Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

I realize the guy's smart as hell, and his books are truly magisterial, but I will confess: they seem like a solution from another planet.

I also realize that his inside-baseball level of detail thrills many aficionados of the long war, but the approach seems so inside-out, starting with the government and "market states" and all their associated paraphernalia as the alpha and omega of the solution, and I'm just highly skeptical of basing so much of our political system on interpreting terrorism as the be-all and end-all threat of the age.

As I've said repeatedly, terrorism is, to me, what's left, not what's next—much less what's transcendent.

To me, that's like America in 1875 saying Crazy Horse and threats like him are the future of the United States experiment and we should reshape our entire government and foreign policy and national security establishment to meet this transcendent challenge.

We're facing a world where we've radically expanded the in-club to include the vast majority of the East and much of the South, and we in the West find that extended family pretty scary—pretty wild in comparison to the sedate, security rule sets we've long enjoyed in our small family. Along with all these new family members, we've got some serious but limited and sporadic resistance from key situations (and many not so key) in the Gap.

My question is, do we focus on getting the new family members inside our international liberal trade order first, or do we freak out over the envisioned, overwhelmingly Gap-based threat (yes, I understand their fellow travelers will come here and seek to do us harm, but let's not go all wobbly too fast on our own inherent resilience) and choose to arm ourselves with all sorts of new doctrines and capabilities and laws that keep that threat at bay, while—unavoidably—at the same time sacrificing the connectivity we should be building with that huge chunk of humanity, just added to our universe thanks to Cold War's end and the stunning expansion of globalization, which doesn't view this new world with the same fears and paranoia that we now seem given to?

You know my answer.

I read Bobbitt and can't help but think he's willing to risk the New Core's integration in order to secure the Old Core's viability in the face of this transcendent, age-defining threat called terrorism.

To me, that just seems like a bad bet—plus way too government-centric in its approach. I guess I just don't see governments as being as in-charge of things as others do. I never did, so I suppose I don't see the "loss" of state power either.

Thus I don't see the great need to totally revamp the political construct or risk defeat.

I simply don't see defeat on the agenda and never have. We win and we're winning and we continue to win. It's our winning in spreading and nurturing and defending this international liberal trade order, this American System-of-states-uniting-cum-globalization, that gets us the friction (terror) in the first place.

I'm interested in the motion, not the ancillary costs involved.

And so I just don't "get" (meaning, dig) Bobbitt's stuff, even as I admire it and respect his efforts at reorienting thinking. I see a lot of his ideas as being reasonable and sound. I just don't see the need for the larger teleology: just cite me the tactics (laws mostly for him) to be modified and let's move on, because this isn't the game. This is how we handle drunks in the stands.

Please, somebody do their best to enlighten me further on Bobbitt. I'm not offering this comments as a rejection of all his thinking, just the elaborate need for universe-spanning packaging, I guess, because I find that packaging so misleading and so inappropriate and so unhelpful.

To me, the only grand strategy worth having today is a globalization-centric one, not a terror-centric one. To me, that would be like living a cholesterol-centric health-regime—just too narrow. You can't take something that narrow (terrorism) and make it holistic, in a grand strategic sense, in this age of globalization (in which, market states surely play but hardly dominate or define).

Again, I look for counter-arguments here. Bobbitt is impressive if dense and hard to approach, and I'd like to be able to locate his thinking somewhere in my universe, but whenever I pick up his stuff, I simply find myself putting it back down, saying, "Nice, but we don't talk the same language."

That statement may well be a product of my dense-ness on the subject of law and terror (Bobbitt's bailiwick), so I remain open to being convinced otherwise, but clearly, I'm not getting there on my own without some help (another bad sign to me is when you need a cast of others to help you understand why a book is good).