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Wednesday, November 3, 2004
Reading List: The Pentagon's New Map
- 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?
Posted at
22:42
U.S. Election Returns, Viewed from Switzerland
Legendary market and geopolitical analyst Harry D. Schultz and John Walker take a break for a photo op at around 02:00 local time while following the U.S. election returns on 2004-11-03 in Montreux, Switzerland.
As Yogi Berra said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future.", but the predictions of the attendees at this soirée, declared before the polls closed in the U.S., were accurate to a degree unmatched by any of the polling services or news media. By 02:30, the outcome (based on Bush running ahead of his 2000 figures) was sufficiently obvious we decided to call it a night.
Posted at
22:17