The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  The Middle East has commanded our security attention over the last three decades, and America has done almost nothing to help the situation there. What makes suicide bombers possible? It’s not the poverty, because most of these terrorists are middle class and educated. It’s that they have no realistic expectations of a better life—either for themselves or their children. According to Scott Atran, a terrorism expert at the University of Michigan, “The factor is diminishing expectations. No matter how rich or poor, if you have not achieved what you expected, you are more likely to back a radical policy.”◈ That’s what drives a father of two small kids to strap on sticks of dynamite and step onto a crowded Jerusalem bus for his instant of courage—he’s simply got nowhere else to go in his life. What kills expectations of a better life faster and more completely than anything else? Disconnectedness. A person with connectivity always has options: to move, to change careers, to get more education, to do whatever it takes to make something better happen for his or her kids. The disconnected have no options. They have educations they can’t use, conversations they can’t repeat, plans they’ll never fulfill. When you deny people their hope in a better future, you leave them with nothing but the will to deny your desired future. That’s what makes suicide bombers.

  You may counter, “Isn’t it really hatred of the Israelis that drives most of this terrorism?” In the immediate sense, yes, but ultimately, no. When individuals cannot find opportunity in life, they are reduced to fighting over what’s left over: the land and the cultural identity they attach to its history. But define a society by connectivity and the individual opportunities it provides, and you will see that primordial attachment to the land disappear—generation by generation—as mobility trumps tradition. In the meantime, Israel remains the whipping boy, the excuse, the symbol of everything Arab populations want but do not have—in large part—because if Arab leaders provided them that level of connectivity and individual freedom, it would eventually eliminate the ability of elites there to maintain their political standing. So the kings and the mullahs and the presidents-for-life blame it all on Israel and—by extension—the United States. Does anyone really believe that the Middle East would not still have developed all the same problems if Israel had never come into being? Don’t kid yourself, the ruling elites there would have had to invent an “Israel” if none existed.

  The Middle East remains the region most disconnected from the global economy by many measures—and it’s getting worse with time. The world has doled out a handful of Nobel Peace Prizes over the past three decades, all celebrating breakthrough achievements in Middle Eastern peace. What do we have to show for our efforts? Are Arabs any better off now than in the early 1970s?

  In 1980, the Middle East accounted for 13 percent of global exports. Today that share is 3 percent, with the overwhelming bulk being oil and natural gas. A generation ago, the Middle East attracted 5 percent of the global flow of foreign direct investment. Today that number is a mere 1.5 percent. Worse still, eight of the largest eleven economies in the region do not currently belong to the World Trade Organization, meaning the progressive synchronization of economic rule sets is not occurring.◈

  So while Latin America and Developing Asia have moved off their dependency on raw materials and into manufacturing as their main source of exports, the Middle East remains trapped in a colonial-era economic relationship with the outside world. Simply put, the Middle East exports oil and terrorism and virtually nothing else of significance to the global economy. The value of U.S. imports of manufactured goods from Hong Kong alone is twice that of imports from the entire Arab League.◈ That’s one city versus an entire civilization.

  Saddest of all is perhaps the lack of any Middle Eastern stake in the financial future of the planet. Yes, these states depend on the outside world to buy their oil, but they do not use the money they receive in return to invest in any sort of future. It is estimated that Muslim countries currently hold somewhere in the range of one-fifth of a trillion dollars in personal savings.◈ Where is this money invested around the world? Basically nowhere. It sits in bank accounts, doing nothing whatsoever, in large part because of Islamic strictures against earning interest. International financial firms are trying to figure out a way to unleash all that potential investment power, and some are optimistic it can be done while respecting Islamic religious practice. After all, Muslims long ago figured out ways to buy houses using special “Islamic mortgages” that reclassify interest payments as “rent.”◈

  Malaysia is now promoting itself as a global hub for Islamic finance, utilizing a special “standards board” that consults with international Islamic experts. Who has proven most resistant to Malaysia’s efforts to market these instruments throughout the Muslim world? Strict Muslim scholars in the Middle East have raised the strongest objections, but by working with them directly, international banking firms have been able recently to issue “Islamic bonds,” or instruments of sovereign debt acceptable to Islamic religious law.◈ Compare this sort of connectivity with the underground banking of the hawala networks, the informal international funds-transfer system prevalent in many Muslim societies and exploited by terrorist groups because they leave no paper trail. To offer Muslim countries the legitimate connectivity of international finance, the West needs to adjust its rule sets to accommodate Islamic sensitivities.

  The Middle East’s plight is that of basically all countries that have depended on raw materials for export throughout history: it’s just about the slowest way to grow an economy and often leads to economic failure over the long term because prices of raw commodities tend to fall with advances in the technology of extraction and processing. When competing against countries that aggressively educate their populations, countries with large natural endowments will lose every time. Think about it. What is the most developed—not to mention the most globalized—economy in the Middle East? That would be Israel, a country without a shred of energy self-sufficiency, despite being located in the middle of all that oil and natural gas. Yes, U.S. military aid assures Israel’s security, but their own, self-financed intellectual capital drives their economic success. As Fareed Zakaria puts it, “trust fund” states like Saudi Arabia simply have it too easy with all that wealth buried underground. Living off the fat of the land, they never “tackle the far more difficult task of creating a framework of laws and institutions that generate national wealth.”◈ Simply put, they do not create the rule sets that lead to connectivity.

  But of course, the Middle East’s slender connection to the global economy is an important one. In 2001 the planet burned just over 400 quadrillion (Quad) Btu of energy (e.g., oil, gas, coal, renewables), and almost 40 percent of that total was supplied by oil.◈ Of the oil used last year by the world, just over 70 percent of it was imported from a foreign source. The Persian Gulf itself accounted for only about a quarter of that global trade, or 17 million barrels per day (mbd) out of a total of 56 mbd. But the Middle East accounts for just over half the known global reserves of oil. So as the world proceeds into the future and continues to increase its consumption of oil, the Persian Gulf will account for roughly half of that increase. Naturally, growth in oil consumption around the world will vary in the next couple of decades, and this is where things get interesting.

  North America has been the global demand center of energy markets for so long we cannot imagine a future that does not place America at the head of that line. But that future is coming. North America burned 116 Quad Btu in 2001, with Asia right on our heels at 113 Quad. But while we’ll burn only about 50 percent more energy by 2025, Asia’s demand will come close to doubling, meaning those nations will be looking for a lot more energy from the planet than we will—roughly 40 quadrillion Btu more. A good rule of thumb for calculating Quad Btu is to divide that number by 2, with the result representing how many millions of barrels of oil you would need to burn each day to achieve that energy. So 40 Quad would equal about 20 million barrels of oil per day—roughly what the
U.S. consumed in oil last year, importing more than half.

  By 2025, Asia will burn 211 Quad Btu, according to the latest Department of Energy projection. Right now, DOE estimates that that need will be met with 39 percent coal, 37 percent oil, 13 percent natural gas, and 11 percent renewables (e.g., wind, solar, hydro, nuclear). The 37 percent oil share (38 mbd) will be devoted largely to transportation needs, which are expected to grow dramatically by 2025—basically a fivefold increase in the number of cars. Of course, if all those cars are gas-guzzling SUVs, then the millions of barrels of oil per day that Asia would need to burn would be pushed up quite a bit. On the other hand, if hybrids and/or fuel-cell cars capture a large share of that growing market, then the barrel number could be lightened quite a bit. (There is a lot of give in these projections, or what the Pentagon likes to call “swag.”)

  Either way, Asia produces very little oil for itself today, and by 2025 the region as a whole will import more than 90 percent of its oil requirements, or 35 out of 38 mbd. That is roughly twice as much as Asia imports today (18 mbd).

  Six OPEC members located in the Persian Gulf—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates—control two-thirds of the proven, “conventional” oil reserves and over 90 percent of the excess productive capacity in the system.◈

  Of the 18 mbd Asia imports today, just over half comes from the Persian Gulf, but of the 35 mbd Asia will import in 2025, 22 mbd—60 percent—will come from the Gulf. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf’s share of North America’s oil imports will decline slightly from 22 percent today to 20 percent then. The Gulf will boost production for export from 17 mbd today to 36 mbd by 2025, and 11 of those extra 19 mbd will go to Asia, while just under 3 will go to North America. That means the Persian Gulf will be the main source of oil to accommodate Asia’s rising economic prominence within the global economy.

  So let’s say that in 2025 some evil mastermind decides to cripple the Gulf’s exporting of oil. In that scenario, North America would have to go find 6 mbd somewhere else in a global marketplace with a capacity of roughly 60 mbd, while Asia would be shopping around for three and a half times that amount. North America would be facing the loss of roughly 7 percent of its total energy requirement, whereas Asia would be trying to replace almost 20 percent of its Quad Btu.

  So when America sends its military into the Gulf to protect all that oil, it’s clearly our blood, but is it really our oil? Would we be better off just ignoring the 80 percent that goes elsewhere? Of course, since most of that oil goes to fuel some of our largest trading partners in Asia (e.g., China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore), perhaps we shouldn’t get too picky about saying whose oil it really is. As one DOE security expert once told me at a War College workshop, “If you come to my backyard and take 1,000 gallons of water out of one end of my pool, guess what? The water’s going to go down on the other end, too.”◈ So not only would we eventually feel Asia’s economic pain, but our financial markets are so good at quickly processing international risk that we’d feel it first on Wall Street, long before the prices of all those Asian imports shot up.

  Globalization means never having to say you’re autarkic, so here’s how I would array the codependent relationships: we are codependent with Asia because we depend on their willingness to buy our sovereign debt and they depend on our willingness to buy all their exports; but Asia is codependent on the Middle East because Asia depends on the Middle East’s energy exports and the Middle East depends on Asia’s economic growth. So when instability in the Middle East threatens to upset this apple cart (or the similar daisy chain that exists among the United States, Europe, and the Middle East), then it is our obligation to step in to stop the Core’s economy from being damaged.

  When we fight, then, we are not simply fighting for a level of affluence back home in the States. Such assertions are shortsighted in the extreme. When globalization gets sidetracked by skyrocketing oil prices, it won’t be America, or Europe, or even Asia that gets left out in the cold. It will be the Gap, the poorest of the poor, that suffers the most. If we were to allow the Persian Gulf to break down as global oil supplier, not only would that ravage economies there that depend desperately on the oil revenue, but most of the Gap would immediately be priced right out of the market. I’m not just talking inflation here. I’m talking about millions upon millions of lives ending prematurely due to economic deprivation, most of whom will be the youngest children and the oldest adults—just the way it was in Iraq during all those years of UN sanctions. We won’t call these deaths “casualties,” because there won’t be any smoking holes. In fact, we won’t call them anything at all because we won’t even notice them. They will just be dark-skinned people dying somewhere far away.

  So I guess I’m not too sure what Jesus would drive, I’m just certain he’d want us to care more about the rest of the world beyond our borders.

  But wait a minute! All this stuff about oil is just so passé! I mean, we’re right on the verge of the hydrogen age!◈ Plus we’re moving rapidly from coal to natural gas to generate electricity! To hell with the Gulf and all the suicide bombers there! I’m telling you, Jesus would definitely drive a fuel cell! And you know why? Because it would lead to peace and stability in the Middle East! Just like that.

  Right?

  Wrong.

  First, I dislike the notion that our main goal in moving from combustion engines to fuel cells is so we can write off the Middle East as soon as possible. It is not in anyone’s interest to turn the Gulf into Central Africa, where people kill each other nonstop and nobody seems to care because they have no resources that we need. I want fuel cells because they’re neat technology, because it’ll make a better world for my kids, and because it’ll give General Motors a chance to sell us an entire new fleet of cars—and that’s got to be good for America!◈

  The second reason I distrust this scenario is that Asia’s skyrocketing demand for natural gas will keep it interested in the Middle East and Central Asia over the long run anyway. Same dependencies, just different energy type. Asia will roughly triple its use of natural gas between now and 2025, from 11 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) today to 27 Tcf then. Asia went outside of the region to acquire only a fraction of that 11 Tcf last year, but it will either have to triple domestic production over the next two decades (fat chance) or it will have to go out of region for the rest. I know many energy experts say natural gas is a lot more plentiful around the planet than just that gas associated with oil fields, but again, is my goal in Globalization III simply to help Asia gain energy self-sufficiency so both they and we can consign the Middle East to future oblivion? We must imagine a future worth creating where the Muslim Middle East gets to come along too. Otherwise, perhaps Osama bin Laden is essentially correct, and we should accept his offer of civilizational apartheid.

  The third reason I dislike the “let’s move right on to hydrogen” scenario is that I don’t think cutting off what slender connectivity the Middle East currently has with globalization will lead to lasting peace in the region. I simply don’t see that pathway unfolding unless we replace that slim connectivity with broadband, individual-level economic connectivity between the masses of the Muslim world and the Core as a whole. The clock is running on the Middle East and on any hope we may have of someday integrating it into the Core. The bin Ladens of the Muslim world know they’re in a race. They know they have only so much time to successfully turn back the clock on most Middle Eastern societies, and they will fight more desperately with each passing year.

  That will only make our race with destiny all the more difficult to sustain, because as these forces of disconnectedness strain to kill us in new and more diabolical ways, we’ll need to push ahead with efforts to ensure just the opposite outcome of greater connectivity. How hard will it be to spare a billion-plus Muslims from a future of diminishing expectations? I’m guessing more agony than ecstasy, but it is indisputably the right thing to do. And it simply cannot happen on its own.

 
It will be a cross we will bear for years. And, yes, we will need to turn the other cheek time and time again. But there will never be peace in the Middle East until the region joins the world. If we surrender the region to the bin Ladens of disconnectedness, we will end up losing far more than access to cheap oil. We will be surrendering globalization’s promise of eternal peace.

  The Flow Of Money, Or Why We Won’t Be Going To War With China

  I knew my workshop series with Cantor Fitzgerald was in trouble when the spies started showing up. Not a lot of spies, mind you, just three. They weren’t going to participate in the event whatsoever—not even the meals. I was not to introduce them or refer to them in any manner as I facilitated the session. They would sit in the back in the room, interacting with no one, just . . . being there. When my department chairman told me in advance about this trio, he said he couldn’t say who they were, and when a eighteen-year veteran of the CIA tells you someone has no identity as far as you’re concerned, well, you just sort of have to go with it. “They just want to observe,” he said with a finality that told me my super Top Secret clearance wasn’t going to get me any insider dope on this one whatsoever. But I didn’t need any. The workshop we were putting on involved the future of foreign direct investment in Asia. These guys were “observing” because both the Pentagon and the intelligence community had developed a laserlike focus on China as the “rising near-peer competitor.” Our workshop was just giving whomever another chance to line up China’s future in their sights.