Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  One - THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF BUSH-CHENEY

  Two - A TWELVE- STEP RECOVERY PROGRAM FOR AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

  Three - THE AMERICAN TRAJECTORY

  Four - THE ECONOMIC REALIGNMENT

  Five - THE DIPLOMATIC REALIGNMENT

  Six - THE SECURITY REALIGNMENT

  Seven - THE NETWORK REALIGNMENT

  Eight - THE STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT

  Coda

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Notes

  Index

  ALSO BY THOMAS P. M. BARNETT

  Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World

  The Pentagon’s New Map

  Blueprint for Action

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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  Copyright © 2009 by Thomas P. M. Barnett

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barnett, Thomas P. M.

  Great powers : America and the world after Bush / Thomas P. M. Barnett.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01167-6

  1. United States—Foreign relations—21st century. 2. United States—Foreign relations—2001- .

  3. World politics—1989- . 4. United States—Military policy. 5. Great powers. 6. Strategy.

  7. Progressivism (United States politics). 8. United States—Foreign relations—Philosophy.

  9. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-—Political and social views.

  10. Cheney, Richard B.—Political and social views. I. Title.

  E895.B

  973.93—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  TO

  STEPHEN LEE MEUSSLING,

  SON OF a PREACHER MAN

  A lonely sail is flashing white

  Amidst the blue mist of the sea!

  What does it seek in foreign lands?

  What did it leave behind at home?

  Waves heave, wind whistles,

  The mast, it bends and creaks . . .

  Alas, it seeks not happiness

  Nor happiness does it escape!

  Below, a current azure bright,

  Above, a golden ray of sun . . .

  Rebellious, it seeks out a storm

  As if in storms it could find peace!

  —MIKHAIL LERMONTOV, “The Sail” (1832)

  Preface

  THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

  Lately, we are being told that this is no longer our world. America is in decline, and the rest of the world has caught up to us. Wars may be won, but the peace belongs to others—we just have to get used to it.

  And it is true that in the tumultuous times since 9/11 sent our world spinning that much faster, America has searched for a grand strategic vision to animate our spirit and guide our actions, and it has failed. When we should have inspired hope, we have stoked fears, and where we should have built bridges, we have erected walls.

  So I won’t tell you the critics are wrong—just that their own vision is too limited. This is still America’s world, and if we have the will to step up to the plate, we can make things right—right now.

  America’s journey back to where we once belonged begins with one simple realization: This is a world of our making. Neither accident nor providence, this “flat world” is fundamentally our design—a template of networks spreading, economies integrating, and states uniting. It’s so damn competitive merely because that’s our natural habitat; we don’t know how to make it any other way.

  In this world we find no strangers, just younger versions of ourselves, who are prone to all the same sins and manias we once suffered, even as they teach us magnificent new ways to improve our lives and secure our tightly shared future. We must neither fear nor dismiss them, but encourage their pursuit of happiness, and in doing so, we’ll find their main goal is one very familiar to us—the attainment of a middle-class existence.

  This looming achievement will put the planet under great duress in coming decades, much as it once did these United States. For this path to remain sustainable, compromises must be made and great technologies found. Some may see only billions of mouths to be fed, but in reality it is billions of minds to be harnessed. The one resource we will never deplete is our collective imagination.

  But imagination requires confidence, which both spreads and dissipates with the velocity of a virus. Here America plays a special historical role, not as the only great power—because there are so many great powers at work in this complex world—but as the power with the greatest opportunity either to extend or to sabotage globalization’s stunning advance around the planet.

  We are modern globalization’s source code—its DNA. As the world’s oldest and most successful multinational economic and political union, we remain the planet’s most communicable ideology—its most potent insurgency. Those thirteen colonies may have begun—quite implausibly—as the world’s original anti-imperialist league, but our international liberal trade order now encompasses the vast majority of the planet’s population.

  If we own up to our past, we can command our future. We can realign ourselves immediately to a world transforming. Some will see great compromise on this path, but it is really great consistency. America’s grand experiment has always balanced the needs of the many against the needs of the few—or the one. Our main challenge today—indeed, our main opportunity—is not those superempowered few seeking to do us harm but those unprecedented many seeking to do us one better.

  Yes, we have displayed the temerity to bring the mountain to Mohammed, extending our American System-cum-globalization to the most traditional civilizations still thinly connected to its networks, and we have triggered great friction with the power of that force. But in obsessing over that friction, we have lost all perspective on the forces we have created—the great
powers unleashed.

  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 challenged America to redefine the international security system. It was a challenge that the Bush-Cheney administration took up with a vengeance, sensing in that moment a chance to reposition both the presidency and the United States in terms of leadership—even primacy. In this bold quest, the White House’s sins of omission and commission were many. Recounting the most grievous ones (Chapter 1, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney”) is essential to America’s successful reengagement with a world left more unnerved by our government’s counterterrorism strategy than it was ever perturbed by actual terrorists. But our recovery doesn’t stop there. Fences need mending and relationships require repair. We’ll cover that gamut in Chapter 2, “A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy.”

  Before we can go on to explore the handful of major but necessary realignments that lie ahead, a bit of history is in order—specifically, American history. Citizens of this great country need to better understand its seminal role in constructing our current world, an environment that quite frankly too many of us today find frighteningly alien, when it is—pure and simple—the result of a conscious grand strategy pursued from the earliest days of our republic right through Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. And so, in Chapter 3, we’ll speak of great men and great powers and how each shaped the American trajectory and its impact on world history.

  Then we come to the hard part: recognizing where and how America lost its way in the years since 9/11. Since we’re talking about a world transforming in a dual sense, both from an American-engineered globalization process (ongoing) and Bush-Cheney’s decision to launch a “global war” (we’ll see where that takes America next), we need to approach this complex issue from a variety of storytelling angles—Rashomon style. So in Chapters 4 through 8, we’ll explore what I have come to realize are the five essential realignments to be made in America’s grand strategy going forward. We’ll start with economics, then expand into diplomacy and security, before branching out further into global networks and all the larger global equations (e.g., our planet’s increasingly fragile environment, heightened spirituality and religious identity, rising immigration rates) that must likewise inform America’s strategic realignment following Bush.1

  The next few years will constitute the first true test of globalization. As our globalized system continues processing its worst financial crisis ever, President Barack Obama encounters an international order suffering more deep-seated strain than at any time since the Great Depression. If there was any remaining doubt that the world’s great powers either all swim or all sink together in this interconnected global economy, then this recent contagion has erased it. Globalization is no longer a national choice but a global condition, and at this seminal moment in history it demands from its creator renewed—and renewing—leadership. President Obama’s opportunity to—as he has so often put it—“turn the page” could not be greater, for history rarely offers such made-to-order turning points.

  The United States isn’t coming to a bad end but a good beginning—our American System successfully projected upon the world. Our Rome wasn’t built in a day but constructed over many decades of struggle, our governing rules subject to constant revision and improvement. “These truths” may have seemed “self-evident” from the start, but self-actualized they were not. That the same is now true for this globalization-of-our-making should not cause us despair. We have been down this path before, taming both a wilderness and the market forces we later unleashed upon its settled lands. We are simply blessed today by a global economy whose expansion has already surpassed all past hopes and dreams for a connected, superempowered world. So many frontiers, so little time.

  Let us begin this journey of integration, not with a vague sense of foreboding but with a firm grasp of the possibilities. America has done a world of good to get humanity to the point where wars are disappearing and networks are proliferating. Where we need to take it next is well within our grasp. As long as we can remember what got us here, trust me, we’ll recognize the shape of things to come.

  One

  THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF BUSH-CHENEY

  It is tempting to write off the entire Bush-Cheney administration as one long unilateral deviation from the emerging global norm of multilateral cooperation, perhaps one even so great as to create a counter-norm by which rising great powers go their own way in response. But this view simultaneously gives the administration too little credit and too much blame.

  Clearly, 9/11 exposed America’s vulnerabilities in this network age and thus triggered a mad rush of new rules to fill in those gaps. For steering this effort, Bush-Cheney deserve some real credit. Their many new rules said, in effect, “Going forward, this is the new minimum security standard for remaining connected to the global economy—meet it or else!” As the world’s sole superpower and primary defender of our international liberal trade order, the United States needed to put forth that standard, if only to immediately restore some confidence to the international system. Did Bush-Cheney overreach in many of their proposed new rules? You bet. But in our system, we expect the executive branch to overdo it in response to crisis and the judiciary to trim back those excesses slowly over time. As for the international overreach, well, that’s pretty much the subject of this book; suffice it to say that in a “flat world,” great-power balancing can come in many forms, with only the most unimaginative among us expecting it to appear solely as a military buildup.

  Having triggered this global counterreaction, we find that our natural instinct now is to return sheepishly to the bosom of the Old Core West, believing that step will restore the fabled alliance and make it once again powerful enough to both continue this long war against violent extremism and meet the rising challenge of Eastern autocracies (read, Russia and China). This would be a double mistake, for Donald Rumsfeld’s much-vilified notion of a “new” and “old” Europe contained an essential truth: Those states that most recently joined our international liberal trade order are logically more willing to defend it. They’re also far more likely to be less democratic, however, given their historical trajectory, than the demographically older and more mature market economies of the West. So when Bush-Cheney made democratization a key pillar of their long-war approach, it effectively put America at odds with many of the New Core great powers (again, Russia and China) that would otherwise naturally be drawn to our military cause.

  Thus it makes little sense to toss out Bush-Cheney’s “baby” (the long war) with the “bathwater” (the premature fixation on democratization), for the former connects us logically with today’s new great powers (China, Russia, India) while the latter binds us rather restrictively to last century’s quorum of aging, democratic great powers (Western Europe, Industrialized Asia). So credit Bush-Cheney on their strategic instincts while condemning their execution, but do not, on that basis, suddenly abandon our historic role as globalization’s primary defender. It may be wrong to describe this long struggle as a “global war,” but there remains a global peace (the international liberal trade order) worth preserving.

  While some experts believe America should start from scratch in recasting—or merely accepting—some new global order, presumably one that pits “good guys” against “bad” or recognizes the onset of competing “empires,” we need to recognize how the choices we’ve made over the past eight years shifted the global landscape in ways that simply cannot be reversed with a new American president or even new American policies. Our unilateral “bender” forced a number of rising great powers to rise even faster, accelerating their natural trajectory out of the fear that an America unchallenged was an America unhinged. Our improved behavior in the coming months and years will not erase their rise. Indeed, it will probably accelerate it, further narrowing our window for strategic rapprochement (rising powers are not, as a rule, great bargainers).

  So like it or not, the Bush-Cheney era has forged a lasting international legacy that cannot be rev
ersed even as it must be redirected. We have inadvertently raised the price of cooperation from those new great powers upon which our future grand strategy must ultimately depend. Bush-Cheney did not kill the Western alliance, but it did leave America with little choice now but to seek new alliance with the rising great powers of our age. The alternative is to retain all our old Cold War enemies (e.g., Russia, China) in addition to all our new post-9/11 foes—an unsustainable pathway.

  The Bush-Cheney administration came into power seeking to realign the strategic relationships among the great powers: whipping NATO into shape; putting rising China, India, and Russia in their place; and reasserting American leadership. The irony, of course, is that the now infamous neocons achieved the exact opposite across the board. Russia’s pounding of Georgia in the summer of 2008 gave us a glimpse of that unwelcome future; exercising its own perceived right for unilateral military action following 9/11, America’s modeled behavior inevitably spawns the worst sort of imitation. The chickens have indeed come home to roost.

  BUT FIRST, THE VIRTUES WORTH CITING

  As many historians have already buried these would-be Caesars, let me now take a moment to praise them before casting seven stones with great deliberation.

  A key attribute of America’s sole military superpower status is that by maintaining our conventional Leviathan, we’ve so raised the “barrier to entry” into the market of great-power war that even having nuclear weapons doesn’t really qualify a state anymore. Americans would do well to remember what a huge gift to humanity that force represents. We were told by international affairs “realists” at the Cold War’s end that America would not be allowed to continue owning the world’s largest gun, that other great powers would necessarily balance us symmetrically by creating one of their own. This has not happened and isn’t close to happening anywhere, not even with “rising China,” whose military buildup specifically targets our ability to target their ability to target Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.