From the New York Times bestselling author of The Pentagon's New Map, a bold, trenchant analysis of the post-Bush world
In Great Powers, New York Times bestselling author and prominent political consultant Thomas Barnett provides a tour-de-force analysis of the grand realignments in the post-Bush world-in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and more. The "great powers" are no longer just the world's nation- states, but the most powerful and dynamic influences on the global stage, requiring not simply a course correction, but a complete recalibration. Globalization as it exists today was built by America- and now, Barnett says, it's time for America to shape and redefine what comes next.
-Senior Managing Director, Enterra Solutions -Contributing Editor, Esquire magazine -Columnist, World Politics Review -Blogger, Thomas P.M. Barnett's Globlogization -Contributor, Esquire.com's The Politics Blog -Public Speaker, The Merit Agency (jen@themeritagency.com)
EDUCATION:
-B.A. in International Relations and Russian Literature, University of Wisconsin, 1984 -A.M. in Soviet Union Program, Harvard University, 1986 -Ph.D. in Political Science, Harvard University, 1990
BOOKS:
-Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (2009) -Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005) -The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004) -Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceaucescu and Honecker (1992)
Thomas P.M. Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. Since 2005, Tom has served as Senior Managing Director of Enterra Solutions, LLC, a strategic advisory and technology firm. There, he has partnered with CEO Stephen DeAngelis in pioneering new software-based methodologies for managing complexity in supply chains, critical infrastructure, large healthcare systems and postconflict development efforts.
A New York Times-bestselling author and a nationally-known public speaker who's been profiled on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Barnett is in high demand within government circles as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert of globalization, as well as within corporate circles as a management consultant and conference presenter. An award-winning professor, Dr. Barnett has written for Esquire, Wired, National Review, and the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by Rolling Stone, The Economist, Time, BBC World Service, CNN, Fox News and numerous foreign media. Tom Barnett has been described by U.S. News & World Report's Michael Barone as "one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time."
Dr. Barnett is best known as the author of Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (2009), Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (2005) and The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004). Described by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius as "a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war," the wide-ranging volumes have generated an enormous amount of reaction from around the world, leading to foreign editions in Japan, Turkey and China, as well as profiles in London's Daily Telegraph, Denmark's Borsen, and Switzerland's WeltWoche (among many others).
In addition to his speaking and consulting, Tom Barnett is a prolific blogger on current global events at his website www.thomaspmbarnett.com, where he counts among his tens of thousands of readers representatives from all the major U.S. military commands, virtually all U.S. federal departments, numerous foreign governments, and major research and corporate entities the world over.
Tom has been a Contributing Editor for Esquire magazine since the beginning of 2005, and he currently writes a weekly online column for World Politics Review and contributes regularly to Esquire.com's "The Politics Blog."
From 2005 to 2009, Tom wrote a syndicated print column for Scripps Howards News Service, and served as a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center for Public Policy and a visiting strategist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
From 1998 through 2004, Prof. Barnett was a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI, where he taught and served--in a senior advisory role--with military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command. From November 2001 to June of 2003, Dr. Barnett was on temporary assignment as the Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked with (then) OFT Director Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski (USN, ret.) on a cluster of strategic concepts that link change in the international security environment to the imperative of transforming U.S. military capabilities to meet future threats.
Dr. Barnett has published a number of articles explaining these strategic concepts, which he presents comprehensively in "what may be history's most famous Pentagon briefing," declared syndicated columnist Jack Kelly. Dr. Barnett has delivered this brief well over a thousand times to a cumulative wordwide audience of more than several hundred thousand government officials, military officers, industry and think tank representatives and opinion leaders.
At the Naval War College, Dr. Barnett also served as Director of the NewRuleSets.Project, an ambitious effort to draw new "maps" of power and influence in the world economy. The project was conducted in partnership with the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which hosted three full-day "decision event" workshops atop World Trade Center 1 (at the Windows on the World restaurant). Prior to this study, Dr. Barnett directed the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project.
Before joining the College in August 1998, Dr. Barnett served as a Project Director in both the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research, the two major divisions of The CNA Corporation (CNAC), a private research firm located in Alexandria, VA. His two major accomplishments during his CNAC career were: 1) serving as a member of the Naval Force Capabilities Planning Effort that developed the new strategic concepts eventually published in the Navy's White Paper . . . From The Sea, the first draft of which he co-authored along with a handful of senior naval officers; and 2) pioneering and managing CNAC's contractual relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
While at CNAC, he published several dozen reports, essays, and annotated briefings on a wide variety of subjects.
In the mid-1990s, Prof. Barnett penned a book-length manuscript entitled, The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer (1998), which he plans to publish as a book in 2011.
Professor Barnett has a BA (Honors) from the University of Wisconsin with a double-major in Russian Language and Literature and International Relations (emphasis--U.S. Foreign Policy). At Wisconsin, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year. Following Wisconsin, Dr. Barnett earned an AM in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and a PhD in Political Science (major-International Relations; minor-Comparative Politics) from Harvard University. His dissertation was entitled "Warsaw Pact-Third World Relations, 1968-1987: Explaining the Special Roles of Romania and East Germany" and was subsequently published by Praeger. While at Harvard, he served as Research Assistant to the Director of the Russian Research Center, Professor Adam B.Ulam, and worked as a Teaching Fellow in the History and Government Departments.
Thomas Barnett is also a Green Bay Packer season ticket-holder (Gold Package), and as one of the stockholders of the franchise, he feels it is essential to check up on his investment on a regular basis. His seats are located in the historic "South End Zone" of Lambeau Field. Prof. Barnett's maternal grandfather, Gerald Clifford (1889-1952), was a 1991 inductee of the Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame.
Thomas and Vonne Barnett live in Indiana with their four children.
Tom Barnett's Great Powers: America and the World After Bush is an engaging, detailed discussion about the world today and the coming decades. I did not agree with all of Barnett's assessments or recommendations, but I respected his thought process. Particularly engaging was Barnett's discussion of the American military, what he refers to as the Leviathan. Barnett discussed the role of the American military in the world, the true challenges it faces and what it does not face (China for instance), and how other nations should more openly rely on our Leviathan force.
But I part ways with Barnett on many of his other thoughts. First, his description of what a grand strategy is struck me as strange. I am not a geopolitical expert, but when I hear the phrase grand strategy I recall George Kennan's Long Telegram, which essentially stated the US strategy for the Cold War before it even began. What Kennan set out was more or less followed, with some variation, by ever US president form Truman to Reagan. But Barnett seems to say that grand strategy can be an accident of history. He discusses the development of the "American System," which has transitioned to globalization. But unlike Kennan's strategy, which was first implemented by the State Department, he seems to acknowledge that this "strategy" could be considered accidental or unintentional. Is that a strategy?
I am also not fully convinced that we should be viewing every nation on earth, and every struggle, as a microcosm of the American experience. Barnett is right that the US had developmental growing pains and we should not be surprised to see other nations having similar problems as they develop towards, we hope, democratic/capitalist nations. But I do not think all our interactions with the world should be based on that assumption. It assumes a certain logical progression of human history that I am not sure holds true. For example, Barnett spends some time discussing "development in a box." The concept being there are certain systems that need to be put in place in every nation, for example banking services, for them to develop. While it may be true that development requires banking, what type of banking can vary. In Iraq, a retail banking model might work. But in vast parts of Africa, micro credit is more appropriate. Barnett acknowledges that there are local differences that need to be accounted for, but these local differences seem so vast to me that is undercuts the entire theory of "development in a box." So far, the concept has only been used in Northern Iraq, the Kurdish regions. It may work well there, but packing that same box for a vastly different terrain just might not succeed.
But part of the issue may be that I do not fully understand Barnett's language. I have not read his previous highly regarded works and recommend that anyone new to Barnett seeking to tackle him, as I was, start with his earlier works first.
The book makes you think about changes in our world and how we allocate resources. While I can nitpick many of its points, I appreciate Barnett's efforts and thought provoking writing.
Barnett provides a soup-to-nuts retrospective and prescriptive look at the entire geopolitical universe. He covers early American history, the good and bad of the Bush administration, and a strategic and economic look at every region of the world.
Aside from perhaps Thomas Friedman, there's not a more optimistic thinker who's worth reading. While by no means a Pollyanna, Barnett sees the world as in much better shape than most of his counterparts in the national security policy community and sees it becoming progressively better. The things that keep most strategists and economists up at night are mere bumps in the road that, if properly managed, will lead to a more peaceful, prosperous planet.
Suffice it to say that Great Powers isn't summer beach reading. The prose is breezy enough; the author has polished it over years of lectures, PowerPoint briefings, and blog posts. But the subject matter is weighty and you'll want a highlighter and a pen to underline things and write notes on the page. You'll find yourself nodding in agreement at times, finding that the author has captured your thoughts perfectly, explaining them in a way where it finally makes sense. At other times, you may think he's mad and want to shout obscenities at him.
"Great Powers" reuses much of the vocabulary and concepts from Dr. Barnett's previous two books, but does not synthesize from them a coherent, comprehensible grand-strategic vision. But this does not seem to have been the author's objective in the first place, for this work does not read as if it was intended for a serious audience but rather for an audience that Barnett could bamboozle from a pretension of intellectual superiority. Indeed, this work reads far more like the hyperbolic urgings of a self-help guru than the sober analysis of a strategist.
Start with the mere structure of the first two chapters. Chapter 1, "The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney," literally parses various and alleged strategic errors of the previous administration among the classical deadly sins: lust, anger, and continuing through gluttony. "Lust" for geopolitical primacy, "anger" in the demonization of enemies, and so on--this analysis is so contrived as to be juvenile, the sort of thing one might find in a high school term paper. One wonders, after reading this, if Barnett truly believes that complicated matters must be dumbed down to this extent in order for us to follow him.
After thus diagnosing our illness, Dr. Barnett has a similar prescription for making us well. Chapter 2, "A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy," artificially forces geopolitical considerations into a pastiche of Alcoholics Anonymous. As in chapter 1, there is no clear reason for doing this; it is contrivance and hucksterism.
Looking past the structure and into the content of the book reveals incoherence, and contradiction. Incoherence is on display early. Likening US foreign policy these last eight years to a drinking spree, Barnett says (pp. 6-7), "Our unilateral `bender' forced a number of rising powers to rise even faster.... Our improved behavior in the coming months and years will not erase their rise. Indeed, it will probably accelerate it...." So these rising powers rise no matter what we do, no matter whether our behavior is "good" or "bad." Yet somehow it's still the US that is the source all this foreign rising. No cause/effect relationship can be derived from this; it is nonsense. Far more likely is that these rising powers find it in their respective best interest to pursue elevation. But why look to an obvious explanation when blaming Bush-Cheney will do?
Contradiction is on display throughout. It is a general theme, in fact. Barnett wants a more modest, less unilateral foreign policy. He wants us to confess our sins, and re-engage the world with contrition and modesty. Then he wants us to adopt as our grand strategy the task of (p. 79) "replicating [our] political constructs...not merely within nations but across the international system as a whole...."
