This assistance is not so much purposefully focused on these Seam States as it is simply drawn to them by the circumstances of how terrorists seek to avoid our efforts at prosecution. A transnational terrorist organization like al Qaeda will exploit the Gap’s disconnectedness to do things like disperse its gold throughout Africa, shift training activities to Asia, obtain guns from Latin American arms smugglers, and tap sympathetic financial networks embedded across the Middle East and—increasingly—Southeast Asia.◈ But in the end, if al Qaeda really wants to bring its war home to America, it will need to exploit globalization’s seams, like the Internet, commercial airline networks, and banking networks—plus the Seam States that mark the geographic dividing line between the Gap and the Core. So if America is truly going to wage a global war on terrorism, it needs to work the Gap as a whole and the host of Seam States that surround it.
For all these reasons, then, I worry that the Pentagon’s focus on the Arc of Instability not only sends the wrong messages to the rest of the world but also does not fully address the security issues associated with this global war on terrorism. Don’t get me wrong, I do not want to expand the barrier mentality of the “arc” approach to the Gap as a whole, nor do I wish to see America’s security assistance to Seam States take on the air of some twenty-first-century Maginot Line. Shrinking the Gap can never be allowed to devolve into a static us-versus-them strategy.
That brings me to probably the biggest reason why I hate the Arc of Instability: using this term just seems like a historical cop-out. In effect, it becomes just the latest excuse advanced economies use to explain why the least-developed regions are being left behind—yet again. Throughout the Cold War, neither the capitalist West nor the socialist East went out of its way to integrate the less-developed countries of the Third World into their privileged economic communities. In effect, there were two “mini-global” economies, and memberships in both were effectively closed to those countries I now identify as belonging to the Gap. Instead of offering genuine economic integration, both sides spent far too much time and resources recruiting and maintaining client states, or political allies in the superpower rivalry. In the most egregious cases, these states became the superpowers’ proxies in futile “hot” wars that had no effective bearing on the ultimate “correlation of forces” between the two camps. In short, both sides largely used and abused the Third World.
All through the years, these disconnected states begged for a better deal, typically using the United Nations as their platform. Remember the New International Economic Order of 1974? Neither does anyone else. That’s because what the less-developed countries heard from both economic blocs essentially amounted to this: “We’d love to help out more, but frankly we’re so tied up in this Cold War that you’ll just have to wait.” With East and West now combined in globalization’s Functioning Core, there are no good excuses for why the nations of the Gap must remain on the outside of the global economy, noses pressed to the glass. Simply put, the bill has finally come due, and the “Arc of Instability” suggests nothing more than a meager down payment. “Stabilization” addresses the collective sins of the past but does not speak to future integration. Connectivity does, and that’s why I believe the Non-Integrating Gap beats the Arc of Instability hands down.
The Core’s political case for integrating the Gap’s regions cannot be defined by fear but must reflect a system-level understanding of the increasingly symbiotic economic relationship that evolves between the two. Over time, the Core will need the Gap as much as the Gap needs the Core. Our security strategies and the language we use to enunciate them must reflect this larger understanding of how the Core and Gap inevitably come together out of enlightened self-interest.
4 – The Core And The Gap
IN THE PENTAGON, they love to use the expression “drinking at the fire hose” in the context of briefs that deliver an overwhelming amount of new information in a rapid flow. Since military officers typically change billets (or jobs) every two to three years, they are constantly finding themselves in the position of having to catch up on a load of detailed information that everyone else at their new posting already knows. So the phrase is part lament and part plea, as in, “I’m drinking as fast as I can here!” In the roughly thousand briefs I’ve delivered over the past decade and a half, I must have heard that expression from audience members about 90 percent of the time. In terms of strategic vision, I am the fire hose!
Being a fire hose on strategy is both good and bad: People either love you or they hate you. Either you’re the most profound thinker they’ve ever come across, or the glibbest piece of nonsense they’ve ever heard. I’ve given talks to large audiences where half the personnel leave the room within ten minutes of my opening my mouth, only to have the remainder sit absorbed for two-plus hours and then give me a standing ovation. And, yes, those who leave tend to be older and those who stay tend to be younger, so there’s that sense of “my day will come.” But then there’s that old joke about Brazil, “Country of tomorrow, and it always will be!” You worry about that too.
If you think all this nervous chatter is leading to some wild tour of the future, you’re right. I’ve spent three chapters spelling out the past and the present, telling you repeatedly that the Pentagon’s biggest sin in strategic planning since the end of the Cold War has been its inability to think beyond war as it has traditionally defined it. I’ve told you that this narrow strategic approach has blinded the Pentagon to the new security rule sets that have emerged with this current, expansive phase of globalization. I’ve even gone so far as to charge the U.S. Government with possibly derailing globalization’s future advance as they continue to pursue this global war on terrorism in too myopic a fashion. I have preached repeatedly the necessity of understanding war within the context of everything else, and this chapter is going to be about that everything else.
I aim to do nothing less than explain how the world works in terms of the Core-Gap divide. The model of globalization I present here follows the KISS principle, as in, Keep it simple, stupid! It will reduce all of globalization’s grand complexity down to four essential elements, or flows, that I believe define its basic functioning from the perspective of international stability. These four flows are (1) the movement of people from the Gap to the Core; (2) the movement of energy from the Gap to the New Core; (3) the movement of money from the Old Core to the New Core; and (4) the exporting of security that only America can provide to the Gap.
In this chapter, I will try to convince you that America’s exporting of security around the world is crucial to globalization’s continued functioning and future expansion. But it’s not simply a matter of “send the troops, and globalization will follow.” This is not some “globalization at the barrel of a gun” dogma. This is about keeping these four basic elements in balance, or avoiding the sort of pathway that I believe the Core is currently stuck in thanks to a combination of our collective responses to 9/11 (including the war in Iraq), the always contentious arguments we have about trade, and the growing realization among the world’s populations that this globalization thing is going to require a lot more work than we had anticipated back in the 1990s.
In short, this chapter is about relating security to the everything else I believe is essential to protect if this war on terrorism is to be truly won, if globalization is to be made truly global, and if the Gap is to be truly shrunk. So pucker up, because I’m about to turn the hose on full blast.
The Military-Market Link
Eliminating the disconnectedness that defines the Gap goes far beyond simply defeating those forces willing to use violence to achieve or maintain it, because these terrorists are nothing more than parasites feeding off this political and economic isolation. Once that isolation is ended, and broadband connectivity is achieved for the masses, the forces of terror and repression can no longer hold sway. Will they ever disappear completely? Absolutely not. But they will have to take their acts truly underground, off the net, a
nd into the world of illegitimacy. That is how you turn a “heroic” terrorist into a common criminal: you surround him with a society deeply connected to the larger world of rules, opportunity, and hope. You render him an outcast among his own. You shame him out of existence. What you cannot do is simply catch him and kill him, because there will always be more. Over time, your violence will be delegitimized and his honored, unless yours is employed on behalf of a society growing in connectivity. Your effort must be intimately identified with that growing connectivity; your war must be in the context of everything else.
By the mid-1990s, my fear that the Pentagon simply wasn’t “getting” that everything else—or globalization—became so profound that I seriously considered going back to school for an MBA. I figured I just could not acquire the necessary knowledge about how the world really worked in this era of globalization if I remained trapped in the Pentagon’s insular mind-set. I was convinced that a rising near-peer simply wasn’t in the works, meaning the role of Leviathan in the global security system was ours for the taking. But instead of moving in the direction of increased understanding of globalization, the Pentagon seemed more determined than ever to withdraw from the world.
The debacle in Somalia seemed to kill the “new world order” rhetoric once and for all, and the Pentagon was relieved to get out of the nation-building business. Around the same time, the military began realizing it was stuck keeping Saddam in the box for the long run, and felt itself being pushed toward interventions in the Balkans, two assignments that looked to be quagmires in the making. Meanwhile, the glide path of force-structure reductions engineered by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell in the early 1990s was proceeding apace, shrinking the military year by year. So with the Pentagon being pulled into real-world operations that ate up resources, it was getting harder and harder to pursue the “revolution in military affairs,” or RMA, that many Pentagon strategists believed was possible because of the emergence of the Information Revolution.
In effect, there was a tug-of-war between the Pentagon and the Clinton White House over the role of the U.S. military in managing international security. Strategists in the Pentagon saw a globalization-fueled strategic environment that was unmanageable at best and chaotic at worst. The Clinton Administration was strongly focused on recasting the international financial architecture to promote free trade, and therefore relegated the Pentagon to babysitting the chronically disconnected states on the margin. Neither side saw the Gap as a threat environment of any note—just a bad neighborhood to be monitored while the real world moved ahead with economic globalization. While the Clinton Administration truly believed in the notion that the rising economic tide would lift all boats, the Pentagon did not, believing globalization would only increase global instability by exacerbating the divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” and propagating dangerous military technologies throughout the system.
The U.S. military harbored its own definition of a “future worth creating,” and it had nothing to do with globalization. It dreamed of missile defense and going mano a mano with a high-tech Chinese military in the Taiwan Straits somewhere around 2025. Their globalization scenarios envisioned trade-bloc wars and future security environments that alternated between Mad Max moonscapes and Blade Runner shooting galleries.
At the time, a lot of foreign policy specialists were arguing that if America was too forceful (read, unilateral) in its security leadership, it would inevitably trigger the rise of competing “poles” in the system—like a united Europe or an emboldened Japan. I just felt that the strategic default position of waiting around for a rising near peer seemed inadequate and dangerous. Did we win the Cold War just to hang back and let the world run itself? Wasn’t that the same bold choice we made after World War I?
More to the point, I had a growing sense that even though our allies constantly spoke in public about the need for American military restraint, what they would say privately was radically different. I got a taste of this in 1993, when I participated in a two-week government-sponsored seminar in Salzburg that brought together “future leaders” from around the world to discuss the post-Cold War security order. As part of my participation, I gave a seminar presentation that outlined what I thought were the major camps of thought in the U.S. foreign policy establishment regarding America’s role in international security. The details of the discussion were less impressive to me than the confessions many participants made to me regarding their own governments’ complete inability to think about global security in a comprehensive fashion. As one senior-level official in the Greek defense ministry confided, “Only an American can even think like this, because only America has the military capabilities necessary to deal with global security issues in any real way.” As much as my foreign colleagues derided America’s penchant for believing only we can run the world safely, most expressed relief that at least someone was worrying about globalization’s larger security issues. The challenge was to figure out how the U.S. military mattered with regard to globalization. That’s why I figured getting an MBA might help me in my quest. I just wasn’t seeing the military-market nexus whatsoever, even though I knew intrinsically that it was there. After all, America’s biggest trade and investment partners were also our biggest military allies. Surely that wasn’t merely an accident of history. If globalization was really going to sweep the planet, wouldn’t America—as the world’s biggest economy—necessarily build new security relationships around the world as a part of this process?
One of the main reasons I left Washington in 1998 was my realization that I needed new conversation partners in my quest to discover globalization’s military-market link. At first glance, leaving the Navy’s premier private-sector think tank to join the Naval War College seemed like a move in the wrong direction. Now I would be joining the Defense Department for real, losing my status as a skeptical outsider paid to voice my objective criticisms. But the War College had something CNA did not: an open conduit for serious conversations with Wall Street regarding the security issues arising from globalization.
I came to the War College for the express purpose of utilizing the Center for Naval Warfare Studies’ ongoing research partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald to explore the military-market nexus that my limited understanding of globalization simply lacked. If I was going to be present at the creation of some new world order, I needed to understand how that world worked in an economic sense. The real peace dividend of the Cold War was a world that essentially worked economically, or one that was no longer divided between competing economic models. If during the Cold War our military power defended capitalism from Communism’s threat, then certainly some protective role still remained in this complex, messy world. History hadn’t ended. If anything, it had merely resumed, and I was there—in the words of one popular song—“watching the world wake up from history.”◈ The question was, Wake up to what?
That is what Cantor Fitzgerald was worried about. Having survived the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamist extremists who advocated America’s military withdrawal from the Middle East, this ambitious company tried to break away from the “masters of the universe” confidence infecting much of Wall Street in the nineties to ask some difficult questions about what rejecting the new rule set might look and feel like in the era of globalization. The key figure in this conversation was Bud Flanagan, a retired four-star admiral and a character of rare vision, who, upon joining the firm in 1996, quickly established an unprecedented research partnership between Cantor and the Naval War College. A series of historic “economic security workshops” ensued, exploring such real-world scenarios as a terrorist strike on Wall Street, war in the Persian Gulf, and a financial crisis in Asia—all of which proved amazingly prescient. More important, though, the workshop series led to new channels of dialogue between the Pentagon and Wall Street, conversations that, in Flanagan’s view, were essential to expanding the American military establishment’s nascent understanding of how globalizat
ion was altering our definitions of national security.
Flanagan was just the sort of mentor I was looking for when I arrived at the Naval War College in the summer of 1998. Fortunately for me, Bud was looking for someone to expand the seminar series beyond its original focus on specific scenarios to a broader exploration of globalization itself. In effect, Cantor was interested in “mapping” globalization’s emerging Core rule set and, by doing so, engaging the national security community in a discussion of the major security threats that might disrupt or even disable globalization’s continued advance. Bud was concerned that the 1990s might be a replay of the 1920s, so the question was, What would it take for the 2000s to turn as sour as the 1930s? Or, What could kill globalization?
The main finding of the New Rule Sets Project workshops was a simple but compelling model of globalization as a series of key resource flows that needed to be kept in relative balance to one another. Those four flows were: the movement of people (migrations), energy (primarily oil and natural gas), long-term investments (foreign direct investment), and security (the “export” of U.S. security “services” to regional “markets”). The notion of keeping these four flows in balance really just meant that nothing in the global system should be allowed to prevent the flow of any of the resources from regions of surplus to regions of deficit. In effect, labor, energy, money, and security all need to flow as freely as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce.
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