The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Well, the day the article appeared in the Pentagon’s Early Bird news service, I got a call from OSD’s policy shop, asking, in effect, who was I and why was I saying these things. That gives a sense of how vast the “office” of the Secretary of Defense truly is. When you tell people you’re working in OSD, a lot of them think you have a cubbyhole down the hall from the secretary himself. In reality, OSD is a huge management organization of several thousand employees. I had been briefing my material for months throughout the Pentagon and intelligence community, including basically all of Secretary Rumsfeld’s senior personal aides earlier that spring, but there were entire divisions full of hundreds of policymakers who had no idea who I was or what my ideas were.

  A couple of weeks later I gave my brief to a collection of relevant DASDs (pronounced daz-dees). The Deputy Assistant Secretaries of Defense are fifth-tier policymakers (after the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Under Secretaries, and Assistant Secretaries) with direct oversight of the career worker-bee bureaucrats who really make the Pentagon trains run on time. DASDs are politicals, meaning appointed by the current administration. So they come and go over the years (most stay in positions for a mere 18 to 24 months), while the worker bees are permanent. In many ways, the DASDs enforce the administration’s vision throughout the rank-and-file civil servants, a category I belonged to at that time (as a Naval War College professor), despite my second “hat” as Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation.

  I wasn’t brought in to have my hands slapped for the press story. The DASDs were perfectly friendly during the brief. They listened politely and then followed up with a host of questions. When we were finished, all the DASDs in the room basically turned to the special representative sent down from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy to check me out, waiting for this guy’s final judgment. He simply shrugged and said, “Nothing I see here goes against the stuff we’re trying to do in our shop.” So, in effect, I was given a clean bill of health and sent on my way with no restrictions on my daily activity. Because I wasn’t saying anything publicly that worked against their emerging long-term plans, there was no need to clamp down on what I was saying in the brief.

  I was relieved and more than a little bit surprised. I didn’t kid myself that I converted anyone in the room that day about the Core-Gap theory in its full glory, because clearly that vision goes beyond the pure security issues that fill up the DASDs’ in-boxes on a daily basis. But what was amazing was how no one in the room challenged any of my judgments concerning the Pentagon’s need for a “new ordering principle” that would ditch the decades-long focus on great-power war and deemphasize China as a threat. You have to understand, the Bush Administration came into power with a serious focus on Asia as the future arena of global conflict—not Southwest Asia and sure as heck not Central Asia. The whole “defense transformation” they were pushing back then was driven by a fear of a rising near-peer in the East, not a collection of lesser includeds in the Middle East. Africa didn’t even appear on their strategic map. So I left OSD that day convinced they were getting ready to make some big decisions about the future of U.S. military basing around the world. I knew such a review process had begun in the policy shop. Now I understood just how profound it was going to be.

  Ten months later Greg Jaffe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning defense reporter of the Wall Street Journal, rang me up about the “Pentagon’s New Map” article in Esquire. Like a lot of people, he had read it during the run-up to the war in Iraq and had found it interesting, but after the war, he came back to the piece, believing it to be sort of a Rosetta stone for decoding the stream of big policy changes he was seeing coming out of OSD. So we talked for several hours, by phone and in person, about the Core-Gap thesis. Then Greg did a round of interviews throughout OSD and even traveled to Kyrgyzstan to—in his words—“check out the Gap in person.”

  What Jaffe ended up writing for the Journal in a front-page story was really quite stunning in terms of the huge change it captured. In the piece, Jaffe described a “radical shift in strategy” that “puts less emphasis on China” and more on fighting terrorism throughout an “ ‘arc of instability’ that runs through the Caribbean Rim, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and North Korea,” as it was described by OSD officials. Jaffe went on to say, “Worries about this arc of countries, largely cut off from economic globalization, increasingly are influencing how the military trains, what it buys, and where it puts forces.”◈

  Now, the story caused its own little media buzz, and since I was quoted in it as saying, “Disconnectedness defines danger,” I got to go on National Public Radio with Greg Jaffe to discuss the strategy changes described in the article.◈ I love going on NPR, because it’s such an intelligent audience as a rule, and this time was no different. But what I heard in the questions we were fielding from our interviewer and call-ins made me realize what a great conceptual and real-world distance there is between my definition of the Gap and the Pentagon’s definition of the Arc of Instability. By that I don’t mean “Argh! Those idiots understand nothing of my work!” All these policymakers are incredibly smart, dedicated, and caring people who are doing their best to deal with the real world they find themselves managing today.

  But what NPR’s callers made me realize was that most Americans—and frankly, most of the world—are going to view the definition of an Arc of Instability as equating to “unstable Muslim countries that America cares about primarily because of oil.” Remember back to the Iraq War debate: a lot of people belittling the Bush Administration’s case for toppling Saddam, saying it had nothing to do with the global war on terror but rather represented the onset of American “empire” in the region to protect our oil interests there. In effect, what I heard on NPR that night was that American tendency to cut to the chase and get right to the punch line: “Sure, you can talk about the ‘gap’ and making globalization global, but in the end, all the Pentagon really wants to do is kill bad guys and protect oil fields.”

  After the Jaffe story appeared, I received dozens of e-mails from around the world, mostly from graduate students in security affairs, asking me to confirm that the Gap and the Arc of Instability were really one and the same. In effect, many of these suitably impertinent young scholars were demanding that I fess up and admit that my grand Core-Gap thesis was nothing more than window dressing for a smash-and-grab thrusting of U.S. military power into the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. Now, I realize that all grand strategy is ultimately reductionist: you take this gigantically complex world and reduce it down to a few key concepts and principles to guide your foreign policy. My “shrink the Gap” certainly qualifies. But seeing the concept get further reduced to just the Arc of Instability and all these negative connotations that phrase conjures around the world . . . well, that just drives me nuts.

  You might think I am just being picky or sensitive about the phrase. After all, it probably doesn’t appear anywhere outside of the Pentagon, right? Wrong. In October of 2003, U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story called “Global Cops: Inside the Pentagon’s New Plan to Police the World’s Most Dangerous Places.”◈ Inside was a two-page map that reproduced my Non-Integrating Gap exactly as it was drawn for the Esquire article. I was listed in the credits—good for my ego. But the phrase arching across the familiar shape read “Arc of Instability.”

  Let me try to make the case here that something vital is lost in this bureaucratic translation.

  First, the arc concept is old, dating back to the Carter Administration, which used it to describe an “arc of crisis” that ran from the Horn of Africa up into Afghanistan.◈ The whole point of describing that arc was to suggest that the Soviets were behind all of these crises in one way or another (sort of true), which meant America needed to start getting tougher in the region militarily, hence the Carter Doctrine that said we would limit Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf region. So besides carrying the baggage of being so centered on the G
ulf and oil, it also carries a whiff of “We’d better step in there before somebody else does.” That is absolutely the wrong signal to send right now to other great powers, but especially to a China concerned about future access to oil as its energy requirements double in the next two decades. In the late 1970s, the Soviets were right to look at the Arc concept as suggesting America was closing the loophole that had previously existed in our containment strategy. So it’s no surprise today that the Chinese get nervous whenever they see a staunchly Sinophobic Pentagon describe an Arc of Instability that looks suspiciously like an encircling strategy.◈

  Second, the Arc concept smacks of treating symptoms, not the disease. No amount of U.S. military presence in the Gap is ever going to make it stable in any lasting sense. Our presence can boost security, and security will allow for growing connectivity between the country in question and the outside world. Ultimately, any Gap country is made stable by being economically integrated into the Core and having the resulting economic development find expression in increased liberty over time, because liberty plus economic development will get you a stable democracy in the end. So all we do when we export security into any region is get the ball rolling, nothing more.

  But that is not how the Arc gets interpreted either by our friends or our critics around the world. Instead, it gets interpreted as a babysitting job for the U.S. military, as we care for rigid authoritarian governments in the region in exchange for stable access to their energy. When the German daily Die Zeit lambasted the “Pentagon’s New Map,” they captured this image perfectly in the phrase “Der Babysitter kommt im Kampfanzug,” or “The babysitter comes wearing a military outfit.”◈

  Such suspicions make perfect sense to people on the outside of the Pentagon looking in. You can parody the Pentagon’s logic as follows: We’re focusing on this arc of countries. Why? Because they’re unstable! How so? They’re full of bad guys! So how do you make them stable? Easy, kill the bad guys. How do you know when you’re finished? No more bad guys to kill. That will leave the region stable? It’ll sure as hell keep the oil flowing! Next question?

  Worse still will be the episodic nature of our activity in this approach: We’ll go up-tempo as the “instability” flares up, but what will our role be in the times between spikes in hostile activity? Will our forces pull back into the shadows to reduce our “footprint” and our overt presence as occupiers, only to bulk back up again in response to a schedule they get to determine? Do we switch back and forth between friendly community police officer and killer SWAT? Can we expect the locals to buy both roles from the same people? Can we expect the same soldiers to play both roles?

  My point is this: Using the Arc of Stability as an operating theory makes it seem as if America is only interested in getting what it wants, not what the Gap as a whole really needs. As usual, the Pentagon focuses just on the bad to be prevented or eliminated, not the good to be generated in its place. That’s what you get when you think of war strictly within the context of war, instead of considering it within the context of everything else. America ends up looking like Assassination Inc., picking off bad guys so corrupt rulers throughout the Middle East can maintain their failing regimes and our access to oil. Tell me how this undercuts bin Laden’s case against the House of Saud? The Middle East’s connectivity to the outside world is stunted, plain and simple. For years that connectivity has been almost completely defined by oil and little else. To the extent we are viewed by the world as protecting only that slim connectivity and nothing else, our effort will seem completely self-serving. In other words, we will be viewed as protecting our good life and doing nothing to make life better in the Middle East.

  Of course, you can say I’m being unfairly reductionist here, and unreasonable in demanding that the Pentagon consider all these issues that clearly lie outside its normal prerogatives. But the Pentagon put itself in charge of both this global war on terrorism and “transforming” the Middle East through the “big bang” of toppling Saddam’s regime. To back away now from the full consequences of these actions looks disingenuous, to say the least. What America has started in that part of the world thanks to our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is definitely something beyond the Defense Department’s purview, but that only makes the words we choose to describe and explain our security strategy all the more crucial.

  A third reason I hate the Arc of Instability is that it suggests America is only interested in providing order, not justice. What I like about the Gap concept is that it provides a larger context that forces the conversation to move beyond just picking off the bad guys and toward a definition of what will make countries more than just “not unstable.” As soon as the dialogue shifts beyond those symptoms to root causes, the challenge of how we generate greater connectivity throughout the Gap elevates our conversation from mere national security strategy to truly grand strategy. Once you do that, the Pentagon can’t hog all the seats at the table—better still, neither can the U.S. Government. America cannot connect an Afghanistan or an Iraq—much less an entire Middle East—to the larger world all by itself. Only the Core as a whole can do that, led primarily by the private sector. When that economic connectivity ensues, then you start talking about not just a more orderly world but a more just world.

  I also hate the Arc concept because it suggests sort of a barrier defense between the Core and the Gap, as in “We’d better hold the line here or we’ll be swamped by all their terror and chaos!” Besides making it seem like we’re holding back the Muslim hordes, there is a similarly distasteful sense that the Middle East is about as far as we’re planning to move into the Gap. Now, I know the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have made serious noises about having future bases inside Africa as well, but when you look at the difference between how our government begged the world to let us take down Saddam and how the world ended up having to beg us to do something about Liberia, you can’t escape this sense of Africa being a “bridge too far.”◈ After all, it’s on the other side of the Arc. If we hold the line at the Arc, do we really have to do anything about Africa?

  In addition, “holding the line” at the Arc also gets interpreted as anti-Islamic. You can’t help picking up this vibe—that sense of these people are crazy. Whenever I go on talk radio I always field the question, “Isn’t your Gap really just the same thing as saying Islam is the problem?” My answer is, The Gap contains all religions, and all religions inside the Gap are more fundamentalist than their counterparts in the Core. Catholics in the Gap are a whole lot more fundamentalist than those in the Core, as are Christians in general. Jews in the Gap, or basically Israel, tend to be far more fundamentalist than Jews in the Core. The same thing is true for Muslims.

  All religions in the Gap are more fundamentalist because they play a different role from the one here in the Core. In the Core, religion is mostly about inner peace, whereas in the Gap it is still mostly about external networking—the goal being survival in hard economic times. Religion used to be more like that in America, say, a hundred years ago or right up to the point when we created a social welfare system. Until that point, religion in the Core served the same survival-network function that Islam so readily—and deftly—plays throughout the Gap. That a small percentage of believers seek to use that network for evil purposes should not taint the efforts of the whole, nor should it put us in the position of treating Islam in general as the problem or the enemy. As Daniel Pipes repeats endlessly, “If militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.”◈ But again, the phrase “the Arc of Instability” conspires to pigeonhole our approach to just the Muslim countries, because in most geographic descriptions of the Arc, the predominantly Muslim regions are emphasized.

  On a more practical level, it is also important for us to realize that in this global war on terrorism, while many of the political grievances associated with the most prominent transnational terrorist networks are now centered in the Middle East, the operating environments of such groups span the Gap as a
whole. The real seam we need to be working lies not just along that Muslim arc, but around the entirety of the Gap. In reality, one of the least-told stories of our global war on terrorism involves just that—the significant increase of bilateral security relations between the United States and a host of countries, or Seam States, that ring the Gap.

  What are the Seam States? Classic examples include Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Why are they important? Whenever you look at global maps of where terrorist networks are centered, invariably all the ones we care most about are located inside the Gap. Moreover, as we track their movements, or what the military would describe as their “interior lines of communication,” these too lie overwhelmingly inside the Gap. How those terrorists access the Core is through the Seam States. This is sort of like the September 11 terrorists who hijacked the planes flying out of Boston boarding those planes previously at a regional airport in Maine. In that instance, Maine, with its looser security rule set, was the “seam state” that was exploited. Since security tends to be higher in the “deep” Core states, terrorists invariably seek access through the Seam States, or gain access to the United States by transiting through Mexico or some Caribbean island nation, as opposed to walking through security at JFK Airport in New York City.◈

  The U.S. security strategy vis-à-vis these Seam States is simple: get them to increase their security practices as much as possible and—by doing so—close whatever loopholes exist. This is what gets the U.S. government involved in helping Brazil achieve better transparency throughout the Amazon Forest, South Africa get a better grip over its banking networks, and Indonesia clamp down on rebels across its far-flung archipelago.◈ Other countries where the Pentagon has increased security assistance since 9/11 include the Philippines, Algeria, Djibouti, Pakistan, and India.◈ All these efforts would have made sense—and in some instances did make sense—on some level prior to 9/11, but thanks to the global war on terrorism all such bilateral security assistance expands with far greater speed and urgency.