by Cheryl Rofer
Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam, February 2009.
Thomas Barnett burst on the foreign affairs scene with his book, The Pentagon’s New Map. In his new book, he sketches his vision for the new president.
Barnett argues that globalization makes the world a better place, and his future for America takes place within that context. He sees free markets as an important part of that. Nations that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other, particularly if a nuclear exchange is a possible outcome. Connectivity via the Web and our burgeoning electronic gizmos open people’s minds to alternatives to oppressive governments.
Barnett also tries to put his ideas, particularly those on connectivity, into practice. It can be argued that it’s trivially obvious that a person would try to put his ideas into practice, but anyone who’s tried to stay on a diet knows the difference between idea and practice. Barnett maintains a presence in the blogosphere; in this book he acknowledges people who have commented on his blog, with special thanks to a few of them who contributed criticisms of drafts of the book. He sees the web as a way to broaden citizen participation in government – “Everyone should have their own foreign policy” – and is taking steps to encourage that development.
The book and the actions have different strengths and weaknesses, so I’m writing this review in two parts: what he has written and what he is doing. This post is the first.
What He’s Written
There are many ideas I like in this book: Trade can undercut warring tendencies; today’s information technologies can undercut dictatorships; the nature of war is changing, and we’re not managing small wars very well; we should look back to American history for lessons in dealing with developing nations; power is economic as well as military. I tend to share Barnett’s optimism, although perhaps in a more moderated way. The book’s value is in these good ideas, more than overarching concepts.
If there is a single theme to Great Powers, it is to put the behavior of other nations into the context of American history. We are to understand China’s mercantilism in terms of America’s 19th century, Iraq’s fractiousness in terms of the 18th. According to Barnett, this historical categorization tells us that we can expect globalization to bring democratization and prosperity to the world, just as it did to America. We do have to deal with some of the more rambunctious behaviors, analogous to those of the railroad barons for example, but once we get past those rough spots, a capitalist paradise awaits. Today’s globalization, he says, is like the integration of the American West during the 19th century.
Historical parallels are useful, and some in this book are piquant, reminding us that America has not always walked what we now talk. There are at least two things wrong with this schema: it is far too Americentric and it was written before the Great Financial Meltdown of Fall 2008.
Americentrism and a Grand Strategy
The Americentrism leads to self-congratulation for our having overcome the difficulties we now see in others, making present-day America the model and goal for all those countries that are somewhere on the path we have followed. American exceptionalism, for example in rejecting the International Criminal Court, is a natural outcome. But we have to ask how inevitable it is that other countries will follow American history, or how much Barnett has distorted his analogies to make them persuasive. I’m not a good enough student of American history to make a judgement on that last.
For example, in his discussion of how AFRICOM, the US military’s newest command, might be set up, he says it will be based on interactions with locals, but the vision he describes is very much customary US military, with an emphasis on population security over warfighting. He even suggests that a retired general would send a strong signal, since that general would be a “clear civilian head,” located in the center of the Beltway, northern Virginia. This easy statement reveals both military and Beltway leanings.
Barnett talks about a “grand strategy” but doesn’t develop one. Barnett provides a definition, of sorts, of grand strategy in an interview with ZenPundit (Mark Safranski).
Ideally, grand strategy is a vision of your preferred future world in terms of its rough structure and governing dynamics (this is how power is distributed and these are the goals that most people/nations are working toward).He adds that “everybody in this super-empowered age needs their own foreign policy,” but he wants “my ‘300’--million, that is—all paddling in the same direction.” So this is why he doesn’t develop one in this book, but rather gives a “deep contextualization” for developing one, to give Americans a sense of their own history and how globalization grows out of it. That Americentricity again.
There is some value to this, but expecting one’s readers to all “paddle in the same direction,” much less all those Americans who don’t read the book and all those in the rest of the world who may have other ideas, seems like a lot. It’s fairer and likely more effective to present one’s own vision and then respond to the discussion that ensues.
The Financial Meltdown
James Joyner asked Barnett about the effect of the meltdown on his discussion in this book, which was written before last fall’s dreadful events. Barnett’s reply seems to say that this, like all else, is included in his thinking, but he is unspecific about its effects. There are some statements in the book that will need to be modified; whether the meltdown fundamentally undermines Barnett’s optimism remains to be seen.
“Why not be grateful that the enterprise [the world economy] no longer depends solely on the spendthrift American consumer?” he asks at one point. We don’t know how we’ll pull out of the financial mess, but it’s hard to argue that the “spendthrift American consumer” and the enablers in China didn’t have a big part in this.
At another point, he considers “how much simpler it would be to generate a true financial panic in China than, say, the United States” because “it [China] has nowhere near our capacity for discounting strategic risk through agile capital markets, …a responsive insurance industry, or a federally insured banking system, to name a few examples.” Um, yeah.
It was one of Barnett’s fundamentals, connectivity, that allowed the financial rot to spread worldwide. And it was the free-enterprise private sector for which he has so much respect, enabled by a hands-off government, that encouraged the rise of the risky investments while providing insufficient oversight. In another context, Barnett says that a more interconnected world will need more regulation. Perhaps we reached that point several years back.
He argues that the development of the “Gap,” largely meaning the Middle East and Africa, will occasion “a long period of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to create the infrastructure behemoths that will make all this expansion happen.” Many of these firms will be backed by their national governments, and they will live on government contracts: Halliburton writ large! This development may be merely delayed by the financial meltdown, but it is clear that “too big to fail” is a bit of conventional wisdom that will be rethought.
Privatization
Barnett is also an enthusiast for privatization. Let Blackwater (now Xe) clean up Darfur, as its CEO, Eric Prince, suggested! His discussion assumes that because so much privatization of military functions in particular has occurred (which he confuses with foreign policy), it must be a good thing, taking up the functions no longer performed by a hollowed-out government. He does not consider the downsides of no-bid contracts and that the hollowing-out may be a function of too much privatization.
The discussion of privatization follows the trajectory of the book: it’s part of American history, therefore natural, therefore good, and therefore will be followed by the rest of the world. He does allow that “there’s plenty of new rule sets that need to be constructed for this blending of private and public security elements engaged in frontier-settling activities.”
Later, he observes that it is contractors who are hanging on to manufacturing obsolete Cold War weapons systems, contradicting his rosy picture of their innovations. One of those new rule sets will take care of this, no doubt!
But There Are Some Good Ideas
There is a lot I liked in this book in both style and substance. But fresh writing stales when too many stylistic quirks are repeated too often. And some of the ideas, when worked out, didn’t live up to my expectations; other ideas weren’t sufficiently worked.
What I liked tended to be individual ideas or interpretations; the theme to what I liked was upending old conventional wisdom by taking a new look. Here’s a sampling:
Barnett recognizes how important the Organization for Security and Co-Operation (OSCE) in Europe has been, particularly in regard to the fall of the Soviet Union. I would have liked to see him work out how an OSCE equivalent might operate in the Middle East.
He would co-opt China as a friend and ally rather than our next big military threat. Co-optation is a great way achieve the gains that military force might be used for with none of the downsides in destroyed lives and materiel. Again, I would have liked to see this argument worked out in greater detail.
He does work out in detail how President Lincoln looked beyond the Civil War to reconstruction. His history of late 19th-century America is stirring, and the kind of thing Americans need to brace themselves for the challenges we’re facing. I like his optimism, to which I also seem to be temperamentally inclined. I do wonder how accurately he’s interpreting the history, though.
His points 9 (Once the war is won, the only alternative to withdrawal or domination is transformation) and 10 (Socialize the problem, institutionalize the solution) of Barnett’s 14 Points are nice ones, nicely explained. His discussion of Keynes’s/Kennan’s “grand strategies” in point 12 is also well done. It would have been a delight to see him use these points as a framework for the entire book.
How It’s Written
His writing, particularly the historical vignettes, can be gripping. All the more pity that the book so badly needs editing.
Barnett shares Thomas Friedman’s breezy writing style, optimism, overuse of metaphors, cliches and occasional incoherence. I found his first book unreadable because of his love of neologistic jargon. He has partially suppressed that love in Great Powers, but rule set and Core and Gap and superempowerment bounce into the text.
The last chapter, rather than being a summary and springboard, is a rant against Barnett’s pet peeves that he believes stand in the way of full-bore economic globalization. It is overlong and repetitive in its complaints against global warming, overattachment to Europe, and “premillenial doom and gloom.” This was really a disappointment, when I was looking forward to a stirring call to action on a summary of his ideas.