The Pentagon's New Map

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Before I tell you how I believe a Globalization IV (2002 and beyond) works out, let me offer a quick rundown of what I believe are the key challenges and dangers that we inevitably encounter as America pursues this Global Transaction Strategy.

  In terms of strengthening the Core’s ability to withstand and better manage System Perturbations, I think the biggest challenge America faces comes in accepting and advancing the inevitable bifurcation of its military into a warfighting-focused Leviathan force and a peacekeeping-oriented Sys Admin force. First, the continuing effort at transforming America’s military machine from its industrial-era roots to its Information Age future received a huge boost from 9/11. Not a budgetary boost, which has mostly gone rightfully to operations and maintenance, but a strategic boost that allowed the advocates of transformation to pull back from distant dreams of a near-peer competitor and join a global war on terrorism that is very here and very now.

  In the post-9/11 strategic environment, transformation is immensely incentivized to succeed, especially as the strain of the occupation of Iraq alerts the Pentagon to the need to elevate all those “military operations other than war” from lesser includeds to the greater inclusive. As Art Cebrowski likes to say, “warfare is bigger than combat and combat is bigger than shooting.”◈ But clearly, much work still needs to be done. My main advice in this regard is that the Secretary of Defense should shape transformation first and foremost by redefining career paths and what it means to become a flag officer. In my mind, the quickest way forward is to eliminate service identities once a senior officer reaches flag rank. Although I still believe in having the four services, I think all flags should be “purple,” or the color that symbolizes the Joint Staff and service “jointness” in general. Once the uniformed leadership of the military is thus forged into a truly unified whole, I believe the heavy lifting can begin on bifurcating the force for real. Until then, there will be too many iron “rice bowls” to melt down.

  I believe that bifurcation is crucial because I am certain America still needs the “big stick” force and will for decades to come. But I am also certain that fearsome warfighting capability often stands in the way of our being better able to interact with allies and win new ones. If we are going to move in the direction of better managing System Perturbations like 9/11, to include this new task of homeland security, the Sys Admin force must come to the fore and eventually define America’s security relationships around the world. This is the cop-on-the-beat force that will assure globalization’s smooth functioning as far as security crises are concerned, while the Leviathan force will largely remain in the shadows, only to be used as necessary within the global war on terrorism.

  One key direction along which this Sys Admin force must evolve is toward better understanding of the full potential of cyberwarfare. Up to now, the Pentagon has treated cyberwar much as it has treated globalization—a complication to military operations rather than a serious operating domain. This needs to end and soon, but I am quite optimistic on this score for generational reasons. Frankly, all the dinosaurs who just do not “get” network-centric war are almost out of the ranks, free to sell their wisdom on television networks. The next generation that assumes control understands networks in ways the previous one never could. They do more than just read e-mail, they know how the Internet works.

  The best question I ever received from an audience came from an Esquire staff writer named Tom Junod, who after seeing my brief asked, “If your vision of the future comes about, what changes more, America or the world?” In terms of dealing with this new form of crisis I call the System Perturbation, I believe the world changes far more than the United States. It is not about turning this country into “fortress America” but merely about raising the security practices throughout the rest of the Core. Beyond that, I think the private sector will change more than the public sector, because governments in general are far more used to thinking about collective goods like security, which business sees largely as a sunk cost. Here I cite the amazing amount of public-private cooperation that emerged during the preparations for Y2K. That sort of partnership needs to be resurrected on far grander scales if we are to manage the System Perturbations of the future.

  Within the U.S. Government, I think the Defense Department will change less than the rest of the federal system. This is true because the Pentagon’s challenge is simply to disaggregate largely existing skill sets, while the Department of Homeland Security and the rest of the federal agencies involved in the global war on terrorism need to integrate widely disparate skill sets. To that end, I think “interagency” cooperation between federal departments has superseded “jointness,” or cooperation among the military services, as the key management challenge in national security in coming years. Finally, within the Pentagon itself, I believe the way we wage wars will change a lot more than the equipment we buy or how we buy it. For far too long, too many think-tank weenies have chosen to judge all transformation efforts in terms of what appears in the lines of the defense budget. This is myopic in the extreme, and misses the enormous amount of change that has flowed throughout the defense community since 9/11. Simply put, we all need to focus on war within the context of everything else.

  In terms of the second great thrust of the Global Transaction Strategy, or working to firewall off the Core from the Gap’s worst flows, here I will emphasize the need for more security alliances throughout the Core. NATO needs to keep growing and soon absorb the entirety of the former Soviet Union. America also needs to generate a Pacific Rim regional security alliance that binds our military future to that of Developing Asia’s and especially China’s. A strong strategic alliance between India and the United States needs to be the cornerstone of follow-on security alliances that encompass Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, and that pillar will serve as the third of three that will eventually rise up and thereby rule out all war on the Eurasian landmass.

  Outside of military alliances, the United States needs to continue doing exactly what U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has advocated and pursued over the past several years: bilateral free-trade agreements, regional free-trade agreements, and global free-trade agreements. None should be prioritized over another, and all should be pursued to their earliest common denominators. Bilateral agreements like the one the United States cut with Jordan more than half a decade ago can have huge demonstrative effects, even when the politics of the agreement far outpaces its economic logic. Regional agreements like the Clinton Administration’s proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas are not just crucial first steps in reducing economic barriers to development in emerging markets, they renew America’s sense of political expansion. Because of NAFTA, both Canada and Mexico are closer to being part of the United States today than much of the Wild West was prior to the twentieth century. We need to keep that sense of growing America in our relations with Latin America, which will account for the bulk of our population growth in coming decades.

  Finally, in terms of the strategic goal of shrinking the Gap, I do side with those who say that the State Department is in desperate need of its own transformation. Unlike a Treasury or a Justice that is forced to keep up with changes in the private sector, the State Department has become a seriously ossified culture operating in an ever-changing global landscape. Full of regional area experts, the State Department has developed the negative skill set of always being able to tell you why the change America seeks abroad is simply too hard to achieve, and then doing its best to fulfill that prophecy.◈ While it is true that America can always become more cognizant of cultural differences around the world, we need a State Department that promotes a shrink-the-Gap strategy in ways Defense will never be able to pursue. At it stands today, the State Department stands for absolutely no strategic vision whatsoever within the U.S. national security establishment, and that is a crying shame. Here I agree with Newt Gingrich (six words I never expected to write): The State Department needs a complete overhaul and now.◈

 
; The main foci of any shrink-the-Gap strategy should include the following: First, the Core needs a far more aggressive approach to closing down chronic civil war situations, which are driven primarily by wars of control over key natural resources. Here the Core needs to pursue ambitious peacekeeping goals, utilizing existing regional security institutions such as ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) as launching pads. The model of this approach was seen in Sierra Leone, where Core military troops formed the structure of command and control, while the peacekeeping forces were locally derived.◈ What must follow such efforts is internationally recognized war crimes courts (again, Sierra Leone’s example is a good one) and new forms of deal making between multinational corporations and states dependent on the export of natural resources like energy. Here, the best example comes from Chad, where a new deal between an ExxonMobil-led consortium and the government promises that a significant portion of the proceeds from a newly developed oil field will be set aside, under World Bank supervision, for Chad’s long-term economic development.◈

  Another focus would be a far more ambitious approach from the Core as a whole to stemming the AIDS epidemic not just within the Gap but across such New Core states as Russia, India, China, and Brazil as well. Recent World Trade Organization agreements that allow New Core economies to begin mass production of AIDS drugs for discount sale throughout their own countries and the Gap are a huge step forward, but more must be done. AIDS in Africa is wiping out the very people that continent needs to keep producing if we are ever to integrate the continent into the Core—its professional middle class and its military officer corps.

  Finally, the Core’s foreign aid should focus on encouraging the widespread use of bio-engineered crops and increasing telecommunications connectivity throughout the Gap.◈ The former is a no-brainer, while the latter is the simplest and most direct way to eliminate disconnectedness inside the Gap, allowing the locals to take advantage of global information networks to generate more income through more advantageous sales of their goods. These approaches, when combined with the micro-loans philosophy of putting modest-sized technologies directly in the hands of potential entrepreneurs (usually women), offer the best potential for freeing up the daily lives of children from manual labor and redirecting that time toward education.◈ Our goal should be very simple here: keep young girls in school at all costs, delaying sex and pregnancies. Also along this line, the United States must eventually abandon its myopic focus on abstinence as the preferred prevention method of controlling sexually transmitted disease. And we should encourage all forms of birth control throughout the Gap. All women there need to be able to avail themselves of safe choices for controlling their biological futures. Simply put, America must stop holding the Gap’s healthcare hostage to our long-running rule-set clash over abortion.

  Perhaps the most important institutional challenge we face in shrinking the Gap is the lack of international mechanisms to encourage and manage much-needed regime change there. The Gap suffers numerous bad leaders who have greatly overstayed their welcome, and the Core needs a series of international institutions to guide this process, such as Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent suggestion that an “International Reconstruction Fund” be created along the lines of the International Monetary Fund. This organization would focus on pooling expertise and resources, such as peacekeeping forces, to facilitate the processing of failed states once bad leadership has been removed.◈ How to identify such leaders for removal? Here the example of the joint UN-Sierra Leone war crimes special court shows the way. Once the court indicted Liberia president Charles Taylor for his activities in Sierra Leone, his fall was predetermined. This is exactly the sort of approach we should use for the Castros, Mugabes, and Qaddafis of the Gap. Let their own regional neighbors hurl the first charges, and then let the Core step in and force their downfall.

  If those are the main challenges I foresee in this Global Transaction Strategy, what are the main dangers?

  First, America cannot have the Old Core on the sidelines. The Core networks that Europe extends into the former Soviet Union and North Africa are crucial to shrinking the Gap. With its population rapidly aging, Europe needs to move beyond “guest workers” and into American-style encouragement of significant immigration flows. The right-wing, anti-immigration politicians need to be shouted off the political stage and pronto. As for Japan, it moves beyond its long slump by accepting the fact that it has moved beyond its great manufacturing stage and into something more postindustrial like the United States. Over time, it will become the great economic patron of China, moving its production and even much of its design to that nation. It will also shed its now antiquated defense philosophy and join the Core in shrinking the Gap’s security problems. Tokyo’s historic decision to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq was a huge step forward in this regard.

  Second, globalization cannot afford to see any New Core powers lost to the Gap in coming years through economic failure or the onset of conflicts. One way to avoid this is to make sure all New Core powers (Russia, China, India, South Korea, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico) feel welcome and well utilized in the Core-derived institutions that conduct most of globalization’s key decision making. The Clinton Administration’s push to expand the G-7 group into a far larger G-20 was a brilliant first step, but many more could be taken. For example, the UN Security Council permanent membership group should be expanded to include all these states, plus Germany, Australia, and Japan, and the practice of letting one permanent member’s veto hold up all actions should be abolished, except in cases involving the permanent members themselves. The fact that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has openly broached this subject is a sign that reform will alter that antiquated rule set before the decade ends.◈

  A second key way to avoid the loss of any New Core economy is to develop some international system for processing state bankruptcy. Here the best hopes are centered on the IMF and its tortuous efforts to generate a “sovereign Chapter 11” program that would more effectively deal with the issues faced by a Russia, Argentina, and Brazil in recent years. The key player in this drive has been the IMF’s second-in-command, Anne Krueger, whose simple goal is to formalize the now messy procedure by which private-sector lenders and public-sector borrowers interact during debt crises. One of the key complaints regarding past IMF handling of debt crises is that the banks were protected more than the states, leaving the masses with the short end of the stick. Handling this form of System Perturbation better is a key pathway to bolstering the New Core’s standing within the Core as a whole.

  A third task to focus on as we try not to let any New Core states fall off the wagon are a trio of chronic security scenarios: the Kashmir conflict between Pakistan and India, the Taiwan-China situation, and the decades-long division of Korea. Regarding Kashmir, the United States needs to focus on what is best described as a failed state in Pakistan, which barely controls much of its countryside outside of Islamabad. Since that dovetails nicely with the global war on terrorism, this ball is unlikely to be dropped. With Taiwan and China, we need only to manage Taiwan’s security evolution so that it does nothing to trigger unnecessary responses from a China with far larger fish to fry. Beyond that, time itself will render this security situation moot, as Taiwan and the mainland continue to integrate with each other economically. The last of the trio, divided Korea, is clearly a question of removing Kim Jong Il from power. Following the disposal of Saddam Hussein, this issue will naturally rise to the top of the list for whatever presidential administration emerges from the 2004 election.

  The third great danger faced by America in this Global Transaction Strategy is the potential for the Doha Development Round to stall, which would call into question the World Trade Organization’s future as the great economic mediator between Core and Gap—or more specifically, between the Old and New Core economies. The outlines of the great compromise here are fairly straightforward: the Core needs to open its markets up considerably t
o the food exports of the Gap, and the Gap needs to develop better rule sets regarding patent protection and foreign direct investment.◈ The key task in making this bargain occur is getting agreement within the Old Core of America, Europe, and Japan, so again, how we treat our oldest and best allies is crucial to expanding the Core over time. The key danger, however, is that the New Core will pit itself against the Old Core as champion of the Gap’s economic needs, something we have already seen in the Cancún negotiations of September 2003, when the so-called Group of 20-plus staged a walkout to protest the Old Core’s refusal to cut their enormous agricultural subsidies. This group was led by China, India, Brazil, South Korea, and Mexico—all key pillars of the New Core.◈

  Probably the most important indicator of failure in this strategy would be signs that the world was no longer as willing to buy American sovereign debt. In many ways, these are the only polls that matter in the global war on terrorism, because—as always—money talks. Ten years ago, foreigners owned only about one-fifth of all outstanding Treasury bills, but today that figure is closer to two-fifths. This growth represents the world’s enormous trust in the U.S. Government, not just as a sure economic bet but as the ultimate guarantor of globalization’s overall security. When the United States needed to sell a whopping amount of debt to finance the invasion of Iraq, foreigners bought four-fifths of the sovereign bonds offered—or well over $100 billion.◈ America dips into that well too frequently and at great risk, especially if the rest of the Core loses faith in our definition of collective security.

  Finally, the last great danger to success in the Global Transaction Strategy comes from within, or basically America losing heart because of some catastrophic terrorist attack or the withdrawal under fire of the U.S. military from postwar Iraq. Here again, I think the Bush Administration and any that may follow it must make every effort to sell the American people on the long haul ahead in this global war on terrorism.