The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  As for the frequency issue, or the notion that much of humanity is fighting at any given time, it is important to check the actual historical record. A good source for this is the University of Maryland’s Peace and Conflict Ledger 2003, which lists every country in the world by region, and then details those that have engaged in or suffered from armed conflict at some point in the twenty-first century. The numbers are very revealing. In the North Atlantic region (North America and Western Europe), only one nation out of 18 is checked: the United States. In the former socialist bloc of 27 countries, only Russia (for Chechnya) and Yugoslavia are checked. In Latin America, only Colombia is checked out of a total of 24 states. In Asia, it is 8 out of 27, while North Africa and the Middle East feature 4 out of 21. Africa, by far the worst situation, has 17 nations checked for armed conflict, but 27 that are not. Add it all up, and we are talking about only 32 countries (not counting the U.S.) out of a total of 161 states monitored in the Maryland study, or one-sixth of 191 states currently belonging to the United Nations.◈ If you prefer glass-half-full statements, you could say that over 80 percent of the countries in the world today have not recently experienced any significant levels of mass violence or organized combat.

  I do not want to get too caught up in the sheer “numerology” of counting states in conflict, because we are really talking about societies experiencing violence from within, not states going to war with one another. My larger point is this: Whenever we start talking about the United States as a global policeman, or “rushing in” to deal with these incidents of mass conflict, there are—at any one point in history—probably at least three-quarters of the states about which we do not need to worry. So, yes, the United States gets involved with situations “all over the world” (but really only inside the Gap), but there are also all those states in the Core where we simply do not need to come calling. Within that pool of 32 recent or ongoing situations of armed conflict, America is involved in only a handful. In the former socialist bloc, we are definitely involved in Yugoslavia but not Russia. We are involved somewhat in Colombia, Latin America’s sole situation. In Asia, we are involved in the Philippines, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, but not India, Nepal, Myanmar, or Sri Lanka. In the Middle East, we are deeply engaged in Iraq, but not in Algeria, Israel, or Turkey. Finally in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States can only be said to be involved in Liberia, but not Burundi, Congo, the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Angola, Chad, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda, Eritrea, or Senegal. Add it up. That is only 8 out of 32 cases. So if we are a global cop, we are clearly quite choosy about which cases we take on.

  Of course, as part of our global war on terrorism, you could argue that the United States is involved, security-wise, with a lot more countries than I have indicated here (e.g., our new mini-base in Djibouti). My goal here is simply to point out that being a policeman does not mean you visit every house every day looking for bad guys. It simply means you have to step into certain bad situations that need your attention—on a regular basis. But doing that means the rest of the world gets to sleep a whole lot easier.

  No matter how you slice the threat definition, it is hard to make the case that the Pentagon’s task in the era of globalization is much more than what I would call a 5 percent solution. Meaning that the U.S. military is currently actively involved in about 10 significant situations around the world, out of a worldwide population of almost 200 states—or about 5 percent of the total. When you talk about the role of police in any community, they are typically focused on about 5 percent of the population—or the outright rule breakers and rule benders. The other 95 percent of the population is not a target but something to be defended. The same holds true in the current international community. The Pentagon needs to focus on the roughly 5 percent of both states and transnational actors that tend to bend or break the security rule sets. By working that fraction consistently, it sends the right signals to the rest of the community that playing by the rules pays off.

  When the New York Police Department successfully brought down crime rates throughout the five boroughs over the 1990s, one of the ways they did so was by concentrating on the small things—or what the Pentagon would call the lesser includeds. This theory of crime prevention is known as the “broken window” approach, because it says that when criminals pick up signs from the environment—such as broken windows that remain unfixed—that say rule sets are either lax or unenforced, they become emboldened and commit more crimes.◈ So the answer is, you fix those windows, you enforce all those “petty laws,” and you have your personnel out there, present in the community and sending that signal each and every day that rules matter. Of course, to really clean up an environment, you need to concentrate your police in exactly those neighborhoods where the rule sets are weakest. You need to define these areas where the rule sets are thinnest, and then you need to shrink them right out of existence. That is not just community policing, that is a genuine strategic vision for the world at large—exactly what the Pentagon has lacked in the era of globalization.

  The Myth Of American Empire

  As I sit down to write this, it is September 11,2003. I wear a somber suit and tie, as today I will attend a memorial service at the Naval War College, where we will remember ten graduates who died in the attack on the Pentagon. In the background, President Bush gives speeches pushing for more stringent antiterrorism laws and defending the cost of occupying Iraq, Osama bin Laden has a new tape airing on Al Jazeera calling for the expulsion of the American “infidels,” and national newspapers run articles describing the world’s plummeting lack of respect for the United States. Some are calling this the Age of American Empire. If it seems odd that America should constitute many nations’ definition of what is most wrong with the world since September 11, 2001, then we have nobody but ourselves to blame.

  Where we needed to put forth vision, we have left the impression of vindictiveness. Where we needed to offer hope in a future worth creating, we have frightened needlessly with loose talk of “Who’s next?” and “Bring it on” and “World War III” (or “IV,” I lose count at times). Finally, where we needed to explain grand strategy, we have spoken menacingly of preemption and little else. We have defined the future in terms of what America fears and desires, not what the world fears and desires. We recognize a Core that is threatened, but not a Gap crying out in suffering. We have failed in our imagination, in our words, and in our deeds. It is time for this nation to grow beyond our sense of anger and humiliation over 9/11, and the first foolish notion we must discard is that the only way we can make the future safe is to partition it through “empire.”

  America does not shrink the Gap to conquer the Gap, but to invite two billion people to join something better and safer in the Core. Empires involve enforcing maximum rule sets, where the leader tells the led not just what they cannot do but what they must do. This has never been the American way of war or peace, and does not reflect our system of governance. We enforce minimum rule sets, carefully ruling out only the most obviously destructive behavior. We push connectivity above all else, letting people choose what to do with those ties, that communication, and all those possibilities. Many in the Gap, and not just a few in the Core, will choose to opt out.

  That is not the problem we seek to address. We know that violence and injustice are universally associated with involuntary disconnectedness. We know those who seek those conditions do so with the worst of intentions, full of hatred for the world beyond their exclusionary dreams of the “good life.” We were made to feel that hatred on 9/11, and our natural reaction has been to recoil in terror, strike out in anger, and build walls internally, around our nation, and between Core and Gap.

  Some of that firewalling makes sense. Being open does not require being defenseless or tragically naïve. But it does mean avoiding strategies designed to keep them out, or down, or dispirited. The concept of empire stems from this language of exclusion. It speaks to burden, no
t liberation. It speaks to elites, not masses. It instills fear, not respect. Empire is the absence of strategy. It does not describe where we must take this world, only where some find it today. It defines U.S. power by a single dimension—the ability to destroy. It mirror-images Osama bin Laden’s call for revolution by proposing we defend the status quo, when what America really needs to do is understand we are in a race with history, connecting the disconnected before globalization’s spread grinds to a halt, which would ensure no escape from the Gap for hundreds of millions and thus provide the forces of disconnectedness with a captive population.

  America needs to be the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away. We need to rescue those trapped inside before they are crushed under the weight of their own diminished expectations. We need to feel their pain, and make it our own.

  Talk of an “empire” of freedom, liberty, or democracy is oxymoronic, and demands that the recipients of our largesse somehow traverse difficult historical terrain that we ourselves took decades to cover. America has seen its society consumed by civil wars on a number of occasions over our history. We can no more command societies around the world to bypass these fault lines than we can summarily disarm the hatreds fueling these conflicts. All we can offer is choice, the connectivity to escape isolation, and the safety within which freedom finds practical expression. None of this can be imposed, only offered. Globalization does not come with a ruler, but with rules.

  America’s role in providing globalization’s security is merely removing from the playing field those actors who willfully disregard its emerging rule sets. Just because those rule sets look an awful lot like America’s highly evolved internal rule sets does not give us the authority to demand their immediate replication around the world. America has evolved dramatically over the course of its 228 years of experimentation as the world’s melting pot of peoples, cultures, and ideas. We may blaze this historical trail, but we cannot force the rest of the planet to march behind us in lockstep precision.

  We are historically empowered to defeat all threats to our quest for global connectivity, because we know all too well what price we may pay—as a nation and a world—for allowing the ideologies of disconnectedness to prevail. But offering connectivity is not the same as mandating content; the former involves enforcing minimal rule sets, the latter maximal rule sets. America seeks global adherence to protocols, nothing more.

  Our model is the Internet, which we unleashed to revolutionary effect around the planet; we administer this system primarily to raise its collective standards for robustness and stability. Our global security strategy must be very similar in approach: not fixating on any single threat, but focusing on keeping the network of collective security itself up and running. America can and should provide that unique security service to the planet as a whole, because as the economic and social engine of this world-historical process, we enjoy the safety of lying farthest away from globalization’s tumultuous frontiers.

  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 tore through that sense of insulation, triggering the natural desire for isolation. But Americans recognize the self-destructiveness of that pathway, and so we search for strategies of advance versus retreat. Where talk of “empire” fails us is the temptation to define the future as open to us, but closed to them, therefore they must be ruled. So there are those who speak of “imperial garrisons” that must be “left in place for decades to ensure order and stability.”◈ But for whom? America cannot be in the business of serving as security guard to the Core’s gated community. Our mobility as individuals has always defined our freedom as citizens of this union of states. As that model of basic human freedom replicates itself across the Core (NAFTA, the EU, and all that will ensue), now is not the time to set globalization’s fixed borders.

  In fact, just the opposite is required. The increasing perversity displayed by those entities seeking violent enforcement of mass disconnectedness reflects their awareness that time is not on their side. September 11 did not reveal globalization’s failure to spread so much as its dizzying speed of advance. The world is not witnessing the clash of civilizations but their individual transformations from isolated rule sets to interdependent rule sets. In our national hubris, we assume that the mere massing of our troops in the Persian Gulf will trigger a transformation of the region, when all we did by removing Saddam Hussein’s regime was simply loosen the floodgates of global connectivity on a society long trapped in isolation.

  By triggering that profound transformation of Iraq, we have set off a perturbation of the Arab system as a whole. The order that ensues will be driven by the connectivity that takes hold between Iraq and the outside world. The battle we wage inside Iraq now does not involve extending U.S. “imperial” power but simply negating the efforts of those who will kill to preserve that society’s disconnectedness. To the extent we succeed in defeating those efforts, our “power” in Iraq will evaporate. No empire will result, just the extension of the Core’s connectivity and the elimination of yet another pocket of disconnectedness inside the Gap. To pretend that this activity—this exporting of security—somehow constitutes the advance of American empire is like pretending the midwife inherits parental rights over the baby she delivers, or that Microsoft owns copyright to any e-mail passing through my Hotmail account.

  Historical analogies to previous empires are not only useless, but they point us in the wrong directions. Those who cite them approvingly commit the sin of static reasoning. The “good life” they want America to protect is not sustainable in a world divided by barriers but is instead preserved by the increased flow of resources between Core and Gap. Those who cite historical analogies to shame us into returning to our “roots” ignore our nation’s past and continuing triumphs in enabling globalization’s spread by our willingness to export security.

  Both views likewise underestimate how America’s continued willingness to play both security Leviathan and System Administrator to globalization is crucial to furthering its advance. They simply refuse to own up to America’s responsibility for a future beyond our narrowly defined “national interests.” The same this-far-and-no-farther mentality that fixes these united states at the round total of fifty seeks to limit America’s responsibility for global order to “the barbarians at the gate.” We need more destiny made manifest and less love for this homeland. We need to understand that, in grand historical terms, there are only two types of people in the world: those who now live in states united and those who someday will.

  It is not nationalism that drives America to spread its ideals around the world but an innate need to share our belief in a better tomorrow. As Minxin Pei, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, so aptly points out, American nationalism is unique for its focus on past achievements linked to future triumphs. Most nationalism around the world expresses itself as past tragedies linked to current grievances.◈ In short, Americans own the most optimistic, forward-looking patriotism in the world.

  Even more amazing, our government does almost nothing to encourage it; it springs from within. No one told Americans to raise flags after 9/11. No government agency distributed them. No public authority dictated their use. Citizens spontaneously spent their own money on this flood of U.S. flags, many of which are produced in China. (How’s that for a portrait of globalization?)

  That need to share a faith in the future with others is what drives America to become the only nation that worries about the security of strangers all over the world. Moreover, where the vast majority of states define finger-wagging and economic sanctions as the upper limit of their responses to mass violence unleashed far from their borders, America will send her sons and daughters into harm’s way time and time again.

  Perhaps the worst definitions of American “empire” describe it in terms of compulsion, or the mechanistic notion that America seeks empire simply because it is strong and desires to become stronger.◈ The cynicism displayed in that diagnosis is almost as pathetic a
s the sterile academic reasoning that defines the most powerful player in the world system as its inevitable bully. What such finger-pointing fails to understand is that this country has willingly walked away from more global power than any empire in human history has ever achieved. Indeed, over time America has displayed a generosity toward its “empire” that renders the very word ludicrous.

  America, for example, is consistently chastised within the economic development community of experts for not providing foreign aid to poor countries at a level commensurate with its wealth. We are told, “The whole developed world is more generous than the United States. America does not do its share!” Somehow, the fact that America performs virtually all the Core’s combat interventions in the Gap counts far less than other countries simply sending money, or—better yet—peacekeepers after the fact.◈ But we are told, “America intervenes militarily only for selfish reasons!” Apparently, these selfish reasons drive us to intervene in the world’s most disconnected and impoverished countries. Then we are criticized for not converting a higher percentage of them into overnight democracies, which is like wondering why the oncologist lets so many of his patients die compared with the ear specialist.

  My point in citing these differences in Core-state efforts to shrink the Gap is not to rank one above the other, for all such state-based efforts are crucial, even as they inevitably pale in comparison with what the private sector ultimately must achieve to integrate any Gap economy into the Core. Rather, I seek only to point out the obvious specialization that has developed among the Core’s states, with each doing what it feels most comfortable providing in terms of blood and treasure. That America favors the former over the latter reflects our commitment to fighting for ideals versus spoils. Simply put, Americans believe that wealth is created in a non-zero sum manner—that is, one person having more does not mean everyone else must have less. Thus we see no logic in waging war for economic gain; it is simply inefficient. Yet somehow Americans have fought time and time again for ideals not easily reduced to crass economic self-interest (although revisionist historians have tried mightily), such as freedom from tyranny, slavery, fascism, and communism.