This will be interesting for those who view things thru a 'spiritual' context.
Tom Barnett is one of the leading scholars on 'globalization'. Mindy is part of the Global New Thought Movement.
My take away is the integration of spiritual and/or religious movements and economics.
source: thomaspmbarnett.com
Mindy Audlin's interview with Tom
Remember when Mindy interviewed Tom? She wrote later to ask if she could include the transcript of that interview in a book called Voices of Peace: 21 Visionary Leaders Engage in Humanity's Most Urgent Conversation. We agreed and publish the transcript here as well.
(Check out the website. You might be interested in the book.)
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We are very blessed to have the unique opportunity to talk with a former assistant for strategic futures in the OFT, Office of Force Transformation, and a professor at the Naval War College, among many other things. He is the author of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century and his latest book, Great Powers: America and the World after Bush. We are delighted to have with us today Thomas P.M. Barnett.
Well, Tom, I saw you speak last year. You were at the annual conference for the Association of Global New Thought and I was absolutely riveted by your message, and thought it was fascinating. It is a little unusual for us to have political strategists on our Leading Edge program, but your message is a Leading Edge message, and I thought it was really important to bring your vision, your ideas to this forum. There is so much in what you are seeing for the future that is really aligned with what we teach here at Unity. On the very first page of your book The Pentagon's New Map, you write: "When the Cold War ended, our real challenge began. The United States had put out so much energy during those years trying to prevent the horror of global war, that it forgot the dream of global peace." Why is it so important for that shift in perspective to occur?
Well, it is actually crucial now, experiencing as we are arguably I believe the first global economic crisis of the globalized age. You have to go all the way back to 1982 to really find a global recession, but back then, we did not really talk about global economy; we really only talked about the West - about twenty five percent of humanity at the time, even though it controlled about seventy percent of the global productive power and wealth in the system. But now we really are talking about a global economy that encompasses, by a lot of measures upwards of eighty five percent of the world's population. So the package that we pursued, the model of development that we had, really went all the way back to the early 1800's, when the Industrial Revolution hit Europe and England, in particular. That model, rather resource-intensive, obviously has to change fairly dramatically when you are talking about not one-tenth or one-fifth or even a quarter of the world's population engaged in that sort of standard of living pursued, but instead we are talking upwards of eighty five to ninety percent. We are in a different frame of reference in terms of the ingenuity, the innovation and the recognition of huge inter-dependencies that are being created by this massive unleashing of popular demand for a better life, those three billion capitalists and such that were added in the past couple of decades. So the reason why it is important for America to shift is that still, very much so, we see a world of nuclear weapons, we see a world of terrorists, we see a world only of bad things. And after seven years of post-9/11, of that kind of mindset and vision from Bush-Cheney, we really became so disengaged from the way the rest of the world is viewing this time period, one of great economic advance, one of incredible integration, networks proliferating, and empowerment to a level that is just stunning. I mean fifteen to twenty years ago, you could talk about half the world never having used the phone.
That is amazing.
Now we are talking about Twittering revolutions and cell phone coverage of events almost in any neck of the woods you can name, globally. So, we really have to understand the way we have conducted ourselves with the world. Focusing on the prevention of bad things needs to shift - and I think it has, to a certain degree with Obama - into a creation of what has been called the future worth creating, the recognition that we are coming upon the emergence of a global middle class, which is huge, and that we need to understand this is not an alien world. This is not a Frankenstein that we have unleashed. What we have created here is something we very much sought to do. It went all the way back to the end of the Second World War when Franklin Roosevelt basically promised a new deal for the rest of the world much as he had created for America, and really made explicit something that had been dreamt of, going all the way back to his cousin Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20th century: this notion of remaking the planet in our image, not so much immediately in a political sense, but very much immediately in the economic sense. So if you think of America, it is really the first multi-national union in human history. Thirteen members to begin with, fifty members now, and no reason why we could not add more members - the EU does it; nobody calls that imperialism. That model of states uniting, economies integrating, networks proliferating, collective security growing, a competitive religious landscape - meaning not just freedom of religion but freedom of religions to compete for believers, okay, which is a huge social lubricant - . . .
Yeah. We will talk more about that in some depth. I would like to talk more about that.
. . in a sense of rule is fundamental, okay? That came about in America when we really knitted together our sectional economies in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War into a truly national, continent-wide economy. When you start to see national companies, national brands, national products, then national identity truly begins to emerge, much like you are watching in China today. So when we had that kind of flowering of integration, what arose in our environment was a middle class for the first time in our history, a broad middle class, and because of the great rapaciousness and the brutality of the capitalism we were practicing in that time period, much as it has been done on a global scale now, we went through a very angry period in our 1870's, 1880's, a populist phase, even though we were growing very dramatically in terms of wealth, great income inequality, raping the environment, child labor abuse, a rough lot for women, I mean it was an angry, divided, unequal society that then went into - thanks to the progressive movement very much led by religious groups - . . .
That was in 1890 . . .
. . . a progressive age where we really tamed our environment and really started to come up with an answer that separated us from Europe. When Europe encountered the emergence of a great middle class at the turn of the 20th century, they came up with rule from the Right - fascism, and rule from the Left - Bolshevism, where we came up with rule from the middle, and that middle-class ideology which feels under assault today because of the competitive landscape we have created with the global economy, that is really the caption, the flag-target for the 21st century, if you realize we are facing the emergence, and coming about right all around us right now, a global middle class that will have to decide how it is going to rule itself from the left, from the right, or from the middle. So we are seeing on a global scale many of the same things we went through as a multi-national union once we got past our Civil War and the question of slavery, in America here, 1865 to 1917. So the role that religious groups played in creating that progressive movement, I say, is going to be replicated, already being replicated on a global scale, and that is why we should admit or accept that the 21st Century is going to be the most religious century we have ever seen and that is not a scary thing. Do not put that all in terms of radical fundamentalists, think more in terms of the evangelicals, which as a group, are expanding dramatically as fundamentalists are shrinking in their influence, and come to realize that we need to harness that kind of religious awakening much as we did in America at various points - we had a number of religious awakenings in our past - and understand it as a tremendous force for creating a progressive agenda and taming this global version of capitalism which needs to be tamed much as our national versions did a hundred, a hundred-fifty years ago.
It was back in the 1890's that the Unity movement and the New Thought movement really started to take root. You were talking about all the things that were happening in the 70's and the 1880's, it was sort of in response to that. I am assuming that desire for unity . . .
Well, you raise a big kind of economic determinist point. I mean, there was a religious awakening in America pre-Revolution, and it was one of the causes of our Revolution. There was a religious awakening in the American frontier in the 1820's and 30's which, you know, developed into the Abolitionist movement, and it was a huge influence there. But the one that happened in the latter decades of the 19th century was much more economically driven, which gives me a lot of hope when you are talking about a middle class emerging globally. You know, people when they exist in a sustenance mode, just barely getting by, largely agricultural, the rule sets and the strictures, the social codes that come with that tend to be really strict. Everybody gets married, everybody cranks babies, no homosexuals allowed, we plant these crops, these crops work here, we do not mess around, we do not experiment, this is how we survive the off season.
Right.
Okay? And if you think about that, that is the Malthusian trap that says population is strictly limited because organic growth, how you can grow by using resources from the world, is strictly limited. There is no such thing in that mindset as inorganic growth or escaping the limits of material growth into true wealth like we have done with the Industrial Revolution in the West since the 1800's. So if you understand that most religions in the world were formed during that tough Malthusian phase, when you allow societies to go from sustenance to abundance, that is massive social revolution.
And that is what is happening worldwide right now.
That is what is happening worldwide. What happens is what happened in America in the 1870's and the 1880's. I mean, we had the rise of the middle class, the rise of leisure activities - that is when all our social institutions, civic institutions really came about, the vast bulk of them. It is when 'leisure time' and those kinds of definitions came about - major league baseball started, all sorts of stuff happened in that time frame and you are seeing a replication of that model now. So, people who have lived in sustenance for thousands of years, with strict religious codes attached to that survival, all of a sudden, young woman does not have to marry who dad says, all of a sudden young woman does not have to stay in the village, all of a sudden young woman can get an education, all of a sudden she can marry outside her faith, her religion, her race, her social caste, whatever, and the controls largely male over female that had existed and had been enshrined in a lot of tough religious stricture for centuries comes under assault and you got social revolution, and you got two responses to that social revolution. One says, hey, this is out of control; if women are going to be allowed to do this, when we have not allowed women to do that in our neck of the woods for centuries upon centuries, thousands of years, one answer is the fundamentalist answer: That is an evil world.
Yes.
. . . I am going to cut myself off from it, I cannot live with you bad people, I am going to force isolation and drive you out. Or you say, I have got to adapt my religious code to this and my adaptation is going to be the new better version that I need to evangelize and spread to the rest of the world - almost in a defensive / offensive manner, you know - if I cannot defeat your integration efforts I will remake you in my social-religious image. You see both of these answers coming out of Islam, which is a very rapidly growing religion,/with a strong evangelical strain to it, but also a core fundamentalist-that-has-gone-violent strain that really constitutes what most people call this long struggle or persistent struggle or long war, whatever you want to call it, against radical extremism. So many people look at that little package and say, "This is our future, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, more religion is bad."
I would argue the opposite is true and we should not take our cues from the very odd historical evolution that Europe went through after the Second World War, when it, you know, after two world wars in a row, basically said nationalism is bad, religion is bad, bury these concepts. Because we do not recognize ourselves as a multi-national union here in America. Instead, we look to Europe and say, "Well, that is the first version." We make the mistake of assuming that their particular evolution, because they went through so much violence in the first half of the 20th century, signals the notion that modernity brings a collapse of religious identity. When I would argue, as I just did, you take people from sustenance to abundance, my God, that is a bizarre, a historical, perverse journey by their standards, and in that journey, which is inescapable - because people want better lives, they want better lives for their kids, etc. - they are going to search for and grab onto self-help guides, religious codes, you know, anything that will give them a moral compass, a handhold definition of what a good life is. And so you are seeing in these places like China, which arguably features the most un-churched generation in human history, and a vast one at that, you are seeing China explode in terms of its religiosity, and really go back to what it was, a highly spiritual nation.
I saw you at a conference that was a New Thought conference. You were one of the keynote speakers and there were Unity ministers there, there were leaders from throughout the New Thought movement, and their response to your talks, was that everyone was abuzz. I think we are not used to hearing political strategists at conferences of this nature and yet the message really resonated. What is going on with that?
Well, you know, it really taps into the bulk of religious sentiment in the world, which tends to be more pre-millennialist, more optimistic, more "How can we make this world more heaven-like?" over time, as opposed to that kind of post-millennialist, fatalistic, more fundamentalist rejection of the modern evil world mindset. But do not expect it to go away immediately, I say, because globalization is on a tear, even with the global downturn. It slowed up things dramatically in the advanced economies or older economies in the West, but not much in the surging economies of the East and South, so that globalization is definitely still in a very high frontier-integrating mode, much like it was in the American West as we expanded westward across the 19th century. And it was David Prothero who wrote this great book, Religious Illiteracy, and in it, there is a chapter on this great history of religion in America throughout our history. Frontier areas always beget the most firebrand evangelical movements, because it is a tumultuous landscape. People are going from, as I said earlier, sustenance to possibilities of abundance very rapidly, things are being created out of thin air - networks, governments, opportunities - and there is a huge demand for religion in that kind of landscape, because amidst all that change it supplies a sense of some permanence, and supplies a sense of some code of behavior against which to measure the progress of economics, politics, social change. So if we are in a frontier-integrating mode on a global scale, which I believe we are, no surprise, the evangelicals are taking the day, and religions are expanding dramatically, and the versions of religion that you find in these frontier areas tend to be more intense than the kind that we have migrated toward in our lasting abundance in the advanced west. So we tend to look at them and say, "Wow, you know, they are scary, they are hardcore, they are old-school, what is up with that?" My Catholic church is certainly getting a taste of that with a lot of these . . . priest shortages. We get these priests from Africa, Latin America, and we expect these laid-back types, but what we get are these firebrands. So religion, by and large, I think finds my message unusual in its optimism, and feels empowered with the message that we are in that frontier-integrating age, and that on a global scale we are experiencing a populism that better lead to a progressivism because once you have the anger, you better find answers . . .
Right.
. . . otherwise things fall apart. I think they like the message that says, hey, you are not part of the problem, you are very much part of the solution, and do not let the religious movements of the world be tagged with the radical sins of a very small minority who are on the wane in the historical sense; and yet, as globalization comes to their frontier off-grid locations, you have got to expect them to put up a fight.
Sure. As you were saying, the shift that is happening is happening so rapidly that it seems like everybody is trying to catch their footing. It's easy for that Armageddon type of fear to take hold, so here is something that is an alternative to that.
Right.
It is very refreshing.
Well, you know, globalization's prevailing movement, so to speak, is that economic networks tend to race ahead of political networks and/or rules, so the economic rules race ahead, the political rules lag behind, the networks race ahead but the security lags behind. So you get kind of a wild-west mentality, and we are so removed from our frontier-integrating days, we like things very calm and very certain and very conformed . . .
Right.
. . . very controlled. So that when we see crazy stuff come at us, stuff that we have not encountered, these mindsets are so off-grid... I mean they are the Unabomber, they are David Koresh, they are Timothy McVeigh, and when we look at them we just say, Well, these people do not represent things, they are mentally ill." When we get a package like 9/11, our tendency is to say, "Well, this is either a conspiracy or Armageddon, either God is in charge or the U.S. government actually pulled this off", because the notion that, like, nineteen or twenty guys with half a million dollars pulled this off is too scary to contemplate. So we look for very simple answers, and that is where you get the conspiracies. We would prefer to have the stern father administer all the justice in the world, whether it is God or the U.S. government.
Right.
Than to say, "Hey, this is the world we are creating, we take responsibility for it." You want to fix this world? It's called engage this world, not put up a firewall. It is interesting to me that the countries that are the most engaging right now, that are experiencing the most religious tumult are not the old countries of the West. The number one supplier around the world of missionaries right now is South Korea.
Really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So we are faced with kind of a back-to-the-future sort of admonishment from history here. We were good at selling to the bottom of the pyramid, back when we had a middle class that was much more lower-end, back when Sears & Roebuck could sell you a house in a box.
Right.
Or where Singer would sell you a sewing machine using micro-loans, except they called it 'installment plan' back then. Back when we were media-dark and people did door-to-door salesmanship. All that kind of stuff which is going like gangbusters right now in parts of Africa, throughout China, throughout Asia, throughout India. In these places, you are looking at all the same dynamics that you saw, say, in the American West in 1865 - 1900. And we have just gotten sort of complacent in our view of the world, and so darn focused on consumption in the last twenty years. In part, because our global strategy is sort of bringing Asia on board with, "Say, hey, you want to go for export-driven growth? Fine, we will absorb all your exports, you take all your profits and put them back into our debt markets, keep our money cheap, and we will keep this thing going for quite some time, and we'll allow you to rise without any sort of great power arms races and whatnot", and we were enormously successful - too much so with Asia, to the point where they cannot sell to us anymore, and we cannot go into debt anymore. So we need to move on to something else and remind ourselves, "Hey, there is a growing middle class coming onboard out there, but it is not the one you sold to in the past. This one expects a lot of value for its money, and it has got to be a lot more spiritually motivated." And it is back to the future, remembering what it is like to sell to a conservative couple in Oklahoma in 1895, as opposed to the college student who gets a credit card the minute he turns eighteen.
And goes nuts.
And goes nuts.
Thomas, we have talked a lot about peace in a strategic perspective. What does peace mean to you, personally?
Well, it is all about creating certainty. What is compelling, frightening about the rise of the middle class is, you say, ideally you want a population bell curved. You want a few poor people on the left, you want a big mass of the middle class in the middle, and you want a small chunk of really rich people on the right. You ask yourself, "What are those various components that they want from their government?" The poor arguably want protection from their circumstances, and the rich you can cynically argue want protection from the poor. What the middle class wants is really hard to deliver, and that is the challenge of the 21st century when you have a rise of the global middle class. The middle class wants protection from uncertainty, they want protection from the future, which is why they are so drawn to religion. Religion gives you ideas about the future, a way to contextualize it and say, "If you do this, good things will happen; if you do that, bad things will happen." That's what the middle class wants, because it has achieved a certain standard of living, so its ambitions are modest, they are middle-class, and there is nothing wrong with that. They want to keep what they have achieved, a better life than their parents had, and they want to pass on the possibility of better lives to their children. So, you know, security has become the dominant aspect of peace in the last twenty years, and it's a huge revolution. I would like to point out that when I got into this business, one of the first things I ever did - I just came from listening to my first child's heartbeat and seeing the ultrasound, when she was a fetus - and then I walked into a room and we had a discussion about a limited nuclear war. We had this sassy, rhetorical discussion about how many tens or hundreds of millions could go in various scenarios and what would be acceptable. In the time frame when I started my career - I'm forty seven, I had a PhD when I was twenty seven - the paradigm was to lighten up the planet in seven minutes. But now, if you look at it, and you see this with the drones in northwest Pakistan, now the goal is to kind of find, recognize, target and kill one or two bad actors, try to limit the collateral damage involved, and you try to do that in about a seven- to eight-minute kill chain, as they call it. What is stunning about that to me is that in twenty years (my career) - this is human history - we have gone from a paradigm that said blow up the planet in seven minutes to kill a bad guy in seven minutes. So war has gone from a system-level fear, which was profound when I was a child, as we all feared nuclear war, and now it is down to kind of a 'get the bad guys'. If you look at US military intervention in the last twenty years, go all the way back to when we toppled Noriega in Panama, we have not fought wars against militaries much. We have not really waged wars against countries or nations or peoples, and every instance since then, either right from the start or very soon into it, we realize we are basically there to get the bad guys.
Right.
So . . .
Can we really get the bad guys or, if we get the bad guys, will there just be another bad guy that pops up?
Well, this is a good point, and this is what my work in the private sector with EnterraSolutions in the last five years has been all about. It's something we called development in a box that we are doing now with the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and we are being asked to come in to a lot of other countries in Asia and Africa and the Middle East to do this as well. The notion that it is not enough to go in and take out the crack dealer, if you leave behind the wife, the six kids and all the associates and all the demand function that guy has created, because two weeks later . . . a new crack dealer.
Right.
The same thing you can extrapolate to the level of nations. You take out the bad Saddam, you can very well end up with another Saddam unless you empower the people. My argument is, if you do an intervention militarily, you're going to leave that place more connected than you found it. Not just elite-connected through the exporting of resources like energy, but mass-connected because that is the kind of mass connection that gives you that twitter that fuels revolt in Iran. People realize there is an outside world, they realize they should not have to be treated like this, they realize there are other opportunities, and it makes them more demanding of their government, which is a good thing for us. So, it is absolutely true if you just go around killing bad guys, if you do not create anything good, you create bad things in your mind. You need to, for example in the Middle East, create about a hundred million jobs in the next twenty years or use bolts to torque in its way through their demographics. A certain segment of that will be peeled off and turn to violent ends because of the injustices they see in their political systems. You may not stop all of it. You may and you will have to kill a certain number of them to prevent certain bad things from happening, but if that is the bulk of your thrust and your effort, you cannot kill them faster than they grow up because, thank God, you value life to the point where you find it disgusting to kill on that level.
Right.
But there is another great evolution. I mean, you know, I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and everybody I knew who was a man had fought in that war. That was a war in which seventy million people were killed. Now, wars today kill in the hundreds or thousands. Genocide used to be seven, eight million dead, but now it is a couple of a hundred thousand dead. It is great that we have ratcheted definitions down, but do not let those ratcheted-down definitions or thresholds convince you that we live in a world of more war today because we do not. We live in the most peaceful planet we have ever had, we have fewer wars. To qualify for a war nowadays, you need three dead a day to get you a thousand dead for a year and they call that a war.
That is just about any inner city in the United States.
Yeah, what else, you know, yeah. Along those lines you can declare war on everything, can't you - smoking, choking on toys, whatever - because when you get big enough numbers, all sorts of things will give you a war; hence our tendency to declare war on things all the time. But you know the world lost 28,000 people a day for six years in the Second World War. Now the average war today, in a year, takes about 28,000 lives. So everything has come down from defense, you know, and me having to defend all the time, and much more to the point of security, and that is watching the economic development which says, the middle class wants. I have just been sending their sons and daughters off to war, but America does have a special role to play in terms of kind of policing the world. To the extent that other countries can, and even in that effort in which we have been enormously successful in the last twenty to thirty years we need more help than we can muster on our own. Because we have triggered an expansive phase of globalization so vast we need lots of bodies to man those frontier ports and forts that we are doing, like in Southern Afghanistan approaching upon Northwest Pakistan, stuff right out of the U.S. cavalry history and the American West. Lots of bodies are required, and the bodies are going to come from allies that are not going to be our traditional ones. More likely, more logically, they are going to come from countries like India and China.
So what about you and I and your typical American middle-class person, what can we do to cultivate peace and harmony here in our planet? What can the individual do?
Well, you know, I think religious groups need to look at the kind of subjects they tackled in the time frame that I described earlier with the United States. So you push things like, better educational opportunities, push stricter child labor laws. You push for the improvement of health, so you go very green. I think the movement of the evangelicals towards green in the last decade has been stunning and very welcome. You tackle global smoking - you want to talk about a global killer. After we drove out all the tobacco companies here in America they went abroad. They have just been enormously successful in hooking a lot of people on smoking, and I see that as a big kind of focus for religious movements. I think it is going to be one of the big things we do, and anything that promotes the rights of women, that is really crucial because anything that keeps girls in school, delays early pregnancy, delays first sex, delays first pregnancy, delays marriage, reduces population pressures, educates them, empowers them, makes them more uppity and demanding and, if you saw in Iran, you really risk your authoritarian regime when you anger the women.
Well, that makes some sense there.
Well, most of authoritarianism usually comes with a very strong patriarchal bent, and yet we know from history, if you want to develop your economy, if you do not, make your women available to the labor force and deal with all the social changes that come as a result. There is no way you can grow your economy with a happier labor force off line. So there are plenty of traditional, social issues that come right out of our past, things that we did in America 120 - 130 years ago,. where we should be pushing very similar lines. And I would not argue so much for the prohibition of alcohol as I would tobacco, because there is nothing that kills people more effectively in our modern world than tobacco.
So if history has one lesson for us in terms of how to create peace or just the strands that you have seen and been able to weave together and project into the future, what is the one lesson that you would want to pass on to future generations? What have you learned?
Well, I wish I could make the reference correctly here. I think it is A Room With A View. The line was along the lines of 'connect, only connect.' If I would take one perspective from history, I would go with that line: you should always focus on connection, you should never bet against connection. Humans are ultimately highly social animals and whenever they seek connection, so long as it is not harmful to themselves, it should be allowed in each and every instance, because with connection typically comes rules. The freest person on the planet was Unabomber, living in a shack in the woods, living by his own code, committing murder at will. Why? He had no connection with the outside world. Every time you take on connection, whether it is a mortgage or a marriage or children or home ownership, career, education, anything that connects you to the rest of the world, usually comes with rules; and it is with those rules that come the pacification, a certain amount of ennui, a certain amount of other complex things. But compared to a history of humanity, what we got going now is incredibly pacifying. You go back every hundred years in human history, you will find a much greater percentage of humanity engaged in or preparing for manslaughter. Today is such a rare thing that we have professionals, even our militaries are amazing, compared to the rest of society. And I have lived among them all my life - most people, until this war with Iraq, when you see the reserves and the National Guards get involved, most people did not know anybody in uniform . . .
Right.
. . . nobody ever went to a war. Yet we have done a lot of military activity around the world in the last twenty years, I would argue on a policing basis. We have not really declared war on anybody for more than half a century. But it is a tremendous thing to realize how much we have ratcheted down violence in the system, and how that has come with all this tremendous wealth, so that the challenges that we face today are just fantastically better challenges than we had before - the answer is still 'connect'.
We have a caller on the line. We have Randy from Florida who has a question for you, and we only have a few minutes. Randy, welcome to the program. You have a question for Tom today.
RANDY: Well, quickly, I just have a comment. I have to go to your blog, Tom, occasionally to come back down to earth. I read a lot and I have to argue a little bit about tobacco, for instance, it kills a lot of people but when the Indians smoked tobacco for centuries, they did not have lung cancer. It was not until the corporations started curing tobacco with sugar that we had this increased cancer rate that nobody really seems to want to look at. Then when you go to Iraq, I could argue that we killed a million people over there and displaced millions more and the whole place is a shamble, and we have caused it and we did not need to. So, what about that?
Thanks for calling, Randy. Tom, how do you respond to that?
Well, Iraq was headed up by a very brutal dictator by anybody's measure, who did commit genocide against his own people - ask the Kurds, ask the Shia - who was a threat to his neighbors, who launched and prosecuted a long war against Iran in which vast numbers were killed. I think the more realistic estimates of the amount of dead, civilian dead in Iraq on the basis of the war is much lower than a million. I think more in the range of three to four hundred thousand is more realistic. I would tell you, go back and look at what we did when we did the more humane route, so-called, with UN sanctions for ten years from the early 90's until the war broke out when we invaded in 2003. By our estimates we killed - UN estimates - about 50,000 people a year by denying them access to basics of medicine; and the people you kill in that kind of environment are the same ones that get killed by poverty and by disconnectedness, in general. They tend to be young kids and old people. But we do not count those deaths in this world. In fact, we do not count deaths usually in this world unless there is an American bullet that went through a body or a bomb that dismembered it. The kind of deaths that occur under other people's watches or occur because of brutal regimes or wars between states or wars within states, we tend to ignore them, like the four to five million dead in the Congo in the last eight to ten years because of a massive civil war that has raged on there for a long period of time. So to condemn us when we do stuff, when we actually go in and try to stop bad things . . . I do not think anybody who has been to Iraq recently, certainly anybody who has been to northern Iraq for the last seven or eight years, and has seen the amount of liberty that has flowered there, and the amount of opportunity for economic development and the opportunity to connect up with the outside world would condemn us. There are comments on real cause, absolutely, but letting the situation go on the way it did, killing as we did - according to the UN, about a million people - slowly, quietly, off-grid, off-camera, through sanctions, comparing that to the effort we made to liberate that place and give it an opportunity to rule itself, it is always easy to say let us do nothing and let us assume better outcomes occur. I think history shows us that when we do nothing we tend to kill more, dramatically more through our inaction than we do through our action.
Thank you for calling, Randy. That actually brings up a beautiful quote that is in your book, Great Powers. You say "I believe life consistently improves for humanity over time, but it does so only because individuals, communities, and nations take it upon themselves not only to imagine a future worth creating, but actually try to build it."
It is the unleashing of the individual ambition on a planetary scale. It has really been the leitmotif of the last twenty to twenty five years, going back to Deng declaring to get riches as glorious in China, amidst what some people consider to be this persistent state of global conflict, when in truth we have the lowest level of conflict around the planet in decades. There has been a massive empowerment and enrichment of hundreds of millions of people around the planet, thanks to globalization's spread. Yes, you will find friction with that process, and if you only focus on the friction with that process, you will ignore the tremendous force that is being unleashed in terms of individual ambition and opportunity, but you will definitely drag the United States and other countries, not just us - there is going to be increasingly, India and China, getting dragged into these kinds of things - dealing with the tumult that happens when connectivity with the outside world occurs for places that have been off-grid for a long time. Yes, there will be violence involved in that, yes there will be death and all sorts of tumultuous result, but you look at the Balkans ten years after we bothered to go in and stop the genocide there. The Balkans are a much better place now, connected up in all manner of connectivity - political, economic, social and whatnot - and I think in another five to six years in Iraq, you are going to look back and say this was an enormously successful opportunity for us to show that we are interested in bringing the Middle East and parts of the world that had been off-grid from globalization into a situation of true individual empowerment, just like we saw the demands being made by the Iranian people over the last several weeks. Never bet against a people's desire for freedom, connectivity or pursuit of individual opportunity and liberty because it is strong out there . . .
Very true.
. . . and I admire America for making the effort, even when it does not always do it well. Try to tap into that and unleash it as much as is possible, because when you look at history, there is no other country that has ever tried to do that.
Right. The book is called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century, and the newest release, Great Powers: America and The World After Bush. Our guest today has been Thomas P.M. Barnett. For more information, and to read Tom Bartnett's blog, you can visit www.thomaspmbartnett.com.
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