A groundbreaking reexamination of U.S. and global security, certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year.
Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what?
Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers-and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon's New Map is a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century.
Building on the works of Friedman, Huntington, and Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability-and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history.
For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future, the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security, and the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon's New Map is a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it-there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond.
This bold and important book strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century." In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization "this country’s gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is "the defining security task of our age." His stunning predictions of a U.S. annexation of much of Latin America and Canada within 50 years as well as an end to war in the foreseeable future guarantee that the book will be controversial. And that's good. The Pentagon's New Map deserves to be widely discussed. Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future—this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored. --Shawn Carkonen
-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.
This review is from: The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)
Thomas Barnett is a remarkable and very admirable fellow who has written a book that should certainly be read by more Americans. The book is well-written and Barnett comes across as someone who sincerely wants to improve the security of the United States and the world. Barnett has a powerful and inspiring (some may say intoxicating) vision of the role of the US in the 21st century. The only problem is that his approach is not workable.
Those who've read the likes of Martin Van Creveld and Thomas Friedman will find some familiar thinking in this book. The author's main contention is that "disconnected" countries, those that aren't connected via information and economic networks to the rest of the world, are a huge source of danger. Such countries are usually run by a nasty elite who essentially tyrannize their populations who are left poor and angry. Having been left poor and angry, these disconnected people are ripe for becoming terrorists and their nations ripe for the location of terrorist networks, crime syndicates, and so forth. Hence, we need to use military force to go in, defeat the nasty people running things, and enforce a new order that will give the oppressed people of these societies hope so they won't need to bomb us. In the process, we'll give them new law enforcement agencies that will crack down on criminal syndicates.
Reactionary types will accuse Mr. Barnett of being some kind of neo-imperialist or perhaps a global fascist. Nevertheless, I personally think that Barnett sincerely believes that what he is proposing would be a "good thing" and that it would improve the lives of the people he seeks to liberate. I'll leave the name-calling to someone else, as there are unquestionably lots of people running around who are willing to do just that. While the moral dimension to Mr. Barnett's proposal is fascinating and worthy of serious discussion (far different from the name-calling and character assassination I've heard up until now) my primary concern is whether or not the proposals in this book are cost-effective or even feasible.
I'm afraid that what Mr. Barnett is proposing is far more complicated, sophisticated, and expensive than what he leads the reader to believe. Barnett frames the issue in either doing something (what he proposes) or doing nothing. He points out that in light of September 11, 2001, we can't do nothing. And then he implies we're only left with his proposal. But he doesn't fully entertain the consequences of failure. Those consequences would be lots of dead young Americans, even higher levels of anti-American sentiment around the globe, and billions of dollars wasted. And due to the complexity of what Mr. Barnett is proposing, failure is more likely than success.
The essential problem here is one of complexity. Mr. Barnett's strategy focuses on the US spending extreme amounts of resources to bring order to troubled lands to harmonize them with current global economic realities. But the universe naturally tends towards disorder. As Mr. Spock pointed out, "Logic suggests that it's easier to destroy than to create." Chaos and disorder come naturally; order takes a significant input of resources. In attempting to create order in disordered places, the United States would be left extremely vulnerable to potential rivals and enemies who would simply try to create or enhance disorder in those places. This process would cost potential rivals very little but could have extremely high costs on the US on a sustained basis. An example would be Iraq, where we are hoping a mere $100 billion will bring about some kind of order. Anyone who wanted to harm us could spend far less money just to destroy that delicate order we've struggled to create. And in looking at Iraq right now, there's no guarantee that we are anywhere close to creating an orderly society.
As Mr. Barnett makes a big point about "disconnectedness defines danger" he doesn't really adequately bring the importance of this back to the home-front of American society. In an increasingly interconnected world, the US benefits not just from additional connectedness to others but to additional connectedness to ourselves. Improvements in infrastructure, a better business climate, improved efficiency, and so forth all serve to make the US a more competitive place on the international level and also serve to make the US a more attractive place for international capital and human resources. Barnett wants to put off making the US more connected in a highly dicey proposition to make dysfunctional societies more safe for international capital and human resources. Considering how intractable so many of our own various social problems have been it's rather presumptuous to assume we can go about fixing other places. And the cost/benefit analysis is lacking and, at least on the surface, not all that appealing.
For all my criticisms of Mr. Barnett's proposals I need to stress that I don't necessarily think his approach will lead to catastrophe on a nationwide scale. I just fear it will be exceptionally costly and put tremendous strain on our society, our military, and our economy. All for results that are highly improbable and quite unlikely to be successfully obtained. In short, it's a prescription for a gigantic waste of resources that even if it were successful would be possibly not worth the price. There are arguably more cost-effective and sure-fire ways of achieving a more secure future for the United States.
Americans who are interested in the future of US strategy need to be familiar with this book. While I strongly disagree with Mr. Barnett's proposals I also very well realize that they are and will continue to be highly influential. If you don't know what Barnett's talking about you can't even begin to understand the future debates about the US's role in the world. If you want to be a part of the discussion, get your hands on this book and become familiar with one of the most highly influential proposals available for the future of the United States and the world.
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This review is from: The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)
First, I would disagree, at least somewhat, with the previous reviewer who has stated that there is little new in this book. Whether or not this is original (and Barnett certainly does not claim his argument is), it is the first attempt to address these issues that is getting traction in the Washington political community. This is very, very significant. Hopefully, the (many) flaws of this book and its ideas will get corrected and refined over time, but it has captured the imagination and provided the metaphors that probably are and will define our foreign policy over the next 25 years.
Second, I do agree that this book should have stayed an article. It is one-third autobiography, one-third description of Pentagon decision-making, and one-third description of his own ideas. This makes it amusing to read, but difficult to process as an analytic argument.
Third, this book offers what I believe is the most honest reason for the war on Iraq yet. It could not be offered by a politico, but it can be offered by someone on the inside watching the decisions evolve. I think that he clearly illustrates what Wolfowitz meant when he said the war was fought for "bureaucratic reasons".
In summary, I strongly recommend the book for its discussion of a likely strategic direction for our country. The discussion of Pentagon decision-making and planning is likely also useful to people to wonder why it's so hard to change that organization.
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I had heard that Barnett held himself in high esteem--I just didn't realize it would go on for 448 pages. He spends the first 30 pages discussing how innovative and brilliant he is. I was disappointed to find out that this is what passes for intellectual argument these days. There is little here that wasn't in the international development literature from the late 1970's and early 1980's. It just seemed new because the previous works were forgotten. He lost his remaining brownie points when he mentioned natural gas (CH4) as a carbon free energy source. I didn't even take organic chemistry and knew that was wrong. Solar, wind, nuclear--carbon free. Still curious, read his Esquire article instead. At least that editor was able to keep his ego in check. Check it out from the library instead of wasting the money.
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First Sentence:
WHEN THE COLD WAR ENDED, we thought the world had changed. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
security rule sets, economic rule sets, disconnectedness defines danger, exporting security, vertical scenario, horizontal scenarios, economic connectivity, global rule sets, killer brief, strategic security environment, internal rule sets, new ordering principle, legal rule sets, growing connectivity, new rule sets, sole military superpower, vertical thinkers, lesser includeds, historical arc, global security environment, submarine community, international security environment, defense transformation, vertical shock, national security crisis
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Cold War, Middle East, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street, Bush Administration, Defense Department, Sys Admin, Persian Gulf, North Korea, Soviet Union, Cantor Fitzgerald, Functioning Core, Naval War College, New Core, Air Force, Clinton Administration, Secretary of Defense, South Korea, Central Asia, Old Core, Saddam Hussein, State Department, United Nations, White House
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