The coronavirus reminds us just how connected our world is, how there's no going back, and how this is the nature of crisis in the age of globalization

When I wrote my trilogy of books (Pentagon's New Map [2004], Blueprint for Action [2005], Great Powers [2009]), my primary purpose was to explore and explain what I thought was the new nature of crisis and conflict in the world.

In the first instance, it is about globalization's rapid and penetrating embrace of lesser connected countries, or what I dubbed the Gap. By and large that is a great thing (reduction of global poverty, creation of first-in-history truly global middle class), but it's very disruptive of culture and tradition and power structures, and conflict (largely in the form of state and non-state resistance to all this rising and intrusive connectivity) ensues.  That's why I called it the Pentagon's new map, my argument being, this is the nature of crisis and conflict.

The terror strikes of 9/11 represented that sort of new crisis: actors targeting symbols of connectivity (trade, security) and hoping to trigger a self-isolating effect (West leaves the Middle East). West, instead, came in force, triggering all sorts of refugee flows, revolutions, crackdowns, civil wars, etc.  West got tired and now it's mostly the East working this problem, but the connectivity continues and grows - both good and bad.

As my previous post indicated, Y2K was, for me and many others, a scheduled practice-like glimpse into these dynamics of system perturbation as the defining form of international crisis (vertical shocks followed by long horizontal waves of impact). 

Since 9/11, we've had the Great Recession and a variety of lesser pandemics.  Now we're finally confronting the long-anticipated killer pandemic that is coronavirus - the first great replay of a Spanish Flu-like transmission under the conditions of modern globalization.

How are we handling it? Actually, pretty much like expected.  

Authoritarian countries seek to hide or minimize the situation, while democracies are slow to act despite mounting evidence. This is to be expected.  Vertical power systems like China know how to handle horizontally spreading crises like this through traditional means of centralized control. Once the initial vertical shock passes (Wuhan for China), vertical systems tend not to fear horizontal dynamics. They are built to suppress such dynamics. Vertical systems really fear the out-of-the-blue stuff at the beginning because it triggers that popular emperor-has-no-clothes realization that all dictators fear so intently.

Instead, it's the horizontal political systems (like US and democracies in general) that tend to struggle more with the follow-on horizontal scenarios like this. We see the vertical shock of Wuhan in the distance and we blow it off (too far away, nothing to do with us). Then we start noticing the horizontally travelling shock waves approach through the world's many networks. But, given our system and culture, we fear the imposition of vertical controls ("evil Washington," "black helicopters," "take my guns" and other fantasies) that oftentimes work best right off the start, and so - over time - we suffer being the land of a 1000 different responses. Who's in charge? Hard to say. News comes in from all angles (POTUS, CDC, Congress, governors, mayors, school districts, etc.). The broken-clock preppers are right again! And the rest of us fight the inner panic urge.

While that decentralized approach, at first, seems to makes the problem worse (and it can alright), over time, our horizontally-defined strengths emerge. Our horizontally-structured system is free to experiment across the board, and our free press (even under conditions of political polarization) are adept at discovering, critiquing, and spreading best practices as they emerge (God bless them, one and all).  In the end, our horizontal political structures will tighten up some (centralize), but not wildly so, and they tend to re-relax over time as the crisis fades in memory and legal remedies ensue.

But lessons will be learned, and we will structure aspects of our polity, economy, networks, etc., to account for what we've learned.  And yes, it will make us better next time.

The larger lesson that remains is the same one we've been learning for two-to-three decades now, or since the end of the Cold War freed our minds to look at our connected/connecting world without the overlay of the superpower conflict/great-power war paradigm: our modern world is defined by connectivity, which grows over time and sets the parameters of all meaningful crises and how we respond to, and grow from, them.

Yes, we may think we can unilaterally withdraw from that world - however selectively or broadly, but that's a myth.

Yes, we may think we can renegotiate all the terms of our connectivity with the outside world, and, while we can certaintly adjust, that's a multi-sided game now with all sorts of great powers trying the same trick at the same time, so rule-set clashes proliferate.  These clashes are far from traditional conflict, but they do represent those powers realizing that, now that globalization is here, that is the best way to fight for what you want - or believe in.

Since 2016 America has sought to withdraw from the world, and it hasn't gone all that well. Our ability to set agendas, dampen great power tensions, or steer developments has been hugely diminished.  So has the global appeal of our rule-sets, which we spent the previous seven decades advocating for, and spreading, around the planet. We are a much smaller power in the world right now, and we're increasingly nervous about that, because the world hasn't grown any simpler as a result.

The coronavirus crisis exposes the folly of our recent approach (The Wall being our most hilariously sad example), more saliently than the still-dismissable (in too many minds) slow-mo climate change crisis (which certainly drives the uptick in zoonosis transmission events [animals-to-human disease vectors] by pushing humanity and wildlife together in more disruptive synergies).

And so corona does us this favor: it reminds us of how far we've come in this globalization and how going-your-own-way is a fear-threat reaction beneath our standing as a long-time global leader and - indeed - the primary architect of the world we still find ourselves in.

And so we learn again about the nature of our globalized world, the threats it poses and the crises it generates, and - hopefully - we once again reconsider our recent slide toward fantasizing about the return of conventional/strategic great-power war as a possibility (or, more insanely, as an inevitability) and we re-embrace what we re-learn everytime we endure one of these vertical-shocks-triggering-scary-horizontal-waves ...

Namely, that we are all in this together, and increasingly defined by our global connectivity.

We can try to shape that hardening reality for the better, or we can stick our fingers in our ears and scream nonsense in an effort to block this reality out. In our worst fears, we can always retreat to nostalgia, demanding that the homogenous world-of-our-youth magically return. But frankly, along that path lies not only self-delusion of the Osama Bin Laden sort but also the political violence that pathetic neediness begets.

But that world is gone, and that America is gone. What has replaced both is something far better, full of far more freedom, acceptance, diversity, and tolerance that what came before - yes, even despite our predictably frightened behavior of the past few years.

That new world/new America simply requires new and better skills.  And the coronavirus is just another experience that will generate, teach, and codify those lessons and skills.

And it will make all of us, our nation, and this world stronger (or, if you must insist - greater).

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ...

Remembering one of my favorite writings (refound here).

Creed of an American Grand Strategist

I am a great power. And so can you!

by Thomas P M Barnett

America today must dramatically realign its own post-9/11 trajectory with that of the world at large - a world undergoing deep transformation amidst great structural uncertainty. This realignment will require a new understanding of the world and America’s role in its evolution. Such an understanding is found in the realm of strategic thinking known as grand strategy.

Every functioning state pursues some form of grand strategy, either purposeful or accidental. Sometimes leaders will seek to sell a national strategy to the public, hoping to garner popular support. Other times they will keep it secret, because they can or because they must. In ages past, one leader might encompass this whole process. In today’s modern government, the norm is for hundreds and even thousands of key people to be involved, for change to be incremental and spread over years, and for significant disjuncture to occur only with shifts in top political leadership.

So when I speak of affecting significant and lasting change in America’s grand strategy, or its systematic approach to shaping this age of globalization, understand that I target not merely one administration or one party or one generation of leaders, but my nation’s sense of historical purpose - its political soul. America’s grand strategy must reflect its complex internal make-up as a people, but likewise its magnificent impact upon the world as its most successful multinational political and economic union. It must at once incorporate America’s imagined identity (we are the most synthetic of the world’s political creatures) and the world’s emerging ambitions, which we have enabled through our stewardship of global affairs. This challenge properly met, we bequeath unto our children a most wonderful world. Abandoned, we condemn them to a fate of dead-ended dreams and open-ended conflicts.

The modern grand strategist therefore aims to forge a lasting chain from analysis synthesized to vision spread to values embedded to leadership executed. A grand strategy is not an “elevator speech.” It cannot be slipped in like a password. Its why must be inculcated in younger minds so that, when they become older hands, these leaders know which levers of power to pull - and when.

Grand strategy is like imagining the chess game from start to finish, except that, in today’s world of rapidly spreading globalization, it’s never quite clear how many players are involved at any one moment or which pieces they actually control. That may make it seem like there are no rules, but that means it’s important to make explicit our definition of the rules and realize that playing consists largely of making our rule set seem attractive to others, regardless of how the game unfolds. This game-within-the-game resembles the highly iterative process of generating our own grand strategy. As Parag Khanna argues in his book, The Second World, the line distinguishing geopolitics (the relationship between power and space) and globalization (the global economy’s expanding connectivity) has been effectively erased. Therefore, my grand strategy—regardless of content—is mostly about trying to shape every other state’s grand strategy more than they shape mine. What was once highly hierarchical is now far more peer-to-peer in dynamics, thanks to globalization’s stunning advance. Still, while all great powers have grand strategies, some matter more than others.

After two decades of engaging the US national security establishment as a grand strategist, these are my articles of faith:

To be plausible, grand strategic vision must combine a clear-eyed view of today’s reality with a broad capture of the dominant trends shaping the near-term environment. It cannot posit sharp detours, much less U-turns, in history’s advance. This river’s course is set even as our journey upon it remains fraught with both promise and peril. Thus the vision does not seek to change human nature, which got us to this point quite nicely, but to placate it, thereby ensuring the portability of its strategic concepts (the dos and don’ts) among minds from different backgrounds, cultures and ages. No new human is required, just a solid fit between today’s inexhaustible ingenuity and tomorrow’s finite possibilities. So check your social Darwinism at the door, for all must gain admittance to this kingdom.

Grand strategic analysis starts with security, which is always 100 percent of your problem until it’s reasonably achieved. Then it’s at most about 10 percent of your ultimate solution. Scaling Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” involves far more than reaching that first rung. In any given conflict, if job creation is your only realistic exit strategy, then winning hearts and minds is an ephemeral victory at best. The grand strategist prefers stomachs and wallets any day. Humans are social creatures. They seek connectivity with one another across every possible avenue, leveraging each new technology to ends always self-fulfilling and sometimes self-destructive. This eternal search for new forms of connectivity defines globalization’s ceaseless advance throughout human history.

To remain realistic in this age of emerging hyper-connectivity, grand strategy must begin with the premise that security challenges will grow exponentially as a result of technology’s advance - the more connections, the more potential failure points. But to admit that challenge is not to surrender to its implied “chaos,” a judgment frequently employed by security experts to curtail serious exploration of grand strategy. All too often, they prefer to focus on contingency planning in a complex, “uncontrollable” world. Grand strategy purposefully aspires to be proactive, not merely protecting itself from failure, but exploiting avenues of success as they reveal themselves. Grand strategy is not a hypothesis but diagnosis combined with prescription.

Grand strategy is not clairvoyance; it does not seek to predict future events, but rather to contextualize them in a confident worldview. The goal is an opportunistic outlook that welcomes the churn of global events for the new, alternative pathways presented (“I hadn’t considered going that way up to now!”), eschewing the fatalism encouraged by mass media commentary (“These events have - yet again - cast grave doubts upon the possibility of achieving ...”). The unforeseen need not be the unexploited. In times of crisis, people naturally hesitate in choosing between what is right and what is easy, hence grand strategy must inculcate among its decision-makers a sense of confidence toward bargain-seeking behavior, both in terms of buying low (every crisis generates bargains in some form) and settling fast (i.e., cutting losses quickly). To employ a poker analogy, the grand strategist favors no chip - save his last. While the ultimate goal is always to increase his pot of earnings, the proximate goal in any hand is to gain admittance to the next round of play.

Grand strategy encourages realistic thinking about risk by comprehensively cataloguing the nation’s full complement of resources. The government may present both face and fist to the world outside, but it hardly reflects the country’s full instrumentality. This vast reservoir lies with the people and their collective ingenuity, which may or may not find adequate expression in the national economy, depending on the amount of economic freedom allowed therein. Americans tend to be overly impressed by authoritarian regimes, believing they represent the most formidable packaging of national will and skill. Of course, the opposite is true, especially in this age of expansive globalization; the many and the unleashed will always trump the few and the constrained. When we forget that, we find ourselves battling stubborn insurgencies of all sorts: among youth, across cyberspace, in postwar contingencies. Life finds a way of connecting ambition to resources within even the most controlled populations.

Grand strategic thinking always keeps the government’s role in proper perspective. Because of our Cold War experience, during which the fantastic dangers of global nuclear war shaped our popular sense of the US government’s global responsibilities, Americans invest far too much emotion in our government’s diplomatic interactions with the world and ascribe far too much power to our military’s ability to shape events. We are too proud of our victories and too stunned by our defeats, making us a sort of manic-depressive superpower that alternates between overestimating its strengths and exaggerating its weaknesses. By taking a long view of history, grand strategy encourages some much- needed humility regarding America’s place and power in the world. By understanding that hard power merely enables soft power by removing what the global community may judge - from time to time - to be intolerable barriers (e.g., extreme disconnectedness forced upon populations by dictators, dislocating disasters, continuing civil strife, or the general absence of political stability), we begin to understand the US military’s subordinate role: globalization’s bodyguard, but hardly its keeper. Globalization comes with rules but not a ruler.

The emerging global rule set is always under adjustment - more so during crisis. The only constant rule is that rules are constantly changing. The grand strategist tracks these evolutions across various sectors primarily for the purpose of gap analysis. These gaps are only incrementally revealed under normal circumstances, and conflicts can exacerbate them to the point of severe system crisis, which globalization - in its sum expression of connectivity, rules, alliances and mutual understanding - is getting better at processing. The grand strategist is therefore interested more in direction than degree of change, and he recognizes that politics lags dramatically behind economics and that security lags dramatically behind connectivity. His work is primarily concerned with keeping those gaps from growing too large by filling them in with new rule sets distinctly favorable to his vision, defined across the levels of system, state and individual (from Kenneth Waltz).

The grand strategist resists the demands of narrow thinkers to declare some collection of states or developmental model or industry paradigm as currently transcendent. Such choices are required only among the narrowest of minds (or the most savvy editors) out of fear that their arguments (or publications) won't find purchase unless some clear niche can be canonically fenced off. To wit, a joke: What do you call a grand strategist who promotes a new grand strategy every few weeks? A newspaper columnist. When pundits drown out strategists, the end of reason is truly near. So grand strategists do not entertain, much less succumb to, single-point-failure doomsaying, because system-wide thinking adheres to the horizontal view, not the vertical drill-down of experts who say, "I don't know anything about the rest of all that, I just know that my [insert favorite apocalyptic scenario here] makes your entire vision impossible!" Systematic thinking about the future means you're not "for" or "against" issues like peak oil or global warming or water scarcity, you just accept the dynamics implied and rank them accordingly. A holistic approach must be the grand strategist's calling card, leaving fear-mongers to the corners into which their need for binary, zero-sum outcomes ("A is up, so B must be down") paints them. The grand strategist welcomes such analysis as he welcomes all such data points. He simply refuses the accompanying Kool-Aid.

And so, the grand strategist is neither surprised nor dismayed when the awesome force of globalization’s tectonic shifts elicits vociferous or even violent friction from locals, for these are the essential drivers of conflict in our age. Success is not about avoiding any violence, but effectively processing the anger behind all violence. We live in a time of pervasive and persistent revolutions. Hardly able to prevent all eggs from cracking, the grand strategist wants only to make sure that the resulting omelets are not thoroughly wasted. In today’s super-empowered environment, anybody can play cook. Fight that inevitability and you’ll be taking on all-comers in never-ending conflict.

America’s grand strategists should calculate applications of hard power with the emotional detachment that comes with knowing that history is on our side. More than two centuries ago, the original anti-imperialist league of 13 colonies birthed the American System (Henry Clay’s term) of states uniting and economies integrating in collective security. Once the European version of “glo-colonialization” self-destructed in a massive civil war (1914-1945), our American system was successfully projected onto the global landscape, yielding an international liberal trade order first known as the West and now known simply as globalization. It is the first global “empire” in human history that both enriches and empowers its alleged “subjects,” and Dr Frankenstein’s monster, a truly world-spanning middle class, will inevitably emerge as the 21st century’s most awesome social force. Capturing that majority’s ideological “flag” constitutes the primary task of all grand strategy in the years and decades ahead.

Today’s grand strategist is “present at the creation” of some new world, the anticipation of which gets him out of bed each morning, ready to do battle yet again - room by room. His victories are not measured in battles won nor crises averted, but in minds shaped and leadership revealed.

Dr Thomas P M Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. He is a prolific author, whose latest book, Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399155376?ie=UTF8&tag=thompmbarn- 20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0399155376) , will be published next month. His blog can be accessed at http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/ (http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/)

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

Creative Commons "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported"

© 2009 ISN, Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich, Switzerland 

"Pentagon's New Map" and "Blueprint for Action" coming out in German/Germany this November

The ad:

The links:

• https://www.j-k-fischer-verlag.de/J-K-Fischer-Verlag/Der-Weg-in-die-Weltdiktatur--3612.html
• https://www.j-k-fischer-verlag.de/J-K-Fischer-Verlag/Drehbuch-fuer-den-3-Weltkrieg--3613.html

Will enjoy this translation in particular, as I can still read German from my PhD work.

In Changsha, China right now for some meetings/discussions with Hunan Academy of Social Sciences, but publisher asked me to post right away.

For all of you who asked why no German versions? all these years, apparently it took the flood of refugees/migrants from the Gap for the ideas to receive some direct attention in Germany. Yes, I realize that most of the media coverage concerning me has been inaccurate - to say the least. But now readers can decide for themselves.

Looking back on my arguments about Europe having to take in far larger numbers of immigrants to avoid a too-rapidly-aging demographic profile: I run into Europeans all the time who say, "That's easy for you to say but we have to deal with these people! And pay for it all!"

Well . . . having run that very experiment in my own family (three biological kids later augmented by one Asian and two Africans) . . . yeah, I do know a thing or two about the complications, costs, challenges, etc.

And I still make the same arguments. In this world, you go diverse or you're going down.

Fortunately, despite the nativist white blacklash here in the States, that's how the vast majority of Americans feel too, according to this Economist-published polling:

More than half of Americans answered "better" (dark blue) and more than 90% said "better/no difference" (latter being light blue) while less than 10% said "worse" (pink).

The numbers from European countries (larger pink "worse" blocs) are far more "drawbridges up" - as the Economist put it.

Thank God we have always been a synthetic country/citizenry/identity. 

 Yes, I also realize the titles are a bit jacked-up in translation. First think you learn as a writer: you don't get to title your articles/books.

America’s Post-Oil Grand Strategy

[Published in Mandarin by Knowfar Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies in Beijing, but available in original English only here]

America's Post-Oil Grand Strategy
by 
Thomas P.M. Barnett

June 2015

The United States defaulted to a Middle East-centric grand strategy in the waning years of the Cold War and has remained stuck there ever since – sometimes in denial (like now) and sometimes in fervent embrace (George W. Bush and his neocons) but always in a manner that demanded some measure of White House attention.  That seemingly unbreakable focus – particularly in relation to allies Israel and Saudi Arabia – now rapidly dissipates, falling victim first to a technological curveball and ultimately to a demographic shift that leaves Americans less willing to police the world and more interested in recasting their pursuit of happiness.  

America’s political leaders have taken to describing this era as one of unprecedented uncertainty, but this is hardly the case.  Globalization is either winning or has won across all the world’s regions, leaving only the question of which global “brands” (American, Chinese, Indian, European, Russian) will dominate where.  President Obama and much of Washington now project the nation’s grand strategic ambitions in the direction of Asia, but they are mistaken.  America’s historical scheme of integrating the world “laterally” (West to East) since World War II is largely complete, meaning these United States now enter an age of “vertical” integration (North to South) in the Western Hemisphere. This latitudinal expansion of the American System once imagined by our Founding Fathers will define U.S. foreign policy across the rest of this century.

The technological curveball that arrives just in time

In many ways, the hybrid U.S. economic system of big firms surrounded by a sea of small, technology-innovating start-ups represents the purest real-world expression of Karl Marx’s dialectic materialism – a theory of history that tracks causality from inexorable technological advance to altered economic reality to inevitable political change. What Marx never imagined was a political system able to structure itself so that those technological waves would just keep coming over the decades, consistently “buying off” the electoral acquiescence of the lower and middle classes in the face of elite domination (oftentimes real, sometimes just imagined) of the highest levels of government.  In Marxian terminology, America’s political “superstructure” has learned how to co-evolve with its economic “base” better than any nation-state in history.

The feedback loop that has allowed that successful co-evolution is America’s sometimes stunningly permissive rule of law.  Basically, you can try or invent just about anything in America that isn’t currently prohibited by law, whose construction trails innovation sometimes for decades. In too much of the rest of the world, one’s innovation and industry is limited to what is allowed by law.  Do Americans pay for that permissiveness?  Regularly – in the form of surges in criminality, environmental damage, labor abuse and sheer greed.  But thanks to our participatory regulatory and legal systems, the “little guy” can fight back and can make those bastards pay for what they’ve done!  So while the construction of protective laws trails crimes, disasters, and tragedies of the common, it never falls so far behind that the political system fractures – save for our unique historical experience with slavery.

Thus, it is only fitting that America’s historically recent Middle East-centric grand strategy, seemingly beholden as it was to the goal of assuring the world’s access to affordable energy, now falls victim to yet the latest in a long string of U.S.-triggered technological waves – the so-called fracking revolution.  This silver bullet development, coming as it does just as two new, energy-import-dependent superpowers (China, India) rise in the East, could not be more fortuitous for extending the global moratorium on great power war begun with the invention of nuclear weapons.  It essentially introduces enough slack in the world energy system to allow both Asian giants to step into their economic primes without needing to militarily challenge either the United States or its long-nurtured global trade system.  When combined with the Western Hemisphere’s most crucial resource advantage – namely, arable land in an age of global climate change, America’s new-found energy independence fundamentally prevents any historical repeat of the structural run-ups to World Wars I or II, much less any revivification of the Cold War’s East-West destructive superpower rivalry.  Thanks to fracking, it turns out that this town is big enough for the both of us – the U.S. and China in the Pacific Rim today, and China and India in Asia tomorrow.

Think about that for a minute: amidst all the continuing expert predictions of overpopulation and rising consumption bankrupting the planet to the point of non-stop “resource wars” among “thirsty” great powers (think oil and water), American ingenuity once again comes to the world’s rescue on both energy and food (i.e., water turned into human energy).

Just a decade ago, America imported almost two-thirds of its crude oil and entertained plans for new infrastructure to facilitate imports of liquid natural gas.  Today it surpasses Saudi Arabia on crude oil production and, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, will become a net exporter of crude oil in roughly a decade’s time. Moreover, by tapping into what is estimated to be the world’s second-largest shale gas reserves (China is number one), America has re-vaulted itself to the leading ranks of world natural gas producers – soon available for export.  This sort of technological turnaround is – quite frankly – just as impressive as China’s economic rise over the similarly long gestation period of the past quarter-century.  But – again – more importantly, America’s technological achievement essentially solves the structural challenge created by China’s rapid ascension in the world power system – but only if both Washington and Beijing become smart enough to realize that.

President Barack Obama was absolutely correct in downsizing America’s “war on terror” from the Bush Administration’s focus on regime toppling to hunting down and killing bad guys.  Frankly, that’s been America’s story on military interventions going all the way back to Panama and Manuel Noriega in 1989.  We don’t take on governments anymore; we take on bad/nonstate actors (the Milosevic gang in Serbia, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the “deck of 52” in Iraq, Qaddafi in Libya, and so on). By re-symmetricizing what has long been described as radical Islam’s asymmetrical war on the West, Obama right-sized the terror war. But to cover his soft-on-defense vulnerability as a Democrat, he coupled that wise decision with the strategically unsound declaration of America’s “pivot to Asia” – in effect, shifting from a region in which globalization’s advance is still being violently contested to one where its victory is already complete.

But here’s where the strategic irony grows stunningly disturbing: by attempting to contain rising China’s natural military expansion in East Asia, Washington inadvertently prevents what must become Beijing’s progressive embrace of the role of extra-regional security Leviathan for the Persian Gulf.  Worse, by doing this, Washington actually encourages rival India to do the same when it must eventually partner with China in providing that regional security umbrella. In other words, just as America’s technological breakthrough on energy relieves it of its unwanted role in the Persian Gulf, Washington wrongheadedly works to prevent our historical relief from moving toward those “responsible stakeholder” roles. 

America’s Long(itudinal) War: It only gets worse

Understand this from the start:  the Persian Gulf still matters to Europe in terms of energy flows but not to the United States.  From the five top-10 global oil exporters located in the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait), only negligible amounts of crude oil currently flow to the Western Hemisphere.  The vast majority of Persian Gulf oil exports (roughly four-fifths) flows into East Asia, with China and India alone accounting for half of that flow.  Anti-war protestors got it only half-right: it may have been American blood, but it was never our oil.

If you’re paying attention to Barack Obama’s second-term boldness in foreign policy, this newfound swagger clearly tracks back to a growing sense of both America’s energy independence and its ability to influence global energy markets.  The recent bottoming of global oil prices was due in no small part to rising American production.  In the case of Venezuela’s flagging financial support to Cuba, this left the Castro brothers more open to Obama’s offers of normalizing bilateral relations. In the case of Iran, this increased the White House’s confidence in moving ahead on the nuclear power deal – despite Riyadh and Israel’s obvious displeasure.  Even in the case of Russia’s ongoing squeeze of Ukraine, the Obama Administration reveals no penchant for “blinking,” and why should it?  The more Vladimir Putin isolates Russia from the West, the more Moscow is forced to sell off its vast natural resources to the world’s largest buyer of the same – those notoriously stingy and difficult Chinese.  Putin’s reward for grabbing the Crimea is pitiable: the right to sell off Russia at bargain-basement prices to Beijing.

But make no mistake: there is genuine strategic risk in Obama’s mistimed Asian “pivot.”

In Asia alone, Washington risks a number of stumbling-into-great-power-war pathways, several of which could be driven by local powers (Japan and Vietnam especially) over-reacting to Beijing’s latest – literally – dredged-up beachhead or the right shooting incident between patrol craft operating above, on, or below the disputed waters.  A rising superpower like China has wont of an appropriate whipping boy to demonstrate its growing military prowess.  When America reached that jingoist apogee late in the 19^th century, it was smart enough to target the comatose Spanish Empire in the Caribbean (Cuba) and Pacific (Philippines).  For China, still nurturing regional grudges over past “humiliations,” East Asia is a sufficiently target-rich environment.  And with the Pentagon locked and loaded to prove its AirSea Battle Concept, one cannot help but worry that some Asian variant of Archduke Ferdinand is now figuratively riding through the streets with his car-top down. Granted, the resulting shooting war is more likely virtual than real, but there too we find burgeoning cyber-warfare forces on both sides of the Pacific itching to press those keys and reveal to the world the damage they’re truly capable of inflicting.

Should the United States increasingly put at risk its greatest foreign policy achievement in history – namely, the rapid and planet-wide spread of our economic source-code (aka, globalization) – with this China-centric “pivot” to East Asia?  No. In Beijing’s eyes, any U.S. effort to block their naval expansion leaves the Mainland vulnerable to military pressure from the sea – the oft employed attack vector of Western powers seeking China’s “humiliation.”  All Americans have to do to approximate the average Chinese’s nationalism on this point is to imagine Chinese aircraft carriers, submarines and aircraft patrolling just beyond America’s declared national waters.  Think of just how far Fox News could run with that.

Predictably – if not fortunately, crises in the Middle East routinely erupt to recapture America’s dangerously short strategic attention span.  Here, the Obama Administration’s modus operandi of “leading from behind” is a preview of coming distractions. With Washington locally perceived as backing out of its longtime regional Leviathan role, and with relief (China, India) nowhere in sight, we collectively enter a nobody-is-minding-the-stove period in which the region’s preeminent three-sided rivalry between Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey will come to a dangerous boil.

We’ve seen this already unfold in the Islamic State’s frighteningly rapid rise.  Fearing growing encirclement by the fabled Shia Crescent, Riyadh secretly bankrolled the group’s emergence in Syria and Iraq.  Ankara, with similar rivalrous instincts, allowed Turkey to become a smuggling sieve for foreign fighters and supplies transiting to and from ISIS.  Now, as their monstrous co-creation threatens them directly, both regimes are caught in the sort of strategic conundrum usually reserved for intervening extra-regional great powers – a truly telling development.  Iran too now faces a certain imperial “overstretch” throughout the wider region, making its determined effort to gain international recognition as a nuclear power oddly reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s efforts with the West during the Cold War, in that, the more Tehran engages in great-power meddling of its own, the more it wants to erase the threat of possible strategic retaliation against the homeland – a decidedly logical move.

But it will be in the nuclear realm where this three-sided Gulf rivalry regularly rattles the world’s nerves in coming years. With Tehran on the verge of getting the Obama Administration to implicitly recognize its nuclear breakout capacity of a year-or-less, Riyadh is strongly rumored to be readying itself to cash in Pakistan’s long-offered promise of ready-to-use nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, Ankara, with NATO nuclear weapons already on its soil, will likely resist the temptation for now.  Still, soon enough the world will find itself managing a three-sided nuclear standoff – however latent – among Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  That prospect has to scare even the most fervent believer in the system-stabilizing effect of nuclear weapons, myself included.

Frightening as it may be for the world to re-learn the fundamental logic of mutually assured destruction – particularly in a region chock-full of End Times-embracing millenarians, I have spent the last decade proclaiming the inevitability of this pathway simply because Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly was always unsustainable and a bit spooky with its Masada complex.  Now, the technological curveball that triggers America’s new strategic distance renders this outcome virtually inescapable.  In nuclear terms, the inmates are finally running the asylum.

Go South, Young Man

America’s shift from a “horizontal” grand strategy (West integrating East) to a “vertical” grand strategy (North integrating South) is preordained by demographics. Any country’s economic rise stems first and foremost from an advantageous national age distribution, meaning lots of labor relative to children and old people. This “demographic dividend” is typically triggered by improvements in healthcare for mothers and young children, which allows families to eschew additional pregnancies out of the growing assurance that their first two or so children will make it into adulthood. That turning-off-the-fertility-spigot creates a welcome labor bulge that comes with a time limit of roughly a generation’s time – like the journey of America’s Boomer generation from youth to (now) old age.  If you’re lucky, your society gets rich before it gets old.

America took advantage of a fortuitous demographic dividend in the 1950s and 1960s to power the global economy with manufacturing.  Compared to all of its competitors that suffered great loss of young life, the U.S. was overloaded with labor relative to dependents – a glorious run extended somewhat by the first Boomers’ arrival in the workplace in the mid-to-late 1960s. Japan was next to ride a lifting demographic wave, rising like a rocket across the 1970s and 1980s, only to see that trajectory fizzle out since the 1990s as the nation rapidly started stockpiling old people due to stunningly low fertility.  China was next in the 1990s and 2000s, but then predictably saw its demographic dividend peak in 2010.  Now, with fertility still low (the one-child policy became a hard habit to break), China will age (mean age) three times as fast as the U.S. through the middle of the century.

Whose up next?  Southeast Asia enjoys a demographic dividend now, with India’s coming on its heels.  Beyond them lay the Middle East and Africa, the latter looking at the biggest dividend that the world has ever seen (the better part of a billion people).

Why this economic history matters: Once a nation embraces manufacturing to leverage its demographic dividend, it starts “climbing the ladder of production,” moving from cheap and assembled goods to higher-order manufacturing.  A rite of passage is seen in automobile manufacturing, which dovetails with any rising economy’s growing middle-class demand for mobility.  As it climbs that ladder, the nations in question must slough off their lower-end manufacturing to those countries coming into their own demographic dividends.  In short, these nations become inexorably bound to their successors through direct investment and integration via expanding global production chains.  In many ways, then, the shifting center of gravity in the global economy’s cheap-labor surplus is a magnificently integrating and thus pacifying historical force.  China, for example, needs Southeast Asia’s demographic dividend to work for its own long-term economic health.  In the end, that’s the biggest brake on Chinese regional militarism.

Which brings us to why America must turn its welcoming gaze southward – now.

America is the Dorian Gray of great powers.  We’ll age far more slowly than the rest of the West and even most of the advancing East over the next several decades precisely because we enjoy immigration pressures from Latin America – a far younger and faster-growing region than North America. Demographically speaking, the two most important factors in economic growth are slowing social aging and integrating one’s economy with younger and faster-growing neighboring economies.  For the U.S., that’s Latin America, which is why America’s long-standing policy of focusing its foreign policy attention everywhere else in the world but Latin America must end, along with our nation’s highly costly and destructive “war on drugs” – a process thankfully begun in terms of individual states decriminalizing marijuana use.

You may be thinking: shouldn’t America contest China’s spreading influence in places like East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa?  The answer is no, for all the economic integration reasons cited above.  Good example: China and Africa are simultaneously engaging in a massive urbanization wave, giving Chinese construction companies clear economies-of-scale advantages in that vast building scheme.  Yes, American companies can and should be part of that build-up process, but we cannot hope to compete with the Chinese for influence brought about by progressively deeper economic integration.  America’s great accomplishment during its demographic heyday was to trigger and nurture and defend Asia’s integration into the global economy.  Now it’s Asia’s turn to extend that historical process to most of the remaining South – but not Latin America if the U.S. plays it smart.

With climate change making the planet’s middle lattitudes increasingly inhospitable over this century, migratory pressures will grow.  In choosing between heading south (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) or heading north (North America), most Latinos will continue to head north – as they should.  In terms of underutilized arable land, upper North America offers far more economic potential than South America’s southern cone.  Today America grows wheat in water-starved Texas.  By mid-century we’ll be growing it in water-rich Alaska.  No kidding.

Right now, one out of six Americans is Latino.  By mid-century, Latinos will approach a one-third share of the U.S. population – and voters.  Already, Miami is the de facto social and economic “capital” of Latin America – a sign of political integration to come.

No, adding new stars to the American flag won’t unfold as some modern, militaristic imperialism. Instead, led by its largest demographic cohort ever – those Millennials, these United States will get back in the historical business of attracting and accepting new members.  Remember, we began this journey of integration as a confederation of 13 colonies (1789), growing over the next 170 years to our current total of 50 states.  That’s averaging a new member roughly every half-decade. Then we shut that door following the admissions of Hawaii and Alaska (non-contiguous states, it must be noted) in 1959, adding nothing since.  Do you want America to stay competitive with those billion-person Asian behemoths China and India?  Well, the Western Hemisphere contains roughly a billion souls.

When America’s Founding Fathers dreamt of an American System of political, economic, social and territorial integration, they weren’t just contemplating our horizontal slice of North America.  Visionaries like Alexander Hamilton and later Henry Clay (who coined the term) imagined that system extending itself to welcome all Americans. 

The U.S. remade the world over the last seven decades by spreading its system of rules and economic model.  Globalization was a “conspiracy” hatched by Washington and it’s been called many things over the decades, from Teddy Roosevelt’s “open door” to Franklin Roosevelt’s “new deal for the world.”  Having successfully led that integration process from West to East, it’s now America’s duty – and self-preserving opportunity – to build out that American System across the entire Western Hemisphere.

And that process needs to begin now – as in, the next president.

Pop!Tech 8 artwork by Peter Durand of Alphachimp

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Alphachimp artwork from 2005 "New Map Game": "Blueprint for Action" preview

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How to Become a Grand Strategist

Wrote it for Esquire back in the fall of 2008 at the request of an editor there, but it never got published. Later presented the accompanying briefing to the Knowfar Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies in Beijing, and they translated it into Chinese and published as my first document in my role as Visiting Scholar (2015).

How to Become a Grand Strategist

[original opening penned by Esquire editor]

AN UNTESTED NEW PRESIDENT FACES TWO ONGOING WARS, A DEEPLY DISTRESSED NATIONAL ECONOMY, AND AN INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM UNDERGOING MORE DEEP-SEATED ECONOMIC TURMOIL THAN AT ANY TIME SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION … IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN WE NEED FAR-SIGHTED STRATEGISTS, THIS IS IT.  SO WE ASKED RESIDENT STRATEGIST, THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, WHO JUST FINISHED HIS LATEST BOOK, “GREAT POWERS:  AMERICA AND THE WORLD AFTER BUSH," TO HELP US FIGURE OUT HOW TO BUILD SUCH A CADRE FOR THESE TURBULENT TIMES.  HERE’S HIS CRADLE-TO-GRAVE EXPLORATION OF WHAT IT TAKES TO BECOME A “GRAND STRATEGIST,” ALONG WITH A QUICK ANALYSIS OF WHETHER OUR PRESIDENT-ELECT SEEMS UP TO THE TASK HIMSELF.

There are four fundamental reasons why American grand strategy matters more right now than any other nation’s grand strategy.

The first is that the American example is provided the source code for this era’s version of globalization, which superseded the colonial model of world integration previously pursued by the Eurasian imperial powers.  These United States represent the oldest and most successful multinational economic, political and security union on the planet, a collection of states whose integration has been so successful and so deep that we forget the fantastic journey that brought us to this present state of being.  We should not, because it is our essential gift to world history, currently finding its replication—finally—in the European context from which we sprang.  The success of that model, the European Union, has made it the second great source code for the future of globalization.  By both improving on and falling short of the original, it provides the world a much-needed contrast (i.e., “go slow” globalization compared to our “go fast” model) in these tumultuous economic times. 

The second reason is that America currently serves as the sole historical bridge between settled Europe’s post-military, post-nationalistic achievement of stable identity and rising Asia’s pre-military, pre-nationalistic pursuit of the same.  In other words, while Europe has evolved past the great sources of 20^th century conflict (militarism, nationalism, ideologies in general), Asia’s emerging powers—save for Japan—are rapidly approaching these historical phases, largely clinging to the hope that comprehensive marketization of their economies alone will so integrate their societies with the larger world as to render these traps obsolete.  The trade-off, however, is substantial for the planet as a whole, because in so rapidly integrating with the global economy, Asian nations have turbo-charged globalization’s dynamics to the point of resurrecting fears of zero-sum competitions among great powers for resources, markets and military allies in the decades ahead.  They’ve resurrected the specter of empires.  Having avoided that historical path through our pursuit of an “empire of ideals,” America remains at once militarily empowered and still ideologically committed enough to use that power in defense of the global system we did so much to create.  Europe is no longer able to play that muscular role and Asia—save Putin—seeks to avoid the temptations associated with it.

Thirdly, America’s ability to maintain its status as global military Leviathan is far from assured absent a clear grand strategy that articulates the rationale for such a role.   That articulation is what sustains the American public’s support for the regular employment of that force, while dispelling the fears of the rest of the world regarding the use of military might that is often seen as arbitrary or self-aggrandizing.  The “sweet spot” to be targeted is thus a vision that says to both Americans and the rest of the world: “These are the mutually agreed upon conditions under which U.S. military forces are deployed to improve the global security environment.”  Does this give the world a say in how we use military force?  Yes.  But it defines more the “ceiling,” or those lines we shall not cross, than the “floor,” the minimum effort we are compelled to make.  Frankly, America’s fears have always tended more toward the higher boundaries (Have we gone too far?) than the lower ones (Should we be doing more?), given our overall wealth, geographic security and sense of duty to others.  And so, we desire constraints on our tendency to go overboard just as the world does.  If reasonably achieved, such a grand strategy both preserves and sanctifies our status as sole global military superpower.

Finally, America’s grand strategy matters most right now primarily because it is so off-kilter from globalization’s current trajectory.  We’re fighting a “global war” that no one else on the globe seems to recognize, against enemies whose power we consistently exaggerate to the point of provoking disbelief among even our closest allies.  America seems paranoid and belligerent at exactly the historical moment when the world is going our way. And when that exemplar, sporting the world’s biggest gun, seems so disturbed about global trends, it sows the seeds of uncertainty across the international system by suggesting that we don’t have a clue about what lies ahead.  Neither Europe nor Asia can fill this vision void, because while each can offer models (Europe’s integration of states, China’s national development), none other than the United States of America can offer a trusted mechanism for eliminating the risk of debilitating conflict—however scaled.  The price of war determines all other prices in the global marketplace.  America either backs those “securities” or they—much like our financial markets--will become subject to wild fluctuations. 

In the tumultuous times since 9/11 sent our world spinning that much faster, America has searched for a grand strategic vision to animate our spirit and guide our actions, and it has failed.  When we should have inspired hope, we have stoked fears, and where we should have built bridges, we have erected walls.   

We simply have to do better.  Globalization is currently held in the grip of its worst financial crisis ever, arguably the first truly global catastrophe of our networked age that unfolds—layer upon complex layer—like the system-wide perturbation of our worst Y2K fantasies.  If there was any remaining doubt that the world’s great powers either all swim or all sink together in this interconnected global economy, then this unprecedented contagion has erased it.  Globalization is no longer a national choice but a global condition.

So how do we develop appropriate grand strategy for this day and age? 

Part of the problem is that, since the Cold War’s end, America has largely gotten out of the business of thinking in terms of grand strategy.  I mean, when you’re the system’s sole superpower, your grand strategy would logically seem to consist of making sure you remain #1 and little else.  In strict military terms, that goal was both sufficient and easily achieved.  But once we discard our neocon blinders and widen our vision to take in the full panoply of globalization’s growing complexity and all the rising great powers it has generated, that tendency to reduce grand strategy to mere, “hard power” dominance seems woefully inadequate—especially to this now insolvent Leviathan.

So, in terms of building up America’s capacity to generate and sustain a lasting grand strategy, we need to generate enough leaders with the full range of skill sets required for this crucial task.

What is grand strategy?  A simple definition is to say that, as far as a world power like America is concerned, a grand strategy involves first imagining some future world order within which our nation’s standing, prosperity, and security are significantly enhanced, and then plotting and maintaining a course to that desired end while employing—to the fullest extent possible—all elements of our nation’s power toward generating those conditions.  Naturally, such grand goals typically take decades to achieve, thus the importance of having a continuous supply of grand thinkers able to maintain our strategic focus.

In that vein, let me run you through some of the attributes and skills that I’ve come across in my own study of American grand strategy and strategists, along with my own attempts (alas) to play that role within the U.S. national security community for the last two decades. 

We’ll start with some basics and then move on to the more complex skills, finally examining the current market for grand strategy.

Prepare ye the way of the grand strategist

First, it pays to have a happy childhood, not a perfect one, but certainly not one that leaves you permanently damaged. You can’t see too far down the road if you’re always in a defensive crouch. Child psychologists say that every child grows up thinking the world is exactly like his or her family, so tough childhoods yield dark, pessimistic worldviews while pleasant ones generate the sort of can-do optimism required of somebody with the natural ambition to shape the world for the better. Grand strategy isn’t merely about bad futures to be prevented.  That’s called contingency planning.  Rather, grand strategy is about accessing the best possible future, one in which your nation can be all it can be.

Second, birth order matters.  First-borns tend to be the chief executives, meaning they’re often in charge of implementing grand strategic designs, while the “babies” of the family tend to be the vision hamsters, happily spinning out new ideas from their wheel.  So if you think of grand strategy as a sort of religious triptych, it’s the younger siblings that play prophet, generating the word, while it’s the older ones who end up assuming the role of deliverer.  Grand strategists need to be natural salesmen, or persuaders of great artistry, and you find that emotional IQ further down the family ranks, among those forced to charm their way in a world of more powerful siblings. 

Third, keep it gay.  Since the British economist John Maynard Keynes, arguably the greatest grand strategist of the 20th century, was a homosexual, being gay can’t be described as a handicap.  In fact, that sense of living outside the accepted mainstream is an occupational advantage, however it’s artistically achieved, for it gives you the intellectual cojones to imagine future worlds that conventional wisdom judges as “inconceivable!”  Holistic views of the future require a deep ability to see life from a wide variety of angles, otherwise you’ll be constantly flabbergasted by all those “irrational actors” who pop up in opposition to clear logic of the path you’ve constructed.

Doing a complete 180, it’s also highly beneficial to end up married with children.  Successful marriage forces constant personality adaptation, or the ability to rationalize your way to happiness despite the ongoing challenges of daily life.  Grand strategists need to be happy warriors, because temporary setbacks and roadblocks constantly abound in any long-term quest to shape world order.  Having kids is important because they connect you personally to downstream futures, meaning, in the long run, we won’t all be dead.  Bonus points for interracial marriage and/or adoption, because nothing forces you out of your comfortable skin more thoroughly.

Beware the mid-life crisis.  Grand strategy, like youth, is largely wasted on the young.  It’s your middle years when you’re most able to process complexity in all its . . . uh . . . complexity, but that’s also the timeframe when people are most likely to suffer depression, or the ultimate personal challenge of rationalizing lost dreams versus remaining possibilities.  Processed well, your middle years can turbo-charge your mental skills, moving you past mere analysis into true synthesis—the hallmark of grand strategic thinking.  Done badly, you’ll find yourself alone in that red Miata, world-weary cynicism in tow, driving to pick up your kids on the alternate weekend.

The grand strategist as personality type

Ego comes first.  You can’t be a grand strategist without a sizeable ego.  Why?  The more successful you become in spreading your vision, the more often you’ll be called a complete dumb ass by total strangers.  Grand visions of better futures are—intellectually speaking—the fattest possible target for deflating criticism.   Everyone and anyone can name that “one thing you’ve clearly overlooked!”  The trick is, to spread vision, you need to remain ultimately accessible, especially to young minds you seek to capture, and they tend to be, when unconvinced, the most disrespecting audience possible.  So a thick skin is a must, along with the confidence that allows you to resist dumbing down your material in the face of initial poor sales.  As a contemporary said of Keynes, “He never dimmed his headlights.”  When you think in terms of decades, you gotta stick with the high-beams.

Optimism reigns supreme.  Noted futurist Peter Schwartz declares, “optimists are not people who expect no challenges,” but rather are those who “believe that challenges can be overcome.”  Grand strategists tend to be more “fox” than “hedgehog,” meaning they generate many possible solutions to a particular problem instead of always reaching for the most comfortable, conventional answer—hence their confidence in being able to work around any one road block.  They are rationalizers of the highest order, such that virtually any outcome can be cast as yet another indication that “everything is going according to my plan!”  Megalomania is an occupational hazard (see Richard Nixon), best treated with a self-deprecating sense of humor (Abraham Lincoln).

The closet introvert.  Alexander Hamilton possessed the classic split personality of a grand strategist:  the charismatic winner of hearts and minds who, as intellectual loner, took perverse pride in standing against the crowd.  Grand strategists are the Groucho Marx of the intelligentsia:  desiring mass acceptance while avoiding any club that might accept them as a member, they seek to steer conventional wisdom while escaping its stultifying grasp.  As such, they’re a weird mix of benevolence and intolerance in their relationships:  despite being the acquaintance of thousands, they possess few close friends (e.g., Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt).  Expert at getting others to understand their ideas, they still view themselves as lonely, persecuted visionaries (Nixon, along with one of his idols, Woodrow Wilson). 

The insatiable sponge.  Strategic thinkers are curious about everything and everyone—Teddy Roosevelt being the exemplar.  They read widely and possess tremendous memories for people they’ve met and stories they were told.  They have a genuine interest in popular pursuits, and befitting their high emotional intelligence, they exhibit a remarkable empathy for people unlike themselves.  As Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote of Lincoln, he had “the gift or curse of putting himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.”  Ironically, it is that intense empathy that affords them great equanimity in the face of danger—even disaster.  Armed with this knowledge, they are able to distance themselves from the dynamics of crisis.  Grand strategists are rarely surprised but often saddened by the course of human events.  They see a world of “when’s,” not “if’s.”

Educating the grand strategist 

Beautiful minds.  Grand strategists tend to view the world horizontally, rather than vertically.  They connect dots naturally, recognizing processes and patterns before others.  They thrive on exposure to the new as opposed to deep study of the familiar.  They tend to learn “how” over “what,” and prefer to teach themselves than to be taught formally by others.  They are most interested by the intersections of knowledge (i.e., the Medici effect), or where different domains overlap with one another.  They have an innate capacity to discern force from friction, so they spot underlying causes without being distracted by symptoms.  Take, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s ability to dissect the great social and economic issues of his day from the perspective of a self-taught naturalist/environmentalist.  He understood politics as a struggle of the fittest, yet sought to level those playing fields—both at home and internationally—so as to avoid overly self-destructive and therefore unsustainable competition.

Natural translators.  The best practical preparation for becoming a grand strategist is to learn as many languages as possible—another legendary TR skill.  Studying languages—both actual and technical—teaches you how to master new vocabularies and the logic that underlies them.  In a world of increasingly specialized lexicons for almost every profession, that’s a huge skill.  Studying language immerses you in the thought processes of others, giving you different lenses for viewing the world.  It puts you in the other guy’s shoes, which is crucial for out-of-the-box thinking.  Language study also boosts your skills at mimicry, because to speak Russian or Chinese, for example, you’ve got to act a bit Russian or Chinese.  If you really want to connect with foreign leaders and audiences, you have to get inside their comfort zone, and one of the best ways to do that is to play the part.  Pope John Paul II was a more recent master of this stage art, along with JFK (“Ich bin ein Berliner”) and Reagan (“Doveri, no proveri”/”trust but verify”). 

The softer sciences.  Grand strategists are more naturally located in the so-called softer sciences of political science (Wilson, Henry Kissinger), economics (Keynes), history (TR), and especially law (Hamilton, Lincoln).  Indeed, when hard scientists wade into the fray, it’s often with a moralistic bent that’s difficult to stomach, because they typically effect such conversions late in their careers, often out of great anger at the injustices of the political world.  So while harder scientists often make the best dissidents (e.g., physicist Andrei Sakharov, mathematicians Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anatoli Scharansky) and caustic regime critics (like the linguist Noam Chomsky), they’re rarely a good source for grand strategic thinking.  Grand strategy essentially involves political struggle at a global/system level, so it’s best practiced as an art of the possible as opposed to a design problem logically solved through number crunching.

The right credentials.  Generally speaking, a graduate degree gets you inside the door of participating institutions and government agencies, but a PhD is required to avoid any glass ceilings later on.  Law degrees equate to a PhD, but an MBA ranks somewhat lower.  As a rule, a PhD from anywhere beats a graduate degree from somewhere.  Credentializing experience includes stints in the government, the military, or international investment banking.  For cachet, it’s hard to beat an Ivy League PhD (like uber-journalist Fareed Zakaria) or a premier teaching position at one (see law prof Philip Bobbitt).  Of course, the King Kong today is arguably 4-star army general and commander of Central Command, David Petraeus (PhD Princeton), who seems intent on checking every power-job box on the list.  Increasingly, we see the premier legacy artists (e.g., Kissinger, James Baker) wielding their talents in the private sector following extensive government stints.  Befitting this frontier-integrating age of globalization, many of the world system’s biggest structural linkages are being built today between emerging-market governments, globe-spanning multinational corporations, sovereign wealth funds, and “universal” banks (meaning, those with both retail and investment divisions).    That’s where yours truly (Harvard PhD, 7 years in the Defense Department) plies his craft these days.  Finally, it’s de rigueur nowadays to publish a thick, lofty volume every 3-t0-5 years, and if they’re mega-bestsellers, like those of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, then you go to the head of the Davos line.  The problem with columnists as grand strategists, however, is that, due to the news-sensitive nature of their business, they tend to switch gears too frequently on topics to sustain a lasting vision. 

Grand strategist, strategize thyself

Plan for opportunism.  As knowledge worker guru, Peter Drucker, argued, “Successful careers are not ‘planned.’  They are the careers of people who are prepared for the opportunity because they know their strengths.”  The key distinction for the grand strategist is whether he’s adept at decision-making or more cut out for the adviser role.  In other words, are you a Nixon or a Kissinger?  Once you figure that out, it makes sense to ally yourself with your opposites—concentrating on your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses.  You want to collect these people as you advance throughout your career, using them to venture into as many fields as possible to build up your street cred, balancing time inside government with time in the private sector.  Because you can’t get rich in government (alas), success in the private sector is essential to building up the fuck-you! money that allows you to maintain that g0-ahead-and-fire-my-ass! bravado when you finally land your dream post in the administration of your choosing (right around the time your oldest kids head to college).  Sad to day, but if you really need that salary, it gets much harder to speak truth to power.

Seek out mentors.  Another Drucker truism:  “Most people think they know what they are good at.  They are usually wrong.  People know what they are not good at more often.”  Mentors are crucial for telling you what you’re good for and where you best slot in, so you want to collect as many of these as possible early in your career.  The world of grand strategy is full of mentor-protégé relationships.  Grand figures (e.g., Kissinger, Baker, Brent Scowcroft) typically spawn small networks among subsequent generations, because nobody moves up the ranks on their own.  Look at Dick Cheney’s decades-long dance with Donald Rumsfeld, stretching from the Ford administration (where Cheney succeeded Rummy as White House chief of staff) right through that of George W. Bush (where Rummy assumed Cheney’s former slot at the Pentagon).  The problem with this reality, of course, is the tendency toward groupthink within the various lineages.  As such bad habits can be passed on inappropriately.  Good example:  Brent Scowcroft’s “honest broker” model as George H.W.’s national security adviser in the late 1980s yielded protégé Condi Rice’s disastrous performance during George W.’s first term, when her passive approach to managing the interagency process produced a magnificently dysfunctional postwar effort in Iraq.

Building the canon.  The grand strategist doesn’t just think in decades, he or she needs to view their career similarly.  Your twenties are for picking up academic credentials, while your thirties see you honing your entry-level skills.  Many grand strategists will spend their forties racking up private-sector successes (and money), only to hit their stride in their fifties.  The top-drawer jobs in government typically come then, to be followed by the “wise men” years spent headlining a global consultancy or law firm that bears your name (Kissinger & Associates, Scowcroft & Associates, Baker & Botts, and so on).  The field is crowded at all levels of progression, so building a known canon of widely read works is a key way to set you apart.  Ideally, when your name comes up, it’s readily attached to strategic concepts that have permeated the community, so that observers frequently spot echoes of your canon in the decisions of policymakers.  In the end, most of the grand strategist’s greatest victories are nearly untraceable—your “bold” proposals of yesteryear imperceptibly morphing into today’s conventional wisdom. 

Finally, do whatever it takes to avoid ending up as the aged doomsayer who wanders the halls of influence warning of the End Times.  These guys tend to view their careers in power as “one big lie,” so if they worked nuclear weapons, now they want them universally abolished!  If they worked energy, they’ll bend your ear on “peak oil” or global warming.  Whatever they feel they didn’t adequately accomplish in their ambition-filled careers, they reluctantly bequeath to the next generation—their “idiot kids”—as one giant guilt trip.  Robert MacNamara is the poster child for this in national security, while George Soros now claims that title in high finance—brilliant strategic minds twisted by decades of rising regret over worlds they now realize they could have created but didn’t. 

A life in the day of the grand strategist

Brain-time is everything.  Since grand strategists are logically interested in just about everything happening in our vast world, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the crisis du jour.  The problem, of course, is that grand strategy doesn’t aspire to clairvoyance.  Grand strategy isn’t about predicting future events; it’s about having a consistent worldview that allows you to contextualize current events as they unfold.  Again, if you’re given to a new grand strategy every other month, you’re better off being an op-ed columnist or TV commentator.  Because the true grand strategist emphasizes continuity, he makes for a relatively boring interview whereas the media craves “new” views and voices—no matter how regurgitating the actual content.  Of course, once you commit yourself to a government position, you’ll likewise find yourself routinely engrossed in today’s “shocking event,” in turn logically finding solace in whatever out-of-power strategic thinkers you can routinely tap for advice.  Upshot?  Successful grand strategists schedule plenty of time for either deep thinking on their own or networking with those that do.

Managing an intellectual portfolio.  In our media-saturated age, a grand strategist needs to “hit for the cycle” in terms of intellectual output.  “Singles” are things like five-minute appearances on cable news channels or blog posts that connect you to a dedicated daily readership.  A prominent op-ed or speech is more like a “double,” while a “triple” extends into the realm of a major article in a mainstream media publication, testifying before Congress on some pressing issue, or a keynote address to one of those Davos-style gatherings of the global superclass.  “Home runs” include bestselling books, serial TV or talk radio appearances in programs that are based around your core ideas, and the Holy Grail of grand strategy—being summoned to the White House for an off-the-record conversation.  The danger of this mad chase for influence, of course, is the trade-off between richness and reach—as in, the bigger the audience you seek, the more you’ll inevitably dumb down your material.  If you’re not careful, your vision can quickly be reduced to mere sloganeering, which often makes you even more appealing to politicians—the “best and the brightest” bowdlerized for the “rest and the lightest.”

Zen and the art of grand strategy.  The reason why actor Christopher Walken is constantly busy making movies is because, as he puts it, there’s only one Chris Walken-type—himself!  Rather than trying to be all things to all people, Walken continues to hone his stylistic niche—movie after movie.  Typecasting to some, but a full-employment act to Walken.  The dedicated grand strategist aspires to the same sort of brand-name status:  being so closely identified to his strategic concepts that his influence moves beyond the need for mere footnoting.  Think about Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” (originated by Bernard Lewis), Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” Joseph Nye’s “soft power,” or Thomas Friedman’s “flat world.”  All of these strategic concepts have moved into popular discourse as strategic memes.  The intellectual danger here consists of “bouncing the rubble”:  as in, you spend the rest of your career seeking to pulverize your opponents by either extending the concept or defending yourself against how others choose to distort it.  Still, every performer wants a “hit song” to define their legacy, so as purgatories go, this is a small price to pay.

The tantric grand strategist.  If anticipation isn’t your favorite joy, then forget about trying to play grand strategist.  It’s not just that strategic visions typically take decades to unfold, you’re likely to wait equally as long for the credit.  In contrast, the blame, as master grand strategist George Kennan discovered, tends to arrive far faster, such as when his early-Cold War “containment” strategy soon fell hostage to the domino theorists of America’s disastrous—and largely pointless—intervention in Vietnam.  In short, don’t go into this business to make your parents proud but rather to safeguard your grandchildren.

The creative tools of the grand strategist

Conceptual arbitrage.  As biographer Robert Skidelsky wrote of Keynes, whose “spend to save” monetary theories defined much of FDR’s mobilizing response to the Great Depression:  “His achievement was to align economics with changes taking place in ethics, in culture, in politics and in society—in a word, with the twentieth-century spirit.”  Most of what the grand strategist does is arbitrage strategic concepts between those analytic fields that seem furthest ahead in understanding today’s world and those that lag behind.  Living, as we do right now, in a world of pervasive and persistent revolutions triggered by globalization’s rapid advance, there’s plenty of work to be done.  As the ongoing worldwide financial crisis demonstrates, globalization’s growing networks far outpace even our economic understanding of what’s going on, much less our political capacity to manage resulting dislocations.  Proof in point:  for close to two decades now, we’ve only been able to identify our age in terms of where we know it began—as in, a post-Cold War world, or a post-9/11 security environment.  Where are we heading next?  Again, Fareed Zakaria posits a post-American world, as if that’s direction enough!  Meanwhile, historical arbitraging seems all the rage:  Are we rerunning 1914?  Or is it 1929, 1938, or 1946?  In grand strategic terms, we have no idea when we are—much less where we’re heading.

Alternative futures.  A lot of grand strategizing involves scenario-based planning, or what futurist Peter Swartz likes to call, “memories of the future.”  It’s the use of scenarios that leads many outside observers of the field to assume that its main aim is to predict the future, when nothing could be further from the truth.  As Swartz explained in his seminal book on strategic planning, The Art of the Long View, the end result of scenarios is “not an accurate picture of tomorrow, but better decisions about the future.”   Good scenario exercises are primarily useful for reducing strategic surprise:  you guide government and/or industry leaders through a series of alternative futures, engaging their analytic feedback, to reduce the chance that, following some downstream “bolt from the blue,” they’ll be reduced to muttering to themselves, “I had no idea anything like this could happen!”  Want to know what our Pacific Fleet’s greatest intellectual advantage over the Japanese navy was in World War II?  Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz declared that it was the naval war games he and his fellow officers had played in the 1930s:  “The war with Japan had been reenacted in the game rooms at the Naval War College by so many people, and in so many different ways, that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise . . . absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war.” 

A focus on rules, not specific solutions.  Again from Drucker:  “Effective people do not make great decisions.  They concentrate on the important ones.  They try to think through what is strategic and generic, rather than ‘solve problems.’”  The grand strategist cares less about the specifics of any decision than the formulation of the rules by which decisions are regularly guided.  Does this choice give us more enemies or more friends?  Does it sap our nation’s moral strength or is it a good fit?  Do we have sufficient resources to do this on our own or must we seek alliances?  Take a look at the first seven years of Bush-Cheney’s “global war on terror” and you see bad outcomes all around:  more enemies, fewer friends, moral conundrums and fiscal bankruptcy.  So we have to ask ourselves, “Is this the future we were hoping to create?”  Shine that light into the eyes of our president-elect and what you’ll see reflected are the outlines of the Obama Doctrine—the putative myths of our next best future.

Spreading the gospel

Never turn down a chance at public speaking ….  First, you need all the practice you can get, because for the top-level audiences too busy to actually read any of your works, your primary manner of reaching them will be through speeches or presentations.  So it’s essential that you be a killer speaker—as in, knock ’em dead the first chance you get.  Plus, being a strong speaker, whether you’re standing in front of thousands or just that one crucial decision-maker, is how you make strong first impressions, the key to the grand strategist’s ability to network widely.  In today’s world, speaking skills typically need to be blended together with engrossing slide presentations, which puts a premium on your stage timing.  Elevated to an art form, it’s Joel Osteen (evangelical fervor) meets Laurie Anderson (multimedia glitz) meets Chris Rock (stage presence), because if it’s your vision versus somebody else’s and you’ve got the better show, your content will win every time—especially with the PowerPoint-obsessed military.  Finally, due to the typical complexity of your message, you’ll want to be a mesmerizing speaker because you’ll often have to give the same presentation—multiple times—to the same audience in order to get full buy-in.

… Because successful grand strategists are brilliant speakers.  Grand strategists have to be able to argue the most complex logic but deliver it in the language of commonsense.  They have to speak with great authority and moral conviction, and yet still approach the audience as a supplicant, winning their devotion.  It is a complex package few can master, but one that separates the wannabes from the players.  Alexander Hamilton was a stunning orator, as was Henry Clay and Clay’s self-admitted devotee, Abraham Lincoln.  All could hold audiences in the palm of their hands—for hours on end.  Alfred Thayer Mahan, America’s first great global strategist, peppered his Naval War College lectures with brilliant analogies that linked historical narratives to deductive reasoning.  He also had a gift for coining buzz phrases, like the Middle East.  Woodrow Wilson was a master at connecting ideas to audiences, giving them the feeling that, as biographer Clement Kendrick put it, “he was merely saying well what they always felt.” 

The stump speech as your instrument.  The grand strategist markets reproducible strategic concepts, or fully formed ideas that arrive in your brain like zip files and then decompress in all their complexity, transferring the full implications of the long-term vision.  Kennan’s Cold War concept of containment fit that bill:  so simple and compact that it’s immediate meaning is apparent in the very word, even as its embedded rule sets were both lengthy and subject to wide interpretation.  The best way to develop these transferrable concepts is through the highly iterative process of presenting them—time and time again—to a wide variety of audiences.  Like the politician, the grand strategist essentially gives the same speech at every venue, tailoring the delivery and technical details according to the listeners’ distinct backgrounds.  So while the playlist may vary plenty, the overall performance and its effect on the audience do not.  Ronald Reagan’s supreme on-stage confidence as a politician stemmed in large part from his persistent honing of “the speech,” which he first started delivering in the 1950s on behalf of his corporate sponsor, General Electric.  Al Gore, backed up by his stunning slide deck (Keynote, mind you, not PowerPoint), won his Nobel Peace Prize essentially for giving the same compelling presentation the world over.  Ditto for Air Force colonel John Boyd, who, through dogged determination, revolutionized U.S. military thinking about warfare across the 1980s by delivering the same breakthrough brief thousands of times to young officers. 

Picking the right choirs to preach to.  The grand strategist, while taking every advantage to speak truth to the powers-that-be, focuses most of his attention on the powers-that-will-become.  Thus, his preferred audience consists of future decision-makers early in their careers but not before they’ve had some real-world executive experience.   In national security, that equates to thirtysomething mid-level career officers (or their civilian equivalents) who’ve landed in one of the military service “war colleges” following their first command in the field.  In the corporate world, it’s those rising young executives who’ve been selected by their bosses for mid-career educational tune-ups, like a compressed-schedule “executive MBA.”  Casting your net more widely, there’s a small universe of high-end confabs and ultra-cushy retreats for those high-powered connectors and cross-pollinators of new ideas in media-centric industries.  Besides rubbing elbows with lots of celebrities, your message can pick up a good deal of insider buzz that leads you to additional worthwhile speaking venues and further media opportunities.

The grand strategist’s customer base

Desperate policymakers.  As Henry Kissinger wrote in his White House memoirs, “There is little time for leaders to reflect.  They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important.  The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” As such, Kissinger argued, “a policymaker’s greatest need for outside advice is in an intermediate realm between tactics and goals”—otherwise known as the “out years” in Washington.  For civilian policymakers, that’s the two-to-five year time frame beyond the current budget cycle; for defense policymakers, it’s the 5-to-10 years just beyond the FYDP—or Future Years Defense Plan.  That’s the sweet spot where the policymaker faces just enough wiggle room to make a difference somewhere downstream but likewise needs some navigational guidance.  Unfortunately, as Kissinger noted, most outside academics brought in to advise leaders “tend to flood the policymaker with minute tactical advice or elaborate recommendations as to grand strategy until, glassy-eyed, he begins to feel new and unaccustomed affection for his regular bureaucracy.”  Lesson being:  don’t try to tell policymakers how to do their job but also don’t attempt to re-invent the grand strategy “wheel.”  Instead, help them realistically see the medium-term connections between the former and latter, or what Harry Truman’s Secretary of State (and preeminent practitioner of grand strategy) Dean Acheson once termed, “the struggle through illusion to policy.”

The corporate strategic planner.  Today’s global corporations face a competitive landscape that’s unremittingly unforgiving.  Thomas Friedman, who coined the phrase, “flat world,” likes to say the world known as globalization is far from mature, turning only 19 this year.  Good to hear, because as the global economy heads into “middle age” over the next couple of decades, it’s tastes and wants are going to mature along with its rising income level, generating the first truly global middle class in human history.  Global corporations the world over want to access that ballooning disposable income, the problem being that most of it will be found in the relatively low-trust environments of emerging and/or “frontier” economies, where legal and regulatory structures tend to be unsophisticated, weak and decidedly corrupt when compared to the advanced West’s high-trust business environment.  So if you thought only great power governments get involved in nation-building, you’re wrong, because increasingly their flagship corporations are moving into that nebulous space so as to achieve first- or early-entry into anticipated consumer markets.   And if they don’t move quickly?  Well, Western companies often find their Eastern counterparts (often state-owned) have already fenced off much of these economies—along with their natural resources—from effective competition.  In the past, trade followed the flag, but in today’s global economy, it’s often the other way around, meaning corporations increasingly play a part in any great power’s grand strategy, whether they like it or not.

The military commander.  Since the end of the Cold War, Western military leaders—especially American ones--have been among the most active and eager consumers of grand strategy, the irony being that—constitutionally speaking—Western militaries aren’t authorized to make such decisions!  Currently inside the U.S. military there is a fierce ideological struggle between two camps:  1) those who favor a doctrinal focus on the potentiality—dare they say, inevitability? —of renewed great power rivalry and even full-blown wars (typically projected to occur over access to energy resources in third-party regions); and 2) those who believe that, thanks to long-established patterns of nuclear deterrence and exponentially increasing economic interdependencies, the age of great power war has ended and thus we face, amidst globalization’s continued advance into unstable regions, a future of endless but minor small wars—especially those involving insurgencies.  Here’s where grand strategy really matters:  depending on how the world’s rising great powers, along with the West’s established great powers, view globalization’s future unfolding, they’ll collectively either recognize overlapping strategic interests and thus choose to cooperate with one another (a progressive, 21st-century mindset), or determine that their strategic interests are being increasingly threatened and choose to protect them in whatever manner necessary (a return to a more 19th-century colonial mindset).  In terms of grand strategy, the stakes couldn’t get much higher for the United States.  If we continue sticking our necks out by playing globalization’s Leviathan and we’re unable to win the support of other great powers (meaning, besides Europe), there’s no way we can afford to pursue this course much longer.  But if nobody’s minding the global store, so to speak, it’s hard not to imagine that the East’s rising great powers will feel compelled (even empowered?) to pursue such actions on their own, like Russia claims it was doing recently in Georgia (to selfish ends—big surprise).  Eventually, that second pathway will start to look uncomfortably like 1914, meaning any number of small-nation leaders might soon be auditioning for the role of Archduke Ferdinand (but thank you, Misha, for your contribution to global insecurity!).

Mad Men for flag and country

Strategic optometry.  Grand strategy is a non-stop sales job.  As a rule, most grand strategists never push a button or launch an attack or negotiate an alliance.  Instead, their ideas and visions shape a generation of senior executives, military officers and policymakers who do all those things.  Since any grand strategy, like any war plan, is constantly altered in response to real-world events, its vision of the future undergoes continuous debate.  In an eye exam, the optometrist keeps switching lenses and asking, “Does this seem better or worse?”  The grand strategist does much the same through his persistent marketing efforts, always asking the same question of his audience, “Does this future seem more or less achievable?”  The grand strategist doesn’t go where no man has gone before; he’s of no use if he dreams up worlds that can never be.  Done well, he simply arrives at logical futures before others and then articulates the pathway.  Sometimes the grand strategist dreams too far ahead, like Woodrow Wilson did after World War I, but because of that failed attempt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who idolized Wilson and served in his administration, entered World War II armed with a clear vision of where he wanted to take the world.

There are no pre-Wilsonians.  Sizing up John Maynard Keynes’ impact on the modern field of economics, his biographer Robert Skidelsky proclaimed that “while many economists are anti-Keynesian, no economists are pre-Keynesian.”  The same can be said about Woodrow Wilson’s seminal notion of a peaceful world order shaped—in no small measure—by an America willing to intervene overseas in the defense of freedom and human rights.  Most of America’s presidents since then—both Republican (e.g., Nixon, Reagan) and Democrats (JFK, Jimmy Carter)—have either openly identified themselves as Wilsonian or simply revealed themselves as such, including both of our post-Cold War presidents to date.  It may have taken WWII to prove Wilson was right, but no wars--not even our loss in Vietnam nor our difficulties in Iraq—have since rendered his vision irrelevant.

Great nations require great ideas.  Early in his first term, Nixon told Kissinger that “Nations must have great ideas or they cease to be great.”  Nixon’s dream was to bring about a permanent peace among great powers by removing the potential for East-West war in Europe (détente), slowing down the superpower arms race, and bringing China in from the cold.  Given that America was bogged down militarily in southeast Asia at the time, Nixon’s grand strategic design was insanely ambitious.  But two decades later, all of Tricky Dick’s dreams came true—and he lived to see it happen.  Nixon liked to play madman for real, engaging in acts of strategic brinkmanship (e.g., carpet bombing North Vietnam, taking the fight into Cambodia, secretly negotiating with Beijing behind Moscow’s back) that lesser leaders would have balked at.  His confidence (or recklessness) derived from his strategic vision.  He knew where he wanted America to lead the world.

W(h)ither Obama?

We see in Obama all the makings of a strategically minded president.  With no personal demons in tow and a bi-racial make-up that revolutionizes the very notion of national politics in America, he brings all the characteristics of a transformational leader. 

A first-born child of a broken home, Obama’s childhood was nonetheless a happy and adventurous one, to include a stint living abroad (Indonesia) and an adolescent period of being raised by loving grandparents in Hawaii.  Now deep into his forties, he’s happily married with two daughters.  Far from signaling any internal instabilities, Obama projects such an above-the-fray serenity that he was popularly cast as “Spock” (another guy with a split background) opposite John McCain’s fiery “Kirk” across a long and contentious general election.  A lawyer by training (Harvard, no less), Obama naturally sees connections and similarities where others spot divisions and differences.  He promises—and often actually delivers—a post-partisanship in his policies. 

Technically a tail end Boomer, Obama’s elevation nonetheless suggests a popular rejection of the last two decades of Boomer rule, making him the most symbolically potent president since Ronald Reagan swept into town.  He becomes the first president born after 1960, meaning he was a true child of the sixties, but came of age in the 1970s, when arguably much of today’s globalized world first began to appear.  Thus, Obama is a man of this age, much like JFK, the first president born in the 20^th century, symbolized a modern, grown-up America back then.

Neither a Nixon nor a Kissinger, Obama seems more an amalgam of FDR’s aloofness, JFK’s mystique, and Reagan’s theatrical discipline—a wonderfully appropriate show of personality and inspirational speaking skills, given the current panoply of overlapping crises.  But having amassed an equally appropriate and impressive cast of older mentors (e.g., Warren Buffet, Colin Powell, Paul Volcker, Chuck Hagel), Obama signals his awareness that the mere promise of changed leadership must rapidly be followed-up by distinguishing action.

However, to the extent Obama has revealed great ideas to revitalize our great nation, his strategic vision so far seems more inwardly than outwardly focused.  In most ways, his suggested foreign policy course speaks more to an America catching its strategic breath than aggressively shaping the world to desired ends.  Obama clearly wants to unwind America’s strategic tie-down in Iraq, promising an enhanced effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but all that ambition merely points in the direction of finishing what George W. Bush and the neocons started, rather than revealing where an Obama administration might want to focus next.  Truth be told, because of the strategic overhang created by Bush, Obama’s entire first term is likely to be characterized by strategic retrenchment and a certain accommodation of globalization’s rising great powers—namely, a fairly strong continuation of Bush’s own anti-neocon foreign policy of the last two years. 

Of course, the world in all its complexities and turmoil is unlikely to afford an Obama administration enough quietude to concentrate wholly on America’s domestic regeneration.  If the last two years have been any guide, he will face a lot of disrespect around the world, not all of which will magically disappear at the sight of his face.  The current financial crisis has definitely taken down, by several pegs, a number of rising rogues (e.g., Russia, Iran, Venezuela) that bedeviled Bush in his final months, but given the high degree of state intervention in our economy right now, Obama will be forced to dramatically recalibrate America’s message to the rest of the world regarding globalization’s benefits and perils and the appropriate models for handling each.

For now, it seems a good bet that any Obama grand strategy will await a potential second term, having emerged—through trial and error—across the long expanse of his first.  If America had wanted a putative grand strategy right now, it would have voted in McCain and his “central focus” on winning the global war on terror in Iraq-segueing-into-Iran, along with his promised “league of democracies” to do ideological battle with the East’s authoritarian powers (e.g., Russia, China).  Instead, thanks in no small part to the October stock market crash (definitely not the October surprise McCain was hoping for), America voted in Obama’s heal-this-nation-and-repair-America’s-standing-abroad, decidedly un-grand strategy, suggesting that America’s grand storyline for globalization will be resumed only after a significant period of self-reflection and self-mending.

If so, Obama’s strategy of having America re-gather its strength and regroup its resources in the near-term is being amply aided by the ongoing financial crisis in the sense that none of the world’s great powers, being themselves significantly distressed right now, are likely to step into any strategic breach created by our breather.  If anything, most of them are quite open right now to discussing a collective way out of this accumulating mess, affording Obama a historic opportunity to reconnect the United States to the world with a new brand of leadership, one that calms great powers by suggesting that America now recognizes their growing interests and fears and is willing to re-partner with them on that basis.

In sum, Obama’s first term was never slated to present any grand strategic design.  George W. Bush and the neocons killed that possibility years ago.  However, if Obama’s administration can navigate the next four years in such a way as to restore America’s economic health and international standing, a second Obama administration would be well-placed to both propose and impose a new American grand strategy that’s logically focused on the biggest structural change the planet faces over the next generation—the rise of a global middle class whose center of gravity will be located in the Pacific/Indian rim and not those of the Atlantic/Mediterranean.  Toward that end, Obama’s worldview, being far less Eurocentric than any previous president, will serve him well.

The "Pentagon's new map" recast as USMC's "arc of instability"

In honor of Newt's SC victory . . . remembering a 2006 dinner with him

The post from back then, reposted in full. The dominant impression: wide-ranging knowledge, reflecting a huge memory.

Speaking with the Speaker, and a great reporter

Referenced from: http://thomaspmbarnett.com/globlogization/2006/3/23/speaking-with-the-speaker-and-a-great-reporter.html#ixzz1kJTxa9cN

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2006 AT 5:35PM

Last night was pretty good. Sat at the head table with the hosting general of the Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course and Newt Gingrich, who seemed to know a lot about me (saying things like, "this is a book I know you'd find interesting" and stuff like that, and asking a lot of questions that revealed some knowledge).

Gingrich is a pretty easy guy to talk with. Inquisitive as hell, he asks question after question and then he spits out theories every so often at high speed, often linking them to American history. His favorite point of comparison to today was the tougher years of the Civil War.

I countered more with the settling of the West, and we went back and forth some on the subject, which was fun.

Also, covered Iraq, where the consensus of the table (us and five or so 3-stars) was that we toppled the regime but that we should have kept the government (mostly because we were prepared to topple a regime but not to replace a government). Gingrich really liked that enunciation, and wrote it down on his Delta flight coupon sleeve, upon which he took notes throughout the night (not a napkin note-taker, he).

Gingrich asked me about Indiana (why I was there), said he loved the zoo there (I told him we had just visited and were members; he countered that he was a zoo freak who visited them every town he traveled to), and compared his Wisconsin experiences to mine (his wife is from a town not that far from my hometown).

Chatting through a dinner with him is pretty much what you'd expect, having seen him on TV so many times: accessible, very fast, likes to hear himself talk but listens very intently as well (asking you to repeat stuff he likes, or typically following up everything you say with a question). Serious Republican, no doubt, and he wears his credentials openly on every point, but not hard to converse with or conduct a reasonable argument. It's not hard to see why the military likes to have him around so much. He's a fascinating guy, and who doesn't like all the Civil War references?!

When I got up to talk, I was a bit nervous, or rather, a bit too tired, as I often am when I talk late after talking early (I am not the young man I once was), so I stumbled a bit on the first couple of slides, in part because the mike started feeding back and in part because my clicker did not work whatsoever, which was baffling, because we tested it all out earlier in the afternoon.

I had one of the hosting personnel swap out the batteries and it did little good: instead of clicking the keypad, I could use it but basically only if I held it almost over the laptop. Very weird. Worked fine back in my room. Really wonder about the RF quality of that room, which is a none-too-rare experience for me in venues.

Anyway, once I got warmed up, it flowed. But I was surprisingly more stark and forceful than usual, which I didn't credit to Gingrich being there so much as my sense from the room: about three dozen 3-stars from all services. Basically tough faces to work: thinking hard, agreeing or disagreeing hard, and working it all out very seriously in their skulls.

You can just sense that with certain rooms: this is not entertainment to them but something far more serious. So you just go with the feeling, and the delivery adjusts.

Still, I was a bit surprised. Just didn't expect such a strong flow.

Went about 60 (norm is 30) and then did about 30 Q&A, which was exceptionally good, and tougher than usual. Seems like everyone had either read or was reading PNM.

Signed about 25 copies of BFA afterwards, and Gingrich came up and said how much he liked the talk. What was especially cool during the signings was hearing what I heard several times during the earlier one that afternoon: senior officers saying this was one of the rare times in their lives when they ever bothered to get an author to sign their copies, which is kind of a weird compliment but one I get in its meaning--namely, people saying they don't usually get touched by a book but that this one did it for them. You get that sort of feedback from a 3-star and you feel pretty good about your decision to put it into print.

Then the real treat for me: a long chat over beers with Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal. He showed up at the reception because he heard I was talking (Gingrich flew in as well for the talk). Both he and Newt would have come anyway that night or early the next morning for their own stints with the JFOWC, but it was a real honor to have them both attend the dinner because of me.

I hadn't spoken F2F with Greg for a while, so a great discussion on what good reporting is over the reception before dinner, and then just a nice long private conversation (no flags) on the porch outside our rooms after the dinner and talk, a conversation that ran until midnight.

That meant I got little sleep before my flights home to close on the house this afternoon, but it was worth it. I respect Greg so much, and like him personnaly as well, that it was really great to have that time together, jawing our way through a host of defense and mil topics. Greg's been on the Pentagon beat for so long, and he's so on top of his game. Still, I'll be interested to see what the paper has in store for him next. He's simply too good a reporter just to keep doing the same thing forever. Frankly, I don't think he can get much better at what he covers now than he already is, and that's a recipe for stagnation if you're not careful.

Weird fact about Greg: his first newspaper job was in Montgomery, which is why he's easily talked into this course.

"The Brief" back in 2002, before Esquire article, before the book, before everything

Gave this brief to the student body of the Naval War College at the request of the president, Admiral Rod Rempt, who introduces me. This is the basic brief I developed for Art Cebrowski while working as his Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2001-2003.

Spot the comments I make WRT mentor and good friend/colleague Bradd Hayes.  Why? I had just given an interview to a local paper (Newport Daily News) following my selection as Esquire's Best and Brightest. The writer did a job on me, quoting all the self-congratulatory stuff and skipping all the paired self-deprecating comments.  Lesson for me: If you give a reporter the rope, he or she will hang you.

Not that I've ever done that as a journalist . . ..

My old Y2K brief

This was taped by USIA for use in US embassies around the world in the summer of 1999.  USIA was shuttered for good in September of that year.  Coincidence?  All part of the Y2K conspiracy!

Brief runs almost two hours.  We had to mute the REM song for the closing credits.  I'm sure you can guess the title.

It was a fun brief that I gave close to 100 times around the world across 1999.

Blast from my Past: The New Map Game (2005)

Event was held in the spring of 2005.  Jeff Cares' firm, Alidade, in Newport, ran the game with me as head judge.

Four teams (US as Old Core rep, China as New Core rep, Brazil as Seam State and Iran as Gap), and we had about 12-15 players on each team (the people who signed up for the event)  Jim Fallows came and observed the China team throughout.

We had a dinner the night of day one, where I did my big PNM brief.  Then full day of play, where I previewed Blueprint at the end.  Then half-day the final day, where Steve DeAngelis and I did a combo from the stage discussing the emerging partnership between the New Rule Sets Project and Enterra Solutions.  Months later Steve bought my company and me along with it.

The game itself extended about a decade or so into the future, with various moves every X years.

I wrapped things up with comments on day three.  The Alphachimp guys were drawing throughout.  Here's the one they drew for my closing comments:

Thinking of my ongoing criticism of Obama:  we came out of the exercise saying we wanted something that's Carter-like but with Reagan's backbone (I had mentioned Reagan, but the artist put down Dole), or a Republican Carter administration.  Interesting to consider now with Obama:  just a bit more Reagan and he'd probably be about right for the times.  The other big lesson:  China refused to get in a war with the US - no matter the scenarios we threw at the China team.  It was one of my many data points that said, China will disappoint at a near-peer competitor--as far as the Pentagon is concerned.

Odd tidbit:  years later we find out that one of the participants is one of those sleeper Russian agents finally unearthed and sent back home a while back.

The New Map Game site is still up and have all these drawings, links to press stories, gamebook and final report.

Click here to download the final report.

A German take on "The Pentagon's New Map" as "critical geopolitics"

Passed along by a German correspondent.  It's a think tank-style critical review of the New Map as an example of spatially expressing a threat (Hamburg U, Institute for Geography, 2005).

A bit much into the symbology for my taste (e.g., the deconstruction of the New Rule Sets Project logo and investing a lot of meaning into Esquire artwork), but a very serious effort at understanding and critiquing what I sought to accomplish by centering my analysis around a world map.

It's found here on the web: http://www.geowiss.uni-hamburg.de/i-geogr/abschluss/arbeiten/diplomarbeit_eggerstedt.pdf.

I also make it downloadable here for posterity's sake.

My German's only so-so at this point, but I caught the gist of the criticism.  At a couple of points it felt a little bit like Susan Faludi doing a number on my psyche, but fair is fair, and again, this is a serious attempt at interpretation.

In general, the New Map is interpreted in Europe as an example of "Neoliberal geopolitics."  For an example, see this Austrian piece.

Blast from my past: "Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture" (2007)

Recasting the Long War as a Joint Sino-American Venture

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Baker Center Journal of Applied Public Policy

Fall, 2007, pp. 34-44.

In this so-called long war against the global jihadist movement, the Bush administration’s greatest failure has been its lack of strategic imagination. It has added the right enemies to our to-do list, but failed to enlist the necessary new allies, giving our people the misperception that it’s America against the world.

This need not be the case. Our natural allies are now located on the frontiers of globalization, or among the three billion-plus new capitalists who joined global markets over the last generation, chiefly among them the Chinese.

The integrating core of globalization—namely the old West plus the emerging markets of the East and South—have effectively outsourced the global policing function to the United States by refusing to balance our immense warfighting and power projection capabilities with their own. Instead, Western Europe focuses on economically integrating the former Soviet bloc, while rising titans like China and India, for reasons of rising energy requirements, focus overwhelmingly on integrating—on relatively narrow terms—resource providers located in those regions least connected to the global economy, or what I call globalization’s non-integrating gap (e.g., the Caribbean rim, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southeast Asian littoral states).

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon’s new map in this long war corresponds greatly to those gap regions, for there we find the preponderance of “moderate” dictators, rogue regimes, and failed states, all of whom either attract the attention of transnational terrorists or support their activities for their own nefarious reasons. Viewed in this light, our victory is logically defined as the successful building out of globalization’s core and the simultaneous shrinking—or successful economic integration—of those gap regions. As we’ve seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is no mean task and one that generates significant labor requirements.

So I say, locate the labor where the problem is.

A New Strategic Value Proposition

America has the wherewithal to wage any conventional wars necessary to defeat traditionally arrayed enemies (i.e., militaries). But in today’s “flat world” competitive landscape, war’s just the first-stage defensive acquisition. Real stability comes only after the second-stage postwar merger that extends globalization’s broadband connectivity to the previously disenfranchised masses and—yes, Virginia—exposes all that cheap labor to “exploitation” by outside capital that typically pays significantly higher wages than the local economy can muster.

Let me give you my definition of the value proposition here and see if it doesn’t make sense.

America’s got a first-half offering without peer: a Leviathan with an unparalleled capacity for war-making and the unspoken power of deciding when other states can make war themselves. What we lack is a credible second-half offering, or what I’ve dubbed a “system administrator” force capable of winning the peace through effective stabilization and reconstruction operations. Ultimately, this force needs to be more civilian than uniformed military, and fueled more by private sector investment than public sector aid. It also can’t be an American-only operation. The Bush administration’s big mistake in Iraq was telling allies, “If you’re not tough enough to show up for the war, don’t show up for the peace, and forget about any contracts!”

Based on our efforts to date in this long war, America currently fields a first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. We lost less than 150 personnel in the Iraq “war” (major combat operations). We’ve lost more than 2,000 in the “peace” (postwar) that hasn’t quite followed.

So yeah, it matters.

Right now, our enemies in this long war field a better, more capable version of the sysadmin force than we do. Don’t believe me? Then you haven’t been paying attention to new entrants to the market like Hamas and Hezbollah, two tribe-building enterprises that excel at the second half while not even trying to compete in the first half, as Israel recently discovered in Lebanon and the West Bank to its growing regret.

So if the gap’s new entrants to the postwar market should be sizing our sysadmin force (just like the Soviets once sized our Leviathan force during the Cold War), it seems clear who should be increasingly populating the core’s second-half team today: new entrants to globalization’s “systems integration” market such as China and India.

Think about that for a minute. Stability and reconstruction operations associated with postwar and post-disaster environments require lots of bodies, both in terms of uniformed boots on the ground and relatively cheap labor to lay down all that necessary infrastructure—both hard (physical) and soft (institutional). China and India both have million-man armies, as well as a long-demonstrated willingness to send their best and brightest (along with their most desperate) civilians the world over in search of economic opportunity (e.g., “non-resident Indians” are outnumbered only by the multitude of “overseas Chinese”).

More to the point, the best nation-building brand out there right now is the Chinese model. I know, I know, it doesn’t meet our threshold definitions of democracy and human rights (not to mention coming nowhere near our EPA standards), but it sure as hell beats America’s post-Cold War product line of Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Let’s be honest: China’s leveraged buyouts, as mercantilist as they are, beat our hostile takeovers—hands down.

And that just tells you how bad America’s military intervention “brand” has become. Emerging from World War II, the world believed that an American invasion was a fundamentally good thing, or something that got you tons of aid and propelled you to the top of the pile (e.g., West Germany, Japan, South Korea). Back then there was no shortage of “mice” that wanted to “roar” for our attention, but somewhere along the way, probably thanks to the influence of nuclear weapons on our military strategy, we lost that second-half skill set, probably because it seemed pointless in a world perverted by the looming threat of mutually-assured destruction. So, starting with Vietnam, where we first displayed our sad combination of increasing ineptitude at, and discomfort with, the second-half game, our brand has suffered a precipitous decline.

So why not turn to the original market-maker in the field of “revolutionary war,” otherwise known as the People’s Republic of China? If we face a future of insurgents and what the our military calls “fourth-generation war” (in which our enemies seek to deflate our will rather than defeat our forces), why not ally ourselves with the best counter-insurgency model operating in those gap regions today, one that effectively—and rather preemptively—woos both dictators and failed states alike?

Put another way, you can invade the country and then start up your counter-insurgency/reconstruction ops (the American route), or maybe you might just co-opt the major players pre-conflict with investment offers they can’t refuse (the Chinese route). So maybe it’s not always the case that if you want it bad, you get it bad.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating America continues its whack-a-mole approach to regime-toppling interventions inside the gap, only to turn over the aftermarket opportunities to the Chinese . . . uh . . . actually, I’m coming uncomfortably close to saying just that. I just believe that if we combined our chocolate (military interventions with a moral compass) with China’s peanut butter (economic interventions with a practical mindset), we might actually come up with a whole superpower, or basically a joint offering that finally covers the market—as in, defeats our political enemies while connecting the economically disenfranchised.

I’m asking you to come to the inescapable conclusion that America under the Bush-Cheney management team has become an un-sellable global brand in a market (modern globalization) that we made. That’s just wrong.

It’s wrong because it gets our people needlessly killed and because our interventions end up leaving the targeted state more disconnected from globalization than we found it (or worse, increasing its negative connectivity in the form of criminal and terrorist ties), meaning we’re not making the world a better place and we’re discrediting ourselves in the process.

So I’m asking you to invest in something better, or what I think will truly answer the mail in this long war—a full-service superpower that can wage both war and peace effectively. Combine the United States, a seemingly unprincipled Leviathan willing to invade anywhere inside the gap, with China, a seemingly unprincipled sysadmin willing to invest anywhere inside the gap, and I believe you’re looking at a superpower built whole, a long war legitimately won, and a globalization made truly global.

Now let me take you through the prospectus.

Less Clausewitz, More Sun Tzu

We know full well that America can defeat any traditionally arrayed opponent in major combat operations, known as “phase 3” in Pentagon parlance. But both Afghanistan and Iraq show that we’re simply not up to snuff in “phase 4” operations, otherwise known as the postwar. As we’re not credible in the postwar, our enemies have simply ceased fighting us in the war, knowing that a persistent postwar insurgency can defeat an impatient superpower. If your enemy’s goal is simply to kill 3 or 4 of your personnel a day and he’s willing to throw virtually unlimited labor at that goal, you’re going to lose over the long haul unless you figure out how to deny him ready access to his labor pool. That means jobs are our exit strategy.

Run into this savvy fourth-generation-warfare (4GW) competitor enough times and the American public will inevitably tire of engaging in any major combat operations, sensing a pointlessly ineffective postwar outcome. When that happens, our enemies in this long war have achieved an effective lock out, fencing off the roughly two billion people in these gap regions for their version of fundamentalist isolation.

Get good at phase 4 operations, however, and not only are your war threats made credible, but likewise your up-front offers of—for lack of a better phrase—pre-canned bankruptcies for failing regimes. I mean, why not make a pre-emptive bid instead of launching a pre-emptive war? By doing so, we turn on its head Karl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as “ . . . continuation of politics by other means.”

Inside the Pentagon, strategists describe this goal as getting so adept at phase 4 operations that you can wage them up front, in the pre-crisis period known as “phase 0.” At this point, you’re in Sun Tzu’s preferred venue, and your battles are won long before shots are fired. You’re basically the peacekeeper and infrastructure builder who shows up before the crises boil over, effectively keeping the situation just cool enough to avoid a major military intervention. Think of it as limited-liability nation building.

Imagine the Iraq scenario this way: according to insider accounts, the Arab League convinced Saddam Hussein to agree to go into exile and avert a war months before the U.S.-led invasion occurred. In the end, Arab leaders abandoned the plan because of disputes among themselves over how it would have played out. No imagination required there: the region’s leaders were of many minds regarding the possibility of a real “cake walk” for the Americans. But consider this possibility: what if, at the right moment in that negotiation, a proposal is made for a consortium of Chinese, Indian and Russian elements (both governmental and private-sector) to run the postwar reconstruction? Imagine how the zero-sum sheen is rubbed off the potential American-dominated postwar occupation.

Then consider how the Chinese could have conducted the rebuilding of Iraq’s shattered infrastructure—on time and under budget. And then consider how President Bush’s “big bang” strategy (i.e., making post-Saddam Iraq a shining example of potential reform in the region) might have unfolded differently, primarily because popular expectations—both here and in Iraq—would have shifted from instant democracy to rapid reconnection to the global economy.

Seriously, do you think we’d have the same deprivations and lack of economic activity that fuel sectarian violence in Iraq today if we had picked the Chinese over the Coalition Provisional Authority? Or let me put it this way: could the Chinese have done any worse?

Do you find such a scenario implausible? Then you haven’t been paying attention to Africa recently. Anyone’s who done any business or peacekeeping in Africa in the past decade will tell you that the “China LLC” (with an emphasis on “limited”) is already up and running across most of the continent. For example, China recently became the 13th-largest provider of peacekeeping troops across gap regions, with a concentration in Africa (Congo, Liberia, Sudan) and a nascent portfolio in the Middle East (Lebanon) and the Caribbean (Haiti).

Chinese trade and aid throughout Africa has risen dramatically in recent years, to include a sandals-on-the-ground presence of 80,000 nationals. China’s goods are in every market, its vehicles ply every road (many of which are laid with Chinese funds and laborers), and its logistical and information networks are sprouting up everywhere valuable raw materials are found—especially oil.

Beijing recently hosted an unprecedented summit of 30 African leaders and guess what topped the agenda? It surely wasn’t the Bush administration’s soda straw view of globalization, otherwise known as the “war on terror.” Instead, the summit focused on debt relief, human resource development and training, investment and aid, and reduced trade barriers. Just survey America’s strategic debates concerning Africa today (“Do we intervene in Darfur with troops?” “Go back to Somalia to deal with the Islamists?” “Set up an Africa Command?”), and it seems clear: we’re stuck in a phase-3, Clausewitzian mindset while China’s winning early-stage, phase-0 contracts (and allies) in a way Sun Tzu would readily approve.

Whether we care to admit it or not, China effectively limits America’s strategic liability across Africa already. Sudan is a good example: many in the West want to criticize China’s large-scale investments in the nation’s infrastructure and oil industry. But quite frankly, absent the West’s interest in providing significant numbers of peacekeepers for Darfur, what China does in Sudan with its ongoing investments is limit our potential strategic liability.

In that forest, large branches may fall, but not the entire tree. So long as the latter does not occur, America hears nothing.

Cynical? Hell yes. But if we’re not going to beat ‘em, please don’t deny we’re implicitly joining them in this liability-limiting endeavor. As the world’s sole military superpower, America is the silent partner in every non-intervention the global community launches.

So No Rest For the Weary Leviathan

Let’s be honest about the capabilities at hand for solving Africa’s endemic conflicts (and they are so many). NATO (the Europeans) have basically “been there, done that” decades ago and exhibit little desire to return. Meanwhile, the African Union, the continent’s putative peacekeeping arm, is essentially the UN without the swagger (I know, hard to imagine). When the AU hit the ground in Darfur, for example, they quickly settled into a passive observation role, basically documenting the ongoing atrocities and little else (they shoot photos, don’t they?).

America needs to get real with itself. Africa is not ours and ours alone to ignore strategically, and it’s got to be so much more than just the experimental playground for Bono and the “two Bills” (Gates, Clinton). Tied down as we are militarily in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, because China’s effectively “prepping the battlefield” for us in Africa, and that’s where this fight heads next.

As the U.S. and its Western allies squeeze the balloon of the global jihadist movement currently centered in the Middle East, that balloon can expand in two directions: north into Central Asia and south into sub-Saharan Africa. This fight won’t go north simply because that region is surrounded by interested powers (e.g., Russia, Turkey, India, China) willing to do whatever killing is required to stop the spread of Al Qaeda’s influence—and yes, that includes Shiite Iran, no friend to the exclusively Sunni-derived radical Salafi movement currently fronted by Bin Laden.

So if it can’t go north, this fight’s heading south.

Frankly, it’s the combination of that inevitability plus China’s rising influence on the continent that drives the Pentagon to stand up an Africa Command (already in prototype in European Command’s Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa). But here we risk repeating the Bush Administration’s mistake of adding new enemies but no new allies. Instead of viewing China’s growing presence as a strategic complication, America needs to recognize it as a natural partnering opportunity.

Africa is enjoying an economic upswing, thanks in no small part to China’s rising resource draw. The continent’s business climate is improving dramatically, and about half of the world’s top-20 fastest growing economies can be found here. Hell, when American hedge funds start moving in, you know something’s brewing.

America has the sad tendency for viewing Africa primarily as an aid sinkhole, whereas maturing emerging markets like China view it as a logical target for future expansion. Yes, Beijing’s resource requirements drive everything for now, but think ahead to when China’s “inexhaustible” cheap labor supply dwindles due to higher production costs and a burgeoning middle class more focused on consumerism than savings. To whom does China outsource the low-end jobs while it scrambles up the production ladder? Clearly, Beijing will divert as many jobs as possible to China’s underdeveloped interior, and just enough to its neighbors to keep the regional peace, but eventually a good portion will flow to Africa, in large part to balance the very real imbalances created to date by China’s mercantilist trade profile.

There are plenty of China hawks in the Pentagon who are dead certain we’re headed for some military showdown with Beijing over Taiwan. But more of Wall Street is coming to the conclusion that our real competition with China is all about who makes the most markets in globalization’s gap regions. That makes Africa the logical ground zero in both the long war and this ever “flattening” global competitive landscape.

But you know what, this is exactly the kind of race America needs to be running.

Racing to the Bottom of the Pyramid

China today is not the market it was as recently as five years ago, when basically any foreign company and investment were welcomed with open arms, giving foreign multinationals control over roughly 60 percent of the country’s current exports. Today’s China sits atop a huge pile of domestic savings and approximately one trillion in U.S. reserve currency, giving it a confidence far distant from the fears barely suppressed during the Asian flu of the late 1990s. One way that confidence is expressed is increased developmental aid to trade partners, largely focused on accessing their raw materials.

As China becomes more outgoing in its foreign policy, however, its economic focus turns inward to a host of structural problems: its rickety financial sector, the imbalance between the booming coast and the dreadfully impoverished interior, and the rapidly aging population (no country in human history has ever aged as quickly as China will over the next three decades). Toss in the greatest migration in human history (internally, from rural to urban areas), and we’re talking about hundreds of millions of new consumers rapidly surfacing in China’s burgeoning middle class.

Thus, what was primarily an investment dynamic by which foreign companies rented China’s cheap labor for export creation now rapidly shifts into strategic alliances with rising domestic companies that Beijing not only positions to dominate the growing internal market but likewise plans on growing into successful global brands. This new inside-out growth strategy (i.e., domestic dominance leading to global dominance) is interpreted by many Western investors as a “nationalist backlash,” but as long-time China watcher Harry Hardin argued recently in the Wall Street Journal, this is a “marginal adjustment to, rather than a fundamental repudiation of, Beijing’s broader embrace of globalization.”

In short, China’s just wants to elevate its game.

The car industry is a good example. Western firms jumped into China years ago primarily to access the cheap labor on auto parts. But now, as China’s car market explodes (it’s already roughly the equivalent of the U.S. and European markets and soon to become the world’s largest domestic market), the strategy of such global giants as GM, Ford, Honda, and Volkswagen shifts from accessing labor to accessing customers. As Bill Ford Jr. recently told the Wall Street Journal, “We’re barely scratching the surface in China.”

There’s been a lot of hyperbole recently about how quickly Chinese automobile manufacturers can wedge themselves into the U.S. market as the third coming of Toyota and the second coming of Hyundai. But the real export opportunities in joint ventures with rising Chinese firms (e.g., Geely, Chery, Great Wall, SAIC) will appear first in other emerging markets and developing economies. It is in these lower-end markets that companies tap into what University of Michigan economist C.K. Prahalad dubs “the power at the bottom of the pyramid.”

That dynamic is important to consider as we contemplate the long-term integration of such gap regions as the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and southeast Asia, especially as we retool our approach to postwar and post-disaster stability and reconstruction operations.

The problem is, when the rich, know-it-all Americans show up on the post-whatever scene, our tendency is to cost everything out at Six Sigma prices, when in reality, what’s typically appropriate is something on par with One or Two Sigma outcomes. We go for the grand and complex when the simpler and more robust usually works better in such austere environments. So it’s wireless, not landlines. It’s cell phones, not laptops.

Pricing out Africa’s integration at American prices makes no sense whatsoever. Africa is going to be a knock-off of India and China, which in turn can be considered knock-offs of Singapore and South Korea, which in turn can be considered knock-offs of Japan, Asia’s original knock-off of America. Think of it as a realistic “six degrees of integration.”

So gaining access to markets like China and India isn’t just an end in itself (i.e., cheap labor), even when investments subsequently penetrate the domestic market’s expanding opportunities. In the end, Western foreign direct investment into these new pillars of globalization’s core serves as a gateway to accessing the emerging-markets-after-next, or that next wave of infrastructure development found inside the very gap regions where this long war against radical extremism plays itself out.

Taken as a whole, the infrastructure building opportunities inside emerging markets—both existing and future—over the next three decades is considered by developmental experts as unprecedented in size. Asif Shaikh, CEO of International Resources Group, an international professional services firm specializing in developing markets, estimates that six trillion dollars of infrastructure will be built in the energy sector alone, with an additional four trillion dollars spent on water. Much of this work will occur in the twin pillars of China and India, so expect a roll-up of Western and local firms to create the multinational behemoths capable of handling this enormous flow of construction.

Then imagine what these resulting giants will be capable of accomplishing in postwar and post-disaster reconstruction environments in Africa and other gap regions.

The strategic importance of allying with Chinese and Indian firms is that they re-acquaint us with the twin realities of selling successfully to modest-wealth classes and building markets on globalization’s rough-and-ready frontiers, two skill sets many Western firms have essentially lost as our economies moved far away from such experiences. America’s last frontier, for example, closed over a century ago.

But it’s worth recollecting that market-making, frontier-integrating period known as the “settling of the American West,” because it reminds us of the intensely close relationship that once existed between our military and the private sector, something that was lost during the Cold War period, except in the rather closed club of the military-industrial complex. Now, as we look to postwar experiences in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where new contractors galore have entered the nation-building market, it’s clear that the military-market nexus has once again become the centerpiece of our national security strategy—that is, if we’re serious about winning the long war.

Let me tell you, the Chinese are just as serious on this score as we are. To its credit, the Bush administration has spent a lot of time encouraging Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder.” What the White House hasn’t done effectively is define—in a sufficiently expansive fashion—which stakes America truly shares with China.

An Offer They—and We—Can’t Refuse

Britain was smart enough at the start of the 20th century to hitch itself to the rising star in the West called America. That strategic mentoring role and resulting “special relationship” allowed the Brits to punch above their weight through three world wars (two hot and one cold). America faces a similar decision on China today: do we mentor Beijing into the halls of power or do we succumb to the realists’ predictions that war with the Middle Kingdom is inevitable in this “Pacific century”?

Britain went to war twice with fellow first-tier great power Germany in the first half of the 20th century and both were radically reduced to second-tier powers as a result, so I guess it all depends on how long America wants to remain a first-tier superpower. If the world isn’t big enough for a second one, then we’ve got a real problem. But is the world is ready for a superpower partnership . . . ?

The fact is, China’s already our silent partner in virtually every crisis spot around the globe. Want to fix Sudan? Better involve China. Want to tame Chavez? Better involve China. Want to economically isolate WMD-seeking Iran? Forget about it, because China and India (not to mention far-more-reliant-on-imports-Japan) have already made that call on both oil and gas. But help on taming Tehran? Under the right conditions, better involve China.

Then there’s Kim Jong Il.

It’s no secret that with the tie-down of American forces in Iraq we can’t do much of anything but bomb North Korea into the stone age, which—of course—would instantly trigger that which Beijing fears most: the mass flow of refugees north. So, in so many words (okay, just hearing Bush say the word “diplomacy” is enough), the Bush-Cheney team has let it be known that it would be fine by them if somebody rid them of this horrible man. You know, next time Kim’s train simply comes back empty.

Actually, the Chinese have studied the KGB-engineered fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu in Romania, going so far as to interview senior players there, so the concept of forcing Kim out from within is no joke. After all, Lil’ Kim runs a serious kleptocracy, and criminals can be flipped.

Then there’s what would be waiting on the far side of a united Korea: the makings of an East Asian NATO that rules out great power war on the continent. Simply put, it’s the biggest missing link in America’s current long war strategy, trapping—as it does—far too many of our military assets in a Cold War-era strategic posture.

But get an East Asian NATO set up and two things happen: 1) it frees up U.S. troops stationed there; and 2) we’re finally able to seriously tap the region’s trio of great powers (China, Japan, Korea) for military help in places where it’s more needed, like the Middle East and Africa. Finally, it’s important because, historically speaking, it’s not a good idea to have both Japan and China powerful at the same time without some sort of arrangement in place.

So what’s the state of our military-to-military relationship with China under the Bush administration?

In a word, guarded.

The Bush neocons came into power in 2001 obviously gunning for China. Remember the EP-3 spy plane incident off Hainan? Well, if Cheney and Rumsfeld hadn’t been interrupted by 9/11, that preview of the coming distractions would have been amazingly prescient.

Following 9/11, though, China fell off the Pentagon’s radar until . . . that is, when the most recent long-range planning cycle (2005 Quadrennial Defense Review) kicked into gear and many of the defense-industrial complex’s pet weapons systems and hugely expensive platforms were threatened by the ongoing operational costs (re: Iraq) of this long war. At that point, the China hawks went into overdrive and have stayed at that level since, cranking out warning after warning about China’s “huge” military build-up and how it threatens Taiwan and the rest of Asia.

How huge is that build-up? The highest estimates say that in twenty years China might be spending roughly half as much on its military as the U.S. spends on its military today! I don’t know about you, but I think our lead is safe for now. Plus, quite frankly, 85 percent of China’s arms purchases are from the Russians, so seriously, how bad can that be? Or did I miss something about who lost the Cold War?

Ah, but plenty of security experts will reveal—only on background, of course—that “if you only knew what I knew about Chinese attempts to [blank],” then you’d never even consider treating them as anything but globalization’s fifth column, just waiting to spring up and disable our entire economy with their cyber-jujitsu!

I say, it’s finally nice to have somebody surpass the Japanese and French in trying to steal our technology.

Seriously, every rising power in human history has sought to catch up to the leaders by engaging in persistent and pervasive economic espionage. America did it to the Europeans throughout most of the 19th century, begetting large portions of our industrial revolution in the process. Why should the Chinese be any different from the rest? The fact that they engage in such theft more over the Internet than the traditional route of sending their spies into our factories doesn’t make them unique. It makes them up-to-date.

Given all the situations where we’d like China’s help around the planet, the truly sad reality right now is that our military-to-military cooperation with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) remains embryonic at best. For example, just as Kim Jong Il was popping his first nuke last summer, the U.S. Navy held its first-ever ship training exercise with a single Chinese naval vessel off the coast of San Diego. Seventeen years after the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen and that’s all we’ve managed.

Meanwhile, we’d love it if Beijing could somehow make Kim go away on its own, instantly shifting that security risk to China. I mean, talk about wanting to go all the way on the first date!

Outside of Asia, strategic risks are shifting against China, especially in the realm of energy security. Americans like to think we’re dependent on foreign oil drawn from unstable regions, but truth be told, we’re not. Roughly 70 percent of our imported oil comes from the Western hemisphere and Europe/Russia, with only 30 percent drawn from Africa and the Middle East (15 percent each), so that gives us a 70/30 split between stable/unstable sources, and those percentages aren’t predicted to change much in the future.

China, on the other hand, faces a riskier import profile over time. Today, China draws just over 40 percent of its imports from the less stable regions of Africa and the Middle East, but according to our Department of Energy, by 2030 that share will rise inexorably to almost 70 percent, making Beijing’s stability profile the mirror image of our own.

So it was no surprise to hear China’s top official on long-range energy planning recently propose that our two nations should come together to jointly explore, produce and—most importantly—protect energy sources in politically unstable regions.

You want China—as the Bush administration has long declared—to become a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs? Well, Beijing just gave you a clear signal about which stakes matter most to China. Are we paying attention or just jerking knees?

When I go to Beijing and brief government and military long-range planners on these concepts, it’s easy to get a lot of warm smiles in reply. Hell, I’m making it sound like America’s got no choice but to partner with China all over these unstable regions. But you want to know how I quickly wipe smiles off those smug faces?

I tell them this: “For now, people inside the gap tend to equate globalization with Americanization, so we’re the bad guys they take hostage and blow up in the name of Allah and drive out of their lands to achieve their dream of civilizational apartheid. But know this, globalization is increasingly taking on a distinctly Asian flavor, with China firmly in the front, giving it a new face. Faster than you realize, you’ll see Chinese being taken hostage, Chinese being blown up, Chinese held up to the camera and having their heads cut off. And it’ll all happen because the radicals and extremists and jihadists and terrorists will inevitably come to this conclusion: the best way to drive off globalization is to drive off those infidel Chinese!”

Works every time.

Why? It’s one of the Chinese leadership’s greatest fears. That’s fundamentally why they keep such an amazingly low profile inside the gap despite the steep rise in their investments, peacekeeper deployments, and energy dependence. For now, America is the only place where fear of globalization equates to fear of China. But soon, that fear will spread to most of the planet, linking our two nations in the temptation common to all great powers: self-loathing.

Stuck in the Middle With Hu—For Now

The good news is, China’s self-limiting lack of self-confidence is going away as Beijing’s bosses experience a much anticipated generational shift from the so-called fourth generation (e.g., President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao) to the far different fifth generation (the equivalent of our late Boomers, or roughly Barack Obama’s cohort born in early 1960s—like me).

China’s leadership generations go like this: Mao Zedong fronted the first generation of revolutionary giants (1949-1976), while the second (through the 1980s) was led by radical reformer Deng Xiaoping, who sent China down the path of markets and thus did more to shape our current world than any leader of the late 20^th century. The third generation, helmed by Jiang Zemin, ruled China across the 1990s and right through 9/11. Jiang’s was the first generation of leaders trained abroad, overwhelmingly in the Soviet Union—birthplace of socialism. This was crucial, because the technocratic tinge of that formative experience made Jiang’s generation confident enough to extend Deng’s reform movement further, creating the “China Inc.” we know and fear today in global business.

The current leaders, known as the fourth generation, did not travel abroad for their education, trapped as they were in the nationwide insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. The result? A careful bunch of homebodies whose foreign policy consists of the soothing slogans (“peacefully rising China,” recently scaled back to “peacefully developing China” lest it seem too confrontational) and whose economic vision has turned increasingly inward to focus on the left-behind rural poor of the interior provinces.

So it’s not too surprising that America hasn’t gotten very far with Beijing recently in any seriously strategic dialogue: our neocons aren’t asking and their fourth-generation leaders aren’t listening. Toss in ever-paranoid Taiwan as the figurative third monkey holding his hands over his eyes (i.e., unable to see future integration with the mainland), and you’ve basically got the entire dysfunctional matched set.

But real change is just around the corner—and I’m not just talking about the 2008 American presidential election.

Next year the Chinese Communist Party will most likely pick from among the fifth generation pool the leaders who will assume the reins officially in 2012 but whose lengthy succession begins rolling out almost immediately. This generation may be known to many of you already, because whether you realize or not, you went to college with many of them in the late 70s and early 80s. So yeah, this crowd does get America. In fact, these guys get globalization better than our current leaders do, because China is so much closer—historically speaking—to the infrastructure build-out process associated with globalization’s Borg-like integration wave.

What’s so amazing about this next generation is how they look at the world: a Kantian naiveté bordering on Thomas Friedman (“Got McDonald’s? You’re in!”). But beyond that wide-eyed optimism there is a growing and rather steely awareness that, as Spiderman’s uncle famously intoned, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Having spent days in deep discussion with this crowd, I will tend you what impresses me most about them is their earnestness. They are perceptively shifting—echoing John F. Kennedy’s generational call—from thinking about what the world owes China to what China owes the world.

There’s not a moment to waste.

When I last sat down with PLA strategists, I told them their biggest challenge over the next decade or so is rebranding their military from “revolutionary warrior” to “globalization’s security guard” in support of China’s role as globalization’s general contractor in the great build-out to come. This repositioning of China’s global security profile must be approached carefully, setting up easy wins that mark the PLA as both competent in its execution and trustworthy in its presence—especially in partnership with U.S. military forces. A joint response to Asia’s 2004 Christmas tsunamis would have been a good opportunity. It worked for the Indian Navy, but China’s military was nowhere to be found.

Over time, the Pentagon and the PLA need to prove out this strategic alliance in a series of early-stage engagements—preferably in Africa—that demonstrate how market economies—both old and new—come together to shrink globalization’s gap. Yes, I realize that many in my country consider the cultural and political gaps between America and China to be insurmountable in any time frame worth mentioning, but in my opinion, that Cold War mindset plays into the strategic goals of the global jihadist movement, which wants nothing more than to pit a rising East against an aging West with radical Islam as the great balancer.

I say we deny Osama that dream—as soon as possible.

Rehabilitating failed states is a labor-intensive process, because postwar and post-disaster environments—our most likely traction points—simply demand it. When you have a body requirement, you go to body shops, locating the labor where the problem is.

In the Cold War, our strategic triad consisted of missiles located on land, at sea and in the air. In the long war, many Pentagon planners have taken to describing America’s new strategic triad as the Army, the Marines,and Special Operations Command.

No argument there.

But what I’m telling you is that, on an international scale, we’re looking at a strategic triad consisting of the United States, China, and India—the three million-man militaries out there today (once North Korea is liquidated). This is the sysadmin’s strategic triad that, when backed up by half the world’s economic power come 2026 (according to The Economist), makes the dream of shrinking globalization’s gap entirely feasible.

But, as always, the way ahead is determined by will as much as by wealth, and here is where America’s current leadership vacuum is so damaging. We’re staring at two years of a badly wounded, lame duck presidency suffering the whims of a protectionist, know-nothing, Democrat-led Congress. So waiting on the politicians is not an option. President Hu Jintao’s recent tour of America demonstrated this in spades: the deep warmth on the west coast segueing to the damp cool in the Bush White House.

That’s why business leaders must play a leading role right now in transcending the lack of strategic imagination currently afflicting Washington, first and foremost by framing the subject of China in the already looming 2008 presidential race.

I know my argument will strike many as naïve, but I don’t believe it’s naïve to trust greed over political ideology, either in America or in China. I trust people to be exactly who they are, and I expect the Chinese to remain Chinese.

I also expect greed to drive much of our debates on China here in the States. On one side, we’ll find protectionists and defense hawks offering all arguments imaginable as to China’s “inevitable” threats and treachery. They will seek to make money off your fear—or, in the case of Lou Dobbs, just pump up his ratings. On the other side, we’ll find corporations and investors offering every opposing argument imaginable as to China’s unlimited” potential and market. They will seek to make money off your hope—and your fondness for Wal-Mart’s low prices.

But rest assured, both sides seek to make money off China’s rise. It’s just a question of who cleans up the most. My immediate goal is to see our Army and Marines get the funding they need to survive the challenges of this long war, and so long as China is held up as the holy grail of the “big war” crowd within the Pentagon, that shift in priorities—from smarter weapons to smarter soldiers—will not come about.

My long-term goal is to harness China’s rise for something beyond the final assembly of our low-cost goods. I believe that something is to become the final assembler of low-cost countries, a market niche that sole military superpower America needs desperately filled right now.

America cannot deal with its strategic future until its leaders finally let go of its Cold War past. History will judge us all very harshly for wasting the strategic opportunity staring us in the face.

Blast from my past: "Look Out, World" (2008)

Look Out, World

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Good magazine, Nov-Dec 2008.

Why Vote? Reason 177

You should vote because John McCain and Barack Obama have very different takes on the global mess they'll be inheriting—and what they'd like to do with it.

Despite all the talkabout our troubled economy, this year’s presidential race will still come down to competing visions of the post-9/11 world, and what America needs to do about it. George W. Bush leaves office stunningly unpopular, due overwhelmingly to his schizophrenic foreign policy (six years Hyde, two Jekyll). Given the strong political impetus for change, this election has always been the Democrats’ to lose.

True to form, the Dems have done their best to make it a close vote by nominating an African-American senator with limited national security credentials. But Barack Obama gave them no choice. By redefining the way campaigns are mounted in this networked age, his candidacy has produced the sort of worldwide electricity that most certainly will get him selected as Time’s “person of the year”—if he wins.

In contrast, John McCain’s candidacy has the consistency of comfort food, the underlying personal message seemingly, “I’ve waited long enough.” He is the default candidate—as in, “If you aren’t willing to risk it all on Obama, think about me.” Unlike Obama or Hillary Clinton, voting for McCain as president offers no history-making opportunity, which makes the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate all the more politically clever.  But even with that move—bold or desperate or both—McCain remains an essentially back-to-the-future choice: a pre-boomer for a public fed up with that generation’s do-nothing politics.

Both nominees offer a strongly “realist” perspective on international affairs, with the differences stemming primarily from their generational backgrounds. McCain’s stark realism stems from the Cold War. Ronald Reagan’s personal mystique was largely a fiction of our imagination, but McCain’s legend—the good and the bad—is based on true stories of personal heroism. He lived them all. If you want someone who can recognize human evil and fight it tooth and nail, McCain’s your man.

Obama’s subtle realism emerged from a far different time: the truly tumultuous 1970s, where we first locate much of today’s globalization—energy and food shocks, Middle East conflicts, environmental awareness, global market swings, and transnational terrorism. Befitting those fractured times, Obama’s journey plays out like an ABC “Movie of the Week”: the biracial child who willed himself from a Jakarta grade school to the pinnacle of Harvard Law, landing next on the South Side of Chicago as a community activist who instinctively countered the prevailing counterculture. If you want someone who can recognize global complexity and manage it with confidence and care, Obama’s your man.

Both McCain and Obama represent quintessentially American stories, with their amazing personal trajectories obscuring the underlying political philosophies each brings to a possible administration. Pundits (and Karl Rove) would have you believe that fear alone will settle this election. But the question every voter must answer is not, “Do you fear?” but rather, “What do you fear more?”

Barack Obama will make America smarter about the outside world, and John McCain will make the world smarter about America. And on that score, there are plenty of ways to divvy up the global landscape. Here are ten criteria you can use to compare the candidates and help you break down the basic choices.

Priorities: Where’s the focus? Early last summer, Fortune asked the candidates to lay out the “gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy.” According to the article, Obama didn’t blink: Our energy policy. McCain paused for several long seconds before answering, “Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence.”

Those answers speak volumes about how each senator approaches international affairs. Obama focuses on upstream, big-picture causality (e.g. fix energy and improve everything that follows from it), while McCain gravitates toward more downstream, immediate tangibles (stop the bad guys from doing bad things). So if you want a terrorism-centric foreign policy, McCain is your guy. If you want something broader, Obama makes more sense. With McCain, you’re less likely to experience a security breakdown, but more likely to see a wider array of ongoing problems exacerbated. With Obama, you’re more likely to see more general improvement on a host of issues, but you stand a greater chance of waking up one morning to some nasty surprise. The basic question is, which spooks you more concerning America’s resilience? The perceived steady decline, or the occasional external shock?

ADVANTAGE: The American voter, because there’s a distinct choice.

Who should America seek out as strategic allies? If you think it's the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database.

Allies: How to pick ’n’ save? Here McCain makes a bold call, but an awful one. His proposed League of Democracies—an international alliance of democratic countries—is as close as anyone has come to mindlessly regurgitating Cold War memes. McCain additionally calls for ousting Russia from the G-8 (to be replaced by India), while leaving rising China out in the cold. Here’s why it won’t work: When you tell off both Russia and China, you kill India’s incentives to bind itself to the West. Why would New Delhi pick that fight with two huge neighbors also on the rise? If the Indians wouldn’t make that call during the Cold War, what’s the additional incentive now? Ditto for Brazil, South Africa, and a host of other rising pillars of the southern hemisphere. They’ll simply view McCain’s proposed forum as yet another arena in which the old West gets to boss them around and demand they toe its preferred line.

Here’s a big clue as to whom America should seek out as strategic allies: rising defense budgets, big standing armies, and a willingness to use them in other peoples’ (failed) states. If you think that’s the French and the Germans, you need to update your global database, because in this century, the countries with the most rapidly expanding global economic networks are the ones most incentivized to play—in the manner of the United States—globalization’s bodyguards.

The far more careful and circumspect Obama wins this round hands down. He’ll clearly bring a non-Eurocentric view to global alliances, speaking as he constantly does about the need to integrate a rising Russia, China, and India into our plans. McCain makes similar noises, but all of that is drowned out by his League of Democracies. As his response to the Russia-Georgia conflict amply demonstrated, given the right prompt, he’ll reflexively knee-jerk us into another Cold War standoff at a point when America needs to be stocking up on allies—as immature as they may be—rather than adding more enemies.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, for the sole reason that he’s smart enough not to let Georgia—on its own—declare war between NATO and Russia.

The vision thing: What to expect? You can tell a lot about each candidate’s modus operandi on foreign affairs by the campaigns they’ve built. Obama’s team of 300-or-so advisors is methodically organized, reflecting a corporate ethos that minimizes ego clashes and maximizes on-message delivery. From the experienced Clinton gang, Obama’s managed to attract the very cream of the crop, so expect a well-run State and Defense. Obama’s decision to pick Joe Biden as his running mate only strengthens that.

You should anticipate a far more conservative first term from Obama on national security than Bush’s previous eight years. Obama will seek to carefully unwind America’s tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration’s freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time. Some bad things will definitely happen in the meantime. The potential upside is substantial on restoring America’s good standing around the world.

McCain, on national security, is truly “what you see is what you get.” Despite the hovering from the neocons, McCain will be his own man and run his own foreign policy. Palin as vice president adds nothing to the senator’s well-credentialed resume. Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies; but always entertaining, and full of sharp turns. If he had won it all in 2000, he would have arrived early enough in the rise of Russia, India, China, and Brazil to perhaps have had a serious opportunity to get them in line, especially on the heels of 9/11. But now, trying to ride herd these rising great powers could easily backfire if pursued angrily (remembering the man’s temper), so the downside on McCain could be profound.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because a more conservative—dare I say, humble—American foreign policy is what the world needs now.

Heal the force:  How to repair the U.S. military after Iraq?Here’s where McCain’s unimpeachable credentials in national security and his history as a rice-bowl-breaking maverick could well serve America’s strategic needs. There will be a huge bureaucratic and political impetus to “heal the force” after Iraq, meaning rest the troops (good idea) and resume buying all the same outdated military platforms and weapons systems (a truly bad idea that will leave us as unprepared for the next Iraq as we were for the last one).

McCain is far more likely—believe it or not—to push the necessary changes through a Democratic-controlled Congress, which, in an inevitable “anything but Bush” post-election fit of pique, could easily trash all the good work so far accomplished by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, General David Petraeus, and many others. Obama, especially since he’ll bring back all the same security players from the Clinton years (who were too deferential to the military), is more likely to pass on that fight in favor of other early possible legislative victories.

The fly in the ointment? McCain’s bevy of neocon advisors, armed with that League of Democracies notion, might just as easily try to have their cake (Cold War Leviathan force) and eat it too (continue to engage in plenty of post-9/11-style small wars). That would, indeed, look like a third Bush administration.

ADVANTAGE: Definitely the maverick McCain, but only so long as Father Time doesn’t toss the presidency—in the form of Sarah Palin—back to the neocons.

Globalization: America’s new bogeyman, or its logical cause célèbre? Despite the trade-protectionist leanings Obama put on display for the primaries, where his proposal to renegotiate NAFTA was particularly egregious, he has assembled a nice collection of Clintonian economic advisers. Plus, Obama’s more holistic approach to national security is less likely to get America trapped in useless overseas adventures and more likely to make him sensitive to the needs of emerging and developing economies. Obama will never match Clinton’s zeal, but he’s unlikely to screw up globalization’s continued advance.

McCain’s senate record indicates a fierce free-trade stance. And since a Democratic-controlled Congress could easily engage in all manner of trade protectionism, especially vis-à-vis China and recently re-demonized Russia, having a Republican in the White House makes a lot of sense if you don’t like that sort of thing. The problem would be—again—McCain’s penchant to pick unnecessary fights with globalization’s rising economic pillars, too few of which will qualify for his democracies-only club.

Then there’s the larger reality that globalization faces a populist headwind that is likely to pick up dramatically in coming years. A stubborn McCain, as correct as his economic instincts may be, could easily find his politics out of synch with global trends, resulting in stalemated trade negotiations overseas and deadlocked legislation back home.

ADVANTAGE: Obama, because he’ll guarantee half-a-loaf outcomes on most issues and could spark the necessary shift to progressivism that globalization desperately needs.

Letting McCain be McCain will be a bumpy ride for all involved: the rest of the U.S. government, the American people, our allies, and—most importantly—our enemies.

Climate change: The end of the world as we know it? Climate change is becoming a dominant global narrative, one that indirectly challenges globalization’s advance by casting doubt on whether developing nations can emerge as the West once did. The brutal truth is they can’t, but not simply due to climate change. There are a host of more immediate reasons (air pollution, supply constraints) that speak to humanity’s need to move beyond oil and any number of self-limiting industrial-age technologies. Because America remains the world’s single biggest national market (meaning we control a lot of demand), we must either lead or eventually get out of China and India’s way.

Both Obama and McCain seem to understand the larger competitive challenge framed by global warming, which isn’t surprising because both are problem-solvers at heart. Given today’s political landscape, both are selling the chimera of national energy independence (a dubious economic goal), linking it to job creation in the high-tech “green” sector. Usually, it’s safer to go with the Republican candidate when it comes to promoting entrepreneurs and innovation, so a slight edge to McCain on that score. But since any response to climate change will entail some serious cooperation with emerging economies on their infrastructure development, and with vulnerable developing economies on the aid-related subjects of food security and disease control, Obama’s “dignity” agenda tops McCain’s focus on demanding democracy.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Let’s stipulate that both candidates will move the ball forward significantly.

Iraq: When do we wrap up? The Iraq “war,” or whatever you want to call it, is clearly a moving target, meaning where Iraq was at the beginning of these campaigns—when positions were initially articulated—and where it is today, are two vastly different things. The criticism now focuses primarily on the high cost involved.

McCain gets credit for advocating the surge and the associated counterinsurgency strategy, two much-needed changes on which the Bush administration wasted many months—and lives—before adopting. Basic lesson? When McCain makes a decision, he follows it through to the end, eagerly seeking out new solutions to persistent problems.

But for those who objected to the war, Obama also gets credit for opposing the invasion from the start. As for opposing the surge, Obama now appears less flexible than McCain in admitting his party’s past mistakes and moving on to better solutions.

In political terms, the problem McCain faces is that improvements in Iraq favor all the positions Obama has long advocated. So again, we see the essential difference emerge. McCain’s approach has the value of concentrated effort, but suffers the dynamic of “one damn thing after another,” meaning: Just after you fix one thing, you’re on to the next. Obama is less likely to suffer big losses in any single situation, but he’s also less likely to score any big wins.

As for wrapping up America’s combat involvement in Iraq, the differences between the two candidates have narrowed dramatically: Obama calls for a withdrawal of combat troops by 2010, while McCain targets 2012. The major difference concerns the pace of withdrawal: Obama says the Iraqi government should decide; McCain says our generals should decide. In reality, it’ll be our generals right up to the point when the Iraqis decide for themselves. This “war” stopped being America’s to “win” or “end” a long time ago—to wit, Iraq’s government wants us gone by 2011.

ADVANTAGE: Obviously McCain, because of his courageous call on the surge.

Afghanistan and Pakistan: How do we ramp up? Obama has made some hawkish statements about taking the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban directly into Pakistan. Much like McCain’s tough talk regarding Iran’s involvement in Iraq, such statements should be taken with a grain of salt. Pakistan, like Iran, is a far bigger and more potent entity than its troubled neighbor, and possesses considerable leverage on its own. With Pervez Musharraf gone from power, expect even more autonomy from an Islamabad intent on showing it’s no U.S. puppet.

When George W. Bush redirected the war on terror in 2003 from Afghanistan to Iraq, that was a radical move. Today’s radical move would involve rapidly re-directing U.S. military efforts back toward Afghanistan, thus accelerating Iraq’s movement toward policing its territory and handling its neighbors largely on its own. In asserting that Iraq will remain the central issue for the next president, McCain actually stakes out the more conservative position here, whereas Obama now advocates a more aggressive line.

Odds are good that Afghanistan will once again become the central front in the war on terror early in the next president’s term, and that some modest troop surge will accompany a revamped counterinsurgency strategy that takes on many of the same characteristics of what worked in Iraq.

Attempts by the competing campaigns to portray either Iraq or Afghanistan as the “good war” are largely rhetorical at this point. Events on the ground appear to be driving this re-direct in operational focus, and both candidates advocate the same basic ramp-up in U.S. capabilities and resources.

ADVANTAGE: McCain, because you have to go with experience on this potential quagmire.

Obama will seek to carefully unwind America's tie-down in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to expand his administration's freedom of action elsewhere, but this will take a long time.

Iran: How far do we go? Here McCain advocates a hard line strikingly evocative of George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq: prevent a regime that sponsors transnational terrorism from achieving weapons of mass destruction. Obama, in contrast, advocates a more direct diplomatic approach aimed at revamping U.S.-Iranian relations as a whole. How you judge the validity of their approaches depends on your perception of the threat.

If you trust the long and varied history of strategic nuclear deterrence, then you’re probably of the opinion that the Shia bomb (Iran) won’t be any more usable than the Jewish (Israel), Sunni (Pakistan), Hindu (Indian), Confucian (Chinese), or Christian (the rest) bombs, especially since Israel very likely possesses at least 200 deliverable nuclear warheads. And if you’re familiar with the history of nuclear proliferation, you’ll know that declared nuclear powers tend to be extremely careful with the technology, whereas undeclared powers (e.g., Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, South Africa) have been known to share. So the real question is, Do you think Tehran is crazy enough to give either Hezbollah or Hamas a nuke? And if there’s even a scintilla of chance there, should America pre-emptively strike, or instead aggressively seek some détente with Iran?  In other words, is it time for Dr. Strangelove to step up, or should “Nixon” finally go to Tehran?

Iran, of course, complicates the matter by in effect saying, “You know we’ve already got the ‘guns’ [i.e. missiles] and are cranking out ‘gunpowder’ [i.e. uranium], but since we’re not manufacturing any ‘bullets’ [i.e. warheads], you can’t actually prove anything—or ever be quite sure how close we’ve come to putting it all together.” Couple that stance with Ahmadinejad’s frequent verbal threats concerning Israel’s right to exist and there are plenty of grounds for both McCain’s calculated threats and Obama’s calculated engagement.

But if a conventional bombing campaign could assuredly take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, chances are the Bush administration would have pulled that trigger by now; and if not the Bush administration, then certainly Israel. If neither could see its way to launching a strike by the end of the Bush administration’s second term, then it’s highly unlikely that such a campaign—absent full-out invasion and occupation—will ever make sense. In short, we’d have to go nuclear to stop Tehran from getting nuclear.

If that strategic logic and historical record ring true to you, then you definitely want Obama in the White House, because McCain could well launch us into a war with Iran. If you consider that pathway inevitable, then McCain’s the better choice, along with a strategic missile defense that—despite all the failures up to now—finally works as promised.

ADVANTAGE: Push. Totally depends on your worldview, unless you’re committed to granting Israel a zero deductible on America’s nuclear umbrella insurance policy.

The war on terror: Remember that? It must seem odd that, seven years into this war on terror, al Qaeda itself seems like such a strategic afterthought. Part of this is due to the Bush administration’s real success in disrupting al Qaeda’s global networks.

But it’s also due to al Qaeda choosing to become less operationally focused and evolving into more of a worldwide anti-American/Western branding mechanism—sort of a Jihadis-R-Us. Sad to say, this is probably as close to “victory” as we’ll come for the foreseeable future because, cynically speaking, transnational terrorists are a useful bogeyman for a networked age.

As somebody who’s worked in national security affairs for close to two decades, I’ll tell you that as far as anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism are concerned, it won’t matter much who gets elected president. The U.S. government possessed such a security community prior to 9/11, and that community got a whole lot bigger after 9/11. Today, that community operates like any sizeable and widely distributed bureaucracy: just well enough not to fail spectacularly, but nowhere near well enough to succeed spectacularly.

So in regards to the candidates, frankly, it’s a coin toss. Obama would present a more conciliatory face, which can invite more aggression or subdue it. McCain would present a less compromising face, which can accomplish the same. Both will promise and likely achieve somewhat more secure borders, and any new management might inject the Department of Homeland Security with more purpose and better execution, but expect the world to continue appearing more dangerous over time (God bless our sensational media) while actually becoming more secure. And if it makes you feel any better, just go on believing that Washington really runs America and that America really runs the world.

ADVANTAGE: Draw. This leaves the final count tied at 3 apiece, with 4 toss-ups. Expect another tantalizingly close vote.

Blast from my past: "Managing China's Ascent" (2007)

Managing China's Ascent

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

6 August 2007

Realists insist the U.S. and China are slated for military conflict in the decades ahead. America cannot peacefully accommodate China's rise because it subverts our role as the world's lone superpower.

Let me offer a different vision.

Over the past two decades, global capitalism has expanded dramatically from its previously narrow western base (America, Japan, the EU) to include five sixths of the planet with a "bottom billion" still trapped in crushing poverty. But that expansion triggered a vociferous ideological backlash centered in those less-connected regions, particularly the Middle East, currently penetrated by "infidel" markets, networks, and ideas.

Countering that fundamentalist backlash requires lengthy, labor-intensive efforts by outside powers to build both nations and markets, because this long war is less about winning hearts and minds than creating jobs and opportunities for idle hands otherwise seduced by radical ideologies. Traditional western allies are only modestly helpful in this struggle. Post-colonial Europe, having been there, done that, now dreads all those Muslims wanting in. No, if we want serious allies, we should look to nations currently engaged in economic integration both at home and abroad.

Natural ally. China is just such a country. Loaded with excess bodies willing to scour the world for economic opportunity, China is America's natural ally in extending globalization's reach and absorbing those off-grid regions where rogue regimes, failed states, and transnational terrorism thrive.

A smart America co-opts China's rise just as Britain shaped ours a century ago. Instead of containing China, we should steer its rise to suit our strategic purposes. And what China must do is what America did back then: build its military and rebrand it as a force for global stability.

A good place to start is Africa. The Pentagon has recently established a dedicated Africa Command to thwart radical Islam's penetration of the continent. That military unit should work hand-in-glove with China, which has already flooded Africa with 80,000 nationals engaged in pre-emptive nation building. In this alliance, America focuses on governance and security while China focuses on infrastructure and markets to accelerate Africa's integration into the global economy.

Why would China help?

With its rapidly aging population, China must scale the global production chain faster than any country has done before. That means China, along with Asia in general, must replicate its own success story by developing markets elsewhere and eventually exporting its less-advanced industries.

This is what Europe did to North America in the 1800s, and—in turn—what America achieved in East Asia in the last half-century. Now it's Asia's turn to engineer globalization's spread, and Africa, with its natural resources and cheap labor, is the next logical target.

It's time to shelve antiquated balance-of-power strategies and end China's free riding on our global security system. Our nations' strategic goals coincide: globalization's preservation and continued expansion in the face of radical extremist challenges.

All we lack—on both sides—is the next generation of visionary leaders to make this strategic alliance happen. Until then, both capitals remain trapped in myopic arguments about Taiwan, tainted products, and trade deficits.

Thomas P. M. Barnett, senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a former Pentagon adviser, is author of The Pentagon's New Map (2004) and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005).

Blast from my past: "The Inevitable Alliance" (2008)

Debating China's Future

with 

Li Cheng, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Harry Harding, Cui Liru, John J. Mearsheimer, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Rob Gifford, Mao Yushi, Bates Gill, Tang Shiping, Zhao Tingyang, Robert J. Barnett, David Shambaugh, June Teufel Dreyer, Pan Zhenqiang, Dan Blumenthal, Shi Yinhong, Robert S. Ross, Kenneth Lieberthal, Zha Daojiong, John Hamre and Xiang Lanxin

CHINA SECURITY, VOL. 4, NO. 2, SPRING 2008

Thomas P.M. Barnett

The Inevitable Alliance

China’s main strategic vulnerability right now is that it possesses economic and network connectivity with the outside world that is unmatched by its political-military capacity to defend. This forces Beijing to “free ride” on Washington’s provision of global security services, a situation that makes China’s leaders uncomfortable today – as it should. American blood for Chinese oil is an untenable strategic transaction.

The United States faced a similar situation in its “rise” in the late 1800s and set about “rebranding” its military force over a several-decade period that culminated with a successful entry into World War I. Since World War II, the United States has maintained a primarily expeditionary force that is able to access international crises, and since the end of the Cold War has done so with unprecedented frequency. This too is an untenable strategic burden.

America needs to encourage China’s effective re-branding as an accepted worldwide provider of stability operations. The problem today is two-fold: 1) major portions of America’s military require China to remain in the enemy image to justify existing and new weapons and platforms; and 2) the Chinese military is hopelessly fixated on “access denial” strategies surrounding Taiwan, meaning it buys the wrong military for the strategic tasks that inevitably lie ahead.

So long as both nations insist on such mirror-imaging, their respective militaries will continue to buy one military while operating (or, in China’s case, needing to operate) another force that remains under-developed. Such strategic myopia serves neither great power’s long-term interests, which are clearly complimentary throughout the developing world.

The good news is that both China and the United States are within a decade’s time of seeing new generations emerge among their respective political and military leaderships. These future leaders view the potential for Sino-American strategic alliance far differently than do the current leadership generation. If Washington and Beijing can navigate the next dozen or so years without damaging current ties, I fully expect to see a Sino-American strategic alliance emerge.

I do not present this as a theoretical possibility, but as my professional judgment based on years of extensive contacts through both nations’ national security establishments.

Grand strategy often involves getting leaders to understand certain future inevitabilities. The global primacy of the Sino-American strategic alliance in the 21st century is one such future inevitability.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions, and author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004).

Blast from my past: "The Rise of the Global Middle Class" (2009)

The Rise of the Global Middle Class

by

Thomas P.M. Barnett

Good magazine (Jan/Feb 2009), pp. 90-91.

America has had the biggest demand in the global economy for so long that we can’t remember what it was like when that wasn’t the case. But that’s all about to change.

I’ll let you in on a little secret about globalization: It is demand that determines power, not supply. Consumption is king; everybody else serves at will. So it ain’t about who’s got the biggest military complex but who’s got the biggest middle class. Everybody’s got the dream. What matters is who can pay for it.

For as long as we can remember, that’s been America—the consumer around which the entire global economy revolved. What’s it like to be the global demand center? The world revolves around your needs, your desires, and your ambitions. Your favorite stories become the world’s most popular entertainment. Your fears become the dominant political issues. You are the E. F. Hutton of consumption: When you talk, everybody listens. That was the role the Boomers played for decades in America and—by extension—around the world through their unprecedented purchasing power. But that dominance is nearing an end.

In coming decades, it won’t belong to Americans, but to Asians. So say hello to your new master, corporate America: Mr. and Mrs. M. C. Chindia.

The rise of the Asian middle class, a binary system centered in China and India, alters the very gravity of the global economy. The vast sucking sound you hear is not American jobs going overseas, but damn near every natural resource being drawn into Asia’s yawning maw. Achieving middle-class status means shifting from needs to wants, so Asia’s rise means that Asia’s wants will determine our planet’s future—perhaps its very survival. And as any environmentalist with a calculator knows, it isn’t possible for China and India to replicate the West’s consumption model, so however this plays out, the world must learn to live with their translation of the American dream.

As for the new middle class’s relative size, think bread truck, not breadbasket: Over the next couple of decades, the percent of the world’s population that can be considered middle class, judging by purchasing power, will almost double, from just over a quarter of the population to more like half. The bulk of this increase will occur in China and India, where the percentage shifts will be similar. So if we round off China and India today as having 2.5 billion people, then their middle class will jump in numerical size from being roughly equivalent to the population of North America or the European Union to being their combined total.

The vast sucking sound you hear is not American jobs going overseas, but damn near every natural resource being drawn into Asia’s yawning maw.

No, it won’t be your father’s middle class—not at first. Much of that Asian wave now crests at a household income level that most Americans would associate with the working poor, but it will grow into solid middle-class status over the coming years through urbanization and job migration from manufacturing to services. And for global companies that thrive on selling to the middle class, this is already where all the sales growth is occurring, and it’s only going to get bigger. As far as global business is concerned, there is no sweeter spot than an emerging demand center, because we’re talking about an entire generation in need of branding—more than 500 million teenagers looking to forge consumer identities.

There are also essentially two unknowable wild cards associated with the rise of China’s and India’s middle classes: First, how can they achieve an acceptable standard of living without replicating the West’s resource-wasteful version? And second, what would happen if that middle-class lifestyle was suddenly threatened or even reversed? The planet must have an answer to the first question, even as it hopes to avoid ever addressing the second. Here’s where those two fears may converge: As their income rises, their diets change. Not just taking in more food, but far more resource-intensive food, like dairy and meat. Right now, China imports vast amounts of food and India is just barely self-sufficient in the all-important grains category. Both are likely to suffer losses in agricultural production in coming years and decades, thanks to global warming, just as internal demand balloons with that middle class. Meanwhile, roughly one-third of world’s advanced-lifestyle afflictions—like diabetes or cancer—will be found in China and India by 2030. Toss in the fact that much of the population lives along the low-lying coasts, and our notional middle-class couple could eventually cast the deciding global votes on the issue of whether or not global warming is worth addressing aggressively.

Whoever captures the middle-class flag in coming years will have to possess the soft power necessary to shape globalization’s soul in this century, because humanity’s very survival depends on our generation’s ability to channel today’s rising social anger into a lengthy period of social reform. This era’s global capitalism must first be shamed (populism) and then tamed (progressivism), just as America’s rapacious version was more than a century ago. Today’s global financial crisis simply marks the opening bell in a worldwide fight that is destined to go many rounds.

Blast from my past: "Mr. President, Here's How to Make Sense of Our Iraq Strategy" (2004)

Mr. President, Here's How To Make Sense Of Our Iraq Strategy

One of the architects of the Pentagon’s New Map of the world offers a most important guide to a) why the boys will never be coming home and b) why this is the first step toward a world without war

By Thomas P. M. Barnett

Esquire, June 2004, pp. 148-54

Is this any way to run a global war on terrorism? The new conventional wisdom is that the warmongering neocons of the Bush administration have hijacked U. S. foreign policy and sent the world down the pathway of perpetual war. Instead of dissecting the rather hysterical strain of most of that analysis, let me tell you what this feedback should really tell us about the world we now live in. And as opaque as the administration has been in signaling its values and true motivations, I will try in this piece to explain what Iraq should mean to us, why all the pain we have encountered there is the price we must pay to ensure a peaceful century, and why this is the birthing process of a future worth creating.

There is no doubt that when the Bush administration decided to lay a “big bang” upon the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein and committing our nation to reconnecting a brutalized, isolated Iraqi society to the world outside, it proceeded with virtually no public or international debate about the scope of this grand historical task. I, however, see a clear link between 9/11 and President Bush’s declared intention of “transforming” the Middle East.

In the March 2003 issue of this magazine, I published an article called “The Pentagon’s New Map” [available at Esquire.com/barnett], which was about work I had spent years doing at the Naval War College and the Pentagon to figure out the true threat environment for the United States in a post-cold-war world. The answer? Most of the world is peaceable and functioning. I call that the Core, and it is basically the parts of the world, including China, where globalization has taken root to some degree. The rest of the world, which had never been considered by the Pentagon to be a direct threat, much less the gravest threat we face, is made up of the countries that remain disconnected, either because of abject poverty or political or cultural repression: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. This I call the Gap. The primary goal of the foreign policy of the United States should be, in my view, to shrink the Gap. Nothing about our Iraq experience has changed this view.

The only way America can truly achieve strategic security in the age of globalization is by destroying disconnectedness. We fight fire with fire. Al Qaeda, whose true grievances lie wholly within the Persian Gulf, tried to destroy the Core’s connectedness on 9/11 by triggering what I call a system perturbation that would throw our rules into flux. Its hope was to shock America and the West into abandoning the Gulf region first militarily, then politically, and finally economically. Al Qaeda hoped to detoxify the region’s societies through disconnectedness.

But the president decided correctly to fight back by trying to destroy disconnectedness in the Gulf region. We seek to do unto al Qaeda as it did unto us: trigger a system perturbation that will send all the region’s rule sets into flux. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world—from our rule sets, our norms, and all the ties that bind the Core together in mutually assured dependence.

Disconnecting the great disconnector from the Gulf’s security scene is only the beginning of our effort, because now Iraq becomes the great battle field for the soul of the whole region. That second victory will be far more difficult to achieve. Our efforts to integrate Iraq into a wider world will pit all the forces of disconnectedness in the region against us. Therefore we must enlist the aid of all the forces of connectedness across the Core—not just their troops but their investment flows and their commercial networks.

America needs to demonstrate to the Middle East that there is such a thing as a future worth creating there, not just a past worth re-creating, which is all the bin Ladens will ever offer Muslim populations—a retreat from today’s diminished expectations. If America cannot muster the will—not to mention the Core’s aid—to win this struggle in Iraq, we will send a clear signal to the region that there is no future in the Core for any of these states, save Israel.

History’s clock is already ticking on that great task. As the world progressively decarbonizes its energy profile, moving away from oil and toward hydrogen obtained from natural gas, the Middle East’s security deficit will become a cross that not even the United States will long be willing to bear. The bin Ladens of that region know this and thus will act with increasing desperation to engineer our abandonment of the region. Like Vladimir Lenin a century earlier, bin Laden dreams of breaking off a large chunk of humanity into a separate rule-set sphere, where our rules hold no sway, where our money finds no purchase, and where our polluting cultural exports can be effectively repelled. Bin Laden’s offer is the offer of all would-be dictators: Just leave these people to me and I will trouble you no further.

By taking down Saddam Hussein and turning Iraq into a magnet for every jihadist with a one-way ticket to paradise, America has really thrown down the gauntlet in the Middle East; it has finally begun exporting security to that part of the world for real. In the past, we always had ulterior motives: to keep the Soviets out, to keep the oil flowing, to keep Israel safe. But reconnecting Iraq to the world is so much bigger than any of those goals. It is about creating a future worth living for a billion Muslims we could just as easily consign to the past.

Powell Doctrine, R.I.P.

What does this new approach mean for this nation and the world over the long run? Let me be very clear about this: The boys are never coming home. America is not leaving the Middle East until the Middle East joins the world. It’s that simple. No exit means no exit strategy.

One of the worst strategic concepts the Pentagon ever came up with was General Colin Powell’s notion that America should never intervene militarily overseas unless and until an exit strategy is clearly defined. The legacy of that dictum has poisoned the U. S. military’s strategic planning ever since, generating the force we have today—perfect for drive-by regime changes and understaffed for everything else.

Fortunately, the Powell doctrine has died with Operation Iraqi Freedom, and with it dies America’s decades-long tendency to blow off all the suffering and instability that plagues the Gap, or what we used to call the Third World. What is so amazingly courageous about what the Bush administration has done in trying to generate a “big bang” throughout the Middle East is that it has committed our nation to shrinking a major portion of the Gap in one fell swoop. By doing so, I believe this administration has forced America to finally come through on promises repeatedly offered during the cold war but never delivered upon. The irony, of course, is that the administration is guilty of such grotesque dissembling over its rationale for the war that it is unable to fully take credit for this historic achievement. And its dissembling has also aroused the passions of the empire crowd.

The concept of an “American empire” is very chic right now in literary and academic circles, and since the Bush administration never seems to offer a sufficiently comprehensive answer to the question weighing on most Americans’ minds (“Where is this all leading?”), many of our best and brightest have connected the relevant dots and declared Washington the de facto Rome of a new imperial age.

This is all nonsense and bad history to boot. Empires involve enforcing maximal rule sets, in which the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war or peace and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. Our goal must be to extend the Core’s security rule set into the Gap and, by doing so, shrink the Gap progressively over time. This is not about extending America’s rule but about extending the genuine freedom that collective security provides. All this talk about empire mistakenly seeks to impose a nineteenth-century simplicity upon a twenty-first-century complexity. In short, this era’s version of globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. To deny that achievement is to discount the vast improvement America brought to the system administration of globalization following World War II compared with earlier, deeply flawed efforts by Europe’s monarchies—Britain included.

There is no doubt that many governments in the Core still view the world system as a balance of powers, and so any rise in U. S. influence or presence in the Middle East is seen as a loss of their influence or presence there. Too many of these “great powers” are led by small minds who prefer America’s failures to the Core’s expansion, because they perceive their national interests to be enhanced by the former and diminished by the latter. They prefer the Gap’s continued suffering to their own loss of prestige, and they should be ashamed of their selfishness.

But America is far from alone in this great historical quest. As we realign our global military-basing structure to better reflect our continuing role as military Leviathan throughout the Gap, we leave behind old friends in Western Europe and embrace new ones in Eastern Europe. We increasingly trust East Asia to police itself while we export security to West Asia. We even go so far as to imagine and work toward future bases sprinkled throughout the African continent, a region long abandoned by the West to suffer decades of endemic conflict and disease.

The New Strategic Paradigm: Disconnectedness Defines Danger, or, Kiss Those Dictators Goodbye

So, why all the dissembling on the part of our political leadership? Well, the truth is, we are just coming to terms with a new grand strategy for the United States, the historical successor to containment, and our government doesn’t yet have the words to explain this vision to the world. So we come off as dishonest, which is a terrible mistake, because this vision describes a future worth creating: making globalization truly global. This is something to be proud of, not something to run from.

The defense community spent the entire post-cold-war period scanning the strategic horizon, desperately searching for the fabled “near-peer competitor” that would someday replace our late beloved foe, the Soviet Union. About eight years ago, most defense strategists fell in love with China, convincing themselves that here was an enemy worth plotting against. Since then, the great bureaucratic push to “transform” the U. S. military into the high-tech warrior force of tomorrow has focused almost exclusively on that conflict model—basically China’s invasion of Taiwan in 2020.

It was a beautiful dream, one easily sold to a Congress whose only interest in national-security planning is “Will you build it in my district?” It also corresponded to the Bush administration’s view of the world prior to 9/11, which focused exclusively on great powers while expressing disdain for the Clinton administration’s feeble attempts at nation-building in Third World wastelands. Frankly, it made everyone in Washington happy, because casting China as the future enemy provided the national-security establishment with a familiar villain: big, bad, and communist.

Naturally, the defense and intelligence communities reshaped themselves for this “new” challenge. We hired China experts by the barrelful and scripted all our war games to feature a large, unnamed Asian land power with an unhealthy interest in a small island nation off its coast. You want to know why we don’t have a clue about what goes on inside the Gap? Because our military strategists spent a decade dreaming of an opponent that would not arise, for a war that no longer existed. We’re the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the streetlamp instead of near his car a block away, because “the light’s better over here.”

The new rule set here is a simple one: We need to refocus all of our war-planning and intelligence systems from the Core to the Gap. This doesn’t mean we still don’t maintain a hedge against possible Chinese mischief. It just means a new strategic paradigm rules the roost: Disconnectedness defines danger. You want to locate the real danger in the system? Focus on those countries or regions most disconnected from the global economy, not those desperately working to integrate themselves with the outside world—like China.

What the intelligence failures on Iraq and al Qaeda should tell the Bush administration (and any that follow) is that it’s time to get explicit with the American people and the world about how there are simply two very different security rule sets in the world today: one that corresponds to the stable and overwhelmingly peaceful Core, and another that corresponds to the violence-ridden and increasingly unstable Gap. What scares most people about the Iraq war is the sense that the Bush administration lied to them in order to whip up sufficient popular support for taking down Saddam Hussein. The White House comes off like the cop who yells out, “He’s got a gun” and then airs out the “suspect” with a barrage of shots, only to discover later that he was just pulling out his wallet.

Without reopening the entire debate on Saddam, who I think we’ll all admit had multiple priors and a number of outstanding warrants for his arrest, just take a minute and ask yourself why this administration felt it needed to hype its case for “present danger” to such an unseemly degree. The majority of Americans had already expressed support in polls for removing Saddam simply because of all the bad things he had done and continued to do to his people. So why all the unnecessary drama?

I’ll tell you why. The international system today lacks any sort of recognized institutional rule set for processing a politically bankrupt state. We have one for economically bankrupt states, and it’s called the IMF bailout and rehab process. We may argue incessantly about that rule set, but at least we’ve got one. So when an Asian financial “flu” disabled a number of states in 1997, the system processed that entire crowd within a couple of years.

What do we have for the Saddams and Mugabes and Kim Jong Ils of the world? Just a toothless UN Security Council whose only “weapon” is sanctions that inevitably kill innocent civilians while doing nothing to change the behavior of the regime. The UN is at best a legislative branch for the global community, whereas the U. S. is clearly the closest thing we have to an executive Leviathan able to prosecute criminal actors across the system.

The new rule set on this one is relatively straightforward but difficult to achieve; we need an IMF-like international organization that is set up to process dangerous Gap leaders who have ruled beyond their expiration date. It’s not a long list, but imagine how much better a world we’d have if we could somehow manage to ditch all these dictators in a manner the entire Core could buy into—even the French.

As for the American public, what the intelligence failure on Iraq should translate into is a new and frank understanding of the limits of arms control. Again, different worlds (Core, Gap) require different rule sets on security. Getting any state from the Gap into the Core means, first and foremost, getting that state to accept the Core’s fairly clear rule on security with regard to WMD—basically “just say no.” I know it’s hypocritical for nuclear powers to tell smaller states to “Do as I say, not as I do,” but on WMD I think that it’s better to err on the side of order over justice.

What Americans need to understand about the potential (and real) proliferation of WMD inside the Gap is that all the arms-control treaties in the world won’t do a damn thing to stop it. All such treaties reflect the conventional wisdom of life inside the Core, where mutually assured destruction has basically ended great-power war. That logic, or that security rule set, simply does not penetrate the Gap. So when states or transnational actors inside the Gap make moves in the direction of acquiring WMD, the new security rule set called preemptive war not only makes sense, it is imperative. If the Core lets the Gap’s lawlessness on WMD infect our long-standing stability on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, then we will be doing nothing less than throwing away the cold war’s most important peace dividend.

Pentagon vs. Pentagon: Why We Will Soon Have Two Militaries, Not One

The second reason why so much of the world is unhappy with the current state of affairs in Iraq is that it’s now clear that the Bush administration did a terrible job of thinking beyond Saddam’s takedown. In effect, it is guilty of planning for war within the context of war when it should have been planning for war within the context of everything else. This is an acute and continuing problem for President Bush himself, who has gone so far as to color his reelection campaign with the imagery of his being a “war president,” when both the public and the world at large clearly want evidence that his administration isn’t myopically focused on this global war on terrorism but instead has learned to locate that much-needed security effort within the larger political, social, and economic context of globalization’s advance—or everything else.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t lay all the blame for this sad state of affairs on the Bush administration alone. The Pentagon has spent the last decade and a half willfully ignoring its growing workload throughout the Gap. We’ve spent the entire post-cold-war period engaging in what are derisively known throughout the defense community as “military operations other than war” (MOOTW, or Moo-twah to insiders), and yet we have adamantly refused to rebalance our forces—especially our National Guard and Reserves—to account for this dramatic uptick in the Gap’s demand for our services. Simply put, we currently have a military that can do two or three Saddam-style takedowns every year but cannot pull off even one Iraq-style occupation.

But that is changing rapidly, and for the better. Already, senior Defense Department leaders are pushing for the creation of a “stabilization force” component within the U. S. military. A year ago, such a proposal would have been summarily rejected, but today it strikes most serious defense analysts as a crucial task of defense transformation. In this new era, our military interventions will be judged primarily by whether or not we leave the country more connected to the outside world than we found it, not whether we generate an instant democracy or win the war in record time.

The importance of this new direction within the Pentagon cannot be overstated, because it signals a “back to the future” outcome that will return America’s national-security establishment to the structure that served our nation so well prior to the historical aberration known as the cold war. Before we created the all-encompassing Department of Defense in 1947, America had two very distinct security establishments at its disposal: a Department of War and a department of everything else called the Department of the Navy. The War Department served as the “big stick” force that we busted out as required, while the Navy Department (especially the embedded Marines) served primarily as the “baton stick” force that we employed around the world on a regular basis.
Why did America fuse these two entities into a unified whole? As the cold war was beginning, defense strategists correctly foresaw a decades-long hair-trigger standoff with the Soviets over nuclear weapons. In effect, national defense (War Department) and international security (Navy Department) became interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable; to defend America was to deter the threat of global nuclear Armageddon.

As one small part of humanity that survived the madness of the cold war, let me be the first to applaud that historic decision. But let’s be clear: The dangers to system stability that we face today do not involve global nuclear war among great powers; they involve undeterrable rogue regimes and transnational actors located exclusively inside the Gap, with the exception of the cold-war tailbone known as North Korea.

What the Iraq occupation is making clear throughout the defense community is that we currently have a Department of War and a Department of Everything Else—the latter underfunded and overworked—coexisting uncomfortably inside the Department of Defense. Over time, a great divorce will occur because no house divided against itself can long stand. This progressive bifurcation of the U. S. military into a Leviathan force focused on waging wars and a System Administrator force focused on winning the peace has been years in the making, but it took the painful lessons of Iraq to really get the ball rolling.
What this splitting of the force will mean to future presidential administrations is clear: greater flexibility in dealing with the world as we find it. The Leviathan force will remain your father’s military: testosterone-fueled, lethal, and not subject to civilian law. The Sys Admin force will end up being more your mother’s military: supportive, nonlethal, and willing to submit to recognized authorities such as the International Criminal Court and the UN—Teddy Roosevelt meets Woodrow Wilson.

What this bifurcation offers the rest of the world is twice as many opportunities to contribute to America’s current scattershot efforts to export security throughout the Gap. The Leviathan is the classic come-as-you-are coalition of the willing, and since this flies-on-eyeballs crowd will feature Special Operations Forces as the pointy end of its spear, any nation able and willing to contribute its own small contingent of tough hombres can join this bandwagon on a first-come, first-to-serve basis.

But contributing to the war-fighting half of the pie won’t be the only way to gain a seat at the table, because the follow-on Sys Admin effort will allow those nations unwilling to field combat forces in certain situations to nonetheless participate in the peacekeeping force that must necessarily stand watch over the longer haul. Having both forces is crucial for this reason: There is a strong temptation for any administration—especially the pointlessly vindictive Bush White House—to tell allies that if they do not join in the war effort, they cannot participate in the rebuilding that follows. What having both forces means is that we will be able to tell potential allies not only to “come as you are” for the war but also to “come when you can” for the peacekeeping.

As we have learned in Iraq, America can lose about 150 soldiers in six weeks of combat and/or lose about 500 soldiers to terrorism to date in the ensuing occupation. Either way, it hurts just the same. If any country is willing to help out on one side of the war-peace equation, we should simply be grateful for the sacrifice offered, not picky about the timing.

Here’s what this splitting of the U. S. military means to the American people: The National Security Act of 2005 tentatively sits on the far side of this national election. I fully expect that if Bush is reelected, this piece of legislation will be profound, moving America down the pathway of seriously reordering its national-security establishment for the better. Does that mean a Kerry administration wouldn’t do the same? Not at all. In fact, that administration may well be the far better choice to pull off such a dramatic reorganization, given the growing distrust of many Americans and the world regarding the Bush administration’s integrity on matters of security.

My point is not to tell you how to vote, but simply to make sure you ask the right questions. If you think “preemptive war” and all that violence in the Gap are going to go away simply by voting Bush-Cheney out of office, you’re kidding yourself. The next administration is going to have its hands full with international-security issues no matter how much it may want to focus on other things. So don’t let either ticket off the hook on how it proposes to reshape our national-defense establishment for the big tasks that lie ahead.

As Americans seeking to choose our next president, we all need to understand better the stakes at hand, for it is not the danger just ahead that we underestimate but the opportunity that lies beyond—the opportunity to make globalization truly global. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization’s tipping point from a closed club of the privileged few to a planetwide reality. Making that strategic vision—that happy ending—come true will end war as we know it.

America has made this effort before and changed the world. Now is the time to rededicate this nation to a new long-term strategy much as we did following World War II, when we began exporting the security that has already made war only a memory for more than half the world’s population, enabling hundreds of millions to lift themselves out of poverty in the last couple of decades alone. It is our responsibility and our obligation to give peace the same chance in the rest of the world.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, just published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. From November 2001 until June 2003, he served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Blast from my past: "Ten Reasons Why China Matters to You" (2008)

 

Ten Reasons Why China Matters to You

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

GOOD magazine, May/June 2008, pp. 58-65

Don’t be scared of China—the country is perfectly positioned to be our most powerful ally (lack of democracy notwithstanding, of course). But if there is anything to worry about, it’s not China’s massive military; it’s the economy, stupid.

Why China Matters To You:

10.

Because Nixon went to China and your world was born.

When President Richard Nixon reopened diplomatic ties with Mao Zedong's communist China in 1972, he enabled the most profound global economic dynamic of the last half century: China's historic reemergence as a worldwide market force. Nothing shapes your world today more than China's rise, and nothing will shape our planet's future more--for good or ill--than China's ongoing trajectory.

After centuries of relative isolation, China’s rapid reintegration into the global economy transformed globalization from its narrow Cold War-era base (the West) to its current “majority” status, whereby two-thirds of humanity now enjoys deep and growing connectivity with international markets and the remaining third works toward it. China’s decision to rejoin the world was globalization’s tipping point, meaning—absent global war—there’s no turning back now, only adaptation.

If Nixon opened the door, then Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping led the Chinese people through it. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng chose wisely: By tackling economic freedom before political liberalization, Deng kept China stable during its tenuous first years of market reform. Although Deng is correctly labeled an autocrat (he ordered the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989), he is also correctly identified as a modernizer who unleashed a generation’s immense creativity.

Many from that generation will tell you that, before Tiananmen, they felt freedom was “90 percent political and 10 percent economic,” but after Deng’s crackdown, they concluded—somewhat harshly—that real freedom was “90 percent economic and 10 percent political.” In other words, they decided that markets were the first, best instruments for generating positive change in China.

A grand bargain was struck: Deng won military support for further market reforms so long as a lid was kept on political change, and the army was afforded enough of a budget to modernize. The Party would remain supreme, but state involvement in the economy would shrink and private business would be encouraged along with investment from, and trade with, the outside world.

China has experienced incredible economic growth ever since, increasing its gross domestic product annually by almost 10 percent—as fast as you dare expand. But China is also nowhere near becoming a democracy, and its achievement scares nations around the world—and excites others—because it suggests that you can rapidly embrace globalization, achieve great income growth, and remain a single-party state by following the so-called China model.

---

9.

Because China may be an ancient civilization, but it's a young society that's growing up very quickly--and unevenly.

China's modernization strategy included slowing population growth through the “one-child policy.” Yet China remains huge: 1.3 billion souls crammed into a country no larger than our own. So if you think we’ve added quite a few Hispanics in the last couple of decades, imagine inviting everyone in the Western Hemisphere and half of Africa to come live inside the United States, because that would give us China’s crowded mix of rich and poor.

Given China’s traditions, the one-child policy favors males over females; the latter are too often aborted or offered up for international adoption. (Disclosure: My fourth child originally hailed from Jiangxi province.) The build-up of males has led some Western demographers to worry that over time, China will inevitably become militarily aggressive—how else to distract all those frustrated young men? But this fear is overblown, as is evidenced by trends in the rest of Asia, where, for example, similarly frustrated South Korean males simply go abroad and, you know, marry a broad in places like Vietnam or Thailand. Bottom line? Desire wins out.

The more profound legacy of the one-child policy is that China will grow very old, very fast. Right now the country enjoys a demographic sweet spot: plenty of workers supporting relatively few children or elders. But once you restrict the baby supply, the population as a whole moves up collectively in age, meaning that China will rapidly progress toward the “Florida mark” (20 percent of the population above age 65) in just two decades. The United States will hit Florida around the same time. If America, in all its wealth, is struggling with that profound shift, how much harder do you think it will be for China, weighed down by hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants?

Here’s one thing to remember when anyone tries to sell you on China running the world someday soon: that China will get very old before it gets truly rich, something the world has never witnessed before. What history tells us is this: Aging populations are not aggressive populations.

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8.

Because China's transformation echoes much of America's past: not only the good, but plenty of the bad, and the ugly too.

Impossible, you say. Ruled by communists, China’s civilization bears no resemblance to our own.

But China’s true “communist” period was just three decades out of a 5,000-year history, the rest of which featured a social bent toward markets in general (the Chinese are inveterate gamblers, for example) and past periods of serious global trade connectivity (recall the Silk Road of yore). Add in the strong focus on family ties and a deep spiritual history that has long featured free competition among various faiths and we’re not exactly talking about some brother from another planet.

So forget trying to figure out today’s China through its own history, an endless cycle of disintegrating peace and integrating war. Think about it this way: Right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of “rising America” circa 1880—absent democracy, of course. Once you realize that, then depending on where you go around China, you can locate yourself somewhere in the last 125 years of America’s own ascendancy.

Some examples: Foreign policy-wise, you’re looking at a mild-mannered Teddy Roosevelt: China’s military stick is getting bigger, but it still prefers to speak softly, mostly threatening small island nations (read: Taiwan) off its coast.

The nation is likewise undergoing a construction and investment boom that’s right out of 1920s America, and frankly, that should give pause to anyone concerned with global economic stability. China’s banking and financial industries are about as regulated as ours were prior to the Great Crash of 1929. But there’s no sign of a slowdown. Shanghai already has 4,000 skyscrapers—twice as many as New York—and plans another thousand.

Check out China’s space program, which just put its first man in orbit. Beijing now speaks openly of repeating our 1960s quest for the moon. Groovy! Let me just raise my glass of Tang in salute and wonder why Americans aren’t on Mars yet. Speaking of which, there’s also a sexual revolution brewing, with China’s urban youth taking one great leap forward from Father Knows Best to Sex and the City. This revolution won’t be televised, but it’s being compulsively blogged.

Corruption-wise, Beijing remains stuck somewhere prior to the Progressive Era of late-19th-century America, and that’s no good. China’s political system needs to be able to process all this social and economic pressure with more flexibility. Citizens are simply growing angrier and more demanding with each passing year. China’s legal system also needs to clean up its act, because the more China’s economy opens up, the more the global business community is going to demand greater transparency and better avenues for legal redress. Corruption already consumes upwards of 5 percent of China’s gross domestic product. In a “flat world” of economic hypercompetitiveness, such inefficiency eventually costs too much.

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7.

Because China's rapid and deep integration into manufacturing means that Chinese products permeate your life--at some risk.

Globalization tends to integrate trade by disintegrating global supply chains. By breaking up these chains, globalization spreads various segments of production and assembly across those economies that offer the cheapest labor for each particular stage. China has deftly inserted itself into a long list of these chains, becoming the final assembler of note in toys, cell phones, CD players, computers, and auto parts, to name but a few. By doing so, China has consolidated much of Asia’s previous trade surpluses with America into its own burgeoning bilateral trade with the United States. So when you hear about America’s huge trade deficit with China, bear in mind that it’s the same huge trade deficit we’ve long had with Asia as a whole.

Also be aware that this figure hides a lot of complexity. Foreign corporations control the majority (approximately two-thirds) of this production for export. American companies in particular dominate China’s U.S.-export sector, meaning it’s basically our companies renting Chinese labor and keeping much of the profit. The Chinese export that sells for hundreds of dollars in America nets only tens of dollars for the Chinese economy. That’s how Wal-Mart, the single biggest source for Chinese exports in the world, keeps its prices so low. So if you think Western companies are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, then understand that you’re a prime beneficiary.

Naturally, China’s deep penetration of the U.S. market has raised product-safety issues. Any economy that is growing as fast as China’s cuts plenty of corners. But realize that China learns by scandals just as America did over the past century. Frankly, the best crises are the ones you actually hear about, because that means the international press got ahold of them, and those already affected or at risk will get the information they need to protect themselves. Once tracked back to China, Beijing is put on public notice that whatever laxness exists simply cannot be tolerated anymore, with threats of quarantine, bans on exports, cessation of investment flows, and so on.

A generation ago, such threats would elicit yawns from China’s ruling elite, but now, with the Communist Party’s legitimacy riding on economic expansion, they’re taken with the utmost seriousness. In short, China’s government is starting to act more like a business which recognizes that its reputation is often its most important asset, because fierce competition means that today’s mistake allows somebody else to steal your customers by the start of business tomorrow.

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6.

Because China's demand for resources is altering global markets in ways both profound and perverse.

China’s explosive economic growth forces it to suck in resources from all over the world. As James Kynge, a longtime China-watcher, notes in his recent book China Shakes the World, “China’s endowments are deeply lopsided.” Blessed with too many people, China is short on just about everything else: arable land, water, energy, and raw materials of all sorts. Thus, the only way China manages to serve as globalization’s “manufacturing floor” is to become a leading global importer of virtually any commodity you can name, from cement and copper to oil and gas.

While there’s hardly anything wrong about that, China’s insatiable demand for resources likewise drives Beijing to actively court pariah states and “rogue regimes” while the West tries to isolate the same regimes with economic sanctions. Take China’s relationship with Iran: While American diplomats work night and day to level even harsher sanctions to slow down Tehran’s reach for the bomb, China quietly edges out Japan as Iran’s major energy investor, sweetening the deal by reselling it some of that fabulous high-tech military hardware the Chinese military imports from Israel—hardware which then turns up in southern Lebanon in the hands of Hezbollah.

On the face of it, that constitutes obstructionism on China’s part, as if it’s trying to prevent the global community from cracking down on bad behavior. But the inescapable truth is that China’s scramble to find resources means it has to cut deals with anybody, no matter their disreputable record. So while Sudan’s government engages in what many Western states consider to be “ethnic cleansing” or genocide in its Darfur region, China is more than happy to invest heavily in Sudan’s oil industry while supplying the Sudanese government with weapons. Do that long enough and you’ll have Hollywood stars galore decrying your hoped-for coming-out party as the “genocide Olympics.”

But the longer-term danger is this: China is getting awfully dependent on a lot of unstable countries without having the global military footprint of a great power—you know, like somebody building a very large house made of straw, nowhere near a fire station. When bad things happen—like, say, that one afternoon nine Chinese oil-rig workers were killed by rebels in eastern Ethiopia—China can’t respond like a military power you should fear, because it needs that oil. Once that reality sinks in with local bad actors, expect them to start squeezing Beijing for their own slice of protection money. You know that Thomas Friedman bit about America funding both sides of the “war on terror”? Well, this is how that sort of thing starts.

Today, China might get by simply by buying off every dictator it can. But that won’t work in a future world defined by hyperconnectivity, where everyone can witness the human implications of China’s deal-making. Nor will it work in a future world defined by hyperinterdependency, a world China is creating—whether it realizes it or not.

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5.

Because the panda "huggers" versus "sluggers" debate is a lot of hot air--until Washington scares Beijing into raising your mortgage interest rate five points overnight.

I’m considered a “panda hugger,” someone who rationalizes China’s current lack of democracy and argues that, despite all its selfish behavior, China should be considered by America more as a potential ally than a downstream threat. Being an economic determinist (I taught Marxism at Harvard in another life), I believe economics shapes politics more than the other way around. Thus, I tend to be patient when I see an autocratic regime marketizing its economy, especially when the economy opens up to globalization’s networks.

So when I draw up a list of regimes I’d like to see forcibly changed by the global community, China’s nowhere near the “to do” range. That doesn’t mean I want Washington to forgo pushing Beijing’s leaders in the direction of increasing political freedom and transparency, it just means that I have more faith in the transformative power of markets than others do, so I don’t argue for picking fights with China on that score when I think there are so many other, more urgent situations around the planet today that we could collectively address.

“Panda sluggers” refers to those politicians, writers, and activists who make just the opposite argument: China has had plenty of time to change politically in a manner commensurate with its embrace of markets and globalization. If Beijing’s ruling elite has managed to keep such a firm grip on political power, then maybe it’s really cracked the code on “authoritarian capitalism,” meaning we’re looking at an inherently antagonistic model of development. If so, America had better wake up to that reality and start combating China’s “soft power” influence-peddling around the world.

This view dovetails with trade protectionists who say that Washington must confront Beijing over its unfair trade practices and defense hawks who say similar things over China’s rising military spending. My counterargument? When America was a rising power around the beginning of the last century, we were highly protectionist. Now that we’re advanced, we’d like everybody else to follow our example. Fair? All things being equal, yes. But all things aren’t equal when you’re trying to catch up, the way China is today. I say, if you talk them into becoming capitalists, then you have to live with the consequences and be patient.

What concerns me most about this ongoing debate is the potential for the perfect triggering crisis to come along and decisively shift public opinion in favor of the “slugger” position, launching America down some path of economic retaliation against and/or military confrontation with China. Obvious security situations spring to mind, such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Iran’s nuclear program, or some significant U.S. military intervention in Pakistan—a longtime strategic ally of China.

But a more likely trigger is an extended economic downturn in the United States, or a financial panic in China following the bursting of some stock market bubble. If seriously threatened, might China decide to divest itself of U.S. currency—China currently holds $1.4 trillion in U.S. dollar reserves—sending the value of the dollar into a tailspin? No one knows for sure, but intelligent observers realize that, as former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has put it, there basically exists a financial “balance of terror” between our two economies, meaning that when either of us pulls the economic trigger, we may well both end up with fatal wounds.

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4.

Because as China builds out its infrastructure, it can set a good or a bad example to developing economies struggling to deal with fragile environments.

American businesses face a key decision: dive into China’s dynamic markets or risk missing out on their coming wave of innovation. Nowhere is this more true than in infrastructure development, which is expanding like gangbusters in China right now and will continue to do so for the next couple of decades. Good example: China is building freeways like crazy. In about 20 years, it’ll have roughly 50,000 miles of them—the equivalent of our interstate system.

In that time, the world will spend $10 trillion for infrastructure development in energy ($6 trillion) and water ($4 trillion). Most will happen inside China and India at a pace not witnessed on this planet since America spread its network westward following our Civil War. Naturally, environmentalists are worried. If China replicates our resource-intensive style of growth throughout its economy, there will be no end to its pollution and carbon emissions. If you’ve spent any time in China, you know what I’m talking about: acrid-tasting air that the U.N. estimates is responsible for the premature death of 400,000 Chinese a year. Now add in the four times as many cars and trucks that will be on Chinese roads in 20 years’ time, along with far more urbanization and industrialization, and tell me if that sounds sustainable.

But guess what? The Chinese themselves aren’t exactly clueless on the subject. After all, they live there. So I’m betting—and I admit this is a bet—that the Chinese, along with the Indians and emerging markets elsewhere, will be smarter than that. Not because they want to be, but because they’re forced to be. These rising economies will have to zig where we zagged, and how they zig will be important, not just for the “advanced” West, but for all those emerging markets to come in places like Africa.

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3.

Because China is globalization's general contractor: always happy to take the job and your money, but hard to get on the phone once you discover problems.

Globalization now impinges on the most traditional, off-the-grid societies in the world. Not surprisingly, there’s going to be plenty of cultural blowback triggered by that process, and some of it is going to come our way in the form of transnational terrorism—just as it did on 9/11.

For America to win a long war against radical extremism, we need to make globalization truly global by integrating the one-third of humanity whose noses remain pressed to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in to the party. That’s labor-intensive, and American workers price out far too high. Yes, we must be significantly involved, but it’s not going to be Americans—much less Europeans—who do the heavy lifting. No, it’s going to be those longtime frontier laborers of the global economy—the Chinese and other Asians. The highly networked Chinese have shown up like clockwork at every frontier globalization has ever created. Currently, more than a million Chinese nationals have turned up in Africa alone, engaging in what I call preemptive nation-building. It’s great that China has triggered a commodities boom over much of Africa. God knows those economies can use all the help they can get. But the longer it looks like China is just there for the raw materials, the more Africans are going to catch on to the fact that—for now—the Chinese aren’t doing any more for the continent’s long-term development than the European colonial powers did decades ago.

But China needs our help, too. As the Chinese become increasingly dependent on resources drawn from unstable regions—by 2020, roughly 70 percent of China’s oil imports will be from the Middle East—the country must continue leveraging U.S. military power. Otherwise, it’ll be left unduly subsidizing weak or corrupt regimes, with China’s economic connectivity put at risk by local warlords, chronic insurgencies, and radical extremists bent on driving out globalization’s networks. If America can’t afford to maintain global security on its own, and China can’t afford to replace our effort on its own, then a strategic alliance makes eminent sense.

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2.

Because China will not be our biggest future enemy but our most important ally.

A significant portion of our national-security establishment wants desperately to cast China as an inevitable long-term threat. Why? Part of it is simply habit, as most who argue this line spent the bulk of their professional lives in the Cold War and just can’t imagine a world that doesn’t feature a superpower rivalry. For those who need to fill that hole, China is the best show in town, because its military buildup allows these hawks to argue that America must buy and maintain a huge, high-tech military force for potential large-scale war with the Chinese.

My counter is this: China’s military buildup is not historically odd. America did the same as it became a global economic power in the late decades of the 19th century. Remember Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet? It’s the same logic we see with China today.

But won't events put China and the United States at odds—say, over the strategic issues of fostering stability in the Persian Gulf? Hardly. Right now the United States imports only about one-tenth of the Persian Gulf’s oil exports, with the vast bulk heading east to Asia. Frankly, there’s no sense in the strategic equation “American blood (spilled) for Chinese oil (imports secured).” As China’s oil imports skyrocket in coming years, unlike ours, do you think that’s a politically sustainable situation?

My larger, more long-term fear is that by keeping China our preferred threat, we deny ourselves access to its significant military manpower and growing budget. With Europe and Japan both aging dramatically and China’s strategic interests ballooning in unstable regions, this makes no sense. Better to lock in China as soon as possible as the land-power anchor of an East-Asian version of NATO. The sooner we achieve that, along with Korea’s reunification, the sooner we can draw down our military in the region and better employ it in hotter spots around the world, eventually with Chinese (and Indian) troops helping out.

What would a strategic alliance with China look like? It won’t come as some “grand bargain” achieved in a single summit, but rather a long-term buildup of trust through coalition operations. Asia is an obvious focal point for such cooperation, but a complex one. Far better in the short run would be to create a strategic dialogue between the Pentagon’s nascent Africa Command and the Chinese military regarding joint peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Africa. By focusing on that relatively clean slate, America and China could come together to explore what our military alliance could ultimately entail.

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1.

Because we're less than five years from a new generation of Chinese leaders with whom a far stronger relationship may well be built.

China is on the verge of a generational leadership change that will profoundly shape its emergence as a global power over the next decade. America should take advantage of this new group’s eagerness to play an actively constructive role in international affairs.

To make clear how this would work, here’s a quick primer on the generations of Chinese leaders since 1949: Mao personified the first generation, Deng the second. Deng was followed by a third generation fronted by Jiang Zemin, China’s president and party boss across the 1990s. What’s important to note about the third generation is that this cohort was largely educated in the Soviet Union during the 1950s. The technocratic flavor of that formative experience emboldened these leaders to extend Deng’s economic reforms far deeper into Chinese society, even as the leaders steadfastly refused political liberalization.

That brings us to the current, or fourth, generation of leaders, represented by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, a risk-avoiding pair who have been quietly at the helm of “peacefully rising” China since 2002. Internally, their focus has been on harmonizing the huge imbalance between the booming coastal provinces and the left-behind rural poor of the interior.

Since 9/11, China has been almost invisible in international security affairs, essentially free riding on America’s vigorous prosecution of both radical Islam’s global insurgency and the so-called Axis of Evil, despite being a potentially key player. After all, China has long stood as North Korea’s patron and now emerges as a dynamic investor for energy and raw-materials providers throughout the Middle East and Africa.

But understand this: China’s fourth-generation leaders did not travel abroad in the 1960s for their college education, trapped as they were by the Cultural Revolution. So it’s hardly a surprise that these homebodies have proven reticent to step out internationally. But that’s changing as China’s fifth-generation leaders-in-waiting step into senior positions of power. Starting in the late 1970s, many of them were educated right here in the United States—the birthplace of today’s market-driven globalization. All but penciled in for future top slots last fall at the Communist Party’s supreme gathering, this group has already begun its years-long transition to rule, slated to begin officially in 2012. Increasingly, China’s next leadership generation speaks openly of the nation’s achievement of great power status.

How America engages China’s emerging elite in coming years could well determine—for good or ill—the lasting contours of the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. The scariest aspect to this relationship right now is that America’s economic interdependency with China vastly outweighs the two nations’ political and, more important, military connectivity. Bind America and China together, and globalization cannot be derailed. But set them persistently at odds, and that’s a recipe for unacceptable danger.