- Barnett, Thomas P. M. The Pentagon's New Map. New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004. ISBN 0-399-15175-3.
- This is one scary book—scary both for the world-view
it advocates and the fact that its author is a professor at the
U.S. Naval War College and participant in strategic planning at
the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. His map divides
the world into a “Functioning Core” consisting of the players,
both established (the U.S., Europe, Japan) and newly arrived
(Mexico, Russia, China, India, Brazil, etc.) in the great game
of globalisation, and a “Non-Integrating Gap” containing all
the rest (most of Africa, Andean South America, the Middle
East and Central and Southeast Asia), deemed “disconnected”
from globalisation. (The detailed map may be consulted on the author's Web site.) Virtually
all U.S. military interventions in the years 1990–2003 occurred in the
“Gap” while, he argues, nation-on-nation violence within the
Core is a thing of the past and needn't concern strategic planners.
In the Gap, however, he believes it is the mission of the U.S. military
to enforce “rule-sets”, acting preemptively and with lethal force
where necessary to remove regimes which block connectivity of their
people with the emerging global system, and a U.S.-led “System
Administration” force to carry out the task of nation building when
the bombs and boots of “Leviathan” (a term he uses repeatedly—think
of it as a Hobbesian choice!) re-embark their transports for the
next conflict. There is a rather bizarre chapter, “The Myths We
Make”, in which he says that global chaos, dreams of an American
empire, and the U.S. as world police are bogus
argument-enders employed by “blowhards”, which is immediately followed
by a chapter proposing a ten-point plan which includes such items as
invading North Korea (2), fomenting revolution in (or invading) Iran
(3), invading Colombia (4), putting an end to Wahabi indoctrination
in Saudi Arabia (5), co-operating with the Chinese military (6),
and expanding the United States by a dozen more states by 2050,
including the existing states of Mexico (9). This isn't globocop?
This isn't empire? And even if it's done with the best of intentions,
how probable is it that such a Leviathan with a moral agenda and
a “shock and awe” military without peer would not succumb to the
imperative of imperium?
November 2004 