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Entries in globalization (102)

12:19PM

Final column at World Politics Review

The New Rules: Globalization's Future Depends on Stable U.S.-China-India Order

BY THOMAS P.M. BARNETT | 30 APR 2012
COLUMN

Editor's note: This will be the final appearance of Thomas P.M. Barnett's "The New Rules" column at World Politics Review. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Tom for the insightful, compelling analysis he has offered WPR readers each week for the past three years, as well as for the support he has shown for WPR over that time. We wish him continued success.  

Amid all our current fears regarding the global economy’s potential “double dip” back into deep recession, a longer-term question stands out: How can a supposedly declining America protect the golden goose that is globalization while managing the rise of twin economic superpowers in the East -- namely, China and India? History says that three is a crowd when it comes to system stability. Invariably, some conflict will arise to trigger a two-against-one dynamic that must yield to either the stable stand-off of bipolarity, as during the Cold War, or the emergence through decisive conflict of an acknowledged unipolar hegemon, as in the early post-Cold War period.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

8:39AM

WPR's The New Rules: In Globalized World, Time Is on America's Side

Second-to-last column at WPR.

There is a popular tendency to characterize globalization as an elite-based conspiracy or as something imposed by greedy outsiders upon unsuspecting native populations, hence the enduring belief in the possibility of its systemic reversal. In truth, the spread of modern globalization reflects a bottom-up demand function, not a top-down supply imposition. People simply crave connectivity -- in all its physical and virtual forms -- as well as the freedom of choice that it unleashes. This simple truth is worth remembering when we contemplate America’s global role in the decades ahead.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

11:32AM

West Hemisphere way behind on integrating intra-regional trade

Per the 10 March Economist editorial on Latin America's growing fears about being recaptured by China as just a source of commodities (deindustrialization) and per the recent Wikistrat sim on North America's Energy Export Boom where we discussed, in one master narrative, the notion of NAFTA using the lure of cheaper and cleaner energy to re-energize the Free Trade Area of the Americas initiative.

Now, you have to understand that this chart is misleading, because it counts intra-EU trade while not counting interstate trade within the multinational union known as the US.  If the stats were equalized on that scale, then the NorthAm numbers would be unreal.

But larger point about Latam's numbers being small (and presumably the W Hem numbers being commensurately low) is valid.  The US and the rest have not made the regional trade integration effort that is possible here, as South America is beginning to recognize its mistake is not pursuing FTAA.

People will paint this as de-globalization, but it's not a binary choice.  Globalization tends to push regions to up their regional integration for all sort of reasons, the primary one being the title of the editorial here: "unity is strength" in trade negoations.

But the long-term advantage here is substantial: if you want to grow, then you want to have high trade flows with faster-growing neighbors first and foremost.  China is doing that in SE Asia but US is not doing the same in W Hem, thus the strategic impulse now to go after things like reviving FTAA.

9:58AM

WPR's New Rules: Worried by China's Rise? Watch Out for its Decline

Much of what drives America’s current phobias regarding China stems from the dual -- and fantastically linear -- assumptions of America’s terminal decline and China’s perpetual ascension. We are thus led to believe that China no longer needs the United States and that America, in turn, can do nothing -- short of increasing military pressure -- to constrain the Middle Kingdom’s rise to global hegemony. On all scores, nothing could be further from the truth. China and the United States suffer a level of strategic interdependency that is vast and shows no signs of reduction. Simply put, America cannot stay rich without China, and China cannot get rich without America.

Read the entire post at World Politics Review.

12:01AM

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

 

3:04PM

Quoted in Reuters piece on Eurozone break-up scenario

 

LONDON | Thu Nov 10, 2011 9:54am EST

(Reuters) - Any euro zone failure would send shock waves around the globe, shifting the balance of geopolitical power and perhaps prompting a fundamental reassessment of what the world's future might look like.

. . .

Suddenly, pundits, policymakers and other observers find themselves questioning one of their most fundamental assumptions -- that an increasingly united Europe would be a key player in a newly multipolar world.

"You already have one of the great pillars of globalization, the United States, entering a period of difficulty and looking inward," said Thomas Barnett, US-based chief strategist of political risk consultancy Wikistrat -- which is being asked by several private clients to urgently model scenarios. "Now one of the other pillars, Europe, looks about to implode."

That, he said, could leave the continent's powers -- who only a handful of years ago made up much of the G7 group of largest economies -- increasingly sidelined as China, India, Brazil and others rose.

. . .

Wikistrat chief strategist Barnett says much depends on what emerges if the Euro falls. If, as many suspect, a rump euro zone around Germany remains whilst Mediterranean states go their own way, the whole geopolitical focus of the continent could shift.

The northern element, he suggests, could focus its attention more to the east, giving priority to what could either become a corporatist or confrontational relationship with Moscow. The southern states, in contrast, might integrate much more closely with North Africa and the rest of the Mediterranean -- a region perhaps dominated by a newly assertive Turkey.

The euro itself should still be salvageable, he says, but it may just be that the political will is simply not there.

"It's essentially a common-law marriage that never quite made it to the church and now seems to be moving toward a split," said Barnett. "It shouldn't be necessary, you would have hoped that it could be avoided, but we are living through an age of political immaturity."

. . .

Find the entire article here.

12:17PM

Wikistrat's "The World According to Tom Barnett" 2011 brief, Part 7 (Q&A on religion)

Continuing the segments from my Sept 2011 presentation of the brief to an international military audience in the Washington DC area, first cluster of questions focused on religion, and since I deleted that slide sequence for time reasons in the main presenation, I had it teed up at the end to cover this contingency.

8:54AM

WPR's The New Rules: Obama Must Avoid the 'China Threat' Trap

No credible international affairs specialist would contend that the 2012 presidential election will hinge on U.S. foreign policy, given the state of the U.S. economy and the widespread social anger that one sees bubbling up across the country. What's more, Americans -- if not Beltway partisan pundits -- have achieved a certain sense of consensus on foreign policy under President Barack Obama, whose leadership has displayed a palpable "give them what they want" dynamic that reflects his desire to keep overseas issues on the back burner while he focuses on domestic ones.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

9:57AM

WPR's The New Rules: A Look Ahead at the Geography of Global Security

As part of a “big think” forecast project commissioned by an intelligence community sponsor, I’ve begun to think about the future geography of global security. As often with this kind of project, I find myself falling into list-making mode as I contemplate slides for the brief. So here are nine big structural issues that I think any such presentation must include . . .

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

9:09AM

Time's Battleland: Arab Spring with same impact as "big bang strategy": Islam at war with self - not West

 

Nice piece in the NYT at the end of September pointing out that the primary impact of the Arab Spring is that, in giving people chances to rule themselves and not be subject to dictators, Islamic activists find themselves splintering from within . . .

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

12:01AM

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Resilience Can Rise to Future Threats

Last month I spent a couple of hours on the phone being interviewed for the next iteration of the National Intelligence Council's global futures project. This one imagines the world in 2030, and the interview was part of the organization's early polling process of experts around the world. I've participated similarly in previous iterations, and I've always found the NIC's questions fascinating for how they reveal the group's primary fears about the future.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

8:00AM

Chart of the Day: Slowing trade = slowing global economy = slowing globalization

FT story that matches a previous Economist bit about the slowing of traffic through the Suez (HT Dan Hare on latter).

As I've noted here before, the more than 10% drop in 2009 was basically recovered in 2010. For now, the trade growth still forecast through the rest of 2011 is more than twice as high as the 2008 total, but we are headed in the wrong direction.

In releasing these figures, the WTO hinted that the fiscal crisis in Europe is much to blame (uncertainty depresses production depresses trade).

The danger now - again - is that trade protectionism begins to creep back in, especially of the monetary sort, as the BRICS are getting hot under the collar over the hot money pressuring their systems - Brazil especially.

10:40AM

WPR's The New Rules: Time to Worry About Over-Eating, not Over-Population

The real clash of civilizations in the 21st century will be not over religion, but over food. As the emerging East and surging South achieve appreciable amounts of disposable income, they're increasingly taking on a Western-style diet. This bodes poorly for the world on multiple levels, with the most-alarmist Cassandras warning about imminent resource wars. But the more immediate and realistic concern is the resulting health costs, which will inevitably trigger a rule-set clash between nanny-state types hell-bent on "reining in" a number of globalized industries -- agriculture, food and beverages, restaurants, health care and pharmaceuticals -- and those preferring a more free-market/libertarian stance.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

8:49AM

WPR's The New Rules: Credit the U.S., Not the U.N., for More Peaceful World

Thanks to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the wars they spawned, many people around the world think they're living through the most dangerous, violent and strategically uncertain period in human history. Well, that simply isn't true, as the most recent Human Security Report from Canada's Simon Fraser University makes clear. Entitled, "The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War," the 2009-2010 edition of the annual report marshals a ton of solid data that proves our world is less violent than ever and that it has "become far less insecure over the past 20 years." 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

12:25PM

Chart of the Day: globalization's greatest victory

The rise of a global middle class, as depicted by The Economist (HT, Richard Jefferson).

People ask, what did America do for the world? It set the conditions for this to happen - and then it defended that system from those who would do it harm. The US is only world power in history whose primary goal has been the peaceful rise of other great powers through trade and development.

9:27AM

Time's Battleland: Globalization at the barrel of a gun

Careful where you aim that weapon, buddy!

That phrase, with its powerful imagery, was often tossed at me following the publication of my 2004 book, The Pentagon's New Map. In it, I argued that globalization's expansion was, and would continue to be, the primary cause of unrest and conflict in the world, as connectivity - in all its forms - extended itself into the non-integrated regions and triggered rising expectations (as in, "If the Indians and Chinese are getting richer, then why do we continue to submit to this incompetent government that keeps us unduly disconnected from all that opportunity?").

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland.

9:37AM

WPR's The New Rules: The Race for Global Leadership in the Age of Anger 

Ian Bremmer, the founder and head of Eurasia Group (for which I work as an analyst), has argued that we are living in a "G-Zero" world, or one in which there is no genuine great-power leadership. From the perspective of political science, it is hard to disagree, as anyone reading a newspaper these days can attest. Still, the historian in me says this situation cannot last for too long. My reasoning here has nothing to do with the global correlation of military force, since thanks to globalization's emerging middle class, "butter" will inevitably emerge as the winner over "guns." 

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.

10:57AM

Our fiscal failure eventually achieves the global rebalancing sought

FT op-ed by former senior Chinese central bank official.

The big lesson of the past few weeks, he says, is that China must end its dependency on the dollar.

China has run a current account surplus and a capital account surplus almost uninterruptedly for more than two decades. Inevitably this has led to an accumulation of foreign reserves. It is clear, however, that running these surpluses persistently is not in China’s best interests. A developing country, with per capita income ranking below the 100th in the world, lending to the world’s richest country for decades is not reasonable. Even worse is the fact that, as one of the largest foreign direct investment-absorbing countries in the world, China essentially lends money it borrowed at a high cost back to its creditors, by buying US Treasuries, rather than importing goods and services.

Internationalizing the yuan, stimulus packages, letting it rise slowly, bundling up all those bucks in sovereign wealth funds - nothing has really stopped the preciptious accumulation because the government remains committted to keeping the yuan low, seeing in inflation an unacceptable risk.

But by staying so married to the dollar, it runs the same risk extended, as the US will inevitably inflate its way out of a certain amount of its unsustainable debt.

As Yongding puts it, "The longer it continues, the more violent and destructive the final adjustment will be."

Of course, the same holds for the US in this game of chicken.

12:38PM

Leading indicator of India eventually surpassing China as globalization's factory floor

Fabulous Economist story entitled, "India's Guangdong."

Short explanation from me b/c fighting ear infection:

Demographic dividend huge in India, and will stretch deep into mid-century.  China's, by comparison, had heyday from 1980-2010 and now starts slow decline.  China, for example, loses about 1/3 of labor entering workforce over next decade - decline finally set in motion by one-child policy.  India surpasses China in labor around 2030, and has 50% more by 2050.  SE Asia on similar trajectory.

All comes to say: China, as it moves up value chain (all those Foxconn robots!), exports jobs to India and SE Asia - inevitably.  Good and bad thing for China, just like it's been good and bad for US last 30 years.

As I watch this, I keep saying to myself: where is the leading indicator of how India actually gets around to seriously industrializing?

That's why this article so cool:  says Gujarat is the state to watch.  It's India's Guangdong.

So stay tuned.

10:56AM

WPR's The New Rules: U.S. Must Get Back in Touch With Its True Exceptionalism

This month's debt-ceiling deal in Washington did little to quell the growing chorus of complaints around the world concerning America's continued inability to live within its means. As those complaints invariably translate into corporate hedging, government self-defense strategies, credit rating drops -- Standard and Poor's is already in the bag -- and market short-selling, the U.S. will most assuredly be made to feel the world's mounting angst. This is both right and good, even as it is unlikely to change our path anytime soon: Until some internal political rebalancing occurs, America will invariably stick to its current cluster of painfully outdated strategic assumptions.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review.