Customer Reviews

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

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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...."

Hubris. Make that deadly sin number 8.

Barnett's earlier books, especially The Pentagon's Mew Map, took much of the fear out of the War on Terror and replaced it with a challenge to America to engage with the other economic powers in the world to complete globalization and lift two billion more people out of poverty. His latest book, Great Powers, tells us why it's something we can and must do not only for those two billion people but for America's future. Particularly interesting are the parallels he draws between America's history and the state of things in many developing countries. Our government and our laws took generations to fully develop and its no suprise that the same is true elsewhere, China and Russia included. This book is a roadmap for the US for the next several generations. Barnett is nothing if not a hardheaded realist. He says that the military is still going to play a large role overseas in small wars but that the real goal is to get poor countries to attract capital and develop substantial economies of their own. This requires multinational trade and development efforts; the more countries the better. This not only lifts people out of poverty but takes away the rationale for terrorist activity.

To make the leap countries need to educate their children, boys and girls, adopt the business rules and institutions that permit foreign business to deal with them and gradually transition to governments that will work for the people not the ruling class. In Barnett's world, prosperity is king. By engaging with the other big economic players in the world the US can lead a team that can make this happen. If you are feeling sorry for the state of the world these days, this book will lift your spirits with its very believable "Yes we can!" message.

I think after reading this book that Thomas Barnett has created a masterpiece that focuses on the future, by reminding Americans of their past. Here is why: Barnett took the empirical evidence from works of hundreds of noted historians and primary sources and began to make a comparison of American history to today's world and more importantly to the world of tomorrow. All the while he continued to blog, writing his thoughts and collecting snippets of material from those 180+ who by way of responding, enlisted in his "Corp of Discovery" to chart a vision of the future. In the finest tradition of the Medici Effect, Tom Barnett collected all the intersecting ideas and points of information, mulled them over in his mind, shared them with his many readers, listened to their voices, gave presentations around the world and heard back from his audiences. Out of this mass of information he created Great Powers.

When I read Tom's work I am struck how much his view of American history dovetails with my own views. I am of the infamous boomer generation, but by fate was raised by my grandparents, who probably gave me as large a dose of "the Greatest Generation" as they had instilled in my mother, so I always seemed to feel more comfortable in my views of the world in that earlier cohort group. Today, as I teach my modern American history classes, I realize that lessons I have tried to instill into my students appear in Great Powers. So much has written about our history, concentrating on the greatest events or on our failures, as has been the case in the recent decades of navel gazing and self-loathing treatises. Tom boils it down to the really important events and persons responsible for today's rapidly connected world. Reading this book will instill a sense pride in being part of this great and grand experiment called America.

Great Powers is written for everyone interested in history, politics and strategy, but it is especially useful to generation coming up that is hungry to envision a better world. To launch them on their many courses, they need to have the knowledge that the port that launched them, the United States, is more than the negatives they have heard about since they began to read and understand. As those of the next generation sail into the future they need to know their home port is something to be proud of, and its source code of empowerment, something to be cherished.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this book is that it reads more like a long one sided conversation than a written discourse. As a result the prose flows easily and conveys a sense that Barnett is talking directly to the reader. A more unwanted result is that the prose is laced with cliché's, colloquialisms, and gaffes that are usually ignored in conversation, but stand out in written communication.

That aside what about the contents of this book? Well by any standards Barnett is a generalist rather than a specialist in geo-political scholarship and this book reflects that. It generally avoids details and specifics in favor of broad generalizations and simplified analysis. This in itself is not a bad thing. Such an approach makes the book highly accessible to everyone from Joe the Plumber to harassed senior government officials who don't have time for a lot of in depth analysis. Of course presuming that the opinions Barnett offers are valid, the book offers such general descriptions and prescriptions that before any of its ideas are implemented specialists of various ilk will need to flesh out the ideas it contains into actionable concepts.

Now like all good conversationalists, Barnett sometimes forgets what he said earlier and will contradict himself. For example on page 7 he makes the cogent observation that the "Leviathan' (i.e. U.S. Conventional Military Forces) is the principal reason that conventional state-on-state war is increasingly improbable. (This harks back to Mahan's "fleet in being" concept and is quite good). Yet on 253 he seems to support his observation, but also seems to argue that the threat of Nuclear Holocaust was what made conventional wars impossible. Admittedly many of the seeming contradictions in the book are due to Barnett's often fuzzy prose, again something that would be ignored in conversation but detracts from his book.

There are also broad areas that Barnett clearly has no understanding of yet have a good deal to do with strategic thinking. For all his talk of connectivity he seems to have no understanding of the misnamed Global Telecommunications Network on which the Internet rides. This is odd since his former mentor the late Admiral Art Cebrowski noted brilliantly that if the sea was the `commons' of trade and commerce as Mahan observed, then `cyberspace' (i.e. the Internet)was the 21st Century commons. Equally bizarre since Cebrowski was the principal proponent of Network Centric Warfare (NCW) and Barnett was part of his team when Cebrowski was head of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation and promoting NCW; Barnett appears to have no awareness that NCW is in point of fact a command and control system (C4ISR) that has been successfully adopted by both the U.S. Navy and Air Force.
Well be that as it may, this is a good book for people who want an easy and enjoyable introduction to what Barnett calls "Grand" Strategy (which term he never satisfactorily defines).

Cross posted from my blog - Fear and Loathing in the Blogosphere -

In his new book Great Powers:American and the World After Bush Tom Barnett provides some much needed perspective on where America stands almost 8 years after 9/11 and what challenges lay ahead.

Barnett begins the book by laying out perhaps the fairest reading of both the achievements and missteps of the Bush administration, including the single most realistic assessment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq offered by anyone. Barnett offers a point by point critique of the administration's blunders in both the post war and the attempted rerun of the WMD narrative on Iran while also maintaining that a world without Saddam is still preferable to a world with Saddam and giving the Bush administration credit for riding out the public disapproval and pushing ahead with the surge.

After offering a balanced assessment of recent history, Barnett reaches back in history a few hundred years to compare the current rise of the 3 billion new capitalist of the New Core with the rise of the American middle class across the 18th and 19th centuries and eventual spreading of the American model via the Atlantic Charter, Marshall Plan, etc, after WWII. Placing our current challenges in the context of American history is Great Powers single biggest contribution to our current understanding of public policy. Again and again Barnett backs up his point that our current challenges are a result of our success, not failure (i.e. moving from our primary national security threat being the Soviet Union to the primary threat being a dude in a cave is progress). A corollary to that point is this: the new global middle class will not accept being denied their opportunities anymore than the rising American middle class would have, and America can lead or get out of the way, but we cannot stop it (nor would we want to).

Great Powers is in some ways more and in some ways less ambitious than Barnett's last two books, The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action. Both PNM and BFA offered ambitious scenarios for possible future American military interventions (preferably with our New Core allies) abroad in hot spots such as North Korea. GP avoids such speculation and instead tracks the progress of the department of everything else. GP offers a pathway for that department to take as it grows out of DOD and eventually into its own cabinet level position - a clear pathway that I felt was lacking from his previous two books.

On the other hand, I found the lack of ambitious scenarios somewhat disappointing. BFA ended with a section Tom called "Blogging the Future" in which he speculates on everything from the collapse of North Korea to the expansion of the United States - GP offers no such wild speculation (as Tom says "nobody likes a wishy washy visionary") but teases with a brief mention of H.G. Wells Things to Come but fails to offer a Barnett branded look at the future.

Let me be clear, the lack of sci-fiesque ending in no way takes away from the important policy points made by Great Powers and should not dissuade anyone from picking it up. In fact I'd say GP continues Barnett's streak of writing outstanding single volumes (meaning you can read just one and get plenty - even if you're unfamiliar with his previous work and even if you don't make a habit of reading books about foreign policy). Add in the fact that Barnett offers probably the most balanced and reasoned view of foreign policy of anyone writing today and you have a book that is both highly informative and very accessible. Great Powers should be read by anyone who - given the topsy-turvy nature of the headlines recently- feels that they need a little realignment.

Anyone familiar with Barnett from previous books and Esquire articles knows that his writing style is witty and engaging. Always an enjoyable read.

Barnett's strength is to simplify concepts around a short cliche...such as that 'Job Creation Is The Measure Of Victory In Iraq'...which ties into his previous book's emphasis on the value of globalization. Of course, this is also a weakness for at times the author comes off as breathy and slick as that guy selling the ShamWow in infomercials.

I appreciate the section on what Bush got right. If only so we can avoid the knee jerk arguments about policy that go like, "Well, since Bush did X we should do Y"

The use of the 7 Deadly Sins and 12 Steps references should have been avoided as it gives the following discussions a shallow feel. Better to stick to the important points, whether that turns out to be 6 or 8...no need to shoe horn it into 7.

In his first work, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Barnett interjected his personal experiences with the brass to the point where the reader wondered if it was a policy tome or an memoir. Great Powers suffers from much the same. Too much name dropping and self-referencing. Interesting, since Barnett does not need to prove his credentials anymore.

Clearly Great Powers is written for a general audience, and in that regard Barnett's book is great to get the average guy thinking anew about the world.

Seldom have I seen such a profound misreading of a more important book. That is, of course, assuming that those "reviewers" even bothered to crack the book open. I know, reading can be hard. Well. I've just read this giant of a book. And do yourself a favor: If you welcome having all of your assumptions challenged; if you are intellectually secure enough to step out of your echo chamber for just a moment; and if you are hungry for illumination in a time that seems that there is so much darkness - read Great Powers by Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett's analyses of the way forward in the Obama years, coupled with his holistic view of the American expansion westward and its parallels to today's globalization is nothing short of brilliant. And challenging. And enraging. And heartening And exhilarating. All in the same volume.

On the other hand, if you are only looking for a cheap political document, something just to serve as affirmation for the beliefs you've long ago set in stone, something just to satisfy your need for easy rhetoric, then this book will be way over your head.

I rather think that the most impressive thing about Thomas P.M. Barnett is his handle: those initials let you know you are in the presence of the Eastern Establishment. I guess. I wouldn't sink to a lousy ad hominem attack but for the velleity of what Mr. Barnett has to say. I don't disagree with him, but --my goodness!--haven't we all said these things to ourselves before? Where is the originality? I am not surprised that TPMB loves the good old power-point. Like John Meachem, (or however you spell his name) TPMB shows how easy it is to become a fixture in Washington circles, if one will only ruthlessly self-promote.