WINNING CAN BE A BITTER PILL FOR SOME TO SWALLOW:

Twelve steps to a new grand strategy: a review of Great Powers: America and the World after Bush by Thomas P M Barnett (Benjamin A Shobert , 3/21/09, Asia Times)

Noticeably absent from most of these is an attempt to penetrate the fog of past mistakes and advocate a path forward based on what the errors of Iraq tell us. Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P M Barnett's newest book, works to correct this inadequacy by adding clarity to the challenges facing the world, recasting them as opportunities and reminding Americans that we are "the source code for globalization". (pg 423) Barnett's passionate belief comes across clearly in this book: Americans need to be reminded that even those things which make us feel insecure, such as China's rise, can only be understood as the American model having won over the decrepit model of communism. But this equally means that Americans are in a unique position to set the process back, in particular in response to the country's financial instability.

Given the current economic turmoil, when baser instincts are to look outside our borders for others to blame, Barnett's book is a well-reasoned argument for America to re-imagine itself and re-engage with the world's problems, precisely when our impulses are to retract and disengage. Barnett believes that America has insights on politics, economic development and fostering innovation which are unique to our history. Many of the lessons of our development - in particular the uglier chapters of America's Civil War period - should be reminders to us of the challenges emerging countries will face. These memories should also empower a gracious patience on our part towards them as they develop.

Equally important, at time when many Americans question both the nature of their country's power and the means by which it should be used, Barnett reminds his readers that the US still has the military, diplomatic and economic power to make the world safer. In many ways, he wants to remind his readers that America is still a "Great Power".

INTERVIEW: Redefining America's global role (Asia Times, 3/21/09)

The February release of Tom Barnett's latest book, Great Powers: America and the World after Bush, is the most recent in a line of bestselling books that have advocated a different model of engagement for US military power coupled to a new structure of how America can deal with threats to its safety and security. Benjamin A Shobert interviewed Dr Barnett. [...]

Benjamin A Shobert: I think some readers might struggle with your thoughts on the "exact nature of our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan" (pg 52). Specifically, if you knew America didn't have, as you call it, a "department of everything else" to deal with the aftermath of Iraq, don't you run the risk of leaving behind an even more unstable situation than the one you inherited?

Tom Barnett: Absolutely, that was a risk. My argument was that there is no way the US military was ever going to break its Vietnam syndrome (we self deter and limit our impact on regime changes because we're not comfortable with the post-war requirements of nation-building and counter-insurgency), unless something along the lines of Iraq occurred. That's easy to say from where I'm sitting, but the long hard slog in Iraq was going to trigger a process of evolution the military needed to go through.

Looking at it as a sequence of unfolding events, Iraq will be judged by history to be relatively unimportant in a strategic sense, not unlike Britain's Boar War. It is not game-changing in the sense it is not a conflict where American "empire" had gone to die. Rather, it serves as a crucial turning point in the US military's evolution: yielding the type of military that we need so that we can step up to future challenges in this global security environment.

Benjamin A Shobert: But doesn't that mean it was going to get out of control?

Tom Barnett: Truthfully, you could say to the region, "I can't control this." If you look at what was happening in the region around 2005, the events in Iraq were triggering a load of positive change in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, etc. Granted not all of it was going to turn out well, but overall there was this sense that there was no going back and that some of the change was going to be quite meaningful.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2009 6:28 AM