Thomas P.M. Barnett - part 7 (The Myths we make)

HH: Joined now by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett. He’s the author of The Pentagon’s New Map, one of the preeminent global strategists in the United States. The book, The Pentagon’s New Map, widely read and influential within the Pentagon and other military think tanks. We are on Chapter 7 of an eight week series. This chapter, The Miss We Make, and Dr. Barnett, welcome back, always a pleasure to talk to you.

HH: If I could summarize this, I think I’d use the line from Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate. In this case, America with the world about what it’s up to. Fair?

TB: I think it’s that, but at its core, it’s a misperception as to what shape the world is in right now. There was a tendency coming off the Cold War to assume that what we had back then, and you know, we have a tendency whenever we move off one period and into the next, to look to the last period with a sense of nostalgia. And you know, that runs in about a twenty year cycle, so we are very nostalgic right now for the 1980’s, and the so-called stability of the Cold War.

But the truth is that the 1980’s were the peaking of most of the dangerous trends we saw in the world. It was the peaking of global defense spending. It was the global peaking of men under arms. It was the global peaking of arms transfers. It was the global peaking of the number of terrorist incidents around the world, even though we get more deadly incidences now. You look back to 1985-1987, and it was really the last great gasp of a lot of violence around the world, and we’ve been on a generally very peaceful trend ever since, so that when we count up the wars we have today, and the civil strife, and the military coups, and the incidences of genocide and politically inspired violence, we’re actually looking at numbers that are better than we’ve seen in 30, 40, and in some instances, 50, 60 years, going all the way back to the Second World War. So you know, the first thing you’ve got to get across to people is right now in history, never has a smaller percentage of humanity ever been involved, or in the course of organizing itself currently, to engage in acts of mass violence or terror. It’s actually the most peaceful we’ve ever been, and we’ve never had a global economy that’s ever been as big, and as expansive, and as stable, and as growing as we’ve got now.

HH: I think you persuasively move through some of those myths, and I want to come back to them. But I found the second half of Chapter 7 much more compelling about the problems we face, even in the midst of the non-chaos and the economic boom that we find ourselves in. I want to read a fairly lengthy quote from Page 354-355, where you write, “Where we need to put forth vision, we have left the impression of vindictiveness. Where we needed to offer hope in the future worth creating, we frighten needlessly with loose talk of who’s next and bring it on, or World War III or IV, I lose count at times.”

HH: “Finally, where we needed to explain grand strategy, we’ve spoken menacingly of preemption and little else. We have defined the future in terms of what America fears and desires, not what the world fears and desires. We recognize a core that is threatened, but not a gap crying out in suffering. We have failed in our imagination, in our words and in our deeds. It is time for this nation to grow beyond our sense of anger and humiliation over 9/11, and the first foolish notion we must discard is the only way we can make the future safe is to partition it through empire.” I agree wholly with that. The question is how do you do it?

TB: Well, like most of these arguments, it tends to be generational shifts. You know, I think what we’re suffering right now is almost the Boomer leadership that we’ve been saddled with, that still views things in kind of binary, zero sum ways. And it’s because their seminal experiences were in the 1960’s, and so they’re so tainted by Vietnam, and so tainted by the height of the Cold War, and they were raised in that mindset. I really think that’s a trap that we find ourselves locked into, in terms of the leadership we’ve had since 1990, and I think we’re probably looking at another six to eight more years of that kind of stuff before we really move into a generation that probably…you know, more reflective, the first candidate we’ve gotten so far is Obama, more reflective of people born after 1960, who really came of age in the 1970’s, and start to see the world in terms of its gross connectivity, which really became apparent to us as we discussed earlier, once the Cold War peaked, you know, ’72, ’73, we make détente, we open up China, we have the Mid-East War, ’73, oil price shocks, rise of OPEC, rise of environmentalism, rise of terrorism. The kind of problems we face today were really born in that kind of peaking of the Cold War experience in the early 1970’s. We’re yet to see a generation of leadership move into positions of real power and authority who think more in those horizontal, connected, global terms. Instead, we’re still re-fighting kind of binary conflicts from the past. And you know, terrorism and Islam, radical Islam, is just basically replaced the Soviet threat in a lot of people’s definition of a scary world that we can’t control.

HH: Well that…we’ll leave to another day whether or not Barack Obama is the person who can understand the horizontal nature of threats now.

HH: Generation…I agree with that, but here we have an information war where the enemy not only can now reach the battlefield, the information battlefield, they can control it in ways that we don’t even begin to understand, and I thought what was provocative here, Dr. Barnett, is that you’re laying a big blame on the American media for not even attempting to have this conversation with the public. And I will again read, it’s a lengthy quote, I want people to hear it, though. “The world needs a better effort from America in the coming years, but just as important, it needs a better explanation of what that effort seeks to achieve. To that end, we need a better dialogue between the public and the nation’s leadership on the strategic choices that lie ahead. Too often, the entire process gets short-circuited by a chattering class of op-ed columnists and network television experts who insist on issuing score cards on a daily basis, instead of exploring the long term issues that both shape and are shaped by the national security strategy that this nation pursues.” And you know, it goes on, and I’ll come back to it. But you’re absolutely right. When was the last time you had a substantive conversation about grand strategy on television?

TB: Well, the only time I guess I’ve really had one was the two times I did hour-long shows on C-SPAN. The first time was with Brian Lamb, one of the last shows of BookNotes, and frankly, it’s why my first book became a New York Times bestseller, because that was the only media I had the week that I sold enough to get on the New York Times bestseller list. What kind of stunned me about that development was, you know, it just showed if you get a chance to actually talk through an argument, there’s a real hunger out there. But instead, you know, most of the appearances you’re going to do on television are three to four minutes maximum, you’re usually screaming past some other talking head in some other remote location, and you’re really chewing over the day’s events instead of thinking in terms of long term requirements, what we’re going to need to do, how we’re going to need to change our system and our state, and the way we approach international relations. So I mean, it’s a lot of facile comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, when the real answer is, you know, Desert Storm wasn’t getting over the Vietnam syndrome, because the Vietnam Syndrome wasn’t about defeating traditionally echeloned opponents by bombing them back to the Stone Age. The Vietnam syndrome was about the difficulty that we encountered in nation building and counterinsurgency. And we are finally dealing with the Vietnam syndrome now in Iraq, but we don’t have that discussion about how we get better over time. We get these facile comparisons to Vietnam, and we get the who lost the war question, when the reality is we won the war. 137 combat casualties in about five weeks of combat was basically just cause to take down a Manuel Noriega in 1989. It was just cause on steroids, just a bigger snatch and grab. What we have lost even since we affected that war and waged it very effectively is the peace. And we don’t have much discussion about that.

HH: I want to read again from Thomas Barnett’s Chapter 7 in The Pentagon’s New Map. “The zero sum nature of partisan politics in this country is in many ways the biggest handicap America suffers when it tries to forge a coherent and long term security strategy. Yes, this partisanship will sell newspapers and books, and draw viewers to the show, but it generates more apathy than understanding, and that apathy is what lulls far too many Americans into swallowing these misguided myths about our country’s role in international security.”

HH: Second paragraph, “Most Americans are constantly confronted with pointlessly hyperbolic media debates about tactics, but are exposed to almost no calm deliberations regarding strategy. I will confess,” this is you, Thomas Barnett writing, “as someone who does this for a living, I simply cannot watch most of these shows for more than a minute or two without sensing that my strategic IQ is dropping with each idiotic sound byte offered. The cumulative result is a flood of unanswered questions, a public that often feels overwhelmed by current international events when simply put, we need not be.” We’ve got a minute to the break, Dr. Barnett. This is a massive failure of American media.

TB: It is, because we’re not spending the time to discuss the implications of our engagement with the outside world. We kind of scare people so they’ll come back after the commercial break, okay? And when you inundate people with all these dark images, and it’s all failure, and our presence around the world is hated by everybody, when of course it isn’t, and it’s welcomed around the world in many instances after instances, what we push on people is a sense of futility. And when you get that scared and overwhelmed by images of the outside chaotic world, you tend to have two responses. One is let’s just withdraw, this is too complex, I’m going to call it global chaos. Or two is, let’s get out there, let’s become global cops, let’s run an empire, let’s kill them all if necessary. Those are two exaggerated responses.

HH: Dr. Barnett, when we went to break, we were talking about the failure of the American media to communicate effectively about this war, and that has implications, especially in an information war. Is it because the anchors who are asking the questions are in over their heads? Or is it because they really do understand what the issues are, but they have ratings concerns?

TB: I think their ratings concerns is probably the biggest problem, because I mean, you watch your average local TV news at 10:00 or 11:00, wherever you are, and what they usually start with are various descriptions of criminal activities in their region. And our national news media tends to focus on similar things. Good news is never reported, stability is never celebrated. It’s always the responses to this process of globalization that are emphasized, the friction, but not the force. I mean, our problem today is not that globalization isn’t moving fast enough, or that it’s at risk of demise or being stopped. Our problem today is that the global capitalist economy is expanding so rapidly, and is penetrating traditional societies with such power, that we find ourselves coming in and dealing with conflict that was inconceivable fifteen, twenty years ago, because the nature of the global economy was far smaller then. You know, we added three billion capitalists at the end of the Cold War, and there’s a tendency to assume that a lot of this kind of friction or resistance of the spread of globalization and the global economy, is really due to our military presence, when the reality is if our military presence wasn’t there, the same resistance would be there, there just wouldn’t be anybody there to deal with the consequences, and try to keep the overall levels of violence down.

HH: But that’s a three level concept you just put out there. It requires evidence, facts not yet in evidence, that I don’t know…of all the television interviews you’ve given over the last six years…and how many is that? Is that a thousand? Is it five hundred?

HH: All right. Does anyone give you the time to do that? I just don’t think it’s possible for American media to deliver that kind of package of information anymore.

TB: Well, you know, what it is, and that’s why I wrote this chapter, is that you spend a lot of time defeating these myths, you know? There isn’t global chaos. You know, you look around the world, there’s about 200 countries that belong to the U.N. And on average, four fifths of them haven’t experienced any level of mass violence in a long time. So I mean, when we start thinking about the world that America has to deal with, we’re only talking about one fifth of the countries, less that the global population. Probably about 10-15% of the world’s population. And of those situations that are brewing at any one time, we get involved in maybe one out of four on average. So I mean, if you think about it, it’s very much a cop metaphor in the best sort of sense, like any cop you talk to in a community, he’ll tell you I don’t deal with 95% of the population. I deal with about 5% of the population, okay, the rule breakers and the rule benders. And frankly, that’s all we deal with. And so, it’s about a 5% solution. When you put it in those terms, and what we get from global stability, the hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty in the last twenty years, all the growth in the global economy, I mean, all those people who don’t die, who aren’t malnourished, who don’t have shortened lives because they lack access to better water, better air, better medicine, I mean, a lot of that is facilitated by the fact that we’re willing to go out there and kind of keep the general peace, at a burden that is less than we’ve ever had, historically, going all the way back to the Second World War.

HH: Another myth you dismiss as one that often occurs when you’re attempting to talk about the reality of the strategic situation the country finds itself in is that any attempt to explain ourselves in unselfish terms, “Are immediately dismissed by the isolationist wings of both left and right as either sheer hypocrisy or betrayal of our historical roots.” In other words, nobody wants to hear even a pretty centrist, long-standing Democrat with a PhD from Harvard, who’s been running around the Pentagon for years, say we’re not an empire. You get shouted down, in essence. Again, I think the American media is just not prepared for a serious conversation about these issues.

TB: Well, you know, and some of this is a fact that life has gotten so good, that our threshold definitions of difficulty are much lower than they were fifty years ago. I mean, fifty years ago, a genocide was, you know, numbered in the millions. Genocide today starts somewhere around 100,000. Massacres used to be tens of thousands. Now, massacres are double digits. And that’s a good trend, that we care about human life more, and that we’re working down in the weeds compared to the kind of mass violence we dealt with fifty years ago. But I mean, that happens also, that reductionist sort of approach, to definitions of empire, okay? Empire, historically, has meant political control. It’s meant economic control. It’s meant military control. And when you look around like for the role that we basically have in terms of helping globalization remain stable, and spreading the global economy, and defending it against challenges, that doesn’t involve political control. If we had political control, the U.N. would jump when we barked. We don’t have economic control. Our control is fairly latent. We’re the reserve currency of the world, and we’re the world’s biggest market, but we don’t run the WTO, we don’t have the ability to control other nations’ economies. And if you think about even military control, I mean, we have serious sized bases in only thirty countries around the world, and a big chunk of those are NATO countries. I mean, we have presence in a lot more countries, in single digits or double digits, because we interact with militaries the world over, and that’s what gives us the ability when bad things happen around the world, to come in, because we are familiar with local militaries, and they’re familiar with us, and we’re considered a trusted third party who can come in and deal with crises without adding to them, by and large.

HH: Let me put forward an objective premise statement that you write, and one that if I were to say it on a television show, would never get through either the host or an opponent. It is this, the battle we wage inside Iraq now does not involved extending U.S. imperial power, but simply negating the efforts of those who will kill to preserve that society’s disconnectedness.

HH: To the extent we succeed in defeating those efforts, our power in Iraq will evaporate.

HH: No empire will result, just the extension of the core’s connectivity, and the elimination of yet another pocket of disconnectedness inside the gap. I think that’s objectively and undeniably true, but that Dr. Barnett, if you make that…

HH: Sure. But no one…that will not get to first base in American media, will it?

TB: Well, I mean, I’ve got to plead our attention deficit disorder, because a very successful version of this process we experienced just a decade ago in the Balkans, and yet nobody seems to recognize that as a success. We had virtually no casualties. We had huge amounts of help in terms of the post-war situation with peacekeeping, such that we had the number of troops per thousand that is demanded to have a stable peacekeeping situation. And yet we provided only about 10% of the overall manpower. I mean, that system, that fake state, Yugoslavia, came apart. It is now a number of states who are successfully integrating, applying for membership and getting membership into the EU, applying for membership and getting membership into NATO. A couple of these countries are fighting alongside us in Afghanistan now. That was a huge success. That was no extension of empire. What’s the nature of our empire in the Balkans today? There is none. What I can tell you is my wife buys Bosnian strawberries in a grocery store down the street from my house in Indiana. That’s the connectivity we’ve created. That’s the economic empowerment that we’ve offered people in Bosnia, and in the other surviving republics coming out of the Balkans experience. We’re facing a similar situation in Iraq today. We have succeeded in Kurdistan, we’re not succeeding in Shia and Sunni portions.

HH: But Dr. Barnett, do you believe honestly, if you try to make that argument to, say, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, that it would get to first base?

HH: Now we’ve agreed it’s a problem, it doesn’t happen, American public opinion is not shaped by coherent conversations about the challenges we face. There are reasons for that. We’ve articulated them. What is to be done?

TB: Well, you know, the key thing is to recognize where we’ve been successful in the past. I mean, a discussion, a serious discussion, exploration of why the Balkan situation worked, why we can consider that a success in retrospect.

HH: Okay, but I didn’t phrase that…if you have a half an hour with the heads of the networks, Dr. Barnett, and they say okay, we brought you in, we’ve read The Pentagon’s New Map, we’ve heard you’re critical of how we do…what do you want us to do? What do you tell them?

TB: I would spend more time talking about global economics, and the reality of the success we’ve experienced over the last 25 years. And a more fundamental exploration, you know, continent by continent, what a lack of mass violence there is in the world today. If you go continent by continent, and we’re actually at a point in history where we’re talking almost…in Latin America, there’s only one good operating national liberation movement, the FARC in Colombia. In Southeast Asia, it’s, other than Sri Lanka, we’re looking at a very stable situation, by and large. The Middle East is burning, and the Middle East has been problematic for quite some time. But you look at Africa, you’re talking about I think half the twenty fastest growing economies in the world. So just some sense of balance, and not this tendency to take one bad experience, and extrapolate it across the entire world, and then to speak very ominously about rising trends.

HH: But they’re going to look at you and they’re going to say Dr. Barnett, that’s great…

HH: …and everyone will turn us, yeah, they’ll turn us off. Now how can we sex that up? How can we get people interested in this? What format? What host? What are you suggesting?

TB: Well, I like the kind of long term discussion of big ideas that you see on a C-SPAN, and nowhere else, because everything gets chunked up so much, and it tends to be a situation where you’re often pitting opposing views against one another, which really kind of brings the conversation down to a tit for tat level, and doesn’t allow the kind of faith exploration of a concept, and a safe, more relaxed exploration of complex arguments.

HH: So you’re saying one on one for extended periods of time with smart people by smart people?

TB: And you get that on the radio. I mean, I feel really good going on the radio for hour-long segments. You know, that’s my favorite venue, because you really get a chance to explore something. On television, I don’t know how many times I’ve gone on where the notion was we were going to talk about a book or an article that I’ve written, and instead, I’m doing voiceover for Jessica Lynch’s arrival in Ramstein Air Force Base. And I’m being asked questions I couldn’t possibly answer about Special Operations tactics.

HH: And do the hosts that encounter you on television…I do agree, radio’s very different. Have they read your book?

TB: Very, very rare. I can tell you, like Lamb on C-SPAN is somebody who reads books. Tony Snow actually read books. But most of the time, you’re going to find it’s basically producers who’ve read the book. It’s the 25 year old producer of the segment, and often, you have great pre-interviews with these people. I mean, they’re really into your stuff, they read your blog, they read your articles, they’re familiar with your stuff, and then you get onto the show, and even though you’ve done like a fifty minute pre-interview, where you were just going through all sorts of great complex ideas, you get on the show and it’s all what happened 35 minutes ago in Iraq that they want you to comment on.

HH: And I think that’s because they’re limited. I know you’re writing a new book. I hope you will give a lot of time to persuading American media that this can be made to be interesting and riveting. There are specifics I’ll come back and talk with you about, but do you think in the hands of a Lamb or a Charlie Rose, or someone like that on television…

HH: This can be made to be compelling? And not just with you, but with a lot of people.

TB: I think it can. You know, I think…and one of the reasons I want to write a third volume is I really think we’ve neglected the raising, you know, kind of organic to the national security community, our own grand strategists, or people who think horizontally across sectors and geographical entities, when instead what we do is we find niche experts, you know, vertical thinkers, very drill-down sort of artists who know their one thing, they know how to make this one bomb, or they know about suicide tactics, or they know about this aspect of this religious cult, but they don’t know anything else. And they tend to give you the scariest, most frightening stuff, which because it’s never contextualized, it’s never put in any sort of larger context, it’s just a barrage of all these kind of very niche experts telling you the worst thing that comes into their mind when prompted by the host.

HH: Dr. Barnett, last week, I had Douglas Feith on the radio show, former undersecretary of defense. I’m sure you briefed him and his staff on many occasions.

HH: And I asked him what I ask all of the senior brass when I get them on. How come we’re getting our butts kicked in the information war, and he said because we sat around, we talked about it, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, again and again, and we couldn’t figure it out. Do you agree that we are, in fact, getting whacked, day by day, week by week, month by month, in the information war against the fans of the disconnected gap, and keeping it there? And if so, how do you change that?

TB: I don’t think we are. I really think that tends to be overblown. You know, the reason why it doesn’t work for us in the public sector is that Americans naturally distrust the government, which I think is a good kind of reflexive response to propaganda in all forms. I mean, we really seek truths from a variety of sources, so we tend to look non-hierarchically for sources of information. And I will tell you the generation behind me, the Gen Y, the Millennials, the Echo Boomers, are more like that than ever. So I think we focus too much on trying to win hearts and minds, and pretending that we’re going to talk these people, almost Oprah-like, into disliking us more or less, if we explain ourselves better. And you know, I was thinking about your question about the media. You know, I went on Japanese media once, public television, for three hours to talk about my vision with two other experts, and I thought who gets that kind of focus in the American media?

TB: An American Muslim who is an expert on the Middle East, Fawaz Gerges, a great guy, and Francois Heisbourg, a French international relations expert who’s an inveterate George Bush hater, which made him kind of an interesting foe. But it was a good discussion that went on for three hours, and I thought to myself during the break, who gets three hours on American television? And it’s self-help, you know, self-help stuff. If you’re willing to talk about how to improve the average American in terms of their inner life, I mean, we’ll spend that kind of time in public television and in the national media, and we’ll fixate on that. But give that kind of effort to understanding the rest of the world, and that’s just considered too hard a sell, when I would argue we make ourselves ignorant about the outside world, because the rest of the world’s actually very, very much interested in American culture. We have huge influence, so back to your point, huge influence in terms of our mass media and our content, and the kind of example we set in terms of the lives we lead, and how that gets broadcast around the world in terms of our movies and our books, and everything else. We have a much stronger influence with the rest of the world than they have with us. We do tend to have the problem of buying our enemy’s propaganda, by and large.

HH: Now it wasn’t always this way. 150 years…we’re at about the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

HH: And of course, there were fewer choices, but there was less literacy, and they were thronged, and they were widely replicated, and widely distributed in the pamphleteering culture, widely debated. So that public culture of debate and exploration is pretty much dead, Dr. Barnett. How do you…

TB: Well, it was an oral tradition, and then it became kind of a one-way broadcast tradition across most of the 20th Century. But now in the 21st, we’re actually getting back to dialogue, we’re seeing sort of the crude, raw, most unexpurgated forms in places like the blogosphere, where you and I both operate. But I would argue that that conversation’s getting better and better, and that the sources for information that the average person, young person faces today, makes them more in power than ever. So we actually are raising the next generation that’s more interested in the outside world than ever, is more diverse than any we’ve ever had in American history, and I think it’s actually going to be much easier to engage in these kinds of debates, and this kind of understanding.

HH: Now the appointment of Tony Snow has done a great deal, I think, for the conversation in the press room. Ought the government, without using propaganda, to concentrate more on credentialing people of expertise and accomplishment to carry on these conversations in the public square, whether on the payroll or not?

TB: Yeah. In a sense, we tend to hire people who are experts at spin, or political operatives who are most interested in covering someone’s rear end, rather than kind of openly explore these kinds of things, because our actual political leaders do that, like a Don Rumsfeld actually asked the question are we winning? How would I know if I’m winning? What would it look and feel like? How could I measure it? You know, that was ridiculed, that was ridiculed as an exploration.

TB: I mean, if you don’t already know, was the great reply from the masses, if you don’t already know, then you must be incompetent to ask questions like that, when we’re at the beginning of a long war where we have to ask those questions.

HH: What did you make of Senator McCain’s condemnation of Donald Rumsfeld as the worst Defense Secretary in history?

TB: Well, you know, I wrote a piece on Don Rumsfeld for Esquire that I got lambasted for, because what I tried to do, and here’s a good example of the problem. I tried to explain the difference between the institutional force, the force here in America of our military that creates the force that can go abroad and operate, okay? And the institutional force is the Pentagon. It’s all the research labs. It’s all the training facilities. It’s the schoolhouses. It’s all the stuff that generates a force that then goes over and operates. What Rumsfeld did in terms of the transformation of the U.S. military was to focus on making the institutional side of the U.S. military more nimble, more responsive, speedy, more agile, more up to date, and more networked, okay? He gets in trouble for what he did in terms of the usual temptations of a SecDef to engage in what they call the 5,000 mile screwdriver effect, to interfere too often with the generals in terms of the operating force abroad, and that down side with him tars and overwhelms what is actually a very positive legacy, I would cite, on the institutional side, in terms of the changes and the transformation and the reforms that he set in motion that’ll last for years and even decades. But try to tell that story, and it all comes down to you’re celebrating a butcher.

TB: Well, I think there was a lot of…I think they are rightfully blamed for blowing off the complexity of the post-war situation. But you know, I think the harder thing for American to admit is that we all kind of fell for that in the form of the Powell doctrine in the post-Cold War era. We all fell for the notion that you know what? We’re just going to go in, shoot the place up, round up bad guys, and leave as quickly as possible. We don’t stick around, we’re not responsible, we only do decisive victories, no quagmires for us.

HH: Dr. Barnett, Page 364, “Only time will tell if George W. Bush is more Harry Truman than Woodrow Wilson.” I think that’s exactly the right analysis. We’ve got about two minutes. Can you explain what you mean, and can you give us your best guess as to which it will be at this point?

TB: Well, both of them, Wilson after World War I, and Truman after World War II, came to the conclusion that they really have to set kind of a new global rule set in motion to prevent the kind of vast conflict that they had been involved in, in the previous war. What Wilson failed to do was to contextualize his idea, this League of Nations, in such a way that he could get enough buy off from the American public to really support kind of a long term engagement. You know, he almost overreached in terms of his promises, and he kind of under-reached in terms of his attempt to institutionalize the relationships that needed to be institutionalized among the great powers to make this thing work over the long haul. And so his idea of a new rule set basically faded. Now almost upon his departure from office, we retreat from the world, and then we engage necessarily in the Second World War twenty years later. Then Truman faces a similar situation, and his argument is not just we need new rules, but I’m willing to create the international institutions, the strategy, I’m willing to reorganize the U.S. government, it takes me years to make all these new rules appear around the world, IMF, World Bank, United Nations, NATO, containment, Marshall plan, but he was successful in creating enough of an understanding among other great powers that we had friends in this process, enough to get us through a Cold War. Bush has proposed radical new rules. What he has failed to do to date is to find enough major players around the world to buy into that rule set. If he had, we would’ve had the troops we need in Iraq today. So it’s a matter of us not explaining in enough non-zero sum terms that when we make this effort at security, it’s not about us in a zero sum fashion, accruing all the economic and political gains on the far side of that intervention, it’s about creating connectivity so that the rest of the world, in addition to us, can liberate whatever was that repressed situation before, and connect it to a global economy that actually empowers people instead of keeping them on the margin.

HH: And is that set in stone, in your opinion? Or are there many years after Bush leaves ‘til we will know?

TB: I think George Bush was brilliant in some ways, in the first term, for recognizing the changes that need to be made. I think the failure in the second term is that he hasn’t done a very good job at selling that, and kind of explaining us to the rest of the world, and I consider that a failure of diplomacy. It was an administration that was chock full of decision makers, but not enough in terms of visionaries, and people to explain what we’re trying to achieve. That’s the sad fate. I think he’s a good first term, but a bad second term.

HH: We’ll be back next week to conclude our series. Thank you, Dr. Barnett, www.thomaspmbarnett.com.

Audio here
Hewitt: Hour 2 - Hugh continues his weekly visit with author and grand strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett, as they cover Chapter 7 in The Pentagon's New Map.

http://www.townhall.com/MediaPlayer/AudioPlayer.aspx?ContentGuid=5225bcc0-bd04-407e-abb6-83dd97819af6

3 posted on 02/21/2007 6:35:41 AM PST by rellimpank (-don't believe anything the MSM states about firearms or explosives--NRA Benefactor)

The Pentagon’s New Map

Wow. I guess I know where I'm going for lunch: Barnes & Noble. Going to have to get back to HH again too.

Good news is it's out in paperback now..spending lless money, always a good thing.

The Pentagon's New Map is one of the few book I call a must read.

Saw an interview with the author of The Pentagon's New Map on CSPAN not long after 9/11. At that time, everyone and their mother were jabbering about why 9/11 happened and what we should do about it. This guy, Tom Barnett, was the only person who offered a complete, authorative analysis, not only of why 9/11 happened, but he put it in context with a pattern of conflicts around the world, and offered a prescription for what we should do. I don't know, in the long run, if it will be determined he was right about everything, but at least he offers a logical approach to the problem and possible solutions.

I don't know, in the long run, if it will be determined he was right about everything, but at least he offers a logical approach to the problem and possible solutions.

Niether did George Kennan in 1946

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