Marine Corps Gazette: The Gap as "Arc of Instability"
Monday, May 17, 2010 at 12:02AM
Thomas P.M. Barnett in Citation Post, Core/Gap map, Pentagon's New Map

Story from May issue, scanned and sent to me.  Crude image, but the shape is familiar.

Not the first time the Core-Gap map was redubbed:

That's how US News & World Report did it, but there I got credit from Mark Mazetti ("Pax Americana," 6 October 2003):

Ultimately, what is envisioned is a fundamentally new role for the U.S. service member around the globe--at once soldier, diplomat, international negotiator, and guardian of economic security. The military's mission thus becomes far more nuanced and more difficult: bringing regions like the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East into what U.S. Naval War College professor and Rumsfeld adviser Thomas Barnett calls the "functioning core" of globalized nations. At the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, Admiral Cebrowski has even discarded the term "warriors" when referring to U.S. troops. He prefers instead "enforcers," with a mission nothing short of "enforcing the norms of international behavior" in the world's most dangerous places.

Readers will remember I had an entire section in Pentagon's New Map called "Why I Hate the Arc of Instability."

Article originally appeared on Thomas P.M. Barnett (https://thomaspmbarnett.com/).
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