Thomas P.M. Barnett

[kandrathe]

I watched his presentation and interview twice this last week on CSPAN and found his world view to be thoughtful and compelling. I was interested if anyone else has heard of him, and what they think of his stuff. His thoughts and book seem to be getting quite a bit of attention from some high level people in Washington.

The CSPAN presentation
rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/ter/ter122004_barnett.rm?mode=compact

His Web Site

The Book

In a nutshell;

"Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. " What he see is an emerging set of rules in the global economy where 2/3 are players, and 1/3 are left out. What we need to do is to integrate the gap and get them up to speed with the game.

He explains how and why up to 9/10/2001 that the US was still mostly aligned for fighting "global nuclear war", and was marginally capable of fighting one or perhaps two limited theatre wars. Our military is designed and probably the best in the world at kicking butt. It is so important that we have a cabinet level post and a department of War(or Defense). For those nations that are in the core, who we get along with well we have another high level Department of Peace (or State). However, as we see time after time in the wake of this butt kicking there is a void (i.e. nation building) that the US does not engage in and has no "Department of ". Barnett calls this the Department of Transition, or the Department of Everything Else. It would be this Departments job to rehabilitate a failed state back into a player within the global economy.

I especially enjoyed how he diagrams the disconnects between the UNSC, to the US needing to resurrect the tired old mantra of "imminent threat" to try to justify ousting Saddam, and when that fails they resort to "Look out, he's got a gun!". And, then the "Well, I thought he had a gun. It looked alot like a gun." The reason? There is no executive authority beyond the UNSC to make a decision as to what the neccesary course of action should be.

So, then when the decision is made to actually do something, either by the UN with the US's help, or the US with some token help, the US goes in and kicks butt. Now there is another gap. On the heels of the military force there should have been an even bigger peace keeping and nation building force, and without it we see looting, the break down of civil authority, the entrance of insurgents, missing critical materials, etc. The third gap is the extraction of the transition team, or what is the exit strategy.