The coming storms
Scholars and pundits trade dark prophecies--and high hopes
Bacevich makes clear that he is not blaming the victims or exonerating Osama bin Laden or other Islamic extremists. All the same, he says, "we have overinflated the strategic importance of the Middle East, and taking a more realistic and balanced approach to the region would require making changes here at home that we are unwilling to make." In saying that military actions stemming from America's pursuit of material abundance are a major cause of World War IV, Bacevich rules out any possibility of idealism or altruism in Bush's security policies, particularly as applied to the Middle East. And that is where Thomas Barnett, author of an important article in the February issue of Esquire , offers a more nuanced--and certainly more hopeful--perspective.
Breakdown. Barnett's position extends one of the central arguments of his widely hailed book, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. There, the former U.S. Naval War College researcher and professor argued that 9/11 signaled a major system breakdown in the U.S.-backed globalizing process. "In the process of rapid expansion," Barnett says, summarizing his analysis of the go-go '90s, "economics got way ahead of politics, technology got way ahead of security." Older structures intended to support global security, including the United Nations, were simply not up to the task, he believes. The growing disjunction between global security and economic globalization aggravated--and was aggravated by--the distance between the "Core" nations that generally play by and profit from the rules of globalization and the "Gap" nations that do not yet operate by those rules. By Barnett's analysis, 9/11 was a gesture of defiance orchestrated by a well-organized group of extremists who seek to keep the people of the Gap outside the Core--and locked into a totalitarian theocracy fundamentally opposed to the openness that comes with globalization. Those extremists, Barnett adds, rightly associate globalization with American ideals and interests. But--and here Barnett differs decisively with Bacevich--the historical uniqueness of those ideals and interests is that they benefit not just one player but all players in the non-zero-sum game of globalization.
But if Barnett earlier praised Bush's new bold security initiatives (including regime change in Iraq) for redressing a system imbalance, his Esquire article warns that bold military moves will lead to nothing if America does not now induce other Core nations--not just the obvious European ones but also India and China--to participate in new and often ad hoc security arrangements involving extensive and vigilant policing of the troubled Gap areas. In addition to transforming our own military for large peacekeeping operations, America must engage in more imaginative and persuasive diplomacy, using enticements, for example, to bring Iran into the game as a responsible regional player instead of merely threatening it not to build the bomb. "Iran's the key," he writes, urging Bush to think like Nixon on the road to detente with China. "Squeeze it now while it's scared--and while Arafat's still dead. America has played bad cop long enough with Iran. For crying out loud, Iranians are the only people in the Middle East who actually like us!" To lock China into a new security arrangement--and particularly to get it to cooperate in the effort to remove North Korea's Kim Jong Il from power--Barnett urges Bush to drop the U.S. defense guarantee to Taiwan, which will only stop Taipei from making unnecessary symbolic gestures of independence from the mainland.
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