This is as parcial excert from a interview between Hugh Hewitt and Thomas P.M. Barnett. These are the parts of connectivity that I thought were most interesting for the full transcript go to
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Transcript_Page.aspx?ContentGuid=
958c6c72-2360-497d-8957-e341b11b24db
Thomas P.M. Barnett - Part 5
HH: Part 5 now with Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, in the conversation about his book, The Pentagon’s New Map,
one of the most important books of the last many years, read throughout
the Pentagon, instrumental in rethinking our strategic approach to the
world through the military and beyond. Dr. Barnett, welcome back. Good
to have you. ... HH:
What I liked about Chapter 5, Dr. Barnett, is it’s something I could
imagine being written 150 years from now, because it is at that level.
It’s a here is the challenge thrown down by bin Laden, here is the
riposte by the Bush administration, and it’s got none of this day to
day kind of, is the surge going to work, whatever. But it’s genuinely
the distillation of what happened. TB: Right. And you know, that’s the hardest part to sell to people,
is that we’re in this thing, you know, and it’s not really our choice
to leave or to come. I mean, we’ve been drawn into a battle that’s been
raging, I would argue, inside the Middle East for quite some time, and
there’s just no way we can divorce ourselves from it, because even if
we’re not there, you know what? The Asian economies depend so much on
access to oil, that the world has got to be there on some level. And
since we’re the only country that has the capacity to project military
power, you know, this is the world we live in. Either we deal with it,
or we retreat and just accept the fact that we’re not going to have a
standard of living that we can really enjoy. HH: Now I want to back up to system perturbations. What an unwieldy
term. I know why you use it, but couldn’t you have come up with
something cleverer? TB: Well, it’s the notion of…the classic example is you drop a stone
in a pond, and you say that’s the vertical action, that’s the vertical
scenario, dropping the stone in the pond. But what it creates are these
horizontal scenarios, the ripple effects. And you start to think about
that as a way of describing sort of the asymmetrical attack that you
experience, or to describe sort of any kind of shock to the system. I
mean, if you think about Katrina, if you think about SARS, you know,
they tend to have a geographic quality to them, they tend to come out
of the blue, they tend to scare people. They don’t tend to kill a lot
of people per se, but they have repercussions that are much bigger than
the actual strike. And so you start to realize that’s…my argument is
that’s a way of describing what it is to be attacked in a dense,
interconnected world. It’s the disconnectedness that results that’s
your real problem with. Not so much the original strike, because I
don’t think you can stop anybody from doing anything they can dream up.
I mean, it’s a complex world. But you’ve got to get better at being
resilient in terms of handling what comes as a result of that strike. ....... HH: Now it’s days and weeks. One of them Beijing and SARS. Explain how this faster perturbation plays out there. TB: Well, they ran into a situation, China did, where they were far
more connected with the world than they realized. I mean, they’ve
connected up in terms of all this travel, all this money going in and
out, all this business, but they still have parts of their universe in
China which are still semi-backward. So you have the kind of dangerous
practices with poultry and agricultural livestock in the Canton
province, Guangdong Province, as they call it now, and you get…that’s
typically where the flues arise for the planet. Well, we got SARS, kind
of this superflu, a few years back, and lo and behold, it quickly
transmitted itself not just to Guangzhou, but right over to Honk Kong.
And once it hits Hong Kong, international node for international
travel, boom. You get SARS traveling all around the planet very
rapidly. That’s when the World Health Organization, sort of the global
authority on this kind of thing, comes in and basically says to China,
you get this thing fixed, or we’re going to stop travel in and out of
your country. It actually happened to Toronto, where somebody showed up
from Honk Kong, infected with SARS, and the WHO shut down Toronto for
some period of time. And all of a sudden, China was responsible for all
this disruption around the world, and was forced into dealing with the
lack of transparency in its own health system. And what it triggered
was a huge uptick in state to state cooperation among all the countries
in Southeast Asia, so that when Avian Flu comes along a few years
later, they’re far more resilient. HH: And demonstrating, I think, the point that if you are connected
to the core, as China is, uneasily, but nevertheless there, you cannot
adapt non-core behaviors and succeed in it. TB: No, you’re forced, you know, each time you have one of these
perturbations, you’re forced by the system as a whole to kind of get
your ship in order, and to conform more an more to the rule. So the
more you connect, the more you’re subject to the code. HH:
Now Sub-Saharan Africa, after 9/11, also connects with a demand for
pharmaceutical relief for its AIDS crisis, a sort of reverse to the
China connection. TB: Yeah, this is one of those great complexity tales, you know, the
butterfly flaps its wings in China, and you get a hurricane off the
coast of Florida. What had happened was, and we talked about this as a
possibility of Y2K, you get the 9/11 strike, and we were concerned that
people would take advantage of Y2K to sow their own seeds of mischief,
and then claim credit as part of the great, you know, awakening of
terror and chaos that some people had predicted with Y2K, so it didn’t
surprise us that when you had 9/11, you’ve got this fellow traveler who
jumps into the situation right on its heels, and spreads anthrax, okay? HH: Yup. TB: You get five dead, eighteen sick in America. I mean, in terms of
actual deaths, it was miniscule. I mean, it wasn’t even a good car
wreck. But it created repercussions, especially since the anthrax was
spread into the Senate offices. Right on the heels of that, you get
Canada, normally a very sedate and very regular rule set follower,
Canada declares that it’s going to break Bayer Pharmaceuticals’ patent
on Cipro, and it’s going to start pumping out generic versions to make
the country safe from this possible sort of attack. Well, that was kind
of stunning for Canada to step up and do something like that. America
didn’t have to make such threats, or go through such demands, because
all America needed to do was glance sort of knowingly across the
Atlantic at Bayer, the German giant pharmaceutical, and they were smart
enough to start pumping out Cipro 24/7, all across the world, and
flooding the U.S. market with Cipro at cut rate prices to make sure
they appeared to be very responsive to new American concerns. Now
Africa watches this, sub-Saharan Africa, which for years had been
arguing on the AIDS crisis to the core, as I call it, advanced
countries, you have got to give us a break on patents. You’ve got to
give us some sort of relief here. You’ve got to let Indian and
Brazilian pharmaceutical companies come up with your triple cocktail,
break all your patents, and give it to us cheap, because we’re talking
about a huge crisis here, lots of people dying, and the result, the
response you usually got from the West was hey, that’s too much to ask
for. Well, that response wasn’t good enough, the result was we got a
new deal on the WTO treaty… HH:
During the go around of the World Trade Organization, sub-Saharan
Africa just rose up and said if you can break Cipro’s patent, you can
break the patent on these cocktails. TB: Right. And it was us being revealed as saying hey, under
national security emergency conditions, we’ll come up with a new rule
set on drugs if that’s what’s required. And what sub-Saharan Africa
countries basically said to us was hey, we think we’re in that kind of
situation with AIDS. Cut us a break, or we’ll derail the launching of
the development round. Since that was occurring in November, 2001, and
the advanced countries certainly didn’t want to make it look like Osama
bin Laden derailed those talka by creating this big tumult, they
basically gave in. It’s been complex in terms of the outcome, but they
basically gave in to the demands of developing countries to get some
relief on patents with AIDS drugs, so the outcome, oddly enough, in
this complex world, Osama bin Laden attacks America on 9/11, and you
get cheaper AIDS drugs throughout the gap as a result. HH: Now to the core and the controversial section of Chapter 5, your
argument that the United States needs to be a perturber, that it needs
to, and Bush did embrace, the big bang strategy, that the Middle East
simply does not work for the vast bulk of people who live there, that
that therefore, we went in and turned over all the tables as a response
to 9/11. We changed the rules. TB: Right. And you know, we have that history. I mean, the birth of
our country was a rules set reset for the planet. I mean, it sort of
said this is a new possibility, this kind of democracy, this kind of
government, this kind of new expression of political and economic
union. And so we have a history of doing that, and we really did it, I
would argue, in enjoining the effort in the Second World War and coming
out of it, and creating all those international organizations under
Truman, and creating the whole sort of structure for the Cold War, and
we were kind of called upon again by 9/11 to say you know, here’s the
new package. And we’ve gotten some of the rules out there. I mean, the
preemption concept with Bush, I think, is a necessary rule set change.
The trick has been how do we get it acceptance among a wide enough
array of countries in the world that it becomes not just a perceived
unilateralist act by America, but instead becomes a sort of logical
expression of the will of a majority of countries on the planet. HH: Now I want to quote you, I’m sure it’s a line that strikes some
of your audience as absurd, and others stand up and cheer. “Not only is
the United States government the greatest force for good the world has
ever known, but the U.S. military is the single greatest instrument of
that good as well.” Now I know that as a matter of statistics, you’ve
proven that, just in terms of mission days spent bringing relief to the
world where suffering is occurring. TB: Right. HH: But nevertheless, that still posits positive good to the U.S.
military’s operations in the world, and that must strike some as
far-fetched. TB: Well, I mean, I think you’ve got to look at it in terms of the
grand sweep of history. When we saved Europe in terms of a very
disastrous civil war in the first World War, we came back and stopped
the threat of fascism in the Second World War, and basically have
engaged in a long term babysitting operation in Europe that, you know,
gave birth to the EU over the long haul. We stood down the threat of
the communist socialist bloc, and on that basis, helped liberate 3
billion people in the direction of markets and economic freedom, and
hopefully over time, political freedom. We’ve become a huge glue in
Asia, and participated in that section of the world’s rise. Yes, there
were things we did along the way that were great missteps, Vietnam
being one of them. But you have to look at these mistakes in terms of
the larger stories that don’t get told, which is when Americans come
and stay with their forces, typically, stability ensues, economic
integration ensues, and you get prosperity over time and lasting peace.
We’re down to the tougher nuts now with sub-Saharan Africa and the
announcement today by Bush that there will be an Africa command, which
is something I predicted in the second book, Blueprint For Action, and
we’re stuck in the Middle East for quite some time. But these are no
longer challenges, and no greater challenges than what we faced in the
past. We just have to remember our role in history, and I argue that
that’s a very, very, very positive role that no other country has
aspired to, to the degree that we have.
HH:
Well now, let’s go…that was the jumping off point, and here comes the
right hook. Osama bin Laden’s message on 9/11 was essentially this. You
will never be able to live with us in your midst, we will attack you
from within, we will never give you peace. Your only choice is to
remove us from your world by removing yourself from ours. The only
alternative to this outcome is that one of us must die. That is
absolutely right. One of us must die. Either the core assimilates the
gap, or the gap divides the core. And again, this relates back to
Emily. Either you won or the cancer won. It was a completely shattering
event.
TB:
Right, right, right. And the cancer felt like that. It had kind of
gotten inside the walls of the house, and gotten inside the skin of my
first born, and it was there to kill her, and it was going to be…either
it went, or she went. And that kind of ordering principles is profound.
I mean, it’s Earth-shattering. I think that’s what 9/11 was for a lot
of people. And I think that was Osama bin Laden’s basic take on us, was
that if he scared us enough, dramatically enough, kind of punched us
hard, right in the face, he was hoping to shock us so out of control,
that we’d say you know what? It’s not worth it. We’ll pulling out of
the Middle East, and he’d have his set piece with the House of Saad
that he’s really gunning for. And instead, we basically threw Bush’s
decision to go not just to Afghanistan but to Iraq, we basically threw
the gauntlet back in his face, and said you know what? We’re going to
connect the Middle East faster than you can disconnect it, and we’re
not leaving until your part of the world connects, and in fact, until
your chances for acquiring power are completely destroyed.
TB: So they pioneered this kind of business-oriented approach to thinking through complex future alternatives, and creating scenarios which give the audience a deep understanding as to what that possible world would look and feel like. And once they give you a variety of those choices, you get a sense of the possible range of futures, and you ask yourself, how am I positioned to deal with those futures? So it’s a simple methodology. You ask a couple of questions, you get four outcomes, a yes-yes, a no-yes, a yes-no, and a no-no. And that gives you the four scenarios. So you try to keep it kind of rigorous and simple. What I did in this four-way scenario was basically to say hey, either the big bang is going to work, meaning we deal with Iraq effectively, and it creates kind of a tumult of change around the region, or Iraq is going to do badly, and you’re going to get kind of a cause celeb that’s going to draw a lot of resistence from around the region. And then there’s the question of Iraq itself. Does it become made over effectively, or does it end up becoming sort of America’s West Bank? And I think you’re right. We’re kind of stuck on the bad end of both of those spectrums. Iraq is looking more like America’s West Bank than a successful makeover, and we are seeing the cause celeb argument that the National Intelligence Council made, and not really the follow through on the big bang that we were hoping for, and that looked like, quite frankly, was going to be achieved as late as about sixteen to twenty-five months after the original invasion. There was a lot of very positive change throughout the region, which has since retrenched to a certain extent, because we haven’t been successful in the reconstruction. So I dubbed that kind of bad-bad scenario Blackhawk Down, a kind of a never ending series. Unlike a one-time act in Somalia, it’s the thing that just goes on, week after week after week, and since it’s broadcast across the media, it has a very numbing effect that kind of says to America, quagmire, a repeat of Vietnam, we can never defeat all these people, we’re better off to leave. And that’s the problem.
HH: Now in the opening to his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn wrote about what if the façade that we confronted was paper mache, and you could stick a stick through it? He was referring to the Soviet Union, and in fact, that’s what happened. Is it not possible that our enemy across the border, Iran, is in fact in very bad shape, and that we are close to a tipping point in Iraq that comes about from a combination of factors including new tactics, but also weariness, and a desire for stability on the Iraqis’ part?
TB: Well, first, I’ve got to say, we have very similar sources, because I did my senior honor’s thesis as an undergraduate on Solzhenitsyn, because I was a Russian literature major. So I loved the Oak and the Calf.
HH: Wonderful book.
TB: Love the reference. I think that is the case. I think when you look at Iran, it is a very spent, failed revolution. It hasn’t succeeded in exporting itself anywhere. It’s a bit of an outsider, much like Russia was to East-Central Europe and to Asia, not really loved in either quarters, so you’ve got to remember these guys are Shia, not Sunni. That’s the bulk of the regional neighbors that it’s dealing with, especially the House of Saud, and these guys are Persians, not Arabs. So if you think about they haven’t been very successful, they do put up a pretty brave front in terms of their infiltration and influence peddling throughout the region as a result of Afghanistan and Iraq. But if you look at what’s going on inside that country, that place is rotten to the core, and I really think we’re looking as a situation very much like late Brezhnevian Soviet Union, that if we push them to the edge effectively, we could get a collapse, and that’s the real debate now. Are we doing too many sticks, not enough carrots? What’s the balance? And Bush is pushing a pretty hard line, which has people concerned about a follow-on war, but he may actually pull it off, or he may end up conflating this thing, because as we saw with Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas, their proxies in the region, Iran is willing to conflate this crisis, and that can be pretty dangerous.
HH: Yeah, and very perilous times. Now I want to, before we get a couple of calls next segment, go to the one gap in your gap analysis that I find, which is the underestimation of the appeal of fundamentalist Islam, that they don’t want to connect, in fact, what they hate is the connection, and that it’s not a minority position in many places, or at least it’s not a minority among the powerful. They hate the connection.
TB: Well, in the Middle East, you’ve got a weird conflation of two different trends. You’ve got kind of the masses who are afraid, who desire the connectivity, especially the young people, and you’ve got to remember, the Middle East is overwhelmingly young. A lot of these countries, 70% of the population is under 30. So that crowd does want their MTV, by and large, and it’s the fear among the elders, and it’s a fear certainly among the ruling elite, and those who believe that globalization, if it comes in, will be highly pollutive, and very corrupting with its Western influences. So that’s what gets you the kind of middle class educated terrorist like Osama bin Laden, the guys who just find us all reprehensible. That’s a concentration of three different sources that say this is a bad thing: the elders in the population, the ruling elite who know their ability to control as authoritarian dictatorships in many of these situations would be eroded if they allow that connectivity to occur, and then those like Osama bin Laden and others radicals who say this is just a bad thing for our culture. You put that package together, it looks like the bulk of the population is resistant to Westernization, but we know from polls, time and time again, and this has been done very recently in Iran, and it was a kind of stunning result. They say, in effect, you know, we like your politics, we wish we had democracy, we like your markets, we’re natural traders, there’s nothing wrong with that in our minds. What we have a hard time handling is kind of the social norms that you have. You’re just a little too loose and fast and wild for us, and so we really fear that we’ll see the disruption of our social life if we open up. And that’s the fear that the fundamentalists really jump on, and say you know what? It’s so bad, you’ve got to keep our countries really isolated from this negative outside world.
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