The Pentagon's New Map
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Can a bin Laden, or perhaps a bin-Laden-after-next, possibly succeed in the same manner as Lenin’s Bolsheviks? As U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick likes to say about the current era of globalization, “No future is inevitable.”◈ That is true for only so long as America and the world remain trapped by the rule sets of the past. If we as a nation are able to surmount the rule-set gaps that plague both our “world-historical relationship” with Islam and our—until recently—feeble responses to the rise of “sacred terror,” I believe a very positive long-term scenario for Globalization III is ours for the taking. But only if Americans remember that while typically this country follows the rules, sometimes history—1776, 1861, 1945, 1962, 2001—calls upon this nation to create new rules.
Whether we realize it or not, we are all—right now—standing present at the creation of a new international security order. You might think that the global war on terrorism is nothing more than the twisted creation of a warmongering Bush Administration, but you would be wrong. The global conflict between the forces of connectedness and disconnectedness is here and it is not going away anytime soon. Either America steps up to the challenge of defining this new global security rule set, or we will see those rules established by people who dream of a very different tomorrow.
A Future Worth Creating
I felt absolutely crushed watching the televised picture of World Trade Center One’s collapse on September 11, 2001. I had been inside the building a couple of dozen times over the previous three years as part of the Naval War College’s ongoing research partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street broker-dealer firm that lost several hundred of its employees on that terrible day. I had led several daylong workshops on the 107th floor at the Windows on the World restaurant and had come to know a significant number of the amazingly talented people who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.
The research project I was conducting with Cantor’s help involved exploring how globalization was altering America’s definitions of national security—in effect, altering our calculus of risk management. The workshops we conducted jointly brought together Wall Street heavyweights, senior national security officials, and leading experts from academia and think tanks. These were amazing conversations for everyone involved, primarily because of the novelty of having all these people in the same room discussing globalization’s future and the threats that could derail it.
Our joint venture was called the New Rule Sets Project. As director, I regularly visited two places: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This only made sense, since the project sought to facilitate America’s understanding of the growing nexus between national security and globalization, and that meant getting Wall Street and the Pentagon talking to each other on a regular basis. On 9/11, I was gearing up for another Pentagon briefing the following week. It would have occurred in the Navy’s command center facilities that were destroyed that day. The week following that canceled trip, I was scheduled for another round of planning meetings at Cantor’s headquarters on the 105th floor.
This steady stream of briefings and meetings gave me a new, far broader sense of how globalization was shrinking the world, not just geographically but also pulling together seemingly disparate sectors. Individuals on both sides of this unprecedented dialogue—security and financial—often said that this was the first time they had genre-hopping conversations like this since college. I took that as a real compliment, meaning we were crossing policy boundaries at will and getting decision makers out of their usual mind-sets. A great example of this was the debates we had about China. When the full panoply of Beijing’s interactions with the outside world was put on the table, the country seemed a whole lot less inscrutable all of a sudden—less threatening. The deeper we plunged into how the worlds of finance and national security overlapped, the more the phrase “unintended consequences” kept cropping up, along with “spillover,” “tipping points,” and “pathway dependencies.” What had looked like “chaos” from the Pentagon’s perspective appeared a lot more orderly once you knew how to track globalization’s causes and effects.
In this unique dialogue, Wall Street executives helped my research team connect the dots in ways the Pentagon never does in its long-range planning. It was like we were drawing a new map of the world and the great currents of activity that defined the mixing bowl that is globalization. A lot of times I felt like some explorer, going where no man has gone before. It was very exciting. It popped me out of bed in the morning. It made me feel that my work had meaning—I was doing something important to make the world a better place. Like everyone else, I needed that feeling, because it gave me hope for the future.
When the terrorists struck both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, the New Rule Sets Project essentially ended because of Cantor Fitzgerald’s catastrophic losses. Like most people, I felt a sense of outrage over the many lives cut short, but I also felt a new sense of urgency in my work. A lot of my colleagues confessed that 9/11 made them feel that their work was somehow trivial, that they had been studying the wrong issues. This was only natural, because everyone in this business feels a bit responsible when America takes a body blow like 9/11—we feel bad we did not see it coming. That feeling was, of course, eventually overwhelmed by all the new assignments that the global war on terrorism generated throughout the Defense Department.
But in those days immediately following 9/11, I must confess that I was at a loss about what I should do with my career, which at that point seemed completely defined by this pathbreaking project. At one point, I even considered leaving the college and offering to work for Cantor Fitzgerald. But that felt as if I was reaching for straws. Deep down, I knew I had been on the trail of something truly important in the New Rule Sets Project—something that would frame what was really at stake in this hastily declared “global war.” That realization helped me get my feet back on the ground in my career, but it also forced me to think more clearly about that global future I had long assumed was inevitable.
September 11 told me that globalization’s uneven spread around the planet delineated more than just a frontier separating the connected from the disconnected—it marked the front lines in a struggle of historic proportions. The combatants in this conflict harbor very different dreams about the future, and if 9/11 alerted us to the asymmetry of will regarding the use of violence to achieve desired ends, then that asymmetry—that rule-set gap—would have to be eliminated. Revenge was pointless, and even killing the killers smacked of treating symptoms rather than the disease. America’s use of military power in this war has to be guided toward strategic ends: the destruction of those who would wage war against global connectivity and the freedoms it unleashes.
America cannot really join this war until it can define the enemy, and it has had difficulty doing so out of the fear of appearing racist or intolerant. But here is where our fixation on quick fixes and “big bangs” undermine our ability to keep our eyes on the prize, because identifying that goal leads us to identifying the true enemy. That enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (the Middle East), but a condition—disconnectedness.
To be disconnected in this world is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated. For young women, it means being kept—quite literally in many instances—barefoot and pregnant. For young men, it means being kept ignorant and bored and malleable. For the masses, being disconnected means a lack of choice and scarce access to ideas, capital, travel, entertainment, and loved ones overseas. For the elite, maintaining disconnectedness means control and the ability to hoard wealth, especially that generated by the exportation of valued raw materials.
If disconnectedness is the real enemy, then the combatants we target in this war are those who promote it, enforce it, and terrorize those who seek to overcome it by reaching out to the larger world. Our strategic goals, therefore, are to extend connectivity in every way possible, but only in a manner that promotes justice as much as order. Because when we sacrifice, when
we suffer, and when we die in this war, we must know that the good we promote is both immediate and lasting. Americans need the confidence of knowing that every difficult step we take represents forward progress on some level.
To that end, we need to understand what is really at stake here, which is nothing less than the future of globalization itself. You may say that globalization is not a goal or a strategy but simply a condition of the world we live in, and you would be right on many levels. But globalization is also a historical process, or something that is defined by a sense of momentum and purpose. Globalization has a past, which defines its limits, but likewise a future whose promise it must fulfill, otherwise it will become a spent notion in the minds of political leaders whose determined actions are required for its continued advance. In short, once globalization is “done” as far as most leaders are concerned, the willingness of states to continue compromising with one another to further its growth will evaporate. Everyone in this world will lose if this hopeless situation comes to pass, but more saliently, the historic window of opportunity will close on a major portion of humanity currently living outside globalization’s Functioning Core. That is not just a sad or unjust scenario, it is one fraught with danger for America—the world’s biggest economy and the political ideal most closely associated with globalization’s promise and peril.
Whether we realize it or not, America serves as the ideological wellspring for globalization. These united states still stand as its first concrete expression. We are the only country in the world purposely built around the ideals that animate globalization’s advance: freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of expression. We are connectivity personified. Globalization is this country’s gift to history—the most perfectly flawed projection of the American Dream onto the global landscape. To deny our parentage of globalization is to deny our country’s profound role as world leader over the second half of the twentieth century. More important, to abandon globalization’s future to those violent forces hell-bent on keeping this world divided between the connected and disconnected is to admit that we no longer hold these truths to be self-evident: that all are created equal, and that all desire life, liberty, and a chance to pursue happiness. In short, we the people needs to become we the planet.
There are essentially two big questions for the future of globalization. The first question is, “What will constitute the great dividing line between who’s in and who’s out of globalization’s Functioning Core?” Another way of saying this is, “How big will the Non-Integrating Gap end up being?” The answer here is crucial, because the size and composition of the Gap will determine the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century.
The second big question is, “Do new rules emerge globally that erase—or at least ease—the misalignment of rule sets that emerged across the 1990s?” In other words, “Do political and security rule sets catch up to all the connectivity fostered by the economic and technological advances we have witnessed in this current era of globalization? Or does globalization keep feeling like a runaway train that must eventually jump the track, as its previous version did in the tumultuous 1930s?”
With regard to the first question, I offer two possibilities: We live either in a world divided by competency or one divided by culture. A world divided by competency corresponds to Thomas Friedman’s description of the differences between the “Lexus world” and the “olive tree world.” In his seminal 1999 volume exploring the globalization phenomenon of the 1990s, Friedman divided the world into those people who seem to “get” globalization and all that it promises (e.g., the ability to manufacture high-tech goods like Lexus automobiles) and those people who don’t seem to “get it” and thus prefer to remain trapped in a simpler world where groups fight over little chunks of “sacred lands” (like this olive tree grove, or that mountaintop).◈
At the other end of that spectrum is someone like Samuel P. Huntington, whose controversial 1996 volume The Clash of Civilizations posited that the future of global conflict would be defined by where the world’s major civilizations bump up against one another (the concept of “fault-line wars”).◈ In his mind, it’s not so much a matter of who is good or bad at globalization as it is the sheer reality that different cultures value globalization’s resulting connectivity and content flows in very different ways. For example, not every culture is going to welcome the Internet (connectivity) if it means easy access to pornography (content flow).
Those are basically the two great choices in terms of how the world ends up defining globalization’s frontier: either it is just a matter of bringing countries “up to speed” to participate in the global economy, or we have to admit that some cultures simply will never be able to join our not-so-global economy.
Turning to the second question of rules, I posit two potential pathways: Either the world develops new rule sets to meet the challenges of the age or the rule-set misalignment that emerged in the 1990s persists, meaning economic rule sets are always outpacing political ones, and security rule sets never quite catch up to all that technologically driven connectivity. Another way to express this danger of misalignment is to say that America itself may come up with a host of new rules (e.g., preemption strategy, global war on terrorism, the Patriot Act) to bridge this divide, but that these new rule sets will have a divisive effect on globalization’s Functioning Core. Simply put, other advanced societies will reject the new rules we propose, leading to a situation where America’s security rule sets are seriously out of sync with that of other great powers—like France, Germany, Russia, and China. In this pathway, we do not really accomplish anything worthwhile in terms of advancing globalization: old divisions are simply replaced with new ones.
If, in waging war against the forces of disconnectedness, the United States ends up dividing the West, or the heart of the Core, then our cure ends up being worse than the disease. This is what Robert Kagan really speaks to when he talks about the “West”—as we have historically defined the trans-Atlantic security bond between North America and Western Europe—coming undone. His 2003 book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order is frequently shorthanded by the quote, “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”◈ In other words, Europe and America tend to view rule sets very differently. Our willingness to use military power against Saddam Hussein’s regime, for example, proves that America believes new rules are required in security (preemption), whereas most in Europe see no such misalignment between the rule sets of technology (weapons of mass destruction) and security (war should remain purely a defensive option). Clearly, that gap in perception had long existed between the United States and Europe, only to grow truly dysfunctional when the unifying Soviet threat disappeared. So it is not just a matter of recognizing the rule-set misalignments that emerged in the 1990s, but also of agreeing on what constitutes the right rule-set reset, and here America and Europe appear to disagree strongly—for now.
Of course, others will say that America cannot be afraid to forge these provocative new security rule sets, that we simply must admit that “dangerous times” call for “dangerous measures.” Admittedly, the U.S. defense community is very partial to such arguments, although most officers I know worry about the long-term repercussions for American society as much as my wife, Vonne—a card-carrying member of the ACLU—does. So when I hear journalist Robert Kaplan—a real Pentagon favorite—admonish America to adopt a form of “warrior politics” suitable for managing an explicit “empire,” I get more than a little nervous.◈ In my mind, if the Pentagon does its job right, the rest of the country gets to go about its business with as little change as possible. I am not interested in “toughening up” America for the big bad world outside; I am far more interested in taming that part of the world that currently lies outside the Core’s firm security rule sets, rules that have given this country a very peaceful previous quarter-century. The “good war” is
a won war, not a war forever waged.
Let’s not kid ourselves, most of the rule-set changes proposed since 9/11 focus on war and the military management of “empire.”◈ But that just reflects our habit of thinking about war solely within the context of war instead of approaching war as something that occurs within the context of everything else. Yes, you can bomb terrorist-haven countries back into the Stone Age (usually a very short trip), but that hardly constitutes promoting connectivity in and of itself. Yes, invasions and regime changes facilitate the removal of our enemies in this war, or those who endeavor to keep entire societies trapped in splendid isolation (the Taliban, Saddam). But as we’ve seen in both postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, that is not even half the battle. If all we do—for lack of effort—is simply replace one “disconnecting” leadership with another, then the countries in question will inevitably lapse back into problem status. So clearly, the rule-set reset we seek is far larger than simply keeping the barbarians at the gate, which—frankly—is what virtually every discussion of “American empire” is really about. In effect, America’s avowed goal should be extending our culturally neutral, rules-based “civilization” called globalization, because if we do not all live under the same basic rule set, there will always be a global hierarchy by which some rule and others are ruled. Until there are equal rules, we are not all equal.
You want a future worth creating? It is called making globalization truly global. If we shoot for anything less in this global war on terrorism, we simply shoot ourselves in the foot, condemning globalization to futures worth debating. If globalization is permanently hampered by rule sets being out of whack, the Core will remain seriously vulnerable to damaging “shocks to the system” like 9/11, outbreaks of contagious diseases, future “electronic Pearl Harbors,” or rapidly emerging environmental catastrophes of global proportions. Worse still, the progressive division of the world economy into cultural or regional camps diminishes the overall potential for international cooperation—meaning, in effect, that no one is minding the store on such big issues as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global warming, and the spread of AIDS. In this far darker scenario, we all seem to live in a dog-eat-dog world, where every major power looks out for number one. Over time, globalization’s advance is invariably reversed by increased economic nationalism, arms races, and—eventually—conflict among great powers. You could describe this scenario as a rerun of the 1930s. Flash points might include Europe versus America over genetically modified organisms, China versus America over a solution to the North Korea problem, and Russia versus America over the latter’s growing military presence in Central Asia.