Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  So if we’re going to fault Bush-Cheney on grand strategic terms, we’d need to divide our criticism between the following two points: the opportunity costs involved and the strategic overhang created. The former refers to crises not responded to during the time frame of our combined Afghanistan-Iraq deployments. This is a tricky thing to measure, because, by many experts’ definitions, most of the world’s so-called crises are not truly international security crises if the United States military doesn’t show up. Instead, they’re “hot spots,” failed states, chronic wars, “disturbing developments,” and the like. Genocide is, of course, a special category, which is why great powers argue so interminably about when to actually employ the term. Sudan’s Darfur crisis arguably falls into this always disputed category: bad enough to get a few African Union, UN, and even NATO advisers and would-be peacekeepers to show up, but not sufficiently important for a decisive military response by America. Here’s a simple rule of thumb: If nobody’s shooting except for the bad guys, it’s not a real crisis, because if you want the good guys to shoot back, that happens only when the Americans show up. I’ll skip boring you with a long list of actual events, like Darfur, where American forces could have made a difference. The simple reality is, the Bush administration chose Afghanistan and Iraq, ceding the rest of the planet—or less hyperbolically stated, the rest of what I call the Non-Integrated Gap—to the tender mercies of whoever bothers to show up when the shooting starts.

  If opportunity costs are an inherently slippery way of measuring the strategic sin of gluttony, then downstream overhang is less so, and by that I mean—in effect—how long it would take successive administrations to “burn off” the “weight” of long-pursued interventions with deeply sunk costs. How long have Bush-Cheney tied down U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq so as to make impossible any serious redirect to other regions in the event of a crisis truly perceived as such by Washington? Possible examples would be a major intervention into collapsing North Korea, the always available Iran scenario, the possibility of China’s invasion of Taiwan, and Russia’s next adventure. Most immediately, a major intervention into northwest Pakistan commands significant attention. Given that all of these scenarios are brewing at something above room temperature right now, we can approximate our strategic overhang by sensing how “soft power” oriented—or diplomatic—America’s attempts have been to manage these situations under Bush-Cheney. In that regard, I would have to say that all but the Iranian situation elicited rather accommodating stances by the United States: China’s Taiwan-focused military buildup saw us chastising Chen Shu-bian’s Taipei for dangerous provocations; North Korea’s testing of a nuclear device was rewarded by our offering to negotiate a peace treaty to end the Korean War; Pervez Musharraf’s temporary use of emergency rule in Pakistan won him an influx of military support against the Taliban threat in his northwest terrorities; Putin’s crackdown in Georgia won Mikheil Saakashvili humanitarian aid and little else; and, as for Iran . . . well, it seems well on its way to ruling out regime change by generating a sloppy, asymmetrical form of near-nuclear deterrence—namely, given our current tie-down, America can’t stop Tehran from getting nuclear unless we go nuclear first, as conventional air strikes against Iran’s deep underground facilities would accomplish a delay but not a firm denial of what seems inevitable now.

  On that scale, then, it would seem that our current strategic overhang led the Bush administration, in its last years, to sue for peace everywhere except Afghanistan and Iraq. Will the situation get any better anytime soon for our incoming president? Unlikely. Even with a strategic withdrawal from one or both situations, the institutional “healing time” involved for the Army and Marines will be substantial, and it’s extremely unlikely that any president would endure that loss of strategic face without respecting that requirement. As for another scenario forcing such an immediate shift, there I think you’d have to consult the Bush-Cheney second-term record, cited in the preceding paragraph, to recognize just how hard that would be. Does this overhang prevent the sort of air-delivered strikes so favored by the Clinton administration over the 1990s? Absolutely not. You name the country and America’s airpower could deliver a major-league hurt within days, if not hours. The problem is, of course, that in most plausible scenarios there’s little to actually target, meaning we end up lobbing a few cruise missiles and calling it a day—or more to the point, a 24-hour news cycle. But as Clinton was routinely derided throughout his years for employing such “pinprick” responses, don’t expect that tactic to scratch too many strategic itches in the years ahead.

  Here we finally get to the meat of the matter: By consuming so much of America’s military force during these seven long years of nonstop, high-tempo, high-rotation action, the Bush administration basically condemned its successor to what will probably be an additional seven lean years of military operations. Whether it’s simply winding down Afghanistan and/or Iraq and “replenishing the force,” or shifting dollars from operations and maintenance funds to cover a plethora of Cold War “programs of record” (weapons systems and major platforms) that the Bush administration has refused to scale back (even as it gobbled up relatively huge—as in $100 billion plus—supplemental defense spending bills every year since 2001), the next administration has been handed a veritable train wreck in terms of future budgetary crises. Something will have to give. If that “something” is not an improved situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, then you can pretty much forget about any significant U.S. military interventions anywhere else. But even if it is, we’re still probably looking at four to eight very lean years (and if you’ve already spotted the corollary in federal budget deficit spending, then go to the head of the class!).

  What does that mean for the next president? It means ingenuity and inventiveness will be at a premium, because our incoming president’s grand strategy is necessarily one of realigning America’s trajectory to that of a world being transformed by the simultaneous rise of numerous great powers.

  There will be no more swimming against the tide.

  Two

  A TWELVE- STEP RECOVERY PROGRAM FOR AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

  Now that we know the sins, there must be penance. If not for Bush and Cheney, then it must come for America.

  Here, I’ll describe the basic steps we Americans need to take to regain some control over our destiny and realign our as yet unstated grand strategy to a world transforming at incredible speed. And taking these steps isn’t merely about our reasserting our virtue. Because there’s even more at stake than our salvation. A world that rapidly doubles its middle-class ranks in a generation’s time is either going to become very content or very conflicted, and no nation can do more to ensure either outcome than America.

  For the past eight years, America has remained somewhat trapped in angry isolation, cherishing its fears and nurturing its resentments. But we need to stop looking for security at the bottom of the bottle labeled “Shoot First” unilateralism, because we will never find it there, certainly not in this world of rising connectivity and interdependency. We instinctively reached for that empowering brew after 9/11, and our state of strategic intoxication since then has left a trail of tears—among our warriors and their families, among the recipients of our violent outbreaks, among a world’s population that suspects—and hopes—that we’re capable of so much more self-control. It has also isolated us from the society of fellow states and caused us to doubt our exceptional role in world history. No one on this planet who wants a better tomorrow welcomes this sad state of affairs.

  We need to recognize our past mistakes and strengths if we’re going to recapture some grand strategic momentum and once again start paddling faster than globalization’s surging current. There is a new world still out there, awaiting some great nation’s discovery and description. It’s a world in which globalization has been made truly global, according to a system of rules that’s both fair and self-sustaining but most of all is empowering to the middle, to individ
uals, and to the self-made. That is a world of unlimited creativity, energy, and ingenuity, and we as its dominant species need to get there fast.

  The world desperately wants America back. In the best tradition of self-help programs, here are the twelve steps to get back to where we once belonged.

  1. ADMIT THAT WE AMERICANS ARE POWERLESS OVER GLOBALIZATION.

  Today’s globalization is the Pandora’s Box we opened long ago; it’s past the point where we—or really anybody—can claim to be in charge. If globalization comes with rules but not a ruler, then it is those rules we must collectively manage better, not just in their constant extension to new territories and domains, but also in their constant improvement and progressive deconflicting.

  We Americans survey the hypercompetitive global landscape with its cheap labor and trade protectionism, and we call these practices “un-American,” when of course they’re the most American things in the world—in their good time. So how do we keep ourselves competitive in this globalization of our making, realizing we’re playing against “younger” versions of ourselves in many instances? And how do we simultaneously muster the will and the resources to play the vital role of bodyguard that we have long assumed in friction-filled locales distant from our shores?

  We do what any general contractor does: We hire out the lower-end jobs to the most competent, entry-level providers and we keep the top-of-the-pyramid work for ourselves. We stop trying to pretend we can do it all by ourselves and thus get to call all the shots. We admit that the rising complexity of all this connectivity means we’re but one seat at a very large table of rule-proposers and rule-deciders. But it’s a key seat because our node is the terminus for a lot of consumption in this global economy and the starting point for a lot of innovation. Remember that as we move ahead: In a global economy, demand determines power far more than supply. We’re also first among equals because our financial networks process risk with speed and daring (i.e., the booms) and a brutal honesty (read, the busts) that’s the envy of the world. (Yeah, I said it.)

  What we absolutely should not do is what our nativist instincts tell us to do: throw up walls. Every generation of immigrants that’s ever come to America has quickly tried to slam the door shut behind it. Every generation of industry titans that’s ever conquered America’s markets has demanded shelter from the storms of global competition. Every well-established religion wants its faith and community protected from the dilution and damnation that come from too much intermingling with a desperate, grubby world. As Theodore Roosevelt would have surely argued, it’s been our democratic rejection of exclusionary thinking and complete lack of inbreeding that have kept America strong—culturally, technologically, politically, militarily, you name it.

  So we Americans need to embrace Thomas Friedman’s “hot, flat, and crowded” global future for what it really is: a chance to evolve into something even better, and then take everything we’ve learned along the way and sell it around the planet at suitably discounted prices. That includes our best rules for managing all this complexity, because those rules not only will constitute the new definition of security in the twenty-first century, but also will remain one of America’s best exports and a principal means for shaping international order.

  There’s much left for us to do in building out this American System on a global scale, so grab your tool of choice and let’s get started.

  2. COME TO BELIEVE THAT ONLY A BIPARTISANSHIP FAR GREATER THAN THAT DISPLAYED BY OUR NATIONAL LEADERS CAN RESTORE SANITY TO AMERICA’S FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

  Modern American political history, meaning since the start of the twentieth century, has veered from periods of great partisanship to periods of great compromise.

  The period of extreme partisanship that we’ve just lived through is not new; we endured something quite like it from Teddy Roosevelt right through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, an age dominated by partisan armies, commanding majorities, and a high degree of party discipline. The resulting political environment nonetheless saw huge bursts of legislative creativity, especially with TR, with Woodrow Wilson, and early in FDR’s presidency. As Ronald Brownstein notes in The Second Civil War, the country was “deeply divided but not closely divided” in those first decades of modern America. When one side won, it won big, and thus ruled “big.” As the country moved deeper into the Great Depression, however, it entered into a bipartisan age that stressed negotiation and compromise, by Brownstein’s measure the longest such period in American history. In an age of great conflict and harsh ideological choices, America “was closely but not deeply divided”: Everyone basically wanted the same general outcomes, and so cross-party dominance, so to speak, was the order of the day. That age of bargaining yielded, starting with the Kennedy administration, to an atmosphere of greater partisanship due to the controversies of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the subsequent rise of the “Reagan Republicans.” Our current period of hyperpartisanship can be said to have arrived when the GOP finally won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, after four decades of minority status. Since that time we’ve seen party discipline reach stunning heights in a Boomer-dominated political landscape that finds America both deeply and closely divided, meaning Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but neither commands a serious majority. This era came to an end with the election of 2008.

  In my opinion, the Boomer generation represents one of the weakest cohorts of politicians America has ever produced. Like most revolutionary generations, the Boomers were frustrated by the lack of the political change they effected in their youth, so the bulk of their talent and ambition thereupon went into the private sector. This dynamic is common to many revolutionary generations throughout history: Thwarted on the political front, they turn to the far less restricted domains of business and technology in an attempt to change their world from another angle. The result is typically a huge burst of creativity and entrepreneurship. We saw this in Europe after the failed revolutions of 1848, in the United States following the Civil War, and in today’s China after Tiananmen Square. The serious talent simply skips a political process it considers “low” and “demeaning” and instead chooses the real “business” of social and economic progress, believing that “what’s good for my company/industry is good for my country!” If I were to compare the Boomers as a political generation to one from America’s past, it would be to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or roughly from 1870 to 1900. The reason why that comparison will strike so many of you as obscure is that most Americans can’t name any presidents or prominent politicians from that age, but know well the industrial and financial titans such as Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Decades from now the key names most Americans will remember from our age will be Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Rupert Murdoch (yes, he’s a Yank now, too), while virtually all our politicians will slip into well-deserved obscurity.

  That may seem a harsh judgment, but let me explain why I think it’s so crucial for America’s grand strategy going forward that we as a nation move beyond the political rule of the Boomers. Morris Massey, an expert on conflict between generations, pioneered the argument that states, “What you are is where you were when . . . ,” meaning all of us reach a point in life where we discover a world larger than ourselves. At that juncture, we become cognizant of the morals we’ve developed across our early years, and those morals—or worldview—tend to persist across our adult years. For most people, that fateful transition occurs in the teenage years, which explains our tendency to stick with the popular music of those years throughout adulthood. Admit it. You stayed cool enough across your twenties and maybe you faked it deep into your thirties, but then you woke up in your forties and realized you absolutely hated your kids’ music! It happens to everyone.

  So Massey’s basic point is that our worldview is essentially formed by the time we hit college. Everything that came before is considered normal, and much of what comes after is
viewed as just plain weird. Given enough grounding by parents and religion, most people hold on to their “normal” as they grow older, taking in stride the increasingly “weird,” but eventually succumbing to nostalgia for the “good old days.” One trick I’ve learned as a foreign policy strategist is that whenever I encounter somebody with a clear position on something, I simply check how that issue was playing out back when this person was a teenager. It usually matches up quite well. Let me give you an example: Talk to anybody about China today and you’ll typically encounter first impressions formed in adolescence. For those who came of age in the 1950s (think Korean War), China remains an aggressive Communist regime that cannot be trusted, no matter how many stripes that tiger changes. Fast-forward to the 1960s crowd and you’ll find a lot of China-coming-apart-at-the-seams arguments, meaning the country’s rapid rise is likely to trigger its internal collapse. Coming of age in the 1960s meant your dominant impressions of China consisted of widespread famine (“Eat your dinner! Kids in China are starving!”) and the temporary insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.