Great Powers

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Genres: War & Military

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Pentagon's New Map, a bold, trenchant analysis of the post-Bush world

In Great Powers, New York Times bestselling author and prominent political consultant Thomas Barnett provides a tour-de-force analysis of the grand realignments in the post-Bush world-in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and more. The "great powers" are no longer just the world's nation- states, but the most powerful and dynamic influences on the global stage, requiring not simply a course correction, but a complete recalibration. Globalization as it exists today was built by America- and now, Barnett says, it's time for America to shape and redefine what comes next.

Release date: February 5, 2009

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 496

Sample

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

 

One - THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF BUSH-CHENEY

Two - A TWELVE- STEP RECOVERY PROGRAM FOR AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

Three - THE AMERICAN TRAJECTORY

Four - THE ECONOMIC REALIGNMENT

Five - THE DIPLOMATIC REALIGNMENT

Six - THE SECURITY REALIGNMENT

Seven - THE NETWORK REALIGNMENT

Eight - THE STRATEGIC REALIGNMENT

 

Coda

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Notes

Index

ALSO BY THOMAS P. M. BARNETT

Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World
The Pentagon’s New Map
Blueprint for Action

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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Copyright © 2009 by Thomas P. M. Barnett

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Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnett, Thomas P. M.
Great powers : America and the world after Bush / Thomas P. M. Barnett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-01167-6

1. United States—Foreign relations—21st century. 2. United States—Foreign relations—2001- .
3. World politics—1989- . 4. United States—Military policy. 5. Great powers. 6. Strategy.
7. Progressivism (United States politics). 8. United States—Foreign relations—Philosophy.
9. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-—Political and social views.
10. Cheney, Richard B.—Political and social views. I. Title.
E895.B
973.93—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

TO

STEPHEN LEE MEUSSLING,
SON OF a PREACHER MAN

 

A lonely sail is flashing white
Amidst the blue mist of the sea!
What does it seek in foreign lands?
What did it leave behind at home?

 

Waves heave, wind whistles,
The mast, it bends and creaks . . .
Alas, it seeks not happiness
Nor happiness does it escape!

 

Below, a current azure bright,
Above, a golden ray of sun . . .
Rebellious, it seeks out a storm
As if in storms it could find peace!

 

—MIKHAIL LERMONTOV, “The Sail” (1832)

Preface

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Lately, we are being told that this is no longer our world. America is in decline, and the rest of the world has caught up to us. Wars may be won, but the peace belongs to others—we just have to get used to it.

And it is true that in the tumultuous times since 9/11 sent our world spinning that much faster, America has searched for a grand strategic vision to animate our spirit and guide our actions, and it has failed. When we should have inspired hope, we have stoked fears, and where we should have built bridges, we have erected walls.

So I won’t tell you the critics are wrong—just that their own vision is too limited. This is still America’s world, and if we have the will to step up to the plate, we can make things right—right now.

America’s journey back to where we once belonged begins with one simple realization: This is a world of our making. Neither accident nor providence, this “flat world” is fundamentally our design—a template of networks spreading, economies integrating, and states uniting. It’s so damn competitive merely because that’s our natural habitat; we don’t know how to make it any other way.

In this world we find no strangers, just younger versions of ourselves, who are prone to all the same sins and manias we once suffered, even as they teach us magnificent new ways to improve our lives and secure our tightly shared future. We must neither fear nor dismiss them, but encourage their pursuit of happiness, and in doing so, we’ll find their main goal is one very familiar to us—the attainment of a middle-class existence.

This looming achievement will put the planet under great duress in coming decades, much as it once did these United States. For this path to remain sustainable, compromises must be made and great technologies found. Some may see only billions of mouths to be fed, but in reality it is billions of minds to be harnessed. The one resource we will never deplete is our collective imagination.

But imagination requires confidence, which both spreads and dissipates with the velocity of a virus. Here America plays a special historical role, not as the only great power—because there are so many great powers at work in this complex world—but as the power with the greatest opportunity either to extend or to sabotage globalization’s stunning advance around the planet.

We are modern globalization’s source code—its DNA. As the world’s oldest and most successful multinational economic and political union, we remain the planet’s most communicable ideology—its most potent insurgency. Those thirteen colonies may have begun—quite implausibly—as the world’s original anti-imperialist league, but our international liberal trade order now encompasses the vast majority of the planet’s population.

If we own up to our past, we can command our future. We can realign ourselves immediately to a world transforming. Some will see great compromise on this path, but it is really great consistency. America’s grand experiment has always balanced the needs of the many against the needs of the few—or the one. Our main challenge today—indeed, our main opportunity—is not those superempowered few seeking to do us harm but those unprecedented many seeking to do us one better.

Yes, we have displayed the temerity to bring the mountain to Mohammed, extending our American System-cum-globalization to the most traditional civilizations still thinly connected to its networks, and we have triggered great friction with the power of that force. But in obsessing over that friction, we have lost all perspective on the forces we have created—the great powers unleashed.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 challenged America to redefine the international security system. It was a challenge that the Bush-Cheney administration took up with a vengeance, sensing in that moment a chance to reposition both the presidency and the United States in terms of leadership—even primacy. In this bold quest, the White House’s sins of omission and commission were many. Recounting the most grievous ones (Chapter 1, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Bush-Cheney”) is essential to America’s successful reengagement with a world left more unnerved by our government’s counterterrorism strategy than it was ever perturbed by actual terrorists. But our recovery doesn’t stop there. Fences need mending and relationships require repair. We’ll cover that gamut in Chapter 2, “A Twelve-Step Recovery Program for American Grand Strategy.”

Before we can go on to explore the handful of major but necessary realignments that lie ahead, a bit of history is in order—specifically, American history. Citizens of this great country need to better understand its seminal role in constructing our current world, an environment that quite frankly too many of us today find frighteningly alien, when it is—pure and simple—the result of a conscious grand strategy pursued from the earliest days of our republic right through Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. And so, in Chapter 3, we’ll speak of great men and great powers and how each shaped the American trajectory and its impact on world history.

Then we come to the hard part: recognizing where and how America lost its way in the years since 9/11. Since we’re talking about a world transforming in a dual sense, both from an American-engineered globalization process (ongoing) and Bush-Cheney’s decision to launch a “global war” (we’ll see where that takes America next), we need to approach this complex issue from a variety of storytelling angles—Rashomon style. So in Chapters 4 through 8, we’ll explore what I have come to realize are the five essential realignments to be made in America’s grand strategy going forward. We’ll start with economics, then expand into diplomacy and security, before branching out further into global networks and all the larger global equations (e.g., our planet’s increasingly fragile environment, heightened spirituality and religious identity, rising immigration rates) that must likewise inform America’s strategic realignment following Bush.1

The next few years will constitute the first true test of globalization. As our globalized system continues processing its worst financial crisis ever, President Barack Obama encounters an international order suffering more deep-seated strain than at any time since the Great Depression. If there was any remaining doubt that the world’s great powers either all swim or all sink together in this interconnected global economy, then this recent contagion has erased it. Globalization is no longer a national choice but a global condition, and at this seminal moment in history it demands from its creator renewed—and renewing—leadership. President Obama’s opportunity to—as he has so often put it—“turn the page” could not be greater, for history rarely offers such made-to-order turning points.

The United States isn’t coming to a bad end but a good beginning—our American System successfully projected upon the world. Our Rome wasn’t built in a day but constructed over many decades of struggle, our governing rules subject to constant revision and improvement. “These truths” may have seemed “self-evident” from the start, but self-actualized they were not. That the same is now true for this globalization-of-our-making should not cause us despair. We have been down this path before, taming both a wilderness and the market forces we later unleashed upon its settled lands. We are simply blessed today by a global economy whose expansion has already surpassed all past hopes and dreams for a connected, superempowered world. So many frontiers, so little time.

Let us begin this journey of integration, not with a vague sense of foreboding but with a firm grasp of the possibilities. America has done a world of good to get humanity to the point where wars are disappearing and networks are proliferating. Where we need to take it next is well within our grasp. As long as we can remember what got us here, trust me, we’ll recognize the shape of things to come.

One

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF BUSH-CHENEY

It is tempting to write off the entire Bush-Cheney administration as one long unilateral deviation from the emerging global norm of multilateral cooperation, perhaps one even so great as to create a counter-norm by which rising great powers go their own way in response. But this view simultaneously gives the administration too little credit and too much blame.

Clearly, 9/11 exposed America’s vulnerabilities in this network age and thus triggered a mad rush of new rules to fill in those gaps. For steering this effort, Bush-Cheney deserve some real credit. Their many new rules said, in effect, “Going forward, this is the new minimum security standard for remaining connected to the global economy—meet it or else!” As the world’s sole superpower and primary defender of our international liberal trade order, the United States needed to put forth that standard, if only to immediately restore some confidence to the international system. Did Bush-Cheney overreach in many of their proposed new rules? You bet. But in our system, we expect the executive branch to overdo it in response to crisis and the judiciary to trim back those excesses slowly over time. As for the international overreach, well, that’s pretty much the subject of this book; suffice it to say that in a “flat world,” great-power balancing can come in many forms, with only the most unimaginative among us expecting it to appear solely as a military buildup.

Having triggered this global counterreaction, we find that our natural instinct now is to return sheepishly to the bosom of the Old Core West, believing that step will restore the fabled alliance and make it once again powerful enough to both continue this long war against violent extremism and meet the rising challenge of Eastern autocracies (read, Russia and China). This would be a double mistake, for Donald Rumsfeld’s much-vilified notion of a “new” and “old” Europe contained an essential truth: Those states that most recently joined our international liberal trade order are logically more willing to defend it. They’re also far more likely to be less democratic, however, given their historical trajectory, than the demographically older and more mature market economies of the West. So when Bush-Cheney made democratization a key pillar of their long-war approach, it effectively put America at odds with many of the New Core great powers (again, Russia and China) that would otherwise naturally be drawn to our military cause.

Thus it makes little sense to toss out Bush-Cheney’s “baby” (the long war) with the “bathwater” (the premature fixation on democratization), for the former connects us logically with today’s new great powers (China, Russia, India) while the latter binds us rather restrictively to last century’s quorum of aging, democratic great powers (Western Europe, Industrialized Asia). So credit Bush-Cheney on their strategic instincts while condemning their execution, but do not, on that basis, suddenly abandon our historic role as globalization’s primary defender. It may be wrong to describe this long struggle as a “global war,” but there remains a global peace (the international liberal trade order) worth preserving.

While some experts believe America should start from scratch in recasting—or merely accepting—some new global order, presumably one that pits “good guys” against “bad” or recognizes the onset of competing “empires,” we need to recognize how the choices we’ve made over the past eight years shifted the global landscape in ways that simply cannot be reversed with a new American president or even new American policies. Our unilateral “bender” forced a number of rising great powers to rise even faster, accelerating their natural trajectory out of the fear that an America unchallenged was an America unhinged. Our improved behavior in the coming months and years will not erase their rise. Indeed, it will probably accelerate it, further narrowing our window for strategic rapprochement (rising powers are not, as a rule, great bargainers).

So like it or not, the Bush-Cheney era has forged a lasting international legacy that cannot be reversed even as it must be redirected. We have inadvertently raised the price of cooperation from those new great powers upon which our future grand strategy must ultimately depend. Bush-Cheney did not kill the Western alliance, but it did leave America with little choice now but to seek new alliance with the rising great powers of our age. The alternative is to retain all our old Cold War enemies (e.g., Russia, China) in addition to all our new post-9/11 foes—an unsustainable pathway.

The Bush-Cheney administration came into power seeking to realign the strategic relationships among the great powers: whipping NATO into shape; putting rising China, India, and Russia in their place; and reasserting American leadership. The irony, of course, is that the now infamous neocons achieved the exact opposite across the board. Russia’s pounding of Georgia in the summer of 2008 gave us a glimpse of that unwelcome future; exercising its own perceived right for unilateral military action following 9/11, America’s modeled behavior inevitably spawns the worst sort of imitation. The chickens have indeed come home to roost.

BUT FIRST, THE VIRTUES WORTH CITING

As many historians have already buried these would-be Caesars, let me now take a moment to praise them before casting seven stones with great deliberation.

A key attribute of America’s sole military superpower status is that by maintaining our conventional Leviathan, we’ve so raised the “barrier to entry” into the market of great-power war that even having nuclear weapons doesn’t really qualify a state anymore. Americans would do well to remember what a huge gift to humanity that force represents. We were told by international affairs “realists” at the Cold War’s end that America would not be allowed to continue owning the world’s largest gun, that other great powers would necessarily balance us symmetrically by creating one of their own. This has not happened and isn’t close to happening anywhere, not even with “rising China,” whose military buildup specifically targets our ability to target their ability to target Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.

Say that fast five times in a row!

My point is this: The continued de facto worldwide moratorium on preparation for straight-up, great-power-on-great-power war is a monumentally positive influence on human history. This is why it is so crucial that we shut down the remaining Sino-American scenarios for potentially direct confrontations (ditto for Russia), because as long as both sides allow their militaries to be shaped by such myopic scenarios, precious resources will be wasted that could be put to better use elsewhere in a complementary fashion.

The Bush administration’s two terms overlapped extensively with the almost eight-year reign of Taipei’s provocatively nationalistic Democratic Progressive Party government of President Chen Shui-bian. To mince no words, the Bush-Cheney team handled the entire situation with great restraint and wisdom. The same can largely be said about handling China’s “rise” in general, including refusing to go off the deep end in response to various missteps and gaffes by Beijing (e.g., the satellite shoot-down test, the occasional spy scandal, refusing U.S. Navy ships safe harbor in a storm, the Tibet/Olympic torch protests). Instead, what we got from a Bush administration that came into power clearly itching for confrontation with China (remember the E-P3 plane incident in April 2001) was a calm, steady hand at the wheel of our bilateral relations, best exemplified by Henry Paulson’s stint as secretary of treasury, Robert Zoellick’s tenure as deputy secretary of state, the successive commands of admirals William Fallon and Timothy Keating at Pacific Command, and Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill’s supremely patient efforts at “cat herding” the six-party talks on North Korea.

The lack of a serious U.S.-China confrontation in the years since 9/11 is the most important dog that did not bark during the Bush-Cheney administration. In the grand sweep of history, this is arguably George W. Bush’s greatest legacy: the encouragement of China to become a legitimate “stakeholder” in global security—Zoellick’s term. This sort of effort at grooming a great power for a greater role in international affairs is a careful balancing act, and the Bush team sounded most of the right notes, from reassuring nervous allies in Asia, to avoiding the temptation of trade retaliation while simultaneously pressuring Beijing for more economic liberalization, to drawing China into the dynamics of great-power negotiation over compelling regional issues like the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. We can always complain that Bush-Cheney didn’t do more to solidify what was the most important bilateral relationship of the twenty-first century, but we cannot fault them for any lasting mistakes, and that alone is quite impressive. Indeed, history will be likely to judge this success as greater than the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq.

To a lesser degree, the same can be said of Bush-Cheney’s handling of Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia and that country’s re-emergence as a player to be reckoned with in international affairs. Yes, many lament Moscow’s slide toward authoritarianism, decrying the “loss” of democracy that never really existed in the first place, but the key thing to remember in the rise of the so-called “security guys” (siloviki) is that it has eliminated Western—and Eastern—fears of Russia’s imminent collapse and all the security burdens such an event could have foisted upon outside powers. Plus, any careful reading of Russian history will tell you that Moscow’s periodic depressive phases can—and should—last only so long, so a subsequent manic recovery was preordained. But just as important, it was both inevitable and good that Putin’s crowd arrested Russia’s long and pitiful downward spiral as a failed great power, because Moscow’s resurgence forces everybody to bring something closer to their “A” game when we butt heads over Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Real power vacuums are almost never adequately or intelligently filled, so better to let whatever power shifts must come do so at a gradual pace, allowing the targeted parties the time and confidence to play all ambitious external powers off one another. The strategic danger here arises when small states like Georgia (which started the conflict, mind you) are allowed to unilaterally declare war between Russia and the West, but here even we must acknowledge Bush-Cheney’s sensible restraint. Without it, we’d face a plethora of small-state nationalist leaders “auditioning” for the historic role of Archduke Ferdinand—unwitting trigger of World War I. That’s a casting call better skipped.

While Bush-Cheney achieved only modest results in global trade policy, locking in several important bilateral free-trade agreements, they also steered the nation through plenty of rough waters without ever succumbing to congressional or popular pressures for trade protectionism. Moreover, the Bush White House made a good fight of trying to reduce America’s disastrously unfair agricultural subsidies as part of the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round negotiations, a stance that looks increasingly ridiculous—in addition to immoral—with global agricultural prices rising so high. If we factor in Bush’s dramatic increase of funding for global HIV prevention, as well as his creation of the innovative Millennium Challenge Corporation to encourage developing economies toward foreign direct investment-threshold status, then it’s fair to say that, outside of its failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, this administration has displayed real strategic imagination regarding development issues. In this regard, I would also consider Bush-Cheney’s long-standing opposition to the Kyoto Treaty on global warming to have had a beneficial effect. How so? It delayed its effective ratification until such time as the world came to realize the sheer folly of excluding rising China and India from its ranks of the constrained.

Finally, I still admire George W. Bush’s display of audacity and hope in launching his Big Bang strategy upon the Persian Gulf. There’s no question in my mind that, no matter the weak rationales offered (or the slick sales job), Saddam Hussein was a horrific dictator whose time had come. That Bush-Cheney were able to pin that tail on the 9/11 donkey didn’t bother me in the least, for democracies such as our own always have to make it personal before we can launch a war of choice. That Iraq became a cause célèbre for the region’s radical jihadists likewise caused me no regret, because no matter what we did following 9/11, al Qaeda would have located some justifying cause somewhere in our actions. So if a center of gravity was to be had, better it be located over there than over here, and better that it involved our professional warriors instead of our untrained civilians. Most shocking perhaps, even the cynical realist in me has to admit that while an Iraq postwar done right would have had a revolutionary effect on the region, an Iraq postwar done wrong has had much the same effect—namely, making it impossible for the region to ever go back to what it once was. By locking America into real, long-term ownership of strategic security in the Gulf, Bush-Cheney transformed our dedication to maintaining an open door to that region’s energy into a commitment to bodyguard globalization’s ongoing transformation of those traditional societies.

To some, that historical process will always smack of “globalization at the barrel of a gun,” but to me, the genuine realist recognizes the fact that whenever globalization creeps in, it is always the most ambitious and most talented that step forward to cut their own deals (like the Kurds in Iraq), triggering social tumult and ethnic divisions and even political fragmentation as a result. As I will argue later on, globalization will remap the Gap (my term for globalization’s poorly integrated regions), forcing new political configurations that repair the many wrong divisions left behind by Europe’s colonial cartographers. This wave of disintegrating integration is beyond anyone’s control at this point, for it is fueled by the demands for a better life of 3 billion-plus new capitalists around our planet—arguably the greatest collective power the world will endure across this century. Simply put, these once-and-future consumers will not be denied, only placated. So what George W. Bush’s Big Bang amounted to was an attempt, however unconscious, to step in front of that historical tsunami and ride it toward lasting political change for the better. In the end, I believe history will vindicate Bush’s audacity in this regard, however poor his follow-up execution proved to be. As Fareed Zakaria notes in his book The Post-American World, what is stunning to anyone visiting the Middle East today is not how much Iraq has destabilized the region but how stable and thriving the region is despite Iraq’s violence.

Bush-Cheney also deserve plenty of credit for leaving Iraq far more stable at the end of their second term compared with where it stood in 2005-6. The call on the surge wasn’t easy but needed to be made. Harder still was sticking with that tough choice during the initial ramp-up in U.S. casualties. While the surge was years late in coming and wasn’t accompanied by a similar diplomatic surge (as called for by the Iraq Study Group), it did finally reduce the overall violence, meaning Bush-Cheney’s strategic patience—always a question mark for U.S. administrations—clearly paid off.

History will inevitably record that it was better for America to have made this strategic commitment than any other great power, and better for us to force this fight with the radical Salafi jihadists now before some eventual success on their part fostered a mad dash among economically vulnerable external