Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq, By T. Christian Miller, LA Times, July 4, 2007

The decline of the Roman Empire to some, or the logical shift from public sector to private that we're seeing all over the dial, so why should we expect the war/peace equation to be any different?

Remember this: markets build countries by demanding the development of states that function sufficiently enough to enable and regulate and protect them. Who's going to put in the frontier time required to integrate these bad lands? Expect the most incentivized to do the bulk of the work: our super-incentivized against their super-pissed-off, with technology empowering all individuals. We win by creating numbers. Locally, that can be hard, but globally, it's happening in spades (those 3 billion new capitalists). So our strategic goal is connecting the incentivized to the opportunities.

America will not be the main conveyor of globalization into the restless Gap; New Core pillars like India and China and Brazil and Russia and South Korea and Indonesia (etc.) will.

The coming realignment is everything. There were trajectories in sight prior to 9/11. There were the course corrections and ruleset resets triggered by that System Perturbation, and now, as dinosaurs fade and mammals rise, we seek the great realignment.

Trajectories resumed, globalization consummated. No illusions on the amount of violence required, but also no delusions that we can win by expanding our list of enemies and contracting our pool of allies.

Thanks to Kelly Hall for sending this.