Approaching the tipping point
Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog
January 01, 2005
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, stroke of midnight, 31 December 2004
We have survived the 11+ hours of The Lord of the Rings. Actually only Emily, my oldest daughter, and I make it to the end. Youngest Vonne Mei hits the crib around 9pm. Jerry, wearing his Spiderman costume with fake muscles is carried up at 10. Son Kevin, who starts the day puking, then is rollerblading around the basement at 3, goes back to upchucking at 6 and conks out for good around 9pm.
It's been that kind of day.
A death in my spouse's family this morning ends a tough year on that score, so we're up before dawn on New Year's to drive Vonne and baby to Logan airport for the flight back, leaving me and the three oldest for several days. That'll push off the start of my writing for a couple of days, but that seems for the better. I am still wrapping my mind around the outline and a couple of more days fiddling will seem good. Plus that'll give me Monday and Tuesday to get things settled at the college regarding my formal end date.
Interesting possibilities already coming in over the transom, so my sense is that 2005 will be a very good year, but one of transition. Clearly, everything will revolve around the sequel to PNM, and looking at the outline, I realize clearly that this will be a sequel.
That feels both odd and quite natural. Given the year I've had and how PNM turned out, it would seem both weird and false to simply write another book where Core-Gap, System Perturbations, SysAdmin, etc. all seemed to vanish into the past. I mean, what's the point of being a visionary if you're just going to change your look with every book? Either I'm with the program or I'm not, and I've decided I'm with it.
So I signed my contract with Putnam tonight, and it'll go out with FEDEX on Monday, the same day I hand in my resignation to the college—at the very strong suggestion by my superiors. Their choice, my choice, and never the twain will meet from here on out.
So I move from advocating to serious commitment. This is who I am going to be—all grown up with my father in the ground.
So it's ever-upward and ever-forward for this mongrel, Chinese-American family with the purebred Siberian cat and the soon-to-be adopted purebred black Lab (actually, mom was a blond, so go figure). I must admit, sometimes I marvel at the racism we've already met on this subject of our youngest, with some of the strongest reactions coming from kids who attend school with my two oldest ("She's not your sister. She's Chinese and someday she'll find out!"). But we'll move ahead on this subject and so many others in 2005. And maybe we'll all head back to China, all six of us, in 2006, just to piss those people off all the more!
So I'll take the hate mail in stride, my kids will take the racial taunts in stride, and that which does not kill us will make us stronger over the long haul.
Because it's always a long haul. As Gen. Abizaid recently told the Washington Post's David Ignatius a couple of weeks back ("Achieving Real Victory Could Take Decades," 26 December 2004, p. B1), this is going to be a "long war," against what Abizaid calls this century's version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, radicals determined to disconnect the Middle East from the world at large. According to his top admiral, David Nichols, commander of the 5th fleet (Ignatius' paraphrase), "It's not 'us' vs. 'them,' but a connected world in which everyone will gain by isolating and destroying the extremist fringe." As Ignatius later puts it:
That's what victory would look like in Abizaid's Long War, too. In the broad arc of the world where Centcom operates, life would feel modern, connected, free, relaxed, ordinary. It would feel like a hand that is no longer clenched in a fist. It's a fight where the Muslim masses would win, without the United States losing. But this past week, those images of connectedness and success seemed a long, long way off.
There certainly seem a long way off in south and southeast Asia following the Christmas Tsunamis. But even here there is a nice glimmer of hope. How about a unprecedented "core regional group" made up of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. Ever heard of that quartet before? Toss in China and you've got a might hand ready to sow connectivity with disconnectedness was generated almost instantly by one massive vertical shock followed the world's biggest horizontal wave.
What's so great about how the Core must respond to this tragedy is that if it does not respond as fully as it should, smart money knows that we'll end up losing a victory we could easily achieve, if only we understood this global war on terrorism within the context of everything else. There is connectivity to be won in Asia in 2005. There is a future worth creating there, a Core worth expanding, a Gap worth shrinking.
On that "core regional group," a name I naturally like, we that new club have the sense to include China? I mean, if China's rising, shouldn't it be there helping the very same region reshaped by its rise? Good question for both Washington and Beijing.
My world of the defense community still sees only danger and threat and confrontation in everything China does, ditto for Russia. Is there a future worth creating where we somehow manage to turn these two giants back into enemies? I mean, is there one for those who do something other than plot brilliantly massive wars against brilliantly massive opponents? That debate is raging right now inside the Pentagon regarding the Quadrennial Defense Review and how we describe China in that document. Does either side realize the opportunity for good that now exists in the response to the tsunamis in Asia? How resources for war can be diverted to something better?
The big cuts are coming in defense for the classic big-ticket items. The Navy is going to give up a carrier as a sacrificial lamb in 2005, and it won't be the last. So if that is our decision making, are we effectively managing the "everything else" for those cuts to make sense, or are some of us simply setting up the rest for the much desired I-told-you-so down the road.
I say beware of the doom-spouting prophets in this day and age. They want conflict and rivalries and danger the world over, and they don't care how many historic opportunities are discarded in the process. Theirs' is that classic "us v. them" future, lacking the connectedness, lacking the sense of responsibility for the "them" and considering only the "us" (as our Founding Fathers constantly advised us, I am told in email after email). This selfish view encompasses a future only worth creating for us, one that forces the "them" to stay outside, over there for all time, lest of course they were to come here and increase the mongrelization of our culture, our values, our blood.
For some it dies hard, but for me it never dies. I see 2005 as a year for staying the course but also taking some bold steps to carve out both a new place in this world for my family (odd as it may seem to some here in Rhode Island, a tiny white island in a sea of multi-kulti America). That's what I'm doing in my personal life, that's the upcoming piece in Esquire, that's the book that just itchin' to come out (I pretty much dream it every night now).
This is what I take from 2004: people want a hopeful vision and a guide to what they might do to help bring it about. PNM ends the year # 78 on Amazon (78! Tell me that one back in April when it came out and I would have shouted "Shut up!"). All the finger-pointing books have come and gone. All the backward-looking books have come and gone. Eight months later, PNM remains. And the reason why is that it's not a grand strategy for the summer of 2004, it's a grand strategy for what lies ahead: for the Long War that spreads the Long Peace--which has long defined the Core--into the still tumultuous Gap. That future worth creating has been years in the understanding for me, and it will be years in the making for this planet. But 2005 is as good a year to start as any, and I look forward to it immensely.
Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at January 1, 2005 12:00 AM |
