A man who dreams big

■"Spend $150 Billion Per Year To Cure World Poverty," by Daphne Eviatar, New York Times Magazine, 7 November 2004, p. 42.

■"Roads Lead to a New Way of Life for Rural Ethiopia," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 8 November 2004, p. A3.

I have heard a lot about Jeffrey Sachs from my friend Mark Warren, the executive editor of Esquire, because the magazine picked him as one of their Best & Brightest last year, plus he wrote a piece for them soon after, just like I did, so Mark got to know him somewhat, and came away awfully impressed. I've always heard good things about him, and the bad stuff tended to be criticisms I've often heard about myself, so I tended to cut the guy a break. His talent is legendary, and he's been a figure on the global stage for most of his career, so it's hard to come across a profile on him that has much new to say about his storied career.

This one does, but primarily because it tells the story of Sachs' latest global gambit, which is essentially convincing the Core to come up with a ton of money pronto to shrink the Gap once and for all:

In his version, Africa, through no fault of its own, is trapped. Held back by geographical impediments like climate, disease and isolation, it cannot lift itself out of poverty. What Africa needs, then, is not more scolding from the West. It needs a "big push"óa flood of foreign aidóto boost its prospects and carry it into the developed world.

To say this is controversial is a vast understatement: countries that get the most aid in the world today are at the very bottom of the growth ladder, whereas countries that attract foreign direct investment are at the very top. So why does Sachs think more aid will achieve a tipping point?

This article really doesn't say. Rather it suggests that Sachs is an opportunist who's arguing for a new view of development economics now because leaders across the Core are listening for ways to shrink the Gap out of fear of the terrorism that is breed there. Id don't say that disapprovingly, for I too am one helluva opportunist. As I wrote in PNM, it's one thing to have a great idea, but quite another to get in front of the right decision-makers at the right time. That's the difference between necessary and sufficient.

Then the article goes on to declare him a genius on several levels, but also suggests that he's making atonement now for all his years of pushing free markets in the former Soviet bloc.

So right now he's running around the Core trying to get leaders to sign up to the plan by giving them plenty of detailed plans about how the money would be spent. Logically, for him it starts first with food sufficiency. Why? You can't conquer traditional communal rule sets until you solve the food issue. Until then, it'll make sense for any backward country to stick with what they know and what's got them through the hard times in the past.

But having worked with the US Agency for International Development's Africa Bureau for a while, I know there are plenty of economic policies across Africa thatóunless changedówill blunt the impact of money tossed in this direction. If anything, what USAID has learned in past decades is that the most important aid they deliver focuses on changing rules, rather than simply pumping money into bad systems.

Sachs wants the Core to cancel all of Africa's past debts, which isn't a bad idea, but again, how much does that change if nothing else really does? Sachs' reply? "The idea that African failure is due to African poor governance is one of the great myths of our time."

If it is, there are a lot of educated Africans themselves who believe it most of all. Sachs counters that when you control for income level, African governments are no worse than those anywhere elseóan interesting argument. But the question still begs, How does giving a ton of money quickly to such governments lead to a positive outcome? Windfalls have a way of corrupting even the best peopleówitness the lives of lottery winners.

But the article goes on to say that Sachs has left the building as far as data is concerned. He's just into preaching now, and his new book next spring will describe the "end of poverty" through the "big push" he's advocating.

What should we make of his faith? Well, he had a lot of faith in "shock therapy" for Russia and Poland, which was his "big push" in the 1990s. A lot of people there, the article claims, still blame him for all the looting. In the end, people behaved an awful lot like people, instead of whatever Sachs believes them to be.

And yet, Sachs remains eminently respected, even if a lot of experts in his field think his current "big push" is no better than the last one he pulled. He's just that effective of a visionary: he gets the subject on the table and does what he can with it while it's there. And he's smart enough to know that there is a huge rethink on the nexus of security and development right now due to the Global War on Terrorism, so push while you can.

Me, I don't see a huge push of aid as the answer, but aid that focuses on connectivity first and foremost. In the beginning, that's simple stuff, like transportation connectivity, and you move from there. But in my mind, your rule set on foreign aid is simply, Does it leave the country more connected either internally and/or externally with the world at large? If you can answer yes to one or both aspects, it's good foreign aid. If you can't, it's probably a waste of money.

Road building is back in favor at the World Bank and it tends to do great things when it's applied in places like Africa, but here's the rub I've heard from experts in the field: the World Bank will pay for the building of a road, but not its maintenance, which it leaves to the state to figure out. That kind of attitude gets you roads that look great the minute they're laid, but deteriorate at high speed. To me, that's a corollary to the Pentagon's tendency to budget only for acquisition and training and never for actual operations.

In the end, you still need good governments to be able to keep up the roads, otherwise you end up with one big Rhode Island.

Hernando de Soto would be proud, Brazil!

■"Cable Pirates Thrive in Brazil: Rather Than Fight Them, the Government May Legalize Them," by Todd Benson, New York Times, 10 November 2004, p. W1.

Cable piracy is huge in Brazil, but all that effort at connectivityóhowever illegalórepresents a serious capital outlay when it's all added up.

So what's a government to do? Tear it all down and throw ordinary citizens in jail?

Or maybe just accept the idea and start charging people for the service, forgiving them the past transgression? After all, that's a lot of effort that would have gone wasted, pissing off a lot of voters, and just bypassing the chance at revenue.

This is pure Hernando de Soto stuff (making you wonder if he wasn't in on it, because he advises Brazil): accept the informal economy where you find, credentializing the assets accrued and allowing the system to take advantage of the taxes/revenues.

Here's how one Brazilian TV official put it:

"The cable companies are well aware that the problem of pirate television isn't going to be solved through police repression," he said. "We have to be intelligent. And that means letting a market that is already thriving continue to thrive by giving it the legal means to do so."

In other words, better to switch than fight!

Planning the SysAdmin follow-on from the start

■"Rebuilding What the Assault Turns to Rubble: Seabees, Other Units Began Planning Early for the Reconstruction of Fallujah," by Jackie Spinner, Washington Post, 10 November 2004, p. A20.

We went into Fallujah with several thousand Marines and Army personnel, but also with $90 million in planned reconstruction efforts.

This Seabee says it all:

"A lot of trigger-pullers and pilots, they can do just about anything with their weapons," said Merola, 38, a reservist with the 7th Naval Construction Regiment, based in Newport, R.I. "But you don't want to give people a piece of flat earth to start over with when you're done."

Well said, Commander, well said.

Testimony to the Congressional Overseas Basing Commission

Dateline: Office of Force Transformation, Rosslyn VA, 9 November 2004

Just on my way out the door here after nice long talk with Art Cebrowksi. Heading to testimony on Hill to Overseas Basing Commission.

Below is the text of my opening statement submitted for the record both here and there:

TESTIMONY SUBMITTED TO THE
OVERSEAS BASING COMMISSION BY
DR. THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
PROFESSOR, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE
[9 November 2004]

First, let me thank the Commission on Overseas Basing for inviting me to testify here today.

Second, let me emphasize right from the start that I'm not an expert per se on the U.S. military's global basing structure. I am essentially a grand strategist who spends his time contemplating the long-term objectives of U.S. foreign policy with a particular focus on how the employment of military force around the world can bring about not just increased security for our country, but improve the global security environment as a whole. I have written extensively on this subject, and I know that it is primarily on the basis of my recent book, The Pentagon's New Map, that I was asked to testify today, so many of my comments here will involve describing how I think this new map informs future planning for U.S. overseas basing realignment.

The concept of the new map began with a simple geographic display of where America sent its military forces since the end of the Cold War. In my view, this distribution represents the natural demand pattern for U.S. security exports since the Soviet Union departed the scene. By the exporting of security, I refer to the time and attention spent by the U.S. military on any particular region's actualóor potential foróincidences of armed conflict or mass violenceóeither between states or within them. By my calculation, U.S. military crisis response activity over the past 15 years represents a roughly four-fold increase compared to the 15 years following the end of the Vietnam War. I come to that conclusion by adding up the combined total of the four major services' cumulative days of operations in these responses. It was not only that America conducted more operations over the last decade and a half, but also that these operations grew tremendously in length and complexity.

How did America deal with this tremendous growth in the world's demand for our exporting of security? Especially as the Pentagon itself was engaged in a long-term downward glide path in terms of personnel and resources? We essentially mounted five major responses:

1) We denied the existence of this rising demand, by adhering as strictly as possible to the tenets of the Powell Doctrine, which said in effect, "pull out of any situation as quickly as feasible"

2) We denigrated the importance and utility of the bulk of these responses, dubbing them Military Operations Other Than War, thereby justifying the Pentagon's well-demonstrated tendency to under-fund, under-prioritize, and under-man the skill sets associated with post-conflict stabilization operations

3) We tried to technologize the problem away, but unfortunately we spent the vast bulk of our money on the warfighting side of the house, effectively providing to America what it has today: a first-half team that plays in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game

4) We outsourced as many non-combat functions as possible, pushing them on to both allied militaries and private contractors, and

5) We ran significant portions of the Reserve Component ragged by turning them into de facto active duty.

In my opinion, the Defense Department has effectively run out the string on all of these responses: the Powell Doctrine has been overtaken by the events of this Global War on Terrorism; Military Operations Other Than War can no longer be counted upon to remain in the category of "lesser includeds," unless drive-by regime change is considered enough to constitute "mission accomplished"; the occupation of Iraq will invariably transform transformation, shifting its focus from the "first-half," or warfighting portion of the force, to the "second-half," or peacekeeping and nation-building portions of the force; this global war has clearly strained the ability of our traditional allies to mount sustained operations in support of U.S.-led interventions; and there is already credible discussion of the possibility of reinstituting a draft in order to meet the pressing needs of rotating our ground forces into and out of the current theaters of operations. In short, we have picked all the low-hanging fruit in our increasingly desperate responses to this burgeoning demand curve, to include our relatively understated drawdown of military installations across the United States in the 1990s.

If America is going to continue to pursue a Global War on Terrorism that many experts have logically argued will extend for not just years, but decades, then we must be willing to dramatically reshape both the structure of our forces (rebalancing them extensively in the direction of Military Operations Other Than War) and their positioning around the planet (the subject of this commission). I believe these two change processes are highly interrelated, and here I present what I think are the clarifying strategic concepts embedded within this "new map" for the Pentagon.

The Non-Integrating Gap (shaded) and Functioning Core (un-shaded) of globalization [from The Pentagon's New Map (Putnam, 2004)]

Included in my submitted testimony is a graphic of a global map (see above) whose shaded portions encompass what I have dubbed globalization's Non-Integrating Gap, or those regions that are both least connected to the global economy in a broadband fashion and have accounted for approximately 95 percent of crisis responses by the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War. Within this Non-Integrating Gap, I can locate basically all the wars, all the civil wars, all the ethnic cleansing, all the genocide, all the incidences of mass rape as a tool of terror, all the situations where children are lured or forced into combat units, all the active UN peacekeeping missions, and the centers of gravity for all the transnational terrorist networks we're targeting in this Global War on Terrorism. This Non-Integrating Gap marks both the effective limits of the spread of globalization in terms of deep social, political, economic connectivity and associated content flows, as well as the spread of stable governance that defines the lack of mass violence and armed conflict throughout what I call the Functioning Core of globalization, or those countries and regions not shaded on this map that have enjoyed both collective peace and the rapid integration of their national economies since the end of the Cold War.

It should come as no surprise to this Commission that the U.S. military has closed over 150 major bases across the Core since the end of the Cold War, while adding more than two dozenóand countingóinside the Gap. The U.S. military is the world's largest security consulting force, and like any consultancy, it needs to be as close as possible to where the client lives. Since the end of the Cold War, our clients are found almost exclusively inside the Gap, and hence our Defense Department has slowly but surely adjusted to that defining strategic reality of our age.

Now, the current-and-future administration proposes a further and far more dramatic overhauling of that global basing structure, and if you check the contours of my Non-Integrating Gap, you will see that this plan greatly conforms to the strategic security environment depicted here: in effect, all this administration is proposing is to move as many fixed bases as possible closer-in toward the Gap, while experimenting with a host of smaller, temporary-style installations (the so-called lily pads) sprinkled throughout the deeper, interior reaches of this Gapómost specifically in sub-Saharan Africa.

As a whole, I heartily approve of all of these moves to relocate the U.S. military's fixed presence and operational centers of gravity away from the past successes of the Cold War and nearer to the future challenges of this Global War on Terrorism, because I see this geographic rebalancing of the force to be a prime prerequisite for my declared strategy of "shrinking the Gap" by exporting security to the worst pockets of instability and rogue regime activity found therein. Without such a long-term commitment on our part, I would find it impossible to contemplate how many of these disconnected countries and regions would someday enjoy sufficient stability to count themselves members of a deeply integrating and secure global economy. And in my mind, that is what America's grand strategy for this century should be all about: making globalization truly global and ending the disconnectedness that defines the world's chronic sources of mass violence and armed conflicts, which--in turn-- breed transnational terrorists. If there is to be a finish line in this Global War on Terrorism, our progress toward it will be marked by a succession of basing realignments in the decades ahead.

That last statement constitutes the first of my caveats regarding this administration's current plans for realigning base structure globally: because I do not believe this historic round of proposed realignments will be our last, I caution national security planners to think as flexibly as possible about the nature of the new, seemingly long-term relationships we're currently building as we move bases from western Europe to eastern Europe, and from east Asia to west Asia.

Let me explain why I think such flexibility in planning is in order, andóby doing soódescribe what I believe is truly flawed about the U.S. military's current Unified Command Plan. Specifically, let me describe what I think are the three key boundary conditions that limit Central Command's ability to conduct its share of the operations in this Global War on Terrorism.

First, CENTCOMís "tactical seam" lies to its south, meaning that as the U.S. and its coalition partners are successful in driving transnational terrorism out of the Middle East, that fightófueled as it is by a fundamentalist Islamic response to the "Westoxification" imposed upon traditional societies by globalization's creeping embraceówill head out of the Persian Gulf and into sub-Saharan Africa, where we already see the beginnings of such violent conflicts being repeated. So whatever realignments we pursue in coming years must take into account the possibility of that success in order to take advantage of its unfolding. In my mind that means that when we construct bases both around and inside the region of the Persian Gulf, we should view those facilities less as permanent features of the strategic landscape and more as the first step in what will be a long-term progression of military fronts deeper inside the Gap. What complicates this likely scenario pathway isóof courseóthe reality that CENTCOM's area of responsibility does not encompass sub-Saharan Africa (at least at this time).

Second, CENTCOM's "operational seam" lies to its north, meaning that a key indicator of our success in going on the offensive in this Global War on Terrorism is seen in the return today of the same pattern of operational reach for Middle East terror networks that we once witnessed in the 1970s and early 1980sónamely, they can strike at will across the Middle East and extend themselves with significant effort into the southern reaches of the European continent (expanding now to include the ìnear abroadî of the former Soviet Unionóto Russia's significant distress). As in the case of sub-Saharan Africa, it can be said that CENTCOM simply does not talk nearly enough with these affected countries lying outside its area of responsibility. But, of course, many of these same countries are ones the U.S. is counting upon to supply it the "close-in" bases of the future. Over time, CENTCOM's area of responsibility will become the "near abroad" of virtually all of what I call the Functioning Core of globalization, so this war will be far less distant than we might imagine, even as we continue to be successful in our attempts to keep it far from our own shores. Thus, in our efforts to move bases closer in to the action of the Middle East, we'll need to be careful to avoid the impression that we're luring unsuspecting new partners into the fray, in effect causing them to draw fire.

Finally, CENTCOM's "strategic seam" clearly lies to its east. Already, Asia as a whole takes the lion's share of the energy coming out of the Persian Gulf, dwarfing what this country imports from the region. Our energy requirements will rise by less than a third over the next two decades, whereas Asia's will roughly double over the same time span. In short, we can expect India, China, a united Korea, and Japan to all come militarily to the Middle East in a much bigger way than their miniscule efforts to date. They will come either to join the growing security alliances our current efforts in the region will hopefully someday beget, or they will come to salvage what security relationships they can out of the strategic disaster we have generated by our mistakes. Either way, these Asian powers will be coming, because their economic interests will eventually compel it. My point is this: nothing we should do in this realignment process should be construed by any of these states as constituting a zero-sum strategy on our part to deny them militaryómuch less economicóaccess to the region. If anything, our base realignment process should not only encourage stronger military ties with all of these states, but do so in such a way as to facilitate their eventual entry into the region under the conditions most conducive to our long-range objectives of transforming states there into stable members of a larger security community that will beóby definition of both geography and economic transactionsómore Asian in character than Western.

Let me end with two final caveats: one general and one specific.

In my book I argue for a ìback to the futureî outcome in U.S. force structure planning, one that admits we already have a transformed warfighting force without peer, or what I call the Leviathan force, but also sees the need to invest in and transform what I call the ìeverything elseî force, or a major portion of the U.S. military that is optimized progressively to conduct peacekeeping, low-level crisis response, humanitarian and disaster relief, nation-building and other postconflict stabilization operations. I dub this latter force the System Administrator force. Short-handing these two forces in terms of service components, I would describe the Leviathan force as coming primarily from the Air Force and Navy (our fundamental hedges against the resurrected possibility of great power war) and the SysAdmin force coming primarily from the Army and the Marines. My caveat regarding this natural bifurcation of the U.S. military is this: the bases we position around the Gap, but still inside the Core, should be optimized for the projection of warfighting power. In effect, they should serve the needs of the Leviathan force. Conversely, the bases we generate within the Gap should be optimized for the long-term presence of largely ground troops whose main activity will be centered around peacekeeping and nation-building.

This is an important point in my mind, because itís counterintuitive to most analysts, who would prefer to see our bases circling the Gap serve as permanent forward deployments of massed combat force, whereas any bases weíd generate inside the Gap would remain largely empty store fronts, or Spartan-style facilities designed merely to enable the throughput of overwhelming force that would be employed only sporadically and always leave the scene as quickly as possible. In effect, I am arguing for the complete opposite: I think our forward bases surrounding the Gap should be the empty shells designed for the rapid throughput of warfighting assets, whereas the bases we build inside the Gap should give off the impression that weíre in it for the long haul. In my vernacular, the Leviathan force comes and goes as required, but the SysAdmin force represents those ìboysî who never ìcome home.î If we are serious in committing ourselves to the long-term defeat of transnational terrorism, these are the strategic signals we should send in our global basing realignment process.

Finally, a more specific caveat: any efforts to move our forces closer-in toward the Gap will necessarily remain geographically uneven so long as two great insecurities grip East Asiaónamely, the continued existence of the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea and the potential for conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan's potential moves toward "independence" from the mainland. There is a huge Cold War victory to be advantaged in Europe, basically represented by the existence of NATO. No similar peace dividend exists in Asia, meaning that the Achilles' heel of this realignment plan isóin my opinionóthat it leaves far too much strategic decision-making power in the hands of actors in both Pyongyang and Taipei, neither of which should be trusted to act rationally regarding their own interestsómuch less ours.

I'll end my comments on that frightening note, leaving any others for our subsequent question-and-answer period.

Okay, so the Danes aren't the Dutch!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 November 2004

So stop the emails!

You know, people should be a little more tolerant. I think it was Nigel Powers (father of international man of mystery Austin Powers), who said once: "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures. . . and the Dutch."

So maybe I just let it slip once! (or three times).

Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy . . .

Review here! Getcher Barnett Review here!

Hey Folks. . . Critt here. . . we're making progress on the Review (The Barnett Review.)

T.M. Lutas. . . no, that's not right. . . I mean Lexington Green. . . no, that's not it either. Wait a minute! Maybe it's the Danes (I'm pretty sure it's not the Dutch.) D'oh!

Ok, I got it now. The first set of subscribers -- everyone who stuck up their hand by this morning -- have begun self-organizing as an informal Advisory/Editorial Board. They'll help decide the content, format and delivery, and how best to offset costs for the first edition.

Next week, we'll announce a contest to name the Review*. The rules -- yeah, we

gotta have a rule set for this gig -- will be simple and easy to follow. We'll post the details Sunday night, November 14th.

The publication date for the Review's first edition is November 24, 2004.

Be there, Aloha! (or something to that effect.)

Subscribe, suggest, or comment by sending an email to review@thomaspmbarnett.com

* know anything that rhymes with blogozine?

Testifying in front of Congress' Overseas Basing Commission

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 November 2004

Here's the press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Wade Nelson, 708-204-0711

OVERSEAS BASING COMMISSION HEARING SET FOR NOVEMBER 9



Commissionís third public session will receive testimony from military leaders and Defense policy experts

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 2, 2004 -- The Commission on the Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure of the United States (Overseas Basing Commission) will hear testimony from former military leaders, diplomats and defense policy experts at a hearing to be held beginning at 9:00 a.m , Tuesday, November 9, 2004, in room 138, Dirksen Senate Office Building, 1st and C Streets, N.E., Washington, D.C.

This will be the third meeting held by the Commission, which was established by Public Law 108-132 to provide Congress and the President with a thorough study and review of matters relating to U.S. military facility structure overseas. The law requires the Commissionís report to include a proposal for an overseas basing strategy to meet current and future Department of Defense (DoD) missions.

The Commissionís task is to assess independently whether the current overseas basing structure is adequate to execute current missions, and to assess the feasibility of closures, realignments, or establishment of new installations overseas to meet emerging defense requirements. The Commissionís report will serve as another data point to assist the Congressional Committees in performing their oversight responsibilities for the DoDís basing strategy, future military construction appropriations, and the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission determinations.

At the November 9th hearing, the Commission will receive testimony from three panels of experts:

Panel One: Begins at 9 a.m.

Dr. John J. Hamre, Former Deputy Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller);

Ambassador Robert E. Hunter, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and U.S. Representative to Western European Union.

Panel Two: Begins at 10:30 a.m.

General Charles A. Horner, former Combatant Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Space Command, as well as the Commander of 9h Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Force during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm;

General Montgomery C. Meigs, former Commanding General, U.S. Army, Europe and 7th Army, and Commander of Multinational Stabilization Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina;

General Charles T.ìTonyî Robertson, Jr. former Combatant Commander for U.S. Transportation Command and Air Mobility Command;

General John H. Tilelli, Jr. former Combatant Commander of the United Nations Command, Republic of Korea/United States Combined Forces Korea and President of USO Worldwide Operations, as well as Vice Chief of Staff the Army and Deputy Chief of Army Operations.

Panel Three: Begins at 1:30 p.m.

Prof. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Strategic Researcher, U.S. Naval War College;

Marcus Corbin, Senior Analyst at the Center for Defense Information;

Michael Noonan, research fellow (defense policy) and the National Security program director for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

The OSBC began its operations in May, 2004. Public Law 108-324, the Fiscal Year 2005 Military Construction Appropriations Act, extended the Commissionís reporting period until August 15, 2005.

HTML Version of interview with Raeson

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 8 November 2004

Gonna be busy today writing up testimony to Congress' Overseas Basing Commission, where I am testifying tomorrow on an afternoon panel with two other experts.

Here is the HTML version of the interview with Raeson:

A Hammer Looking for Nails: The Gap, The Core and The Final Frontier

ìThe tumult created by globalizationís creeping in on the Middle East was going to create anger and violence and terrorism. When 9/11 comes along, and the connections are clear to us--at least for an instant--the United States (frankly, nobody else has the firepower to do it) decides it has got to change the Middle East in a big, big way, looks around and says: ìwho can I start with?î It decides on Iraq, and I say ìthatís as good as anybody.î So are we going to kick his ass militarily in the war? Yes, absolutely: supreme confidence there. Are we going to screw up the occupation? Absolutely! Why would you advocate going even if that is going to happen? Because this military is not going to change unless it experiences failure on that far side.î

An interview with Thomas Barnett by Henrik ÿ. Breitenbauch, co-editor of R∆SON

Thomas P.M. Barnett is an unusual and influential strategist in the American defense environment. A special element in Barnettís work is a widening of what ëstrategyí consists of--its conceptual space is extended from purely military perspectives to include not least economic, social and political development.

He is Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor at the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the American Navyís university, the U.S. Naval War College. From November 2001 to June 2003 he held the temporary assignment of Assistant for Strategic Futures in the centrally important office, Office of Force Transformation under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, which is dedicated to the strategic transformation of the American military in response to the changed security agenda after 9/11. Barnett has given a wide-range of important briefings in the US defense community; he is the author of a number of articles about the strategic concepts he has been developing since the late 1990ís; and recently he published the book The Pentagonís New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. Articles and other material is available from his website: www.thomaspmbarnett.com.

The starting point for Barnettís thinking is that the combination of globalizationís economic integration and the state of nuclear deterrence means that war between advanced states, who participate actively in the functional integration, will soon be practically irrelevant. Therefore, we ought therefore to focus on the non-integrating parts of the world, both because this is where the real threats stem from, but also because addressing those threats properly means helping the regions to catch up. Based on an analysis of US interventions since the end of the Cold War, Barnett constructed the Pentagonís ìnew map,î where we can distinguish the integrating Core from the Non-Integrating Gap. His basic policy recommendation is simple: îshrink the Gap.î

In this interview Barnett talks among other things about how it would be possible to construct a more efficient solution model for deciding how and when the Core should use force with regard to the catastrophes of the Gap.

(1) Connectivity, not democracy

(2) The terrorists are those who do know better

(3) You do not have to become a bad Moslem to live a good life

(4) A hammer looking for nails

(5) Iraq: The Yugoslavia of the Middle East

(6) The final frontier

1. Connectivity, not democracy

HOB: Let us start with the Gap-Core distinction: how clear is it that either the global situation or Americaís challenges can be adequately summarized in the Gap-Core logic? There seems still to be some issues with the new Core-members like India, Russia China--might ìold securityî concerns not return at some point?

BARNETT: The point in making the distinction between the Core and the Gap is not that I am saying that there is not any possibility of security issues re-arising within the Core. But simply that with the connectivity of an expanding, ever deepening, enmeshing global economy; with that kind of interdependence naturally arising among the old Core--between the United States, the Europeans, Japan, Canada and Australia--there is not really any danger of anything happening other than name-calling. Between us and what I call the New Core, there is and will be for quite some time, the possibility for more than name-calling: that integration process requires new rules to emerge.

You cannot bring Russia sort of into NATO without changing NATO, and not as a result make that a different Rule Set. Look at China buying up our US Treasury Bonds and becoming the biggest source of the US trade deficit; or India supplying all the IT-workers and doctors to the United States plus remitting such sums of money back to India in terms of non-residential Indians who work and live in the United States. That kind of integration processes cannot help but create new Rule Sets. They always tend to come in the economic realm first.

Typically, political understanding lags greatly behind it: it can be summed up with phrases like ìnationalism,î ìprotectionismî or that natural tendency--when you start bumping up against one another and you have not done that in the past--to assume bad things about each other. The unfamiliarity of this new interaction means that there are dangerous possibilities. So there are a lot of things that we are going to learn and adjust to as, for example, India becomes a much bigger part of not just the U.S.'s but the whole worldís economy. To understand what it is to have Russia actively involved in world affairs, when for several decades it was always on the other side of the fence. To have China develop this tremendous integration with the outside world. All that forces us into all sorts of questions and issues that have been dwelling and lingering for decades that are not easy for us to answer. There are a lot of adjustments when you open up to the outside world: America thinks we have adjustments as the global economy expands. We talk about sending jobs overseas and think it is a tough adjustment for the US workers who may have a assumed that a good economy would have allowed them to stay in the same jobs for their entire life, never have to go back to school, never switch careers: that whole ideal that we cling to comes from the 1950s, and it's very unrealistic. And we think that is a big adjustment in terms of globalization.

But having just spent three weeks in China, I can tell you: that country is undergoing so much more adjustment, so much more change, so much more synchronization of its internal Rule Sets with those of the worldís (which is what the global market economy demands from it) that it seems like such a jumping-the-gun phenomenon for us to always be looking for slippage, always be putting the worst sort of perspective on the motivations behind anything that Russia, India or China do as they deal with some significant changes. They have in recent years changed from economic policies that were very state-heavy for many decades and moved towards the embrace of markets in a very profound way. You would think we would be happier but it is almost like we look for every opportunity to say: ìyou are not going fast enough and far enough, and--aha!--that means you, secretly, deep down, inside, must be a threat!î

We have wished for this to happen for so many years and when it does happen we cannot believe it: we have such great suspicion towards these three big countries. I think about them a lot because they hold such a big chunk of the worldís population and if you can remove that kind fear factor within the Core a lot of things will work out pretty dramatically.

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On Russia, India and China: We have wished for this to happen for so many years and when it does happen we cannot believe it: we have such great suspicion towards these three big countries.

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But India and China do not feel like they have been invited into the corridors of power. They are part of G20, but they are not part of G8. They kind of wonder how the G8 gets to figure out what happens in Iraq. The G8 had this meeting in Sea Island [G8 Summit, June 8-10, 2004] and there decided what they were going to do about the future of the Middle East--and there was no China there.

HOB: So there is a homology between the global situation with the three big countries and the post-cold war challenge with the eastern European countries. In Europe, the Partnership for Peace was a way of letting the East in: an example of how we have to find ways to be receptive?

BARNETT: Right, the PfP is sort of a microcosm of what I am talking about with Russia, China and India--because they are such vast countries, and the cultural distance is stronger, so the distrust is stronger. We keep complaining about our change: but we have so little understanding of the kind of change that it requires for them to make this great journey. We do not signal ways that ìwe can make you feel comfortable about your security situation, for you to feel confident enough to deal with these wrenching, internal social changes.î

One of the reasons why I think the Core-Gap distinction is important--and which always stuns these Cold War types when they see it--is that my Core is basically what we used to call the First and the Second World together. And now it is finally time to deal with the Third World in some way other than hospice care through official development aid and selling them arms so that they can kill each other.

HOB: This is an extremely interesting thing about your analysis: the European left has been saying for 30-40 years that the North-South relation is the more important, and here comes someone from the Pentagon policy making environment saying something akin to it?

BARNETT: Right, I agree with that to a certain extent, even though I studiously avoid the ìNorth-Southî concept since I have my ABCís in South America [Argentina, Brazil, Chile], like Australia and South Africa are in the South. I try to focus on: whoís connecting up? I studiously avoid ìdemocracyî as some sort of bellwether. Instead I look at whether connectivity is growing between any specific society and the outside world, and whether its government in fact encouraging that? So I focus less on where they are in their historical development, and more on whether they are going in the right direction. I want to capture the integrating countries in the first, best behavior I can find, rather than having a huge standard: ìa freely elected president for five times; and clean up everything!î--like the EU has been telling Turkey for how many years now? ìBe perfect before we take you!î

2. The terrorists are those who do know better

HOB: It seems like you do not really distinguish between a material or economic globalization on the one hand and a cultural or ideational on the other? Is that distinction meaningless?

BARNETT: I really think it is. Consider the sheer physical connectivity of networks--you build networks so that you can do things, and when you do things economically the ideas and the content naturally flow. That gives such a tight synergy, and as long as that is happening I feel good about it. My argument on the political side--which is always slow--is that you have to be patient, and you have to let the local political scene evolve at a pace that it can manage. I argue for a lot of patience with Russia and China, because I watch them just leap-frog through decades a year at a time, and we are watching them race through our past history with such a sense of impatience of them getting to the ìright now.î

We do not understand that the real world we now enjoy is not something they can achieve overnight: so let us get out of our way to assure them that they will not be targeted unnecessarily in the security realm; that they will not be forced to maintain large security hedges when they are scrambling for resources, when they are dealing with aging population--as even China is--and when they have huge infrastructure and resource requirements. If they are going to move in the direction that we hope they move--which will benefit us tremendously in economic terms ñ then all we need to do is step beyond old fears and take advantage of the successes of the cold war. That ideology was defeated. We just seem unwilling to move along that line and to claim the successes. But until you do move along and see the world in terms of who is integrating and who is not ñ then you are not going to get to the point where you are able to amass the resources to deal with this Gap, which is where all the violence is.

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If you do not want it to be a West versus Islam thing, then do not alienate the biggest players in the East.

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If you do not want it to be a West versus Islam thing, then do not alienate the biggest players in the East. Either they live closer to the problem, like Russia; or they see themselves as natural regional powers, like India; or they are going to have their energy requirements from the Persian Gulf doubling over the next 20 years like China. Compared to their interdependencies with that region, ours and even the Europeansí are small. If you look strategically downstream they are the logical partners for us to be romancing. And how do you romance them? You tell them a story with a happy ending, and you say: ìif you do these things, even if a lot of them will be hard, then this is where we can all go 20 years from now. It will be such a better world; you will have such a better country; and you will have done so many good things for your countryÖî

HOB: This positive vision, and optimism, is interesting coming from a strategist--because it clashes with both the classical war games-stuff of the military academies, and also with the widespread critiques of globalization from both left and right on both sides of the Atlantic. Pessimism seems to be more on the agenda anywhere else--how do you ìdareî to just come along with a positive strategic vision?

BARNETT: Well, I am just looking at history. We have seen tremendous things happening when countries come together economically in what I call the Old Core--Europe, Japan, the United States. By 1980 that was one tenth of the worldís population controlling two-thirds of the wealth and productive power: a lot that can be done by that kind of cooperation. We have waited almost 50 years for the old socialist block to give up its pipedream and join usÖ I see our side gaining adherence in big, big chunks. The size of the problem set called mass violence around the world has been shrinking fairly dramatically. When I got into the business 15 years ago we were still concerned about nuclear war across the planet: people are not really concerned about that anymore, and they should not be--other than the issue of the rogue who is not part of the club. If Iran, for example, was part of the club, then their having the nukes would never be an issue--about as big an issue as Denmark having nukes. Nobody would care ñ they would say: ìitís the Danes, whatís the big deal?î Or the Canadians. If Canada wanted nukes tomorrow who would really care? They are read into the system and everybody trusts them, and there is a sense of familiarity and a common cause.

If the US was forced to switch territory with the Canadians, most Americans would just move to Canada: it is not the soil here that is sacred, itís the concept. My book is constantly being accused of not understanding the irrational mind--but my response is: the irrational mind is the unconnected one. The irrational mind is the one that goes berserk because they do not have options for their talents and their ambitions.

That is the lawyer with three kids who straps a belt on with dynamite in the West Bank because that looks like the best option for him after going to law school: that is the best future he can come up with. But if you can give him a job a law firm somewhere I guarantee you, he does not get on that bus. The terrorists are not the ones who are so poor they do not know better: it is the ones who do know better, that have an education they are never going to use, and dreams they are never going to fulfill. Nothing kills people more than the sense of a dead-end life.

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That is the lawyer with three kids who straps a belt on with dynamite in the West Bank because that looks like the best option for him after going to law school: that is the best future he can come up with. But if you can give him a job a law firm somewhere I guarantee you, he does not get on that bus.

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I see such a huge opportunity with what has happened over the last 25 years with roughly half the worldís population on their way to be joining the world economy. Has it been a perfect ride for them? Absolutely not: look at Brazil or Argentina. This process is more an art than science. To join is to risk a lot: the process of connecting is such a brave act that we have to go out of our way to recognize, promote and protect it--and to do as much as possible to remove security impediments to it, and to send clear signals of transparency and security to these countries. The trajectory that Russia has been on for the last 15 years; China for the last 25; and India just for the last 10 is just stunning. Because their societies are exposed to these strong, external influences this is the perfect time to shower them with security.

We do it on one level when the US tries to deal with the big security issues in the system in a way that nobody else can because we have the worldís biggest military. But how we explain that action and how we solicit their approval and their cooperation is enormously important, convincing them that this is not a zero-sum outcome. That: ìwe are not going to the Middle East to grab your oil, China!î That we are going to secure the flow of that energy for another 20-25 years until we move on to hydrogen; and that in doing so there are certain things we need from, for example, China. in terms of economic and diplomatic support.

But in exchange for that we are hopefully creating an international security environment that allows China not to revert resources toward things like a blue water navy to make sure that their energy comes from the Middle East safely; or it does not force them to patron relationships with rogue regimes there out of necessity because they are scared to death they will not have access to energy over time.

3. You do not have to become a bad Moslem to live a good life

HOB: This is where you advocate a special role for the US where it supplies public goods on a global level?

BARNETT: I do not advocate a ìone size fits all," as we have been doing for 15 years, saying as long as we have a big force that prevents war between the big powers then the system will work itself out, globalization will spread, connectivity will grow--that is sort of the benign Thomas Friedman vision. . .

HOB: Regarding the special role the United States must play due to the military capabilities, how would you address the ensuing division of labor? How far should the United States be able to pursue its role in terms of making decisions on behalf of the West, the ìCore of the Core," including e.g. NATO?

BARNETT: The Clinton Administration put a model on the table where we go in and deal with the real nasty security stuff--and as soon as possible turn it over to the UN and everybody else, and they would do the integration process. Our niche was to be light on aid and heavy on military spending; the converse would be true for the Europeans, and the Japanese would just send money.

The problem was that the UN was not the vessel for that: it is such a Congress-like entity, a legislative branch, without a real executive function. The best you have is a group that can cite bad activity around the world, but does not have any means to deal with it. The hope is, if the UN condemns somebody that they change their ways and somehow get beyond the violence and then we can send the peacekeepers in.

But there is a huge gap between those two situations, and that gap is filled by the US, which says ìWell, if youíre really serious about this we will go in, but if we do it has to be cast in such a way that we can have freedom of action, because it is our lives that are at stake. Then hopefully you will rally around once the bad guy has been taken care of.î We have been trying to negotiate those things on the fly each time the issue comes up, and it is tortuous. It took years to get anything done in Yugoslavia. That would have continued ad infinitum. Given that the global economy would have run smooth enough in its expansion then the rest would just have been scary neighborhoods far away, and we would all have talked about it, but nobody would have done anything about it. The US enabled that ìweíll do a little bit, but no moreî practice across the West in the 1990s by just responding enough to crises throughout the Gap.

HOB: After Somalia, that is?

BARNETT: Well, Somalia looked like a big turning point but it really was not: we kept doing these things. But while we keep everything from boiling over in the Gap we never fix anything. There is no system for dealing with fixing these countries. The only way we could avoid getting in to some imperial nonsense was to make this rule: ìAs soon as we cannot find anyone to kill in a situation, weíre gone!î That is the Powell doctrine! ìAs soon as you cannot find anymore bad guys to kill--then leaveî. The problem is that if you do not leave anything in your wake, then the bad guys will reappear and we have to go back in five years. There are some in the Pentagon who argue openly for that: ìLetís go in and kill them every once in a while: they will never change anyway.î And I keep saying: ìWell, thatís not much of a solution, sir.î

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That is the Powell doctrine! ìAs soon as you cannot find anymore bad guys to kill ñ then leaveî.

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That whole debate did not move along until 9/11--which was an example of what happens if you nurse it along without curing it. Eventually, and that is my larger argument, your good thing will encroach upon their bad thing. But their bad thing is traditional and goes back centuries. And your stuff comes in through cable or the internet, and you are impinging whether you realize it or not. When the violence against and rejection of the West really starts to pick up is when globalization starts to impinge on the Middle East--and why it does so in ways it does not in Africa is of course because of the energy.

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Changing US foreign policies will not change anything about the Middle East. If you stop supporting Israel: does that mean there will not be repressive regimes there that suck at globalization and do not provide for their publics? No, that is not going to change that at all.

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Globalization is happening, and the Middle East will be relevant for energy reasons for at least another 25 years. But changing US foreign policies will not change anything about the Middle East. If you stop supporting Israel: does that mean there will not be repressive regimes there that suck at globalization and do not provide for their publics? No, that is not going to change that at all. The Europeans do this even more than us: constantly blaming ourselves saying ìNo, itís really my fault, itís what I did in the past. If only I was more sensitive in a multicultural sort of way; if only I could understand why they treat their women in ways I would never stand in my country, as minors their entire lives, thenÖ.î That argument just drives me nuts!

There are all sorts of people from that region living in Europe and the United States and they like living there: they do not seem to have given up their souls to do that. You do not have to become a bad Moslem to live a good life. I reject this social Darwinist argument which to me is the real fallacy of Samuel Huntington. Thomas Friedman said some get it--globalization--and some do not; Huntington said some people are never going to get it because of who they are. I add a third pole to that argument: anybody can get it. Where the ìgetting itî part has not extended itself to is where all the violence is. Where they have ìgotten itî there is still some concerns about mass violence--most of them overblown I would argue--but the real violence is where people have not had the chance to ìget itî yet, the chance to join the world.

There is no mystery why these things do not happen easily. There are huge wrenching changes coming with it--in areas like marital relations; sex relations; family; the good life; good education; loyalty to your family, your tribe and your village; and concepts of mobility that are very threatening to traditional societies (especially ones that are built around the notions that you stick together, that women are for having babies, that you make food, and do not try radical changes because that will get you a bad harvest and that will get you dead!) They are very traditional and hard scrambling existences: they are very low on Maslowís hierarchy of needs, still working on shelter and food in many instances. Yet we expect them to embrace the same cosmopolitan lifestyles we have achieved, where people, except for the marginalized in our society, do not worry about food anymore.

4. A hammer looking for nails

HOB: You are arguing for the convergence of our policies of security and development with regard to the Gap. To which extent will we see increased coordination or convergence of these kinds of policies in the West?

BARNETT: This is where the theme of connectivity is nice--it gets you off the norms of democracy, and just says: ìYou got to have the infrastructure and networks, and people have to have a certain level of security.î And we start to realize that in order to deal with these security issues we also have to deal with the infrastructure and networking issues. The notion that you send aid to some places and war fighters to others breaks down: to really defeat a Saddam is to integrate Iraq, and to do that is to do development politics. What holds up our ability to get security there is peopleís inability to get electricity, water and move sewage. All of a sudden the two become incredibly merged.

We have a disparity here of capabilities: [On the one side] a US with a ìLeviathan forceî as I call it, able to destroy real dangerous elements inside the Gap. But it is almost a hammer looking for nails, because unless you can do the integration on the far side of the conflict, wielding that hammer is almost useless, or worse than useless. It scares people so much, that you almost risk the unity of the Core to employ it. I mean: did everyone in the Core want to see Saddam gone? Sure, he was a bad guy, and it was better for that oil to flow. And the hope is that Iraq will develop on that basis--even though the record of countries developing on the basis of oil is pretty bad.

So everyone had the same desire, but the fear was that if the Unites States was going to do it, how were they going to handle the aftermath? And there we sent all the wrong signals. We said in effect: ìIf youíre not tough enough to show up for the war, donít show up for the peace: donít expect to be cut in on anything!î That was a huge, colossal blunder on our part, a very macho view of security as if the only thing that matters is the ìblowing upî part. We have learned since the occupation in May 2003 that our people get killed just as quickly in the peace keeping as in the war part. Actually, more quickly because we do it so badly.

What would it take to get Europe and other Core countries comfortable with this process? You have to define it from A to Z--and you have the pieces for such a system now, from start to finish. How do you deal with a politically bankrupt state, a regime that everybody wants gone? We do have a version for economically bankrupt states: it is called the IMF. It is a very controversial version, and thereís a lot of suspicion and anger surrounding the IMF: but a least we have a system for dealing with economically bankrupt states. As soon as Argentina or Brazil starts to default on their debt, we have a system where you go in at A and come out at Z, and you are successfully processed without any prejudice at the end. We are constantly fine-tuning that IMF Rule Set. But look at how it is done. Who runs the IMF? The biggest countries in the world--and why? Because they are the richest countries and you vote by how much money you put in, which is very fair: you put up the money, you get the say.

We do not have that system for politically bankrupt states. When they are really politically bankrupt like Mugabe or Kim Jong-Il we just say: ìThere is nothing for processing them; shouldnít the UN do something about it?î The UN then debates it, and maybe they will get to the fact--usually well after the fact that many people were killed, and it becomes so obvious that the situation is a bad, bad thing that we finally have the conscience to say something about it, like Sudan today. And what can the UN do? They can indict you. It is actually a grand jury, even the UN Security Council: they cannot actually issue any warrants for your arrest. They can say: ìyou should stop, and if you do not stop, we will not let you sell sugar for the next ten years,î and slap some really meaningless economic sanction on you--which historically has almost never done anything of value, unless it was universal like with South Africa under Apartheid.

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People say: when are we going to make the UN stretch across that whole process? I know it is written in the Charter, but good luck with that concept: it is never going to happen.

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That is what is at the beginning of this process. People say: when are we going to make the UN stretch across that whole process? I know it is written in the Charter, but good luck with that concept: it is never going to happen. Downstream from that grand jury you have a US Leviathan military force, which operates with a few close allies--NATO, Australia, etc--and that force is able to make the takedown. But how do you connect that ability with the decision making process? This where the G20 comes in: the G20 is the star chamber of everyone who matters in the global economy. When you take the 20 biggest economies, you really get the whole package, about 90% of the wealth. The G20 is where you will find all the money and the authority, where you can locate the entirety of the Core. If just that body could evolve over time, as you see it struggling with ever since 9/11, where security issues have been dominating the G8 meetings. The Sea Island meeting was an Iraq meeting! They barely talked about the global economy. They are already aspiring to that role without saying it. If you made that G20 a package that could have an executive function, where it could say: ìthe UN has said these guys are bad, we all agree that they are: could we come to some understanding that the Leviathan should be used?î

Then you could have the Leviathan be put into service with the knowledge that a System Administration force on the far side--where the US has a much smaller role, and the allies around the world a much larger--will come in once the take-down (or ìthe correctionî or ìthe security elementî) has been dealt with. If you employ the Leviathan force inside the Gap in this manner, then there would be an upfront agreement that the SysAdmin force will come in the Leviathan forceís wake. That force, a very manpower intensive function, takes the occupation through its phases effectively.

Then you have another gap being filled on the far side of that: an international organization like the IMF but one that specializes in exactly what we are talking about--that weird mix of security and development. This is what Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post calls the IRF--the International Reconstruction Fund--like a perpetual Marshall Plan for politically bankrupt states designated for rehab. Who would fund that IRF? The same G20 that would make the decision upstream in the process. They would vote according to how much money they would put into it. And then you have the International Criminal Court on the far end. It is that kind of A to Z function: then you would have a real system.

If you can get that system up and running, I guarantee you that most of the dictators would leave on their own volition because as soon as they went on the list they would know that their time was up. These guys are mostly about their money and their women--given the opportunity most of them would do a Baby Doc Duvalier and get the hell out of Dodge before the sheriff comes. When you lay it all out like that it all sounds kind of dreamy: ìOh, would it be nice if it all worked out!?î but it is not that hard to work out, most of the pieces are already there.

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If you can get that system up and running, I guarantee you that most of the dictators would leave on their own volition because as soon as they went on the list they would know that their time was up.

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The UN Security Council does its thing even if it takes its time. We have a got a G20 that is moving in this direction or at least the G8 part is, as they are already having these kinds of discussions: that meeting on Sea Island was basically a meeting to bless the US decision on Iraq and get people to pony up money for the reconstruction. We are basically fumbling towards this system. We have the Leviathan force, the US military that can take down anybody that matters inside the Gap. I would argue that we do have the pieces for the SysAdmin force, but the key piece that we do not have is an understanding of the necessity of putting together the SysAdmin force--and this will not happen until the United States says it will invest in this force.

I talk to foreign militaries all the time: when the Americans put the hub down, then the rest of them are more than happy to supply the spokes. The SysAdmin force is a military that they can interact with; it is a technology they are comfortable with; it is a mission they are ideologically comfortable with: it mixes heavily with development issues, deals with things like AIDS, pandemics and the environment--all these holistic issues that people want to have dealt with. It is a wonderful package, but nobody is going to move in the direction of that kind of permanent international stabilization force unless the US shows a commitment to it. But once the US does that, I would argue that the resources that the US would have to put into would not be that large. The Europeans and the Japanese--and ultimately I think you could bring the Russians, the Chinese and the Indians into this--they are more than happy to participate in this kind of thing. This simple act of cooperation on that security effort would, I would argue, create much deeper security ties across the Core as whole. Then we would have the resources between the G20ís money and militaryÖ

5. Iraq: The Yugoslavia of the Middle East

HOB: But do you see this happening within the Pentagon? Is there a move towards this kind of stabilization force?

BARNETT: There is. The Pentagon will change according to failure.

HOB: Like most organizations?

BARNETT: Yes, but it is particularly true for the militaries. The worst thing that can happen to a military is that they win a war because then they sit on their mountain top and expect that it is going to last for ever--until somebody bonks them over the head. The best thing that can happen is that they lose a war, because then they really learn something. This is why--not cynically--I supported the Iraq War. Something was going to pull us into the Middle East, it was going to happen. There is not much that goes on between the Middle East and the world other than oil, a few nuts and terrorists: there is not a lot of economical interaction. But there is some real penetration content-wise, which can be destabilizing like mass media flows: young girls can watch TV-shows about life in Western Europe and the United States and they realize that women live in different ways in those parts of the world--and think: ìIím never gonna do that.î That creates much diminished expectations, anger, angst and unhappiness: Nothing drives people more nuts than that. Whereas before, they were happier because they so to speak did not know any better: being barefoot and pregnant all their lives. Because that was all they knew. And that was all women knew in Europe 200 years ago, and in the United States 150 years ago. So these are not alien concepts to us: they are just things we have forgotten.

I knew that the tumult created by globalizationís creeping on the Middle East was going to create anger and violence and terrorism. When 9/11 comes along, and the connections are clear to us--at least for an instant--the United States (frankly, nobody else has the firepower to do it) gets in its mind that is has got to go fix something, in the Middle East. It decides it has got to change the Middle East in a big, big way, looks around and says: ìwho can I start with?î It decides on Iraq, and I say ìthatís as good as anybody.î Here we have a guy that nobody likes; a place that has been sanctioned for years; that we have been bombing for 12 years; and it is smack-dab in the middle--sort of a Yugoslavia of the Middle East. If I can go in there and create some change and stir things up, thatís as good a place as any, especially since I get two birds with one throw because he was a bad guy and should go anyway.

So are we going to kick his ass militarily in the war? Yes, absolutely: supreme confidence there. Are we going to screw up the occupation? Absolutely! Why would you advocate going even if that is going to happen? Because this military is not going to change unless it experiences failure on that far side. To see and experience that failure is a compelling reason to change. Because if we do not get better at that SysAdmin work then we will never have any successes in the Global War on Terrorism.

To me it is not illogical to pack Iraq, 9/11 and everything together, because I am trying to approach the problem at the system-level. Killing Osama is not the answer: it would be like curing one computer virus and believing that you have then solved your network security problems for the next 50 years. Either you fix the system as a whole--or you accept that you will have to shoot at anything that moves in certain parts of the world for the next 50 years, and I find that morally bankrupt. That would be condemning a big chunk of humanity to a horrible existence. But is it harder to go in and make that change happening? Absolutely. You are going to lose lives and kill a bunch of people in the process ñ but sitting back and hoping that the Middle East is going to get better in 30 years without making some sort of effort is Ö that will be like the last 30 years, just uglier.

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Globalization is coming to the Middle East, and we have to integrate it. If we do not go there security-wise, the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians would be coming, and eventually the Japanese too.

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To me, all these things are racing towards the inevitable. Globalization is coming to the Middle East, and we have to integrate it. That energy has to come out of there, because developing Asia needs it, and we need developing Asia. If we do not go there security-wise, the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians would be coming, and eventually the Japanese too. We can get there first, and try to make it a good thing, make it cooperative and a benefit to the region as a whole. Or we can wait until it gets really bad, and poor China gets so desperate that it starts doing something crazy or scary or intimidating. And we would go: ìHey, you shouldnít be doing that,î and then we would have ourselves a nice cold war brewing in the Core again. We could then tell the Middle East: ìHere are some arms, pick a sideî--back to the joy we knew for 50 years because it is so damned comfortable. Or we can deal with this problem, which will not go away and only get worse without our attention.

As I say somewhat controversially in the book, 9/11 was sort of a gift from history: it is this trigger that allows a lot of possible, difficult processes to begin. We need some real serious discussion over this: where is globalization going; where is China going; where are the Russians going; the Europeans? Certain things are going to happen over the next 35 years--you Europeans are aging demographically, you will need more energy. When you make that kind of empirically-based argument you can have better discussions over where this situation is going, and then maybe you will avoid phrases like ìexporting democracyî, or the ìglobal war on terrorismî--and you can try to come up with something a little more benign, like ìShrink the Gapî; ìconnectivityî; ìGlobalization does not come with a ruler, it comes with rulesî; and the mixing of security and development economics. These strategies require a lot of key players to put aside non-zero-sum attitudes that we have had for along time, and which we assumed would hold sway in a Balance of Power world that would naturally re-emerge after the Cold War.

But it has not: what has emerged is a much skewed form of power. The Europeans are the leaders in rule making; the Americans are the leaders in profound new technology and the ability to wage war; the Chinese have this amazing new power in making [manufacturing] everything; the Indians have this bizarrely tilted power in Information Technology; and the Japanese are sort of this new center of cool and design and fashion. There is a tremendous package of talent and resources, which is coming together on its own--and if there was no Gap we would not care about it, just go along with economic integration, and find something else to bitch about, like gay marriages or something.

But because the Gap is there, not only do we have to recognize this tremendous interdependence that we are developing in the global economy, but we also have to put it to some use. Doing that requires us to go back into the past that most of us would prefer to forget, especially the Europeans. The Americans come off as cowboys--I certainly do in some peopleís eyes--for saying: ìHey, look at the violence there: it can perturb your system in a very negative way.î With just two planes two buildings are going down, excluding the Pentagon: that can change a lot of rules for you overnight. Either you can deal with that power and that anger, or not. But do not pretend it is not there. If you are willing to do it, you have to understand that you will be traveling back in history to some scary places, to some scary kinds of violence with people willing to scalp their victims and cut off their heads.

_______________________

With just two planes two buildings are going down: that can change a lot of rules for you overnight. Either you can deal with that power and that anger, or not. But do not pretend it is not there.

_______________________

Economically we are already there. Politically nowhere near. Militarily there is the US--and then everybody else standing around going:

- ìWhat are you gonna do about it?î

- ìWell, I think I am going over to kill themî, and that scares the hell out of everybody:

- ìWell, we want you to go kill them but please donít do it in a scary way!î

And we start calling each other names over who is going to pay for it. Meanwhile, the violence and the pain and the suffering go on in the Middle East--and Africa just burns. And nobody does anything about that.

I look at the package of capabilities inside the Core: we have got it all, everything we need to do this. If you can just get past your pinhead attitudes and your great power politics--elevate yourself to a strategic understanding, for just a minute: what has to be done over the next 20-30 years? This we can predict with great certainty I would argue, in terms of demographics, energy and the entire economic transformation. These are not great mysteries, even though people want to pretend that they are. The logic is of dealing with this situation in a comprehensive A to Z fashion, one that admits that you cannot foreign aid these things out of existence. Nor are you going to bomb them out of existence. You cannot kill them all, and you cannot "social work" them to death either. It has to be some very complex combination, where you will kill bad guys, and where you will nurse other people back to health. It is within the Coreís capabilities.

The political imagination, the dialogue and the language can be changed--that is why I wrote the book: to get that positive vision out there. It is sad that in democracies we have to scare ourselves so, to do something security-wise. If you make a logical argument about the exertion of security, then people will say: ìWho will die for your war? You must be doing this for empire; you must be doing this so multinational corporations can go around the world and exploit labor!î

_______________________

Talk to somebody who has no multinational corporations exploiting their cheap labor: it sucks, itís called Central Africa!

_______________________

And I say: ìYour point? Yes, I am: it is called development! Talk to somebody who has no multinational corporations exploiting their cheap labor: it sucks, itís called Central Africa!î But show me a place where they do have them do it, and yes the first generationís life looks like England in the 1890s: they work in factories and the conditions are rotten. But their kids go to school and become something better, and then their kids' kids become something even better. That is how we did it. How do we expect everyone else to magically jump ahead? During the Cold War, I would watch Star Trek and dream of a future where we would get past the nuclear Armageddon thing, and all come together. It is basically here, now what?

6. The final frontier

HOB: So basically the mission in the Gap is to boldly go where no man has gone before?

BARNETT: It is our final frontier! It is exotic and scary and will require difficult things of us. But you are not a bad person for doing that kind of stuff: in many ways, we are moving away from paradigms of war to paradigms of police work. Across the Core we do have cops, and it is robust system. In the Gap there are no cops: you can kill 100.000 people before anyone cares. Hack them up with machetes, and throw their bodies down the river, and maybe five months later the UN will say: ìthatís really bad, you should stop!î So we are talking about extending police work.

_______________________

In the Gap there are no cops: you can kill 100.000 people before anyone cares. Hack them up with machetes, and throw their bodies down the river, and maybe five months later the UN will say: ìthatís really bad, you should stop!î

_______________________

China is the only one in the Core we should really worry about, and my guess is that we only have to do that for another 10 more years. Some see a scenario like: ìOh, my God, youíre gonna create a global police force, but somebodyís gonna come along like Nazi Germany, and then you wonít be ready for it because youíll be the British Empire tending to that instead of getting ready for the Nazis!î

But I do not think the hedge required to prevent that scenario is that big. We are at a unique point of history in terms of the interconnectedness of the global economy and the fact that nuclear weapons effectively rule out major power war: we have an opportunity--if we can just enunciate certain things, and it takes more than regular political leaders to do it. That is why I, as a Democrat, actually find myself supporting Bush more than Kerry, because he speaks in terms of right and wrong, good versus evil. You need a certain amount of that to get people up to do it, because these are not easy things. You need Putin to be Putin sometimes. If you say: ìWell, why donít you negotiate with them?î then he will say: ìThey just killed 300 of my kids! Why donít you go negotiate with Osama bin Laden?!î At some point you have to say: ìThat doesnít work!î You donít have to be tragically naÔve, just because youíre sensitive or something like that: Sometimes bad guys need a bullet through their head. You cannot shy from that, and if you do it well you will save so many more lives.

_______________________

We have an opportunity--if we can just enunciate certain things, and it takes more than regular political leaders to do it. That is why I, as a Democrat, actually find myself supporting Bush more than Kerry, because he speaks in terms of right and wrong, good versus evil.

_______________________

When I put out my vision like this it is very black and white. Some people see only the upfront sacrifices, not the potential gain, and say that what I talk about is perpetual war. And there are others who think this is really a chance to save a lot of lives. It is something that requires us to come together, like the Europeans.

Globalization is happening, and if we can just latch on to some of these integration processes and use them in such a way as to mitigate suffering in these parts of the world that are not integrating: Then we really kill two problems at the same time, not only do we deal with that suffering, but we avail ourselves of new opportunities--for investment, and yeah: for cheap labor, and we exploit it. Then we can all really get through this stalemate that we have had for many, many decades in the third world, where we used to say: ìWeíll get to you eventuallyî.

HOB: And eventually could be now?

_______________________

This administration is doing much of what I argue for, but I do not claim that they are following my logic--I claim it to be the logic of the world. They are employing almost a Nixonian sort of secrecy on it, as though the world would not trust them on it.

_______________________

BARNETT: Eventually should be now! I would argue that it will also be inevitable because of the demographics. The book tries to be a theory of everything, because I believe a theory of everything is required for people to understand these systems. This administration is doing much of what I argue for, but I do not claim that they are following my logic--I claim it to be the logic of the world. They are employing almost a Nixonian sort of secrecy on it, as though the world would not trust them on it. In that secrecy, which is almost pathological, many people are rushing in to fill the gap--with conspiracies, charges, accusations and labels. And then it all gets to the point where you have this ìEurope is from Venus, the US is from Mars,î as if that captures where we are in history right now! I can just hear somebody from Africa say this and add ironically ìI can really see the difference! Youíre rich, healthy, fat, living the good life and I live in constant war! No wonder you people canít get along!î It is hilarious the differences we continue to see among ourselves, compared to what it really means to be shut out. Go to Africa, some parts of Latin America; South East Asia or the Middle East where people are really, really shut out of the process. And it's not surprisingly that there are people who feel ripped of and sometimes want to do something about it.

It feels very fortunate that 9/11 came along to finally put thing into sharp relief. It allows me to make arguments that I think ultimately are very compassionate. That should attract Europeans with their nanny-state mentality: Iím giving you two and a half billion people to go nanny! And when they act up, the Americans will go kill them and you won't have to do the hard stuff. Or, those scary people can come kill you--and they will: they'll show up on election days and blow up their backpack bombs.

Europeans are all familiar with this sort of terrorism, by and large. You have gone through a lot of terrorism, and somehow that has deadened you to what has to be done--you have kind of made your peace with it. Americans are somewhat schizophrenic on this, since we accept 30,000 deaths a year with gun violence--but bin Laden can go commit 3,000 murders on television one day, and we will be so mad about that that we will go invade countries.

But thank God we still react violently to terrorism: that it still lights a fire under us, and it is finally lighting one under Putin. We can either deal with it or we can choose not to, but it is not going away, and this globalization process will not stop just because we stop supporting the Israelis or get off oil or something like that. The older I get the more convinced I get that life is accomplished by those rushing to embrace the bad things, because you may as well get it over as soon as possible. I learned that when my daughter got cancer at age two, which I write about in the book. It really taught me something about strategic planning: dealing with difficult things in the right fashion, not dragging them out.

The Interview with the Danish international affairs magazine Raeson

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 7 November 2004

Beautiful day here in Rhode Island. Kevin and I went to a fun run over in Warwick (across the bay on the mainland) that was held in this gorgeous tree-lined park along the bay. Reasonably flat course. My Kevin, age 9, started sensibly for once (9:00 first mile), then cranked a nifty 8:23 for the second, and did the remaining 1.1 miles in 8:31. He finished just out of the money in the 1-18 age group (4th), but beat his beat time of 28:18 by a whopping 2:14, coming in at 26:04, or an 8:24 mile pace. He put a huge kick at the end, catching a boy who was maybe 5 inches taller. Best of all, only two times does he stop to walk, and both times I immediately talk him out of it without any effort. Plus, no complaining about anything during the race. He's really beginning to master himself in this venue and it's a lot fun to witness. He's going be death on wheels by the time he hits high school, because he'll a very experienced racer.

But the real fun is just spending the time with him, and seeing his sense of accomplishment and self-discipline grow.

Easy week coming up (I hope): just three events in DC over a reasonably paced trip (testimony to Congressional commission, sit-down with Art Cebrowski at the Office of Force Transformation, and a meeting at the Cato Institute, which I've never visited [their invite]).

Too much house-cleaning today, so I'm tossing out an interview (the Danish version is found online at http://www.raeson.dk/tpmb011104.htm) in the Danish international politics magazine called Raeson, which I'm going to guess means "Reason" in English. The interview was conducted many weeks ago in early summer by Henrik ÿstergaard Breitenbauch, who is Co-editor of RÊson, a Research Assistant at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and a PhD Candidate in International Relations at Copenhagen University. I expect an invitation from one of these organizations in the next few weeks for a trip in the spring that might encompass several days and numerous speaking engagements.

But for now, all the Danes get is this interview, the English version of which can be found in PDF form here.

I'm fairly happy with the interview. I wasn't in the best mood when I gave it (I do remember that), so I just let her rip, because I find that I sound more like myself when I do that than when I try to sound all measured and academic. ÿstergaard, like most Europeans, conducts a pretty good interview, so it wasn't hard for me to sound all the notes I wanted to sound.

The only thing that surprised me about the interview (posted 2 November) was how much of it Raeson ended up publishing (13 pages!). Naturally, ÿstergaard came up with a suitably intimidating photo to go with it, and I guess I don't really care for the title, because by using a phrase that I am arguing against in terms of paradigm, it misconstrues my vision a bit, but--frankly--I hate the titles most pubs come up with anyway(except Esquire), so why should this one be any different?

As for the "Final Frontier" bit, I deserve that one simply for mentioning Star Trek, which automatically tags you as a bit spacey in some people's minds. Still, the "final frontier for globalization" is not bad: . . . where no rational actor has gone before!.

I think what I like about the interview best, is that I had a good chance to make a key point in spades: the US needs to be about spreading connectivity, not mandating content--especially in politics. That "patience" argument is crucial to avoiding the asinine-yet-inevitable "perpetual war" label.

Another month on the Foreign Affairs bestseller list!

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 6 November 2004

First dinner in a while with the family last night, and boy, did they let me have it for the absence! Big Chinese meal with cake from worldís best bakery, Mad Hatter of Newport, and then I took all four kids to see ìThe Incredibles,î which really was a great movie from stem to stern.

Today was just catch up: a bunch of work on the lawn, washing sheets, taking the three youngest for a long trail bike ride (me pulling the two youngest in a Burley buggy), then Mass, swimming at the Y and the usual DVD Saturday night date after McDonaldís.

Nothing really in the Times this morning that I wanted to blog anyway, but I am happy to cite the fact that I made the FA bestseller list for the sixth month out of seven since the book came out in April (dropped off in August, largely because I simply stopped briefing and disappeared into China the entire time).

While on the road this week, I saw the November/December issue of FA, and it had the composite bestseller list for August/September. I came in 9th on that one. In this current one (posted 2 November for the month of October, I came in at 12th, which is a drop from 6th in September, but what the hell, Iím still on the list after many books that came out with me in April and May have long since passed into the beyond, so I enjoy while I got it, like staying in the triple-digits on Amazon (#605 right now).

Hereís the entire list and see you tomorrow:

Foreign Affairs Bestseller List

The top-selling hardcover books on American foreign policy and international affairs. Rankings are based on national sales at Barnes & Noble stores and Barnes & Noble.com.

POSTED NOVEMBER 2, 2004

1 Chain of Command, by Seymour M. Hersh, HarperCollins (last month #2)

2 America's Secret War, by George Friedman, Doubleday (new)

3 9/11 Commission Report, by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Barnes & Noble Books (new)



4 Running on Empty, by Peter G. Peterson, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (4)



5 Imperial Hubris, by Anonymous, Brassey's (3)

6 Our Oldest Enemy, by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, Doubleday (new)

7 The Fall of Baghdad, by Jon Lee Anderson, Penguin Press (new)

8 Nuclear Terrorism, by Graham Allison, Henry Holt (11)

9 When Presidents Lie, by Eric Alterman, Viking (new)

10 9/11 Commission Report, by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Norton (1)

11 The European Dream, by Jeremy Rifkin, Tarcher (5)

12 The Pentagon's New Map, by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Putnam (6)

13 Blood and Oil, by Michael T. Klare, Henry Holt (15)

14 The Missing Peace, by Dennis Ross, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (9)

15 Banking on Baghdad, by Edwin Black, John Wiley & Sons (new)

Some face time with Mark Warren

Dateline: Continental flight from Newark to Providence, 5 November 2004

■"Arafat reportedly alive but in grave condition: Middle East braces for end of an era," by Paul Wiseman and Michele Chabin, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 1A.

■"U.S. prefers diplomacy with Iran, but conflict possible: Relations continue to worse over nuclear ambitions, support of terror," by Barbara Slavin, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 11A.

Getting my ass home after five briefs spread over four days, with a total audience in the range of 1,750, with a neat mix of flag officers (CAPTSONE on Monday in DC), intell analysts (AFCEA on Tuesday in MD), junior and senior officers (Air War College and Air Command Staff College on Wednesday in AL), and under- and graduate students in Princeton on Thursday in NJ).

Last night's effort in Princeton was pretty good. Never been to the college before, or the Woodrow Wilson School, so it's nice to check those boxes. The audience was small (by the week's standards) but fairly intense in their concentration (you can tell when the laughter bursts out like thatóalmost against will). Plus it was a weird mix of earnest young faces (students) and some wizened visages (some profs, some walk-ins). So a strange interweaving of facial expressions, as young students often give you that glowing, very open-face look of absorption (with that hint of anticipating the next, toss-off line they know will be funny if they can just process the reference fast enough), whereas elders tend to give you that slightly pained, this-bit-rate-is-a-bit-high-for-me expression, which can look uncomfortably close to indigestion after a bad meal (I try not to take it personally).

I started very poorly. The fatigue factor was huge, as I almost fell asleep in a chair in my hotel's lobby prior to the talk (I begged for early access to a room as I actually contemplated a napósomething awfully rare for me). But then I got a call on my cell from some journalist writing for a Marine Corp something or other and he wanted to talk about the proposal out there to generate either a separate African Command or shift sub-Saharan Africa from European Command to Central Command. The journalist had read PNM, so it was a fairly easy conversation (my usual response: neat move, but a very downstream, minor change compared to the rebalancing of the force I advocate in my Leviathan-SysAdmin model).

Then I worked a couple of slides, adding new animation that puts on screen some verbal text that I have become so used to using each time I give the brief that it finally made sense to help the audience out and give them the visual cues on top of the language (my brief's bit rate is very similar to a Nintendo game).

Treat for me was that Mark Warren, executive editor of Esquire and my good pal and editing guru of everything significant that I've written since 9/11 (the two articles for his mag, PNM, and the to-be-penned A Future Worth Creating), was in the audience with his father-in-law, a big brain of the hard-science type (chemist). The chemist's take on the material was typical of a lot of smart people I brief: he said he would need to watch the show several times before he got it all down in his head. Some briefers would be appalled at that judgment (telling me to dial down my fire-hose delivery), but I think it's just great, because it brings them to the book and the blogóall of which are meant to be experieneced like a really dense LP you want to listen to over and over again to get it all down in your skull.

I'm not interested in competing in the usual sound bite marketplace of ideas; I'm looking to create an army of thinkers who step beyond that conversation and see the connections in the whole, who get the military-market nexus, who understand war in the context of everything else. When you try to change language and mindset as I am trying to do, you're only interested in those willing to put in the serious study time. The ones who simply glance over the material and sigh, "perpetual war!" are ones you need to dismiss out of hand, because you can't create synapses that aren't there, just muscle up the ones the natural horizontal thinkers have but tend to under-appreciate.

Is there an age component to that capacity? Sure. In general, people have that capacity for horizontal thinking (seeing the connections across fields) much better when they're younger than when they're older (same reason why it gets tougher to learn new languages as you get older; you keep trying to fit new sounds into old hearing patterns). Then again, hard scientists (surprisingly enough) are often better than soft ones (like political scientists) in horizontal vision. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. There's actually far more pinheads in my field than, say, chemistry.

Also, there's a generational aspect to it, something I see in my own kids in spades. Kids growing up today have a far greater capacity for horizontal thinking than my parents' generation, who were generally taught to color inside the lines and stay within their designated lanes. My son Kevin's displayed intelligence at age 9 tells me he'll be a difficult fit in traditional educational settings his entire life, as he's almost a pure horizontal thinker (obvious to anyone who's ever watched him play either the piano or Nintendo at warp speed), which often gets mistaken for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Anyone who's ever had a dinner conversation with me will attest to how close I come to that definition (imagine Robin Williams merged with Dennis Miller and you almost capture my scattershot-yet-circular/repeating conversation flow). But frankly, that skill-set is why I can put on the show I do andóin certain circlesóget paid a lot of money to do it. So when Kev says, "Dad, I wish other kids didn't think I was so weird all the time," I say, "Kev, some day people are going to pay a lot of money just for the privilege of watching you be weird for an hour or so."

Along those lines, when the orphanage director in Yongfeng handed us Vonne Mei back in August, her only exasperated advice (translated to us by guide David) was: "This one . . . only thing she sees is the new toy . . . only thing that matters." I know some parents would find that sort of exclamation sort of frightening, but I just smiled to myself as Vonne took Mei in her arms and one word popped into my head: perfect!

After the talk, I went to a dinner with about a dozen Princeton grads and undergrads, almost all of whom had more stuff to cite on their resume than I had when I was 35. I felt for one guy, because all he could say in his introduction was that he basically went to school at Princeton. I was basically that guy during my time at Harvard: had virtually nothing on my resume other than good grades, wasn't particularly articulate in settings like that (pretty quiet actually), fairly plodding writer, no connections to speak ofónada. In short, horizontal thinkers like myself tend to be late bloomers, because it takes so much longer for everything to come into focus. The good part is, we tend to stay young forever, because we're like toddlers our entire livesóalways the new toy . . . only thing that matters.

After dinner with the students, which was a lot of fun and took me back to my days at Harvard, I sit down with Mark Warren in a local bar and we discuss the book. I value face time with Mark quite a bit, because despite our strong friendship and intense collaborative style over the (now) years, we've actually only spent maybe . . . 24 hours together face to face.

So we talked about the next book a lot and how the prospect of the second Bush Administration changed that. But since the AFWC is going to be about how to fix the world over the next two decades, it can't contain any analysis or projections that live or die with what the neocons are looking to achieve over the next four years.

And yet, asking that question (What's next for the neocons?) is a good one, one that helps me distinguish between what are the likely best steps toward A Future Worth Creating and what are likely missteps. I've been fielding this question everywhere this week, because that's the big question hanging out there on Bush II: Where is this all going to . . . at least next?

So, having been forced by circumstances several times already this week to posit what my advice would be to the President, I ran Mark through my basic argument right now about the two most important countries to Bush's second term: Iran and China. Since you already know my take on the utility of viewing China as a putative near-peer military competitor, you might be guessing that my advice would be: Take on Iran next!

But it would not. In fact, my advice would be pretty close to the opposite on Iran, because I've long believed that having Iran on the "rogue" side of the ledger will continue to deny us the stabilizing outcome we seek for the region as a whole (and if no one's gonna say it, then I will: Die Yassir! Die!). I want that outcome, but I want a cemented strategic relationship with China as much or more over the next four years, because I'm convinced we need to lock in that embryonic security bond as well as similar bonds with both India and Russia, and I see a strategy for Bush over the next four years that points in this direction.

So Mark and I ruminated on that line of reasoning, parsing out how that logic would set the book's narrative arc, and maybe result in something smaller in the meantime. This conversation cost a good two hours of sleep I desperately needed, but it was worth it. This book is coming magnificently into focus for me.

Good thing my confidence was high on this flight home, because it was a small commuter jet, the kind I can spread my personal wingspan across, touching both sides of the fuselage at once. Our first try at landing at TF Green at Providence was aborted somewhere around 2,000 feet altitude, when apparently the wind shear alert went off in the cockpit and the pilot sucked up the landing gear and powered his way out of his descent in one hell of a hurry. It was like that feeling when the rollercoaster hits the bottom of the big drop and you feel your body compress heavily into your seat. I have flown more times than I can count over the last 15 years, and I have never been in a jet than aborted a landing that late in the descent. No one spoke until we leveled off, waiting for the pilot to inform us what the hell just happened, but since his comm link was open during the landing (inadvertently?), we heard the whole thing. He reassured us that the low-level winds were difficult but not insurmountable. "For now," he declared, "our destination is still Providence." So we did another big loop around the city, everyone held their breath, and we repeated the descending glide path. This ride seemed just as rough, but he went all the way, and despite the bouncing touchdown (it's scary not to be level right at the very end!), everyone on the plane was rather relieved to be back on the ground. Moving around the island later, I can understand the nature of the problem: it's that kind of wind that slams the car door in your face as your trying to get out of your seat to exit the vehicle.

Needless to say, I'm happy to be home.

Here's the additional catch (working just off my USA Today, because that's all I could tap en route, plus I like the sheer challenge of trying to make sense of the world using just that lesser rag):

■ So it did all come down to the question of gay marriages!

■ Islam's moderate middle path is found in southeast Asia

So it did all come down to the question of gay marriages!

■"Presidential election may have hinged on one issue: Issue 1," by Walter Shapiro, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 6A.

In retrospect, Ohio was the key. The Dems thought the war in Iraq plus job losses would do the trick, whereas the Republicans banked on fear of terrorism plus shared social values. The wildcard in the mix was that really only one of those four elements appeared on the ballot in addition to the two candidates: Ohio's Issue 1, which proposed a ban on gay marriages.

Here's the local political analysis:

"I always try to avoid single factor analysis," said Ohio Democratic strategist Greg Haas. "But if Issue 1 had not been on the ballot, John Kerry would have won Ohio."

Bush probably ends up winning Ohio by a mere 100,000 votes, and what we hear from the state's political activists is that "This issue drove a lot of first-time voters and new registrants to the polls." Shapiro notes the usual bit about regular churchgoers preferring Bush by a wide margin, but that margin was even larger in Ohio. Ditto for African-Americans, where Bush pulled in 16% of the vote, significantly above the national average of 11% he achieved. Many in the black community in Ohio believe the issue of gay marriages is what swung those additional votes.

A while back I made mention of the issue of gay marriages and its potential as a tipping-point wild card. Little did I expect it might be so easily tracked in its impact. People want to complain about the exit polling in terms of the rollercoaster ride Tuesday night, but that's not what exit polling is all about. It's about helping figure out subtle influences like this one.

So in the end, the Red Sox might have given old John a bit of a psychological boost, but it seems the Massachusetts state government's little tug o' war over the issue of gay marriages might have done him some real harm, meaning good association was trumped by guilt by association. The Bush camp's ability to paint Kerry as the "extreme" liberal (left of Teddy!) was a huge part of its victory. Karl Rove's no boy, but he is some political genius.

Islam's moderate middle path is found in southeast Asia

■"In Malaysia, 'Islamic civilization' is promoted: Tolerance one of the tenets," by Paul Wiseman, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 25A.

Interesting article on Malaysia's attempt to position itself as a model of moderate Islam. It has long been my sense that the positive future of Islam comes to Southwest Asia from Southeast Asia, whereas this radical Islamic stand against globalization is clearly heading southeast from Southwest Asia to sub-Saharan Africa over time.

Here's the key segment:

This country of 23 million residents is offering itself as a progressive model to an Islamic world divided between Muslims who believe they can co-exist with the Western world and fundamentalists who say they can't and shouldn't try.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, an Islamic scholar by training, is trying to promote what he calls Islam Hadari. Roughly translated, it is Arabic for "Islamic civilization." Abdullah's somewhat vague version of Islam emphasizes economic and technological development, social justice and tolerance for other religions.

Abdullah's ruling coalition soundly defeated its Muslim opposition in national elections in March, turning back its vision of turning Malaysia into an Islamic state, but that doesn't mean Abdullah's government doesn't go out of its way to court its roughly 60% Islamic majority, which basically correlates to the ethnic Malays, the rest being Chinese Buddhists, Indian Hindus and Christians. Given the slight majority, you can imagine how race, religion, and just-whose-country-is-this? sentiment can all get mixed up in one nasty brew, like the 1969 race riots that targeted the ethnic, typically more well-to-do Chinese (leaving hundreds dead).

What's interesting to me about the article is how basically all the examples of where the government has gone out of its way to favor Muslim Malays over other ethnic-religious groups has to do with the definitions of family, marriage, and sex. So you get the feeling that the moderation has to do more with economic and politics, whereas the "gives" to the majority Malays tend to register in the social values sphere.

Interesting no? Makes you think about this election? The conservative majority okays the Bush team on their economics and national security in return for their efforts on upholding social values. Looking on it that way, you get a sense of what it means to be more Core-like than Gap-like: you push the connectivity of free trade, free markets, collective security and transparency, but you do let yourself engage in some content control and some behavioral modification when it comes to the truly touchy stuff like family, marriage, and sex.

The "truly sophisticated" might find such a quid pro quo simply too crude for words, but I believe itís a fundamentally (dare I use that modifier?) sound approach to trading up on connectivity while not feeling like you're trading down on social content.

Getting over myself on this election

Dateline: limo service heading from Newark to Princeton NJ, 4 November 2004

■"An Industry in India Cheers Bush's Victory," by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 4 November 2004, p. W1.

■"An Electoral Affirmation of Shared Values: A Clear Bush Majority In a Divided Country," by Todd S. Purdum, New York Times, 4 November 2004, p. A1.

■"Two Nations Under God: Voting about nothing, and everything," op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 4 November 2004, p. A31

■"The Day the Enlightenment Went Out: Bush's victory signals the triumph of belief over fact," op-ed by Garry Wills, New York Times, 4 November 2004, p. A1.

■"A Blue City, Amazed by a Red America: To Some New Yorkers, the Heartland Seems Like a Foreign Land," by Joseph Burger, New York Times, 4 November 2004, p. A19.

■"Divided at the Polls, Americans Move Closer on Role in World: Post-9/11 Consensus Emerges On Force and Its Limits; Seeing Lessons in Iraq," by Gerald F. Seib and Carla Anne Robbins, Wall Street Journal, 2 November 2004, p. A1.

Recovering from last night's theft at warp speed, thanks to modern marvels of technology and my wife's great good will. Awfully good to be home last night and sleep in my own bed, especially since the usual little bout of night terrors meant I got to sleep with Vonne Mei in my arms as the dawn rose on her very first birthday. I am in love with this child, as I am in love with all of my childrenóand my wife.

Thanks to all the emails I still get on a daily basis, I only got a sloppy sort of five hours of sleep, but all time at home is quality time, so I headed out this morning feeling much better.

Getting over the election is equally easy. Would have supported President Kerry like crazy in moving this country ahead on this global war on terror, but will do the same for President Bush. The next four years will be crucial for the Core and the continued spread and health of the global economy. China will be in an entirely new era at the end of the next four years, as will both India and Russia. Not surprisingly, basically all New Core powers are fairly relieved with another four years of Bush, because they'd rather have the U.S. steady while so much is going onóon their end. Plus, Bush seems committed to both fighting global terror and growing the global economy, and those are numbers 2 and 1órespectivelyófor the New Core.

The simplest answer on this election comes from Todd Purdum, one of the Times' best political analysts: shared social values trumped mistakes in the steering of the global war on terror. In effect, the majority of Americans want America to remember some key things about itself as it goes about trying to reshape the global security environment in response to the new challenges revealed by 9/11. In many ways, this election reminds me of the backward-glancing social conservatism of China's 4th generation of leaders, the Congress Party's return to power in India, and Putin's tough line on capitalism run amok in Russia. Like these three leaderships, the Republicans right now are doing a better job of listening to the rural heartland, which still counts for plenty in all of these four powers. And what they are saying is what I have often said: no matter how long the train nor how fast it's moving, the engine cannot go any faster than the caboose.

China wants to integrate rapidly with the outside world and modernize its economy, but guess what? It can't leave the rural poor behind. Ditto for India's IT-driven economy. Ditto for Russia's rapidly polarizing social scene where cities leap ahead and the villages tend to get left behind. In America, which is so much further along in its development, the matter is as much about values as economics. In effect, the rural heartland says to the far more integrated and outwardly-connected big coastal urban areas: you can run ahead in your "sophisticated" view of the world and how it works, but election-wise, you won't be getting out too far ahead of what constitutes heartland values.

So yes, there is a go-slow, values-based alternative ideology born within this multinational economic and political union we call the United States, and it says: we will embrace social change and outwardly-directed integration at a pace we can manage and no faster.

I got over myself on the election as soon as I read Friedman's whiny op-ed this morning. It sounded so much like me late last night that I was immediately appalled. Garry Wills' supremely snotty piece (if you have faith, you must be a pinhead) then pushed me right over the edge. I can vote with the Dems but I can't stand so many of them.

Then again, that's much my sense of living on the East Coast for the last two decades. Reading that piece about how Manhattanites are confounded by the election reminds me of why I'd gladly live in the Midwest even as I worked primarily on the coasts: people on the coasts are often people on the fringes of everything I readily hold dear, and their arrogance about the "little minds" living in the middle is just too galling for words.

The best thing that I think comes out of this election (besides Arafat finally leaving the scene, as if on cue) is the growing sense of an American consensus about what the real threats are: catastrophic events designed to disrupt connectivity by killing indiscriminately in a new form of warfare waged by those who reject the expanding global system we call globalization. We call this enemy terrorism, and we fear its most violent capacities: weapons of mass destruction. And we're willing to do something about it up front instead of waiting around for them to strike.

Moreover, not lost in all this change is a new sense that old enemies need be old enemies no longer. This is especially true of China, which the public increasingly understands shares hugely overlapping strategic economicóand therefore securityóinterests in any global war on terror.

But the public was something more than the perception of US "unilateralism" in dealing with this overarching threat. They turn to the UN because they can't think of anything better, but clearly they want something better, because they are strongly in favor of preemptive strategies by coalitions of both the strong and the willing, which sounds an awful lot like my Coreóboth Old and New but especially the U.S. in combination with the New Core pillars.

Americans seem to want all this, and a package that spells this all out. There is a reason why PNM strikes so many readers like a revelation, and why they go so out of their way to evangelize its message to others. The book answers that mail.

So as far as I'm concerned, I'm right where I need to be in terms of message, although I'm still working out the question of the pulpit. But the task is clear: the next four years will matter greatly, so it matters that Bush be a great president. In that effort, he and his administration will have my full support, because I don't sit out games and I don't leave the court until I foul out.





Here's the additional catch:

■ Asia's working hard to synch up its regional rule sets with the rest of the Core

Asia's working hard to synch up its regional rule sets with the rest of the Core

■"Indian Firms Step Up Data Security: As Outsourcing Increases, Protection of Information Becomes U.S. Political Issue," by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2004, p. B6.

■"India Taps China's Reserve Of Technological Talent," by Saritha Rai, New York Times, 2 November 2004, p. W1.

■"Fears of pandemic prompt flu summit," by Michelle Healy, USA Today, 2 November 2004, p. 6D.

India, great back office to the United States, is finally and justly getting sucked into our burgeoning rule sets on data and information privacy. This is a hugely important rule-set export by the U.S. which will inevitably further integrate Indiaóand by extension its new "back back office" labor pool Chinaódeeper into the Core defined by American-coded globalization. Connectivity requires code, and code requires shared values regarding appropriate rule sets and reasonable boundary conditions, as in "your freedoms end when they begin to impinge upon mine."

IT connectivity tends to drive this rule-set synchronization process most obviously, but plenty of far more basic forms of connectivity push it as well. The simple connectivity of disease transmission and the mounting fear of the avian flu as possibly the first great pandemic of the post-9/11 era is driving unprecedented cooperation not only across Asia, but between New Core Asia and the Old Core West. This is also great stuff, because it signals a growing willingness on the part of the New Core pillars to join the Old Core is preemptively dealing with potential System Perturbations like a rapidly spreadingóand decimatingóflu-based pandemic.

A bittersweet ending to an otherwise rewarding trip

Dateline: TF Green Airport, Warwick RI, 3 November 2004

Just finished 4 speeches over three days: the CAPSTONE presentation at National Defense U in DC on Monday, the luncheon speech to a gathering of intell analysts and contractors in Columbia MD on Tuesday (an annual symposium of the Central Maryland chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, or AFCEA), and then, today, after flying to Montgomery AL last night, I briefed the current classes of both the Air War College and the Air Command Staff College, or almost 1,000 students in all. The total audience for the four briefs was probably 1,500, as the AFCEA conference was large.

It was a three-medallion trip for me, meaning AFCEA gave me a nice (and very large) Intelligence Community medallion, and both Air Force colleges gave me their school medallions.

Alas, I return home empty-handed nonetheless. On the Delta flight from Montgomery to Atlanta, I made the mistake of taking off my waist-pack while I worked over some old blog files that I was reviewing to order my ideas for the next book, and I got so intensely focused on that, that when we landed I simply grabbed my overcoat and my PC bag and departed the small commuter plane without my waist-pack, still under the seat in front of me. I got about 40 yards in the terminal, decided to buy some newspapers for the long flight to Providence, and instantly realized my mistake. Dashing back to the plane, it was empty save for the sole attendant and a cleaning guy. No waist-pack under the seat.

I don't think the cleaning guy was holding out on me, at least I'd like not to jump to that conclusion. My guess is that someone in the back of the plane spied the pack, with its glistening silver Verizon cellphone attached, and made the quick grab.

I made all the appropriate efforts at Atlanta, but got nowhere. No one had turned anything in, and the plane was cleaned out and turned around to Dulles within an hour.

Significant losses for me: all my ID's (license, college ID, special Dept. of Navy ID), all my credit cards, my cellphone, my Blackberry, a bunch of other small items like some cuff links I bought in China that had sentimental valueóand of course the three medallions from the trip).

I feel embarrassed and stupid about the whole thing. I've left things on planes before but they were always there when I ran back, so this was really disheartening. Unless the cleaning guy felt he had hit some legitimate paydirt, then it was another passenger who simply decided to take advantage, and that sort of event always leaves me feeling a bit hollow.

Luckily, I have both pairs of glasses and my keys (separately held), and didn't lose anything connected to the PC, or my notes for the book. I'll be out for the phone, getting a new license, and I'll have to go back to my wife's old Handspring instead of the Blackberry. Not sure how much trouble I get into for losing the government ID's or Blackberry, but I'll just have to live with that. In the end, probably $300 out of pocket, plus $44 in cash lost (honestly, the only thing the thief really gains unless they pawn cellphones).

Got a hold of my wife and she canceled all the cards immediately, so no damage there. Now, I'm just sitting in Green waiting for my wife to drive here late at night to give me money so I can get my Honda out of the parking lot (I have no capacity to get my hands on money).

Thank God I have a couple of spare credit cards I don't carry, plus a passport. Otherwise I don't think I could make it to Princeton tomorrow night (thankfully, no rental). But I'll be forced to get the new driver's license upon my return on Friday, otherwise, I won't be able to rent a car next week for my next DC trip.

I try not to read too much into things, but this event makes me feel like I should really stop traveling so much and get out of the talking/speeches business. Then again, they were all great talks (at least, the last three were) to large audiences.

I guess this loss just goes along with my general ennui about the election. I felt Bush would win all along, just like the Yankees always did over the Sox. I'm just glad I was on planes yesterday when all that nonsense from the exit polling got the Dems all jacked up. That would have been a bit too much to bear.

It's weird, but the election doesn't seem to settle anything for me, as I suspect is true for many Americans. I'm not dismayed Bush won, but I'm not happy either. The whole thing just strikes me as somewhat passionless. So Bush won. So we get more of the same. So nothing really decided or changed.

So what do we do now? Stay the course in Iraq? Keep telling allies to shove it? Go after Iran or North Korea?

I'm left with the question that motivated my book: Where is this whole thing going?

It just doesn't feel quite right. It doesnít feel sustainable. It doesn't feel like a winning strategy.

So I guess I hope I get past this little personal bump with minimal cost, get a good night's sleep, have a good talk with my spouse about how our eldest son isn't doing so well in school, get a sense of whether or not Bush's victory means anything to me personally in my career (should I consider going somewhere else in this government or just get out?).

Oh, and catch a morning flight to New Jersey tomorrow in less than 12 hours and give another big talk at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton later in the day.

I fear I am losing track of more than just my wallet in this life, but five flights in three days can do that to you.

[Then I get home to find that someone's pinched my blog for the day!]

Announcing: The Barnett Review

[Webmaster's note: It's in addition to this blog. The blog doesn't go away. Really. ( Thanks to Adam White and Robert A. Green for the early heads up.) Whew!]

Hello. . . Critt here. . . Tom's "webmaster." (I use quotes so as not to offend webmasters whose day to day work reflects their mastery of web design skills. Mine are, at best, rudimentary.)

In March of last year Tom sent me a heads up on his about to be published Esquire 2003 article, The Pentagon's New Map. After reading it, my reply was, "Dude, you're gonna need a blog."

His response, "No time. Gotta turn it into a book now. But maybe, someday.. . . . .."

Well, "someday" came and, beginning in March of this year, we cobbled together a "weblog-centric site." Ho! Did the man ever blog -- over 1000 posts in the first 7 months, with readers coming in daily from more than 30 countries. It's great to see the global reach blogging has given to Tom's message and the enthusiastic reception by those who, likewise, work toward creating sustainable global futures. Your collective positive response has caused us to ask, "What next? What now?"

Here's what we're thinking: In addition to this blog, how about a newsletter -- a review, published monthly? We'll include a collection of previously published posts -- suggested by you, selected by Tom -- along with reader questions and comments. Tom, as always, will add new commentary. The idea seems doable to us. What I want to know is, would that work for you?

Let me know what you'd like to see. We have something in the works for those of you with a business priority, but that's for later. For now, since there are more than 400 educational organizations that have readers of this blog, we'll give questions from academia first priority.

Okay? Ok.

To make a suggestion, comment, or request the first edition of "The Barnett Review," * send an email to review@thomaspmbarnett.com.

* Hmmm. . . maybe we should have a "name Tom's review" contest? Where's Peter Durand when I need him?

Barnstorming on election day

Dateline: Holiday Day Inn, Arlington VA, 2 November 2004

Today I rush off to give keynote address over lunch to a big defense contractor conference in Columbia MD. It's all about the future of intelligence.

After that I get on two planes that take me to the vicinity of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama (my first trip ever to that state), where (I believe) I'll be giving two talks tomorrow (one to student body and one to academics). That means I get to spend this historic election night flying planes instead of staring at the tube like everyone else. Too bad, but part and parcel of my campaign to spread the vision

Meanwhile, make sure you vote today if you haven't already. No matter whom you choose, it is truly a sacred rite.

Here's the daily catch:

■ Judging the GWOT

■ Everybody take a deep breath and relax on election day

■ The Leviathan wants to keep its defense intelligence agencies

Judging the GWOT

■"The Real 'October Surprise,'" op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 2 November 2004, p. A21.

■"French Push Limits in Fight On Terrorism: Wide Prosecutorial Powers Draw Scant Public Dissent," by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, 2 November 2004, p. A1.

■"Ethnic Fighting Flares in China: Authorities Declare Martial Law in Rural Henan Province," by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 2 November 2004, p. A18.

■"Bin Laden Lauds Costs Of War to U.S.: Recent Videotape Boasts of Inflicting Economic Damage," by John Mintz, Washington Post, 2 November 2004, p. A3.

On this election day, it's worth some time to think about terrorism and how successful we've been in this Global War on Terorrism and what costs we've paid, both in terms of people and lost civil liberties.

Ignatius makes a point that I've made in other posts many times before: the success of the GWOT can be seen in the lack of attacks on America's homeland since 9/11 (to include this election). The pattern of terror strikes we've seen since 9/11 is back to being very similar to the pattern we endured in the 1970s and early 1980s: they can blow things up in their own neighborhood (Middle East), and on occasion, they can reach into the areas surrounding their ownóbut no farther.

That pattern tell you that the GWOT is successful in keeping Al Qaeda on its heels, despite the recent boasting by Osama in the video. His most damning boasts actually aren't indicative of what he made us do, but what we ourselves decided to do: namely create the behemoth of DHS, throwing tons of money at homeland security in general (a vast overkill) and deciding to not just invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the classic Powell Doctrine manner of kill-the-bad-guys-and-then-simply-leave-the-scene but in the "transformation" of the Middle East mode that requires a huge SysAdmin follow-on effort from us (for which we were woefully unprepared).

Yes, OBL and Al Qaeda put the System Perturbation of 9/11 on us, but we decided how to run down the horizontal waves of disruption that ensued, and that's a basic rule set of System Perturbations: super-empowered individuals can trigger vertical scenarios, but only governments have the massive resources necessary to engineer long-term horizontal scenarios in responseólike creating DHS or seeking to transform the Middle East. We don't get to choose the vertical scenarios, they choose us. But we do get to choose the horizontal ones we pursue in response to the vertical ones, and so long as those choices are wise, then we're really in control. My verdict is then: DHS, bad choice, transforming Middle East, good choice but so far bad execution. DHS only perverts America and wastes money, whereas transforming the Middle East is a solid, realistic, strategic choice that requires our defense establish to dramatically alter itself for the challenge.

On the up side, we remain a country of great civil liberties, unlike a far scarier France, where I think Richard Clarke would feel quite at home. Moreover, we can handle real disaster without martial law, whereas a far more fragile country like China suffers an incident very similar to one that turned NYC upside down a few years back, and they have to put a province in the penalty box to get a grip on things.

Overall then, the GWOT goes fairly well. Yes, we have lost far too many souls. But keep some perspective. What we've lost in combat deaths since 1975 doesn't equal what we lost on the beaches of Normandy on one morning in 1944, nor what we lost in NYC on 9/11. It's important to have professionals fight and die in this war, and it's important to keep it an away game, not a home game.

But yes, we can and will do better in terms of organizing ourselves for the tasks that lie ahead, and that's why I continue to push the Leviathan-SysAdmin arguments.

Everybody take a deep breath and relax on election day

■"No Matter What Happens, Relax," op-ed by George F. Will, Washington Post, 2 November 2004, p. A21.

■"One bright spot amid dirty tricks, paranoia: Early voting went well," by Laura Parker, USA Today, 2 November 2004, p. 5A.

Will's op-ed reminds me why I still like to read the man: he's a great historian on America's past. Here's the key bits:

If, for the fourth consecutive election, neither candidate wins a popular vote majority, relax. There were four consecutive such elections from 1860 to 1892 . . .

If today's election produces vast consequences from slender margins, relax. This is not unusual . . . In 1968 a switch of 53,034 votes in New Jersey, New Hampshire and Missouri would have denied Richard Nixon an electoral vote majority and, because George Wallace won 46 electoral votes, the House probably would have awarded the presidency to Hubert Humphrey.

If George W. Bush loses, relax. Turbulence is normal. Since 1900, not including Bush, there have been 18 presidents, of whom only five served a full eight years or more. Only 11 of the 42 presidents before Bush served two consecutive terms.

At the dinner I attended last night to discuss PNM, a lot of angst was raised about the red state/blue state polarization of American politics. My answer was that this was not that unusual if you look back over the length of American political history. Plus, when you look at what we are so jacked up about concerning the Supreme Court, that cluster of issues is awfully narrow and removed from much of daily life (the nexus of abortion, stem cells, etc.). This is not so much a hugely divided electorate but one that squabbles incessantly over relatively small issues (historically speaking) on the margin.

Yes, this is probably a fairly dirty election, but I, like Laura Parker of USA Today see that bright spot being the great success of early voting. I think that's the future: something more like a month-long voting period during which half vote, leaving the other half (the same people who turn in their tax forms on 15 April) to conduct the idiotic mad scramble on election day.

This is a real improvement that helps more to vote, so I choose focus on that today.