Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

National security types have long noted -- and complained about -- the relative lack of military veterans in Congress, which results in too few experienced votes being cast when the prospect of overseas interventions is raised. I have long noted -- and complained about -- the fact that Congress' most prominent military vets hail from the Vietnam era, which has led many to instinctively reject the necessity and utility of conducting nation-building and counterinsurgency. Clearly, our lengthy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan will alter this generational equation, but how will the experiences of today's veterans impact their votes in tomorrow's Congress?

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

The upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections loom large in the political fortunes of so many players, both internal and external, that it constitutes a historical referendum of sorts -- not just for Iraq, but beyond as well. Across the region, globalization, in all its complex currents, appears poised at a number of inflection points. The outcome of Iraq's elections will leave winners on some fronts, losers on others, and will trigger plenty of bandwagoning by those worried about being left out or left behind. Here's a list of some potential outcomes, none of which are mutually exclusive, in rough order of likelihood:

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

We Americans tend to have an overly inflated sense of our place in this world. If there is an enemy, we must defeat it. If a global challenge looms, we must lead the way forward. When somebody reaches for a weapon, we must strike before they can use it (against us, naturally). And should we fail to do so, we would be to blame for whatever tragedy might result.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Throughout its first year in office, the Obama administration has completed numerous course corrections across the breadth of American foreign policy. Demonstrating the power of a much-needed apology, President Barack Obama's new-look foreign policy was charming enough to earn him a Nobel Peace Prize. But it struck many observers as a change in style, not substance: Many of Obama's "changes" merely extended or expanded upon those made during the last two years of the Bush administration, following the repudiation of the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Last week in Cape Town, South Africa, I was a keynote speaker at the massive Mining Indaba conference, the premier annual gathering of global extractive companies involved in Africa's dominant economic sector. And the difference between the many military and aid conferences I've attended on Africa and this international commodities convention in Africa was telling. If you think most Americans now obsess over a "rising" China, you should know that we take a backseat to the Africans on this score. But whereas we often see China's rise as a potential threat, Africans see it as an opportunity, and China's "positive resource alliance" -- as another speaker put it -- is the primary reason why.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

If the 2008 Olympics were China's big coming-out party, and 2009 the year that Beijing merely managed to save global capitalism with its rapid -- and accurate -- stimulus package, then one might assume 2010 holds even better things in store for the People's Republic. After all, just about everybody now recognizes the "superiority" of China's authoritarian capitalism over the West's free market variety.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

It's taken as gospel by most pundits today that we live in an increasingly dangerous, deadly and unstable world -- with Haiti's horrific earthquake serving as the latest, irrefutable data point. We are told that ours is a planet at perpetual war with itself, locked in a global conflict that is not only cast in civilizational terms, but superimposed over a landscape chock-full of never-ending combat and ever-rising death tolls. The end of the Cold War superpower rivalry, rather than pacifying the world, actually unlocked a Pandora's box of tribal hatreds. In retrospect, the Cold War has even taken on a nostalgic hue, reminding us of simpler, more manageable times.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Last week, as part of my company's investment work in the health care industry, I sat through a marketing pitch from a Chinese manufacturer of low-cost and disposable drug tests, many of which deliver results in mere seconds. They ranged from the familiar home pregnancy tests to sophisticated multi-panel urine screens (for narcotics) -- and even included a mouth swab for measuring blood-alcohol levels, the kind you'll soon be scooping out of a bowl at your favorite bar to check your ability to drive before heading home.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Thanks to the recent global financial crisis, we've heard much talk about the coming "de-globalization," defined by some as the reversal of the now decades-long push to further integrate trade among national economies by disintegrating production and spreading its means across the planet to the cheapest sources. In the past, all forms of growing supply chain connectivity could be justified on price, buttressed by just-in-time delivery capacity. But the market woes of the last year-and-a-half supposedly threw all that logic into question.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Political pundits across America seem committed to the notion that our just-concluded decade deserves the moniker "worst ever," with the formulations ranging from Time's demonic "decade from hell" to Paul Krugman's self-flagellating "Big Zero." But if Krugman could call it "a decade in which nothing good happened," much of the planet might find our myopic bitterness a bit much -- as if the entire world should stop spinning just because the Dow Jones Industrial Average forgot to exit the decade higher than when it entered.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

If you thought the neocons were vanquished, disappearing along with the Bush-Cheney administration, better think again. Their mindset still animates most of what the GOP offers in opposition to President Barack Obama's magical apology tour. For while the president won a Nobel Peace Prize for his heartfelt mea maxima culpa, Charles Krauthammer & Co. see no reason to surrender America's two-decades-and-counting "era of maximum dominance" to the Chinese simply because Beijing holds the pink slip on our national economy.

Continue reading today's New Rules column at WPR.

Last week, I noted that the GOP's defense hawks have taken to accusing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats of exploiting America's health care crisis to further their long-term "plot" to curtail defense spending -- and, by extension, our nation's capacity for military interventions abroad. The implied beneficiary of this "unilateral surrender"? Why, the Chinese, of course, who'd thereby be left free to conquer the developing world in their unending quest to secure raw materials.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Conservative voices are being raised against what defense hawks consider to be the Democrats' ulterior motive in addressing healthcare in America: a none-too-subtle longterm plot to curtail U.S. defense spending and thus render our military forces as strategically impotent as those of our NATO allies. This charge is at once hypocritical and correct, but not for the dark reasons ascribed to the Obama administration.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

"Rebalancing" has been the watchword of President Barack Obama's foreign policy to date: rebalancing the global economy between East and West, rebalancing domestic needs and foreign responsibilities, and -- soon enough -- rebalancing the international security burden among the world's great powers. One number explains why that last rebalancing is necessary: It costs the United States $1 million a year to keep a soldier inside a theater of operations such as Afghanistan. The math is easy enough: For every thousand troops, the price comes out to $1 billion a year.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

From the World Politics Review front page:

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, WPR asked six prominent commentators what feature of today's geopolitical landscape might not be as durable as we imagine. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Ian Bremmer and Alexander Kliment, Nikolas Gvosdev, Walter Russell Mead, and Jacqueline Newmyer examine The Next "Berlin Wall Moment."

Tom's piece is entitled the The Austin Accords of March, 2031

Historic treaty ushers in long-anticipated era of U.S. southward expansion.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Meeting in the New Texas statehouse on the 195th anniversary of Texas' declaration of independence from Mexico, official representatives from the Tejas Confederation, the Northern Alliance of Mexican States, and the United States government signed a comprehensive treaty that will immediately "re-admit" the Tejas states of El Norte and Gulfland to the American union, and submit to Congress formal pleas for new statehood on behalf of all five Northern Alliance members -- Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon.

Continue reading today's special column at WPR.

Tom's comment about the piece:

Previous to being offered this job, I had run a bit of scenario work past Judah Grunstein at WPR, so when he asked me to pen something and told me what the others were already working on, my mind was already leaning toward just a straight-forward future-headline approach to the problem, vice a piece stuffed with conditional language and a list of causal factors that supported the hypothesis. So I ended up with a piece that is a total zebra among these well-built horses. Of the group, I find myself most easily attracted to the Bremmer/Kliment piece on state capitalism and the CCP-loses-legitimacy bit from Newmyer (especially the line: "As a primary matter, we should recall that China's Communist Party elites are the heirs of a dynastic system famously characterized by cycles, in which the legitimacy of a ruling house could vanish in the space of a generation.").

Again, I just felt it would be easier for the reader to grasp what we were fishing at by presenting him or her with a fait accompli, and since all the current talk about gangs, drug lords, Mexico-as-a-failed-state, etc., seemed to me to provide more than enough imaginative momentum to a downstream scenario that broke a lot of china--from today's perspective, so why not simply describe that journey and let the reader judge the plausibility?

As for describing an Hispanic president: I figured from the Berlin Wall moment perspective, we saw four elections and then an African-American won, so projecting ahead another four (Obama reelected, then Petraeus for 1-2 and an unnamed third president following him for 1-2) meant I could do the same sleight of hand regarding an Hispanic. The "soft border" concept comes, naturally, from the whole Af-Pak-India cluster (Pashtun to the north, Kashmir to the south), and then I toss in the Cuba scenario from past Esquire use, and run with the scenarios of state division so favored by many thinkers. In short, I wanted to respect the forcing function suggested by Robb's global guerrillas while showing the adaptability of nation-states.

I wrote the piece over two days: Day one got me the news story and the outline of the phases (imagined as a box inset alongside the piece), and day two saw me fill in the phases, which required a lot of recalibration for the storyline to hold enough water.

Overall, a very fun piece to write and hopefully a fun one to consider as a reader.

President Barack Obama has successfully transformed America's strategic dialogue with the world for the better in his first year, impressing Europe -- or at least eminently sensible Norway -- enough to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In relationship after relationship, America now finds itself talking about what really matters, which in most instances means prioritizing economics above terrorism (George W. Bush's one-note presidency) and climate change (Al Gore's shrill post-vice-presidency).

Continue to read the week's New Rules column at WPR.

Photo: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933 (Photo by Elias Goldensky).

For roughly four decades, a clear foreign policy rule set has existed between the United States and Latin America, centering largely on the question of counternarcotics. Starting with Richard Nixon's "war on drugs," an explicit quid pro quo came into existence: U.S. foreign aid (both civilian and military) in exchange for aggressive Latin American efforts to curb both the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics (primarily marijuana and cocaine).

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Much ink has been spilt over the question of whether or not globalization leads to the "death" of the nation-state, or at least its eclipse by a rising tide of super-empowered non-state actors -- especially multinational corporations. On this score, history has been fairly clear: States that score high on globalization connectivity typically feature governments with extensive regulatory reach and strong enforcement capacity -- not exactly the demise of the public sector.

Continue reading today's New Rules column at WPR.

Americans' fear of China right now is palpable. We see danger in its products, in its vast reserves of our currency, in its growing military might, in its ravenous hunger for raw materials, and in its single-party state. With "Made in China" seemingly stamped on the bottom of everything we bring into our already overstuffed houses, we worry that China will soon buy and sell us, just like Japan seemed poised to do two decades ago.

Continue reading today's New Rules column at WPR.

America awoke last Friday to the stunning news that its young president, Barack Obama, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Naturally, in these hyper-partisan times, the award has elicited wild praise and unbalanced scorn back home, with darn near everybody trying to figure out why Obama was tapped for such a high honor just months into his first term. But as with all such awards, more was revealed about the selectors than the selected. So if the choice of Obama is inarguably premature, then what signal was Norway, one of America's oldest and most sensible friends, trying to send?

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

As someone who thinks systematically about the future for a living, I frequently read science fiction with an eye for what it reveals about how today's real fears are being projected upon tomorrow's imagined landscapes. The books behind the 1973 movie "Soylent Green" (too many people!) and the 2006 movie "Children of Men" (no more babies!) make for a good example. Compare their central premises and you've basically captured the 180-degree turn the popular imagination has experienced on population growth over my lifetime.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

President Barack Obama's performance at the United Nations last week was widely hailed -- and condemned -- as a clear departure from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. His most telling statement spoke volumes about the limits of U.S. power in an interdependent world: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone." Subtext? Atlas has put down the heavy globe and has neither the intention nor the wherewithal to pick it up again.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

As somebody who spends his workdays evaluating investment opportunities in emerging/frontier economies, I receive a lot of business pitches involving new technologies. The time I spend listening to these accounts of how things can ultimately work out for the better balances my work in the national security realm contemplating how everything must "inevitably" collapse into conflict. I find the perspective it offers invaluable, because it reveals how often what we call "realism" tends to be hopelessly trapped in centuries past.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

During the last several weeks, Americans have found themselves back in the middle of a fierce debate over our continuing military effort in Afghanistan. What was Bush's forgotten war had, until recently, seemed quite safely transformed in public opinion into Obama's "war of necessity." Now, because of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for significantly more troops, coming on the heels of his public declaration that the Taliban are essentially "winning," the ruling Democrats have suddenly been thrust back into "quagmire" mode. Predictably, we are once again awash in feverish Boomer analogies to Vietnam, despite the pronounced absence in Afghanistan of any great-power antagonism. Indeed, America enjoys the exact opposite there.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

In what some experts are calling the third great wave of outsourcing -- after manufacturing and services -- cash-rich Arab and Asian governments are buying up arable farmland (read: water rights) all over the developing world. Naturally, the worst-case artists in my field of national security see only one possible outcome: a long, steady decline into a chaotic, Mad Max-like dystopia, characterized by that favorite of the alarmist set -- resource wars.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column on WPR.

One thing I've discovered from writing columns over the years is that they're a great way to elicit invitations to sit down and talk with various players in the national security establishment. All you have to do is mention somebody's office and you're likely to get an e-mail from their public affairs officer eager to set your thinking straight. And so it was last week that I had the chance to converse with Ambassador John Herbst, three years in the job now as the State Department's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

We hear a lot of talk nowadays about the structural imbalance in global trade: namely, the West needs to spend less and export more (Germany excluded) and the East needs to export less and spend more (China especially). What we don't talk about much are the structural deficits that currently stand in the way of rising Asia's collective ascension to the role of established third pillar of global order. Instead, we place too much hope on China's unique abilities to scale that mountain on its own, while simultaneously fearing that Beijing's resulting ambitions will ultimately prove globally destabilizing.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

U.S. plans to expand its military presence in Colombia have elicited predictable condemnations from anti-American elements in South America, but also concern from friends who see them as encroachment from our ongoing "war on drugs." Similarly, in another part of the world, Africa Command boss Gen. "Kip" Ward's repeated assurances that the United States isn't interested in setting up bases on the continent remains a tough sell, given the new regional combatant command's explicit mission to expand U.S. military cooperation there.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

These are nerve-racking times at the Pentagon. For "Big War" adherents, Iraq is not looking like the "one off" that many hoped it would be, as Afghanistan-Pakistan appears to be, if anything, an even harder slog. None of the dominant Big War scenarios are looking good, now that Iran is ever closer to nuclear deterrence, North Korea ever closer to collapse, and Taiwan ever closer to a peace deal with Beijing. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, meanwhile, is locking in a more balanced take on small wars versus large, and the serious Leviathan budget-cutting has begun.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column for this week at WPR.

Last February, the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction published a comprehensive 456-page historical analysis of the Iraq reconstruction experience entitled, "Hard Lessons." The IG, Stuart Bowen -- who was there from the beginning, assuming the post actually before the invasion -- was kind enough to send me a copy this week. Having now read it, I must say it's an incredible piece of data collection and analysis, even if, in my opinion, its concluding optimism about the U.S. government's recent efforts to better prepare itself for the next "Iraq" -- already upon us in the form of Afghanistan -- is truly unwarranted.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column for WPR.

Last week's major policy address by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was as noteworthy for the strategic concepts she dismissed as for the ones she embraced. Clinton provided Americans with a strong sense of how she plans to conduct U.S. foreign policy: not merely as "the indispensable nation" that assumes international leadership, but rather as the global rule-set convener that aggressively builds partnerships across a strategic landscape pulsating with rising players -- both state-based and transnational

Continue reading this week's New Rules column for WPR.

For those in the West eager to uncover another Tiananmen-like crackdown by Chinese authorities last week in the Xinjiang provincial capital of Urumqi, the true story disappoints, even as it points to a potentially far-more-destabilizing social phenomenon: the emergence of race riots inside allegedly homogenous China. Note that President Hu Jintao's embarrassingly rushed departure from the G-8 meeting in Italy was not provoked by Sunday's riots by angry Uighurs, but rather by Tuesday's even uglier revenge riots by even angrier -- and better-armed -- Han Chinese.

Continue reading this week's WPR column.

As a kid, I was constantly subjected to fear-mongering on population growth, which was not only out of control, but certain to lead to widespread conflict, political repression, and freakish efforts at human survival. ("Soylent Green," anyone?) Now, in my middle years, I find myself increasingly assaulted with the opposite "dangers": too few babies, and a rapidly and unevenly aging world. Somehow the dire predictions of what the consequences will be have remained the same.

Continue Reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Back before the Iraq surge, "military operations other than war" -- a now-antiquated term referring to non-traditional warfare -- were treated as "lesser includeds," filed deep under subsections of big-war plans, doctrine, and acquisition strategies. Today, by contrast, the U.S. national security establishment is increasingly embracing what I like to call the "greater inclusive" paradigm, which recognizes our military's rising quotient of such operations, not as some rare exception, but rather as the new rule.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column for WPR this week.

China's global priorities might not match up that well with those of your average American policymaker. But they do match up quite well with President Obama's agenda. That's the sense I got after spending last week in Shanghai with a bevy of China's top foreign affairs academics. Although the workshop I attended was focused on U.S.-Chinese relations, there was no shortage of side conversation on the post-election meltdown unfolding in Iran. And nothing I heard in terms of the Chinese sense of priorities bore any resemblance to what you see these days in American newspaper headlines.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column at WPR.

The skyrocketing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated intense debate about how useful they are against insurgent/terrorist networks. Some prominent counterinsurgency experts have decried the "siege mentality" among non-combatant locals caused by collateral damage from the drone strikes. But despite the charge that drones represent a technology (i.e., a means) in search of a strategy (i.e., end goals), there's no question that: 1) drones are here to stay, and 2) they're truly re-symmetricizing the battlefield in a much-needed manner.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules post at WPR.

As the World Health Organization agonizes over whether or not to declare the H1N1 flu virus an official pandemic, I can't help but think of the American national security establishment's continuing struggle over the definition of threat in a post-9/11 world. In both instances, we see institutions with worldwide responsibilities coming to grips with an increasingly interconnected global landscape. And although that global landscape, according to all the available data, suffers less catastrophe, it nonetheless appears to present far greater potential for such catastrophes to unfold with seemingly uncontrollable consequences.

Continue to read Tom's The New Rules column for this week at WPR.

Last week's Economist carried a feature on a recent wave of farmland purchases in poorer parts of the world. The buyers? Cash-rich emerging markets and Arab oil states looking to insure themselves against future food shortages. And if you think that's just a reaction to last year's stunning spike in prices, think again. The new trend speaks to the impact global warming will have on where food will be produced in abundance in coming decades.

Continue reading Tom's 'The New Rules' column this week at WPR

When the global financial contagion kicked in last fall, the blogosphere was quick to predict that a sharp uptick in global instability would soon follow. While we're not out of the woods yet, it's interesting to note just how little instability -- and not yet a single war -- has actually resulted from the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Run a Google search for "global instability" and you'll get 23 million hits. But when it comes to actual conflicts, the world is humming along at a level that reflects the steady decline in wars -- by 60 percent -- that we've seen since the Cold War's end. As George Mason University's Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) notes, that trend applies within the Muslim world, too, so even America's "war on terror" has not quite lived up to the pessimists' expectations.

Read this week's column at WPR.

Last week I gave a plenary address to the Joint Warfighting Conference 2009 -- the annual East Coast naval extravaganza co-sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). This mega-conference opened my eyes to just how much things have changed inside our naval forces thanks to the ongoing long war against violent extremism.

To give you an idea of the ground covered, I have to take you back almost 17 years.

Navy Finally Embracing Role in Small Wars, this week's WPR column.

Tom's comment:

It was a lot of fun to speak at the conference and do the three stints of book signing (the Naval Inst. bookstore sold all 84 copies it had received from Putnam). Also a lot of fun to spend brief bits of time with Mattis and Wilkerson, so I wanted to work both into the piece because it really has been a journey of interaction and mutual aid over the years, with all of us now seeing the naval forces become that which we have long advocated they become.

You know, for most people, 17 years would constitute a sense of failure. But when you think in grand strategic terms, a couple of decades is nothing.

The world continues to hold its breath over a swine flu that, while perhaps slowing, is still likely to kill in the low hundreds and remains balanced on the edge of a true pandemic. Although only a mere 2-3,000 cases have -- so far -- been recorded worldwide (80 percent of them in co-sources Mexico and America), this variant of H1N1 influenza penetrated dozens of nations and all mass-populated regions of the globe in a matter of days -- a truly humbling reminder of how globalization enhances mankind's epidemiological interdependency.

My column is dubbed--by me-- "The New Rules."

This week's effort is entitled, "When Prevention Goes Viral."

'Tis the season of snap judgments on President Obama's first 100 days in office, replete with scorecards, grading sheets, and cartoon thumbs pointing up or down. The temptation with such analyses is simply to generate a laundry list of accomplishments, as if a crowded agenda or a flurry of decisions connotes successful leadership. Under normal circumstances, the key measure tends to be "traction," as in, Did the new administration hit the ground running on issues A through Z?

But these aren't normal times.

Read on at World Politics Review.

Beyond Tom's column, check out the whole theme at WPR: