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October 23, 2004

Map-Reading Issues

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

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Dave Schuler at the Glittering Eye has two posts on Barnett's Pentagon's New Map, here and here. I have, actually, similar issues with Barnett's theory. Essentially, it is a great briefing, with a core of real truth, that misses my vision of what's happening in the world by a very, very small amount. Here is the core of Dave's take on it:

The problem with this definition is that it doesn't fit at least three of the putative members of the Core: Russia, China, and India. And these three members constitute, what, half of the human race? Commenter Mark Safranski [ed note: ZenPundit] makes an interesting distinction between New Core and Core at large. In other words, new Core members that aren't yet fully integrated and Core members that are integrated. The implication of this is that Core and Gap aren't distinct categories but constitute a spectrum of connectivity with differing degrees of Core-ness and Gap-ness.

I guess I still don't find that too helpful. What I'm looking for is a decision process. I feed you a set of economic, legal, social, or whatever characteristics of an unnamed country and you tell me whether the country with those features is in the Core or the Gap. Without such a decision process all you have is a denotation of the Gap. They're a collection of countries that are in the Gap because they're in the Gap. And without such a decision process there's no real way of determining how countries now part of the Gap can be incorporated into the Core.

Barnett defines the Core countries as those that are globalised or globalising. The Gap countries are those that are disconnected and not connecting. So, Haiti and Saudi Arabia are like each other because they are not connected in any meaningful way to the rest of the world, while China and India are unlike those countries because they have extensive trade connections, population flows (mostly temporary in both cases, but some permanent migration from India and a little from China), and so forth.

Within the Core, state-on-state war has been made unthinkable. For most Core nations with causes for war with each other, there is a nuclear deterrent effect (which is why I'm glad India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, so long as Pakistan is ruled by a sane and forward-looking ruler). But for the vast majority of Core nations, there's simply no remaining basis for war. What, for example, would England and France fight about, that they couldn't get easier and cheaper by trade or negotiation, or couldn't simply live with? Thus the Core is inherently stable and free of open warfare, though certainly not of conflict. The ordering principle, then, is to bring states into the Core, to shrink the Gap.

However, these definitions of Core and Gap were actually backed into. What Barnett did was to take all of the places where the US had been involved in post-Cold War conflicts, and draw a line around them. Hmmm, he noted from similarity to earlier work on a different project, the areas inside that line are exactly the ones which are not globalising. Brilliant insight, and very useful. But since Barnett was searching for the killer one-page picture to get across a complex idea, the PNM has some oddnesses. Israel is in the Gap. North Korea is not. That's simply not a rational way to divide the world.

So there are some real strengths to PNM in predicting where conflict will likely break out, as long as some oddnesses are taken into account. But there is a deeper flaw in PNM as a theory of organizing the current conflict: it only incorporates a part of the conflict. In addition to the open and covert warfare between the Coalition and the jihadis, there is a conflict within the West, between those who seek to strengthen and defend the West, and those who wish the West to fail utterly and fall sufficiently into ruin that they would be put into power as an act of desperation.

This group does not have a formal name, unless you count perhaps "anti-globalization", which is a simplification. In fact, this group consists of a wide variety of different organizations, from anarchists to transnational progressivists to unreformed Stalinists to neo-Malthusians to neo-Luddites to anti-capitalists. In effect, it is the furthest of the extremist Left.

Now, this group, which I tend to think of as the "anti-Enlightenment Left", is not inherently dangerous. What makes them dangerous is that their arguments are generally couched in language designed to appeal to the moderate Left sympathies, and it does so successfully. Saying that you want Saddam to remain in power because the alternative is likely to be a free democracy is not a winning argument, while saying that Iraq is a sovereign country and as long as it hasn't attacked someone outside Iraq we have no cause to attack Saddam can be a winning argument; it's certainly more palatable. Because the extreme Left can use rhetoric (particularly in an age where many Leftists have been intellectually reared on Chomsky and Derrida) to push the moderate Left to support or oppose actions in ways which sound good (fairness is a common argument for example) but which actually destroy the underpinnings of the West in general, and the US in particular. In order for these groups to gain power, individualism in particular must fall, and with it must fall capitalism and the supporting doctrines (like Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness) that empower individuals.

Note the similarity to terrorism. Absent state sponsorship, terrorism is not particularly threatening, because the terrorist cells are small and incapable of the sophisticated planning and training that is necessary to carry out mass-casualty attacks. But the jihadis are able to appeal to more moderate Muslims, with arguments about Israel, memories of colonial domination, and appeals to certain aspects of Islam (such as doctrines about women and non-Muslims and their respective rights). These arguments carry enough weight that it is relatively simple for jihadis to get shelter, concealment, aid, comfort, time and space to operate, and various other benefits (including propaganda) from Muslims who themselves actually disapprove of the methods of the jihadis, but not their cause.

But Barnett's theory is a theory of states. If a state is globalising, there's no threat to drive the military's organization or use. PNM gives insufficient guidance to how to approach non-State threats, both the subversive elements of the West (the anti-Enlightenment Left) and the jihadis. And there is a commonality between them. There are reasons why Pat Buchanan (not a Leftists, but a populist neo-Malthusian nonetheless) sounds like Ralph Nader, and why both of them sound like Ayman al Zawahiri in their ideas of how the world works.

But you won't find the answer on a map.

I have been thinking a lot about this, and reading a lot (including Barnett, Tommy Franks' American Soldier, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree (an excellent look at globalization), and I have an operating theory of how the world works, and some ideas of what we need to do in response to the changed world we live in. As soon as I can convince myself that the fact that the way to deal with the world if I am right happens to correspond well to my preferences of how to deal with the world anyway, which were formed during the Cold War, does not mean that I am trying to form a theory which merely fits my preferences, I'll have a longer post on the topic.

I will leave you with this question, though: how do you convince an ideologue that he is wrong?