Chart of the Day: Being Gay in Core v. Gap

NYT story from October about new gay rights in Portugal.

Map caught my eye for obvious reasons.  Quick crude overlay of Core-Gap divide shows you want to be gay in the Core - not the Gap.  

Not true in every single instance, but as a rule . . ..

Wherever you still are cranking babies as a means of survival, you will look down on gays.  Almost all of your survival rules - like religion - will tell you to do so.  But once industrialization and connectivity kick in, then you start to value them for the diversity they bring - especially in key globalized industries (yes, gays tend to concentrate somewhat in certain industries, but so do heterosexual men and women, so there!).

But the more basic point: when you connect you have to go with the acceptance of others, because you value the ties and the business more than your precious identity. Plus, you probably also see more of the world and get over yourself.

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief: the Brief in full

Can be found in this post and on this permanent page, also linked to from the navigation bar above. Or you can go to the YouTube pages directly, as linked on the left navigation bar below.

No, it's no longer exactly the brief I give now.  I've already made about 50 changes. But that's the nature of the beast: it is always evolving and new versions constantly emerge. 

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" brief

Video segments of September 2011 briefing by Tom to an international military audience in the Washington DC area.

Part 1: The Pentagon's New Map

Part 2: The Flow of People

Part 3: The Flow of Money

Part 4: The Flow of Energy

Part 5: The Flow of Food

Part 6: The Flow of Security

Part 7: (Q&A) The Role of Religion

Part 8: (Q&A) Global Economic Crisis

Part 9 - Final: (Q&A) Postwar Operations & US Allies

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief, Part 1 (Pentagon's New Map)

Delivered in Washington to an international military audience, September 2011.

We'll roll out the rest of the brief over the next couple of weeks. This section covers the introduction and my concepts regarding globalization's Core and Gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chart of the day: Transparency International's annual corruption index

Interesting map from Economist based on Transparency International's annual corruption perceptions index.

The usual Core-Gap breakdown:

• Other than Core island Israel, basically all least-corrupt countries are Old Core west and east.
• The middling countries are either neighbors to Old Core (EE) or New Core (South Africa) and its neighbors.  Exception is oil-rich PG majors inside the Gap.
• Virtually all of the New Core are considered somewhat corrupt.  No surprise, these are booming places and boomers tend to have their share of corruption.
• All the truly bad situations are Gap countries.

Typical of the map and my biases over the years, much of Africa surprises by not being too bad.  If there is one great mistake I've made on trends analysis, it's been to underestimate Africa's potential for positive change.

WPR's The New Rules: Building Real States to Empower the Bottom Billion

America's top African diplomat recently signaled Washington's desire to establish more official contacts with the autonomous region of Somaliland, which sits within the internationally recognized borders of the failed state known as Somalia. Meanwhile, both our Agency for International Development and the Pentagon's recently established Africa Command worry about Sudan's upcoming vote on formally splitting the country in two. For a country that has sworn off nation-building, it's interesting to see just how hard it is for America to remain on the sidelines while globalization remaps so much of the developing world.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

Brief Reminder: Where Worlds Collide, Rules Diverge

Early Office of Force Transformation brief slide.  Probably 2002.

Simple point WRT Core-Gap divide:  no one was/is talking preemption anywhere in the Core--only in the Gap. In the Core, it's a world of "assurance" among allies and--at worst--frenemies.  Between the two there are some efforts at suppression of bad flows (e.g., pandemics from Gap to Core) and some deterrrence (missile shields to protect Core from rogues like Iran).

Just another way of saying that what Bush-Cheney was pushing in terms of perceived radical departure from the past was delimited to the Gap, where the ideas were--and remain--not all that radical.

Bottom line on slide:  point being, the rule-set against preemption pretty clear across Core, but Core's stability and connectivity and rule-sets do not extend everywhere, so argument for preemption simply admits that there are still places beyond the stable frontier where rules find little purchase.

Pentagon's New Map available for download--again

Prompted by a teacher facing the start of his class, I'm pleased to re-announce (as I did back in 2006) that the digital version of the PNM map is still available for free download.

You can download the map as a PDF in high-resolution format (17 or so MB) or low-resolution format (around 300 KB).

The downloadable maps will remain accessible via the top mast navigation (above) under the header "download."

Brief Reminder: The 2008 financial contagion = the un-Gap (2009)

A slide I still use in the brief to show a real-world example of the Core-Gap divide.

Core countries are the reddish ones, meaning they experienced fast and furious downward market pressure once the contagion began.  The degree of change is measured across the first 90 days.  And if you toss Indonesia into the Core, as I am increasingly wont to do, the match is that much tighter.

The mostly grayed-out Gap is explained two ways:  1) no real markets; or 2) where markets exist, not much tied to Western ones.

Eventually the slowdown reaches the Gap through the reduced commodity demand of the Core, but Africa, for example, continues to grow--ever so slightly--even through the worst stretch.

How solid the Core, how little of the Gap must be integrated to effectively shrink it

The G-20 map just reminds us of the Core-Gap divide.  Per the original map, I've already moved Turkey into the Core and a good case is made for Indonesia, leaving really only Saudi Arabia on the wrong side of the divide, but what else can be said of the place that treats women so and supplies so many of the world's terrorists?

But then you look at this urbanization map of the world and you realize that when it comes to shrinking the Gap, there ain't all that much ground to cover really.  You just need to connect the mega-coastal cities with good rules, good supply chains, good infrastructure, good transpo and people movement and media, etc., and you've got most of the situation basically covered.  The "contiguity" argument from "Blueprint" seems to hold: there's no leapfrogging.  You have to move in chunks that connect to other chunks.

What the second map says to me:  There are several Africas that link up to various other parts of the world. West to West, East to Asia, Horn to the Middle East, the north to Europe, etc.  Integrating Africa will go much faster than I previously anticipated.  Indeed, my past pessimism on that score is my biggest miscall of the last decade.

Other thing you note from the second map relates to Joel Kotkin's "The next hundred million," a book I'm currently reading:  we've got plenty of room in the heartland for the next 100 million.  Only 5% of America is urbanized, although you basically have to write off Alaska.

Brief Reminder: The Way Ahead for Our Canadian Forces

Based on March 2005 talk I gave to Canadian military conference, where their equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was present, the Canadian military thereupon adopted the Core-Gap map as their strategic paradigm.  I think these slides were sent my way around 2007.  I thereupon referenced them for a bit in my brief, but my arm got tired of constantly slapping my own back, so I eventually moved on.

Chart of the day: Buddy, got $40T to spare?

Caught it first in FT special overview of infrastructure, but then went to source for chart.

Of the $40T to be spent by 2030, $6.5 in North America, $9.2T in Europe writ large, $7.5T in LATAM, $1.1T in Africa, $0.9T in Mideast, and $15.9T in Asia.

Per the Core Gap map, light in the middle and thicker along the edges.

Breaking it down by category, it's $22.6T in water, $9T in electricity, $7.8T in road and raid, and $1.6T in air & sea.

A lot will be internal improvements, but plenty will be external improvements, i.e., improving linkages between states and regions.

Hardly the picture of a world de-globalizing, yes?

Chart of the day: It's not easy being gay--in the Gap

The Economist's point:  it ain't just because of "local culture."

Some 80 countries make homosexuality illegal, and guess what?  They're overwhelming located inside the Gap, where women's rights are much harder to obtain as well.

So check out the chart and notice they are all Gap countries.

Story ends with that old Hubert Humphrey bit about a society/government being measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members.

Blast From My Past: First time on national TV

Aired February 26, 2003 - 12:50 ET

BARNETT: Thank you.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The U.S. military is constantly transforming military capabilities to meet future global threats. A senior strategic researcher at the U.S. Naval War College, Thomas Barnett, is a big help in that regard. His latest article appears in the March issue of "Esquire" magazine, titled “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Mr. Barnett is currently working at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He's joining us now live from San Diego, California.

Mr. Barnett, a very interesting article. Thanks very much for joining us.

You see this current struggle with Iraq within the broader issues of the gaps resulting from globalization. Give us the gist of your thesis.

THOMAS BARNETT, PENTAGON ADVISER: Well, this new way of looking at the world begins with a simple series of observations. First, you look at where this country has sent its military forces around the world over the past 12 years, or basically since the end of the Cold War, a total of 132 cases. You draw a line around the majority of these cases, the regions where these situations have been concentrated, and you're really talking about the Caribbean rim, you're talking about most of Africa, you're talking about the Balkans, the Caucuses, central Asia, the Middle East, southeast Asia.

You draw a line around those regions of the world and you ask yourself, what's the common characteristic here that defines why we seem to be sending military troops into these regions time and time again in this era of globalization? And the basic argument I make is, these are the countries or regions that are having a hard time with globalization. In effect they can't integrate their national economies with a global economy because of repressive political regimes, endemic conflict, abject poverty, perhaps they just don't have the robust legal systems to attract foreign direct investment.

BLITZER: And so I was going to say, that's why you think a war with Iraq right now is not only inevitable and desirable, but clearly imperative for the United States and indeed for Iraq. That's also your argument?

BARNETT: Yes, because when you talk about the parts of the world that aren't integrating in this larger process we describe as globalization, it's very instructive to note that these are the places we're sending our troops again and again.

So you've come up with this new security paradigm that says, it's disconnectedness that tends to define danger in this era of globalization. And when you're talking about the Middle East, you're talking about a region of the world that has very little connectivity with the rest of the planet. Basically, they offer oil, and what we're trying to do is prevent terrorism from coming out of there.

BLITZER: But do you really believe, Mr. Barnett, that the U.S., with this military engagement, can transform that region, beginning with Iraq, into vital democratic robust nations?

BARNETT: Well, my argument is basically, we've got to shrink these parts of the world that are not integrating with the global economy, and the way you integrate a Middle East in a broadband fashion with the rest of the global economy is to remove the security impediments that create such a security deficit in that part of the world. And the biggest security impediment right now, I would argue, is the regime of Saddam Hussein. You move that out of the area, you eliminate that source of conflict, and hopefully, you can talk about integrating part of the world that over the past several decades has woefully underperformed economically. Basically the Muslim population represents something like 20 percent of the global population—only engages in about 4 percent of the trade.

So we've got to expand this dialogue, this interaction between the West and the Middle East beyond just oil. My argument is it's not the oil trade that we have with the Middle East that accounts for the enmity those regions feel for us; it's the fact that we don't have anything BUT the oil trade.

BLITZER: A provocative article in the new issue of "Esquire" magazine.

Thomas Barnett, thank you very much. We gave our viewers just a little bit—an appetizer, if you will—of what's in the thrust of your article.

Thanks for joining us.

What I remember:  I was in San Diego doing an intra-governmental consulting gig (as War College profs, Bradd Hayes and I were there leading a visioneering exercise with a naval systems command, using the same process we had developed within Barnett Consulting LLC in our previous commercial work with the United Way of Southeastern New England—now known as the United Way of Rhode Island, thanks to our advice).  The appearance on Blitzer’s show was arranged by Esquire’s PR firm, Dan Klores Communications.  So I engineered a suitable break in the proceedings, stepped outside the naval facility and into a limo that took me to a ratty little local remote facility (dingy storefront in strip mall), where the tech threw up a pretty San Diego backdrop on a screen that even featured, if I remembered, the occasional commercial jetliner on final approach over the city skyline—on a loop).  It was my first remote and it was hard.  The tech said I wouldn’t want to watch the feed because the time delay meant both Blitzer’s and my own lips wouldn’t match up to what I was hearing—faster—over my ear bud.  He warned that I would start trying to slow down my words to match my lips, making me sound drunk.  So I went without any visual aid and simply stared into camera.

In the car ride on the way home, I called my parents to see if they caught my first-ever appearance on national TV, and the first thing my mom said upon answering was, “Your father and I both agree:  TV adds 15 lbs.”

Without missing a beat, I turned to the invisible camera in my mind and quipped, “Folks—my mother!”

I saw the tape finally days later when I got home.

When I read the text today, my logic remains unchanged:  You go after bad actors when you can muster the international will, but what you focus on in the aftermath ain't democracy but economic connectivity.

Core-Gap thinking in Nick Reding's "Methland"

Noted by my cousin Paul (career "Mad Man").

The brief description of the book from Publisher's Weekly:

Using what he calls a "live-in reporting strategy," Reding's chronicle of a small-town crystal meth epidemic-about "the death of a way of life as much as... about the birth of a drug"-revolves around tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a 6,000-resident farming town nearly destroyed by the one-two punch of Big Agriculture modernization and skyrocketing meth production. Reding's wide cast of characters includes a family doctor, the man "in the best possible position from which to observe the meth phenomenon"; an addict who blew up his mother's house while cooking the stuff; and Lori Arnold (sister of actor Tom Arnold) who, as a teenager, built an extensive and wildly profitable crank empire in Ottumwa, Iowa (not once, but twice). Reding is at his best relating the bizarre, violent and disturbing stories from four years of research; heftier topics like big business and globalization, although fascinating, seem just out of Reding's weight class. A fascinating read for those with the stomach for it, Reding's unflinching look at a drug's rampage through the heartland stands out in an increasingly crowded field. 

The reference to "heftier topics" is explained in a reader review (Gaetan Lion):

"Fast Food Nation" meets "The Pentagon's New Map", September 28, 2009

This is a very good book that reads like a thriller. Reding, the author, covers the advent of meth throughout the rural Midwest through several related angles. 

First, he covers this topic by following the firsthand experience of several key individuals attempting to keep the social fabric of a small town (Oelwein) in the midst of a meth epidemic. These include the mayor, the main primary physician, the chief of police, and the local district attorney. Their narratives describe how desperate the situation is until two of them are able to turn things around (the chief of police by cracking down onmeth dealers and the mayor by raising financing to invest in a new commercial complex to generate jobs). Reding also follows the life of several meth addicts in various stages of either recovery or deterioration. 

Second, Reding studies the history of meth that was at first deemed a legitimate miraculous drug that could cure 33 different ailments ranging from weight gain to schizophrenia. In 1939, a Harvard sociologist warns about side effects including sexual aggression, violence, hallucination, and insomnia. His warnings are ignored as the drug is still used extensively during WWII to maintain the energy and focus of soldiers (on either side) during stressful sleepless nights. Also, medical records suggests Hitler was ameth addict which explains his madness. 

Third, Reding studies the biochemistry of meth. The attractiveness of meth is multi-dimensional. On one hand, it has the libido benefit of Viagra. On another, it has an antidepressant effect similar to Prozac. On another, it is the equivalent of a smart pill that gives you unparalleled mental focus. It is also like a caffeine booster giving you the ability to perform at top level without sleep. Overall, it provides an incredible feel-good feeling. This is because like many drugs it reduces the uptake of dopamine (the satisfaction hormone). But, unlike other drugs it actually squeezes dopamine out of presynaptic cells. The resulting unparalleled flow of dopamine through one's system triggers a feel-good feeling that even sex does not match. On the other hand, the long term side effects are really nasty. Those include bleeding skin-sores, internal organs shrunken from dehydration resulting in liver and kidney failure, weakened hearts and lungs, brains depleted of neurotransmitters. A person is literally falling apart from the inside. Also, it has all the already mentioned nasty behavioral side effects. Reding states there are thousand of stories about meth associated with hallucinogenic violence, morbid depravity, and extreme sexual perversion. Reding provides a few choice examples throughout the book. 

Fourth, Reding maps out the socioeconomic and policy factors associated with the meth epidemic that includes the convergeance of several forces: 
1) the advent of Big Pharma that lobbied to weaken any law regulating the import and sale of meth ingredients found in cold medicine;
2) Big Agriculture taking out small farms in the Midwest and employing a rising flow of low cost illegal Mexican immigrant workers. This part reads like Fast Food Nation; 
3) the emergence of the five major Mexican drug trafficking organizations (the DTOs) distributing their drugs using the same Mexican immigrants. By 2003, 85% of all illegal drugs sold in the U.S. whether meth, cocaine, heroin, were controlled by the five DTOs.; 
4) Globalization and NAFTA making border control between the U.S. and Mexico more challenging. 

Fifth, he leverages Thomas Barnett analytical framework described in The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. Where Barnett divides the World into two sets of countries, the functional ones that follow the Rule of Law (the core), and the rest consisting of failed states that live in chaos (the disconnected ones). Reding makes the connection that even within the core countries such as the U.S. there are expanding pockets of disconnected regions such as the Midwestern towns falling pray to meth. He adds that when small towns are vulnerable to social implosion, larger towns may not be far behind. As a proof, he tracks the route of the meth epidemic that reaches to the big cities such as New York and Los Angeles . . .

Needless to say, I'm intrigued.  Know such small-town life very intimately.  Also know what it's like to indulge in that venue and the reasons why such escape are so appealing (even if, life-wise, I felt like a tourist because all my older siblings had moved up and out and so I knew I would too).

Being able to extrapolate the continued pockets of Gap inside even the most advanced Core is a pronounced jump to graduate-level analysis of my stuff that a lot of cops, social workers, mayors, etc. instinctively make.  I know, because they've sought me out over the years.  I don't particularly develop it in the books; it's just there in a latent sense, and they fill in their own blanks better than I could.  

I will definitely seek out the next time I'm in a book store.  Naturally, I admire anybody who pulls thinking from other realms--the ultimate in horizontal thinking.  Examples are always to be coveted.

Chart of the day: Crime drop defies multiple predictions for rise

Back in 2004, when I was at the Naval War College, a major metro police chief from New England visited me to talk about Core-Gap dynamics in the seam between the inner city and the suburbs, a topic that still gets presented to me from those quarters.  His prediction struck me as entirely sensible:  all the 3-strikes and tougher sentencing of the 1990s was finally coming home to roost in that America was on the verge of starting to expel more ex-cons than new criminals being sentenced (something like 600k ex-cons hitting the street each year while 500k go in).  Naturally, the prediction was that all of these ex-cons would step right back into the Gap-like conditions of their old neighborhoods and lapse back into criminal behavior.

Then you add in the financial/economic woes since mid-2008, and that seems like a recipe for a big spike in crime, yes?

But instead we get substantial drops in lots of major metros across 2009, with the biggest declines happening in the biggest cities (over one million population).

The credit?  Better policing techniques across the board, plus some staffing help due to the stimulus package.

As a rule, we are told that it takes years for a crime drop to register in the minds of the public.

Then there's concern about chronic long-term unemployment + the end of the stimulus money.

So not all sunny, even as we celebrate this counterintuitive trend.

Inside the Gap, birth control is much harder to find

The gist from NYT's Nicholas Kristof (via WPR's Media Roundup) as he crosses central Africa, a place I'll be visiting soon enough:

Here in Kinshasa, we met Emilie Lunda, 25, who had nearly died during childbirth a few days earlier. Doctors saved her life, but her baby died. And she is still recuperating in a hospital and doesn’t know how she will pay the bill.

“I didn’t want to get pregnant,” Emilie told us here in the Congolese capital. “I was afraid of getting pregnant.” But she had never heard of birth control.

In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.

Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.

Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.

So the pill, 50 years old this month in the United States, has yet to reach parts of Africa. And condoms and other forms of birth control and AIDS prevention are still far too difficult to obtain in some areas.

Corollary to reality that abortions are far harder to receive inside the Gap--and often illegal:  it's much harder for women to get birth control inside the Gap, as a rule.

Speaking of which, a map:

Legend comes from an anti-abortion site, so the purplish prose is likely overstated, but it's the most detailed map I could find of any decent size.:

Green: Abortion never legal, or legal only when necessary to save the life of the mother or protect her physical health

Yellow: Abortion legal in "hard cases", such as rape, incest, and/or deformed child.

Red: Abortion legal for social reasons (e.g. mother says she can't afford a child), or to protect the mother's "mental health" (definitions and requirements vary).

Purple: Abortion legal at any time during pregnancy for any reason.

Where the Core-Gap map fails:  highly Catholic LATAM.  Otherwise it matches up quite nicely, suggesting that women's reproductive rights and economic development go hand-in-hand.

A signal defeat of the Obama administration? Only because of its chosen signature vision

Per the Wikipedia entry on nuclear programs:

Red: Five "nuclear weapons states" from the NPT.
Dark orange: Other known nuclear powers.
Yellow: States suspected of having possession of, or suspected of being in the process of developing, nuclear weapons and/or nuclear programs.
Purple: States which at one point had nuclear weapons and/or nuclear weapons research programs.
Green: Other states capable of developing nuclear weapons within several years if the decision to do so were made.

The cited article is a Bret Stephens column in the WSJ lambasting Obama over the Turkey-Brazil-Iran deal, which presents all the same face-saving potential as the old Russian deal we pushed a while back (and Iran rejected).  In short, it buys us maybe 10 months of stockpile setback from the Iranians.

But Stephens point is a larger and more valid one:  the south-south diplomacy here outmaneuvers the braindead American approach on sanctions.  The Iranians don't even have to resort to chess:  they're killing us at our own game of checkers.

My point--as usual:  check out the map, and note how membership in the Core tends to correlate with nuclear capacity, with all the newbies lying not far off the Seam.  People are knocking at the door.  You can let them in or keep them out, but their pursuit of nukes is a backdoor route toward recognition of great-power status that will not be wished away with sanctions. In the end, nukes are the symptom, not the driver.  The only solution that matters is effective integration into the Core, whereupon their ownership of nukes no longer matters.  So long as we keep nukes at the center of our foreign policy, the more hamstrung we become in the processing of their "applications"--as it were.

Graft around the world

Pic here

Use the reference link to get to a PDF file that captures a large and complex graphic produced by Transparency International for Bloomberg BusinessWeek.  It's all very cats-and-dogs in presentation style, so I summarize here.

Factoid: Wonder why Greece has financial problems?  Well, the average bribes paid per household in 2009 amounted to $1700, beating fairly corrupt Russia by a grand ($776) and backward Afghanistan by far more ($160).

Comparing countries by percentage of households that said they paid a bribe in last 12 months:

• Canada and US 2%
• Turkey 2%
• UK 3%
• Colombia 8%
• Thailand 11%
• Kosovo 13%
• Lebanon 14%
• Nigeria 17%
• Pakistan 18%
• Greece 18%
• Serbia 20%
• Ukraine 21%
• Venezuela 28%
• Indonesia 29%
• Bolivia 30%
• Lithuania 30%
• Russia 31%
• Kenya 37%
• Iraq 44%
• Azerbaijan 46%
• Uganda 55%

Per my Core-Gap map:  best seem furthest from Gap, middling are those on Seam, worst are deep inside Gap.

Lenin (and all those BS neo-Marxists) turned upside down

Ah, but we know that capitalism and free markets are thoroughly discredited now that our global quarter-century boom came to an end.  If it could not last forever, it all had to be revealed as false--right?

And, of course, the crisis revealed that the have/have-not gap was globalization's greatest legacy, despite the unprecedented rise of a global middle class that occupies the middle 60%.  

So what is the way forward, besides all of us living under "superior" Chinese rule?

Well, it seems that the only way forward for globalization's Old Core West is to get better at selling to the bottom of the pyramid.

CANYOUBELIEVETHAT?  The ONLY way the Old Core can stay rich is by shrinking the Gap!

So it turns out Lenin and all the neo-Marxists had it right--just completely backwards once the American model of globalization truly surpassed the colonial legacies and Cold War divisions.

Whew!  What a relief!  

Here I thought my whole vision was just a regurgitation of the 1970s neo-Marxists, when it turns out to be their complete ideological opposite!

Thank God I finally saw the light.

This rant was inspired by a Samuelson column in Newsweek--a very good one.  He quotes Arvind Subramanian (a current favorite, for good reason) on the need to cross the "Hobbesian threshold."

In Pentagon's New Map, I said much the same back in 2004:  the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance ideological journey was from Hobbes to Locke to Kant--as in, security to good laws to peace-enhancing connectivity.