CobaltBlue posted this excellent article over on FADG:
nwc.navy.mil
I spread it around to some blog buddies and Don Luskin wrote this interesting reply:
poorandstupid.com
IRAQ AS MERCANTILISM IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Must reading: an entirely cogent -- if morally lacking -- framework for rationalizing the disarming and reshaping of Iraq from Thomas P. M. Barnett of the US Naval War College, featured in the March issue of Esquire (here's a link to its text, on the War College's site). Barnett's thesis is an updated mercantilism for the age of democratic globalization -- where the mercantile interests at stake are not a single nation's, but the whole modern world's.
"Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.
"Globalization’s 'ozone hole' may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.
"The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment."
I offer this excerpt here not because I think Barnett offers a moral basis for a just war, but because his article is a highly articulate explication of the most extreme possible version of "mission creep" in the initiative against Iraq -- beyond disarmament, beyond post-war nation-building, beyond the region-building contemplated in Bush's speech last week... all the way to world-building.
According to Barnett's logic, Iraq is just the first step. And if he's right, this is going to get very, very expensive. Especially if we have to go it alone for the sake of the whole damn modern world.
Posted by Donald Luskin at 10:47 PM | link
I don't entirely agree but I think Luskin is getting at the scale of the matter. I think the task is not world-building but order-building. The institutions of order were designed for the Cold War. Barnett is correct to say that, since Americanization (due to network effects and power laws) is the front edge of the Globalization era, it is America's responsibility to ensure that the new institutions of order emerge.
We are seeing the Clash of Institutions as we manage the Clash of Civilizations.
Paul |
