Summer Reading I: The Pentagon's New Map

We’re working on the idea of testing the quality of forecasting of our own guesses and those of others as well. This book, by Pentagon civilian analyst Thomas P.N. Barnett from 2004, deserves a second edition. It needs one, as well.

Barnett is a guy who does “killer briefs”. His active career on the Pentagon beat, paid both directly and indirectly, spans 1990-2003, so he worked through some of Bush I and II and all of Clinton. His specialties seem to be working on teams to develop joint presentations, codifying “rule sets” for various international players, and once in a while personally coming up with successful narratives (and accompanying slide visuals) for strategic concepts. His style is storytelling, and he weaves some good ones--convincing, and often drawing from personal experience.. He’s a Democrat; I’d call him “neo-liberal”; he comes at the neocons’ point of view from a humanistic philosophy.

I have plenty of sympathy for those of Barnett’s profession; essentially he did the Pentagon version of what I did my last year in corporate life (convincing our company’s leaders the world was safe for instalment loans). Personally, I found it trying, having to suck up at all levels of the organization, and fortunately I was spared from having to keep doing it (9/11 helped). I am curious how they’re making out in Japan, though; that was one that I was pushing, and if they were smart enough to do it right, they’re much richer for it.

That’s sort of the take I get Barnett has on Iraq. Though he makes no claim to being involved in the Bushite push towards invasion there, he backs it (from this volume’s vantage point of late 2003/early 2004, when things were already looking somewhat sour). This is the kind of bathwater you have to throw out in order to keep the baby well. Here’s my description of Barnett’s Baby:

First, The Map itself, for which Barnett claims credit. Draw a broad ring touching on the hot spots of war, famine, and backwardness in the last 20 years. In “The Pentagon’s New Map”, this is the “Non-Integrating Gap”, or “The Gap”, for short. The “Functioning Core” is composed of Europe (except the S.E. part), North America, Australia/N.Z., and all of N.E. Asia, plus China and India. Also included: South Africa and the ABC’s of South America—Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Barnett has appropriately combined the First World and the Second World pieces and redefined the old Third/Fourth World boundaries, going beyond the End Cold War viewpoint. I have a few quibbles (see below).

Second, “the future worth creating”: progressively shrink the Gap through integration and security. He also identifies key “Seam States” (though they are inconsistently included or not in the Core)—and the key to winning GWOT (he’s a believer) is to work through the Seams to Gap states to “firewall off the Core from terrorists”, regulate immigration toward the Core, and protect from diseases. This makes good sense, I say (but I’m not a tailor, so my opinion of the proper use of fashion terminology involved is questionable).

Third, he seems to have made some major contributions to the thinking of the senior military officers—or, if not to their thinking, at least to their ability to articulate their thinking. Two in particular that he seems to be able to make a valid claim about are 1) helping the Navy to realize in the mid-‘90’s that, not only did it rule the waves, there will be no challenger anytime soon; and 2) China is not the proper war object of our military strategy. Essentially, they’re on our side now.

In the time since, he’s been proved right about that, and, though he was too polite to note it, I think he observed how the subtlety of Chinese diplomacy eats our State Department alive in international forums like the U.N. Their role was critical in bringing North Korea to heel, and in making us look like heels, diplomatically, in Iraq.

Fourth, and most powerfully, he has something to say in the final chapters about the future of the Pentagon and what might work to shrink the Gap. His strong idea and bold proposal is to break up the Pentagon, separating the hot-war fighting capability (he calls it “the Leviathan”, and backs up the Hobbes reference) from the peacekeeping/nation building capability. This latter he calls “Sys Admin”; computer jocks would fully appreciate the label, I think, though to me it sounds a little too bureaucratic for marketing purposes.

Here’s the point: “the Leviathan” goes in and takes out the enemy’s military, and there’s no doubt that is basically a U.S. operation (you others can join, if you can keep up). But this other thing, this “Department of Everything Else”: this needs to be internationalized fully, not just made separate within the Pentagon. And why the Pentagon at all? Get them out of it, permanently. Yes, there are U.S. military specialists in local political affairs—as the recent successes in Anbar have shown—and they have major contributions to make. But it should be under the U.N. flag, as is being done much more successfully in the World’s Toughest Nation-Building Job (i.e., Afghanistan). It was a mistake to make the Pentagon responsible for Iraq’s occupation, and it should never be repeated.

By the way, I would love to have a tough-minded guy like Barnett working on the U.N. Charter rewrite (maybe he is—beats me? He’s gone private.) He made a quality suggestion--in passing—that the permanent Security Council members (and he’d up it to 15, by my count) would give up their veto “except in cases involving the permanent members themselves”. Excellent suggestion!

Finally, I give him full marks for the reference to “koyaanisqatsi”, and for using it well. Right on, dude!

Testing Specific Predictions
He went on record with these 10 (I oversimplify for bullet-point purposes—you understand, right, Tom?). Given that we predictors can pick our spots, my assessment is that these were made more to build his logical argument, than for analytically supported reasons.
1) Iraq connected in 10 years—jury’s out, but progress nonexistent.
2) Kim Jong Il out—I’m sympathetic, but it seems to be going another route.
3) Iran overthrows mullahs by 2010—This one I’m taking pretty much verbatim. Halfway between his publishing date and the target date, I’d say he has no better than 25%. Yes, I was disappointed that Khatami went quietly away, too.
4) Free-trade America deal by 2015, allowing us to clean up Colombia—I see more hope for Colombia than for the deal. Bushite non-diplomacy is killing us with most of the Western Hemisphere, except Brazil. I see the Caribbean Rim being forced to choose pretty soon between the Venezuela/Cuba/Bolivia side and the Mexico/Chile/Brazil side. And don’t take Argentina for granted, either.
5) Transform the Middle East—I don’t like the odds on this one working; choose any timeframe less than 200 years. If it transforms, we won’t be the ones doing it.
6) China a diplomatic near-peer—See my comment above: we’ve got more influence because we’re more powerful, but in terms of skill they are running circles around us. Still, I give him credit for perceiving their ability; part of their brilliance is in keeping it somewhat obscured, given their relatively weak political and military positions for coercively leveraging other nations.
7) Asian equivalent of NATO—My uninformed view is that this has some potential, with the Six Nations agreement on North Korea being a good harbinger. It doesn’t have to be quite so overtly a military agreement as Barnett suggests, though.
8) Core-wide security alliance—Sure. There’s certainly a “securities” alliance possible, anyway (very little banking joke).
9) US expands by 10 states, even beyond the Western Hemisphere (!)—I have to differ here. There’s no willingness whatsoever to experiment domestically, and that’s the only scale of importance. Look, we can’t D.C. representation figured out (200+ years), or Puerto Rico statehood (30 or so, at least). Now, unless England decides the only way it can get autonomy within Britain is to join the U.S. (now, that would be historic!), I can’t see us going beyond our (extended) shores.
10) Only then we can go after Africa, unless GWOT moves in there big time—He’s right, of course. For that matter, I think he was being generous putting South Africa in the Core—I look at it as being a lot like Jamaica, on a very big scale. Am I wrong?

Conclusion: As a futurist, he’s no prognosticator, but if he gets the big ones right (“The Baby”), that’s more important.

Ambiguities/Revisions Needed for Second Edition
With regard to membership in the Core vs. Gap, I can see why Barnett insists on including China and India, even if the fit isn’t that important. Among other things, these countries make the difference between having two-thirds In and two-thirds Out, which is real important for the perspective of whether this is something we are winning. Particularly, it is the key success area of the last 20 years.

In this one, I--among others--have to swallow hard and accept that there is a notion one can overlook the Tienanmen massacre and allow China among the “civilized”. Barnett is reasonable in saying that there are various blends of political, economic, and judicial “connectedness”. It is a fact that China and India have had constructive roles since the end of the Cold War, and that is a major peacetime dividend.

There’s a real question, though, whether these two have made their progress, or too much of it, in unsustainable ways, and I mean environmentally. This is one of Barnett’s huge blind spots—there is really no problem incorporating this notion into the “Sys Admin” concept, but Barnett at the time was not Greened at all—his view at the time was, there’s plenty of oil, and then there’s coal.

Pakistan is no Core member, as Barnett said quite accurately, their regime “barely controls much of its countryside beyond Islamabad”. But, he seems to have another blind spot when it comes to their nuclear weapons, which I would rate as a bigger threat to world peace than either North Korea or Iran. To the Core, as well, since India’s within it.

Pakistan’s case demonstrates why I can’t agree with Barnett that “arms control is now dead and buried”. It’s endangered, true; I agree that determined national entities are likely to find a channel to success, and sanctions and treaties won’t do the job. Nevertheless, it’s worth preventing proliferation, and the way to do it is to punish proliferators—even the ones we choose to like. The punishment is: you have to learn responsibility, or you feel pain of some kind (not necessarily coercive regime change, which Barnett loves too much).

Russia is an interesting case for discussion. It qualifies as a Core member based on its high-tech capabilities (leftover from Soviet days), and its military, though deteriorated, is still up there in the Top 5. He doesn’t discuss it, but no doubt there are plenty in the Pentagon who still see Russia as the U.S.’ once and future chief rival.

As far as omissions, Turkey, Israel, and Singapore definitely belong in the Core, with Jordan and Egypt two which should be added as key Seam States. Perhaps, as key recipients of American direct and indirect assistance, these nations have been purposefully left out as a favor in the interests of the efficacy of American policy. Anyway, I’ve got no Top Secret clearance like Barnett, so I don’t agree to sweep them under.

Iraq and Preemptive War
I think that his section backing the concept of pre-emption is one of the weakest and might need rewriting for the anticipated Second Edition. He seems to think it’s very simple which Fearless Leaders need to be busted out, when, and how. I’ll grant that the rules are different in the Gap, as he states, but he seems a little too close to the Action Boys on this one.

Anyway, he seems pretty clear that Iraq was not a case of preemptive war in this key passage (p. 288):

America was able to select--long in advance--the spring of 2003 to launch the Big Bang, which gave us maximum time to make our case to the rest of the Core regarding our motives and goals…we made time to argue our case; we were not rash in our strategic tempo.

Again, although I don’t blame him for the Iraq invasion plan at all, he seems to know what he’s talking about here. On this one, I apparently stand corrected: All through the run-up to the invasion, my basic Question was: What Is the Fricking Hurry? Barnett is telling us that the whole thing was deliberate, elective, not prompted by any specific threat (of WMD, aggression, or even ongoing internal massacre). It was the kind of splash intended to provoke ripples, not one of those clean Olympic dives where the diver enters and the water barely moves.

Barnett implicitly buys into the Bushite Operational Plan argument for the timing—he’s too close to Rumsfeld’s office. I must be closer to Karl Rove’s, because I see the answer to the Question as being driven by the Bushite Political Operatives’ Plan and the exigencies of the approaching 2004 election. I think Barnett should take a long, hard look at this and face this incriminating truth: Yes, Politics were Played with This.

Two Howlers—Please Excise for the 2nd and Successive Editions
p. 290 ff. Iraq’s worst case: America’s West Bank. Barnett’s got it right: “the more the occupation becomes an international tar baby, the more likely it is that America alone will be left holding the bag.” Amen. The problem is that it is hard to understand this and still defend a) the initial invasion decision, given that this was clearly one likely outcome any self-respecting futurist could envision; and b) the morality of marketing the invasion of Iraq as one of those “10-1000” casualty-range operations, when there was the intention to go in there and stay, putting it in the “10K-100K” range (as with the prior British occupation—we have had those kind of mortal casualties, only our medical skill is better).

After recognizing that the occupation was in worst-case mode at time of publication, he spends some effort suggesting ways to turn it around. Ways that were, of course, not taken. His last choice of ways to solve it (p. 293) is the second howler:
through the construction of Sharon’s Wall. To him, that will simplify the future provision of aid to Gaza and the West Bank toward their becoming “connected”. Nonsense—the only Core members with the wiring diagrams (or Bluetooth source code) for the Palestine region are the Israelis. To seal themselves off is to write off the zone—it’s that simple, and it’s becoming clearer all the time.