For your calendar

Ok, all of you people who keep asking 'When and where can I see Tom in person?'

The answer is the Smithsonian on October 27th. Open to the public.

More details as I get them.

Speaking of "The Americans Have Landed"

Looks like I might do C-SPAN on camera Friday morning in the 8-9 range. Sort of impedes start of first day of family vacation, but we'll make it work.

As always, I like going on C-SPAN, and I like to have my material drive the appearance versus just having me on TV to comment on current events.

More details as they come.

BTW, my column this weekend will be a sort of intellectual outtake from the Esquire article. Wasn't so crass to include a pointer to the piece ("a brilliant new article, just out, by yours truly ..."), but I do what I can.

The "Pentagon's New Blueprint"?

Got a nice inquiry through my agent from a principal at a major publisher that found my current piece in Esquire of sufficient heft and promise to warrant discussion of a possible book-length publication.

When traveling in Africa, I cranked an easy 10k blog (which should go up on Esquire's site any minute) that had me recognizing why Kaplan likes doing what he does (please, no one tell the guys at "Coming Anarchy"). I had amassed such a huge amount of material but could only get 6k of it into the piece, which I do consider my best reporting to date (always, with a huge assist from Warren), so the notion of cranking the book that leverages the article in the same way PNM did way back when is certainly tempting.

Options, baby. Always with the options!

Nice post by Curtis on 5GW

Found here and cited below.

Shane's right in his comment: I do agree with the vast majority of the post, to include its criticism that my vision to date has relied a lot on stock characters (nations, militaries, corporations).

The reason why I don't just elucidate the super-empowered masses is two-fold:

1) When I speak to globalization's liberating freedoms, I'm assuming all that. My belief in markets isn't a belief in either governments or militaries or corporations, but in the individuals that animate them. I don't spell that out enough, I guess, in my writings. It's just the way I view them based on my years of interacting with these three actor-collectives. I know that makes me naive to some (oh, to rely on actual experience outside my almost 20 hours of teaching!), but I really think we win--time and time again--because of the quality of our people, which is enabled by our rule-sets and institutions (which, in turn, are nothing without these individuals, as we see time and time again). I could try to write that sort of book next, but I don't think that sort of writing is particularly my forte. Plus there are so many books out there like that, all of which proclaim the rising power of individuals, the wisdom of crowds, etc. I will think about Curtis' admonitions, though, as I write Vol. III. I spent a lot of BFA correcting people's wrong assumptions on PNM (meaning, where they filled in blanks in ways highly different from my assumptions). I think I would have done that naturally to a certain extent anyway, but his words help me focus.

2) In writing Vol. III as a how-to manual, I am sort of taking a pass on truly exploring the individual-led-change possibilities of this era. I mean, I'll take you through my version of it, but I don't promise to give you the same tour d'horizon on individuals as I did on the system in PNM and states/economies/societies in BFA. Instead of trying to be all things to all individuals in Vol. III, I'll explore the one thing I know well. I do that because I feel the knowledge is important in its own right, addressing a serious gap in our tool kit vis-a-vis other, rising societies of SEIs (especially China and India). I also do it because I feel, individually, that this is the next step in self-knowledge for me, and it's time--life-wise--to pass on the knowledge (most of my mentors were roughly this age when they started paying it . . . backward (I guess, in generational terms)). It also seems like the right book to write right now, for me career-wise and for the next step in spreading the vision. But writing the how-to is also a bit of a placeholder for me. The book on SEIs remaking the world in their vision--positively--is a book I could see writing with Steve a few years down the road. To write it now, amidst the very unfolding of what we're trying to do, would seem self-indulgent. We can either teach right now or do, and the do is too important, too much fun, and too lucrative to pass up (what, you thought we'd come up with a way to make both us and others impoverished?). That pathway, only hinted at here and there in our respective blogs, is coming about in ways that are stunningly exciting, teaching us a ton of lessons in the process. Steve, for example, is learning so much in pursuing Development-in-a-Box right now in his opening trips to Kurdistan, that it threatens to take over his own book project before he gets the chance to do the straightforward lay out of enterprise resilience and the like. To the extent he can pull off as much of the "teach" and the real-time "do" in his first book, then so much the better. But me, for a lot of where-I-am-today reasons, I just don't want to try to do both things on the fly. When I wrote PNM and BFA (like two movies filmed back to back), I was leveraging the first 15 years of my career. I didn't have to make any of it up, it was what I did for a living. Since I've left the Naval War College, I have spent a lot of time exploring what it means for me as an individual to affect change, with the most excitingly tangible stuff happening with Steve and Enterra. Someday, I or we (Steve and I) will write that sort of book, and it will be our version of Fifth Generation Warfare, which I believe, leveraging Dan Abbott's forays, will be fundamentally pre-kinetic (i.e., very Confucian), very economic, and hugely liberating and thus subversive in the worst way. But I want to learn all that stuff--first hand--before I try to write it up. I simply need my personal experience to catch up with up with my writing. Until then, Vol. III offers an angle of skills without trying to cover the entire gamut. In many ways, I would consider that approach to be de rigeur, meaning the tale of 5GW can only be told in mosaic. To the extent that is true, I would expect to offer many updates in the future on the roads built.

The flesh is itchy, the spirit is weak

As the drought gets worse in Indiana, the bugs get more desperate to join us in our cooler/moister existence, the pollen gets unbelievably unpleasant, and I grow more ambivalent about life and career.

It has been a blistering pace, this first half of the year. I am not burned out, but I can see it from here. I just feel the need to pull back some, reorder, get things straight, etc. Thank God summer slows things down. As much as we want meetings on demand to keep the great Enterra train running at full tilt, the reality of summer is that things really do slow down.

I feel a certain uncertainty. The proposal was messengered over to Putnam the middle of last week, so until we get some sense of receptivity, or lack thereof, the rest of my summer schedule seems indeterminate. Once we get to the 4th, everything will start scheduling for Labor Day and beyond. I'd like to have a rough first draft of Vol. III in hand by then, so I'm keeping August awfully open for now.

Maybe I'm just waiting to find III a home, until then, the urge to putter around and reorganize is strong.

Or maybe just too many untold-hour workweeks simply catches up, and one slows down merely because the pace is unsustainable.

The debate is real on going to war with Iran

ARTICLE: "Strategy On Iran Stirs New Debate At White House: Military Option At Issue; Officials Cite Questions on Diplomatic Bid to Halt Nuclear Program," by Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger, New York Times, 16 June 2007, p. A1.

Cheney's people are pushing hard to get the military option on the table by next spring. My fear of an October surprise seems less fantastic by the week.

Rice, in her role, naturally opposes. But having no more control than Powell did, the outcome is unlikely to differ . . . except for the Iraq tie down, which is where I got off the bus. Once you commit yourself to the Big Bang, you have to play the board as it unfolds, not just keep adding stuff with little consideration for the commitments already made.

Managing Iraq's journey from fake state to real ones is the reality we set in motion. The Middle East can never be the same as a result, which was the whole point of the Big Bang in the first place: set in motion changes that cannot be stopped and thus force new combinations.

Iraq is its own constellation now, with catalytic capabilities to alter the House of Saud and Iran and Turkey even. Palestine is now politically split into two pieces to match its geographic split (remember how well East and West Pakistan once worked?).

The paranoids among us will argue this is all part of Bush's grand plan to remap the Middle East--naturally, to Israel's benefit.

But there is no such plan, as evidenced by the WMD redux on Iran, which gets marketed almost shamelessly as the redirection from Iraq.

I've said it before many times: Bush and the neocons came into office gunning for the Russians and Chinese, or what I called the "big pieces" strategy. As great power types, it was what they knew.

9/11 redirected, and we got great power thinking applied to the "axis of evil" medium-sized powers. We can, in this era, pursue unilateralism only at such levels. It simply doesn't work with a China that's connecting itself so strongly in trade, technological and financial terms with the U.S. Ditto for Russia with Europe.

If Bush had pulled off Iraq on some level, the leeway from other great powers would still be there. But in failure, it's been withdrawn, so the rerun on Iran leaves us oddly isolated, and our progress--such as it is--on North Korea is by committee only.

But this is bouncing rubble.

We need this administration to black out just like Tony Soprano did. In a parliamentary system, Bush would be gone. His government would simply collapse and elections would be forced. But we are forced to live with this interregnum. We have no choice. So we fantasize about the next president, and we grow increasingly numb to this one's lack of strategic imagination, which is almost self-fulfilling in its impotence, as no one is willing to give us anything right now--and frankly, shouldn't.

The early Bush post-presidency will be remembered as one painful stretch.

Tom around the web: video

The most popular link this past week, by far, was not a link to this site but to the video of Tom's talk at TED in February 2005: Thomas Barnett's bracing talk on the future of war, on TED.com.

Here's their write-up:

Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett has advised US leaders on national security since the end of the Cold War. In this bracingly honest -- and very funny -- talk, Barnett outlines a solution for the foundering US military: Break it in two. One half makes war, and the other half builds the peace that follows. Spontaneous applause and a standing ovation underscore what Barnett said on his blog: "Probably the best 20 minutes of speaking I have ever done."

The video:

Now, the links:
+ Fortify Your Oasis, who hates Tom slides, but loves his delivery, rating him above Steve Jobs.
+ hatke
+ ISN The Blog
+ Random Thoughts Containment Unit: 'it's effing brilliant'
+ Identity Unknown
+ Not A Hat: 'brilliant'
+ Who Would Reagan Vote For? 'I watched this expecting him to be a left wing peace nut, but he really wants to turn our military into serious cold, hard killers and then back them up with a serious force for rebuilding the countries we take down - Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. This guy is awesome, now if someone would just listen.'
+ blogish
+ The Fein Line
+ cartoon life: 'This is an idea that gives me hope for a better world. Win the war, and win the peace. It would certainly be better than the disastrous situation extant now, but I wonder about consequent accusations of cultural hegemony. I suppose one could worry about that when we get there. But let’s get there first.'
+ SageGuide: 'Pentagon Strategist Thomas Barnett gives a hilarious talk filled with macho bravado on the next step in the development of America’s military, creating a peace keeping force. Acknowledging America’s indomitable might when it comes to wars, he also acknowledges their poor record for instilling peace in countries it has conquered. Disturbing, hilarious and thought provoking at the same time, this talk is a refreshing addition to the regular TED line up of design, technology and social commentary.'

Unsurprising failed states list

ARTICLE: Iraq, 'Sinking Fast,' Is Ranked No. 2 on List of Unstable States, By Robin Wright, Washington Post, June 19, 2007; Page A13

No surprise on list--pure Gap.

Failed States 2007

1 Sudan
2 Iraq
3 Somalia
4 Zimbabwe
5 Chad
6 Ivory Coast
7 Dem. Rep. of Congo
8 Afghanistan
9 Guinea
10 Central African Rep.

Not mush surprise on Iraq either--a fake state that comes apart when allowed (even enabled by our incompetence).

Virtually every state on that list suffers the same legacy: lines drawn by others, indicating a certain imposed fakeness.

Yes, America will get stuck dealing with a lot of this, as will any globalizing economy, to include Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Today's anti-Americanism is an historical placeholder for the far more dispersed anti-capitalist anger that comes next.

Answer?

Same as it ever was: globalization made truly global. A violence-reducing strategy?

Certainly for the planet as a whole, which has never known more peace than it has today.

But no, not for those involved at globalization's frontier. Consult your history books on that one.

Gotta get over it if you want it to get over.

A small but very good sign

ARTICLE: A U.S.-China Hotline Coming, Norman Polmar, June 18, 2007

In the end, Bush is credited greatly with doing no harm with the Chinese relationship.

Thanks to Brad B. for sending this.

Tom around the web

The second-most popular link this week was to Tom's new article in Esquire about Africom, The Americans Have Landed. Links:
+ The Huffington Post linked the story, almost in wire-fashion, and created a lot of traffic.
+ Warfare 2050 (mentioned the article, but didn't have the link yet)
+ Baudrillard's Bastard
+ The Blue Herald
+ American Footprints (6/13)
+ Cowboy J
+ Africa Media didn't like the story.
+ Chris Floyd linked it with an ideological axe to grind.
+ And, just in, Foreign Policy has it on their reading list.

+ 5GW has a major post on Tom's thinking called On the Barnettian 5GW. Therein, Curtis coins the term 'Barnettian paradox'.

+ Lexington Green mentioned Tom quite a few times in his Article Roundup.
+ jDub‚Ñ¢ posts a semi book report on PNM.
+ InsideDefense mentioned Tom, but it's subscription only. Here's the excerpt from Google: 'Other defense observers, such as author Thomas Barnett, have previously disputed this line of thinking, likening it to trumped-up estimates of Soviet power...'
+ MountainRunner linked AFRICOM as embryonic DoEE.
+ ArtLung Blog linked No divided loyalties, no permanent friends.
+ Valley of the Shadow linked One Leviathan, many SysAdmins.
+ Wolf Pangloss linked Great piece on Iran’s economic collapse, despite all the oil wealth.
+ International Consortium on Religion, Culture, and Dialogue linked yesterday's column.

What was most popular? Stay tuned!

Cool PNM wallpaper

Brad B. writes in to say:

I took the map from the pdf file you have on your site and resized it to fit a 1600x1200 screen. Then I created a negative image of it to make a nice desktop wallpaper for anyone running their monitor at 1600x1200 pixels. Just tell Windows to Center the wallpaper and select black as the background color.

(And I can vouch that it also works well on 1280x800.)

Thanks, Brad!

I like the "motivated by money" part

ARTICLE: Sudanese students flock to learn Chinese, By Lewis Machipisa, BBC News, 13 June 2007

Thanks to doubting disciple for sending this.

Tom's column for this week

Why must America go it alone on prosecuting war crimes?

Almost six years after 9/11, the United States still struggles to create an alternative judicial system to prosecute terrorists for war crimes as "unlawful enemy combatants."

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court, set up in 2002 to adjudicate such individuals for crimes against humanity, continues to grow in stature, competency and --most importantly -- actual cases. So the question begs: Why must America construct its own war-crimes court when the world seems content with the ICC?

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Deny Iran external enemy

ARTICLE: 'Iran Curtails Freedom In Throwback to 1979: Repression Seen as Cultural Revolution,' By Robin Wright, Washington Post, June 16, 2007; Page A10

Good signs, in my mind, on Iran internally. The mullahs are really scared at growing social discontent. The economy's only going to get worse.

What we need to do is the Gorby trick: we need to deny them the external enemy rationale if we want the soft kill to eventually unfold from within.

My Wikifamily

I realize it now: three remixes with my wife and then we went peer-to-peer for Vonne Mei (whose name sort of means, "a smaller, Chinese version of Vonne."

Wiki-man!

Reading Wikinomics and realizing how many choices I've made fit it.

My boss is in Philly.

Our company really now in Northern VA.

My agent's in Massachusetts.

My editor's in Manhattan.

My manager's in New Jersey.

My webmaster's in the Carolinas somewhere, along with my Powerpoint master.

Me? I'm in Indy, most of the time.

We rarely get together F2F, but collaborate constantly .

Tom on TWS

Brandon Winters sends in this link to The Twelve Commandments , an article about Giuliani. Page 2 features this quote about Tom:

Another large influence is Thomas P. [sic] Barnett, the strategist whose book The Pentagon's New Map was a major bestseller. Giuliani read it, loved it, and met with Barnett. One of Barnett's themes is expanding the sphere of American economic interaction with the rest of the world. Giuliani alludes to this idea in his 12th commitment, and it will likely play a large part in the mayor's forthcoming Foreign Affairs essay, slated for publication this fall.

We have time for some soft-kill

ARTICLE: Agency warns against attack on Iran, By George Jahn, Associated Press, June 15, 2007

Note the estimates on timelines here and tell me we don't have time to execute some soft-kill penetration in the meantime.

What we pursue now as a strategy gets us an isolated, pissed-off, nuclear Iran down the road with big friends in rising powers Russia, India and China.

Criteria for a real conversation

OP-ED: The Power China Is Building, By Gary Schmitt, Washington Post, June 14, 2007; Page A27

Schmitt, whom I've meet, pushes very hard for a much larger U.S. military budget. To do that, he must sell all current responsibilities plus all possible enemy images.

Notice in this piece how he doesn't make any direct money comparisons, instead offering the scary image of "scores" of modernized platforms China is buying that are--in reality--nothing more than stuff they buy primarily from the Russians. If the Sovs never matched us, how does China buying Russian stuff in vastly smaller numbers match us? Our focus should be--as always--on capabilities, not numbers. No commander of PACOM, for example, would trade our sub fleet for China's. Fallon and others have stated that China is nowhere near matching our capabilities in the region, much less elsewhere.

The larger notion that somehow America stands "in the way" of China is a bit much. Please name a spot where we'll stop China from doing trade, because we won't even consider that on Iran, so does anyone think we'll go to the mattresses on Zimbabwe or Sudan?

As an assertion of conflicting strategic interests, it does not fly. Schmitt offers no economic or trade analysis of China's already massive and growing interdependency with the American economy, because none matches his preference to add China on top of the Long War as a compelling requirement.

America can't manage a Cold War-like rivalry with China plus a Long War against radical extremism, and frankly, China can't come close to managing either, given its hundreds of millions living on less than a dollar a day and their supremely rapidly rising elder population. Run the numbers down the road and they simply do not compute.

But Schmitt unabashedly wants a far larger U.S. Defense budget and makes no bones about it, so China's "scores" of Russian platforms must impress. But as someone who spent some time studying Soviet military capabilities, especially naval ones, I remain unimpressed.

China's capabilities place it in the same zip code as Britain's in numbers, but hardly in skills (frankly, I'd take India's navy over China's). Ask yourself what Britain can manage right now as an independent global power and what it would take from the Brits to "stand in our way" as a hostile one and you'll get a sense of the huge capabilities gap that still remains.

As China rises, we can choose to shape that rise, or we can try to counter it. What we can't do is prevent it.

Frankly, what we suffer with China most right now is its free-riding on our own vast global security efforts. The only cure for that is to engage them toward more effort in similar areas.

Or we can pick a fight or start up an arms race. Which path strikes you as getting America what it wants and which gets Osama what he wants?

If you want Schmitt's path, you need to be able to argue how China can get rich before it gets old before its gets seriously capable of threatening us somewhere besides Taiwan, AND THEN how it maintains that wealth and economic power, despite the aging, in hostile opposition to the U.S., somehow shielded from a global economy that we still dominate but from which it has somehow detached itself in some coherent, alternative economic bloc, thus allowing a consistently hostile policy toward America (and if you're going to push a China-running-the-global-economy scenario, then I say, "Put down that crack pipe!"). Just think that one through and lay out a plausible political, social, environmental, technological, demographic,and ECONOMIC scenario in addition to Schmitt's preferred security scenario based on a sheer "dramatically rising defense budget" that still, in total, doesn't match our military-industrial complex's vast R&D spending alone.

And then we can have a real conversation.

If you think that at-sea naval battles using subs versus carriers is the future of 21st century warfare, much less the essential basis of our power competition with China, then we must certainly spend a lot more money building naval platforms. With globalization and the continuing reality of nukes, however, I just don't see that vision providing us much security coverage in the complex future unfolding before us. But a lot of analysts prefer old wars to new ones. Me, I'm more interested in China's capacity for cyber attacks than torpedoes, because I just don't see Beijing engaging in lengthy conventional scenarios with us (and no, cyber plus a rapid conventional engagement does not buy wins, it just gives you something new to defend in what inevitably ends up being an untenable conventional fight--to wit, our situation in Iraq).

Underestimating our strengths and overestimating those of others is a sure way to lose the resource utilization contest over time, so interpreting our relationship/competition with China solely on the basis of defense budgets is a bad idea. Extrapolating motives from them is even worse.

After all, who spends most and who wars most? China's last serious military intervention was in 1979, almost three decades ago. Care to guess our number since then?

Our willingness to use our forces is our greatest strength. We know ops, and we're confident in doing them. Count up purchase numbers if you want, but I prefer usable, experienced troops and commanders with actual combat experience. When China can rapidly insert 50,000 combat troops in Africa or SWA and support them over time, then we'll have a different conversation. Most people have no idea what that entails, but Chinese strategists do.

Thanks to Barry Kaplovitz for sending this.

Mystery ended on why Chanda and I agree on size of the Gap

Just finished Nayan Chanda's Yale UP-pub, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization and it is a stunning tour d'horizon. Outperforms Diamond.

This is what I bumped into at the end:

[as he flies in a jet]
Some of the concerns most often articulated about globalization stem from the income inequality between rich and poor and within countries open to the winds of global trade. The interconnectedness that we call globalization has bypassed a huge swath of territory from Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central and Southwest Asia to South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia as well as parts of the Caribbean. Poorer countries' share of world trade has fallen over the past twenty years.

More than a billion people still live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have traveled beyond the place of birth. Lacking such basic infrastructure as drinking water, primary education, health services, roads, electricity, and ports, nearly two billion people are forgotten and invisible denizens of a world I could not access from my plane. Yet it is this population that presents both a moral and a practical challenge to the developed world. Malnourished and disease-ridden children in Africa and Asia--whose numbers have grown with failing agriculture, stunted in part by the pressure of rich countries' farm subsidies--stare at the glittering West in silent rebuke. To the policymakers of rich countries, they are simply sources of insecurity--from illegal immigration to drug smuggling and crime--and vectors of disease. A Pentagon strategist calls this region the "non-integrating gap," from which new and unconventional security challenges are likely to emerge. The U.S. Defense Department has quietly dispatched dozens of special advisers to hold thousands of exercises in more than a hundred nations to preempt and prepare for such threats [endnote: Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004, 107-91.] But the dangers posed by this glaring socioeconomic disparity are more fundamental and long-term. An inability to use the enormous potential that this left-out population represents would not only limit the markets for goods and services that developed and rapidly growing countries generate but would result in stagnant economies and failed states that can only become source of increasing numbers of illegal immigrants and recruits for crime and terrorism.

My quibble is Chanda's placement of the endnote, because the rest of the last long para is also a conceptual lift from my book. He sets me up as diagnostician narrowly focused on security concerns and then presents himself as the broader thinker who considers things more holistically, and given he's obviously read my entire book, that's a bit self-serving.

I am familiar with the temptation: you crank several paras of other people's work and you don't want to put that endnote at the very end, instead giving the illusion that you've seriously extended and improved the analysis. But when that happens, you need to be a little more honest than Chanda was here. Anyone who reads PNM knows I make the same arguments on "winning the peace" and not just looking at "war solely within the context of war," plus my call to "shrink the Gap" cites all the same rationales Chanda appears to so wisely add to my apparently limited analysis (yes, I am often accused of not getting to the "fundamental" nature of the problem and not thinking sufficiently "long term").

Honestly, that kind of omission happens a lot. I write an entire chapter on "System Perturbations" as a new form of crisis and warfare, but that citation often gets lost in follow-on works that clearly feed on my approach.

But this is quibbling and ego-surfing that must be viewed as beneath the visionary (yes, that persona again, although me as just Tom can get annoyed and let it go at that). The big thing is that the vision spreads and gets replicated in a reproducible fashion.

After all, I get criticized for not citing Immanuel Wallerstein's Core v. Periphery even though I see my thoughts and definitions of that breakdown as being diametrically opposed (and derived from a completely different angle)--as in, I say the Core must shrink the Gap to stay wealthy while Wallerstein argues the exact opposite. I also argue the Gap is the Gap because it's weakly connected to the Core while he argues that the Periphery is impoverished primarily from too much connection to the Core. In my mind, then, I turn Wallerstein and his bankrupt Marxism on its head.

So I guess we all fall victim to our own sense of unique arguments, and we all want to seem like we're breaking from the stale past and making things anew. I should have cited Wallerstein in PNM despite my sense of distance. Truth is, I never made the connection mentally until others pointed it out (as pathetic and sloppy as that sounds, and yet, neither did anyone among the thousands I briefed all those hundreds of times, which I guess tells you how much the mil community reads Marxists). Of course, I could have and should have cited tons of other people too (also not mentally connected), but then again, I didn't write an academic tome but a popular book so I tended to cite only recent popular references, like Friedman, Huntington, Fukuyama, Zakaria, Lomborg, Kagan, and so on (actually, I am no slouch in the anal citation department). Then again, you'll never satisfy all the academics and I'm being sort of an academic weanie myself here with such whining.

In the end, I saw myself triangulating between Friedman's economics (he didn't cite Wallerstein either in Lexus and the Olive Tree and I guess I see no reason why he should have) and Huntington's "civilizations," believing Fukuyama's End of History ended any need to apologize to the historically-discredited Marxist BS artists.

Still, very cool to be included in a book of this stature and quality, even as I do wonder about the "thousands of exercises" bit he seems to attribute to me.

Oh damn! Did it again!