Note: This interview was conducted over the radio and later transcribed. In this excerpt, I correct a few mistakes in the text, something I didn’t get a chance to pursue prior to publication. The two majhor mistakes were my use of “sustenance” when I meant “subsistence,” and my mixing up of the terms “premillennialist” with “postmillennialist.” Both were just weird mistakes I kept making in that timeframe, reflecting my near-dyslexic relationship with certain words. I also corrected certain flow issues, meaning punctuation style. It's always scary to have an interview transcribed, because how you speak in an interview doesn't always look good on the page, but I'm pretty happy with this one. And so I enter it into the record here.
A POLICY FOR PEACE
Thomas P.M. Barnett
Thomas Barnett is a former assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation (OFT) and a professor at the Naval War College. He is author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century and Great Powers: America and the World After Bush. Here he discusses political and military strategies for creating peace among nations.
“Never bet against a people’s desire for freedom, connectivity or pursuit of individual opportunity and liberty, because it is strong.”
—Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map
Q: Tom, 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?
It is actually crucial now, experiencing, as we are, the first global economic crisis of the globalized age.
You have to go all the way back to 1982 to find a global recession, but back then, we did not really talk about global economy. We really only talked about the West—about 25 percent of humanity at the time, even though it controlled about 70 percent of the global productive power and wealth in the system.
Now we are really talking about a global economy that encompasses, by a lot of measures, upwards of 85 percent of the world’s population. Our resource-intensive industrialist model obviously has to change fairly dramatically when you are talking upwards of 85 to 90 percent of the world’s population engaged in pursuing that standard of living.
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. After years of the post-9/11 mindset, America really became disengaged from the way the rest of the world was viewing this time period. It was one of great economic advance, one of incredible integration, networks proliferating, and empowerment to a level that is stunning.
Fifteen to 20 years ago, you could talk about half the world never having used the phone. Now we are talking about Twittering revolutions and cell phone coverage of events almost in any neck of the woods you can name, globally. We really have to understand the way we have conducted ourselves with the world.
Focusing on the prevent of bad things needs to shift into a create 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.
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 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.
When America had that kind of flowering of integration, what arose in our environment was, for the first time in our history, a broad middle class. We went through a very angry period in our 1870s and 1880s, a populist phase. Even though we were growing very dramatically in terms of wealth, there was great income inequality, raping the environment, child labor abuse, a rough lot for women. It was an angry, divided, unequal society that led to the progressive movement very much led by religious groups.
Today we are seeing on a global scale many of the same things we went through as a multinational union—from 1865 to 1917—once we got past our Civil War and the question of slavery in America.
The role that religious groups played in creating that progressive movement, I believe, is already being replicated on a global scale. That is why we should admit or accept that the 21st century is going to be the most religious century we have ever seen.
Do not put that all in terms of radical fundamentalists. Think more in terms of the evangelicals, who, as a group, are expanding dramatically as fundamentalists are shrinking in their influence. 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. Understand it as a tremendous force for creating a progressive agenda and taming this global version of capitalism that needs to be tamed much as our national version did 150 years ago.
When people exist in a subsistence mode, just barely getting by, the rules, structure and social codes that come with that mode tend to be really strict: Everybody gets married. Everybody cranks out babies. No homosexuals allowed. We plant these crops. These crops work here. We no not mess around. We do not experiment. This is how we survive the off-season.
That is the Malthusian trap that says population is strictly limited because organic growth, how your 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 1800s. Understand that most religions in the world were formed during that tough Malthusian phase. When you allow societies to go from subsistence to abundance, that is a massive social revolution.
Q: And that is what is happening worldwide right now.
That is what is happening worldwide. What happens is what happened in America in the 1870s and the 1880s. We had the rise of the middle class, the rise of leisure activities. That was when all our social and civic institutions really came about, the vast bulk of them. Major league baseball started. All sorts of things happened in that time frame and you are seeing a replication of that model now globally.
These are people who have lived in subsistence for thousands of years, with strict religious codes attached to that survival. All of a sudden, a young woman does not have to marry whom dad says. All of a sudden, a young woman does not have to stay in the village. All of a sudden, a young woman can get an education. All of a sudden, she can marry outside her faith, her religion, her race, her social caste—whatever. The controls that existed and had been enshrined in a lot of tough religious stricture for centuries come under assault and you’ve got social revolution.
You’ve got two responses to that social revolution.
One says: Hey, this is out of control. 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. 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 need to adapt my religious code to this and my adaptation is going to be the new better version. Then I need to evangelize and spread the word to the rest of the world. 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 it also has a core fundamentalist-gone-violent strain that really constitutes what most people call this long, persistent struggle against radical extremism. 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.”
When you take people from subsistence to abundance, my God, that is a bizarre, perverse journey by their standards. That journey is inescapable because people want better lives. They are going to search for and grab onto self-help guides, religious codes, anything that will give them a moral compass, a handhold definition of what a good life is.
You are seeing this in these places like China, which arguably features the most unchurched 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.
Q: I first saw you speak at a spiritual conference and everyone who heard you was abuzz. 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?
It taps into the bulk of religious sentiment in the world, which tends to be more postmillennialist, more optimistic, more like, “How can we make this world more heaven-like over time?”
But we do not expect that premillennialist, fatalistic, rejection-of-the-modern-evil-world mindset to go away immediately. 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.
People are going from subsistence 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. It supplies a sense of some code of behavior against which to measure the progress of economics, politics and social change.
If we are in a frontier-integrating mode on a global scale, which I believe we are, it is no surprise that the evangelicals are taking the day, and religions are expanding dramatically. The versions of religion that you find in these frontier areas tend to be more intense that the kind that we have migrated toward in our last abundance in the advanced West.
We tend to look at them and say, “Wow, 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.
Religion, by and large, finds my message unusual in its optimism, and feels empowered with the message that we are in that frontier-integrating age.
I think they like the message that says, “Hey, you are not part of the problem. You are very much part of the solution. 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.
Q: As you were saying, the shift is happening so rapidly that is seems like everybody is trying to catch their footing. It’s easy for that Armageddon type of fear to take hold. So here is an alternative to that. It is very refreshing.
Economic networks tend to race ahead of political networks and/or rules. The economic rules race ahead. The political rules lag behind. The networks race ahead, but the security lags behind. You get kind of a Wild West mentality. We are so removed from our frontier-integrating days; we like things very calm, very certain, very conformed, very controlled.
When we get a package like 9/11, our tendency is to say, “This is either a conspiracy or Armageddon. Either God is in charge or the U.S. government actually pulled this off.” The notion that 19 or 20 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 conspiracy theories. We would prefer to have the stern father administer all the justice in the world, whether it is God or the U.S. government.
You want to fix this world? Then engage this world. Don’t put up a firewall.
Q: Thomas, we have talked a lot about peace in a strategic perspective. What does peace mean to you, personally?
It is all about creating certainty. You ask yourself, “What are those various components that people want from their government?” The poor arguably want protection from their circumstances. The rich, you can cynically argue, want protection from the poor.
What the middle class wants is really hard to deliver. 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. Its ambitions are modest. They are middle class, and there is nothing wrong with that.
They want to keep what they have achieved. They want a better life than their parents had, and they want to pass on the possibility of better lives to their children. Security has become the dominant aspect of peace in the last 20 years, and it’s a huge revolution.
One day, back when I first got into this business, I had just come from listening to my first child’s heartbeat and seeing the ultrasound when she was a fetus. 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 20 years ago, the paradigm was to light up the planet in seven minutes. Now the goal is to 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 20 years—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 was has shifted from a system-level fear, which was profound when I was a child. We all feared nuclear war. Now it is down to “get the bad guys.” If you look at U.S. military interventions in the last 20 years, all the way back to when we toppled Noriega in Panama, we have not fought wars against militaries much. We have not really engaged wars against countries or nations or peoples. Every instance since then, either right from the start or very soon into it, we realized we were basically there to get the bad guys.
Q: Can we really get the bad guys or, if we get the bad guys, will there just be another bad guy that pops up?
This is a good point. 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 there will be a new crack dealer.
The same thing you can extrapolate to the level of nations. You take out the bad Saddam, and 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. 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.
I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and everybody I knew who was a man fought in that war. That was a war in which 70 million people were killed. Wars today kill in the hundreds or thousands.
Genocide used to be 7 million or 8 million dead. It is now a couple of hundred thousand dead. It is great that we have ratcheted definitions down, but do not leg those ratcheted-down definitions 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 you a thousand dead for a year and they call that a war.
Along those lines you can declare war on everything, can’t you? Smoking, choking on toys—whatever. 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.
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 having to defend all the time, and much more to the point of security, watching the economic development, which the middle class wants.
Q: So what about the typical American middle-class person? What can we do to cultivate peace and harmony here in our planet?
You push things like better educational opportunities. Push stricter child labor laws. Push for the improvement of health. You go very green. You tackle global smoking if you want to talk about a global killer. After we drove out all the tobacco companies here in America, they went abroad. They have been enormously successful in hooking a lot of people on smoking.
Anything that promotes the rights of women is 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, and makes them more uppity and demanding. As we saw in Iran, you really risk your authoritarian regime when you anger the women.
Q: Well, that makes sense!
Most authoritarianism usually comes with a very strong, patriarchal bent. Yet we know from history, if you want to develop your economy, make your women available to the labor force and deal with all the social changes that come as a result.
Q: If history has one lesson for us in terms of how to create peace, what is the lesson that you would want to pass on to future generations?
Connect.
If I would take one perspective from history, I would go with that advice: you should always focus on connection. 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 the Unabomber, living in a shack in the woods, living by his own code, committing murder at will. Why? He had to connections with the outside world.
Every time you take on connection, whether it is a mortgage, a marriage, children, home ownership, career, education, or anything that connects you to the rest of the world, it usually comes with rules, and with those rules comes pacification.
Compared to a history of humanity, what we’ve got going now is incredibly pacifying. You go back every hundred years in human history, and you will find a much greater percentage of humanity engaged in, or preparing for, mass slaughter.
It is a tremendous thing to realize how much we have ratcheted down violence in the system, and now that has come with all this tremendous wealth. The challenges we face today are fantastically better challenges than we had before.
The answer is still, “connect.”
Q: There is a beautiful quote in your book, Great Powers, where you write, “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 image a future worth creating, but actually try to build it.”
It is the unleashing of the individual ambition on a planetary scale. 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.
Yes, there will be violence involved in that. Yes, there will be death and all sorts of tumultuous results. But look at the Balkans 10 years after we bothered to go in and stop the genocide there. The Balkans are a much better place now, connected in all manner of ways—political, economic and social.
Never bet against a people’s desire for freedom, connectivity or pursuit of individual opportunity and liberty, because it is strong. 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.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:37AM 
