Hank Gaffney taught me how to put my natural inclination for horizontal thinking to good use in diagnosing security situations in the world around me. Hank used to present these wildly complex vugraphs in the 1990s that displayed a number of bad security situations around the world as horizontal scenarios, meaning he would measure the “pain” or “instability” in any situation and plot it out over time as it rose and fell—“peaks and valleys,” he would call them. His argument was that the Pentagon tended to ignore these situations until they reached some critical point where they magically tripped our “national interest” alarm, and then the White House would call over to the Pentagon and say, “Do something about that now!” Of course, the Pentagon would respond with complete shock: How could anyone have predicted this? Then the military would rapidly muster an interventionary force and respond to the “crisis,” afterward bragging that it handled the situation with virtually no warning time.◈
It was those vugraphs that eventually pushed me to defining what I call the Post-Cold War Horizontal Scenario, which I describe as follows: First, there is no clear beginning or end to the conflict, meaning it feels as if it has been around forever and that it will continue well past our lifetimes. Think about the Middle East. When exactly did the hostilities start there? Was it the late 1980s or the early 1970s? Or was it when Israel was created in 1948? Or how about the Crusades eight centuries ago? And exactly how much longer will we be hearing about a “forthcoming” Middle East peace plan? Expect one anytime soon?
A second characteristic of these horizontal scenarios is that the definition of the enemy changes over time. When the United States went into Somalia in late 1992, at first the enemy was the chaos that prevented relief workers from dealing with the famine. Then it became the lack of a functioning central state. Then it became all those warlords running around the place. Then we decided it was one warlord who was the real problem. Then we suffered more casualties in a single day since Vietnam and—presto!—we decided the United Nations was the problem and we got the hell out of that Wild West shooting gallery.
Another annoying feature of these scenarios is the revolving cast of allies, who seem to enter and exit our military coalitions like it’s festival seating or something. I am not just referring to the French here, either. Countries seem to switch sides these days at the drop of a hat—or perhaps just a hint. Think about our secretaries of state jetting around the world trying to get all sorts of small powers to subscribe to our latest public offering, promising this or that aid package in return.◈ What kind of “imperialist power” has to go around begging every little country sitting on the UN Security Council to let it—pretty please—invade some country and topple its horrible leader that nobody likes? Does that seem a dignified way to run a world empire?
Unlike the classic vertical scenario, these horizontal ones feature loads of adaptive planning for the military. Rather than one giant battle, it is strike after skirmish after ambush after . . . Planning is done on the fly. It is not chess but something closer to soccer. The ball is always moving, and substitutions are constantly changing the composition of both your team and your enemy’s. But worse still, your political leadership’s definition of the “problem” you are trying to solve keeps changing, making your attempts to keep score almost meaningless. You want to know what today’s definition of the problem is? Try reading the op-ed pages; you will have plenty to choose from.
Probably the most unpleasant aspect of these post-Cold War horizontal scenarios was the sense of irrelevance they bestowed on the U.S. military. In many ways, the 1990s seemed like one unending string of babysitting jobs that always placed the military on the margins of what for the rest of the world seemed like a decade of momentous positive change. So what did the Pentagon do during the go-go nineties? It periodically tussled with Monty Python’s Black Knight, Slobodan Milosevic, systematically dismembering his body politic as he idiotically taunted us to fight on. We also spent a dozen years keeping Saddam in the box defined by his northern and southern no-fly zones.
Did we respond to the mini-holocaust raging in Central Africa? Not really. That one was simply too far away from friends that mattered, like Saudi Arabia and Israel in the Middle East or our NATO allies in Europe.
Actually, it was the spread of globalization itself that was the dominant horizontal scenario of the 1990s. Where it extended and connectivity grew between any national economy and the global economy, security rule sets seemed to likewise expand. But where globalization did not effectively take root, there the security rule sets seemed thinner and—in some sad cases like Central Africa—completely absent. But if you were handicapped by the typical Pentagon mind-set of focusing strictly on downstream, potentially juicy vertical scenarios, globalization’s growth across the nineties slipped under your strategic radar, quietly reshaping the international security landscape America faces today.
Hank Gaffney’s biggest gift to me was helping me recognize and understand such horizontal scenarios and—by doing so—providing me a crucial tool to map out the strategic landscape that slowly came into focus across the 1990s. I stopped scanning the strategic horizon looking for “near-peer competitors” capable of delivering the “bolt from the blue” that would trigger the Big One. Instead, I began to see the global security environment for what it really was, a complex web of almost unlimited horizontal scenarios that all required some level of understanding if I was ever going to fashion a comprehensive vision of America’s role in securing global peace.
Mapping Globalization’s Frontier
If we think of globalization as the ultimate horizontal scenario, then we immediately move beyond the simplistic notion that globalization is a binary outcome—first it was not there, and then it was. Globalization is not a yes or no, despite the all-encompassing outcome suggested by its name (by definition, globalization must be everywhere, right?). Rather, globalization is a process, a pathway, a what combined with a where. Understanding where globalization has taken root and where it has not is the first step toward mapping the international security environment of the twenty-first century. For the military, the importance of this demarcation cannot be overstated. It is like the difference between land and water, jungle and desert, mountains and grasslands. Knowing where globalization begins and ends essentially defines the U.S. military’s expeditionary theater. It tells us where we will go and why. It tells us what we will find when we get there, and what we must do to achieve victory in warfare.
I will propose a new map of the world that captures this challenge and the threats it poses. It will not be an East-West map. It will not be a North-South map. It will be a map that shows you which regions are functioning within globalization’s expanding web of connectivity and which remain fundamentally disconnected from that process. It will show you that where globalization has spread, there you will find stable governments that neither require our periodic military interventions nor warrant our consideration as threats. But look beyond globalization’s frontier, and there you will find the failed states that command our attention, the rogue states that demand our vigilance, and the endemic conflicts that fuel the terror we now recognize as the dominant threat not just to America’s future security but to globalization’s continued advance.
Before I can draw this map in full, though, I need to define what I mean by globalization’s spread. To do that, I must describe more fully what I mean by globalization’s Functioning Core, or those regions that are progressively integrating their national economies into the world economy.
Globalization is a condition defined by mutually assured dependence. To globalize your economy and your society, you must accept that the world will reshape your future far more than you can possibly hope to influence the world in return. The continuity of the past, where son followed father in occupation for generations, will in most cases end with callous disregard for tradition. Moreover, if you globalize you will import from that world outside far more than you can possibly offer in return.
While your culture will be added to globalization’s ever-evolving mosaic, your society will—in return—be challenged to adapt to an amazing array of content flows (e.g., ideas about the role of women, free speech, “proper” education) that come with globalization’s connectivity. The same will hold true for the goods and services you can offer the world, which will pale in comparison with all the products that will flood your markets, challenging your producers and firms to adapt to a new competitive landscape or die. Most important, while your influence regarding global rule sets will be small, globalization’s influence regarding your internal rule sets will be enormous. In fact, your importation and adoption of these global rule sets will be the main price you pay for leaving your disconnectedness behind.
Sound incredibly difficult? It is. Americans tend to forget how difficult this is because most of the hardest compromises we made in building this country now seem far behind us—the Civil War, universal suffrage, civil rights. The reason Americans are so unconsciously comfortable with the emerging global rule sets is that they so intimately reflect what we have become—a multicultural freemarket economy whose minimal rule sets (telling us what we cannot do, not what we must do) allow for maximum individual freedom to go where we want, live where we want, and conduct our lives how we want. Of course, when you extend that rule set to the entire planet, you are going to find yourself dealing with a lot of issues you thought you would never encounter—again. So the temptation is great to simply throw up our hands and exclaim, “We will never understand those people!” When in reality, understanding them requires us—in most instances—simply to look into our past and remember ourselves.
For example, America’s greatest outbursts of nationalism have typically occurred during periods of increased interaction with the outside world (think of World War II and the early Cold War years). When global events have drawn us out of our natural inclination toward isolationism, we don’t just engage the world, we embrace it with a messianic fervor that other states often find quite disturbing. But such nationalism is, in many ways, a natural response on the part of individuals to any society’s growing connectivity with the outside world. That is why globalization’s progressive advance will trigger more nationalism around the world, not less. This may seem counterintuitive, but as nations join the Core, expect their societies (especially their youth) to demand preservation of cultural identity. This is only natural and right, but we need to understand such nationalism for what it truly represents: not anti-Americanism per se, but a fear of lost identity. Globalization empowers the individual at the expense of the collective, and that very American transformation of culture is quite scary for traditional societies.
Americans often seem flabbergasted when those who oppose globalization around the world protest that it is “forced Americanization.” We shouldn’t be. Because we are furthest along in this grand experiment called the United States, and because that model of mutually assured dependence characterized by minimal rule sets greatly predates globalization’s advance, we may well enjoy a lead in this historical process. But with that lead comes responsibility, for either we use our tremendous power as a nation to make globalization truly global, or we condemn some portion of humanity to an outsider status that will naturally morph—through pain and time—into a definition of the enemy. And once we have named our enemies, we will invariably wage war, unleashing the death and destruction that come with it.
Remembering that disconnectedness itself is the ultimate enemy, America can, by extending globalization in a fair and just manner, not only defeat the threats it faces today but eliminate in advance entire generations of threat that our children and grandchildren would otherwise face. In short, there is simply no possibility of keeping the threat “outside, over there” anymore. If we as a nation accept the logic of globalization’s advance, our definition of us must include all of them who now feel left out of globalization’s benefits, as well as the them who would employ all manner of violence to deny its advance. This historical process is neither forced assimilation nor the extension of empire, but the expansion of freedom first and foremost.
But expanding that freedom requires that we understand both its presence and its absence, and how globalization’s frontier defines this age. Real freedom exists within defined rule sets that reduce life’s uncertainties to the point where individuals can efficiently run their own lives, avoiding the tyrannies of extreme poverty, endemic violence, and talent-stifling political repression. A China, no longer trapped by the impoverishing inefficiencies of sustenance agriculture, joins globalization’s growing Core. A South Korea, spared the inefficiency of having to be an armed camp thanks to American might, joins globalization’s growing Core. An India, no longer defined by the mindless inefficiencies of a caste system, joins globalization’s growing Core. In each instance, as entire populations are liberated from the debilitating inefficiencies that kept them largely disconnected from the integrating whole, not only does their freedom increase but ours does as well. For each time we expand globalization’s Functioning Core, we expand for all those living within it the freedom of choice, movement, and expression.
So how do I define this Functioning Core?
First and foremost, a country or region is functioning within globalization if it accepts the connectivity and can handle the content flows associated with integrating one’s national economy to the global economy. Most societies welcome globalization’s connectivity, when they are able to attract it. But not every society can handle the content flows that come with all that connectivity, meaning all the ideas, products, services, mass media, and so forth that flow into the country as a result. How a society handles that content flow, and the behavior it engenders (both good and bad), depends largely on the nature of its legal rule sets. A country like the United States lets its people have virtually unlimited access to global content flows. If you behave badly on the basis of that access, we have a downstream legal system that will punish you—but only after the fact. Most traditional societies around the world prefer to maintain upstream controls over access to content. Such traditional societies emphasize censorship, or the denial of access to what is officially considered “bad” content. In a wide-open democracy like the United States, extremely little content is preemptively declared off-limits—child pornography and certain drugs being good examples. But in more traditional societies, the list can be quite long, and herein lies the destabilizing effect that globalization’s connectivity can bring. If you are a young woman living in Iran and want to discuss sex, dating, and marriage, guess where you go? If you are one of the two million regular Internet users in that country, you probably log on to a Yahoo chat network at your local café and escape the mullahs’ censorship.◈
My favorite example of this effect is what happened to Barbie, the toy doll for young girls, when she decided to launch her one-woman invasion of Iran. Barbie apparently infiltrated Iranian toy stores at some point in the 1990s, exploiting the retail networks of the global economy. Soon after, a government-backed children’s agency labeled Barbie a “Trojan horse” for Western influence, complete with her revealing attire. Despite—or perhaps because of—this official warning, Barbie apparently proved too popular with young Iranian girls. Eventually, concerned local officials engineered a counterattack—the moon-faced Sara doll clad head to toe in an Islamic chador. But this officially approved anti-Barbie was not enough to stem Barbie’s negative influence, and so orders went out to local police to detain Barbie wherever she was found. Barbie has become a doll on the run.◈
Another good example of how a country’s fear of content often trumps its desire for connectivity was Nigeria’s attempt to host the 2002 Miss World competition. This effort came about because Miss Nigeria was awarded the title in 2001, and national leaders wanted to capitalize on that achievement to showcase Nigeria’s growing connectivity to the outside world. The outcome was a complete disaster, in large part because a major portion of Nigerian society simply could
not handle the content flow associated with that event. In Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north, having a baby out of wedlock is enough to get a young woman sentenced to death by stoning, according to the strict Islamic law practiced there. Not surprisingly, many of the Miss World participants threatened to boycott the competition if it was held in Nigeria. But that was nothing compared with the rioting triggered in the north following a newspaper column that appeared in a Lagos-based daily. In it, the author made light of Muslim protests against the upcoming competition, and suggested that if the prophet Muhammad were alive today, he might well have taken one of the young beauties as a wife. By the time the wave of violence abated in the north, several dozen Christian churches had been burned to the ground and several hundred people lay dead in the streets.◈ Soon after, the Miss World competition was moved to London, and Nigeria became just a bit more disconnected from the Functioning Core of globalization.◈
But most modernizing societies fall into the same category as China, which is wiring up its population so rapidly that it has sparked an Internet boomlet among international investors.◈ China is of two minds regarding the Internet: it craves the connectivity, but it would also like to keep its billion-plus people under “mouse arrest.” By that I mean deny them access to certain “bad” Web sites like “Playboy.com” or the search engine Google, where apparently it is quite easy to locate sites that criticize the Communist leadership.◈ Who wins out in the end? I say, track the money. If China continues to attract foreign direct investment for its telecommunications infrastructure, then it will inevitably be a case of “build it and they will surf” wherever they damn well please.
A second way to describe a country or region as functioning is when it seeks to harmonize its internal rule sets with the emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets. Naturally, we would like to see all three occurring at once, but significant movement on any front is more important than the lack of progress in the other two. That is because there is more than one way to skin this cat, and America should not be in the business of mandating any one approach above the other. The best approach is simply to let the locals decide where to start, because they will know best what is likely to succeed first.
The Pentagon's New Map Page 14
