Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  It’s really only when you start bumping into children of the 1970s like me (born 1962) that you tend to find a more benign view of China’s rise. Why? Our China has always been opening up to the outside world, starting with Richard Nixon’s historic trip in 1972.

  So it’s no surprise that my generation is the first to be so open to strategic partnership with China in global affairs. To us, that seems “normal” enough.

  After World War II, American politics was dominated by the “greatest generation” for four decades (1952-1992, from Eisenhower through Bush the Elder). Following that long reign, the presidency basically skipped the fifties generation (e.g., Mondale, Dukakis) and moved right into the 1960s Boomers (first Clinton, then Bush the Younger). So with regard to China, we’ve basically moved beyond the reflexive hostility of the early Cold War crowd and into the persistent suspicions of aging Boomers who still largely favor “containing” China and hedging against its rise. Looking back over the past two Boomer presidencies, we see them chock-full of that sixties mindset, and that’s just not good enough given our current strategic situation—namely, too many new enemies and too few new friends. Iraq is not Vietnam, and the long war against extremism is not a rerun of the Cold War against Communism. It’s time for our debates on national security strategy to draw upon a worldview shaped more by the 1970s—an understanding of international affairs better in line with today’s globalization paradigm (e.g., have/have-not conflicts, oil price shocks, transnational terrorism, global environmentalism).

  Boomer politicians obviously care about these issues. I’m just saying that how they frame possible solutions is reflected—and too often restricted—by “where they were when . . .”

  That’s why the candidacy of Barack Obama (born 1961) hit so many national chords in 2008. His vision of a post-Boomer bipartisanship made instinctive sense to a lot of Americans, especially young Americans, who felt that sixteen years of Boomer rule has seen this nation argue incessantly over several weeks of a fetus’s life and the last couple of minutes of a person’s death and barely touched upon a host of huge issues lying in between those extremes. The same can be said of our foreign policy: It’s either “Shoot all the bad guys” or “We want democracies now,” when most of the world is struggling with tough issues between that baseline security goal and that top-line political achievement. Now it’s President Obama’s chance to change all that.

  In short, being closely divided is fine, but being deeply divided is not. As long as we lack any comprehensive middle-class consensus on issues like globalization and overseas military interventions, we’ll have a hard time defining, much less sticking to, a feasible grand strategy. Why? We’ll continue to treat globalization as a zero-sum game in which the rise of a global middle class threatens our way of life, and that attitude will simply place us on the wrong side of progress—even history.

  3. MAKE THE DECISION TO COORDINATE ALL ELEMENTS OF AMERICA’S NATIONAL POWER ACCORDING TO A GRAND STRATEGY THAT WE HAVE COLLECTIVELY DEFINED.

  The Bush administration actually did a great job of boosting the profile and volume of foreign aid within the so-called DIME package (standing for diplomacy, information, military, economic) of U.S. government assets. It increased the total amount of U.S. foreign aid by almost one-third in its first two years and elevated the flow to sub-Saharan Africa to its highest level ever, including boosting the U.S. government’s spending on HIV-AIDS by a tremendous amount. Bush may not have engaged the world in the “kinder, gentler” manner of his father or felt Africa’s pain as empathetically as Bill Clinton, but the man did put some serious money where his mouth was on the subject of relieving human suffering and promoting economic development.

  Having done all that, the Bush administration disappointingly continued down the path of further embedding the U.S. Agency for International Development within the dysfunctional State Department, where USAID was cast as State’s “implementation arm.” While it is technically an independent agency, the truth remains that USAID lacks any serious voice or coordinating power in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, leading such prominent think tanks as the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies to jointly recommend a cabinet-level Department of Global Development to “realize the president’s vision of elevating development as a third pillar alongside diplomacy and defense.” For now, despite such high-level recommendations (matching my own recommendation in Blueprint for Action four years ago), the structure of America’s foreign aid program continues to mark us as uncoordinated and therefore unstrategic in our approach. With a current portfolio of dozens of separate programs spread across seven federal departments, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and eleven other significant government agencies, we mirror the bureaucratically diffuse approach of Germany and Japan, two governments we purposefully restructured following WWII to have a modest foreign policy agenda. Instead, it is obvious that we ought to use a more logical model: Great Britain’s Department for International Development. The Bush administration missed a golden opportunity to create my “Department of Everything Else” in response to the widely perceived failures of our postwar reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then again, people don’t like to admit it when they screw up royally—least of all politicians.

  If foreign aid was suitably upgraded under Bush, most experts argue that the State Department, especially in its public diplomacy (i.e., the “hearts and minds” information-dissemination programs like the old Radio Free Europe), remains significantly underresourced. Let me offer a different take. I view the State Department as largely playing the role of “good cop” across the Core, or those nations already enjoying significant levels of connectivity to the global economy, and the Defense Department as fundamentally playing the role of “bad cop” inside the Gap, where globalization’s frontier-integration projects are located. Seeing them as such, I’m less interested in “supersizing” State, as one blue-ribbon government commission put it, to make it more capable inside the Gap than I am in seeing foreign aid in general elevated to the level of a cabinet department.

  So where do I argue a shifting of funds should occur?

  In general, I am skeptical of any suggested increase in “strategic communications” by the U.S. government. In a connected world, I don’t see a big requirement for U.S.-sponsored mass media projects. Plus, if Americans don’t trust our government’s propaganda today, why should anybody else? If we’re talking better security for America’s information networks, through which all these hearts and minds can allegedly be won (or just detected and kept under surveillance), then that’s different. But frankly, I don’t see the government taking the financial and technological lead on network security, but rather the private sector, which the public distrusts slightly less when it comes to their freedom of communication (another Bush-Cheney legacy). As for the intelligence component (e.g., analysis, spying, technical snooping), of course I’m all for reform within the intelligence community. Who isn’t? And yet, in an increasingly open-source world, I don’t advocate shifting more government money in that direction—save for more language training—because I remain highly pessimistic that the spy agencies, be they dominated by analysts or machines, can sufficiently overcome their collective cult of dysfunctional secrecy to outperform mass media journalism, the emerging blogosphere, and the Internet in general as a source for “centralized intelligence.” I want an intelligence community that’s far more open to interacting with the world at large, not one given more snooping technology, because its biggest problems lie in not knowing what it does not know. Rather than “boil the ocean” by trying to make sense of the entire Internet every night, we need an intelligence community that masters searching more than sheer processing.

  Where I do see the need to shift resources is within the military itself. While the Department of Defense has certainly spent a lot of supplemental funds (i.e., episodic funding by Congress for actual operations) on what I call System Administrato
r-oriented operations (e.g., postwar/ disaster reconstruction and stabilization operations and counterinsurgency campaigns) inside Afghanistan and Iraq, in terms of dedicated annual budget, it continues to buy for the “big war” Leviathan force (more Navy and Air Force) while starving the “small wars” SysAdmin force (more Army and Marines). The vast majority of long-term spending (R&D, acquisition) remains focused on big platforms (ships, aircraft, Army’s Future Combat System) designed to fight more traditionally arrayed opponents in conventional warfare, while glaring needs inside the ground services tend to go unaddressed (e.g., more special operations/unconventional capabilities in general, dramatically increasing the size of the Marine Corps and Army, creating a special military advisory/training corps), resulting in the Army and Marines trying to fund as much of these requirements on the bureaucratic sly, using O&M (operations and maintenance) funds or the congressional supplementals. This has to end. We can’t keep funding one force (the Leviathan) while working the other force (SysAdmin) to death. When almost 90 percent of your officers say the war in Iraq has stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin, they’re talking people first, equipment second, and platforms third. And when over 90 percent of your casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan occur after the wars of liberation, the national security community simply isn’t doing its job, which is preparing for, and achieving, victory at a reasonable cost in treasure—and blood.

  There will be a significant push within the next administration’s defense posture to “get back to basics” and “heal the force” after Afghanistan and Iraq. To the extent that this becomes a bureaucratic cover for going back to old spending habits (Thanks a billion, Mr. Putin!), America will simply be setting itself up for more failure down the road inside the Gap. Worse, if the United States were to somehow signal to the rest of the world’s great powers that big-war spending is the way to go, we would almost force them to emulate our bad choices in force-structure planning. How does that matter? China’s future military requirements aren’t being met by the People’s Liberation Army’s acquisition focus on Taiwan, nor does India prepare its military for its future overseas responsibilities by continuing to focus on Kashmir. Already, we see what damage such a big-war focus has done to Pakistan’s military capabilities to deal with its northwest territories: All that American military aid over the years has been spent building up a force more appropriate to fighting India than for taming its Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Now, as the real push comes to shove over the rising operational capabilities of the Taliban and al Qaeda inside northwest Pakistan, America finds itself having to recast the Pakistan military’s force structure, raising the obvious question, Why wasn’t Islamabad spending all those billions in American military aid for these purposes the whole time?

  There are a lot of U.S. Marine and Army officers asking the same questions about the Pentagon’s spending priorities back home.

  4. MAKE A SEARCHING AND FEARLESS MORAL INVENTORY OF THE “GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR.”

  In a nutshell: The good news is that we have killed or captured a good portion of al Qaeda’s senior brain trust, meaning the generational cohort of leaders who built up the transnational network to the operational peak reached on 9/11. As a result, al Qaeda’s network is a lot more diffuse and dispersed, with the surviving leadership’s role trimmed back largely to inspirational guidance from above on strategy and tactics. Yes, al Qaeda now takes credit for virtually every terrorist act across the globe, but as worldwide revolutionary movements go, this one is relatively contained, in geographic terms, and thus successful only in terms of generating local stalemates against intervening external powers. Most crucial is that al Qaeda’s brutal tactics have cost it popular support throughout the Islamic world. The bad news is that while al Qaeda’s operational reach may now be effectively limited to the same territory (Southwest Asia and extending to adjacent areas) as were the classic Middle Eastern terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, that just means America’s efforts to date have made us safer at the expense of allies in Europe, Asia, and Africa. By turning back the clock while making no strategic headway, the Bush administration merely engineered a back-to-the-future operational stalemate at an unsustainably high cost, effectively isolating America from the world in the process. The pessimist in me says we’ve reached a strategic cul-de-sac.

  Thus, seven years into this long war against violent extremists, we measure our progress and naturally feel depressed: enemies proliferating, friends disappearing, and the front seemingly limitless. So stipulated—regarding the war. And yet this war’s worldwide impact pales in comparison with ongoing changes triggered by globalization.We need to remember that larger context if we’re ever going to recognize this struggle’s successful conclusion. Remember, the Cold War didn’t end with World War III but with 3 billion new capitalists joining the global economy. We were never ahead in that war, either, but clearly we triumphed in everything else.

  As globalization expands, it naturally invades those regions most disconnected from its influences to date. In effect, this struggle marches backward in time as we quell civil strife and battle violent extremists in increasingly primitive locations. So don’t expect less violence as globalization permeates the Middle East and Africa. Entrenched elites and cultural fundamentalists will resist globalization’s democratizing effects, especially when it comes to the rights and prerogatives of women. Globalization brings networks. Networks are gender-neutral. Provide such connectivity to a traditional society and you’ll turn it upside down by empowering women disproportionately to men. Put most crudely, this long war will see us liberating females through economic connectivity while killing off self-righteous young men standing in the way. Why do fundamentalists deny real education to young girls? Because that’s where all this “trouble” starts. No modern economy has ever developed without first liberating its women with expanded economic opportunity, then social change (often related to birth control, best accomplished with a paycheck), and finally political participation.

  We’ve got to get better at defining both enemies and allies in this long war. We instinctively interpret any religious awakening as a sign of increasing fundamentalism, when more times than not it’s an attempt to reconcile tradition with modernity. Unlike fundamentalists who advocate disconnectedness from the “corrupt” world, evangelicals of all faiths work to connect populations across borders, generating self-help networks and empowering individuals relative to elites. According to experts who track such trends, evangelism is exploding around this planet while fundamentalism is declining. Missionary activity, for example, has never been higher globally, signaling this century will be far more religious than the last. Having said that, we must carefully disaggregate our perception of the Islamic threat: Not every Muslim is an Islamist is a fundamentalist is a jihadist. Many Muslims thrive in market democracies, not just in the West but in South and East Asia, where their largest populations are found. More specifically, Islamists want governments in predominantly Muslim countries to reflect Muslim values, just as America’s government reflects our predominantly Judeo-Christian roots. But wanting that doesn’t automatically make you a fundamentalist who demands civilizational apartheid from the West, nor does it commit you to violence toward such ends. If the Islamic Middle East is truly to embrace globalization, then we must respect the many compromises that faith will demand in return. The problem of threatened cultural identity cannot be allowed to overwhelm the profound benefit of economic connection, especially in the short term.

  Both al Qaeda and the West’s antiglobalism fanatics are operating under the pathetic delusion that this era’s version of globalization is an elitist ideology to be defeated instead of a profound force driven by individual ambition that’s been unleashed upon the world by the collapse of socialism in the East. Judging the long war strictly as war will always yield a depressing verdict. So don’t expect the killing to stop anytime soon, because the greater the force (globalization’s spread), the hotter the friction (terror-bas
ed resistance). Thus, judging this ongoing struggle within the context of globalization’s progressive advance across the world provides useful perspective, as well as confidence that we stand on the right side of history.

  So how do we realistically define victory? Most people think it’s killing terrorists and incapacitating their networks, but to me it’s less about “draining the swamp” than about filling that space with something better. The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation. Thus, the only “exit strategy” I recognize is local job creation. Headlines will frequently proclaim the “failure” of our military strategy against al Qaeda. Don’t be disheartened by that judgment. It may be true, but it is completely irrelevant.

  In operational terms, the entire history of al Qaeda, which emerged from Islamic resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, has been one of moving from one center of gravity to the next. Not welcome in Saudi Arabia following the Soviet withdrawal, al Qaeda was effectively stood up in its modern form in Sudan in the mid-1990s. Driven out by the Sudanese government in 1996, al Qaeda returned to Afghanistan, later to be evicted by the U.S.-led invasion following 9/11. To no one’s surprise, al Qaeda next slipped into Pakistan’s ungoverned northwest tribal areas, reconstituting itself there, along with the ousted Taliban. If al Qaeda must resort to hiding in one of the most off-grid locations on the planet, I would call that a success. If a Web-enabled al Qaeda can effectively coordinate terrorist attacks in the West from there, then—again—we’re back to the pre-9/11 standoff. That means America and the world remain highly incentivized to continue tightening up security practices, but since this is highly desirable for all sorts of reasons relating to globalization’s rapid expansion, al Qaeda’s historical function here is both useful and invariable—its continued efforts simply force more resiliency from us. Then again, so do tainted Chinese products, avian flu, global warming, high oil prices, and financial market crashes. Al Qaeda may grab headlines occasionally, but in global terms its impact rarely rises above the white noise generated by globalization’s skyrocketing transaction rate and its associated mishaps.