After the notable success and influence of The Pentagon’s New Map and the discomfort caused inside the Department of Defense by his unconventional ideas regarding ” war in the context of everything else”, Tom Barnett was given the classic ” to be or to do” choice. Barnett could shelve his ideas and return to designing strategic naval studies for ” the Big War” that he did not believe was coming to justify weapons systems that might never be used and have a comfortable academic sinecure and prestigious advisory posts. Or he could walk away, taking a huge gamble in order to write the book with the strategy he believed would be best for America and the world.
Thomas Barnett chose a future worth creating in writing Blueprint for Action.
There is continuity and conceptual flow from the Pentagon’s New Map in the pages of Blueprint for Action but the two books are unalike. In the first, Barnett spent a great deal of time explaining the world as it is; the second book is about the world as it could be – if we make the right choices. Unintentionally, Dr. Barnett has become something new – a grand strategist for the people who is selling his vision one reader, one soldier, one journalist, one voter at a time by book, brief and blog. The ideas are selling and the influence of BFA, I expect, will exceed that of The Pentagon’s New Map because soldiers and senators alike want to see an endgame to our foreign policy, and because ultimately hope is more motivating than fear.
Prior to descrbing a broad overview of a complex book, I have to note something stylistic – blogging has changed Tom Barnett as a writer. Perhaps Esquire’s Mark Warren was also an influence here but in BFA Tom’s writing is more relaxed, conversational and targeted to the non-expert and I’m pretty sure the almost daily blogging during which time this book gestated had something to do with the shift. Blogging is part brainstorming, part-venting, part feedback loop and regular readers of Tom’s blog will see things leap out at them from the pages amidst much that is new.
[ Full disclosure also requires me to note , as regular Zenpundit readers already know, that I have written previously for The Rule-Set Reset and about PNM theory at HNN. Dr. Barnett has also used a small section of my material in BFA ]
Blueprint for Action shies away from few subjects – Iraq, al Qaida, 4GW, network centric warfare, Rising China, rogue states, EU transnationalism, Islamist terrorism, Taiwan, Guantanamo, global pandemics, Iran, nuclear proliferation, preemption all can be found within – it is a tour de force demonstrating the interconnections of the strategic challenges facing the United States. It is analytical, bold and at the end, Blogging the Future”, highly speculative. In BFA you will find references to other thinkers from Ralph Peters to Robert Wright to Robert Kaplan to van Creveld to John Boyd.
After, PNM was published Dr. Barnett was frequently accused by leftists of being an evil, imperialist “Neocon “. After BFA he may be attacked by some neoconservatives as a starry-eyed liberal transnationalist. Neither label is accurate. What Dr. Barnett is proposing is to align American strategy with the enormous geoeconomic forces of globalization in order to both prevent globalization’s systemic breakdown and to make more probable the best-case scenario outcomes like ” A Peacefully Rising China”. Barnett is for integrating a nascent civilizational convergence, not sharpening conflict, but there’s nothing dovish about a strategy contemplating regime change in Pyongyang by any means necessary.
Neoconservatives are simply not going to like Barnett’s A-Z Rule-Set for processing politically bankrupted states that involves any kind of ICC-like structure. But longitudinally, the United States is simply going to have to secure ” buy-in” from other great powers on robust rules for dealing with non-state actor terrorists, rogue state menaces and disintegrating Gap states, not just temporary acquiescence. The costs of not doing so in Barnett’s view are self-evident:
Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page