by Cheryl Rofer
Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam, February 2009.
This is the second part of my review of this book. The first part is here.
What Tom Barnett is doing is at least as interesting as his book. The book describes some of it, but not all.
Connectivity, a central concept in Barnett’s thinking, is changing the world. The connectivity provided by fax machines and primitive e-mail helped to undercut the Soviet Union and got the Tianmen Square rebels’ story out in 1989. Now we get tweets as Mumbai is being attacked. We have hardly begun to exploit that connectivity.
Every day, enormous numbers of people discuss enormous numbers of topics on the Web. More people now get their news from the Web than from any other source. Can it be used to develop policy? David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, will tell you that it can be used to elect a president. Developing policy is harder.
Superempowerment?
I belong to a cluster of bloggers who discuss foreign policy and other topics. We read each other’s blogs and link among them. Barnett calls us, if I understand him correctly, superempowered individuals. I’m not entirely happy with the jargon aspect of that phrase or what Barnett seems to mean by it. I have access to a great many things through the internet, true; but there are limits to the power that gives me. One of thosee limits is being heard. If I write a blog and nobody reads it, does it really exist?
Among my cluster of bloggers are several who particularly like Barnett’s work. Although I have criticized Barnett at times or admitted I hadn’t read something he wrote, they keep in contact. We have other disagreements as well, but enough agreement and common interests to remain in the cluster. I like to have people to argue with, because it helps me sharpen my thinking. The argument is usually genuine and in a helpful tone. We occasionally toss bits of snark at each other, but it’s in good humor.
Barnett has bravely dived into what some consider the unruly morass of the blogosphere. He maintains his own blog, and in Great Powers he acknowledges its commenters as well as bloggers in that cluster of mine who reviewed parts of the book in draft. Most authors acknowledge readers and commenters and people with whom they’ve had some good discussions that have contributed to their thinking. The difference is that Barnett met these people through his blog. He probably wouldn’t have met most of them otherwise, and some are pretty good. They’re also not your average Naval War College professor; they bring a much greater variety of viewpoints.
That book to which I contributed a chapter, Threats in the Age of Obama, is another Web-based experiment in policy development. The authors are part of that blogger cluster. I haven’t met any of them in real life. Each of us wrote our own chapter, Mike Tanji and his editor pulled it all together, and it’s available in dead tree form. But we wouldn’t have been aware of each other without the Web.
I’ve tried to work through a web discussion to a consensus in what I called a blog tank, in analogy to think tank. The procedure was sketchy, and I would have preferred more participants, more discussion and more depth. But it showed that there are ways to reach a consensus via internet dialog.
Those are all small beginnings of policy development on the Web. But there is that question of being heard.
The VSPs
Barnett started out, as a professor at the Naval War College, on a trajectory into the realm of Very Special People. That term, abbreviated VSPs, refers to those whose ideas Count, who are listened to by the media and the political class. The requirements for entry into VSP status include credentialization by a university (Ph.D. preferred) or holding a high position in an appropriate government organization. And, of course, to be okayed by the VSP community.
The term VSP arose in the blogosphere a few years back, when one of those credentialed folks made a particularly foolish statement and failed to defend it during a foray into said blogosphere. If I remember correctly, she quit blogging at that point.
Bloggers stared at each other through the Web and realized that they might be able to do as well in foreign policy as the VSPs.
Many people have shared that feeling as they have watched the nightly news or read their newspapers. The news filter dumbs it down, and sometimes that reaction is incorrect. But take a person whose hobby is American history, another who’s learned strategy in the military, another who does business with other countries, and let them discuss. Chances are they can come up with something as good as your average VSP can. Chances are that your average VSP owes allegiance to a particular faction, and that this group will develop blind spots and fixed ideas. Insurgents see things differently than the establishment. We badly need new insights now.
I’m looking for a way to measure the influence of this broader approach to international relations. Barnett claims that the military likes what he is saying. I see expressions of enthusiasm in various places, but I wonder how the military expression of his ideas differs from counterinsurgency warfare.
In the VSP community, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have an article in Foreign Affairs that sounds very much like Barnett in VSP-speak, minus the connectivity. (Having an article in Foreign Affairs is the essence of VSP-ness.) Will the VSP-osphere simply incorporate Barnett without crediting him? I don’t see that they have engaged him.
Will the Unassimilated Gap of Tom Barnett and the connectivity crowd be assimilated by the Functioning VSP Core? Will there be open conflict or a quiet takeover? Stay connected.