that sort of
standard of living pursued, but instead we are talking upwards of
eighty five to ninety percent. We are in a different frame of
reference in terms of the ingenuity, the innovation and the
recognition of huge inter-dependencies that are being created by this
massive unleashing of popular demand for a better life, those three
billion capitalists and such that were added in the past couple of
decades. So the reason why it is important for America to shift is
that still, very much so, we see a world of nuclear weapons, we see a
world of terrorists, we see a world only of bad things. And after
seven years of post-9/11, of that kind of mindset and vision from
Bush-Cheney, we really became so disengaged from the way the rest of
the world is viewing this time period, one of great economic advance,
one of incredible integration, networks proliferating, and
empowerment to a level that is just stunning. I mean fifteen to
twenty years ago, you could talk about half the world never having
used the phone.
That
is amazing.
Now we
are talking about Twittering revolutions and cell phone coverage of
events almost in any neck of the woods you can name, globally. So, we
really have to understand the way we have conducted ourselves with
the world. Focusing on the prevention of bad things needs to shift -
and I think it has, to a certain degree with Obama - into a
creation of what has been called the future worth creating, the
recognition that we are coming upon the emergence of a global middle
class, which is huge, and that we need to understand this is not an
alien world. This is not a Frankenstein that we have unleashed. What
we have created here is something we very much sought to do. It went
all the way back to the end of the Second World War when Franklin
Roosevelt basically promised a new deal for the rest of the world
much as he had created for America, and really made explicit
something that had been dreamt of, going all the way back to his
cousin Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th
century: this notion of remaking the planet in our image, not so much
immediately in a political sense, but very much immediately in the
economic sense. So if you think of America, it is really the first
multi-national union in human history. Thirteen members to begin
with, fifty members now, and no reason why we could not add more
members - the EU does it; nobody calls that imperialism. That model
of states uniting, economies integrating, networks proliferating,
collective security growing, a competitive religious landscape -
meaning not just freedom of religion but freedom of religions to
compete for believers, okay, which is a huge social lubricant - . .
.
Yeah.
We will talk more about that in some depth. I would like to talk more
about that.
. . in a
sense of rule is fundamental, okay? That came about in America when
we really knitted together our sectional economies in the immediate
aftermath of the Civil War into a truly national, continent-wide
economy. When you start to see national companies, national brands,
national products, then national identity truly begins to emerge,
much like you are watching in China today. So when we had that kind
of flowering of integration, what arose in our environment was a
middle class for the first time in our history, a broad middle class,
and because of the great rapaciousness and the brutality of the
capitalism we were practicing in that time period, much as it has
been done on a global scale now, we went through a very angry period
in our 1870's, 1880's, a populist phase, even though we were
growing very dramatically in terms of wealth, great income
inequality, raping the environment, child labor abuse, a rough lot
for women, I mean it was an angry, divided, unequal society that then
went into - thanks to the progressive movement very much led by
religious groups - . . .
That
was in 1890 . . .
. . . a
progressive age where we really tamed our environment and really
started to come up with an answer that separated us from Europe. When
Europe encountered the emergence of a great middle class at the turn
of the 20th
century, they came up with rule from the Right - fascism, and rule
from the Left - Bolshevism, where we came up with rule from the
middle, and that middle-class ideology which feels under assault
today because of the competitive landscape we have created with the
global economy, that is really the caption, the flag-target for the
21st
century, if you realize we are facing the emergence, and coming about
right all around us right now, a global middle class that will have
to decide how it is going to rule itself from the left, from the
right, or from the middle. So we are seeing on a global scale many of
the same things we went through as a multi-national union once we got
past our Civil War and the question of slavery, in America here, 1865
to 1917. So the role that religious groups played in creating that
progressive movement, I say, is going to be replicated, already being
replicated on a global scale, and that is why we should admit or
accept that the 21st
Century is going to be the most religious century we have ever seen
and that is not a scary thing. Do not put that all in terms of
radical fundamentalists, think more in terms of the evangelicals,
which as a group, are expanding dramatically as fundamentalists are
shrinking in their influence, and come to realize that we need to
harness that kind of religious awakening much as we did in America at
various points - we had a number of religious awakenings in our
past - and understand it as a tremendous force for creating a
progressive agenda and taming this global version of capitalism which
needs to be tamed much as our national versions did a hundred, a
hundred-fifty years ago.
It
was back in the 1890's that the Unity movement and the New Thought
movement really started to take root. You were talking about all the
things that were happening in the 70's and the 1880's, it was
sort of in response to that. I am assuming that desire for unity . .
.
Well,
you raise a big kind of economic determinist point. I mean, there was
a religious awakening in America pre-Revolution, and it was one of
the causes of our Revolution. There was a religious awakening in the
American frontier in the 1820's and 30's which, you know,
developed into the Abolitionist movement, and it was a huge influence
there. But the one that happened in the latter decades of the 19th
century was much more economically driven, which gives me a lot of
hope when you are talking about a middle class emerging globally. You
know, people when they exist in a sustenance mode, just barely
getting by, largely agricultural, the rule sets and the strictures,
the social codes that come with that tend to be really strict.
Everybody gets married, everybody cranks babies, no homosexuals
allowed, we plant these crops, these crops work here, we do not mess
around, we do not experiment, this is how we survive the off season.
Right.
Okay?
And if you think about that, that is the Malthusian trap that says
population is strictly limited because organic growth, how you can
grow by using resources from the world, is strictly limited. There is
no such thing in that mindset as inorganic growth or escaping the
limits of material growth into true wealth like we have done with the
Industrial Revolution in the West since the 1800's. So if you
understand that most religions in the world were formed during that
tough Malthusian phase, when you allow societies to go from
sustenance to abundance, that is massive social revolution.
And
that is what is happening worldwide right now.
That is
what is happening worldwide. What happens is what happened in
America in the 1870's and the 1880's. I mean, we had the rise of
the middle class, the rise of leisure activities - that is when all
our social institutions, civic institutions really came about, the
vast bulk of them. It is when 'leisure time' and those kinds of
definitions came about - major league baseball started, all sorts
of stuff happened in that time frame and you are seeing a replication
of that model now. So, people who have lived in sustenance for
thousands of years, with strict religious codes attached to that
survival, all of a sudden, young woman does not have to marry who dad
says, all of a sudden young woman does not have to stay in the
village, all of a sudden young woman can get an education, all of a
sudden she can marry outside her faith, her religion, her race, her
social caste, whatever, and the controls largely male over female
that had existed and had been enshrined in a lot of tough religious
stricture for centuries comes under assault and you got social
revolution, and you got two responses to that social revolution. One
says, hey, this is out of control; if women are going to be allowed
to do this, when we have not allowed women to do that in our neck of
the woods for centuries upon centuries, thousands of years, one
answer is the fundamentalist answer: That is an evil world.
Yes.
. . . I
am going to cut myself off from it, I cannot live with you bad
people, I am going to force isolation and drive you out. Or you say,
I have got to adapt my religious code to this and my adaptation is
going to be the new better version that I need to evangelize and
spread to the rest of the world - almost in a defensive / offensive
manner, you know - if I cannot defeat your integration efforts I
will remake you in my social-religious image. You see both of these
answers coming out of Islam, which is a very rapidly growing
religion,/with a strong evangelical strain to it, but also a core
fundamentalist-that-has-gone-violent strain that really constitutes
what most people call this long struggle or persistent struggle or
long war, whatever you want to call it, against radical extremism. So
many people look at that little package and say, "This is our
future, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, more religion
is bad."
I would
argue the opposite is true and we should not take our cues from the
very odd historical evolution that Europe went through after the
Second World War, when it, you know, after two world wars in a row,
basically said nationalism is bad, religion is bad, bury these
concepts. Because we do not recognize ourselves as a multi-national
union here in America. Instead, we look to Europe and say, "Well,
that is the first version." We make the mistake of assuming that
their particular evolution, because they went through so much
violence in the first half of the 20th
century, signals the notion that modernity brings a collapse of
religious identity. When I would argue, as I just did, you take
people from sustenance to abundance, my God, that is a bizarre, a
historical, perverse journey by their standards, and in that journey,
which is inescapable - because people want better lives, they want
better lives for their kids, etc. - they are going to search for and
grab onto self-help guides, religious codes, you know, anything that
will give them a moral compass, a handhold definition of what a good
life is. And so you are seeing in these places like China, which
arguably features the most un-churched generation in human history,
and a vast one at that, you are seeing China explode in terms of its
religiosity, and really go back to what it was, a highly spiritual
nation.
I saw
you at a conference that was a New Thought conference. You were one
of the keynote speakers and there were Unity ministers there, there
were leaders from throughout the New Thought movement, and their
response to your talks, was that everyone was abuzz. I think we are
not used to hearing political strategists at conferences of this
nature and yet the message really resonated. What is going on with
that?
Well,
you know, it really taps into the bulk of religious sentiment in the
world, which tends to be more pre-millennialist, more optimistic,
more "How can we make this world more heaven-like?" over time, as
opposed to that kind of post-millennialist, fatalistic, more
fundamentalist rejection of the modern evil world mindset. But do
not expect it to go away immediately, I say, because globalization is
on a tear, even with the global downturn. It slowed up things
dramatically in the advanced economies or older economies in the
West, but not much in the surging economies of the East and South, so
that globalization is definitely still in a very high
frontier-integrating mode, much like it was in the American West as
we expanded westward across the 19th
century. And it was David Prothero who wrote this great book,
Religious Illiteracy,
and in it, there is a chapter on this great history of religion in
America throughout our history. Frontier areas always beget the most
firebrand evangelical movements, because it is a tumultuous
landscape. People are going from, as I said earlier, sustenance to
possibilities of abundance very rapidly, things are being created out
of thin air - networks, governments, opportunities - and there is
a huge demand for religion in that kind of landscape, because amidst
all that change it supplies a sense of some permanence, and supplies
a sense of some code of behavior against which to measure the
progress of economics, politics, social change. So if we are in a
frontier-integrating mode on a global scale, which I believe we are,
no surprise, the evangelicals are taking the day, and religions are
expanding dramatically, and the versions of religion that you find in
these frontier areas tend to be more intense than the kind that we
have migrated toward in our lasting abundance in the advanced west.
So we tend to look at them and say, "Wow, you know, they are scary,
they are hardcore, they are old-school, what is up with that?" My
Catholic church is certainly getting a taste of that with a lot of
these . . . priest shortages. We get these priests from Africa, Latin
America, and we expect these laid-back types, but what we get are
these firebrands. So religion, by and large, I think finds my
message unusual in its optimism, and feels empowered with the message
that we are in that frontier-integrating age, and that on a global
scale we are experiencing a populism that better lead to a
progressivism because once you have the anger, you better find
answers . . .
Right.
. . .
otherwise things fall apart. I think they like the message that says,
hey, you are not part of the problem, you are very much part of the
solution, and do not let the religious movements of the world be
tagged with the radical sins of a very small minority who are on the
wane in the historical sense; and yet, as globalization comes to
their frontier off-grid locations, you have got to expect them to put
up a fight.
Sure.
As you were saying, the shift that is happening is happening so
rapidly that it seems like everybody is trying to catch their
footing. It's easy for that Armageddon type of fear to take hold,
so here is something that is an alternative to that.
Right.
It is
very refreshing.
Well,
you know, globalization's prevailing movement, so to speak, is that
economic networks tend to race ahead of political networks and/or
rules, so the economic rules race ahead, the political rules lag
behind, the networks race ahead but the security lags behind. So you
get kind of a wild-west mentality, and we are so removed from our
frontier-integrating days, we like things very calm and very certain
and very conformed . . .
Right.
. . .
very controlled. So that when we see crazy stuff come at us, stuff
that we have not encountered, these mindsets are so off-grid... I
mean they are the Unabomber, they are David Koresh, they are Timothy
McVeigh, and when we look at them we just say, Well, these people do
not represent things, they are mentally ill." When we get a
package like 9/11, our tendency is to say, "Well, this is either a
conspiracy or Armageddon, either God is in charge or the U.S.
government actually pulled this off", because the notion that,
like, nineteen or twenty guys with half a million dollars pulled this
off is too scary to contemplate. So we look for very simple answers,
and that is where you get the conspiracies. We would prefer to have
the stern father administer all the justice in the world, whether it
is God or the U.S. government.
Right.
Than to
say, "Hey, this is the world we are creating, we take
responsibility for it." You want to fix this world? It's called
engage this world, not put up a firewall. It is interesting to me
that the countries that are the most engaging right now, that are
experiencing the most religious tumult are not the old countries of
the West. The number one supplier around the world of missionaries
right now is South Korea.
Really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So we
are faced with kind of a back-to-the-future sort of admonishment from
history here. We were good at selling to the bottom of the pyramid,
back when we had a middle class that was much more lower-end, back
when Sears & Roebuck could sell you a house in a box.
Right.
Or where
Singer would sell you a sewing machine using micro-loans, except they
called it 'installment plan' back then. Back when we were
media-dark and people did door-to-door salesmanship. All that kind
of stuff which is going like gangbusters right now in parts of
Africa, throughout China, throughout Asia, throughout India. In these
places, you are looking at all the same dynamics that you saw, say,
in the American West in 1865 - 1900. And we have just gotten sort of
complacent in our view of the world, and so darn focused on
consumption in the last twenty years. In part, because our global
strategy is sort of bringing Asia on board with, "Say, hey, you
want to go for export-driven growth? Fine, we will absorb all your
exports, you take all your profits and put them back into our debt
markets, keep our money cheap, and we will keep this thing going for
quite some time, and we'll allow you to rise without any sort of
great power arms races and whatnot", and we were enormously
successful - too much so with Asia, to the point where they cannot
sell to us anymore, and we cannot go into debt anymore. So we need to
move on to something else and remind ourselves, "Hey, there is a
growing middle class coming onboard out there, but it is not the one
you sold to in the past. This one expects a lot of value for its
money, and it has got to be a lot more spiritually motivated." And
it is back to the future, remembering what it is like to sell to a
conservative couple in Oklahoma in 1895, as opposed to the college
student who gets a credit card the minute he turns eighteen.
And
goes nuts.
And goes
nuts.
Thomas,
we have talked a lot about peace in a strategic perspective. What
does peace mean to you, personally?
Well, it
is all about creating certainty. What is compelling, frightening
about the rise of the middle class is, you say, ideally you want a
population bell curved. You want a few poor people on the left, you
want a big mass of the middle class in the middle, and you want a
small chunk of really rich people on the right. You ask yourself,
"What are those various components that they want from their
government?" The poor arguably want protection from their
circumstances, and the rich you can cynically argue want protection
from the poor. What the middle class wants is really hard to deliver,
and that is the challenge of the 21st
century when you have a rise of the global middle class. The middle
class wants protection from uncertainty, they want protection from
the future, which is why they are so drawn to religion. Religion
gives you ideas about the future, a way to contextualize it and say,
"If you do this, good things will happen; if you do that, bad
things will happen." That's what the middle class wants, because
it has achieved a certain standard of living, so its ambitions are
modest, they are middle-class, and there is nothing wrong with that.
They want to keep what they have achieved, a better life than their
parents had, and they want to pass on the possibility of better lives
to their children. So, you know, security has become the dominant
aspect of peace in the last twenty years, and it's a huge
revolution. I would like to point out that when I got into this
business, one of the first things I ever did - I just came from
listening to my first child's heartbeat and seeing the ultrasound,
when she was a fetus - and then I walked into a room and we had a
discussion about a limited nuclear war. We had this sassy,
rhetorical discussion about how many tens or hundreds of millions
could go in various scenarios and what would be acceptable. In the
time frame when I started my career - I'm forty seven, I had a
PhD when I was twenty seven - the paradigm was to lighten up the
planet in seven minutes. But now, if you look at it, and you see this
with the drones in northwest Pakistan, now the goal is to kind of
find, recognize, target and kill one or two bad actors, try to limit
the collateral damage involved, and you try to do that in about a
seven- to eight-minute kill chain, as they call it. What is stunning
about that to me is that in twenty years (my career) - this is
human history - we have gone from a paradigm that said blow up the
planet in seven minutes to kill a bad guy in seven minutes. So war
has gone from a system-level fear, which was profound when I was a
child, as we all feared nuclear war, and now it is down to kind of a
'get the bad guys'. If you look at US military intervention in
the last twenty years, go all the way back to when we toppled Noriega
in Panama, we have not fought wars against militaries much. We have
not really waged wars against countries or nations or peoples, and
every instance since then, either right from the start or very soon
into it, we realize we are basically there to get the bad guys.
Right.
So . . .
Can
we really get the bad guys or, if we get the bad guys, will there
just be another bad guy that pops up?
Well,
this is a good point, and this is what my work in the private sector
with EnterraSolutions in the last five years has been all about. It's
something we called development in a box that we are doing now with
the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and we are being asked to come in to a
lot of other countries in Asia and Africa and the Middle East to do
this as well. The notion that it is not enough to go in and take out
the crack dealer, if you leave behind the wife, the six kids and all
the associates and all the demand function that guy has created,
because two weeks later . . . a new crack dealer.
Right.
The same
thing you can extrapolate to the level of nations. You take out the
bad Saddam, you can very well end up with another Saddam unless you
empower the people. My argument is, if you do an intervention
militarily, you're going to leave that place more connected than
you found it. Not just elite-connected through the exporting of
resources like energy, but mass-connected because that is the kind of
mass connection that gives you that twitter that fuels revolt in
Iran. People realize there is an outside world, they realize they
should not have to be treated like this, they realize there are other
opportunities, and it makes them more demanding of their government,
which is a good thing for us. So, it is absolutely true if you just
go around killing bad guys, if you do not create anything good, you
create bad things in your mind. You need to, for example in the
Middle East, create about a hundred million jobs in the next twenty
years or use bolts to torque in its way through their demographics.
A certain segment of that will be peeled off and turn to violent ends
because of the injustices they see in their political systems. You
may not stop all of it. You may and you will have to kill a certain
number of them to prevent certain bad things from happening, but if
that is the bulk of your thrust and your effort, you cannot kill them
faster than they grow up because, thank God, you value life to the
point where you find it disgusting to kill on that level.
Right.
But
there is another great evolution. I mean, you know, I grew up in the
shadow of the Second World War and everybody I knew who was a man had
fought in that war. That was a war in which seventy million people
were killed. Now, wars today kill in the hundreds or thousands.
Genocide used to be seven, eight million dead, but now it is a couple
of a hundred thousand dead. It is great that we have ratcheted
definitions down, but do not let those ratcheted-down definitions or
thresholds convince you that we live in a world of more war today
because we do not. We live in the most peaceful planet we have ever
had, we have fewer wars. To qualify for a war nowadays, you need
three dead a day to get you a thousand dead for a year and they call
that a war.
That
is just about any inner city in the United States.
Yeah,
what else, you know, yeah. Along those lines you can declare war on
everything, can't you - smoking, choking on toys, whatever -
because when you get big enough numbers, all sorts of things will
give you a war; hence our tendency to declare war on things all the
time. But you know the world lost 28,000 people a day for six years
in the Second World War. Now the average war today, in a year, takes
about 28,000 lives. So everything has come down from defense, you
know, and me having to defend all the time, and much more to the
point of security, and that is watching the economic development
which says, the middle class wants. I have just been sending their
sons and daughters off to war, but America does have a special role
to play in terms of kind of policing the world. To the extent that
other countries can, and even in that effort in which we have been
enormously successful in the last twenty to thirty years we need more
help than we can muster on our own. Because we have triggered an
expansive phase of globalization so vast we need lots of bodies to
man those frontier ports and forts that we are doing, like in
Southern Afghanistan approaching upon Northwest Pakistan, stuff right
out of the U.S. cavalry history and the American West. Lots of
bodies are required, and the bodies are going to come from allies
that are not going to be our traditional ones. More likely, more
logically, they are going to come from countries like India and
China.
So
what about you and I and your typical American middle-class person,
what can we do to cultivate peace and harmony here in our planet?
What can the individual do?
Well,
you know, I think religious groups need to look at the kind of
subjects they tackled in the time frame that I described earlier with
the United States. So you push things like, better educational
opportunities, push stricter child labor laws. You push for the
improvement of health, so you go very green. I think the movement of
the evangelicals towards green in the last decade has been stunning
and very welcome. You tackle global smoking - you want to talk
about a global killer. After we drove out all the tobacco companies
here in America they went abroad. They have just been enormously
successful in hooking a lot of people on smoking, and I see that as a
big kind of focus for religious movements. I think it is going to be
one of the big things we do, and anything that promotes the rights of
women, that is really crucial because anything that keeps girls in
school, delays early pregnancy, delays first sex, delays first
pregnancy, delays marriage, reduces population pressures, educates
them, empowers them, makes them more uppity and demanding and, if you
saw in Iran, you really risk your authoritarian regime when you anger
the women.
Well,
that makes some sense there.
Well,
most of authoritarianism usually comes with a very strong patriarchal
bent, and yet we know from history, if you want to develop your
economy, if you do not, make your women available to the labor force
and deal with all the social changes that come as a result. There is
no way you can grow your economy with a happier labor force off line.
So there are plenty of traditional, social issues that come right out
of our past, things that we did in America 120 - 130 years ago,.
where we should be pushing very similar lines. And I would not argue
so much for the prohibition of alcohol as I would tobacco, because
there is nothing that kills people more effectively in our modern
world than tobacco.
So if
history has one lesson for us in terms of how to create peace or
just the strands that you have seen and been able to weave together
and project into the future, what is the one lesson that you would
want to pass on to future generations? What have you learned?
Well, I
wish I could make the reference correctly here. I think it is A Room
With A View. The line was along the lines of 'connect, only
connect.' If I would take one perspective from history, I would go
with that line: you should always focus on connection, you should
never bet against connection. Humans are ultimately highly social
animals and whenever they seek connection, so long as it is not
harmful to themselves, it should be allowed in each and every
instance, because with connection typically comes rules. The freest
person on the planet was Unabomber, living in a shack in the woods,
living by his own code, committing murder at will. Why? He had no
connection with the outside world. Every time you take on
connection, whether it is a mortgage or a marriage or children or
home ownership, career, education, anything that connects you to the
rest of the world, usually comes with rules; and it is with those
rules that come the pacification, a certain amount of ennui, a
certain amount of other complex things. But compared to a history of
humanity, what we got going now is incredibly pacifying. You go back
every hundred years in human history, you will find a much greater
percentage of humanity engaged in or preparing for manslaughter.
Today is such a rare thing that we have professionals, even our
militaries are amazing, compared to the rest of society. And I have
lived among them all my life - most people, until this war with Iraq,
when you see the reserves and the National Guards get involved, most
people did not know anybody in uniform . . .
Right.
. . .
nobody ever went to a war. Yet we have done a lot of military
activity around the world in the last twenty years, I would argue on
a policing basis. We have not really declared war on anybody for
more than half a century. But it is a tremendous thing to realize
how much we have ratcheted down violence in the system, and how that
has come with all this tremendous wealth, so that the challenges that
we face today are just fantastically better challenges than we had
before - the answer is still 'connect'.
We
have a caller on the line. We have Randy from Florida who has a
question for you, and we only have a few minutes. Randy, welcome to
the program. You have a question for Tom today.
RANDY:
Well, quickly, I just have a comment. I have to go to your blog, Tom,
occasionally to come back down to earth. I read a lot and I have to
argue a little bit about tobacco, for instance, it kills a lot of
people but when the Indians smoked tobacco for centuries, they did
not have lung cancer. It was not until the corporations started
curing tobacco with sugar that we had this increased cancer rate that
nobody really seems to want to look at. Then when you go to Iraq, I
could argue that we killed a million people over there and displaced
millions more and the whole place is a shamble, and we have caused it
and we did not need to. So, what about that?
Thanks
for calling, Randy. Tom, how do you respond to that?
Well,
Iraq was headed up by a very brutal dictator by anybody's measure,
who did commit genocide against his own people - ask the Kurds, ask
the Shia - who was a threat to his neighbors, who launched and
prosecuted a long war against Iran in which vast numbers were killed.
I think the more realistic estimates of the amount of dead, civilian
dead in Iraq on the basis of the war is much lower than a million. I
think more in the range of three to four hundred thousand is more
realistic. I would tell you, go back and look at what we did when we
did the more humane route, so-called, with UN sanctions for ten years
from the early 90's until the war broke out when we invaded in
2003. By our estimates we killed - UN estimates - about 50,000
people a year by denying them access to basics of medicine; and the
people you kill in that kind of environment are the same ones that
get killed by poverty and by disconnectedness, in general. They tend
to be young kids and old people. But we do not count those deaths in
this world. In fact, we do not count deaths usually in this world
unless there is an American bullet that went through a body or a bomb
that dismembered it. The kind of deaths that occur under other
people's watches or occur because of brutal regimes or wars between
states or wars within states, we tend to ignore them, like the four
to five million dead in the Congo in the last eight to ten years
because of a massive civil war that has raged on there for a long
period of time. So to condemn us when we do stuff, when we actually
go in and try to stop bad things . . . I do not think anybody who has
been to Iraq recently, certainly anybody who has been to northern
Iraq for the last seven or eight years, and has seen the amount of
liberty that has flowered there, and the amount of opportunity for
economic development and the opportunity to connect up with the
outside world would condemn us. There are comments on real cause,
absolutely, but letting the situation go on the way it did, killing
as we did - according to the UN, about a million people - slowly,
quietly, off-grid, off-camera, through sanctions, comparing that to
the effort we made to liberate that place and give it an opportunity
to rule itself, it is always easy to say let us do nothing and let us
assume better outcomes occur. I think history shows us that when we
do nothing we tend to kill more, dramatically more through our
inaction than we do through our action.
Thank
you for calling, Randy. That actually brings up a beautiful quote
that is in your book, Great
Powers. You say "I
believe life consistently improves for humanity over time, but it
does so only because individuals, communities, and nations take it
upon themselves not only to imagine a future worth creating, but
actually try to build it."
It is
the unleashing of the individual ambition on a planetary scale. It
has really been the leitmotif of the last twenty to twenty five
years, going back to Deng declaring to get riches as glorious in
China, amidst what some people consider to be this persistent state
of global conflict, when in truth we have the lowest level of
conflict around the planet in decades. There has been a massive
empowerment and enrichment of hundreds of millions of people around
the planet, thanks to globalization's spread. Yes, you will find
friction with that process, and if you only focus on the friction
with that process, you will ignore the tremendous force that is being
unleashed in terms of individual ambition and opportunity, but you
will definitely drag the United States and other countries, not just
us - there is going to be increasingly, India and China, getting
dragged into these kinds of things - dealing with the tumult that
happens when connectivity with the outside world occurs for places
that have been off-grid for a long time. Yes, there will be violence
involved in that, yes there will be death and all sorts of tumultuous
result, but you look at the Balkans ten years after we bothered to go
in and stop the genocide there. The Balkans are a much better place
now, connected up in all manner of connectivity - political,
economic, social and whatnot - and I think in another five to six
years in Iraq, you are going to look back and say this was an
enormously successful opportunity for us to show that we are
interested in bringing the Middle East and parts of the world that
had been off-grid from globalization into a situation of true
individual empowerment, just like we saw the demands being made by
the Iranian people over the last several weeks. Never bet against a
people's desire for freedom, connectivity or pursuit of individual
opportunity and liberty because it is strong out there . . .
Very
true.
. . .
and I admire America for making the effort, even when it does not
always do it well. Try to tap into that and unleash it as much as is
possible, because when you look at history, there is no other country
that has ever tried to do that.
Right.
The book is called The
Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st
Century, and the
newest release, Great
Powers: America and The World After Bush.
Our guest today has been Thomas P.M. Barnett.
For more information, and
to read Tom Bartnett's blog, you can visit
www.thomaspmbartnett.com.
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