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The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century

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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.

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.

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.

Dr. Barnett deserves credit for presenting some out-of-the-box thinking to a mass audience. The issues he addresses are of vital importance, and we need to discuss them as a nation. This book certainly injects some provocation and some creative thinking into the debate.

However, the book is to a large degree a stream-of-consciousness essay without all that much real "meat" to it. It's probably at
least 100 pages longer than it needs to be, and many of its pages contain repetition of the same grand themes without any rigorous effort to translate these themes into real-world actions.

Indeed, it looks to me as if Barnett's grand themes lose much of their force when they are confronted with real-world facts. By arguing largely at the conceptual level, Barnett manages to avoid confronting some of the strongest objections to his views.

Some of the major arguments Barnett makes, and my thumbnail takes on them:

1. No military on earth can match that of the U.S., and none ever will.

Barnett derides the Pentagon's "worst case planning," arguing that there's no rational basis for doom-and-gloom. Perhaps there is no power that, today or in the near-term, can present a truly global threat to the U.S. military. However, our current or potential enemies don't need to defeat us across the globe -- they can act regionally or locally.

We certainly haven't reached the point that an attack on North Korea would be a cakewalk, and in both the Persian Gulf and in the Straits of Taiwan our navy could in the foresseable future face some serious threats. (Just for example, Iranian dhows equipped with hypersonic anti-ship missiles.)

Personally, I like to go to sleep knowing there are people worried about worst cases, and planning how to meet them. I'm far less comfortable with Barnett's rosy assumptions.

2. We don't need to worry about China or any other "near-peer" nation attacking our interests.

Barnett takes some nasty shots at the folks in the Pentagon who worry about China because - well, because Barnett doesn't worry about China. His whole argument here boils down to economic intergration which, Barnett asserts, effectively guarantees that China won't want to start a war. Barnett dismisses China's saber-rattling about Taiwan as a Machiavellian nod to the hard-liners in the military, designed to keep them happily planning an invasion that never will actual happen.

I'm no China expert, but then neither is Barnett. His background is as a student of the Soviet Union. It seems to me, as a layperson, that at some point China's advantage over Taiwan could be so big that the U.S. might see aiding Taiwan to be pointless -- in part because joining the battle would jeopardize the U.S.'s access to Chinese goods and to China's purchases of U.S. debt. In any event, Barnett avoids digging into any details about the reasons China may or may not seek to occupy Taiwan, instead dismissing any China threat as nonexistent given "integration."

3. We need two militaries -- one for fighing wars, and the other (a much bigger one) for stabilizing and "integrating" other countries.

Barnett has a point (also made by many others) about the need for forces that are trained and equipped for "post-war" operations. Further, he offers some valuable perspective with the suggestions that the "systems administrator" (an unfortunate label) forces ought to include some personnel who are older, who may not be full-time, and who may not be on the same "tracks" as career military personnel are today.

However, Barnett overreaches when he bashes the Pentagon for not splitting its forces into two parts. There ought to be plenty of ways to adapt the existing military to the various missions it may face, perhaps including the addition or restructuring of certain parts of the force structure. Yet Barnett seems insistent that things have to be done his way, meaning in essence throwing out the whole structure and rebuilding it the way he'd like to see it constructed.

The two most current examples of U.S. military involvement seem to cut against Barnett's concept of, on the one hand, a war-fighting force (the "Leviathan") that would win and leave, and on the other hand the peacekeeping force (the "Systems Administrator") that would help integrate the country into the world "core" after the warfighters left. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of having the warfighters leave and the beat-cops remain doesn't fit the facts on the ground.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan are still pretty ugly and dangerous places, and we still need trained warfighters to combat the insurgents and terrorists -- while we simultaneouly try to rebuild the countries' infrastructures and help train militaries and civil service corps. If all we had in Iraq and Afghanistan were "beat cops," we'd be handing the bad guys plenty of soft targets and potential hostages.

4. The U.S. has an obligation to help "integrate" the "gap" nations.

Barnett seems to offer two reasons why the U.S. should take the lead in trying to integrate the "gap" nations, and he tends to blur them together. One reason he offers is that we will benefit from integrating the gap nations, as their propensity to cause us trouble decreases, and younger gap residents immigrate to aging nations in Europe. The other reason is that it's the right thing to do.

It's important to assess these arguments separately.

As far as the pragmatic value of integration, the fact that integration may have some benefit doesn't tell us how much we ought to be willing to spend in pursuit of these benefits. In terms of pure cold benefits and costs, we well might find in some (or many) cases that some kind of containment does the job, at least for a while. Or we may decide that the benefits of, say, immigration would accrue to the Europeans (since the U.S. has a steady supply of new residents coming from Mexico and vicinity), and that therefore certain actions in the gap make sense only if the EU picks up the tab. Also from a purely cost-benefit standpoint, there may be something to be said for writing off much of subsaharan Africa, which by and large isn't hurting anyone but itself.

The moral case for integration is harder to assess, because it involves subjective judgments on both personal and societal levels. For example, if rival ethnicities in Rwanda are hacking each other to pieces, do we have an "obligation" to intervene? Barnett's broadbrush judgment is that the U.S. has obligations to help integrate the "gap," but he seems to stop short of claiming that every upheaval in the "gap" requires our intervention. This seems like exactly the kind of thing the American electorate ought to have a say about.

* * *

Finally, there is an annoying tendency that pervades Dr. Barnett's book: He seems nearly obsessed with setting himself up as the "father" of the U.S.'s future military doctrine. Although he doesn't quite come out and say it, Barnett implies repeatedly that the idea of a "new map" originated with him -- and that others were too foolish, or too fixated on other world-views or other issues (e.g., China), to discover it. It gets realy old reading Barnett's assaults on unnamed Pentagon personnel who, he seems to say, just don't have the cosmic insights he's developed over the years.

Bottom line -- this is a thought-provoking book, but it's long on pages and short on detail. I'd have preferred more hard-core analysis of real-world examples (e.g., China) and less braggadocio.

Whether you agree with it or not, Barnett's analysis of the current security structure of the United States, and how it should change, will irrevocably affect the way you will think about this subject. The strategic structure Barnett posits is based on his map of the world which divides countries between the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. The Core includes North America, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, India, parts of South America, South Africa, and Australia. The Non-Integrating Gap includes those countries we normally think of as being in the third world. The Core is economically developed, offers personal freedom to its inhabitants, and is highly connected with the rest of the Core. The Gap is non-connected, poor, experiences little personal freedom, and has a number of "bad guy" rulers who make trouble for the Core.

Barnett's thesis is that the US should prepare for a twenty-first century mission of "shrinking the gap". Unfortunately, he finds us ill-prepared to do so. He points out that our military still has the cold war focus of preparing to engage a "near peer" foe using massed high tech weaponry. What is needed instead is a dual-mission force that can fight actions like Afghanistan and Iraq by applying overwhelming force against relatively unsophisticated foes, as well as provide the nation building expertise now woefully missing in Iraq.

Barnett is a Pentagon think tank type who has worked with Wall Street financial analysts to project what the security environment will be in this century. He concentrates on four flows: money, energy, population, and security. He sees the US as an exporter of security to the rest of the world. By the judicious application of force (read: get rid of Saddam, Kim Jong Il, and the ayatollahs) he believes the US can create a world in which poverty is decreased, personal freedom is increased, and connectivity serves as a ballast against disruptions of order.

A subtext of the book is Barnett's recounting of how policy is made in the Pentagon and how analysts vie for the "killer brief" as a path to influence and promotion. I seriously doubt that anyone will agree with all, or even most, of what Barnett presents. However, there is little doubt that his ideas are shaping the debate, and informed citizens would do well to acquaint themselves with them.

I'm reading a number of books on the Middle East and our dilemmas there, and this was one I picked up almost on a whim. It apparently generated a great deal of controversy when the idea was originally put forward (as a magazine article) and it's been greeted with a lot of hostility as a book, too. Let's go over the premise of the book, and then some of the criticisms of it.

The author of the book was educated to be a Cold War analyst. Unfortunately, as he received his doctorate the Soviet Union collapsed, and he was left without anything to specialize in. He spent much of the 90s studying the Russian military (especially their navy) and after 9/11 morphed himself into a prophet looking at the world through a new perspective, at least in his mind, so that he can see what needs to be done in the next 50 years, and the goal that could be achieved.

Barnett contends that the end of the Cold War wasn't the disaster for the world that various pundits opined that it was. He makes the point that up until the day the Soviets collapsed, they were the root of all Evil as far as the Pentagon was concerned. The day after, the world without them was a much more dangerous place, because they'd held all the nationalism movements in check and kept a bunch of civil wars from happening. Barnett insists this is bunk, and examines the world in some detail, pointing out that major portions of the world now don't have insurgencies or wars at all, and haven't had since the fall of the Soviets.

The main premise of the book, however, is Barnett's new perspective, the map of the title. Instead of splitting the world up into Communist and Capitalist sectors, with a "Third World" not aligned with either, he instead now divides the world into two groups: what he calls the "Functioning Core" and the "Non-Integrating Gap". Both of these terms are rather clumsy and unfamiliar, so he spends a great deal of time discussing what exactly he means by each of them. The Gap consists of most of Andean South America and the Caribbean rim, all of Africa outside if South Africa, the Middle East, and SouthEast Asia. The Functioning Core is the rest of the world, including such newly developed countries as Argentina and India.

The main premise of the book is that we need to shrink this Gap to the point where the countries involved transform themselves into democracies with more independant economies that allow money to flow freely. The countries involved would also (with the shrinking of the Gap) improve the situation of the women in the country, and allow foreign investment and exchange of ideas. The result, optimally, would involve the end of war as we know it, and the transformation of the world into a more tranquil, stable world.

Much of the criticism of Barnett's idea comes from the hard left and the hard right. The left worries that we're imposing our society and civilization on other cultures and societies, so that other nations wind up disliking us. A corollary, of course, is that we'd be destroying all those indigenous cultures, because of little details like their abuse of women or top-down political structure. The right, in contrast, dislikes the idea of stretching ourselves all over the planet trying to control various groups of dark-skinned people, most of whom the average rightie doesn't care about one way or the other. The idea is that we should just retreat to our borders, and let them shoot one another, only emerging from our lair to respond to attacks on us.

Barnett discusses both of these scenarios (and dismisses them rather easily) as either short-sighted or just plain stupid. The ideas presented here are very far-sighted and wide-horizoned, and frankly I've been trying to say much of it for a while. Unfortunately I'm not as articulate as Dr. Barnett.

Barnett's style wanders between conversational and complex, but for the most part stays with the former than the latter. The criticisms that Barnett levels at the Bush Administration aren't what you'd expect from a Democrat (which Barnett is): he insists that Bush made the correct decision in invading Iraq, though they've done a very poor job of articulating what they're trying to do, and their vision of the world after they have succeeded. It's a wonderful idea and frankly I'm surprised that more people haven't adopted it.

The one speedbump, of course, is the willingness of the country to send troops around the world to fix the sorts of things that get countris into Barnett's Gap. Barnett thinks that if the President were to articulately and clearly elaborate on what they want to do for and with the world, the result would be acceptance, and enlistment of young men into our armed forces for the purposes of spreading peace around the world. I'm not certain that it's the case, and I know that the opposition candidates politically will turn this into a political issue.

Beyond all of this, however, the book puts forward a number of interesting facts, strategies, and conditions around the world that are very very informative. The author uses all of these to make his point that it's not impossible to perfect humanity at the national level (we basically have in Europe, outside the Balkans) and that we should at least make the attempt. I really thought this book valuable, and frankly think it the most important book at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, if not since the end of World War II.

EDITED 8 July 2007 to add rave review of the author's newest incarnation, his presentation given to TED (URL in the comment). He has finally distilled and refined his ideas into a world-class presentation that is a fantastic stage-setter for more substantive and detailed presenations (see second URL in comment). His current (2007) brain is beyond five stars. I am so very pleased to see this brilliant development.

Old Review (Still Valid on the Book Itself)

This is another of those books that started as an article and should have stayed there. The author, who appears to be either unfamiliar with or unwilling to credit works from earlier decades as well as more recently that present ideas similar to and often superior to his, has essentially three good ideas that can be summed up as follows:

Idea #1: World can be divided into a Functioning Core and a Non-Integrating Gap. The disconnected gap is bad for business (risky) and the US military can protect its budget by getting into the business of exporting security so that Wall Street can do more business safely.

Idea #2: Connectivity or disconnectedness are the essential means of defining and influencing which countries are able to move into the Functioning Core and which remain in the Non-Integrating Gap [too state-centric for my taste, but a good point--my 1990's call for Digital Marshal Plan remains valid.]

Idea #3: Economic relationships have replaced military power as the essential attribute of relations among nations--for example, we cannot deal with China as a military power without first having a comprehensive economic strategy and economic tools with which to influence them.

There are many points where I agree with the author, and I give him credit for thinking of all of this on his own, without much attention to decade's worth of scholarship and informed professional opinion in the military journals. He is absolutely correct to note that we cannot fence the Gap, we must stabilize it. Of course, Joe Nye and Max Manwaring and Mark Palmer and Bob Oakley and Jonathan Schell, to name just 5 of the 470+ national security authors have made important points along these lines, but their work is not integrated here. This is one massive Op-Ed that should have remained an article.

The author has irritated me with his low-key but obvious assumption that he is the first to break out of the box and "get it." On page 63 he goes on at length with the view that America has lacked visionaries, and the implication that he is the first to come forward. Not true. From John Boyd to Chuck Spinney to Bill Lind to GI Wilson to Mike Wylie we have had many visionaries, but the military-industrial complex has always seen them as threats. We tend to dismiss and shoot our visionaries, and I am truly glad that the author's personal relations with Cebrowski and a few others--as well as his fortunate association with a couple of naval think-forward endeavors--has given him some running room.

There is actually little of substance in this book. The article has been expanded, not with substance, but rather with very long descriptions of this young man's engagement in the process of the Pentagon and the process of strategic reflection. His discussions of the many forums that he found boring if not hostile to free thinking are excellent, and that aspect of the book takes it to four stars where it might normally have only received three.

Two weaknesses of the book, perhaps associated with the author's urgent need to "stay inside the wire" in order to keep his job:

1) All his brilliance leads to just two forces being recommended: the "big stick" force and the "baton-stick" (constabulary) force. In fact, were he more familiar with the literature, he would have understood that from diverse points we are all converging on four forces after next: Big War, Small War including White Hat/Police Ops, Peace War, and Cyber-Economic War. Inter-agency strategy, inter-agency budgeting, and inter-agency operations, with a joint inter-agency C4I corps under military direction, are the urgently needed next step.

2) The author is delusional when describing and praising our operational excellence in defeating well-armed enemies. Were he more familiar with the after action reports from Iraq, particularly those done by the Army War College (clearly on a different planet from the Navel War College), he would understand that Iraqi incompetence was the foremost factor in our success, especially when Rumsfeld insisted on throwing out the sequence of force plans and sending us in light and out of balance. He also ignores the vulnerability of complex systems and relies much too heavily on University of Maryland and CIA unclassified publications that are completely out of step with European conflict studies and other arduously collected ground truths about the extent of state and sub-state war and violence.

I disagree with his concluding recommendations that place Africa last on the list of those areas to be saved. His overall recommendations are simplistic, focusing on the standard litany for Pentagon go-alongs: Iraq, Korea, Iran, Colombia, Middle East, China, Asian NATO, Latin American NATO, Africa.

I note with interest his use of the term, "the military-market link." I believe this refers to an assumption, matured by the author in the course of his Wall Street wargames, and certainly acceptable to the neo-conservatives, to wit, that the U.S. military exists to export security so America can do business. I would draw the reader's attention to Marine Corps General Butler's book, "War as a Racket", and his strong objection to having spent his career as an "enforcer" for US corporations.

I do want to end with a note of deep sympathy for the author. On the one hand, he overcame a period of time when his sanity was questioned by ignorant Admirals and other "lesser included" Captains of limited intellect. On other he is trapped in a system that does not like iconoclasts but rewards those who innovate on the margins. His book is most useful in describing this environment, where people who rely on secrets are completely out of touch with reality, and service chiefs focus on protecting their budgets rather than accomplishing (or even defining) their mission. He appears to have discovered the Catholic mafia within the naval services, and his several references throughout the book lend weight to my belief that we need to do religious counter-intelligence within the government.

Barnett's work introduces many new conceptual tools for understanding the world that the reader will need to understand his argument. He divides the world into a "Core" and a "Gap", each of with functions according to different rule sets. Generally, the Core icludes the US, the EU, Japan and the rest of the developed (and developing) world that operates through the rule sets of interdependece and connectivity. Generally, the Gap inculdes the Middle East, Africa, parts of South America, and South Asia. This part of the world is not connected to the Core because it operates with different, dysfunctional rule sets. This distinction is not perfect, there are anomalies in both the Core and Gap. The outliers nothwithstanding, it boils down to globalization being part of the Core and not being part of the Gap.

Barnett argues that the Gap's disconnectedness is a threat to the Core and thus the Core should "shrink the Gap" (or "grow the Core" if you like). The 9/11 attacks represent this threat. Barnett calls the attack a "System Perturbation", but he essentially means that the operating rules in the Core were disrupted. Bin Laden attempted to change the US' rules sets to drive it out of the Middle East, but in the short term he had the opposite effect. The US realized that its post-Cold war rule sets were not sufficient to deal with the threat of disconnected states, so the US developed new rule sets like the Patriot Act and pre-emption.

Barnett argues that the US' (and eventually the entire Core's) adoption of new rule sets must work to shrink the gap over time. Much like what happened on 9/11, the US must create some system perturbations in the Gap. He argues that invading Iraq was a sort of big bang for the region where a whole new operating system will eventually emerge and develop from one cataclysmic event. The old rule sets were disrupted and new ones will emerge over time.

According to Barnett, the Core must hang around and ensure that connectivity results from the new rule sets in the Middle East. To do so he proposes a bifurcation of the existing US force into one more suited for war and one more suited for nation-building. Barnett stresses the importance of Core-wide coperation in this regard; the rest of the Core will be more capable of helping the police force rather than the US warfighting force.

Basically, Barnett wants the Core to progressively baby-sit parts of the Gap until they are connected to the Core and no longer pose threats. A tremendous task to be sure. But unlike most pundits and experts he offers something better than reasons for dispair, which I like. We need some guidance towards a better world in our policy. If nothing else his ideas ought to be debated and it is good to see that some of his strategic principles are gaining traction.

Nevertheless, I do not know what to make of his argument as a whole. It sounds like many before it in promising a peaceful, interdependent world, dating all the way back to Kant. Even in the decades before the first World War many in the Manchester school out of England made similar claims about the growing interdependence and prospects for peace in Europe. What I am trying to say is that while there may be a strong correlation between interdependence and peace, is there any causality? Barnett does caution by qouting Tolkien, offering "hope without guarantees" and I do not agree with doing nothing If anything, Dr. Barnett has clearly identified the systemic problems that pose threats to the Core, and particularly the US. However, I do wonder about the particulars of some of his ideas. How can we be sure that we can control system perturbations of our own making and of those by others against us? How do we reconcile differences within the Core yet alone come to a consensus on shrinking the gap? What about the stability of the global economic structure during this process of agressively spreading globalization? Maybe trivial points, but before undertaking such an enormous challenge we ought to pin down some of these details.

Overall a good read though. Barnett's a decent writer for someone who works in the defense community. I recommend it, if for nothing else to get you think about the national security issues facing this country in a different manner.

Some people have commented that this book is an execellent evaluation of the direction that the strategic goals of the USA should take and what may be the framework for forming a coherent policy outlining our grand strategy for what America's role should be in the world. This is correct and true. Others have objected that the author incorrectly assumes the US should police the world. What they fail to realize is one of Barnett's points is that an extremely large military budget is one of the reasons we have a such a large deficit, which is bank-rolled by many foreign investors. Why, because they get returns on it (other economic gains in certain instances in how it can affect currency markets), and because the US government exports security which provides stability for the institutions of globalization which some of these emerging economies are plugged into. Anyone who knows what the size of the debt is, take a guess at what happens when these foreign investors don't renew their financing of the debt or pull their assets out? This is why the US has a stake in being globally active because our government is financed by the institutions of global capital which require a stable global environment (not to mention our economy's role in the global system in addition to the government). Regulating global situations is the US exporting it's military expertise as the global good of security and stability. Our country can get the debt constantly financed if our society, economy, and government can provide returns for the capital that is invested in each. People will support American institutions (not just government) financially when we provide goods in exchange. When our country is global, our government must serve global ends; just like any transnational corporation.

The Pentagon's new map relies on the concept and importance of connectedness (aka globalization) as the key to world stability. Barnett defines two 'camps' in the world: 'core' nations who follow the rules of civilization, and 'gap'countries who are focused on disconnecting civilization for their own gain. He explains that connectedness is facilitated and preserved by free movement of people, energy, investments, and security (I would add ideas/information and technology to these 4 but one could argue that 'they're in there'). This elegant model has roots in history and with considered thinking does not appear overly simplistic as some reviewers have suggested. It is appealing to portray the world as so complex that nothing can be accomplished (Barnett alludes to this) but solutions that work are generally the simplest (Sir William of Occam).

One of the alarming messages from the book is the low quality of thinking and decision processes prevalent in the defense establishment. It is commendable that Barnett took the uncommon action of connecting to business/economics thinkers but if defense analysts are not routinely tapping into the private sector for information, tools and processes, they are in the dark relative to what is happening in the world. The descriptions of what passes for problem solving and decision making processes in the Pentagon sound third rate.

The only problem with this book is it is about 3-5 times longer that it needs to be, saying the same things over and over with slightly different nuances. The saving grace is Barnett is a good story teller and it is very readable. However, it can be a 'tough slog' to absorb all the tidbits in support of the major thesis. It would be easy to lower the rating to 4 stars just on the basis of writing style and verbosity. Barnett may be a good brief writer but he's a wordy guy. He would have a tougher time 'making it' in a cutting edge business because he wouldn't have enough time to get his message out.