Pentagon's New Map : War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

by Barnett, Thomas P.M.

• ISBN13: 9780399151750
• ISBN10: 0399151753
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-26
• Publisher: Putnam Adult

Summary

A groundbreaking reexamination of U.S. and global security, certain to be one of the most talked about books of the year. Since the end of the Cold War, America's national security establishment has been searching for a new operating theory to explain how this seemingly "chaotic" world actually works. Gone is the clash of blocs, but replaced by what? Thomas Barnett has the answers. A senior military analyst with the U.S. Naval War College, he has given a constant stream of briefings over the past few years, and particularly since 9/11, to the highest of high-level civilian and military policymakers-and now he gives it to you. The Pentagon's New Mapis a cutting-edge approach to globalization that combines security, economic, political, and cultural factors to do no less than predict and explain the nature of war and peace in the twenty-first century. Building on the works of Friedman, Huntington, and Fukuyama, and then taking a leap beyond, Barnett crystallizes recent American military history and strategy, sets the parameters for where our forces will likely be headed in the future, outlines the unique role that America can and will play in establishing international stability-and provides much-needed hope at a crucial yet uncertain time in world history. For anyone seeking to understand the Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Liberias of the present and future, the intimate new links between foreign policy and national security, and the operational realities of the world as it exists today, The Pentagon's New Mapis a template, a Rosetta stone. Agree with it, disagree with it, argue with it-there is no book more essential for 2004 and beyond.

Author Biography

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

Table of Contents

Preface: An Operating Theory of the World	p. 1
New Rule Sets	p. 9
Playing Jack Ryan
New Rules for a New Era
Present at the Creation
A Future Worth Creating
The Rise of the "Lesser Includeds"	p. 59
The Manthorpe Curve
The Fracturing of the Security Market
The Rise of Asymmetrical Warfare
How 9/11 Saved the Pentagon from Itself
Disconnectedness Defines Danger	p. 107
How I Learned to Think Horizontally
Mapping Globalization's Frontier
Minding the Gap
To Live and Die in the Gap
Different Worlds, Different Rule Sets
Why I Hate the "Arc of Instability"
The Core and the Gap	p. 191
The Military-Market Link
The Flow of People, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Population Bomb
The Flow of Energy, or Whose Blood for Whose Oil?
The Flow of Money, or Why We Won't Be Going to War with China
The Flow of Security, or How America Must Keep Globalization in Balance
The New Ordering Principle	p. 247
Overtaken by Events
The Rise of System Perturbations
The Greater Inclusive
The Big Bang as Strategy
The Global Transaction Strategy	p. 295
You're Ruining My Military!
The Essential Transaction
The System Administrator
The American Way of War
The Myths We Make (I Will Now Dispel)	p. 341
The Myth of Global Chaos
The Myth of America as Globocop
The Myth of American Empire
Hope Without Guarantees	p. 367
Acknowledgments	p. 385
Notes	p. 391
Index	p. 427
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface An Operating Theory of the WorldWHEN THE COLD WAR : ED, we thought the world had changed. It had-but not in the way we thought. When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began. The United States had spent so much energy during those years trying to prevent the horror of global war that it forgot the dream of global peace. As far as most Pentagon strategists were concerned, America's status as the world's sole military superpower was something to preserve, not something to exploit, and because the future was unknowable, they assumed we needed to hedge against all possibilities, all threats, and all futures. America was better served adopting a wait-and-see strategy, they decided, one that assumed some grand enemy would arise in the distant future. It was better than wasting precious resources trying to manage a messy world in the near term. The grand strategy...was to avoid grand strategies. I know that sounds incredible, because most people assume there are all sorts of "master plans" being pursued throughout the U.S. Government. But, amazingly, we are still searching for a vision to replace the decades-long containment strategy that America pursued to counter the Soviet threat. Until September 11, 2001, the closest thing the Pentagon had to a comprehensive view of the world was simply to call it "chaos" and "uncertainty," two words that implied the impossibility of capturing a big-picture perspective of the world's potential futures. Since September 11, at least we have an enemy to attach to all this "chaos" and "uncertainty," but that still leaves us describing horrible futures to be prevented, not positive ones to be created. Today the role of the Defense Department in U.S. national security is being radically reshaped by new missions arising in response to a new international security environment. It is tempting to view this radical redefinition of the use of U.S. military power around the world as merely the work of senior officials in the Bush Administration, but that is to confuse the midwife with the miracle of birth. This Administration is only doing what any other administration would eventually have had to do: recast America's national security strategy from its Cold War, balance-of-power mind-set to one that reflects the new strategic environment. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 simply revealed the yawning gap between the military we built to win the Cold War and the different one we need to build in order to secure globalization's ultimate goal-the end of war as we know it. America stands at the peak of a world historical arc that marks globalization's tipping point. When we chose to resurrect the global economy following the end of World War II, our ambitions were at first quite limited: we sought to rebuild globalization on only three key pillars-North America, Western Europe, and Japan. After the Cold War moved beyond nuclear brinkmanship to peaceful coexistence, we saw that global economy begin to expand across the 1980s to include the so-called emerging markets of South America and Developing Asia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we had a sense that a new world order actually was in the making, although we lacked both the words and the vision to enunciate what could be meant by that phrase, other than that the East-West divide no longer seemed to matter. Instead of identifying new rule sets in security, we chose to recognize the complete lack of one, and therefore, as regional security issues arose in the post-Cold War era, America responded without any global principles to guide its choices. Sometimes we felt others' pain and responded, sometimes we simply ignored it. America could behave in this fashion because the boom times of the new economy suggested that security issues could take a backseat to the enormous changes being inflicted by the Information Revolution. If we were looking for a new operating theory of the worl