Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

Cross posted from my blog - Fear and Loathing in the Blogosphere - In his new book Great Powers:American and the World After Bush Tom Barnett provides some much needed perspective on where America stands almost 8 years after 9/11 and what challenges lay ahead. Barnett begins the book by laying out perhaps the fairest reading of both the achievements and missteps of the Bush administration, including the single most realistic assessment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq offered by anyone. Barnett offers a point by point critique of the administration's blunders in both the post war and the attempted rerun of the WMD narrative on Iran while also maintaining that a world without Saddam is still preferable to a world with Saddam and giving the Bush administration credit for riding out the public disapproval and pushing ahead with the surge. After offering a balanced assessment of recent history, Barnett reaches back in history a few hundred years to compare the current rise of the 3 billion new capitalist of the New Core with the rise of the American middle class across the 18th and 19th centuries and eventual spreading of the American model via the Atlantic Charter, Marshall Plan, etc, after WWII. Placing our current challenges in the context of American history is Great Powers single biggest contribution to our current understanding of public policy. Again and again Barnett backs up his point that our current challenges are a result of our success, not failure (i.e. moving from our primary national security threat being the Soviet Union to the primary threat being a dude in a cave is progress). A corollary to that point is this: the new global middle class will not accept being denied their opportunities anymore than the rising American middle class would have, and America can lead or get out of the way, but we cannot stop it (nor would we want to). Great Powers is in some ways more and in some ways less ambitious than Barnett's last two books, The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action. Both PNM and BFA offered ambitious scenarios for possible future American military interventions (preferably with our New Core allies) abroad in hot spots such as North Korea. GP avoids such speculation and instead tracks the progress of the department of everything else. GP offers a pathway for that department to take as it grows out of DOD and eventually into its own cabinet level position - a clear pathway that I felt was lacking from his previous two books. On the other hand, I found the lack of ambitious scenarios somewhat disappointing. BFA ended with a section Tom called "Blogging the Future" in which he speculates on everything from the collapse of North Korea to the expansion of the United States - GP offers no such wild speculation (as Tom says "nobody likes a wishy washy visionary") but teases with a brief mention of H.G. Wells Things to Come but fails to offer a Barnett branded look at the future. Let me be clear, the lack of sci-fiesque

Seldom have I seen such a profound misreading of a more important book. That is, of course, assuming that those "reviewers" even bothered to crack the book open. I know, reading can be hard. Well. I've just read this giant of a book. And do yourself a favor: If you welcome having all of your assumptions challenged; if you are intellectually secure enough to step out of your echo chamber for just a moment; and if you are hungry for illumination in a time that seems that there is so much darkness - read Great Powers by Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett's analyses of the way forward in the Obama years, coupled with his holistic view of the American expansion westward and its parallels to today's globalization is nothing short of brilliant. And challenging. And enraging. And heartening And exhilarating. All in the same volume. On the other hand, if you are only looking for a cheap political document, something just to serve as affirmation for the beliefs you've long ago set in stone, something just to satisfy your need for easy rhetoric, then this book will be way over your head.

Barnett's earlier books, especially The Pentagon's Mew Map, took much of the fear out of the War on Terror and replaced it with a challenge to America to engage with the other economic powers in the world to complete globalization and lift two billion more people out of poverty. His latest book, Great Powers, tells us why it's something we can and must do not only for those two billion people but for America's future. Particularly interesting are the parallels he draws between America's history and the state of things in many developing countries. Our government and our laws took generations to fully develop and its no suprise that the same is true elsewhere, China and Russia included. This book is a roadmap for the US for the next several generations. Barnett is nothing if not a hardheaded realist. He says that the military is still going to play a large role overseas in small wars but that the real goal is to get poor countries to attract capital and develop substantial economies of their own. This requires multinational trade and development efforts; the more countries the better. This not only lifts people out of poverty but takes away the rationale for terrorist activity. To make the leap countries need to educate their children, boys and girls, adopt the business rules and institutions that permit foreign business to deal with them and gradually transition to governments that will work for the people not the ruling class. In Barnett's world, prosperity is king. By engaging with the other big economic players in the world the US can lead a team that can make this happen. If you are feeling sorry for the state of the world these days, this book will lift your spirits with its very believable "Yes we can!" message.

I think after reading this book that Thomas Barnett has created a masterpiece that focuses on the future, by reminding Americans of their past. Here is why: Barnett took the empirical evidence from works of hundreds of noted historians and primary sources and began to make a comparison of American history to today's world and more importantly to the world of tomorrow. All the while he continued to blog, writing his thoughts and collecting snippets of material from those 180+ who by way of responding, enlisted in his "Corp of Discovery" to chart a vision of the future. In the finest tradition of the Medici Effect, Tom Barnett collected all the intersecting ideas and points of information, mulled them over in his mind, shared them with his many readers, listened to their voices, gave presentations around the world and heard back from his audiences. Out of this mass of information he created Great Powers. When I read Tom's work I am struck how much his view of American history dovetails with my own views. I am of the infamous boomer generation, but by fate was raised by my grandparents, who probably gave me as large a dose of "the Greatest Generation" as they had instilled in my mother, so I always seemed to feel more comfortable in my views of the world in that earlier cohort group. Today, as I teach my modern American history classes, I realize that lessons I have tried to instill into my students appear in Great Powers. So much has written about our history, concentrating on the greatest events or on our failures, as has been the case in the recent decades of navel gazing and self-loathing treatises. Tom boils it down to the really important events and persons responsible for today's rapidly connected world. Reading this book will instill a sense pride in being part of this great and grand experiment called America. Great Powers is written for everyone interested in history, politics and strategy, but it is especially useful to generation coming up that is hungry to envision a better world. To launch them on their many courses, they need to have the knowledge that the port that launched them, the United States, is more than the negatives they have heard about since they began to read and understand. As those of the next generation sail into the future they need to know their home port is something to be proud of, and its source code of empowerment, something to be cherished.

Barnett provides a soup-to-nuts retrospective and prescriptive look at the entire geopolitical universe. He covers early American history, the good and bad of the Bush administration, and a strategic and economic look at every region of the world. Aside from perhaps Thomas Friedman, there's not a more optimistic thinker who's worth reading. While by no means a Pollyanna, Barnett sees the world as in much better shape than most of his counterparts in the national security policy community and sees it becoming progressively better. The things that keep most strategists and economists up at night are mere bumps in the road that, if properly managed, will lead to a more peaceful, prosperous planet. Suffice it to say that Great Powers isn't summer beach reading. The prose is breezy enough; the author has polished it over years of lectures, PowerPoint briefings, and blog posts. But the subject matter is weighty and you'll want a highlighter and a pen to underline things and write notes on the page. You'll find yourself nodding in agreement at times, finding that the author has captured your thoughts perfectly, explaining them in a way where it finally makes sense. At other times, you may think he's mad and want to shout obscenities at him.