Navigating American National Security Challenges in a Changing Global Landscape

In his new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, national security expert Thomas Barnett argues that America's grand strategy is off kilter from globalization's current trajectory and needs to be dramatically revamped. During the Bush administration, America was paranoid and belligerent, he adds, sowing damaging seeds of uncertainty across the global economic system. Barnett spoke recently with U.S. News about the Bush administration's errors and offered a prescription for getting America back on track. Excerpts: 

Where has America most significantly gone off course in the past eight years?

Where Bush got off course for me was becoming really obsessed with two extremes: terrorism and this notion of accelerated democracy. It captured so much of our foreign policy and national security strategy after 9/11. For the rest of the world looking at us, they're just struggling to get their baseline incomes up from $2 a day to $13 a day. There's all the social and economic change that comes about with that shift from basic sustenance economies to an economy with some abundance to it. So for us to become after 9/11 so visibly and pervasively fixated on "kill all terrorists now" and "bring me accelerated democracy now" to them just seemed superfluous, like we were chasing very narrow and extreme goals that didn't really correspond to the lives they were leading.

So what should America do now?

If all President Obama does is give the semblance of somebody who is trying with great effort to be as honest as he can, to as many audiences as possible, and that he's a guy who thinks through second-order effects of decisions he makes . . . even just to the point of this economic crisis, showing a lot of concern and deference to our own middle class, that hopefully gets translated into a similar sort of deference and appreciation of the needs and ambitions and dreams of this rising global middle class. If he could just make that connection again, and make it seem like we're on the side of all this change, and we're eager to not just obsess over its friction but appreciate its force, and don't give any impression that we're holding these people down.

You say that America has not so much lost its standing in the world as that it has modeled very bad behavior. How so?

The rest of the world really misses our leadership when we're gone, and they want us back, especially as a result of this economic crisis. Absent the root confidence of the American consumer, there's not much confidence in the system. If we get really scared about this economic crisis, if we act defensive and lash out, then we'll be sending a signal to everybody else. Our biggest export, and we don't realize it, is rules—and we'll say to everyone else, "This is how you should behave at this point." Globalization is amazing and profound and reshapes the planet; it's the most amazing thing ever unleashed. If we suddenly scream out, "Every man for himself," we'll unleash fear in the system.

You say that people have unfounded fears in the West about countries like China. Why shouldn't China be a concern?

When we were the rising power, we were discounted in many ways because we were brutal to our people, our labor. We were considered pretty unfair pervaders of markets in the sense that we stole technology. We had high tariffs. We did whatever it took to catch up. China is considered a really brutal, nasty, tough form of capitalism. As much as that is going to be a model for many countries catching up by brute force, it's important for us to represent a go-fast mentality and not have China be the only great alternative to Europe's go-slow model.

But doesn't China challenge the notion that economic growth triggers democracy?

That historically happens when people reach $5,000 or $10,000 [per capita] gross domestic product. And China is a ways from $5,000 still. Also, if you look at countries as they join the world, post-revolution, they are often dominated by a single party for 50 years. The party that dominated Japan dominated for 50 years. You have a dominant party that is sort of the Harlem Globetrotters, and you have the Washington Generals on the scene and they lose every time, until the dominant party transgresses enough of the fears and desires of an emerging middle class where they want reform and change.

It's very hard to imagine with all the things China is going to have to endure, in terms of damage to their environment, the aging of their population, the slowdown of continued economic advance, I think by the time you get to 2030, they have very strong expectations that political pluralism is an inevitability.

You say that America is going to need new strategic partners, to include rising powers, going forward. In what sense?

It's the Asians who are the natural integrators of the age. We're still ruled by people who can't say "China" without the modifier "Communist" in front of it. If your population is declining and aging, if your defense budget is decreasing, you're probably not an appropriate ally for what comes next. Instead, we keep convincing ourselves that with the Brits and the Dutch and a few other good friends, we can take care of everything ourselves. But when we say, "Come on guys, let's head out with a posse," they just keep sending smaller and smaller crews out of NATO. I say if you haven't seen a combat casualty in 50 years, you can't be an ally of mine. And you'd better be willing to kill somebody.

Why should Obama read your book?

An agent of mine gave it to him two nights before the inauguration, and he's had enough time to read it by now. He's a post-boomer president still dealing with an overwhelmingly boomer Congress who will fight tooth and nail over the dumbest issues known to man, arguing incessantly over several weeks of a fetus's life and the last couple of minutes of a person's death. It's a post-Caucasian world, not a post-American world. Obama is at a variety of tipping points in global economics and global security. He'll be a successful guy whether or not he reads my book—a lot of other people need to read it.