Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Obviously, the financial tumult captures all attention, and despite my adding about 600 words on the last pass to note its impact, I essentially resisted recasting anything in the economics chapter (I had already had stuff on needing to mend our spendthrift ways) because I hate to succumb to exactly what I preach against across the volume--namely, not getting wrapped around the axle with every single crisis, a practice that yields a new "grand strategy" every ten months or so (like "win the central front in Iraq," No! "confront global warming!" No! "restart the Cold War with Russia!" But wait! "Get America's economic house in order!").

While you have to deal with all of these events in their turn, your grand strategy shouldn't be easily reduced to stuff you'd do normally--like duh! Recover from a financial panic! (As opposed to what? Ignore it completely and hope it goes away on its own?). The stuff that's obvious, you just need to manage, so yeah, when Tech stocks are zooming, most people expect them to eventually crash. Ditto for houses. Ditto for anything that goes up in a market.

Imagine how exhausted you'd be if you got caught up in every crisis. Well, the same is true for grand strategy. If you're going to operate markets, you're going to have to assume there will be both booms and busts, and so long as national and regional economies continue to knit themselves together with scant international oversight, we should expect those booms and busts to get bigger and scarier, until we as a planet (or just the great powers) feel the impetus for new rules on that level.

Remember, in just a decade and a half we've see Japan's crash, the Mexican peso crisis, the Asian Flu, the LTCOM affair, Russian bankruptcy, then the tech crash, then Argentina, then subprime US (SWFs to the rescue!) and subprime-goes-global-with-CDSs (Fed to rescue and the world's first attempt at truly coordinated interest rate cuts).

What do I expect in the future? Again, plenty of up and downs. That is never the question. The question is the response--scope and level and speed.

But here's the larger reality: who knows what the package is come next February?

You want a book on grand strategy, as Mark Warren advises, to be "of its time" but not merely "in its time." The latter is a current events book by an op-ed columnist.

In that sense, the length of time between book-to-bed and book-in-print becomes a bit more bearable--as completely unbearable as it may seem.