E-mail a friendThomas P.M. Barnett
airdate March 18, 2009
Thomas P.M. Barnett has worked in national security affairs since the end of the Cold War. He's currently senior managing director of Enterra Solutions and formerly served as senior strategic researcher at the Naval War College. He's also a best-selling author, with titles that include The Pentagon's New Map and Great Powers, and writes a popular blog. A Harvard Ph.D., Barnett is a contributing editor for Esquire and a distinguished scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard H. Baker, Jr. Center for Public Policy.
National security affairs expert says that the key for global development is the growth of the middle class. (2:55)
Full interview. (12:27)
Thomas P.M. Barnett
Thomas P.M. Barnett: Thanks for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you. Let me start by asking - we can delve into it here in a moment - surface level, what is our, America's, place in the world, post-Bush?
Barnett: Well, I like to describe the message of the book as basically giving Americans a sense of where we are in history and what we've accomplished with this effort to extend our American system of states uniting, economies integrating, networks proliferating, rules accumulating, collective security.
We spent the last half-century trying to spread that message and that model around the world, starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, second world war, creation of an international liberal trade order. That becomes the West over time, hugely successful, attracts the emulation of the East. Dong takes China towards markets.
All of a sudden we have a critical mass, a global economy. It becomes globalization. What I want people to understand is this is very much a world of our creating, okay, and we've gotten the vast majority of the planet to accept our model of markets and states coming together and collective security and all those arguments.
And what we have to be patient on really is the democracy angle, because most countries, when they join globalization, do so as single-party states. It takes them one, two, two and a half generations before they get comfortable enough with the situation and the huge social-economic change that tends to come about with increased connectivity to the outside world to move in the direction of pluralism.
So where I think we are in the world is we've got to get off this fixation on the two extremes of the globalization bell curve, as I might describe it - sort of baseline security - a fixation on weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, as if that should be our entire relationship with the outside world - and then the other shoulder of the globalization bell curve the fixation on top-line political achievement, accelerated democracy.
In the middle of that vast bell curve is this emerging global middle class - 50, 55, 60 percent of the world moving into a middle class status. The big question of the 21st century is who rules that middle class? Does it rule from the left, the right, or from the center? That's what we got good at - ruling from the center. And so I think we're in an historical period not unlike America coming together as a continental economy in the last decades of the 19th century.
Tavis: That's more than a mouthful and I'm glad you answered it in that way. You make the point quite astutely that we've gotten the world to accept our model, and so this globalization that we talk so much about is in large measure, to a large degree, our creating - it's our making.
And yet I don't get the sense, when I go through your text, that even you believe that we can control this thing, that we've created a tiger, a monster - pick your metaphor - that this thing is wagging us more than we're wagging it.
Barnett: Well, I like to say globalization comes with rules, but not a ruler. For a long time we could dominate a West in the face of the Soviet threat - so much so that we felt like we're basically in control of a global economic landscape that we're the center of.
Obviously, that's no longer the case. We've been so successful in bringing up a Europe after the second world war and playing kind of military leviathan on its behalf vis-à-vis the Soviets, and then we did the same basic strategy with a rising Asia, absorbing their imports as long as they plowed their trade surplus back into our debt markets, and then providing a leviathan military presence that allowed all these powers to rise at the same time.
So that you get to this point in history and we have Russia, Germany, France, Britain, all peaceful and relatively prosperous and moving towards integration - all of that happening in Europe, first time in history. And then in Asia you have India, China, Japan, Korea - first time in history you see those four big powers all relatively prosperous and getting more powerful.
And across that entire landscape, which caused 100 million deaths first half of the 20th century, no one's really talking about great power war, okay? So we've accomplished a lot by spreading this model, but are we tapped out in terms of our debt? Are we tapped out in terms of our military effort around the world? Absolutely. So things got to change.
Tavis: Beyond being tapped out - let me just be more frank about it - this animal, this monster called globalization that we've created, could it ultimately swallow us whole?
Barnett: Well, I would say the country that can do the most damage to globalization is an America that does not recognize it as its own progeny, to a certain extent and starts to see it as a Frankenstinean monster, and then decides on that basis we're going to pull back, we're not going to play the same responsible role we have for the last 50, 60 years on global security.
We're going to pick fights with other great powers, we're going to throw up more barriers between us and the outside world in terms of trade, or choke off our ability to attract immigrants and their brain power.
We're heading into a period of history where the resource demands, because we turned on those three billion new capitalists the last 20 years, are going to be so immense there's no way that they can achieve that middle class lifestyle that we've enjoyed, our small fraction of humanity, up to now. When you jumped that shark all the way to 60 percent of the world's population, that's an immense amount of resource requirements.
We're going to need a lot of collective effort on innovation and then a lot of collective effort on integrating these parts of the world that are being sucked into these global networks - very rapid speeds. They're really frontiers.
Tavis: Every great empire in history has at some point failed or fallen.
Barnett: Or gone bankrupt.
Tavis: Or gone bankrupt.
Barnett: Right, right.
Tavis: Well, we're about to cross that line right now, I think, if we aren't already there. But every empire in history has failed or faltered somewhere along the way. Is it the patriotism in us, in some people's minds or in some people's behaviors, the nationalism in us, that doesn't allow us to even consider whether or not, great power that we are, that we could fail, that we could falter?
Barnett: Well, I would argue that we're an original sort of empire, if you want to use that term. I don't prefer that term because empires are mostly about creating rule sets in which the ruler gets to decide the terms of trade with subject populations.
Tavis: Come on, now, you're not going to suggest we have - I know you're a great American, but you ain't about to suggest to me that we ain't done that, historically, around the world.
Barnett: I would suggest to you that historically our relationship with the world has been an effort to recreate the kind of multinational union that we pioneered here in the United States.
People forget that we're the world's oldest and original, in a modern sense, multinational union. It starts with 13 members, 50 members strong now, okay? California has a GDP the equivalent of France. Wisconsin has a GDP the equivalent of South Africa - biggest economy on the African continent. Tennessee's the equivalent of Saudi Arabia.
Arkansas, with three million people, has a GDP equivalent of Pakistan, with 177 million people. Okay, so our 300 million here create an economy that if you made a map of the world of equivalent states in terms of their GDP you'd need two billion people around the planet to accumulate the same kind of productive power we've created here.
So we've done something in terms of unleashing individual creativity and power, all the rules that make all these transactions between all these states and individuals happen. So I would argue, if you want to use the term empire, we're the first one in history that actually empowers and enriches individuals.
In fact, that's one of the scary aspects of our current world, is that we empower people to the point where bad actors can be, in effect, as Tom Friedman describes it, super-empowered, and you face the dangers of trans-national terrorism.
So I don't disagree that we haven't tried to replicate our system much like other empires have, but that the terms of interaction with the rest of the world are on a much fairer, more liberating basis.
Tavis: We'll debate that issue some other time when you come back. Let me offer this, though, as the exit question, which could be a two or three hour conversation. I don't want you to think I forgot the other point I wanted to make. So we talked about globalization. The other point you made in your original thesis or explanation was the point about democracy.
And if the Bush-Cheney years will be regarded for anything - we'll see where this debate comes out historically - but certainly one is going to have to wrestle with their effort to export democracy, if I can put it that way, kindly. Your sense, then, on where we are, how we ought to behave going forward, on this notion that the way we do business is the way everybody else ought to do business, and that our mission is to spread democracy around the globe.
Barnett: Well, I'd like to point out America had kind of a non-party or a single-party state for about 50, 60 years, post our revolution. You don't go until about 1840 where you see two recognizable mass political parties in America - the Whigs and the Democrats - going at it in a way that we would recognize now as a competitive political system, okay?
So that took us only about 64 years. On top of that, 89 years on slavery, another 100 years for free vote, 144 years for women to vote. And we make these kinds of demands on very traditional cultures that have remained fairly off-grid from globalization's embrace and now are being brought in rather rapidly, okay?
And we say come to our level of democracy overnight, even though it took us, in the first blush instance, the question of two parties going at it, about half a century to pull it off.
So I look at a Mexico that was ruled by the PRI for 70 years, I look at a Korea, a Japan, I look at a Malaysia that's finally about 50 years post-revolution allowing an opposition party to get close to winning an election, and I say in a lot of these situations you see a Harlem Globetrotters-dominant party that wins every single election for several decades, and you see a Washington Generals that loses every single time. (Laughter)
And it often takes that half-century to get the situation and the political system and the development of a middle class to the point where you get that kind of comfort with that transition of power back and forth between dominant parties.
So I look at a China today, to me it's about 30 years old, post-Dong. I look at a Russia, to me it's about 18 years old and it's acting like it's about 18 years old. So we have to have some patience with this. We've got to realize that the hard work - getting them towards our markets and that concept, which is really a social revolutionary force, because you take cultures that have been locked in a Malthusian existence for centuries and had their religions formed in that time period, and all of a sudden you give them the possibilities of abundance.
That is a social-economic revolution. If you liberate women, give them the opportunity for education, all of a sudden they don't have to marry inside their tribe or inside their caste, they go from a given family to a chosen family, that is social revolution.
You've got to give countries time to absorb that change and let that middle class start to percolate a little bit, because as I like to say, the rich seek protection from the poor. That's what they really want from their government. And the poor want protection from their circumstances.
But when you get a middle class, the middle class wants the most demanding thing from its government - they want protection from uncertainty or from the future, because they've got something and they want to keep it.
Tavis: As you can probably tell by this conversation, it's an intellectually rigorous text that you'll have fun playing with, I can guarantee you that. His name, Thomas P.M. Barnett. His latest, "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush." Mr. Barnett, good to have you here.
Barnett: Thanks so much.
Tavis: Enjoyed talking to you.
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