The Newsletter from Thomas P.M. Barnett, May 30, 2005 is now available for download:

May 30, 2005 Newsletter (PDF)

May 30, 2005 Newsletter (Word)

The question of hedging in the strategic environment

"But of course, it isn't an unknowable future but merely a back-to-the-future shift of enormous proportions, one that sees us resurrect a type of military force we haven't employed on the battlefield since we settled the West across the 1800s: the frontier force that not only wages Leviathan-like war but administers to an embryonic system of integrating economic and social order. In many ways, America returns to a myopic focus on the details of small wars and small victories, to an integrating function that features skirmish after skirmish instead of culminating and clear-cut inter-state wars (which, by the way, are disappearing from the world). The "lesser includeds" of the Cold War now become the "greater inclusive" by which we shape not just our military forces but our entire foreign policy establishment, but that can only occur if we are able to demote the concept of great power war from its perch as number one ordering principle of the Pentagon to that of merely hedged-against conflict scenario, meaning we dedicate a certain portion of our scenario planning and force generation against this particular scenario, trusting in our ability to maintain a sufficient hedge against what's out there in potential great power foes (I'll spot you China for the next twenty years, but who else?)."