Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  A good example can be seen in architecture in the twentieth century. For ages, humans basically built “crustaceans,” or buildings whose structural strength was maintained on the outside. Once forged metals became strong enough to serve as an internal skeleton, the technology of architecture shifted from “crustacean” to “vertebrate.” Not surprisingly, the mindset of architects did not keep pace, and so the first skyscrapers to rise up looked very much like the old buildings that previously had been capped at lower heights. It took a new generation of architects to emerge and realize that the shape of buildings could be radically altered to take advantage of these material advances.

  As a result of the continuing information revolution, a generation of businessmen and entrepreneurs has arisen to recast the nature of companies. Whereas business has spent the last several decades adapting information technology to existing business structures, now we see business structures adapting themselves to information technology. Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, refers to an architectural design style for creating business services that are independent, reusable, and interoperable, meaning they can be reconfigured at far lower cost than canned software packages and hardwired applications. By adding this interoperable domain on “top” of existing technology platforms and databases, SOA creates a sort of universal translator that allows any portion of a company to interact seamlessly with another portion, or even to outsource necessary functions to other companies altogether. What that means is that today a company can assume almost any distributed form imaginable, concentrating itself in one aspect (say, research and design) and farming out everything else to other firms, or spreading its company assets all over the world to access whatever mix of inputs makes it most efficient (raw materials here, technology design there, and so on). A simplistic way to express SOA’s potential is to say, “If I can do damn near anything over the Internet, my company can assume almost any shape I want.”

  Being an economic determinist, I’ll tell you that technology is shaping business and that business is driving globalization (i.e., integrating trade by disintegrating production), making globalization itself the ultimate service-oriented architecture. That emerging reality will alter politics the world over, making possible political structures no longer tied to territory or citizenship or even shared ethnic identities. We’ve seen this process unfold many times in the past. World religions, for example, rise in this manner, detaching themselves from land, culture, and race to spread beyond their origins. The most powerful religions, therefore, are the ones anybody can join.

  The United States itself is the original political SOA. Who can belong to these United States? Anybody who shows up and gains entry. There are essentially no citizenship requirements other than mastering a few historical facts and pledging yourself to our relatively wide-open rule set designed to maximize individual economic freedom—basically the Golden Rule politicized (Pass no laws you wouldn’t want to obey yourself). Ours is essentially a political structure adapted to individual “applications,” otherwise known as citizens, whereas the vast majority of the rest of the world’s governments essentially ask their citizens to adapt themselves to the existing political structure—the basic difference between common law and civil law. Compare that flexible design to countries where racial or religious background matters, and you’ll spot our structural advantage right away: We can attract talent the world over, and that talent can expect to enjoy the fruits of its labor with minimal restrictions—the pursuit of happiness.

  If we view modern globalization in this way, it’s little wonder why the world associates it with Americanization, for the former suggests the latter’s promise of individual economic empowerment leading to political empowerment. The trick for American grand strategy, however, comes in realizing the natural time lag between economic empowerment and political liberty. Because the United States began as a series of “greenfield operations” (new operations on virgin territory), pursued by those fleeing the lack of economic opportunity and (often) religious rights back home, our citizens’ expectations for accompanying political liberty were high from the start. Indeed, in their impatience those expectations triggered our audacious and unprecedented political experiment. If the same were possible the world over, our grand strategy would be simple indeed. Since globalization now reformats some of the oldest civilizations in the world while rapidly penetrating its most unmodern societies, our sense of timing and sequence is of paramount importance—likewise our choice of allies.

  Given that globalization is the ultimate service-oriented architecture, it behooves us not to remain wedded only to allies whose political structures match or emulate our own. In general, democracies do not wage war with discipline but rather wage crusades. If anything, the United States needs to surround itself with the most businesslike allies we can find, or those lacking any appreciable ideology save the advance of their economic interests and the resulting growth in national power. We need allies who appreciate our Leviathan power for what it is: not the extension of American empire but the protection of globalization’s advancing networks, networks that open doors primarily for their market-making opportunities, as it’s the economies of rising great powers that gravitate naturally toward bottom-of-the-pyramid salesmanship. I’m not looking to saddle these rising powers with the SysAdmin role of “cleaning up our messes” but to present them with the opportunity to push the envelope of their existing integration efforts while asking them to pay up front for the privilege of early entry.

  Again, some readers will bristle at such language. Imagining a conquering international army subduing recalcitrant Gap societies, and pricing out America’s botched efforts in Iraq at $3 trillion (the most purposefully expansive, extrapolated tally), they will count up my Gap nations, and assuming all require invasion, will affix a fantastic sum total to this vision. Such calculations are complete nonsense, of course, extrapolating the worst possible execution to date to encompass all potential future cooperation on this score. If that’s your definition of progress, then you’re wholly out of sync with world history—not to mention human evolution.

  The reality is that most of the Gap will be integrated with little to no mass violence, and costs will be borne overwhelmingly by the private sector. This is the history of globalization to date, and assuming any other path requires spurious logic typically rooted in cataclysmic visions—never in shortage—of impending holocausts and Armageddons. What I’m describing here is the Core’s collective package—“architected” by services rendered and not according to political ideology or form—for those relatively small number of Gap situations where local friction, if allowed, could well overwhelm globalization’s force.

  This is not a vision for reformatting cultures that refuse connectivity of their own accord, but history says these tend to be small communities of religious fundamentalists who demand disconnectedness from others as part of their faith. We have these small communities scattered across America, and their presence is easily accommodated. No, this vision speaks to countries in which elites dominate the economy and restrict, largely to preserve their privileged wealth, the masses’ ability to connect to the outside world. In countries where the sheer absence of connectivity is the key block, then we’re talking the usual constructs of economic aid and targeted private-sector development. In countries where the lack of connectivity is directly linked to the absence of security or the rule of law, then we’re talking something in between. But my main point remains: The Leviathan is a big stick rarely employed, even as the SysAdmin function (more civilian than military, more private-sector-funded than public-aid-dominated) will enjoy near-constant use—or better said, will meet near-constant demand for the next two to three decades.

  In recruiting those powers currently better suited to the nation-building/ economy-connecting role, America does nothing more than rebuild its own tarnished brand by buying start-ups as they appear on the scene—our Leviathan/big-firm approach improved by their SysAdmin/entreprene
urial spirit. In this way, when the charge is leveled that “integrating Africa to the global economy at American prices will bankrupt us all,” we can remind critics that Africa’s development models are logically located in Asia rather than in North America. Africa will be a knockoff of India, which is a knockoff of China, which is a knockoff of South Korea, which is a knockoff of Singapore, which is a knockoff of Japan, which a half-century ago was developed by us as a knockoff of the United States. Call it globalization’s “six degrees of replication.”

  I’m not going to pretend that I can game this process out to the nth degree, but I will suggest the following:1. America needs to increase dramatically our military-to-military cooperation with all such New Core pillars, especially targeting China, India, Russia, and Brazil—the so-called BRIC quartet—while reaching out aggressively to what Wall Street is now dubbing the N11 (Next 11): Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia (G20 member), Iran, Mexico (G20), Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea (G20), Turkey (G20), and Vietnam.

  2. America should be in the business of encouraging security cooperation among any combination of these states—including, most pointedly, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, to which America must reach out diplomatically, economically, and militarily. (And let’s be clear, when we recently asked for observer status and were turned down, it wasn’t America that was rejected but the Bush administration.)

  3. In the cases of Central Command (Middle East and Central Asia), Southern Command (Latin American), and the new Africa Command, the United States should aggressively seek out military cooperation with these countries inside the associated regions.

  4. To the extent possible, top-level articulation and execution of this American grand strategy should be concentrated at the G8 and G20 great-power forums, with America’s number-one task being the expansion of the G8 (meeting at the level of heads of state), including the remaining twelve members (now currently meeting at only the ministerial level), and its number-two task being the expansion of the G20 vision to include security matters in a manner that integrates that discussion with global economic development. And no, it doesn’t make sense to toss Russia out of the G8 over Georgia, any more than it would have been justified for other great powers to demand America’s removal over Abu Ghraib. When building a world order, you want to keep it easy to join and hard to be tossed out.

  5. Six obvious foci for this assembled “team of rivals” are (1) new regulatory oversight of intermarket financial flows; (2) energy, already proposed by China regarding the exploration, production, and protection of new reserves; (3) food, the “oil” of the future as production patterns change thanks to . . . (4) global warming, which will stress Gap nations by far the most; (5) communicable diseases (ditto); and (6) the security of seaborne commercial traffic, where progress is already being made (more on that in a bit).

  America needs to approach this grand strategy with great humility, and by that I mean we need to make sure others get the credit more than we do. Anything less subtle than that and we’ll end up creating too much cultural friction with populations whose demand for national pride is rising dramatically. Besides, this approach has the benefit of truthfulness, because globalization will increasingly be dominated by Eastern and Southern cultural influences, the same way several of the world’s major religions are currently being tilted in this manner. Accepting such outcomes on a global basis is no harder than what Americans have done instinctively at home across the decades of our society’s constant evolution.

  In sum, the diplomatic realignment I present here is not an accommodation of America’s growing weakness but rather the acceptance of other powers’ growing strength. As they have achieved this strength by rising within our liberal trade order, we must process this success with at least as much equanimity as past American grand strategic thinkers applied to previous failures to project our American System abroad.

  And no, accepting this pathway does not constitute admission of a “post-American world,” in Fareed Zakaria’s analysis. It simply marks the accession of many “pre-American” powers into the American System- cum-globalization. No careful observer of America’s historical strength in innovative and efficient rule-making can casually dismiss our capacity to further evolve globalization through the biological revolutions currently just beginning to emerge in this century. Mastering our past accomplishments doesn’t make rising great powers our superiors but merely our fellow travelers. As always, owning the future is all about shaping the next set of rules in industries not yet discovered, something that requires a huge tolerance for economic—and therefore political—risk. In that competition, I vastly prefer America’s chances to those of any other great power on this planet.

  As long as we remain the global economy’s eminent risk-takers, there will never be a post-American world. Just a post-Caucasian one.

  Of his cabinet filled with past political rivals, President Lincoln was warned, “They will eat you up.”

  To this Lincoln replied, “They will be just as likely to eat each other up.”

  Six

  THE SECURITY REALIGNMENT

  Rediscovering Diplomacy, Defense,

  and Development

  A vociferous bureaucratic battle will occur across the first two years of this new administration, one that will greatly determine our military’s future capabilities in this long war against violent extremism. On one side will be pitted the big-war crowd (mostly air-sea forces), with its emphasis on “resetting” the force following the inevitable drawdown in Iraq. On the other side will stand—ironically enough—those forces (mostly ground forces) slated to benefit maximally from any such “healing period.” The reset argument rests on one very conspicuous assumption: Iraq was a one-off, not to be repeated and certainly no harbinger of future conflicts. It was, in effect, a second Vietnam, an asymmetrical war that could not be effectively won using conventional military power. To actually succeed in such warfare, you have to make our force increasingly symmetrical to the enemies we face in insurgencies, meaning more focused on generating security, winning hearts and minds, training up foreign militaries, and encouraging economic development. Adapting the U.S. military to these tasks, goes this line of thinking, will thus ruin it for great-power war, something it must remain optimized to wage lest America invite such conflict in decades ahead.

  In effect, the big-war crowd asks us to do one of two things: either abandon our historic role as globalization’s bodyguard right at the apogee of our system’s expansion around the planet, thus ceding leadership to rising great powers in what would inevitably become a decidedly less American and therefore less safe world; or continue trading off hypothetical future casualties from big-war scenarios against current actual casualties from small-war operations, suffering far more of the latter to prevent the possibility of the former. I don’t believe our military gets to make that first call; it’s simply beyond their pay grade in our civilian-controlled national security establishment. As for the second option, or basically continuing to lowball our SysAdmin effort while overfeeding the Leviathan, I find that both strategically unsound and morally indefensible. As we currently outspend the rest of the planet on defense, we should easily be able to hedge against conventional military threats from other great powers, and as for nuclear war, nothing has changed in that realm besides our provocative insistence on pursuing missile defense in regions neighboring Russia and China.

  In the end, the bureaucratic push to reset the force masks the warrior’s nostalgia for the simpler wars of the past and industry’s greed for the superexpensive weapons systems and platforms associated with such top-line, symmetrical conflicts. It likewise reflects the complete lack of understanding of today’s global economics within America’s national security community, which casually dreams up fantastic warfighting scenarios that bleed plausibility with each passing year of globalization’s advance. Notwithstanding simplistic analogies to pre-World War I Europe’s levels of economic integration, the essential truth remai
ns: Nuclear weapons killed great-power war. That means any future resource wars, however implausible, would nonetheless involve our enemies’ employing asymmetrical forms of resistance, such as proxy wars. Indeed, if Iraq teaches the world anything, it’s that the American military cannot be resisted symmetrically but can be bled asymmetrically.

  Listen to Marine Corps general James Mattis, himself a veteran of multiple command tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, decry, already in late 2005, the strategic mindset that suggests:

  “Let’s hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now.” Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we’re fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they’re doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours.