Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Enter Al Gore, the perfect vessel for a counternarrative to President Bush’s “global war on terror.” The presidential vote-winner, denied his victory in 2000, Gore represents the perfectly plausible historical alternative—the political road not taken. Gore was a longtime environmentalist, and his subsequent embrace of a Paul Revere-like role in warning the planet about the oncoming effects of global warming represents much more than just his personal search for a politically meaningful role after his 2000 election loss. In many ways, Gore’s message promises an entire generation of Americans unhappy with Bush’s “global war” that a suitably transcendent grand strategy is there for the taking. Rather than dealing with our failures in places like Baghdad and New Orleans (or worse, our nonresponses in places like Darfur), and refashioning our national security establishment to manage such inevitable future challenges, Gore’s message promises more familiar dynamics: a planet-threatening foe against which the proper response consists more of an internal decades-long rebalancing than an immediate external exposure to danger. Rather than facing up to the unsavory challenges of shrinking the Gap, global warming allows us to justify pulling back from a chaotic world and addressing its “ultimate” challenge through new technology (always an American favorite) and do-it-yourself sacrifice on an individual level. In short, if American “empire” gets you down, why not register your disapproval, don your global-warming hair shirt, and display your asceticism as a political statement?

  Of course, this states the dichotomy too starkly, but you can see the inherent temptation in replacing an unpopular global narrative with one more compellingly familiar in its Cold War logic (e.g., “saving the planet from man’s recklessness”). As always, ending today’s crisis is as easy as naming tomorrow’s scarier crisis. Humans crave life-focusing crises. As globalization creates inescapable complexity (e.g., terror plus global warming plus financial meltdowns plus energy shortages), it is nice to have one big boulder to push up that hill every day, no matter how Sisyphean the task (in fact, the more outlandish the better). We’re naturally resilient creatures, and self-sacrifice is embedded in our evolutionary code. When Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, it tells me that the world wants a different organizing principle to animate American grand strategy. The world’s worry list goes far beyond America’s preoccupation with its postwar occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and the nuclear newborns North Korea and Iran. Every intervention mustn’t be hardwired to the threat of transnational terrorism and nukes. Today’s globalization is simultaneously far too expansive in its reach and far too immature in its rule sets to be captured by our now discredited storyline of defeating terrorism and thus making the world safe for democracy (echoing Wilson’s post-WWI dreams for a politically engineered peace that ignored the economic underpinnings). Again, in historical terms, we are arguing over the bell curve’s sloping shoulders while ignoring the huge territory in between.

  Given that it has been my living to systemically examine the future, you’d think it would be easy for me to get excited about global warming, but it hasn’t been. Let me tell you why. Right up to 9/11, I directed a Naval War College research project that involved partnering with the Wall Street brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald—the very same firm that lost six hundred-plus workers that fateful day. As part of this project on globalization’s future, we held an “economic security exercise,” or scenario-driven war game, to explore the profound environmental issues arising from Asia’s rapid development. This war game followed two previous ones on the questions of Asia’s rising energy requirements and need for foreign direct investment to fund its stunning infrastructural build-out. If the energy game represented the “motive,” and the FDI event explored the “opportunity,” then the third exercise exploring the resulting environmental damage captured the “crime.”

  The exercise centered on the notion that Asia’s increasing production of CO2 would become a major political issue in the collective fight to address global warming. Indeed, the primary reason the United States didn’t ratify the Kyoto Treaty was that it left rising India and China out of its global equation. Cantor Fitzgerald had successfully pioneered financial markets to take advantage of, and further enable, the cap-and-trade regime imposed on acid rain emissions by the 1990 Clean Air Act. So in this war game, held atop World Trade Center One in June 2001, the firm was clearly interested in promoting similar market mechanisms for Asia on CO2, having recently created a subsidiary (CantorCO2e) for just such purposes. In designing the war game, however, I didn’t want to stack the deck so obviously in favor of the global-warming scenario. As participants were drawn from Wall Street, the U.S. government, the energy industry, and environmental organizations (including the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, who along with the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Gore), I thought it would be interesting to force them to rank a list of competing environmental dangers in order of perceived priority—a bang-for-the-buck hierarchy. In a world of limited resources, I wanted them to tell me where they’d put their next dollar to fix things.

  So I had the group play Survivor by “voting off the island” one danger each successive round following a discussion of some measure of environmental degradation. As the selected measures focused attention on global warming, I was nonetheless surprised to find that it was the first issue voted off, along with acid rain. Next dispatched were deforestation/species loss and hazardous substances, followed by population pressures/loss of arable land. The runner-up ended up being marine habitat destruction (e.g., fisheries), while the hands-down winner was lack of clean water. Now, one can immediately counter that if humanity deals with global warming effectively, then water issues would likewise improve. Our question, however, was all about timing and priority: for example, how much effort should be made to cut global warming x percent by 2100, versus more immediately addressing all the lives shortened by lack of access to clean water?

  Three years later, Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg employed the same thought exercise in his Copenhagen Consensus project, which utilized the combined talents of several Nobel Prize-winning experts. When forced to rank solutions, they too chose to prioritize certain near-term goals (e.g., clean water, malnutrition, debilitating diseases) over the longer-term challenge of slowing global warming. Lomborg later repeated the exercise with a collection of political leaders drawn from all over the world and got the same result. Ditto when he assembled youth representatives from across the planet.

  But having said all that, I think so many Americans want to embrace global warming as the preeminent global challenge of our age because it beats the heck out of the alternatives currently offered. I would love to see humanity focus on a “blue revolution” to address looming water shortages linked to global warming, but I know full well that the war on terror and clash of civilizations are current front-runners for crisis of the age among national security experts, and when push comes to shove with the big-war crowd on the subject of defense acquisitions, I fully expect it to mount a full-court press on the subject of resource wars with those new Gap “colonialists”—the Chinese. So how to hijack this myopic strategic dialogue? Replace it with a bigger, more attractive one and, by doing so, deescalate the harmful rhetoric vis-à-vis Islam while systematically delegitimizing al Qaeda’s self-declared importance as that religion’s lead resistance to globalization’s advance. So if forced to choose, I’d also go with global warming right now, because we’ll do less damage to both our world and ourselves by myopically focusing on that crisis versus terrorism or radical Islam or China’s latest submarine.

  And to me, that’s pretty sad, because it means that the only way we can talk ourselves out of overhyping the global terror threat is to break its current lock on our attention with an even more hyped presentation on global warming, right down to retired military officers warning us that global warming will be the source of much of the world’s future conflicts, a notion that—conveniently enough—quickly gets us ba
ck to resource wars. Over time, it’s easy to imagine the painfully skewed Bush narrative being replaced with an equally skewed Gore counternarrative: Where Bush focused on the extremes of terror and democracy, Gore’s vision promises an equally extreme mix of resource wars on the lower end of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and postindustrial clean living on the higher end. Meanwhile, in both cases, globalization’s huge emerging middle is ignored or—worse—is thwarted in its reasonable ambitions.

  China and India, for example, can’t afford either extreme, making the implied dichotomy unrealistic: Neither can wage long-term conventional wars to fence off the world’s resources. They can neither spare the resources nor anger their financial partners in the West. They’re already simply too connected to globalization to try and carve out resource empires that feed their growth while killing their market connectivity. Such fantastic dreams died with the Soviet bloc’s mini-me global economy in 1989. Once you connect to globalization, all resource constraints become collective problems. That’s the fundamental subversion of global conflict foisted upon great powers by the American System-cum-globalization: Our liberal international trade order denies such partitioning strategies by rendering moot all such attempts at segmented autarky. Simply put, you can’t become interdependent economically and then hold apart some aspect—be it energy or military power—as essentially autarkic. If it didn’t work for the Bush neocons on security, then it will hardly work for China on raw materials. Still, expect a lot of security experts to keep feeding you this strategic nonsense in the years ahead.

  Then there’s the bigger argument offered by Lomborg in his brilliant little 2007 book, Cool It. Like Lomborg, I see no reason to debate whether the world is getting warmer or whether human activity is causing such change. Both points seem reasonably well established by the global scientific community. The real question is whether or not we need to elevate global warming to the status of the greatest crisis of our age. Gore’s counternarrative explicitly promises to deliver meaning to individual lives, much as Bush’s terror narrative did for some. But much like Bush’s narrow narrative, Gore’s narrative demands we act to prevent a negative future rather than enable a better one. As Lomborg argues, our ultimate goal shouldn’t be the reduction of greenhouse gases or global warming per se, “but to improve the quality of life and the environment” for future generations. Rather than explore—quite self-centeredly, I would add—the aesthetics of asceticism in the rich West to avoid imagined future resource wars among great powers, why not ask that emerging global middle class how the global economy can best meet its needs and expectations for a better life? Why not center globalization’s ideology in that massive middle instead of on the extreme have/have-not margins? Those rising New Core economies will eventually account for the large majority of CO2 emissions come the year 2100. If the West’s fundamental offer to these emerging economies is to curtail their growth potential as a way of avoiding future resource wars, then we will end up doing nothing more than guaranteeing that such conflicts occur. If the choice falls between progress plus war versus nonprogress plus internal instability, expect these powers to choose the former every time. After all, that’s the story of the West in a nutshell.

  Human history, as Lomborg points out, says we do better when it gets warmer and that we do worse when it gets colder. It also tells us that it’s far easier (and cheaper) to cool people in hot climes than keep them warm in cold ones. Setting aside the fantastic scenarios of resource wars among great powers whose economic interdependence is already advanced and will deepen further over rising food requirements, we’re looking at life getting much worse in major portions of the Gap but not much more complicated in the Core as a whole. By 2100, average personal incomes in the Old Core West should rise sixfold, just as they did in each of the previous two centuries. Meanwhile, the United Nations projects that individual incomes across the emerging economies of the New Core East and South, along with those of the Gap in aggregate, should rise roughly twice as fast, or twelvefold. That means the average poor person on the planet should enjoy an income in 2100 that equates to $27,000 today. What we know from human history is that mass violence in developing economies tends to disappear once you get per capita income above $3,000. We also know that as incomes rise to the $5,000-$10,000 range, societies tend to take better care of their environment and move toward political pluralism. Indeed, as Fareed Zakaria argues, democracies, once they get above that range, become “immortal,” meaning they never slide back toward authoritarianism. Sadly, the only sheer limit we can cite in such an income trajectory is the limit of personal happiness, which by all measures seems to top out at roughly $20,000 per capita.

  You can say that all such “optimistic” projections are logically held captive to the “unprecedented” challenges presented by global warming, but I would argue that it’s the other way around, and that the challenges presented by global warming are not that unprecedented. Major urban areas, as Lomborg notes, have already weathered in the last century temperature increases similar to those projected for this one, and guess what? More inhabitants still die from the cold than from the heat! Whether you’re talking rising sea levels or more volatile weather or more difficulty in growing food or more invasive spreading of disease, in each instance these challenges are better addressed through rising incomes than, as Lomborg puts it, turning the “CO2 knob” down as far as possible. Deaths from natural disasters are strongly related to economic development but only weakly related to a changing climate, as are deaths from infectious diseases. The same is true for water shortages and food shortages. Rising wealth insulates people from environmental dangers quite effectively. Where sea levels rise and land is dear, money is found to manage that process. Where rising sea levels meet an impoverished population, there you will definitely see increased flooding. But in that instance, should our response focus on holding back that tide, in the manner of King Canute? Or should it focus on raising income levels and accepting that such a goal means carbon emissions will be near impossible to stabilize anytime soon?

  Lomborg sums up his measured position this way:

  Global warming is happening; the consequences are important and mostly negative. It will cause more heat deaths, an increase in sea level, possibly more intense hurricanes, and more flooding. It will give rise to more malaria, starvation, and poverty. It is therefore not surprising that a vast array of environmental organizations, pundits, and world leaders have concluded that we must act to fix global warming. The problem with this analysis is that it overlooks a simple but important fact. Cutting CO2—even substantially—will not matter much for the problems on this list. From polar bears to water scarcity . . . we can do relatively little with climate policies and a lot more with social policies.

  The tendency right now to blame everything on global warming is grand strategic escapism at its worst. My favorite recent example was the horrors of Darfur, which some international opinion leaders blamed on global warming. Such logic allowed us to argue, in effect, “Let’s not intervene militarily when we can swap out all our inefficient lightbulbs back home and chant ‘Genocide Olympics’ during the Beijing Games, thus fulfilling our duty as citizens of the world!” What sounds more responsible, I ask: buying the T-shirt or paying Blackwater to actually do something? Because shaming China into impoverishing Sudan further is unlikely to get us the outcome we seek. So please, spare me the transference of guilt from do-nothing America to do-something China. If you really want to shame China into more action, outperform it on the ground instead of out-talking it in the United Nations.

  America stands on the verge of locking in its international liberal trade order through the successful integration of rising economic pillars in the East and South, whose recent accession shifted our American System- cum-globalization from its past narrow global minority into an overwhelming majority status worldwide. There is no good reason to sabotage the emergence of a truly global middle class by having America’s grand strategy fixate excess
ively in the near term on extreme definitions of either transnational terrorism or global warming, two dangers logically framed as chronic long-term threats destined to be managed and mitigated by long-term responses. By meeting the demands of that emerging global middle class, we set in motion the evolution of worldwide democracy that invariably develops in response to rising income levels, which in turn will sufficiently empower nations to mitigate effectively the challenges posed by the twenty-first century. Moreover, by embracing the global competitiveness forced upon all by this liberal trade order, humans will continue their natural journey “down” the carbon-emissions chain (i.e., from wood to coal to oil to natural gas), moving now toward hydrogen. But as always, those answers will arise largely in response to the most immediate pain felt across the system—for instance, high energy prices. In environmental terms, that means the New Core East and South, with their typically more “dirty” industries and skyrocketing consumption rates, will play the same tipping-point role on future solutions as they now play on emerging problems.

  Our goal must continue to be the effective integration of these emerging powers into the corridors of decision-making power within globalization’s expanding Core. If global warming forces a new Core-wide dialogue on technology and development, then Al Gore will have served his grand-strategic purpose: replacing a divisive American grand strategic focus with a unifying one. The problem for now is that global warming, being logically located somewhat far down the list of immediate global challenges, provides the aging West and especially tiring America the dangerous opportunity to short-circuit that integration effort in the name of a superseding crusade for humanity’s future. Thus, in our haste to rid ourselves of one unsustainable and divisive grand strategy, we might immediately transform global warming into its painfully similar replacement. Rather than fantasize about future resource wars in an attempt to obviate this challenge, much as we fantasize about energy autarky to rid us of the troublesome Middle East, the crucial challenge we face today is to continue trusting in this global system of our creation. We came to these crossroads before—at home—and we fashioned a “new deal” to make the emerging middle class our political center of gravity while addressing the environmental limits of our rapid economic development. This is no time to go wobbly or grow vindictive or to gin up even scarier bogeymen.