Dr. Thomas Barnett on Chapter One of the Pentagon's New Map. (transcript of on-air interview)

HH: This is a special hour on the Hugh Hewitt Show, the first of our eight conversations with Thomas P.M. Barnett. Dr. Barnett is one of the country’s preeminent grand strategists and military theorists. He’s the author of the Pentagon’s New Map: War And Peace In The 21st Century, one of the most influential, if not the most influential books inside of the Pentagon. And over the next eight weeks at this hour, we are going to be talking with him about one chapter at a time. Dr. Barnett, welcome back to the program.

HH: Let’s start with the obvious. Given that you’re a Packers fan and not a Browns fan, why should we trust you about anything?

TB: Well, I’m going to plead genetic predisposition on that one. My grandfather was the lawyer for the Green Bay Packers the first 40 years of the franchise, and actually is the guy who came up with the idea of making them a publicly held corporation. So he’s the reason why they’re still in the world’s smallest city market for a professional sports team.

HH: All right. That’s decent enough. Let’s get to the serious stuff. Let’s begin, very obviously, what is grand strategy, and why do superpowers need one?

TB: I think, you know, my nutshell definition of grand strategy is to think about war within the context of everything else. And I think that’s been less an issue in, say, the two major wars we fought in the 20th Century, World War I and World War II, because those were all-out, fully committed, total wars. What we’ve endured since the end of the Second World War is this overarching framework of mutual assured destruction, and the nuclear standoff. And that forced us, progressively over time, sometimes better than others, to factor in other aspects of human interaction, most notably with the rise of what we now call globalization, the underlying economic trends which force us to kind of reconnect our definitions of war with our definitions of peace. They became kind of abstract, in some way, across the Cold War, because the concept of all-out war became prohibitively expensive. But now that we’re past that dangerous period, I would argue, and the threat of global nuclear Armageddon is gone, we’ve lost the sense of identity between U.S. national security and a definition of global security. So it’s crucial, as we move further beyond this 9/11 experience, which haunts us still, I would argue, to kind of reconnect a definition of what makes America great, and why we want to live here, and why we want to keep it safe, and what makes the world great, and why we want to live in it and keep it safe.

HH: To illustrate for the audience what a grand strategy is, take Great Britain prior to World War I. What was the United Kingdom’s grand strategy up until the Great War?

TB: Well, I guess I would define their grand strategy as maintaining a certain primacy in terms of military power, and using that primacy to extend their economic empire. And their definition, not unlike the famous phrase, what’s good for GM is good for America, was sort of what’s good for the British Empire should be good for the world. And they really were the source code of what most people describe as the first great globalization period, that a lot of people date from roughly 1870 up unto about 1914, and you saw that kind of massive multi-decade civil war rage across Europe, that eventually left the planet so scarred, so defeated in terms of the major empires, that it was really only the United States and the Soviet Union left standing. And it was at that point that you start to see the American source code definition of globalization really begin to emerge. And by that, I mean I think the model for the way states interact is in many ways foretold by the experience of the United States coming together, and growing across the course of its history, that the free movement of goods and services, and the collective security, and the high transparency we have between states in this country really represents sort of a source code for the globalization that survived that first negative definition of…in terms of colonial powers in Europe, and really gives us the possibilities we face today. To make that argument is to sort of reach for a definition, post-9/11, of why our defense of globalization and our, in effect, bodyguard role, in terms of the U.S. Military, is crucial to understand. We’re not just waging a war against terrorists. We’re not just waging a war against radical extremists, or the global Salafi jihadist movement. What we’re really doing is we’re defending the spread of the ideals that informed and animated this country so successfully, and are really be replicated in Europe, and ultimately, I believe, will be replicated in other major portions of the world as well.

HH: One more example of grand strategy. Did the Soviet Union from ’46 forward have one that failed, Thomas Barnett? Or did they just simply not think about where they were headed as a nation and an empire?

TB: Well, the underlying flaw in the Soviet theory, and I mean, we faced this version…in many ways, we face it again with the radical Salafi jihadist movement, is that there’s the success of the early entrance into capitalism, okay? And then we face the difficulty of when capitalism starts to impinge upon those parts of the world that aren’t initially successful at it. One is a catch up strategy for that part of the world. And Leninism offered a catch up strategy. It was kind of the extreme dictatorship by a single party, and rapid industrialization. In effect, Lenin took Marx and turned him on his head. Marx thought that capitalism was going to self destruct at the height of its creative powers. When that didn’t happen, say, in the failed socialist revolution in Germany, Lenin said no, we’ve got to go back in time, and we’ve got to catch a country before it becomes too capitalistic. Mao did one better than Lenin and said no, we’ve got to go back and catch them while they’re still in the villages. And what we’re looking at now with the radical Salafi jihadist movement is again, even another attempt to go further back in time, and make the argument that you really want to catch up and surpass the evil infidel, in this instance, life of the capitalist West. You’ve got to go back to a perfect time defined as roughly the 7th Century, the first two or three centuries after the life of the prophet Mohammed. So we’ve met over time, I would argue, and the Soviets were one version of this, an increasingly desperate sort of back to the future promise of a competing, alternative ideology. And that’s why when I look at the radical Salafi jihadist movement, I see that it’s just another iteration of Leninism, another iteration of Maoism, but the weakest one we’ve faced yet, because they don’t really offer much of an alternative.

HH: You know, I noticed on your blog today, which is linked at Hughhewitt.com, that you are comparing present day Iran to Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, with their brain drain and their paralysis in so many respects.

HH: Perhaps a little bit more dangerous than Brezhnev, because they had much more to defend than fatalists do. Let’s get some terms out, Dr. Barnett.

TB: Well, the brief, in the way I describe it, and the way it’s used colloquially in the national security community, is standing up in front of an audience, in front of Power Point slides, and walking them through some argument, some strategic argument, or some budgetary argument. For me, it usually involves some sort of grand strategic argument, meaning I’m trying to weave together definitions of security, definitions of politics, definitions of economics and societal technological change. And it’s really…I compare it in some ways to the weatherman standing in front of the screen, delivering you the weather. He’s flashing a lot of images, there’s a certain timing element to it. It’s really a performance designed to march somebody through a complex, in my instance, typically, a conceptual argument. And it’s a strange, unique sort of following that this particular communication mode has inside the Pentagon.

TB: Well, the brief…typically, you start with the lowerlings inside the Pentagon, and it’s whoever owns the issue that you’re talking about, a program manager, or somebody who does policy for the U.S. Navy, say, or U.S. Marine Corps. And you come in with a vision that says here’s the lay of the land, here’s what we’re looking at, in terms of challenges, here’s an argument for a strategic way ahead. And if you successfully sell that person, the question you want to hear that person say is, who has seen this brief?

TB: Because the key question is, you want to get past that person, every person in the Pentagon, in a hierarchal sense, is a gatekeeper for the one above. And so what you do, if you’re successful, is you brief number 10 on the chain, he says who has seen this brief? If you can’t say number 9, you brief number 9, and you work your way up the chain as far as you can go.

HH: And how willing is the United States government, especially the Pentagon, to engage in sort of deep, strategic assessment and rethinking?

TB: Well, it’s hard in the sense that so many of the groups that you would naturally identify as long range strategic thinkers inside the Pentagon tend to get caught up in this annual budgetary drill, and this annual strategic review drill. There’s so many reports, and so many Power Point slides, and so many point papers to crank out, often they do only marginal changes to the existing sort of conventional wisdom. And real, out of the box sort of thinking is hard to sell, in many ways, because you have to accept the fact that if you come out with a new vision, you may challenge people’s definition of the current force structure. And by that, I mean the mix of ships and aircraft and the stuff that we buy. And when you do that, then you’re really getting into the guts of the military industrial complex, and you’re asking for wrenching long term change.

TB: Well, the concept of the core is just a definition of where globalization has extended deep connectivity throughout the world. I mean, our definition of the core, for example, through the Cold War, would have been simply the West, okay? North America, Western Europe and Japan. We preserved, and we integrated, resurrected, Western Europe and Japan after the Second World War, in an effort to box the Soviets in. It was the economic component of our containment strategy. But that globalization, while very successful, only about 10% of the world’s population by 1980 encompassed as much as 2/3rds of the planet’s productive power and economic wealth. That core grew dramatically across the 1980’s, and across the 1990’s. It started first and foremost with the decision by Deng Xiaoping in China to open China up to the outside world, and to choose markets over socialism. But it also includes the emancipation of the Soviet Bloc, it includes India, it includes industrialized Asia, Australia, New Zealand, it includes South Africa, post-Apartheid. And it includes three big pillars down in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. So it’s the construct of looking at the world, and saying where has globalization extended itself in terms of deep connectivity? On that basis, what can we define as countries that have joined an overarching rule set that says freer trade, freer markets progressively over time, more transparency on security issues over time, and a definition of collective security that says there’s not going to be wars between we the great powers 1) because there’s the threat of nuclear war hanging over us, which really outlaws the utility of great power war in its traditional definition, but 2) because we’re all moving in roughly the same direction in terms of the acceptance of markets. If you think about that large core of globalization, it’s roughly half the world’s countries, but it equates to almost 90% of the world’s GDP. So the old West, the new East, and key pillars from the south.

HH: In chapter one of the Pentagon’s New Map, you write, “An enduring conflict between those who want to see disconnected societies like Saddam’s Iraq join the global community, defined by globalization’s functioning core, and others who will do whatever it takes in terms of violence to prevent these societies from being, in their minds, assimilated into a sacrilegious, global economic empire.” Isn’t there a middle ground in there, Dr. Barnett, of countries caught between the core and those forces of disconnectedness?

TB: Well, there’s always the question of pace. I mean, we like to think of globalization as a foreign policy issue. But globalization is really a question of domestic politics and domestic economics. It’s about how much you’re going to open yourself up to outside forces, because as you do that, those outside forces naturally have a tendency to exert more influence and power over your country than you can possibly exert over that larger process. It’s a fairly comfortable process for a country like the United States, because we’re such a huge domestic market. But if you look at even a place like China, the amount of change going on in a situation like that, Argentina, Brazil, what’s going on in Europe, it asks for a willingness to let social interactions, and economic models, be dramatically redefined. There’s a tendency to say either you go fast like the Americans, and try to create more winners than losers, or there’s a sort of go slow approach that the Europeans advocate, limit the number of losers, and on that basis, accept more social harmony at the price of a slower growth rate. But I think in the future, what we’re going to find is that the countries that have most recently joined the global economy, the ones that are experiencing the most change, are going to give us insights as to how fast countries can adapt themselves to globalization. And the bad part of it is, by most people’s definition, is that most countries are going to be able to open up to globalization by maintaining themselves in a social order sense, by having a single party state. And if you think about it, that’s how most of them have done it.

HH: Now I want to explain to people, globalization is, Thomas Friedman’s understanding, openness to market forces and free trade. Is that a good baseline to understand it by?

TB: I think it is. And again, he doesn’t push the concept of democracy first and foremost. Neither do I, because I think you really get democracy from markets more than you get markets from democracy. I mean, I’m a bit of an economic determinist in that regard. I think we flowered as a democracy as our market activity forced that kind of freedom, politically, across our country in terms of our development. I mean, we fought wars over it.

HH: Well, you’re echoing what Richard Nixon wrote in The Real War, which was soft détente, push freedom and markets into the Soviet Union, and they will crack eventually, because market forces do that to dictatorial situations. But when you look at China, Dr. Barnett, saying we don’t want Google, we want a PRC version of Google, is that more connectedness or less connectedness?

TB: Well, there’s always going to be a trade-off, okay? The more connectivity, typically, you’re going to see a government seek more control over the content. Why? Because they can’t handle all the free images that come along with it. I mean, globalization, and the networks it brings, tend to be gender neutral, okay? So when they come into any society that was previously unopened up, okay, by definition, traditional, that traditional society tends to be defined as male control over the female, by and large, in economics and politics, in family life. And when you come in with globalization, and those gender neutral networks, by definition, you’re empowering women disproportionately to men. And frankly, that’s what we find when we analyze the kind of radical jihadist movements’ resistance, and the fears of people in the Middle East. It’s not that they don’t admire democracy. They want it. It’s not that they don’t want markets. They want that kind of personal freedom. What scares most people, when globalization comes in, is the social change. You go in with those kinds of markets and networks, I guarantee you, you are messing with people’s definitions of wives and lovers and mothers and sisters and daughters and families and education, and the definition of the good life. And when you do that, it’s typically going to be educated young men who look at that package and say you know what? This is not what I signed up for, and I’ll be willing to fight and kill and die under the most perverse conditions to prevent the social change that I find reprehensible.

HH: Now is it your position that we ought, as a grand strategy, to be pursuing globalization, and thus greater connectivity, at economics first, and then wait for the flowering of democracy at countries’ own time?

TB: Right. I mean, my trinity is, I define it now, is it’s connectivity first, okay? Get the economic connectivity, connect the masses of any country to the outside world. The second order of business has to be, and we’re seeing this, I think, in the long war, reciprocity. There needs to be freedom of religion, okay? And democracy tends to follow, I would argue, after those two preconditions have been met. And you’re going to have to accept that globalization when it comes in, and that first economic connectivity, it’s going to come with a lot of Pollutus content, as far as the locals are concerned. So it’s going to be natural for them to reach for, you know, taboo based controls over content. And they want their MTV, they’re just not sure they want Britney Spears naked staring at them.

HH: Before I get to your calls and questions, one more definitional issue, Dr. Barnett.

TB: Well, my use of the term rule set is just a way of kind of bundling up the notion that that…for any activity, you know, human life, American football, the U.S. legal system, how you run a business, there are rules connected to that activity. Some of them are formal, the ones that get written down, some of them are informal, the kind of conventional wisdom and the insider knowledge that everybody has. And what I argue is, when rule sets get out of whack in the world, that’s when you have security issues and danger, and you tend to have war, to kind of, in many ways, seek equilibrium. My definition of the 90’s, and in effect, what went wrong with it, what it got us, sort of the 9/11 shock to the system, is that economic rule sets raced ahead of political rule sets. And technological rule sets raced ahead of security rule sets. We connected up the world as a whole in terms of economics and technology and networks faster than our political understanding and our security understanding could keep pace. And so vulnerabilities were created. An extreme vulnerability was revealed, for example, on 9/11, in terms of a very deliberate attack against our infrastructure. And what it did was not only create the damage on the ground right there, 9/11, New York City, Washington, D.C., but it sent huge repercussions, such repercussions throughout our systems in terms of the psychic damage, and the sense of vulnerability created, that we created, in effect, a rule set reset. We said oh my God, we don’t have enough rules in this area and that area, so we started making rules like crazy, very fast. We slapped one together domestically. We call it the Patriot Act. And Bush proposed one internationally. He called it the law of preemption, in effect, okay? And both of them were trying to define a new minimum standard for stability.

HH: And they have not yet been bought into by the rest of the West, or the connected core, much less the disconnected gap?

TB: Well, and it’s because we have to acknowledge the notion, and it’s an argument I make in the second book, Blueprint For Action, that we really have to contextualize the employment of that awesome power known as the U.S. Military. We’ve been entrusted dramatically, I would argue, since the end of the Cold War, with having the world’s sole military superpower status. Nobody’s really trying to build a force that’s anywhere close to our reach and our firepower and our capacity to roam the world and wage war at will. But in exchange for allowing us to keep that disproportional status, we have to submit to some larger understanding of it’s under these conditions you get to use that tremendous power, and it needs to be some understanding as to what the repercussions and what the responsibilities of not just the United States, but other advanced powers to deal with the aftermath of that kind of situation. That’s the rule set that hasn’t emerged yet, although we’re getting closer.

HH: Let’s talk with Dave in Colorado, first call to Thomas Barnett. You’re on, Dave. Welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Dave: Thank you, Hugh. I want to thank you for having such a great guest, and having such a intelligent discussion on grand strategy. I’m a military officer, working long range strategic planning for a command that deals back, of course, with the Pentagon. And everything he said is right on about non-material versus material solutions. As soon as you start to try to make wide swings in non-material approach, or a different approach, you affect the juggernaut of the things that you purchase. I would like to make the point that often we do, we are able to make some changes, and they usually are coincident with other big social event, military event, something that you could tie to and justify. He’s right on there. I’m going to find your book, sir, and make it a part of my education. I appreciate you talking about things in grand strategy like instruments of power, like diplomatic, military, informational, economic, these are all very important things that tie into how we move our big, grand strategy forward, and I’m so tired in the media of hearing these simplistic bumper stickers, and somebody’s got another strategy, and they expect it to be all military or all information, or all diplomatic. I just thank you, Hugh, for bringing this great topic forward, and bringing this guest to the radio.

HH: The next seven weeks as well, Dave. Thanks for your service. Dr. Barnett, is that a common reaction among uniformed military?

TB: Well, you know, they’ve been bumping up against the reality ever since the end of the Cold War, that it’s not just enough to win the war anymore. If you don’t follow through on the peace, then heck, you might as well just schedule the next decapitation regime-toppling visit seven, eight years hence. I mean, we went to Iraq, we went back to Iraq. We went to Haiti, we’ve been back to Haiti already. We went to Somalia, and we are sort of back in Somalia through our support with Ethiopia there.

TB: Unless you fix the aftermath, and connect the country, leave it more connected than you found it, the problems and the lack of stability that led rise to the initial conflict just repeats itself time and time again.

HH: Dr. Barnett, when we went to break, you were saying it’s not enough to decapitate an enemy regime. If you leave it there without connecting it to the core, that group of economically developed, globalized countries, it will in fact revert into perhaps at least as bad a situation. Does that argue for a prolonged commitment of American men and material to Iraq this time?

TB: It does, I mean, because we’ve known for years now, from looking at countries post-conflict, post-disaster, post-civil strife, but the recovery process typically extends as much as ten or twelve years. That corresponds, by the way, to most estimations of what it takes to defeat a stubborn insurgency. It’s a long term process of nation building, which is a controversial subject. We’re very snake-bitten on it, because of our effort in Vietnam. But the key thing I’d like to note in terms of differences between Iraq and Vietnam is with Vietnam, we had superpowers funding the other side, and we really don’t have that here. We have a much less powerful opponent, in terms of the radical Salafi jihadist movement, which in many ways is really a parasite that tends to come into conflict situations, so that if we abandon Iraq to that kind of sectarian violence, we’re really, in many ways, turning it over to become an outpost what will inevitably draw us back in this long war against radical extremists.

HH: Now in chapter one of the Pentagon’s New Map, you express a lot of admiration for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for their diplomacy and unexpected overtures to the People’s Republic of China and arms control.

HH: And then you write, “We need a visionary now who understands that we’ve already reached the mountaintop.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

TB: Well, we’ve reached sort of the mountaintop of a grand historical arc, I argue, in terms of a relationship with Islam, that’s really been brewing ever since we’ve settled the basic dynamics of the Cold War, which I argue happened when we first cut the first SALT treaty with the Soviets back in 1972. We basically said you know, we’re not going to try to blow up your regime, you’re not going to try to blow up our regime, we’re going to have a basic détente in Europe. Yes, we’ll have rivalries in the rest of the world, but that’s the basic rule set, and both sides can feel confident that the other side’s not really out to destroy it. On that basis, we really achieved what Kennan had always wanted with containment, which is wait for the Soviets to rot from within. And as we advance in the information age, the Soviets couldn’t follow because of the freedom unleashed, and the Soviets couldn’t follow because of the freedom unleashed, and boom, the whole thing went down without a shot in 1989. Commensurate with that settling, and the peaking of the Cold War in roughly the early 70’s, we started a new historical arc, because as the global economy moved in the direction of expanding, and we added what we now describe as those three billion new capitalists in places like Russia and India and China and Brazil and other places, we created kind of a commodities boom that we’re watching remake markets around the world right now, and have huge influence. And we created new demands and new encroachments on parts of the world that previously were left pretty much untouched by the globalization up to that point. And the key thing, the key region of the world that was reasonably left untouched until really quite recently was the Middle East. But when you see the combination of that kind of encroaching embrace of globalization, coupled with the fact that you no longer had the Soviets supporting terrorist networks in the region, and a lot of these groups that previously professed Marxist values now had to reinvent themselves along religious lines, you saw a reawakening of Arab nationalism, and a reawakening, as you always see when globalization comes into traditional societies, of identity politics. You know, you don’t really define yourself much until you have to define yourself with regard to the outside world. So when you see this expansion of the global economy begin to unfold over the 80’s and 90’s, it was inevitable that we were going to be drawn into the kind of identity politics and struggles and conflicts, wars of the spirit, Francis Fukuyama likes to call them, that have been raging inside the Middle East for the last ten to fifteen years, and really peak when we make the decision that you know what? We’re mad as hell after 9/11, we’re not going to take it anymore, and we’re going to go in and lay a big bang on this part of the world, try to shake things up by taking down the biggest, baddest actor in the region, and establishing the possibility of a new order. And that was, to me, the most explicit and most logical rationale behind our decision to topple Saddam. It was to create the possibility of a new economic and political order in the Middle East, and that’s not something that gets done by Tuesday. It’s not something that gets done by this administration’s end. It’s the kind of effort we made in terms of integrating Europe, say, after the Second World War, and the effort we’ve made across the 1990’s to integrate former portions of the Soviet Bloc. It’s a long term effort, and there will be instances where we have to use military force.

Steve: This is Brad in Los Angeles. (Hugh hit the wrong button) I was calling to see if you think a 9/11-style attack could have taken place 20 years before it did, or in 40 years before it did?

TB: I don’t think so, unless you’re going to talk nuclear weapons, in the sense that there wasn’t the levels of connectivity that we have now. I mean, I like to use the example of Christ dies, and by my faith, was resurrected. That news takes centuries, and in some instances, more than centuries to travel around the world. You get to the level of connectivity and the shared consciousness we have, 2001, we watched that all happen live on television. And that traumatic event doesn’t take years or centuries to travel around the world in terms of the news. That’s all transmuted through that instantaneous network of connectivity to the planet as a whole, and we all share that kind of shock. If you think about it in the most concrete sense, it was two buildings in New York at the crux and 3,000 bodies, okay? In the grand scheme of things, that kind of violence, and that kind of destruction happens all the time. But it was the attack on our sense of vulnerability, it was an attack on the symbols of what we represent to the world in terms of globalization, you know, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, economics and trade, and the military might that protects and bodyguards that process as it spreads around the planet. These were like psychic blows, and I really think it takes a level of connectivity, but density of that connectivity, to get the kind of effect with 9/11. Think about the difference between the effort that it’s required of me to make sound travel through air, and think about the whale song traveling through an ocean, more dense, travels farther. Then think about how when you were a kid, you put your ear in the railroad track, and you could hear the train coming miles and miles away. The denser the connectivity, the more you can perturb the system, and shock it in dramatic ways.

HH: Part one, chapter one of the Pentagon’s New Map with Dr. Thomas Barnett has flown by. Next week, chapter two: The Rise of the Lesser Includeds. I want to get Steve in Portland, who I promised that opportunity to. Steve, your question for Dr. Barnett?

Steve: I’m…thank you for doing this. I haven’t been to college in 25 years, and I’ll be attending the next eight weeks. My question, Dr. Barnett, is in chapter one, you do spend a lot of time talking about that old mindset where everything is focusing on the war aspect and not the peace aspect of it. Today, on Hugh’s blog, he linked over, I think it was to National Review, talking about Rick Santorum’s latest job, where he’s with a think tank, and on a panel, or a committee called America’s Enemies. And I just wanted to know, do you see that as a perpetuation of that type of maybe Cold War-style thinking? Or do you see it as being the fulcrum in the balance that we do need, so that these new rule sets can be developed?

TB: Well, I think that as…the key way I like to define things, because I believe America is more comfortable in spreading good than erasing evil, is that we need to look at victory in this long war as a successful extension of the networks and the rules and the stability and the security that comes with the deep connectivity of globalization, and the elimination of these off-grid locations, or what I call the non-integrated gap, those parts of the world that are poorly connected to the global economy, where we find the endemic conflicts and the hideouts and the sanctuaries that offer possibilities for transnational terrorism to flourish. So I focus less on enemies, and I focus on what makes us strong, understanding what makes us strong, our inherent resilience, our strength of character, our definitions of stability and freedom, and I think when we use military power, we have to focus on the aftermath of leaving that place better off than we found it, and not just on killing bad guys. And I’ll give you one really specific reason for that. If you define that core as I describe it, and you counter-pose it to that non-integrating gap, which tends to be more focused on the Equator, the vast bulk of population growth is going to occur in those disconnected or poorly developed parts of the world, and the demographic aging that’s going to occur across my entire core means, in effect, and this is kind of the microcosm that Israel faces with Hamas and the Palestinian question, we can’t kill ‘em faster than they can grow ‘em. So it’s got to be a matter of spreading the connectivity, creating the stability that comes along with that, and the rule sets that create expectations of long term stability, which is what attracts foreign direct investment, and the capital flows, and that kind of stuff, which really has remade a China and some of these parts of the world that have joined the global economy in the last ten years, and it’s really got to be a matter of we leave countries more connected than we found them, because if we don’t, we’re going to find ourselves, as I said earlier, just going back and back again to the same situation. So to me, it’s not so much defining enemies, but connecting ourselves and our understanding to what it is about this country that makes it so great, and why it’s such a logical source code to the planet.

HH: Dr. Barnett, a great start to this series. I look forward to next Tuesday, same time, chapter two.

2 posted on 01/10/2007 6:47:23 AM PST by Valin (History takes time. It is not an instant thing.)

4 posted on 01/10/2007 6:54:34 AM PST by rellimpank (-don't believe anything the MSM states about firearms or explosives--NRA Benefactor)

He was very interesting.

His two books have had a great deal of influnce on the way I view this war. Make no mistake, he's a lefty, he supported jon carry, and love algores movie more proof that smart people can do really stupid things. But on this one thing he's got a good handle on what's going on.

6 posted on 01/10/2007 7:36:04 AM PST by Valin (History takes time. It is not an instant thing.)

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