Thomas Barnett's Blueprint for The Pentagon's New Map

I met my friend and fellow blogger, Mark Safranski of http://zenpundit.blogspot.com, during a debate thread at H-Net’s Diplo channel. Mark’s wide ranging historical and strategic knowledge have led him into fascination with Thomas Barnett’s concepts for defining America’s challenges and proposed pro-active measures. At his blog, Mark and fellows in favor and critical of Barnett carry on lively explorations of its nuances and applications. Mark gets into many other subjects, with usual brilliance and incisive language.

Personally, I find Barnett rather too theoretical, and impractical in some respects. Nonetheless, theory often shapes perceptions, and then actions, and needn't be taken in whole to advance understanding. As you will see below, being familiar with Barnett is essential to understanding an important strand of U.S. defense thinking.

If nothing else, Barnett’s prominence provides beleaguered ROTC and active military graduate students with a significant, academically respectable theme about which to write term papers and with which to defend themselves against scholarly antiwarriors who’ve never been in military service. I am told that Barnett is quite giving of his time and helpful to such students.

Now, I’ll let Mark briefly outline Barnett’s thinking:

October will see the release of Blueprint For Action, the second tome of former Defense Department strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett and the logical continuation of the ideas laid out in his first book, the bestselling The Pentagon’s New Map.

The influential Dr. Barnett has already briefed a sizable percentage of the U.S. military’s new active duty flag officers, captured the attention of Donald Rumsfeld and watched the Pentagon grasp at his idea of “ System Administration” in the new Quadrennial Review. Michael Barone called Barnett someone who “…may turn out to be one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time” while David Ignatius of the Washington Post has raised comparisons to “Tom Friedman and Karl von Clauswitz”.

What is this man’s “grand strategy”, who holds no official post and spreads his message by word of blog and from an editorial perch at Esquire magazine? What are the implications of “PNM” for promoting democracy?

PNM strategy advocates the United States forging a new, non-zero sum, international security “Rule-set” linked to the realities of globalization designed to “shrink the Gap”. Barnett divides the world into Core, Seam and Non-Integrating Gap states depending on their level of “connectivity” to the global economy. Old Core states are the advanced, mostly liberal, capitalist democracies of the West and Japan while New Core countries like India, China and Russia have charted course toward economic liberalization and integration. Gap states, by contrast, are a Hobbesian nightmare of isolation and cruelty. Typified by sub-Saharan Africa, North Korea and much of the Mideast, the Gap is ruled by dictators, racked by civil wars, major humanitarian disasters and state failure. The Gap exists mostly outside the world economy except for tightly controlled governmental or transnational criminal channels and has populations that are generally desperately poor and unfree. Seam states ride the fence between these two worlds, nations in transition.

Security challenges for the Core revolve around four Core-Gap “ flows”:

· Migration of people from the Gap to the Core
· Movement of energy from the Gap to the Core.
· Movement of money from the Old Core to the New Core
· The export of security from the Core to the Gap – that only America can provide.

For the hardest cases of intervention, Barnett proposes two inter-related armed forces:
“Leviathan” – the mostly American, overwhelmingly destructive, high tech military; and “ System Administration”, a Core-wide, robust, nation-building force for reconstruction, peacekeeping and post-conflict “connecting-up” to the global economy.

Is this vision good or bad for promoting democracy overseas? In Blue Print For Action, Barnett states that “Democracy is not a means, but an end” but how pro-democracy activists will interpret PNM will have much to do with their own time-horizons. Longitudinally, Barnett’s strategy to “shrink the Gap” by promoting connectivity creates a global strategic environment supportive of fragile democracies and hostile toward violently anti-democratic regimes like North Korea. Moreover, the Core Rule-set that Barnett wants to see exported to the Gap is the liberal, democratic, market model.

There is a fairly ruthless streak of utilitarianism that runs through Barnett’s strategy that will unnerve those who care passionately about democracy in a particular country – this describes many activists - rather than about making changes systemically that help democratization everywhere. Barnett would boldly cut many a sharp corner in order to lock-in the major powers like India, China, Russia, and Japan into an “Asian NATO” and irrevocable commitment to greater liberalization, political reform and economic integration. To his critics who would protest his pursuing connectivity before democracy, Barnett offers a supreme confidence that making globalization irreversible will also make dictatorship untenable.

Thank you, Mark, for an excellent capsule.