(Thomas Barnett on Booknotes, Part 2)LAMB: Let me then jump to another easily understood point. You say we should take out Kim Jong Il.
BARNETT: Well, one of the arguments that I make is that if you`re going to be serious about a global war on terrorism, what you`re going to end up having to do is integrate these regions that are historically poorly connected to the outside world, meaning the regions that are poorly connected to the global economy, as we understand it. People talk about globalization and they make it sound like it wasn`t there 20 years ago. It`s everywhere now.
LAMB: Define that.
BARNETT: It isn`t...
LAMB: Define globalization.
BARNETT: Globalization is a connectivity of communication networks. It`s a connectivity of people travel, idea movement. It`s connectivity of economic trade and a movement of money. It`s goods and services and ideas and traffic and all sorts of connectivity that develop in a mature fashion among the most mature economies, OK?
In the aftermath of the Second World War, that core that grows out, this new core of a global economy, was based on North America, Western Europe and Japan. If you listened to the World Bank around 1980, big chunks of what used to be the Soviet bloc sort of start coming on line because China starts to open up to the outside world, India begins to change over the `90s, the soviet Union breaks up. We`re talking about some of the big economies in Latin America. You`re talking about the tigers in Asia. They start to integrate with this global economy.
So I talk about a core, a functioning core of the global economy, which is roughly two thirds of the world`s population. And then I distinguish that from what I call the non-integrating parts of the world. And the reason why that`s important...
LAMB: The gap.
BARNETT: The gap. What I call the non-integrating gap.
LAMB: I mean, before we go, you`re talking about two different things. This word comes up all the time -- core and gap. Core is two thirds of the world?
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: And gap is the other third.
BARNETT: That is poorly integrated to the global economy.
LAMB: Name some of those.
BARNETT: I would run it from left to right on a map. It`s the Caribbean rim. It`s the Andes portion of South America. It`s most of Africa. It`s the Balkans. It`s the Caucasus. It`s Central Asia, Southwest Asia and much of Southeast Asia. How I develop that swathe of the world and call it the non-integrating gap -- what we did was, we simply took and placed on a map the almost 150 military interventions we`ve engaged in since the end of the cold war. So...
LAMB: When did the cold war end?
BARNETT: For me, 1990. So I`m talking about the last 14 years. Where have we gone? Because the Soviets go away and we get out of the bipolar competition with them. And you say, What`s the natural demand pattern that the world exhibits, in terms of what I call the exporting of U.S. security? What are the situations that demand our attention, that attract our interventions?
LAMB: A hundred and fifty times?
BARNETT: A hundred and fifty times. And all I did was, I drew a line around that -- that figure.
(CROSSTALK)
LAMB: And you have that map in the book.
BARNETT: Right. And I say, What unifies these regions? And what I find is these regions uniformly are less connected to the global economy than that functioning core. And what`s interesting is, that functioning core, there is no war in it. There is no mass violence.
LAMB: They`re not always democracies, though.
BARNETT: No, not always democracies. But what I talk about in the functioning core is that you`re -- what I see in these countries are that they`re consistently seeking to synchronize what I call their internal rule sets on economics, markets, politics, and whatnot, with the emerging global rule set that...
LAMB: I`ve got to stop you again because you use this a lot -- rules set.
BARNETT: Rule sets.
LAMB: Sets, S-E-T-S.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: Rules -- is it rule sets?
BARNETT: Rule sets.
LAMB: OK, rule sets.
BARNETT: Rule sets.
LAMB: Yes. And you use that all the time.
BARNETT: Right.
LAMB: What is a rule set?
BARNETT: Well, as I explain at the beginning of the book, one way to think about a rule set is it`s the way the game is played. It`s the rules of the game, OK? So American football has a rule set. American baseball has a rule set. Hockey has a rule set. The U.S. economy has a rule set. The way the U.S. engages militarily with the outside world has a rule set.
LAMB: And you say it`s changed in 1776 and in -- jumping ahead to 1861, or all the years, it seems like, when war happened.
BARNETT: Yes. Because usually, what war represents is that the rule sets have gotten so dangerously out of whack that there is such either anger or dissatisfaction in the system that somebody tries to change the system through war, OK? And the argument I make about the 1990s is that globalization had spread so dramatically to such a larger portion of humanity, that what happened was, was that the connectivity raced ahead of the security rule sets, and the economic rule sets raced ahead of the political rule sets.
Here`s an example. You get connectivity in the Internet, and you have new definitions of dangers, like stalking on the Internet. And until you create a law that says stalking on the Internet and create a name for it, there`s a rule set gap there. There are people abusing new forms of connectivity to do dangerous and bad things, and until you create a law that says, That`s wrong, I`m going to call that wrong, here`s a new law, there`s a gap between those two rule sets, OK? Same thing with, say, identity theft. You get the connectivity of the modern age, and people can steal your identity. Until we come up with this phrase, identity theft, it wasn`t even really illegal. That`s where the economics and the connectivity get ahead of the politics and the security.
LAMB: Go back to Kim Jung Il.
BARNETT: OK.
LAMB: Take him out.
BARNETT: Well, here`s that argument about disconnectedness defines danger. So I look at the world and I say, Show me the places that are poorly connected, I`ll show you the violence, I`ll show you all the wars, all the genocide, all the ethnic cleansing, all the terrorists that we care about. So when I see a country that`s disconnected from the outside world, inevitably, bad things are happening. Because who wants to disconnect a society from the outside world? Somebody who wants to rule that society in an authoritarian fashion. And when you give them that kind of power over people, they tend to do bad things to those people and they tend to do bad things to their neighbors. They tend to become a threat.
So I look at a Saddam Hussein. I look at a Kim Jong Il. Kim Jong Il in North Korea is one of the most disconnected societies in the world. Three million people, we estimate -- we can`t even tell -- we think three million people died of a famine in the late 1990s in North Korea. Why? Because Kim Jong Il refused to let the food shipments come in to deal with this famine. He preferred to keep his control over his people than to allow them to be fed. And on that basis, he was, I would argue, criminally negligent in the death of three million people, half a Holocaust. Does anybody know about this? It`s a very untold story. It doesn`t make the newspapers. Why? Because North Korea is so disconnected, nobody knows what goes on there. It`s like Stalin killing 20 million people in the 1930s. We couldn`t figure that out until decades later.
So when I see a Kim Jong Il and I see that kind of disconnectedness, I say, by definition, this is a bad guy. And I will argue, if you want to make globalization spread and if you want the rule sets that come with that globalization to encourage collective security and to reduce the incidences of war, you`ve got to push connectivity for all it`s worth and remove from power those who try to enforce, involuntarily, disconnectedness on any society. So Kim Jong Il is a roadblock. He makes Northeast Asia a worse place than it would be with his departure.
LAMB: By the way, back to your Power Point briefings. How many times have you given one?
BARNETT: I`ve given probably a thousand or more.
LAMB: How many people usually in the audience?
BARNETT: Anywhere from -- I do -- sometimes -- I`ve done ones for senior leaders, where it`s the one guy in the room, and I`ve done them for as many as 500 or 600, where there`s another 2,000 or 3,000 that might be watching on video communications, you know, broadcast around the world.
LAMB: And how many other people are there in this town like you that give Power Point briefings?
BARNETT: Well, there are a lot of people who get Power Point briefings. What I get told a lot after Power Point briefings is that they`ve never seen anything quite like mine. I mean, mine stuff tends to be -- because it is high concept and because it doesn`t race through history and because it presents a lot of big ideas, to get that across to people, you have to make it entertaining and you have to make it dynamic. So my presentations tend to be highly theatrical. It`s almost like watching a show. In fact, people have said that I could probably take it and put it on Broadway and charge money for it in that kind of manner.
LAMB: Most guys like you who give Power Point briefings don`t end up getting in "Esquire" magazine.
BARNETT: No.
LAMB: And they don`t end up writing books that are on -- you know, that -- this book is -- I can`t even see -- who published this book?
BARNETT: G.P. Putnam`s Sons.
LAMB: Yes. So it`s a -- it`s a...
BARNETT: Serious house.
LAMB: ... serious trade publication -- I mean, trade...
BARNETT: A mass -- a mass book.
LAMB: Mass books.
BARNETT: Yes. Not a trade publication, in effect.
LAMB: Right. Well, but it`s a trade book, they call it, in the hardback nonfiction category. The question to you, though, is, how did you get this into an "Esquire" magazine?
BARNETT: Well, I`ll tell you, I spent most of my career across the `90s making these arguments about how national security had to come closer and understand this process of globalization. And what I heard from the Pentagon was, It`s a complicating factor. You know, We don`t do global economics, we do war. So the only way I could get into people`s offices was to create this very compelling, entertaining Power Point presentation. And I knew that most of the `90s, I was getting in because I was awfully entertaining, because people loved the Power Point. They thought it was fascinating. They didn`t know what any of it meant, in terms of how it connected to national security.
But I knew that something would come down the pike that would make those connections more clear. 9/11 did that for me, OK? At that point, my description of the world and saying, Look where we go with our military interventions. We go to the most disconnected parts of the world. It`s where globalization hasn`t taken root. All of a sudden, the arguments about why we wage war and why we seek peace in this environment are intimately connected to a globalization. That becomes a package and a message that has broader appeal than just DoD.
And so I started briefing it outside of DoD, and on that basis, I started briefing it to private sector industries, like international financial community, to information technology community, which understands this kind of stuff, and my tendency to employ information technology metaphors in my language -- it makes perfect sense to them. I mean, this is a world they recognize.
And so when I say, This is where the Pentagon and war and peace and the arguments of national security fit within, you know, the great unfolding of this globalization process, that private sector says, I understand. This is good information for me as a businessperson. You get that kind of reputation, you start giving speeches to industry groups. "Esquire" comes along, and in the summer of 2002, they say we`re going to do a "best and brightest." And they are looking for a strategist, and they are looking for a strategist who expresses a new definition of how war and peace operate in this world because they say after 9/11, things have changed.
They ask around. They`re told, Hey, you got to see this guy. He`s got this brief. It`s weird as hell. He gives it all the time. He`s kind of a cult figure inside the Pentagon. People really like him. They`re not sure exactly what to do with him, but he gets to brief everywhere. So go see this. They send a guy up to -- Andrew Chayefsky (ph), one of their reporters, up to the War College. He sits through two hours of the brief. I do it just for him. And he says, This is unbelievable. I`ve never seen anything like this. I didn`t realize people even thought this way inside the Pentagon. I mean, I can`t believe they pay you to do this.
And so they picked me as one of their best and brightest. They put me in the December issue. At that point, "Esquire" says, We got to see this brief. I come down, I brief the staff. They give me some advice on how to dress better, as you would expect from "Esquire." And they say, That one image that you`ve got in here, this map, as soon as that comes on the screen, they say, We have got to get that map inside of "Esquire" because the world and our readership doesn`t understand this larger rationale for the war on terrorism that this administration is conducting. They just don`t get it.
I mean, the fear factor in the American public is, in effect, Where are we going with this? I mean, we`re going to do Afghanistan. We`re going to do Iraq. Where are we going with this? Where does it end? What`s a happy ending? Give me a finish line. Describe how this ends. And once you get what the map is, you get a description of how the world works, where war fits within how that world works, and it gives you a sense of progress -- you know, judgments of measures of effectiveness. We are doing better when we do this. We are doing worse if we do that. It gives the American public some way to judge the actions of this administration, which I would argue they`ve explained in a poor fashion in terms of the grand strategy. They just say, basically, Trust us on this. So...
LAMB: What do you think, by the way, of George Bush and what he`s done so far?
BARNETT: Well, let me get -- let me get all the way to the book here, and then I`ll answer that question.
LAMB: OK.
BARNETT: Because I have a tendency to jump around, and it makes it harder for...
LAMB: And so do I, so we`re in bad shape here, if we`re not careful!
(LAUGHTER) |
